Seattle City Council Sustainability & Transportation Committee 4/16/19

Good afternoon, everybody.

Today is April Tuesday, April 16th, 2019. It's 2 p.m.

My name is Mike O'Brien.

Welcome to the Sustainability and Transportation Committee.

I am chair of this committee and I'm joined by Jasmine Marwaha, who's staffing us today.

Thanks for being here.

We have a number of items on our agenda today.

We're going to start with appointments to the Seattle Pedestrian Advisory Board, both appointments and reappointments.

Then we will let me look here.

Then we'll take up an ordinance about land use and zoning around electric vehicle readiness in parking garages.

We will take up appointments and reappointments to the Urban Forestry Commission.

We will have the Urban Forestry Commission present their annual report.

We will hear from the School Traffic Safety Committee in their annual report.

And finally, we'll have the first conversation about a possible alley vacation related to an affordable housing project at Willow Street near MLK.

So we will start with public comment.

There are four folks signed up.

Alex Zimmerman, you're first, followed by Amy Fowler, then Megan Murphy, and Rachel Ludwick.

Thank you, sir.

Die Heil, my dirty Fuhrer.

Nazi garbage, rats from animal farm.

My name Alex Zimmerman.

I want to speak about school.

What is this agenda number 10?

School, traffic, safety.

I'm totally confused.

I drive car, next school, something happen, I pay my ticket, my insurance go up, I lose a thousand and thousand dollars.

A bike can't drive.

Next, school and CDIVAC, kill children and nothing happen.

Wow!

What is a privilege have this a bandito, a criminal who can drive in city walk and try kill us children?

And why we cannot fix this problem?

It's make me absolutely sick.

I try understand how this possible.

And you for my understanding, Consul Brian, you are member of what is this?

Oh, bicycle club.

It's not legal, you cannot doing this here.

Oh, so Billingham make a decision last year, no bike in city work.

Why we cannot doing this?

Who care about us children?

Oh, a bike care about us children?

Can drive like a crazy?

I see this every day next to my car, driving and driving.

When I open door, they freaking are idiot, are psychopath, are kamikaze, are crooks and bandito.

So my proposition very simple.

Make a law no bike and CD walk in exactly next school.

Like car have a problem.

We need stop in car, we need stop in bike, we need stop in bandito.

Thank you very much.

Amy.

Good afternoon, Chair O'Brien.

I'm here on behalf of the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency.

We are the air quality agency for King, Kitsap, Pierce, and Snohomish counties.

I manage our voluntary and incentive-based programs there at the agency.

And I'm here in support of CB 1194-72 to encourage electric vehicle infrastructure in all new construction.

Transportation is the leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions in our region.

Excuse me.

And our board of directors has asked the agency to act more aggressively on climate pollution.

And to do so, we have to address cars.

Every gallon of gas burned is 20 pounds of CO2.

So other than not driving, driving less, driving electric is our best option for those single vehicle, single occupant vehicles that need to happen.

Unfortunately, although our region is a leader in electric vehicle adoption, Charging infrastructure has not kept pace.

This ordinance will help us do a little catch up.

It will make EV charging stations more equitably available, and that will help make electric vehicles more equitably available, including low-income housing developments in this ordinance means that the infrastructure is there, and so individuals can afford to buy a used vehicle and know that they'll have a place to charge it.

That's why we encourage adoption of this ordinance.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Amy.

Megan.

Thanks for letting me speak.

I was wondering, in Sioux City, Iowa, I wanted there to be electric charging vehicle stations.

Is there any worksheets I could send to the city council there and so they could review?

Do you have literature about it or?

Yeah, we could probably share the presentation that folks gave to this committee two weeks ago.

That would be probably a good starting point for a fellow council member that wanted to see what we're doing here.

That would be good.

I'm trying to get their interest.

We'd be happy to share that with you.

And also, you know those things that they're building, the tunnel, when you're trying to decide how deep?

I feel like they had the committees meet, and it should be more three-dimensional or something, or knowing more about what materials are going to be used and how much and where they're coming from, those materials.

Because then I feel like the timeline might move faster.

So it was really interesting, though.

I'm glad everybody's working so closely together.

So, and then, um, I, I think that once the rent control ordinance, um, passes at the state that, um, we should pass it citywide for rent control.

I thought, um, because I know you're an advocate for 10 encampments and we're trying to get cleanup because last night she said it should be like a hotel cleanup for the encampments.

Well, we could go and even step further and actually get, get people inside housing.

And, um, so I thought that was good and, um, So just a lot to look forward to, but I'm trying to think if I missed it.

10 encampments, rent control.

Okay, yeah, I think I got everything.

Thanks.

Thanks Megan.

Rachel.

Sorry, this is the part where I get my notes.

Hi, I'm Rachel Ludwick.

I'm a parent in North Beacon Hill.

And I'm actually really thrilled that the community leaders in the School Traffic Safety Committee are presenting today because the challenges they face trying to figure out ways to get kids to school safely is a direct result of our transportation priorities being misaligned.

As an example, SDOT has shifted away from creating regular sidewalks and instead are creating low cost ones, a substantial proportion of them over what we'd originally planned.

And a lot of them are ones like tire stops lining an existing at grade sidewalk, which just gets pushed by a car parking into the sidewalk.

which is kind of questionable for a safe route to school and whether it's even worth the money.

And in fact, it's not even clear that they're costing substantially less than a full sidewalk.

And of course, the reality is this isn't going to get us to safe routes to school.

The problem is we overwhelmingly spend our time and our money and our time on projects for cars.

The Mercer mess is still a mess.

It's 2.5 times as much as what we'll spend on sidewalks over the entire levy.

The Lander Street Bridge project, which has a single side sidewalk, also will cost more than everything we'll spend on sidewalks over the time of the levy.

And every project around the city, we prioritize car volumes and car parking over everything, including our children safely walking to school.

This is unacceptable.

At our current sidewalk cost, the 2,457 missing block faces within a quarter mile of schools that the School Traffic Safety Committee found will cost nearly a billion dollars to build.

If we can't build safe routes that way, then we'll have to do something different.

What if we slowed our traffic and deprioritized cars everywhere near schools?

What if we made our complete streets law require people first transportation planning rather than people who can afford cars and are able to drive first?

What if we actually had 25 mile per hour arterial speed limits everywhere, which we don't even on Vision Zero corridors?

What if our greenways actually diverted traffic?

What if we planned our streets for kiddos with the same devotion that we have for wealthy car commuters?

And what if our children could actually walk to school on the street if they needed to because the streets were that safe?

I really look forward to seeing some kind of redirection and rethinking about how we plan transportation as a result of the School Traffic Safety Committee's report.

Thank you.

Thank you, Rachel.

Rachel's the last one who signed up for the general public comment.

We do have a public hearing that will be coming later in today's agenda around the electric vehicle legislation.

Is there anyone else who wants to provide public comment at this point?

All right.

Seeing none, we'll close public comment, and I'll invite presenters forward for the first few items, I think five or six, and let Jasmine read this on record.

I should mention first that we've been joined by Council Member Swann.

Thanks for being here.

Appointment 01289 through 01293. Appointment of Carol Kachidurian, Han Jung Ko, Anna Leticia Zieverts, and the reappointment of Patricia M. Chapman and David Seder as members of the Seattle Pedestrian Advisory Board for a term to March 31st, 2021.

Welcome, everyone.

Why don't we start by doing a quick round of introductions?

Should I press on the button?

Should be going.

Okay.

Hi, everybody.

My name is Belen Herrera.

I am the Pedestrian Advisory Board liaison.

Thank you.

I'm Carol Caciudorian, and I am here to be appointed to the Pedestrian Advisory Board.

Ana Zivartz, also here to be appointed.

Thank you all for being here.

You want to give us a quick overview of the Pedestrian Advisory Board and then introduce the new appointments?

Yeah, so the Seattle Pedestrian Advisory Board are the stewards of the Pedestrian Master Plan and also assist in the decision-making and guidance for the Pedestrian Master Plan Implementation Plan.

And it's comprised of 12 members, 11...

Partially used to be out between the mayor candidates and the council candidates with one get engaged member and that get engaged member gets rotated every year and specifically the get engaged members a youth position between the ages of 18 to 29 and That's pretty much what the head board does great

The pedestrian master plan is a critical piece of our commitment to Vision Zero, which is the city's commitment to eliminate all traffic-related fatalities and serious injuries across any modes of transportation.

And we know that almost everybody starts and ends a trip as a pedestrian.

And for a lot of people, that's the only way they get around.

And so ensuring that we are designing a network of safe pedestrian connections for all users in our system is critically important.

And the pedestrian master plan is an amazing document that really lays out a map for how we achieve that.

And what we also know is it's really expensive and going to take a lot of commitment to actually build out that network that we need to do.

So why don't we take a minute and let Anna and Carol, if you want, just give us a few minutes about why you're interested in joining this, what draws you to the work, and what you might hope to accomplish as a member of the Pedestrian Advisory Board.

So I moved to Seattle a little over a year ago after living in Washington, D.C.

since 1980. And certainly I experienced the changes that Washington, D.C.

had in terms of additional facilities for people walking and biking.

I'm a multimodal transportation planner.

I'm a consultant.

When I saw the ad for the Pedestrian Advisory Board, it just struck me as the right thing for me to do in this city that I've come to love as a way to contribute and to apply both my personal and professional background.

I'm a lifelong pedestrian.

I was a child, a young adult, as a college student, as a mother with two children, and now as an older, an empty nester and an older adult.

And so I feel I bring those perspectives as well.

As a multimodal transportation planner, when I turned 60, I thought I could probably focus on active transportation for older adults.

And so I do.

And I do that in my work for both walking and biking.

The other thing to note is that I had a disability earlier in my life, up until about 18 years ago.

And so I experienced a pedestrian, my experience walking as a pedestrian with a disability.

Professionally, I also worked on a number of committees in my positions with people with disabilities.

And so I understand both personally and professionally that aspect of it as well.

I think I said at our meeting last week that I hope I don't have any particular personal goals for being on the Pedestrian Advisory Board other than being a good member and helping that board make good advice to this committee and city council.

Thank you, Carol.

You're welcome.

Anna?

Hi, Ana Zivartz.

So I also just recently moved to the Seattle area, though I grew up in Olympia, Washington.

I left in 2005 and moved to New York City, where I lived until last summer, basically.

And then I moved back here for a job with Disability Rights Washington.

I'm the program director of Rooted in Rights, who are a video advocacy team.

that's part of Disability Rights Washington.

I'm low vision, and I moved.

I left Washington state because I felt like it wasn't a place that I was going to be able to get around in.

And New York was a place that I felt like I had equal access to going to where I needed to go.

Coming back here, It's been amazing to see the sort of commitment to transportation, the relatively functional bus network compared to other places.

But I think there's a lot we can do to make Seattle a more pedestrian-friendly city.

And being part of the board, I want to make sure that the other disabled folks that I'm connected to, our voices are heard.

I also want to make sure that we're talking about how this is all connected to zoning, to housing affordability, to building out transit networks to transit areas that are transit deserts so that it's not just rich, white, wealthy folks who have the opportunity to live in walkable communities, that it's all our community.

It's the whole city and outside of the city as well.

So that's my interest.

Great, thank you so much.

And I'll just take a moment to thank you and Rooted in Rights efforts and collaboration with the city working in Olympia to get some more flexibility around legislation to protect pedestrians and bus lanes and use automated enforcement to make that safe.

And I think that your work and Rooted in Rights work down in Olympia.

We still have a couple weeks to go here to get that finished.

It's a completely different conversation because of the work that you all have done, so thank you for that.

You're welcome, and we hope to bring that sort of perspective to a lot of conversations around mobility and access.

Great.

And then, Belin, Hanjung Co. is also a new appointment but not able to make it.

Do you have anything to say about that?

I do.

I brought some information so I can have some talking points.

