Good morning.
Thank you for being here for our regularly scheduled May 20th, 2019 council briefing.
We have council members Sawant, Herbold, Pacheco, Mosquero, and Gonzales with us this morning.
And if there's no objection, the minutes of the May 6th, 2019 meeting will be approved.
Hearing no objection, the minutes are being approved.
This morning we made hard copies of the minutes of last week's briefing and I announced that we are required now to start the process by which we will approve the minutes.
I will for the first, the next couple of weeks make hard copies of these minutes, although they're sort of bare bones to some extent.
This is a beginning format.
It's likely to change.
There may be some additional information provided and some information deleted, but we will make sure we comply with the rules.
And again, this is the, I think the second one that we've approved.
And so bear with me while we get a good product that meets all of our needs.
And again, we will continue with that process.
So thank you very much for the city clerk.
And I would ask the city clerk's office to, um, to chat with me after this meeting.
So I can give you a little feedback on this particular one and we'll try to improve it.
So thank you for that.
Uh, let's go around the room a little bit and talk a little bit about, um, a preview of today's full council actions.
We will do that after we have our federal legislative update.
I will dispense of the president's report until we do the pre preview of today's city council actions.
And I, cause I have a proclamation, some other things just to simply describe to you, but why don't we defer that until we go around the table and go through our full city council actions.
And why don't we hear from our federal legislative team first and thanks for being here, Leslie.
So come on forward.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Yes.
Yes.
Why don't we do that?
And I'll just come back to the president's report.
We are always going to do the legislative update before we did our full council actions.
And so, Okay.
Okay, go ahead.
So why don't we start off with introductions, just jump in.
Good morning, everybody.
I'm Sierra Howlett-Brown, Director of Federal Affairs for our Office of Intergovernmental Relations, and we have our federal lobbyist, Leslie Polner, here in Seattle.
She's been doing some periodic Skype briefings with you all, but hoping to get her here quarterly, maybe twice a year in person, so we can do some in-person visits with departments and some of you all as well.
But Leslie is going to go through a current update on what's happening at the federal level with legislation and appropriations.
If you have any questions, just jump in, but we'll walk through some of the probably more pressing issues that are relevant right now in D.C.
Great, and I'm going to stay high level because I know that you have a very full agenda today, but happy to take any questions.
In the good news category, the House is moving forward with appropriations actually pretty quickly, and they're trying to get all of the measures, all 12 measures, onto the floor by June, which is ambitious, but they are moving them through committee.
And they are, though they did not reach a congressional bipartisan budget deal, the House has set its own top line spending measures that are fairly high and actually a considerable bump up from FY19, which is really good news.
They've already approved the Labor Health and Human Services and Education Bill and They are working this week on energy and water and interior.
One item to note that we worked on very hard in energy and water, excuse me, in the interior bill, is a new workforce program that we worked with SPU on, and that's our water workforce program, and that was received in appropriations of a million dollars that would do workforce training specifically targeted to the utility sector, because as we know, over 50% of that workforce is expected to retire over the next five years.
This week, we'll also have the Transportation, Housing, and Urban Development Bill marked up in the subcommittee and we'll be watching that, but that's expected to have a 7% increase, obviously contains a number of programs.
that are really important to us.
So we're going to keep monitoring that.
The Senate, of course, is moving much further behind, and we expect that the Senate is going to have lower numbers than the House is working off of.
All of this, of course, will then be negotiated in conference.
But again, in an effort to avoid any kind of government shutdown, it's a good sign that the House is moving forward and also that the House is going to be starting off from a very strong negotiating position by pushing their numbers up.
So the next big piece that we're going to hear about this week is infrastructure.
As you may recall, about three weeks ago, House leadership, Senate leadership met with the President, supposedly agreed on a $2 trillion spending deal.
There is possibly a follow-up meeting that's going to be happening, tentatively scheduled for this Wednesday.
I think already you're beginning to see that deal falling apart.
Not a great surprise to anybody.
The president is saying that he will not agree to raising the gas tax.
I think in another sort of bad sign, last week the president announced that he would be pulling nearly a billion dollars in funding from high-speed rail in California, which is of course something that's important to Speaker Pelosi.
So again, it doesn't really set the stage for very promising negotiations around infrastructure.
Nevertheless, in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Chairman Pallone has introduced an infrastructure package bill that would do significant funding around clean energy, smart communities, water, brownfields, broadband.
So, you know, again, I think what you're seeing is people beginning to lay out the foundation for a longer-term strategy.
So it may not happen this Congress, but I think what you're seeing is the groundwork being laid for something in the future.
Also, I think you're seeing the groundwork being laid around transportation reauthorization.
