Finance, Native Communities and Tribal Governments Committee 7/21/2026

Good morning.

The July 21st Finance Native Communities and Tribal Governments Committee meeting will come to order.

Thank you, we've taken care of it at the time.

It's 9.30 a.m.

I'm Dan Strauss, Chair of the Committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Kettle.

Here.

Council President Hollingsworth.

Present.

Councilmember Saka?

Morning, here.

Vice-Chair Rivera?

Present.

Chair Strauss?

5 present.

Thank you.

We have all council members present, and we have a busy meeting today with nine items on the agenda.

First, we have a presentation from the Indigenous Advisory Council and a briefing on reappointments.

We have a presentation on the City of Seattle's progress on the Tribal Nations Summit Commitment Areas, and we have our first briefing on the mid-year supplemental budget package.

If there is no objection, the agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

And I'm gonna confirm with Ledge IT, because I know that we changed the sign-in link.

Can you confirm that there are no public comment registrants virtually present at this time?

There are no virtual public comment registrants at this time.

Thank you, Mr. G. And can we confirm if there are anyone in person?

Nobody's in person.

So we are going to open and close the public comment period and move right on into our first agenda item.

Clerk, will you please read items one through six and you can read the short title of items one through six into the record please.

Item 1, Indigenous Advisory Council annual update.

Item 2, reappointment of Jackie S. McCormick as member, Indigenous Advisory Council for a term to July 31st, 2028. Item 3, reappointment of Jeremy Takala as member, Indigenous Advisory Council for a term to July 31st, 2028. Item four, introduction of the reappointment of Derek Belgard as member, Indigenous Advisory Council for a term to July 31st, 2028. Item five, introduction of the reappointment of Luther F. Mills as member, Indigenous Advisory Council for a term to July 31st, 2028. Item six, introduction of the reappointment of Suzanne Salto as member, Indigenous Advisory Council for a term to July 31st, 2028. Briefing and discussion presenters, Derek Belgard, Indigenous Advisory Council, Colby Monasmith, Department of Neighborhoods.

Wonderful.

I believe we have the director here today as well.

Great to see you.

I'll turn it over to you for some brief introductions, and I see that you also have a presentation.

Colleagues, we will be voting on these reappointments at the next committee meeting, and unless you hear otherwise, folks don't need to come back for the next one.

Over to you.

Great, thank you.

Good morning, Chair Strauss.

Strauss, thank you for having us here, and thank you, esteemed committee members this morning.

My name is Quinn Pham, as mentioned.

I am the serving director of the Department of Neighborhoods, and I wanted to be here to Introduce Kobe Montesmith, our Indigenous Advisory Council liaison.

Kobe is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and brings deep experience from her work in urban native organizations, particularly in workforce development and expanding access to education.

The Department of Neighborhoods has the honor of supporting the Indigenous Advisory Council and look forward to continue working with you all to elevate some of their priorities that you'll hear today.

Thank you.

I hand it to Colby.

Thank you.

Yeah, don't bring that microphone as close as you can.

Say Mick Jagger like the Rolling Stones.

Thank you.

I appreciate the invitation to present today.

As Director Pham mentioned, my name is Colby Montesmith, and thank you, Chair Strauss and esteemed members of the committee.

Yeah, you can move that microphone anywhere you want.

I will share the presentation that we have today.

I would also like to share that we are joined today by an esteemed community leader and member of the Indigenous Advisory Council, Derek Belgaard, who is a member of the Siletz and Chippewa Cree of Rocky Boy, Montana.

I'd like to have him introduce himself and speak to his experiences on the Indigenous Advisory Council.

Thank you for being here today.

Yeah, it's been an honor working with the IAC being part of it.

It's a true honor to be able to support our community that way.

As you know, our community has some of the worst disparities when it comes through policies and things that affect our community.

Just recently we had a bad count come out with the KCRHA that really harms our community in a way because they didn't bring us to the table soon enough to actually help develop something, a tool that's going to work for our community.

So oftentimes when policies and systems are created and they leave our native community out, Our community is negatively impacted.

What usually is good for most, you know, and policies and things are made and trying to have the most reach actually has a negative effect on our community because of the historical, you know, unique traumas of our community.

So we have to be up front, we have to be in the front of these things and actually have a voice early on.

And so one of the things that I'm really thankful for in the City of Seattle is this creation of IEC back with Council Member Juarez created and, you know, headlined it.

A lot of cities and a lot of places where policy is made, we don't have that seat.

We don't have that opportunity to actually have our voice in early on to make sure that our community is protected, to make sure our community members have a voice.

And so it's something I take really, you know, a lot of, you know, a lot of love and respect for.

And I raise my hands to the city for actually having the IAC.

But it's very, very important for our community to have.

It's something that I think, you know, I know we all take very seriously.

and whether it's MMIP work or homelessness and housing or public safety, we need to be in there and so I can't just value it enough.

It's just amazing what we do and thank Colby and all of you for supporting it.

Thank you, Derek.

So today's presentation is to provide an overview of the work that the Indigenous Advisory Council has done over the last year and many of the projects that they've worked on across the city.

And to provide some context, the Indigenous Advisory Council was established in 2021 from an ordinance from the City Council I'm sorry, I don't know why there is a chat in the middle of the screen.

Okay, thank you, it disappeared.

And the work that we do is rooted uniquely in the experiences of our members.

We are the only advisory board across the city that is composed entirely of indigenous people.

It is a nine member and it reflects the experiences from tribal leadership as well as local native nonprofits, elders and youth.

So it is a very unique and experienced board.

and the root of the work that they have is based in shared goals that was established in strategic planning that was created by the Indigenous Advisory Board and they would like to serve as culturally grounded advisors and that is rooted in their knowledge and experience on Native issues and communities and they work together to plan and evaluate and strategize on how they would like to work with the city and they set those policy priorities that helps them sort of strategize across their work to make sure that they're making the most impact.

And as they go through, they have set specific budget and policy priorities for each year in their strategic planning that are based specifically in honoring the political relationship, the trust and treaty obligations and the roles that have very unique tribal government and native community impact.

So those can include many different aspects where we're working specifically with tribes and urban native organizations, creating funding set asides and sort of developing their capacity within our community.

Also, we are working under the Race and Social Justice Initiative within the City of Seattle to ensure that Native communities are represented and across city policies and their concerns are being considered when policies are being created.

So investing in those culturally responsive programming across different city programs.

and we want to sort of highlight that these are the specific funding budget areas that the IEC has identified across the city and this is not to say that these are not being invested, they are being invested in and they're seeing the impact of that across the city, Seattle Indian Health Board, Chief Seattle Club, and other agencies are receiving funding, but we also acknowledge and the IEC also acknowledges that this is a tough budget year and specifically these are the areas that they see the most impact in and they'd like to see that the budget areas are either maintained or strengthened.

even in tight budget years, because we know that this is the areas that have the most impact across the community and the most need across the community, whether that be in responsive housing or the support of Native communities through family support and children, as well as, of course, murdered and missing Indigenous people being a very, very particular issue with gender-based violence rates being very high.

So I'd like to highlight some of the work that they have done and the accomplishments of the Indigenous Advisory Council and the partnerships they've made with different departments.

Specifically, we'll start with the Department of Education and Early Learning, because as they had worked in previous years on the Families Education Preschool and Promise levy engagement, there has been an underrepresentation of Native communities in that engagement, and the Department of Education and Early Learning acknowledged that, came to the Indigenous Advisory Council last year, over a year ago, and initiated conversations with them on how they can improve the engagement and how they can bring in more perspectives on Native communities into that levy.

and that implementation plan.

And that has led to the Indigenous Advisory Council working with Native community organizations such as Seattle Indian Health Board, the Urban Native Education Alliance, as well as a sort of wraparound support programming across different organizations to host four Native community engagement sessions.

In previous years, there were no community-specific engagement sessions.

This year we had five, including an engagement session with the Indian Parent Advisory Board at the Seattle Public Schools.

So it was really a strong commitment by the Department of Education and Early Learning and the Indigenous Advisory Council to improve that engagement rate.

And key priorities across Native communities have been included into the implementation plan, which included food and security, access to childcare, and specific trades and career pathways.

So wraparound supports and those issues that are across community are now being reflected in the implementation plan.

Additionally, in FIFA planning, there was a lot of concern, particularly because human trafficking is a very key issue in tribal and Native communities, and the Indigenous Advisory Council recommended that there need to be more communication around FIFA preparations across intergovernmental agencies with tribal governments as well as the community.

So the Office of Intergovernmental Relations and the IEC strategized and created these FIFA World Cup planning sessions that hosted with the Washington State Attorney General's Office, Seattle Police Department and other agencies as well as Mother Nation to talk around how they are preparing for FIFA.

and it led to a stronger coordination between different agencies, the city and the Washington state government.

