Seattle City Council Civil Rights, Utilities, Economic Development & Arts Committee 3/26/2019

Greetings and welcome to the Civil Rights, Utilities, Economic Development and Arts Committee.

It is March 26th and it is now 9.33 a.m.

I'm calling the meeting to order and I'm Lisa Herbold.

I'm the Chair of the Committee and Councilmember representing West Seattle and South Park District 1. I'm joined by Councilmember Shama Sawant.

Today's agenda, we will cover, we'll begin with public comment and then the items of business for the day.

We'll cover two appointments, one appointment to the Seattle LGBT Commission, another to the Museum Development Authority Governing Council, and then we will have a discussion, I think probably our third meeting to date, discussing a proposed ordinance relating to public accommodations.

specifically focused on requiring businesses that are considered places of public accommodation to activate their closed captioning on their television receivers.

And then that will be followed by a briefing on the council's work to identify potential solutions to address eviction harms identified in a previous resolution that the council passed.

And we will wrap things up with a briefing on the Ship Canal Water Quality Project.

So with that, we'll move right into public comment.

Thank you, Newell.

Newell is our timekeeper.

Keep an eye on him and the clock behind him.

You have two minutes to speak.

And we have public comment beginning with Alex Zimmerman followed by Jason Morris.

Sieg Heil, my dear Fuhrer, a Nazi pig, anti-Semite, criminal, and killer.

My name is Alex Zimmerman.

I want to speak about the agenda about eviction.

From my understanding, you have been sitting in this chamber for 20 years.

You don't do nothing.

It doesn't surprise me that you, for example, haven't For the last five years, never stop in Amazon.

You never won war, talking for five years about stopping Amazon.

Alex Zimmerman, only one, who come to this chamber for many years and talking about stopping Amazon.

This whole eviction, you know what it means, 100% HBS, maybe 95% HBS, not a principle.

When we stop in Amazon, we change everything.

Eviction, homeless, better life for poor people.

So why you don't doing this?

For five years, I never hear from you.

You all go for re-election, stopping Amazon.

Amazon want to hire another 10,000 people right now.

Stop over 10,000 people doing something.

What is real?

You don't doing this.

Very strange.

I don't know what is you doing here for $140,000 per year.

You never talking about criminal what is we have right now in this chamber.

You very quiet about Gonzalez, who violated Constitutional Law Open Public Meeting Act five times.

Guys, it's very unique situation.

You never mention her.

You don't ask her move out.

You ask Murray move out, Mayor Murray, but not her.

And she violated law five times.

Why you quiet, huh?

Can you explain to me why you don't talk to people when you go all for election again?

With who?

With your fascist mentality?

She's violated constitutional law five times, court recognizes, and you're very quiet about this?

How is this possible?

Stand up Seattle, stand up America.

We need clean this dirty chamber from this crook and criminals.

Thank you very much.

Our next public speaker is Jason Morris.

Good afternoon, Council, and I appreciate this chance to speak a little bit.

I'm a first-person self-advocate of people with developmental disabilities, and I am advocating for the closed caption ordinance for businesses to turn on their closed captions.

And being a person that has what's called dysgraphia, reading and writing disorder, Having learned the language through seeing closed captions and hearing it on the TV really helps.

So that's my plug.

Thank you.

That's all we have signed up for public comment.

And if there are no other speakers, we will move on to the first item of business.

Gen item one is appointment of Wayne Adrian Roque as member Seattle LGBTQ Commission for a term to April 30, 2020. Thank you.

Good morning.

Morning.

Morning, Council Member.

It's such an honor to be here sitting with you.

Thank you.

Can we just start with a quick round of introductions?

Sure.

My name is Wayne Rock.

My pronouns are he, him, his.

Any other questions?

We'll just go right down and do some quick introductions.

I'm Dimitri Gross, Legislative Assistant for Council Member Herbold.

Erica Pablo from the Seattle Office for Civil Rights.

My pronouns are she, her, and hers.

Good morning.

Erica, could you please just kick us off with a quick description of the commission and its functions?

Yeah, sorry, I'm getting over a little cold, so I'm a little congested.

So the Seattle LGBTQ Commission advises the mayor, city council, and city departments on issues concerning the LGBTQ community.

And they're, like I mentioned last week, they're excited to present their work plan the end of April.

And so that's what they're busy doing right now.

They did a retreat in December.

And so they're really looking forward to presenting to council.

Great, thank you.

So Wayne is an appointment that has been brought to us by the Commission itself.

There are three appointing authorities.

The mayor is appointing authority, the council is an appointing authority, and the Commission itself is.

Am I correct in that this is a Commission appointment?

This one's a council appointment.

This is a council appointment.

I'm so sorry.

Fantastic.

So talk a little bit about yourself and why you're interested in serving on the Commission.

All right.

Well, my primary expertise and work lies in serving the API community.

And because of its intersectionality, it's important to, it was very important to me from a very young age to recognize that and to be able to serve my community in understanding more LGBTQ issues.

There are generational traumas that usually inform the way we approach many of our sexual minorities in our community.

And for me, that was something I recognized at a very young age.

it's part of what I do at the agency I work at is building that intersection of race and orientation because it's also a class issue and all these things kind of go together.

Also recognizing that LGBTQ issues are not specifically just LGBTQ issues, they're class and reproductive rights issues and many other things.

And so, because so many of these things kind of delve into the work I do is it was only natural that I gravitate towards serving on a commission so I can build that bridge between the city and the city process and on the ground grassroots agencies that are working with communities of color that are queer.

Thank you.

Talk a little bit about the grassroots agencies that are working with communities of color that you want to specifically create that bridge with.

Sure.

So I work for ACRS.

I also work in partnership with PACE and REWA.

Those are some really pivotal organizations I work for.

I also work under the Asian Pacific Islander Coalition of Washington State and the Commission of Asian Pacific American Affairs in Olympia.

And so those are some of the agencies I work at.

And something that I've noticed that is lacking with many of these agencies is an understanding of where LGBTQ APIs lie in that formula.

My primary work is civic engagement.

And even in those spheres, you can see a general lacking of understanding because my work lies in outreach.

And in that outreach, I've noticed that the community is still not very familiar.

And it's not up to the community, it's up to us to meet the community where they're at.

And that's part of the bridge that I want to build is there is still that link missing between understanding the intersectionality of sexuality and gender identity in racial politics here in Seattle.

Fantastic, thank you.

Council Member Swann, any thoughts or questions?

Just, well, thank you for expressing a desire to serve on this commission.

As you I'm sure know, the LGBTQ commission is one of the commissions actually that is showing a lot of leadership in what a city of Seattle commission should be doing in terms of not simply restricting themselves to what city council or mayor's office politicians want them to do, but really doing what's right.

And so that's been very exciting.

And I think Council Member Herbold has really, you know, and this committee has done a lot to really encourage that approach.

Just one thing I would say, and you probably know this person already, but there is, I believe he's a medical student at the University of Washington, Dilip Nagarkar, who is, and if you don't know already, my office will give you his contact information.

I only mention him because he's doing a lot of excellent work trying to, have more of an understanding of LGBTQ issues within the South Asian community, which I'm a part of.

And the South Asian community is part of the API community.

So I was just thinking that it would be a good connection for you both and for the commission as a whole.

Definitely.

Thank you so much.

I love that.

And we are welcomed by Council Member O'Brien.

Good to see you this morning.

And so sometimes I know that folks who are interested in serving on the commission will attend a few meetings in advance.

Have you done that yet?

Yes, I have.

Have you gotten your feet wet?

Yes.

All right, great.

Well, I have no further questions.

I really appreciate your willingness to serve and coming forward and using the expertise that you've built through your work.

your relationships with the community to assist the commission in fulfilling its goals and objectives.

And we will be having the commission here in, I think, meeting after next to talk about their work plan, as Erica mentioned, and hopefully we'll see you again.

But if there are no further questions, I would like to move the I'll give them back to the number.

Appointment 01275. All those in favor, vote aye.

Aye.

None opposed.

None abstaining.

This will move on to full council on Monday.

You're not required to go, but you're welcome to attend.

Thanks again.

Thank you very much.

Thanks again.

Attend item two is appointment 1267. Appointment of Stephanie Ellis Smith as member of Museum Development Authority Governing Council for a term to July 11, 2021.

Welcome and thank you everyone for joining us.

We could just kick this off with just a quick round of introductions.

Stephanie Ellis Smith.

Doug Raff.

Cindy Bolton, CFO at SAM.

Kenny Pittman, Office of Intergovernmental Relations.

Very good.

Kenny, you want to kick us off with just a thumbnail sketch of, yeah, that'd be great.

Yes.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'd like to present to you for Stephanie Ellis-Smith for an appointment to the Museum Development Authority, filling out the remainder of an unexpired term.

She is one of the three appointees that are actually appointed by the Museum Development Authority's governing council.

The others are by the mayor and also the Seattle Art Museum.

She brings an extensive, rich, history of working in the arts field in the philanthropic area and is highly recommended and we recommend her appointment.

Stephanie, you want to talk a little bit about your interest in serving on the commission?

Sure, thank you.

And thank you for having me.

That's right, Museum Development Authority.

As was introduced, I have worked in the arts and cultural field here in Seattle and across the state for the past 20 plus years.

I'm a scientist by training, but I ended up moving and working with Jacob Lawrence and his wife, Gwen Lawrence, in the Catalogue Raisonne Project.

I founded and ran the Central District Forum for Arts and Ideas, an African-American-based humanities and cultural programming organization that is still going in its 20th year.

I've served on the State Arts Commission, appointed by Governor Gary Locke, the Seattle Arts Commission, appointed by The mayor at the time, of course, I'm blanking out on that.