As many of you know, the transportation bill will expire next September 2020. And so I think what you're beginning to see is some of the framework and the pieces coming together around a transportation reauthorization package.
that may be able to get done.
Obviously smaller than a huge, massive infrastructure build, but nevertheless really important.
The other piece of relatively good news is around housing and homelessness, which, you know, for the first time I think really in a decade at least, you're seeing Congress take the issue of housing and homelessness seriously, and particularly with Maxine Waters as the Chair of Financial Services.
She has now held three hearings on homelessness, on affordable housing, on oversight of HUD.
She has introduced comprehensive homelessness legislation.
There has also recently been bipartisan, bicameral legislation introduced by Senator Feinstein.
and Senator Murkowski addressing homelessness that would provide funding for both capital costs and for services.
None of this, again, gets done right now.
These are ambitious programs, but the fact that they're actually talking about it, I mean, I think if you had asked somebody last session, what are your top 10 items, I'm not sure that housing or affordable housing would have even been on the list.
So I think this is very promising and something that we're paying quite a bit of attention to.
One other item to flag this week, the House Judiciary Committee is going to mark up the DREAM Act.
A more comprehensive bill was introduced by Congresswoman Roybal Allard and Nydia Velazquez, which was the DREAM and PROMISE Act.
That bill ran into a little bit of problems with some of the moderates around how certain criminal convictions would be handled along with citizenship, they have negotiated a compromise, and so that bill is going to be marked up this week in judiciary.
We expect it to pass.
They're hoping to put it on the floor in June as well.
I will stop because I know you have the report in front of you.
I'm happy to take any questions that you may have, but it's good to be here with you.
Any questions?
No, just keep rolling through.
This is good.
Very good.
Great.
And I'll just continue to remind you all, if there are any federal issues that you do want some special attention on, us to track any sort of action, make sure to reach out to OIR.
And Leslie's in DC for us, so she's able to set up meetings for you all if you are in there.
We do expect a lot of kind of churn and different issues bubbling up during the 2020 election.
So we will continue to track all of those things that come up.
And as always, just let us know if you have any special.
Yeah.
Council Member Mosqueda.
Thank you so much.
I just want to take this chance to say thank you to our federal lobbying team.
You guys are doing a tremendous job.
And having had the chance to see you both in D.C.
and then in a number of other cities, visiting other local municipalities and their partners, just want to say thanks for all your work.
One of the really exciting things that I had the chance to do with you while we were in D.C.
was to meet with Congresswoman Jayapal and talk about the Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights that they are planning to mirror after our Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights here in the city of Seattle.
And I think it was Senator Harris, Kamala Harris as well, in the Senate who's considering Moving that forward.
I'm still very interested in how we can continue to be subject matter expert witness on our end over here and just wanted to see if there's any news on the timing of the Advancement of the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights at the national level I'm happy to follow up on that My understanding is is that they are hoping to do something this summer, but I can get a more exact timeline for you Great.
Okay, and for our colleagues It was really exciting to meet with the National Domestic Workers Alliance and others when we were in D.C.
who basically reiterated that they're taking our version of the city ordinance and they're dropping it into federal law to the extent that they can and building on it.
So we're doing exactly what we had hoped, which is to create a tidal wave of positive policy change for domestic workers.
So thank you for working on that and keeping us updated.
Very good.
Excellent.
Okay.
Thank you very much.
We look forward to that.
Again, just to reiterate, it's a little crazy, of course, on our federal.
I think we've got all to agree on that and what's going on.
So what's very important is we have the resources there.
So if there's, again, any questions or you need to contact information, just let us know and we'll make sure we get any questions or initiatives that we're working on clarified and we'll assist you.
So thank you again.
Okay, so very quickly, I'm passing around a proclamation here.
There's an event occurring this Saturday at First AME Church, which is put on by the National Association for Black Veterans, NABVETS.
My dad was a black veteran, and it's a commemoration of, or a celebration of the veterans and event, and there's a proclamation to honor, actually, veterans from the Hispanic community, and this is, a sort of a joint event.
And again, there's I think one remaining Buffalo soldier.
I think many of you know the story about the Buffalo soldier and that last one in the Northwest area here will be honored as well.
So here's a proclamation and all of you are invited to the event.
So I'm passing out the flyer to it.
I want to make sure that you know you're invited and there it is.
From the governance equity and technology committee nothing up for a vote this afternoon.
We do have a meeting tomorrow morning at 930 and one of the agenda items is I think an issue that all of you are following dealing with our surveillance technology and we will have a discussion on a proposed bill to approve the Seattle Department of Transportation's use of closed-circuit television CCTV traffic cameras and automated license plate readers otherwise known as ALPR ALPRs, you'll hear that acronym tossed around a little bit, as well as approve the Surveillance Impact Report, SIRs, for use of these technologies.
