Seattle City Council Housing, Health, Energy, and Workers’ Rights Committee Special Meeting 6/6/19

Clap once if you can hear me.

Give it up if you want human service providers to get an equitable contract.

All right.

That worked.

So I want to say thank you to all of you who are here today.

It's a standing room only audience, and I'm going to turn down the microphone a tiny bit.

Can you all hear me okay?

A little bit more?

Can you all hear me now?

Better?

Okay, let's just go for it.

We're going for it.

All right, good afternoon.

My name is Teresa Mosqueda, and I am joined by our council colleagues, Councilmember Sawant and Councilmember Bagshaw.

Thank you so much for being here.

Today is a special committee meeting of the Housing, Health, Energy, and Workers' Rights Committee.

This committee will come to order, it is 1.35.

I'm very excited for you all to be here and we have a full one hour plus packed with three panelists.

Today we'll be discussing Seattle's human service provider contracts.

We'll get a chance to hear from the actual experts on the field on the ground.

This room is full of those individuals.

You are the experts.

You are the leaders in providing human services.

We'll hear from you about what it means to provide services to our most vulnerable populations.

We'll hear from individuals who've been directly impacted from the human service contracts and frontline human service workers.

This is a time in our city when homelessness and income disparities have led to a homelessness crisis, a lack of affordable housing, and an increased need for human services.

Without you, without the frontline human service providers, we cannot provide the critical services to our most vulnerable in the community.

Without adequate funding, you, the workers, and the organizations face tremendous burdens on a daily basis to provide the very critical services to this most vulnerable population.

Many of you have been involved in this conversation with the city for over 10 years.

In fact, until last year, not all human service provider contracts even received an inflationary wage adjustment.

While this has been an issue that many of you have been interested in addressing, we have made some progress.

Last year, really appreciate our council colleagues who helped us get a 2% increase in inflationary adjustment for human service providers.

And I want to emphasize all human service providers.

at a time when we're seeing increased need for homeless services, health services, and housing services.

And at the same time, we heard from many of you that while you're qualifying individuals for housing, for food, for assistance, many of the workers who are on the front line are eligible for many of those services due to low wages and increased pressure on the organization in terms of costs, not just costs for labor, but also the cost of property and rental payments and so much more.

This is our obligation and our challenge as a city to make sure that we are fully funding our human service provider contracts.

I want to be really clear about something.

It is a partnership that we have with you, and it's an obligation that we have to fulfill our end.

There's many good reasons why Seattle contracts out services to the community partners who provide human service contracts.

We do this because these are our most trusted members in the community.

Many times they're providing bicultural and bilingual services.

In many cases, you have trusted relationships already and individuals will come to you.

You are the experts in the field.

And because of your focus on serving these individuals, you are often more cost effective and efficient than the city would be in terms of us providing that direct contract.

But being cost effective doesn't mean that we, as the contractor, should contract away our responsibilities.

We've made a commitment to support you, to support the workers and the organizations, to support the unions and the individual workers on the ground level who are leading the way with providing these critical services.

And we can't hide behind contracts to fulfill these commitments.

It is our obligation.

And it is our responsibility to make sure that those who are ensuring that there are services for the most vulnerable have the services that you need and the resources that you need to fulfill those services.

These are services for our elders at senior centers.

These are services for the youth who are seeking housing and employment.

These are our community health clinics.

These are folks who are providing services to those who've experienced domestic violence and sexual assault and providing prevention and response.

You're providing access to food through food banks and meal programs.

And you're providing home by housing folks and helping to get them into shelter.

So we want to be really blunt, and we want to be honest today.

We feel that we've fallen down on these obligations.

We know we have fallen down on these obligations.

And the larger issue around historic and legacy underfund is something that my colleagues, especially Council Member O'Brien, who's not here today, has tried to take on in the past years.

And now we have an opportunity to build on what we were able to do in last year's budget.

Thanks to Council Member Bagshaw for chairing the budget last year.

an opportunity to continue around that bend.

So we're at the turning point.

Last year, what we did in the budget around the 2% inflationary adjustment was a step in the right direction.

But we need to ensure that these contracts receive inflationary increases across the board this year and every year.

This is not just a budget exercise.

The budget should be a reflection of our values.

And we value your work.

We value your organizations.

And we value the services you provide to the most vulnerable.

With that, I want to invite up our first panel, and before we do that, turn it over to our council colleagues for some public comment and opportunity to hear from everyone at the table.

Council Member Bryan, please go ahead and have a seat, and we will get you set up here.

As we turn it over to our council colleagues, I want to note for folks, we're going to have three panels today, so there's a chance to hear from a number of folks, and then we're going to do public comment at the end.

Council Member Sawant, I saw you grab for the microphone.

Thank you Council Member Mosqueda.

I first of all wanted to welcome everybody here and also let everybody here know that unfortunately because we are also fighting on other struggles related to displacement and gentrification in the Central District and all the work that's involved in it.

I'm unable to stay for this meeting but I just wanted to say a few things before I left and I appreciate being given the opportunity to do that because I know we have three panels and the discussion is a very full one.

First of all, I wanted to thank everybody who's here and also who's not here.

Hundreds of people who have been on the front lines of addressing the acute crisis of the shortage of affordable housing and the homelessness and the overall social crisis that has erupted in our city and in our region.

And we know that they didn't come overnight.

This is something that has now shaped up and become bigger and bigger over so many years.

And over the last five years that I've been in City Hall, many of you and I have talked with one another in our exchange of ideas of how we can address this, including the people at youth care and many other service providers.

And also I wanted to recognize SEIU 1199 Northwest, who's here and represents a lot of the workers who are on the ground and seeing the crisis firsthand, but also ironically being part of the people who are affected by the crisis.

And I think this is really the worst possible nexus where we have a whole population that needs service and the people who are serving that population are also now being so impacted by the skyrocketing rents, the lack of affordable housing, the lack of health care.

And so it clearly is a call to action.

This is a call to action for all of us.

So I really appreciate all the work you are doing and also the work you're doing advocating for increased funding.

Year after year during the budget cycle you have told all the politicians here in City Hall and not just on the City Council, but also the Mayor's office about how these services are being nickel-and-dimed.

I agree the 2% inflationary adjustment was absolutely critical, but let's face it, it is just a drop in the ocean of what we need.

We need, you know, if we're going to turn a lot of this conversation into action, then we're going to need bold policy solutions.

We're going to need to expand the tiny house villages, which are now showing a really terrific track record of transitions to affordable housing.

We need to fully fund all the services you all provide, and we need a major expansion of publicly owned affordable housing.

But none of this is possible if we don't also unleash our collective forces to fight for progressive revenues by taxing big business and not accept defeat because of any setback last year.

Let's keep moving forward and fighting for it.

I also hope that you will join the City of Seattle Renters Commission, the Tenants Union, be Seattle and many other community organizations who have joined my office and other community groups to fight for rent control in Seattle because it is high time.

And I hope you all know that right now there is a real struggle going on in New York City to maintain and expand their rent control because they have seen through their personal experience that having rent control without corporate loopholes actually provides a lifeline against the affordable housing crisis.

So, I hope you will all join the petition.

I hope you will all continue fighting, and I thank the committee for providing this opportunity.

I appreciate it.

Thank you, Council Member Sawant.

Council Member O'Brien or Baxter?

Okay.

Thank you for being here and thank you.

Yeah, thank you councilmember O'Brien for joining us as well I want to let folks know as I mentioned earlier councilmember O'Brien has been working on the historic legacy under fund of many of the human service provider contracts for years So we really appreciate his leadership on that Let's go ahead, Farideh, we have one item on the agenda, and this is the most important one.

If you could read into the record the item, and while she's doing that, if I could please be joined by Mark from Neighborhood House, Debbie from Corporation for Supportive Housing, and Jim from Sound Generations.

Agenda item one is stabilizing human service contracts for briefing and discussion.

Wonderful.

Thank you.

As you guys are joining us, I just want to say a few quick thank yous to all the folks who've made today possible.

And a lot of you are in the room, and there's so many more.

I want to thank the folks at the Seattle-King County Coalition, Hilary Coleman, who's been working with us to help pull this all together from the Coalition on Ending Homelessness, in addition to the tremendous amount of folks from the coalition who worked on policy change to get this conversation started.

Just to list a few, Allison Isinger from the Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness, Julia Stravosky from the Seattle Human Services Coalition, Lauren Fay from DESC, Shoshana Weinberg and Evelyn Correa from Youth Care, Jesse Inman from SEIU 1199, Corrine from OPEIU, Kelly Larson from Plymouth Housing, Aaron Moore from West Seattle Helpline, Flo from Catholic Community Services, Jennifer from Ballard Food Bank, Rizwan from Muslim Housing, Alex and Andrew from SEIU 775, Amy Gore from Central Staff, Jesse Rollins, formerly with Councilmember O'Brien, and Leslie Daniels, both of them now working on this issue, and Dana, Stephanie, and Joseph from our communications team, and Sejal Parikh, our Chief of Staff, who's lead on labor.

