Good morning, everyone.
It is Friday, February 15, 2019, at 9.30 AM.
My name is Mike O'Brien.
Welcome to the Sustainability and Transportation Committee.
It's a special committee meeting this week on a Friday morning to handle a single agenda item, another discussion, and hopefully a vote on the appointment of Sam Zimbabwe as Director of the Seattle Department of Transportation.
Today, I'm joined by Jasmine Marwaha, who's staffing me.
Thank you for being here.
We'll go ahead and jump right into public comment.
I have two folks signed up for public comment, David Goldberg and then Sean Van Eyck.
You'll each have two minutes.
Come on forward.
Good morning, esteemed committee.
I'm here today as, in my personal capacity as a human being, a member of the planning commission in the city of Seattle and chair of the board of Seattle Neighborhood Greenways to speak in favor of the confirmation of Sam Zimbabwe's appointment I became acquainted with Sam back when he and I both worked for sister national organizations working on transportation, Transportation for America, and Reconnecting America, and have heard nothing but good things about him since those years and all the good work that he's done.
As you know all too well, transportation is one of the key issues facing Seattle in addition to our housing issues.
And I think Sam is uniquely positioned as a person both with sort of a national perspective, having been on the cutting edge of a lot of visionary work, but also having been in the trenches working in city government and actually seeing how things get done.
And we're in a great position in the city of Seattle in that we have great plans.
We have great climate action plans.
We have great modal plans.
We've adopted Vision Zero.
Move Seattle is quite a visionary thing.
What we need is to get it all done.
We need bravery and we need commitment.
We all need to support Sam a lot, but I hope that you will endorse his appointment, and I look forward to working with Sam in the years to come.
Thanks.
Great.
Thanks, David.
Sean?
Good morning, Councilmember O'Brien.
This is Sean Van Eyck.
I'm here in my capacity as the labor representative for Pro-Tech 17, formerly PTE Local 17. As you may know, I was a member of the search committee the mayor appointed to replace Mr. Kubli, and very much appreciated that opportunity to participate in that very robust search.
I also appreciated the opportunity at the tail end of that to have members actually engaged in that process as well.
It went swimmingly, and I am here to strongly endorse the appointment of Sam Dibabwe as the next SDOT director.
Thank you.
Great.
Thanks so much for being here, and thanks for your work on that committee, Sean.
Is there anyone else in the audience that would like to provide public comment?
All right, seeing none, we'll close public comment, and I'll invite presenters forward.
And we'll jump into agenda item number one.
I'll let Jasmine read that when we get to it.
Appointment of Sam Zababwe for SDOT director for a term to January 1st, 2023.
Welcome.
Thank you for being back here again.
I understand you are, you're a little trial by fire for the last, your first few weeks on the job here in Seattle.
So congratulations for that.
I figure if you're still back here at this point, that bodes well for the years to come in front of us.
Before we jump in, I don't know, Calvin, if you have anything you want to say.
Shafali or Sam, I guess we can start with introductions from everybody.
My fault.
Calvin Chow with Council Central staff.
Sam Zimbabwe with SDOT.
Shafali Ranganathan with the mayor's office.
I have a handful of questions I want to run through, but you guys want to make any opening remarks or say any comments before we jump into that?
I'm just here to reintroduce Sam Zimbabwe.
He's still here.
Doing your job well.
And yeah, and I just have to say on behalf of the mayor how appreciative we have been of his role in the snow response and and how outstanding their commitment has been.
They've been working 24-7, 12-hour shifts, so I'm thankful for that and thankful for Sam's leadership.
That's great.
Yeah, I would only say it's been a fun first few weeks, first three weeks.
Fire might have actually been easier than what I had to deal with, but I'm still here and very much looking forward to the conversation.
That's great.
Maybe, Sam, if you don't mind, Talk to me a little bit about what you've experienced in the last few weeks.
I am particularly interested in hearing your perspective on kind of the state of affairs of the hundreds of workers in the SDOT.
I imagine that there's groups of folks that were working overtime and stretched during the tunnel closure.
