Seattle City Council Housing, Health, Energy, and Workers Rights Committee 6/13/19

Well, good morning.

Buenos dias.

Gracias por estar aqui.

Thank you guys so much for being here today.

Today is Thursday, June 13, 2019, and the Special Housing, Health, Energy, and Workers' Rights Committee will come to order.

It's 9.33, and I'm Teresa Mosqueda, the chair of the committee.

So excited to see a packed house again on these topics.

I know many of you are here to talk about the first item on our agenda.

And the first item is a briefing and discussion on the human service department contract inflationary adjustments.

This follows a really robust work session that we had about two weeks ago.

How many of you all were here at that work session?

Thank you so much for being here.

It was a packed house, and if you weren't here, if you're the media's watching online, it was standing room only.

And we had about two hours worth of testimony at the table about the need for human service provider contracts to have at least an inflationary adjustment for our incredible organizations that are taking care of our seniors, of our youth, of our families, of folks who are experiencing homelessness, and those who are trying to prevent falling into homelessness.

So thank you so much for all of the work that you do on a daily basis.

And thank you so much for being here today.

We really appreciate it.

Welcome Council Member Herbold.

Thank you so much for coming.

I was just talking about the first item on our agenda, which is the Human Service Department Contract Inflationary Adjustments, which I think is why we have a packed house again today.

There's two other items on our agenda.

There will be a briefing and possible vote on the housing levy administration and financial plan This is what I like to refer to as the moral compass for the office of housing in terms of how they use their dollars We want these dollars to be going into affordable housing across the city and really to create site ownership and site control especially for organizations such as who and individuals who work directly with those who've been experiencing displacement and to build affordable housing not just units but cultural centers with child care and plazas and small women and minority business opportunities and public spaces and senior centers so that'll be the second item on our agenda.

And the third item is a briefing, and this will be the first discussion on Council Bill 119537, which modifies our city's notice of intent to sell legislation.

So this is for properties that have two or more apartment units in it.

We want to make it more possible for those who are renters to have an opportunity to maybe purchase those buildings if they go up for sale before they go onto the market, and for our nonprofit housing developers to have an opportunity to make an offer before it goes online to the highest bidder in the market out there.

So this is really about leveling the playing field and creating a notice of intent to sell so tenants and non-profit housing developers have a heads up on when those properties are going up.

So those are our three items, and if there's no objection to today's agenda, I will approve today's agenda and move to public comment exactly on time at 935. We do have quite a few people signing up for public comment, so thank you in advance for being here.

And David, you are first in line today.

I know you get here early, appreciate it.

David, thanks for being here.

I've never seen so many motivated homeless service providers before.

They only get fired up when it comes to getting paid their ill-gotten gains.

City Council is buying off- David, we're asking for you to keep your comments directed to us as council members and keep the dialogue respectful per our rules.

Well, City Council should stop buying off the subhuman, mistreating service providers.

It's obvious City Council is using tax dollars to buy off political activists, organizers and operatives hiding behind unaccountable non-profits whose six-figure salaries buy off our politicians.

and trade re-election support for no accountability for all the bankers hours half-hearted efforts tainted with an ignobly racist agenda and hypocritical priority that discriminates against innocent sober drug-free homeless citizens judged harshly and deemed unentitled.

by these, excuse me, they're deemed unentitled by these very people who think they're entitled to another yearly raise.

Shame on this treasonously corrupt and unconstitutional agenda of racially perverted, unqualified, and inept subhuman service providers.

The very reason the homeless crisis will never be solved.

Yet the same people will be here demanding more money, even though they should all be investigated and fired.

Reject this guaranteed yearly raise for these subhuman service providers.

All right.

Thank you.

We will now move on to the next item of business.

The next person who signed up to testify just says DESC and 1199. I don't know if there's a group that wanted to sign up for a DESC.

Great.

And the next person will be a next group will be 1199. So welcome up DESC.

And is there more than one person that will be speaking?

Just one of you speaking.

