Maybe some of that applause is for the West Seattle Bridge, rockin' and rollin'.
Thank all of you for being here, all of you, for your work.
Apologize for having my back to you.
Because this is exciting, what we're about to do, to sign into three pieces of legislation that'll improve equity in our cannabis industry.
I think our city and our country, are trying to look at an industry that has been historically used to marginalize communities, dare I say intentionally criminalize communities, and now with the right values and right people, how do we take that industry and advance equity, advance opportunity.
These policies are quite frankly a necessary step to Undue generations of injustice and discrimination caused by what was then called the War on Drugs left so many black communities and communities of color so far behind, devastating in our communities.
And I think many of you, many of us can talk about firsthand about the effect it's had in your own lives, with your own family members, with your own friends and community members.
Council Bill 120391, which of course will express our intent to engage in cannabis equity and in the expungement of cannabis convictions and equity work and funding and fundamentally to fund and convene a needs assessment for the needs within the workforce and the cannabis industry working with communities to figure this out.
Council Bill 120392, which of course will advance equity in the licensing and the licensed activities.
Working with the state, following suit with the state, and looking at the social equity licenses.
And of course, 120393, which will require employers to take action to develop job retention, security, and stability within the cannabis industry.
Our workers need to be treated fairly, compensated fairly, compensated competitively, and most importantly, be safe.
We can't solve generations of injustice just like that.
But we can try.
And we can allow these critical steps to demonstrate our clear commitment to what I'm calling and what the city's been calling our One Seattle approach.
In One Seattle, we don't leave our friends and family and our devastated communities behind.
In fact, we embrace them.
We hold them up.
We'll hold them up with love, compassion, respect, and we let nothing get in our way.
Now, the truth of the matter is, while I like to pound my chest and say, look what I've done, I won't do that because I want to pound the chest and say, look what the hard work of Councilmember Mesquita has done, because we know if it wasn't for her leadership.
And there are other people in here, too.
I'm going to get some props, too.
I don't want Teresa to think you're getting all the props today.
But clearly, she was a partner and a leader in passing this legislation, and we need to fully recognize this.
I also want to thank the staff of the Office of Labor Standards.
I say this to Steve Marchese family and the facilities and administration, also known as the Calvin Goins family, for these bills and the coalition of advocates.
Most importantly, the advocates were the essential partners, including UFCW 3000, And by the way, that is a cool name.
You'll see w 3000. I have the leaders here.
I won't go through all of the leaders.
They know who they are.
They didn't do this work to be recognized.
He did this work for the benefit of the community, the Freedom Project, industry representatives and black excellence in cannabis.
I want to give a special shout out to Brianna Thomas, our labor liaison, because You know, every now and then you need someone to take the credit like me, but you need, more importantly, someone to do the work that Brianna's done.
So, thank you.
Where is Brianna?
I'm right here.
Okay.
Brianna to actually do the hard work.
This afternoon, I would be remiss if I didn't mention Mary Mitchell.
She was instrumental in creating the Racial Equity Toolkit during her seven years as Director of the Consumer Protection Services at FAS.
But she led not only with just pure leadership, the kind of commitment, quite frankly, you either have it or you don't.
And so I want to give Mary her special shout out because she clearly has it.
So these bills show when we identify a common objective, when we are not afraid to address what I call the soft underbelly of this country, this happened to our community, when we can bring everyone together and collaborate, we can make progress.
There's still a lot of work to be done, right?
Still a lot of work to be done on the state and federal levels.
This will include the federal level, the, on the federal level, the passage of the Federal Safe Banking Act, giving retail cannabis stores the, quite frankly, the common sense access to financial tools to keep their workers and customers safe.
You're going to hear from Council Member Mosqueda, who may go into a little deeper narrative about the story on how we got here.
So I'll simply close by saying that in our administration, we lead with listening first.
We're going to make some mistakes.
You read the newspaper there saying I'm always doing something that gets me in trouble.
But I say this, if you're leading with your heart, if you lead with integrity, it's OK.
Because we're in this together, that's what One Seattle is about.
I've never solved a problem when someone says, it wasn't my fault.
That's not how you get problems solved.
You get problems solved by doing this kind of work that we saw here done today.
So with that, I will introduce my friend and colleague, Teresa Mesquera.
I want to thank Mayor Harrell and I want to appreciate that he is stepping up to the podium and stepping up into the call for action to create good trouble.
There is an important opportunity for us in this moment to step forward and create good trouble as we've been called upon to do by folks who have shooken up history, who've stood up and called for racial equity, who've stood for social justice, and today is an example of us hopefully creating good trouble, a small step forward to repairing past harms.
I'm incredibly excited to be able to be part of this signing today, and I really want to thank Mayor Harrell for stepping into this role.
He, in partnership with my office, decided that this was the year.
This was the year we were going to listen to the stakeholders who've been calling for action.
We had a presentation in December of last year where Finance and Administrative Service Department employees, largely led by people of color, came forward and said, for three years, we have been calling for action to create equity in the cannabis industry.
We've had deep conversations with stakeholders.
We know that there's past harms, not only at the national level, not at the state level, but at the local level that we can undo with public policy right here.
And that conversation in December was followed up with a demand for action from UFCW 3000 and the broad coalition that they worked with, with frontline workers and community members and small business owners, black and brown led business owners, who said this has to happen now.
In partnership with Mayor Harrell, we were able to act on that call for action.
And it wouldn't have been possible without the incredible work of his team.
Again, I want to thank FAS, Office of Labor Standards, the team at Office of Economic Development, and his core team that got this going to begin with.
Thank you very much to Gerald and Devin for the early conversations in the first quarter of this year.