Additionally, the Indigenous Advisory Council advised on the First Peoples Climate Fund, which was a Green New Deal Oversight Board advocacy investment in climate strategies that were rooted in indigenous sovereignty and leadership and that experience of climate activism that is rooted in our communities.

The Indigenous Advisory Council's feedback was incorporated into the fund's goals and strategies, and seven grantees, including two federally recognized tribes, were granted funding as well as five native-led organizations based across the city.

So it's rooting our climate action in the knowledge and experience of our tribal communities.

Additionally, in a similar policy, the Seattle Parks and Recreation worked with the Indigenous Advisory Council on their native plant policy and wanted to include more comprehensive and inclusive traditional ecological knowledge and really rooting the indigenous values into that planning.

That resulted in provisions to source materials from tribal enterprises, native owned businesses, and really rooting the work in our cultural values and ethnoboth.

botanical understandings of our environment.

Similarly, the Green Seattle Partnership strategic plan worked with the Indigenous Advisory Council in several feedback sessions to inform their own strategic planning, and that has also included commitments to advance relationships and ecological knowledge sharing between tribal nations and urban Indian organizations.

So again, rooting our environmental impact in the knowledge of the people who've been here the longest and who know exactly how to work and live in this community.

and more exciting work that has continued across the years.

The Indigenous Advisory Council works on Indigenous Peoples Day planning and provides direct investment into intertribal community-led activations and celebrations across the city.

And these have continued for multiple years.

Some of our notable, of course, are in United Indians of All Tribes Foundation's annual event at Daybreak Star.

Hummingbird and Indigenous Family Services have done multi-day regalia workshops and celebrations with youth and family, really rooting that cultural knowledge back into the community and ensuring that Indigenous Peoples' Day is a community-led celebration.

This year, we are excited to announce that there are four agencies who are interested in hosting, and it will not be just a single-day celebration.

and the agencies are actually looking to host multiple days across the week, in short of essentially making Indigenous People's Day an Indigenous celebration across the whole week in October.

And more details about those events will be coming out soon.

Of course, the Indigenous Advisory Council led and assisted with the Tribal Nations Summit and worked very closely with the Office of Intergovernmental Relations to ensure that is being a successful event that happens biannually, and additional information, of course, will come in the later presentation from OIR.

And there is, of course, a YouTube video highlighting the Tribal Nation Summit of last year and the work that occurred and the importance of that event that we highlight and would recommend everyone watching.

But up next and exciting news for this year is that we are indigenizing civic engagement as the root of our 2026 engagement and we are bringing community into City Hall.

We're hosting two events in August, 2026. We will be hosting a group of native youth at City Hall in partnership with the Urban Native Education Alliance.

They will be receiving a tour and be working on learning more about the city government and how they can get involved as well as the career pathways so we can bring their engagement and experience into the city.

Additionally, in September, 2026, it will be a full day event.

We will have a civic engagement day at City Hall where we're bringing community in for a full day of workshops, interactive activities, networking, bringing the community and city together to bridge those gaps and bridge those relationships so that the urban Native community feels represented and seen and has a better understanding of the city.

So we are partnering very strongly with Seattle Urban Native Nonprofits, which is a coalition of several urban Native organizations across the city to ensure that the day is being planned and organized around community priorities and interests.

and we're just seeking to increase the understanding of civic processes across all of these events.

And this is led particularly from the Indigenous Advisory Council's leadership.

And I would like to highlight it back over to Derek if he has any other additional reflections to share.

Yeah, a great presentation, Colby.

Yeah, I think it speaks for itself.

All the great things that we've been doing and we look forward to doing more.

Yeah, any questions?

So many.

I'm excited to get into the conversation and so I just want to check with my colleagues before I dive in with you all.

Colleagues, if you have questions about the IAC's annual presentation of the committee and we should probably start doing it more regularly every quarter or so just to see how progress is being made because what I notice, usually we have a seven slide rule in the committee, just the amount of information any one person can take in at one time.

We've got 14 slides today, so that means that we at least need two of these meetings every year.

But I'll open it up to my colleagues to see if you have questions and then I can start ticking through some of these slides.

If we've got enough time, I'd love to watch that video.

I see Vice Chair Rivera has her hand.

Good morning.

Thank you, Chair.

And thank you all for being here.

And of course, I love the Department of Neighborhoods.

Shout out to all the staff that's in the audience.

Super appreciate you all.

And I'm so lucky to get to work with you as the department is under the committee that I chair and happy to see you here at Finance today.

I really, I don't have a question, Chair.

I really just wanted to say that I very much appreciate the update.

There's so much work going on and we don't always hear what's going on.

And so I really appreciate having this presentation so we can all hear and know all the great work that the IAC is doing and more importantly, how community is getting folded into all the work that's happening here at City Hall.

that is really important.

If we don't know about it, we can't talk about it and we can't help uplift it.

So I really appreciate you all coming here today.

And Director Pham, I really appreciate you being here because it just goes to how important you view this work that you came here today to be here for this presentation as well.

So thank you.

I know we will be meeting later today and I'm really excited to touching base.

There's so much great work that Chief Seattle Club is doing and just close to here and up in Lake City and really appreciate all the work that you're doing.

So I wanted to mention that and call that out as well.

and other things.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Councilmember Rivera.

Colleagues, any other comments, questions?

I see Councilmember Kettle.

Thank you, Chair.

I finally got my computer system issues resolved just in time to check in.

First, thank you, Mr. Bellegarde, Ms. Montesmith, and Director Pham for being here today.

Mr. Belgaard, I take on the point about, you know, learning about things before rather than after.

That is an enduring, chronic need of city government.

That's one reason why.

And we're in this transition now that I've been reaching out in different ways for, you know, involvement with what we call right now Portal Park in Belltown.

And to really build on, by the way, the work of the Elliott Bay Connections Project that really, I think, I'm not an expert, but I think did a great job of incorporating native aspects into the new park, you know, Myrtle Edwards and Centennial.

I'm sure you've been there and seen that.

with Ms. Echo Hawk and her advocacy and advising.

That's really great.

As I often say, there's two things that make Seattle stand apart from other major cities.

One is our tall evergreen trees.

and the second is our Native community and the art and all the different pieces that go to that.

And that's something that could be incorporated in Portal Park.

And we've been doing the technical pieces because it's essentially a brown site with the viaduct and so forth, but we're in that transition phase now, moving to the next piece.

And so I reach out as as the District 7 representative on that point to definitely solicit any input, advice, and the like.

That would be fantastic.

Thank you.

Yeah, we'd love to have that.

Yeah, we're going to make the city really beautiful with all the new parks and everything we're going to do.

Yeah.

Okay.

Now on a more, a different topic, one of the things, and I'm butting my chair hat on, of public safety, human trafficking, commercial sexual exploitation, human trafficking, the challenges that we've been seeing in different places in the city, most notably in North Aurora.

You know, I note that like with FIFA World Cup coming and now going, which is hard to believe, now it's gone, it's done.

and I recognized there was a surge of asset and capacity that came in the city.

We had federal law enforcement work in this issue and other elements as well.

You may not know, or anybody at the table may not know, but has there been any early feedback in terms of how that went, how the interaction was going in a sense of, you know, was it, did you find it to be successful?

I mean, talking to community, they tend to say everything was quieted down during the course of the World Cup, but now, by the way, now the test is, what's gonna happen now?

And I was just curious if there was anything

Yeah, I don't know about North Aurora, but I, you know, the work that we do down at Pioneer Square, we were really prepared for it.

We thought it was going, you know, we just don't want to always think for the worst, but, you know, you have to be prepared.

So, but I think overall it was a success as far as public safety was, at least in the Pioneer Square area.

I know that's not the trafficking thing you're talking about on North Aurora, we kind of went through without any major incidents at all.

I mean, it was probably not even as comparable to like a Seahawk playoff game.

So it was actually handled really well.

Okay, great.

And that community, your work has been incredible and the recent Community Solutions Project.

which I was engaged on early but then the city for different reasons was not as engaged on it.

But it seemed to be working well and I would hope working together with you and others in the community.

And that again, that's another thing that, have you seen the changes?

And so now the question is how do we maintain it?

How do we avoid sliding back?

Yeah.

I think just keep our focus on it and just don't let it look at it in the rearview mirror.

It's something that we have to actually nurture and take care of on a regular basis and not just think it's gonna come back if we don't.

We gotta make sure that progress is maintained.

But yeah, I don't, No other than more resources.

I know we need more planning.

But yeah, I think the momentum's there now and I think it would be behoove us to actually keep it going as far as all the public safety in that area.

