Seattle City Council Finance & Neighborhoods Committee 4/24/19

Hi, good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to our Finance and Neighborhoods Committee.

This is our April 24th, 2019 meeting.

Thank you, Councilmember Gonzalez, for being here.

Lena Thibault, thank you for participating.

Allison, thank you very much for getting us organized.

Do we have nobody signed up for public comment?

Okay, well, today we're going to kick off our committee with two appointments.

Elise Kawahara Day and Audrey Hoyt have been selected for nomination to the Pioneer Square Preservation Board.

And then we're going to invite our Human Resources Department to discuss a possible vote on our first quarter employment ordinance.

And that's going to be followed with Ben Noble on our city's capital improvement projects.

And I believe that goes to Q4 from last year.

And then we will end with a presentation by our FAS department on their 2018 Race and Social Justice Initiative accomplishments.

And I wanna recognize and say thank you to Calvin Goings and his team in advance for that good work.

So, since we have no public comment, and make sure that nobody's come in that wants to speak, then let's just move forward with our appointments.

And Allison will read them in, and then I'm gonna ask for your introductions.

Would you like me to do both of them at once?

Please, let's do.

Item number one, appointment number 01307, appointment of Elise Kuwahara Day as a member of the Pioneer Square Preservation Board for a term to March 1st, 2021. And item number two, appointment number 01308, appointment of Audrey Morton Hoyt as a member of the Pioneer Square Preservation Board for a term of March 1st, 2022.

Great, thank you.

Welcome.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So do you want to start introductions?

Sure.

Hi, I'm Elise Kuwahara-Day.

I'm a project architect with Environmental Works Community Design Center in Capitol Hill.

I am interested in being part of the Pioneer Square board.

I originally grew up in Kent, Washington, so I have some familiarity with the area.

My family is from the Seattle area in general, and so I've always loved the Pioneer Square architecture and just the historic character of it.

And we'll come back and have all the reasons in a moment.

Sure, sorry about that.

No, that's good.

Alicia, we're so ready to go.

I know it, but it's great to have that enthusiasm.

Audrey?

Hi, I'm Audrey Hoyt.

I am a business owner in Pioneer Square.

I'm one of the co-owners of the Pioneer Collective.

We are a local co-working meeting and event space in Pioneer Square.

We've been open about just almost four years on the corner of 1st and King.

And I appreciate getting to be here and look forward to telling you why I'm excited about the possibility of the preservation board.

Excellent, thank you.

I'm Gina Nash.

I'm the coordinator for the Pioneer Square Preservation Board in the Department of Neighborhoods.

Gina, thank you for being here, and I just want to say thank you for all the help that you have given my office in the last year in particular around the Preservation Board and all the things we're looking to accomplish.

Do you want to say anything about your candidates?

I'm just so pleased to have both of those to present to you today.

And I think I'll just let them talk about them.

Great.

Well, Elise, you are on a roll.

So why don't we start with you?

Sure.

You can pick up where you were leaving off.

Will do.

Like I said, I'm very interested in the Pioneer Square area.

As an architect, I really admire the historic character of that area.

And I'm interested in being a part of the board to help preserve that and make sure that that stays for future generations.

And can I ask you a question, which is, we're always trying to reach that balance between preserving the character, preserving the buildings, and at the same time moving forward so we aren't seeing dead buildings.

And particularly on 2nd Avenue, there's some that we have been talking about recently from the Metropole building down to what used to be the Nugent building and that some of those spaces are operating now, some of them aren't.

What is your thinking and approach about encouraging use of like the opportunity zone funds that might be coming forward and at the same time preserving the character?

I'm not quite as familiar with Opportunity Zones funds, but I'm interested in learning more about them.

In terms of whether, striking a balance between preserving and introducing new and exciting things, I think there's definitely room for both.

And I'm interested to review any of the projects that come forward with that in mind.

In terms of buildings that are there now, I think the Weyerhaeuser building was a pretty interesting mix of doing both.

It fits pretty well within the character, but also is new and doing sustainable strategies.

And so I'm interested in looking at that.

Great.

We are as well and are constantly doing that in our office.

So thank you for your help.

Audrey, so tell us more about your vision and why you want to do this with all the things you could do with your time.

Yeah, so I'm a Seattle native.

I was born and raised just outside of Seattle.

And I remember as a child visiting many older neighborhoods in Seattle and how magical and special those distinct areas felt to me.

I now realize most of those areas are part of preservation or historic or opportunity zone.

Well, not opportunity zone, I guess.

What's the third term I'm looking for?

Landmark districts.

and have recognized that it really takes stewards dedicated to keeping those areas preserved to allow for that character and rich history to be preserved.

I received a Bachelor of Science in Economics in college and have always been very fascinated with urban design, architecture, city planning, and policy.

So I feel as though I still would like to harness this idea of creating economic, I'm interested in these ways that we can create economic incentives to facilitate positive preservation-minded development.

I have two little girls and I think about them enjoying these historic parts of Seattle and how rich and interesting those areas are, Pioneer Square, Pike Place Market, parts of Capitol Hill, Ballard while also recognizing that we are a very growing city and we need to be able to develop and change and create new histories at the same time.

So I would say my interest in being on this board comes from my true dedication to wanting to create a very livable, sustainable urban city that has character and a rich architectural history while also is a growing and sustainable city.

Great, well thank you for that.

I will just put in this last footnote that our goal around Pioneer Square, working with the Pioneer Square Alliance and with your preservation board, is really to raise some of the buildings that we know are either completely, not just underutilized, but like in the case of the Metropole building, it has been 10 years now since it burnt.

Corn Walker building, I had an opportunity to walk through it about a month ago.

A stunningly beautiful building, but it's gonna need a lot of love and a lot of investment.

Same thing with J&M Cafe, that there are ways that we can address that.

So I really am taking my lead from our Department of Neighborhoods, but we want to move forward with some really great interventions so that we can get more housing.

and not just low-income housing, but market rate and affordable housing mixed in there.

So if you can help us do that, it'll be great.

Good.

Do you have any other questions?

No.

Good.

Well, then I would like to move the appointments of Elyse.

And do you go by your middle name, too?

Kuahara Day, or?

My last name is actually Kuahara Day.

OK.

Hyphenated.

So to move this appointment for Elyse and for the appointment of Audrey Morton Hoyt, both as members of the Pioneer Square Preservation Board and both for Well, you've got a one-year term through 2021 and you've got a two-year term to 2022. Is that accurate?

She's filling in for the position.

The term ends so she'll be filling the remaining part of that term and then be eligible for and be eligible for another okay second Okay, those in favor say aye aye Nobody's opposed and nobody's abstaining.

So this looks good.

We'll move forward.

Um to full council vote next week Thanks so much and feel free to call us if you've got any questions or anything we can do to support you Thank you.

Thanks a lot

Okay, the next item, would you like to read this in?

Is Lena gonna do this for us?

Sure, item number three, Council Bill 119493, an ordinance relating to city employment, commonly referred to as the First Quarter 2019 Employment Ordinance.

Very good, thank you so much, and thank you for coming in, Dan, and with those who are, Sarah, thank you, all of you being here.

Do I have to move this amendment first?

We just have a correction.

All right.

So, Dan, Sarah, would you all like to introduce yourselves?

Sure.

Dan Eder, Council of Central Staff, Deputy Director.

Sarah Butler, SDHR Policy and Legislation Advisor.

Lisa Gardner, SDHR Compensation Program Manager.

Shauna Fitzner, Lead Administration, SDHR.

Good.

Thank you very much, all of you, for coming.

Dan, do you want to kick this off?

Sure, I'd be happy to.

I'm going to turn it over to SDHR to walk you through the details, but at a high clip, this bill has two parts.

The first part is the designation of three positions to civil service exempt status.

The second action that's included here is authorization to use 2019 appropriations that were anticipated in the adopted budget.

The Seattle Municipal Code, so for the designation of civil service exempt positions, the Municipal Code and the personnel rules establish guidelines for jobs that are covered by and exempt from civil service protections.

In order for a position to be reclassified or changed, re-designated from civil service covered to civil service exempt, prior approval must be provided by ordinance and this bill would accomplish that goal.

As you noted at the front end, there is a technical amendment that makes some housekeeping changes to true up the intent of the bill with the positions that would be affected.

The second bit of the bill would specifically authorize the executive to use funds that were already appropriated in the adopted budget.

That would allow the executive to pay the employee's share of the 2019 premiums for the Washington State paid family medical leave benefits that will begin in 2020. The 2019 budget included approximately $5 million for this purpose.

This bill is what I would describe as a belt and suspenders explicit authorization to use the existing funds for the originally intended purpose.

Great.

And we have enough?

We have enough budgeted money to cover?

The budgeted funds are sufficient to cover the purposes.

Very good.

So Sarah, I'm going to turn to you if you would like to describe these exempt positions, why they're exempt, and what your recommendation is, and then we'll deal with the correction.

as included in amendment one.

I will defer to the class manager.

Thank you.

You have before you a request to approve the 2019 first quarter employment ordinance submitted as is or with possible amendments.

The difference between the original submission and the amendment bring this closer to you.

The difference between the two is that after submittal, upon review, we learned that item A on the original submittal had in fact already been legislated and adopted as part of the 2019 budget ordinance.

So it was not necessary for it to be included in this ordinance.

Great, thank you.

So do you want to talk a little bit about these three exempt positions?

Two of the positions are in information technology as information technology professionals, A, and per city per municipal code and per the IT professional pay program, those are exempted automatically by classification.

The third position is in SDHR as a personal analyst moving to strategic advisor one exempt.

and meets the criteria for exemption where the position requiring a particularly high degree of professional responsiveness and individual accountability or position requiring a confidential or fiduciary relationship with the appointing authority or judicial positions requiring insulation as a third branch of government.

Upon internal review and analysis, this position did meet the criteria of a position requiring a particularly high degree of professional responsiveness and individual accountability.

