Seattle City Council Select Budget Committee 92822

Good morning.

Good morning, everyone.

Thank you very much for joining the select budget committee of the Seattle City Council.

Today is September 28, 2022. The time is 9.33 a.m.

I'm Teresa Mosqueda, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Councilmember Nielsen?

Councilmember Nielsen?

Here.

Councilmember Juarez?

Here.

Councilmember Lewis?

Present.

Councilmember Morales?

Here.

And Chair Mosqueda?

Present.

Nine present.

Thank you, colleagues.

We are all present here today for the first of our meetings for 2022 calendar year.

As we join together, we are This is our opportunity to again join with the City Budget's Office to hear from them about the presentation of the biennial budget as transmitted to Council from the Executive Mayor Harold yesterday.

On today's agenda, we do have a process overview from Esther Handy, who is our Director of the Central Staff, and also Deputy Director Ali Panucci from Central Staff.

We will be joined virtually by all of the panelists here today, but we will be joined virtually after the presentation from Central Staff by the City Budget Office Director, Julie Dingley, who will provide an overview of the 2023-2024 proposed budgets.

Colleagues, this is a relatively brief overview given the detailed overview that Central Staff will engage in starting on October 11th.

Over the course of four days, Council will have the opportunity to get into more details with central staff, ask specific questions, and really get to the heart of any concerns or opportunities that you see in the proposed budget.

But we invite you as well to ask questions of Director Dingley today, recognizing that she has purview over all of the offices that have reported to her in establishing the budget.

And while she might not be the issue expert, I know that between her, what information and requests that we give to her today, In addition to the request that council colleagues will be collecting over the next week in partnership with central staff, we will then be able to have a more robust discussion about any questions, concerns, ideas, or opportunities that you see for the proposed budget and how it can be enhanced before we conclude our budget deliberations in the next eight weeks.

With that, recognizing that we have a full packed agenda for this morning, ideally we will be adjourning before 1 p.m.

Is there any objection to today's agenda?

Hearing no objection, today's agenda is adopted.

First, I want to thank our clerks, our IT team, security, the entire team at Central Staff as well.

This is the first opportunity that I've had now moving into the third year of chairing the budget to be in person.

For the last two years, we have been operating fully remotely, and so I have not had the privilege of seeing our colleagues who help make the operations run on a daily basis in real life, and I want to thank them for their process that they run to make sure that everyone can participate in these meetings, and especially thank them for helping to make sure that our processes this year are especially safe in the midst of COVID.

Colleagues, for all of us, as we engage in the beginning of looking at the 2023-2024 proposed budget, We are going to be focused on, I believe, three categories.

At least from my perspective, there are three main pillars that we can pull together to lift up our community and create greater stability and equity.

The first is investments in housing and caring for those who are unsheltered.

We want to make sure that we are investing in a budget that cares for everyone.

and making sure that the workforce that cares for those who are either unhoused or have housing insecurity are fully cared for and invested in, in terms of wages and inflation.

And we also want to make sure that we are continuing our commitment to grow affordable housing across our city.

The second pillar is investing in the health and safety of our community.

Everything from COVID response to making sure that kiddos have diapers, that families have food, and that our infrastructure as well as community safety is invested in.

And the last category is our equitable economy and resilient local economy.

That means investing in frontline workers, many of whom have been called heroes in this time of the pandemic, but yet still are facing resistance and harassment every day when they try to organize a union our frontline workers who are organizing on a daily basis, whether within the city or outside of the city, we want a budget that invests in a more equitable economy, so we are going to be focusing on what workers and working families need, as well as what small businesses and local entrepreneurs need to create a resilient local economy.

Those are the three pillars that I'll be looking at, housed and cared for, healthy and safe, and an equitable and resilient local economy.

We have our work cut out for us this year, though, colleagues, with shaky economic forecast, high inflation that continues to grow at the national and global level, and an ending of the federal COVID relief financial assistance.

We are going to be engaging in some tough conversations, but we want to set the record straight.

This council has already rejected austerity budgeting over the last two years.

We have rejected cuts to core government services and key personnel within our city.

We will continue this commitment to warding against any austerity and cuts and come together to face the deficit that has been outlined by the new Office of Economic Revenue forecast together.

The deficit that faces us collectively as a city family is over $141 million in operating deficit in the year 2023 alone, and grows to over $150 million in the year 2024. So together, we will help close this gap, prevent against austerity, invest in services for our most vulnerable, and grow a more resilient economy.

I would like to pause and thank Mayor Harrell and his team for the work that they have already put in to submitting this budget for us.

We appreciate especially Director Dingley's very transparent process and engaging with our office, with central staff, and with the team on the floor.

All of your offices among our city council colleagues, you have all talked about conversations you've had with the city budget office already, and there was a lot of thought given to the priorities that you've raised.

And now it's up to us.

It's up to us on council.

It's up to us as a community with our partners as residents, as labor members, as members of the small business community, as folks who care for or are part of our vulnerable communities.

We need to hear from you and make sure that the final city budget that is crafted from city council reflects our progressive priorities.

Again, I know that this has been a hard process to go through to shape even the budget in front of us, and I want to thank you, colleagues, for the work in front of us to make sure that the final budget does reflect our values, our priorities, and the investments that we would like to see while we are in the midst of COVID.

During the transition years between the executive branches, we have continued to serve in a steady hand on city council to make sure that we are protecting core investments in our city, investments in housing and the workforce, investments in childcare and boosting our local economy, investing in climate resilience programs and infrastructure investments.

And I have no doubt, colleagues, you will continue to bring those priorities and lift up and amplify those priorities in the upcoming biannual budget discussions.

Without the hard-fought investments that we have made over the last two years, working families and core government services would have been worsened if we engaged in austerity.

Without the investments that we made to addressing COVID, the crisis not only to the physical health of our residents, but the trauma that many continue to suffer with, with increased stress and hardship, we would have seen inequities deepen.

I'm excited to continue to work with you as we address these issues directly in year number three of my term as budget chair.

We only have eight weeks.

It's not a lot of time.

So again, thank you in advance for all the work that you've done to make sure that your priorities are known within our staff, to the community members for the letters, calls, emails, and public engagement you've already sent to our office and all of our colleagues as well.

And we look forward to participating with you in the upcoming eight weeks to make sure your voice is heard and incorporated in this process.

So, speaking of process, I do want to spend a quick second, colleagues, to talk about where we are at in terms of our deliberations.

We are going to have eight weeks of budget deliberations, and then the ninth week, as you see from the calendar that's been published, is solely dedicated to the final passage of the budget and the full council passage.

Again, the budget committee meetings are accepting written public comment at any point.

We have carved out extended period for public comment at our select budget committee meetings at the beginning of each of the week's sequence.

So, remote and in-person public comment will be accepted for at least the first hour and a half of the budget meetings.

If there's more folks that have signed up, we may extend that time.

I want to emphasize the hour and a half because, for example, last year, if we had four meetings in one week in a row, we'd have 20 minutes at the top of each hour.

What we've done is condensed all of those time slots over that four-day period into one day to try to reduce exposure and COVID risk.

So that's why we've emphasized we are planning for an hour and a half and could be extended if needed.

And those select budget committee meetings in which we will be taking remote and in-person public comment and welcome written public comment as well, include today, September 28th, October 11th at 9.30 a.m.

and October 25th at 9.30 a.m.

In addition, there are three public hearings dedicated solely to hearing from community members.

Again, happy to accept any written public comments as well.

Those get circulated to the floor.

And encourage remote participation in these public hearings.

And we'll be accepting in-person public comment as well.

The entire duration of the public hearings are dedicated to hearing from members of the community.

We will hear from you on October 11th.

at 5 p.m.

We are having another evening hearing on November 15th at 5 p.m.

And if the evening hearing times don't work for you, there is a November 8th, 9.30 public hearing only dedicated to hearing from members of the public.

Again, October 11th at 5, November 8th at 9.30 a.m., and November 15th at 5 p.m.

If you would like to send us written public comment on any of those days that we're deliberating without oral public comment being accepted, at any time, please go ahead and email all of us at council at seattle.gov.

I look forward to continuing to hear from you.

We aim to have the initial balancing package published on November 7th, and then we will accept a series of amendments, I'm sure, and vote on the revised package on November 16th.

And I have an announcement.

I want to thank the council president for their interest in working with our office and central staff to instead of have a November 21st final budget meeting and then a November 22nd full council meeting on a Tuesday, we are looking to combine those days.

The council president has agreed that we can move the full council meeting from November 22nd, which is a Tuesday, to immediately following our Select Budget Committee meeting on the morning of November 21st.

As in the past, we have concluded those morning final budget votes.

which allow for central staff to do any tweaks, do a last-minute comb through of the final amendments, look for any technical amendments that need to be adjusted before the final vote.

So, we are going to do votes on the amendments on November 16th, final vote the morning of November 21st, adjourned by 1 p.m.

for an hour break, and then we will come back for full council on November 21st at 2 p.m.

the revised agenda will be shared with all of you so that you can share that out.

But everything remains the same that we sent out in the last few days except for that final vote.

Any questions about process, theme, as council begins its deliberations?

Okay.

With that, I'm excited to go ahead and welcome to the forum here today our folks who are dialing in remotely.

Again, appreciate that everyone who has signed up for public comment today has signed up for remote participation.

And I wanted to emphasize before we go into remote participation why this is so critical for us to continue to treat COVID as the pandemic that it truly is and continues to be.

I'm going to quote from Joni Silberner, who's an independent healthcare journalist who on KUOW's Weekend Review last week, emphasized in her opening comments to the KUOW panel, no, the pandemic is not over.

We are headed into winter.

We have every reason to be concerned, every reason to be vaccinated.

No, COVID is not over.

She went on to say, There are over 3,500 hospitalizations currently in the United States right now on a daily basis due to COVID.

There are 300 to 400 people dying every day still from COVID.

There are 10 deaths a day in Washington State alone.

So no, the pandemic is not over, she concluded.

I really appreciate everybody taking this so seriously, especially our clerk's team who put some placards up and information out there so that folks know when the public comment period is and how to reach us on the remote days that we are asking for folks to just write in.

And with that, we look forward to hearing from members of the public about what they see in the initial proposed budget that's come down from the mayor's office as of yesterday at noon.

Madam Clerk, do you mind teeing up the public comment presentation?

Thank you colleagues.

Hello, Seattle.

We are the Emerald City, the city of flowers and the city of goodwill on indigenous land, the traditional territory of the Coast Salish peoples.

The Seattle City Council welcomes remote public comment and is eager to hear from residents of our city.

If you would like to be a speaker and provide a verbal public comment, you may register two hours prior to the meeting via the Seattle City Council website.

Here's some information about the public comment proceedings.

Speakers are called upon in the order in which they registered on the council's website.

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

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

A reminder, the speaker meeting ID is different from the general listen line meeting ID provided on the agenda.

Once a speaker's name is called, the speaker's microphone will be unmuted and an automatic prompt will say, the host would like you to unmute your microphone.

That is your cue that it's your turn to speak.

At that time, you must press star six.

You will then hear a prompt of, you are unmuted.

Be sure your phone is unmuted on your end so that you will be heard.

As a speaker, you should begin by stating your name and the item that you are addressing.

A chime will sound when 10 seconds are left in your allotted time as a gentle reminder to wrap up your public comments.

At the end of the allotted time, your microphone will be muted and the next speaker registered will be called.

Once speakers have completed providing public comment, Please disconnect from the public comment line and join us by following the meeting via Seattle Channel broadcast or through the listening line option listed on the agenda.

The council reserves the right to eliminate public comment if the system is being abused or if the process impedes the council's ability to conduct its business on behalf of residents of the city.

Any offensive language that is disruptive to these proceedings or that is not focused on an appropriate topic as specified in Council rules may lead to the speaker being muted by the presiding officer.

Our hope is to provide an opportunity for productive discussions that will assist our orderly consideration of issues before the Council.

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

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

Thank you Seattle.

Coco Weber and Peter Condit.

Good morning Jesse.

and Jesse.

Good morning.

Oh, perfect.

Good morning.

Hi, good morning.

My name is Jesse Friedman, and I'm the policy director at Youth Care.

I'm here today to express my concerns with the proposed cap on inflationary adjustments for human service providers that was included in the mayor's budget.

Youth Care, along with many of our partner agencies, has seen a roughly 70% turnover over the past few years.

This shouldn't come as a surprise because a recent study from the National Low Income Housing Coalition showed that you need to work 90 hours per week at a minimum wage job to afford a studio apartment in King County.

Unfortunately, due to disinvestment in this workforce, this is roughly what most entry-level direct service workers earn.

It's unacceptable that workers who are working 24 hours a day with people in crisis are unstably housed themselves.

This puts entire organizations like ours in jeopardy, as we try to maintain a consistent level of care with a workforce who can't afford to stay in this field.

That means fewer housing beds and fewer supportive services at a time when our clients need them more than ever.

If we're serious about ending the homelessness crisis, we need to invest in this critical workforce, not give them what functionally amounts to the pay cut that's included in this proposal.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Coco Weber, you're next, followed by Peter Condon.

Good morning, Council.

This is Coco from District 3. I'm an educator, renter, and long-time Seattleite calling today to ask you to reject the mayor's backward budget proposal, which literally steals our city funds such as Jump Start from Seattle's most vulnerable and gives it to systems such as the police and shot spotter that are reactionary and do nothing to address the root systemic issues that must be given care so that Seattle can be a city where all can thrive.

As the council knows, the Nick Jr. report demonstrated that around 80% of CLS 901 calls were for non-criminal emergencies.

And yet the council still hasn't funded a non-armed emergency response alternative to the police, despite acknowledging that it is ethically and fiscally prudent to do so, as exorbitantly priced police response to emergencies often ends in more harm being committed, both at first police contact and then in the exorbitantly priced jail and court system.

People are dying in King County Jail awaiting trial.

Outrageously, Harold's budget cooked more non-criminal responders back into the police system.

Regarding Harold's call to fund shot spotters, the Chicago OIG reported that although the city spent 33 million on this technology, a quote from the OIG rarely led to evidence of a gun-related crime, and the presence of the technology changes police behavior, more aggressive policing of black and brown communities.

Seattle Public School faces a budget deficit.

from education and early childhood care to housing and life-saving support for intensifying climate emergencies.

We need a budget that will provide true care and safety for the people.

I'm asking the council to reject the mayor's budget and instead look to the Seattle solidarity budget as your starting point for the budget season.

Thank you.

PS, please do not allow more police money to go to, more funding to go to the police under the guise of the park rangers.

It is a, We need the parks to be a safe place for all of our Seattle residents, including black and brown families.

We do not want them to be fearful of going to the park for fear of being killed by park rangers who are actually police.

Thank you.

I yield my time.

Thank you so much.

Peter Condit, good morning, followed by Allison Isander.

Good morning and thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

This is Peter Condit, a small business owner in District 6. I have some initial remarks to make about the mayor's proposed budget.

First of all, the Seattle Police Department should shrink, not grow.

They should not be allowed to reabsorb parking enforcement.

They should not be funded with ghost positions they will never fill, and they should not house any so-called alternative responses within their own ranks.

The SPD is still under a consent decree for racist use of force, and 2020 proved that years of bringing more resources into that racist structure is a failed strategy.

Second, The mayor uses jumpstart money to cover an overall budget shortfall.

This is defunding housing.

I know the mayor doesn't want to defund the Seattle Police Department, but that choice means defunding other things.

Housing is the most important resource that affects the safety of everyone in Seattle.

Defund SPD, don't defund housing.

Third, the proposed budget underfunds community-led responses with only $2 million.

The Nick Jr.

Report recommends that 49% of SPD's calls should receive a community-led response.

This requires a financial commitment commensurate with that need.

Finally, I'll say that the city should not spend a million dollars on ShotSpotter.

The technology that this for-profit company sells is purely reactionary and does nothing to address the causes of gun violence.

In 2021, Johns Hopkins University researchers published a 17-year study of ShotSpotter.

They found that, quote, Implementing ShotSpotter technology has no significant impact on firearm-related homicides or arrest outcomes," end quote. Many cities that use ShotSpotter are reconsidering their contracts. The Office of Inspector General in Chicago found that the use of ShotSpotter increased officer stop and frisks and seldom provided any investigative value. People have been falsely accused of crimes and incarcerated based on questionable ShotSpotter evidence. Thank you for listening and thank you for your hard work for the city.

Thank you very much, Peter.

Good to hear from you again.

And Alison Isinger, please go ahead.

Good morning, council members.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to comment this morning.

My name is Alison Isinger and I am the director of the Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness.

Here on behalf of our dozens of member organizations and the thousands of people that they shelter have and provide healthcare to in our city and beyond.

I like you have not had a full chance to absorb Mayor Harrell's proposed budget, but clearly what has stood out is the mayor's proposal to cap inflation adjustments for human services contracts to 4% and to undo the council's 2019 legislation that was passed unanimously to try to get us out of the death spiral that human services providers and the folks that they employ are in.

I listened to Mayor Harrell's budget speech.

He said that in developing his one Seattle budget a guiding principle was to meet urgent community needs while empowering employees to deliver essential services.

Thank you Mayor Harrell.

That's a guiding principle that we can all get behind.

However I think everyone in Seattle understands we cannot accomplish that by losing the very essential workers who provide the services, care for seniors, elders, veterans, survivors of gender-based violence, refugees, and immigrants.

The very essential workers our city relies on and has praised throughout the pandemic by reducing their purchasing power and further putting a check, a cut in their paycheck as opposed to more money in their pocket.

There is no resilient economy without childcare, healthcare, shelter, and housing support.

And we think the city council and every voter in Seattle knows that.

We ask you to adjust this portion of the mayor's budget because this is an inadequate response to the crisis that we are in together.

Core and essential services have to be the starting point for our one Seattle budget.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Allison.

The next three speakers are Emily Pena, Julia Buck, and Phil Dupree.

Phil, you're listed as not present.

You still have time to call in.

Please go ahead and do so.

Emily, good morning.

Just star six, Emily, one more time.

Oh, can you hear me?

Now we can.

Yeah, go ahead.

Thank you.

Good morning, council members.

My name is Emily Pena.

I am a resident of District 2 and I work in District 7. I'm here as a co-chair on the Seattle Human Services Coalition City Budget Task Force and as a representative of the Meals Partnership Coalition on SHSC Steering Committee.

We stand together as a coalition of human service provider coalitions to correct the proposed budget limiting inflation for city contracted human services to 4% in a time of unprecedented inflation specifically on important items for meal providers, including proteins and culturally relevant, nutritionally dense food items, as well as critical staff vacancies.

This proposed attempt to cap the inflation adjustment would be dealing human service providers across the city, a massive budget cut.