Everybody, these are all the folks who pulled today off, and it is a packed room, so let's give them a round of applause.

So we are going to turn it over to you all.

Thank you for being our first panel.

And we do have 20 minutes for each panel.

Please go ahead and introduce yourself.

And thank you again for being here with us today to talk about the need to stabilize our human service provider contracts.

Thank you, Councilmember Mosquedos and members of the committee.

And good afternoon.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify.

My name is Mark Okazaki.

I'm the executive director for Neighborhood House, one of many nonprofit social service organizations serving vulnerable populations here in the city of Seattle.

As a multi-service community action agency, our programs extend across a wide range of needs, including early learning, youth development, employment, housing, and aging and disability services.

We employ about over 280 staff who speak 40 different languages and dialects and often are multilingual.

This afternoon, I've been asked to speak on behalf of all nonprofit organizations under contract with the City of Seattle's Human Services Department in support of an automatic inflation adjustment.

Hallelujah.

I cannot express enough how important this is in this point in time for all of my colleagues.

All of us are facing tremendous financial stress in the midst of a booming economy and full employment labor market that is driving wages up and making housing less affordable.

The Seattle minimum wage has created real compression issues for Neighborhood House and my colleagues across the city.

While we support this and want livable wages for all employees, we are also forced to, with the real challenges of balancing budgets that are already stressed.

We provide, all of us, provide vital services and our success is your success when it comes to advancing important public policy priorities that contribute towards a healthy, vibrant, and inclusive city.

Like the city, our costs go up every year, rent, healthcare, utilities, insurance, but most of our costs are in salaries.

In my case, it's 75% of my budget.

And every year, when we build our agency budgets, we have to find ways to absorb these costs.

Even with an inflation adjustment, we are forced to make hard decisions about where to cut.

And the last place we want to cut is in our services.

By way of example, I run a state-funded preschool serving 160 low-income children living in the four largest public housing communities here in Seattle.

This year, we had to subsidize the state funding to the tune of $80,000.

In this last legislative session, the state approved a 6% increase in preschool funding.

And even with that, I am still looking at an $80,000 shortfall in next year's budget.

The best my child development director could tell me was that our deficit wouldn't get worse, even with a 6% adjustment.

Like all of my nonprofit colleagues, I'm doing active and aggressive fundraising to make up for the shortfall.

And despite our best efforts, I'm not able to pay competitive wages.

Our average preschool teacher's salary is $37,000.

By comparison, a kindergarten teacher in the Seattle Public Schools earns on average $74,000.

You can see that we are hard-pressed to recruit and retain high-quality teachers and support staff.

Like my other nonprofit colleagues, we do this work out of commitment to social justice.

We do this work because we want to make a positive impact on those who are struggling.

We do this work because we believe that shared prosperity is the only way we create a thriving city for all.

An inflation adjustment won't solve all of our funding dilemmas, but at least it would stabilize the foundation of our funding from the city.

I urge your support for an automatic inflation adjustment.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Councilmembers, for this opportunity.

My name is Debbie Thiel.

I work for a national nonprofit organization called Corporation for Supportive Housing, or CSH, and we provide loans and technical assistance to nonprofits and communities to develop supportive housing because it is the solution to chronic homelessness.

So I oversee our work in the Western United States, and I live here in Seattle.

But a lot of my work is in Los Angeles, where we have our largest program office.

And Los Angeles is currently going through a very significant expansion of its homeless response system.

in that literally billions of dollars are going into the system right now to end chronic homelessness over a 10-year period.

And so I've been asked to talk a little bit about what we're doing in Los Angeles to support nonprofits through this significant expansion.

When we started the work of implementation, we first had to acknowledge the significant underfunding of our nonprofit community.

For years, nonprofits had lagged in salaries and not been able to compete with the government industry.

They hadn't had any funding for their infrastructure.

And so we first went to the nonprofits and said, what do you need?

What do you need to build your capacity to take on the large responsibility of deploying these billions of dollars in resources?

And they essentially came back to us with three buckets of work.

In terms of addressing their capacity, we looked at financial liquidity, organizational infrastructure, and recruitment and hiring.

In terms of liquidity, this is a top concern for nonprofits in Los Angeles because there's a three-month lag between when they incur expenses and when they receive their reimbursement from the county.

So the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority and an organization called the Nonprofit Finance Fund is looking to create a cash advance program of three-month cash advances with few strings and the ability for nonprofits to essentially use that cash to pay for that lag instead of having to potentially have large amounts of unrestricted cash on hand, which can be incredibly difficult.

Some are taking out loans and having to actually pay debt to manage their services while they waited for those reimbursements.

And it was definitely prohibiting nonprofits from growing and increasing their staff because of that concern about liquidity.

As well, in terms of liquidity and development, the largest number of developers in Los Angeles will be nonprofit organizations.

So, we, CSH, worked with the City of Los Angeles to create a $60 million loan fund that would pay for acquisition and pre-development costs so that nonprofits would be able to secure sites and pay for those initial costs before the permanent financing from public funders came in.

The second challenge around hiring was really interesting.

When the money came into Los Angeles, there were a thousand jobs created in the homeless housing and services sector.

So, needless to say, the county recognized their role in addressing this with the nonprofits in hiring and recruiting staff, and they created a website that's called Paycheck with a Purpose, where they encourage nonprofits to list their jobs on the website.

They actually actively manage and advertise that website themselves.

And then finally, even some of the most sophisticated nonprofits are often operating in a deficit in terms of their own internal organizational capacity around information technology, human resources, financial management, and fundraising, because no one wants to pay for those services that are actually foundational to helping a nonprofit operate.

So we're part of a group in LA that's called the Funders Collaborative, which is a group of public, private, and philanthropic funders.

And we looked at the situation and said, what can we do to support these nonprofits?

And we put together a fund of $150,000 per agency that's working on housing or services right now.

for anyone experiencing homelessness and paid for professional technical assistance to get an assessment of what their organizational needs are and then to pay for that technical assistance and their general operating costs to build and expand their services.

So I wanted to just mention also as I look through the West Coast, Portland is another community to consider because they have recently made a commitment with the County of Multnomah to create 2,000 units of supportive housing to end chronic homelessness there.

And they're a little bit of a head start in terms of non-profit capacity because they're already putting annual increases in their contracts of 3 to 4% for their non-profits.

So I hope that's helpful to get a sense of what's happening in some other communities and appreciate your dedication to this issue.

Jim, and we'll do questions at the end here.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to share with you my thoughts on having an automatic annual adjustment of inflation for the human services contracts.

My name is Jim Wickfall, and I lead Sound Generations.

And at Sound Generations, we provide services to aging adults and adults with disabilities in four pillars, food security, transportation, health and wellness, and assistance services, and we operate six senior centers.

And in my role leading Sound Generations, I've seen the rising costs of doing business from our ability to keep staff trained, having the appropriate equipment to do our jobs, the cost increasing just to do our operations.

And from a programmatic perspective, an example is with our Meals on Wheels program.

Right now, we are experiencing a 12-week waiting list because we don't have additional funds to be able to actually provide food security to hundreds of individuals here in the Seattle area.

In addition, prior to working for Sound Generations, I had the opportunity to work with a major aerospace company here in the Seattle area for more than 31 years, retiring as the vice president responsible for all of our facilities in our commercial airplanes areas in Puget Sound and also in Charleston, South Carolina.

And with my experience, I've learned that given the opportunity, It would make a prudent business decision for us to solidify the ability to have funding available to maintain support to our human services departments, sustaining the services that support Seattle residents.

So let's make Seattle a great place to grow up and to grow old.

Thank you so much.

We do have a few questions.

Council Member Bagshaw.

Debbie, good to see you again.

Thank you so much for your wisdom coming from Los Angeles and Portland.

We collectively have had good contacts with LA and Portland in just the last couple of weeks and talking with people about what's working for them in those cities.

Obviously, with Los Angeles, with the initiatives that were done, like what were they, Triple H countywide and H in the city, they've raised billions of dollars, which I think, of course, is something we need to go back and look at.

The big progressive funding to be able to help people with housing as well as just to make sure that our providers are supported.

Would you talk to me a little bit about Portland when you talked about the various contacts there?

Who were you talking about if we wanted to reach out and talk with them?

Sure.

In Portland, we're working with both the city and the county of Multnomah.

And then there's an entity called Metro that oversees a broader metropolitan response.

And they're all working together to work toward this plan that they've established and adopted.

Their councils jointly adopted a plan to create 2,000 units of supportive housing.