All these acronyms are sort of pursuant to our surveillance bill that many of you put a lot of work into.
We'll have at the table, side-by-side, Jim Loader, Ginger Ambruster from the IT.
We'll have Sam Zimbabwe and Jason Cambridge from SDOT and the Community Surveillance Working Group many of those key members, and the CTAB, Community Technology Advisory Board.
This will be a briefing and discussion only since this is actually the first SIR ordinance.
We have the ordinance in place.
We're going to have a discussion.
Many issues could be raised.
We're trying to get our sea legs sort of speak on that process, so we won't vote it out.
We just have an open discussion.
Now, because of the protections of privacy that so many of us are passionate about.
I will ask that if you are heavily vested into this issue to try to come to the meeting tomorrow at 930 to voice your concerns.
What I don't want to do is, a lot of this technology we have ready to use, I don't want to create an unnecessary delay if we could avoid it.
So I'm slowing it down to have a robust discussion tomorrow, and then in a few weeks we'll bring it back, or maybe even longer than that, depending on where the discussion leads.
But again, I wanna thank all of you for voicing your concerns and the Community Surveillance Working Group and CTAB.
They're doing some great work to make sure privacy needs are met.
So that'll happen tomorrow morning at 9.30.
And then we also have, I sort of misspoke last week.
We had a council rules amendment that we discussed.
I thought we were gonna bring that to the full council.
I misspoke and it's gonna come to the committee tomorrow.
Just council rules amendment to improve the sort of the decorum in city hall.
And that'll be at the discussion that will be a vote Voted item tomorrow morning at 9 30 After any questions about any of that stuff good.
I'll go quickly.
So We have after this meeting a civic arenas discussion councilmember Juarez Could not make it this morning So I'll chair that meeting and I do want to say a few things at the briefing on her behalf pursuant to her requests and The first thing I want to announce is that the Civic Development, Public Assets, and Native Community, the next meeting is June 5th.
And this Thursday, Council Member Wares will be attending her first official Sound Transit meeting as a board member, and she's really excited about that.
And a few District 5 updates, just a couple of them.
She wanted to take time to acknowledge two public servants from D5 who have worked tirelessly to make sure the city is a safe and welcoming place, and that would be Chris Leverson, from Building Lake City Together, and Janine Blalock from Lake City Greenways.
And both of them have been working with SDOT to repair sidewalks for both the east and west side of LCW from 123rd to 125th.
And we are looking forward to a repair in the repairs in 2020. And so thank you very much, Chris, Janine, and the other civic-minded heroes who are committed to building safer communities.
Councilman Waters, we hope you, probably watching if you are able to, and I hope I did your shout-outs justice.
Thank you for preparing that.
One last thing is, this morning, just when I approved the meeting minutes, I made a motion to approve the May 6th meeting.
That was what was presented to me, by the way, that my Ron Burgany, and I just read what was put in front of me.
You have to know a certain movie when I say Ron Burgundy.
If you don't know it, you don't get the joke.
I should ask how many of you know who Ron Burgundy is.
Okay, so my Ron Burgundy.
I just read what was in front of me.
So let me do that again.
If there's no objection, the minutes of the May 13th, 2019 meeting will be approved.
To May 13th, not to May 6th.
Hearing no objection, the minutes are approved.
So thank you very much.
Council Member Swans, you have it.
Good morning, everyone.
There are no items on today's City Council agenda from the Human Services, Equitable Development, and Renters' Rights Committee.
This week has the next regularly scheduled meeting of the Select Committee on Homelessness on Friday, May 24th at 9.30 a.m., where we will discuss the impacts of Seattle's tiny house villages and continue the discussion on the issues around regional governance.
Thank you, Council Member Schwartz.
Council Member Herbold.
Thank you.
So on the Civil Rights, Utilities, Economic Development, and Arts Committee items for full council today, we have the Ship Canal Water Quality Project Proviso Lift.
Councilmembers might remember that we, during the budget process, included a budget proviso on the tunnel portion of this project.
and required that the executive come back to us at 100% design and report on its efforts to stay on budget and on schedule.
The project itself is part of a larger effort for both the county and the city to limit the number of overflows in order to reduce contaminated water from reaching Puget Sound.
It is required under a federal and state consent decree.
It is a joint project with the county.
And again, during the 2018 budget process, the council included a spending proviso.
SPU has updated their confidence rating as part of reporting back to the CREATA committee.
The confidence has increased from 65% to 70%.
And what that means is that the project is 70% likely to cost 570 million or less.
The city's share of that project is about 393 million.
This is actually five major construction projects, and the storage tunnel is the largest portion of the project, estimated at 218 million.