It's all about activation.

That was the most massive activation that we saw.

And as I often say, nothing builds momentum than momentum.

And so we don't have to lose the momentum.

And not to go on a side tangent, but slightly, I've been talking to Inspire Washington, Downtown Seattle Association, the mayor, the deputy mayor, that how do we do that?

And I often say sports and entertainment.

And what's entertainment for our city?

Arts and culture.

We should be taking the lessons learned from FIFA and applying it from the sports piece into the arts and culture, aka entertainment space.

We have a unity loop.

Let's have a unity loop for arts and culture that includes Pioneer Square, for example.

And it's CID and other places in the city.

Yeah, because what was going on at Occidental during the FIFA experience was just amazing.

The vibe and everything around it, which actually, you know, helps create safety.

It helps create, you know, just keep things cleaner and more vibrant.

So, like, yeah, we just need to do more of those type of things throughout the different neighborhoods that are having issues, you know.

Great, that'd be great, and I'll resist making a comment about cameras.

All right, thank you, Chair.

Thank you, thank you.

Colleagues, any other questions?

Otherwise, I'm gonna ask us to go back to slide five to talk through some of these budget priorities.

We are in the Finance Native Communities and Tribal Governments Committee, and so you are well-placed, well-timed for this part of the discussion.

Would just love to dig in a little bit deeper as many of these topics, some of them we fund but not necessarily earmark for indigenous organizations such as the transitional housing, technical assistance, down payment assistance.

For that one, how do we make it how do we indigenize this work?

And then we can tick through the other ones as we go.

But do you have any thoughts or reflections on how you'd like to see us make funding investments in transitional housing, technical assistance, down payment assistance in either an indigenous way or for indigenous people?

Well, I think the first- And you gotta grab that microphone a little bit closer.

I'm a little hard of hearing too many rock concerts.

Yeah, me too.

I was at Megadeth concert on Saturday.

I still can't really hear.

But yeah, I think I have to keep an IAC involved, you know, and coming up with solutions.

Even Chief Seattle Club, even though we specialize and really the only native-led housing organization that's actually focused on permanent support of housing and that type of issue, right?

It's still a lot of community members that need a voice.

There's other players in the thing that actually should have a voice in how it's done and how it's prioritized when funding is so scarce, right?

So I think IAC is the main thing to keep involved with that and actually, you know, because it brings a lot of other natives and leaders into the conversation that come from different aspects, from youth work to, you know, MMIP to the tribal government's relations and everything else.

So I think that's the first step is actually just making sure IAC's out there in the budget planning, yeah.

Thank you.

And as we continue forward, if you've got other great ideas, don't hesitate to let us know.

In the culturally responsive services and third spaces for youth, how do you see this?

Are there specific projects that you see in the pipeline or is this, again, an orientation where we need to be looking for these opportunities when we get to the budget season?

What we've seen is an interest in increasing out-of-school activities, which was a theme that was in the Department of Education and Early Learning.

Particularly, there's a difficult access to after-school activities.

The Native community tends to be a little disperse, and the cultural center, Daybreak Star Cultural Center, is a little hard to get to for families' after-school time.

So finding better access points for culturally responsive services for youth has been a key theme across our community engagement.

So organizations like Rise Above, Urban Native Education Alliance, Red Eagle Soaring, those community organizations really lead this work in youth engagement and in continuing investing in those organizations to lead and partner and indigenize youth programming.

What we see for our native youth is that they need youth, their need is to have culturally specific programming, things that bring in those cultural teachings, how to make regalia, how to do traditional medicine, all of those different cultural practices are really important for our youth to feel empowered and seen in the community.

So it's really important to invest in those programming.

Thank you, and I know that through our Tribal Nations Summit, we have continued to move forward the work on addressing gender-based violence and the crisis of missing murdered indigenous people.

Are there specific steps at this time that you see us needing to take, or just don't lose sight of that incredibly important work that we are doing through the Tribal Nations Summit?

Both.

Definitely don't lose sight of it.

It is a very important key topic because it does require a lot of interconnected work.

So it requires partnerships with tribal governments, it requires a strong partnership with SPD, both of the officers on the ground, and of course there has been a large commitment by Chief Barnes and leadership at SPD to continue this work, and ensuring that's working all across the different channels of community engagement.

What we've seen is data is difficult for Native communities, and it's highlighted particularly when it comes to murdered and missing Indigenous women.

because Native communities tend to be underrepresented in data and not tracked.

So it's hard to know the scope of the issue, but particularly the community leads a lot of efforts in trying to find relatives.

Organizations like Mother Nations and, of course, Seattle Indian Health Board lead when it comes to these services and gender-based violence, and so continuing to invest in partnering with them.

underrepresented in the number of counts, but as Derek will oftentimes remind me for being such a small portion of Seattle's population, it is overrepresented in the number of homeless individuals that we have on our streets.

and that kind of brings us to invest in cultural and social service facilities.

I know we made a very large investment over the last few years in the Thunderbird treatment facility, something that through my work with Chief Seattle Club is understanding, number one, that culturally attuned services help a person heal in the way that they are, and then also the power of the indigenous cultural in traditional medicines and foods and just how that can make a really big difference.

Are there other opportunities like Thunderbird on our horizon or are there other places that we can be looking to at this time?

Well, I think there's a lot of areas we could be improving on, the youth stuff and, you know, and homelessness work that we do, we know it starts, you know, if we're gonna actually ever make long-term change, it starts with youth work and families, and one of the things that we need to invest in is create more culturally appropriate safe spaces for our youth, and so invest heavily in that, you know.

We have the highest disparities, you just pointed out, and one of the things that we also know is we're least likely to utilize any services that aren't culturally appropriate.

And that comes from that trauma and that fear and that lack of trust for systems that have continually harmed us.

So if we're going to get people, even when somebody needs some help, if you have youth at risk that you want to get to a positive basketball program, it's got to be a culturally appropriate one where it creates a sense of belonging for our people and our community.

Same way shelters, if somebody's chronically homeless in the street, they're not gonna go to a shelter if it's not culturally appropriate, because it doesn't feel safe, it doesn't create a sense of belonging, a place that's theirs.

And so anything we can do to actually just create and help those things that happen, whether it's through the art, as Kettle was talking about, Council Member Kettle, or whether it's through the staffing, or whether it's through just the actual programming in itself, whatever, but it's gotta be culturally appropriate.

Yeah, I'll just kind of tack on to what you were saying about trauma because it's something that I think we hear a lot that folks can be, all people can be skeptical of going into health services or into shelter, anything like that.

And so it's easy to gloss over what you just said.

What's different for our indigenous people here is that there was government policy of killing boarding schools, spreading blankets that were supposed to create warmth that actually carried disease.

And I just bring that up, colleagues, because that is the difference between the group of people that we're trying to serve and everyone else that's on our streets because there's just that added layer of distrust, skepticism that has to be addressed and the only way we can address that is by being culturally appropriate and indigenous led.

Miigwetch.

Yeah, it comes back to our conversations for a long time over, Derek, of time doesn't heal wounds, actions heal wounds, and these culturally appropriate health services are exactly what that is.

On slide six, I'll just say I'm glad that the FEPP levy has you involved now.

This goes back to why it's so important that we have consultation at the outset of any program, not something to come back to afterwards, but hey, if we messed up, then I'm glad we're back.

I'll tick onto slide seven and just call you out again.

Derek, at the Tribal Nation Summit, you mentioned the importance of having culturally appropriate policing during FIFA down in Pioneer Square, having shared some pretty scary stories of times when there was not culturally appropriate policing, not on the behalf of the police necessarily, but because of fans and people got a little too excited, but that there wasn't the understanding of how important your space was.

And so I just, I'm grateful for you bringing that up in the Tribal Nations Summit because I was excited to see the Suquamish police down in Pioneer Square and not even just the police.

I think it was the entire police force and the chief of police.

And we couldn't, that would not, that is an outcome that would not have been achieved without your input.

Thank you, it was success.

Yeah, I see that we are starting to run long in the tooth here.

I'll just say Indigenous Peoples Day and this is on slide 11. I'm glad to hear that it is becoming a longer than just a day event.

it was amazing to get to be at United Indians of All Tribes Pow Wow just this last weekend.

When I was growing up there was no camping.

Now the whole field is camped for the weekend and then there's tent camping and it's just amazing to see what, and it was discussed that takeover was not a point in time, it is living, breathing today.