Okay.

Very good.

Did you want to add anything?

Okay, Sarah, do you want to add anything to that?

Nothing to that item, no.

Okay, Council President Harrell, thank you for being here.

Either of you have any questions about this?

Yes, so on the...

Let's see, in the bill...

I guess it's...

section 1c no section 2 related to the authorization of additional payment for the employees premium share into the state paid family medical leave insurance program can you just talk a little bit more about what the fiscal note is on that.

I don't actually see an itemization in the summary fiscal note.

It's not noted in the fiscal note.

It was included in the 2019 budget.

The total that I have is $4.8 million for 2019. And again, this is just for 2019 premiums.

$2.2 million of the costs are general fund, and the rest is non-general fund.

I'm sorry.

How much is from the general fund?

Let's see.

$2.2 million.

And the remainder comes from where?

Non-general fund, so everything else.

I don't have it broken out.

So maybe Dan, you can address that.

If 2.2 is coming from general fund, this is for paid sick leave premiums.

Where's the remainder coming from?

No, it's paid family and medical leave, which is different than sick leave.

Pardon me.

It's the paid family and medical leave insurance program.

I suspect that the balance is coming from utility funds and other non-general fund sources.

And so I just want to make sure that is, and I think the three of us serve on the Labor Relations Policy Committee, I just want to make sure that this is still in compliance and conformance with everything that we're doing in the Labor Relations Policy Committee area, which We can't necessarily talk about in more detail than I just have, but I just wanna make sure that we're not stepping on our own toes or the toes of the bargaining team there.

I believe it is consistent with the discussions you've been having.

The fiscal note doesn't note any fiscal impacts of this bill.

I think, well, I could have mentioned what the dollar amounts are, but I think the reason why the fiscal note doesn't address the dollar amounts is because this bill doesn't appropriate any new funds.

It merely provides explicit authorization to use the appropriated funds in a way that's consistent with the expectation in the budget, but the budget didn't spell out that these funds would be used to pay for the employee's share of the paid family medical leave premiums.

And you don't necessarily have to walk me through the details of the formula, but we came up with this number of $4.8 million, presumably using some form of formula in order to determine what that amount was.

That's right.

Okay, and we have a level of confidence in the formula that leads us to believe that this is an accurate forecasting and estimate of the appropriation needed to cover the benefits through the end of 2019?

We do.

The only caveat being if we did settle with unions and there was a salary increase for this year, we may need to return for further budget appropriations.

Okay.

So we are going to be paying 0.4% of the city's total payroll, and a portion of that is the employer's responsibility, and a portion of that can be pushed from the employer to the employee, but for 2019 is going to be entirely paid for by the city.

I will add that is up to the, for each employee, up to the Social Security maximum this year of $132,900.

I'm sorry, I missed almost everything you said.

If you'll pull the microphone closer.

So it's a maximum per employee up to the wages, the Social Security wages of $132,900.

as opposed to the complete payroll for the year.

Okay.

Thanks for that clarification.

Thank you.

Council President, do you have anything else you'd like to add?

No questions.

Okay, so I'm going to first move the amendment to this bill.

I'm going to look for a second.

Second.

Okay, all those in favor of the amendment say aye.

Aye.

None opposed.

So then we will go on to the amended bill.

And this is for ordinance 119493, so I will move this as amended.

Second.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

No.

No further discussion or comments.

This will go forward to the full council on Monday.

Thank you very much.

All right.

So the next item of business, thank you all for coming and for the good briefing earlier this week.

So we'll go on to the quarterly report.

Do we have anything we want to read in or invite Ben Noble?

I'll read in the item, just on to the record.

Item number four, the 2018 Q4 CIP monitoring report summary and highlights.

Very good.

Thank you, Ben and Caleb.

Thanks for being here.

Dan, are you going to kick this one off as well?

Sure.

Happy to do that.

Um, as you know, the, uh, executive and city council have been engaging in a collaborative effort to up the game, uh, providing council and the public with forward looking information about, um, the city's capital projects and their ongoing progress.

Um, I have appreciated, um, the cooperation and focused effort that executive staff, um, have, brought to the table, and I want to publicly thank CBO and the departmental staff who have been contributing as well, and in particular Ben and Caleb Wagner.

Today, Ben and Caleb are here from CBO to present the quarterly report for the end of 2018. I think you're well aware that the city has recently updated its financial systems, and this led to an unusual delay in closing out the 2018 books.

As a result, the fourth quarter capital project reports were submitted somewhat later than what we expect will become the norm in the future.

In 2018, by way of background to these reports, the Council adopted Resolution 31853, memorializing expectations for enhanced quarterly reports for high-risk, high-profile, or particularly complex capital projects.

That resolution established reporting formats and timing.

And recognizing that big and complex projects face schedule, budget, and scope risks, the Council's goal was to engage in a discussion about strategies to mitigate these risks before they happen rather than after the fact.

Consistent with Resolution 31853, the Council followed up early this year with Resolution 31866, identifying a suite of projects that will get enhanced reporting, sometimes referred to as the 2019 Watch List.

Executive staff will begin reporting on the 2019 Watch List projects when they provide capital projects reports for the first quarter of 2019. This list is very similar to but not quite the same as the list of projects for year-end 2018. For instance, the city center streetcar connector project and some other projects were included on the 2019 watch list but are not reported on here.

And with that background, I'll turn it over to CBO staff.

And thank you, Councilmember Herbold, and I want to acknowledge that this is something that Councilmember Herbold has been encouraging us to do, to look at specific CIP projects rather than just the blanket budget control level that we had seen before.

So thanks for being here.

Ben and Caleb, welcome.

Yeah, and I was going to offer a few comments of introduction and turn it over to Caleb.

First of all, I wanted to echo, but in sort of in return, Dan's thanks to CBO As thanks to central staff, this has been really a collaborative process.

The executive had an interest in enhancing capital reporting for ourselves, if you will, and the council had an interest as well.

So we were well aligned, and I think we've come to a good place.

And as you'll hear today, there's still a bit of work in progress, and I'm happy to report that as well, because our goal is to get this right and to be open to adaptation as we go.

Today, I think we're going to do two things.

One is to introduce you to the structure of the report and how it's evolved in our work with central staff, and then also to talk about some of the specifics that are there.

I will add, it is the nature of this thing that it covers literally hundreds of projects.

So I do expect you will have questions about some of them, and I also expect I won't be able to answer them all.

So I'm going to cover myself right now about that.

But I will try.

I certainly have read the reports myself and have had some follow-up.

But if there's stuff we can't answer here, we'll certainly get back to you.

And the goal here, one of the things about this in general is that the tone of this from our end is to encourage transparency you have every reason to be holding the executive accountable.

I think the frame we're hoping for is not one about gotcha, if you will, but really about these are issues and projects that we all care about.

If there are problems, we all need to know about them and to think about what solutions might be and ideally as early as possible.

So, but again, that said, accountability is part of this and I'm not trying to deny that.

I just want to give you a flavor for how we've approached it.

So with that, give Caleb a chance to walk.

He's, and again, all credit to Caleb in some sense around the structure of this and the really hard work to make it happen.

So I thought he'd be well positioned to give you a sense of the structure and how we got there.

Great, thank you.

Thanks, Ben.

Yeah, so I was going to give a quick background on kind of the report, how we laid it out, and why we laid it out like this.

It's three pieces.

We have a discrete projects report.

We have an ongoing programs report.

And then we have the watch list, which is the enhanced report.

The reason we did it like this is because the discrete projects are actual discrete bodies of work with start and end dates.

Ongoing programs are kind of ongoing bodies of work, and we want to focus on different measures for those.

And then the watch list projects are large, projects that have a lot of complexity and different risks.

So we're going to go through those in three different pieces now.

The focus of our reports now are more forward looking, what's coming down on the horizon rather than what happened in the past.

It's looking at total project costs for projects rather than one year looks at what just happened.

just this year because it could have affected the project in the out years.

So that's kind of what our focus is here.

So the first section is the discrete projects report, and we worked with Dan, central staff, and the departments to kind of define some of these elements.

The first, the three things that we're asking for from the departments now are an update for the project stage.

We defined those project stages last year in the budget.

There's, I think there's five of them, or six of them, and it goes from planning, initiation, to design, construction, procurement, and then close out.

So if your project has moved into a different stage, we ask to update that so that we know that it's moving forward.

We ask for an update to the end date of the project.

You're projected end date if it has changed.

Again, the information in here, the total project cost for the discrete report come from the 19 to 24 budget because it was more current.

So we wanted to give the most current information.

And then we ask for an update to the total project cost, a projection.

Just as background, one of the things that this work required, as Caleb described, happened last year is we needed to move the departments all to some agreed definitions on the stages of construction projects.

And they weren't that far off, but just an example of what the work actually involves is sitting down with the folks who are actually implementing projects and saying, okay, this is how we're going to structure this.

What do you guys do at SPU?

What do you guys do at City Light?

How can we align this all in a way that's consistent for both the council and the executive on the reporting side?

maybe leaping ahead just a couple of pages, but on some of these projects, the big ones that you've identified on the watch list, are we going to have a dashboard like we did with the waterfront project?

I thought that was so incredibly helpful so that we could see the green, yellow, red.

Green is things were on schedule.

They were within the scope.

Yellow was like, hey, this is something we're paying attention to.

And red was either there was a delay or an increase or a contractors change order?

We have an element that's a dashboard, but when we get to the watch list projects, Caleb's going to walk you through the actual format of those reports, because those are also standard.

So there's a format about each of those, and you'll see the specific, we report on each of those elements in different ways.

If I may, Chair, the 286 discrete projects, what's the criteria to be a discrete project again?

So when you all adopt the CIP, there are actually individual projects.

So we have, I'm going to do some like, we've taken, I didn't bring one, I meant to bring one.

We've taken the CIP that is about that fat, essentially one page per project, and we've boiled it down to rows in a multi-paged Excel sheet.

