Hello, I'm your host, Brian Calinan.
How is the Seattle City Council reacting to the recent State of the City address from Mayor Harrell and his request to hire more police officers?
And could a new state law on environmental reviews speed up the process in Seattle to build more shelters for homeless people?
Plus, what's going to happen when Seattle's eviction moratorium ends at the end of February?
Councilmember Andrew Lewis answers these questions and the ones you're sending into next on Council Edition.
You know, the Council has set out an ambitious hiring target of 125 officers.
Mayor Harrell mentioned that in the speech, and we really look forward to meeting that hiring goal together.
All that and more coming up next on City Inside Out Council Edition.
And we are joined by Coun J. Lewis.
He of course r district from Pioneer Squ also is the chair of the for the Seattle City Coun All right, well, here we go.
I wanted to ask a few questions about the state of the city address that Mayor Harrell recently gave.
One point in particular, talking about getting city employees back to work in person by mid-March.
Your thoughts on that, where we are in the COVID recovery process.
I'll also throw in a message from one of our viewers who wrote this.
Is everyone on the council motivated to work together?
Some thoughts about what it means to have workers come back downtown, working together as a council in person.
Some thoughts here.
Yeah, well, we saw some encouraging announcements recently from Microsoft and Expedia about their return to work over in the private sector.
A big announcement today that Weyerhaeuser, just saw it up on the Seattle Times, Weyerhaeuser's coming back to Pioneer Square in April.
So it's happening, Brian.
We're at that stage of the pandemic.
We're back to work is one of our next challenges, public policy challenges.
And I think what it really centers for us is, Can we lead by example and bring the city and the county employees back into Pioneer Square?
Whenever I'm down there having lunch with folks was just down there this afternoon.
People really miss having the city and county employees there, you know, between the two of us as governments, we put tens of thousands of employees down into that neighborhood.
And their absence is conspicuous.
So I'm really looking forward to that return to work.
And I'm looking forward to working with my colleagues on the council dais instead of a Zoom meeting.
And I'm just looking forward to the spring.
It'll be a spring of recovery.
I think so too.
Looking f in studio here too.
I wan I made another point here was also talking about pu he sees as a need for mor respond to crime.
I'm goin clip of his address where plan for public safety.
N
The depleted staffing we see today does not allow us to react to emergencies and crime with the response times that our residents deserve.
It does not allow us to staff the specialty teams we need for issues like domestic violence or DUI or financial crimes.
Financial crimes that target our elderly.
Now I'm going to piggyback on this with some social media responses from people in your district.
Here's one from Ferdad who lives in Pioneer Square.
He writes, when can we expect more police officers dedicated to our area?
Businesses are struggling with break-ins and daily thefts.
Another message here.
What are plans to help the mentally anguished who scream and wail at all hours of the night in Pioneer Square?
Thank you for those messages.
And Council Member Lewis, two big issues I'd like you to tackle here.
Do you support Mayor Harrell's plans to add more police officers for one, and what kind of resources do need to be assigned to focus on Pioneer Square?
Yeah, well, you know, before those were Mayor Harrell's priorities, they were the councils when we adopted our budget in November.
You know, the council has set out an ambitious hiring target of 125 officers.
Mayor Harrell mentioned that in the speech, and we really look forward to meeting that hiring goal together, you know, as stated as a priority in our budget that we've put forward.
In terms of the mental health response and the rapid response, we really need to make sure the Just Care program is permanently funded and made just a part of our public safety architecture.
The Just Care program throughout COVID, which I've worked with the Downtown Seattle Association, Alliance for Pioneer Square, and the Chamber of Commerce on getting funded is run essentially by the LEAD program, Let Everybody Advance with Dignity, formerly Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program.
And that program has been incredibly successful in getting folks who are in various levels of public health distress, be it mental health, be it drugs, into some kind of supportive sheltering environment that is off the streets and out of Pioneer Square.
This is the group that took care of the Pergola encampment.
This is the group that took care of City Hall Park.
And we really need to make sure that that sticks around.
Right now, that expires in June.