I know that there's big stuff still happening with the buses coming out of the tunnel in just over a month.
And then I imagine that the crews that do any, I assume lots of people were called up to manage the snow response too.
And so I imagine there's some folks that have been burning it on both ends.
But tell me a little bit about what you've seen out there and how folks are doing and what we can do to support them.
Sure.
I think even before I started at SDOT, SDOT was sort of working in overdrive for the permanent Viaduct closure.
And obviously the organization has responded incredibly and sort of done everything that's asked of it.
I can't thank the...
staff throughout the organization enough for being called on to deliver in lots of ways that they're both used to and not used to.
And then also working at the same time to try to bring me up to speed as quickly as possible.
So I've had the chance to meet folks from around the agency and hear about what's going on through a series of sort of 101 presentations about different divisions, getting briefed up on projects at the same time as the agency is still in this major response mode.
We've sort of done the normal response to snow and ice, and then this turned into the abnormal, and the department and the staff were able to transition sort of seamlessly from what we were regularly prepared for into that unusual situation of just back-to-back snowstorms that haven't been seen in a really long time.
So it's in some ways slowed me down a little bit in terms of getting everything, you know, getting up to speed on all of the different parts of the organization and all the projects.
But at the same time, I've been able to see just the incredible response that the department has been able to put in.
That's great.
And I know that I've been joined by Council Member Johnson.
Thanks for being here.
Apologies for being late.
No problem.
You know, it's a Big department, a lot of folks have been there for decades.
There's a lot of expertise in that department.
And so I know that there's the folks there know how to do their job.
And at the same time, it's a department that's been without a kind of permanent director for over a year now.
And I'm curious what you're seeing as far as how folks are reacting to that and having what, hopefully, we'll see how the vote goes today, but permanent leadership at least for time going forward.
Yeah, so I think everybody has been very welcoming and very willing to share what they're working on, where they've had challenges.
And so what I've asked is, as we go through those introductory sort of get-to-know-you meetings, that I'm getting not just what's working well from people's perspective, but also where they have challenges.
And that helps me. really get to know the organization as a whole.
I would agree that there's a lot of folks who have been with the department for a long time and know the ins and outs.
And there's also a lot of really talented new folks throughout the organization.
And that's been interesting to come in at this time when people are just showing all of their talents.
So, you know, I was out during the snow response with somebody who is a plow, who's driving a plow, who came over from Washington State DOT, has only been, I think, with SDOT for a year or so, but has years of plow driving experience at the state level too.
And so, just being able to bring in, not just, you know, bring, have people come into the agency with lots of talent as well is also nice to see.
So.
So I've talked a little bit about the kind of the not so normal things that have happened since you've been here.
But you know, you were hired, I think in large part, not for emergency response necessarily, but for kind of the ongoing operations of SDOT.
And I know one of the skill sets you bring that we're really excited about is project delivery.
And so public comment, we heard a little about Move Seattle and how kind of innovative that package is.
And yet, Deputy Mayor is a former co-chair of the Levy Oversight Committee.
I recall you talking about this a number of times.
So Sam, what are you seeing in terms of, you know, once we get through these, I mean, with the Seattle squeeze going on for a couple of years, we're never going to really be through it.
But when you get a step back for a second and things get back to a little bit more normal, Have you had a chance to look at kind of some of the projects that are on the books and, you know, how we're going to get stuff put on the ground with kind of crazy construction environment in Seattle?
Sure.
So I have had some opportunity to dig in there and I think that the work that the department did over the last year with the levy reset was valuable.
We had to unfortunately postpone our levy oversight committee meeting from last week.
because of the snow and we're going to rescheduled for next Wednesday.
But I think we'll be able to share some good news coming out of the end of 2018 from the reset and then what we were able to do.
I've also been really starting to get into the where we stand on things going forward and where we both have where there's still some challenges in terms of continued cost escalations that we're foreseeing and just some of the pipeline of projects that are coming.
That's great.
I think one of the things that I'm looking forward to is how we make sure that we're getting, how the council's getting really good information and the public's getting really good information on what's happening.
