Seattle City Council Briefing 2/19/19

You're on, boss.

OK.

Good morning, everybody.

Thank you for being here for our regular scheduled council briefing.

Just a few remarks.

We'll just go around and do a preview of today's full council actions.

I'll start it off.

And of course, at 1145, we have the city of Seattle, Jenny Durkin, Mayor Durkin's state of the city address.

I'll talk a little bit about the specifics on that when I get to that in a second just for the viewing audience.

So this afternoon we have six voting items from the governance, equity, and technology committee.

The first is an ordinance that relates to the City of Seattle's Myrtle Reservoir Radio Transmitter Facility, basically authorizing the director of FAS to execute a lease with the King County.

And this is pursuant to the Puget Sound Emergency Radio Network, which you may recall was the improved system was a result of the voter approved levy in 2015. That was a $273 million to upgrade the aging emergency radio network.

And this is actually the third agreement that the city and King County has entered into pursuant to the construction and maintenance of the new facility.

So we have that first, and then we have appointments to the International Special Review District, one appointment there, and three appointments to the Community Surveillance Working Group, and then one appointment to the Ethics and Elections Commission.

As I said earlier, let me just say some specifics about the State of the City address.

It begins at 1145. The doors will open at 1115. It's at North Seattle College in Deborah Juarez's district.

And I think she's, I don't know if she's part of the program, but I think she's introducing me or something along those lines.

It's, the event will be on stage one, the stage one theater of the library building at North Seattle College.

and see we're talking about district 5 and she walks in and there will be refreshments after the speech at a reception with the mayor and so again that's 1145 doors open 1115 the public is certainly welcome to attend.

Okay, Council Member Bekshaw.

Nothing.

Nothing today this afternoon and nothing this Wednesday.

We could go with that.

Thank you Council Member Bekshaw.

Council Member Sawant.

Thank you, President Harrell.

Good morning, everyone.

There are no items on today's full council agenda from the Human Services, Economic Development, and Renter's Rights Committee.

The next meeting of the committee is scheduled for tomorrow evening at 6 p.m.

here in council chambers, and this is the meeting that we were going to have last week but had to be postponed.

rescheduled due to the weather.

And just a reminder, we will be taking up the resolution regarding the appointment of the Permanent Director of the Human Services Department, which outlines a procedure for involving community members and employees in the HSD for the appointment search and confirmation.

At the table, we will have representatives of the HSD change team, the silence breakers, Protech 17, the union that represents many of the HSD workers, and also representatives of the Seattle Human Services Coalition, human service providers, and clients of the Human Services Department.

I really hope that council members can be here to listen to the important community members who work so hard to meet the needs of the people in Seattle with, and they do so with perpetually insufficient resources.

So I'm hoping that'll be a good discussion.

And then the meeting for the Select Committee on Homelessness will be, is, is on schedule for February 28th, but I don't have an agenda to announce it because we are still working with community members to finalize that and I will let the council know as soon as I have that.

And again, Council Member Esparza, your meeting is Wednesday at 6 o'clock.

Did I hear that correctly?

Okay.

Thank you.

Right.

Council Member Herbold.

Thank you.

The only item that I want to report on coming up to full council is an item that moved out of Councilmember Mosqueda's committee and that is the misclassification resolution 31863. I want to thank Councilmember Mosqueda for allowing me to address what for me is a little bit of a legacy issue from my tenure as Chair of the Committee with Oversight on Labor Issues.

Specifically, the resolution asks OLS, the Office of Labor Standards, to propose policy solutions to the Council in order to address the issue of misclassification, calling people who are truly employees and should have access to our labor laws contractors.

and also asks that the Office of Labor Standards work with the Office of Intergovernmental Relations on issues most appropriately addressed by the state.

It also asks LSAC, the Labor Standards Advisory Committee, which is a committee both of worker advocates as well as employers, to develop a work plan and consider how the committee can work with OLS to engage stakeholders in public hearings.

It directs OLS to develop strategies that the city should consider based on the findings of a study that's being conducted by the Washington Department of Commerce with an expected delivery date of June 1st, 2019. And then finally it asks that both the Office of Labor Standards and the Labor Standards Advisory Council report back to the council and semi-annual reports starting in the third quarter of 2019. The idea being that we'll know what happened in the state legislative session by that point and know whether or not there's action that would be best taken here at the city level.

California is also working on this issue by addressing mandatory arbitration causes.

The idea is that a worker can bring a representative action on behalf of the government agency.