Thank you to not only Bernie White Bearer, but Senator Claudia Kaufman and Council President Emeritus Deborah Juarez and Randy, it was great to see you Randy, who are all out there to really take a risk and make it happen because What we see there today is, again, it's not just Indigenous Peoples' Day, it is an Indigenous Peoples' Space, and I'm excited for the city to continue working, and this is where you might want to go on to, I guess we skipped over it already, the Green Seal Partnership in the previous slide, connecting United Indians of all tribes to be able to steward more land around Daybreak Star with native plants, with an indigenous mindset, and I'm already seeing the improvements there.

I'm going on long, I'm gonna call on Council Member Kettle, is that a new hand?

Old hand?

So all that to say, before we speak into the IAC appointment, reappointments, if we are able to play that video, I don't know how long it is, but if it's...

I'm sorry, wrong direction.

Let's see if this works.

I'm afraid I don't hear the sound.

And it's not showing up there.

Well, for everyone watching online, Legistar has the link to the presentation, which has the link in the presentation.

Maybe we'll send it around as well.

We're going to be talking about the Tribal Nations Summit in just a minute, so I don't think we'll, you know, this is a good video, but I don't think we'll miss anything there.

Just grateful to have this presentation with us today.

If you want to, oh.

We're loading this up.

I'm going to talk about the, just to keep us moving a little bit here.

We have one, two, three, four, five reappointments to the Indigenous Advisory Council.

We have Jackie McCormick.

who has been a long-time advocate and provides programming through Rise Above, which is youth development and a cultural third place for people to go.

She is incredibly amazing.

We have Council Member Jeremy Takala, who is from the Yakima tribe.

Jeremy has been a longtime participant in the Tribal Nations Summit.

He's somebody that I really love to work with, and I got to see him just a week or so, maybe two weeks ago here in City Hall.

The thing that I love about Jeremy is you can see and feel his smile from across the mountains.

I can feel you looking at me right now, Councilmember.

We have Derek Belgard sitting here at the table.

Derek and I first started working together.

when Colleen Echo Hawk was CEO of Chief Seattle Club and I worked for a council member, and this is where I start edging into District 7, please don't get mad at me.

It was amazing to get to work with you then and to see as you grew into the CEO's shoes and now it feels like it's an old hat.

You're just grooving and shaking and you really have filled into this role and this space in a beautiful and amazing way.

One of the things that Derek and I got to work on was activating Fortson Square which had a art piece that was literally called The Ruins.

and it felt that way.

And being on the historic shores of the inlet there, so where Fortson Square is next to Smith Tower was built where it is because it was the closest bedrock to the waterfront.

And so Fortson Square is a place that now has a welcome statue rather than the ruins.

and that was due to your good work.

So talking about activating space.

We have Council Member J. Luther Mills of Suquamish Tribe.

I've gotten to speak with Council Member Mills so many times over the years One of my favorite memories of him was educating me, not necessarily on the importance of SEPA, but on the importance that SEPA has for federally recognized tribes and indigenous people because currently it is their only way of being alerted if there will be the ground disturbed in places where there's culturally important sites.

Those are held privately because it's not our business and the only way to ensure that land disturbance isn't doing something really bad to a culturally significant place.

is through this tribal notification, and the only process we have today is SEPA.

And finally, Suzanne Salto of Snoqualmie.

I haven't seen Suzanne in a while, but man, she's amazing.

She does not hesitate to let you know what's going on, and I just really love Suzanne for that.

I'm sorry if I took your overview of all of the reappointments.

I just really appreciate all the members of the Indigenous Advisory Council.

And I see that you've got the Video up and running now, so Seattle Channel will switch over to that video and as you're ready, just hit play.

We are America.

We are democracy.

We're not adjacent to it.

We are it.

This is our land.

This is our soil.

We've been doing this stuff and we know how to do it.

There's something about a staying power that we have is tribal governments that go beyond the fact that we have to use the term tribal government.

Because at the end of the day, it's about kinship.

So everybody, I just want to welcome you to the second tribal summit.

Look around.

because there is no other city where you're going to see city officials, the chief of police, other city staff at the table with tribal leaders.

No other place.

This is one of the most interesting events I've actually been to as a tribal leader.

We're often told about what governments are doing and how everything they do is supportive of the tribes, but rarely do they listen.

The City of Seattle Summit really stood out in that it was a dialogue.

Especially in the last summit, the mayor made it clear that the department heads needed to make commitments to how they were going to address the questions that tribal leaders raised.

All the issues that we have for the City of Seattle, they don't stay within the city limits, right?

Water doesn't stay here, pollution, homelessness, income disparity, discrimination.

My tribe's a little bit further away, but a lot of the events that happened in the Puget Sound region affect everyone.

You know, it's important to all citizens of all tribal nations that make Seattle their home to see how the cities and governments can work with our tribes.

I think they should walk away that this is good governance, that their tax dollars are being spent well, and that Seattle is putting our money where our mouth is, that we're not just doing land acknowledgments.

I really want people to see that Native American people have a way of knowing that is incredibly emotionally sustainable and lovely and intuitive and that they should learn from.

I've been trying to get Council President Emeritus Juarez to this committee since the day that she retired for the first time.

I didn't realize that this is how I could do it.

That's beautiful.

Colleagues, we are running a little bit long, so I'm gonna just check to see if the panel has anything else.

And I'm gonna give you last word to the panel.

Council Member Rivera.

Just very quickly, Chair, I wanted to underscore something from the video because I think it goes to the part of the conversation today is Director Duane Chappelle with the Department of Education and Early Learning was at the summit.

So when you see that the FEP levy incorporates feedback from community, from our tribes, he listened and he made that commitment as was asked at that summit.

And so I just really think it's important to uplift that this is happening and I am very grateful to Deal for listening and for engaging and obviously the Department of Neighborhoods as well.

So thank you, Chair.

Thank you.

I'll end with this, which is, This is what I said at the powwow this weekend, which is thank you to our elders, thank you to our veterans, thank you to our drummers, thank you to our singers, thank you to our dancers.

This last weekend, thank you to Andre from the Parks Department that has been putting on powwow from the Parks Department side for 23 years.

Some people don't even stay in jobs for three years, and he's been putting on powwow for 23 years.

and so thank you to, and I said that this weekend, thank you specifically to Bernie, but also to Senator Kaufman and Council President Meredith Juarez for their work to make this a living, breathing moment and place in our city.

So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to you for last words and then we're gonna vote on the appointments.

I did steal your show there with their backgrounds.

Sorry about that.

You go first.

Just miigwech again.

Thank you for all listening to us and taking our words in and for all the support and yeah, look forward to it.

Yeah.

And again, Department of Neighborhoods is just honored to be able to support the work of the IAC and look forward to doing that collectively with you all on council.

Thank you.

And additionally, Wado, thank you for having us.

We deeply appreciate the opportunity to speak with you today.

We look forward to having you back soon.

Thank you.

With that, we're going to transition into the next agenda item.

Clerk, will you read the short title into the record?

Item 7, Tribal Nations Summit Progress Update.

Briefing and discussion presenters are Francesca Murnin, Office of Intergovernmental Relations and Colby Monasmith from the Department of Neighborhoods.

Thank you and as folks are getting settled, I forgot to mention that today we will be proclaiming to be Salmon Bay FC our National Champions Day.

Our USL2W team just won the national championship for the entire United States and they are named after a land place that has been a tribal People have lived there since time of memorial, and I'm just honored that we get to name our teams after places that have existed and thrived for thousands of years, millennia at this point.

So with that, we've already kind of introduced the Tribal Nations Summit as a concept, but I'll turn it over to Director Hashemi from Office of Intergovernmental Relations to also introduce Francesca, and we know Colby.

Over to you all.

and members of the committee.

I'm Mina Hashemi, Director of the Office of Intergovernmental Relations, and I'm joined by my colleague, Francesca Murnan, who serves as our Tribal Relations Director, and Colby, who you just heard from.

Thank you for the invitation to join today.

We're pleased to be here to brief this committee on progress updates from the City's Tribal Nations Summit.

As this committee knows, city policies, programs, and services have far-reaching impacts to tribal governments, and it's critical that the city respectfully engage sovereign tribal nations in government-to-government relationships on issues that may impact tribal interests.

In recent years, OIR has prioritized rebuilding and expanding our tribal relations program to be more proactive and accountable to tribal nations.

A cornerstone of this work is the City of Seattle Tribal Nations Summit, a citywide event led by OIR in partnership with department of neighborhoods and city departments, the mayor and the council.

The summit provides an official opportunity for the city to identify actions and outcomes to uphold the sovereignty and treaty rights of federally recognized tribes and to build partnerships, strengthen coalitions and truly listen.

You will hear more about outcomes and commitments from the 2025 summit in the following presentation.

We are proud that Seattle is one of the few cities nationwide to meaningfully engage with tribal nations through government-to-government convenings, and we are grateful to the tribal leaders and our city partners whose engagement and participation make this possible.