Okay, great.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Hello, council members.

Thank you for the opportunity of speaking today.

Can you hear me okay?

That one will work, yeah.

We'll restart your time here.

Thank you.

Hello, council members.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak today.

And just get real close.

My name is Noah Fay, and I'm the Director of Housing Programs with DESC, a very large human service organization here in Seattle.

We have nearly 700 employees and operate out of 19 locations across five council districts here in the city of Seattle.

Daily, DSC serves roughly 3,000 people living with severely disabling conditions.

DSC's work has been proven to save taxpayer dollars and has been shown to lead marketed healthier outcomes for our clients.

Study after study after study has proven this point.

However, as cost of business naturally increases over time, we're faced with making tough decisions about how to sustain this very success.

Whether it be the cost of healthcare, utilities, or basic repair and maintenance, The cost of doing business increases year over year, but our contract revenue does not.

This reality affects every aspect of our work, but none is greater than the effect it has on our staff.

Our staff are the lifeblood of everything we do at DESC.

The passion and dedication of our staff is matched only by their skill and expertise.

Like all professionals, DESC staff devote years of training, education and experience to become the skilled workforce that they are.

But when wages cannot keep up with the cost of living, our staff are faced with the very real decision of needing to leave the work that they love and have a deep passion for simply in order to make ends meet.

Without reliable inflationary adjustments to our contract, we are unable to retain the skilled staff that serve as the linchpin to our work, with nobody paying a higher price than the thousands of vulnerable people we serve every day.

We are simply asking that we ensure we don't continue to lose ground year after year.

I want to thank the council for the work that was done last year to make inflationary adjustments to HSD contracts.

It was a great start, but we need to continue on this effort.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you so very much.

It's okay to applaud.

Yeah.

PAU 1199. Welcome.

And then followed by that will be Estela Ortega, Executive Director of El Centro.

Welcome, and do you have more than one person speaking today?

Okay, so how much do we usually give her?

Okay, so because you have a group, we will give you the five minutes, and then if you guys can use all that time together.

Thank you.

Welcome.

Perfect.

Is that good?

Okay.

My name is Patricia Towers.

We are here representing SEIU 1199 Northwest in support of Councilmember Teresa Mosquedo's proposed inflation adjustment on human service contracts.

I work at the front desk, front lines at DESC.

for over 13 years.

Clients come in our building expressing to me that they see, they recognize my face more than they do the case managers.

They could, in some cases, have six case managers in a year and a half because of the turnover.

This morning when I was getting off the bus, Coming here, when you walk over a human body sleeping on the sidewalk, I think about Seattle and I think we're such a rich city that this shouldn't continue and that it's fixable in support of Teresa Mosquedo's proposed inflation adjustment on human service contracts.

Also, my coworker and friend, Clotonia Vann, spoke last week on, she said, imagine having a new teacher every year.

How do you think that would shape a person's foundation?

And lastly, more than AIDS, cancer, diabetes, drugs, disrespecting human life is the highest killer.

of all those diseases, I was stunned at the percent.

So we support you, Teresa Mosquedo, and thank you very much for having us here.

Thank you so much.

Hello.

I first of all want to acknowledge the work that both of you have done and your continued commitment to addressing this issue in our city.

You are walking the walk, not only just talking the talk, and we appreciate that a lot, My name is Andrew, and I work at Evans House, and I just wanted to share a short story illustrating why not only do we need to be building more housing, but to sustain the housing that we already have.

Evans House is a 75-unit supportive housing project.

We primarily have people who are being discharged from long-term psychiatric hospitalization.

I started there about seven or eight months ago, and almost immediately when I started, the elevator broke down.

We have a lot of people there that, along with psychiatric illnesses, also have physical limitations, walkers, wheelchairs, limited mobility.

Having the elevator down was very challenging for a lot of reasons.

We offer a lot of services, including medication management and meals on site.

We definitely suffered in terms of people being stable on their medications because they wouldn't be able to come downstairs.