So Hang Young Ko, she also goes by Coco for her nickname.

She is a trilingual research scientist and professor specializing in human development and gerontology, which is the study of the process of aging problems of old people and the study of As a trained scientist, she found it important to pay attention to equity and social justice issues such as safe living environments, support for social engagement for both older and younger generations.

She identifies as Taiwanese and she helped her Taiwanese community organize Taiwanese American Heritage Week back in 2014 and 2015. As part of the board, she hopes to contribute to the walkability needs of diverse residents.

particularly for those of the older generation.

Great.

And Council Member Sawant, typically have new appointments show up at the table, but I also recognize that the meetings during the day can be harder for folks to make it to, so I really appreciate you both making it here and I'm comfortable advancing an appointment for Han Young in her absence too, but if you have any concerns, we can hold off on that.

Fine with that.

And I also thank, I mean, including the profile that you read out of Han Jung, and also the comments that Carol and Anna both made.

I think they're really important that you're focusing on the, I mean, obviously the needs of all pedestrians, because as Council Member O'Brien said, we are all pedestrians, but also placing a specific emphasis on the needs of the disabled community members and older citizens.

I think if we can have an urban space that is designed that works for disabled and older people, I think it will work for everybody.

And so it's really a good benchmark to have.

And I look forward to hearing about what specific things we can do.

I mean, obviously, prioritization at, you know, signaling privatization, not privatization, prioritization.

I'm not going to be advocating for privatization.

So privatize the signals in Seattle.

It's an opportunity for corporate money to be made.

Like what's happening?

But also I think sidewalks, I mean the quality of sidewalks and all of that is tied together.

Like from point A to point B, can we make it safe and accessible in every way?

And I appreciate also that you said that it's also, it's tied in with housing affordability and so on, so really.

Great, in addition to the three appointments, we have two reappointments.

And I don't know if you wanted to say anything about them or

Yeah, so the first one who's a council reappointment is David Cedar.

He was a previous PED board member and would like to be reappointed.

And he was an active volunteer and leader with the Seattle Neighborhood Greenways and Central Seattle Greenways.

He's committed to helping transform Seattle streets into places that are safe, equitable, and comfortable for all ages and abilities.

He brings knowledge of SDOT working since he has served for two years and would like to continue to do so.

Patricia Chapman is a mayoral reappointment, and she has also previously served for two years on the board.

She brings not only her two years' experience on the PED board, but she is a retired FHWA perspective as well as senior perspective as well.

Great.

Both Patricia and David have been great members of the board from my perspective, and I'm more than happy to reappoint them.

So I'll go ahead and move all five appointments and reappointments agenda items one through five.

Second.

All in favor signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Great.

Thank you both.

These appointments will go to the full council on Monday.

You're obviously welcome to attend, but not necessary to be there.

Really thank you for your service and commitment and invite you to use your voice on the board to push the city to continue to work on our pedestrian environment.

There's a lot of work to be done.

I think there's a commitment to do the work but there's a commitment to do a lot of things in the city and without some focused attention sometimes we will not achieve what we want to and the headboard plays a really important role in elevating those voices and raising awareness and and holding us all accountable to deliver on on the master plan which we've made a commitment to do so i look forward to hearing a lot from you in the coming years well for me in the coming months but um so thank you all so much thank you All right, agenda number six, Jasmine.

Council Bill 119472, an ordinance relating to land use and zoning, amending sections 2322062, 2324045, 2349019, 2354030, and 2384A010 of the Seattle Municipal Code.

Well, welcome everyone.

Why don't we start with a quick round of introductions?

Yolanda, you can lead us off.

Yolanda Ho, Council Central Staff.

Andrea Pratt, Office of Sustainability and Environment.

Christina Gann, Department of Construction Inspections.

Great, so we had a great conversation a couple weeks ago.

This is a piece of legislation I've been very excited to have a chance to vote on.

And so the presentation last week or two weeks ago was great, really good to understand.

The work, it's clear to me that a lot of really thoughtful work has gone into drafting our legislation, including looking at what kind of peer jurisdictions around the country are doing as kind of a baseline for best practices, conversations with folks in the electric vehicle industry, and advocates in the community, and also conversation with the folks that build the buildings that will be required to meet these new requirements.

I think that you've navigated a path that works out really well, and I'm really excited about that.

Yolanda, maybe I'll give you just a minute to give a quick overview for folks that are jumping into this conversation today for the first time.

and then we'll probably do the public hearing after that.

Sounds good.

So, Council Bill 119472 would amend the Land Use Code to add a requirement for the provision of electric vehicle charging infrastructure that would make it easier to install charging equipment or stations in the future if development provides off-street parking.

So specifically, the legislation would require that each private garage or private parking area provided for an individual residence, such as a single-family house, duplex, or townhouse, includes an EV-ready space defined as a 208, 240-volt, 40-amp power outlet.

require that multifamily development with shared parking garages or shared surface parking lots provide at least 20% of the spaces as EV ready with higher requirements for smaller parking facilities, require that parking facilities for non-residential uses include a minimum of 10% of the spaces as EV ready, and allow flexibility from the EV requirements in instances where meeting the requirements would require certain types of upgrades to the utility infrastructure.

These requirements would apply regardless of whether the parking was required by the land use code or provided for other reasons and are not intended to increase the number of off-street parking spaces constructed.

Excellent.

Andrea or Christina, do either of you have anything you want to add or touch on?

I don't think so, and we're happy to answer any questions you all may have now or after the public hearing.

In general, what my recollection is that for single family homes or really small construction projects, six or fewer units, there's a requirement that if there's parking provided, there's essentially a one EV per stall.

So any individual townhome owners, single family home would have access to it.

And then as we get to bigger projects, the requirement shifts to about a 20% requirement.

And I had a chance since our last meeting to meet with a company that actually does EV charging stations, and they confirmed what you said, that the technology is there, almost there today, where a single charging station has the capacity of managing load in a way to charge as many as five vehicles.

So A 20% charging station or EV ready requirement with some good use of technology could get us to 100% adoption, which would be outstanding.

And looking at the comparisons to other jurisdictions, it feels like we've taken kind of the various highest standards from other jurisdictions and put them all together.

And it feels like for our city to be taking the next step relative to the jurisdictions where continuing to raise that bar a bit is my understanding.

Is that accurate-ish?

I think you nailed it.

It's great.

I appreciate that.

Council Member Swann, do you have any comments on that before we go to the public hearing?

No, really.

I'm also actually very excited about it.

Great.

Also some exciting news down in Olympia about electric vehicles.

So hopefully this session will finish with a little more flexibility on the other end of how we do this.

So there's, we're going to go ahead and open the public hearing.

I have four folks signed up.

Leah Missick's first, followed by Annabel Drayton, and then Alex Zimmerman and Anthony Harrison.

You'll each have up to two minutes.

Hi, and good afternoon.

My name is Leah Missick, and I am the Washington Transportation Policy Manager at Climate Solutions.

Climate Solutions is a regional nonprofit with the mission of accelerating clean energy solutions to the climate crisis.

We are in strong support of this ordinance, which is one step along the way of transitioning to a clean energy economy.

As our city grows, it is important that our infrastructure is adaptable to the future.

The transportation sector accounts for about two-thirds of the city's greenhouse gas emissions.

In addition to promoting multimodal transportation, we also need to ensure that our infrastructure will accommodate zero-emissions vehicles.

This ordinance is crucial in that way.

New buildings will stick around for decades, but electric vehicles are here now.

Making sure a building has the wiring and outlets necessary to accommodate vehicle charging up front is very low cost, but retrofitting a building later on can cost five to ten times as much.

One of the biggest barriers to EV adoption is the lack of convenient charging at home.

Given the low cost, it only makes sense for new buildings that include parking already to accommodate for future EV charging.

The outcome will be broadened access to EVs, lowered air pollution, and fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

I want to emphasize that this ordinance went through a robust input process and the staff made adjustments according to the feedback they received.

The result is a well-crafted ordinance that is one step along the way of helping to ensure Seattle's growth is more sustainable.

So thank you for considering this ordinance.

And again, we're in strong support.

Thanks.

Thank you, Leah.

Annabelle.

Good afternoon.

My name is Annabel Drayton.

I'm a policy associate at the Northwest Energy Coalition.

We're an alliance of over 100 member organizations united around clean and affordable energy.

I'd like to start off by thanking you all for your commitment to equity in the environment.

As you all know, from the 2014 inventory, on-road transportation makes up 66% of the city's greenhouse gas emissions.

This amendment is an essential solution in a suite of policies and programs that can be used to reduce air pollution and meet the city's climate goals.

NWEC is supportive of policy aimed at advancing beneficial transportation electrification and supports this council bill that would ensure new buildings are EV ready.

EV ready buildings or land use codes help provide several EV infrastructure solutions.

To name a few, EV infrastructure installed during new construction, such as electrical panel capacity, raceways, and pre-wiring can be up to 10 times cheaper than installing EV infrastructure during retrofits.

New construction buildings last for decades, so it's critical that charging infrastructure is incorporated during original construction.

And these standards are technology neutral, which allows the infrastructure to adapt to a wide spectrum of EV charging technology.

Again, we are supportive of this policy, and we look forward to continuing to work together to meet the growing EV adoption and infrastructure demand in Seattle, reduce air pollution, and support a healthy environment for all.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Annabelle.

Alex.

Oh my gosh.

Ze heil, my dirty Fuhrer.

Nazi garbage rat from animal farm.

My name Alex Zimmerman.

What has happened with parking for electrical car?

It charge next store or go hospital or everything, and this happened for last few year, and I drive all around.

I never see one electrical car.

When I drive, staying in charge, we spend a dozen and dozen million dollars, a hundred million dollars for nothing.

You need to be absolutely freaking idiot and cretina.

Spend a hundred and hundred million dollars for who?

For private driver.

Nobody spend money for me as private driver.

I pay for gasoline.

I pay for taxes.

I pay for everything.

Why I pay for everything?

Why I pay for everything, you freaking idiot?

This guy, electrical car, don't pay nothing.

I pay for them.

I pay for them, and million people pay for them, too.

Why is so many station about electrical car?

What is happen when tomorrow this whole electrical car will be dead?

Why?

Guys, what we have right now is a bunch of freaking idiots.

I will call this a Nazi social democratic mafia.

We talk about climate change and spend hundreds and hundreds of million dollars for nothing.

We all pay for this.

So I speak right now to you, Seattle Emerald degenerate 700,000 idiot.

When you start thinking not with your asses, start thinking with your brain and clean this dirty chamber from this crook.

who spend a billion and billion dollars for nothing in transportation.

It's exactly what has happened, from sound transits to electrical parking cars.

Stand up, America, clean this dirty chamber from this cretina, from this Nazi pig.

Thank you very much.

Anthony Harrison is next.

good afternoon mr chair councilwoman thank you anthony harrison on behalf of charge point and i am pleased to be here in strong support of this really important ordinance charge point is one of the leading of EV charging in the world.

And we have the largest network here in North America.

And we have actually just over 600 charging spots here in Seattle.

And we work with cities across the country on EV readiness ordinances.

And I can tell you if adopted, this will be the most sound and reasonable EV readiness ordinance in the country.

And I wanna commend the staff on the robust work they did to reach out to industry on the design and development of this policy.

And as an EV infrastructure provider, we get to see firsthand what the huge upfront barriers are to deploying the infrastructure we need to support the growing rate of cars.

And this ordinance addresses that number one barrier.

There's been multiple studies that shown that having policies like this in place can lead to 70% to 80% cost reduction at time of installation for EV charging stations.

so i am again pleased to testify in support and i look forward to seeing this ordinance going to effect thank you great thanks anthony that's the last person who's signed up to provide comment or testimony in the public hearing is there anyone else that wants to comment seeing no one else moving towards the microphone we'll go ahead and close the public hearing oh Yeah, so for those on the camera, the question was about, will this be in commercial retail operations?