City departments lead the vast majority of this day-to-day work with tribal governments and Native communities and work closely with OIR to carry out the work.

Our journey is far from complete, and it will take all city departments, the mayor's office, and the council to sustain our progress toward these commitments.

We are grateful to have collaborative legislative partners in this work, and I want to thank council for your support and leadership, Councilmember Juarez and Chair Strauss for your sustained commitment and leadership on this summit.

We hope this collaborative approach and our ongoing commitment is apparent today and in future briefings.

And with that, I will pass it on to Francesca.

Thank you.

Thank you, Director Shimmy.

Hello, Council.

My name is Francesca Bernan.

I'm a citizen of the Shawnee Tribe and of the Cherokee Nation, and I work in the Office of Intergovernmental Relations as the city's tribal relations director.

Hello again.

My name is Colby Malna-Smith.

I am also a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and I work for the Department of Neighborhoods as the Indigenous Advisory Council liaison.

For today's briefing, we're going to focus on the two commitment areas of collaborative cultural resource stewardship and culturally attuned systems of care.

We'll be returning to your committee in a couple of weeks to brief on the other two commitment areas.

But there's a lot of good work to show, and so we broke it out into two sessions for you.

We have briefed this committee leading up to and following the 2025 summit.

In March of 2026, Mayor Wilson, Council President Hollingsworth, and Councilmember Strauss issued the event summary report that detailed guidance and wisdom that we heard at that summit last September.

That summary report also includes an updated and reorganized set of city commitments.

These were all shaped in partnership with city departments, and they seek to address some of the key priorities that we heard across themes at the summit.

This work requires sustained and consistent interdepartmental coordination.

With each passing year, we are improving our ability to more effectively engage with tribal governments and native communities.

The city remains committed to this work because we understand and respect the sovereignty of tribes as governments and seek to ensure that local government is a collaborative and effective partner on the many ways that our issues may impact tribal governments and tribal beneficiaries.

Since September, progress has been made on all of the commitment areas in these two sections, yet it's important to remember that the work is long-term and iterative.

It can take many years for a single project to come to fruition and many engagements for meaningful progress to be made.

This progress reporting seeks to measure that we are on track with keeping the commitments integrated into our city efforts.

There will always be opportunities to do more and to do better, and keeping these priorities in the forefront helps ensure that we are seeking out opportunities where feasible and aligned with city and tribal priorities.

In the areas of cultural collaborative resource stewardship, the city made eight commitments focused on land, water, and wildlife resources in Seattle and across the areas that the city stewards.

And this is a full detailed list that's also available in the summary report and in the future slides we're gonna go over some project specific detail progress updates that touch on these areas.

And in the areas of culturally-attuned systems of care, the city has 10 commitments focused on improving services to American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian residents, particularly in the areas of family and youth services, violence prevention, health and human services.

And as you can see, these are also all ongoing and on track.

And now to shed some light on these tables, we're gonna feature a handful of project updates across the city.

It's a small sampling of what's underway and we included our most notable moments of progress since last September.

Some items have already been shared in your briefing from the Indigenous Advisory Councils and other will appear in our upcoming presentations.

First, we'll start with the hydroelectric project re-licensing.

This past June, City Light filed an amended license application with the federal government as part of their process to re-license the Skagit River hydroelectric projects.

This included an application on the Skagit project comprehensive re-licensing settlement, which was an historic agreement with tribes, federal, state agencies, and other licensing partners that will guide the future of the Skagit project.

In addition to that settlement agreement, the City Light negotiated separate individual agreements with the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe, the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, and the Sauk Swaddle Indian Tribe.

These agreements provide financial compensation to tribes, promote tribal employment and education programs, fund cultural centers and administrative buildings, and commit to energy efficiency investments on tribal land.

The settlement is a result of years of negotiations with all of these partners and agencies and reflects our agreed path forward for managing shared resources in the Skagit River watershed.

Together we've developed a blueprint for restoring salmon runs, honoring treaty rights, addressing climate change, managing flood risk, and delivering reliable renewable energy to the region.

For tribal fisheries, the Seattle Public Utility Cedar River Hatchery is a long-term commitment to account for blockage of sockeye salmon passage upstream of the Cedar River.

The utility maintains working relationships with fish co-managers, which include the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe, as well as the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

And in 2026, there is collaborative efforts with the tribe to enhance adult sockeye storage.

so it is an ongoing partnership.

More locally, additionally, the city is supporting tribal fisheries impacted by Seattle waterways.

Seattle has five fish salmon-bearing creeks plus other streams that are historically or currently support other fish.

Federally and state regulations are increasingly requiring that fish passage barriers be removed by owners as they fail or are replaced.

Seattle Public Retilities is in the early stages of developing a comprehensive watershed-wide creek culvert strategy to address creek culvert fish passage and barriers in urban watersheds.

And these efforts are starting with the city's largest urban watershed, Thornton Creek, in District 5, with several tribal governments also expressing interest in collaboration.

In the area of water stewardship and access, there are many city departments that play a role in managing tribal access to public entry points for saltwater and freshwater boat launches and other public access points.

Seattle Department of Transportation manages an extensive shoreline street-ends program that includes dozens of access points and periodic opportunities to update the physical features, including plantings and furniture.

underneath the First Avenue Bridge street end that is adjacent to tribal trust land of the Muckleshoot Indian tribe and the tribe's fishery wharf and their seafood enterprise.

There are currently efforts underway to engage the tribe on improvements to that area.

And then many of the other street end programs include tribal priorities around habitat restoration, urban canopy improvements, and soil remediation, all of which are aligned with improving the water quality and the habitat for wildlife throughout Seattle.

In addition, the Seattle Parks Department routinely maintains and notifies tribal fisheries of any potential changes in the access points for public boat launches around the city.

A significant portion of the city's land stewardship and restoration efforts are led by Seattle Parks and Recreation and Green Seattle Partnership.

In 2026, the Green Seattle Partnership renewed and expanded four partnerships to support urban native and tribal leadership.

This includes Cattell Rising, who will join the partnership to lead youth in school engagement in collaboration with tribal nations.

a United Indians of All Tribes Foundation who will take over leadership of land stewardship programming around Daybreak Star in Discovery Park and Duwamish Tribal Services who will lead as a land steward in the West Duwamish Greenbelt adjacent to Heron's Nest and the Duwamish Longhouse.

And Futures Rising will also act as co-creation and restoration leads in stewardship at Frink and Maplewood Playfield.

This last session we participated in some joint advocacy efforts around a bill of importance to both the city and tribal governments.

Research has linked coho salmon deaths to six PPDQ in stormwater.

This chemical is derived from a chemical found in vehicle tires.

Concentrations in stormwater are found to be lethal for coho salmon and more recently for other salmon species as well.

The bill was introduced this last session that would have included a fee on tire purchases and a ban on the chemical.

It was later amended to just be a ban on the chemical by 2035. The bill did not pass, but there are ongoing advocacy efforts to explore bringing this bill back in future cycles and participating in continued advocacy with travel partners.

Earlier this year, the Office of Sustainability and Environment announced two urban Indian organizations will receive grants through the Environmental Justice Fund, which invests in community-driven solutions that accelerate climate action.

These two grantees are Ancestral Sisterhood, whose project will improve traditional ecological knowledge solutions and climate disaster preparedness across the greater Seattle area that creates a framework for community organizations and members.

And the second is Duwamish Tribal Services, whose programming will foster ecological health, cultural visibility, and community connections.

to land through hands-on restoration and culturally grounded education.

Seattle Public Utilities also continues to play a role in the upper segment of the Lower Duwamish Waterway Superfund cleanup.

In 2024 and 2025, cleanup seasons resulted in 65,000 cubic yards of contaminated sediment being removed.

And you've heard a little bit about FIFA coordination in our last session, but the Seattle Police Department did outreach tribal law enforcement agencies from around the state as part of their mutual aid strategy.

And that resulted in the Suquamish Tribal Police Department and the Squally Police Department sending officers to all the Seattle area games.

The image here is a member of the Suquamish PD engaging with fans in Pioneer Square.

You also heard about the two webinar series that we hosted in partnership with the Washington State Attorney General's Office.

Those sessions focused one on tribal leadership, and we saw engagement from many of the tribal enterprises, casinos, and other businesses operated by tribes, as well as a second broader community-focused session.

Across the two sessions, we saw over 200 attendees.

And then third, we would like to feature the Office of Arts and Culture, who invested in three urban Indian organizations to host World Cup celebrations across Seattle.

Those were focused in District 1 and 2 in District 7.

As discussed earlier, murdered and missing indigenous people is a very key topic for the community.

