Seattle City Council Committee on Economic Development, Technology and City Light 2/9/22

Good morning, everyone.

The February 9th, 2022 meeting on the Seattle City Council's Economic Development, Technology and City Light Committee will come to an order.

It is 9.33 a.m.

I'm Sarah Nelson, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Barres?

Here.

Sawant?

Present.

Strauss?

Present.

Herbold?

Chair Nelson?

Present.

For present.

Yes, and I note that Council Member Herbold has a health issue going on, so she will not be attending, but she could be joining late, so let's watch out for her possible attendance.

Okay, let's move into the approval of the agenda.

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

Seeing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

All right, I do want to note that there is a document that will be available on the record, and we can have that explained to a greater extent.

Many of the things that you will be hearing today will be available shortly for public viewing.

So at this time, we will open the remote public comment period for items on the agenda.

I thank everyone for their patience and cooperations as we operate this remote public comment system.

I'll moderate the public comment period in the following manner.

The public comment period for this meeting is up to 20 minutes, and with each speaker having up to one minute to speak, we have more than 20. It's possible that we could need to extend that a bit.

And speakers are called upon in the order in which they are registered online to provide comment.

Each speaker must call in from the phone number provided when registered and use the ID and passcode that was emailed upon confirmation.

Please note that this is different from the general meeting listen line ID listed on the agenda.

If you did not receive an email confirmation, please contact your spam or junk email folders.

In addition, I will – so, just a reminder.

I'll call on each speaker by name and in the order in which they registered on the council's website.

If you had not yet registered to speak, but would like to do so, you can sign up before the end of public comment hearing by going to the council's website at seattle.gov-council.

The public comment link is also listed on today's agenda.

Once I call the speaker's name, staff will unmute the appropriate microphone, and an automatic prompt of, you have been unmuted, will be the speaker's cue that it's their turn to speak, and then the speaker must press star six to begin speaking, and you'll hear that reminder over and over.

Please begin speaking by stating your name and the item that you are addressing.

The speakers will hear a chime when the 10-second mark comes up, and once you've heard that chime, please wrap up, and if they do not end their comments at the appropriate time, the speaker's microphone will be muted to allow for all people to speak.

Once you've completed your public comment, we ask that you please disconnect from the line, and if you plan to continue following this meeting, please do so via the Seattle Channel or the listening options listed on the agenda.

The public comment period is now open, and we will begin with the first speaker on the list.

Please remember to press star six after you hear the prompt, you have been unmuted.

And the first speaker is Randy Benneker, followed by Pete Hanning.

Go ahead, Randy.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Audio working?

Yes, it is.

Thanks for the opportunity to comment.

I'm Randy Banneker and I just wanted to thank you Madam Chair and your colleagues for convening a discussion this morning about small business and public safety.

As you know Seattle's a city of unique neighborhoods made even more engaging by the businesses in those neighborhoods and individually and collectively they contribute to a spirit of innovation and community support that has launched and sustained a multitude of national and global brands in our region.

Being the place where this happens is a very good thing because it offers economic opportunity to us and to our kids.

But for businesses to prosper they need a level of public safety and security that's welcoming to their customers and employees and protects their property and places of business.

Please carefully consider the comments you hear from the panel today and help them with the public safety challenges that limit their recovery and our city's recovery.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Next up is Pete, followed by Matthew Humphrey.

Go ahead, Pete.

Good morning, Madam Chair and other council members.

Thank you very much for hosting this important meeting.

My name is Pete Hanning, and I would like to speak this morning about nightlife and public safety.

Since the very beginning, nightlife and entertainment has been a vital part of Seattle's fabric, but we're in a scary inflection point.

The nightlife economy needs support.

Our guests and employees feel unsafe, and our businesses have been repeatedly broken into and vandalized.

We know that a vibrant nightlife economy is important in order to keep a safe and alive city.

Each precinct within our city has multitudes of entertainment zones.

We have a new and emerging nightlife community in the Soto that is both exciting and tenuous.

But without intentional support, it could easily falter.

I really urge the city to take a look at our nightlife economy as part of the tools in which we can use to pull ourselves out of there.

And finally, I want to say thank you for your genuine support.

For too long, the council has looked at the business community as only an ATM or an adversary.

This dynamic must change.

We need help and are a vital part of what makes Seattle special.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Pete.

Our next speaker, Matthew Humphrey, followed by Nick Ladd.

Yes, thank you for having me.

My name is Matthew Humphrey.

I'm speaking today on the matter of safety and economic recovery.

I'm a small business owner and resident of Seattle since 2005. I own two barbershops and a salon and spa in Ballard in the Roosevelt neighborhoods.

In the past two years, my business has been burglarized, shoplifted from, vandalized and harassed by people who appear to have mental and substance abuse issues, in total costing me over just $25,000 worth of damage and loss.

I lost that coverage after my first insurance claim and had difficulty finding new coverage because my businesses are located in Seattle and a prior claim due to the same.

In the past two months, we've experienced additional burglary, shoplifting, malicious damage to our properties, and attempted robbery.

I employ roughly 44 people in this city and pay a considerable tax base for the size of my business.

I'm not experiencing even the most basic security and safety I would expect in a great city like Seattle.

While you focus on root causes, small businesses, owners like me continue to suffer financially and emotionally as we try to return and rebuild after COVID.

Please turn your attention to creating real consequences for these criminals.

Thank you very much.

We're now up to Nick Ladd and then Michael Malini.

Nick Ladd, remember to press star six, please.

Sorry about that.

Sorry about that, everyone.

My name is Nick Ladd.

I'm the owner of Latin Last Brewing.

We're a new brewery in the U District on 45th and 8th next to the Blue Moon.

I just want to call in.

We're a small business.

We're struggling with security.

We've been in our space since August, have had three attempted break-ins, four broken windows.

countless graffiti, needles, drug paraphernalia, human excrement, et cetera, which is, you know, something we can deal with.

But the most frightening things that have happened is we've had multiple instances of mentally ill drugged out individuals coming into our business, threatening customers, threatening staff, to the point where we no longer feel safe staffing our business at the normal hours we were planning.

The economic impact is tremendous, but there is a very real fear in our employees every day they come into our business not knowing what's going to happen.

Unfortunately, we're about a block and a half away from a very large encampment.

And I could unequivocally say that a lot of the issues we have are directly related to that encampment and Seattle's general failure to support these individuals and support the neighbors who are living in communities.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

All right, next up, Michael Malini, followed by Naomi Lewis.

Hello, my name is Michael Malini.

I'm a renter in District 3. I'm expressing my concern about today's committee meeting not being an appropriate place for discussion of public safety, as the city already has a public safety and human services committee for public safety panels.

Instead of duplicating that work, this committee should focus its limited time this year on investing in the BIPOC business community, ensuring equitable access to capital, assisting businesses struggling from two straight years of reduced customer traffic due to the pandemic, preventing large technology companies from squeezing small businesses by taking a large percentage of sales and fees, and ensuring businesses aren't displaced by rising rents or development, as well as transitioning our electrical grid off of fossil fuels and protecting workers from wage theft.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Next up is Naomi, followed by Jennifer and Shane.

Good morning.

My name is Naomi Lewis.

I'm the owner of Luminati Labs.

I'm a facial studio on University and 47th and I've been open for two months and was recently robbed of all my product and equipment.

I also own a spa on Capitol Hill that's been in operation for 20 years.

So I'm no stranger to the crime and violence in the city.

However what I'm experiencing in the university district should be declared a district and emergency crisis.

We are in desperate need of police or safety officers walking the beat every single day.

The city council may have walked up and down the avenue assessing the situation of broken windows, graffiti, and testimonies of shop owners, but that is only scratching the surface.

The alleys are covered in needles, garbage, and witnesses.

The alleys are dark and inviting to criminal activity.

And this puts the workers, customers, clients not wanting to stay or shop in our neighborhood.

We're vital to this community, and we shouldn't be looked after like any other neighborhood.

On a daily, I'm fearful for my team safety.

We operate our business with panic buttons, mace, taser, and a guard dog.

No one should operate this way.

I'm inviting City Council Member Sarah Nelson to spend a full day with me so you can experience the essence of this neighborhood.

Thank you.

All right, Jennifer Antos and then Shane Clyburn.

And we will be muting at one minute because we've got a lot of folks on our list.

I'm sorry about that.

Go ahead, Jennifer Antos.

Thank you, Council.

Thank you.

My name is Jennifer Antos.

I'm the Director for the Neighborhood Farmers Market.

We organize markets in seven densely populated Seattle neighborhoods.

Each week we are faced with assaults harassment and behavioral health and overdose crises.

In the past month we have had two assaults on members of our staff who are no match for a person navigating the fog of substance abuse regardless of any training or resources I put in their hands.

I'm here to support the solutions presented by panelists today while Seattle goes head to head with the root causes affecting our community.

I'm asking council to seriously consider implementing the request made by panelists, and please coordinate increased resources that help people who are struggling to obtain services and affordable housing they need.

Thank you for your time and for working to improve the community we all share.

Thank you.

Shane Clyburn, followed by Gail and Louiki, and then Jonathan Fleming.

Go ahead.

Remember to press star six to speak.

Can you hear me now?

Yes.

OK, sorry.

You're welcome to begin.

All right, Shane, we're having a hard time.

Sorry about that.

Can you hear me now?

Yes, go ahead.

Sorry, it kept switching me back and forth on mute.

Hi, my name is Shane Clyburn.

Thanks for having me.

I manage the U District Market for Seattle Neighborhood Farmers Markets with Jennifer, and I live in the 6th District.

As she mentioned, for the past several months, markets have seen an increase in incidents involving people experiencing homelessness.

A few weeks ago, I was one of those people physically assaulted while standing between One of the market vendors and a man who appeared intoxicated and probably unhoused.

I wasn't injured and neither was the vendor or anyone else nearby.

I am concerned that these public safety conversations often seem to be focused on crime reduction at the expense of support for people currently living on the streets of Seattle.

Security is important but we must also do what is needed to help those in need.

The man who attacked me was not a hardened criminal and I'm not angry with him for what happened.

He and others like him need help including stable housing and access to care services.

I hope that the solutions we propose include the support necessary to help those experiencing homelessness.

If we want to make Seattle a safer city for everyone that must include support for the most vulnerable and desperate among us.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you very much.

Gail Nowicki then Jonathan Fleming.

Let's see, Gail is present.

Are you there, Star?

Yeah, can you hear me?

Yes.

Okay, my name is Gail Nowicki.