This is a compounding problem after years of inequitable adjustments for human service providers.

And last year, former Mayor Durkin's attempt at a 3% increase.

I urge you at the very least to uphold the recommended 7.6% budget increase determined by the CPIW.

We cannot go back to our frontline staff and tell them they will continue losing money to do this incredibly necessary work.

This proposal is unacceptable and I urge the council to make sure that at a bare minimum, we can keep up with inflation.

Thank you and I yield my time.

Thank you very much.

Julia Buck followed by Phil Dupree, then Steve Daschle.

Good morning, Julia.

Good morning, Council.

My name is Julia Buck.

I'm a homeowner in District 6. I'm calling in because I hope that the Council will work to reconcile the Mayor's Budget with the community-driven priorities identified by the Solidarity Budget.

I have a number of concerns about the Mayor's Budget including the 20 million defund of housing.

And it looks like that money is going to $17 million for SPD positions that will not be filled.

In other words, sort of free money that would be salary if they hired someone, but they can't.

And boosting the SPD ammunition budget by $3 million.

There's also the ShotSpotter program.

You know, SPD is concerned about lack of officers.

This is a program that spins the wheels of police investigating potential gunshots, but not ones that have been called in.

That's a strain on staff.

Both Cleveland and Detroit are considering dropping shot spotter.

Shot spotter has been held in contempt of court in Chicago, which is one of their premier cities.

And in Chicago, a 13 year old boy was shot by police.

And then ShotSpotter sort of worked with police to create a gunshot in the area in sort of an attempt to justify shooting that 13 year old.

I don't think that works toward the goals of equity or public safety.

I'm also concerned about the transit safety funding.

There are deaths beyond the Rainier Quarter.

And there's still no real safe bike slash pedestrian route from South Seattle to downtown.

Finally, I wanted to mention, you know, I know Councilmember Nelson said we were giving SPD $30,000 hiring bonuses because we have to show we appreciate them.

One line that came

I'm sorry that you got cut off.

Please do call in or excuse me, please do send in your last comments on that issue that you are trying to raise.

Phil Dupree, you are listed as not present.

We will come back to you at the end.

Steve Daschle, followed by Dennis Seals and Laurel Gray.

And that would conclude us for today.

Good morning, Steve.

Please go ahead.

Good morning, council members.

Uh, my name is Steve Daschle.

I am the executive director of Southwest youth and family services and the co-chair of the Seattle human services coalition.

I joined my colleagues in opposing the mayor's proposal to, uh, amend the ordinance passed by the council to, uh, allow for inflation adjustments for human services providers.

Um, as you know, uh, our, Every year when we come and advocate for the budget, our first priority is to do no harm.

And unfortunately, the mayor's budget does harm in the form of capping our inflation adjustment to 4%.

That in effect is a cut to human services and will ultimately result in our inability to provide the services our community needs.

In my case, for instance, as the director of Southwest Youth and Family Services, we just approved an 8.4% average increase for our staff.

That's not sustainable if our contracts don't allow it.

And for us, the choice will be having to reduce our services, reduce our staff levels, or not be able to provide the services.

So while we're working on wage equity in general, this inflation adjustment that we just passed is before any of the discussion around wage equity.

And as you know, we're in the midst of a study on how much our staff should be paid.

And if we are already starting behind the eight ball in keeping up with inflation, will never be able to reach that goal of equity for our staff.

So I encourage you to.

Thank you so much.

The next two speakers are Dennis Sillis and Laurel Gray.

Dennis, good morning.

Chair Mosqueda and committee members, on behalf of more than 1,100 residents and 250 staff at Plymouth Housing, thank you for the opportunity to comment on the City of Seattle's proposed budget.

My name is Dennis Sills and I work for Plymouth Housing.

Supportive services and permanent supportive housing are made possible through human services contracts.

The Mayor's budget proposes a 4% inflationary adjustment.

when inflation, depending on what measure is used, is significantly higher.

Human service workers are already underpaid, and this budget proposal is a significant cut and makes the situation worse.

As Plymouth prepares to open four new buildings and house 400 more people by 2023, we have many openings and are finding it challenging to attract and retain workers.

Plymouth worked to increase wages this year by over 8% to retain workers, and we still have dozens of vacant positions because we cannot recruit enough new staff.

This creates significantly unsafe working conditions as workers are trying to do longer hours and cover for vacant shifts around the clock.

The majority of our workforce is diverse, so this is an equity issue.

Our previous mayor calculated inflation at 3% and council adjusted contracts to reflect 5.8%, which was a step in the right direction, but still less than the real inflation people were experiencing.

This budget proposal falls short of providing adequate resources.

Additionally, we urge council to ensure the budget fully utilizes jumpstart funding to support our most vulnerable populations in our city by supporting housing efforts.

The proposed budget significantly diverts significant jumpstart funding resources to support the general fund.

We ask council make sure we keep up with inflation and protect resources for housing.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And our last speaker that's present is Laurel Gray.

Good morning, Laurel.

Laurel, I have you unmuted on my line.

Do you want to just double check your own phone to make sure that it's not on mute?

OK, thanks.

Yes, good morning.

Hello, council members, and thank you for the opportunity to comment today.

My name is Laurel Gray.

I live in District 5, and I'm here representing OSL, a meal provider serving cost-free meals to those experiencing homelessness and hunger in the greater Seattle area and as a member of MPC and SHSC.

We do stand together as a coalition of human service providers and coalitions to correct the proposed budget that limits inflation for city-contracted human services to 4% in a time of unprecedented inflation.

This budget will Limit and completely cut off our ability to purchase critical items for meal providers such as fresh culturally relevant and nutritionally dense proteins and vegetables.

And our end to address our dire staffing shortages, this proposed 4% inflation adjustment cap would be crippling for meal providers in all areas of our work.

I urge you to reject the mayor's budget and at the very least uphold the recommended 7.6% budget increase.

We cannot go back to our staff and tell them they will continue losing money to do this critical work.

We cannot go back to our clients and tell them that we are unable to afford the ingredients required to create the meals they're in such desperate need of.

This proposal is unacceptable and I urge the council to make sure that at a bare minimum, we can keep up with inflation.

Thank you for your time.

Absolutely.

Thank you for your time.

And colleagues, that does conclude all of the people that are listed as present on today's public comment sign-in sheet.

So thanks again to everybody who dialed in.

Really appreciate your comments and concerns and encourage you to send in either your full comments or the remainder of your comments to council at Seattle.gov.

With that, that concludes our public comment for today.

And we're going to move on to the first item on our agenda.

Madam Clerk, do you mind reading in the first item into the record?

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and they have a whole crew of central staff members behind them.

So huge applause for all the work that you already have done to help dissect what is being sent to us and for all the work that you will be doing with council as we seek to infuse this budget with council priorities over the next eight weeks.

We really appreciate all your hard work and it's great to have you participate virtually.

Thanks again for continuing to do that as we seek to try to limit in-person contact.

I'm happy to answer any questions that you may have.

Good morning.

Thank you, Budget Chair Mosqueda.

Good morning, Council members.

Really pleased to be with you as the Council begins its budget review process.

For the record, Esther Handy, the Director of Council Central Staff, also really want to thank and recognize our Central Staff Assistant, Patty Wigrin, who is on the line for this committee meeting and will be on the line with you throughout this process, and our team of analysts who are both listening in and digging into the budget as we speak.

We enter this discussion today at an unusual economic time.

On the one hand, a strong labor market sees employment returning to pre-pandemic levels.

On the other hand, inflation is driving consumer prices up, particularly for the basics that families rely on like groceries and fuel.

We have COVID transmission rates back down to low in King County, vaccines available for the first time for people of nearly all ages, but there also remains many unknowns about the virus and public health as we head into another winter cold and flu season.

Those economic and social conditions of the city will inform how you prioritize resources in the city budget over the next eight weeks.

I want to remind you of your roles during that eight-week process.

Patty, let's go to the next slide.

pursuant state law, it's the mayor's job to prepare and submit to the council a proposed annual budget in September.

That proposed budget must be in balance and was transmitted yesterday.

I'd like to remind the council at this point, it is just that, the executive's proposal.

Today begins the council's role.

It's the council's job to review and modify the mayor's proposal and ultimately to adopt a final balanced city budget, which must be done no later than 30 days prior to the next fiscal year.

You have in front of you a biennial budget.

It's the first that the council has considered in this form since the fall of 2018, when the council adopted a 2019 budget and endorsed 2020 budget.

We looked at annual budgets through the height of the pandemic.

At the end of this process, you will be asked to approve a 2023 budget and endorse a 2024 budget.

As we listen to the executive's overview presentation shortly, and I really want to thank City Budget Office Director Julie Dingley for putting together a really comprehensive overview of the budget for you this morning and spending time with us today, I offer a few questions for you to consider.

The first are what strategies did the executive use to balance the $1.6 billion general fund in the face of a $141 million operating deficit?

What principles guided those decisions?

Did any of the decisions change a current policy?

And how did those decisions in this proposed budget impact the six-year financial outlook for the city?

Second, we'll be listening for how the budget addresses some of the council's key policy initiatives.

Thank you to Chair Mosqueda for framing up housing and cared for, equitable and safe, and economic resilience.

We'll be listening for does the budget use a regional solution to serve houseless individuals and families?

How does it maintain a clean city with accessible parks and open space?

Is it running a public safety system that recruits and retains our public safety workforce and also advances a reimagining of policing with a larger civilian response network and new alternative 911 response?

Does this budget advance a Vision Zero transportation strategy that invests in core road and bridge infrastructure?

Is this a budget that partners with our tribes, supports our native communities, and that cares for both our most vulnerable residents and those that offer frontline services to them?

Our team will be listening for these and each of the initiatives that you have been advancing through your committee work this year.

Finally, we'll be listening for how funding from the Jumpstart Payroll Expense Tax has been used to expand investments in housing, equitable development, economic resilience, and to advance the city's Green New Deal.

Collectively, the council's investment strategies to create an equitable recovery out of the pandemic.

Next, we'll walk through the budget process.

I was going to hand it over to Central Staff Deputy Director Allie Panucci.

Allie, if you have any trouble with your internet, feel free to pass it back to me.

Thank you, Director Handy.

Good morning, Chair Mosqueda, members of the Select Budget Committee.

For the record, I'm Allie Panucci of your Central Staff.

I'm going to very briefly describe the Council's six-step budget deliberation process that really begins today.

I won't go into much detail as Chair Mosqueda covered much of this, but I just wanted to start with a thank you to Chair Mosqueda and her team for working with us to develop an orderly and transparent process for the Council's budget deliberations.

The budget process this year, like previous years, comprised of six main steps and three public hearings as highlighted on the budget timeline presented on this slide.

As we enter each step in the process, I'll just touch base with all of you for reference and for the public who's following along to signal where we are in the process and what is coming up next.

The process is really designed to provide time for the committee to hear from the public and to engage in discussion and debate about the proposed budget, individual council member priorities, and then a review and final adoption of the council's balanced budget.

Next slide, please.

Today, the committee will hear an overview of the mayor's proposed budget submitted for the council's consideration.

This will complete step one of the budget process.

After this overview, we have about two weeks for the committee and staff to dive in and digest, research, and analyze the mayor's proposed budget before moving on to step two in the process.

Next slide, please.

So following the discussion today, the next time the committee will convene will be for budget hearings, where select departments will be invited to provide an overview of their department-specific proposed budget, focusing on any significant changes or reductions relative to the 2022 budget.

And central staff will identify potential budget issues and policy options associated with the proposed budget.

This is an opportunity for the committee to ask questions, begin to share ideas about changes or new initiatives they may want to include as we start developing council members' budget amendments.

The committee will also hold the first of three public hearings on October 12th at 5 p.m.

Next slide, please.

So with that, that really is a quick summary of the process and where we are today.

We at central staff are looking forward to supporting the council's budget deliberations, completing step six of the process when you all adopt the 2020, excuse me, 2023 and endorse a budget for 2024 on November 21st.

And with that, I'm happy to answer questions or hand it over to the chair.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, director.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

led by Sajal Parikh, our Chief of Staff, and I want to thank our team as well.

Aaron House, Policy Director.

Make sure to thank Freddy de Cuevas, who usually serves as our clerk in all things operation, and our newest member, Melanie Cray, who has been very busy with all things related to public safety and will be busy with infrastructure-related items as well.

Thanks to everybody for the early work on this and the analysis.

I wanted to lift up something that Esther Handy, Director Handy started with, and that is what central staff will be looking for.

The questions that Esther, that Director Handy outlined, I would almost love to have printed out and put in front of all of our desktops as we consider the deliberations.

And the reason is because these are policies that the council has already passed into law.

These are not value statements necessarily.

Those value statements have already been debated and passed into statute.

So each one of those questions that Director Handy lifted up is coming from the council.

These are priorities that the council has already opined on and have already been passed into statute.

So I just wanted to clarify that these direction and analysis that central staff is lifting up have come from past acts of the council and have come from past laws that are still in statute.

It is possible for the executive to send down a proposed budget that is in balance, but is balanced by proposing changes to statute.

That is a debate that we can have about whether or not policy could change.

But I think the analysis that we have asked Director Handy to lift up is absolutely rooted in what is already statute, what has been identified as council priorities from our past deliberations in terms of what's already codified in law.

and a very, very fair and very helpful way for us to evaluate how the proposed budget aligns with our council priorities and what's in statute currently.

Okay.

Thank you for the outline.

Again, thanks to the council president's office and central staff for identifying ways for us to combine the final budget date on November 21st.

We will have that final budget date and we will then have full council immediately afterwards.

I'm going to ask folks from central staff to quickly outline, you know, you see a November 16th date where we do a final action on the budget, but then we come back and we do it again on the 21st.

Can you remind folks why we sort of, it looks like we're taking two days to do that effort.

I tried to summarize it in terms of technical read through, but could you remind us why we have those two different dates towards the end of our deliberations?

Sure, happy to.

Chair Mosqueda, thank you.

So what happens on the 16th is the council considers a series of changes to the proposed budget.

Overall, the proposed budget package includes around 28 pieces of individual legislation.

And so all of those amendments and the balancing package itself may be making changes to multiple pieces of legislation that makes up the total budget package and so we need that time to reconcile all those changes make sure we have everything aligned correctly and that the budget adoption ordinance along with the other 26 supporting pieces of legislation are consistent with state law for adopting a balanced budget and reflect the actions taken by the committee.

So that final meeting the morning of the 21st is just for the council to take final actions on all of that budget legislation and to address any technical amendments that may be necessary.

Because as we're reconciling, we often identify one or two things that need to be adjusted in order to legally balance.

Great, thank you.

Any other questions?

I am not seeing any questions, so thank you for getting us kicked off on the right foot here with a reminder and orientation to some of the policies we have passed in Council throughout the years and what is currently in statute.

We really appreciate your work in advance.

Vice Chair Herbold, great to see you.

Please go ahead.

There, thanks.

I just wanted to put in a quick word of appreciation both for you, Madam Chair, as well as Central Staff Director Handy and Deputy Director Panucci for Making some changes to the public hearing schedule to allow for more time for the public to digest the chair's package when it comes and give us feedback on it.

I'm sure it'll all be great, but I appreciate the shift and allowing for that more time to just review what's in the package.

Really, really appreciate that.

It's very kind.

Thank you, and thanks for some suggestions on that as well.

You will note the asterisks on the bottom of the calendar.

Colleagues, it does say some of these dates are subject to change.

So especially when we look at the week of, I'm not remembering, probably week six or so there, there is a possibility we might have to use that Friday, but we really try to free up as many days as possible, and we're gonna be as efficient as possible.

I think with that, if there's no additional comments or questions, I'm going to transition us over to Julie Dingley.

As I do, though, I just want to take a quick second to thank both Julie Dingley in the role of CBO, the City Budgets Office Director, but also our central staff who over the last few years have helped me better understand what the process had been in the culture of the city over decades, which has been we receive a pretty thick narrative document.

And it's often difficult to understand, especially by department where line items have changed.

This was especially challenging in 2020 when I began serving as budget chair.

And there was a call for more information, clarity on where the money was going, especially within public safety.

And we launched an inquest to try to figure out more information about where there was underspend, where there was vacant positions, how that money was being used.

And I want to thank central staff for flagging for us in that time.

We have been working with the city to figure out ways that we could do things differently to get a better understanding of where each line item was shifting and do that within our process that the city uses of a pretty heavy narrative document instead of a line item.

we have received from the executive is more detailed in terms of where there was underspend, where there was vacant positions, how those pockets are being used and how money is being either generated back to general fund or within departments.

I want to say thank you to the central staff for pushing the concept and Director Dingley for helping to operationalize that and for your commitment to making sure that was a joint effort.

I have some other comments that I will save here about Director Dingley, but I wanted to get item number two read into the record as we

Agenda item to city budget office overview of the 2023 and 2024 proposed budgets for briefing and discussion.

Thank you, Director Dingley.

Thank you to your staff who I'm sure is in the wings and waiting to weigh in when necessary.

We will have a robust presentation here today.

Colleagues, we do anticipate adjourning before 1 p.m., so please do raise your hands as we go through, but recognize we have a series of slides to get through.

Happy to take your questions as we go through though, because that would be near impossible to try to remember towards the end of the I will be looking for the raised hands virtually and feel free to chime in if I don't see your hand raised.

do walk through your presentation to also help us understand some of the other policy changes that you've committed to.

When we talked about the deficit of $141 million in terms of operating deficit for the year 2023, we talked about how this must be, you know, not only are we looking for efficiencies, but we must pair greater efficiencies within our budgeting process, having real-time information on where there's vacant positions, have a better understanding of where the state, federal, county dollars that from our other partners at the state and federal level.

So this is a really important effort to try to make sure that we have We have a lot of work to do.

We have a lot of work to do to make this a more transparent budget process and I would love for you to be able to weave into your presentation what policies you are advancing to help us get to that.

And again, colleagues, I will note that all of this discussion today is on the proposed budget.

The proposed budget is a two-year proposed we're going to continue to move forward.

I think it's a great call for additional progressive revenue when we look at the growing needs, the growing population, and the projected growth in our region from people continuing to move here.

our social media and in our newsletter, but it underscores where large cities really are being pressed to step up to the plate to create cities of the future so that as people move into those geographic hubs, we're creating enough housing, creating enough food security that we're investing in green canopy and we're creating opportunities for us to not only house people who are coming into our jurisdictions, but ensure that it's green, it's livable, and that it is affordable.

And so it weaves together everything that we care about in the budget, and in order for us to do that, and in order to meet the growing needs of our community, we need additional progressive revenue.