So there are projects that are, The departments are managing very specifically to a specific budget that are going to, so I could pull up any one of these.

Lake City Community Center Improvements is a specific project.

A distinction there, and it's probably easier to distinguish it by putting in opposition, if you will, to a programmatic CIP.

So, for instance, the Parks Department has within its CIP something called Trail Improvements.

I think that's the official title.

And that is, and I don't know the budget of that one off the top of my head, but say several hundred thousand dollars a year, and we identify it in the CIP as trail improvements because the individual trail improvements are potentially quite small and not worth tracking in that way.

Let me try a different angle on the question.

Of the 286 discrete projects, how many are not discrete projects that are lost in the shuffle or like trail improvements?

Is there another 100 or?

There's actually a different category that is called the programmatic projects that is a separate, so they're not included at all in the discrete projects.

So every one of the discrete projects has a start and an end date, and when it's complete, it drops out of the CIP.

Okay, so let me tell you my concern.

Yes.

What I'm trying to understand is it seemed like when we started coming up with the concept of a watch list, if you will, that it was the larger projects where we're looking at cost overruns and whether it affect our bonding or our general sub fund or our utility funds, whether we didn't want to find out too late.

Our branch of government didn't want to find out too late.

And my concern when we're looking now at 286 projects is that the big ones that are flagged, and I know we have the watch list, but that's fairly large too, that some of the smaller discrete projects, and I'll speak just for myself, I wasn't too concerned about it.

It was a much larger project.

So I think that by doing that, you're taking the watch list enhanced projects from the discrete projects, I assume those are the ones we're going to flag.

And for your concerns, and for it's worth, our concerns as well, as I was saying, our interests are shared.

The reason on the program side, program projects, you know, The way they're administered is that there is a budget, I'm going to pick a number, it could be wrong.

There's a half a million dollars to spend on trail improvements.

Parks will never spend more than that on trail improvements in a given year.

There's no risk of them going over the budget, that's how they manage to it.

So one of the thoughts, and perhaps you'd considered it, is that 14th project, that's not on a watch list but indeed is a discrete project, I thought maybe you're going to do it by dollar threshold, like any projects over 5 million, let's say, or something.

And so what I'm hearing is it's not a monetary criterion.

It's whether there's a begin date and an end date, sort of just how it's categorized.

For the watch list, actually, we used the discrete projects.

It's more about how they are managed.

Right.

there are 200 plus discrete projects.

We then thought about what's a meaningful and useful way to report on the ones of those that are of most interest, and that's how we came up with the watch list idea.

And in particular, we've thought about different criteria, and one of them is financial threshold.

So we look hard at project 60 million, is that?

60 million is what we established initially, and then what we did is we the stages we found everything over 60 million we found that group of projects and then we found a bunch that are closing out and so we took those off the list because they're essentially done just some financial closeout items and that's how we came up with the initial watch list then the second watch list which you guys just adopted by the resolution is what we did is roughly the same thing and we and we added some through just deliberations and then sent it to you guys and then you had an opportunity.

It feels like almost anything of that magnitude belongs on a watch list unless it doesn't, if you will.

But then we also said, let's look below 60. If there's stuff there that is really complicated or of interest for you, and we have that for the dialogue, we added some.

So there'll be some projects that are below 60, and there'll be some above 60 that aren't there.

But it did provide, you know, and we looked at different cutoffs.

It seemed to be a useful distinction point.

Thank you.

opportunity on a regular basis to add projects, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

And us too.

I mean, we all, again, shared interest, we'll want to do the same potentially as well.

Thank you.

That's very helpful.

Please continue.

So that was that's kind of what the discrete projects report all of the non watch list projects contained Then we're gonna go through some highlights on the discrete projects report.

There was 286 projects in 2018 31 were completed or closed that that kind of is defined a little bit differently across departments.

A lot of these have long closure periods.

Closed to a department sometimes is considered substantially complete, there's physically complete, and then there's financial closeout.

These are all projects that weren't in the CIP, in the 19 to 24 CIP, so they're closed out.

There was some fire station projects, large IT projects, one or two utility projects, and some parks, little or parks projects.

And then of the 232 that were on the discrete project list, as you said, the subset are the watch lists.

And then by the simple math, there's almost 219 that are not on the watch list.

And as of the reporting here, 93% of them are projected to stay on budget.

There are 15 that are not, and what's interesting is half of the 15 are actually at the moment projected to come under.

So we're reporting everything above and below.

There were not significant risks in the ones that remain, but just as an example, we will seek an increase in the budget for the part of the Burke-Gilman project that's underway that's related to some reimbursable work from the utility.

So I don't have the details, but I think they've encountered some utilities.

work as part of that project and they'll have to be accepting some money from the City Light and SPU and I think also from King County to work on that.

I think Councilmember Herbold has a question, Ben.

Thank you.

Of the projects that are, of the 7% of projects that are not on budget but are over, do they happen to be ones that we've selected for the watch list?

I'm just trying to figure out whether or not we're selecting the right projects.

Yeah, no, they're not, but I think consistent is that they're not very far over.

I mean, these are small amounts, you know, like a couple hundred thousand dollars on, which is public's money, I want to be clear, that's a lot of money, but in the context of a multimillion dollar project, so, Here's an example of one.

There's a $14 million project in City Light for the Western energy and balance market, which I think is a combination of IT and some physical improvements.

It's a $14 million project.

Current projection is it'll be $347,000 relative to that.

This 93%, is that of all of the 232 discrete projects, or is it just of the non-watchlist projects?

I think it's non-watchlist projects.

So by definition, it is the non-watchlist projects.

Yes, correct.

So before we leap off the discrete projects report page, which, let's see, it's page 1, 2, 3. I notice here we have the aquarium expansion.

I know that this has been something on our list for many, many years, and we've got a $34 million adopted CIP budget for that.

We know that that's a public-private partnership, that that's the ceiling on what the city's going to put in.

And then after that, if it goes over, they're going, they, the aquarium, are going to have to raise more funds.

to deal with that.

Can you talk to us about where that project is in the process?

Yeah, Marshall Foster at the Office of Waterfront is in a better place, but I know that there are discussions right now with the aquarium actually, and our intent is to bring you an agreement between us and them that sets out the payment schedule, if you will, for that $34 million commitment from the city.

And the idea is to work with them on a Timeline that works for both of us.

It's informed by Their schedule which includes a fundraising schedule and then ultimately their construction schedule and then also from us.

I'm at the Principal source we plan to use to support that is real estate excise tax because it will actually be a city-owned facility Although operated by C's so I think the next few months you will have an opportunity ideally to approve an agreement that sets out a payment schedule for that and as you describe it that will be this The idea is that will be the city's commitment.

Good.

I would really request if we can to see that before September.

That is the goal for obvious reasons.

Yeah, good.

Just to clarify, this particular slide is, this is just six projects of 232 projects.

It's more, it's, you're not drawing our attention to these particular projects, you're just trying to show me the format.

We were trying to show you the format.

This is, I'm moving it around because I happened to bring it.

It's a beautiful format.

Yeah, no, it's, and yeah, and to fit it on whatever this is, six pages, I'm leaning hard on my bifocals.

But you can, you know, on the screen you can blow it up as big as you want.

Before Caleb moves off this slide, but also for the slide that I think you were looking at, Council Member Herbold, I wanted to draw your attention to the fact that this is, we're looking at actual costs as of the end of 2018 and projections that are more recent in the March-ish timeframe.

The comparisons against the budget is to the 2019 to 2024 adopted CIP.

That's, what the most recently adopted budget and CIP.

And it's a little bit of a funny mix and match because it's 2018 actuals versus 2019 and beyond CIP.

But when Caleb was saying that approximately 93% of the projects are on budget, the comparison is to changes which may have happened in the CIP.

Right.

So are we losing something by not having a column for the original projected cost?

If we're comparing whether or not we're to budget just to the best, most recent update, are we not being as transparent as we should be as it relates to the original projected cost of those projects?

I think it's a valid point.

It will only come up in the fourth quarter of each year.

The first, second, and third quarters of 2019 will be compared to the same 2019 to 2024 adopted CIP.

So we won't have a mix and match of information for three out of the four years.

In the fourth quarter of 2019, good food for thought, maybe we can think about giving you both data points and you can compare against.

And I think what you're identifying and isolating is a problem within a year, I think, it is replicated year after year after year if we're not keeping in a column that identifies what the original projected project cost was going to be.

We do, certainly for the enhanced reporting for the watch list projects, we have a sort of a baseline against which we always can compare.

That doesn't get updated.

This is a long-standing conundrum.

I'm having worked on reporting actually when I was with council as well about, because we, the documents, the public documents that people can track are the updated.

At some fundamental level, every project comes in on budget because you have to approve the budget for the project, right?

So, and that tautology is not satisfying.

But so, I think you've raised a good point, and we will think some, but as Dan has pointed out, for the bigger projects, we're definitely keeping track.

The other thing I would add, and I hope to, we were talking about this, we had been talking about this for a while, and I plan to bring you an example of when we present the budget in the fall.

For some of these larger projects, kinds of things that would be on the watch list, Our goal, our anticipation going forward is not to actually quote you.

When we first introduce a project into the CIP is not to give you a false sense of what the final budget would be.

Because we know at 0% design that we have no, likely don't have a good idea.

So what we're likely to do, what I'm hoping to be able to do, because I think it's better for everybody and more transparent.

is to say, and these are big projects, so this is a project we think will cost between, I'm making up numbers, $75 million to $125 million.

This is the business case, if you will, for the project, and we are asking for your approval for $5 million to do the design work to get us to a more precise, and it will only be a more precise, and we will ideally we're giving you a number that's, using my example, we'll say, this is with 75% confidence, we can tell you this project will complete at $100 million.

And we are now asking you for, in my example, potentially 95, right?

And then we will keep updating that as we go.

And also updating the confidence expectation.