And just been around, I've been on the board and board chair of Artist Trust, supporting individual artists across the state and a number of other organizations and councils and advising in roles and capacities.

Thank you.

You definitely have a wealth of experience, and I'm actually surprised it's taken you this long to get to this particular body because of that depth of experience.

Chair Raft, do you want to talk a little bit about all of the obvious reasons why you have put forward Stephanie as a nominee?

Well, she's an excellent nominee.

She replaces somebody who had served since the authority was founded.

And it took us a year to find somebody with her excellent background.

We, you know, we have very little to do unless the museum is building a building or re-assuming bond issues.

But we need people who understand economics and public support.

and real estate, so she has the right kind of background, and we're very pleased to have her.

It took us a year to find her.

Well, I'm glad that that has occurred and that you have found each other.

Stephanie, I just have so much admiration for the work that you do and, again, the depth and breadth of your engagement in the community around arts issues.

Thank you.

Absolutely.

Folks have any questions?

I'll do a second.

We said councilmember herbal Stephanie.

Thanks for your civic commitment to the city and the people of the city for making this work and It's clear that you Have been committed for years in this.

So thank you for your willingness to serve and very grateful.

Thank you so much Anything further to add?

Okay.

Well, with that, if there are no further questions, I will move appointment 01267. All those in favor, vote aye.

Aye.

None opposed.

None abstaining.

Congratulations.

This will move on to full council on Monday.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you.

Agenda item three is council bill 119487. An ordinance relating to public accommodations requiring persons owning or managing a place of public accommodations to activate closed captioning on television receivers and adding a new chapter 14.05 to the Seattle Municipal Code.

Thank you, Noel.

Greetings and welcome.

I appreciate your joining us.

Introductions, please.

Yes, my name is Eric Schreier, and I am the co-chair of the Commission with People for Disabilities.

Thank you.

Shivanka Chauman, Council Central Staff.

Perfect.

What was it?

Central Staff.

Thank you, Asha.

Do you care to kick us off?

Absolutely.

So we've discussed the premise for Council Bill 119487 in previous committee meetings.

Back in January, Eric provided a lot of background about other cities that have mandated closed captioning on televisions.

and the reasons for that and who that benefits.

And then a few weeks ago, we discussed a draft version of the bill.

The bill that is in front of you today is primarily substantively the same bill with some very small minor changes.

But essentially what the bill does is requires that any television receiver in a place, in a public area of a place of public accommodations must have its closed captioning turned on by the owner or the manager of that place during regular hours.

And so all of those terms, place of public accommodation, public area, and regular hours are defined in the bill.

And the only exceptions is if there's no television in that public area, or the television itself is technically incapable of showing closed captions.

Before I get to enforcement, the bill also includes technical standards for the closed captions, which are black background color, specific text fonts, a text size of 24, and white text color.

And just a little bit of background for the viewing public who this issue might be new to some folks is that in 2002, the FCC actually adopted requirements for digital television receivers that they have to include the ability to turn on closed captionings.

And then in 2010, there was a similar requirement added for Spanish language programming.

So before the Seattle Commission for People with Disabilities brought this issue to me, I was unaware that all modern televisions had this capability.

And so I think that's a really important foundational part of this bill is this is just simply requiring folks who are in places of a public accommodation to turn something on that already exists.

I also want to recognize that the Commission adopted a resolution in November 2018 supporting the development of this ordinance.

And as Councilmember Sawant mentioned earlier, we really rely on the Commissions to identify priority issues and bring them to the Council to work on.

Thank you for allowing me to do that segue.

Sorry for interrupting.

It's your committee.

So in terms of enforcement, the Office for Civil Rights will be enforcing this law.

The intention is that enforcement will begin 180 days after passage of the bill to allow time for education, technical assistance, and outreach to persons to whom this ordinance would apply.

The enforcement model is essentially one that would allow SOCR to provide an advisory letter to somebody to notify them that they may have a violation and to allow them to comply with the law within 30 days.

Essentially, that person would submit a response that would either explain how they've ameliorated the violation or discussed why the, or excuse me, disputed the presence of the violation at all.

At that point, the process can move forward.

If the person wants to appeal, they may do so to the hearing examiner.

The penalties are up to $125 for the first time there's a violation.

and up to $300 for subsequent violations.

At the hearing examiner stage, they may consider a variety of factors about what the civil penalty should be.

In terms of SOCR's ability to enforce this ordinance, there may be a need for further staff, depending on how compliance goes over this first year.

If there's further need for intense technical assistance or translation for those businesses that require it, as well as just general sort of compliance for the general business community.

Because some of this was based on how The all-gender restroom bill went there, and there turned out to be a need for staff time to do a lot of technical assistance with that.

The same may be true here.

And then the other piece is this may cost about $25,000 to $50,000 for outreach and education.

And it's not clear that OCR's budget can currently support that.

And so that may be an additional need for SOCR to be able to effectively enforce the ordinance.

Great.

And just to underscore, this ordinance is drafted in such a way that enforcement itself does not begin for 180 days after passage.

Again, that is intended to give SOCR the ability to engage with the business community about the expectations with the desired result of not having to do a lot of enforcement, much like we have seen with the rollout and implementation of the all-gender restroom ordinance.

I just note that a lot of the time, it's enforcement that has to do the outreach.

So there is some that even within the 180 days before enforcement, that staff may be the ones that have to do that sort of education and technical assistance.

Of course, yes.

So this bill, and maybe we could turn it over to Eric a little bit, this bill is modeled on some other ordinances and research that Eric has done.

There is a similar law in Portland, another in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and yet another in Pawtucket, I think that's Massachusetts?

Rhode Island?

Rhode Island?

OK.

And I think Eric did a lot of research on this issue.

And as has been mentioned, this is not just designed to help folks who have hearing loss, but it can help other people as well.

But as it relates to hearing loss, one in five Americans have some type of hearing loss that affects their ability to communicate and receive information.

Eric, do you want to share with us a little bit of what led you to make recommendations in this bill that might differ a little from some of the other bills that you looked at?

Well this bill is probably the best design model that I have without the loopholes The main problem I researched, as far as the community goes, is that many businesses turn The captions are extremely small, or it's very hard to read the actual captions.

And sometimes they disappear.

They blend in with the clothing.

So there's a lot of technical issues in that people complain about.

And businesses, say, some people ask to change the background so it's more visible.

It's important to have those captions on.

And so I'd like to add the captions, the technical model for the specific specs.

the background color, the size of the font, and the kind of font as well.

In addition to that, the text color.

White matches with any kind of visual kind of problem.

It has the contrast, there's little technical details that I would like to accommodate so that all people with disabilities, not just limited to people who are hard of hearing, but it applies to people with cognitive disabilities, In addition to that, people moving here from other countries, learning English as a second language in the first place, that can help them as well.

And you all, hearing people, sometimes even have a hard time hearing the TV, and those captions can help, you know, hearing people as well, to filter out different accents, whether it be between characters or reporters on the news.

It can help with understanding better clarity with name pronunciation.

brand names, there's a huge spectrum of different things and how it can help and so with everything.

And so that's something I wanted to add to this bill and that's based on my own personal experience communicating with the general public as a whole and approaching those issues with the city and the state of Maryland.

So I think one of the, again, the principles of this bill that should be recognized is that there is an obligation under the ADA in places of public accommodation to make a, what's called a reasonable accommodation, but much of that Much of the implementation of that law is reliant on an individual to make a request, and that puts the onus on the person with disability to make that request and what this bill attempts to do is recognize that making that request can sometimes be difficult or embarrassing and that the onus should really be on us addressing sort of the structural issues inherent in places of public accommodation that create those barriers and our work to try to remove them.

So I mention that as part of the context for what I hope we can just do a little bit of a discussion around some of the feedback that we have received from members of the business community that I've reached out to to ask for their input.

There are a number of requests that have been made for changes to the bill, and I think some of those things merit consideration, although some I think might run counter to the goals of the bill, and others might just be unnecessary because of my understanding of the technology.

So if we could perhaps go through some of what we've heard and just have a little bit of a conversation about them.

The first issue that I heard is that some programming It's not the issue of the television not having the ability to turn on the captions.

But some programming does not have closed captioning as part of basically the software.

Is it software?

I'm not really sure of the technical.

But it's just not embedded, so it can't be turned on.

Yeah, I'd like to add something as well in addition to that.

The ADA law requires captions of all televisions that have the capability, and that specific language is the chip.

It has a specific kind of chip, any TV that has that installed, and that's been going on since 1990. And so any television within 13 inches or wider have the chip and the capability to turn on closed captioning.

The issue that I'm raising right now is not related to the television.

It's related to the programming.

So some programs don't have the closed caption embedded into the programming itself.

I just note that specifically in this bill, there's a provision at the end that says that this bill doesn't supersede any sort of state or federal law.

So to the extent that there are programs that don't have closed caption because they're not required to, because they're subject to some sort of exemption, this bill would not penalize somebody for, you know, having closed captions turned on their TV.

But if the closed captions literally don't show up on the program, they're not going to be held liable for that.

So the issue isn't don't turn on the closed captions, it's just simply an issue that the captions are on, but at some instances, nothing will be showing because the program doesn't allow for it.

Right.

So if that were to be reported to the Office for Civil Rights for compliance, like that would be the discussion that happens when the person was to send back a written response.

essentially say this is the program we were watching.

It didn't have any closed captions.

We had the TV turned on and there were closed captions on the programs on both sides of that.

So it would be just a matter of figuring out for OCR what that compliance looked like.

Until recently Seattle Channel is an example that didn't provide closed captioning with its programming so that would be I don't know enough about the laws which programs are required to or not, but it's great that we're benefiting from closed captioning happening now at Seattle Channel, so that was a great step, but I imagine there are other programs like that that still exist, and so that wouldn't be on the TV owner responsibility at that point.