It's something that I know this council has supported with its robust passage of Jump Start progressive payroll tax in the past.

and we will be looking to work in partnership with the mayor's office to make sure that progressive revenue is deployable before the next biennium starts.

And with that, I will turn it over to Director Dingley.

Again, thank you for your ongoing conversations collectively as a city family as we look to ward off austerity and look forward to hearing more about the proposed budget.

I will note one more thing.

As much as we probably want to get into the We have a lot of concerns about the proposed budget.

We also need to recognize that this is Mayor Harrell's proposed budget.

Questions about the programs and the impact, absolutely appropriate for us to ask.

But if there's concern and angst, I want to just make sure that that is directed towards the policy and not the person in all of our deliberations.

So look forward to hearing more.

but we just anticipate that this will be the beginning of a conversation for a more detailed deliberation to start on October 11th.

Okay, please take it away, Director Dingley.

Great, thank you so much, Chair Mosqueda, and to all of the council members, city staff, and members of the public that have tuned in today to spend time diving into Mayor Harrell's 2023 and 2024 proposed budget.

Before I just want to also say thank you, Chair Mosqueda, for your kind remarks on the on the opening.

I will do my best to weave in answers to those questions throughout.

I do think that this presentation answers many of those questions, both you and Director Handy raised as well.

So please do ask, though, along the way if we if we miss anything.

All right, so before jumping into substance, I want to first acknowledge the difficult budget environment that we in the city continue to face.

We will expand on the challenges and their implications much more throughout the presentation.

But this particular combination of inflation, COVID-19 persisting, looming potential national or global recession, and the cessation of the federal pandemic relief funds has really created a very unique situation.

The good news, if there is good news to be had, is that we have all been working really well together.

So even before you confirmed me as budget director at the start of the year, CBO had been working with your offices and central staff on how best to deploy the federal COVID relief dollars with the Seattle Rescue Plan.

Transitioning to the budget director's chair in this environment has obviously been incredibly challenging, but having you all as partners during this year has been reaffirming.

I admit to being more than a little bit nervous when only a month onto the job I had to meet with each of you to tell you which 2022 spending ads I thought we should hold due to the uncertain economic picture.

As it turns out, I didn't have a lot of reason to worry and all of you were incredibly gracious and thoughtful in working through the city's challenges together.

So I thank you for that.

And I think you know from Mayor Harrell's address yesterday that we do share values and priorities as a city and this proposed budget reflects that.

So all that is to say thank you for all of the time that you and your teams have spent engaging with me and with CBO and the mayor's office as we have really gotten to know each other, learned about what is important at each of your committees, districts and communities and developed a shared understanding of our challenges.

And today, well, yesterday, I guess, is also not the end of that collaboration, but the start of a new phase as you craft your changes to this proposed budget.

And we hope that our teams will continue to engage with, that your teams will continue to engage with us as you analyze, amend, and ultimately pass an adopted budget in two months' time.

As I told you during my confirmation hearing in February, transparency and collaboration are two of my top guiding principles in this role, and I look forward to strengthening our partnership.

So now under at the very highest level the City of Seattle's 23-24 proposed budget is the first under Mayor Harrell's administration.

The 23 proposed budget includes approximately $7.4 billion in appropriations overall, including about $1.6 million in the general fund and about $300 million for the jumpstart payroll tax.

As was noted, this is the first biennial budget since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The city operates typically on a biennial budget with a two-year proposal developed every year.

However, that practice was suspended during the first year of the pandemic to allow the city to react rapidly to those changing economic circumstances.

The 23-24 proposed budget investments focus on taking action to address our city's most urgent needs, looking to get the basics right and focus on our responsibilities while also grappling with $140 million general fund deficit.

Despite that deficit, this budget aims to support our most valuable or vulnerable community members, particularly recovering from the pandemic and the resulting economic conditions, and makes investments in key priority areas that you heard from the mayor yesterday.

Housing and homelessness, public safety, access to opportunity, healthy communities, climate and environment, safe and reliable transportation, and good government.

The biennial budget is balanced after really digging into the base, asking departments for limited reductions, looking at vacant positions, as was mentioned, holding on new spending and repurposing some general fund adjacent revenue sources that we'll get into more.

This budget is built conservatively and maximizes opportunities to replenish reserves and bends the curve on new spending.

So though inflation continues to be at a 40 year high growth and the general fund expenditures is effectively flat, increasing at just point 03% over 2022 adopted levels.

Once you, you know, take out one time funded things from the federal government.

CPIW, which the city uses as sort of a fairly reliable indicator of local inflation, was 7.6% for the year ending in June.

So a growth of 0.03% on expenditures indicates we really did squeeze where we could without causing budget-related layoffs.

So that's sort of a two-minute overview, and now I want to take you through some detail.

So if you can go to the next slide, please.

So just to give you a sense of where we're gonna go today.

So I'm first gonna take a look at the overall economy and its impacts on revenues.

We're then gonna take a look at how we crafted this budget, not just the process, but also the values and principles that we used in making decisions.

And then after that, I'd like to look at the different strategies we use to get to balance after starting the year with $140 million gap.

There are a number of new and expanded investments that support city priorities that I'd like to highlight for you and for the public.

And with that I think we're ready to dig in.

So on the next slide, you'll see a pie chart here that represents the full entire proposed budget for 2023. the proposed budget by by sort of spending area how the budget is organized.

This is all funds included at 7.4 billion.

Now this is all what we call colors of money.

So this includes spending on with restricted revenue sources.

For example, utilities and transportation you can see makes up the lion's share of the budget at 49 percent.

On the next slide it shows you that that's a slice of that same information.

So here we have the general fund by the budget by budget area at about one point six billion.

And you can see when you look at just the general fund, which is our most flexible funding source that we have available to us in the city and going to be largely the subject of today's conversation, you can see that that those percentages shift considerably.

So with just general fund, public safety is 47% of the overall spending.

Now you often hear that budgets are a reflection of our priorities.

They're also a reflection of our responsibilities.

And as you heard from the mayor yesterday, public safety is a core charter responsibility for the city and appropriately funded here at this 47% level.

Okay, so next I wanna take you, I think I have one more look at all the different, sorry, next slide, thank you.

This is another look at the same information that you saw in the pie chart at the top just over the last couple of years so that you can see how the funds have shifted over time.

So you'll notice that since 21, the general fund hasn't grown all that much.

This is something that I'll sort of leave for you all to dig into more.

I'm not going to get into all of the details here, but I thought it was a helpful visual to see how those revenues are tracking or how the spending in those areas is tracking over time.

Okay, on economy and revenue, that's next.

Thank you so much.

As you heard, 2022 has been a year of significant economic instability and uncertainty, which will continue to impact the 23-24 biennium.

On the upside of all of this, the economy, both nationwide and in the Seattle region, has seen strong recovery from COVID-19 disruptions and the recession.

And as of August, you heard previously the unemployment levels, I'm sorry, employment levels have returned to their pre-pandemic levels and job creation and consumer spending remains strong.

Now on the downside, the supply chain impacts of the pandemic pent up consumer demand.

And then the war in Ukraine, which of course is first and foremost, an absolute humanitarian crisis in the context of this presentation, talking about the economic impacts of it, it's led to higher and more persistent inflation than previously anticipated.

And so it remains to be seen whether the Federal Reserve's actions to contain that inflation will tip the national economy into another recession, or whether it will in fact simply bring down inflation overall, which is their goal.

So right now, the budget's built in line with the most recent national and regional forecast and assumes slower economic growth, inflation moderating by mid 2023. Our revenues continue to recover, although not uniformly, from pandemic lows and shift away from one-time, as it shifts away from sort of one-time transfers and those emergency grants that buoyed us for the last couple of years.

However, if this persistent high inflation continues, it will, as this high inflation continues, it creates structural imbalances.

It's worth mentioning here that the labor costs are also the city's biggest driver and that open contracts in a high inflation environment is an extra challenge and I'll talk about that a little bit more later.

This uncertainty also means we don't know what we will need to react to that surfaces sort of from the national political climate.

In, in the wake of the Dobbs decision just last month, and then again in this proposed budget, you'll see that we're making investments to ensure access to reproductive care.

And then you know this month, and in the last couple of months in the news, seeing that sitting governors are flying refugees around the country to make political to win political points.

And so this is all to say that we really need to continue our close collaboration in the months ahead and we're going to be looking forecast to forecast and sort of external factor to external factor to make sure that we are adapting to the needs of the city.

So I want to talk a little bit more about how high inflation impacts our city revenues on the next slide.

So revisiting for a moment something that was raised during the August revenue forecasts around that high inflation and how how it impacts our revenues.

Setting aside whether fighting inflation will slow economic growth, the direct impacts of inflation will systematically weaken the purchasing power of the general funds.

While you might assume that city revenues will generally grow as the price of goods and services increase, it's just not true for all of the city's revenue streams.

Property taxes are statutorily constrained to grow at just 1% plus the value of new construction.

And as you can see in this chart here, they represent 24% of total general fund revenues.

And then, additionally, policy choices around public utility rates and fees charged for city services could also constrain that overall growth.

Those rate paths are set in law, for the most part, and they don't necessarily reflect a one-to-one with inflation.

More often than not, they smooth that impact over time, which means that they don't, in the immediate term, keep up.

And at the same time, inflations will drive up the cost of all the goods and services the city will purchase.

This could be materials that city departments and contractors use for facilities construction and maintenance.

Anything from lumber to steel to concrete have seen double digit price inflation in the recent years.

And the cost of replacing vehicles in the city's fleet have increased some 10 to 43% in the last two years, depending on the vehicle.

And the cost of fueling those vehicles has been obviously higher in a year with high gasoline prices and those unanticipated costs.

And then, of course, our single largest expenditure area is personnel with salaries, health care, and retirement costs.

So in sum, it's worth noting that the combination of revenue changes both up and down, depending on the revenue sources, and cost pressures on the expenditure side due to labor constraints, supply side limitations, price increases for personnel materials, is both uneven and difficult to quantify.

So because the city budget must be balanced, it's important for city leadership to make tough choices about what to pause or defer and what to continue at current levels or to increase.

On the capital side, for example, we have deferred many projects and continue to look for ways to reduce costs of operations and service delivery.

Okay, next slide.

I want to talk to you a little bit about the process overall of how we arrived at this budget.

So you just heard about the challenge and where we began 2023. So now taking that information, how did we get here?

So as you see at the top, there's a chart here that describes the overall budget process from the city budget office's perspective.

So starting in January, where we're providing, we're preparing the budget guidance that we're going to send out to departments.

March through May, departments are preparing their budget proposals.

during the summer months, CBO and the mayor's office review and finalize those budgets.

And then now is the time, we are right here at this connection point between the green and orange here, where you have now received the budget and it's starting on the first phase of budget review here.

I can also say that we, in working with departments During this whole year, we had to ask a lot of really critical questions.

We were looking for efficiencies.

So can a department provide the same service at a lower cost?

We were looking for refining ideas and new investments.

So how can we get the most out of every dollar?

Is this where we want to put our limited resource?

And then we were looking strategically to partner with other government community based organizations other groups, there are the city is not the only place that that important services can be funded, it is a significant one but it's not the only one.

And then, as you know, I met with all of you along the way.

So we began our series of one-on-one meetings in February to address the deficit, where I brought you with nervous palms the proposed reductions from the 2022 spending.

And then we walked through the projected deficit.

We revisited those.

I'm sorry.

And then we engaged around your spending priorities and met again just before the budget was released.

So I just want to say I really appreciate that partnership once again.

And it has really informed how we put together this budget overall.

OK, next slide, please.

So from the end of the Great Recession through early 2020, the city has enjoyed a remarkably long period of economic expansion.

However, although the city's revenues were growing, expenditures were growing even faster.

And during that time, the city greatly expanded the number of departments to address emerging needs of a growing population, as well as considerable new spending.

And this was, you know, sort of in particular, though certainly not exclusively to address the homelessness crisis.

And further compounding that issue, new revenue sources have been created over the last several years, but they have been designated for specific and very important uses only, and not available to the broader general fund to sort of meet basic city needs.

So this mismatch between expenditures, revenues, and restricted revenue streams has created small but growing deficits in the years leading up to the pandemic.

And as a result, the budget in those years was balanced with one-time solutions.

So as you see here in this chart, that's exactly what's playing out.

So for seven of the last 10 years, there were current budget deficits.

As you can see, in 2020, following the blue line, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, revenues declined precipitously, and the city was faced with critical decisions around how to bring the budget back into balance.

While many jurisdictions around the country introduced extensive austerity measures and numerous layoffs, the city was able to temporarily defy fiscal gravity due to the timely passage of the payroll expense tax and the emergency COVID-related funding support from the federal government, which you can see in this orange line going up to the top of the graph that we didn't have to bend that curve in spending.

So with one-time strategies largely exhausted in 2022 and coming into the 23 budget, again, we had a gap of about $140 million.

So in the next slide, I'm going to talk you through the steps we took to close the budget deficit.

So obviously one budget in one year cannot solve a problem that has been over a decade in the making, but this budget does take steps to bend that overall spending curve and find savings wherever possible, and that's flexibility to some restrict funding sources, so we'll talk about that a little bit.

Upon entering office the administration recognized the need to act quickly and identify those strategies to address this deficit and this was the first work that I took on since becoming director.

And I want to thank each of you for your close partnership over these last nine months and I know I'm going to keep saying that and I hope it doesn't become something that you're tired of hearing because it's very heartfelt.

So working together, we employed several strategies.

And I have a visual for this in a couple of slides, but I just want to talk you through these strategies here.

So on 2022 spending holds, this was the first strategy we reviewed overall.

And we looked at the 2022 adopted budget for opportunities to pause or reduce new spending that had been recently authorized.

So in partnership with all of you, we have about $20 million worth of new spending that was identified to hold.

And that was on hold pending new more favorable forecasts.

And unfortunately the general fund did not come through for us to be able to unlock those spending holds.

So those are assumed in balancing.

We also had departments were asked to prepare reduction proposals, equating to about three, three to 6% of their proposed budgets.

After a thorough review, lots of questions, many meetings, the proposed budget includes certain reductions to realize departmental efficiencies, but not all of those.

We didn't go all the way to 6%.

We also, as part of that, looked at vacancies.

So departments critically reviewed all vacant positions and the assumptions for those positions, including hiring timelines.

Those assumptions will determine the proper amount of budget allocated for salaries and benefits in the budget.

And then we also reviewed those general fund-adjacent revenue sources.

So what do we mean by that?

So as I mentioned, in recent years, new revenue streams have been created, each with their own dedicated purposes.

And the proposed budget makes changes to the spending plans for certain funding sources that are listed here below, given our current budget realities.

So first, for the Transportation Network Companies tax, or TNC tax, When the city passed our TNC regulatory framework, including the Driver Resolution Center in 2019, proceeds from the tax were primarily designated for the Driver Resolution Center, affordable housing and transportation.

And due to Washington State's preemption of the city's TNC driver regulations and minimum compensation and benefits for drivers regulations, as well as a new, more vigorous funding source coming for low income housing in the jumpstart payroll tax, The resolution here broadens the use of the TNC tax revenues for ongoing transportation initiatives, including transit investments and continued administration and enforcement of the tax.

We also took a look at short-term rental tax.

So again, because of this new vigorous funding source for equitable development projects and the lower than expected revenues in short-term rental tax, which is the tax on Airbnbs, as an example.

This budget reprioritizes the use of short-term rental tax proceeds to first pay for debt service on affordable housing projects.

Second, to pay for investments in permanent supportive housing.

And the remainder going to the Office of Planning and Community Development, or OPCD, for those EDI Equitable Development Initiative grants.

So these changes prioritize the investment made in permanent supportive housing and allow it to be maintained over time, recognizing that EDI has this new, larger, incredibly robust funding source.

We also made changes to the payroll expense tax.

I have several slides on this a little bit further in the presentation, so I'm not going to cover them just here just yet.

And finally, of course, you heard from the chair that we are currently looking for options for revenue stabilization.

So the way that our state and local governments finance services to support our community needs is often structured in a manner that puts a disproportionate financial burden on those who are least able to afford it.

So understanding we have both dwindling proceeds from local funding sources like cable television and commercial parking taxes and rising inflation, there's really an opportunity to re envision the way the city funds its service delivery and operations.

So in order to address that long term structural budget problem closer out to more of the 2025 budget realm.

The executive and legislative branches are jointly convening a Seattle Revenue Stabilization Work Group, which will provide recommendations on potential progressive revenue options for the city to consider again as part of that 2025 budget process.

All right, next slide, please.

So making budgetary choices with limited resources is never easy.

We took this, this is an incredibly daunting task to take on.

And of course, it's just exacerbated when again, we're facing $140 million general fund deficit.

So CBO and the mayor's office centered these values that you see on the screen and priorities when making decisions.

First, it was clear that we were not going to have budgetary layoffs.

Second, we wanted to make sure we could maintain core city services that our residents and customers expect.

Third, we wanted to identify opportunities for other resources to sustain one-time funding.

Can we look to our state partners, to our county partners, the feds, and focusing the limited investment opportunity we had in this budget on core priorities?

And you see those listed here, homelessness, affordable housing, public safety, opportunity, environment, and transportation.

Okay, taking you back to some numbers.

So on the next slide here, I want to show you a sort of a visual version of the general fund six-year financial plan.

So again, I don't have to say it again.

You know, you've heard me many, many times.

We started with a deficit.

And so this is really how we closed it.

So the stacked bars that you see here represent our revenues.

And then the green line is expenditures.

So you can see in blue you have base revenues, in pink you have one-time revenues or fund balance, in orange are grants, and in yellow are transfers from the payroll expense tax.

I want to draw your attention to, so on the green line, again, that's our expenditure path and forecasted path.

Draw your attention to two things.

The first thing is we've included here a dashed green line.

And what that dashed green line represents is the level of spending in this budget if we were to have not taken any of our reductions.

So if we hadn't taken action to pay for what we were adding in the budget, that is the trajectory we would be on for additional spending.

So that's where you can see us really bending that curve.

The second thing I want to point out is that this budget or this this sort of visual look at the six year financial plan is only transferring payroll expense tax in 2023 and 2024 and again we're going to talk about this a little bit further.

It leaves the door open to that progressive revenue conversation to be what fills the gap in 25 and 26. I hope that this is a helpful visualization.

Again, I have many, many charts and graphs that we can go through, but wanted to show you this first.

Thank you, Dr. Dingley.

I'm going to pause here for a second.

I'm going to show incredible restraint and not asking questions about jump start right now and I'm going to hold those.

And I just have a few questions and I'm going to turn over to our vice chair and anybody else wants to get in the We have a lot of work to do.

We are working on policy changes and projects to get more real-time data from departments so we can better utilize any underspend and have a sense of where funding might be available including during supplemental budgets.