I own and run Gargoyles Statuary, a niche and legacy business on University Way for the last 29 years.

And it's become very unsafe and unstable in the district over the past few years.

In the past two weeks, my neighbors, two of my neighbors in my building have been broken into and vandalized.

A few months ago, I had a pack of fabrics full of heroin needles put through my mail slot, which I stepped into and luckily did not stab myself.

Every day we deal with people who are visibly high on drugs and mentally unstable and constantly feel unsafe.

We have had our window vandalized multiple times over the past year and are fearful to make changes because we just know it's going to happen again.

We need more officers and patrols on a regular basis and social services to find ways to help the mentally ill. and homeless people that are living on the out and just causing a lot of trouble because they really don't have anywhere else to go.

As a business owner, we shouldn't be dealing with these problems on a daily basis.

We're not trained to deal with drug addicts and the mentally ill.

And we just really need your help to support us.

This has been a long time we've been in business and I've never seen things so bad.

So thank you for hearing this.

And that's it.

Thank you very much.

Next, we have Jonathan Fleming, then Shauna McMahon and Peter Convit.

Hi, my name is Jonathan Fleming.

I'm here to speak about safety issues in Pioneer Square.

Together with my wife, we own Pioneer Square D&E.

We're across from the fire station on 2nd Avenue.

Our story isn't much different than others in regards to the impact of COVID-19.

However, What I'm here to talk about is the issue of safety in Pioneer Square and the impact it's had on our business.

Over the last three years, we've seen increases in theft, vandalism, and general aggression behavior towards our team and our guests.

We've dealt with multiple break-ins in the last two years.

The facade of the restaurant has been vandalized on multiple occasions.

We've had our cabinets tossed while we had our backs turned and the kitchen to run food to a table.

We've had our outside furniture stolen.

These issues, and more that I don't have time to tell, have had a severe impact on our business.

Even before COVID we were seeing a decline in revenue during dinner hours but we fear that without change it's only to get only going to get worse.

We fear that these experiences and others like it have created a stigma that Pioneer Square is an area that should be avoided.

There are empty retail storefronts all over our neighborhood.

It's time for action from the City of Seattle to help businesses like ours or otherwise storefronts more storefronts will be empty similar to ours.

In order for our business to survive We need people to feel safe coming to work on a daily basis.

Sorry about that.

Let's see.

You're welcome.

Anybody who wasn't able to finish their comments, you're welcome to send them in and we will make sure that they are available and on the public record.

Okay.

Let's see.

Shauna McMahon, then Peter Condit and Michelle Kenny.

Go ahead, Peter, press star six.

Oh, hello.

Sorry, I thought it was Shauna's turn first.

You're welcome.

Shauna, are you there?

Good morning.

Hold on, Peter.

I apologize.

Shauna, are you available?

Council Member Shauna is listed as not present.

Oh, sorry.

Go ahead, Peter.

Thank you.

Hello, this is Peter Condit.

I'm a District Six resident and a small business owner.

I'm calling to say that the city should not be responding to systemic inequality and the lack of housing in our city by criminalizing acts of survival and blaming individuals in crisis.

Recidivism is nearly guaranteed when people are forced into the criminal legal system and are later released into an unchanged or worsened economic situation.

To prevent harm, this committee should focus on equitable community-led investments and not on notions of increased policing.

which only operates by threatening or perpetrating violence.

You should center the injustices that low-income residents often face, such as wage theft, and work on getting people's basic needs met.

In the meantime, I would rather a person steal what is necessary to stabilize themselves and let business owners pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

We should not base city policies on a hand-selected few business owners' impressions and opinions.

I do not like that public dollars are being spent on this panel discussion today, which will inevitably prioritize the profits of capital owners who have a seat at the table.

Thank you very much.

Next up is, let's see, Michelle Kenny, then Pipo Bui and David Haynes.

Oh, okay.

Michelle is not present.

Pipo Bui, please.

Hi my name is Kipo Bui.

I'm a Seattle resident and co-founder of Seattle Coffee Works and independent coffee locations across the city.

During the pandemic our cafes have been broken into looted and set on fire.

Our people have been spit on punched in the face and stalked.

You're already starting to diminish these kinds of behaviors with more social workers mental health support bike patrols on the street and attention.

Thank you.

I hope that you will continue to do so with humanity and compassion.

We know these people.

And most of them, including those who are living on the street, do not commit these bad behaviors.

Let's not blame an entire group of people for the property damage and assault.

Instead, please consider putting more ARPA or other government money into grants that can help small businesses to rebuild, especially those that have been the victims of vicious and ongoing assault.

We've spent thousands of unreimbursed dollars replacing windows, doors, and equipment at a time when our revenues have been down more than 50% for two years.

And instead of blaming unhoused people, please ask the well-off people of this city to turn off their computers, get out of their houses, and come downtown or to their local shopping district.

Walk around, greet people, make eye contact, smile, laugh.

Thank you very much.

Next up is David Haynes, then followed by Lois Hu and Jim Cairns.

Thank you.

David Haynes, I live in District 7, and I'm witness to evil criminals taking over Pioneer Square Park and the entrance to the new restaurant every night, conducting uncivil war on community, while cops are not even trained properly, always quick to come up with excuses why they can't and won't arrest evil criminals ruining downtown.

The majority of Seattle's public safety crisis is directly linked to city council, the mayor, U.S.

Attorney, The police and a federal judge signing off on unconstitutional police reform, exempting drug pushers from jail, destroying lives daily, selling crack, meth, and heroin, listed nonviolent misdemeanor, escalating violence, imploding society.

It's obvious the inept, sabotaging, unqualified, race-baiting political police chief does more favors for the criminal underworld with his leadership than the law-abiding community's In fact, the police chief thinks it's more important to relationship build with law-abiding citizens being politicked by the chief with his goal to BS community into believing the real problem is homelessness, which gets blamed for most of the crime so cops can have an easier payday, while counsel and business community never demanded investigation into the.

All right, next up is Lois Code, then Jim Cairns and Mo Kahn.

Hello, Madam Chair and council members.

My name is Lois Ko.

I own a small ice cream shop called Sweet Alchemy in the University District, as well as Ballard and Capitol Hill.

I'm speaking up today because the safety of my staff and customers, as well as the economic vibrancy of my neighborhood is being threatened.

I've done business on the streets of University District for 16 years and have never felt for the safety of my staff and neighbors as I do now.

A few late night businesses on my block are considering closing earlier, and we are not even back to pre-pandemic hours of operations.

How many times is it too much to have guns pulled on us, whips, swords, knives, and machetes lashed at us, and broken bottles thrown, laid, and stabbed at us?

How many times can a business withstand the same window and glass being broken and having nothing stolen and sometimes having everything stolen?

Every time we're assaulted, we feel marginalized and unwanted, and we question the existence of our business.

The unrest in our streets is shaping the future of our business and street landscape.

We need a safe neighborhood for a thriving business segment.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Jim Cairns, then Mo Khan.

Jim, are you there?

Press star six, please.

Okay, if you're having trouble joining or speaking, we will come back to you.

Let's hear from Mo Khan, please.

Hi, my name is, hi, thank you very much.

My name is Mo Khan.

I'm the third generation owner of Cedar's Restaurant in the U District.

We've never seen over the past 40 years this business has been around We've never seen the U District in its current state.

We have feces at our doors that we have to clean up almost on a weekly basis.

We have needles.

We have our customers being blowed smoke on.

We have our staff having to deal with individuals who are very, very violent and, you know, on drugs.

And so what we need is our police officers and our social workers to have more of a strong presence in the U District right now.

And I believe we can do this if we can all work together and come to an adequate solution.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our last three presenters are Justin Fogel, Aurora Bennett, and Lina Ono.

Yeah, this is Justin Fogel.

We run and operate three locations, Health and Beauty, Hair Removal Company, Sugar Plum, and the U District Ballard, and in downtown Seattle.

We have been treated very poorly in regards to lots of hostility, having our staff accosted, and a lot of the similar comments that have already been said by many of the business owners and residents in the North Seattle and the Seattle market in general.

Currently, we have landlords that don't want to do anything about safety, say that we have to externalize it, pay for it ourselves.

And the market in general has really made it that we have heavily questioned whether or not Seattle is really going to be the long-term place that we want to continue to be at.

So we asked the city council to really review for police and safety and health professionals so that we can actually get a safe city.

We don't currently have that.

Thank you very much.

Next up is Donna Holloway.

I don't know.

Oh, excuse me.

No, this is, has Aurora Bennett just spoken?

No, that's me.

Aurora Bennett.

Hi, I'm a lifetime resident of Seattle.

I grew up here.

I managed my family's property management company for the last 10 years.

We've been active 40 years.

We have a lot of low income and affordable rentals in the South Seattle area.

We've always felt like our communities have been the dumping ground for issues in the city.

But these days, it's rampant in most neighborhoods.

So the newest result of crime in our city that we're seeing is the redlining that's taking place with our insurance.

As other people have mentioned, we've lost coverage and we've had to seek out new coverage.

We're being told we're going to lose coverage next year.

And it's just for being in Seattle.

We know that next year, by losing further coverage, we're not going to have anywhere to go with what to do when we do have these instances.

So we're really questioning how small businesses are going to exist in Seattle if the city is not taking accountability for the issues that are facing us.

We offer basic human needs to people that need low income housing and we do our best but we need more support and we are hoping that all of our tenants can remain safe

Thank you very much.

We have slightly extended the 20-minute time limit for these public comments.

However, there are just three more presenters.

So if there is no objection, the public comment period will be extended to about three minutes.

Hearing no objection, we will continue with these last speakers.

All right, Lena Ono, then followed by Dan Crookston, and then Dawn Halloway, and then we will close public comment.

Go ahead, Lena.

Star six.

Lina, you are listed as present, so please press star six or we will move on to our next speaker.

Okay, let's put a hold on Lina and we will go to Dan Crookston and then Donna Holloway.

Hi, this is Dan Crookston.

I'm the owner here in Ballard of Mean Sandwich and I just wanted to I have my concern of Van House and the services that need to be provided to them and my concern that Mark Barnes, the CEO of the new homelessness agency here in King County isn't here on the call with us or if he's going to be getting the minutes from this particular meeting so that he hears these concerns as well.

My main concern is just the safety of my staff and my customers.

and the profuse amount of human feces, needles, and clearly folks that need help.

And I wanna hope this commission will come up with ways that the business community can be helpful as well as the community at large.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Donna Holloway, please.

Star six.

Hello.

Hello, my name is Donna Holloway.

Thanks for making time for me.