And we really need to make sure that that does not happen, that we keep this asset.
They just, earlier this week, they took care of the encampment that was at 4th and Pike, which had been causing issues in that neighborhood.
So this is a critical part of our infrastructure, directly responsive to that issue, which is one of the biggest issues we're facing.
got it.
And the dollars f where I know it's been a I know the city has suppo
Yeah, well, the city of Seattle and King County jointly funded Just Care with one-time federal dollars.
So it's been funded essentially as an emergency COVID mitigation program.
It's been so indispensable to the downtown core, and they've been such a good partner with groups like the Metropolitan Improvement District and the DSA, that it would really be a shame to lose them.
So we should make sure it's permanently funded.
with general fund money that can be reliably used year over year instead of this one time federal money to mitigate a unique challenge during COVID.
We know when we come out of COVID here that those challenges related to mental health, homelessness, they're going to persist.
They're not going to go away when the when the virus succeeds.
Neither should just care.
Okay.
Okay.
Thank you for that.
I want to make sure that I touch on another issue here too, because we also recently heard from city attorney and Davison about criminal activity downtown.
She wants to include increased prosecution of misdemeanor crimes.
Also focus on a backlog of cases in her department.
She said this to the Seattle Times.
We are going to be doing It's going to be deliberate start to change the timin committed and when we do it.
I know that you were q to council member lewis an to us your response to wh is talking about and also as an assistant city attor
Yeah, so I appreciate the role that the city attorney has as someone who used to work in that office.
I am not optimistic for the success for that to materially improve some of the issues that we're seeing downtown.
For those who are unfamiliar, the city attorney's docket primarily deals with misdemeanor prosecutions.
I have heard anecdotally that there has been an uptick in arrests for those kinds of misdemeanors that has resulted in people getting booked into the King County Jail, but they're being almost immediately released by judges because there's not enough space in the King County Jail to hold low-level misdemeanors like shoplifters stealing less than $20 worth of stuff or whatever.
Uh, what the task in front of us really is, is how can we remove people that are causing those issues from the streets of downtown Seattle and have them be in a place where they can be that isn't victimizing others?
And for some people, that certainly will be jail, but we're not going to be able to book a misdemeanor given that King County's jail numbers have plummeted.
They've lost 550 jail cells during COVID.
There's nothing we can do about that.
The county is an independent government, and I don't think they're going to re-enlarge their jail anytime soon.
So in the meantime, we have to mitigate.
That's why programs like Just Care that I just talked about are important.
The capacity that they have added of about 250 sheltering spaces is catering to a similar demographic of folks, of people who are in and out of the criminal legal system, experiencing homelessness, committing high volumes of misdemeanor crimes.
Some of the comments I made in that piece to the Seattle Times was, to the extent that we have limited jail spaces, we really need to be pursuing the organized retail theft ringleaders who we can get on a felony hold.
And King County will book felony holds.
And the West Precinct has been working with my office, has been working with Mayor Harrell, and we are really focusing our efforts on trying to work with King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg and hold some of these organized retail thieves that are committing, well, that are really causing the massive concentration of organized retail theft in the city center.
I think it's just tough to do that with a solely misdemeanor-based strategy.
And I have not seen so far that they're being successful in getting people held on bail just because the judges have finite space.
They're not using them on misdemeanors.
That's beyond all of our power right now.
Okay.
All right.
Thanks f down.
I wanted to shift i now with you.
You attend recently for an announce partnership for zero.
Thi from bigger businesses, ph specifically at homelessness So Mark Jones, the ceo of homelessness authority ma point I thought in his co what we consider a good a homelessness.
Here's the
There is actually no such thing as a good homelessness announcement.
That's not a real thing.
The only good homelessness announcement is the one where we say everyone is housed.
That's not today.
What we are saying today is we're going to commit to getting there.
your thoughts about what seemed very confident abo with this investment of h people who are homeless d
I think it's absolutely possible and really appreciate that plan coming together over the course of the transition between the Herald administration coming on board and our work post-budget as a council with the regional authority in shaping this new partnership for Xero in downtown Seattle.