That is the portion that the proviso is on.
So voting in favor of this bill today at full council will allow Seattle Public Utilities to move forward with the selection of the contractor and move into the next phase of the project.
In addition, we had intended to move forward the legislation that moved out of committee last week, the hate crimes legislation.
I did receive a request from Director Lockhart last week asking that the vote on the ordinance be postponed to allow for a racial equity toolkit analysis.
And she writes, at minimum, we would hope that the vote could be delayed into at least June 3rd.
And we have heard from other folks in the community about their concerns on this legislation.
I am intending to delay it.
You may recall that we received a letter from the mayor last week urging us to move quickly, given the fact that we've heard so many concerns from folks in the community.
I think it's better.
I think it's good public policy that we have proposed, but I think it's better to bring folks together.
and make sure that everybody is on the same page.
Just as a bit of background on the bill itself, we also heard last week the city auditor's report where they reported on a number of things including the FBI 2017 report that showed that nationwide hate crimes had increased 17% in Washington State.
They had increased 32% in Seattle.
They have increased 198%.
Over the last, from 2010 until now, the increase has actually, here in Seattle, been 400%.
2.8% of nationally reported hate crimes were in Seattle.
and Seattle only has two-tenths of the U.S. population.
The city auditor noted that higher reporting totals can reflect increased police attention.
We have seen that SPD has hired a bias crimes detective in 2015 and actually has an outward facing dashboard on bias and hate crimes.
But again, I think a really important element of this audit report was an interesting geographic analysis of the location of hate crimes.
by Professor Tim Thomas of the University of Washington, also included as part of the audit itself.
And it notes that crimes are concentrated in the densely populated areas that Seattle has targeted for growth along major arterials and transit routes.
And in less dense areas, hate crimes tend to occur in minority mixed neighborhoods along the border of mostly white neighborhoods.
Professor Thomas notes that a majority of these crimes can be explained by the racial threat hypothesis, i.e., the perceived encroachment of people of color in white-dominated areas.
The law itself actually would result in no additional prosecutions.
It would simply add what's called a special allegation of hate crime motivation to cases that the city attorney was already prosecuting, misdemeanor cases like assault and property crime.
And it also did not contemplate additional penalties The city attorney intended to pursue sanctions such as restorative justice type programs as a way to actually address the harm, not only that hate crimes due to the victims, but also the harm that hate crimes due to the offenders themselves.
Some of the additional changes made in this bill make the bill itself consistent with new state law passed in the state legislature proposed by Representatives Valdez, Gregerson, Nicole Macri, Santos, and a number of other people.
Organizations that supported this bill included the Gender Justice League, the Latino Civic Alliance, the Council on American Islamic Relations, the Jewish Federation, and other organizations who have actually weighed in on our bill.
They actually came out in support of the state bill.
that increase penalties from $10,000 to $100,000, adds gender expression or identity where it did not previously exist in their state law.
And again, this is state law as it relates to felony law prosecutions.
Another, the concern that we're hearing from the community relates to the disproportionality in the offender population.
100% of the victims of hate crimes are members of protected classes.
It is true that there is some disproportionality in the offender population.
Some of that disproportionality is actually in white offenders.
77% of those prosecuted under hate crime laws in the county were white.
the proportion of our white population is 66%.
So although I do believe this is good public policy, I am also supportive of pausing and taking the time to bring the communities together.
Other items on my report today relate specifically to my upcoming meeting on Thursday.
We have a Lunch and Learn meeting jointly with the Gender Equity, Safe Communities, New Americans, and Education Committee.
Thank you to Council Member Gonzalez for joining me on this.
I hope some of you can join us at this event.
Councilmember Gonzalez and I have benefited from a number of presentations from the people who pulled together this report.
It is a report that has been commissioned by the directors of the business improvement areas in the city, and it is the presentation discussion of the systems failure report, the prolific offenders in Seattle's criminal justice system.
It's going to be led by the, the discussion will be led by the neighborhood business groups and they will have representatives from each, the Soto BIA, the Ballard Alliance, and the Pioneer Square Alliance.
Lastly, just want to make note that today we will be signing and presenting a proclamation honoring the life of Sharon Jones.
Sharon was a real change vendor, frequent advocate at City Hall for folks experiencing homelessness.
She passed this month from Lou Gehrig's disease and we will be taking a moment to honor Sharon and her gifts this afternoon.
Thank you, Councilor Harwell.
Just a procedural question.
So I know this passed out of committee, the hate crimes bill.
You said it will come to full council in June.
Is that the goal at least?
So it was on, we'll have to amend the agenda today.
Right.
And I saw today.
Yeah.
And I, I'm.
committed to not voting today.
I haven't yet landed on what the best date to delay it to.