So I live, I've lived in Georgetown for maybe 20 plus years.

I own two small businesses and I'm on the Georgetown Community Council board.

And I've personally experienced immense amount of theft that has put me out of business for five weeks, like every tool I have stolen.

I've been threatened personally with a hatchet and a machete by individuals who are known to the police, who have been arrested and then are repeatedly released.

And I'm hearing what a lot of business owners are talking about, where Many of my neighboring businesses, once their lease is coming up for renewal, are not going to renew in Seattle.

So I'm just concerned that the vacancies will increase if City Council does not take some action to protect the citizens, both the housed and the unhoused.

Thank you very much, and I'll give one more opportunity for Lina Ono to speak.

Otherwise, we'll just close the meeting.

Lina, are you available?

Star six, please.

All right, this closes the public comment period.

And I just want to note that we've heard from a select few business owners in the city and we'll speak to other ways that we have heard from business owners that have called and emailed into our office.

And so let's go on to the item of business.

Will the clerk please call the item that is on the agenda into the record?

Item one, a round table discussion on small business public safety concerns and recommendations, briefing and discussion only.

All right, we will introduce the panel presenters in a moment.

But first of all, I just want to again, thank everyone for taking the time.

I understand that small business owners are really busy and it's hard to make time to make testimony at these council meetings.

I also want to thank, there were about 75 people that have so far written our office and many of council members have gotten some of the same letters.

And I appreciate you taking the time.

These are folks all over the city that are voicing similar and yet very particular concerns.

And then finally, the people who have showed us their neighborhoods.

We have taken walking tours in Columbia City, U District, and Belltown, and we have heard from not just business owners, but also nonprofits, arts venues who are struggling with many of the same interests.

So thank you so much for taking the time.

I am hearing and listening to you.

So let me be clear.

This is a crisis.

These issues that we're hearing are they are escalating.

They are intensifying, becoming more brazenly disruptive to businesses and dangerous to staff and customers.

And so I just want to raise the level of importance of this issue and urgency that we hear these stories and also Think about some recommendations that we can make right now, because we all know that crime is a hugely complex issue.

Even having more officers on the street won't cut it, because even before there was such a staffing shortage, there still did not seem to be enough to start addressing rising crime well before the pandemic hit.

And I do want to thank Mayor Harrell and Chief Diaz and Scoggins for participating in the press conference last week where the executive made clear their commitment to addressing this issue and I look forward to working with them and also perhaps our city attorney to really put some things in place that can make a difference right now.

So I was struck when I was talking to, when my staff was talking to businesses and non-profits in our tours and individually on phone calls, et cetera, that yes, there is property damage, break-ins, repeat vandalism, arson.

And these things are creating situations that these businesses are thinking that they are almost no, that it's going to be difficult to remain viable in our city.

But one thing, a common thread in these conversations is that this is not just about property crime, because these small employers have mentioned assaults on their employees, threats on their employees, you know, entering with gunpoint.

And so I do want to refine or nuance this topic, because this is not about crime on business or property crime.

This is about violent crime.

And that is why that's another reason that I am raising the urgency of this because we have to think about this as impacts on human beings.

So I want to make the point that and respond a little bit to the to the commenters that question why we're having this discussion in this committee.

We've received some emails that are saying that this committee should be focusing on investing in the BIPOC business community, ensuring equitable access to capital, assisting businesses struggling from two straight years of reduced customer traffic due to the pandemic, and ensuring businesses are not displaced by higher rents, etc.

And so what I would like to say is that those items are in my 2022 work plan, which will be finalized very soon.

So we are not not focusing on these issues.

However, businesses are closing.

And we've recently heard of Sneaker City downtown.

Our office talked to them.

They are vacating their premises downtown tomorrow.

and they cite rising crime and threats to their employees as the reason that they are leaving.

We're losing businesses.

We're losing their tax revenue.

We are losing the gathering places that are the nodes of our neighborhoods and communities.

We are losing jobs, and we are losing livelihoods.

So public safety is key to economic recovery, and that is precisely why we are having this conversation in this committee And I will be working with colleagues who want to dig in on the ways that the things that we hear today are relevant to their committee.

And I welcome collaboration with them and with the executive to really come up with some solutions in the very near term that can help.

Because we recognize that crime is an extremely complicated issue.

We're not going to be able to arrest our way out of this issue, even if we had an adequately staffed SPD department.

So I would like to now turn it over to our emcee, Don Blakeney, who is the president of the University District Partnership.

He will call on panelists to introduce themselves and then run us through the agenda that we've got before us.

There will be ample time for council members to ask questions and make comments.

Just want to say that this is not a Kvetch session.

We are trying to have a productive conversation around things that we can do right now.

And these are the experts on the front lines of what's happening across the city.

And that is why I'm giving them a seat at the table to surface their wisdom and expertise going forward.

So with that, I would like to pass the baton to Don Blekeny.

and take it from there.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Madam Chair Nelson.

And again, we really appreciate you and the other committee members taking the time this morning to hear this important discussion about economic impacts that are related to the crime we've been hearing about and the unaddressed behavioral health issues that we're experiencing here in Seattle, small businesses in our business districts.

I want to thank all of the small businesses who called in today to share their stories.

It takes time out of your day, and it's important that we elevate this, that we can all have a shared understanding of what's going on.

As Sarah mentioned, I'm Don Blakney.

I'm the Executive Director of the U District Partnership.

We represent one of Seattle's largest and most diverse commercial districts situated alongside the University of Washington's campus.

And today I'm gonna facilitate a discussion and wanna thank our panelists for taking time out of their days to join us here and to share their experiences from over the last year.

Panelists on our virtual table, I'm just going to read through who's joining us and then as people get to their turn to speak, they can introduce themselves more thoroughly.

But today from Pioneer Square we have Lisa Howard from the Alliance for Pioneer Square.

We have also Tariqa Waters from Martyr Sauce MS Pam.

From West Seattle, we have Dan Austin, the owner of Peel and Press, and Kamala Saxton, who is the owner of Marination Makai.

From Chinatown ID, we have Quinn Pham, and I think we might have Susan Leaf, who's the owner of Fuji Bakery.

Quinn represents Friends of Little Saigon.

And from Ballard, we have Mike Stewart with the Ballard Alliance and Oskar Valesko-Schmitz, who's the owner of Dockside Cannabis.

He also has a cannabis store in Shoreline and in Soto.

And then from Soto, we have Aaron Goodman representing the Soto BIA.

And from Columbia City, we have Justin Pritchett, who is the general manager of Arc Lodge Cinemas.

Each has their own set of stories that they'll illustrate the economic impacts that they're seeing from repeated crime and unaddressed behavioral health issues.

And it goes without saying that these economic impacts, when compounded with the recent impacts of the pandemic, are devastating and require urgent city action.

We need to hear from our panelists.

I said, after we hear from our panelists, we will share a series of recommendations for the city to consider that aim to address these impacts and the system gaps that we are seeing in our communities.

Again, I'd like to thank Council Member Nelson for her leadership and attention to these issues and for having us here today.

And we'll begin this discussion.

I think I'll hand the mic over here to Lisa Howard, the Executive Director for the Alliance for Pioneer Square, and I'll ask that all of our panelists keep their remarks at least initially to three minutes so that we can leave time for discussion with the committee at the end of this.

But Lisa, thank you for joining us today.

And I'd like to interrupt.

The goal was to have citywide representation from each council district.

We have no one right now.

We were not able to get anyone from District 5. That's because Council President hasn't covered.

Just kidding.

But I just wanted to explain that that is one district that is not represented in this panel today.

Go on.

Thank you.

Awesome.

Thank you, Don.

And thank you for having us here today.

As Don said, I'm the executive.

I'm Lisa Howard, the executive director of the Alliance for Pioneer Square.

I really wish you were here to talk today to talk to you about economic development, kind of in a normal sense.

The programs and partnerships we have been working on to bring recovery to our business districts, how we're supporting our existing businesses and our individual DEI work to ensure our organizations are listening, learning and growing and creating a welcome community for all, but we're not.

We're here to talk about public safety and how these issues have perpetuated the COVID-19 pandemic's acute impact on Seattle's economic well-being.

We are seeing in our communities and hear from our constituents that Pioneer safety is by far their top concern.

Just last week, I received an email, one of hundreds that have come in over the last two years.

Some are more angry, some are more sad, but they all have the same tone.

Here's a quote from it.

As much as we love the city and the charm of Pioneer Square, we are not able to stay due to the safety and concern for our staff.

As a community, we weather through the pandemic, the riots, the rising crime.

It has made the city and the area unobtainable to run a normal business.

After four years in Pioneer Square, we have made the painful choice to leave.

Pioneer Square maintains the second lowest office occupancy rate in the city.

Daytime workforce foot traffic is down 79% to pre-pandemic levels.

Major employers signal that it's not the pandemic that's keeping them away, but it is their ability to keep their employees safe.

Company leaders and even government agencies have publicly spoken about threats to safety directly to the media.

We are losing our public spaces and our economic vitality.

We recently conducted a public safety survey in the neighborhood and the results show the decline we feel.

In a two month period, September, October 2021, 64 business owners reported over 850 incidences of assaults, property crime and theft.

36 owners reported a collective cost of all criminal activity they experienced to be over $190,000.

Over half the respondents say crime have increased from 2020 to 2021. 71 say that their employees feel unsafe and 82% feel that their customers are unsafe.

I am here because I have hope.

I hope that we can collectively work to build the welcoming and equitable city that we want to see.

And because those who have chosen to stay and fight for what we've built need your help now more than ever.

At that, I'd like to introduce artists and Pioneer Square Gallery owner, Tarika Waters, to share her perspectives.

Thank you.

Morning, everybody.

Yeah, I'll just start.

It's kind of weird because I feel like I'm just going to echo a lot of points made.

So yes, my name is Tarika Waters.

I run Marta Sauce Art Gallery and now the newly extended Pop Art Museum on Jackson Street, South Jackson Street.

Been in the neighborhood for 10 years.

And yeah, I mean, the stories are not unlike everyone else's.

My building has been broken into multiple times.

My personal health and safety has been put on the line.

more times than I can count, removing human waste and needles.

But I want to make sure that I'm crystal clear that I'm not focusing on one particular demographic of folks, especially when it comes to removing human waste.

I have had issues with just even folks from outside of Seattle coming in, especially being so close to the arenas or the stadiums.

So there's been, I've also been threatened with racial slurs and assault weapons.