That's my response.

Just, yeah, I mean, just to add to that, it is just anecdotal, you know, personal observation is that more and more programming now does carry closed captioning, just regular programming, you know, entertainment programming.

But then occasionally you will run into, for example, if a movie was made in the 60s or 70s, then occasionally it won't be provided.

It's a funny, funny thing.

I was just watching the 36th Chamber of Shaolin because I watched it as a kid, and it didn't have closed captioning.

I really wanted it to have, but it didn't.

But it was, I only mention it because it was a rare occurrence, and most programming I think is capable of having, so really it's a question of turning it on.

It's so funny.

I was, um, some personal experience growing up watching, I loved, uh, Lucy, I Love Lucy, and the captions in the 60s, there were no captions back then in the 60s and 70s with I Love Lucy watching that.

And so, finally, once they added captions, I said, oh my God, she said those words?

I didn't realize that.

You know, the acting matched some of the words, and so I understand this, I understood the story much better.

One of the other issues that has been raised is the issue of sports programming and the concern that the captions for sports programming will interfere with the all-important ticker that can show the score and also display other information about the game that's playing at the time, and we know how avid sports fans don't like to rely on the replays, but they are there for instances where you might miss something in the live action.

But this is something that, again, I've learned a lot about how closed captioning interacts with other text that's on the screen.

Eric, can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yes.

With the new technology that's available in the current day and age, it allows the captions to actually move around and adjust on the screen so they don't actually interfere with the ticker specifically.

There's several features that make the TV itself move the captions around.

And sometimes they can be lower.

It depends on the manufacturer of the TV when they set up those captions.

And so, it is improving over time.

And so, we don't see that as so much of an issue, but also, captions in restaurants and bars, that brings in more business, too, you know?

There's so many people that rely on captions that can't go out because they don't have access to that at a restaurant or a bar environment.

And so, they feel there's no access to equal information.

And so they stay at home and watch the baseball game or the football game, and they have captains at home.

But it really increases patronage when there are captains available in those bars and restaurants.

And it helps the business itself.

It's a good point to make, that there is a business case to be made for creating an atmosphere that increases a customer base.

So what I'm hearing you say is that Not all televisions have the captions The caption capability to move around is that but but some do is that correct?

So all different television companies have the foundation of captions in the program.

And so, as far as sports go, some of the companies have the capability to move those captions around to avoid blocking the ticker itself.

My favorite TV channel is CNN, and sometimes, you know, during the headline news, there's breaking news, and it will move up, so it doesn't block that.

And so, that function has a possibility itself.

And so, it all has to do with the programming of the work.

Asha, anything to add there?

No, I think you covered it.

Other requests from business stakeholders that we've been asked to consider is to allow for a fixed percentage of television, specifically in a television showroom, to have the captions turned off.

So a showroom meaning like you go into the video store?

Right, right.

A television showroom, right, exactly.

A place where they are selling televisions.

They still have those?

They still have video showrooms?

Best Buy, there you go.

Can you speak to that notion and why that might run contrary to the goals of this bill.

Out of my personal experience related to that situation, I have many other people that have entered Best Buy and looked at the new HDTVs, the 4K, browsing around, and they don't have captions.

And so lots of the staff actually don't even know how to turn them on once requested to, and they have to get a manager, and it's a whole fiasco.

And the reason why the captions, you can see which captions work for that specific kind of person, which brand names are more accessible to the deaf community.

So it's very helpful to find the, correct one and having it sometimes the loop itself, you know, all the TVs in Best Buy have the same kind of screen at the same time.

Maybe having 20 minutes to take the time to look at how captions match the person and then just leave that and then make your decision.

So people actually make purchasing decisions based on the display of captioning on different televisions.

And to exempt...

Yes, correct.

The quality as well.

To exempt some TVs.

And the kind of placement as well of the captions.

So to exempt some TVs would interfere with a person's ability to choose a television based on the quality of captioning provided.

Yes.

And the last item that has been raised as a question is often TVs, again, often in sports bars, already have the television on mute.

So nobody has the benefit of hearing what's on the television, hearing the audio.

So the question is, is in those instances where the practice of a business is to have the television on mute and nobody gets the benefit of the audio.

Would that be an acceptable instance to not have the closed captioning requirement?

Just to be a little sarcastic, when the TV's on mute, why can't you just turn it off then?

I think this has been identified as a way to address the earlier concern that if nobody's listening to the television but everybody's watching it, there's a desire to make sure that the captions aren't interfering with what you can see on the screen, and if nobody is nobody's listening, then it's not putting one group of people at a disadvantage with another group of people.

I just want to be clear that many different people go to restaurants, for example, during the Rams, in the Rams restaurant, and there's different displays on the wall.

I think there's about 15 TVs.

And I can hear with my hearing aid.

I can hear some of the background noise.

but all the other customers can hear the TVs in the other room, and so listening to the sound of the other TV can be too loud and overwhelming because there's an echo and overlapping of sound, and so one TV that feeds through all the restaurant watching the same channel, perhaps.

To have fair, equal access to information, So having mute or not mute?

I'm not sure I'm understanding the answer as it relates to my question.

If the policy of a business is to have all of the TVs on mute, The question is, if nobody in the restaurant can hear the audio because all of the TVs are on mute, is it acceptable in those instances to not have the closed caption option turned on?

No.

And if not, can you explain why you feel that way?

I feel that all people have a right to closed captioning, whether there's sound on or off.

As a deaf customer that isn't going to know that there's sound or not in the first place, because they are deaf or hard of hearing.

And so bringing a recording machine to try to record the sound and then ask my hearing friend, can you hear that?

Like getting them into trouble, perhaps.

Some deaf people just can't hear that.

And this is why we have you at the table, to help us think through these instances that, you know, as a hearing person, they're not my experiences.

So I really appreciate your engagement and sharing those experiences to help us build this policy.

Thank you.

And I would like to thank you all so much for your time and encouraging the passing of this bill.

I feel so honored to be working with everyone here.

Council Member Ryan.

Well, in a sports bar scenario, often there will be, you know, multiple different shows showing on TVs at once.

There may be audio from one of them, but all the other, you know, they're not going to have audio from multiple different shows at once in the bar.

And I'll tell you that I appreciate having the closed caption.

In a sports program, you can get lots of information from the tickers and the scores, but the closed caption just adds to the interest there.

And so I understand the concern about how those tools may interfere with each other, but this is an area where, as Seattle joins other cities in making the requirement, Bars will become more aware of the different technologies and purchase TVs that work.

Manufacturers will respond to that demand.

If you walk into a showroom and closed captioning is on all the TVs and some of it do it really well and some of it do it poorly, whether you are hearing or not, those manufacturers will likely see more TVs sold that do it.

And so I think this is a reinforcing mechanism that it sounds like the technology already exists and I would imagine that we'll see it being adapted pretty rapidly as this trend continues.

So I'm pretty comfortable with the requirement as is.

I appreciate the concerns and I appreciate Eric's expertise on thinking through this myself.

I just add as a.

Thank you.

Oh, sorry.

I'm sorry.

I just add as if the policy outcome is for people with disabilities not to have the burden of asking for closed captions every time, they also shouldn't have to be monitoring if something comes off mute for three seconds and they need closed captioning.

And in terms of compliance, it actually makes it easier for businesses as a rote rule that you always have to have them on instead of having to turn one on every time you turn one on.

The default.

And there's commercials and intervening news stories where, you know, the sports ticker stuff goes away.

Or emergency broadcasts as well, you know, if there's some sort of a...

I don't know what that was.

If there's some sort of nuclear rocket coming towards us, you know?

Emergencies is a whole other thing that's very important.

Having access to that information through those closed captions.

Amber alerts for kidnappings, in addition to those are broadcast right away, and people can hear that.

Deaf people don't have access to that.

They can't have access to those.

It's essential to have access to those emergency situations.

And the time is of the essence, especially in those kinds of situations.

Well, thank you, everybody.

I want to thank the business stakeholders that have weighed in on this.

I want to thank your continued engagement, Eric.

We are still waiting to hear back from the Small Business Advisory Council, the Mayor's SBAC.

I also shared this bill with them.

And so for that reason, I'm not prepared to vote today.

But intend to bring this back at our next committee meeting two weeks from today.

Is that April 1st?

I believe it's April 9th.

I think it's this, yeah, April 9th, right.

Then I have a question for the, is the full council going to vote on the 9th?

Full committee?

Committee vote.

Yes, committee vote is the correct, yes.

And then full council after that.

Fantastic.

Thank you so much, everyone.

Appreciate it.

All right.

Next item on the agenda, item four.

Agenda item four is update on potential solutions to address eviction harms identified in resolution 31861.

So, background on this, this has sort of been a body of work that we've been plugging along on.

We started with a review of the losing home report by the Seattle Women's Commission last year.

Subsequent to that discussion and review of that report, we identified the problems that needed addressing.

that were called out in that report, and we passed a resolution, 31861. That resolution, again, identified the problems, not the solutions, but the problems that were creating harm through the eviction process.

This was a resolution that Council Member O'Brien and I sponsored.

And it identified which of those items were being worked on in different contexts.

So some of those items are being worked on within the context of implementing the budget that the council passed in November for 2019-2020.

Some of those items are being worked on within the context of the state legislative agenda that the City Council and Mayor adopts, giving direction to our lobbyists in Olympia to work on issues of high priority, and a number of those items are related to eviction reform.

And then it identified issues that were high priorities for the council.

And so, Asha, you have a memo that you're going to walk us through.

You're going to give us some information on, I think there are seven items.