Probably not a lot of road construction happening this time of year, but I imagine there's a lot of work being done on design and bids so that as soon as the weather starts to turn, The contractors are sitting on the ground.
But you're probably already starting to see, like, how are the bids coming in?
And are we getting commitments to start on certain days?
And are we going to be able to work through things in the construction window over the course of next year?
I have a particular interest on some of the pieces in the bike network.
We passed a resolution last summer kind of making a commitment to complete a lot of the downtown bike network.
But that's just a piece of the overall delivery that we want to see.
Council Member Johnson, do you have any?
Do you want Sam to respond to that statement first?
I would just agree.
I mean, I think those are all places where there will continue to be work over the next few years, but I think the department has already done a lot to try to address those issues.
And so I'll just say that, you know, in the next month or two it'd be good as you settle in to come back and talk to us about what we're seeing in both the bid environment and contractors and make really clear on what the expectations are.
Like, here's what you can see delivered this next year.
And if there are things that, like, hey, we're really worried about this one project, it'd be great just to know that up front so that we can plan around that or figure out what we need to do to make sure it happens if it is a top priority.
Just two quick ones Although they may not elicit very quick responses because I think they're pretty meaty questions But Sam one of the other reasons I believe that the mayor chose you is because of your ability to forge good regional relationships which is really critical for us as a city right now as we get into the final discussions about the West Seattle Ballard Link Extension as we contemplate the renewal of our transportation benefit district and our partnership with Metro that we fund through 50 some odd million dollars a year with a bus service.
Our relationships with the Puget Sound Regional Council and the federal government are critical for us to be able to build many of the projects that Council Member O'Brien talked about.
And in the last couple of weeks, you've had a little bit of a regional boot camp of spending a lot of time, I would imagine, in the Emergency Operations Center with a lot of our regional partners.
So talk to me about what has been surprising to you or some of the things that you've learned about some of our regional partners that you didn't realize walking in.
Sure, so I think that the last few weeks, both with regional partners and with other partner agencies in city government, have been sort of forged some real connections.
I think the things that were critical for getting the city back up and running were making sure transit could operate, and then it shifted to schools operating as well.
And so in both of those, we could be in very close coordination, especially with Metro, understanding where their challenges were and anything we could do as a city to help get Metro back to full operations.
And the communication throughout was great among regional partners.
I think also in terms of city coordination, we had a lot of coordination among city agencies to figure out how we could help each other to add resources to the response.
So in the end, it wasn't just SDOT.
doing our sort of normal snow operations.
It was SPU providing some extra drivers, parks providing crews for clearing sidewalks and curb ramps that really helped us, you know, do as much as we could to get the city back up and running as quickly as possible.
So I think that over the last week or so has been has been really a great part of coming, you know, in some ways, I wouldn't have asked for it quite like this, but I did get up, did make those connections a lot faster than I maybe otherwise would have.
So the other thing I'd love for you to speak to a little bit is, you know, the focus that you've had throughout your career on innovation.
And as we move beyond sort of the emergency responsive nature of the last several weeks, what are some of the places where you'll be looking to continue to inspire to be on the bleeding edge of transportation infrastructure and planning thought processes.
What are some of the websites or organizations that you're paying a lot of attention to or other DOTs that you feel like either at the national or international level are really doing a good job of thinking through innovation and acting with a real good focus on innovation and implementation?
So that's a great question.
I'm looking to a lot of different places to gather information about those types of things.
I mean, I've been engaged with NACTO, the National Association of City Transportation Officials, since I started at DDOT more than seven years ago.
And just looking at sort of the progressive organizations that are in that.
in that arena as well.
David Goldberg talked about this a little bit in his public comment, but when he was at Smart Growth America, I was at a national nonprofit, Reconnecting America.
And so I've stayed connected with the sort of national nonprofit world as well that are bringing good things.
But I also think that good ideas can come from lots of different places.
And so I don't sort of have a set set reading list that I always go back to.