I would ask you if you wanted to add anything else there.

I also wanted you to walk us the last time the city budget deficit was over $100

Yeah, great questions.

So I will take the first one first.

So we are, we're taking multiple steps that are going to take a while to be fully implemented and realize the results in order to have better sort of real time information around budgeting.

So the first thing that we did in this budget was where we were Reducing spending, you see a reduction.

Where we are adding spending, we have an addition.

So there, instead of just assuming a certain level of spending and allowing funds to sort of move within an area, we tried to really demonstrate and put the budget where it was supposed to go.

Another thing that we are doing is we're increasing the monitoring in real time.

We're getting to a real time ability to monitor spending on budgets in partnership with the city finance division.

They have come up with incredible tools that leverage our new ish financial management system that we would have probably implemented but for the pandemic.

What these will allow us to do is meet on a regular basis with city finance, the city budget office and the departments to review spending budget to actuals and be able to make adjustments in real time, point out that this looks strange what's going on here.

This is overspending is this budget in the right spot.

Do we need to seek, you know, some changes from the council.

we're really trying to turn the ship around that monitoring work.

And that'll take a little bit of time as we work through a lot of that.

And then my team is also working with council central staff and others to look at a lot of other ways that we do business and figure out, are there better ways, more transparent ways that we can get all of this work done?

So there's a lot sort of in the works and some more to come.

To the second part of your question around the funding that came to the city under sort of in prior years from the federal government, we had approximately $460 million of federal pandemic relief funds that so far have been accepted and appropriated since the beginning of the pandemic.

That breaks down to roughly 160 million from the CARES Act and nearly 300 million of American Rescue Plan Act dollars.

As I mentioned, all of those funding sources have been allocated and appropriated with the CARES Act grants spent and the ARPA, the Recovery Act grant spending in process.

And the Recovery Act also had coronavirus local fiscal recovery funds, or CLFR, as part of it.

And those funds were allocated as part of the Seattle Rescue Plan that I mentioned at the top that the council member, or I'm sorry, budget chair and city budget office worked so closely to design the use for.

So there is no ongoing pandemic relief support available to us for meaningful use in 23 and beyond.

Of course, many of those existing purposes are still underway in departments throughout the city where they're still working on spending those monies, or we had by design, asked them to have money for multiple years.

So for example, in the homelessness space, we provided funding to the KCRHA, and we'll talk about this a little bit more, that in support of certain efforts that was to be used and budgeted for three years.

So we provided it in one time in 2022, but they have through the end of this biennium to spend it.

So I hope that that answers your questions.

Did I leave out any piece that you were hoping to hear?

I don't know if you want to jump in.

I think one major take away for me is that it doesn't sound like there was any point in Seattle's history where we faced this level of a deficit.

how the city managed the budget.

Yeah, thank you for reminding me of that piece.

In the fall of 2009, decision makers faced a forecast showing about $85 million less general fund than previously expected.

So for the 20, would have been the 2010 budget, they chose to lay off dozens of city employees, freeze the salaries of others, and have furloughs as the strategy to constrain the budget.

They cut the size of the city's fleet, and increased a number of, I'm sorry.

Yes, so they also had a number of other changes, but it's safe to say that the solutions utilized then were certainly not a blueprint for how we wanted to build the 2023 budget to try to find ways to get to balance.

I'm going to pass it back to you, Councilmember Perkins.

to see what happened.

And the cities that engaged in austerity, the cities that engaged in budget cuts, not only harmed the ability for public sector services to recover, but it also harmed private sector as well, harming the entire local economy.

So I think that's important for us to remember the role that Jump Start has had in the last two years.

I don't see a yellow bar for 2022, but we know that there was $85 million for one-time funds that we authorized for the year 2021 and 2022 separate, and that was JumpStart.

Again, lots of work, years of advocacy from community partners calling for progressive tax, but I do want to make sure that when we look at the bar, the recognition gets included for where JumpStart progressive payroll tax was included, And anytime you see the word pet, much to my chagrin, that is jumpstart progressive expense tax.

So, folks, I think this is something that we can be proud of.

Again, community can be proud of that this is something that we passed to protect against that type of austerity, which we had experienced, you know, 10 years prior.

and to set us on the course for not only a more stable local economy, but really investing in our community that's most vulnerable and also helping to create a more equitable recovery.

Deputy Director Panucci, I see you on screen.

Did you have anything you'd like to add?

Okay.

Director Dingley, any follow-up on that?

Yes.

I just want to note that the 2022 should show that in yellow, not in pink.

So thank you for catching that.

I wish I would have corrected that this morning.

I apologize.

that's okay.

I'm happy to point out where Jumpstart plays a role anytime.

The right, excuse me, Vice Chair Herbold, please go ahead.

Thank you so much, and thank you, Madam Chair, for the reminder of the different ways that we've handled budget deficits in the past and what those impacts have been.

Very real impacts, not only on people's lives, but on our local economy.

So really, I appreciate having that front and center.

I have a one follow up question to the question that you asked, Madam Chair and then I have a couple questions about this particular slide.

under the able, steady, and helpful leadership of Director Dingley, we're doing things a little bit differently.

And Director Dingley, your answer was focused, what I heard was sort of more real-time monitoring of spending.

And I'm wondering whether or not that includes The question that I know many of us have been asking, understanding vacancies in real time to help with budget deliberations, specifically vacant funded positions that either the department is not hiring fill at a time or or having difficulty filling.

So that's one question.

And then as relates to this particular chart, I have three questions.

I heard you say it, but I just need it said again, the difference between the solid green line and the dotted green line, what do those lines represent?

Also, the grants, the dark orange section of the bars, I'm seeing that we're not, it doesn't look like we're accepting much in grants moving forward, and would love to understand that a little bit.

And then category, federal relief dollars plus underspend.

And I thought I heard you also say that the pink for 2022 should actually be orange, or not orange, yellow.

Is that right?

Yes, that one should be yellow.

OK, got it.

OK, so I will take those in order again.

If I don't get all of them, please, please remind me.

You were asking about vacancies and how we look at vacancies.

So answer is yes.

Right now, it's an incredibly manual process.

So we have a very, very, very old HRIS or HR information system that holds all of our HR information for the whole city.

We are currently in the process of replacing that system.

It's going to be incredible.

Very excited about it.

It's a couple of years out though from full implementation.

Importantly, that system will have the ability to sync with our financial system.

and be able to provide us that like holy grail of vacancy and other information in real time.

So we don't have to do this incredibly manual process of going position by position in departments that it takes weeks and weeks and weeks to compile that level of information.

So I share and I feel deeply in my bones, the frustration around our inability to do this in an automated way right now.

And it is on the roadmap.

It's going to take us a bit to get there.

And so we really appreciate it.

But are we doing the manual exercise now is, I think, really what my question is.

Yes, that was the second part of what I was going to get to.

So where you'll see reductions in this, but most of the reductions come from recognizing vacancies in departments.

That's the most commonly taken reduction across.

So we worked with them to both look at their on board, their forecasted level of hiring, and realign the budget to what that looks like.

There are certain areas where that has been reinvested into the department, like in the public safety departments that you heard the mayor talk about yesterday.

But again, it's very clearly called out that these are salary savings or vacancy savings, and these are additions in the budget overall.

Very helpful.

And then you had a couple of questions about the chart in particular.

So the solid line is the current expenditures for the city is what the proposed budget has for expenditures and then our assumptions in our financial plan for the out year growth and those expenditures.

The dotted line is taking out all the reductions we took.

So if you were to not assume any of the reductions that we we paid for many of these ads with reduction.

So if you took those out, that's where the spending line would be.

So it just really shows that we worked really hard to bend that curve.

So although the spending compounds with interest over time and increases, it's It's the same, it's the same rate in the out years but it's much lower level to begin with.

So, took a lot of work there.

The dark orange bars.

So we do not as a general rule budget for grants that we haven't yet received.

So, even though we know that we have a trillion dollars in the feds to be allocated for the bipartisan infrastructure law.

We don't know what those grants are going to be just yet.

So we put them in the budget when we have the grant award, the actual letter.

And so that's when you'll see them come out in the out years.

So in many ways, this does understate the grant level of revenue that you'll see in the out years, but we just don't have those just yet.

I think that was all of them.

Was there anything else?

Yeah, the pink bars.

Does that include federal plus underspend or just the federal relief dollars?

Pink.

Does it include federal plus underspend or just the relief dollars?

Right.

Let me double check.

Okay.

I'll come back to you on that.

Thank you.

Yeah.

I'm sorry, let me just follow up on that real quick.

We have two more hands.

Again, colleagues, our plan is to adjourn at one.

We can take an hour break and come back at two.

We do have time held on our calendars.

And feel free to get your questions in so we can all get a baseline understanding of where we're at.

We anticipate that we probably will be done by one, but we got about two more hours to go.

And I wanted to just make sure that you know that we do have time held this afternoon if needed.

Council, Thank you.

Thank you.

the mayor's budget proposal, had a question about comparing this PowerPoint presentation on slide four, which is regarding the general fund pie chart.

Just looking at that pie chart, because last night I had been looking at the pie chart in the budget book that was put out online.

That's in the city budget office website.

if we were to compare page four of this PowerPoint, that pie chart to page 47 in the budget book, it looks like the numbers aren't lining up.

So I just wanted to find out if there was an explanation for the differences in some of those percentages.

Yes, there is.

If you if you don't mind going back to slide four, that'd be really helpful.

So The budget book, the way that it's built, takes the whole department budget and groups it by these areas.

So it would take the entire budget for FAS, for example, and put it under administration.

Um, what this pie chart does, this is trying to get, um, more, a little bit more, um, accurate.

It's not the word I want.

It's more like.

Uh, exacting because we, the way we built this was we wanted to give you a real sense of how the dollars, even within a department top line are spent.

So in the change for administration, for example, if there was administrative dollars in FAS in.

labor standards in all these other departments, those are grouped in that part of the pie.

So it's really a true reflection of the spending versus what's in the budget book, which is very useful because it's telling you by department how their primary function plays out.

Does that make sense, the difference between those two?

Precise is the word I was looking for.

Not exacting, precise.

Thank you for recognizing the difference between the two versions of the pie chart.

I'll have to, I guess, maybe I can ask about that in more detail later.

I'm still not quite understanding what the difference is between those two.

Go ahead.

Well, we will work in the future to make sure that they're consistent.

They were prepared off of different versions.

One was prepared based on pulling the full departments, and one was prepared off of the financial plan.

And they have different levels of precision in how the funds are broken out.

And so that's really where it comes from.

We can certainly walk you through to show you the differences.

OK, thank you.

Of course.

I'm going to turn it over to councilmember Perkins.

Thank you, councilmember Peterson.

I think I was thinking you might be asking about how we're anticipating grant funds for transportation related investments in 25 and 26 because while it sounds like we don't bake that into our presented budget, I'll be asking some follow-up questions as well and I'm I think there are a lot of assumptions being baked in for transportation specifically from federal funds.

We can follow up on that later.

I mean, just in terms of a general principle in terms of how budgeting is done.

If we're not assuming grants in here, can we assume them in other places in the capital budget?

So we'll follow up on that.

Council Member Morales, please go ahead.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you very much, Julie, for all the work that you've done since you started in this position.

I will say when I came into office in 2020, during this pandemic, a racial uprising, the budget process itself was very opaque.

So I appreciate the work that you're doing to kind of turn the tide.

And it does feel like we will be able to have better conversations because of the work you're doing.

So I appreciate that.

I do think it's important to say, you know, as we may be drawing different conclusions from what we see here, different policy conclusions, but it's important that we're at least all operating on the same facts.

So thank you for that.

I'm going to follow the chair's restraint and not comment on the fact that this budget does not fully fund the equitable development initiative, which is one of my priorities for now.

I'm sure we will discuss that more later.

I do have a couple of questions and if it requires follow-up later, that's fine.

But on page 3, you're listing utilities, transportation, environment grouped together.

This may be a similar question to what Council Member Peterson has, but I wonder if we could get the spending breakdown for each department in that category.

If it's already coming, that's fine.

I will acknowledge I haven't been able to look through everything yet, Um, so that's one question I have.

And then you just referenced the fact that getting back to the vacancy question and I understand that doing this manually must be incredibly tedious and time consuming require a lot of manual labor.

That said, I'm interested in what you said about, you know, in some cases, those vacancy savings have been reinvested back into the department.

And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the get a little more give a little more detail about how many departments have that funding reinvested and for what purposes, just so we have an understanding of you know how those decisions are made about which vacancy savings are kept and which ones are actually put back into the department.

That is a great question.

I don't have a slide currently in here around broken down by department so we can certainly get you that information and I imagine that'll also be part of Council Central staff's issue ID work that they're going to do for you all in the next phase.

And then I do have a slide coming up that shows.

areas where the budget was reduced and added in the same place.

So you can really, it really helps tease that out.

It's not by department or by issue area, but we can show you by issue area.

And then if you have specific questions around departments, we're certainly happy to follow up.

Thank you.

Okay.

Thanks so much.

I think we're ready to move on.

Great, next slide.

Okay, so the steps we took to close the deficit.

This is the slide that I promised when I verbally talked through it before around what were the different areas that we went to.

So again, to close this overall 140 million.

Closing it took a mix of revenue enhancements and expenditure changes.

So that here where you're seeing an actual in the green bar, used about $24 million of 2021 underspend, which is also known as just fund balance.

You'll see us use those two different terms.

Also in 2022 underspend, those were as a result of the spending holds that I talked about previously.

We are anticipating some level of 2023 underspend in the budget.

Largely, this is, we have funded projects for the full 12 months of the calendar year for next year, and it's entirely plausible that through no sort of nothing other than just the realities of operationalizing many changes, that there could be some things that don't get off the ground right away, and there will be some resulting savings from that.

We don't endeavor to identify specifically where in the budget that would come from, but that's a generalized assumption.

We also are transferring a total in 2023 of 85.7 million from the payroll tax in to the general fund.

Again, I'm gonna walk through a lot more in the next couple of slides around the changes to the payroll tax.

All right, so next slide, please.

Here is a look at one side of the equation, sort of getting to Council Member Morales' question around targeted general fund, just the reduction side.

The next slide here is gonna show you both together.

But again, most city departments were asked to provide between three and 6% target reductions.

And most general fund departments have some level of reduction in their 23 and 24 proposed budget.

Sorry, I just misspoke.

I said most city departments were asked, all city departments were asked for between three and 6% and most were actually are taking reductions.

And as a general exception, departments that have significant payroll, a jumpstart payroll expense tax proceeds for those dedicated uses from the spending plan, those are not facing overall reductions because they have this this incredibly robust funding source.

So I'm going to show you actually the next slide, because I think that that visual is a little bit more telling.

OK, so here you can see in orange going facing the left, those are general fund reductions.

In the gray going to the right, those are general fund enhancements or ads.

And in the blue are payroll expense tax new spending.

So here it's a really good visual of where you can see where the savings that we took were reinvested in that issue area.

So in community safety is where it's most clear.

The lion's share of that is reinvested in the critical needs for those departments.

You'll also see that playing out in opportunity and access in speaking general fund to general fund.

You'll also see that under good government and a number of other places.

And then, of course, there are places like climate and environment, as I mentioned, that don't have reductions.

They have only ads, but they're principally coming from the payroll expense tax.

Okay.

Let's pause here before we get into Jump Start Payroll Expense Tax.

All right.

I think I want to go back one slide if we can to slide 13. we're looking at the yellow bar here, $10 million in underspanned anticipated.

What sort of accountability or that the mayor is not going to spend on council ads in the chair's package similar to what was done with the 22 million not spent in 2022?

So the 20 million in 2022 is counted for balancing here.

We will know that we have to hit this number for overall balancing.

So we are going to be monitoring throughout next year to ensure that we are in that realm.

If we get to a point probably about mid year, and on the trajectory it looks like we're not going to hit it, then we'll have to take additional steps to direct the departments to understand to a specific percentage level.

I'm hoping to avoid that frankly, and I think that sort of the natural course of Of how we have to implement things you know not everything in the city, that's new, a new position, a new program can be implemented in full, starting January one.

So there are going to be a natural there's a natural lag that occurs and program development community engagement for RFP is and all of that kind of work that will delay some implementation.

It's not my favorite strategy, to be honest with you.

I would prefer to not have to use this kind of strategy.

And that's where our increased monitoring over time will improve our ability to do this.

But we feel comfortable that at this point, there will be about this amount left at the end of the year to count towards balancing overall.

I don't know if that's the right way to put it.

Thank you.

We looked back at historical trends and I don't have those trends at my fingertips Councilman budget chair, but we can certainly take a look at that with you.

And we also the city is still reeling from the sort of great resignation that has has also hit city departments as well.

I don't again I don't have those at my fingertips.

I see Allie's hand though maybe she has it because we have assumed underspend in the past in budgets in proposed budgets but I just I'll get you those details.

Great yeah go ahead Deputy Director Panucci.

HAB-Charlotte Pitts, COB Secretary, she-her, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers, she- Given that the proposed budget is already making some pretty significant assumptions about vacancy savings and taking reductions that aren't resulting in services being eliminated or employees being laid off.

I think there are some questions about how this will be achieved and if there is some risk that, you know, other Council priorities might be put on hold next year if, as we're monitoring the budget, this underspend isn't getting achieved.

So we will be digging into this further and having more discussion when we go into budget hearings.

Appreciate that.

Thank you both.

Vice Chair Hurdle?

Thank you.

Just on page 14, or slide 14, on the three to 6% reduction in 2023, I would love to be able to see what percentage of reduction each department is actually taking in the proposed budget, and just flagging that as an area of interest for additional transparency.

And then on, Slide 15, areas of reduction and investment.

I'm wondering if you could actually go through what departments are incorporated in these categories.

It's not clear.

In particular, I'm interested where HSD investments are.

I'm thinking that they might be several categories.

And then, I wanna just preview, as Chair Mosqueda did earlier, that the proposed police department budget, the incremental budget changes section, has a lot of really, again, transparent and helpful detail about changes to the baseline budget, much more so than previous years.

So I just wanted to take this opportunity to say that I appreciate, in future slides, that information being included.

I am, I have to tell you I have a version of this chart that is all of the city departments, and I was begged by my team to not include it was.

It actually gave them a headache so that we have a rolled up version for you here but yes of course happy to provide you with that.

Okay, great.

That would be helpful.

Thanks for sharing that with all the councilmembers and I'm sure members of the public would be interested as well.

So this is an interesting tee up to go into the discussion here, I think, which is next on jumpstart progressive payroll tax.

And As we know, going into this discussion, there is four specific categories that JumpStart had dedicated in its spend plan.