Which of those items?

might be right for council consideration of action and what some options might be, but also which of those items are being in a substantial way addressed as we speak through the legislative session in Olympia.

So as you mentioned, since adoption of the resolution, multiple bills were introduced in the legislative session.

A couple of them made it through the point at which they had to pass out of the House of Origin in order to stay relevant.

And so there are two of those that address some of the issues that were brought up in the resolution.

It was engrossed substitute House Bill 1453 and engrossed substitute Senate Bill 5600. And so many of the provisions in those bills are similar, but I'll go through those as they come up as relevant to the issues that we identified.

Perfect.

Thank you.

So the first issue that we identified in Resolution 31861 was the financial hardship for tenants that are experiencing domestic violence who are held liable for damages caused by a perpetrator of domestic violence.

This isn't an issue that's being considered at the moment at the state legislative session.

So I've provided several options.

I just note that as I go through these, these options are not a total comprehensive list of the options that council could move forward on.

nor are they necessarily mutually exclusive to each other.

So to implement some solutions to persons that are dealing with this problem, I've identified three basic options.

The first would be option A, which would be to prohibit a landlord from holding a tenant that is experiencing domestic violence liable for damage to the landlord's property that is caused by the perpetrator of domestic violence.

And that would be in the situation where the tenant has a protection order in place against the person that's causing the damage.

Option B would similarly prohibit the landlord from holding that tenant liable.

But in this situation, if the tenant were to file a report with a qualified third party, someone like a law enforcement officer, a court employee, a mental health professional, about the incident in which the domestic violence occurred and the property damage occurred, and then provided that report to the landlord, they would not be held liable.

And in option C, regardless of who is liable for the damage, whether it's the landlord or, excuse me, the tenant, the council could legislate access to and provide some appropriations for a mitigation fund that would cover the damages that are caused by a perpetrator.

What the documentation would be around providing to the arbiters of that fund who caused the damage is something that we can discuss further.

But the essence of the bill would be that neither the landlord nor the tenant would have to absorb the financial hit and that the mitigation fund would do that.

I just note that there is some draft legislation that combines options A and B as attachment C to this memo.

And it's modeled sort of generally off of the RCW provision that allows survivors of domestic violence to terminate their lease agreement if they provide specific information to a landlord.

So it's modeled loosely off of that, just in that the evidence to provide a landlord in order to remove liability would be something like the protection order or a report with a qualified third party.

And Council Member Swann.

Thank you.

So a couple of questions.

One is, so both A, option A and B, in some shape or form require the person, the tenant who's experiencing domestic violence to have taken some action, having reported it to some appropriate authorities or even like I think point option A is like even one step further, having sought and obtained a protection order against a person who's committing the violence.

Yes, that's correct.

So I'm just bringing this up because we know statistically speaking that domestic violence survivors are, until they are out of that situation, face many barriers to report that it's happening because they also face retaliation from, you know, so there's a reluctance, understandable reluctance to report it.

So I'm just wondering what thinking we've done in terms of understanding if there are options where we don't have either of those two things done.

And I'm also especially thinking in the case of small landlords, you know, it's possible that small landlords who own one or two Units rental rentals or maybe just one rental that they you know that they are responsible for and they may know because they have personal relations Just or friendly relations with the tenants.

They may know that this tenant is facing domestic violence, but that person is not Able to or willing to report it in that case.

Can the city offer mitigation?

I'm just I know I know these are hard because it's much better to have a actual documentation, but I'm just raising that question.

And then the other question I would raise is in terms of mitigation in point C, which is not mutually exclusive with point A or B, Can the council come up with some idea of small landlords versus big landlords?

And this is a general question that has occurred to me over and over again in terms of how we should be formulating legislation related to renter's rights.

Can we have some sort of delineation or is it possible to think through that?

So that the city, so that public monies are responsible for mitigation only in the case of, generally speaking, a small land, not a big landlord, who we can make a strong case that they can afford to mitigate that.

I'd also be interested to know, item C, I think, was actually offered as an option for our consideration by the Washington Multifamily Housing Association.

And one of the reasons why they put that forward is because of their advocacy for a similar requirement as part of the state source of income discrimination bill.

The state has created a fund for damages associated with somebody's tenancy.

And I just would love to know a little bit.

I think it's only been a year that it's been to enforce, but if we have any experience that we could share from the state on how that fund is being utilized and also whether or not that fund makes a distinction between large and small landlords.

And it occurs to me as well, and this might also fall into the large-small landlord rubric, I would like to learn more about instances when somebody would need to hold a victim of domestic violence liable, because it seems to me that somebody's insurance would cover a lot of the costs associated with damage to a unit, regardless of the circumstances.

landlords typically have that type of insurance so that they're not having to pay out of pocket every time damage is done.

But again, I don't know as much as I would like to know about that insurance and whether or not it covers these instances and whether or not this is insurance that is sort of universally held because of financing requirements, or if it's the kind of insurance that maybe, again, some small landlords who maybe have already paid off their note may not be carrying.

Some of this I'll have to get back to you on, but starting with the piece around a person experiencing domestic violence, providing proof of what has happened, that you're absolutely right in that that can be extremely difficult.

And I think one of the things that is a benefit of the second option, which is having the tenant file a report with a qualified third party is that that can be with a domestic violence advocate or a mental health professional.

It doesn't have to be with law enforcement.

And the reason for providing documentation at all is to, you know, provide abuse or protect from abuse of this kind of, you know, legal provision so that not everybody is saying, you know, I'm a victim, so I shouldn't have to pay for things.

But I think you're right in calibrating what that kind of proof should look like.

And this draft has not gone out to stakeholders at this point.

So I think once People have a chance to weigh in on what the provisions for proof are, whether they should be necessary and what those should look like.

I think we'll have a little bit better idea of what would work best for people that are surviving domestic violence.

The second thing you had brought up, oh, the distinction between small and large landlords in terms of eligibility.

I'm not sure if the state makes that distinction.

I don't believe that they do.

But I do see the advantage in exploring what that kind of eligibility looks like.

It may be a challenge in figuring out what that line should be, what the delineation is.

But it's definitely something to further explore if the mitigation fund is the way that council wants to proceed.

Sorry, let me just.

In terms of insurance, I think there's a distinction between what either renter's insurance or a landlord's insurance will cover in terms of property damage.

One example that I think shows up in the losing home report that the Women's Commission has brought up is the experience of a person that her relative was beaten pretty badly by the perpetrator of domestic violence and left bodily fluid all over the floor, and the tenant was charged for that.

And my instinct is that there's a normal cleaning fee that takes place, but then something like that would require the tenant to pay a little bit more.

to get that cleaned up and so that may not be something that's covered by insurance and it may be a sum of money that the person experiencing the domestic violence just hasn't accounted for so it may end up contributing to the fees that add up in terms of eviction.

I will have to do further research into what the insurance piece looks like around that, but that's just one example I can imagine where insurance wouldn't even come into play.

It would just be something that needed to be out of pocket from a tenant that they couldn't cover.

Thank you.

Council Member O'Brien.

I think the, I appreciate the kind of range of options here.

And I think I look forward to having some time to go through this and think through what may work.

And I appreciate the questions today too.

I think what's clear to me is when someone's a victim of domestic violence, you know, that is, That is a huge burden on that individual.

And to compound that by charging them to clean up body fluids from being the victim of assault just seems absurd.

How we fix it and how we shift it, I think there's kind of an open policy question.

But I think for me it's critically important that we want to eliminate domestic violence for sure.

And I think one of the steps we can take in the short term is to figure out how not compound the challenges that folks that are victims of domestic violence are facing in these situations.

Issue two.

Okay.

The second issue is the lack of flexibility tenants have around avoiding eviction when they're faced with emergencies.

So temporary unemployment, large rent creases, deaths in the family.

This also hasn't been addressed at the state level.

So the options provided here are A, to require a landlord to offer the tenant a payment plan before they file an eviction notice, the first time that a tenant is unable to pay timely rent in a 12-month period, regardless of the reason.

Again, the pieces around whether that should be a 12-month period is up for discussion.

Option B would be also to require a payment plan before filing the eviction notice, but specifically in the case of an emergency.

depending on whether it's the first time or not, may not be the trigger that activates it.

And then depending on how council wants to move, what that documentation, if that emergency looks like, if necessary at all, would be up for discussion.

And then the last piece, option C, would be providing a defense to just cause eviction, in that if a person is experiencing an emergency, they can use that defense once in a 12-month period.

And again, the 12-month period is variable.

Thank you.

Council Member Swann?

Just a clarification.

So in point A, it says the option is to require a landlord to offer a tenant payment plan the first time the tenant is able to pay regardless of the reason, meaning the reasons you stated in the preceding paragraph.

reduced income of some form, possibly because of temporary unemployment and so on.

And then in point B, you say option B, you say prevent the tenant suffers an emergency.

So when you say emergency, do you, does it mean like medical emergencies or do you, would you, in that option, would you also count losing your job unexpectedly as an emergency.

Yeah, I think it would depend on what council wanted to define an emergency as, whether it is something as acute as a medical emergency that puts somebody in the hospital, or it is something like they've lost their job and it's going to take them a month to find a new one.

So both options, B and C, would require us to have a policy discussion around what, for purposes of this ordinance, is to be defined as an emergency.

An emergency may be the wrong term.

It may be just like an adverse event, something like that, but the decision would be around what that actually entailed.

And maybe we've already done this, and I can't recall, but look at other states and see how they define some of these things maybe as a guideline for.

Absolutely.

Another guideline might be the oft quoted Federal Trade Commission report that demonstrates that 40% of people in the United States do not have $400 to pay for an emergency.