Some of the work even that the National Transportation Safety Board has done around speed and safety has been very interesting to think about how sort of a framework that maybe started in terms of these major catastrophe responses can feed into the engineering community and sort of cross-fertilize.
I think in terms of where innovation is going to come from and what issues we'll have to deal with, it's hard to know.
I wouldn't have necessarily predicted the issues that we're dealing with now, even three years ago, in terms of some of the micromobility challenges that we face.
I think certainly autonomous vehicles are going to be a place where we're going to have to figure out how that fits into the city landscape going forward.
I'm not sure yet of what speed at which that will have to grapple with those things.
My approach to those issues is to try to build consensus as much as possible and figure out a pathway where we can answer as many questions as possible before trying something and then trying things at a scale where we can answer more questions before making full decisions.
That's a sort of incremental approach sometimes, but I think that that helps ultimately build longer term success.
Well, as the Deputy Mayor and I have long joked over the 15 years that we've known each other, it is both a blessing and a curse to be doing this work in the city of Seattle because of our long history of engineers.
Going all the way back to the 70s, you know, I think a lot of folks at Boeing felt like they could design a better transportation system in their basement than those boring old bureaucrats.
I think that that tradition continues today with our newest generation of software engineers.
And though there are many of those sort of blue sky ideas that are hard to implement, as Mr. Goldberg will be able to tell you after the fact, there are some folks that have some interesting on the ground solutions.
As he mentioned to me the other day, you know, a shoulder running HOV 520 bus queuing lane that was just implemented was at the suggestion of a regular five, whatever that bus is that goes across 520, 545 rider who said, you know, it sucks.
We all sit there for 20, 30 minutes.
And so maybe something like this would actually be helpful for bus riders and washed out to their credit, went out and did a little walking tour with that individual.
And they said, you know what?
We actually think we could make it work.
Maybe not forever, but at least for the near term.
And so I think that there's some opportunities to your point of innovation coming from a lot of interesting places.
While we've got a lot of challenges ahead, I'm grateful to hear that you're open to suggestions from other places, because I don't think any of us have all the solutions.
And being thoughtful about where we could steal good ideas from other organizations or cities, and where we also might be able to lift up good ideas that are homegrown, I think is really great.
Council Member Johnson, I love your description of how innovation happens and the other things we hear.
It speaks to what I see, too.
That was great.
Sam, I want to pivot for a second to an issue that we discussed in our budget last year and will be coming up in some conversations this year around adaptive signals.
This is probably a little bit beyond the scope of the confirmation, but while I have you here, I'm going to just put you on the spot for a second or get your thoughts.
There's a lot of folks in the community who have expressed some concerns about how we're using new technology around signal timing, and I think, I'll try to sum up, I think, the concerns that I hear is in general that it's great that we have new technology.
The new technology is able to read situations on the ground in a way and adapt to it.
The challenge is that it's really good at reading cars.
It's kind of okay at reading bikes.
It's not very good at reading pedestrians.
And as a result, the system tends to get a lot of information about what cars are doing, and so it reacts to cars very well on, it feels like, at the expense of other modes.
I'm not quite sure where transit fits in there.
I mean, there's a capacity for transit to override a lot of things, but it's not always clear that it's working terribly well for transit either.
And so through the budget process last year, We've loosely set out a process, it's not terribly well defined at the moment, but we'd love your help getting this set up to convene the folks in the department who are working on it.
The Mercer Corridor is the corridor where this has been deployed for a while, and where I think a lot of folks, particularly David mentioned he's headed the board of Seattle Neighborhood Greenways, and a lot of their advocates, their observations is that things aren't working very well, especially for pedestrians, and so we'd love to sit down, with the folks that are the experts at the city and some of our experts in the community who've been at least making some observations and talk through how this is working and what we're seeing and not working.
And then think about, as we go forward, deploying new technology and how we're going to deploy it and how we prioritize it.
You know, the technology in my mind is fairly agnostic.
It just does what we tell it to do.
But if the only thing we can tell it to do is prioritize automobiles, that's what it does.