And that took just about six or seven months to fix because money was an issue.

With our facilities manager, they said, you know, if we had a huge budget, this would have been fixed very quickly.

So that's just a short story about why this type of inflationary increase is incredibly important to us.

It just helps us be able to do our jobs.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

My name is John.

I'm a mental health case manager, and I specifically chose this position with this organization for the work that they do, which is so vital to the health of our community.

I work with amazing and knowledgeable people, and one of the most frustrating parts of my job is the constant, is the disruption of that knowledge due to the high turnover rates.

Every day my inbox is filled with advertisements from Indeed for positions that pay more, and every day I'm paced to make that decision of working with Seattle's most vulnerable individuals and my own financial security.

Constant turnover rates, which affect many of the organizations represented here today, have tremendous impacts on our clients, who often are sharing the most intimate aspects of their lives with us as we try to help them into housing.

As a city, I think we can and have the ability to do better, and we appreciate you bringing up this legislation.

Thank you very much.

My name is Gary Hilty.

I work for the Mobile Crisis Team, also a part of DESC.

Although it's a county-funded program, county programs don't work if city programs don't work.

We help alleviate SPD and SFD response times.

We take clients to day centers, shelters, hygiene centers, food banks, so entry-level programs.

So inflation increases help sustain basic programs, retain staff, and support the social safety net.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

My name is David Heldy.

I am a housing assistance case manager at the Maine Shelter.

There is not much more time, but there is an absurd level of turnover there.

People just don't make the money that we need in order to live in this city.

That summarizes it well.

Thank you very much.

Estela Ortega followed by John Barbie Tenna Ellison.

Welcome.

We have a crew.

Excellent, great.

And do you have more than one person speaking as well?

No, I think I'm going to be the only one.

Okay, great.

We'll give you a minute to get your crew together because we welcome all of you.

And Aretha, if you want to come this way, you're welcome to come on up.

So do I get a little bit more than two minutes because we have a group here?

You have five, yes.

Thank you.

Thank you for all being here.

Gracias por estar aqui.

Gracias, gracias.

Good morning, council members.

I am Estela Ortega, the executive director of El Centro de la Raza.

El Centro de la Raza provides 43 comprehensive and culturally competent programs and services to over 14,000 children, youth, adults, families, seniors each year with a staff of about 140 people.

And on an average, we utilize anywhere from 800 to 1,000 volunteers a year.

And so you can see that we stretch the dollar very well.

The city of Seattle needs its human service organizations to be strong, to help individuals achieve their full potential in a way that is valuable to our city.

Many human service advocates have dedicated their lives to helping build the infrastructure to provide services that strengthen our communities to live their lives with dignity and respect.

This work dates back to the Survival Services Coalition back in the 1970s.

As providers, we wear many hats in advocating for community needs.

we are crucial to maintaining a healthy democracy and representing and ensuring community needs are heard.

In addition, we provide spaces for the broader community to volunteer, providing an additional public good.

As other organizations have testified, we also continually face turnover because our salaries cannot compete, quite frankly, with city, county, and state government.

This in turn affects the effectiveness of the services we provide and a loss of staff capacity.

Every year we see annual rising cost in health insurance and general operating expenses that increase our fundraising goals.

As we know, most foundations will not pay for general operating support.

We need stability and continuity in our service delivery system to achieve our outcomes that lead to improved lives of those who need a helping hand.

We urge you to support an automatic adjustment for inflation for all human service contracts.

Mil gracias.

Thank you all so much for being here.

We will also have the chance now to hear from John Barbie Tina Ellison.

And I'm sorry, John, if I didn't pronounce your last name correctly.

Oh, it's fine, it's Barbie.

So I'm John Barbie and this is Tina Ellison and we're here on behalf of Compass Housing Alliance.

And one of the things that we do is we provide emergency services and shelters as well as affordable housing for the city of Seattle's most vulnerable adults.

And one of the things we're noticing is we just did a recent study that our annual turnover rate of our frontline staff is over 40%.