And is that through their regional governance, their new regional governance program, the TriMet Portland and Multnomah?

The Regional Governance Adjoined Office on Homeless Services is responsible for implementation.

So can we talk afterwards?

I just would like to get names and phone numbers and be able to reconnect with you.

Sure thing.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Council Member O'Brien.

First of all, thanks for all the work you do and thanks for being here today and your advocacy.

I've been on the council, Councilmember Bankshoff for nearly 10 years and unfortunately, it's only a few rare instances where I recall in the last 10 years where we've actually made inflationary adjustments to our contracts.

I'm curious, in the absence of those, what are the decisions your organizations have had to make and what's the results we're seeing on the street?

I said earlier at a press conference for Napert House and again for all of our nonprofit brothers and sisters that we have to make, we are always searching for efficiencies where we can find cost savings in our administrative activities.

And the last thing, the last thing we want to see cut are services.

And we're getting to that point where I think that we are at a critical point where we may be going to the city and saying, we need to serve more, but with this much money, we just can't.

And so those are the real hard moral choices that we are confronting.

Any other comments on that question?

And another example is, you know, we're forced not to be able to even provide cost of living adjustments to our staffs.

And, you know, they're, The unemployment rate is so low within the area that we have people leaving to take other positions because they get paid more.

And it's just because we have to make the tough decisions to try to be able to deliver services, and it's a challenge.

One more question, yeah.

Thank you all for bringing that up.

Mark, in particular, when you're talking about neighborhood house, When you're having to lay people off at a time when we know that we need so much more services across the board, as Councilmember O'Brien's talked about for years, we are working so hard to get additional units of housing where people can get inside.

We know that the housing first is the model.

And as all of you have said, Jim, you as well, that if within your organizations, you're having to lay people off at a time when we need more and more of this.

I just would like to challenge us, I mean, as we're all talking today.

One of my frustrations, frankly, is one of our local newspapers who will always say, you need to do more with less.

You just need to be more efficient.

They will always tell us that not only do you need to do more with less, you just need to be more efficient.

What would you say to them?

Come and talk to me.

Spend like five minutes in my office, especially with my finance director.

So it is so frustrating, frankly, because we're looking at regional solutions.

And we need everybody in.

That the city we know plays a part, the county, the state.

I've given up on our federal government, frankly.

But locally, knowing that we're going to have to also reach out to businesses and to labor and to philanthropy to say we're all in this soup together.

And it's not an either or, it's an and, but I have gotten to the point where I just can't, don't even say to me do more with less.

We've got to do a lot more with a lot more.

Any other questions, comments?

Thank you for bringing that up.

And I talked about being blunt earlier and that we are not doing our duty.

We haven't fulfilled our obligation to ensure that we give you more so that you can do more.

I want to be super blunt as well.

And I hope that Seattle Times is watching because last year- I didn't say their name.

I am.

Last year they characterized our efforts jointly on council in an effort to try to stabilize contracts here as somehow trying to take money away from human services and homeless services by investing in frontline workers and the organizations and it is quite literally the opposite.

So I hope that our community who tracks this for our local media and otherwise sees this incredibly full audience, standing room only, and so many more people who for years have been calling for stabilizing the contracts.

And here's our joint and unanimous call from council that we want you to not only be able to fulfill your contracts, which we've asked you to do, but that we're giving you the funding so that you can do more with more.

And with that, are there any other comments?

Any other comments from colleagues?

Many thanks for coming for all your hard work.

Really appreciate it.

Let's give this panel one more round of applause.

invite up to the podium here, or I guess the table.

We are making policy with the local frontline experts at the table, literally.

If we could please invite up Tristan Spears from Youth Care, Tanette Barquette from Catholic Community Services, and Susan Estrella from Neighborhood House, a family caregiver support program.

Welcome.

Oh, great.

So thank you so much.

And if there's anybody else who is supposed to be on this panel that I didn't call, Susan, Tenet, and Tristan, please feel free to make your way up here.

Hi.

How are you?

Good.

Susana, go ahead and have a seat.

We have a little name tag for you there.

Susana Bienvenidos.

And we have Tonette and Tristan.

These are our real experts.

You all have had the experience of working with human service provider organizations and professionals as well, if that's correct.

Please feel free to introduce yourself and talk a little bit about the services that you all have received and why you're out here advocating for stabilizing human service provider wages and contracts.

Absolutely.

Good afternoon, Council.

My name is Tristan Spears.

It's real close to your microphone.

Sorry.

Is that better?

That's great.

All right.

Good afternoon, Councilmember.

My name is Tristan Spears.

I'm 26 years old and a youth care alumni.

I'm here today because I want to share my experiences working with a longtime youth care member, Joe Ellenbaas, who actually now works for the city.

Before I had met Joe, I was homeless.

I was relying on anything to survive, anything you could imagine just to find a meal, a snack, a few bucks to get to where I was going.

It was ugly.

I was depressed, sad, desperate, felt abandoned, lacked support.

I was eager to make something of myself, but I didn't know how to do it.

Fortunately, I had a friend that was a part of youth care.

She referred me to a woman working for youth care, and eventually I got in touch with Joe.

Joe was adamant about trying to meet me in person.

Joe was the first person who actually sent me the information packets and then took the time to sit down and explain them to me, instead of just saying, hey, call this person.

He would reach out to them first and put me in touch.

He always took the initiative.

I worked with Joe for three years.

If I needed food, clothing, anything, I could always call and reach out to Joe.

If I needed help, most of the time, Joe had it.

And if he didn't, he knew the direction to put me into work so I could find it.

He would always randomly send me an email or call to check in.

Those small bits of communication, asking me how I was doing, how my job searches were coming along, showed me that he was willing to go above and beyond and that he truly cared.

In the beginning, there were times I missed a few of my meetings with Joe.

I thought he'd give up on me, honestly.

I thought I'd just have to go back to my ways.

But Joe was always there, consistently, no matter what.

And without the time to build the trust, there would never have been a possibility of a relationship to get me to where I am today.

For me personally, it's been hard to trust white males because of my history with them.

And to have faith in someone like that is rare.

This random guy was there for me more than family.

I work in sales.

The best way I can describe it is I was Joe's commission and he wasn't going to give up until the deal was closed.

If it weren't for Joe, I'd probably be another statistic.

The people I grew up with, they're dealing drugs, they're killing themselves to support their addictions.

They're the people you see outside.

They don't have a Joe.

Where would I be without youth care?

Probably with them.

I recently watched an episode of Vice and it said that people who have a history in the criminal justice system have a 95% chance of staying out of prison if they last three years without reoffending.

Three years is how long I spent with Joe.

People I know that grew up in these systems have it hard.

That's a tremendous accomplishment for me, someone like me that grew up the way I did, to make it out, to only be a 5% person of going back into the criminal justice system.

Again, a tremendous accomplishment.

The first time I was put in detention, I was only in the fourth grade.

I was raised in the criminal justice system, then in the foster care system, given up on.

The people I know that were part of the criminal justice system and the foster care system, today they're dead.

I have an amazing credit score.

I have three daughters that are my everything.

I have an apartment downtown.

I'm having a great paying job.

That's what three years of a consistent staff member can do for someone.

Honestly, the fact that we have to tell people that this is what kids need is ridiculous.

Because if we know where those kids might end up, and we know that there's a way to stop it, why are we not putting our resources there?

Toward our children, toward our future, I thank God Joe is there for me and I hope you will support this cause and these human resource agencies so all youth can have someone like Joe.

Thank you for your time.

I wish.

Well, thank you, and thanks for sharing that story, and thanks to Joe as well.

All right, welcome.

Good afternoon, Councilmember Mosqueda and council and committee members.

When I heard about the opportunity to speak with you, I jumped to this chance to share my story.

I would like to start by thanking you for your continued support of a number of programs at Catholic Community Services and our sister human service agencies that serve Seattle's poor, homeless, vulnerable, and marginalized people.

My name is Tony Barquette.

The Barquettes are a longtime Seattle-based family, and we love our city.

There was a time not so long ago that I was lost, distressed, and living in homelessness with no boundaries and no self-confidence.

I wanted to find purpose in my life again, but I wasn't able to move forward with my life without living in homelessness.

Catholic Community Services assisted me in finding housing, and I was finally able to find stability and turn things around.

After getting settled into my home, I was accepted and graduated from Catholic Community Services Aspiring Social Service Employee Training, ASSET program.

I learned about trauma-informed care, structural racism, implicit bias, professional boundaries, and more.

ASSET prepares CCS clients who want to return to work by giving back to their communities.

One of the many ASSET client graduates, like me, have been hired at CCS.

Once I graduated, I applied for employment at CCS and was hired.

And I have been working for nearly a year now.

I received a promotion last week.