Exactly, and the Ship Canal project, I think as you know, is right now in some ways the model for that.

of uncertainty.

No, and again, for us, it is both, it's true transparency in the sense it's acknowledging the uncertainty that is facing us all.

So we can move on to the ongoing program report.

This one's a little bit different because the focus is slightly different.

What we're trying to do, our initial intent was to focus on the discrete projects, and we were going to do ongoing programs a little bit later.

But we kind of combined this into one effort last year.

And so this one is a work in progress.

What we wanted to get at more so on this one was your accomplishment rate rather than just your spending rate.

Having spent 100% of your budget doesn't really tell us if you've accomplished all of the things you intended to accomplish.

So defining an accomplishment rate is a work in progress.

Some departments have more quantitative measures for that.

SDOT does a good job defining what that is.

Some of the other departments are working on it.

There's also a lot of ongoing programs that are customer driven.

Just the utilities have a lot of those that are requests from customers and you can't really tell how much you're gonna spend or it doesn't really give you a performance metric to tell you how much you spent of your previous budget.

So we're still working on that one.

What we showed in this particular report was their final revised budget and the actual spending and how much was spent.

For the first quarter next year, we will show the spent through first quarter and then what their accomplishment rate is defined as and what they expect to spend, their projection.

So I just wanted on this ongoing program.

report page, I noticed two things coming out of SDOT that are of major interest to a lot of people.

And the pedestrian master plan new sidewalks is an example where they've got percentage spent was 74%, roughly three quarters, but 54 blocks were planned and only 34 were completed.

So, you know, what is your quick percentage amount were less than I noticed over in the comments that consistent with the seasonality of sidewalk construction projects, we are always going to run into that with rain and the more snow that we have this year, but it says due to contractor and crew delays, several of the projects scheduled for 2018 delivery are expected to reach completion in Q1 or Q2 2019. So were they able to make up that remaining 35% by now?

I couldn't tell you as we sit here, but that's the nature of this reporting being ongoing.

But again, what you've highlighted here, and I was going to make the point, is that these programs Some of these are very important.

Very important to a lot of people.

Exactly.

I didn't want to give you a sense that we're trying to bury this.

It's quite the opposite.

But it's not that we can sort of identify a specific project that we're, you know, the sidewalks are in multiple locations all across the city.

So we're working on the best way to provide that information.

So we'll get back to you on the specifics of where, whether those, as we move into the Q1 and Q2 reports about how much of that work is actually getting completed in the way that they had projected.

And if you look at the next line too, Ben, and this is with the protected bike lanes.

And of course, all of you know, and SDOT knows for me personally, that connecting the downtown network is really critical if we're trying to get more people like me, age-friendly to ride your bikes, we've got to do this.

But that number to me is scary.

It's like, We're planned and only you know, 20% of those were completed yet.

We have spent a hundred and one percent of the plan So, you know, I again, I don't have enough detail here.

I mean, I could speculate that they shifted to from their original focus to some specific set of projects that were more expensive, but I don't actually know that.

So let's, again, the reports aren't going to be self-explanatory on every project.

So I think we'll need to follow up.

And this is a good example.

But it's also a great example of what Caleb was describing earlier.

that tracking the dollars isn't enough to give you a sense of what's really happening on the ground.

And again, it's a concern for us as well, so let's dig in and we can get back to you.

And we can spend some time with central staff identifying whether there are other of these types of programs that need more detail, if you will, and more information.

great and council member herbold yeah i just want to echo my interest in that because i think um in developing this process we did discuss um the idea of enhanced reporting for uh program cip program elements as well um and so rather than you know just having a line on a spreadsheet um i think we should talk about um criteria for some of these programmatic I think it is important to look at the different plans and budgets and figure out a way to look at some enhanced reporting around some of them as well.

Juxtaposing the 101% spent with about a fifth of the lane miles completed for the bike plan, and then similarly for asphalt, 98% spent, but it looks like about a third done.

And on that one, it's not clear to me.

It says 32 lane miles planned, 9.45 completed.

And the comments say that the projects were started in 2018, but construction schedules were too optimistic and they won't finish until 2019. How are you gonna tell that story in the first quarter report?

Or do you just sort of start all over again?

Or is it still against this baseline?

We will need to account for both what wasn't completed in 18 and sort of what was done in 19. It's a good question.

I don't have an answer as I sit here, but the point is well taken about how we're going to.

And again, that's what you're hitting on, and it's all important stuff, is the nature of this programmatic spending.

It's constantly ongoing, right?

And it looks to me as well that in a couple of instances here, was over optimistic about what they could get done.

So whether, and again, whether they're able to adjust to give us all more realistic projections about what's likely to happen would also be helpful.

Just for the sake of balance, I happen to notice, and we only put these up as examples really of the format, but I will note that on the pedestrian master plan school safety, the last project that's listed there, they actually did.

I was going to bring that up.

They did more projects than they had planned.

Yeah.

I do, I appreciate that, Ben.

I was gonna bring up that, I was just waiting for my entry point, is that, you know, I think that this oversight component in a coordinated effort is important because we wanna, of course, be able to identify when we're not getting it right or when we might be underperforming.

But I also think it's important for us to celebrate the successes.

And those moments of time where we actually over-delivered on particular projects, and you gave us one example here with the pedestrian master plan around the school safety issues.

I think, you know, during last year's budget process, we heard a lot of concerns from pedestrian advocates, particularly in the school safety zones, about our decision around taking some money out of that particular bucket of dollars in order to fund other council priorities.

And back then we had indicated to folks that it was our understanding that there would not be a compromise to the minimal promises made in terms of project delivery in school zones that promote safety.

And I think that this is showing us that we were correct in our policy choice and in our decision to reprioritize some of those funds.

So that in this instance, 108% of the funds were spent, 28 projects were planned, 41 projects were actually completed.

And the comments here provide that they had more funding this year than anticipated, which allowed them to deliver more accomplishments than their original target, including 20 mile per hour flashing beacons, walkway improvements, curb ramps, crosswalk beacons, and speed humps.

So I think that's, I just wanted to lift that up as an example of something positive that we're learning through this reporting.

I really appreciate that because one of the dynamics that I have to tell you is true on the executive side as well as for you is that the We rely on the transparency of the departments, even on the executive side.

We don't have, you know, Caleb is not a one-man shop on this front, but I mean, you know, you can appreciate the departments have lots of folks working on these sorts of projects.

So in an environment where there is both accountability, but there's also opportunity for explanation and understanding, it's just helpful so that we're, you know, again, I said this at the beginning, and that's why I said it.

I get the accountability, and we should be held accountable.

At the same time, there's often a complex story about, both under and overachievement, and just I'd want a chance to explain what's going on.

So we'll dig back in here and figure out what's going on.

And if it's a bad story, then bad on us, and we'll try to tell you what we're going to do to remediate.

And if there's some other nuance there, we'll have shared it.

Likewise, if it's a good story.

Exactly.

We should be telling those too.

No, and that is helpful to the departments as well.

It encourages us to understand that this is not a gotcha game.

It is transparency about where we are and telling the public what's going on and why.

Listen, at the end of the day, we're all human, and we respond to positive reinforcement.

So I am expressing my positive reaction to that last one and would like to have that reaction more often.

I am deeply appreciated, and we will aim to do just that.

All right, moving on.

Exactly.

So the watch list.

So the watchlist projects received the enhanced reports and what I was going to do is quickly run through the enhanced report just to describe how we laid this out.

This was obviously a collaborative effort with central staff, with the departments, just to get the information we need.

It boils down to scope, schedule, budget type information.

The first page is the project overview.

It's just a description of the work accomplished and identification of some risks that they're seeing on the horizon.

That's why we included the indicator light.

The risks here are, they're self-reported, and by nature, they're a little bit qualitative because they are what they feel the risk should be.

So we tried to get more complicated with this, but then it didn't produce the results we wanted.

So we boiled it down to high, medium, and low, and just took the average.

I'm sorry to interrupt, Caleb.

Are you walking through the reader's guide, or are you walking through one particular report?

I'm going to go through the layout of the report, so the reader's guide, essentially.

I do have a question about that, if that's okay.

So it's really helpful to have a reader's guide.

Again, the collaboration of this effort is a lot of it's about making sure that we're all using the same language to describe similar things across departments.

The risk factors that we are rating are Cost estimates, risk profile, community and council interest.

And the reader's guide said that risk factors are rated by departments as one, two, or three.

Green meaning all elements are rated one, two.

Yellow meaning two or more elements rated two.

And red means any risk element is rated three or all are ranked two.

Is that, that's the standard that we're using here?

Okay.

And again, just so we read them off, the five elements are scope, schedule, budget, coordination, and community impact.

I was not.

Yeah.

Thank you for that correction.

That was from the resolution, and that was just general criteria, not for.

This is the interpreted version, if you will.

Got it.

And then, as it relates to what's in the report itself, for each report, you identify yellow, green, and red, but it looks like there's some inconsistency.

between different reports of whether or not they identify the risk element, particularly for the yellow and the red, like what, so which of the risk elements are, have been flagged.

I think there's some of the individual reports do that and some don't.

And we're working with the departments to better to get the information we need from them.

This is relatively new.

It's only the second time we've actually done this report.

So they're kind of getting a sense of what the council is looking for as well.

So we're working with them to define those.

But I think I hear what you're saying.

I think it makes sense, which is that if We're giving you a summary sort of an app.

We have five criteria that we're summarizing into a single dashboard color and a little more information about which of the five triggered us into the one color or the other.

I can understand why that would be helpful, but I'm just making sure I understood.

So yes, duly noted.

We could, in future reports, move from this sort of composite summary, you know, red, yellow, green, but only one of those to account for five different risk factors.

We could provide the detail behind it and just say, you know, the, let's see, what are the options?

a red and everything else is a green and give you that detail that I believe the departments are reporting on that.

The only thing, we absolutely can do it and I'm open to doing it.