And the number one reason during the exit interview is the lack of compensation.

as well as many of our staff have to commute a long way to live outside of the city limits because they just can't afford to live here.

So with that in mind, we're also asking these staff to be the most trauma-informed.

We're asking them to do the most darkest, the most challenging, just the most...

important work to meet the needs of many of our clients, and we need to support them.

We talk about supporting the guests and the clients that we serve throughout the community, but as employers, we also need to support our staff, and we need to make sure that we provide them with the groundwork to be able to do the work.

And so I'd like Tina to share a few words as well.

Yes, please.

And I actually thought Tina Ellison was part of your last name, so you do have more time.

Go ahead, if you want to give them two minutes or more.

Thank you.

So just to piggyback on what John has said,

Just to piggyback on what John is saying, is that we have seen such an increase in the need of our clientele as I'm sure everybody else here has.

Like the gentleman earlier said, you know, people moving into our permanent supportive housing are coming straight from the hospital.

So both psychiatrically fragile, medically fragile, physically fragile, aging populations, on top of the mental health and substance use issues, the behavioral health piece, that's just not gonna go away, right?

And so for us to be able to have the staff that are qualified and capable of doing that work, we just can't pay them the same as Subway does, right?

Because it's really important that they have the skills and the support to maintain that job, because what it's good for is the clients that we're serving, which is then good for our city.

So we are all in support of the wage increase.

And just one note too as well, 80% of our programs are funded through HSE contracts.

And so it's an important funding source for us.

And we want to create stability, growth, and community, not only with our programs that we run, but with the staff that we employ as well.

So thank you.

Thank you very much, Compass Housing Alliance.

Flynn Comer, followed by Flynn Comer, followed by Brian Simpson.

And then Aaron.

How about Aaron?

Would you like to speak, Aaron Comer?

Followed by Brian Simpson, and then will be Mia Fadeh.

Or Ellen.

I'm like George Bush up here.

Welcome.

Thank you.

Good morning, council members.

My name is Erin Coomer.

I'm here on behalf of Youth Care's Board of Directors in support of an annual inflation adjustment for human service providers.

Youth Care serves youth and young adults experiencing homelessness in Seattle and King County.

I've been on the YouthCARE's board for six years and know that this is a recurring issue.

The topic of staff wages, recruitment and retention have come up almost every board meeting.

As Evelyn Correa, our human resources officer shared last week, YouthCARE's annual turnover rate in 2018 was 38% and this year it's now 44%.

Our partnership with the city is very important to us.

We know that you share YouthCare's mission in ending youth homelessness here in Seattle.

It's very hard to fulfill that mission when turnover is constant and positions remain vacant.

When city contracts don't cover the rising rates of inflation, providers have to pick up the tab for the increased costs of maintaining and sustaining services.

Costs like rent, repairs, insurance, sewage, things like that.

This puts us providers in a position where we have to use unrestricted funds, which you know are limited.

Funds that could otherwise go toward paying staff a livable wage in order to keep the doors open and the lights on.

As a board member, I'm very proud of our staff and the work that they do on a daily basis.

I want them to view youth care as a place where they can have a sustainable career, not to mention job security.

but we cannot provide a livable wage, and youth care becomes a stepping stone rather than a destination.

Our city is a leader in so many ways, and I believe we can lead on this issue as well.

Ensuring that providers keep up the cost of doing business is an essential first step in stabilizing human service infrastructure in our city and bringing us closer to realizing our vision of becoming an inclusive and equitable city.

Thank you for your consideration.

Byram and Mia.

Welcome, Byram.

Good morning, Councilmembers.

My name is Byram Simpson, and I'm the Training Program Manager at Youth Care.

My job is to coordinate trainings for youth workers across King County.

And to date, we've trained about 400 staff from 34 different agencies.

This position offers me a unique perspective of the field because I get to see our regional needs and I get to hear directly from youth workers about the demands and challenges of their jobs.