We know that downtown has to recover first on homelessness.
We estimate that we have about 800 people experiencing homelessness in the downtown area.
Mark wants to get that down to 30 folks in a year.
And a big part of it has really just been better coordinating some of our existing assets.
And that's the first, if this proposal does nothing else, that first thing is gonna be very helpful.
Mayor Harrell mentioned in the State of the City speech that he inherited a system that had several different inputs for work orders related to homelessness, related to outreach, removal, muddled lines between enforcement, between shelter referral.
And that has all been streamlined through this process for partnership for Xero.
There's going to be a unified command structure.
Work orders are going to go to one place.
Outreach is going to be case conferenced among the myriad of providers.
It's not going to be siloed.
It's going to be organized.
It's going to be unified.
And if nothing else, that is going to make a huge difference in helping to maximize the existing resources we have.
It's important to note that we're going to have a lot of other resources coming online.
that Mark teased a little bit in some of those announcements.
There's going to be a high acuity sheltering asset that the council funded jointly with King County that will be coming online.
There's also a request for proposals that just wrapped up to build a couple of additional non-congregate shelters.
as well as an RV safe lot concept.
So those things are gonna really help to maximize our impact downtown.
And I think that you're gonna see, you know, things start coming together when you really have unity of purpose among stakeholders.
And you saw yesterday, you know, the city council, the mayor, the county and the business community standing side by side.
I'm ready to take this on.
Yeah, you know, it'll be interesting to see that play out.
Thanks for breaking that piece down too.
I wanted to switch gears just a little bit here and talk about a recent op ed you wrote in the Seattle Times about responding to homelessness as an emergency.
Specifically, you're talking about getting some help from the state to cut some of the red tape involved on environmental reviews for reciting and building shelters for homeless people.
It looks like Senate Bill 5428 is moving through the legislature right now.
The Senate's version of it is passed out of chambers as of mid February here.
I want to talk about this throw in a question from edition super fan here and how can we help?
How is enough is enough.
Thank yo and council member lewis.
how the state bill might answers.
Yeah, you know, sense of urgency about t year or I should say act when the council enacted the 2021 budget, we put money in there for three additional tiny house villages.
Those tiny house villages took almost a year to finish.
And a big reason for that, I mean, there were several contributing reasons why it took a while.
One of the biggest ones was conducting something called SEPA review or State Environmental Protection Act review.
You know, it is good, I will say at the front here, that we have required environmental review under the Environmental Protection Act.
If we're putting in a permanent brick and mortar building, or if we're putting in some kind of industrial use that is going to contribute some poor environmental impact to an area, or if we're building in an environmentally sensitive area, like near a stream or near a wetland, there definitely needs to be environmental review.
The reality of these tiny house village assets, as everyone knows who's been by one in Seattle, we have about 11 or 12 that are active now.
These things are built on parking lots, they're built on vacant lots, they're built on lots that are going to be developed into a building in the future.
These are not built in environmentally sensitive areas.
And we have an emergency.
I mean, we would not stop and go through that review process.
If there had been an earthquake and we had to set up emergency shelter for people who were displaced, and we should respond to this similarly and intentionally by going through this review process, it can delay things by 6 to 8 months.
Indeed, it did last year, and this has real consequences.
The Ballard Commons Park, Bitter Lake Park, places we really, really wanted to see clearative encampments.
We were not able to do that until those tiny house villages were open.
And like I said in the op-ed, the difference between doing that in the late spring, early summer, And when it did happen in late November, early December, was environmental review.
So I support Senator Nguyen's bill, support Senator Nguyen's leadership.
Let's get this over the finish line so that we can move with speed and intentionality to get this stuff going and get it stood up.
Got it.
I wanted to talk with Sound Transit three.
Times has been writing a of the deep bore tunnel w put a train 145 ft below t looking at this current p here.
It could be several to get down to a train at has had some issues keepi operational.
One concern a thoughts about this, this keeping trains underground and an option that people rea
Yeah, you know, we're going to be doing a lot of work as a council really drilling into the potential impacts on our built environment of the Sound Transit 3 route.