So for purposes of that survey, which I think is also sort of a foundational principle of the report about how these destabilizing events can result in eviction, it might be worth looking at that definition of emergency because, again, it links back to the resource issue that we're trying to deal with right here.

Absolutely.

I really appreciate you bringing that up.

It's a very powerful statistic and it should be used as a foundational guideline for legislation of this kind.

Just wanted to mention also that connected to all of that is also the research that we see coming from the University of Washington.

on using statewide data, you know, compiling various data sources including ACS and 10-year census and all that.

But they show that evictions in Washington State, and again, this is not a surprise to any of us, are not affecting every income group.

They're specifically affecting low income groups and that tied in with the statistic you mentioned.

I mean, I think it's definitely, Sure, financial emergencies of any kind should be considered emergencies.

I think when we formulate the definitions, I think that should be taken into account.

So loss of job is a financial emergency, and immediately you would not be able to pay rent if you don't get one paycheck.

Absolutely.

This is another example that the Women's Commission report highlighted.

In this case, you have an individual, the example of losing a job.

You know, what their data shows is with an eviction, it's extremely likely this person will become homeless, which then compounds the challenges of getting back on your feet.

And the expense to the individual and the expense to society goes up dramatically.

This is one of those examples where, like, hey, these things happen in people's life, as you both highlighted.

Too many people in our society don't have a safety net.

And how do we come together and provide a safety net?

Because if we can keep that person stabilized, much more likely to find a new job and get back on their feet without having this massive disruption to the individual and to the broader community.

And then I think there's a question in these options, kind of get to that a little bit, is like, okay, so how do we provide the safety net?

I think there's, even in small landlords, there's a landlord that's owned a building for a number of years, likely it's probably cash flowing pretty positively now because rents have gone up so much and they probably purchased the property at a much lower rate.

I think it's reasonable to say, hey, show a little flexibility.

A small landlord who just bought the property yesterday in today's real estate market is probably negative cash flow for a while because of the reality of rents versus cost of housing.

And I would be sympathetic to a landlord saying, hey, I scraped everything together to make this work, and now how do I provide the safety net?

So how we navigate that, I think, is going to be important.

But it's absolutely critical that if we don't do something, a relatively normal life disruption leads to homelessness in today's market is something that we just can't tolerate, so how we navigate that's going to be important.

And I think, again, for the viewing public, more than half of the people evicted, raised in the eviction study, more than half of them were evicted for, I believe, one month or less owing.

And of those folks who were surveyed, 85% of them became homeless.

I appreciate you, Council Member O'Brien, raising the greater societal costs associated with the outcomes of these evictions, both to people's lives as well as to our ability as a city to address the needs that are created through more and more people becoming homeless through the eviction process.

Moving on to issue three.

Okay.

Issue three is the high default rate for evictions suggests that tenants don't understand the eviction process, the effective mutual termination agreements, or are generally unaware that free legal resources are available.

This issue is addressed by state legislation, so House Bill 1453 require that any eviction notice that gets issued has to be accompanied by a form that tells the tenant that the Washington State Department of Commerce specifically has information about how to find a lawyer or an advocate at low or no cost, about available resources to help pay rent, and it also directs the tenant to call 2-1-1 for that information.

And then Section 3 adds language that requires the Department of Commerce to keep translated versions of the notice in the top 10 languages spoken in Washington State and requires that notice be available in printed form in an easily readable font size.

And also that in addition to being on the form, DOC should provide on its website where tenants can access legal or advocacy resources that can help tenants to understand assistance in their primary language.

The Senate Bill 5600 essentially has parallel provisions to that, except that it puts the Washington State Attorney General's Office instead of the Department of Commerce in charge of the notice and providing that information on its website.

Thank you.

Can we move on?

Issue four, non-rent charges such as late fees, court costs, and attorney's fees can add a substantial burden to the tenant's hardships in paying rent.

This is also up for discussion at the state legislative session.

So the House Bill 1453 requires, first off, that any payment made by a tenant has to be counted before rent before applying it to late payments or damages like legal costs or fees, and that includes attorney's fees.

That way, rather than applying it to the other payments and still leaving rent unpaid, which could lead to eviction, that those funds have to go towards rent, which would potentially avoid an eviction based on rent.

The bill also requires that the tenant's right to possession is not conditioned on payment of anything except paying for your rent.

A landlord can still pursue other legal remedies to collect fees, but the only thing that actual tenancy can be based on is the payment of rent.

It defines rent, which hasn't been done at the state level before, and it defines it as recurring and periodic charges for use and occupancy of the premises.

It can include charges for utilities, but it doesn't include charges for costs incurred due to late payments, damages, deposits, legal costs, or attorney's fees.

Great.

Thank you.

Item 5. There's a couple of more things.

There's an additional piece around attorney's fees.

That House bill states that if in an unlawful detainer action, After default happens and payment of rent, the court is allowed to award statutory costs and reasonable attorney's fees when judgment is for the landlord, but only after a finding that the tenant didn't act in good faith, willfully performed a prohibited act, or willfully refrained from performing a required act.

So as it stands, current law allows the court to award statutory costs and reasonable attorney's fees no matter what.

So this would limit that ability by the court.

It would limit the ability to those instances where the action was willful?

Was that the term you used?

Yeah, if they willfully performed a prohibited act or willfully refrained from performing a required act.

So, assuming something in the lease that they were supposed to do that they didn't.

And so that relates specifically to...

to attorney's fees and the late fees are also capped in the Senate bill.

So so in the late fees they deal with in the next section of they do deal with in the Senate bill, but in the House bill They it basically says that if you're gonna be restored restored to tenancy you have to pay any rent due court costs But late fees only if they are due under the lease and for no more than $75 total so in both instances there is a

a limit on late fees.

And I want to give another shout out to the Washington Multifamily Housing Association.

They've been really, my understanding, willing to meet the bill sponsors on this issue in particular.

And I know this is really important, both as it relates to making sure that people are not being evicted for late fees because rent is being applied to to late fees and they're still showing up as owing rent, but also in recognizing that there are abuses that result in excessive late fees and attorney's costs.

So I really appreciate their work on this.

The Senate bill is, oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.

No, just a question.

Maybe you can add it to your, what you're going to say, but how, how does the, how is it decided what was willful, especially in the case of not doing something that's required?

How do you, all you can say is it wasn't done.

Like, how do you prove?

You know my question.

I'm not sure what prompted the standard of willful, but my instinct is that there's case law that sort of defines what willful and intentional those terms are as opposed to just not prohibiting an act.

I don't know if there's case law specifically in the context of landlord-tenant law, but I'm I know that there's case law generally that sort of defines what that means.

And so in interpreting that, my guess is that the legislature either could define further what willful is or defer to what the courts have said about what willful means.

But I can do some further research into what that term actually means in a legal context.

I just also note that the Senate bill has some similar provisions.

It also would limit late fees to no more than $75.

But it also includes a provision that a tenant should pay an additional $50 for each time the tenant is reinstated to tenancy within the previous 12 months.

And the last piece of that is In terms of attorney's fees, if after judgment is entered, the total amount of rent is either equal or less than two months of monthly contract rent, or it's less than $1,200, the court is prohibited from awarding attorney's fees.

So it's limited in a way that currently is not the case.

I'm sorry, I forgot to mention the last piece of that is if a tenant does seek a stay of the writ of restitution, and I'll talk about that entire process in a couple issues, but if that does happen and the tenant prevails, then the attorney's fees can be awarded.

But if the landlord prevails, the court cannot award attorney's fees against the tenant.

Issue five.

Tenants often need to live with a roommate to afford rent, but some leases can prohibit that or limit the number of roommates.

Landlords can reject roommates regardless of whether that rejection is reasonable.

And a landlord can also impose extra fees and strict screening criteria.

So this isn't something that is being addressed at state legislative session.

So the options here are A, to require that the rental agreement provide the tenant a right to live with both their immediate family members and up to one additional occupant subject to any occupancy limits.

The second is that if a tenant would like to add a roommate to the rental agreement, the landlord can't subject that roommate to any stricter screening criteria than what the landlord screened the original tenant for and can't impose any other additional fees for adding someone to the rental agreement except what it costs to do the screening.

And then the last option would be to prohibit the landlord from unreasonably rejecting a request for a roommate.

So some of that would be figuring out what a reasonable rejection is and what is unreasonable.

But that again is a further policy discussion if that is the way council wants to move.

And my recollection is that there was a bill in the state legislature.

They had their own, there was a statewide Just cause bill that was proposed that actually did address this issue, but that bill is not moving although Certainly, the bills that are moving could be amended to address this issue and make unnecessary our need to address it.

But the Women's Commission report, again, identifies, particularly in a city like Seattle, where the cost of housing is high, that there is a real need of folks to have roommates and often those roommates are immediate family members and in both instances I think there should be some sort of accommodation.

It's my recollection that option A is intended to deal not just with the right to have a family member, but to deal with those instances where the primary tenant passes away and there is a family member who has been living with that primary tenant but is not on the lease and we want to make sure that that person is not subject to eviction simply because the primary tenant has passed away.

Yeah, the way in which we potentially draft legislation can be very specific to what the actual right is if the primary tenant passes away or decides to leave the rights that that additional person has on the lease.

And so I think this issue In addressing it, it's both important to deal with the types of barriers that prohibit people from being able to enter housing as well as the things that might result in people losing their housing.

And so I think it would be important to address both what the landlord can screen for and require on the front end and the punitive action that could be taken on the back end as well.

Absolutely.

Item six.

Okay.

Issue six deals with fees for terminating a lease before the end of the term.

They can often be very high and accumulate even though the market indicates re-renting a unit is not that hard and that the landlord is required to, excuse me, even though the landlord is required to make a reasonable effort to re-rent the unit.