Housing, equitable development, Green New Deal, and economic resiliency, set aside 5% for administration.

So obviously what we're seeing here is a transparent, I think we are seeing is the executive and CBO trying to I think four slides between slide 16 and 20, and then we will take questions on jumpstart payroll expense tax.

Great.

Thanks.

Just so I don't forget, Council Member, that little sliver of payroll expense tax is in the Human Services Department, so we'll talk about that when we get to that part of the budget.

As it relates to public safety?

As it relates to public safety, yeah.

Thank you so much for that.

I got you.

Don't worry.

I'm sure there will be a ton of questions on this, so let's go ahead and again get through slides 16 through 20, and then we'll take questions.

Feel free to line yourself up in the queue as well, colleagues.

Great.

Thank you, Council President.

I'm sorry, Budget Chair.

We have made a couple of changes to the Jump Start ordinance that governs how these dollars are spent.

So obviously, as you all know, this was enacted in 2020 and has been an absolutely critical tool to keeping city programs operating during the pandemic.

And the proposed budget makes three primary changes to the payroll expense tax ordinance.

And then we have an additional item that we're changing to establish a fund policy.

So the first change is around the treatment of the general fund floor.

So the law that governs the use of the payroll tax proceeds establishes that beginning in 2023 so this upcoming budget year, general fund support will only continue if revenues fall below a nominal fixed amount of 1.5 billion.

So the proposed budget would index the annual general fund floor to inflation, instead of leaving it in 2020 dollars.

So this change recognizes the decreasing purchasing power in a high inflation environment and allows the health of the general fund to be assessed in current dollar terms.

The proposed amendment to inflate the general fund floor would result in approximately 105 million in 2023 and 130 million in 2024 as the maximum amounts available to transfer from the payroll tax to the general fund as a policy matter, the proposed budget reflects reflects an approach that fully cedes a 10% revenue stabilization reserve and maintains the original spending allotments for JumpStart spending categories envisioned when the payroll tax was signed into law.

And while also transferring, oh sorry, so overall, I'm going to walk you through how much the transfer amounts are in a couple of slides.

So the second change, and I just want to also point out before I get to the second change, we left intact all of the different spending category percentages.

So those are all consistent.

We didn't touch those.

The second change is around the allowable use for housing and services.

So the current language restricts spending to housing for households at or below 30% AMI.

And our Office of Housing is seeking a modification of changing it for up to 60% AMI.

Because they're seeing significant needs across the housing spectrum.

And although the greatest need remains at 30% and this change does not reflect sort of a deep prioritization of that group.

It does provide a wage with the flexibility that they need across the spectrum to help these projects pencil out.

And so for additional information in that space, I'll direct you to the Office of Housing.

I believe they're slated to present to you in about 10 or 11 days.

So you'll be able to have them here, but also in the intervening time, of course, can have questions with them around that change.

The third and final change is around supplantation.

So the original payroll tax ordinance requires that all spending from the resource be on new programs.

And the proposed budget removes that requirement so that we can shift costs around the Green New Deal or economic development initiative that were already a part of the budget using resources like general fund to all being the same funding source.

So this change allowed for those investments to continue and to not be subject to our reduction reviews in those departments.

So this is not widely used.

This is not something where I've shifted the entirety, just to pick on them, the Office of Economic Development to this.

That is not the case.

It is in discrete parts of the budget where it makes sense to align that spending together.

The last change that we're making in this space is establishing a fund policy that creates a revenue stabilization reserve.

So as I mentioned, we're gonna be seeding a full 10% of the forecasted revenue levels in 2023 in a reserve.

And so that's going to be a fund policy that we're proposing be adopted for the Jumpstart Payroll Tax Fund.

Okay, so I wanna show you this in actual dollar terms.

So on the next slide, This is what the spending plan looks like in current law.

So you can see each of these sort of stacked areas is a different component of the spending plan.

So in 2022, you have the transfer to the general fund for economic relief.

But then you also have housing and services, EDI, economic revitalization, Green New Deal, et cetera, et cetera.

You'll see that per current law, as I mentioned previously, the transfer to the general fund goes away in 2023. And then we have administration and evaluation coming in also at 5%.

Forgot to mention that one.

In 2022, we have this unallocated fund balance.

And this fund balance is a result of higher than anticipated revenues that came in in 2022. So those have not been allocated yet.

So on the next slide, I'm going to show you how the proposed budget uses these resources.

Okay, so you'll recall in the previous chart that transfer to the general fund that gray line at the bottom going down to zero between 22 and 23 so you can see here how that transfer continues into 23 and 24. We are also, you see the administration and evaluation line here.

That continuing.

These are all we dropped off by accident the percentages here those percentages all remain.

So I apologize for that.

The other thing I want to draw your attention to on this slide is the unbudgeted revenue and the treatment of that.

So we had $44 million in 2022 that came in again as a result of higher than anticipated revenues.

31 of that amount, 31 million, is used to establish that 10% revenue stabilization reserve.

And the remaining amount is about 14 million, and that's going to transfer to the general fund.

So of this 86 that's being transferred to the general fund in 2023, 71 of it comes, and I'll show you a slide on this too, 71 of it comes from 2023 projected revenues.

14 comes from the Revenue Stabilization Reserve.

And then as an administrative convenience, we are also proposing to transfer the admin valuation amounts for that spending into general fund.

Just administratively, it would be a little bit easier.

So that can be something we talk about further.

So let me just go to the next slide and show you how this spending breaks out.

So these are the actual It's another way to visualize that same information.

But here you have the programmatic spending breakdown of the payroll tax to the right and the actual percentages that these resulted in.

So we have 5% allowed in the bill.

It's at 4% in the budget.

We had 62% for housing.

It's a little bit higher than that.

by a smidge.

EDI is at 9%.

That's a little bit higher in that spending area.

14.8% for local business and tourism, also referred to in these presentations as economic development, and 9.4% for Green New Deal.

So again, a little bit over what the legislation calls for.

Okay, on the next slide, please.

This is a breakdown of what I was just talking about.

So where in different parts of the budget overview, I don't want this to get confusing.

So I wanted to make sure I put this front and center.

We talk about the total payroll tax transfer to the general fund.

There are just, it's being transferred for different reasons.

So as I just mentioned, going from the bottom to the top, I'm sorry, I'll go from the top to bottom.

So that's how the bullets are written here.

So we have a total transfer of $94.5 million to the general fund.

So this includes about $85.8 of general fund relief.

Again, that comes from $71 million from 2023 revenues.

That's this darkest bluish color.

And then $14.7 from one-time fund balance.

Again, revenues received above forecast in 2022. And then 8.8 million is also transferred for the 5% portion of the payroll tax spending plan for admin and evaluation of the tax.

So this is proposed to be done via the general fund as an administrative efficiency.

spend it out of payroll tax directly, it would require a lot of different administrative moves that I can talk in more detail about.

I don't want to bore everybody to tears here about what that would entail, but it would be a significant lift for several departments across the city.

So this is an easier way of going about it.

Okay, that concludes I think my slides around payroll tax.

I think this is where you wanted to pause, budget chair.

Okay, thank you, Director Dingley.

I just want to make a statement about this.

And I know that we are collectively as a city, as a council going to be diving into the details here of the proposed budget.

But I want to lift up the broad coalition, the years of advocacy that went into passing progressive payroll tax in Seattle.

The Jump Start Seattle Coalition is incredibly diverse.

It is bringing together community activists, stakeholders from labor and small business, folks who represent workers, and also folks who are within our most vulnerable communities.

folks who've been calling for economic resilience investment for years, and this broad coalition of over 100 organizations, not to mention the thousands of people that dialed in to call for passage of payroll tax, focused on four main categories.

Again, affordable housing, Green New Deal, economic resilience, and equitable development initiative.

And I want to make sure that we are all very clear on what the spending categories are, what is codified in statute.

And I want to lift up, again, I think a shared commitment from this council in the past two years as well, which has been to do everything that we can to prevent austerity, to do everything that we can to invest in core city services, to make sure that our most vulnerable working families, small businesses have investments through these very tough times.

to make sure that we can weather this COVID storm and come out of this more equitably.

So as we look at the over $141 million operating deficit in the calendar year 2023, we are both committed to preventing austerity.

we have to continue as a council to make sure that any of the higher than anticipated revenue that is being suggested to be used for investments into the general fund does still align with our city's core progressive values that they align with the priorities that this council has articulated in the past.

Laws and policies that were lifted up by Director Handy at the beginning of this presentation.

I think that we have a clear statement to make to our city employees and contracting organizations with the city that we want to prevent against cuts, layoffs.

We want to maintain core city services.

And I'm going to be working with central staff and all of our council colleagues in addition to community members to make sure that we fully understand that the budget that's being proposed aligns with the jump start investments as codified, and any higher than anticipated revenue is going into our core city services to prevent those cuts and austerity that we mentioned.

So I want to make sure I fully understand that we're going to be able to do that.

So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the core categories, the four core categories and the percentages that were codified in statute, the assumed amount that was codified in statute originally for 2023 and 2024, are those full spending categories as

Yes, the figures that you see in this, if you go back, I think two charts.

The amount that is transferring is the same amount that Council Central staff presented after the August revenue forecast update.

The only deviation is that we are adding some of this unbudgeted revenue that came in in 2022 because we had fully seeded the reserve, which was a policy question that we had talked about at that time as well.

And we decided at 10% because that's consistent with other funds that we have in the city.

And so we took what was left over after fully seeding that reserve and are also using that for one-time balancing.

I will continue to dig into some questions with folks because the higher than anticipated revenue projected for 2023 was estimated to be around $71 million and for 2024 it was estimated to be around $84 million.

I want to make sure I fully understood that the 23 projected, the 24 projected aligns with the spend amounts and categories as codified in statute.

I'll be following up with central staff on that.

Thank you.

I just wanted to thank you, Madam Chair, for your willingness to express some flexibility here in the, I believe it was August meeting where we heard the financial update.

I really think that that is a good practice when we are looking to deviate from established council-approved policy, and it allows the executive to get sort of a preview of what at least as it relates to the budget chair, would find an acceptable deviation.

And so I really appreciate your doing that before the budget was announced and appreciate the ability to sort of, as you say, dig in a little bit more to see how those accepted deviations were adhered to in this budget.

So thank you.

I think that's it.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Just looking for additional hands.

Any additional questions?

Okay.

I want to follow up, though, because I think that the deviations and the conversation around flexibility is really in line with what our community partners who supported jump start also want to to make sure that we're not that we are committed to.

We are committed to making sure that every penny and every percentage that we committed to remained intact as we looked at the dollar amounts that we had codified into statute for 2023 and 2024. I appreciate Director Dingley's confirmation that those dollar amounts align with to the general fund.

And I think what we're seeing is reiterating that they still want those progressive revenue dollars to remain true to the promise of jump start which was to invest in progressive core components of city government that align with making sure that people are housed, cared for, that the workforce has the investments that it needs and that we're we're talking about a lot of people are concerned about what is a cut to the inflationary wage adjustment for human service providers.

that's an area where I think there might be some disconnect that I'll be looking to make sure we we want to make sure that all of the amounts that were codified in statute are adhered to, and we want to use that funding to protect against austerity for the higher than anticipated revenue.

And so thank you to the community organizations who called for both of those things, 350 Seattle, Civic Ventures, Downtown Emergency Services Center, Housing Development Consortium, housing alliance, low income housing alliance, low income housing alliance, low income housing alliance, low income housing alliance, low income housing alliance, low income housing we're going to have to look at how we're going to be able to do that.

We're also going to have to look at how we're going to be able to protect the workers working in Washington and other organizations who are out there saying we want to protect Jump Start's investments and the dollar amounts which we're hearing today is intact but we also need to prevent against cuts and austerity and that's where we as a council and community will have a chance to analyze how those higher than anticipated revenues are I'm going to go ahead and open it up for questions.

All right.

Director Dingley, recognizing you're not the housing director, but do you have the ability to maybe help us get into some of these questions either here today or later on.

I want to flag some questions for you and possible concerns.

First, I'm really thrilled to we're now at near $253 million in total investments in the office of housing for 2023. That is a huge increase.

The mayor noted it in his speech yesterday.

Jumpstart proceeds comprise 56% of the offices of housing's total budget for 2023. and the 2023 proposed budget indicates that we are adding 50.3 million in additional jumpstart proceeds.

These increases reflect the collective work.

I want to again thank the community for their ongoing advocacy for investments in affordable housing to make sure that we're growing the housing stock, especially for where we have the highest need.

So can you talk about why the proposed budget suggests going from a 30% AMI level up to we're talking about is this to accommodate specific projects or is this a broader policy change?

And the reason that I think we as a council and why it's codified in statute at 30% is because we recognize that lack of investments in this deeply affordable permanent supportive housing that we've codified in jump start is where we have the housing.

So what is behind this policy change, and do you anticipate the impact of this change is going to affect projects that are currently in the pipeline, or is this a one-time change just for this budget?

Those are excellent questions, budget chair.

I would really think that Director Winkler-Chin is the best person suited to answer those questions.

I could provide you with some initial thoughts, but I think it would be much better coming from her.

So I'll let her have the opportunity to answer.

we're going to try to refrain from doing which is getting into the policy weeds here and we will be teeing up some of those questions for the central staff in their four days worth of presentations on each department going forward.

Deputy Director Panucci, did you have

budget deliberations is that the current policy requires that 82% of the housing funds go to affordable housing, serving households with incomes at or below 30% AMI.

But the existing policy already allows for some blending of units up to 60% of AMI.

That policy was included to address some concerns about oftentimes affordable housing providers are offering a mix of unit types in order to make the project pencil out and support their operating costs.

and that sort of thing.

And so we will need to dig in more to understand, just as you've said, why that part of the policy is proposed to be struck.

And then the overall AMI target is increased to 60% of AMI.

And if that might result in projects that are only serving households at 60%, AMI might be included in whether or not that's a policy the council wants to support, I just wanted to acknowledge that the existing policies already do allow for some flexibility in the AMIs that are served by units paid for by jumpstart funds.

Thank you so much, Ali, and that is a good reminder.

We did want to make sure that we are building mixed income if possible, and there is some flexibility in there.

82% for deeply affordable housing, 13% for community self-determination fund, and 5% for affordable housing ownership opportunities.

So we will look forward to seeing those percentages still reflected in the budget then and doing some more analysis on that.

that.

Thank you.

All right.

More to come, colleagues.

More to come on any specific questions you have on jump start and this is a great opportunity to ask director Dingley about the application to the general fund.

Any additional questions on it appears at first blush that the proposal as we look at we're going to be able to use the jump start after 2024, as indicated in the chart you showed a few slides ago, is not planning to use jump start after 2024. And I want to make sure that that is accurate.

I see Director Dingley nodding and before the legislation comes to council, if we take this up, we would want to make sure that we've

Yes, I would just love to explain how we went about building the amendment.

So what it does is it's as it indexes that floor, the general fund floor, it creates so any new revenue that the city were to pursue would need to come in and be a general fund resource.

So when you add the amount of general fund of that new resource into the current general fund and then hoping also for additional growth in that general fund, that the math behind that in the bill would mean that that wouldn't be a necessary transfer.

So that's why we're trying to do this in a way that we don't have to revisit this ordinance constantly to address emerging needs.

We want to sort of do this one time and and be able to have that plan play out.

So that's why it's designed in that way.

So new revenue would come into the general fund, would be included in the calculation of the general fund floor.

And that would mean we wouldn't need a transfer from payroll tax.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

about the fact that we do have these dedicated revenue sources.

And as we were having the conversation about progressive revenue, part of the huge outcry against the idea was, where are you gonna spend the money?

Why do you need this money?

Why do you need to do this?

And part of the demand that we heard, we all heard was, you have to tell us where you're gonna spend this money.

And so I think, you know, we are as policymakers here, as people trying to make these decisions about the budget, recognize that we need, you know, we need more general revenue.

We are a growing city.

We have a lot of needs in this community.

And yes, I totally agree that we need more revenue to go into the general fund so that we can do the basic things that we need to do as a city.

And when we've had conversations about trying to do that, part of the pushback we get is, well, that can't just go into general fund.

If you need more money, what are you going to do with it?

So you can't have it both ways.

And I think we need to make some decisions as a council about committing to the things that have already been prioritized.

As the chair has said, we've already codified our priorities that need to be dedicated to addressing past harms in this city.

We talked yesterday about targeted universalism and this idea of correcting the past harms that have been done and dismantling those systems.

And we need to increase the revenue that we have available so that we can serve our community the best way possible.

And so I just, I think it's important to understand that there's a lot of work to do here.

And these are commitments we have made to the people of Seattle.

and we need additional revenue in order to really serve the community.

So that's all I wanted to say.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Council Member Morales.

Well said.

Okay, Director Dingley, we have about another hour for our morning session here.

Let's continue and see how far we can get.

Great.

Well, thank you very much.

All right.

I also wanted to highlight for you that in addition to in high inflationary cost pressures and sort of mixed signals in the economy.

We also had significant unanticipated cost pressures and ongoing uncertainty around some areas of the budget.

For example, the city's Judgment and Claims Fund, which provides for the payment of legal claims and suits brought against the city, is getting an additional $11 million in the budget to pay for extraordinary settlements against the city.

This is a trend that is being experienced by municipalities across the country, where there are just folks, it's a more litigious environment, is I guess the way that I would like to phrase that.

And we also have unanticipated technology needs and the continued rapid rate of change in technology that presents a significant challenge for the city in anticipating costs of projects and services.

An example in this space is the Municipal Court Information System, or sort of MSIS project, which began in 2016 and is replacing a 30-year-old legacy Municipal Court Information System with a more modern and adaptable case management solution.

The costs for that project have escalated by about $17 million since the beginning of that project.

And we have many safeguards in place that that is the last change that we're expecting out of that project.

Now, they weren't in place at the beginning of the project, but we've made significant changes again to make sure it won't change.

But that was an unexpected hit that we had to deal with in this budget.

I mentioned previously, but worth mentioning again that coming into 2023, the majority of the city's labor contracts are also up for renewal, which adds considerable uncertainty.

We do maintain some reserves for this purpose.

However, you know, the exact details around the future settlements are not going to be known until after this budget is accepted.

So a huge, huge area of uncertainty for us.

Additionally, we had significant overages in the fire department.

So the fire department is ending 2022 requesting about 16 million dollars in the year end supplemental.

Again, that's in 2022 current year.

This is due to a mix of factors, both high vacancies, which means more overtime used.

And for firefighters, they have a one to one replacement need if someone is vacant.

And those overtime hours are time and a half.

So it's significantly more expensive.

We also have earlier retirements per a new state law, lowering the age overall.