So any experience you've had with adaptive signals elsewhere and any thoughts you have on how we might move forward?
Sure, so we've, first of all, I would just agree that I think the, from what I've seen and heard of the discussion around adaptive signals both within and outside of the department, I think the type of discussion that you're talking about is, will be a useful thing to have as sort of how is it working, what are the challenges.
And how is it working for everybody?
And then how can we try to address those challenges?
I think from my understanding, Mercer wasn't exactly working well before for anybody, and it's still a challenge.
So it's, you know, we don't want to exacerbate problems, but, you know, being able to have that that dialogue about what is working and how to make it better is, I think, critical.
In Washington, DC, we faced some similar challenges around signal technology.
We installed transit signal priority on about one out of every seven traffic signals.
So this was a system that could hold traffic signals for a couple seconds if buses met certain parameters, and we were tinkering with those parameters to try to balance out bus speeds and congestion.
One thing that that led to, which drew some fire from pedestrian advocates, was that we, in the District of Columbia, we started the pedestrian countdown signals at the very beginning of the cycle.
So you saw from the very beginning how long you had to walk.
When you had variable signal cycles, you couldn't do that.
So when we installed transit signal priority, which was moving transit faster, we didn't change the timing for the pedestrians, but there was a perception that we had because you could no longer see the countdown from the very beginning.
So we got a lot of feedback about that.
And we made some changes based on that to try to alleviate that.
So I've got a history of trying to deploy new signal technology and then making changes when we need to to make sure we're balancing all the needs.
So I think it's a good dialogue and discussion to have.
Similar to Council Member Johnson's comments earlier, I think there is some some expertise in the community, at least on how it's actually affecting users.
And I think that expertise and experience, I guess I'd say, that they can bring to the table could be really helpful.
And I've had conversations with folks at SDOT.
I think they fully understand this and they understand the priorities and I think they're up against some technology, but we're just going to want to put a little attention to that.
Absolutely.
And that's been my experience with folks within SDOT too is there is a receptiveness to feedback and listening and hearing those things and trying to figure out how we can find solutions.
And just I think one of the challenges is how many of those things there are and how and the capacity to have all of those conversations.
Prioritization.
Yeah, prioritization, but also just making sure we structure those in a way that people feel like, you know, understand that they've been heard and we can have that discussion rather than having a discussion about it every day.
Yeah, makes sense.
Look forward to more on that.
Okay, sounds good.
Councilmember Johnson, anything else you want to pick our potentially future Okay, great.
We are planning to put forward a expectations letter.
I'm afraid it's not finished being drafted at the moment.
We've also had some emergency response stuff going on at City Hall and haven't been able to get everyone's eyes on this yet.
Assuming the vote in a minute goes well, you'll be back for the confirmation and for the full council on February 25th.
I'm not going to be here that day, so Councilmember Johnson, I'll ask you to speak to Mr. Zimbabwe at that meeting.
And we'll make sure we have the expectations letter there.
This is a letter that will mirror some of the questions or some of the statements disguised as questions in the question letter you got, and some other things that didn't make it into that letter.
It'll be, you know, jointly drafted by all nine council members, and it'll be part of the record so that folks can see that.
and something that we can look to in the future going forward.
And I don't know, Calvin, anything else I missed there, Jasmine, that I missed there?
Okay, great.
And we'll make sure that as we're working through this, we're not going to drop this on you Monday the 25th.
We'll make sure we're working with your staff so you get a sense of what's in there.
And if you have any concerns and stuff, we'll be open to hearing that too.
So with that, I will go ahead and move agenda item number one.
All in favor, signify by saying aye.
Great, thanks again for your work.
And we'll see you, well, I won't see you, but some will see you back here on the 25th.
And keep at it.
Hope you get a day off over this three-day weekend.
We'll see.
Thanks.
Councilor Johnson, that's all we have this morning unless you have anything for the good of the order.
I think all of us were a little saddened by Wednesday's announcement and I think the first public opportunity for me to thank you for your what will be cumulatively a decade worth of good work here at City Hall.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
With that, we'll be adjourned.