And due to public health, due to safety concerns with me and my staff, I can only operate by appointment only, which is a little disheartening at this point, especially with having to But trying to stay optimistic and trying to stay on a more positive side of things and trying to use art in particular as a way to, you know, bring light and joy to the neighborhood.

You want, you know, just foot traffic, you want folks to be able to come in and enjoy the work, but that's not what I have 90% of the time in the neighborhood.

So yeah, I just, I'll just keep my remarks short and sweet.

That's pretty much, I'm sure we'll talk more about different things as we go along, but it is quite difficult, and I just really hope that this starts to turn in a way where I can continue to invest in Pioneer Square, because this is still one of my most favorite neighborhoods, and I love it, and I really do.

I really do champion this neighborhood ongoing, and so I want to see the best for it.

So yeah, that's all I have to say.

Thank you, Lisa and Tarika.

I appreciate you sharing your perspectives from Pioneer Square.

I'm going to turn our attention to West Seattle and District 1. Dan Austin, the owner of Peel and Press, also involved with the West Seattle Chamber.

Dan, are you here to join us?

Thank you.

Dan Austin with the West Seattle Chamber of Commerce and also Seattle Restaurant Alliance.

I don't want to keep talking the same things over, but I just need to share a couple of experiences we've had out here.

This is not an unhoused individual, so I know a lot of people think we're going to be focusing on drug issues and homeless.

This person lives in a pretty nice house not far from me, was out on bail, broke into my restaurant at the beginning of the pandemic.

caused a lot of damage, was arrested, and was already out on bail for another break-in that he had done.

While out on bail for my break-in, continued to do break-ins, so another three or four businesses were broken into, one actually involving SWAT having to be called out to Westwood Village, because a gun from a jewelry store was stolen in one of the break-ins.

So a risk to public safety, and it's just repetitive.

This is an issue that we have where these people are being released right away and to go out and victimize.

And every time I watched another business get victimized, I felt re-victimized every time I watched it.

And it was heartbreaking to consistently have that pain back on me and to see these other businesses be victimized yet again.

Um, I know some people are wondering why we're talking about this in in this committee.

Um, you know, this public safety piece, especially with employees, restaurants right now are incredibly tough to get staff.

Um, and talking with people through the Seattle Restaurant Alliance, there are.

Folks that are losing people because they're unsafe coming to work and downtown a Capitol Hill and other areas.

And it directly impacts our ability to expand our hours or to open back up for brunch or open patio sections or whatever that this is keeping our sales down during a time that we're struggling for any sales we can possibly get.

I was broken into twice in the first year of the pandemic.

Those two break-ins were not covered by insurance because they were just below the threshold that made it worth it, and those are the differences from me being break-even to losing money.

We worked really hard to try to just break even, and those took out any hope of being financially solvent that year.

So we really need to focus on this public safety piece for the safety of our staffs.

And we need to come up with some solutions that I'm not saying we need more armed officers, but we need people to be out on the streets to be able to help.

We had someone move in under my deck.

I have a wooden deck and they moved in with a camping stove.

And the police wouldn't come out because it was on a private.

It was on our end.

I had to ask them to leave before they would send somebody out.

And that person was in mental health crisis.

We could have burned a building down and taken out six businesses.

We just, we need more resources.

My staff and restaurant workers and workers in general are not social service workers.

We're not trained to deal with people with mental health issues and experiencing those things.

We all want to be compassionate and we need more support so that we can have our businesses thrive.

So thank you.

Thank you, Dan.

And I'll turn it over to Kamala Saxton, the owner of Marination Matai.

Hi there, I'm Kamala Saxton.

I am one of the owners of Marination and Super 6. We have locations in West Seattle, South Lake Union, and Columbia City.

We did have a location in Capitol Hill and a bar in Pioneer Square that we have closed since the pandemic.

I'm a resident, a proud resident of District 2 and of Seattle.

I love being a business owner in Seattle.

We've been in business since 2009. Currently, we employ 70 people.

Prior to the pandemic, we employed 120 people In the last two years, you're going to hear this story over and over again.

It's the same story we've been broken into.

We've had property damage.

We've had theft.

We've been threatened by individuals.

But most importantly, those things can get replaced.

The safes that we lost can get replaced.

What we cannot replace is the safety that my employees feel, and that safety that they don't feel, the safety of our guests, and even the safety of those individuals that have caused this damage or committed crimes in our businesses, their safety is also important to us.

And really, collectively, the goal, our goal as a business and my goal in this call and in the work I do is to collectively work with all stakeholders in this city to figure out how do we regain that sense of safety because we are losing employees.

To Dan's point, we're already having a tough time to retaining employees, to recruiting employees, but if we cannot create a sense of safety, no matter what we do, we cannot retain those employees that we desperately need.

So we look forward to figuring out some kind of collective way we can keep all stakeholders safe.

Thank you, Kamala.

That's helpful to hear.

And I apologize for not acknowledging your Super 6 in Columbia City.

It's a great restaurant.

I want to turn our attention to the Little Saigon area.

We've heard a lot about it in the media, and we have Quinn Pham here, who's the executive director of Friends of Little Saigon, and that district is really the intersection of Districts 1, 2, and 3, so it kind of touches a bunch of parts of Seattle, and it's the intersection between downtown and Southeast Seattle.

So thank you, Quinn, for being here today to tell us about what you're experiencing.

Yes, thank you, Don.

And thank you, council members, for allowing us to talk about this.

Again, my name is Quinn Pham, executive director for the Friends of Little Saigon.

As Don has illustrated, we've been in the news a lot and the stories have not been great.

The perception of safety, as you've heard, is just at a level where our community members, our staff, our volunteers, folks just don't want to be here.

And we, pre-pandemic, we already had high vacancy rates and now with new developments as well, we cannot bring in new businesses.

We've had brokers and people go to us, a non-profit that's very small staff, asking us for help in recruiting businesses.

And there's, when they, when the businesses come and look at the nice spaces, they assume that it's great until they spend some time in the neighborhood and then they're they just peace out.

They just don't want to invest here.

And I, the issues at 12th and Jackson's are very complex.

It's, I have to say that it's a combination of various people from very diverse backgrounds, from places the from outside of the neighborhood, but also people from our community.

And so we feel like we're in this place where we don't know what to do anymore.

And my businesses want to take matters into their own hands.

And I fear for their only livelihoods as well.

In the Chinatown ID, we're lucky in a sense that we have had these struggles for many years, and that's why we've established a public safety coordinator and some various very community-rooted efforts to work towards safety in our neighborhood.

But that's just not enough.

And that our volunteers and our community walks and folks that have been trying to take on some of these strategies, they're also at a tipping point where they cannot take on, continue to do some of the work because they fear for their lives as well.

We've seen many shootings on 12th and Jackson as a result from the black market.

We've seen many, many overdoses.

And this is something that I don't want our families and our community members to see every day.

It shouldn't be something that they should be experiencing every day.

And so I would love to continue this conversation and think about both accountability on various levels.

I think that's where our community is.

Our head is right now is up there.

It's just no accountability on any side.

And there needs to be.

Thank you.

Thank you, Quinn.

And it looks like we did have Fuji Bakery join us.

I think she's in the waiting room if she could get elevated to the panel.

Suzian Li is the owner of Fuji Bakery, which is in Chinatown International District, but also their distribution centers in Interbay and have been around for about five or six years, I believe, at this point.

Suzian, are you with us here in the panel now?

Looks like you're here.

Can you go ahead and unmute?

Thank you for joining us.

Oh, hi, everyone.

Yeah, I have a bakery, Fuji Bakery, and there are two locations, one in ID and one in Interbay.

And both locations, you know, we have had our some challenges that's been mentioned in this meeting right now.

You know, attempted break in.

We have our vehicles, delivery vehicles vandalized.

And just this morning, we have graffiti over our delivery vans.

You know, this is a day-to-day challenge, you know, other than, apart from the pandemic challenges, finding people who are willing to work in the food industry, like everyone mentioned, is public safety.

ID, the ID store since August last year, we already lost count how many times our glass has been broken.

I think it's at least four times now, four or five times, I can't remember now.

And these are not break-ins out of need, but I see that talk about a lot in social media.

These are just vandalism.

They will break it for no reason.

They don't even attempt to come in or take anything.

They just do that.

It makes employees feel extremely unsafe.

And the police is not that they don't care, or they have no tools to do anything.

They don't have the power to do anything about vandalism.

Pretty much, we can just file a form online.

And this has been very frustrating at every level.

I almost could open another location now, but I just, I can't do it in Seattle.

This is not a city that is being very supporting of small businesses.

That's how I really been feeling for since 2020.

Thank you, Susan, for sharing your perspective.

I want to also move us along to another neighborhood, Ballard in District 6. We have Mike Stewart here to join us to talk a little bit about what he sees, and then we'll hear from Oscar Velasco Schmitz, who owns Dockside Cannabis.

Great.

Thank you very much, Don.

And thank you, Madam Chair, for pulling this meeting together.

Good morning, city council members.

My name is Mike Stewart.

I'm executive director of the Ballard Alliance, and we're an organization that represents hundreds of businesses and thousands of residents in the downtown Ballard core.

You know, the rapid growth of criminal activity in Ballard is real, and it is having a significant economic impact upon our local and independent retail shops, restaurants, and other business types.

You know, over the past few months, Ballard business owners and their staff have had to endure regular misdemeanor and felony criminal acts that go unchecked and experience long 911 response times.

the Seattle Police Department is even able to respond at all.

Additionally, we're hearing from business owners and community members as well who are calling 911 each time they witnessed a crime.

Stop calling altogether because they feel that, quote, calling the police is an exercise in futility, as one business owner stated.

Some businesses have also been caught in the feedback loop of reporting on the non-emergency line.

I raise these points because the number of 911 calls that are reported are grossly underestimated and is not a true reflection of the actual number of crimes that are happening around the city.

So that's why I'm so thankful for this opportunity today for you to hear not only from panelists, but from all of the callers as well about what's really happening in the city.

I'd like to share a few stats and examples of what Ballard businesses are experiencing based on some data that the Ballard Alliance has collected between October of 2021 and early February of this year.

The fastest police response time was 12 minutes.

The slowest was seven hours.

And the average response time was one and a half hours.

On January 30th, an employee of a Ballard business was threatened by a man with a two foot long silver pole with a six to seven inch serrated knife attached to the end of it.

The assailant told the employee, I'm going to blank kill you.

Last week, a business owner was threatened by an individual wielding a large wrench that had to be wrestled away from the perpetrator.

A local coffee shop had a store kicked in and items stolen with an estimated cost of $2,500 to $5,000 in repairs and replacements.