And yes, there's a requirement.

Do any of you remember it off the top of your head?

10%.

10% of the spots for retail operations will have.

And again, with the technology able to expand that, that could be up to 50% of the spots could be ready at some point in the future.

So, good question.

SO I WILL GO AHEAD AND CLOSE THE PUBLIC HEARING.

TYPICALLY OUR RULES ARE THAT WE DO NOT HOLD A VOTE ON THE SAME DAY AS A PUBLIC HEARING, BUT I'VE ONLY HEARD POSITIVE THINGS ABOUT THIS, AND I'M INCLINED TO SUSPEND OUR RULES TO MOVE IT OUT IF IT'S OKAY WITH YOU, COUNCILPERSON WANT.

SO WANT TO MAKE A MOTION TO SUSPEND THE RULES?

I'm sorry, no, I just wanted to talk about the amendment.

Did you?

Oh, great.

Thank you.

So all in favor of suspending the rules, signify by saying aye.

Aye?

Okay, the rules are suspended, so now we can proceed to a vote.

Yolanda, tell us about the amendment.

Well, Chair O'Brien, you have sponsored an amendment that would add a reporting requirement to the bill, and so council would request that this report be that the Seattle Department of Construction Inspections and the Office of Sustainability and Environment provide a report to council in three years, so June 1st, 2022, and that report would just kind of quantify how many parking spaces were created, how many of them are EV ready, and also kind of track the number of electric vehicles in the city, as well as kind of understanding the geographic distribution, so what neighborhoods are these being built in, and the types of development that these are associated with, and also track the number of reductions that are granted through a type one decision so we understand if this is a significant barrier or if not.

And the report would also request any recommended adjustments to the standards if they are not meeting intended outcomes.

And I was able to work with Christina at SDCI on kind of making sure this seems reasonable as well to Andrea.

So I think, yeah, this should work in three years.

Great.

And I think, Yolanda, thank you for working on that amendment for me, and Council Member Swant, the thing that I was, I mean, that we always try to do is get some information, but I wanted to be sensitive to how soon could we get information that would actually be meaningful, because when this goes into effect, it'll be for new projects that are coming along.

And so three years, I'm guessing, is probably at the front end when just the first handful of projects will be out there, but it at least will be a chance for us to see and evaluate and The world will almost certainly have changed a little bit in the intervening time, and so if there are things that we need to do to tweak things, it would be good to know at that point, too.

So I will go ahead and move this amendment.

All in favor, say an aye.

Aye.

Great.

And now I'll go ahead and move the council bill, agenda item number six, as amended.

All in favor signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Great.

Thank you for all your work on this and look forward to getting this to the full council and getting it in place and so we can start seeing projects meeting the new standards.

So thanks a ton for your work.

Thank you.

All right.

Jasmine, do you want to read the next agenda items?

Yeah, appointment 01284 and 01285. Appointment of Joshua N. Norris as a member Urban Forestry Commission for a term to March 31st, 2022. And reappointment of Weston Brinkley as a member Urban Forestry Commission to March 31st, 2022. Come on forward.

Welcome, everyone.

And why don't we start by a quick round of introductions.

My name is Joshua Morris.

I'm the urban conservation manager at Seattle Audubon Society.

Welcome.

Weston Brinkley, current chair, Seattle Urban Forestry Commission.

And I'm Sandra Pinto-DeBator with the Office of Sustainability and Environment.

I'm the liaison for the Urban Forestry Commission.

If I may, I'll give a big introduction.

So today is my pleasure to introduce Weston's appointment and Josh's appointment to the Urban Forestry Commission, which was established to advise city council and the mayor on policies, plans, regulations having to do with the management of urban forestry in the city.

The commission has 13 positions.

Six are appointed by the mayor, six by council, and one is appointed by the commission itself.

um council is recommending reappointment of weston brinkley to position number three which is the university representative weston brings strong knowledge and experience leading a range of community-based urban forestry programming science and education he has a degree in urban geography and a master's degree in urban planning with a land use concentration He currently teaches at Antioch University, Seattle University, and the University of Washington.

He's also ambassador for the Urban Waters Federal Partnership.

Weston's broad experience and background in urban forestry research and his strong leadership skills have been an asset to the Urban Forestry Commission.

He has served as the commission's chair for the last two years, and he's been appointed to a three-year term that ends, as Jasmine mentioned, March 31st, 2022. And also, council is recommending appointment of Josh Morris to position number seven, NGO representative.

Josh is the urban conservation management at Seattle Audubon.

And in this role, he leads engagement on local conservation issues and coordinates coalition building advocacy and outreach to support urban conservation priorities, which include our urban trees.

Josh holds a Master of Arts in International Environmental Policy and brings over ten years of professional and volunteer experience in environmental conservation to the Urban Forestry Commission.

He's been appointed to a three year term ending March 31st, 2022.

Great.

Josh, it's okay, why don't we start with you?

Just wanna get a chance to hear a little bit about your background and why you're interested in this role and what you would hope to accomplish.

Sure, so thank you very much for the consideration.

So as I said, I'm the urban conservation manager at Seattle Audubon Society, which is the oldest conservation organization in Washington state.

We were founded in 1916 and are now in our second century as an organization.

And throughout that time, we've had a hand in the establishment of Olympic National Park, North Cascades National Park, the successful passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

We've been involved in numerous environmental lawsuits, and more recently, we worked with city partners to achieve formal designation of the city of Seattle as an urban bird treaty city through the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Throughout the years, the conservation program has shifted focus to better suit the needs of an increasingly urban community, and now our flagship conservation initiative is one that we call Neighborhood Flyways, which seeks to maintain, enhance, and connect habitat patches across the city.

And a healthy, thriving, growing urban forest is critical to the success of that initiative.

And that's why I'm excited about the opportunity to join the Urban Forestry Commission and to share my perspective and expertise with you all as an NGO representative on the commission.

So thank you.

And Josh, just really quick on the urban flyways, is that to support migratory birds?

Is it really for local birds to be able to get to where they nest and where they forage?

For both, but it's critically important for migratory birds as they're flying north along the Pacific Flyway.

Wow, that's great.

Listen, thank you for being here for your reappointment.

Thanks for your service.

Tell us a little bit about where you see the Urban Forestry Commission going and what you want to accomplish next.

Yeah, great, thank you.

We'll do our annual report coming up, so I'll give you some more detail then.

But personally, I just want to say that the Urban Forestry Commission is a really tremendous opportunity for us as a city to better understand the benefits we all get from nature and to really put those into practice in many different ways across the city.

We've had a really just great relationship with staff, with council, Um, and I, you know, personally look forward to continuing that work.

That's great.

Council Member Samant, do you have any questions for these folks?

We'll get a chance to dig in deeper when we get to the, uh, the annual report, but...

Thank you both for your work and I'm grateful, Josh, whether you're willing to step up and join the commission.

I appreciate your work at Audubon and the chance to convene.

There's definitely a lot of interest in the community and I think on the council to do some work around urban forest regulations.

And so I know that the commission has been very active in that and I'm sure we'll talk about that in a moment too.

So I'll go ahead and move appointments, numbers, agenda item seven and eight.

All in favor signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Great.

So your appointment and reappointment will go to the full council on Monday.

And with that, why don't we jump to agenda item number nine.

I'll go ahead and read it in.

The 2018 Urban Forestry Commission Annual Report.

You're welcome to stay.

It's not your report, but you can comment on it if you want.

Thanks, Josh.

And whenever you're ready, we can jump right in.

I'd like to just welcome Sandra to join us up here.

Hi, Sandra.

Thanks for being here.

Well, thank you very much.

By ordinance, the Urban Forestry Commission is required to issue an annual report, and we have a chair and vice chair to provide the information for you today.

Thanks again for the opportunity.

This is always a fun part of the job.

Today, we're going to talk through our annual report, so essentially walk you through how 2018 went.

We're also, of course, going to give a little bit of background on the Urban Forestry Commission, who we are and what we do.

We'd like to give you a glimpse of what we're working on this year, 2019, a bit of overview of our work plan.

And then as you already mentioned, council member, we'd like to focus specifically on the work being done around updating city street regulations.

Urban Forestry Commission's mission, like many of the boards and commissions, is to advise mayor and city council on policy and regulations, specifically governing protection, management, and conservation of trees and vegetation in the city of Seattle.

Thanks.

The way this gets operationalized for us is kind of broadly three objectives.

The first is to help make specific policy recommendations, and that would be working with council.

The second would be to provide a public forum.

engage with the public on these issues.

We provide a space for them to bring up issues, to engage with our group as a way to connect with the government more broadly around urban forestry.

And that's also an area that we're really working on expanding our capacity and our ability to be effective in how we work with the community and to be a way in for the community around urban forestry into the city's government.

And the final key objective we have is around implementation of city's management of forests and trees.

And largely that happens through the implementation of their forestry management plan.

So you can see with our objectives, we're really working with council, we're working with the public, and we're working directly with the departments.

And that includes a half dozen plus of all the different departments that touch on trees and vegetation in the city.

You've figured out how to navigate the complex web of tree oversight that the city provides throughout the departments.

We're working on it.

Me too.

I'm going to hand it off to Sandra to chat a little bit about our 2018 successes in our work plan.

So we did continue working on the tree protection ordinance update in 2018. And Weston will be delving into that in a lot more detail a little bit later on.

We've also been working with staff to update the urban forest management plan, which used to be the stewardship plan through a listening, mainly so far through a listening meeting to kind of an explanation of what the process is, particularly the process for reaching out to communities in the area as part of the planning effort.

We did also recruit new members to the commission, new positions in the area of environmental equity, public health and community neighborhood.

And that adds to the original nine positions that were created in 2009. And then also the get engaged position that was added.

I'm not sure when exactly, but So we have many more members now and a broader representation of skills and interests and perspectives.

Those positions have all been filled, by the way.

So we're also, we had one of our representatives attend the environmental equity cohort.

training sessions that was put on by the city for city representatives as part of the racial and social justice equity program initiative.

So one of our members participated in that in 2018. We did work again on building relationships with other partners that deal with urban forestry issues and met with organizations like Seattle 2030, which dedicates itself to energy, conservation, sustainability, and stormwater.

We were briefed by Sound Transit regarding the Link light rail extension from Northgate to Linwood about tree issues, which you probably saw today was in the news, to get an idea of what their tree replanting program will be and what they're dealing with.

We met with City Fruit to understand their programs related to fruit trees and food security, Mountains to Sound Greenway, the Nature Conservancy, which focused a little bit more on their more urban initiatives than they used to be, especially related to stormwater.

We met with Forterra and learned a little bit more about the Green Seattle Partnership in particular.

and also the King Conservation District, especially in relation to the grant programs that they provide to cities in their region, in their district for urban restoration, environmental restoration.

Sandra, really quick on the work with Sound Transit, in part because it was in the news recently.

Are you all, I mean, do you have an opportunity to work with Sound Transit beyond just the city's borders too?

Well, that's not really our authority or jurisdiction.

So, I mean, certainly we can encourage, but I think that...

I imagine you have some expertise that is relevant beyond just the border, and I don't, you know, obviously the authorities...

It's interesting to note that all the other jurisdictions involved have all of their own rules about trees and tree replacements, as well as WSDOT.

So they are working with several jurisdictions besides Seattle on trying to satisfy all those requirements.

And it seems like the intention to do pretty significant tree replacement is there.

That's great to hear.

Because obviously we need all the benefits that we get from an urban forest.

And it would be great to have light rail too.

So finding a way to co-exist is a good thing.

So thank you.

Sorry to interrupt.

That's okay.

We worked with SDCI and commented on the proposed director's rule regarding the tree code violation penalties.

We provided comments on the accessory dwelling unit draft, environmental impact statement.