It is an indigenous-led social movement that seeks to address the disproportionate rates of violence, including homicide, sexual violence, and human trafficking experienced American Indian and Alaska Native people.

The city continues to seek opportunities to learn more about the complex and interwoven issues that have resulted in MMIW cases.

Mayor Wilson attended and spoke at a local MMIWP awareness event that included impacted individuals and families and service providers.

This annual gathering holds critical space for healing for the community.

Additionally, the Seattle Police Department has continued to meet with tribal chiefs of police including the Swoxwaddle and Tulalip tribal police departments to expand the regional relationships and understanding of tribal law enforcement on these issues.

Chief Barnes and command staff also attended the second annual Tribal Chief of Police Leadership and Counter Drug Conference to network and also seek greater understanding of tribal priorities statewide, including updates from the Washington State MMIWP Task Force.

Several city departments are also providing grants that support capacity building, planning, and or construction of facilities that are operated by urban Indian organizations.

Seattle Indian organizations operate affordable housing, healthcare facilities, sites for youth and elder programming, and cultural facilities.

A few notable updates on these investments, the Office of Planning and Community Development selected Duwamish tribal services to lead the native youth past, present, future project, which will serve urban native youth.

Office of Housing funded the latest in a line of affordable housing and shelter at Chief Seattle Club.

Sweetgrass Flats added 84 units of supportive housing for individuals that experience chronic homelessness.

The Office of Housing provided two community self-determination grants to Chief Seattle Club and Seattle Indian Services Commission to support capacity building for within these agencies as well.

To round out some of our updates, we'll share a deep dive into behavioral health service expansion.

In late 2025, the City Council approved a $4.8 million investment in Seattle Indian Health Board's Thunderbird Treatment Center.

The Human Services Department is working closely with the Health Board to support final construction costs and operating expenses for this 92-bed inpatient treatment center.

The facility is located on Vashona Island and is anticipated to serve majority Seattle residents through culturally-tuned substance use disorder and mental health services.

In addition, the mayor's accelerated shelter surge has resulted in the Human Services Department engaging several tribal and urban Native health care providers to inform behavioral health strategies in emergency shelter.

We've reached the end of our updates for today, but we're happy to take questions on anything that you'd like to discuss.

Well said, well done, and thank you for this presentation.

If you want to click back to slides three and four, just as a summary for us to be able to navigate from, I'll take questions from colleagues.

I will just share gratitude for how you've put this presentation together.

One thing that I'd love to do in partnership with you and the team between now and next year's tribal nation summit is continue refining how we demonstrate or Consider success because a lot of these are ongoing and perpetual right and some of them are time-sensitive and Important the two that I'll give their Well, many of these are ongoing, but the Suquamish Police MOUs, it was something that was very specific and time sensitive, right?

We know that there's conclusion there.

For many of these, it is ongoing.

And I just want to make sure that to continue building trust in these spaces, I know I heard at the last Tribal Nations Summit from Chair Donny Stevenson of Muckleshoot to say, I'm sorry if any of you are feeling weird like we're not jumping to believe you because again, there have been millennia of distrust, hundreds of years of distrust built and so it takes time to regain that trust and progress only moves at the speed of trust and so I just want to make sure that this is because we did not get to this level of detail between the last two tribal summits and so I'm just really excited to have this before us and I'm excited for the next presentation.

I'll ask colleagues if you've got questions at this time.

Seeing none, I'll just kind of go through with you on slide six.

We've had a lot of conversation about the City Light Agreement and it was amazing to have tribal leaders of all three tribes here in chambers to discuss this historic agreement.

I'll put the pin in it here, which is colleagues, I would like to take this committee on the road to Skagit County next year.

so that we can meet in Skagit County at a mutually agreeable place for all three tribes so that we can get a little bit more in depth in the conversation of the process, the outcomes, the plan and the work that we have ahead of us to really implement this $4 billion 50 year agreement because I can tell you by the end of the agreement I'm not going to be around anymore.

actually it could be but unlikely and so you know this is really a moment for us you know when the tribes came to our chambers I think they had a total of 15 minutes to discuss a 50 year agreement and so colleagues get excited we're going to Skagit County next year and tribal fisheries just connecting down.

As a Nathan Hale high school graduate on Thornton Creek, I can remember the first salmon that came back and luckily that was over 20 years ago now.

And it has just been amazing to get to see the improvement in that watershed and how Seattle Public Utilities has really gone above and beyond the Meadowbrook, we always just called it the flood zone.

I don't know, and what do they call it down there?

down by Meadowbrook.

Anyway, sorry, putting him on the spot.

But just to say, through all that work of Again, reclaiming this land to be what it was naturally is good for everyone.

It's good for the orcas, it's good for our kids, it's good for us and our elders.

Sorry, I'm just kind of ticking along because I know we're taking quite a bit of time.

Water stewardship and access, this is really important because that first avenue bridge shoreline street ends, that street end, I believe that there's also a boat ramp there.

and it was mentioned here that there's tribal trust land next to the boat ramp, but oftentimes, I see Council Member Kettle's got his hand up, so I'm gonna turn it over to him right now because this is a great transition.

Sometimes they can't use the boat ramp because of public safety issues.

Sometimes they can't use the boat ramp because of homelessness issues.

And this really comes to, they have tribal trust land within the city of Seattle that they cannot access their rights to fish under the Bolt decision because we are not caring for our water access.

With that, over to you, Council Member Kettle, Public Safety Committee.

Well, shocking chair.

Thank you.

Shocking no.

I'm going to pivot.

I'm not going to say anything about public safety.

I have three strategic priorities.

Obviously, public safety is one of them, but also it's a maritime piece.

and I've been doing a lot.

I was in Regional Water Quality Commission.

I've done different tours of the Duwamish, the Georgetown Wet Weather Treatment Facility, the one in Ballard, all these different pieces.

And when I look at slide seven, fisheries, water stewardship, access eight, slide eight and so forth, that I wanted to ask to be...

Like, I've been doing this in many different ways.

Even in June, I went with the port to Washington, D.C.

to meet with federal entities, congressional and otherwise, to talk about various maritime issues in Puget Sound, and I would love to get a meeting set up that we can work with OIR on to focus on the maritime piece specifically.

Because as we press forward on some of these maritime issues, it would be good to get, going back to Mr. Belgaard's, you know, knowing early rather than later if there's any issues.

So that would be an example of that.

So, Chair, not a public safety query, but a maritime one.

Amen.

Just to keep you on your toes.

Yes, sir.

That's great.

And as I'm looking at the rest of the slides here, I guess I'll just tick to advocacy efforts on slide 10 because in land stewardship we've already talked about the United Needs of All Tribes stewardship programming near Daybreak Star.

But here, something that was really helpful last year was including on our legislative report from Olympia what the bills are for specifically indigenous people or about or in that realm.

So I thank you for that.

You didn't add it to this slide, so I'm adding it there for you.

And I think the next actions for OIR are just keep doing that.

And this is also, we are now seeing in our daily news clips here at City Council that there's a section for tribal governments and Native communities.

This is how we standardize indigenizing everything.

Just taking through on my own, we've talked a little bit about environmental justice efforts, we've talked about FIFA, missing, murdered indigenous people, native-led facilities through the work that Derrick Belgard is doing, they're at Sweetgrass, and we've talked about Thunderbird treatment services already in the last presentation, so sorry, I guess that stole a little your show as well.

So with that, I'm gonna check with colleagues.

Any final questions here?

Comments?

And then I'm gonna turn it over to the committee table for you all to have last word.

Thank you, council members, and thank you, Chair Strauss, for having us today.

We welcome the opportunity to, I think we're back in two weeks, to continue this conversation.

Yes, thank you.

Thank you, Chair Strauss and members of the committee.

We look forward to sharing our next update with you soon.

And in the meantime, please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or if there are ways we can support your offices.

We look forward to our continued work together.

Fantastic.

And I know that you all are excited to go on our field trip to Skagit as well.

Well with that, we're gonna move on to the next item.

We are actually now on, I think, I believe it says item eight.

So if you wanna read, actually let's read both item eight and nine.

You can read the short title into the record please.

Item 8, an ordinance relating to acceptance of funding from non-city sources authorizing the mayor or the mayor's designee to accept and authorize the expenditure of specified grants, private funding, and subsidized loans, and to execute, deliver, and perform corresponding agreements.

Briefing and discussion presenters are Ali Panucci, Director from the City Budget Office, Tom Mikesell, and Edin Sisek from Council Central Staff.

and item nine, an ordinance amending Ordinance 127362, which adopted the 2026 budget, including the 2026 to 2031 capital improvement program, changing appropriations to various departments and budget control levels, and from various funds in the budget, briefing and discussion presenters, Ali Panucci, Director, City Budget Office, Tom Mikesell, and Edin Susick from Council Central Staff.