I tell you this because I want you to understand that I would not be here today advocating for human services if human services hadn't been there for me.

People who have lived under traumatic circumstances and are in need of services, it takes time to blossom and to rebuild their lives.

and regain confidence.

We want to be healthy and safe.

We want to be a part of the goodness that makes strong families and communities.

Social and human service agencies help thousands of people who have walked in the same homeless shoes that I have to repair and lead productive lives.

I love my job, and I'm proud to be working full time, paying rent, feeding my family, maintaining a car, and insurance.

Even with good benefits at CCS, I'm living real close to paycheck to paycheck.

I appreciate your leadership and the passion you have for our city.

Thank you for taking time today to reflect on the important work and human service agencies provide.

Thank you for thinking about us who are dedicated to skillfully providing services with compassion.

Our human service agency brothers are like me.

We need stability to do that.

Please consider the inflation adjustment to help provide that stability.

Thank you all for the work and leadership.

Tony, thank you so much.

My grandma's name is Tony as well.

So I'm really excited to be here.

Welcome, Susana, and you're welcome to bend that microphone just as much as you want to.

Yeah.

Okay.

Hi, everyone.

My name is Susana Estrella, and I'm a caregiver for my son, Michael.

He's 19 years old.

and he has a disability.

And I wanna try, I just say my second, my first language is Spanish.

I'm just trying to say in English, and I hope you, everybody understand me what I wanna say.

What I, I'm here, You know, because a lot of parents, they need support, the parents with special needs kids, they need a lot of help.

I'm here because I want to be their voice because the first, one of the problems for parents is because their language or they speak, They speak no English, and they don't know what programs they can have.

And it's really, really hard to have a kid with special needs.

It's stressful.

It's hard.

Nobody understand until you have a son, a kid with disabilities.

And I'm here because Okay, excuse me.

I want to say my son, he just get a lot of services because I met Mina.

She works in neighborhood house and she's very nice.

She's very helpful and she's like my angel because I have nobody to take care of my son.

He just get DDA.

Thanks, Mina, and thanks Neighborhood House for Neighborhood House.

He get, and I have a guardianship.

It was hard for me because the language and sign the papers, it's a lot of, it's a really, it's a lot of process and it's not easy.

It's not easy, especially if we don't speak the language, it's difficult, very difficult.

So I'm glad I have help.

And what I wanna say, They have a lot of support, group supports, so it's how I feel comfortable.

They have many services, but what I feel comfortable is when I come to the support groups.

And it's nice to have another parent.

I feel like even if they speak English, we speak the same language because we have special needs kids.

And I'm a little nervous because I never talk in public like now.

But I'm just trying.

Thank you very much.

Thank you all so very much for sharing your stories.

Mil gracias por estar aquí con nosotros a compartir sus cuentos y la historia de su familia.

Thank you again for sharing your individual stories and what that meant to your family.

Before you go, let's see if there's any questions from our council colleagues.

Council Member Bagshaw.

What's next for you?

For each of you, Tristan and Tony and Susana, what do you see next in your lives?

For me, myself, I just want to continue advocating for my community to try to restore balance into it.

Because this is Seattle.

I grew up here.

And I've noticed a tremendous lack of Seattle.

So that balance needs to be restored.

For me, with the inflation budget, as long as we get it.

I want to stay in social services.

It's my heart's desire to help those that are less fortunate.

I want to see everyone be successful.

And for me, I'm happy to get in those services for my son.

And I would like to share with other people, because there is places they can help you, like neighborhood.

They can help you.

And it's so nice to have a help.

especially for us.

I just want to say Seattle isn't dying, it's getting woken up.

I do hope Como heard that.

So one of the things we hear a lot about is because of the unstable contracts and the low amount that each human service provider contract has been given, there's turnover in case management.

And one of the things that I'm interested in, and we talked a little bit about this at the last select committee hearing on homelessness, was the need to actually have indicators that our friends in the human service provider organizations can actually meet.

And one of those issues that I'd love to see us track more of is, are we paying enough to maintain the same case managers?

Have you all had a situation where you've experienced case managers having to change over or have colleagues and friends who've seen case managers change.

And what does that mean?

You talked a lot about Joe.

You talked about Nina.

You know, what does it mean to have the same case manager in place so that we can really contextualize that comment?

It means that we need to get higher wages.

Case managers, case managers or advocates, I mean, they can't be around.

I mean, everybody needs to live and it's hard to live with low wages.

So you have to find where you're losing them.

Most of them are either they're falling into homelessness themselves or or finding a job that can pay them more, just changing their whole career.

But the need for having social services, it's really neat.

We have a big homelessness percentage that's really huge.

And then unless something changes and wages go up, and social services, we can lose lots and lots of people.

Absolutely.

For me specifically, having somebody there that I could stop and build a relationship with made all the difference.

If I didn't have somebody that I could sit there and tell my deepest intimate problems with and share those with, then they wouldn't be able to really pull me out of those because I would have been holding back from somebody I didn't trust as much.

You know, with that openness, it made all the difference.

If I didn't have somebody that, like I said, three years, made my difference to be the young man you guys see today.

Excellent.

Thank you.

Algo más?

What I would like to say is, for me, it's good to have people helping you, like they understand how you feel, what you need, what your sons need, and especially because sometimes we we got depressed and sometimes we don't not even wanna answer the phone.

So for me, she's helping because she was calling and like, I don't know if she feel, she feel or she understood, understand how I feel.

She was calling me or text me and it's only what, I mean, what I try to say is she did a lot.

Yeah, she did a lot for me.

I just want to try to say, I want to say she understood me how I was feeling.

So she's very nice.

I don't know.

Is Nina here?

Yeah, she's here.

Let's give it up for Nina too.

Go ahead, Council Member Bryan.

I really am grateful for the three of you sharing your amazing stories.

It's clear you're doing amazing work in our community, and I know that there are thousands of others, including many in the room today and many out there on the front line today.

And as a city and a community, we can do better to support your amazing work, and we'll start that today.

I just think that the title of this day ought to be Seattle Isn't Dying, It's Getting Woken Up.

Thank you for that.

A huge round of applause for the panel number two.

Council Member Bagchan and I are saying, somebody call COMO.

So tweet at them, feel free to tell them that they just got named dropped.

All right.

Evelyn Correa, Paul Rosenthal, Clantonia Van, Teresita Batayola from Youth Care, Plymouth Housing, SEIU 1199, and International Community Health Services make up our third panel.

Let's give it up for these incredible individuals.

We really, really appreciate you being here and sharing your expertise with us.

So in whatever order you all prefer, if you'd like to start down here, sir, and we'll go to Teresita at the end, then we will go ahead and have you introduce yourself and talk a little bit about why this issue is so important.

Well, thank you very much for having us here.

It really is exciting to be in front of the City Council in Seattle.

I'm Paul Rosenthal.

I'm a program manager with Plymouth Housing Group.

Plymouth provides permanent supportive housing for over 1,000 people in Seattle, and we're offering probably the most cost-effective and humane intervention for some of the most vulnerable people in Seattle.

I personally supervise six case managers at two different buildings in downtown, and between those six people, they provide housing case management services for about 162 different people.

The majority of those people, the tenants in our buildings, they were chronically homeless.

Many of them suffer from physical ailments, mental health issues, substance use issues.

They're good people and most of them need some kind of assistance.

I was a case manager about a year and a half ago.

I put in about 40 hours a week.

I lived with three other people on Beacon Hill.

And the only way that I could afford to do that was through the generosity of the person that owned the house.

He believes in social activism.

He took a personal financial loss to make sure that we had decent housing.

And it was a struggle, even after we passed the 15-now resolution, to maintain that.

I made food a personal priority because I wanted to let other things slide, like saving for retirement funds, you know?

A lot of the people that I work with, my peers, they don't have that kind of a luxury.

They've got families.

They have chronic health issues.

Most of the people that I work with, we do this because we believe that everybody should have a home.

It's like it's a personal belief that keeps us doing this stuff.

But a lot of us are afraid of losing our own.

We could easily join the ranks of the people who don't have homes.

I've moved into management, and I'm making more money.

And after taxes, it's still a struggle to afford a one-bedroom apartment in the city.

Just as our cost of living continues to rise, the cost of doing this work is continuing to go up from maintenance into the repairs of our buildings to the utilities, supplies for the people that are in it, healthcare and transportation.

I have a team of six, once again, six case managers.

They serve 162 people.

And without improved wages for staff retention, my team occasionally falls down to five people or four people.

And it creates a lot of challenges for the folks that we try to serve and for the staff who remain at Plymouth.

With the vast number of people without homes, we need service providers to assist them.

And in order to recruit and retain our workforce, we need our government partners to adequately support this crucial part of our city's infrastructure.

Thank you.

Thank you for highlighting the various issues where we've seen inflation in cost.