We were briefed by the Seattle Public Utilities Ship Canal Water Quality Program and Third Avenue Program, and they did request specific input from us on tree replacement species and locations and other things and they've briefed us twice on that so that was really a good relationship to have a lot of input on and we provided comments on the mandatory housing affordability ordinances particularly in relation to the green factor changes and then as related to that the input on the director's rule that the city was proposing for updating the green factor So I'll turn it now back over to Weston and he's going to delve into more detail on the tree ordinance update.

Thanks, Sandra.

So just to kind of set this up, I'm sure you're very aware we're long in the process of working on updating Seattle's tree ordinance.

This is now entering its 10th year.

The interim tree ordinance went in place about the same time that the Forest Commission BEGAN IN 2009. AND IT HAS BEEN AN ITEM ON THE TOP OF THE FOREST COMMISSION'S LIST FOR ITS ENTIRE EXISTENCE, ALL 10 YEARS NOW.

SO WE'RE VERY EXCITED THAT WE'RE CLOSE, HOPEFULLY, TO GETTING SOMETHING IN PLACE THAT WILL MEET ALL OF OUR NEEDED GOALS.

AND WE'RE VERY THANKFUL FOR COUNCILMEMBER JOHNSON AS WELL AS MANY OTHER COUNCILMEMBERS FOR PUSHING THIS FORWARD PRETTY STRONGLY IN THE PAST TWO YEARS.

Broadly, I think the goal is to get something in place that protects trees, which is not something I think we would all agree is happening currently.

And something that does that in a way that is equitable, that works for the huge range of other needs we have for space in our city.

And I firmly believe that's possible.

A key point that we have pushed for that I don't think we've gotten on our list here was to simplify the process.

Every attempt at revising the tree code has been a very complex process.

And I think we believe it can be done simply and still meeting those other goals that I outlined.

um generally some of the key principles are putting in place a permit process where we can finally have data on tree removals you know the most important thing is we don't know how many we're losing and that really cuts down our ability to make good policy we can't make the recommendations we need to without having better information um yeah please

And the main barriers to not being able to document the number is because the trees are most, I mean, because of the location on private properties or like how?

Exactly, yeah.

Trees on private property are removed and there isn't currently a mechanism to track that.

Instituting a permit process would allow for a record.

And would you say that for the most part it's actually not understood by homeowners like what

I think broader understanding from the public from property owners is a key component in this.

Again, I think that reinforces the notion that we need something that is simple because if it isn't utilized, if people aren't using it, then there is no point in having it.

So permits being a key component that really a lot of these other things will flow from.

Protection of exceptional trees and groves.

We have designations in the city for trees that we've as a community decided to have special significance.

We need to ensure that those can be protected and there's mechanisms in place for that to happen.

Fee and lieu program.

So understanding that sometimes we will need to remove trees for a variety of reasons.

And when that happens, making sure that there is some mitigation or some other component in place that can, if not lead to a direct replacement on site, have another way of mitigating the impact of that loss.

A big part of that is incentives for retention.

So not just looking at what we do after we lose trees, but how we make sure we keep the trees in place that we have.

It's much more cost effective to retain a tree than to plant a new one and wait for it to grow for many years.

What kind of incentives would we think about?

There are current city programs in place that provide free trees, that provide training for maintenance, for managing trees on your property.

All of those could be improved, could be better resourced.

That could potentially be a use of the fee in lieu.

And one way also of doing that is in the green factor to provide, to allow developers more points for tree retention than they're currently allowed.

So that would be another type of incentive for retention.

And flexibility around some of the development requirements so that if there's a project and the tree will impact the development in some way, but if they preserve the tree, they could have more flexibility around setbacks or height or some other thing elsewhere to accomplish their housing goals or whatever it is and retain the tree.

Agreed.

Those are things that, when done well, could be great.

Yeah, we've seen a few anecdotes of that being successful already, and if we can find ways to further cement those programs, I think it could be really successful.

A couple other items that we've recommended and had strong, positive feedback on.

tree service provider registration.

So essentially keeping a registry of companies who are approved to remove trees in the city.

SDOT already utilizes such a tool for street trees.

We're proposing expanding that citywide.

First and foremost, this is a safety issue.

We want tree removals to be a safe and well regulated and seen process.

And also we want to be sure that we're not losing trees in instances where we don't need to be.

That we have professionals who are engaging things like tree health.

Would you anticipate that this would be a requirement that for anybody to work on a tree, they would need to be part of it, or that there would just be a registration and that would be the best experts for certain uses?

Yeah.

I think it'll require us defining the term work in this instance.

Specifically to date, we've recommended that removals be done by professionals who are registered.

And the other caveat being here that we're defining removals or even tree activity as only on significant trees or trees larger than six inches of trunk.

So those are kind of the existing thresholds that we're thinking that might trigger the need for this.

And yeah, I just mentioned it, adjusting the threshold for where these items come into play to be six inches.

It's essentially industry standard cities kind of nationwide Seattle in the past has used 12 inches and there's far too many of our trees We're talking probably 50% or more of the trees in the city Fall between 6 and 12 inches and so a program that doesn't capture those really isn't being very well It's not being helped We have a couple other pieces of recommendation looking at small lot exemptions and of course funding enforcement for the program.

And another item that I want to call out that isn't on here is tree replacement.

Working towards replacing trees that are removed as first and foremost the action that should be taken and not just going to a payment.

Again, that sets up a hierarchy.

Preserving trees when possible is first priority.

If they need to be removed, replacement is the next priority.

If replacement can't be done, then we're looking at a fee-in-lieu program.

And hopefully the fee would be used to do replacement.

It would just be off-site somewhere?

Exactly.

And we're also looking at finding ways to make permit costs, the fee-in-lieu components...

available for programs that would target kind of the equity concerns you might have around charging for essential people to be able to own trees, and we think that that shouldn't be a barrier.

The one thing I do want to call out is that These are kind of detailed, nuanced positions that have been discussed for years.

And I feel like we're really coalescing around this list of items.

These are things that are largely supported in then Mayor Burgess's executive order 2017-11, calling for changing how we manage trees.

And they're also items that are largely supported by MHA companion resolution that you all passed recently.

Um, so I just want to kind of reiterate that, uh, we have, uh, executive directive that seems to align here.

Um, these are commission recommendations and we feel, uh, from our expertise are strong and we feel like you all have, uh, at least given, uh, a general policy agreement, uh, in full council that these are directions we want to take as well.

Um, and so I, I think that's a great sign.

We're really close to being able to move an ordinance forward.

I appreciate your ongoing work on this collectively, the commission and frankly advocates throughout the community.

We had a piece of legislation last year, last fall that was in my mind a step forward but kind of missed the mark on some of these things.

kind of a commitment, and I think Councilmember Bagshaw has indicated a desire to kind of steward this work through the Council over the coming months, and so I look forward to that.

Because of all the work that's been done, I think we start from a really good spot, and I remain optimistic that we can get something accomplished in the next few months, so that'd be great.

Great.

Wonderful.

Glad to hear it.

And yeah, we're very thankful that Council Member Bagshaw agreed to step up and help us get across the finish line.

Thanks.

More broadly, our 2019 work plan beyond tree protection ordinance updates would be, again, focusing on the executive order implementation.

How does this work for each of the departments and what does that look like specifically?

We anticipate having a series of director's rules and associated recommendations that will follow any sort of ordinance.

The other big piece of 2019 is looking at the urban forest management plan update, as Sandra spoke to earlier.

This is a great opportunity for us to add in our improved understanding of the current landscape and really outline a very actionable plan for our city's trees and vegetation.

As always, we'll look at a broad range of policy decisions affecting urban forestry in the city.

And as I mentioned earlier, we're really set on improving our engagement with the community, particularly around getting a wider range of voices in the urban forestry community.

You mentioned, you all mentioned equity earlier in your presentation.

Obviously that's a big issue in every respect, but also you see the difference in the Tree cover, there are stark differences.

I mean, you go to North Capitol Hill, it's very beautiful, lots of tree cover.

I mean, I'm not an urban forestry expert.

I'm just talking about it from a laborer's standpoint.

But then you go to obviously low-income neighborhoods, and you see completely different, and much lower tree cover.

Right.

So we did, if I may add to that, we did a canopy cover assessment with 2016 data.

And we had a component to analyze the equity piece.

And it's interesting.

We did the analysis using two census tracts.

One was within 20% of the poverty line and also people of color as a census tract.

And interestingly enough, in general, yes, there is lower canopy as an average.

We also noticed the work that we did showed that some of the affluent neighborhoods that have views also tend to have fewer trees.

And some of the low income neighborhoods that are yet to be redeveloped tend to have some bigger trees.

So it's one of those things that is not ALWAYS THE SAME, BUT WE ARE VERY SERIOUSLY LOOKING AT THE EQUITABLE WAY OF BETTER DISTRIBUTING CANOPY COVER AND ALSO PROVIDING SERVICES TO HISTORICALLY UNDERSERVED COMMUNITIES AS PART OF THE PLAN UPDATE.

YEAH.

I JUST WANT TO ADD THAT WE'VE UTILIZED THAT WORK EXTENSIVELY ON THE COMMISSION AND WE'RE REALLY GRATEFUL THE CITY WAS ABLE TO DO THAT ANALYSIS.

AGAIN, A PRETTY CRITICAL PIECE OF DATA THAT WE NEED TO DO THIS JOB WELL.

That's all we have.

Thank you very much again for this opportunity.

I'm happy to answer any more questions if you have them today and also just look forward to continuing the conversation.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Oh, this is going to be good.

I can see that look in your eye.

No, I'm afraid it might be a stupid question, but I'm going to ask it anyway.

How much did we lose through the snowstorms?

Were only branches lost?

I mean, I did actually see a couple of trees come out at the roots.

I saw one at the arboretum that was pretty sure as a result of the snowstorm, but I don't know if there was any...

I don't have a number, but there were certainly trees down, and I want to give kudos to the departments that actually did a great job with emergency management, parks, Seattle City Light, SPU, SDOT.

We have been working closely together to make sure that we're serving the public in a way that it doesn't matter if it's a parks tree, if an SDOT crew is right there, let's take action and help.

And that's why it's very important for us to protect trees, to make sure that they're healthy in areas where they can pose a hazard, and just great work from city departments.

I can find a number for you.

But yeah, usually in storms, we lose trees, and that's why we keep on planting trees as well.

And I would just add to that, We don't have a good way of tracking, again, the trees that were lost on private property.

We have anecdotal data from colleagues who work as arborists who worked as responders on private property, but we currently just don't have a good way of understanding what was lost.

Again, a mechanism for replacement would be of value here, a mechanism for tracking the losses.

And that would also give us some data around whether certain species that didn't withstand the storms, don't do well with snow, all information we could use to create a more resilient forest system.

Well, thanks a ton for your ongoing work.

Hopefully we can achieve some success on an updated ordinance that meets the objectives that you all have laid out.

I think there's, as you mentioned, I think there's a path to get there.

And if we can do that this year and free you all up to focus on the next iteration of work for trees in our city, that'd be great.

Thank you both.

Thank you.

Next agenda item.

This is the 2018 School Traffic Safety Committee Annual Report.

Invite presenters forward.

Welcome, everyone.

Thank you.

As we get settled, why don't we start with a quick round of introductions?

Would you like to go first?

Sure.

My name is Mitchell Lloyd.

I'm a senior transportation planner with Seattle Department of Transportation and also serve as liaison to the committee.

Great.

I'm Mary Ellen Russell.

I'm the chairperson of the committee and a volunteer.

I'm Margaret McCauley, and I'm a volunteer on the committee.

Marilyn Furman, and I'm a volunteer on the committee.

I'm Jim Curtin with SDOT's Project Development Division, former liaison to the Seattle School Traffic Safety Committee.

Ah, some baton handing off going on here.

Welcome, everyone.

Thanks for your work, and we have a good presentation, so do you want to just jump right in, whoever's going to lead that?

Certainly.

Thank you for having us here.

This is the Seattle School Traffic Safety Committee Annual Report.