Thanks again to Brianna and Dan Eder, who really helped to take this over the line, and to Mayor Harreld, who saw the opportunity for action, knew that there was important hurdles that needed to be addressed, but worked with us to say we were going to continue that commitment to act with urgency this year.
But the folks standing behind us represent the why.
They said that, yes, there are significant hurdles and there are changes that need to happen at the national level.
They said, yes, of course, there's some action taking place at the state level, but we need to do our part at the city level.
We need to make sure that small businesses, especially black-owned businesses that were harmed by past public policy at the city level are first in line to receive technical assistance, funding, guidance to make sure that black-owned businesses, brown-owned businesses can have not only a foothold in Seattle's local economy, that can thrive here and make sure that revenue is shared and not just held by white business owners.
We said here in the city of Seattle that frontline workers ought to have a voice in making sure that they can stay in place if there's changes in ownership because they have very few protections given some of the dynamics at play when you look at business ownership models and on paper who they report to.
We're making sure that when businesses transition, workers can stay in place and continue to have job security as that transition happens.
And we're leading with excellence by making sure that our local knowledge base, frontline workers, are at the forefront to create training opportunities so that workers at the frontline, largely black and brown workers, have an opportunity for technical assistance, training, workforce development, and future ownership opportunities.
we're complementing what the state legislature is doing, and that's what we should be doing.
The city has always been a place for incubation.
The city has always been a place for leadership.
Today we are again showing the nation that we are stepping up to the call for greater equity.
We're doing so by listening to worker voices, and we're doing so in this moment by creating a more just and shared local economy with black and brown business owners.
I'm thrilled to be here with you.
Congratulations to all of you for the work you've accomplished today.
I'm going to sign that and put it in the law.
Great words to Esa.
September?
At this job, the days sort of run together.
No weekends.
Thank you, thank you.
All right.
Thank you everyone for being here.
Deeply appreciate it.
Yes, sir.
We're taking some questions.
One or two?
One or two questions.
Don't worry, it's our topic.
This one's on topic.
impacts that we're talking about, and just in a general layman's term, because sometimes things get caught up in legalese.
Speaking to people specifically from our neighborhood, the Central District, or the South end of Seattle, within this municipality, one, people who've directly been impacted, maybe incarcerated, or got a record around marijuana, and also two, maybe entrepreneurs and people who want to go into this industry.
What exactly do these bills do in a straightforward kind of way?
Sure.
I'm going to answer that, and thank you for that question.
I'm going to answer that, but then I'm maybe going to ask Brianna or Teresa if they want to chime in a little bit.
So the first thing, as you talked about, as you astutely pointed out, we have to work with the community to find out exactly what our needs are.
And when we talk about the effects today, not just in terms of economic loss, We're missing out on this multi-billion dollar industry, but we also still have the effects of institutional racism on what it caused to our families.
And it goes all the way in our equity work, even in terms of property acquisitions.
So the first thing we are going to fund is this needs assessment.
It's not going to be a top-down approach.
We're working with those who do work in the areas of redress and harmful effects in communities.
We'll figure out where we need to make sure our investment strategy goes.
Then with respect to the licensing process, when we look at these no-charge social equity license concept, we have to lower the barriers of entry to make sure that, quite frankly, the community's impact, black folk, people of color, that they are enjoying the benefits of this decriminalized industry as everyone else.
In fact, one would argue more so in the sense of these communities are impacted the most.
So that's going to be true equity.
The other piece is going to be the industry is growing.
We are one of the first states to decriminalize it, and it's fraught with inconsistencies in terms of safety and wage theft.
people trying to game a system because the safeguards in place.
How do we address that and make sure our community is protected?
So that's the needs assessment piece and we'll convert that needs assessment into real legislation.
And quite candidly, we have to lead the state and lead the federal policies in this discussion.
We figured this stuff out here in Seattle and Seattle's willing to invest in this space to make sure it's done right in this country as this country puts their arms around this issue.
I hope I left something for either Brianna, I should ask her to say if I messed up in any way.
You want to say anything?
Thank you, Mayor Harrell.
I think that's the basics of those three pieces of legislation.
We are protecting workers with safeguards, economic and in their workplaces.
We're making sure that the black community has redressed from the fact that they were displaced in the transition from medical to recreational cannabis.
We know there was not an equity lens during that process and we're working to get that right this time here at the city level.
As the mayor mentioned, we can't do it by ourselves.
We need the state to take action and we'll be watching this legislative session.
And last but certainly not least, we're making sure that those barriers to entry, we're getting that cost as low as possible with social equity licensing here at the city level and we're ready for ancillary businesses whenever the state is.
Hope that answered your question.
And I'm going to – I want to make one point, and then I'll take that question.
There was a statistic that I didn't say that I was – I should have said, that currently, black people have a majority stake in only 1 percent – 1 percent of the state cannabis producing and processing, and 4 percent of retail stores.
Now, that is totally unacceptable.
So that's the – disparity that we're addressing through these policies.
You have a question, sir?
Well, I think you getting a free license is a pretty solid start.
But we are going to do.
And generations worth of wealth that was potentially built.
No argument there.
I'm just trying to answer your question.
So I think that's why we're having the needs assessment and those folks will be at the table They were part of this conversation.
They've been guaranteed a seat You can you heard it here first because I want to hear what they need I don't want to presume what it is They need I think government does plenty of that So I think we'll be doing a lot of listening on the front end on what it is exactly they're asking for in terms of restitution and legislation moving forward
Thanks for the question.
We're pretty good on the question side.
Pretty good on the question side.
Thank you for the questions.
We appreciate it very much.
And we stayed on topic.
Anyone want to ask me very difficult questions?
No, I'm just kidding.
Everyone have a great day.
Everyone have a great day.
All right.
Thank you.