Director Lockhart asked for at least, I think, June 8th.
I do want to just check with her office to see whether or not that is sufficient time.
Okay, so as you figure it out, no plans on bringing back to committee At this point, but you're nimble it sounds and we may be hearing back from the final bill in June for the full council sort of what I'm hearing.
That's right.
Okay.
Thank you very much.
Any questions on any of that?
Thanks for this.
The hate bill is really fascinating data, and I'm I watched the the committee meeting and Again, there's just so much I guess so much to think and say about it, and I think we're, I'm glad that the state has recognized a state need to look at it.
When you look at Seattle going up 198%, you know, the whys, the why, it becomes critical, not just the numbers themselves, what's behind those numbers.
So, Council Member O'Brien.
Thank you, Council President.
The Sustainability and Transportation Committee doesn't have anything on this afternoon's agenda, although there was one agenda item that I'll be speaking to as it came out of the Planning, Land Use, and Zoning Committee for the one meeting that I chaired prior to being joined by an esteemed colleague here.
That is a remand from King County Superior Court on a contract rezone petition that the council approved in the fall of 2018. It related to a parcel on about 70th and Greenwood in the Finney Ridge neighborhood.
The short version is the King County Superior Court remanded and asked us to provide some more requirements around transition between the multifamily zone and single family zone on the site and specifically between one single family parcel that the project owns but has a single family home on it and gave us a couple options as to how to address that concern.
The committee chose one of those options and there's a re-executed PUDA that we will be adopting as part of that, assuming that the council supports that moving forward.
Council President, I'm not sure if you want me to speak.
The petitioners, I believe, had asked for an opportunity to speak to the full council again today.
We, at committee, you know, again, this is a quasi-judicial matter because it's a contract rezone.
At committee, we allowed, I believe, five minutes for both the appellants and the applicants to address the remand and the record.
And I believe they're going to at least have an opportunity to speak today.
Yeah, I wrote a letter back to them.
Did you see the copy of the letter that I wrote them?
So I wasn't planning on modifying the speaking time, but if it's necessary, we will accommodate.
But my position, at least, was having reviewed the committee hearing that ample time was given, but we don't want to shortchange anyone at this stage.
So I haven't heard back from them in terms of requests for additional time, but certainly during the public comments section, we'll sort of segregate it and make sure that people have a chance to speak.
Great.
So we may hear, at least my understanding is, up to two minutes from during their public comment window, although each side will only have two minutes regardless of how many people they bring.
And all the quasi judicial rules will apply to that as far as what they're allowed to testify on as the record or not.
And if I get a request between now and today at two o'clock for a few extra minutes, I'll talk to you offline about it.
But at this point, I haven't had any requests for additional time other than the two minute allotment.
So that's the one item in this afternoon's agenda.
If folks have any questions about that, please let me know.
The Sustainability and Transportation Committee meets tomorrow afternoon.
We have a bunch of items on the agenda, so I'll just run through them really quickly.
We, approval to the Sweetened Beverage Advisory Board, approval to, sorry, appointment, and an appointment to the Seattle Transit Advisory Board.
There is a grant acceptance easement, sorry, grant acceptance ordinance for a series of grants that SDOT has accepted.
or would like to accept.
We will hear an application for a street vacation on a project behind University Village adjacent to the Burke-Gilman Trail.
This is the conceptual phase where they will walk through what they're proposing, and we will have an opportunity to approve that at a committee or ask more questions.
So that's the front end of the street vacation process before a project gets permitted and moves forward.
We will also hear a separate ordinance related on the back end of the street vacation process in regards to one of the Amazon blocks, block 19 in the Denny Triangle area.
This is the block, the parcel where the spheres are.
We granted conceptual approval.
to three different block alley vacations a number of years ago.
And this is the point where they come back and they actually get the street vacation now that they have developed the site according to our standards and the conditional approval.
So we will have a walkthrough of what we approved conditionally as a reminder, and then explanation of did they meet those terms of that.
And so that ordinance will be before us.
We'll also be asked to renew a pedestrian skybridge renewal permit, also in South Lake Union.
a skybridge over an alley on the block bordered by West Lake Terry, Thomas, and Harrison.
And then finally, we have five different deed acceptance ordinances.
Each of those ordinances has I believe 20 separate parcels for which we're accepting deeds So over a hundred parcels are affected in those five ordinances as a reminder, this is something that we do as part of our our city rules that these acceptances come to us and These are typically relatively small, you know, a couple square feet often.
When a new development project happens, oftentimes part of that approval is they need to give a few inches here or there for the sidewalk or those types of things or access to utility.
And instead of each one of those coming to City Council, We allow the departments to accumulate those, and once they accumulate about 20 of them, send it over as a package.