The reason why this is important is many contract employees sign, in their contracts actually, it includes a clause where they agree to not enter into a class action lawsuit against their employers.

And one of the things that we've seen is a lot of times progressive policy comes out of successful class action suits.

So this is one of the other issues that I think is really important to work on that's related to misclass.

We don't have a Civil Rights, Utilities, Economic Development, Arts Committee meeting this week.

Our meeting was canceled last week and our next meeting will be February 26th.

I've got office hours on Friday at the South Park Community Center between 2 and 7. And just want to flag that I spoke at the West Seattle Chamber last week to share with them the council's progress on the Mandatory Housing Affordability Program implementation and passage.

Very good.

Thank you, Council Member Herbold.

Council Member Esqueda.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Good morning.

We are excited to have Councilmember Herbold's legislation that she just described in front of full council today that came from the Housing, Health, Energy, and Workers' Rights Committee.

In addition to that, at full council this afternoon, there will be four appointments to the Domestic Workers' Standard Board.

This is the first four.

So we're very excited about these individuals.

Elijah Anderson, who's been organizing with Seattle Area Nannies.

Emily Dillis, who was instrumental in helping us draft this policy and is with Seattle Nanny Network.

Andra Krasner from the, thank you, from the Fair Work Center, who's the program director, and Dana Barnett, who is a member with Hand in Hand.

This is a nice representation of both domestic workers and those who are working as hiring entities who will be sitting at the Domestic Workers Standards Board.

So thank you all for your participation in that, and we're really looking forward to getting that board up and running.

This Thursday, we will have a Housing, Health, Energy, and Workers' Rights Committee on February 21st at 9.30 a.m.

There will be a briefing from the Seattle City Light Rate Design.

This will be their initial report.

If folks remember, we asked them to report back twice this year so that we can actually move forward with long-overdue rate design changes so that our residents and business owners are paying a more equitable structure in the rate design, and we'll be looking forward to that initial report later this week.

We'll also have a discussion and possible vote on the sale of the North Passage plot of land that comes from Seattle City Light as well, and we'll get more information to you from that meeting.

On Friday, I'll be speaking on a panel with Congresswoman Jayapal on the Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights, and this will precede a very important community event that I'm hoping all of you may join us at.

This is going to be right before the screening of Roma.

If folks haven't seen this award-winning film, I would love for you all to post it and share with your constituents and friends and colleagues.

We are excited about this opportunity to join with Casa Latina and the National Domestic Workers Alliance, who are co-hosting this event, to talk about the work of domestic workers domestically, but also internationally.

It will be a really good discussion, and if you haven't seen the movie yet, it'll be a good opportunity to see that.

The movie is free to attend, and it's going to be held at the Central Cinema.

Registration starts at 530, and we will begin our program around 6. So hopefully we can all make it.

And lastly, if you haven't heard, today is the day.

Today is post-storm donation day.

We've been really excited to work with two community partners, Garrett Mussar and Dr. Gary Mustard, who have put together this opportunity for folks who may have purchase extra perishable items that really do need to be consumed within a week or two of their purchase from the stores.

Given our last storm, we know we saw picture after picture of people rushing to the store to buy broccoli and celery and avocados.

Many of these items will perish if they're not consumed right away.

So we do want- But no jalapenos.

No, there was a rush on avocado and toast.

And so we're hoping that folks do take the chance to donate.

We've all been really fortunate to have a warm place to stay indoors with food and warmth.

If you are in that category and you can give back today, please consider doing so.

There's a link on our Twitter and our Facebook on where to do the donations.

and excited to work with folks from Hopelink and others to get the word out.

We know that there's another storm-ish coming this week with various snow flurries throughout the week, but we do hope folks take the opportunity to donate and participate today.

Thank you.

Council Member Juarez.

Good morning, everybody.

Okay.

I'm just making an aside comment.

Sorry, I was listening to you.

Nothing on today's agenda for the Civic Development, Public Asset, and Native Communities.

However, I do want to report that I did just return from the visit to our nation's capital in Washington, D.C. I had an opportunity to attend, again, the National Congress of American Indians and also the Native American Women's Honoring Lunch, which I have been doing for almost 24 years.

When meeting with tribal leadership and local leadership, we address the issues of the opioid crisis, health care, housing, missing, murdered indigenous women and girls, and climate change.

I had an opportunity to meet with Senator Murray and discuss the federal support for sound transit, specifically how significant it has been for our transportation system.

We also discussed the need for increasing federal funding for homeless services.