So that was unexpected, sort of the utilization of that.

And the full use of COVID supplementary leave that we provided for employees in the city.

And again, that backfill at a one-to-one at overtime rates.

So that's just a flavor of some of the things that I had hinted at along the development process when we were sort of doing financial plan updates with Council Central staff that we were seeing additional and unanticipated things.

This is a flavor of some of those.

Okay, so from here I want to dive into the priority areas of the budget.

So these are the areas that you've heard the mayor speak to in broad strokes yesterday at his...

I'm sorry, before we go on Director Dingley, Council Member Vice Chair Hurdle, did you have a question on that last slide?

I wanted to dig in a little bit on the fire department overages.

You know, we have very robust reporting requirements for the Seattle Police Department on the use of overtime, but that is not something that we have for the fire department.

I understand that CBO will be talking with the fire department about additional monitoring of overtime use in the coming year.

As relates to some of the specifics of some of these here, I'm wondering if We could get some breakdown on the overtime used related to earlier retirements because of the state law.

And then I'm very interested in the department's full use of COVID leave.

I understand full use of COVID leave means 100% of fire department employees apparently took the full amount of COVID lead available to them.

And I understand that's a bit different than employees in other departments and the rate of use is much higher.

And so I would like to know of the 16 million, how much And so I think it's really important to understand what is a result of that 100% use of COVID leave and what our policies are related to COVID leave.

those policies, the implementation of those policies were monitored by the department to confirm that the use of COVID leave was consistent with the allowance to use COVID leave.

Yes, we will most certainly get you additional detail around the supplement, the year-end supplemental asks.

Thank you.

Of course.

So I just want to tee up for our colleagues.

As we get into these next sections here, we are going to take the grouping of the slides together, and then at the end of those grouping, then we'll ask for questions on public safety or questions on housing and homelessness.

So let's hold our questions on public safety until we get to slide number 25. Go ahead, Director.

Great.

Thank you so much.

OK, so first we're going to jump into public safety and there are two budget chairs point.

There are three slides on public safety.

So first talking to you a little bit about the fire department.

We, as has been mentioned, the increasing levels I'm sorry, we are increasing investments in the fire department and hiring and training of firefighters and paramedics in the face of historically high vacancy levels.

So again, this is an instance where we have taken vacancy savings, and you'll see that reduction in the budget, and reinvested it into the department.

Reinvested it into the department, are those words?

Sorry, they all ran together just then.

This takes the form of additional firefighter recruits.

So we're looking to hire and train 30 additional recruits.

This is in addition to the 60 recruits in their base budget.

So that's a total of 90 that will be able to help fill those gaps in 2023. We're also going to add additional paramedic recruits.

They incur significant costs in training those recruits for backfill.

And so this has three additional paramedic student training dollars in it and is in addition to the five recruits in their base budget.

The Budget for Finance and Administrative Services, or FAS, also includes capital to build out Fire Station 31. And this new fire station is going to include minimizing call response times while maximizing firefighter health and safety and designing a facility with the flexibility to meet the operational needs of those folks for the next 30 years.

In public libraries, we're adding two full-time security officers to increase patrols and allow the security team there to deter and de-escalate adversarial situations and respond to violent incidents which have increased during the pandemic.

And as you have seen in the park district levy, the levy itself supports an expansion of the park ranger program.

We'll go more into that here because you've already heard about that one.

So we'll go to the next slide.

So in terms of the Seattle Police Department or SPD, we make multiple investments in SPD to improve the capacity for them to respond to community needs and deliver services efficiently.

The proposed budget realigns SPD's budget with staffing projections and reinvest those savings into priority needs for the department.

So to the right here, I've shown you historical police hires and separations with their net change from 2024 through year to date in 2022. And I think that was as of July, if memory serves.

So what those investments look like?

This is continuing the mayor's comprehensive recruitment and retention plan.

Increased overtime costs.

As there are high levels of vacancies, they are backfilled with folks on overtime, and so it is a natural shift of where those dollars would be from taking them from salary savings and putting them in increased overtime where they should be to be used.

equipment and technology at about four point two five million.

This is for the replacement of equipment that have really reached the end of their their life cycle and for needed technology improvements.

We also have a mental health practitioner for permanent executive level qualified mental health practitioner to lead the department's mental health and wellness efforts and the continuation of mental health services for employee for police employees.

Also included here is relational policing and before the badge training.

So this is going to convert the term limited relational policing coordinator into a permanent position and will develop and implement a new relational policing program, including the creation of a new pre-academy community focused training for recruits called before the badge.

There's also increased investment in here for Harbor Patrol to better provide safety services for the city's waterways during the summer boating season.

Also included here is an investment for a gunfire detection system, which would establish the region's first system to combat increased gun violence in the city of Seattle.

The technology would provide the police department with the evidence collection capabilities for use in homicide investigations or other incidents involving firearms.

There are additional investments made to shift the capacity within the Office of Police Accountability to assist with drafting OPA findings for investigations and alleviate the backlog of director-certified memos.

On to the next slide.

The budget also has some investments for domestic violence and victim advocacy.

So we have about $502,000 in the Human Services Department to increase victim advocacy staffing to support survivors of sexual assault in HSD.

The victim advocacy investments in HSD serve about 10,500 people per year.

We also have $438,000 in the Law Department to support increased staffing for the domestic violence unit and for non-DV advocates.

The budget also proposes to relocate parking enforcement officers, or PEOs, from the Seattle Department of Transportation, or SDOT, into SPD.

As you heard the mayor articulate yesterday, the move to SDOT was never fully realized by these folks.

They really retained physical location in SPD, continued use of SPD equipment, etc.

And while SPD might not be the ultimate landing place for PEOs, it's something that we're going to continue to look at over the biennium as conversations for around a third public safety department continue.

Further, this move also helps with the difficulty in recruitment and hiring.

They are also experiencing significant levels of vacancies.

It also provides better access to databases that they need within SPD and removes the basis for unfair labor practices that are currently underway.

There are additionally, and this is in the weeds, but an added piece here is that there are adverse added cost pressures, which allows investment in other community led solutions that we have listed here below.

So those are inclusive of the Community Safety Initiative, where we have $4.3 million going to support regional and ongoing gun violence prevention, serving youth and young adults of color and their families from predominantly black and brown neighborhoods who live, go to school, or work in Southeast Seattle, Central District, and West Seattle.

We also have the King County Regional Peacekeepers Initiative.

This supports restoration services for youth and families impacted by gun violence and referred to community based care by King County's hospital based intervention team at Harborview Medical Center.

These two items were funded with one time money in twenty twenty two budget.

And so this budget is making them ongoing.

That's the end of the public safety section.

Okay, let's take some questions.

The first person that I see in the queue is Council Member Nelson.

Please go ahead, Council Member.

Where does that $4.3 million go in the Community Safety Initiative?

It is in HSD and it's a contract.

I don't have...

I want to say that it's...

Let me find out where it's contracted with.

I don't recall off the top of my head.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Okay.

Council Member and Vice Chair Herbold.

Thank you.

I have a number of questions here.

I can try and condense them, but maybe I will try to rattle them off.

If I need to repeat them, I'm happy to do so.

Interested in more detail about the recruitment and retention plan, I understand that last year, the Seattle Police Department, with the mayor's office, developed the recruitment and retention plan, would like to know how many dollars are proposed for each of those categories, and as Madam Chair has said, mentioned many times, we need to really make sure that as it relates to retention funds, many of those types of programs are programs that are part of our negotiations through LRPC, and we want to make sure that we aren't sort of tipping our hand and eroding our ability to negotiate by funding retention programs that have not yet been negotiated.

As it relates to the funding for harbor patrol.

I think everybody remembers that the police foundation was fundraising to repair a harbor patrol boat earlier this year.

Just wondering if any of the additional funds budgeted here will cover maintenance needs for harbor patrol.

and moving down to the mobile advocacy services, I'm just wondering which base funding is included for those services.

And in the funding for the law department for increased staffing, I'm just wondering, The advocacy partners for this important work have some questions about adding an additional prosecutor because of changes to the protection order bill.

These are civil orders and it's only violation of certain provisions that are subject to prosecution.

It's true that everybody, I think, agrees that expanding the definition of DV to include this body of work means that more orders will be issued, but it's just, it's not clear what the relationship is between the increase and the anticipated increased issuance of protection orders.

As it relates to the PEO move back to SPD, I'm hoping you could talk about the $5 million in savings, where those savings are expected to be realized, and Who we are saving these funds from?

Is it from city obligations or is it for the obligations that event producers or sponsors might have in PEOs, staffing events?

I just want to thank you for increasing or including the ongoing funding for the Seattle Community Safety Initiative and want to ask whether or not the regional peacekeepers funding will allow the hospital-based intervention to expand the older group that program partners have recognized as driving the increase and currently going unserved by this program.

Thank you.

Okay.

And Director Dingley, if you would like to repeat the question that you're answering in your summary, that would be helpful.

Awesome.

I will do my best.

And Council Member Herbold, I know you will not be shy about telling me if I missed a component.

I think I got them all.

So starting at the beginning, you wanted more detail about the recruitment and retention plan and how much is being proposed for each of the categories.

and noted that this is part of our negotiations with LRPC as well.

So you're absolutely correct.

I didn't put the details in here for that reason exactly.

So we will be able to follow up with you separately if that's all right with those specifics.

One thing I wanted to mention that I didn't mention overall is on the hiring piece, what the budget assumes in terms of hiring.

So overall, it decreases the level of staffing.

And it takes the hiring forecast for SPD from losing 113 officers on average per year to gaining 30 officers over the period of the biennium.

So that's just one piece I forgot to mention at that point.

You also asked a question about funding for harbor patrol.

And I can say, yes, those funds are both for the patrol itself, but then also to service the boats.

Hopefully, they're called boats and not ships.

And I didn't just horribly embarrass myself.

But anyway, yes, there is money available for those maintenance needs in that ad.

Mobile advocacy services, how much base funding is provided, I don't have, but we can certainly get that to you.

The law department increased staffing question around the different definition of domestic violence, et cetera.

I'm going to direct you to the law department for that answer.

You can send that through central staff, and we can get that answer for you.

But want to make sure that they answer that for you with all the appropriate nuance that they would have there.

On the move for the PEOs and this averted added cost pressures item, so the way, and this is again very in the weeds, but the way that SDOT, Department of Transportation, allocates their overhead costs, which is the cost to run the department, If you add in, when you add in the PEOs, which is a $20 million block of general fund spending, that's reducing it greatly.

Obviously, there's a hugely important body of work.

I don't mean to suggest otherwise.

But you move in $20 million of spending, and it changes how the funding comes into the department and how costs for running the department are allocated across all of the different units within it.

And so if PEOs are to stay in SDOT, in the 2023 budget, we would have had to add about $5.5 million.

So it's an averted cost.

It's not a savings per se.

But because we didn't have to find that $5.5 million to keep them in SDOT, we were able to make investments in other places.

And then you asked a question around regional peacekeepers, around hospital-based intervention and the older age group.

And I just don't have it up on my screen.

So we do have that response for you, Council Member, and we can get that to you as a follow-up item.

Did I get them all?

You got them all.

I will say, though, that I still don't understand the $5 million in averted costs.

I don't understand I'm just wondering if you could explain why there are 5 million dollars in additional costs with the 5 million with the move to a start that would not be costs that would be.

Realized with returning to to SPD.

And so it doesn't change similarly when it comes back.

So there's no, there's no impact of adding the PEOs back to the SPD overhead overall.

Does that help?

I'm not going to be able to totally parse this for you today, Councilmember Herbold and committee, but I want you to know that central staff is really working on a breakdown to explain this, and I think a couple of the key concepts here is that the savings that Director Dingley is referring to are general fund savings, that the overhead at SDOT is then spread out over other funds that fund SDOT, including the transportation fund and many other and revenue sources.

So it's not money that the city doesn't have to pay.

It's money that the general fund doesn't have to pay with the transfer.

And it is about that piece of what got calculated when the move happened is sort of a key part of the story.

And central staff is going to work on breaking this out in a few tables for our budget hearings, make sure council members fully understand it.

Thank you.

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the community safety communication center, independent department, or not independent, separate department that council led on in the last few years, and also the dispatching of non-police responses.

Are those investments grouped in somewhere into these slides?

That's not immediately apparent to me.

And what can you tell us about whether or not the department is waiting for council to have further discussions on the proposal that was shared in public safety yesterday, or is this something that they're already assuming they have to go ahead to implement?

And of course, Chair Herbold, please feel free to jump in on any of the policy things if I misunderstood.

Thank you very much, budget chair for those questions.

I will say, I should have said at the top that these are not wholly inclusive slides.

These are representative of these areas so there are of course other investments that I couldn't fit into these.

You might doubt that because there's so many crammed in here, but there are just some that I couldn't fit into here.

So to the alternative for police responses, as you mentioned, Vice Chair Herbold added $1.2 million in the mid-year supplemental to finance general as we work on what those plans will be.

The proposed budget adds just over $700,000 to that reserve in finance general, so just shy of $2 million overall for an upcoming plan.

So it's not in a line item yet in the budget.

In a specific department, it just is still in finance general awaiting that current work to conclude.

And then you had asked about CSCC as well, and I don't have them highlighted here, but they are taking, they are having, we are realizing some salary savings in the CSCC budget, but I don't have those on a slide here today.

Deputy Director Panucci.

I take the terms, you know, I just wanted to add to what Dr. Dinley said is that the funds that are were added in the mid-year supplemental and are included in the proposed budget and finance general would need to be moved from finance general to another department.

So the council will absolutely have an opportunity to weigh in and determine where and how those funds get deployed at a later date.

I'm going to go to the next slide.

Thank you.

Any, okay, great.

Then I have a question on the park ranger line at the bottom of slide 23. Obviously, we've had a lot of conversation over the last few days about what is allowed to be paid for in the parks levy versus what is allowed to be paid for in the general fund.

Can you talk a little bit more here about what the funding is the role or the range of the rangers recognizing right now, we have several limitations in parks levy funded operations that we described in detail in yesterday's park board meeting.

Yes, and I think I understand the question.

So if I didn't, please correct me.

There are no supplementary ads to park rangers.

This is the MPD, the Metropolitan Park District investment.

I think that's all I have to say.

Thank you.

to acknowledge that the current use is not problematic of the rangers and we are acknowledging that and manifesting that as our expectation and then asking parks to tell us if they plan on changing the policy so we can have a different policy discussion.

I just wanted to clarify that.

We didn't do anything in the MPD to constrain.

We acknowledge what the current practice is, which generally has been agreed as something that's not problematic.

But I just wanted to offer that clarification.

I'm wondering if this is something that was augmenting what for that clarification.

And Director Dingley, anything else on that?

Okay.

Okay, great.

And then slide 24. I'm going to move on to the next item.

I'm happy to bring those up in the October 11th through 14th meetings.

those are great questions on, um, I'll just briefly say on the gunfire detection system, this is not intended as a crime prevention tool.

It's an evidence retrieval tool.

Um, and for the rest, you know, of that, I would definitely refer you to the police department.

I think that they are just the best suited to speak to that from a policy perspective.

Okay, great.

Well, we'll work with central staff on getting that into the queue for the upcoming weeks.

Uh, council member Lewis, please go ahead.

I think there will be a lot of I will note, though, I am encouraged to that we are continuing to see investments in these areas.

Yes.

All right.

Our next issue area is around housing and homelessness.

So the budget chair beautifully and eloquently went through this a little bit earlier.

So briefly, we have an historic level of money going to the Office of Housing.

We've reached over a quarter of a billion dollars to two hundred fifty three million going to the Office of Housing, which includes about one hundred and twenty eight million from the payroll tax.

That way that that's broken up is it per the both for the spending ordinance for payroll tax and the other sort of base revenues that OH has.

It goes to about $228 million for multifamily housing investments, $17 million for homeownership sustainability and weatherization, and $8 million to really help get those dollars out the door for administration.

It's important to note I think the success of opposite housing over the last several years.

So since 2016 they've produced over 2000 units 20 2150 units of new affordable housing and served 481 rental housing units with O&M funds.

3300 individuals and families with homelessness prevention and housing stability service programs and assisted 280 low income homeowners gain entry into an important foothold to increase intergenerational wealth and prevent displacement.

So I think it's safe to say when you give a dollar to the Office of Housing, they multiply it.

And so we're really excited to see what they do with this historic level of funding.

On to the next slide.

So here getting into the investments for homelessness so overall, we have $150 million citywide for homelessness.

This includes about 108 million in HSD, the human services department for homelessness outreach shelter services and administration.

For KCRHA, specifically speaking to that, we have about 88 million, which is about 81% of the amount proposed for HSD.

So of that 108 million will be transferred to KCRHA.

Sorry, KCRHA is the King County Regional Homelessness Authority.

I forget to sometimes always say that spelled out first.

So if you exclude the one-time federal funding received in 2022, this increase for KCRHA is a $10.3 million or 13% increase in the city's contribution over the 2022 revised amount of about $77 million.

KCRHA also has, for approved uses, any unspent money from the $40.6 million infusion of one-time federal funding that was first made available as a lump sum in the 2022 adopted budget to support programs through 2024. So I spoke to that a little bit earlier, where that allowance kind of continues through.

So those ads for KCRHA include about $2.2 million in 2023 and $7 million in 2024 to sustain existing homelessness programs and services that were previously funded with one-time funding.

This is going to sustain 103 shelter units in 2023 and 343 shelter units in 2024. It also adds $2.4 million to open and operate 50 new tiny home villages or other non-congregate shelter, and $5 million for an estimated 101 new safe parking spaces to serve people who are living in vehicles.

Additionally, we have about $20.2 million in the city's spending overall, so to get to that $150 million total.

proposed, sorry, the remaining $20.2 million of the homelessness spending proposed in HSC's budget will support city-managed homelessness programs at about $16.6 million, contract and oversight administration at about $1.1, and expanded outreach support to connect unsheltered people sleeping in public spaces to shelter and housing at about $2.4 million.

We can go to the next slide.

As part of the budget, we also have For the human service contract inflationary increases the proposed budget funds a 4% inflationary increase to the city's nearly 300 human service contracts.

We are also sending a bill that limits the city's future liability to 4%.

I have to say that in the entire spectrum of building this budget, that this decision was particularly difficult.

We know that human service provider workers do some of the most difficult and meaningful work in the city and that their employers do not necessarily enjoy the funding needed to pay everyone what they need.

But unfortunately, at a time with 40 year high inflation and the ongoing liability that the current law would require, does not match our ongoing general fund resources, which, as I showed in the first half of the presentation, just simply are not growing commensurate with inflation.

So simply by limiting the inflationary increase for these contracts to 4% in 2023 and 2024, it is an additional $19 million for the general fund that is not spent.