A break-in and robbery last year at a local handmade jewelry shop resulted in a loss of nearly $20,000.

Finally, I have personally spent countless hours, and I know Councilmember Strauss has spent close to as many as well, over the past year working with the community and the criminal justice system on one individual who has committed countless repeat offenses in Ballard.

Last year, she pled guilty to three felony accounts that included assaulting the caretaker of a local church, which is in our district, with a brass pipe.

She was released to the street late last summer, came to Ballard, and began her pattern of harassing the community.

In December, she was arrested for violation of an anti-harassment order, and at the same time, is now facing nearly 10 additional misdemeanor charges.

Were it not for my efforts, the efforts of the council member, and the efforts of the victims in this case, I have no doubt that the situation would have continued unchecked, putting the entire community at risk.

So just wrapping up, in Ballard, our business owners, we've made it through several waves of the pandemic, but not without cost and not without concern about potential impacts of another variant.

They simply cannot absorb the added cost of replacing smashed windows, installing expensive security systems, or hiring private security, let alone operate in an environment where the employees and customers are at risk for their personal safety.

Thank you, Mike.

I'll hand it over to Oscar now to talk a little bit about his business.

Good morning.

Thank you, Don, for seeing and to all of the council members present and to my other business colleagues.

My name is Oscar Velasco Schmitz, and I raise a family here in Seattle in District 6, and I'm the block office for our neighborhood, and I participate with the North Precinct Advisory Council through the Premont Chamber.

I operate businesses in Soto, the Fremont-Ballard-Leroy Corridor, almost in District 5 across the street from District 5 at 85th and Aurora, just north of Green Lake, and also own and operate a business at 150th and Aurora in Shoreline.

It's not for lack of participation that all of our businesses are here today and experiencing Not just vandalism, but real crime and violent crime with firearms.

Our business is in a unique position that we cannot accept credit cards, given the status of cannabis federally.

Visa and MasterCard will not allow us to use their protocols.

This presents a very unique opportunity to criminals that would otherwise not be able not be able to get their hands on very valuable items like paper money or a valuable product that has street value.

I think I just want to echo the voices of the other participants here is that we really need to protect the lives and livelihoods of not just our employees, our customers, but everybody that has any kind of tangential relation to these businesses, whether they're walking down the street or the elderly that come in as patients to our businesses.

I don't have answers to this.

These are symptoms of a larger breakdown in our civil society.

We all know this, we all acknowledge this.

And some of the mitigating factors that we've taken into account are increase of lighting, increase of security, increase of hardening of our infrastructure, roll downs.

And at the same time, these come at a cost.

And we have to balance that cost with being able to provide a living wage to our employees, to be able to provide goods and services to our customers and communities.

And at some point, We will reach a breaking point.

We don't have the luxury of being able to move out of the city of Seattle to be able to operate our businesses, because the licenses that we operate under the Liquor and Cannabis Board are delegated to a given jurisdiction.

So we can't just say we're leaving to the burbs and leaving Seattle.

We don't want to.

We serve our communities.

This is a wonderful city that has a variety and diversity of viewpoints.

I don't know, we're kind of at our wit's end along with everybody else.

We've had, like I said, burglaries, but more importantly, I think, you know, products and money can be replaced, but lives cannot.

And so we thank you for convening this forum.

I look forward to chatting about what other steps we can take as a community and how we can move the conversation forward and have real action in place.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you, Oscar.

And I know that you have a spot in Soto, too.

We're going to hear now from Erin Goodman, who has a variety of businesses within her district.

Erin, thanks for being here today.

Thank you.

Good morning.

Erin Goodman with the Soto Business Improvement Area.

I have come before this Council many times in the past seven years to talk about public safety issues in Soto.

In preparing my comments today, I reviewed some of those past statements, and it is so frustrating that I could have pulled out any one of those previous speeches and given it today.

The issues affecting public safety in Soto remain the same, but the severity, frequency, and impacts have gotten much worse.

In 2015, when I spoke about a business that had been broken into four times in the previous month, I couldn't imagine that I would be here before you today to tell you that I have businesses in Soto that have been broken into more than 20 times in a single month.

Soto businesses, their employees and customers deal with smashed windows, burglaries, organized drug markets, human trafficking, vehicle vandalism, arson, aggressive behavior, and threats on a daily basis.

Part of this is related to the unique nature of SOTO.

We are largely an industrial district with businesses that spread out over acres with their work operations, trucks, tools, and equipment in work yards outside of a traditional building structure.

But even a traditional building structure hasn't kept some of our businesses safe.

And the method of entry are getting more and more daring every day and harder and harder to guard against.

Along with the more normal broken window entry or crowbar door, we have seen thieves cutting holes into the walls to gain entry, breaking in through the roof, and in one case, driving a car through an exterior wall to access the business.

So while Soto businesses have increased their security measures, installing new camera and alarm systems, new fencing, hiring security, installing better locks and stronger doors and windows, They have literally been unable to keep thieves out of their businesses.

In Soto, metal theft drives a lot of the burglaries.

And in an industrial area, we have a lot of metal.

From businesses that sell construction materials, copper pipes and wires, to manufacturers that use these items to make essential products, to the hundreds of trucks that move goods around our city and across our region.

What is most frustrating about this situation is that we know the name of the most prolific metal thief in Soto.

He was caught in the act and charged.

The prosecutor's office filed felony burglary charges and because of his criminal history recommended that he remain in jail until his hearing.

However, the judge released him.

He was caught on camera less than 48 hours after his release.

burglarizing the very same business he had been arrested in.

He is also suspected in at least a dozen other burglaries at nearby Soto businesses that follow his MO.

He failed to show for his January 6th hearing for possession of a stolen vehicle and failed to appear for his January 20th hearing on the burglary charges.

And just to give you some context, In just one of these burglaries, the loss to the business was in excess of $20,000.

This one individual has literally been terrorizing our district.

We know his name, he has felony warrants out for his arrest, and we still can't get him off the streets.

I had to be much more actively involved in the process in a way I've never needed to before.

I spent hours talking to businesses, collecting video, coordinating with SPD and the prosecutor's office, trying to get the system to work and to get this threat off the streets.

Our businesses need help, and I need help to help our businesses.

Thank you.

Thank you, Aaron.

I appreciate you sharing your perspectives from Soto.

And I'd like to now turn to District 2, Columbia City, where we have Justin Pritchett, who's the general manager of Arc Lodge Cinemas, to talk a little bit about what he's experiencing down there.

Thank you, Don.

Hi.

Thank you, Don, for doing this.

Thank you, Sarah, for inviting me.

Just real quick, I don't really want to go into too much depth of echoing what every other business owner is saying.

The Arc Lodge has been faced with tremendous difficulties over the pandemic.

The first year, we're closed to the public.

Last year, we were able to open to the public in February.

As most people know with movie theaters, you're based upon what movies are coming in, so we're only busy when there is a good movie coming in.

We were broken into in August of last year.

That costed us at least $6,000 to replace all the doors on the outside, to replace them to metal doors and everything.

And then two weeks later, when we had a really big movie, we were broken into again.

So that, again, cost us a lot of money.

They took all of our concession stuff, so it didn't put us down for a few days as well.

We have already started working on limited hours due to the governor's policies of because of the pandemic we've had limited capacity of people that are able to come into our theater so that means our revenue is down even more just from the sheer COVID aspect of it.

So to have that on top of being closed due to break-ins or Mental health issues where we have people, we're right in front of a bus.

A bus stop is right in front of our doorway.

So we have people that are able to yell at our customers.

We've had someone punch one of our customers before in the past.

We've had someone spit on customers.

say they're going to kill them where we've had customers running in fear into our theater to where we now have a our doors locked and we invite people in as as one at a time so we can make sure that we're keeping the safety of our guests that are in the building.

I've gotten phone calls of racial threats as well as physical threats, saying that they're going to come down and shoot us because we didn't answer the phone and we weren't open for business.

And so these are all things that are kind of unique to a movie theater because we're actually, you know, we're usually open seven days a week, but we've had to reduce our capacity of the amount of time that we're open for.

And this actually does pertain to what this committee is for, too, because what I'm trying to do for Columbia City is I'm trying to be the owner of the Arc Lodge.

One of the plans of the Arc Lodge is to be able to buy the building so we're able to stay in the community that we've been in for the last 10 years, that my family can then keep it going.

As a person of color, I think that, you know, I've had struggles as far as equality, being able to find financing and everything because a lot of other groups that are, you know, BIPOC groups, they're groups.

They have people that are grant writers and do a lot of grant writing and stuff.

I'm a single person that is a small business owner.

So for me to get financial income, I'm competing with like conglomerates, which is not fair.

So when you're looking at the quality of bringing up people, look at the small businesses, they don't have the grant writers, and they're trying to do something special too.

I can generate a lot of revenue.

We had plenty of employees at one point in time.

We have three employees now because we can't ensure that we're going to have the safety when they leave from our business to go to their cars.

I think that one of the things that the council should really look to do is making it where metal recycling is something that businesses are responsible for.

You have to own a business in order to be able to recycle metal.

In California, you have to have a driver's license and present it.

If you have anything over a certain amount, you have to actually present your driver's license and you have to wait for a week before you can come and recover the money.

So then that way, if there's any businesses that are broken into, they can vet it and make sure that they get the metals back to the proper people instead of just you know, benefiting criminals and paying them.

So maybe hold those businesses accountable to make sure that we can reduce the crime everywhere else.

Thank you.

Thank you again for sharing that information.

I'll go last and I won't take too long because we did have eight callers call in from the University District and talk about what they were seeing, including one business that lost all of their inventory just a short time after they opened their beauty supply store, which is really tragic, honestly.

And, you know, I really, I want to, you know, I want to just give a couple of statistics from our neighborhood over the last few, over the last few months.

You know, we have 150 food and service businesses here, the majority of which are owned by women or people of color.

And we have seen that with the pandemic, we live and die with the population of the students at University of Washington.

We were the first and probably one of the most hardest hit neighborhoods.

During the pandemic, the UW went online to teach their classes.

And that was a big immediate impact to the neighborhood because all of our customers dried up right away.

But we were also one of the fastest districts to come back this fall when they returned to campus and we had a light rail station open.

And so there was a lot of hope in the air.

We had a light rail festival and we were able to see lines at restaurants again, which was super exciting.

But to see this escalation over the fall and through the winter of issues that we're talking about here today really puts a damper on that recovery and makes it even harder.

I'll give you a couple of things that happened in the past few weeks.