And because we are forward looking at, we are calling it the 2019 Annual Report.

So we were created by ordinance, or the committee was created by ordinance in 1975. There are institutional members, public schools, Department of Transportation, police department, King County Metro, and then community members.

All meetings are open to the public and we actively invite people to come join us.

The committee is a central point for people with concerns about school traffic safety issues to come complain and get concerns addressed.

Some of the things we routinely do are recommend new school crosswalk locations and crossing guard assignments with a lot of help from SDOT in identifying optimal locations.

We review traffic circulation plans for new and being renovated school buildings.

We help with the main force updating elementary school walk boundary maps.

And we have been doing a lot to improve crossing guard recruitment, which we'll touch on later in this session.

So we actually didn't realize that other committees were reporting to you.

So we were sort of letting you know that we report to you.

And so today we're gonna talk about what we see as the five top needs to promote school traffic safety in Seattle, starting with support for active transportation for students in Seattle Public Schools, filling in missing sidewalk and other street safety infrastructure, particularly within a quarter mile of schools.

reducing the crossing guard vacancy rate.

Working with OSPI to hopefully, we're hoping you might be able to help us there because the laws that is written includes support for non-bus transportation related expenses, but currently the formula just doesn't accurately reflect the law and Seattle is losing out as a result of that.

And then we want to ensure that the requirements for street improvements when schools are built or renovated are focused on enhancing student safety.

The crossing guard vacancy rate is 39%.

That's correct, yes.

We will adjust that more in a little bit, yeah.

So a big need that students have is some sort of institutional support for active transportation.

I apologize for this statistic.

It says 60% of SPS students do not receive busing.

In fact, 60% do not bus.

50% are not eligible for busing, so it should say 50%.

And these students are expected to get to school without any sort of organizational support through streets that are increasingly dangerous with heavy traffic and with frequent gaps in infrastructure.

Can I ask a question on that?

Yes.

So the...

The city's done some work trying to get more Orca cards into students' hands.

And so over the last few years, starting with some students in Rainier Beach who were really highlighting that they live just inside the walk boundary.

I think it's two miles.

And I went down, and I think others did too, and walked to school with a kid just to see you know, what they had to go through every morning and every afternoon and the challenges they faced.

And so the city stepped up with a pilot program and it's been expanded since then.

And I'm curious, do you know if this data, the 50% eligible is through the Seattle Public Schools kind of baseline or if that includes the extra ORCA passes that we're giving the folks?

So that's a good question.

It does not include the ORCA cards because when we say eligible for busing, that means for the yellow school buses.

That's right.

Okay, great.

And we should say that while we are certainly interested in traffic safety at every level, we tend to focus most heavily on elementary school because that's where the kids are most vulnerable, yes.

So taking a look back at the needed pedestrian safety improvements around schools, For elementary schools, the walk distance is typically one mile.

But here you can see highlighted just within a quarter mile, the red dots are schools, the pink circles is the quarter mile radius, and the gray areas are the missing sidewalks within a quarter mile.

So there are sections of the city where we are asking elementary schoolers to walk a mile to school in the middle of the street, in the winter, in the dark.

SDOT is continually working to improve that situation.

They've made substantial improvements around schools and do every year.

And they have the Safe Routes to School program specifically geared toward that.

And that program is funded in part by the red light camera funds.

And the committee does want to take a moment to register its dismay at seeing in November 2018 the city budget revision, which transferred funds out of the red light camera, sorry, red light camera funds away from the Safe Routes to School program.

If you would press.

Every year in our city, students are struck by cars, including a recent collision in March with a student at Robert Eagle Staff Middle School who was struck and is recovering well from a broken leg now.

But we just want to emphasize that making Vision Zero a reality for the children of our city includes a commitment to funding the Safe Routes to School program, and we hope to see that red light camera money restored in the future.

I appreciate your concerns there, and I share them, acknowledging that I was part of the council that did what was unfortunate.

I would be very interested in working with you all and others to put something in place in advance of this year's budget to just make a commitment to dedicate a portion of these funds, again, maybe even higher than we were at last time, to these projects.

And maybe expand the language around what encompasses a school safety project too to make sure we're as comprehensive as possible.

um there were some challenges in the budget last year there will be challenges and budgets in the future it's always a reality and a council could undo that but um i was really uncomfortable with with what happened in the budget last year i couldn't figure out a way to do something differently and achieve some objectives so i just kind of sat on my hands but i think there's an opportunity to advance this budget to make a clear policy statement from the the city council And if you all are interested in that, I'd be happy to work with you on something like that and think through what that language might be.

We definitely would be, yes.

Thank you.

So now we're going to go cover some things that you probably know, but I feel like are still worth touching on, which is that what we build creates a culture that then kind of accelerates in whatever direction it's going.

So if families are not comfortable walking to school...

then they, if they can, will probably drive, which makes it more dangerous for other people, which makes them more likely to drive.

So that's a vicious cycle, and the folks with the least number of choices and resources suffer the most from that.

And one sort of broader way that we know about this is PTAs.

Some schools have strong PTAs, some schools have no PTAs.

Schools with strong PTAs have been able to do wonderful things promoting walking, biking, and carpooling.

That is haphazard and equitable across the city.

And even the strong ones, strong programs tend to fall apart as parents leave as their children leave.

On the other hand, hiring a district-wide active transportation coordinator could make it more equitable, could help fill in some of those gaps, help figure out where we can get people walking, biking, and carpooling.

and start a virtuous cycle in which the roads are less congested, people feel more comfortable walking and biking and carpooling.

And those benefits don't just go to the school families, but they go to the whole neighborhood.

The feeling of active, you know, happy children walking on the street is something that makes it clear to people broadly that it's a safe place to be.

And it's not just in traffic.

There are studies, and we can provide you the citations, that movement in school children's days is really important for academic performance.

The studies have found that it can be as much as a half a grade level, and that's also supported by all the recess studies.

And then the air pollution and the congestion.

I have personal anecdotes about parents in my children's classes crashing into each other with cars.

So it goes around.

All right.

Yeah.

And so the city is currently missing out on a resource that exists that is provided by King County.

They have an app called School Pool that is specifically designed to help families form walking, biking, and carpooling groups to help people pool their resources to get kids to school safely with fewer cars on the road.

and they provide that free.

It is currently being used in Redmond, Bellevue, Kirkland, Kenmore, Issaquah, and by some private schools as well.

The city of Seattle does not, parents inside the city of Seattle at SPS cannot use this resource currently because there is a need for some administrative support to verify that kids are actually attending the schools that people say King County needs just to have for every family that signs up someone who says, yes, this person attends this school and that is not available now.

So families in Seattle are not able to use this free resource.

So crossing guards, as you noticed, we have a 39% vacancy in a critical safety position.

The program used to be managed by the Seattle Police Department and it was moved over to the district a number of years ago with the understanding that state law would reimburse the costs because the state law states that the state will reimburse full funding for transportation costs.

What has been happening is that that has not been the case and we've been trying to figure it all out.

The current theory is that there's an Excel formula that some bureaucrat is using that is functionally penalizing the city of Seattle.

When it asks for transportation costs, you're only able to put in bus costs.

There's just no way to say, we spent this much money on crossing guards, so they just don't see it and don't consider it and don't reimburse it.

And for rural districts, maybe buses are the only thing, but in Seattle, buses are not, will not, and should not be the only option.

And I don't know.

There's also an issue around the recruitment.

People at schools feel somewhat ambivalent about the crossing guard program residing with them.

They feel a little bit like Seattle Police Department used to do this, and we kind of wish they still did.

And there's not a strong crossing guard recruitment or any recruitment program.

The support around the crossing guards didn't come along with the responsibility for the crossing guards.

So there's one woman there who does an amazing amount of work with the crossing guards.

is incredibly worked in, and there's no one else whose responsibility it is to recruit them.

So the vacancy rate is very high.

We have...

The police department's been really enthusiastic about helping find creative ways to do recruitment, which has been great, but then once the new recruits submit their materials, the processing is also bogged down.

So there's a lack of support there.

But we actually think that despite this high rate, if there's any more consistent support for recruitment, that this could actually come down significantly.

It's not.

In some places, in more affluent areas of the city, it's a little bit harder to find them because it's a very low-paying job.

We don't need that many people in absolute numbers.

There are people who can do this.

It's really just a lack of push to get the vacancy rate down that we see as the biggest barrier.

So we're kind of hoping the city can, or not kind of, we're hoping that the city can help with, in the short term, some resource sharing to get the program back on a sustainable basis and then long-term help push that the state funding fulfills the terms of the state law as it should.

Moving on.

So another thing that we do on the committee is review the walk boundary maps.

These are the maps that determine whether or not a child will be eligible for busing based on the location of their home.

There are other children also get busing because they might be eligible for special ed or might be going to an option school.

But if they're going to their neighborhood school and live inside the walk boundary, they typically are not eligible for busing.

So in 2018, we completed a review of all of the elementary school walk boundary maps.

They had not been reviewed in several years, and we were looking for areas where they were no longer reflecting on the conditions on the ground.

And while there were a few instances where we found that they were not showing the true danger of an intersection and we had to reduce the walk boundary a little, And for the most part, we were able to open the walk boundaries.

SDOT, as I said, is always putting in new projects, and they are focusing projects around schools.

And we found many instances where conditions on the street were better.

It's safe to walk now.

And SDOT also assisted us throughout that process by grading intersections around every school with a consistent rubric so that we could make sure that we were making those decisions about which intersections were safe to cross equitably.

Throughout that process, we found that there were some opportunities to open the walk boundaries that we couldn't take.

You're probably aware that Seattle Public Schools has had significant challenges related to busing this year.

There's a driver shortage, not just at SPS, but also at King County Metro and in the region that has made it very difficult to staff all their routes and resulted in delays of up to three hours, particularly toward the start of the year.

a huge amount of work to improve that situation and now have their, they told me that as of this month, their chronically unstaffed routes are down to 1%.

So this is a huge improvement.

But nonetheless, we found that if the crossing guard program could be fully staffed, we could actually reduce the need for busing and help reduce that last 1%.

There were a number of instances where if we could have created a new crossing guard position, we could have opened another section of walk boundary.

But with the existing positions unstaffed at such a high rate, we couldn't in good conscience create a new position.

Sorry, just one question quickly.

You said that the number of chronically unstaffed routes for the school buses has been reduced to 1%?

That's right, yes.

That's huge.

Yes, it's huge.

That's thanks to the drivers themselves?

Obviously, one of the main issues is that it's private and SPS does not, I mean, because they're a private entity, they don't hire enough drivers, which is one of the reasons actually some of the students are arguing that it should be public, you know, like in many other districts it is.

Yes, indeed.

So I've had a number of conversations around busing and I don't, they have, they feel, they've done studies about whether it should be public or private and still feel confident they've made the right choice.

That's not within my purview.

But, SBS.

Yes, SBS.

But I will say that what they consistently say is that the number one issue is just the lack of drivers in the region.

King County pays higher wages and offers more hours.

And so the drivers are constantly being poached from first student to King County.

And-

I know you're not coming here, but I completely disagree based on the data.

I disagree with SPS, not with you.

Yeah.

But they have gone it down.

They have contracted with some additional providers and worked with First Student, and they've been consolidating routes, and they've been doing everything they can.

The main reason is that First Student does not hire enough drivers.

Sorry.

I'm sorry, that's outside my area of expertise here.

But we just wanna point out that the crossing guard seems like a small piece of it, but it's actually impacting the busing as well.

And we could be, in addition to getting more kids walking, having fewer fossil fuels burned, we could actually just be reducing this uncertainty, these delays that are making life difficult for families of students and also reducing students' ability to be in school and advance their learning.

So just so I understand, your analysis shows that if there were a safe crossing, the students that live in that red area would be a walkable distance from the school.

That's correct.

You can see the schools right there.

This is well inside the one mile distance, yeah.