In the last few years, because we've had such an accelerated amount of development in our city, they're coming kind of fast and furious.
So we're getting, again, five of these ordinances, typically fairly straightforward.
But again, it's about 100 parcels of land with usually modest acceptances.
Again, this is private property owners that are giving the city right to their property.
Often for a sidewalk or transportation access, sometimes it's for utility access.
So we'll have a busy committee meeting tomorrow afternoon.
Love to see you all there.
Good morning.
There are 22 plus related items on the full council agenda today.
19 appointments and reappointments to the design review board and the three appointments and reappointments to the Seattle Planning Commission.
And again, the next plus meeting will be on Wednesday, June 5th.
And that's all that I have for the agenda today.
Excellent.
Thank you.
Council Member Mosqueda.
Thank you so much, Mr. Chair, Mr. President, and good morning, colleagues.
There are six items on the full Council agenda today.
There's the Council reappointment of Aliyah Abdul due to the Labor Standards Advisory Commission.
Aliyah is the owner of Quick Service Restaurant, where she oversees a team of about 137 employees.
and resides in District 1. The appointment of Jillian Cromerow in District 3 to Capitol Hill Housing Improvement Program, PDA.
She currently is the COO and designated broker for Hunter's Capital, where she is responsible for property acquisitions, marketing, leasing, public relations, and overall business operations.
and the appointment of Kelly Larson and the reappointments of Anne Malone and Pradeepta to the Housing Levy Oversight Committee.
Kelly resides in Bainbridge Island and is the CPO for Plymouth Housing where she oversees services provided to Plymouth residents and leads policy program development and strategic planning initiatives.
Anne resides in District 3 and this will be her second term serving on the committee.
Anne is a business development officer for Affordable Housing Investments in U.S.
Bancroft.
She is responsible for originating low-income housing tax credit incentives in the Northwest and Rocky Mountain states.
And Pradeepta is also a mayoral appointment.
She resides in District 2, and this will be her second term on the commission.
Perdita is the Executive Director of Interim Community Development Association where she led the work on housing community development leadership and development services.
So those are the six appointments or reappointments to the various commissions.
I also want to just take a quick second to thank Councilmember Herbold.
Thank you so much for your feedback and responsiveness to the community that were emailing and calling into the OCR Director, I really appreciate your approach to this.
I think that it is a good idea to incorporate additional feedback and help make sure that we're getting to the right place on this and absolutely agree with the intent to make sure that we're addressing hate crimes.
I also want to make sure that when we do so, we're not accidentally or unintentionally compounding disproportionality.
One big issue that I think stands out for me is that while the black community in Seattle is at about 7% of Seattle's population and the native population is about 0.5%, what we see from the 2016 and 2017 data is that black defendants were charged between four and six times their proportionate share of Seattle's population and that Native American defendants were charged between three and five times the proportionate share of the population.
And while I agree that there's really great advances that were made at the state level, I think the biggest difference between what we're potentially considering here and at the state is that the state applies to felonies versus applying to misdemeanors.
and making hate crimes a special allegation that can be added to any misdemeanor may or may not have a disproportionate impact.
So I really look forward to the future conversations that you have and we'll be following closely.
I just want to say thank you to you and to your office for working with our office as we thought through racial impact assessment components that could be potentially added.
Thanks to your team and to you specifically.
I know you were here working late on Friday.
to Aretha Basu from our office who was doing a lot of research on this.
Later this week, we will have the Housing Health, sorry, we will have the special committee meeting to address Fort Lawton on Tuesday, May 21st.
That's tomorrow at 530. This will be the fourth time that the Housing Health Energy and Workers' Rights Committee has had a this issue in front of our committee this year.
I want to remind folks that this is also the 15th year that we have been working on Fort Lawton.
I want to really encourage folks to come participate in the public dialogue.
There will be a public hearing at 5 30 p.m here in council chambers and child care will be provided.
Parents or guardians attending the public hearing who wish to use this complimentary child care can rsvp with ashley.harrison at seattle.gov and also for those who are not using public transit and or other multimodal transportation options if you do need to drive we have pay for your parking at sea park garage located between cherry and james street on fifth and sixth avenues at a discounted rate of five dollars that begins at 4 30 and just a reminder that the parking garage closes at 10 p.m but i am making a commitment we will be out of here before 10 for anybody who's interested in joining us.
We do hope for a robust discussion at that public hearing.
And our next committee meeting will be on June 6th at 9.30 a.m.
There will be the notice of intent to sell legislation, briefing and discussion, Fort Lawton plan and land use, possible vote, and a continuation of the conversation we had last week on the housing levy financial plan and housing funding policies or just the ANF.
bill.