Senator Murray's office has been advocating to the Department of Housing and Urban Development for dedicated funding to retain low-income housing to prevent displacement.

I also had an opportunity to meet with our newly elected Native American Congresswomen, Representative Deb Haaland out of New Mexico and Cherise Davis out of Kansas, and that was very exciting.

Besides meeting with Senator Murray, I also met with Senator Cantwell, and we had an opportunity to discuss the Violence Against Women Act, which we were hoping would be reauthorized.

It wasn't.

However, it will return to the Senate floor next month with some additional comments and changes to protect missing murdered indigenous women.

And we also discussed the Savannas Act.

And Savannas Act, if you don't know, is aimed at, well, both acts are aimed at reducing violence against women by increasing public safety protocols and accountability.

Savannah's Act, in particular, would have the Department of Justice require data collection on missing and murdered indigenous women.

As you may recall, the study showing lack of data collection was done here in Seattle by our own Abigail EchoHawk at the Seattle Indian Health Board and has received national attention.

So that being said, it was great to sit down with our two state senators and some of our congressional delegation and their staff, including Congresswoman Pramila Jallipal, and I think we met with Derek Kilmer's staff as well.

In any event, it's good because it kind of connects what's going on in Washington, D.C.

with what's happening nationally, what's happening regionally, which we're trying to grapple with, with the City of Seattle.

It was great to meet with Indian Country and their leaders because they, as you know, we have 29 tribes in this state.

And six of those major tribes are all in the Puget Sound area and are dealing with the same issues that we are dealing with, mainly the opioid crisis, housing, and medical issues as well.

I had a chance to meet with the chair of Suquamish, Leonard Forsman, the chair of Muckleshoot, the tribal leadership from Snoqualmie.

and tribal leadership from Tulalip and so and Cowlitz as well.

So it's always good to meet with your you know your native government to government sovereign nations because they are dealing and they're all in King County dealing with the same issues that we're dealing with as well and looking at the same pots of money if you will but also through our native communities I'm really trying to strengthen how Seattle the city of Seattle proper We are hoping to work more closely with tribes to make sure that we can truly have a government to government relationship with tribes and using their services, not just the native urban community services that we rely so heavily upon, which would be the Seattle Indian health board and chief Seattle club and those groups because they don't have some of the funding services that tribes have.

So we're hoping to work more closely with them.

The next civic development public assets and native communities committee meeting will be

Good morning.

I've got a little bit to report on this morning.

We've got several items that full counsel and a couple of other things that I want to keep my colleagues apprised of.

Today on introduction referral is clerk file 314414. It's an application of Bellwether Housing to rezone a 21,600 square foot site located at 1400 Madison Street from NC3P160 to NC3P200.

The application is now pending for the purposes of the council's quasi-judicial rules.

and council members should therefore avoid communications with either proponents or opponents of the project about the merits of the application.

If you have questions about the council quasi-judicial rules, please seek the approval of our central staff.

There are three items that I believe I'm in charge of today at full council.

One is Council Bill 119-362, which is the implementation of the University District's Neighborhood Design Guidelines.

The second, Council Bill 119-439, the similarly related implementation of the Uptown Neighborhood Design Guidelines.

Both of those have been years long in the making, and we're excited to be able to get them finally across the finish line.

I believe I'm also shepherding through for Councilmember O'Brien today an issue, Council Bill 119457, related to Children's Research Institute's private communications conduit permit to get them some private communications between a couple of their buildings.

So those three issues are at the back end of the agenda for this afternoon.

Tomorrow, we would have had a Pledge Committee meeting because of the volume of issues that we're dealing with on the citywide mandatory housing affordability meeting.

That meeting is canceled.

Thursday evening here at City Hall at 530, we will hold our sixth and final public hearing for the Select Committee on Citywide MHA.

We're still looking for staff volunteers, so if any of your staff are willing to stay late, we would love to have your support.

Feel free to We will be back around on Monday, the 25th.

after our city council meeting for our final citywide vote on the mandatory housing affordability amendments that we discussed a week ago Friday.

As a reminder, we're wrapping the non-controversial amendments into sort of a larger consent agenda package at the beginning of the meeting.

Any single council member can pull any item from that agenda at the beginning of the discussion, should they like.

And we'll also be combining some of those similar amendments within urban villages together.

For example, Council Member O'Brien has 10 proposed amendments in Crown Hill.

Rather than do 10 individual amendments on Crown Hill, we'll package them together into one.

Crown Hill focused amendment and discuss those.