I think as labor advocates, we constantly think about wages on the front line because we know the impact that it has on retention and turnover.

However, the costs are going up across the board, so I want folks to think about that.

That's why we're calling it an inflationary adjustment, not just a wage adjustment, because there's so much that you all have to do in order to provide that holistic service.

One more huge round of applause.

Thank you for leading off this.

Hello everyone, my name is Evelyn Correa and I have handouts.

Yes, I love handouts and we can make some copies too for folks in the audience.

All right.

Can you guys hear me?

Great.

Good afternoon, council members.

My name is Evelyn Correa, and I am the Human Resources Officer at Youth Care.

And I feel really fortunate that I have that job at Youth Care because I know that a lot of our providers can't afford a Human Resources Department.

We serve young people ages 12 to 24 across King County.

As of today, we have about 300 staff.

We also have over 30 open positions.

So thank you for the opportunity to speak about the importance of an annual inflation adjustment for human services agencies.

I'd like to share with you several charts that capture YouthCare's annual increased cost of business, which anyone doing business in the city can relate to.

The city hasn't become more affordable for individuals or small businesses.

We subsidize these increases each year, yet our contracts remain relatively flat.

Due to time, I'm not gonna review each chart, but I do wanna bring your attention to some of the largest increases.

So we're talking about increased costs of doing business.

And if you look at the first chart that shows the cost of utilities, things like water, sewer service, et cetera, you can see over a three-year period that we have gone from a cost of about $40,000 a year to in three years, $79,000 a year.

And that's one of the more substantive charges.

It's the same thing when you look at utilities, you know, same sort of scenario.

So in this first chart, you see our utility breakdowns.

I mentioned $41,000 a year for water sewer services in 2018. As I mentioned, that almost doubled.

by 2018. In the second chart, you can see that our facilities costs were around $67,000 in 2015, and that number more than tripled by 2018 to almost $350,000.

You'll find similar trends in the last two charts regarding our rental and insurance costs.

Now, some of these costs, some of these increases, rather, are because youth care has grown in the last four years.

That's because of the need, the growing need.

But even if we remove the additions, the increases are still dramatic.

We stretch our budgets to make sure we can keep the doors open and the lights on.

As a result, we have less money to spend on recruiting and retaining staff to provide high-quality care.

Last year, I shared that YouthCare had an annual turnover rate of 38%.

I remember at the time that though the rate was high, we were still one of the lower providers.

Sadly, this year, I have to report that our turnover rate is now at 44%.

Many of the young people that we work with at YouthCare are in crisis.

Our staff do an incredible job building relationships and supporting them, but this is hard work.

And to do it well, we need experienced staff who are responsive, who can make referrals, who can make quick decisions, who know when and when not to call the police.

It is nearly impossible to deliver high quality services with constant turnover and vacant positions.

And this has had a direct impact on our staff and our young people.

Here are several quotes from our staff.

I'm chronically worried that I'm going to be single staffed.

Our workers, our staff get sick.

They burn out.

I worry about what happens if there's a crisis and I don't know how to respond.

Another employee said, I've been here for a year and a half and I am now the most senior member on my team.

The implications of that are terrifying.

So what I'm saying is when this work is done well, people live.

When it's not, people die.

Also recognize the impact of these conditions on young people.

As you heard from Tristan, having a trusted, consistent staff member is key to finding stability.

That staff member is a lifeline.

When that lifeline is cut short, we do damage.

It's a misconception that young people are homeless because they prefer to be outside.

But we need to be honest about what we're inviting them into, because it is legitimate for a young person to wonder, what should I come inside for if I can't have stability?

Why should I rely on someone if I know they're going to leave?

The young people living outside aren't there because they want to sleep under a bridge.

They're there because they crave.

They need community.

Providers must be able to replicate that inside.

Otherwise, we are failing our youth.

The last thing I want to do is end on equity.

12 years ago, 80% of the staff at Youth Care were white.

We have worked hard to live out our values of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

And I am proud to say that we are now 54% people of color and immigrants, including at leadership positions.

But I shudder at the fact that our staff qualify for the very services that we provide for young people.

My life's work has been about access and opportunity for black, brown, and LGBTQ identified people.

That's why I work in human resources.

My consciousness hurts to invite them to this reality.

That's against my own integrity, and I have to think about that.

And that's why I'm here, asking you to support an annual inflation adjustment for human services contracts.

It's a first step, and it's the very least that we can do.

Thank you for your time.

My name is Quintania Van.

I'm a clinical sports specialist with Downtown Emergency Service Center.

I work at Kern and Scott House, which is a special program because we offer a 45 residency and a women's shelter of 25 women nightly.

Thank you for the opportunity to share my perspective on retention and turnover.

Staff turnover can have a profound effect on client engagement and stabilization.

Imagine if teachers on average stayed 12 months.

Student learning due to turnover would be destructive and less effective.

These are the consequences we experience with staff turnover.

Clients' mental and emotional stability is dependent on stable relationships with their care providers.

We serve the most vulnerable population We serve the most vulnerable population in our community, those that depend on supportive services to adequately function.

Between 2018 and 19, DSC housing units were heavily dependent on on-call workers and routinely understaffed.

A safe ratio for swing shift should be three staff to 70 plus residents.

Swing shift is the busiest shift of the day with the least amount of support.

we are engaging residents, serving dinner, and distributing medication.

Often, the shift is understaffed with two or even one staff member.

Because of staff turnover, clinical support specialists, which is what I am, have to perform the duties of a residential counselor, which is the front desk support.

Performing dual responsibilities mean we fall behind on case management, one-on-one time with our residents and crisis intervention.

Both residents and staff suffer when housing teams are overstretched.

We need salaries that reflect the education and experience we bring to social and human services.

We need to stabilize our workforce to ensure these vital services remain strong in our city.

We need our city council representatives to make homelessness and supportive services a priority and funded adequately.

Thank you.

Hi, thank you so much for having us here and thank you so much for considering the issue of automatic inflationary adjustments for city contracts.

My name is Teresita Bateola.

I'm the CEO of International Community Health Services.

We are a community health center with ten sites in King County, seven of which are in Seattle.

We provide care, medical, dental, behavioral health, pharmaceutical, health education, health literacy, and other health services to low-income people, and about 50% of our patients are at 100% of federal poverty level.

and another 25%, a 200% of federal poverty level.

Most of our patients are immigrants and refugees.

We provide services in over 50 languages a year from Asia, Pacific Islands, East Africa, Eastern Europe, and of course, Spanish speaking backgrounds.

We served 31,000 patients, close to 32,000 actually, last year.

And those were served with over 135,000 health center visits.

So it tells you one of two things.

One, their health conditions are not good.

So they have to come in for multiple visits.

And two, whenever we can, we try very hard to provide whole person care.

In other words, If they're a medical patient, we encourage them to be a dental patient.

We encourage them to be part of our community kitchen program so they know and learn better how to have healthy foods.

And if they need it, then we have them participate in mental health and behavioral health programs.

As a community health center, the services we provide are not just within our walls.

We work very hard with many of the organizations represented here out in the community with partnerships, some formal, some informal, because we have to address social determinants of health.

We have to make sure they're in safe neighborhoods, they have access to jobs, they have access to great education, access to transportation and so on and so on.

In a city that is enjoying unprecedented economic wealth, we continue to have too many people fall through the cracks and too many people that we can't find and we can't serve.

I am very grateful to the city because the city has consistently supported uninsured care.

And I think it's an irony that only a few years ago I had to visit several of you to convince you that the Affordable Care Act did not cover everyone, that health continued to be a priority.

Today, I'm saying to you, our uninjured care is going up again.

And this is because of a number of things.

One is that the federal government has done too many things to poison the well, whether it's in terms of formal actions, attacks against Affordable Care Act and removing the individual coverage, mandate or it's in attacking Medicaid and trying to constrict it so that people are no longer able to qualify or fear and intimidation against immigrants and refugees.

And what this does is it prevents people from coming in to see us until they're very ill.

And so these are drivers of costs.

You know, poor health leads to higher costs.

We have an aging population that leads to higher healthcare costs.

We have a workforce that we have to try to hang on to.

when we're facing competition from major hospitals and private providers.

We end up churning some of our folks because we are considered to be the training ground and our staffs are considered to be the cream of the cream when you're talking about people who know how to provide care in a culturally and linguistically competent way.

And like my colleagues, we want to be able to hang on to our staff because it is so important to have that trusted relationship between the people providing the service and the people receiving the service.

So it is really, really very important to us that you do provide us with that inflationary adjustment.

We have a lot of costs that do not Pencil out when we talk about grants, when we talk about fee for service, when we talk about Medicaid reimbursement.

The costs are to support a whole person's care, a whole person's life.

And in our case, we don't just think of the individuals, we think about the families and we think about their communities.