In the past few weeks alone, we've seen 25 of our storefronts get broken windows.

Some of that's from folks who are aggravated with behavioral health disorders that just smash a window or get into an altercation with a business owner.

Some of it's smash and grab at night in the middle of the night and people coming in and taking merchandise for cash.

That happens sometimes more than once to a single business, which is really tragic.

We've heard in the media about several random assaults and high-profile robberies that have happened, including three carjackings that happened over the last week.

Um, we've seen, um, we've learned about businesses.

Also, not only do they get damaged, they can't get insurance to cover the issues that they're seeing, or they've been told that this neighborhood is just too risky for insurance policies, which is an interesting version of redlining that that our businesses are being excluded from those policies.

We have witnessed over 40 arson attempts in the last year in this neighborhood, mostly in our alleys with arsons that lighter dumpsters on fire and the totes and completely melt to the ground.

And some of them have caught adjacent buildings on fire.

We already lost one building that was from people living in it at the Seven Gables Theater.

That historic building was caught fire just over a year ago and we lost that building.

And so we're spending countless hours of staff time really trying to work on connecting dots and working with our city partners who are, you know, great.

And they actually came for a walk this past week with us to hear more about what was going on.

Thank you, Council Member Nelson for coming and Council Member Peterson joined us.

We also have the city attorney and Davidson and representatives from the mayor's office and the chief of police.

And I think there's a genuine interest on the city side, you know, to really dig into these issues.

And so I just want to kind of quickly summarize what I've heard today from folks.

I think we've heard, you know, there's a lack of account.

We've heard about a lot.

Sorry, we have heard about repeated issues and how the lack of coordination between victims and city resources.

has compounding impacts in geographic specific areas.

We've heard about how the lack of prevention strategies, both social services and problem solving, leads individuals to have an outsized impact in our neighborhoods.

We also have heard that the lack of SPD capacity has been felt dramatically in neighborhoods.

I speak from the university district's perspective.

We had a foot patrol up until two years ago, and the minute it left, it felt very different in the neighborhood, and we saw an escalation in some of these issues.

Some neighborhoods are talking to us about how they're particularly vulnerable.

Also some business types we heard today are particularly vulnerable and require different, probably different strategies than something that can be applied all the way across the city.

So we are here today and wanted to talk about a set of specific recommendations for the city to consider to have an impact in our neighborhoods this spring and this year.

These recommendations are not meant to be exhaustive, but they're meant to be pragmatic and they're meant to address the gaps we are seeing in our community.

And these recommendations look to focus in on the chaos that's in our neighborhoods that we are seeing and to offer coordination and follow up and accountability that gives us a path forward to work on these things together.

And I'll start off by just saying there's this idea of coordination is really important.

And so we're putting forward a recommendation that we have community safety hub coordinators in neighborhood business districts.

This is really the staff time that neighborhoods and volunteers and business owners are all doing on their own to try to understand if one person's breaking into five businesses, or if there's an individual who's experiencing homelessness but has lost touch with their, with their case manager and then gets aggravated because they get into an altercation with a customer and then something bad happens.

This stuff happens day in and day out in our neighborhoods, but there's no real person at the city side that has the capacity or has really been asked to focus on this.

We think there could be, in these areas where you're seeing high levels of chaos and incidences that impact small businesses and customers, and employees, we see that there's a role for coordination.

And so this idea of a community safety hub coordinator could really understand the issues in a neighborhood like the University District and be able to have an impact by connecting dots in that neighborhood.

Where would this person live?

To be determined.

Maybe this person could take information and share it with the police when it's appropriate, but also work with an outreach worker to help track down someone who maybe switched neighborhoods and isn't really on the radar and can't get the help they need.

That level of personal understanding makes a huge difference.

And when we come up with community based solutions to address issues of public safety, and this person doesn't need to work, doesn't need to carry a gun, doesn't need to wear a badge, but couldn't have a big impact and really help the different agencies looking at this issue to have a deeper impact along the same lines, have this person have that cross jurisdictional authority.

I think we need a dedicated person within the mayor's office who can focus on crime and st These issues always come between H.

S. D. Human Seattle Police Department, office, the King County but also our contracts wi through evergreen treatm just or neighborhood out depending, it could be a city project that needs to be pulled into this or a park.

These departments have incredibly different missions and an overwhelming set of priorities, I'm sure, for each different line of business.

But we need that level of cross-departmental coordination to be able to have the impact and to be able to make progress on some of these issues when we see there's something systemic that needs to be changed.

I'm going to kick it over to Mike Stewart, and he's going to talk a little bit about an idea we have around high visibility foot patrols.

So Mike, if you could take that.

Yeah, thank you, Don.

And I mean, just kind of.

Sorry, I'm sorry, Mike.

We are going to go into in-depth in some of these recommendations, but I just want to provide a brief moment if there are any council members who have any particular questions or want to make a comment before we move on.

And I wanna note that the recommendations that you will be hearing will be posted on the Seattle Legistar homepage and also on my website.

There'll be reference in links in social.

So what you will hear will be available for the public and for other council members.

Thank you.

Go on, Mike.

Oh, no, Dan, Council Member Strauss, sorry.

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to Don, Aaron, Oscar, Quinn, Tariqa, Lisa.

I guess I probably should have stopped saying everyone's name before I started, but Lisa, thank you all for being here.

I want to let you know that we hear you and that I'm not insulated from what you've described because I've been working with so many small businesses, and Mike in particular, and people in the community, not just in Ballard but across D6.

And I do hear you that we need more types of response than just police, so that and that police time can be focused on crime.

That's the aspect of the police because we need more mental health first responders, we need more CSOs, we need more neighborhood coordination.

I was really happy to champion mobile crisis teams and understand that we need more of them and more dedicated to our city.

I'm very clearly aware that we have organized criminal activity occurring in our city, and some of it is hiding behind homelessness.

It's very clear to me that we need to interrupt organized enterprise and predatory behavior.

We need to stand up and utilize more diversion programs, and we need to address homelessness with adequate shelter and the time and relationships it takes to get people inside.

So I just wanted to take this moment to, I know Aaron, I've heard you make many of these comments many times before, Lisa the same, and it's a pleasure to get to work with many of you, and I'll continue to work with you on the work that we've begun in the work groups, and look forward to seeing you all soon, because I know that the important work occurs for me on the ground in D6, and for all of us in our communities.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Seeing no other questions, we can go on to the next Speaker, go ahead, Mike.

Terrific.

Thank you, Council Member.

So continuing on with a couple, I've got two potential solutions here to elevate, as Don mentioned, high visibility foot patrols.

You know, neighborhood business districts need these foot patrols, and they don't necessarily have to be sworn officers with badge.

There's a lot of examples to pull from, but it's where, you know, these teams, would remain in specific high traffic area geographies and over time are able to build relationships and trust with the community.

And more specifically, here's some things that they could do, you know, that what the foot patrols would do.

They would reestablish a walking foot patrol with neighborhood business districts, first and foremost.

The potential to deescalate some of the mild to moderate crisis situations without the involvement of SPD.

Obviously, when it hits that point, we need our law enforcement agency to assist.

bring in the appropriate city and human resources and expertise to problem solve or support when necessary, wear high visibility jackets, hold a visible presence in our neighborhood districts, develop relationships and build trust with community stakeholders while providing an unarmed safety solution, spot trends and issues across the neighborhood that require further investigation and a coordinated response, and potentially offer a great recruiting ground for SBD while also addressing the ongoing feeling of abandonment and chaos in our neighborhood business districts.

This position, this role could work very, very closely with the community safety hub coordinators that Dawn referenced earlier, and most certainly with business district leadership as well.

The second piece is SPD emphasis patrols.

Yeah, I think it bears mentioning the strategies that we've outlined thus far can provide an effective lower cost, faster to scale strategy that will enhance public safety in neighborhood business districts, but by no means do they completely remove the dire need for increased support from the Seattle Police Department.

I do want to be very clear on this point.

We need a police department that is adequately staffed to serve the basic fundamental public safety needs of Seattle's 725,000 plus residents.

This includes fast response times and priority 911 calls and the ability to prevent crime before it happens.

But with regard to the emphasis patrols, we need to be targeted in how we deploy our police force to ensure that they can promptly arrive on the scene when there's a major emergency And there's also a role for police to help deter crime from happening in the first place.

So we think, you know, using the on the ground data generated by the community safety hub coordinators and the foot beat safety teams that we outlined earlier, SPD could then strategically place emphasis patrols in identified target areas to swiftly interrupt negative activity and break that pattern.

Because, you know, currently there really aren't a lot of mechanisms available to disrupt criminal patterns and a combined approach of SPD emphasis with these new resources we think will make a significant positive impact for our neighborhood business districts.

And at a very basic level, interrupting criminal activity before it happens allows us to reduce the number of arrests and incarcerations.

It limits SPD involvement on lower level crimes like break-ins and property damage.

and frankly reduces the strain on the criminal justice system, which we all know is tremendously strained with a massive, massive backlog of cases at this current time.

So thank you, Don, I'll turn it back to you.

Thank you, Mike.

And not everything can happen before we get to the impacts that we see.

And so Lisa is gonna talk a little bit about something that she's been experimenting with, with the support of the city that maybe we could expand this year to help businesses that get vandalized.

Thank you, Don.

So the, the idea that we're bringing you today is the broken window and damaged storefront funds with neighborhood business districts, seeing a major increase in vandalism, broken storefront windows and doors as well as late night smash grab burglaries.

We have an opportunity to build a program to play a role in funding those repairs.

The Broken Window Fund is a program that the Alliance has been implemented about a year ago to much success with outside funding.

and OED recently matched additional community dollars for both Pioneer Square and the U District to give out dozens of window of facade and repair grants.

This is by far one of our most successful programs that people have a true appreciation for.

It's a major cost for owners to absorb and on top of any stolen cash or merchandise and it's a pretty straightforward easy to implement immediate response that could have an impact directly on our small business owners immediately.

Okay, back to you, Don.

Thank you, Lisa.

And lastly, I just some of these issues also intersect with the back end of the insurance industry.

And I think Aaron has a bit of personal experience with this and so to Aaron.

Well, you heard from several folks today, both in public comment and our speakers, about the challenges of insurance affordability and access in Seattle.

And I had heard a number of anecdotal stories, but also have come to understand that many times businesses routinely choose not to report crimes because they are afraid of losing their insurance or that their rates will increase astronomically.

So some of the stories in Soto, I had a business that told me that in 2019 they had 10 companies to choose from, but now they only have three and the offered insurance is way more expensive with much higher deductibles.