Welcome in, welcome in.

And colleagues, again, we have two items before us.

Our chartered duty and right, which is to approve grants, grant acceptance to the City of Seattle.

And then item nine, which we will get into our mid-year supplemental budget.

These items are for briefing today.

I would point to summary attachment A if you would like to see the details of these transfers and I'm always excited to see my favorite department director Ali Panucci especially with our Ballard Vermont rivalry that occurred this weekend.

I almost texted you to see if you were at the game, but Vermont played a darn good game.

They're a tough team and it came down to six rounds of penalty kicks.

So that just says what it needs to say of your good Vermont team.

Over to you.

So if we want to run through, just if you want to do quick introductions, I know everyone knows you, but just for the TV and the thousands of people watching on Seattle Channel, and we'll do mid-year grant acceptance first, take a pause, and then we'll go through supplemental.

Sounds great.

Good morning, Ali Panucci, budget director.

Good morning, Ed and Sessis with your central staff.

OK, I will kick us off.

I'm going to go over, as Chair Strauss described, the mid-year supplemental budget ordinances that are two bills increasing or decreasing department appropriations.

This first slide is just the mission statement for the city budget office.

My team supports stewardship of city funds and supports the mayor in proposing their budget and then works with your staff during your budget adoption process that I'm looking forward to this fall.

Next slide.

So we will start with the Mid-Year Acceptance Ordinance.

This is one of two of the budget bills at Mid-Year that are traditionally heard in this committee.

This bill accepts grants, service contracts, or donation funds from various agencies and organizations.

and authorize the expenditure of funding backed by their respective revenue sources.

And then the other bill adjusts the adopted budget with more standard appropriations and changes to provisos.

Next.

Actually, you could just flip.

Yeah, thank you.

So the mid-year acceptance ordinance accepts about $44.9 million of external funds and appropriates $38.4 million of those in various departments from multiple funding sources.

This slide is a summary of the acceptance amounts that is organized in the same way that the budget book is organized into our service areas.

the five service areas and it just outlines the $44.9 million.

I wasn't going to go into a great amount of detail on this.

I'll highlight a few of the acceptance in the next slide, but happy to answer questions.

Go ahead, thank you.

So this slide is just a highlight of some of the acceptances included in this bill.

For example, it includes accepting $5.2 million from the King County Parks Levy for capital costs for the Memorial Stadium.

redevelopment.

There are a number of grant acceptances, primarily from King County Natural Resources Department that's supporting many projects in parks throughout the city, some funding for ongoing support of the monorail and Seattle Streetcar, and some specific funds that were allocated to Seattle to help support some of the World Cup.

items.

And another one I'll highlight is an award to support SDCI's share of a multi-departmental grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

This grant provides funding for outreach and engagement work to incentivize resilient investments in unreinforced masonry retrofits.

SDCI is working with the Office of Emergency Management on this, and there is a match associated with that award that will be provided by staff hours that's already appropriated in the budget.

I wasn't going, in the interest of time, going to go through each of them, but I will happily take questions if the chair would like me to.

Yeah, thank you.

Thank you for taking a pause here.

And we also have Tom Mikesell at the table as well.

Colleagues, do we have any additional questions here?

I just want to thank you for clarifying the naval fire drills as it was previously documented.

As we can see out of our windows here, one of the most active shipyards in Washington State.

One third of our sales and use tax comes from port and maritime activities.

and one of the most consistent funders is the United States Navy through their work at the shipyards out there as I have seen some ships that went in while I was still staff that are still there today.

But I see Council Member Kettle with your hand.

Thank you, Chair.

Are you sure?

It's always a good day, an outstanding Navy day to have Navy, you know, noted in the briefing, so thank you for that.

My question was, you know, related to FIFA and the various grants that we got, particularly on the public safety side, overtime and all the like, is everything track?

It may not show up here because of the timing, but is everything tracking on that front from your perspective related to the FIFA World Cup?

We don't yet have full reporting on all the actual spending and sort of talking with departments sort of intermittently.

It did seem to be tracking, but I don't yet have definitive final numbers on our actual spending compared to what we assumed in the budget and what will be reimbursed for because it's reimbursable, but we will plan to report back to the council later in August if I have the information or as part of the budget delivery on what how that actually all played out.

But I'm choosing to be optimistic that our cost matched what we received in external funding and what we already assumed in the budget.

Okay.

Hope.

Yes.

And thank you.

And by the way, I also appreciate the Memorial Stadium.

Obviously, anything related to Memorial Stadium, Memorial Wall is of great interest to me.

So thank you for noting the Memorial Stadium on there, too.

Good bookends, the first bullet and the last bullet.

Nicely done.

All right.

Thank you, Chair.

Absolutely.

Colleagues, any other questions, comments on the grant acceptance?

Not seeing any other than I know that the Evans Pool is in there and as well as my favorite super block the Garfield super block and I know that Evans Pool would not be able to be replaced without this grant and so it's just appreciate accepting money from other sources.

Fantastic.

Moving on to the Mid-Year Supplemental.

After Director Panucci's briefing on the Mid-Year Supplemental, we'll talk about some pre-introductory changes that we made through Eden's presentation.

Over to you, Director.

Thank you.

So this is the Mid-Year Appropriation Bill.

It adjusts appropriations throughout the budget.

So it's basically, it's amending the adopted budget.

This is the, I think the second or third bill you've seen this year the carry forward ordinance that you heard earlier, as well as the exceptions bill.

And it also makes some changes to our capital improvement program and lifts a proviso.

Overall, the ordinance as proposed would increase the 2026 adopted budget in the general fund by about $92 million and then decrease across other funds by about $48 million.

So you have two tables in front of you on the screen.

The blue table is sort of a snapshot of what this bill does, and it's kind of organized like how we organize our financial plans.

So on the revenue side, this bill includes about $8.7 million of new revenue that supports some of the appropriations.

it appropriates $94.5 million of general fund and net across all other funds.

It's a decrease.

There's a number of technical corrections and sort of abandoning capital appropriations that carry forward every year.

So it's for a net impact of about $36 million and tried to highlight the sort of, changes ins and outs, so you could do that math if you were tracking along at home.

And this is just meant to be a snapshot of sort of the overall impact compared to what you all adopted in November.

And then from a general fund perspective, What I really wanted to highlight here is there's about $2 million of revenue assumed in this bill in general fund.

It increases general fund expenditures by $94.5 million.

When you just see that number and you know that we are confronted with a significant deficit, it's kind of eye-popping.

However, most of that was already assumed when you all were adopting the budget last year.

Much of that money was held in the planning reserves, which is not appropriated, but their expenditures that we anticipate are likely to hit in the current year, but we do not yet have enough information.

Contracts haven't been settled to appropriate.

So the majority of that is really the implementation of the SPOG and SPMA contracts that were finalized after the adopted budget, and so that includes sort of retro payments for previous years as well as increasing those departments' budget so they can pay people consistent with the contract.

So overall, the net impact to the general fund through this ordinance is a half a million dollars.

Next slide.

Before we move on, I'm just going to take a pause here because when Director Pannucci worked here at Central Staff, we worked together in what I call multi-year budget reform in practice and procedure.

and the six year look back was a procedure and this demonstrates practice of content today.

And I just, I say that because when I took the budget chair role, I believe that there was 270 to $290 million in a structural budget deficit.

That number has ebbed and flowed over time, which is why we put a date stamp on any of those charts at any point.

And a couple of the things that I have seen in your time here at City Hall Director, was also the exceptions ordinance has dramatically decreased over the time that we've worked together from skyrocketing numbers to I think it was $2 million this year, maybe a little higher.

But we have dramatically reduced the amount that departments are overspending in any given year, meaning that we are through procedure becoming more accurate with our budget our budget and then through practice we are being more accountable to hold them to it.

And so in this year where we have again another $170 million structural budget deficit before us, seeing that there's only point that there's $500,000 of net general fund increase is really important.

And so colleagues, I know that there will be amendments.

Amendment deadline is this Friday at noon.

And as much as you can find sources of funds to offset, it is helpful.

And so that'll get into the conversation with Eden in just a minute about the pre-introductory changes that we made.

we made them in the same way that this green table here is which we appropriated money last year and today we are identifying how those appropriated funds will be used.

So just wanted to chime in and talk about the long range path to how we got here today and my gratitude for your work.

Thank you.

I appreciate the partnership and I should also thank The two people sitting on either side of me who worked alongside me on much of that work when I was on central staff and the team in the budget office, as well as your leadership and others across the city.

It really takes everyone being committed to address this problem in order to get to a more stable place.

Okay, next slide is just, in a lot of ways, just more words describing the same numbers I just went over.