And Caleb has already provided the qualifier, which I would add, which is it's, this is self-reported and it is qualitative.

But again, we're not trying to hide anything.

We have the information.

So that's the.

How would you do that?

What is your visual on it?

Would you add it to your spreadsheet there?

So right now we're reporting and we could.

We could, there's a, we have a summary dashboard for the risk status.

We could have that summary and then underneath it, or above it, I suppose, have the individual elements and, if you will, the color of each of those, and then it'd be obvious how they summed up or not.

The averaging is a little tricky, but.

What do you?

Well, it's not because it's just an SPU project, but it's been flagged by staff for me that the Ship Canal Water Quality Project is a good example of providing the more granular detail about the type of risk factor, so maybe just take a look at that one.

Okay.

Okay, and then the second page, and this kind of gets to the explanation of some of those risks, because we have the budget summary is the second page, so that describes kind of what they're projecting for the project.

in the current quarter.

So what we're showing right now is we have a 30% baseline total project cost.

That's the industry standard for when you establish your baseline for your project.

But that's 30% design.

And this could speak to the point that you raised, Council Member Hobold.

We are anchoring ourselves to that original budget and comparing to it for these larger projects.

And then we included the 19 to 24 adopted CIP total project cost, the actual spending through 2018, and then the projection.

The variance on this page is the difference between the projection and the previously adopted budget.

So it'll show that's the variance.

We didn't show the variance to the 30% design.

I mean, it was just getting a little bit cumbersome to show all that.

And then we provide the narrative section for them to explain what's going on there.

The chart itself is cumulative to show the spending over the years.

And then the third page is the schedule, showing the schedule risk, what is projected for the schedule.

This gets a little bit tricky because some of these projects, the bigger projects have multiple sub-projects within them.

Example is the Ship Canal Water Quality Project.

So it's a little bit tricky to show exactly what the schedules for all of those elements are.

We're working with the departments to do that.

And then the final- Excuse me, before you leave that page, I just point out that there is, similarly to the budget slide, there is a baseline project schedule which remains constant even as the project schedule updates.

And a note on that is we are starting in the middle of some of these projects, so we just didn't include that because it's probably not that informative right now.

So as we move forward, as projects hit that milestone, we'll include those.

And then the last page is to show the project funding by the funding source, and just to show what the strategy is if there is a funding gap.

We didn't include this for the utility projects because they're primarily rate funded, and so it was just one pie, and it wasn't very helpful.

So that's the basic layout of the report and kind of the intent.

Now we will go through watch list projects.

Yeah, so here's the list of them, and then I thought it'd be worth walking through where we are on that summary risk factor.

And I can say a couple of things about these projects, but again, I'm honestly not the expert.

So the Madison Street Bus Rapid Transit, the risk here is that we're, More than anything it's a there's both a schedule risk But a the bigger issue is a budget risk or a funding risk and that's we're waiting on federal grants So it's a higher risk project because we have not secured the funding.

But again, that that's It's not that's not a good thing or a bad thing.

It is the thing if you will Laid right for a couple of years now I thought we were planning to move forward this year in it and then it was we had to take a step back and

Again, I don't have all the details.

Anyway, I'm not going to try to do this on the fly.

And we've grouped these now.

So this page I'm talking from is the SDOT subset.

So that's in terms of ordering things.

Last one, viaduct replacement.

There are multiple projects in the viaduct space, if you will.

This one that we're talking about here is the Habitat Beach.

And it's looking good.

And it's expected to be completed this year.

23rd Avenue Corridor, that was a paving project that in some ways was one of the motivations for this enhanced reporting work.

It did not go as well as all had hoped.

So we are finishing Phase 2 there and then beginning design on Phase 3. So it generally looks okay.

I have to look back and see what the risk factors were.

Yeah, I think more than anything, since we're only in design on Phase 3, there's still some uncertainty there.

How will the delay in the viaduct demolition impact this habitat beach?

I am expecting to get reports from Estad and the Office of the Waterfront tomorrow on that very question.

So real-time question, and this is backward look, this is an older report, so we are interested in finding out what those impacts might be.

And just personal note, I happened to have ridden my bike down the waterfront last evening and I hadn't been down since.

It's amazing.

Sorry, that's really editorial.

That's right.

I had the same experience a week ago, but we saw in the paper just this week that the contractor is saying they're only two weeks behind, but we heard from some of the waterfront business leaders that they were concerned that it was way more impactful than just two weeks.

So thank you if you'll let us know what you

Yeah, we're tracking that one.

Northgate bridge and cycle track, so they're getting ready, moving closer towards construction.

So risks here, we still need to nail down some of the permitting work.

I think the biggest thing is the project is not, we've not received bid, they're not put the project out to bid yet, and we've not received bids back.

And until you actually have a bid on a project, you don't really know whether your budget's going to work or not.

So again, transparency about where we are on that.

I think that is a really good point.

This is really helpful.

I believe they're evaluating the bids right now.

Okay.

Yeah.

I think, Ben, you're covering these at the right level.

I just want to point out to folks that for each of these projects, there is a four-page report that has a lot more detail.

So we're just giving, you know, the kind of top-level summary.

And we can talk more, too, about if we're going to do this on a regular basis, how you want us to come and present.

Well, I think it's a really good point.

I think that having time to delve in to the report prior to this meeting so that, you know, we can ask you very specific questions that we can point to the information that's been provided to us.

Because obviously we all are very interested in many, many of these projects.

So we also don't want to put you on the spot, Ben, to ask you for.

I'm happy to be on the spot and I will defer when I don't have answers.

I want to echo that hope.

because we got the materials a week ago and I think it would be a little bit...

helpful to have a little bit more space between the receipt of the report and the scheduling of the committee presentation.

I also would really like the opportunity, and we can't do this in a week's time, the opportunity to invite the chairs of the committee with the oversight of these departments, like we've discussed before.

So the transportation chair, for instance, and the parks chair, if there are parks projects on the watch list, which there aren't this time, but City Light and me.

And in that time, too, we'd have an opportunity, if you had questions, we'd have an opportunity to process them.

And again, I'm happy to present our answers here, because I'm not trying to hide anything, but that way, this could be more productive, potentially.

I think so.

Well, this is the first time, so we'll figure this out.

A suggestion on the utility projects, SPU and City Light.

Both of them have review panel types of oversights.

I'm wondering if there's a way we can get a message to those panels that maybe one of those members could sort of take ownership of being the liaison on this work.

Their purpose, of course, is sort of to be the watchdogs as well on when capital projects go a little high.

So maybe one of them could take ownership of that.

I'm happy to reach out to utilities and get their sense on that.

So I'm going to continue.

It sounds like this is still productive.

Lander.

Things are actually going well, it is inherently a risky project because we are building over train tracks and the coordination there is tricky.

But in general, my understanding is the project is moving forward well.

Delridge had been a- I just want to also give you kudos about Lander because My understanding is that original design and estimates were much higher than the $125 million.

And our spending projection is $102 million.

So again, another good story.

It appears this project is going to come in over budget.

I was going to wait until it did before I celebrated.

But yes, this one actually looks positive.

But we're still, and again, this gives you a sense, we're still rating it as medium because it's actively under construction.

And we could still run into something.

Delridge, medium, it was actually higher towards the end of last year because what's happened here is we discovered there was a significant drainage issue that needs to be addressed in order to do the paving work that had always been planned.

So we're working now with SPU.

So the overall project cost here is going to increase in principally because the scope is increased because there is this drainage element that needs to be addressed as well given the scale of the repaving element.

So now shifting to the waterfront projects, the main corridor, again, we just, you just, Council Member Baxter, asking about that, and I think the medium risk here, and we're going to find out some more about where they are in terms of potential delay.

Overlook Walk will be a complicated project, and also when we were, At the time these reports were being prepared, the LID still remained a little uncertain.

And that uncertainty has been resolved in the months since as well.

The pier projects are rated medium here.

Pier 58 is in design.

These are not unlike the railroad project.

These are projects that are being constructed in the water and are inherently risky, if you will, and complicated.

So I think we'll be back to you with some more information about these in coming months.

It's great.

Well, it's 58. We're having to deal with the fish windows and then all of that.

All of it makes it more complicated.

So if we could have a schedule on what you're anticipating outcomes to.

And then lastly, utilities, ship canal project we've talked about.

Denny substation transmission lines, this is the transmission lines that will connect to the substation.

That is going to be a difficult project, just a complex project.

We're only now in the design levels, but it'll be underground work in a very urban environment.

On that one, what does it mean that in the schedule risk, it says as the project moves forward towards completion, a significant amount of non-conforming work within the project has been identified during the final acceptance?

That was the Denny substation.

That's actually the last one.

You know, that's fine.

I thought we were at the Denny's substation transmission line.

Yeah, exactly.

No, no.

So I was about to get to Denny's sub.

So the issue here is that we're there.

And some of this is maybe best taken up in executive session.

There are some issues with the contractor about the work that has been completed and questions about who's responsible and who's not.

And so that's so we're in that final closeout stage and still sorting through that.

But again, transparent about there being an issue.

given its subtleties and complexity, not in a position to go further.

Great.

This is not the kind of project, at this stage of this project, there's no policy decisions left there that could mitigate those risks, I think is the point.

Exactly.

No, and it's right.

want to both acknowledge the work that you're doing on oversight, but also what Seattle City Light was doing with the community in a very positive way.

Seattle City Light representatives met with John Pearson, Mirabella, a lot of the other folks up there, and coordinated efforts with SDOT so that we weren't digging up streets twice, but making sure that we had, you know, even empty cable vaults, but put them in at the same time so that we could just use that road space well.

So, as you're talking to people, I just want to acknowledge the fact that I appreciate how hard they've worked and worked well with my office.

Much appreciated.

We'll pass that on.

And I wanted to say that I appreciate the comments The spirit with which we're doing this work, because this isn't gotcha work.