So thank you for considering this issue.

Very incredible panel.

Thank you for all your information, for the data that you provided and the stories.

Questions and comments from our colleagues?

I do have one.

And I really appreciate this, Teresita, and especially the work you have done with us in the last decade.

Just in the last week, we have learned that two, maybe three facilities for seniors are closing and has something to do with Medicaid.

We've heard about Vashon Island.

We've heard about one on Capitol Hill and another close.

Can you enlighten us on what's going on with that and what you see that needs to happen?

I mean, the fear of putting multiple hundreds of seniors, vulnerable seniors, out on the street without places for them to go is as about a frightening matter as anything I've heard.

So can you address that?

So one phrase, Medicaid reimbursement sucks.

There's just no two ways about it.

It doesn't pay for the real cost.

It so happens that one of those nursing homes, it's not a senior center, it's a nursing home, it's CARO, which is in our community, and we're trying very hard to work with them to find a solution because we're talking about over 100 seniors who are going to have to find something somewhere and nursing homes across the country are closing.

So it's not a unique trend in our community.

So what we need to do is to try and figure out community-based programs where we have our elders able to age in place.

Starting March of this year, ICHS took over assisted living, adult day, and congregate meal program from SCIPTA, Seattle Chinatown International District Preservation Development Authority.

One, they wanted to focus on their main mission of community development.

But secondly, they realized that the cost of providing that kind of care was just not affordable to them.

And to a health center like us, because we are able to grow and stretch, and we're a Medicaid player, as lousy as their payment rate is, we're able to serve them a little differently.

But on top of that, we have just started a program of all-inclusive care for the elderly, which is a Medicaid-Medicare program.

So it's for low-income seniors who are nursing home eligible, but cannot afford to be in a nursing home or do not want to live there.

They can stay in their home, stay in the community, and we provide them with all the wraparound services, not just the medical suite of services, but also socialization, transportation is important.

If home care is needed, we will provide that too, and it is all based on an individual care plan.

And we're going to make it work.

The margins are very thin, but it's needed and it's our mission.

So an inflationary adjustment just really, really helps us try and fill that very narrow gap that we have in terms of what we get in terms of reimbursements.

One of the things that I think is a misunderstanding is that people believe that the folks who we see living outside are coming to Seattle, and we know that around 80% of the people who become homeless have lived in King County before.

Besides that, even if they are homeless and they've come from someone else, we're a welcoming city, so we want to provide those services and are proud of the services that our human service provider contracts offer.

regardless of where people come.

But can you talk a little bit about some of the situations in which you've seen folks who've been in this area, in King County, in Seattle, and the consequences that have led them there?

Can you talk a little bit about any of the anecdotes that you hear in terms of the cost of housing that has really created some of the situations that many of your clients have seen?

Okay, so I guess I've been with Plymouth for about 10 years at this point, and I've worked in a number of the different properties that they have, and so I've talked to lots of different people through all the different economic strata, except for obviously the one percentile that you could possibly meet.

And so I've talked to people who are living in one of our senior living facilities who traveled all across the entire world, suddenly developed a brain tumor, found that spending all of their money and the money they saved up for retirement put them onto the street, and with this chronic illness, they were never able to get their feet again until they were able to connect with somebody who got them into Plymouth Housing.

I hear a lot of stories that function in that particular way, where people go from having a nice middle class or lower middle class life, they get sick, Boom.

And then suddenly they're on the streets.

Thank you.

I can speak to that as well.

And so I mentioned that we have about 300 employees.

And one of my responsibilities is employee relations, which is where a lot of the coaching and those kinds of conversations happen.

And I know from talking to staff, and it's usually very confidential conversations, of course, that they will share with me that they are in peril because perhaps when they came to us and got the job, they'd been unemployed for, let's say, eight or nine months.

So that put them in the hole, as we say, right?

And so now you've got a job, but you are way behind the eight ball in terms of what you owe your landlord in terms of perhaps what you owe other lenders or owe family members.

And so you're working from a race that essentially got started, the whistle was blown long before you got to the front of that line.

And so I hear those stories all the time.

We've talked about what kind of, internal support we might be able to provide.

But we recognize that we don't have the funds to pay the wages that we want, let alone to try to figure out how to close some of those gaps when staff themselves are vulnerable.

But we recognize it as a huge problem.

I'd also like to weigh in.

First of all, I want to say that our city contracts are for city residents, so we have to provide zip codes, and we're very careful about that to make sure of that.

But I also will say that, yes, the cost of housing, the cost of living in the city has really affected not just our patients and clients, but also our staff.

However, we do see patients who are traveling, who are choosing to travel, be stuck in traffic, or take public transportation to come see us.

And a lot of that is because of the kind of care and staffing that we have.

The culture and language is very, very important.

They trust us.

They feel safe with us.

Thank you.

Other questions, comments?

Council Member O'Brien.

It's so apparent that you all do this work because you're passionate about it.

I haven't heard anyone say I got into this business because I'm really looking to provide financial stability for myself.

And we laugh about that.

You're all in positions where you're mentoring, you're managing, you're supervising, you're recruiting people to this field.

And this is the most important work that we need to get done as a society right now.

The only way that I see it happening is for the generosity and kindness of individuals like yourselves and the folks you're recruiting and the sacrifices people have to make to be in this business.

Our economics in our community are just upside down.

We need to be saying that we need some of the best people in the world to be coming and working in these fields and we're going to treat you fairly and appropriately so you don't have to make the personal sacrifices and we failed to do that today.

I'm grateful that despite that, you all have stuck around so long.

I can only imagine the pain when you have people up underneath you who you may even be advising that they should take a different job because that's the best for them.

When you know that that means the organization and the work will suffer, but it's what you have to do as a human being.

And we as a society and we as a city have to do a better job so that that's not a dilemma you have to face and make your job a little bit easier.

I would like to add that we have staffs who choose to stay with us but work part-time and then part-time in the hospital so they can get the better pay, the better benefits, and they're making that sacrifice because they are committed to the community, committed to the patients and families.

Multiple jobs.

So before Sajal Parikh leaves, Chief of Staff, just want to say thank you to her for all the work she did to pull this together.

Seeing no more comments, I just want to say thank you to this panel, to the other two panels that have come before.

This is the continuation.

It's not the beginning because this work has been going on for a while.

Thank you to both of you and Council Member Bryan for unveiling and continuing to bring up the issue around historic underfunding.

This is though the beginning of our efforts in 2019 to make sure that we're able to move forward a commitment to addressing the inflationary increases that you all need this year and going forward.

We will have legislation for folks to take a look at starting next week.

We do also have public comment that we want to get to.

And before that, how would you all feel about a big picture if we came out there and you all stood up and we took a picture from over here?

Yeah?

Okay, let's give it up for this panel one more time.

Just in case you didn't hear that, let's give it up for this panel one more time.

Okay, we're going to gather right over here and then we're going to do public comments.

It's a work session, I can do what I want to do.

One, two, three, and hold it.

And one more.

Great.

Okay, let's go ahead and and take the public comment that's appeared on today's council agenda.

If folks can help us out with trying to keep the volume down so that we can hear the folks who came to publicly testify.

What we'd like to do is hear from Casey Jaywork.

And Casey, are you still here?

Hi, Casey.

Okay, there we go.

And the Honorable, if you'd kindly move out of the way.

Casey, let's make sure your microphone's on.

Casey, you're a tall guy.

You sit one there, and then you stand up straight and feel better.

Okay, so before you begin, let me try to get folks' attention again.

Clap once if you can hear me.

Clap twice if you can hear me.

Give it up for Casey Jayward as one of our first presenters.

Council members, thank you so much for your work on this.

My name is Casey Jay work.

I am a I work with formerly houseless people at DESC I help them stay housed in private apartments.

These are my colleagues I'm here to ask you to support.

I'm here to ask you to support the built-in adjustment for inflation.

This just seems, in addition to being the just and fair thing to do for our clients and for us, it also seems like responsible governance and financially responsible.

When you underinvest things, they cost more in the long run.

When you pay the price tag up front, then you don't have to pay more later on.

So please support this.

Thank you.

Thank you, Casey.

John Meadows, followed by Heather Fitzpatrick.

Hi, John.

Thank you, everybody, for being here today.

And get real close to the tall microphone.

My name is John Meadows.

I'm the maintenance coordinator for Plymouth Housing Group.

We've got 14 buildings and growing in the downtown Seattle area.

Like Paul Rosenthal said, we've got thousands of tenants.

We've got nine maintenance techs at best on a good day between thousands of tenants, multiple things going wrong.

We have janitorial support inside of buildings, but when we're getting multiple work orders, tens, dozens, hundreds, you know, by the week put in, things are going wrong, and then sometimes people are getting pulled off of things, it creates a great work for the people that are trying to provide for the people.

that we're trying not to fall into the same situation as.