These students are close to the school.

And that would put less stress on the bus drivers, also less congestion, less pollution, all those things, you know, assuming that it's a reasonable walk.

So, and we're volunteers, and we do have support through Schools Transportation and through Seattle Department of Transportation, so we have taken a preliminary look at, because in some places, The walk boundary might include an area where not very many students happen to live going to the schools.

But there are a number of instances like this one.

This includes many students in this area who do go to Wedgwood Elementary.

So this would definitely have an impact on how many routes are needed, yes.

School speed zone cameras exist around the city.

They take pictures of people who are speeding when the lights are flashing and send out tickets.

And that program is run through the Seattle Police Department.

One project that we have begun uh in 2017 is to track the data um the police department uh tallies the number of tickets at each location every month but we were finding it was really difficult to say with just just that month's data whether conditions are actually improving or not and because the number of school days in a month are variable you know december doesn't have very many compared to november so looking month to month is often not very helpful either So we've started a spreadsheet tracking, looking at December compared to the year before and the year before and the year before, and we have about three years' data in that now, and we're gonna keep moving it forward that we hope will be available to SDOT, hope they'll be able to use effectively to really examine whether or not conditions are improving.

For example, at Mercer Middle School, one of the cameras there is consistently our highest number every month with an average of 826 tickets.

And that's just four hours a day, I think, and only on school days.

So there's a lot of tickets.

And there was actually a plan that SDOT had worked on for an improvement there as a result of a request by the school that um came up against some vocal opposition and has been shelved and so uh we're hoping that as we have this data and as it becomes more robust it'll be available to lean on to to help really gauge where projects are needed and where um vocal opposition is maybe not uh always the most important factor a neutral source a neutral source exactly where safety projects are needed yes

All right.

Sorry, really quick on that, just to remind myself and the public, the revenue from the school safety speed zone cameras, those are 100% dedicated to school programs, and we didn't change that last year.

Yeah.

My understanding is that's the requirement by statute.

Is that correct?

State requirement.

Yes.

And then the red light cameras we historically had done is a 25%.

I don't know the percentage on top of my head.

We can get that for you, though.

And the goal, of course, with these school speed zone cameras is that we don't collect a penny.

Yes.

Because everyone's following the laws.

And, you know, if we have that great circumstance, then we'll find some other avenues to support safety projects.

But we really do want to see those numbers going down.

And I appreciate your...

help to dig into the data.

I know when they first started a number of years ago, the early data showed that they would, you know, I remember seeing the revenues at a specific camera would taper off after the first year, which was great.

We're adding a lot of, we continue to add cameras, so that's also a good thing to, but if you, this analysis is really important for us to help understand what's going on, so thanks for looking into that.

And there are some I didn't bring, you know, there's quite a range, I should say.

Some cameras we do see are down very low numbers, as few as 20 or 30 in a month.

So we're hoping to see more of them head that direction.

Yeah.

You know, obviously, if there's a place where we're seeing 800, there's something wrong.

Yeah.

And so, we need to, you know, prioritize that.

And of course, the understanding which neighborhoods are more impacted and making sure that we're meeting our kind of equity commitments too is going to be really important.

The last thing we want to talk to you about is city code and school construction.

As Margaret mentioned, when schools are built or renovated, we take a look at the circulation plans and give input on them and try to identify conflict areas before the school is built and open.

And as part of that process, we have on a couple of occasions seen SDOT and SDCI requesting some improvements from schools and really requiring them in order to get the variances they need.

that we didn't think were an appropriate use of schools' money or resources.

And for example, you can see here is a drawing for Wing Luke Elementary that includes a box truck turnaround to facilitate package deliveries to neighbors behind the school.

And it's actually eating into the playground there.

In addition to being paid for by schools, it was going to be taking away playground space from the school.

And we had a fair bit of communication around that with SDOT, and we were not able to get them to drop the requirement for the box truck turnaround.

They did eventually work with schools to find a location for it to be that didn't take away from the playground, but it did, the school was not happy.

They felt that it hampered their ability to manage their on-site circulation as they would like to do it.

And now ESSA is a large organization.

None of the people at the table here were involved in that, but also the people who were working on it, who were requesting these are just, they are not in the Safe Routes to School division, and they're trying to do their best for the taxpayers and get information you know, everything they can out of development, but we feel that there should be an acknowledgement that a public school is not a typical development and that a public school should not be required to build things that benefit commercial vehicles.

I appreciate the acknowledgement that the two gentlemen here from FSTOD are maybe not the ones making that decision, but I don't know if you guys have any comments on that.

If you don't, that's fine.

Well, I think one of our big challenges, as was mentioned, is that, as that is a large organization, and whether it's Safe Routes to School or Vision Zero, making sure that those principles are entrenched and ingrained within and throughout the organization is one of our biggest challenges.

I think we've made some good strides over the years, but this, I think, clearly illustrates that we still have a little ways to go there.

But this is really good food for thought for us and I think can help us move internally to make sure that we are communicating with folks who we don't see every day or ever in some cases to ensure that they understand what the objectives of our programs are and what kind of outcomes we're trying to achieve, which everyone can get behind safety for students, so.

Thank you.

Now, along with that, we really want to applaud the recent passage of the council bill that will change the focus of requirements for traffic studies to include more of a multimodal focus.

That's a big step forward.

We are watching as the director's rule is developed.

We'd really like to make sure that not only is the multimodal focus strong, but that schools are specifically addressed in the director's rule as having their separate traffic requirements.

School projects have very different transportation requirements than a typical commercial or residential development.

They have more vulnerable young users, more pedestrians, more bicyclists, and also the rush hour is offset from peak commute hours.

So we would like to see the director's rule require transportation studies for schools to really focus in on the transportation needs of schools and not treat them the same as, say, a commercial or a condo project.

So that's it.

As you may remember, these are our main points.

We are hoping the city can help the district get active transportation support going.

And one of the ways is point number four, which is helping push on the state, because that's something that's really Seattle specific.

And it's in the large scheme of things, not necessarily a large amount of money, but it really affects the district's ability to do what they need to do.

Something that is the city's is bullet point two, missing sidewalks.

Bullet point three, we're, as mentioned, hoping that the city can do some resource sharing in the short term.

And then, particularly because we know the police department is enthusiastic and has some both institutional knowledge and networks that they can provide.

We've been working with them as much as we can, but...

need some additional help.

And then the last one is the making sure that city requirements for schools focus on student safety.

And yeah.

And thank you very much for giving us the time to speak to you today.

Just one question.

I know obviously your assessment is citywide, but I'm sure you've heard of specific concerns relating to also the school traffic safety outside Bailey Gadsden Elementary School.

I'm sure SDOT has.

So I was just wondering if you or SDOT had anything to say about what could be done

I personally go by Bailey Gottsard at least eight times a week, so I have a lot of personal opinions, and I'm moving my children by.

They were in the next district over, or whatever it is, elementary school catchment.

So I have a lot of opinions, but maybe Estat wants to...

say what you're gonna do, and then I'll tell you what you should better do.

I wanna hear both opinions.

Well, personally, I'm not personally driving any of the plans moving forward with Bailey-Gadgett, so I'd have to go back to our team and collect what our current plans are for that area.

I am very familiar with Bailey-Gadgett, though.

It's pretty much surrounded by arterials and major principal arterial streets, 12th Avenue, Rainier slash Boren in the area there.

It's a challenging place to walk, bike, drive.

Even as an adult pedestrian, you have to be sort of more aware than usual.

Multiple crossing guards have been hit in recent years there.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think that our approach would be to limit speeds through that area and certainly look at what we can do to improve crossings for people who want to walk and bike to school out there as well.

Again, I'd have to go check with the team, though, and see exactly what we have in the works at this point.

So from a user perspective, I guess, the fact that we can't maintain the crossing guards because they're scared is a big deal.

And that we're always going to have a large population crossing two major streets because of Yesler Terrace and the wonderful new resources and parks and the community center.

We're always going to have people going there.

That's not optional.

We did recently, the police representative on the board asked us to write the district, I mean, not the district, the department to ask for extra police enforcement on drivers in school zones during school passing times.

And for most schools, the sort of you know, I'm late, I'm late, car commuter conflicts come in the morning, but for Bailey Gatzert being surrounded by hospitals, we've found that the afternoon rush hour also conflicts with Bailey Gatzert, let out time, so we've asked the police department to also do afternoons there.

You know, enforcement's a Band-Aid.

It's not really going to do it.

And SDOT really, I think, has the primary role in that.

And I feel like looking at the 12th Avenue, I think, is kind of the first way to fix.

And then Boren would be next.

I could draw a lot of pictures, but I don't know that we have time for that, but yeah.

I think we should take a moment also to just say that we do have a police officer on the committee and that police is very supportive.

They work with us too.

They have a hotspots list that you can put schools on when they're having specific traffic concerns around them and they will routinely send officers there in the morning to try and change the behavior because often it is The parents of the kids are causing problems, so they can assist with changing that behavior, which is particularly helpful in the short term.

Mitchell is able to work with SDOT to often get some faster things like signs or striping pretty rapidly, but the police are the ones who respond first to try and address an issue while SDOT is working on their revisions, and they're extremely helpful.

So yeah, I would just urge the committee and SDOT also to keep my office updated on journey.

That sounds good.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thanks.

I want to just say I really appreciate the thoroughness of your work.

This presentation is outstanding, and I particularly want to acknowledge that your comfort with bringing concerns for the City Council directly and with SDOT, and you do it in a very respectful way.

But I think it's really important for me that we have these independent commissions that are beholden to us and say, like, hey, that decision you made the other day, we didn't like it, and here's why.

And so I do want to commit to work with you all to think through if there's a strategy to...

I think it could be fairly straightforward to simply make a statement that the city council will dedicate a certain, you know, go back to recommit to where we do with the red light camera revenue and also maybe talk a little bit about the scope of what those investments look like too.

So as we mentioned, some of the other camera revenues are determined how much is allowed to be spent on things other than school traffic safety is set by state law.

The red light cameras were initially, our understanding is that when they were first authorized, you know, kind of part of the political sell was that this would go towards traffic safety improvements.

And that has continued to be the case, but the amount has gone down.

And our concern is that, you know, once a revenue stream is going somewhere else, then if you move it, you're taking out of that.

It can get hard to put it back.

And so we would be very interested in looking at any...

sort of more permanent backstop that say this much will always go and and if it could be returned to its previous level and and have some sort of more permanent resolution marking that as its level that would be um excellent great um i would love to do that and figure out how to you know what are the set of safety improvements we can invest into because there's a great need there

And again, in an ideal world, people would stop running red lights and we would stop collecting that money and we'd move on to the next thing, so that's great.

So thanks so much for your presence today and your ongoing work for safety of our kiddos.

Thank you very much.

Thanks very much.

All right, Jasmine had to run to a meeting, so Jody, thank you so much for being here.

Would you mind reading in the last agenda item?

Excuse me, agenda item 11, clerk file 314422, the petition of Willow Crossings LLLP to vacate a portion of 39th Avenue South and south of South Willow Street.

Thank you so much.

And as presenters are getting, or once presenters get settled down, I'll ask you to do introductions.

This is my go-to spot down here.

So you can keep an eye on me?

Yeah, right.

It was my day, so.

All right, Beverly, if you would like to start by introducing yourself, and then we'll...

Beverly Barnett from Seattle Department of Transportation.

Emily Thompson from GMD Development.

Jeff Wall, Studio 19 Architects.

Danielle Friedman, Department of Neighborhoods.

Michael Jenkins, Seattle Design Commission.

Welcome, everyone.

Thank you all for being here.

Beverly, I see you have the mic.

Can you start off and tell us where we are in this process and what we're going to hear about today?

Yes.

So we're brand new in this process.

So I want to explain why we're here today and what we're going to see.

So over the course of 2017 and 2018, the City Council took a pretty intense look at the existing street vacation policies and rejuvenated them and revised them.