The public, they don't care.

They look at us all as the same as the city.

So if we go over these cost overruns, they're not saying it was the department executive, it was the council, it was the city of Seattle.

So I think the departments fully understand that.

So we're all in this together, and I think this is a good body of work.

So I look forward to, appreciate a lot.

Thank you.

My only request in the future is put page numbers on your.

on your handouts.

Gotcha.

I can do that.

It's a please, it's not a gotcha.

I've been well guided.

That's part taken.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Anything else?

Good.

Really appreciate it.

All right.

Thank you.

And I know we've gone over a little bit longer.

I look forward to hearing from FAS now.

Thank you all for being here and for waiting.

We ought to get some coffee after that discussion.

I'm sure we put him to sleep on that one.

Oh, how could you be?

Are you kidding?

It was great.

Thank you for coming, and thank you for all your work.

Yeah, it's great.

Council Member Amaya, I read it in.

Please, would you?

Item number 5, 2018 Finance and Administrative Services, Race and Social Justice Initiative accomplishments.

Great.

And I see that our Director Goings is here.

Oh, Maggie, how nice to see you back at the table.

And then I'll ask everybody else to introduce themselves.

Does everybody get settled in?

The green light here up here on the stem everybody make sure that your lights on and these things move So if you'll make sure that they move close to you so we can hear you and Calvin going to do you like to start the introduction sir and glad you're here.

Thank you chair bag shot I just want to say thank you again to members of the committee for the opportunity to be here today And I'll let the team introduce themselves if that's all right absolutely Maggie Thompson the equity and policy director in the director's office

Sherry McLeod with regulatory compliance and consumer protection.

Kelly Allen, senior analyst with the fleet's management division.

I am also the co-lead of the change team.

Dora Wren, RCCP.

All right, Dora, you've got a lovely, beautiful, dulcet, soft voice, so move this towards you, if you will.

Dora Wren, RCCP, and I am also change team lead.

Thank you, Dora.

Hi, I'm Darcy Sinkmars.

I'm with the fleet management division and the motor pool manager.

Thank you, Darcy.

Liz Alzear, City Purchasing and Contracting Services Division Director.

Great, thanks, Liz.

All right, Mr. Goings.

Chair Bakeshaw, thank you very much.

We're really excited to be here today to talk about our 2018 Race and Social Justice accomplishments, as well as a few brief look-aheads on the projects we are actively working on this year.

I want to first acknowledge the members of our amazing staff and our FAS Change Team, many of whom are here in the audience today.

If they can wave.

amazing team, and they really have been critical partners in all that we'll be talking about today.

I know we've got about 30 minutes or so, but want to be respectful of your time.

So we have about a 15 to 20 minute PowerPoint, which we'll go through quickly.

And if possible, maybe to hold the questions to the end, because I think you'll find many of the questions are answered during the course of the presentation.

So I just want to start by saying thank you, first of all.

Thank you for your confirmation of my appointment as the FAS director back on September 17th.

And in that short seven months, we really have done a major recalibration to uplift, highlight, operationalize, and socialize equity at FAS.

Because it really is foundational to all of the work that we do in our department.

And that starts with establishing our five pillars, which you'll see on the screen behind me.

These really are the guidework, the guiding principles, the framework to everything we do at FAS.

And you'll be hearing a little bit more about those throughout the course of the presentation.

So first, to frame our conversation about race and social justice today, I want to focus on our efforts specifically in two of the five pillars.

Specifically, pillar number two, a respectful, equitable, and collaborative workplace really is important to me both personally and as the director of FAS.

And we've implemented several efforts to strengthen this body of work.

First, I've elevated the good work that was going on at FAS by establishing an equity and policy director in the director's office and have sought deeper engagement with our teams across FAS around change team and equity in racial equity toolkits.

Secondly, early in my tenure, we kicked off a months-long process to establish performance agreements with all of my leadership team, all of the managers, and the strategic advisors at FAS.

So for the first time ever, 100% of all people managers and strategic advisors at FAS have a written performance agreement.

And a key part of those agreements is furthering racial equity within the department.

Third, our HR division is updating our workplace expectations and standards.

We're reviewing our workforce equity impacts and performance measures and discipline.

And we're applying an equity lens to our recruiting and onboarding for all new staff.

So Mr. Goings, quick question.

This is fabulous.

I love it that every manager has this kind of an agreement in place.

Are you the only department doing this?

I can't speak to that.

Let me ask you the question.

Let me rephrase that question.

It's the first time in my experience that FAS has done this.

Is this something that we should look into more deeply?

I can just speak for my department.

As a new department director, when I started on day one, I was interested in seeing the evaluations of the senior managers of the department, and they did not exist.

And so part of, I think, an opportunity for us to improve the work that we do is to make sure that we're holding our frontline staff and our senior managers all accountable.

And by having written performance agreements, written understanding of what's expected of me to be a successful employee, I think is very important.

And then pillar number four, economic opportunity through city contracting.

You know, systemic and institutional racism is real.

And FAS must do our part through our cornerstone programs such as WIMBY and Priority Hire.

And to that end, we are absolutely committed to promoting economic development opportunities to underrepresented communities.

and continue to build on the success of these efforts going forward.

And that's just a quick overview.

You're going to hear a lot more detail of these exciting programs in a moment.

But to kick things off, I want to turn it over to Maggie Thompson, our Director of Equity and Policy, to talk about the work she's been coordinating in partnership with the amazing team at FAS.

Maggie.

Thank you, Calvin.

So we have a lot to cover.

My intent is to give you a brief snapshot of sort of the coordinated effort that I've been doing in partnership with everybody at the table and in the audience.

We, of course, continued our ongoing work around WIMBYs and priority hire, which you'll hear about in a moment, but first wanted to highlight some of the other efforts that started last year.

We took a renewed focus on racial equity and FAS particularly with respect to support for the change team and engaging newly and differently on racial equity toolkits.

With respect to the change team, we expanded the change team, went from about two or three existing members in 2017 and now to nearly 20 members representing every division across the department.

The growth has been a real dynamic process as the team continues to build relationships and skills in doing racial equity work in collaboration with all of their colleagues.

So you'll hear more from Dora and Kelly in a little bit, but we're really excited this year to have a new foundational charter document and an upcoming retreat to dig in on this work further.

How big is your department, again, how many employees?

630 employees, give or take.

Thank you, thank you.

And then just quickly, in addition, we took a special emphasis on racial equity toolkits last year.

We started by requesting proposals from all of our divisions and then moved forward with nearly every one of them.

We've been working very closely with the Office for Civil Rights to develop trainings and workshops for all of the staff to really support them in moving through that work.

And then subsequently we've developed a community of practice around this body of work.

Project teams generally span multiple divisions, multiple subject matter experts.

Every project has members of the change team on it.

And then I've been holding monthly community of practice sessions with our staff teams where they can learn from each other, discuss challenges, opportunities, and then we also bring in staff both from OCR and from other departments share their equity expertise.

So that's been a really powerful space for the staff to do some learning.

This has definitely been a learning curve, but I can say that these projects have already had a strong impact in terms of helping staff bring a racial equity lens.

both to these projects and to their existing jobs that they do more broadly.

So you'll hear a lot more detail about all of these things, but kind of just wanted to give you a quick overview.

And I'm going to turn it over to Liz next to talk about WIMBYs and priority hire.

Great.

And I am so appreciative of your enthusiasm.

Let's just start with that, that this sounds about as positive as I could imagine in seven months.

Well done.

OK, Liz.

Thank you.

So the slide before you, or behind me, reflects FAS Wimby spend for 2018. And as shown, with the exception of FAS consultant contracting spend, which unfortunately fell significantly short of our projected Wimby goal, FAS Wimby spend for purchasing, transactions, and completed construction projects exceeded the city's actual Wimby spend.

To ensure we achieve our goals this year, FAS has implemented a more robust plan reflecting WMBIE plans for each division that are tied to key staff performance agreements, increased training efforts, and monthly reviews.

For prompt pay, FES increased its prompt payment rate in 2018 to 90%, a 7% increase over 2017 and 4% over the citywide average of 86%.

While FAS would like to achieve 100% prompt pay, we're confident that this year we'll meet the citywide prompt pay goal of 95% through our close monitoring and reporting out on a quarterly basis.

Liz?

Yes.

This is great.

We know that small businesses can't wait oftentimes, but you specifically used the word consultants.

What about contractors?

Are we paying our contractors 90% of the time as well?

I would have to get back to you on that, but we do have prompt pay provisions in our construction projects.

That's a good question.

I love what I'm hearing, so this is not critical.

Maybe it will be after I say it like that, right?

So the PropPay notion of paying within 30 days.

When I get a utility bill or any other bill now, I mean, in the olden days when I was younger, you know, before the internet, you got those 30 days, but it seems like if you're a week late now, you start getting all these calls, your cell phone rings, you get these texts.

It seems to me that we as a city, we really penalize folks out there for not paying us properly within 30 days in our utilities and everything else.

So is it that hard for us to pay our consultants?

just not just your department, but all departments within 30 days, it just seems like we should hit that 100% of the time.

So what are we doing wrong?

Because we insist people pay us within 30 days pretty religiously as an institution.

It's a tough question, but maybe we could talk offline about how we improve that, because for the 10% of the folks that weren't paid on time, it just seems like we're not practicing what we preach as an employer.

So I don't really want you to respond, but it just seems to me that as a city, we should be able to, all the departments should be able to do that 100% of the time.

We expect it, right?

It's our goal and definitely worth the follow-up.

Yeah.

All right, thank you.

I'll now highlight our priority hire program, which applies to select construction projects of $5 million or more.

But I'd first like to start with the priority hire success story.

Andrea, the woman in the photo on the slide, is a laborer apprentice and mother of five.

Andrea completed a news trades rotation program in the summer of 2016. And as a pre-apprenticeship graduate, she was given hiring preference and placement on the City of Seattle's Denny's substation project.