You know, we're talking about downtown right now and how deep some of those stations are going to be.
But we got to take stock as well that, you know, that that route goes through some culturally sensitive areas in the Seattle Center campus, making sure that we're Being good neighbors to some of the arts institutions there that have just been, you know, the first to close and last to reopen during COVID and we want to make sure we don't disrupt their recovery.
Want to make sure that we are sensitive of the impact on the maritime industrial areas in the interbay neighborhood in terms of making sure freight mobility is maintained throughout the process of building it.
So, you know, there's a whole bunch of these different issues we'll be developing.
I'm really excited that the Council has sent over and Executive Constantine has accepted Council President Juarez to serve for another spin there on the Sound Transit Board representing our interests.
I look forward to talking to her about these issues and others to make sure that we can get the amenity of grade separated fast rail transit without having too much disruption to the existing uses in that area.
OK, thank you.
I wanted to talk about some housing issues.
Plenty to throw your way here.
One of our viewers is a champion for small landlords and writes this.
Please ask Councilmember Lewis how quickly the small landlord stakeholder group he shepherded through last fall's budget will ramp up and why it hasn't been five plus years since Council has had any speakers, presentations, dialogue with small landlords while passing a tsunami of new regulations.
Thank you for the question.
This is referring to your budget amendment from last year that you helped pass.
What's your response to this question?
Yeah, so I'm working with SDCI.
That's the Seattle Department of Construction's inspections right now to see how we might structure that stakeholder group that I put forward in that slide.
I'm looking forward to it.
We know from survey after survey, study after study, during the COVID era, that one of our big hurdles in getting relief out to renters and landlords has been that lots of small landlords just aren't very well equipped to access how that money is being distributed.
A lot of small landlords that still do things that don't do things necessarily like on a computer in terms of accessing online banking portals or whatever else.
for example.
So, you know, I think that's really going to be the utility of this approach is like, let's really look at, you know, how are we failing to get that relief out to landlords and tenants, looking at ways to help streamline and improve compliance among landlords with the myriad of different tenant protections that the council has advocated in the past and making sure that that's a seamless process and not Byzantine or hard to navigate.
In terms of the process questions, you know, I have not chaired a committee that includes renter regulations, so that'd be a question for the chair of the committee who holds that gavel.
It's not me, so I have to differ on that.
Fair.
I want to make sure I followed up with another piece, though.
The eviction moratorium set to end here in Seattle at the end of February.
What do you think is going to happen then?
Yeah, well, what I'm really looking forward to is this portal that the Herald administration is going to set up to streamline the ability for landlords in Tennessee and access to resources to avoid an eviction.
I really want to make sure that that's in place.
I know that that's a priority for the administration and that Director Torvaldsen over at SDCI is working really hard to make sure that that resource is there.
So, you know, that's what I'm looking forward to to make sure that tenants are in a position where they can access a lot of this money that's being put out there for relief.
And that is a shared mayoral and council priority to make sure that people can be made whole and stay housed.
Got it right.
The $25 million set aside at the city level is going to be very important for people to access.
I wanted to ask another affordable housing question that came in.
You serve on the Finance and Housing Committee, and here's what Eric wants to know.
I live in Wallingford, and I'm watching my neighborhood get demolished by HALA, that's the city's housing affordability and livability agenda, to make way for multifamily housing.
Meanwhile, Laurelhurst has open land that will result in no displacement or demolition, and council is letting new mansions be built there.
Eric, thank you very much for the email here.
He's talking about a large parcel of land north of Children's Hospital that's going on the market.
And as you point out, Eric added a three letter acronym.
Councilmember Lewis that starts with a W and ends with an F.
I'll let you figure that one out, but he's upset about this and wanted to ask about this.
It sounds like this is an area here that could be set up for some single family mansions, and he's concerned.
Yeah, well, I think we need to make sure that when we're really looking at our built environment, that we're cognizant of figuring out ways to put affordable housing anywhere we have a hook for.