You know, we're not unlike the people that we're trying to service.

A lot of us are just a paycheck away from being in that same situation.

You know, whether it's a flood or a fire, things going wrong, then we have to pull people off, and now we're still stacking up.

Everybody has needs, you know, so I definitely support this adjustment.

I'm pleading for it, you know what I mean?

I'm in Seattle trying to get housing for myself.

I can't even afford to live in a neighborhood that I grew up in because things are how they are.

I get pushed out to Tukwila and then further back just because of how things are.

We need this, not just for ourselves, but so that we can support the people that we're here to help.

You know, some people are working double jobs.

Some people are commuting just to park and ride so they can catch public transportation to get into work.

You know, we work 40 hours a week and then we still get home and we have to prepare to come back in for the next day.

So this is the type of thing where if we want to have service with a smile and we want to provide for people so that they're happy, we need to be happy and we need to be comfortable in and of ourselves.

And to do that, we're going to need an adjustment.

That's what I'm here for.

Absolutely.

Thank you so much, Sean.

Thank you for your time today and for your concern about Seattle's human service organizations and the inflation adjustment.

My name is Heather Fitzpatrick.

I'm the CEO of Wellspring Family Services.

Our agency is working to prevent and end family homelessness.

Councilwoman Mosqueda, you did a great job of recapping a lot of the challenges just in your introduction and I'd like to reinforce three points that you and many of my colleagues on the panels already made.

First, the demand for our services is growing and so are our operating expenses.

We are losing knowledgeable, experienced, compassionate staff because we must choose between compensation, benefits, and service capacity.

Many of our staff are close to homelessness themselves.

And finally, that turnover has an impact on our ability to help families.

You heard the story of Justin and Joe at Youth Care and the impact that trust and relationship have on services.

That trust building, it takes time and consistency.

Handing off clients destroys trust, delays services, and causes additional trauma, which in turn requires additional services.

Short-changing compensation, and that's most of our budget, as it is for most human service organizations, is penny-wise but pound-foolish.

Please give us better choices.

Thank you.

Excellent.

Thank you.

Manas, followed by Leah Heverman.

Good afternoon, Councilmember Mosqueda and the other Councilmembers.

My name is Mano Zechatu and I'm the Executive Director of Refugee Women's Alliance.

We pride ourselves by serving refugees and immigrants from cradle to golden age.

We have about 150 staff in 10 different areas of the county.

while we're facing the same issues that the rest of my colleagues were representing today and talking about that, I want to urge you to consider that the people who are working at human service organizations are also professionals with degrees and lives that they need to support and we're not able to continue to retain them because they also need to leave.

People come and work for our organizations because of their passion, because they're really sold on the mission and they want to work the communities that they're supporting for the communities that they're supporting.

But I see the trend that they're also leaving the industry because they cannot afford to stay on.

And we are seeing a lot of our wonderful staff leaving not because they don't want to do the work, but because they have to, because they have to live.

So I want to thank you for supporting this inflation adjustment, and I would like to urge you to continue to do so.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Hi, I'm Leah with the Housing Development Consortium.

Many of our members are service providers with dedicated, compassionate frontline staff who work day in and day out to provide the care and support needed for people to reach their full potential and be seen with their full dignity.

Frontline staff are working with people transitioning out of homelessness, battling to overcome drug and alcohol addictions, people living so far in the margins that without the hard work of human services staff, they'd be off the grid entirely.

Yet in a city booming with economic growth and opportunity, we don't adjust the wages of these vital workers to match inflation.

Their wages are stagnant as rents rise and the cost of living surges.

If our city council is committed to creating systemic empathy, where all people are valued and provided the tools to forge their own opportunities, we need to value our human services staff, who are the foot soldiers doing this hard work.

If we are committed to the goal of a Seattle that works for everyone, then we need to support the workers that make up the backbone of Seattle's commitment to compassion.

I ask you to commit yourselves to creating a lasting solution to this yearly problem, and to value the workers who sustain the communities and programs we all invested and all benefit from.

Thank you for your leadership, and thank you for everyone in the room who does this work.

Yeah, absolutely.

Next, we have Natalie DeGraffes, followed by Patricia Dwosh, and then Aldiana Scott-Therese.

So sorry.

Natalie?

Hi.

Hi, welcome.

My name is Natalie Dejarfis.

Much like Clantonia on the third panel, I'm a clinical support specialist at DESC's Kerner-Scott House.

I've had the amazing good fortune to have been able to work at the same project in various positions for the past two and a half years, and I've been able to develop really strong rapport with many of our clients, which means that I can serve them better because they trust me.

I've also seen our project at times when we had almost no full-time staff and relied almost entirely on on calls who are amazing and necessary but not stable.

So this destabilization of the destabilization of our staff really impacts our clients.

They don't have consistent rule enforcement.

They don't have consistent access to the resources we need to provide them.

And they deserve better than that.

They deserve stability.

And I've heard many of them express to me that when a staff member that they've developed rapport with, who they trust, leaves, it really throws a wrench into everything for them.

Because they've been through a lot, and they're amazing, resilient people, but they really need and deserve stability.

And that means we need to be paying a sustainable wage.

That means that we can keep staff on for long enough to form those relationships.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Patricia?

Okay, let's all go to Eliana.

Sorry about my messy handwriting.

I'm Eliana Skathonis.

I'm a member of the Neighborhood Action Coalition, and I'm the chair of the Othello Village Community Advisory Committee.

I'm here today, of course, to support an annual inflationary adjustment for human service contractors.

But as was obvious from the powerful testimony today, that's only a very small first step.

As we heard and as I've seen on the front lines, the quality of services provided depends on those front line staff.

And right now, we as a city are failing to support these key providers and the agencies they're working for with living wages, decent training, and reasonable caseloads.

It's a shocking moral failure that as the crisis keeps getting worse and as the stresses weigh ever heavier on these agencies, that we're expecting them every year to do more with less.

We need to be investing at the scale of the crisis, which is something I know Allison has been saying for years.

And that starts with getting basic sensible processes running here.

We shouldn't be coming back here arguing about how people need to be getting a living wage and we need to increase again this year.

It shouldn't be every budget season having to make the same plea.

And I've been organizing for most of my life, but I've learned I've learned most from being the mother of seven children how you have to be reasonable and how you expend your resources and your energy and your time.

And that starts with setting up good process so you don't have to put all the energy into making the same decisions over and over again.

This is just basic common sense.

But once we do that, we need to be getting sustainable, progressive new income in here so that we can actually solve the problems.

Thank you.

Excellent.

Thank you.

Jason Austin, followed by Katie Wilson, then David Headley, followed by Marguerite Richard.

Hi there, Jason.

Okay, I'm sorry.

I see your name.

That's enough.

I see you.

We will get you on.

Jason Austin, go ahead.

Good afternoon members of the council and everyone who took their time out of their day to be here today.

My name is Jason, I'm a housing case manager with Catholic Community Services.

I work for a state funded program.

I want to repeat the refrain that the gentleman earlier said about three years.

I've been in my current position with CCS for three years, and with the exception of my program supervisor, I'm the most senior person who works for my program.

You know, my former coworkers left for a number of reasons.

Some of them went back to school to pursue careers in education or healthcare.

Some of them took jobs in the private sector.

But what they told me as to why they left was the exact same thing.

I can't picture myself doing this for the rest of my career.

That's a shame.

That is a shame, that is a failure of our community.

Seattle is globally recognized as a mecca for people with skills and technology because people can build lives and careers doing that work here.

And if we wanna live in a community where everyone is cared for and housed appropriately and healthily, we need to make these jobs careers that people can build.

There are at least two, thank you.

I've seen at least two former clients of the program that I work for here today standing shoulder-to-shoulder with me as my co-workers at CCS.

I've been privileged to be a part of their process, and I want to see them build lives in this community doing this work.

They bring their lived experience and their passion to this.

And if they had to leave and find other work because they couldn't afford to continue to do this, that would break my heart.

So please think about this being a city that is for all of us.

Thank you.

Excellent.

Thank you.

Katie Wilson, welcome.

Hi, council members.

My name's Katie Wilson, and I'm here representing the Transit Riders Union.

I just wanted to express our strong support for this initiative.

Super important.

The folks who work at human service providers in Seattle do some of the hardest work and some of the most important work in our city, and we need to start paying them like it.

The other thing I want to add is that we think that these workers deserve not just living wages and inflation adjustments, but we think they should have transit passes, just like people who work for the city of Seattle, just like people who work for King County.

And so we hope you'll work with us to make that happen as well.

That's something that benefits not only workers, but it benefits all of us because it incentivizes public transit, makes sure that we're meeting our climate goals, and getting people out of cars.