She earned more than $115,000 in direct wages on the project, and the contractor has retained her for work on other projects.

As the data on the slide illustrates, the city's Priority Hire Program promotes access to construction careers for women like Andrea, for people of color, and for others who are underrepresented in the construction industry.

Our Priority Hire Program prioritizes the hiring of residents that live in economically distressed areas, particularly in Seattle and King County.

This next slide shows that under our Priority Hire program, women and people of color, especially African Americans and apprentices of color, have seen an increase in work opportunities on these projects.

The success of Priority Hire has also led to an expansion onto public-private partnership projects like the Arena Renovation Project, the Seattle Asian Art Museum Project, and soon the Aquarium Project.

I'm pleased to share with Council today that the City continues to be a national leader in these workforce development efforts, and I want to thank Council for its ongoing support of the program.

I also want to thank the labor unions, contractors, apprenticeship programs, and community partners who are at our side.

It takes true partnership to meet the region's demand for construction workers, and we applaud them for putting underrepresented communities first.

I would like to highlight that in 2015, when our priority hire ordinance was first signed, council gave us a goal to have 40% of construction labor hours on these projects performed by people living in these priority zip codes.

So far, we're on track to meet this goal by 2025. And while we appreciate having this ambitious goal to work toward, much has changed since 2015 with the huge boom in construction and other entities in the region adopting priority hire.

Even with the recruitment and retention strategies we have in place, reaching 40% by 2025 presents a challenge that will require ongoing review.

We will be seeking guidance from our Priority Hire Advisory Committee on this challenge, and we will share any recommendations they may have with you.

I'll now turn it over to Dora and Kelly, and they'll be sharing information with you on our change team activities.

Good afternoon.

Hi, Dora.

Hi.

Thank you for allowing us to be here today.

I'll give you a rundown of the change team.

Maggie really touched a lot of the things that we have progressed in doing since 2017, 2018, and currently.

We have had an opportunity to direct and expand our membership throughout the department.

because of the input of our current director and Maggie, from two in 2017 to now about 20 individuals, most of whom are in the audience today.

We've also had the opportunity to do community service, which is something that was not stressed.

We have Food Lifeline within the department.

In 2018, the department was able to deliver 1,300 pounds of food to Food Lifeline, in 2017, rather.

In 2018, it was 1,800 pounds of food.

My expectation this year is we'll at least hit the one ton mark.

So as far as community service, we're doing great things within the department for our stakeholders and interior and exterior.

I'm going to turn it over to my co-lead, Kelly Allen.

And thank you for your generosity.

I mean, a ton of food is a big deal.

And it's a big deal.

And I appreciate you doing that.

So with the expansion of our team, we took the opportunity to do a sort of reset for our foundation.

And so part of that, we worked together to establish our mission statement, which goes as follows.

The Department of Finance and Administrative Services has the most diverse set of responsibilities of any city department.

In support of FAS's service to both internal and external customers, the FAS RHAI change team is committed to promoting equity, diversity, and transparency in department transactions.

Seeking ways to, I'm missing some.

Seeking ways to further incorporate racial equity into FAS lines of business through the racial equity toolkit as well as other means.

Growing the community of FAS employees who bring a racial and social justice lens to the work they do every day as public servants for the city of Seattle.

We have also, as stewards of this work, And in the spirit of setting a foundation setting, we resolved to adopt a charter that fits our needs today.

The process itself, I would consider that or describe it to be synergistic, representing the power of working together.

The result is a starting point for us, a structure that underpins our mission.

So we are also working with the department in the racial equity toolkits.

We are actively involved in several of the REDDD projects that are happening throughout the department.

We'll talk in more detail in coming slides about that.

We are also, the change team is involved in some other valuable partnerships as Calvin kind of pointed to in the beginning, this department is working on applying a racial equity lens to a lot of the processes and procedures that are happening.

So part of that, We are being called upon or asked to participate or partner with the Human Resources Department to kind of apply that racial equity lens into some of the HR processes.

So I will turn it over actually to Dora to talk more about another partnership that we have with the Fire Department Hiring Board.

The Seattle Fire Department last year decided to change their hiring practices and processes.

And one of the things that they asked was for the change teams throughout the department change teams throughout the city to have representation for their hiring process for their fireman's boards.

It's a unique opportunity.

It was the first of its kind.

The RSAI individuals had an incredible impact on their hiring practices and the outcomes for their employees.

We had an opportunity, I was on the board as well, to not only interview the candidates, but we also had an opportunity to critique the interviewers, which gave a very level playing field to how they handle their business.

And I think the outcomes will show with this new hiring process with the whole new group of recruits they had this year.

So we're very proud to have done that last year.

We've been invited to do that again this year.

And we're looking forward to this collaboration in the future.

I just want to say thank you, Kelly, you as well, on this.

That's the first time that I have heard about a cross-departmental effort that way.

And what you were suggesting about critiquing the evaluators or the people that were actually selecting, that's first-class work.

And I think that'll really move the needle on what we're trying to accomplish.

Council President Harrell.

That is outstanding work.

I missed on how that had come about.

did the Department of Firefighter Department or the chief approach you or did you approach, how did that, this synergy come together?

From what I understand, we were approached to ask if we would be interested in it.

And I'm not sure how they came to that conclusion.

Maggie can probably help.

I believe it was an ask from the mayor's office to citywide change teams to volunteer essentially to participate in those panels.

Because I know, We have looked at police and fire particularly, but other departments on the hiring.

Tonight I have a meeting at 7 o'clock with the president of the black firefighters Association and there will be about eight firefighters, many of them are Old dinosaurs like me that have been around for 20, 30, 40 years.

But the numbers have been staggering in terms of the losses of women and people of color.

And so, again, in a post-I-200 environment, And I think there's been a lot of unintended consequences here, or maybe even intended consequences.

But that kind of work becomes critical in where we're trying to get.

And quite candidly, no one within the department seems to oppose trying to look at how we could do better.

But we just can't seem to get there.

So I'm real pleased to hear your team helping out.

That's great.

Thank you.

We appreciate it, and we look forward to doing many more collaborations.

I'm really looking forward to seeing the police department once they step forward.

We'll leave that to you, Representative Powell.

What strikes me about what you're all saying is that this is genuine.

I don't mean to ever say that we hear a lot of words, but sometimes we do.

But this seems like it's been embodied.

You are leading the charge here.

You are doing some things.

that are unique and successful.

And I'm very appreciative to all of you for your extra work.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

And with that note, we are planning our first retreat for FAS change team members, which will be the first week in May, as a matter of fact.

We are very excited about it.

A lot of members are here, very excited about it.

It's in cooperation, of course, with SCR.

are anticipating this to be an annual event, it would also enable us to bridge our work for the future for 2019 and possibly into 2020 as well.

And if you have anything you want to add.

No, just kind of echoing how excited we are to further build our infrastructure, build our awareness and plan for the future.

One question, Chair.

So getting your participants, these lovely folks at the table in the audience, getting the numbers up, it doesn't surprise me.

Mr. Gowen's reputation precedes him.

Before he was with the city on doing this kind of work, he's spent a lifetime of inclusion, and I've known him in a prior life, so to speak.

But it can't just be him alone.

Maybe it was, but how do you get the energy up from a couple of people to 20?

someone's a good cook and brought food or something or I appreciate your kind words back council president but I just need to be clear you know I set some broad goals but it's the people around this table that did the work and the people behind me that did the work we have an amazing team at FAS and I've said it from day one I think FAS was a department that never And I think with a little bit of goal setting, the resources that are necessary, and then get the heck out of their way, this is an amazing team that is doing absolutely transformational work each and every day at FAS.

And they deserve the credit.

It's a good director.

Okay, so what else do we have here?

I know we're getting short on time, so we'll move along to the next slide.

So the FAS monitors women in our minority owned business utilization very closely on its projects.

And we work proactively to support contractors to be successful on our community workforce agreement covered projects.

For example, we engage in contractor education at all stages of the project.

and we provide one-on-one technical assistance as necessary.

However, we've noticed that over the past few years, WMBIE utilization has increased on non-Community Workforce Agreement projects and yet remains steady on CWA projects.

While this may not be a trend, we're interested in proactively considering ways to further increase WMBIE participation on community workforce agreement projects and therefore have undertaken a racial equity toolkit to identify opportunities to improve our MBE participation.

So far we've conducted focus groups in late 2018 and earlier this year.

and we're continuing with our stakeholder engagement strategy throughout this spring.

For our next steps, after completing stakeholder engagement, we'll go through steps three through six of the toolkit, and then we'll report back to our Priority Hire Advisory Committee made up of contractors, union representatives, training providers, and community advocates.

Great.

I was earlier today talking with Sound Transit about the outreach they've been doing for ST3, and I think they've done an amazing job on neighborhood by neighborhood.

What I had asked them if they would do is to make sure, and they've said they were already doing it, but working with the Department of Neighborhoods.

And they had really dived deeply into the neighborhoods where there haven't been people that, or meeting people that hadn't been part of the I think it's important to remember that we are in the middle of real processes to date.

And if you've got things like that that you're doing, working with the department of neighborhoods to pass on names, contacts, because we're always trying to find people who are the natural cultural leaders, maybe not necessarily the ones that have been most involved to date.

If there are names of people, organizations, that you can share with D.O.N., I think that would be very helpful.

Very good.

Thank you.

Okay.

Thank you.

So I'll end my portion of the presentation with one final success story.

This story is about Tracy, shown in the slide here.

Tracy is the owner of T&T Traffic Control, LLC.

We first met Tracy when she worked as a laborer on a City Light project.

Since then, Tracy has started her own traffic control company with 18 projects completed or underway, including the Arena project.

We applaud workers like Tracy who made the bold move to start their own construction companies.

We believe it's truly an inspiring representation of the goals of both the Priority Hire Program and the city's WMBIE program.