When we have public land, that's usually a hook where we can make sure that some entities, some nonprofit developer can come in and build housing for folks who are at a lower area median income or AMI, lower percentage.
I'm really proud that through our development, standards, we were able to stretch that even more for permanent supportive housing, passing new standards, lowering the cost by almost $50,000 per unit to stretch that value further.
So look, I'm not the best person to comment on this particular parcel of land.
I'm not really aware of what the dynamics are.
I believe that's in Councilmember Peterson's district.
Councilmember Peterson might be a good resource for your caller to get an update.
But I would say, generally speaking, when we have public land, I really want to make sure we're maximizing the use of public land for some kind of affordable place for people to live.
Because we have a lot more agency, obviously, with land we own than land that we have to acquire.
Land in Seattle is expensive.
We're a highly desirable city to live in.
That makes it harder for public entities to carve out space for folks who don't have a lot of money.
Alright, thank you for taking on the question.
We have one more.
Another message came in for you.
Patrick wrote this to us.
Will there ever be a tax incentive or a program to help Seattle natives buy houses?
This is an interesting one, and I know that the council's been talking about a lot of different programs as the last dollars in federal relief or handed out here this week.
I know there was a meeting about this.
Your thoughts about this.
Is there something like this even on the table?
Any thoughts on this?
No, you know, I haven't heard of any program exactly like that.
I mean, I would say that, you know, Council Member Morales in particular has talked extensively about trying to create some kind of social housing concept in the city of Seattle or some kind of publicly owned housing concept so that you, you know, like in a lot of Western European countries, you have a large concentration of housing stock.
that is either cooperatively owned, you know, owned by the city, or in some respect, you know, essentially operated at cost, where people paying rent into it are not paying into any rent with a profit motive attached to it.
It's difficult to do in a system that has very strong property rights, obviously to come in and do too much regulating on, you know, like how rent can be set or other things like that.
Now, in terms of incentivizing ownership, I think that part of that conversation has to be what kind of course can the city and the state take to increase housing supply and reduce housing cost in order to facilitate a program like that penciling out.
And we're not really in a place like that where the city is situated to be able to provide some kind of subsidy or incentive for private buyers at a big scale to be able to take advantage of that.
Obviously, here and there, there are some small nonprofit-operated programs.
But bringing it to scale is going to require creating more affordable housing stock.
Got it, thank you.
I wonder if we can sneak in one last question here.
I was thinking of one piece with the state of the city here looking ahead to the budget.
The mayor is talking about using some money from the jumpstart payroll tax to shore up a budget shortfall that Seattle Mayor experienced this year.
I know the council is really tried to keep this money in a certain lane here.
Some thoughts about what the mayor was saying there.
Yeah, look, I appreciate any suggestion for the big fiscal challenges that the city faces.
We had a very big budget boom over the course of the last decade, where the general fund increased considerably.
It's fairly clear that that's coming down a little bit due to the pace of building falling off.
And a big part of our revenue comes from constructing new buildings and like all of the multiplier effects that go into that.
You have contractors that are buying concrete.
You're employing the people driving the trucks.
You're employing the architects.
You're employing the construction workers.
And all of them are in turn consuming in the city.
going to restaurants, going to bars, going to the grocery store, what have you.
So with that diminishing a little bit from the highs of where it is, we have a general fund that is sort of running a little bit over.
So we need to make sure that we can figure out a way to get down to a sustainable level.
I think everything should be on the table to have that discussion.
Another thing I'd like to see though, Brian, with that surplus is Is there a way that we can take some of that money, that windfall, and invest it into things that will stimulate our recovery?
By that I mean investments that will be directly responsive to our public safety challenges and our homelessness challenges.
Because part of getting that general fund back up is going to be getting downtown humming again.
getting a return to work, and that means making big progress on homelessness and public safety.
So if there is a way to maybe deploy that money for some proactive initiatives around those goals, that is something I'm interested in as well.
But I think everything has to be on the table to deal with our revenue crunch.
Got it.
Thank you very much.
Council Member Andrew J. Lewis, thank you very much for joining me this month, and we will see you next time on Council Edition.