When we hire youth workers, we are asking them to be crisis responders, nurses, mentors, teachers, care coordinators, trauma stewards, emotional supports, and much more.

The entire time they're working, they're responsible for the physical and emotional safety of the young people in their care.

That's a lot to ask of one person who is making barely more than minimum wage.

Erin mentioned in her testimony that these jobs are seen and treated as stepping stones.

And that means that we lose talented and passionate youth workers to higher paying positions or fields.

Being a youth worker can and should be a career in and of itself.

People do this work because they're good at it, because they love it, and because it is a vital service.

But the way our agencies are funded, it's not sustainable to build a career and a life in those positions.

This system diminishes our capacity to do this work well and to be that one consistent, trusted person that Tristan mentioned last week.

We train staff to use a trauma-informed lens, which means taking the time to really listen to young people and find out what is going on under the surface.

But when you're single-staffed and responsible for eight adolescents in crisis, you have to triage.

So not only does this inflation disparity impact the wages we're able to pay, it impacts the way we're able to provide effective care.

The people I interact with every week truly value the work that they're doing, and I'm asking City Council to value that work in kind.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you very much.

Welcome, Mia.

Mia will be followed by Patricia Heiden and Anna from YWCA.

Good morning.

My name is Mia Edra, and I'm the program manager at Youth Care's HOPE Center.

The HOPE Center is a 24-7 emergency shelter for youth ages 12 to 17. Our program serves high-needs youth, youth who are involved in the sex trade, youth who are experiencing substance use disorder, youth who are street entrenched, and youth who have acute mental health needs in a trauma-informed way.

Our shelter has 14 beds, and under state law, we're required to have one staff member for every eight youth.

I've worked at the Hope Center since we opened in May of 2017. Since that time, we have never been able to fill all 14 of our beds.

Not because there isn't a need, but because we are so chronically understaffed that we can never meet the ratio requirements to supervise more than eight youth at a time.

The hardest positions to fill are grave staff, meaning the staff working from 12 a.m.

to 8 a.m.

in the morning, who are required to stay awake and check on the youth as they sleep.

It has been almost impossible to keep the positions filled because the hours are so difficult and the pay is so low.

We have a wonderful staff at the Hope Center.

They're incredibly committed and do amazing work to help young people stabilize and build trust.

But I can't get my staff to stay more than 10 months, 12 at the most.

And when they leave, they all generally say the same thing, that they love the team, they love the clients, they love the work they do, they just need to make more money.

It is one thing to have youth sleeping outside because there are no shelter beds.

It is another to have youth sleeping outside, not because there aren't enough beds, but because there aren't enough staff willing to do the job.

That is why this legislation is so important.

When agencies cannot keep up with the cost of doing business, youth as young as 12 years old end up sleeping outside on our streets.

I think I can safely assume that no one in this room would ever want a young person to face this reality.

But unfortunately, that's exactly what we're doing if you don't pass this legislation.

On behalf of our youth and staff, I urge your support.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you so very much.

Good morning.

Good morning.

My name is Patricia Hayden and I'm the chief program officer for the YWCA and the co-chair for the Seattle Human Services Coalition.

and today I'm speaking on behalf of the coalition.

SHSC members provide the services that support Seattle residents to thrive across their lifespan.

From youth development to senior centers, gender-based violence response and prevention, to community clinics, human services build well-being.

We urge you to automatically adjust human service contracts for inflation so that we can maintain the human services infrastructure that we have built together.

If you built a home for your family, you would secure that investment by repairing a roof after a storm damaged it.

not just let it fall into disrepair.

In the same way, when costs to provide services like technology, recruiting, training, transportation wages, health care benefits, and facilities increase, we must pay those costs or we will not be able to maintain current services.

Simply put, you undetermine Simply put, you undermine, I'm sorry, our capacity to reach our goals when costs to provide services rise, but your investment does not.

In some years, the City has made inflation adjustments on some contracts, but even those sporadic adjustments are less than actual inflation.

You have the power to solve this problem once and for all.