This is not being addressed at the state level, so the options below are A, to require all rental agreements to have an early termination fee.

and limit that fee to one month's rent or to actual damages, whichever is lower.

B would be, would not require all rental agreements to have an early termination fee, but for those that did have them, to cap the fee at one month's rent or actual damages, whichever is lower.

And again, how much that one month rent or actual, I'm sorry, how much the one, whether one month of rent should be the appropriate trigger is a policy question.

And lastly, define what a landlord's obligation to make a reasonable effort to re-rent the unit actually is.

I just note that the underlying RCW, if there isn't an early termination fee, there is a requirement to pay either the actual damage, the actual amount, or the difference between fair housing value and what the landlord's loss is.

In option A, if all rental agreements had an early termination fee, that underlying RCW wouldn't be at issue.

If it were option B, then for rental agreements that didn't have early termination fees, that RCW would come into effect.

And option C, as it relates to a landlord's obligation to make a reasonable effort to rerent the unit, That is the current obligation in state law.

The problem is what is a reasonable effort is not defined.

And so option C would, I think, in some ways be building off of what is already required and would be sort of addressing a definitional gap in state law.

Okay.

Issue seven is the last issue.

It's even if the tenant has good cause to be late on the payment of rent, courts don't have the judicial discretion to prevent evictions.

So basically they don't have the discretion to stay a writ of restitution.

This is being dealt with at the state level.

Both the House Bill and the Senate Bill address this issue.

There are a lot of provisions in the Senate Bill, so I'll go quickly through what's in the House Bill, which is basically that if the judgment is for the landlord on nonpayment of rent, The court can stay or vacate the writ of restitution at the show cause hearing or if the tenant makes a subsequent motion upon good cause and unfair and just terms for both parties.

The bill defines what the court should consider.

There are six factors.

The tenant's payment history, evidence that the payment was caused by circumstances beyond the tenant's control and that are unlikely to occur.

evidence or lack of evidence, the tenant's willful or intentional failure to pay rent, the tenant's ability to timely pay the judgment, the relative burden on the parties resulting from reinstatement or the refusal to reinstate the tenancy, and then conduct related to any other notices that are served at the same time the notice or pay or vacate that is the basis of this writ was issued.

It keeps the burden of proof is on the tenant to prove that it's for good cause and on fair and just terms.

And there are some limitations on what the court can do.

They can't stay the rent for more than three months from the date of judgment.

They can order repayment within that time, but they can't stay it for longer than that.

The tenant has to give the landlord or deposit with the court one month's worth of rent within five days of the order.

And if the court does find, I'm sorry, conditioned on the court finding repayment of the balance, the court will issue the writ of restitution, but it won't be served by the sheriff unless there's a default, in which case the court will then tell the sheriff to issue the writ.

The Senate bill is similar.

It also provides the ability for the tenant to make a motion for good cause to stay the writ.

The factors considered are the same as those in the House bill, but it adds two more.

It adds that the tenant has to be otherwise in substantial compliance with the rental agreement, and the court has to consider whether the landlord can obtain disbursement from the Landlord Mitigation Program.

The piece about the Landlord Mitigation Program in the Senate bill talks about, it essentially widens the number of things that the program covers to include cases in which there are unpaid judgments.

So if the landlord does get reimbursed, then the tenant has three months to repay the Department of Commerce, which holds the Landlord Mitigation Program, and has three months to deposit those funds to the court.

The other piece of the Senate bill is that the limitations around what the writ is issued, how long the writ is issued for, which is similarly three months.

The tenant, again, has to deposit the payment with the court, one month's rent within five days of the order.

In the case of default, the sheriff can serve the writ but not execute it until the five days are expired.

If the tenant defaults, the sheriff can serve the writ or the landlord can serve a notice, telling them as much.

The other piece in the Senate bill that isn't in the House bill is that if the tenant is depending on emergency rental assistance from a government or a nonprofit, the writ of restitution can be stayed with the documentation that basically says they can pay the balance of that order.

And then the last piece is the tenant can't ask for relief by judicial discretion if they've been served with three or more notices to pay or vacate for failure to pay rent within 12 months prior to that notice.

And so that's an additional limitation for the tenant that isn't in the House bill.

Well, either one of these that pass are going to be real, I think, game changers for tenants in this state.

And I really appreciate our our legislators who've been working on this, as well as all of the stakeholders who've been involved.

I'm really encouraged by the action that's being taken.

As far as our next steps go, I think we're going to sit tight and see what comes from the state legislative session.

Some of the items that we have identified as not being addressed by the state legislative session might might come up, and so I think we need to wait and see what happens there before we decide for sure which items we want to push forward on.

Looking towards you, Council Member O'Brien, does it make sure that you agree with that course of action?

Yeah, I think, one, I really appreciate this kind of broad overlay to give us a sense of the mix of things that are potentially being addressed.

I recognize that those can all shift on a moment's notice, but help kind of get our head around some of the challenges that the report raised that we really wanted to find a way to address.

My sense is at this point, until the legislature finishes their work, There's a lot of kind of hypothetical scenarios, and I think it'd be much easier to just let that play its course over the next month, five weeks.

And then we can evaluate what was in those bills.

That'll probably take a little few more weeks to navigate what was actually done at the end.

And then we'll have some clarity on what hopefully will be a great body of work that will affect people throughout the state, which would be outstanding.

And then if there's still issues that remain, and I imagine there will be, we can kind of reconvene and talk about what's next.

Thank you, Asha, for your work.

I really appreciate it.

Agenda item five is Ship Canal Water Quality Project Update.

Greetings.

Thank you.

Introductions.

Brian Goodnight, Council Central staff.

Mami Hara, Seattle Public Utilities.

Keith Ward, Project Executive, Ship Canal Water Quality Project, Seattle Public Utilities.

Great, thank you.

Who would like to kick us off?

I'll start.

Director Hara?

Thank you, Councilmember Herbold and Councilmember O'Brien.

Before Keith starts his update, I'd like to just touch on the purpose of the Ship Canal Water Quality Project.

The project is part of Seattle's combined sewer overflow control program to meet state and federal requirements.

that are intended to reduce the size and number of sewer overflows.

Seattle Public Utilities developed a plan which contains several projects to support its consent decree to reduce combined sewer overflows.

The Ship Canal Project is the largest of the projects contained in the plan.

It will keep, on average, 75 million gallons of polluted stormwater and sewage out of Lake Union, Salmon Bay, and Lake Washington Ship Canal.

per year.

Nearly 70% of the city's CSOs associated with the plan occur from the basins that feed into those water bodies.

And since we last briefed you, we have some good news about the project, but I'll leave it up to Keith to tell you about it.

And lastly, you'll recall that council approved a budget provisor requiring SPU to get legislative approval before proceeding with development of the tunnel after achieving 100% design completion.

And so I'm pleased to tell you that the mayor expects to transmit a request in the next two weeks to you.

And I'll leave it to Keith to tell you about the project.

Great.

Thanks, Mami.

Thank you for the opportunity to present an update on the project today.

Today I'd like to provide a project overview, then focus on the project schedule and cost, uncertainties and risks, and I'll close with communications next steps.

So the Ship Canal Water Quality Project is a storage tunnel to reduce combined sewage overflows into our waterways.

The project will improve water quality by keeping an average of 75 million gallons of polluted stormwater and sewage out of Salmon Bay, Lake Union, and the Ship Canal each year.

In 2013, the city signed a consent decree with the U.S.

Department of Justice, the EPA, and the Washington Department of Ecology about combined sewage overflows into these waterways.

And the performance requirement, which is shown here, is that we must have less than one overflow per outfall per year on a 20-year moving average.

So that's all in the future.

This applies to all of SPU's 85 outfall locations.

This is a shared project with King County.

The Ship Canal project will address five of Seattle's outfalls and two of the county's.

And this map shows the King County's basins that flow to their two outfalls in green and the city's basins that flow to our outfalls in pink.

King County also has a consent decree for their two outfalls in the Ship Canal, and both consent decrees require that we complete construction on the project by the end of 2025, and I'll be referencing this a couple times.

So visually, it looks like the King County basins cover a lot more area geographically, but yet the joint project agreement has the split between Seattle and King County at 65, 35. So what that says to me is that the number of acres is not an indication of the volume of outflows that we're trying to address.

Is that more or less correct?

Yes and no.

Seattle has more volume than the county, but the way that that cost share was developed about four or five years ago was actually if each agency went on their own and created their own projects to solve their problems and you totaled it all up, Their cost would have been about 35% and ours would have been about 65%.

So it's actually volume wise, Seattle has about 60% of the volume and they have about 40% of the volume, total volume.

But it's actually based on the cost, what would have been the cost had each agency gone separate.

And this is all in this joint project agreement that was ratified back in 2015, 2016.

And so is that just a function of construction costs being lower outside of the city?

No, it was actually specific to these areas.

So for example, both agencies would have had to build four to five underground storage tanks.

So if, for example, let's say that the total was 500 million, their construction cost and estimated was about 35% of that total.

So this is all those tanks put together.

So this is really, the agencies did kind of two scenarios.

If we all went on our own, how much would it cost?

And it would actually cost about the same, but it would have been a lot more community impacts and condemnation needed.

And that's why we came together to do this shared storage tunnel.

That's largely related to the number of outfalls, since we have five and they have two, and we would have needed to, you know, construct some kind of storage, you know, at the end of each of the outfalls.

That's why our proportionate share of cost would be higher.

Okay.

Thank you.

That's for Brian.

Question on the consent decree and the requirement of one per average, one overfill per average over 20 years.

I assume that we use, I don't know what, some sort of hydrographic modeling or something.