I wish I had something fun to call that bill, Mr. President.
I'll keep working on it.
And then lastly, we will be bringing back the rent bidding legislation.
As you remember last year, this was one of the first housing policies that we passed to prevent the online platforms from scaling up the cost of rent in the city and really providing a disproportionate advantage to those who have internet, have high-speed internet, or have a computer And the unfair practice of sort of an eBay for rental units was put on hold and the judge sided with us.
So we're going to ask for another extension of a year as we work on additional policy considerations.
This week I will be speaking at the Plymouth Women's Luncheon and also at the Within Reach Health Equity and Education event on Thursday.
I'll also be in District 5. Shout out to DJD5.
I know she's watching.
And visiting a Halcyon mobile Homes where we heard from many of the residents earlier this year and also meeting with Seattle greenways As well as a tour in the neighborhood Excellent.
Thank you.
Mr. Thank you very much customer Gonzalez Good morning
Nothing on this afternoon's full council agenda from the Gender Equity, Safe Communities, New Americans, and Education Committee.
We do have a regularly scheduled committee meeting this Wednesday, May 22nd.
That'll start at 9.30 a.m.
per usual here in council chambers.
There are four items on our committee agenda.
First, we will start off with a briefing, discussion, and possible vote of Bees Law, an ordinance intended to amend our city's existing paid family care leave program to include city employees who experienced the death of of a child immediately or shortly after its birth.
These parents, Rachel and Erin Alder, who many of us had an opportunity to hear from a couple weeks ago, will be joining us at the table.
A second item on the agenda is a presentation from the Seattle Municipal Court and the Mayor's Office of Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault regarding their joint work on a very exciting project called the Domestic Violence Intervention Project.
Third, we'll be getting an update from the Seattle Municipal Court regarding the Court Resource Center.
In 2016, during the budget, we allocated some funding and directed the excuse me, no, we did not allocate funding, but we did ask the city auditor's office to engage in a audit of the Court Resource Center.
That audit resulted in a suite of recommendations that would assist the Court Resource Center in providing a better data-driven service model to those individuals who are coming into contact with the Court Resource Center, and we'll hear an update from SMC in terms of their implementation of those various city auditor recommendations.
Lastly, we'll be joined by the Seattle Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs, students and teachers of the Ready to Work program, where they will walk us through an update of the Ready to Work program and the effect the program has on the lives of immigrants and English language learners who are looking to gain employment and job readiness skills in order to move towards economic self-sufficiency.
So we'll have a full and informative, productive committee hearing.
Hope that all of you that are available will join us.
A few updates on other areas in my committee.
Wanted to give folks a quick little update on the work that we're doing as it relates to the criminal justice realignment work that came out of a slide during budget last year.
Really happy to report that we have hired a new central staff.
member to continue the council's efforts around criminal justice reform and realignment of that system.
Carlos Lugo has extensive experience building coalitions and working with diverse stakeholders at the local, state, and national levels.
Carlos was appointed as the state's first ombudsman after serving as a principal analyst on Hispanic affairs at the State Department of Corrections.
He's also directed voter outreach and mobilization efforts as a senior staff member for political campaigns in Washington and Kansas and worked for former Congressman Howard Berman.
And we are excited to welcome Carlos.
And I think his first day is today.
So if you see him, he is the go-to person who will be helping us continue to work on criminal justice reform from the city council perspective.
Okay, and then in terms of the topic that Council Member Herbal touched on in terms of repeat offenders, as many of you know, the Executive Mayor Durkin and Executive Constantine did assemble a high barrier individuals work group.
My office sits on that particular work group.
This week will be the third meeting of the High Barrier Individuals Workgroup that, again, was convened by Mayor Dworkin and Executive Constantine.
The group is working toward a viable and sustainable solution to serving those members of our community that are clearly suffering from a variety of unmet needs.
Individuals in this group are disproportionately homeless struggling with mental health challenges and fighting substance abuse disorders Of course, we know that there isn't a one-size-fits-all approach and we are working collaboratively with the executive and with the county to identify some harm reduction approaches that will ultimately meet the needs of public safety for both those who are experiencing homelessness, but of course for those who are just moving around our city and working in the city.
So excited that that work continues to move forward and looking forward to outcomes as a result of that work group in the very near future.
Next, wanted to give folks a quick little update.
Last Tuesday, I, along with Council Member Herbold and Mayor Durkin and other city leaders, attended the Neighborhood Business District Safety Forum at the Nordic Museum in Ballard.
I know that Council Member Pacheco's office was represented and Council Member Bagshaw's office was also represented.
We heard from a lot of business owners and representatives from around the city about their local safety and livability concerns and the impact of property crime and other quality of life issues affecting their businesses.
We had a productive conversation.