Well done and it sounds like some of our small business administration helpers were involved in this too.

I'll turn it over to Darcy who will cover her team's important RIT work on shared mobility.

Thank you, Liz.

So the next slide you'll see is about a racial equity toolkit on shared mobility.

The desired outcome of the RET is to promote economic advancement of people of color through a shared mobility service contract for use by city employees for city business travel.

Establishing a contract is essential to augment the existing motor pool with the city to give city employees more travel options when conducting city business.

This will improve accessibility for employees who do not work downtown where our current motor pool exists and for employees when the motor pool is fully booked.

So our RET stakeholder outreach and research included engagement with share mobility providers such as local taxi companies and TNCs.

We also engaged current motor pool users, fleet coordinators, and regulatory compliance and contracting professionals in FAS.

So on the next slide, you can see that we're moving on to next steps already.

We're implementing the next step, in fact.

We are working in fleet management to create a centrally managed pilot contract with two local taxi companies that are primarily owned and operated by people of color.

These contracts will provide the city employees the ad hoc and scheduled ride services they need to use for city business travel.

We'll use the pilot experience in 2019 to guide the development of a long-term contract proposal process in 2020. And that's that, Rhett.

We'll turn it over to Sherry for the last one.

This is a grand idea.

As we all know, that using something other than renting a city car costs a lot less.

And I think in our office, we've pretty much shifted over.

I like the idea of having the specific companies that you've contracted with as a possibility.

One thing I'd just like to throw in here, and I've heard and I'm so grateful on all this work, we've been also focused on age-friendly efforts and making sure that we're reaching out to people of all ages and abilities so that as we're looking at these contracts, if you will just Add on through your, I know we use the acronym of RET, your toolkit, just to make sure that we're considering people who may not have the ability to get around as easily.

as many of us are fortunate to do.

We've discussed that with the taxi companies already, looking about the wheelchair accessibility and also just access from the street.

Where can they pull up to Seattle Municipal Tower, for example, making sure it's available for our employees.

If I could be so bold to ask a favor.

Sure.

I ask a lot of favors in my lifetime.

On this pilot, I'm very interested in it.

I'm chair of the taxi committee and TNC committee and the ride shares and that whole world is just a fascinating world.

Presented your department with a lot of challenges, us as a council member and the executive with a lot of challenges.

I kept apprised of sort of what that pilot looks like, and this is the first I've heard of it.

It could be fascinating.

As you well know, we have some resolutions in place in what we're trying to do.

We're always trying to create parity, but I'd love to just know more about it.

So if there's some way I could get some information on what that looks like, I'd deeply appreciate that.

Absolutely.

Good afternoon.

And thank you, Darcy.

People of color have been disproportionately burdened by the criminalization of marijuana and disproportionately affected by economic barriers to business ownership.

Washington and Colorado, as the first states to legalize, did not include any equity program elements, such as vacating marijuana convictions and prioritizing licenses to those most impacted by criminalization of marijuana.

Mayor Durkin and City Attorney Pete Holmes addressed the vacation of Seattle Municipal Court marijuana misdemeanor convictions in 2018. Governor Inslee announced his marijuana justice initiative in January of this year, allowing individuals with one marijuana misdemeanor to apply for a pardon.

Currently, Senate Bill 5605 appears to be heading to the governor's desk this week, which would allow thousands of individuals to apply to vacate their marijuana misdemeanor convictions.

We are in our fifth year of legalization.

People identifying as white own 78% of the Seattle marijuana retail stores, but demographics show whites as 69% of the Seattle population.

African American ownership is at 2%.

It's actually one store.

and African Americans represent approximately 7% of Seattle's demographics.

There are more people of color as marijuana dispensary operators prior to legalization.

This inequitable trend is reflected across jurisdictions who have decriminalized.

Some cities and states new to legalization have built into their efforts equity elements, priority licensing, fee reduction and waivers, mentoring, incubation programs, support, and funding.

Our RIT team has been conducting research and engaging in stakeholder outreach.

Our stakeholders include former medical marijuana dispensary owners, community and business associations, civil rights organizations, community leaders, and other city departments.

Our research has included the state application and license process and learning from other jurisdictions with similar objectives to address the inequities with new programs under legalization.

Our next steps include continued work with the Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board as a key partner.

They've actually participated by telephone at some of our meetings.

We will continue to learn and engage with our stakeholders to develop recommendations to address our outcome and support equity in this industry.

The photo in the slide is actually our team a couple, three weeks ago down in Olympia.

We did a little field trip to go down there and learn more about the legislative process, and we were fortunate enough to meet the sponsor of Senate Bill 5605, Senator Joe Nguyen.

And we got to see the cherry blossoms.

I would like to say that that is a very good use of your time.

And I appreciate the fact that you took the time to go down to Olympia, learn more about the process, meet with the people that you needed to talk to about why this bill was important.

So thank you for doing that.

And if I may add to that, I think it's really important for our legislators to hear directly from the people who are carrying the responsibility of enforcing and monitoring the implementation of some of the laws that get passed at the state level.

You know, it's one thing to legislate, it's another thing to actually implement those things.

And, you know, we have a small piece of the implementation enforcement pie, but it's an important one nonetheless.

And I, as a policymaker at the city, have always found it really beneficial to hear from people who are actually doing the work.

to make sure that whatever policies we're considering are being well-informed by the realities of how those policies play out in practice.

So really agree with Chair Bagshaw's observation and opinion that it's a really good use of city employees staff to head down to Olympia and share those stories about why some of these policy changes are so important and really appreciate you all taking the time to make the journey down there to provide that information and to get information back too.

So thank you for doing that.

Thank you.

And with that, I'll pass it off to Maggie to share upcoming projects.

Coordinated.

We all do.

So this next slide, I won't read each of these off to you, but just wanted to give you a quick snapshot of the other projects that we have underway.

So we have eight total toolkit projects.

And I'll just say briefly that, you know, it's been a really incredible process.

Staff have picked some really meaty, complicated topics to dig into and bring a racial equity lens to.

And so the thoughtfulness that they are bringing to these projects is really incredible.

And then I will also say that one of the muscles that are being strengthened through these projects is really the outreach element here.

FAS is not necessarily a department that is as well practiced as some other departments.

in terms of stakeholder engagement.

And so that's been something that's been great to actually have conversations with community members on the work that we are doing very directly.

So just wanted to kind of give you the whole universe of projects and know that we've got a lot of this work moving.

Good job.

No, it just sounds like you were underscoring what Liz was saying.

Colleagues, do you have any questions you want to pursue?

sort of closing comments, if I will, in the lateness of the hour that, and I'm not saying this just because you all are here, but this almost models the kind of work we're trying to do within departments.

And so then when I hear a presentation like this, I'm wondering how I could share this as a council with other council members.

And so we may want to think offline about a briefing or something along those lines, how we can encourage this kind of participation.

Now, what I do like, let me tell you what I like about it.

I like that you're looking at, something as granular as how do you waive an animal shelter service fee, as well as the large policy issues on the marijuana policy.

I know Ollie Garrett One of the cannabis board, liquor board commissioners was out in Olympia.

I saw her last week in Olympia.

She understands this kind of work.

As a board member, she does a lot of inclusion work.

And so what I like about what you're doing is you're looking at the larger policy issues as well as some of the stuff, the grassroots stuff as well.

And then I just like to see the numbers.

There are force in numbers when you're trying to embrace this kind of work.

And then you're doing cross-departmental work as well, which is critical.

So I think you're, on all cylinders, doing this kind of work.

And I just want to applaud you.

So good stuff.

You have any comments?

So I think that you are seeing our genuine enthusiasm about the work you're doing and appreciate the outreach, Liz.

Just everybody around the table, I'm just very impressed.

And for all of you that have been involved in the change team who are sitting there quietly watching your colleagues, I got a quick question.

Don't look, Calvin.

How many of you agree with him that the department in the last seven months has become more collaborative?

So how many of you believe that you all have created a more respectful environment?

Is that it?

So you're feeling like that there's things that we have to do.

I will tell you that this is one of the most profoundly good RSJI presentations that we have seen.

Because you are modeling, as Council President Harrell said, you're modeling the work we want to see.

But I'm also getting the sense that you've bought in.

There's been a lot of times when we've seen these presentations where I'm just like going, I'm hearing the words, but I'm not seeing faces.

I'm not seeing people that are genuinely engaged in this.

So thank you all for your involvement and to the extent that we could bottle this.

Oh, I'd love to do it.

Director Goings, you get the last word.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

What I've heard is we need to follow up on prompt pay, sound transit contacts to D.O.N., be mindful of wheelchair accessibility in the RET, come back generally on the shared mobility RET update, and share this kind of best practices with some of our fellow departments.

Good.

And all ages and abilities say that, too.

Absolutely.

Yes.

I do want to, if I could, just one quick note.

Vision on the taxi pilot, some information on that.

is, as you may know, Maggie Thompson is leaving FAS for the private sector at the end of May.

And it is with very mixed emotions.

I'm very happy for Maggie.

This is a new opportunity in the private sector.

But frankly, I'm sad.

We're going to miss you.

You have been a tremendous asset to the city.

to FAS.

You have been a champion every step of the way, whether it's the five pillars, our performance measures, our performance agreement.

Maggie, who sits 10 feet from me, probably comes into my office or I go to her cubicle six or seven times a day talking about how critical these issues are.

It's the core of her being.

And she has the work of the change team, RETS, racial social justice issues.

I could not, we could not have done it without her.

And so I just want to say thank you for the amazing work that you've done, and we are going to miss you.

Thank you, Calvin.

I wouldn't feel like I could move on if I wasn't leaving behind a great team of people to move the work forward.

That's very gracious.

Thank you.

I didn't know either.

So we'll hear more about it.

I'm proud of you.

Thank you.

OK.

Anything else?

No.

All right.

Well, thank you all again.

This meeting's adjourned.

Lina, Thibault, thank you for being here and taking over.

so