And one of the topics of the discussion through that were what opportunities were there for of the community to see a vacation was coming in and to have a voice.

And so the policy revisions looked a lot at the role of the community when the city was reviewing vacations.

And one of the things we'll talk about after the PowerPoint is the community engagement plan process, which the Department of Neighborhoods is administering.

And then this is a new petition that came in under the new policy.

So they have developed a community engagement plan And the reason we're here today is one of the other things within the new policies was that when a petition came in, a brand new petition, that we would bring it to the Transportation Committee before we'd done all our work.

Because we come to you at the end of the process after we've identified issues and worked and worked on them, and we think we're bringing into you all the issues resolved and solutions.

And so what we heard from the council and from the community is that well maybe there might be a different way to resolve some issues.

So let us see us early on.

So I think this may be the third project we've brought in.

So we're still kind of figuring out what kind of information you want to see and how early.

But the idea the direction and the policies is that we will come in basically with a brand new petition.

And now of course the before someone can petition they do a community engagement plan.

do early design guidance, meet with Michael Jenkins, and do the normal feasibility assessment work with me and others in SDOT and the city.

But the idea is that with a brand new, fresh project, you're seeing it before we've worked at it, and so this creates an opportunity and for members of the public to say, oh, I like this, or can you think about that?

So we think there's some projects you're probably gonna give us a lot of direction and some not, and so we're just kind of seeing how that goes.

So with this, this is a brand new petition just starting in the process.

So what we have planned is that Jeff and Emily will go through the PowerPoint presentation, which shows the project, where it's at, summary of the community engagement plan, And then Danielle and Michael will talk about the community engagement plan process and what Michael expects the design commission to consider as we move forward.

So we do have about 20 slides.

We wanted to give you a really good overview.

We can go through things pretty quickly if you're familiar with the area and the project.

So we'll just be guided by how much information you need.

I don't know, Emily, were you going to, or is Jeff going to jump in?

Yeah, I'm going to start, and then we'll kind of go back and forth here.

So, Jeff, if you want to go to the next slide.

That's okay.

So just to kind of orient you to where the project is, this site is about a block north of the Othello light rail station.

If you're familiar with the new Mercy housing building that went in across the street last year, we're just pretty much in the same block on the other side of the street.

And a little bit about the applicants.

The project is being co-sponsored and co-developed by the company that I'm a partner at, GMD Development, and a nonprofit partnership with AOF Pacific Affordable Housing Corporation.

We are based in Seattle, have a long history of working in the Pacific Northwest.

Most recently, in June of 2018, we opened Linden Flats, which is up on Linden at 132nd, which is 170 units of affordable housing.

We only develop affordable housing.

And we're very committed to Seattle and are partnering with the Office of Housing on this project and another project in Belltown coming up.

And so tell me about AOF Pacific.

I'm not familiar with them.

Yeah, so they have an office in Seattle.

Their head office is in California.

They have two roles and projects in Washington.

They're a co-general partner in a number of larger bond transactions.

I don't know.

I think they do have some stuff in West Seattle that they're members of.

And they do a lot of our work around tenant services, property tax abatement.

project participant though gmd takes the lead on design and construction which is why they're not here today and tom's in europe so and and you said that you only do affordable housing we only do affordable housing as a for-profit developer as a for-profit correct and so how how You're kind of unique.

Well, unique for Seattle, not unique for the industry.

The affordable housing industry utilizing the low-income housing tax credit as a financing piece of their development is actually more dominated by private companies.

than nonprofits.

It's just in the city of Seattle and in the state of Washington, the way that the funding policies have been developed over the years, it has created a favorable playing environment for the nonprofits.

And so typically the private companies don't operate here as much.

And then I see on just the note on the Linden Flats, is that the top photo there?

That is the top photo, yeah.

That was without any Office of Housing funding.

Zero Office of Housing funding on that project.

To our knowledge, it's the only recent bond transaction built in the city of Seattle with no Office of Housing funding.

And so 4% tax credits?

4% tax credits and renewable energy tax credits, which is why we have a very large solar thermal and very large solar PV installation.

And I know this is not the project we're here to talk about today, but what level of affordability?

All of our projects are 60%, 100% at 60%.

Yeah, great.

So I guess specifically to talk about Willow Crossing, we went out to look for any project.

We found a site on MLK, a block north of the light rail station, which we loved, TOD site, that actually already had a MUP, but it was a much smaller project and we needed a greater number of units for feasibility.

There was a site available behind it along Willow that would create an L-shaped parcel.

So we purchased both sites.

We actually purchased them with a city acquisition loan from the Office of Housing.

So the city is a partner on this transaction just for the acquisition portion.

And we are now working to vacate an unimproved section of 39th to be able to span the vacated portion, if you will.

So, what is important about this is there is already a 20-year land use restriction now for affordable housing at 60% of AMI on both parcels, both the front MLK parcel and the back Willow parcel.

And is that because of the acquisition funds?

Because of the acquisition loans, exactly.

That was the requirement?

Correct, yes.

That's the mechanism that the city uses so that if it goes south or whatever, the land is still protected.

Okay.

So there's sort of two business plan options here.

The plan that we are pursuing is 211 units of housing, just using the same financing package as we talked about at Linden.

So 4% bonds with permanent financing and no city of Seattle subordinate debt.

We would actually be repaying our land acquisition loan in full at our LP closing, which my understanding, according to Lori Olson, has never been done before.

So they've actually had to redact quite a bit in the documentation for it.

So and then that would come with an extended 37 year land use restriction that would start the clock ticking again at placed in service, which would be in about three years.

If we are not successful in getting the vacation, for our business plan, which is, again, not to use Office of Housing subordinate debt, we do not have enough units on either site to make it financially feasible.

So at that time, we would basically essentially give the keys back, if you will, to the Office of Housing and say, OK, Steve and Lori, what do you guys want to do?

Do you want to find another developer who can step in and develop both sites separately?

Do you want to, I mean, they can remove, my understanding is they can remove the land use restriction and sell, we would basically step out of the picture at that time.

So, and that would, there would be no, an unknown cost and timing to develop those, to develop affordable housing on that site.

So, for your model, without the vacation, it just doesn't, it doesn't pencil for the model that you're using?

Not without subsidy, and that's just not, not what we're looking for.

Yeah.

And so kind of to, I guess, step back with this project and all of our projects, when we think about this location, this location is sort of the north entrance to the Othello neighborhood when you're riding south on the light rail station.

And there's so much new development going on in Othello.

And we really see this as a gateway corner to the neighborhood.

And we want to help use our project to create a more active pedestrian environment leading into the light rail station you get a lot of pedestrians coming out of um of the lower density housing to the east or sorry to the west and we want to create a better corner there and pedestrian experience and integration as you come out to mlk or out to mlk to the light rail station

So I'll talk about a little bit of the architectural side of this.

We actually had this project in our office previously.

Emily's company bought this project from one of our clients with the MOP approved.

So I just wanted to kind of brief you guys on what was actually in the original design based on what's changing as we move forward since we already do have a MOP on this project.

And in terms of the permitting process, we will be doing a MOP for revision, not starting from the beginning again.

So for this redesign, we're reprogramming the first floor by adding a larger lobby and amenity spaces, maintaining the retail spaces along MLK, and keeping the previously designed courtyard space in the middle of the building.

Access from MLK, it's a community plaza that will be open to the public.

The exterior design is exactly the same.

The parking is now moved from off of South 39th, which it was previously designed, which if both of these projects were developed would become sort of a vehicular and pedestrian disturbance on the site.

And it's just now accessed directly off Willow.

So you go directly into the parking garage instead of having to have vehicular circulation between the two future projects.

So it's much better for the pedestrian experience.

We've had many meetings with the community, and everybody was in favor of the project, especially because of the community courtyard, as well as the fact that they would prefer the project to be affordable housing.

When we met with the community, it was not an affordable housing project.

It was 100% market rate apartments.

For design review.

For design review, originally with the MOP.

and one of the main comments that always came out of those meetings was can we get more affordable can we get more affordable and our client previously was thinking of doing a very small amount just to sub just to reflect the code requirements but they really wanted more affordable housing in that area and then with the new design additional outdoor open space along willow has been provided as well as more amenity space for the residents within the building between the two sites now This is a map site plan of the two sites.

So on the east, you'll see the 6901 MLK site, which is what we previously had permitted through the month process.

And then the Willow site is on the west.

And shaded with the red is the vacation that we're proposing.

And you can see that the vacation actually dead ends to the south.

It does not continue past any of these sites.

So it does not connect to anything past the Willow site.

And then to the north, it does not connect to any other streets either.

I'm not sure if that was vacated in the past or how this became about.

We don't have the information on that.

But this is a solo street by itself with no connectivity other than to Willow.

And it's not used very much right now.

And total...

It's not improved at all.

Yeah, actually, if the photos are, it doesn't look like a place that people would hang out and assume it's a city street.

Yeah, exactly.

And if you look at these photos that we have here, you can see that actually it's being used by the Willow property as parking.

And it doesn't even look like if you were driving down the street, you wouldn't even know that you're allowed to go in there.

It's completely personal property.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

So, yeah, it's not being used at all right now.

And there, from our perspective, seems to be no use for it in the future.

And this is our ground floor plan.

You can see that there's the community plaza off of MLK on the east central side of the project.

We have the retail in the darker purple colors on the west, which would flow off into the plaza and also be accessed from MLK.

The orange spaces are the amenity spaces for the apartments, and the blue are the units on the ground level.

So you can see that we've got outdoor amenity spaces, notes five, one, and seven, and that's where we would have common space for the residents as well as for the community.

And the parking's accessed from note four there on the north.

This is the transit system right now, and you can see that 39th is a dead end street.

And in actuality, Willow does not cross MLK either.

And so you're not getting a lot of traffic flow coming from the east.

Everything is really isolated to MLK and from the west.

In terms of vacation and no vacation benefits, we have a graphic here that shows on the left what it would look like without the vacation.

And that's our last MUP drawing.

And we showed a typical what a development would look like on the Willow side.

So you can see that there's traffic problems if we were to develop these as two separate parcels.

But if we combine them, we'll actually solve the traffic issue, direct access into the parking garage without having any pedestrian interference, and also create a lot more open space around the perimeter of the project.

I just want to add one thing to that last slide.

Though we are a block from the light rail, we are including some underground parking.

The original mop that Jeff's previous client had had two levels of underground parking, I think 75 or 80 stalls.

Eighty.

Eighty.

We are proposing one level of underground parking.

I think on this document says 40 stalls 41 but we've actually lost a few because we need to increase our bike parking count so we're in somewhere in the mid to high 30s so it's not as if it's a 211 unit building with 211 parking stalls it's a fairly modest number yeah i can jump on that too i think we're down to about 32 to 35 stalls and we have 102 bicycle stalls now yeah so it's a modest number I'm just going to talk a little bit about the community engagement process.

As Jeff mentioned, they had a whole public outreach process during the design review piece.

We then went under the new community outreach process that went into effect in July of last year with Danielle's support, drafted up a community outreach plan.

had really wonderful, robust meetings with the local community groups in that neighborhood.

Everyone was Everyone felt like they got their win at design review because they got the look of the building that they wanted.

Then we came back and told them that it was going to be 100% affordable housing, and they felt like it was Christmas.

It was a very positive experience.

We didn't have a lot of success having people come to the open houses that we planned.

I think, again, people felt like they were very engaged during the design review process.

It was just icing on the cake now.

But one of the things we talked about a lot at the community groups and at the one-on-ones that I had with individual stakeholders within the community was the idea of the public benefit.

So we have to produce a public benefit package.

And in wanting to maximize housing on the site, we don't have a lot of opportunities for additional open space to create some of the public benefits that we felt like to create enough robust on-site public benefit.