In fact, in one of the businesses I spoke to now does not report to insurance for anything under $30,000 in damage, and this is not a large business.

In the U District, as Don mentioned, businesses have been told they don't qualify for insurance simply because they operate in the U District and it's not a safe area.

This is unacceptable.

Access to insurance is a key part of running a business.

And we feel very strongly that these anecdotal stories tell us a lot, but we don't know the whole picture.

And the city needs to study this issue to better understand the impacts of our current public safety crisis on small business insurance affordability and access.

A study could look at insurance rates and availability across the city and test for geographic equity across neighborhoods and any disproportionate burdens being placed on small businesses specifically businesses owned by women and people of color.

Thank you, Maren, for sharing that.

I'm gonna hand it back to Council Member Nelson.

These were our ideas that we put forward.

It's not exhaustive.

We could have a discussion now and entertain questions or hear other ideas, but Council Member Nelson, thank you for letting us have the floor here today and to share these experiences and ideas with you at your committee.

You're on mute.

I wanted to follow up on what Aaron said for two reasons.

Number one, because there is a misperception that property crime is not on the rise, it's because people are not reporting precisely because we don't want our premiums to go up or lose our coverage altogether.

So that is a fundamental problem, and I think this is a very good idea.

Also, I wanted to make the point that when we're talking about a broken window.

I don't know if you all know how much that, I mean, the public knows how much that costs to replace that, but it's at least $1,200 and it goes up from there.

When that happens repeatedly to a business, that is a lot of money.

So in isolation, folks might not think that's a big deal, but that is expensive.

It takes time.

and it creates a lack of security until that window is fixed.

In addition, there is a glass shortage.

At the same time that we have a plywood, explosion in plywood prices and also shortage.

We toured Belltown and all the windows at Patagonia were broken.

They replaced them with high carbon windows.

I don't know if that's, bulletproof but uh...

that's really expensive so i think that this is important for two reasons number one because reporting is not happening uh...

because people are submitting claims they don't have to and i'm just going to please indulge me for this one idea related this is not on the list but an idea that i have thought of uh...

in in it you know people are reporting to the traditional and going to the online uh...

format uh...

s p g or if it's about a certain value and they must call the an officer to take a statement and that can take many many hours i'd believe that at being good thing we could do uh...

is to uh...

add a section on our Find It Fix It so that these reports can be, so they can at least be documented in an easy, fast way that there could be documentation regardless of the cost of the crime, but that that will provide information for the deployment of officers and it will help what other liaisons we might have at the city to really track what is going on.

So I'm going to put that forward.

I've heard that this has been positively received by some of you.

And so that's just one idea that I came up with all by myself that could also serve the purpose of making sure that we raise the visibility of this issue.

Okay, those are my comments.

And we will go into Don, if I'm correct, question answer period.

So would any of my colleagues like to ask a question or would any of the panelists like to add anything or talk to each other?

Madam Chair.

Yes, Council President Deborah Juarez.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Well, first I want to thank you for having this time.

I've been on council six years and I don't think we've ever had an opportunity, particularly since what we've all dealt with this trifecta since 2020. of the pandemic, a recession, and the social upheaval.

And I think the pandemic really revealed and peeled back the inadequacies and inequalities that we see.

So in respect to your Committee for Economic Development and listening to public comment and taking notes, I truly do believe that this issue should be, and we cannot pretend it doesn't exist, that public safety is a core element of economic recovery.

We've heard from businesses and we've been hearing from businesses, not just from the pandemic, but also from the, not all protesters, but some protesters, as you know, caused major damage to the Seattle Public Library, to the tune of well over 400,000, and to businesses.

And so I am just glad that we are providing an opportunity to hear businesses speak and not be quick to demonize them or demoralize them or accuse them of criminalizing our unsheltered relatives.

But as business owners, big and small, that they absorb these costs and insurance don't always pay for these costs.

I know just from D5 and also the U District and also Greenwood and other neighborhoods in Soto that it is a shame for us to walk through our city and see boarded, broken windows, boarded up windows, empty buildings, vacancies.

What we, when I used to chair the Waterfront, we know that the Waterfront and their business is a magnet for economic development and businesses and jobs in our hotels and our retail and our tourism.

So normally, if this was four years ago, I would have been kind of questioning, like, why are we kind of doing public safety, quote, unquote, within the economic development arena.

But I think that we're not being honest with ourselves and our city when we don't understand that those two are linked and that we have to address that and that we have small business owners.

And I particularly like, I'm sorry if I forget your name, the young woman who owns the art gallery that talked about how important it is to have foot traffic and clean doorways.

And just to provide not just the restaurant and also hearing from the folks about how there was a time that Seattle, downtown Seattle nightlife was a thing.

It was a place to go.

People don't go downtown anymore.

I know some of you, again, I think when we have these conversations, people are quick to say, oh, it's just business, and you're criminalizing the unsheltered, and you don't care.

But what I've heard from all of you, and also the people have called in, is that we can do both.

We literally can attack the root causes of these issues, and we can uplift and support and empower our businesses, big and small.

So I'm glad that we're having an honest, candid conversation without impugning the integrity of our other colleagues, without name-calling, without bringing up the past about who voted for what when.

There was a comment made a few days ago about when we passed the jumpstart tax.

And I was one of the people that voted no.

Now, I didn't want to go into all the detail yesterday, but one of the reasons I voted no is not because I was against the tax itself, but I wanted it to go to the voters.

And so I'm hoping that, and thank you, Council Member Chair, that you're providing a space, a safe space for people to say, this is why I did what I did.

This is why I voted the way I voted.

And also businesses, we hear you.

We hear you.

And we have particular tools, if you will, in our toolbox.

And a lot of you, of what you shared, that what we can do to keep downtown safe in other neighborhoods, like the U District, like Lake City Way, like Northgate, like Aurora, like Soto.

I'm here to, you know, I am the vice chair of this committee, but it's really Council Member Nelson that's taken the lead, that that has to be, one of the top three issues that our city has to grapple with and deal with and be honest about.

And I know Dawn's been in the trenches for a long time.

It's good to hear from you again, Lisa, from the Alliance for Pioneer Square.

We hear a lot from the businesses folks.

Working with the poor friends of the waterfront, working with Northgate folks, OVG, NHL, you know, the bottom line is this, we need businesses and businesses need people to feel they need their staff and the business to feel safe.

Because those are the people that provide the jobs.

And if we don't have that and if we if we we get into this mode of I don't even know a good way to say it, but I guess what I've seen is if we get in this mode of being retaliatory, impunitive to people who just want to talk about what they see on the streets.

I was downtown Saturday night, not very late.

And I'll be honest with you, I don't go to the market anymore unless it's Saturday in broad daylight.

And again, I'm not saying that to say there are only bad people down there.

I'm saying that it's become a real safety issue.

And I don't think the downtown core can say it any louder.

And I think that being a proponent of the chamber of business doesn't make you anti-labor.

I mean, I said yesterday, I'm sure everybody heard, we are a labor town, but we're also a business town.

There's a reason why we have Amazon and Microsoft and Starbucks and all these innovative businesses here.

Do they have mistakes and shortcomings?

Absolutely.

But I think if we can all just talk about it and then like you're doing, Madam Chair, move forward to how do we do that?

How do we increase a police presence to stop crime before it happens?

How do we equip businesses and our city departments to get out there and meet people where they're at with addiction and mental health.

I tell you, going to work, it breaks my heart to see all those tents along 3rd and along 5th.

I'm not going to pretend that they're not there.

We see them every day.

And so I'm glad that, Madam Chair, that you were providing a space for us to talk honestly and openly and candidly, and that we can actually have civil discourse and we can agree to disagree.

But I appreciate the people that called in and I appreciate the panel that you put together, because I think in the six years that I've been on council, I've never had an opportunity to hear from all the businesses.

And so thank you.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Council President Juarez is our president.

Thank you very much for those comments.

And I see that Dan Austin has his hand up.

Yeah, thank you.

Yeah, I just wanted to mention, and this is something I really, I like the idea of the community hub coordinator and some sort of street team to be able to be in the business area as a foot patrol.

And I would like to point out that I'm not sure maybe, I'm not sure which council member might've been in with this past, but about five, six years ago, our business licenses went up by roughly four to $500 with a promise of 200 additional police officers.

Since that passed and we've paid it every year, we've had continuously less and less police officers.

And that was a specific tax put on the businesses to support 200 officers for safety.

With this foot patrol idea, this business district walking patrol, The businesses are already paying dedicated money to public safety because it's not going to police officers because we don't have them.

So there is money that is being paid from the business licenses that were supposed to be for police officers, which even if we could get them, we cannot hire as many police officers as we need in the next three to four years.

I think it's a really good dedicated source of funding to be able to help put into these programs with either Community Safety Hub individual or the foot patrols because that money is there and it was dedicated towards, at that time, police, but let's call it public safety now.

That was a specific increase to businesses and we did not get the, we put the money in and we didn't get the service that we paid for.

So I just wanted to point that out, that fund is there, we've been paying for it, we haven't seen a benefit from it, and maybe we can find out how much money that exactly is and move that over into these new ideas.

But the funding's there, we don't need a new tax for it, it exists.

Well, thank you for that insight.

I remember that the Seattle Chamber did support that, businesses taxing themselves for additional officers in 2018. That's correct.

And I hadn't remembered that.

So I will follow up on that one.

I wanted to mention that You know, the business owners here have businesses to run and the BIA directors, the portfolio of the work that you are mandated to do is fairly narrow.

And you are performing the role that city agencies should be.

And I am looking forward to our new interim director at OED and to sort of recapacitize the divisions of OED that you are actually doing, the matchmaking functions of finding businesses spaces.

And I just am trying to acknowledge the fact that a lot is riding on you as well as you represent all of these concerns.

This wasn't in your job description.

And I believe that the city can do more and starting with forwarding and advancing and promoting some of these ideas.

Who else has a question?

I see that Oscar does.

Thank you.

Go ahead.

Thank you so much.

So in addition to the window replacement fund, windows can be broken and re-broken and re-broken again.

So in terms of hardening some of the infrastructure that's in place, I'd ask that you please consider a fund to provide roll down protection for some of these storefronts.

It's common in large cities across the world to be able to protect storefronts from people that would otherwise break in causing numerous headaches and expenses and troubles for all of the community.

Thank you.

Are those, I know those exist.

My company Fremont Brewing has one of those.

Are they difficult to get permitted?

If I can tell you, we have them installed on the interior of our businesses and we have other, other mitigating infrastructure, but I couldn't tell you if they're difficult to determine or not.