I believe it was helpful for folks to understand what the city's approach currently is to address these issues.
And Mayor Durkan, Council Member Herbold and I, as well as representatives of the Police Department, Fire Department, City Attorney's Office, and the King County Prosecutor's Office, spent a lot of time sharing facts and data and underscoring the challenges facing this city and addressing the scale of needs of folks experiencing homelessness and the impacts that sometimes bleed into the public safety arena.
We, of course, spent a lot of time reinforcing the city's approach to frequent low-level offenders.
We know that they have needs that cannot be met through incarceration and tried our best to share as much of that information with the audience to thread that needle and to really have that nuanced conversation in that particular space.
I really look forward to the conversations, ongoing conversations with these business district leaders and with other neighborhood members on these public safety concerns.
And as many of you have heard already, Council Member Herbold and I are going to be co-hosting a Lunch and Learn later this week on Wednesday at 1230. I really want to encourage as many of you all to join us as possible.
I think it's really important for us to listen and learn and be there with open minds and really work together to try to frame the conversation in a way that will be productive and that will advance ultimately public safety for all across the city.
So I really encourage you all to join us.
Additionally, I wanted to provide an update on some of the ongoing work happening out of my office regarding the recent surge in gun violence in the Central District, in which there have been multiple victims and in which we have seen a very huge uptick in fear and frustration in the neighborhood.
My office was present at the African-American Community Advisory Council meeting on Thursday night last week.
Following the committee discussion on this topic that Councilmember Sawant hosted in her committee last week, our offices have been collaborating on a subsequent meeting in my committee in the coming weeks that will involve and include city departments at the table.
It's my understanding, based on communications from the mayor's office, that multiple city departments, including the Seattle Department of Transportation and Seattle City Light, will be meeting with residents of the Central District, and specifically those who live along 21st Avenue, where there have been several drive-bys and where we are continuing to see significant issues as it relates to gun violence and the fear as a result of that.
So it's my hope and expectation that the department staff will walk the neighborhood with residents and develop a plan to begin the process of identifying and creating a plan to actually implement some crime prevention through environment design improvements in the very near future.
I've agreed to allow them an opportunity to do that outreach before they come and present to us at council what those solutions are going to be.
And we can then, during a committee meeting in my committee sometime in June, discuss their plans for implementing safety measures to disrupt and reduce gun violence in the Central District.
Also related to that, I had an opportunity to also talk with the Youth and Empowerment folks over at the Human Services Department in terms of their request for proposal that is out that I think Council President Harrell mentioned last week.
That process is going extremely well.
Also, there's money in investments that the city will be making in order to reduce violence in communities that is very focused on harm reduction as well.
We will be getting a briefing from them in September or August, but likely in September, with an update on how that request for proposal process turned out and who the city can expect to see those investments going to in terms of community-based organizations.
So really, I'm proud and happy that we can convene these really important conversations in chambers and really want to thank Council Member Sawant's office and her for their collaboration on continuing to work on framing this conversation and hopefully identifying some real concrete solutions that we can implement with a sense of urgency.
Council Member Schwartz?
Yeah, I just wanted to say likewise, thank you and your staff for
Absolutely.
And then lastly, I'll just close by hitting my education.
My last policy area, which is education, wanted to make sure that folks were aware that the Department of Education and Early Learning has announced The 2020-2021 K-12 school-based investments funding process, it is now open.
Applications are due by June 28, 2019. Folks, specifically principals, who are interested in applying for those dollars, and there's $115 million available over the next, for the funding cycle.
So folks who are interested in applying for those dollars should go to education.seattle.gov.
My office is happy to share some additional information with you.
For those of you who do weekly newsletters or are interested in putting it on your social media networks, we would really welcome, and I think DEEL would really welcome an opportunity to have you amplify that opportunity.
Excellent.
Thank you.
Councilman Gonzalez, a lot of work.
Okay, so just real quickly, we'll start at 1040, our Civic Arena Select Committee.
Just sort of a teaser on the agenda for those that have not had a chance to see it.
We do have one voting item, which will be the fourth item on the agenda dealing with the tension, the permanent tension tiebacks around Thomas Street.
We'll have a briefing and discussion and a vote on that item.
But in addition, earlier in the agenda, we'll have a construction schedule update a sort of an update on our financial due diligence and the Seattle Storm lease modification.
And if you haven't been briefed on it, this will be very, it's informational, and we'll vote on the last item.
So we'll start at 1040, and hopefully everyone will be there right on time.
Councilor Musca, did you have a question?
Oh, you had that.
Okay.
Everybody good?
Okay, we'll stand, Jerry, and I'll see you at 1040. Get your inquisitive look on that.
I'm trying to read these cues.