And there are some opportunities, and we'll talk about that.

actually you want to go forward two slides this is just a summary of the public outreach that we did anything that we did in printed and digital was all in multiple languages culturally appropriate to the neighborhood and again we had a couple of really great meetings with the local neighborhood groups But one of the things we sort of zeroed in on pretty early on was what can we do as an offsite public benefit in the neighborhood in order to make our public benefit package more robust?

And the topic that came up most regularly and I felt like was most appropriate is there is a program called Places for People, which is being implemented by another local community group with the acronym called HOSTED, which stands for Healthy Othello, Safer Through Environmental Design.

And they're basically, they've identified a couple different locations within the neighborhood that where they're going to put public art that will create a space that is more interactive and safer and try to um i think the first space is near the safeway and they have a couple different locations chosen they've got local artists lined up to do the art and they're basically doing one location at a time as they're able to raise money for it so i think the first location is fully funded but we felt like that might work well with this as well given that we don't know the timing exactly of when we will close and that's when we would fund a project and so we would then be able to fund to whatever you know whichever location they are working on These locations are all within a quarter mile of the site.

And given that it's about pedestrians and safety and community and art, we felt like it was a good tie into what the purpose of the public benefit package is supposed to be so and then this is a summary of the on-site public benefits that we are proposing so we have the entrance plaza at mlk which is on the left drawing and then um we have this willow plaza we've got a funny uh street that side right of way a funny right of way um step back in designation or uh public space I don't know what you would call it.

It's just a funny piece of land.

The way that SDOT has the roads situated right now in front of the site, they step between the two sites.

And so there's about a 10-foot discrepancy on where the actual right-of-way and curb lines will be.

And so on the Willow side, we'll be left over with an area that we can't improve to our building, but we can improve in terms of right-of-way benefits with seating and landscaping and public benefits.

Yeah.

So we're proposing those two locations plus an off-site public benefit donation.

And we wouldn't have to improve that.

We just are electing to for this project.

And then there's just a couple more visuals of the sites.

This is the front of the site along MLK.

And then if you stand at the corner, you can see how it works back along Willow.

And this is our central plaza along MLK.

And we will be working with, there's a couple different nonprofits that we're going to hope to try to connect with minority owned businesses in the area to make sure that the, and small businesses to make sure that the retail spaces are devised appropriately for small businesses and not, you know, just giant 6,000 square foot spaces that small businesses can't use.

We do have income underwritten from those spaces.

but it's at, like, a 50% discount to market rent, so we are hoping we're able to connect with a local business who can move in.

And when we had our design review meetings with the community, they were really hoping that these spaces could be very small so that they could get multiple tenants within the building and reach out to local community members to take these suites.

Great, and so the on-site spaces, the MLK-1, let's see, so...

When I look at the plan view, does the plaza go all the way through or is there- No, there's a small typo on that.

So where he had number seven on that tab is actually, that is not a public space, that is private for the tenants.

Right, so it's the first plaza, and then it stops.

The building entrance is also located in that one of the entrances.

Okay, so it's not continuous.

It doesn't go all the way through.

It's not like a bridge or something.

Correct.

And so the trunk that faces on MLK, that won't be fenced off or whatever.

It'll be private.

It won't be fenced off, most likely.

It's privately owned, but it'll be publicly accessible.

Correct.

Correct.

And similarly, the one on Willow is going to be a little more straightforward because it's probably just going to feel like a wide sidewalk.

Yes.

That's the intent.

That's great.

So, Beverly, as you said, this is a relatively new process.

Michael, do you want to weigh in?

And Danielle, do you want to talk a little bit about the engagement?

I'll go first.

Yeah, so this was one of the first projects I worked on with advising.

Othello, as you know, is a very diverse area.

So we wanted to make sure that they were really reaching out to all neighbors, including people speaking other languages other than English.

So we had them translate into Spanish, Vietnamese, African languages.

including Somali, Amharic, Oromo, and Zugrinya.

They did a mailing to local neighbors, put up posters in the neighborhood, did an online survey, which a lot of the things they talked about were things that showed up on the survey in terms of making it affordable, having people...

have local businesses in the plaza and things like that.

They did two focus groups with different groups that, as they mentioned, weren't very well attended, but still advertised it broadly to make sure people knew that they were offering this to come and give input on the project and also the public benefit.

And then we had them reach out to some key organizations, Homesite, Puget Sound, SAGE, Rainier Valley Community Development Fund, UW, Othello Common and the Multicultural Center, the organizations in there.

And then we had them send their invitation and to their focus groups and survey to many, maybe 25 different groups, neighborhood groups in the area.

So they did a pretty extensive outreach process to really make sure that they were hearing from community members and organizations that are impacted by this.

Do you mind showing slide 16?

So for the design commission process, remember when you change the policies, any applicant that was subject to design review would come to the design commission before starting the early design guidance process.

We spent a lot of quality time together to try to figure out because they were revising an existing MOP to expand, to convert in the way that from a market base to affordable housing.

We had to do it a little bit differently, but we tried to stay within the spirit of those new requirements.

And they met with a few of the commissioners WHO ARE ALL, I THINK, LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS, WHICH I THINK IS HELPFUL FOR A PROJECT LIKE THIS BECAUSE OF THE NATURE OF THE PUBLIC BENEFIT PACKAGE.

I THINK THERE'S NOT A LOT OF QUESTION ABOUT THE UTILITY AND USE OF THAT RIDEAWAY.

IT CLEARLY WAS, IT FEELS LIKE IT'S NOT REALLY CONNECTED.

I THINK THE CHALLENGE HERE IS THE PUBLIC BENEFIT PACKAGE.

AND THE PUBLIC NATURE OF THE PLAZA IN PARTICULAR OFF OF MLK.

WE SEE THIS A LOT WHEN THERE'S A PUBLIC SPACE BUT IT'S ALSO BEING UTILIZED FOR THE PUBLIC TO ACCESS THE BUILDING.

HOW THEY BALANCE IT FEELING REALLY PUBLIC AS OPPOSED TO AN EXTENSION OF THE IDENTITY OR THE FUNCTION OF THE BUILDING IS A CHALLENGE.

I think there's a solution here.

We just have to spend a little bit of time figuring out how is it designed so the public has clear cues that this is public space and not just the building entrance.

again i think there's ways to unpack that it's just spending some time to figure that out by contrast the willow plaza really feels independent of the building its function and will feel i think particularly public for for anyone who wants to use it all of this i think is balanced against the basic proposition that this project the vacation creates affordable housing with the no vacation option really not having a vehicle or an option for affordable housing.

And I think that's that balancing test that you all try to strike to acknowledge the fact that affordable housing is being created as a result of a vacation that isn't necessarily THE PART OF THEIR PUBLIC BENEFIT PACKAGE, BUT IT'S CREATING SOMETHING THAT I THINK THE COUNCIL HAS BEEN QUITE CLEAR ABOUT AS PART OF THE VACATION PROCESS.

SO I THINK THE COUNCIL WILL, EXCUSE ME, THE COMMISSION WILL LOOK AT THAT ISSUE CLOSELY AS PART OF WHAT THEY EVALUATE.

OTHER THAN THAT, IT'S BEEN A PLEASURE SO FAR WORKING WITH THEM AND HAVING THE COMMISSIONERS HELP, AND I HOPE THAT THEIR HELP, I HOPE THAT THEIR PARTICIPATION HAS BEEN HELPFUL.

Well, I'll just weigh in with some of my thoughts.

I think I'll start with, I guess, the MLK Plaza.

I would say that the concerns that you highlighted, Michael, and that we discussed would be the primary concerns.

And if this were a more traditional project, I'd say those concerns would be significant.

But on the specifics around this project and what the mission is for this, I will leave it to design commissioners to work a way to make it best.

And I imagine that at the end of the day, it'll probably I mean, there'll be retail along there, and there'll be people be pulled in there, and it may not feel like totally public, but I'm okay with that.

I look at the, you know, my assumption is that if you walked away from this project, the Office of Housing would find someone else, one of our nonprofit likely providers to buy this, and they would build something at a different scale.

But it would almost certainly require additional office housing dollars to make that happen.

And so we could get more affordable housing here in a different constraint if we didn't want to vacate 39th.

but by your proposal, what you're doing is it means we're freeing up Office of Housing dollars to invest in an additional project.

And so I kind of view this as, well, this site, yes, could ultimately have affordable housing.

It really is.

The opportunity cost is that without this.

And so then also, what are we giving up?

Well, we're giving up something that no one knows we really have, which is a small street.

So maybe, you know, in theory, that probably should be treated differently today, but it doesn't actually go anywhere.

It's not gonna connect anything.

We also have a set of values that we're very committed to, both the council and the mayor, on we want to use public land for affordable housing when possible.

This isn't really that, but it's kind of that.

I mean, what we're talking about is giving up some land that's in the right of way, which is a public, use in exchange for a project that's going to deliver, you know, a couple hundred units of 60 percent of my housing at a transit oriented development location that's on a network.

It's in a mixed use community.

I mean, there's a lot going for it.

So the I think the point for more One of the points for doing this process, Beverly, as you outlined, for me was to give a sense of kind of right track, wrong track, or if there's a major decision to be made or we want to go in a different direction, that we don't come back and either say redo the whole thing or be told, like, we can't really redo this.

It's a really great idea, but it's too late to incorporate it.

Everything I see here is heading in the right direction, and I trust that the Design Commission will be thoughtful and balanced on how to make that space usable, but recognize that the benefit we get really is that the project happens in this case, and it's fairly unique.

Dr. Swant, do you have anything to add to that?

I talk a lot.

Beverly, do you have anything else you want to add?

Or does that give you some?

No, I think that gives us good direction.

We'll just jump in.

Great.

Tell me a little bit about the timing of when you guys would hope to be breaking ground and getting through the process.

That's where we make our plea here.

So now that we've had this meeting, my understanding is that Michael and his team will start working on actually sort of drilling into some of the design pieces of the off-site benefit and sort of the pedestrian and streetscape issues that we need to work through a little bit.

and that they basically have, will take a couple months to produce their report.

And then it will, does it have to go to the, it gets approved by the design commission and then it comes back here for two meetings and then it goes to council.

So our hope is that we are able to get back here in the early fall before you guys close the agenda for budget.

Because if we don't, and if, so if we're able to do that, we're putting in our bond application in May.

So we should have bonds.

If everything goes smoothly, we would be hopeful to close at the end of December, the end of the year, and start construction pretty quickly.

If we are not successful in getting on the commission agenda before budget and commission or then appointments to the new committees in January and February, my understanding is it could be March before we get in front and we probably would have to reapply for our bonds because the State Housing Finance Commission now has a fairly tight timeline If you get a word of bonds, you have to close in a certain amount of time.

So we would probably have to reapply, which would push us out probably to a May or June closing of next year.

So about six month difference.

Well, I don't control either Beverly and Astat's schedule or Michael and the design commission's schedule, but I'm sure they heard your plea.

What I can say is that I'm excited about this.

I get the transitioning council just, you know, I give you a bunch of feedback and then you come back and I'm not here and the new person's like, that's not the feedback I would have given.

So I would love to commit to work with you what I can do on the council to show some flexibility if we need to to get this through, ideally before budget and certainly before the end of the year.

So that will be dependent a lot on how responsive you are to both Beverly and Michael's team.

But hopefully, that's a feasible thing.

And it's a really exciting project.

And we'd love to see the Office of Housing is expanding their investments in more affordable housing.

We recently passed MHA.

So we're continuing to grow the pool of nonprofit housing providers capacity.

But that is definitely not going to be enough.

And so having private developers like yourself engage in this and be successful and hopefully be replicated delivering you know a housing type that we really need but without the scarce office of housing resources or used uniquely for a revolving fund and hopefully in the anf plan will allow them to actually reuse that money again on another project relatively soon too so i'm pretty excited about it so thanks for your work on this thank you uh councilman thank you for sticking around beyond our deadline i really appreciate that and um with that we are adjourned