We urge that you take this commonsense step to secure public investment by adjusting all human services contracts annually for inflation.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Welcome, Anna.

And followed by Anna will be Liz Agui.

Good morning, council members.

My name is Anna Prayapongpisan.

I'm speaking on behalf of the YWCA of Seattle, King, and Snohomish Counties.

We are here today to ask City Council to automatically adjust human services contracts for inflation.

We all understand that inflation is part of daily economics.

That's why in 1975 Congress recognized that cost of living adjustments were critical, specifically in financial situations where institutions and people are working with a fixed amount of income.

Our costs to provide services for Seattle residents through the YWCA have increased well beyond adjustments that city has provided for healthcare and transportation systems, as well as critical services like technology support, staff recruitment and wages, training and contracts and facilities.

For example, every year, the costs of contracting with Seattle Housing Authority increases.

This partnership is critical to the YWCA's ability to provide housing and services to those experiencing homelessness.

When costs to provide services rise, but your investment does not, it threatens our ability to maintain our current services that you've asked us to provide on your behalf.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Liz, welcome Liz.

Followed by Liz will be Ileona Kenner.

Thank you for the opportunity to address the Seattle City Council and this committee on the proposed inclusion of annual inflation adjustments in all Human Service Department contracts.

My name is Liz Adjaye and I am here representing International Community Health Services speaking in support of the proposed inflation adjustments.

Established in 1973, ICHS is a federally qualified health center that provides comprehensive and affordable health and wellness services throughout King County.

We offer culturally and linguistically appropriate medical, dental, and behavioral health care for patients of all ages, as well as traditional Chinese medicine, pharmacy services, nutrition, community-based outreach and education, health education, and related services.

ICHS operates 11 sites, four full-service clinics in Seattle, Shoreline, and Bellevue, two school-based health centers, a vision clinic, a mobile dental clinic, a weekly primary medical clinic at a community partner organization, a 24-hour assisted living facility, and a congregate meal program.

At ICHS, we help our community to build the foundations they need to live healthier lives.

We do this with facilities where patients can access the full range of primary care services, with skilled providers who have the expertise across health and wellness spectrum, and with programs that meet the needs of community members at every stage of life.

And it is critical that we secure these investments by adjusting all human service contracts annually for inflation.

It is no secret that the cost of providing health care increases each year.

For example, the cost of operating our facilities increased by over 10 percent from 2017 to 2018. Typical health care fees like Medicaid reimbursements do not fully support our costs.

We provide for a whole person's care, which ripples back to their families and communities.

Building annual inflation increases into human service department contracts shows that the City understands how important these services are to community well-being.

This will ensure that organizations like ours will be able to better keep up with the rising cost of living in order to meet our goals of a just society and a thriving community.

Thank you for your time and your leadership on this issue.

Hi, my name is Ilona Kinnear, and while I'm not a part of any nonprofit, I'm glad that I can be here today to help push forward with this legislation.

Wages have been stagnant throughout this country for decades, and while the price of living has continued to grow, the only hope workers have is the relocation of an overall increase in the minimum wage.

Thankfully, this happened for Seattle, but it's still not enough.

And while this doesn't apply to all minimum wage workers, I feel like it's a great step in the right direction that will eventually hopefully push for this to apply to all minimum wage.

And because of that, I hope you will pass it.

And if I can speak just briefly on the other topics on this, I believe that they are also really important to help housing for other people.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you for coming back.

I know you were here last time.

It seems like you were inspired to speak, so thank you for sharing your thoughts and great segue.

It sounds like the next two people are here to talk about the housing plan.

If we can have Eric Privates and Steve Gleb please join us.

Eric first.

Welcome, Eric.

Good morning.

I'm Eric Privates.

I'm the Director of Real Estate Development for Homestead Community Land Trust.

I'm here to support the passage of the Housing A&F Plan, and specifically I'd like to call out Amendment 13, Councilmember Herbold's proposal, to increase the amount of subsidy available to the construction of three-bedroom units.