And so we can, and I assume that we are in agreement with both ecology and EPA, and so we can walk through what we're doing, and this is what's happening, and so we expect that we will only have one overflow per, you know, outflow per year, whatever.

But then the world's changing rapidly in ways that we don't totally understand.

Is this like we get to a technical agreement and we're kind of in compliance because we are in this kind of safe harbor where the model set it?

Or if we start having 100-year events kind of every five years and it says, well, our models were wrong and you guys had four overflows in the last 10 years, you guys need to go back and build some more storage or do something else?

Or do we not know that yet?

That's a great question.

And this question is being asked around the country.

Right.

We're one of the first to get to a consent decree on this, I believe, right?

Yes.

And a lot of cities are now reopening their consent decrees or asking to reopen their consent decrees because they're seeing so much more intensity and frequency of rainfall.

And so their current agreements just They don't allow them to meet, you know, whatever standard has been set in an affordable way.

So, you know, that is a great question.

And so, I guess, is it unresolved as to how that works?

I mean, is the consent decree that, like, at the end of 20 years, we will see if you met it or not?

Or is it like, as long as our models say you meet it, that's fine?

It's really in perpetuity.

But what we have done is a lot of work to look incorporating expected climate change into our volume that we need.

And that's one of the reasons why a year ago we talked about moving the tunnel from a 14 foot diameter to an 18 foot 10 was based on more recent rainfall data.

We really go back 38 years and we look at past data and then we try to predict the future.

Eight or nine years have been a lot more significantly different events, so that factored in.

And I would say also our line of business within the utility is doing some really, really good work.

Actually, I talk about confidence on cost estimating.

They're looking at confidence on sizing based on where they think climate change would go.

So this is one of the few programs that has incorporated climate modeling recently into its program.

Well, I know that SPU in particular has had scientists working on climate issues for, I don't know, over a decade, maybe decades.

And so I'm not totally in the science world there, but my sense is we have some of the best experts here locally thinking about how that works.

The utility is working aggressively to incorporate climate science into all of its work.

But, you know, it's a process.

And so for this, for drainage and wastewater modeling, it's actually fairly recent.

And, you know, we only started doing that about two years ago.

Okay.

Yeah.

Thanks, Peggy.

Okay.

So the Ship Canal Project is SPU's most important CSO project because of the CSO volume and frequency of overflows.

This pie chart shows the City of Seattle's total 2018 combined sewage overflow volume, which was 52.6 million gallons from our 85 outfall locations.

The gray wedge shows that 80 of our outfalls overflowed 8.1 million gallons in 2018, and this is about 16% of the total volume.

The yellow shows the overflow volumes from our five city outfalls that are part of the Ship Canal Project, a total volume of 44.5 million.

In 2018, these five outfalls were 84% of all the city's combined sewage overflow volume.

And the Ship Canal Project is an important part of protecting our region's water quality.

This is a planned view of the project.

The project includes a 2.7 mile long, 18 foot, 10 inch diameter storage tunnel that will go from Ballard to Wallingford.

The alignment of this tunnel is shown in dark.

blue on this, purple.

Construction is in the five neighborhoods shown, including five drop shafts to take flows from existing pipes down into the tunnel.

There also will be a pump station in Bowerd and an eight-foot diameter conveyance tunnel under the ship canal between Fremont and Queen Anne.

Our design and construction schedule is critical to project success.

This shows our design and construction schedule for our five major construction packages on the top left.

These packages are in various stages of design, which is in the light blue, and construction in the dark blue.

And the orange line shows where we're at today.

The red line shows our construction complete regulatory deadline when the entire system must be operational by the end of 2025. Overall, our schedule shows we're on track.

The red star shows that the pump station will finish construction and be operationally complete in advance of the construction completion deadline.

Our first major construction package, the Ballard Early Works package, shown by the first row, is in construction.

This year, our largest construction package, Row 2, which is the storage tunnel package, begins pre-construction near the end of this year.

It includes both tunnels, the drop shafts, and work in all five neighborhoods.

The remaining packages will connect basins, the existing basins to the tunnel, complete the pump station, bring the system online, and move into design.

We're currently bidding the storage tunnel package, and I'll talk a little bit more about that.

A cost uncertainty decreases as these projects move from left to right, and we'll talk about this more on future slides.

Before we move on, can you just talk a little bit about the Ballard early work that's happening now?

Perfect.

Can I go to the next slide?

I'll talk a little bit about that.

So I mentioned that we have a project in construction.

This is our $13 million Ballard early work project.

The focus of this project is to prepare the Ballard site for the start of future tunneling operations.

This is later this year.

This is very common in tunneling projects.

This project is on schedule and slightly under budget.

Our bid price was about $650,000 less than our rent engineer's estimate.

We're about halfway through construction.

And then if you look here in the upper right side is construction of our new concrete pier.

that will be used to dispose of soils from the tunneling.

That will allow us to reduce about 17,000 truck trips across the city or specifically in that area.

After construction, this pier will again be open to the public.

And shown on the left is installation of a new water line using trenchless methods.

This line will bring water to the site for tunneling operations.

And how does the existence of the pier eliminate truck trips?

Sorry, so we will actually be bringing a conveyor belt from the beginning of the tunneling operations nearby over to that and load the soils onto barges and then take those to a disposal site.

Since we last briefed you, we have increased our confidence on our $570 million budget from 65% to 70%.

That was the good news that Mommy was alluding to, yes.

We're also on schedule.

I think that's pretty good news, too.

But this is always a big one.

We always focus on this, of course.

So a 70% confidence means that there's a 70% chance that costs will be at or below the estimated cost, and a 30% chance the estimated costs will be exceeded.

SPU's share on the $570 million is about $390 million.

And I also want to put in that the 6535 is on costs that the two agencies share.

Two of our projects are paid for only by SPU based on our original agreement, and they are a significant amount of work to get the water to the storage tunnel.

So we incur those costs.

So we presented a project cost update to this committee in May of 2018. I'm going to walk through our January 2019 cost estimate relative to our May cost estimate.

I'm sorry, January 2019, yes.

And talk about the cost categories that build up this estimate.

Our current estimate and its confidence reflect cost and scope reductions that we've been working on since April of 2018. So in the first row are our base costs, and these are our normal construction costs in today's dollars, things like concrete, rebar, skilled labor, engineering.

Our base costs includes our hard, soft, and also property acquisition.

These are at $438 million currently, and you can see that this has decreased by about $9 million, primarily since our King County and City of Seattle project team worked together to find savings last summer and better value by eliminating our shill-shoal pipe package.

And this was a 1,500-foot-long pipe, 48-inch diameter, that would have gone under the future Burke-Gilman Trail along shill-shoal pipe.

We were able to, the team did some great work to figure out that we can actually use an existing nearby sewer pipe in order to not build that project element.

And the second row is escalation.

This is what it will cost.

to complete the project in the future.

It's currently estimated at $64 million.

This increase reflects updated information and changes in the project schedule.

And of course, delays can and always do increase cost.

And this is an area that we're really focusing on is keeping things on schedule in order to manage escalation.

In the third row, we include uncertainty, because we can't know everything about the design or bid prices, and also risk, because construction projects have risks.

We plan for and manage uncertainty and risk with tools like our risk registers and integrate risk reserves into our project cost estimates.

Our current cost estimate shows a $4 million increase in our cost reserves for uncertainty and risk costs and schedule risks.

Because of scope changes, mainly the pipe, the removal of that social pipe project that I talked about, we were able to increase our cost reserves.

So we put those savings into the cost reserves.

That increases, increased cost reserves, increased reserves increase our confidence, our budget, our cost estimate confidence.

We're now at 70%.

Most other agencies budget between 50 and 80%.

So I like where we're at right now.

And can you talk a little bit about the schedule risk impact escalation?

Sure.

And is it advisable to be budgeting for that, and we are not?

Or is there some reason why we don't need to?

Thank you for pointing that out.

So we did, in the third row, we do have some cost reserves for some schedule impacts.

When we did our evaluation last year, there was a kind of a really worst case scenario if everything really pushed out in time.

And based on discussion with our several different consultants, we, both agencies decided to not budget for that.

That would not be normal to budget for that.

But that helps us give us a magnitude of how important it is to manage the project based on schedule.

But yes, that is indeed good news.

Thank you for delivering it.

Yes.

As part of our cost work in early 2018, we worked with the executive and council to identify possible scope and cost reductions.

These were included in our cost estimates at the time in our $570 million budget.

Since then, we've continued to work to realize these cost reductions as well as others.

I want to update you on this effort.

We've been able to partially or fully realize four scope adjustments, which are shown in the left box, including plans for a refurbished tunnel boarding machine, value engineering recommendations, construction staging savings, and also street use permit credits.

We were not able to realize three of the scope adjustments.

The Wallingford and Bowerd conveyance projects could not be constructed earlier due to construction constraints of multiple contractors being in the same place.

Also, two potential reductions, the tunnel bid alternative and odor control, weren't realized because we made other bigger changes.

By removing the shill shoal pipe from the project, which created a net savings of $10.7 million, we could no longer realize these specific adjustments.

And it's primarily because by utilizing the existing pipe as opposed to the larger diameter pipe, which is a 48 to a I think it's a 42, but it's a different slope.

We're going to need to drain the tunnel at a slower rate.

And because of that, we're going to hold the combined sewage for a longer period.

So we want to have odor control.

And we no longer wanted to entertain a possible smaller bid alternative.

We want to utilize all that.

All this was validated based on modeling to make sure that we're still okay in the long run.

So we were not able to realize the cost savings, but they were part of a greater cost savings in a sense.

make sense.

Council Member O'Brien.

You mentioned in the timeline show that the storage tunnel is out for bid and construction should start by the end of this year.