We anticipate that we'll be able to get through that agenda on the 25th.

However, we've got a backup plan in the event that there is still some need for some additional discussions.

We will hold the regularly scheduled Pleas Committee meeting on the morning of Wednesday, March 6th as a backup plan in case we can't get through all of our amendments on the 25th.

We'll ask for further discussion on the 25th, but for those of you who are regularly PLEZ committee attendees, you don't need to hold the time on your calendar.

But on the off chance we can't get through everything on the 25th, the morning of March the 6th will be our double secret backup.

I guess not so secret anymore.

Last week on Valentine's Day, the University of Washington Board of Regents gave us a Valentine's Day present by approving our major institution master plan process, which we voted conditional approval to in December.

That was also about three years in the making.

I'm excited to see that come to fruition and including all the transportation provisions and the affordable housing provisions that we included in that plan.

However, before you run out to give a high five to our colleague Sally Clark or others, it is still a quasi-judicial matter and remains so until the SEPA appeal windows closes on March the 20th.

So please, no ex parte communications with any appellants or opponents of the University of Washington MIMP until after that March 20th date.

Finally, colleagues, Sound Transit's begun last set of open houses for the West Seattle Ballard Light Rail Extension.

Those open houses will cover the proposed level three analysis that they have done, as well as take comments on the federal scoping process.

Three of those meetings are scheduled over the next couple weeks.

One, West Seattle meeting February 27th at Alki Masonic Temple.

One on February 28 in Ballard at Ballard High School and then finally on March the seventh and Union Station.

So as we get close as an elected leadership group of wrapping up our series of recommendations to the full sound transit board in April.

This is one of the final ways where community members can come and learn a little bit more about the end to end alternatives that are being discussed.

and provide input before the federal scoping period closes.

The schedule is to have our elected leadership group meet at the end of March to do a deep dive on the issues related to the Chinatown International District Station, have a set of preliminary recommendations discussed and voted on in April, and have the Sound Transit Board approve those recommendations in May.

So we're making good progress there.

And after a year and a half of debate, have only a few issues left to discuss, which I think is a testament for all the hard work of our staffs and Sound Transit staff.

So, that concludes my somewhat lengthy report this morning.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Johnson.

Thank you very much.

Council Member Gonzalez.

Thank you.

And then I would just add to Council Member Johnson's remarks around the Sound Transit alignment options.

If you can't attend the open house, there's also a lot of other ways that you can submit your comment, including sending an email to wsbs.gov.

COPING comments at SoundTransit.org.

You can also leave a voicemail at 833-972-2666.

And you can even send a letter in the mail to West Seattle and Ballard Link Extensions, care of Lauren Swift, Sound Transit, 401 South Jackson Street, Seattle, Washington, 98104. So that's for the folks who might not be able to attend one of the open houses but still wants to submit I would like to make a comment about the proposed preferred alignments in the EIS.

Okay, committee updates for me.

I have one item on the introduction and referral calendar this afternoon.

It is Council Bill 119461, which would authorize the Seattle Police Department to offer a $15,000 signing bonus for experienced, i.e., lateral hire officers to the police department.

one too many.

This would allow the police department to, as the title of the bill, offer a $15,000 signing bonus for lateral hires.

These are individuals who have already been trained and are ready to begin providing public safety services in our community right away without going to the training academy.

I'm passing out A thorough brief by Greg Doss from central staff, thanks to him for pulling this together, that really lays out both the historical work that has been done, but also breaks down the bill itself, and also begins the process of identifying some potential issues for amendment that the city council may consider.

and that we will likely continue to have a conversation about those issues in my committee.

So essentially this has been identified as a strategy by the Seattle Police Department to be more competitive in the space of lateral hires for the police department, all of the regional departments in the Puget Sound offer some form of a hiring bonus where the outliers in this particular area.

The police department has indicated in the fiscal note reflects that this is a revenue neutral proposal as proposed by the mayor so because there are ongoing vacancy rates within the police department, they're able to use some of those salary savings due to the vacancies for this signing bonus.

So there's a few issues that have been highlighted.

One is making sure that there is either a sunset date or temporary authorization for the proposed incentive program included in the bill so that it's not existing in perpetuity.

We want to make sure that this tool is only being used when it's actually needed as opposed to ongoing commitments through our finances for this program.

Secondly is a policy question as to whether or not this hiring incentive should apply to new recruits as well as that is very strongly related to what I believe has been a shift in the hiring and recruitment of the Seattle Police Department to focus on recruiting from diverse communities, and that recruitment is generally done in the new hire space.