The housing affordability issue in Seattle is obviously one that everybody is keenly aware of.

We work specifically on the home ownership end of it.

And that's an area that is, there's really this missing first rung in the housing ladder in this city.

And, you know, 20 years ago, The median home price in Seattle was about $275,000, and that was affordable to somebody earning median income.

After about 2006, we began to see a divergence in the housing prices increasing much faster than median income.

We had a brief little break after the recession.

But it has continued up on that trajectory.

And now we have median house price that is around $750,000.

What's the odds of here who are working in these critical jobs of affording their first home and being able to stay in the city.

And that's why we're encouraging the council to really look at any kinds of tools and adjustments to the ANF plan, that future housing levy, to help start to really focus and address even more resources on filling that gap so that we can provide an opportunity for people to purchase their first home here in Seattle and stay here.

Absolutely.

Thanks.

Thank you so very much.

Steve, good to see you again.

Hello.

Good morning, council members.

Good morning.

I'm Steve Gelb with Emerald City Seattle.

We're a collaborative of unions, government, affordable housing providers, community groups, businesses, and workforce training providers.

We work at the intersection of equity and environment.

We're currently working with the Housing Development Consortium and non-profit housing providers to bring the environmental and equity benefits to building upgrades and new construction.

We believe in leveraging government investments to advance equity in hiring and procurement and construction.

We helped develop a CWA with the city and the building trades for energy efficiency, and that led to the model for the Seawall CWA.

We also recognize that inclusive procurement for women and minority-owned businesses is a key opportunity for wealth building and creating a diverse workforce.

We believe that provisions for WIMBY contracting might be a great fit for the housing sector, allowing for new businesses to start up and grow and become mid-sized firms and general contractors of the future.

That is why we support Council Member Mosqueda's proposal for a comprehensive labor equity strategy for housing construction in order to determine the best path forward to help advance equity while we strive to solve our homelessness, affordable housing, and climate crises.

Emerald Cities is committed to supporting strong measures that can advance comprehensive solutions to these vexing crises and look forward to working with the city and stakeholders to do so.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Steve.

Very, very appreciated.

Lina Hibberman, followed by Patience Malava.

Hi, I'm Leah with the Housing Development Consortium.

Our city's ecosystem of growth and opportunity depends on the strength of our human services sector from community health clinics to housing and homelessness services.

Our 180 members are working at every corner of this work and we see the importance of strengthening the entire integrated network of the human services sector.

We are fortunate to live in a city where our government values and prioritizes investing in our collective efforts to foster economic, physical, emotional and social well-being.

To protect those investments and make sure they are maximizing their impact, I urge you to adjust all human services contracts to adjust with inflation.

As Seattle's economy booms, we need to ensure we are able to retain a strong, dedicated human services workforce.

Last week during the Learn It Lunch, we heard from Tristan with Youth Care, who benefited from a three-year consistent relationship with his case manager, Joe.

We also heard that many organizations like Youth Care have staff turnover rates of over 40%.

We undermine our ability to create successful outcomes and maintain the infrastructure for successful delivery when the cost to provide services rises, but our investment in the sector's infrastructure does not.

I urge you to think of the bigger picture of our city.

It is vitally important to create a sustainable solution to this yearly problem.

Thank you for your leadership and thank you to everyone in this room who does this work.

Thank you so very much.

Good morning committee members and committee chair.

Thank you for all of the work that you have done in updating the administrative and financial plan and also updating the housing funding policies.

I'm here to speak on that agenda item and specifically we strongly support Council Member Mosqueda's amendment that's proposing a comprehensive labour equity strategy.

As you heard from one of our members, we really see this as very intentional and thinking ahead of can we collect data to establish a baseline to make decisions that are effective and work on an approach that can actually be applicable on the ground and our members have offered, we have 180 members within our association that are working on non-profit, affordable housing development, service provision and funding as well.

They have offered to be at the table to work with the executive in developing what the data parameters will be so that they're actually applicable on the ground as well.