So said another way, in order to inflate full CPI for these contracts, the council would need to find about $7.15 million in 2023 and $12.12 million in 2024 to get those levels to the current law.

So that's the end of the housing and homelessness section.

I can take any other questions.

Great, thank you.

Colleagues, questions on the last three slides related to housing and homelessness?

Vice Chair Herbold, please go ahead.

I just want to confirm that this slide, slide 28, although the heading is housing and homelessness, the information about the lack of an inflationary adjustment that reflects CPI is about all human services contracts, not just the ones related to homelessness, correct?

Yes, it is.

I could have put it in a different section.

But yes, since there's such a huge amount of the spending here I thought it was appropriate but certainly it could have gone somewhere else.

Thank you.

Just a few remarks.

If the chair would indulge me.

I'm, I am disappointed I appreciate.

And, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think The intent of the ordinance sponsored by Our Good Care is to ensure that these essential nonprofit providers who are already operating on shoestrings are unable to pay their staff living wages, that they don't fall further behind financially because the city is not enter into contracts that keep up with their cost of business.

We can all point to numerous times in the last two years where the council has provided funding to accomplish a mission, critical goal for the city, and that those funds actually went unspent because of nonprofits' difficulty finding staff willing to work for low wages during this time of unprecedented stress on these workers, leading to their participation in the great resignation.

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority reports that providers face significant vacancy rates, and the five largest providers alone have more than 300 vacant positions.

You know, this is a crushing reality that nonprofit providers are experiencing, and I think if it stands, this proposal, as suggested, will result in our inability to, again, meet mission-critical objectives.

And, you know, we're hearing from providers that they are, actually at a breaking point, and they have to increase wages to do the work that we desperately need them to do.

Whether or not it's expanding a team that can respond to people in behavioral crisis, or helping people experiencing homelessness find a home.

We heard from folks this morning, our nonprofit leaders who have already passed budgets that provide a modest but essential wage increase for staff, on the strength of their trust that the city was going to follow the law and fully fund the required increase.

So I could go on, but again, our intent is to advance nonprofit worker wages, not force them further behind, which I feel that this proposal does.

I just wanna say that I will be looking for every opportunity to work collaboratively with the executive and with my council colleagues now that the budget has been proposed to address this gap and ensure that our partners receive the funding they're entitled to under the law so that they can do the work that we desperately need them to do.

Thanks.

Thank you so much, Councilmember Herbold.

I'm going to entertain additional comments on this item before going to any other topics that we'd like to raise in housing and homelessness.

I will just underscore my concern as well about this area here.

I noted it in relation to the use of higher than anticipated revenue that the broad coalition that had supported Jumpstart was also supportive of protecting against austerity and cuts.

we're going to continue to work with the council to make sure that we are on the right track and again, what we heard from public testimony, the initial e-mails and calls we've received so far, this is a cut.

that we're going to be looking to correct.

We're going to be targeting the policy, not the person or the presenters here today, and this will be a policy that I think we will be looking to correct as well.

We just had a press conference that Mayor Harrell was also part of with Executive Constantine earlier this week that specifically talked about investments into the people, into the workforce that cares for our most in the human services arena said that often folks in behavioral health care are not only receiving inadequate wages, but had been banking on the ability to keep up with inflation in this era, thanks to the legislation that we passed in 2019, that this includes folks with bachelor's degrees and master's degrees often working we are providing essential public services but have been treated like our work is that we, they've been treated as if they deserve what's ever left over rather than being prioritized to care for the sustainability and the health of those who are most fragile and the most vulnerable in communities.

So again, just raising the issues of the workers themselves who helped to codify this into statute.

I see a disconnect between the we're going to continue to work with the city to make sure that we have the necessary inflationary adjustments.

So I very much will be prioritizing this along with our colleagues and any other comments or questions on the HSD, excuse me, the human service provider wage adjustments.

Yes, Councilmember Lewis.

We've been having a lot of discussions, rightly so, in this budget conversation and throughout the year about the massive vacancy rates in the fire department, the vacancy rates in the police department.

And now we're moving on to another category of essential public service worker, our human service workers.

under these contracts.

I'm just going to briefly speak from experience that I was not completely aware of the magnitude of difference a lot of these people that we work with make in the community until you're a district council member and you're really relying on them to show up and help problem solve through complicated public safety issues that are at the intersection of public health, public safety and community building and the role that they feel really is essential and we should treat it in the same way as we're treating police and firefighter vacancies as part of our public safety architecture.

So I just wanted to also express my interest in working to see what we can do on this issue throughout the budget process as far as this conversation is useful for issue ID.

And just to signal my interest to central staff in this, I definitely appreciate the burden that the budget office was under in coming up with their initial proposal and look forward to working in partnership to see what we can do to make sure that this disparity could be corrected in this biennium.

So I appreciate it.

Thank you.

Okay, thank you so much.

And I did see your hand as well.

So happy to come back to you on any items related to housing and homelessness.

Council Member Nelson comments on this item?

Or do you want to just be in the queue generally?

No, it's on this item.

I don't know if I would characterize this as a cut because it seems like what we're doing is decreasing the planned raise or increase.

But I wasn't around in 2019, so I don't know all the reasoning about this.

I do understand that these workers tend to be overworked and underpaid in general.

But it just does seem weird that we're not giving the same increase to all of our employees.

So And do we go into the budgets of each of the nonprofits for whom the 2019 increase was intended to benefit?

Because we don't really control their budgets and how much they are actually paying their workers.

So I guess I'll read that ordinance, but just some general comments now, and I can take the discussion offline.

Thank you so much and I'm going to ask Councilmember Herbold as well.

I believe she had a follow-up.

I did.

I did have one question about CPI.

The proposed budget gives a figure of upwards of 7 million to cover a 4% increase.

Was this calculated on current contracts held by HSD only or does it include the services and contracts for housing or other services that King County RHA now holds through their contracts?

That's a good question.

This applies to human service provider contracts, which are not exclusively in HSD.

There are some in DEAL, for example.

And I think DON.

has one that transferred from HSD that also receives this increase.

This largely applies to the funding that is provided to KCRHA.

There's one exception where in 2023, the city used to be the direct recipient of Continuum of Care grants.

That grant now is received directly by KCRHA, by the Regional Homelessness Authority.

So the proposed budget provides a one-time bridge increase of inflation in 2023 but does not continue it in 2024 and leaves it to the authority because they are now the direct recipient of that to be able to figure out their own inflationary increases.

Thank you.

That might be an old hand.

All right.

I'm going to take that as an old hand.

Okay.

Oh, excuse me.

Oh, Council President.

No, that wasn't a hand.

All right.

It is a hand.

Sorry.

That's okay.

I just want to clarify something.

Maybe you can help me too, Budget Chair.

Madam Chair.

So are they saying that the King County Regional Housing Authority will be looking at the the inflationary costs where we maybe didn't for the workers?

I would say the city is on an island unto itself in providing inflationary increases for contracts.

The county does not provide noticeable increases.

They might be considering on a one-time basis, in this upcoming year, I understand.

But as a general rule, they do not, as far as I know, and as well, the federal government that provides these grants does not provide those increases.

So for monies that are coming from the city, we are applying them for money going to KCRHA.

But again, for that one instance of that one grant where we're no longer the direct recipient, in 2024, we are asking KCRHA to figure that piece out.

And then they, of course, would have to figure out increases for the balance of their funding.

Would we be in a position with the two members from Seattle City Council that sit on the King County Regional Housing Authority to revisit our supplement, our 4 percent cap on the city side?

Council, go ahead, Director Daley.

I didn't quite understand the question, but maybe if you are on it then.

I'm going to turn it back over to you.

Thank you.

And I see Deputy Director Panucci raising her hand.

There's two things I want to add to the conversation to round this out.

The policy that's in statute right now, it requires the city contracts that go to the King County The regional homelessness authority has non-city contracts as well.

So we don't have control necessarily over how those non-city contracts that regional homelessness authority manages receive a cost of living increase.

But what we are saying through the statute that already exists is that we anticipated that those should have gone to 7.6% in the statute that's already in place.

There's two things that I would note.

One is that the regional homelessness authority, when they sent the request to both the county and the city, and I would say generally because they do fundraising as well within private philanthropy and they search for other grants, the proposal that they put forward did not have that 7.6% increase in the inflationary wage adjustment baked into their baseline budget, which is problematic.

It's the statute.

We, I think, could assume that it could have been, should have been part of the administrative cost for Regional Homelessness Authority.

But they included it as part of an overall around 13% that the city has in statute is 7.6%.

It only applies to those city we're not going to be able to do that.

We're not going to be able to do that.

The only way we can do that is to bring that from the AWI that we put into statute in 2019 that this year should have been at 7.6% and it would be dropping that down from the mayor's proposal to 4%.

I don't know if that

I also just want to clarify one quick thing, if I may, that this this proposed amendment to the legislation is not a maximum the city can provide it simply limits what we are required to provide.

So amounts above that cap could be considered as a policy decision to go that could match the inflationary level.

What this does is just, it limits the, again, limits the requirement to protect the city and be able to smooth out some of those investments over time.

Thanks.

Deputy Director Dingley, anything else?

Sorry, Deputy Director Panucci, anything else?

I think you all covered it.

I'm happy to answer additional questions if there are any.

I'm not seeing additional hands.

I have a question for our colleagues.

We had anticipated adjourning at 1 p.m.

We have about 10 more minutes, and we have about seven more slides.

So I'm wondering if colleagues are free, if we could try to get through the rest of these slides and adjourn by 1.30.

I'm even seeing a shrug of support from the Council President.

That's a strong indication of support.

Okay, great.

Any objections?

we're going to end by 1.30.

I promise, Deputy, I promise, Director Dingley, but thanks for bearing with us on all of our questions.

We do, I recognize that many of my questions I'm going to reiterate to the departments, but I appreciate that you are here to receive some of these questions and also allow us for us to identify any concerns at this initial stage.

So let's go ahead and continue.

Great, well I will do my best to get us there on time.

So, if we go to the next slide please.

This is where we're going to jump into investments that are around access to opportunity.

In the Office of Economic Development, there is an enormous investment thanks to the payroll tax and economic revitalization.

So key investments in that space are around commercial affordability, downtown neighborhood economic recovery, workforce development, an export accelerator initiative, capital for small business development, and a Seattle job center.

Largely, these investments are considered more one time in nature as the Office of Economic Development is working to develop the full economic revitalization strategic plan and workforce development strategic plan that was required by the ordinance.

That wasn't ready for this budget.

And so we are working on that and it will be included in the 2024 budget.

So look for that there.

But these investments are definitely intended to get everything started.

There's also funding here to expand the Seattle Conservation Corps to pre-pandemic levels, adding an additional 10 enrollees, bringing it to 60 total.

I'm sorry, 50 total.

We're also improving CIVIFORM.

So I love this program.

CIVIFORM is the city's common application across multiple departments that decreases the time and effort for residents and their trusted intermediaries, which are often community-based organizations, to apply for City of Seattle programs.

This is like the epitome of improving access.

And what we've been able to do in our pilot, we had over 10,000 residents that applied.

that it took them less than five minutes on average, where before it was more like 30, 40, an hour.

It took so much longer.

And so we're just seeing an incredible improvement.

And we're also seeing them link to other affordability programs from that initial application that perhaps they wouldn't have done but for this technology.

So we're really excited and really grateful for the public-private partnership that made this possible.

We are also addressing permitting roadblocks in the Seattle Department of Construction Inspections or SDCI for including support for continuous improvement and additional civil engineers.

There's a total of seven additional FTE in that space paid for with fee revenue.

We're investing $5 million, again from payroll expense tax, in the UW Rainier Valley Early Learning Campus.

This is a joint investment with the federal government, the state, and philanthropy.

It's going to be a multi-use campus that's going to include child care, preschool, adult classrooms, family support services, UW bachelors and master's degree programs, mentorship, the list goes on and on.

So as you can hear, also very excited about this program.

We're also leveraging payroll tax to do hiring and retention bonuses for child care workers, right?

It's about 5.3 million.

And what that will allow us to do is provide bonuses of between 500 and $1,000 to each of the approximately 4,600 child care staff in Seattle.

Collectively, those staff serve over 20,000 children in the city.

The funding could also be used for hiring as well, as there are many positions that are open.

We also have investments in Seattle promise and culturally specific and responsive K through 12 investments, which are about 9.7 million over the biennium.

This is coming from repurposed families, education, preschool and promise levy.

I think I got that theft levy resources to to maintain those overall.

And we estimate that those investments will serve about 2700 students over the biennium.

OK, on the next slide.

We're also making an investment in Memorial Stadium.

Obviously, this is a partnership for that redevelopment project in partnership with Seattle Public Schools and many, many others that are going to be brought to the table.

Total project cost is estimated at between $200 and $250 million to really completely revolutionize the space around Seattle Center and Memorial Stadium.

So not only creating a beautiful stadium, but increasing access to the Seattle Center campus, which currently is only on one side, and it would open up access all the way across the other three directions, and many, many other improvements as well.

We have incredible amounts of funding going to the EDI initiative, thanks to, in large part, or in predominant part, to the payroll expense tax as well.

So the total amount for EDI in the budget is at $23.9 million.

In order to keep safe access to all of our parks and rights of way, the budget is also establishing a united care, a unified care team.

So what this is going to do, so what we did is we took a step back and we looked at all of the efforts that we had under the pandemic to do work under clean cities.

You might remember that under COVID, we had a heightened level of service for clean cities, and we called that a surge level of investment.

So what we did was we took a step back, we worked with all of those departments and considered what is the level of service that we need as a city to maintain where we want to go.

And so that's what this budget reflects.

So what we're going to do is instead of having a citywide focus for those teams where there's a lot of inefficiency and going in between locations, what we're going to do is create geographically focused teams that's going to shift the way the work is approached overall.

So these teams will coordinate, focus outreach efforts, track progress, build relationships with community, the neighbors, both housed and unhoused outreach teams and businesses within their region.

We're also going to ensure that continued delivery of trash mitigation services.

So, you know, over the last two years, this work has only been supported.

Well, not only it's been supported with one time funding.

And so this is allowing us to have ongoing funding to maintain those trash mitigation services.

We're also going to be expanding system navigator capacity.

So this budget is going to add six additional system navigators to ensure that the unified care team geographic teams have dedicated capacity to help unsheltered people in tents, RVs and vehicles get the resources that they need to transition into shelter and permanent housing.

And lastly here, it's going to formalize this team providing the operational administrative support.

So that day to day leadership and operational support is a key step in setting up the leadership structure for this work to ensure continued effective operations, even as the city goes through inevitable leadership changes at some point in the future.

This team would have that sort of steady hand in the in moving forward.

So that concludes this section, if we want to I think that's all I have to say.

Thank you.

I will take any questions here.

related to Seattle Promise.

We've raised some questions around the investment there.

As I know council members know who have been here since before I got here, there is policy in place already about how Seattle Promise underspend, how the FEPP levy underspend would be used.

related to investments going back into the Seattle preschool program.

And then there's also a question still for me that I'm going to try to get some clarity on about whether when the supply of resource available for Seattle promise exceeds the demand or when the demand exceeds supply excuse me. that there is a prioritization of who gets that scholarship money.

And so just want to flag for my colleagues that there are still some questions about how and whether spending that is an appropriate thing to do.

Thank you.

Thanks, Council Member.

One thing I wanted to note, and of course, look forward to working with you on this, on the contours of how the program will operate.

The Levy Oversight Committee voted to approve the use of the underspend for this purpose.

So just to give you that update.

Thank you.

Any follow-up Council Member?

Okay.

Council Member Lewis, please go ahead.

Thank you, Budget Chair.

So, Director Dingley, very, very excited to see Memorial Stadium on this list as the chair of the committee who oversees Seattle Center and also as the District 7 Council Member.

This is just such a great investment in the campus to really take care of the last underdeveloped corner of that important part of our community at Seattle Center.

What is the source or what's the mechanism on how we're proposing to make such a significant capital investment?

This is going to come from the real estate excise tax or REIT.

It'll just be a one-off REIT.

It's not something we're going to seek bond financing for or anything like that.

The budget actually proposes a combination.

So it's going to be, I don't have the exact details at my fingertips, but it's a combination of cash financing and then bond financing down the road.

Great.

Well, I look forward to learning more about that.

It's really exciting to see it in here and really happy we can move forward on that joint priority of the district and the city.

Thank you, Councilmember Lewis.

That was the question I had as well on the Monroe Hill Stadium.

So thanks for asking that.

Any additional questions on this?

All right, moving on.

Great.

Making good time.

Okay.

Next priority care category is healthy communities.

So the budget invests $350,000 in a new pilot program to improve access to quality care for an estimated 1,000 uninsured or underinsured Seattleites.

Going to be targeting BIPOC, immigrant, refugee, and historically marginalized communities in the city of Seattle, as those are often the highest levels, have the highest levels of uninsured or underinsurance.

This funding is going to expand the Public Health Seattle King County Community Health Worker Program and engage with more community based organizations, particularly those for connections with trusted individuals and communities to be able to make those connections.

As I mentioned at the top in the wake of the Dobbs decision that was sort of breathtaking, we are going to make ongoing the investment in the Northwest Abortion Access Fund through the city's public health contract with King County Public Health.

And parks and open spaces, you have spent a lot of time on this, so I will just go ahead and skip this one because you obviously did a lot in the Metropolitan Park District, and there is just an enormous priority in parks and open spaces, as you heard from the mayor yesterday.

On enhanced graffiti abatement.

Here we're going to be creating a single point of contact at the city designed to be designated to be lead on this issue will be responsible for coordinating a new interdepartmental team or IDT as we call it, and setting the standard for graffiti tracking metrics and abatement procedures.

There are many components to the plan as a lot of this work is still being fleshed out but It may include the One Seattle, Many Hands initiative, expanding graffiti abatement prevention, increased enforcement, and working with SDOT on abatement for the WSDOT right-of-way so that we actually have them take care of their owned infrastructure there.

The Seattle Indian Health Board is also going to be receiving a one-time capital investment of about $800,000 for the construction of a detox facility that they have underway.

This is the only slide in this category so we can pause for questions.

Great, thank you.

Councilmember Lewis, is that a new hand?

Might be a leftover hand.

Old hand, apologies.

No problem.

Councilmember Nelson, please go ahead.

Thanks.

Can you just tell me quickly, does parks take a Is the parks budget general fund less this year than it was last year?

I mean in 2023 compared to 2022.

I don't have that at my fingertips, but I do know that we're meeting the general fund floor for parks, which grows with inflation.

So I would assume it's just talking about the general fund portion of the parks.