It highlights a few of the major drivers in this bill in terms of those general fund increases, including, as I mentioned, the labor agreements.

It appropriates the first half of a $5 million commitment to support the Seattle Chinese garden capital campaign and the second half you'll see in the budget, working with Chair Strauss very closely, other labor agreements.

It makes an important start to an investment in replacing our Seattle License Information Management or SLIM system, which is very important for managing our tax and regulatory fees.

The main piece that will have an ongoing impact to the general fund is the addition of an assistant city attorney in the law department that was a request, and I know many of you have been in conversation and worked on this with the city attorney and in previous work to work on extreme risk protection orders.

So that's just the highlight of the general fund appropriations And then this is just a snapshot of some of the changes in other funds.

One item I wanted to highlight was an investment in Seattle Center to support the World Cup activities.

That money is from the Jumpstart Fund, and it was underspend from last year in the Office of Economic Development, so in the economic revitalization character.

This was an important investment to allow some of those free events at Seattle Center during that incredible weeks of events, as well as the drive clean Seattle fleet electrical vehicle infrastructure.

That was an opportunity to avoid debt financing some project because there was some unanticipated underspend.

So that is just a highlight.

A lot of the rest of it is there's a lot of technical ins and outs, abandoning appropriations, transferring money, that type of thing.

So I'm going to go through that in detail, but happy to take questions.

And that concludes my presentation.

Thank you.

I'll just say on slide nine, I appreciate in the one place that we are increasing general fund expenditure is that extreme risk protection or Assistant City Attorney.

This Assistant City Attorney will be working on making sure North Aurora becomes a safer place to live, be, transit through everything, all of the above.

with her ability to use the extreme risk protection orders to take the guns out of the hands of very dangerous people who are harming themselves and others, ensuring that there is due process to address that constitutional right, and this is the process to do that with.

And so I just really appreciate she put the hard press to me to fund this in the Mid-Year Supplemental, which is glad that the mayor's office did so that we didn't have to bring in an amendment.

So appreciate you there.

Colleagues, any questions on the mid-year supplemental before we get into Edmund's presentation?

Council Member Kettle, Council Member Rivera.

Thank you, Chair.

And to echo what you just said, This was one of the amendment ideas that we were looking at in terms of, you know, increasing the ability for the city attorney to work with the King County prosecuting attorney in terms of what's happening across our city, but most specifically North Aurora.

So I just wanted to echo my chair and his comments on this point, and I do support that very much.

Thank you.

Fantastic.

Thank you.

Vice-Chair Rivera.

Thank you, Chair, and thank you all for being here.

I feel like it's the same crew that's been here since I've been here, and I very much appreciate the continuity and you, Director Pannucci, now, and your new roles still get to sit with us and help us, so I appreciate you and your work.

Chair, I'm just gonna say, this is a lot of information to present.

We're sort of like, I feel it's a little bit of a speed dating situation with the presentation of these so I'm going to ask for a formal meeting so we can really sit down and go through this.

I have some concerns about some of the budget items that we present in committee and as far as I feel when we get the budget projections, we're always assuming that, you know, there's always a pessimistic scenario.

Then if you look at the adoptive budget versus the actual budget over the last few years, we've done better than we've anticipated.

So we've added more things.

So I feel like we're constantly coming up short.

And so I intend to dig more into the adopted versus the actual versus the projections.

Um, so that I have a better understanding of where we're at, um, with our city budgeting, because we keep talking about the structural deficit, but I do think that, um, if you look over the last, I don't know, handful of years or certainly since COVID, I think our budget has come in better than what we anticipated, what we projected, but we're including more things into the budget.

And so it looks like this deficit, yes, it's a deficit, but it's because we're including more things.

So anyway, all that to say, I intend to dig more into the information.

And Chair, I'm going to ask and suggest that we look at the in addition to the projections, we look at the adopted and the actuals over the last number of years to really see how our budget has been over the last few years, because I think those numbers are really helpful to compare year to year, not just the projections and the adopted.

Thank you.

Well said.

And colleagues, I always recommend a one-on-one briefing with budget items because yes, in this presentation it is a bit high level.

I'm currently on page 11 of 45, 46, 49 pages of explanation of how this budget is working.

And so this is how I will know what, if any, budget amendments to bring this Friday.

So you're absolutely right.

Well said.

Colleagues, any further questions here?

If not, we'll move into Edden's presentation about the pre-introduction changes that we made to support the work we began last year with the Southeast Seattle and Central District Reinvestment Fund.

Over to you, Edden.

Good morning again.

My name is Edden.

I've heard the record with council members of staff.

I have two slides.

So last fall, during the budget process, Council adopted Ordinance 127356, which created a new fund called the Central District and Southeast Reinvestment Fund, and via a separate Council budget action appropriated a total of $1.35 million from the general fund into that new fund, into Finance General Reserve.

with a purpose to support programs and projects that promote equitable development, cultural preservation, and community-led revitalization into Central District and Southeast Seattle neighborhoods.

So this council pre-introductory change moves a total of $1.2 million from that finance general reserve into the specific departments, including arts, human services, parks, Department of Neighborhoods, and Office of Economic Development.

And I can, to give the Council President an opportunity, provide additional context, or it can move on to the last slide and then we come back to this, whatever your preference is.

Let's take a quick pause, see if there's questions, comments about the appropriations within the Central District Southeast, South Seattle Reinvestment Fund.

Fun fact, South Seattle was its own incorporated city until it was annexed in 1907. Council President.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

And just sending some gratitude, thank you to the Mayor's Office for getting this in the pre-introduction and to our central staff and the new Chair for your work on this as well.

So really appreciate it.

And thank you to the colleagues who voted on this last year, setting up this fund as well to help the community.

So thank you.

Fantastic.

No further comments here.

We'll click on to the next slide.

This is giving a little bit, I'm not going to steal your show, but a little bit of overview.

Depending on time for our next committee meeting, Director Panucci and I have been working together and discussing how we begin previewing the budget process for this year with some structural conversations, kind of to Vice Chair's point here.

and so depending on that amount of time for the next presentation will determine how in-depth we get in that one conversation and there will be a number of committee meetings between now and the fall budget session to dig into it.

And with that, back over to you, Edin, and Director Panucci if you'd like to share any other words on that.

All right, so this is just some reminders and dates.

Second briefing and vote on both Council Bills, 1-21252 and 1-21253.

The mid-year grants, mid-year supplemental, is scheduled for August 4th, Finance Committee.

All amendment concepts are due by the end of this week, so please reach out to me and your central staff and my central staff colleagues if you have potential amendments to discuss.

So July 24th.

If the legislation is voted out of committee, it will go to...

Both bills will take place at the August 11th City Council meeting.

and relatedly in terms of budget legislation, the mayor's proposed budget is expected to be transmitted in late September and will likely include a year-end supplemental and a year-end grants acceptance and appropriation bills.

Director?

Thank you.

Happy to give that presentation and that will show some of 25 actuals, 26 revised and then our projected deficit.

I just wanted to take the opportunity.

I got a note from my team while we were talking to Councilmember Kettle's question about the actual spending on the World Cup event that will all be reconciled through the year-end supplemental budget, which gets transmitted with the budget.

So if I have information in advance of that, happy to provide it to you and the rest of the Council.

But that is where it will formally get kind of reconciled and we'll have a clearer picture.

So I just wanted to note that for the record.

Great, thank you.

And as noted, we have the Friday noon deadline for concepts.

Again, it's just concepts.

So if I said to Eden today, I would like an extreme risk protection order assistant city attorney right now, that would meet that deadline.

and that will give central staff enough time next week to develop that proposed amendment.

My request is if possible, please do identify the funding source in which you're coming from so that we can continue the work like we did with Central District and Southeast Seattle Reinvestment Fund as well as the work that Director Panucci did with the general fund this year.

We're trying to stay on track there.

And so yeah, deadline is Friday at noon.

Colleagues, any other questions on this topic?

Seeing no further questions, any last words from the committee table?

Tom, you've been very loud today.

Anything that you'd like to share?

Nothing.

Fantastic.

Anything from your director or Edden?

Alright, well this does conclude the July 21st meeting of the Finance Native Communities and Tribal Governments Committee on Salmon Bay FC, our National Champions Day.

Our next meeting is August 4th.

We plan to vote on the appointments from the Indigenous Advisory Council and our grant acceptance ordinance as well as our mid-year budget ordinances.

We do also plan to have our second briefing on the city's progress towards the tribal summit commitment areas.

With that, I hope you all have a wonderful day.

And if you'd like to join us in Bertha Nightlandis at 1.15, we will be celebrating national champion Salmon Bay FC.

Have a great day.