Thank you.

Excellent.

I'm sorry, I could not read your handwriting.

Followed by David and then Marguerite.

Yes, I'm Honorable Michael Fuller.

I've been fighting for our homelessness for some years now.

Right, Sally Bradshaw?

For some many years.

But I'm looking at the increase of homelessness.

Now, August 25, 1619 to August 25, 2019 is 400 years of enslavement.

But at the time of September 11, you had Audacity and the Gums to talk about war on America, when it's a war on America.

You have spent $338.3 billion on unauthorized, undocumented, and then our veterans sleeping on the street.

That's a conflict, Sally.

Sally Bradshaw, that is a conflict.

Our veterans come before people of color.

Now, I've been fighting.

I've traveled under bridges and abandoned buildings in Washington State in the 90s when Bill Clinton was in office.

But now, the King County Council, a 10-year plan to end homelessness.

But in 2010, 11.2 million unauthorized, undocumented aliens.

of $42.1 million, unauthorized, undocumented aliens.

And then our tax payers are spending $300,000.

That was in February 2015. But I am devastated that You wasn't talking about our veterans, my dad who served his country in the United States Air Force during the Korean War and Vietnam War, and my sister was in the Persian Gulf War in 1992 when George H.W. Bush Sr. was in office, also the 41st President, also put in the Law of America with Disabilities Act, July 26th of 1990. That's not being enforced by y'all.

So I'm going to hold you accountable for violating your oath to office, RTW 2.1.

Thank you, Your Honorable.

We got to keep moving.

There's two more people signed up to testify.

The next person is David, followed by Marguerite.

Sir?

He was the president in 1789, 1797. And the 23rd president was Benjamin Harrison.

Benjamin Harrison was the president in 1789, 1797. Is that you, David?

Hi, David.

Welcome up, David, and followed by Marguerite.

I just want to protest the fact that I got put second to the back.

I know I signed that way before that.

And I would like to know how many people on the speaking list are fixing to get paid off the levy?

Is city council going to prove status quo and funnel all this money while never holding them accountable for egregious subhuman bankers hours efforts?

It's appalling the multitude of panelists and Most of the speakers and everyone just recently in the chambers once raises for all the social service providers.

This is more proof we need on an investigation on the six-figure salaries, hiring unqualifieds, being overseen by do-nothing government, forcing taxpayers to pay twice, once to the government inept who's contracting with politically connected non-profits, feeding data during baker's hours, while acting like a political extension for re-election of politicians overseeing their contracts.

On a side note, the California chronic homeless is gouging Medicaid.

And I like to say criminals getting intimate and paid helping the most vulnerable is more proof liberal policies implode.

City council is going to have to be better with the allocation of funds for housing and petition a noble first world 21st century advanced housing developer who's qualified to build proper homes.

A lot of the government oversight on nonprofits who continue to cheat the taxpayers and the homeless, innocent, sober, drug-free have been given a pass on their racist discriminations.

We've seen wraparound service in Seattle is dying video, yet lots of money to skim while they continue to lie about their half-ass efforts.

Excuse my French, but Seattle Times should investigate the six-figure salaries hiring operatives to do the bidding of counsel for re-election at the expense of integrity and forthright, diligent, honest efforts to solve the oppression.

Youth care executives used to work at King County Committee to End Homelessness.

Same executive changed the name to allhome.com.

Once realized it was a bogus entity, he jumped behind youth care.

We need to get beyond College Bukes work and the pay plan, paying criminals, unqualified and inept service providers.

The next person that we have is Marguerite Richard.

And David, I understand why it looks like you signed up earlier.

We did have two sheets who are at the top of that second sheet.

Marguerite, thanks so much for being here.

And if there's anybody else that would like to testify, please go ahead and line up.

Thanks for being here.

Yes.

Good day, everyone.

I brought my little It says, get out.

And this is what I was told to do by Tenel Stefanescu the last time I was trespassed from here.

So I'm delivering this to him.

He can get out, you know, for telling me what to do.

And that's very important because these people here today, they were exercising their free speech.

And so when you speak on homelessness, I think it's a crying shame that all these people come up in here saying that they're doing things to eradicate it, but yet and still it's increasing.

So I don't know if it's the elephant in the room, the giraffe, the, was it a black leopard?

a tiger, a monkey, what is the problem?

And I'm concerned about that because there's a lot of people saying that they're advocating for this adjustment so that we won't have to go through what we are going through and we won't have to see all the trash and the litter and stuff on the streets anymore.

So, A, I've written you, you didn't write back.

You didn't, you didn't, what is this?

You know what I'm saying?

These people call themselves representing us and they don't even communicate with us.

Unless, I don't know if you like Jay-Z that just, you know, tipped over the Richter scale being a billionaire.

And I see you looking at me. because a lot of these people, they don't have the kind of finances.

If they did, maybe they wouldn't be homeless.

And then sometimes when you throw them out on the streets for no reason at all, then they have to go get a lawyer that they cannot afford.

So this is just beyond my comprehension right now with this, because like he was saying about the 10-year plan, hey, we lived through that too, and we still didn't see a change.

Thank you, Mr. Sharn.

I see a few folks lined up to testify.

Please go ahead and introduce yourself, and then we'll get you to sign up in just a little bit.

Welcome to the mic, Allison.

Thank you very much Councilmember Mosqueda.

I thought I would ask everybody who's still here who has been part of this Just for Inflation campaign to come up and join me because this really is a wonderful opportunity.

I thank you Councilmembers Mosqueda and Bagshaw for staying and for hosting and making it possible for us to talk with you about why we do the work, why this work matters, and why in partnership with all of us, the city needs to step up and make the investment in the infrastructure of human services.

We hear a lot about roads and bridges, about seawalls, about bike lanes, and the people who filled this room and the buildings, most of them crumbling, that they work in every day and every night are the infrastructure of what supports folks in all parts of Seattle.

I myself started out as a children's advocate for kids experiencing homelessness in New York City.

And so for 30 years, I've had the experience of people saying, oh, thank you so much for what you do, and essentially implying that this is something that people do out of the goodness of their hearts.

These people are workers.

These people are doing the most vital work there is.

And the infrastructure investments that the city has made historically are the infrastructure investments that we're asking you to protect by creating a longstanding solution to the need to just adjust for inflation.

As you both know very well, and as we all will attest to, that's only the first step in correcting really decades of disinvestment in this infrastructure.

We don't want it to crumble, we want our community to thrive.

And we've seen and heard today some of the most extraordinary examples of how individual people thrive and how that then bolsters our whole community.

So I thank you both and your colleagues, Council Members O'Brien and so on, who were here earlier.

I hope all the Council Members listen to and watch this entire afternoon because it inspired me and I hope that it inspires you to take this modest next step so that we can all get on to some of the bigger work.

As you said, Council Member Bagshaw, we need to do more with more.

Thank you.

Much more.

Thank you so much.

Seeing no one else signed up to testify, I want to just thank our council colleagues for being here, for everybody who testified, for the incredible panel, for the turnout today, standing room only.

We do have two more opportunities to talk about this.

On Thursday, July, sorry, June 13th, that's next week at 930, we'll have some legislation for you all to consider.

That's really exciting.

And then we will bring it back the following meeting, which will be July 11th, given the holiday break.

for us to potentially consider moving forward with an inflationary adjustment that we can put into our statute to concretize our commitment to this.

Council Member Baxhaw.

Again, thanks to everybody.

Council Member, I want to ask, and this comes back to my role as the Cranky Finance Chair, Do we have the 10-year look back on how much money we've spent and how much money going forward this will take?

Not to throw cold water on any of this.

We know we need it.

But I also want to acknowledge that from what I'm hearing, we're not going to have that bow wave going forward.

So I want to make sure that we are all being, I don't want to say realistic because that's nasty, but what it's going to take for us to do what people are requesting here.

That's right.

I think there's two items that we've been discussing today.

One is the historic underfund, the historic deficit that I think we've heard has affected so many of our human service provider organizations and the need for an inflationary adjustment going forward.

So what the legislation will consider with your indulgence is Just the latter, the inflationary adjustment going forward, recognizing we got a lot of work to do to make up for the historic underfund, but that should help address the bow wave issue as the chair of finance.

I know that's a big deal for you.

And getting that first step in place was the 2% across the board.

This will be a more accurate reflection of the actual cost of living going forward, which we think will at least help stabilize for now as we work on parity and equity in the future.

So with that, please look for the legislation to be online as of this Friday.

And that'll give folks a full week to take a look at it.

Feel free to come back and testify on Thursday next week.

And one more just note of appreciation for all you do and for everyone being here, a little bit extra today.

And we know that's what you do every day, provide a little extra with less.

So let's do more with a lot more.

Okay, great.

Thanks everyone.

This meeting is adjourned.