Lateral hires are going to be older folks who've gone through training already, who have been in law enforcement for quite some time that may not fulfill our diversity commitments both in our accountability ordinance but also in policy and practice at the Seattle Police Department.

So considering whether adding a type of bonus to the new recruits as well as to the lateral hires is another strategy that I'm exploring currently with the executive.

And, of course, we're trying to be sensitive to any potential revenue impacts to the budget as a result of potentially expanding this program.

to new recruits, so we will have an ongoing conversation about that.

The third is making sure that we get a long-term commitment from officers who we are offering the hiring bonus to.

We don't want to be in a situation where we offer the hiring bonus, and then three or four months later, this person gets the same hiring bonus from a different police department in the region, and then we lose that personnel.

So that is another aspect of the policy conversation that will continue to unfold in my committee.

I invite you all to join us on February 27th where we will have additional conversations about some of these policy issues and consider potential amendments.

The amendments will if adopted likely result in a bill title change so we would have to reintroduce the bill and we'll work closely with the clerk's office and the council president's office to make sure that we can coordinate a reintroduction of the bill should these amendments come to fruition and advance out of out of committee so If anybody has any questions, please feel free to talk to me.

You're always welcome to go to Greg Doss, of course.

And then Cody Ryder in my office is the lead legislative aide on this particular policy issue.

I just want to say the manner with which you've done this is really effective, and that is even before the discussion, you've identified several issues before the discussion has begun.

I just found that most effective.

And I'd suggest all of you do the same, by the way.

No, I'm just kidding.

But that's very helpful.

Thanks for that leadership.

You're welcome, and I appreciate that and I appreciate Greg Doss's work in queuing up the conversation for us to have this policy discussion.

I will say that there was also, if you have an opportunity and ongoing interest in the hiring and recruitment difficulties of the police department, In this space, I really encourage you to go back and look at the committee hearing.

There's also a presentation that was given to us by the police department that really lays out sort of the trends both backwards looking but also forecasting in 2019-2020.

I should note that we we did end 2018 with a net negative of 41 police officers in spite of this City Council's ongoing actions to support hiring of additional officers for the police department.

So they continue to have issues with recruitment and hiring and retention, and this is one short-term solution for a very small bucket of the type of people that get hired at the police department.

It's a very sort of targeted tool for a short-term period of time for a particular type of population.

I strongly encourage you to go look at that and to also review the response, the first quarterly response from the mayor's office to a statement of legislative intent that we passed in 2018 requiring the police department to disclose to city council on a quarterly basis what its hiring numbers are relative to the targets and also breaking that down by precinct.

So really rich information there and look forward to continuing to work with the executive and the work group that has been established by the executive and my office that will have a representative of my office and also central staff, mayor's office, city budget office, Seattle Police Department to really take a look at what some long-term best practices are in this space that could be implemented in 2019. So more to come on this particular issue.

Happy to answer any questions if anybody has any.

Nope.

Excellent.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

And then lastly, just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge the legal community just suffered a loss over the weekend.

And the family has asked us to respect the privacy, so I'm not gonna say too much, but I would be remiss in not acknowledging that there was a loss to the criminal defense bar over the weekend.

Darren Morris, who was 45 years old and a longtime King County public defender, criminal justice reform advocate passed away over the weekend.

We want to send our thoughts to the legal community who I know is really feeling this loss and of course to his family and his survivors.

Our thoughts are with them today.

Thank you for mentioning that.

Appreciate that.

Okay, that concludes our briefing.

Council Member Esqueda, did you want to say something before we depart?

Yes.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Just a short public service announcement as well regarding another housing topic that Council Member Johnson and I are going to be closely watching and helping to engage this council with in the upcoming months, and that is regarding Fort Lawton, as this council has been engaged in trying to get affordable housing, mixed-income housing, mixed-use housing out there at Fort Lawton.

We originally had a hearing that the Office of Housing was hosting in the community on February 11th and due to weather that got changed.

We were hoping to schedule that for the upcoming week but given ongoing weather, we are going to now have this meeting on Monday, March 4th.

in the evening, and there will be information sent out, but we are hoping community partners come and participate in that discussion as well.

It's been a long time in the making, so looking forward to working with all of you to get that over the last hurdle as well.

Again, Monday, March 4th is the rescheduled date.

Thanks to the Office of Housing for hosting.

Okay, we'll see everyone in D5 at 1115, doors open, 1145, speech.

We stand adjourned.

Thank you very much.

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