Okay, got it.

I seem to remember a snafu when we tried to do it, so thank you for that.

Justin, well first of all, I did not notice if Quinn or Justin had their hand up.

Did anyone else see?

I did have my hand up.

Okay.

I was just going to say, just following up with what was just said, rolling gates would definitely be great.

The main issue that we have, because we're a historic district, we can't have bars, we can't have anything on our doors or in front, because that actually is something that It makes it worse, less inviting, and so it presents a bad image.

And so that's why in all of Columbia City, we can't have that.

We can't even have neon lights.

So the other issue that we actually, it took us almost three months to remove the bench right in front of our business because that's where a lot of people were standing and harassing people.

And then I do think that the Find and Fix It is a great idea, just because that, in coordination with the sliding doors, with the Door Fix It, the theme that was presented would be a good combination, the two.

So where you have the Find and Fix It is able to then coordinate with the funds that is for the door replacement, where maybe even the city just takes over that whole replacement for smaller businesses.

Great idea, thank you.

Quinn, please, go ahead.

Thank you.

Yes, I was just gonna say that the Chinatown ID is also a historic district where the ISRD oversees and it's not preferred to put up gates.

But if there's something urgent like this, I think they would be more lenient on it, but that would, need city support.

The other thing I wanted to talk about is, in addition to the city coordination, I'm also urging better coordination across King County.

That's a big one for us, mainly because some of our issues are even like state and federal.

We have huge EBT fraud, and it's been an up and down battle for many years, we had a big.

breakdown of it about 10 years ago, and now it's back with a vengeance almost.

And King County has not really played a role in any of that.

The state hasn't played a role.

We just don't know where and how to deal with it.

And so just better coordination, or at least more effort put into working with King County and our state legislation around some of those larger crimes.

Okay, thank you very much.

And I don't know what Council President Juarez knows about inter-government relations on that issue, but we could, that's a good thing to follow up on.

Tarika, you have your hand up.

Yeah, I just wanted to add to the historical component as well, just the limitations with running and have been running a business.

a building that's over 120 years old and not being able to properly secure it.

My neighbors and I, when I say neighbors, just the other business owners in my building, we've tried to come up with multiple solutions to secure just the not even just a building, almost a block, just in investing different types of security systems.

And expanding Martinsauce, knowing what the previous business had gone through with multiple smash and grabs, entering in through the drywall, through the alleyway, I had to just get creative with just other ways of trying to distract and, you know, Just try not to make it look too enticing for folks to do whatever they're going to do.

So, yeah, I just wanted to add to if there's any kind of provisions that can be made for businesses being held in historic districts that.

Yeah, I don't know what to add.

I just want to throw that out there.

It's an issue.

Got it, I noticed that Council Member Strauss was writing notes on that.

I think that's your point on historic districts, so lucky you.

But maybe there is something that we can expedite.

Oscar, please, go ahead.

I had something else.

We have been talking about prevention measures, and I'd like to hear what anybody has to say about violent crime with firearms and what we can do to address that.

I mean, it's not an easy topic to talk about.

I want to acknowledge that.

And it's a real and present danger in our community.

and not to put people on the spot, but this is something that is true and real and that we're having to face.

I just don't, I don't have answers and I don't expect anybody to have some kind of a panacea to address this, but any ideas from folks, from council or from any of the other associations that you might have for the businesses that are having to face these these crimes at the moment.

It's quite troubling.

Council President Urias, did you take off your mic to say something?

I did.

And Oscar, I know that was probably a little bit, where are you at?

I can't find you on my panel.

There you are.

You know, this is the one thing about being on Seattle City Council.

I know Council Member Chair Nelson understands this as well, formally working for Councilmember Conlon when she was a Chief of Staff for him.

Crime and violence, and we all know this, but I'm just going to say it so I can preface it.

you know, it's never gonna go away.

And I would be lying to you as an official or elected to say, oh, you know, we're gonna bring down crime 30% or we're gonna, it's not, that's always gonna be a human condition with addiction, mental health, poverty, those things are never gonna go away in a society.

But what we can do and we are looking at with the help of Mayor Harrell is how we restaff our police department, but also redirect funds to programs to get away from that, so people don't find themselves in the pipeline in the system.

But that's going to take time.

I think people thought when, some people thought that when we redirected funds from the Seattle Police Department to these, what they call, you know, upstream programs that just overnight it was going to happen.

It's not.

we made a real policy decision, like many cities, Minneapolis, LA, Portland, San Francisco, a lot of cities, to look at community policing differently.

And we should.

The way our systems worked in the past for policing were archaic and racist, quite frankly, and based from Jim Crow era.

I know I'm getting a little bit deeper to get back to your question, Oscar.

So I guess I'm going to ask that you be a little bit patient with us.

The mayor has only been the mayor for six weeks.

Council member Nelson has only been here for six weeks.

We're all trying to get under the new leadership of working with the executive.

I think we can promise you that, that at least for me as council president, I meet with the mayor once a week.

I talk to chief of police once a week.

I get reports from chief Diaz once a week.

We work with HSD, we work with Councilmember Herbold, who chairs Public Safety, and of course we have Councilmember Lewis on the Regional Housing Authority.

So, I mean, as a former judge and public defender, I mean, I'll just be frank with you, there's no, you're right, there is no answer today, I don't think, unless someone here has something that I don't know, that is going to change overnight, or even the next 30 days, how we stop some of the most violent crimes.

I think some of you saw, which I could only watch a couple times, the poor woman where the man just picked up a bat and hit her in the head.

I don't know how we got here, for those of us who were born and raised here, but that's where we are.

I think having these discussions and having Madam Chair Nelson keep having these discussions about business and the violence that goes on, because what I also hear from the black community is that they want community policing.

They want their small businesses to be safe.

They want their children to be protected.

They don't have the privilege of not having 911 show up.

And I know these conversations are difficult, And people are afraid to come out and really say how they feel, because they're afraid that they're going to be called a racist or that they're going to be demonized.

But in order for us to just get our arms around the issue of crime, poverty, the root causes, public safety, community policing, we have to be honest about what's out there.

So we're hoping with Mayor Harrell and working with Chief Diaz and the city council, that we'll, and also our new city attorney, Ms. Ann Davidson, that we can start looking at taking out the bad actors that are hurting our city and our businesses and our people and our relatives, and hopefully get back on track.

I don't have an answer for you, Oscar, what's gonna happen to stop people from getting a gun and coming into your store.

And I, to be frank with you, I don't also believe that hiring way more police or addressing every issue with a gun and a badge works either.

Because we know who gets affected the worst, it's people of color.

They get killed.

We just saw that on the news with the no-knock warrants.

But I wanna keep having these conversations with you.

I've seen all your names, I've seen your faces in different places.

And like I said, I'm just honored that Council Member Nelson is getting us all together and I hope this becomes a regular thing that we hear your voices.

And I know that doesn't quite answer your question, but I want you to know that I hear you.

Thank you, Council President Juarez.

Really appreciate you raising our voices and pointing out with all the meetings that you have, the unique vulnerability that our retail businesses are in, especially with gun violence.

So I really appreciate it.

I did hear what you say.

I agree with you.

These are all symptoms of a much larger issue.

I think we all acknowledge that.

And so for now, we need to harden and become, unfortunately, become not as soft of targets for people that would do our employees, our customers harm.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, and being reminded about the resources that were allocated for hiring more officers, maybe we can use some of that for Another buyback, buying back guns at a price that could be significant to actually give them up.

But that's just, I should not be brainstorming live here.

Tariqa, you had one more thing, and then we should probably, oh, Mike has one more thing, and then we should wrap it up.

Go ahead.

I do, but I'll yield to Tariqa, because I just wanted to do a very brief wrap up on behalf of the panel.

I was just going to briefly add to the just the more policing for us.

It's a method of securing the neighborhood.

And to just add a specific point to to just be a black owned business and Pioneer Square.

I don't know if there's any other black owned businesses and Pioneer Square, but my staff is black as well.

So I'm.

Sometimes I get nervous about profiling and having police presence, especially if they're not familiar with the neighborhood dynamics or the community at large.

And I've been here, like I said, for 10 years and I'm still met with, I didn't know, I didn't know.

Or, you know, it's just this weird other conversation and exchange that I usually have with folks that are just surprised to see me on the block.

So extra policing makes me just inherently a little nervous.

But if it's done in a way where it's a community led thing, then that makes more sense.

I know that sounds weird, but it is very layered and I don't want to get into all the things.

I just wanted to throw that out there.

That's all.

I hear you.

Okay, great.

Okay, Mike.

Perfect.

Well, Madam Chair Nelson, thank you on behalf of this group.

Thank you for pulling this together.

We appreciate very much your leadership on these issues that are really clearly important.

And we know, you know, we all take a little bit of comfort, somewhat of a cold comfort in knowing that we're all sort of feeling the same thing.

So, you know, we're hopeful that that will produce energy to make the change that's needed.

And it definitely feels like we're at a great starting point that this isn't the end of the conversation.

So we look forward to working with you to advance these ideas and in short, community safety hub coordinators in neighborhood business districts, a dedicated mayor's office, attention to street level crime and disorder, high visibility, foot beat patrols in neighborhoods, SPD emphasis patrols, a broken window fund, small business insurance affordability and access study.

So we're excited to be working with you in the weeks ahead to start moving these things forward in any way we can.

And also, I think perhaps one of the most hopeful things that I take away from this conversation, Chair Nelson, Council President Juarez, and I know Council Member Strauss has had to jump to another meeting.

Your engagement in this meeting, your comments, and your ability to listen to us, We feel heard today, and that's great.

And we are just excited to work with you and see if we can't begin moving these things forward.

So thank you again for that, and thank you for this opportunity.

All right.

Well, the nice thing about being council member as I get the last word to thank you all for coming.

I know this took a lot of work to pull together and so I appreciate what you've done.

I also want to extend my gratitude to Kate Nolan who clerks my committee and to Jeremy Moen my chief of staff who was lead on this particular project and it's also his birthday so happy birthday and Keep the communication coming.

My office will respond and onward.

Hopefully we can elevate some of this creativity and come to some of these and implement some of these actions.

So thank you very much.

Bye-bye, everybody.

Oh, wait, I'm supposed to say the official thing.

This concludes the February 9th meeting of the Economic Development, Technology and City Light Committee.

Our next committee meeting is scheduled for February 23rd at 9.30.

If there are no further questions, we will adjourn.

Okay, hearing none, this meeting is adjourned.

Goodbye.