Yep.

I can't tell how big a piece of it, but I imagine that's a large chunk of the project.

When we get those bids back, will that further reduce risk, or is that?

Yes.

So that opening and work on that is a big milestone.

And I'll talk more about that, actually.

And we think about that about cost estimating uncertainty.

We always have a range.

I'll talk about that.

So once we get those bids in, that uncertainty goes away.

I'll talk about that in a couple minutes.

Yes.

Well, at least know what it is.

Yes.

The uncertainty will go away.

Right.

And we're doing a lot of work to make sure we get the good bids from the right people.

So we're continuing our work on scope and cost reductions as part of our strong project management practices.

We're never stopping this.

So we're constantly managing our uncertainties and risks.

As designs become more developed and bids are received, our uncertainty and cost estimates decreases.

For example, in the past nine months, we've received bids on the Ballard Early Works project.

And as I talked about, that came in under our bid amount estimate.

The storage tunnel has also moved from 90% to 100% design.

With this information, our uncertainty on these cost estimates decreases.

We proactively manage risks that could impact the project cost and or schedule.

Each month we look at our top risks, which is shown here in kind of what we call a tornado diagram.

And we assess their likelihood and impact.

We determine what management strategies can best reduce our risks.

And we also update our uncertainty and risk confidence model every four months.

In the next three slides, I'll discuss three key risks and uncertainties on the project right now.

A risk event that we're managing relates to our consent decree milestones.

As I said earlier, we're trending well to meet our construction complete milestone at the end of 2025, with a one-year stabilization period in 2024 and 2025. Other risk events can cause design and construction delays that impact this milestone.

We're mitigating these risks by implementing independent constructability reviews on all of our designs, getting the best contractors we can, and having experts monitor the work of our contractors.

We also place a great deal of team and management focus on keeping each project on track and looking for ways to accelerate our designs in order to mitigate this risk.

An uncertainty we're managing is the storage tunnel construction package.

It is our largest construction package by far, so it holds significant cost uncertainty for the overall project.

We're managing this uncertainty and risk in many ways, including for over a year, we've been reaching out to potential bidders, including minority and women business enterprises throughout the area.

This has included an industry review of our designs and specifications in the summer of 2018, where we received over 200 comments from tunneling and specialty contractors.

We also had a bidding meeting last week, where we had over 60 attendees.

The second of these meetings is happening as we speak out in Bowerd, and we are continuing efforts like this throughout bidding.

Over the last year, we've been finishing up the tunnel design, as I said.

This means that we're reducing uncertainty in our cost estimate amount.

Last May, our estimated range on the storage tunnel bid was plus 30% minus 10. And now our range has decreased to plus 20 minus 5. Our current cost estimate shown here is $220 million.

In order to manage our risks, we're also evaluating the bids that we receive based on experience and also the safety record of those firms.

So, you know, my focus is to make sure that we get good quality and good quantity of bids.

So we have a major milestone for this uncertainty approaching.

We're currently advertising the construction package for bids.

We'll receive bids in the summer.

And at that time, we'll have more certainty on about 80% of our total construction costs across all of our projects.

Can you just explain a little bit more about how what you've just described as preparation for the bid process helps manage uncertainty?

Sure.

The more contractors know about the project, so it's knowledge about the project, comfort with the owner themselves and their ability to work with the owner.

And then also I would say risk and risk transfer.

So we've done a lot of outreach events.

I personally have been to many tunneling conferences talking to many, not only tunneling manufacturing, but tunneling contractors, but also second tier subs, people who make pumps, reinforcing, so that they know about this project.

We've been pushing out notices to people.

The entire industry was able to review our 90% plans last summer.

So they've been thinking about this project.

and thinking about ways to do it better and giving and informing us.

And then lastly, risk transfer is a big thing.

We have to, as an owner, we have to think about who is the right person to hold the risk.

So we have, for example, we have pushed, of course, some of the risk on delays to them.

We have, if they have to hit certain dates, they need to hit a date to be off of our Ballard site so we can start our pump station.

If they don't hit that date, they start incurring liquidated damages.

That's a risk that they clearly own.

Other risks we've taken on so that they understand that risk transfer.

That's helpful.

Thank you.

Council Member O'Brien.

This is, I'm sorry, a 17, 18 foot tunnel somewhere?

18 foot 10 inside, Diana.

Which is roughly the size of the light rail tunnels.

I'm curious if a tunnel is a tunnel, and the types of people that bid on light rail, construction companies would say, yeah, this is similar enough, we'd do that, or it's like, oh no, these are completely different worlds.

You know, we like to refer to our tunnel as kind of bread and butter.

I mean, an 18 foot 10 is, as you pointed out, a standard transit tunnel.

So not to knock Bertha, you know, Bertha was 55 foot diameter.

We're totally in the conventional realm.

So really, and the nice thing is there's a lot of actually nice refurbished tunnel boring machines in the 18 foot 10 inch diameter that contractors will likely be able to utilize.

So we expect that, and the contractors we're talking about do these type of tunnels.

This is by far is the biggest, is the most prevalent diameter tunnel.

The soil conditions, you know, there's been a lot of tunneling fortunately in Seattle.

So we have a lot of good data on that.

Our eight-foot diameter tunnel that goes underneath the ship canal, I want to emphasize we actually have two tunnels.

The county actually just put in an eight-foot diameter tunnel about a football field away.

So we have a nice kind of test tunnel for that tunnel as well.

And we've supplied all that information to the bidders.

So it sounds like it's likely that we'll see bids from companies that do other tunneling.

Yes.

This is a tunneling project as opposed to a water versus a transit project.

For the construction world, there's a lot of similarities.

Exactly.

And I would say the similarities are not only tunnels, but deep shafts.

That's a really important part of this project.

Tunneling firms don't usually do the deep shafts, so they will partner in a joint venture with someone else.

And then there is some standard piping projects and underground structures.

So we work to keep construction impacts and issues to a minimum, but large construction projects always have more risks.

For this project, construction impacts likely include seven years of construction noise.

We have noise mitigation approaches, like sound walls and adjusted work hours, but this will still always be an issue that we'll always be working on.

Also, of course, increased traffic.

We'll be using barges, as I said, to take away soil from the tunnel to reduce about 17,000 truck trips.

We're also working to make tunneling operations and underground construction very successful.

We've hired a consultant for tunneling and deep pump station construction expertise to be part of our team.

They're looking at our design and specifications to ensure best practices.

They'll also be part of our construction oversight team and to monitor construction processes and our contractors.

We're also developing response and communication plans so that stakeholders and the public will have good information.

This includes in building upon the significant outreach we've done in these five neighborhoods the past four years of the project thus far.

I'd like to emphasize the importance of being prepared.

We can't eliminate all risk and uncertainties, but we can prepare for them.

So we're spending a lot of time and effort on that.

Lastly, we'll continue to communicate with you on a regular basis about this important project through our semi-annual reports.

Plus, we have other upcoming milestones.

As Mami discussed, in April or May, we'll return to this committee to request authorization per our budget proviso to proceed with the physical construction of the storage tunnel package.

This summer, we'll know the bid price of the storage tunnel construction contract package.

We'll also have an updated uncertainty risk model and an updated overall project budget and confidence.

And we plan to come back to you with this new information and these items later this summer.

Great.

So we'll have bids in the summer.

What is the typical amount of time it takes once you have those bids to make a decision and then execute a contract?

The first thing we do is we analyze the bids to make sure that they fit the requirements.

We actually will probably know whether the bids are good within about a week to two weeks.

Part of the work that we're going to be doing with Mommy, her executive team, and also with our partners in the counties is to think before we open bids.

If the bid amounts are at a certain level, right where we target them, what would we do?

If they're higher, what would we do?

And if they're lower, what would we do?

So that we can, we wanted to, you know, really every day counts, so we want to move directly into awarding the contracts to the right bidders.

So again, just ballpark.

I know it probably takes- From when we actually receive the bids?

Yeah, till- To actually awarding the bid?

Be about two weeks to award the bid after we open bids we expect in that time period.

That's quick.

And then is there a sort of standard amount of time that it typically takes to actually negotiate the contract?

The contract is all laid out because of the specificity of yeah itself It's actually the contractor then needs to go reaffirm their bonding and bring in their bonding and insurance We won't probably execute the contract with them until about Four to eight weeks after we award Of course, we want to aim towards the four-week period though, right?

And then the milestone timeline that you provided showed construction happening in mid-2019, but we have groundbreaking on 2010. What's the reason for that?

Oh, in early 2020?

Yeah, I'm sorry, 2020.

Yeah, so the contractor would mobilize to the Bowerd site, really putting up fencing, occupying office space, those kind of things, late in 2019. The first thing that they'll do from an active construction will be starting that 120-foot deep shaft on the Bowerd site to start tunneling operations.

So we're targeting the groundbreaking to be more towards around that event, hopefully in early first quarter of 2020.

And so the timeline that shows construction starting in mid-2019, mid-late 2019, that's more pre-construction?

Correct.

That's actually once we award the contract, that's when we switch from design to construction.

Great.

So there'll be a lot of submittals ordering the tunnel boring machine and such.

And so we're expecting you back with the proposed ordinance to lift the proviso sometime next month or in May.

We expect April or May we're submitting it in two weeks And and then I know that we're working with council staff to find the right time to come in but great Brian anything dad Well, thank you for coming and preparing us for that that next step that we need to take together with you and just really appreciate the work that you're doing and Congratulations again on reaching this particular milestone, and I look forward to talking to you more and learning more.

Thank you.

We do appreciate Council's stewardship over this project.

Thank you.

All right.

All right.

With that, it's 11.36 a.m., and I will adjourn the meeting.