Yeah, I the general fund floor for parks increases over time.

So I believe the answer is that it's increasing.

But I will confirm that with you because I just don't have that handy.

But yes, we're meeting the floor.

Thank you so much.

I'm not seeing additional hands.

Let's go on to climate and environment.

Great.

You all have also recently done a lot of work in this space, passing the 2022 investments as well.

So we don't have to spend a terrible amount of time here, but we're very excited to have a dedicated resource to support Green New Deal investments in climate and environment.

So in this space, we have investments in healthy, resilient communities, looking at $3.5 million for Seattle Parks and Recreation and the Seattle Public Library.

to receive significant money to decarbonize libraries and community centers in conjunction with planning and development of those community resilience hubs.

We also have $800,000 to support the Environmental Justice Fund and Duwamish River Opportunity Fund, or also known as DROF.

Those investments aim to provide immediate and long-term funding to community-based efforts to address health disparities through investments in everything from food access and environmental justice to youth leadership, environmental restoration, green jobs.

We also are investing to ensure a just transition away from fossil fuels.

So we have about $2.6 million in the Clean Heat Program, which is supporting electric heat pump conversions of oil-heated homes.

This is about $800,000 in rebates at OSC, as well as about $1.8 million in funding at the Office of Housing for fully funded oil-to-electric conversions for eligible low-income households.

We also have about $2.8 million in OSE for building emissions performance standards for large commercial and multifamily buildings.

This money will support the Building Accelerator Program, which provides technical assistance to under-resourced building owners.

We also have $1 million in ongoing funding for electric vehicle rebates for industrial and commercial heavy-duty fleets, including drayage trucks and school buses.

Okay, next slide, please.

We have significant investment as well in equitable clean energy investments.

So workforce investments are absolutely critical to ensuring the clean energy economy provides equitable benefits.

So we have about $1 million for green pathways pre-apprenticeship scholarships, 200,000 to continue workforce investments and climate aligned small business support in the Duwamish Valley, and 160,000 to fund a climate justice workforce advisor.

We also know that transportation is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions so to mitigate those impacts budget also includes.

about 650,000 for FAS, the Department of Finance and Administrative Services, for developing electric vehicle charging stations for city-owned fleets, 2.5 million at SDOT, and 160,000 for OPCD for design, planning, and community engagement around Sound Transit 3, including discussions with community about equitable station siting and design.

This is going to be the largest infrastructure investment in our city's history, and so we need to make sure we get it right.

Significant resources to that end here.

Then also 350,000 for the Office of Economic Development for a mobility study around Seattle's downtown core, which will be critical as well.

That's the end for climate and environment.

All right.

Thank you so much.

Questions on climate and the environment?

I have a few questions myself then.

the 1400 pages of the budget book and the capital improvement program.

Not everything is mentioned here.

I'm really excited about the greening of the city fleet.

The city leading by example on electrification, it's overdue.

I really appreciate the Herald Administration taking a big step forward on that.

I know we're going to get to some additional S.

stuff in a minute here.

Regarding the resolution that the city council just adopted, following up on the slide statement of legislative intent from a year ago where we had asked for a plan to phase out gasoline fueled leaf blowers.

We just adopted a resolution to just reinforce that goal.

I've run my own numbers on how much would actually cost to transition away I was hoping to see something in the budget since we've been talking about this for over a year, but I didn't see anything about leaf blowers in the budget so just wanted to alert my colleagues I've run some numbers on this it's about 200,000 dollars to move us forward in 2023 and another similar amount in 2024. That's very generous.

That's a deluxe brand of electric leaf blowers, the most powerful in the market.

We may not need to even do that.

So just wanted to signal that I wouldn't want to move forward with fulfilling the resolution we just adopted.

And then I think in terms of urban forest, is that going to be discussed later?

That's just didn't make the PowerPoint, but it's in the budget itself about trees.

Yeah, in the budget, just just not in the PowerPoint.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Any additional comments in response to customer Peterson's items?

Okay.

I will also I appreciate the investments that are being made into this area.

Can you clarify for us again, what's the total amount of the Jump Start Green New Deal proposed allocation in all of these areas?

Give me just a second.

We have $21 million in Green New Deal from payroll tax.

And the total is?

the total in this sort of category?

Oh, I don't have a total in front of me that has investments outside of payroll tax.

Okay, no problem.

We can get that to you.

Okay, we'll send some maybe follow-up questions through central staff about the allocation of the Green New Deal funding and understand how these funds are being paired or proposed to be broken down across the departments as well.

I wanted to ask a specific question about the 3 million going to SDOT from Jump Start to support 14 positions that will help develop, renew and plan Sound Transit's major light rail extension project through downtown Seattle.

Can you talk a little bit more about what category from Jump Start this is coming from?

Is it Green New Deal, economic resilience?

Do these positions sunset?

and is this only for work in the downtown core or how are we applying this across the city?

My recollection is that these are as part of the economic revitalization bucket for payroll tax and I believe that these are sunsetting positions.

I don't know the time of those.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Of course.

These are in the Green New Deal because we're mitigating.

Sorry, this is the I'm thinking about something else.

This is climate and environment.

They're in Green New Deal overall mitigating the impacts of transportation by having to single use vehicles.

And then I don't I don't have the duration of the positions, but we can get that.

I think that's all I have.

Thank you.

Okay.

And anything off the top of your head about how other city positions related to ST3 projects are funded, how these projects relate to any agreement that the city has with sound transit regarding staffing of this project?

I'll have to get back to you on that and have SDOT get you the details of how that will work.

One more, two more categories and then we are to the end.

Safe and reliable transportation.

All right.

Thank you for sticking with me here.

So SDOT has significant fiscal challenges ahead.

So the August revenue forecast was an unexpected continued hit to SDOT's revenues, which have been decreasing steadily during the pandemic.

So we anticipate there will be over a $45 million cumulative shortfall in SDOT's most flexible and dedicated transportation revenue stream in the commercial parking tax, or CPT, through 2026. So conversely, planned and unplanned, uncontrollable expenditures continue to bring pressure on the SDOT budget.

That's both from supply chain, inflation, et cetera.

So there were a number of balancing strategies that we used for SDOT in the budget, including reducing some 2022 expenditures.

We deferred or reduced some capital projects.

We also prioritized what expenditures we needed to make and directed some more central resources, like TNC, the Transportation Network Company Tax that I spoke about at the beginning of the presentation, and the Real Estate Excise Tax, or REIT, to also support some of those needs in SDOT.

So speaking specifically to some of the investments in this space, we have $11.7 million in 2023 and $29 million in 2024 in Move Seattle investments.

Those will do work on sidewalk safety repair, transit corridor improvements, arterial asphalt and concrete projects, new sidewalk safety programs, bike lane improvements, greenways, major arterial maintenance, just incredible stuff.

Heavy haul network improvements and investments in the market and 45th multimodal corridor project.

We also have funding in the budget for additional emergency response funds.

Over the last several years and due to worsening storms as a result of climate change, we have seen considerable overages at last minute from SDOT through no fault of their own, but because of the changing environment.

So to respond to those significant events, ice and snow events, we are adding an additional six million dollars to their base, which also has three million in it already.

in order for them to quickly respond to emergency events and keep Seattle moving and safe.

We also have additional investments in Vision Zero, which is a major priority, and I know a shared priority.

So we have an additional $1.3 million in addition to the base investments of seven, so making $8.3 million total for Vision Zero, for investments in the Rainier Corridor Safety Projects in 2023, transit improvements along MLK and concept planning for the 130th West Project, and other transit-related projects that are going to be identified in the coming months.

We also have the West Seattle Ballard Link Extension staffing.

So the city will invest almost $3 million annually from the payroll tax to support 14 positions to help develop, renew, and plan Sound Transit's major light rail extension project through downtown Seattle.

This project represents the largest infrastructure investment in downtown in the city's history and will require close coordination with Sound Transit to ensure we're meeting the needs of Seattle residents.

This budget, as I mentioned toward the top when we were looking at the general, the sort of visual of the general fund financial plan, in many ways understates the resources that will be ultimately available to SDOT.

We don't know yet, the feds have a trillion dollars in their infrastructure bill, we don't yet know because the federal agencies are still working out how their version of RFPs or those grant announcements are going to be designed, what the requirements are going to be, deadlines, et cetera, et cetera.

We have stood up a robust framework within the city family to analyze those potential opportunities to maximize collaboration with partners We've been working with Council Central staff on strategies to engage with you all as we learn about those new projects coming forward.

I understand you also were briefed recently from OIR on what those opportunities could look like.

So we anticipate a lot more coming in this space, but we don't yet have all of those details.

So that is the end of transportation.

We have a few questions here.

Council Member Peterson, please go ahead, followed by Council Member Morales.

Thank you chairman skater and I really appreciate the the balancing strategies.

The city budget office used to try to preserve a lot of the stop funding and also for right sizing the spending for emergency response excited about the increased investments in vision 0 and the top to bottom review that director spots has promised and I'm really pleased to see you call out Rainier Avenue as well.

Wanted to talk about, in terms of the revenue shortfalls, I mean, I know SDOT traditionally gets certain funding sources, I just wanted to say that we can also be creative about those sources.

For example, last year we increased the commercial parking tax rate.

We also increased vehicle license fee, car tab charges.

We've also signaled, some of the council members have signaled an interest in imposing real estate developer impact fees, which would create substantial sums for transportation.

And, but I do want to talk about bridges, because in looking in the budget.

you know, the council authorized $100 million in bond financing for bridges and the executive chose not to use that in 2022. I'm also not seeing it being used next year.

And so that's a concern because I think that authorization is available to you for the next couple of years.

We are looking at the various bridge line items.

We have a lot of material increases in those investments, which is troublesome considering the bridge audit in the wake of the West Seattle bridge closure.

And also, with the West Seattle bridge, you know, thankfully SDOT, through all their hard work, they actually came in under budget for that project.

And it was my understanding that we were going to rapidly deploy those savings to other multimodal bridges in the city.

to try to catch up on that deferred maintenance.

So basically, it's not clear in the budget.

So we'll be digging into this further about what's really being done for the multimodal bridges in our city.

And I'm concerned that it's not an increase.

We're not stepping it up.

And I know that we did not apply, the city did not apply for the new mega project grant funding from the USDOT, which is a big disappointment that we did not go for that.

that money.

I know they are applying for other grants, but I just feel that we're not showing the emphasis for bridges in the actual budget numbers.

So we'll dig into that a little bit further, but really do appreciate your investments in other areas.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We will also pass these notes along to your comments so they can be sure to address your concerns and interests in their presentation when they come to you in 10 or so days.

Thank you.

Let's go to Councilmember Morales.

There's $2.5 million to SDOT along with some money to OPCD for looks like mostly for community engagement around ST3.

And then there's $3 million annually to SDOT to work on light rail through downtown.

And then there's 350, sorry, going back to the previous slide, to OED for a mobility study through downtown.

So I'm just trying to understand the downtown package and if the two and a half million in the slide 33 is the same as the three million in the bottom slide, slide 34, or that's in addition.

Those are different investments.

So we will definitely make sure that in the transportation presentation that they have all those details fleshed out.

And so you can see it sort of as a comprehensive, you know, I'm trying to fit those investments in sort of the overall buckets, but it'll look a lot different when the department's coming forward to talk about their priorities.

Okay.

Okay.

Thank you.

I think we are doing well on time.

to the city of Seattle.

And so I'm going to take that in combination with the report out here.

I'm going to express my concern about us using jump start Seattle green new deal specific category for an ST3 project where we already had obligations to help pay for staff and and not supplanting any of the city's investments.

So I look forward to having the SDOT presentation and or the other departments presentations as well.

But I'm concerned that this does sound like supplantation and not additive investments in just transition work.

We have, please go ahead.

Yeah, if you have an initial response, of course.

Initial response, and of course they should dig into it, but these particular investments, these are new capacity.

So they are additive overall.

Okay, great.

We'll look into that and also a similar position that we see at OPCD for the same project.

It looks like it's using Jumpstart.

Okay.

Thanks for flagging the newness of it.

Let's go on to the last two slides here.

Great, we are almost there.

So I'll try to take you there quickly.

We've already talked a little bit about the fact that the jumpstart ordinance requires or allows for administration and evaluation capacity.

So we have about 5.8 million that's gonna come for specific administrative and evaluation expenses identified in the city budget office, department of neighborhoods, office of economic development, housing, sustainability and environment, finance, administrative services, HR, and the ledge department.

So as you all know, the ordinance also required that evaluation side.

So in the budget office, it's not only for the work to respond to the increased volume of dollars and allocations and projects and programs that we need to analyze and sift through and track, but it's also on the evaluation side.

So you'll see both of those because we have our office of innovation and performance within CPO.

We also have critical IT infrastructure investments throughout the budget.

So you'll see priority needs such as cybersecurity, a hybrid workforce, public records, core technology investments, such as the conversion of city network-based phones, and the replacement of the MCIS project, Municipal Courts IT System, as I mentioned, on those unanticipated costs.

We also have significant investments in asset preservation.

We were very lucky to have an improved REIT forecast in the August forecast.

So we are going to be putting that money to great use in asset preservation.

Just as it sort of goes without saying, but for my health, I will tell you that investing in asset preservation saves money.

in the long term.

So if we have significant deferred maintenance, it can lead to sort of catastrophic levels of financial liability that we have.

And so we want to make sure that we are limiting that by really making the investments in preservation along the way.

Let's see, those investments examples there are rebuilding Fire Station 31, further electrifying the city's fleet, significant improvements to the waterfront, and we also are increasing our reserves in REIT in this budget.

The revenue, the reserves in REIT that are established were developed at a time when the REIT forecast was considerably lower.

So we're going to be increasing those reserves commensurate with the increase in the revenue forecast, because there is that added level of uncertainty around whether or not those are going to come in.

I'll also note that REIT is often the first to drop off in an economic downturn.

And it can drop precipitously so there was an incredible drop at the beginning of the Great Recession in the REIT revenue forecast in one year.

And so it's a particular resource that we want to keep a close eye on, especially because we have, we rely so much on that resource for bonding for significant capital projects as well.

And then a last note here on city utilities.

So they both have a six-year strategic business plans that they are sticking to.

So City Lights has a $1.5 billion budget.

It's maintaining current service levels.

The proposed changes are sort of net zero reprioritizations overall, and they're really necessary to support the business strategies outlined in their 2023-2028 strategic plan.

And similar with Seattle Public Utilities, they are looking for provision of crucial public hygiene services for the unsheltered population, as we talked about at the top.

But all other investments are rate funded and within their strategic plan overall.

Any questions on the good government component?

Thanks so much.

Let's turn it over to Council Member Peterson for the first question.

Thank you, Chair.

Question about city utilities, especially Seattle Public Utilities.

Just want to make sure that the utility tax that the general fund collects from our two publicly owned utilities are the utility taxes, are they increasing?

Are we taking more from Seattle Public Utilities and putting it in the general fund than we did last year?

And this is something that we can follow up with, but I just wanna make sure we don't materially increase that because then it can impact the rates on people's utility bills, which are regressive.

So didn't know if you had any sort of directional that.

I don't know if there is a trend information on that.

have to follow up on that, councilmember.

It's a great question.

I'm not recalling anything off the top of my head but I'll come back to you on that.

I want to start by congratulating you on your first nine months.

not only the work you've done over the last nine months to create this product but also congratulate you on your first nine months.

this is your first major delivery of a budget for our city and it's a biennial one and it's one in the midst of the largest recession we've seen in Seattle's history.

I think that's a great way to end the meeting.

Thank you very much.

I very much appreciate that.

Also, thanks for being on the receiving end of many of our questions and concerns that we've outlined today.

We recognize we will take these and we will have four days worth of deliberations to allow for us to really get into additional questions that may surface between now and then, and we'll use the electronic system central staff has set up to process those questions through CBO to the appropriate departments so there's not a deluge of questions from each of our offices to individual departments.

I want to thank you again, colleagues, for the upcoming eight weeks here that we have.

and I really appreciate our shared commitment to investing in Seattle's residents.

Again, looking towards creating a final budget that invests in a Seattle that is housed and cared for, that is healthy and safe, and a local economy that is resilient, that invests in frontline workers and our smallest businesses.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks to everybody for your participation today.

Our next meeting will be on October 11th at 930 a.m.

We will have the first 90 minutes of course devoted to public comment and encourage folks to again dial in remotely.

If in person, please do socially distance and I want to thank the central staff team for their work over the last four days.

We have had a number of select budget hearings from the select departments and central staff is going to be doing a deep dive into the proposed budget over that four days starting on October 11th.

Please do use the system that has been established by central staff and again I want to thank the central staff team we're going to continue to work with the council to make sure that we're doing the right thing.

I greatly appreciate that leadership.

The purpose of the budget hearings that week October 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th is to review, discuss and ask questions about the proposed budget, get into more detail from the questions we started to identify today and to provide direction to central staff on issues that can help form amendments that they will be considering as those will be due the following week.

that you have about amendments with us.

We appreciate any heads up from our office so that we can better coordinate ideas amongst central staff, but of course, you have the prerogative of keeping those confidential, but would love to be able to work in partnership with the, with the central staff team as we queue up potential amendments to prevent duplication.

Again, a thank you to CBO, to Julie Dingley, to everyone from the CBO team for all the work you've done.

And Julie, is there anything else from you?

I just thank you so much, Council Member.

I just wanted to say a quick thank you to the City Budget Office team.

This is a group of absolutely incredible people who have worked tirelessly over the last nine months to deliver this budget.

And I am but the messenger.

It is really a reflection of not only their work, but the work of all of the city departments and engaging with the community over the last year or years.

And so it is definitely a much broader group that is represented by my presence here today.

And I just, I couldn't close out without just sincere and genuine thank you for their incredible contributions to the city and the residents.

I'm so happy to be here.

I'm so happy to be here.

I'm so happy to be here.

I'm so happy to be here.

I'm so happy to be here.

I'm so happy to be here.

I'm so happy to be here.

I'm so happy to be here.

I'm so happy to be here.

I'm so happy to be here.

I'm so happy to be here.

I'm so happy to be here.

I'm so happy to be here.

I'm so happy to be here.

I'm so happy to be here.

I'm so happy to be here.

I'm so happy to be here.

I'm so happy to be here.

I'm so happy to be here.

to the floor.

So please feel free to come by council chambers and grab a snack if you are around and bring your mask.

Okay.

Thanks, everyone.

We'll see you October 11th for the 930 Budget Committee meeting and again that evening at 5 p.m.

It's going to be a long day.

We will be happy to hear from members of the public at the public hearing starting at 5 p.m.

Have a great rest of your day.

The meeting is adjourned.

Thanks, everyone.