And we are offering this convening platform as the months go by before the September 30th deadline that you have set.

Thank you for all of the work that you have done in putting this together as a committee and in helping us build a city that is a community for everyone and ensures dignified lives for all people.

And I will take my last 30 seconds to lend support to the inflation rate.

for all human services contracts.

We really think that this is the way to go and we support the effort.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

The next person will be Pete Kurtz-Gloves, followed by Marty Koistra.

Hi.

Hello.

Happy to speak to you all today.

My name is Pete Kurtz Glovis.

I'm a program manager at Compass Housing Alliance.

I've been working there for about five years now.

I started out as a frontline staff and saw firsthand the impact of the low wages that are offered to a lot of social service workers in this field.

To that end, I strongly support increasing the human services contracts to account for inflation.

To make that work happen when I was younger, I had to live with about six roommates working in a number of different nonprofits, including DESC, the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance, and the Hepatitis Education Project.

At work, I regularly saw highly qualified workers leave for other programs, sometimes only offering 50 cents more an hour than what they were originally being paid.

The impact on the clients was often negative and, in the case of case managers, was sometimes traumatic.

As a manager now, I realize that low wages continue to impact our frontline staff.

When new positions open up, low wages impact the applicant pool.

This leaves me to choose between either hiring a potentially under-qualified employee or waiting for a better applicant while my programs remain strained and short-staffed.

We love doing this work, but it's not easy in this city at the wages we're being paid.

I recently met someone from a major software company in Seattle who held the same title as I do, had half the direct reports, and earned three times the salary.

I'm simply asking that you invest in us and allow us to continue doing the work that we love.

Thank you.

Thank you so very much.

Marty Koistra followed by Marcy Bowers and Allison Isinger.

Hi.

Good morning, Councilmembers Herbold and Councilmember Mosqueda.

Marty Koester, I work for the Housing Development Consortium, and I'm going to be brief because I know you have a lot of work to do.

But I just want to state, related to the ANF plan work, I want to reiterate the commitment of our members, the many that put their lives on the line every day building and producing affordable housing.

They are committed.

far beyond what I think people believe to the diversity of a workforce that benefits from the economic work and the opportunity that comes from the production and maintenance of affordable housing.

And so they want to demonstrate and share with you everything they're already doing as it relates to this commitment and be part of a comprehensive solution to make sure that we as a community see equity as a top priority.

So we stand ready for that as has been already communicated.

And then as it relates to the issue of the inflation adjustment, I was listening again this morning to the testimony and it harkens back for me many years of our work at Habitat for Humanity and we had seven key principles that bound together our affiliates worldwide with the family of Habitat for Humanity.

One of those principles was clearly that we were about the uplifting of families and individuals, not just the construction of houses.

And we interpret that always to mean not just those that bought the homes or the residents thereof, but all those involved in the production of those houses, as well as providing services and resources.

And we have a real problem today, as you well know, in terms of how well we respect or don't respect the frontline staff who are standing in the gap in our community.

And we really need to do this, and we thank you for leading on it.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

A quick thank you to the Housing Development Consortium, Patience and Malava, and Marty Kuestra.

We received your letter and appreciate you sending this in and your generous offer, as you both mentioned, to be part of the team to do this evaluation prior to September.

So we will take you up on that and follow through.

Welcome, Marcy.

Very good to see you.

I love that you have a tall mic up here.

This is amazing.

Good morning.

Thank you for the opportunity to come and testify in support of the inflation adjustments for area service providers.

In my formal role at work, I'm the advocacy director at Solid Ground.

And every year, over 70,000 people come to Solid Ground for support.

In response, we provide legal services to people accessing state benefits, teach cooking, nutrition, and budgeting classes, educate tenants about their rights and their responsibilities, provide accessible transportation, operate a confidential domestic violence shelter, house over 400 people, including over 200 children, support families with basic housing and rental assistance, advocate for systemic change at the state level, and much, much more.

We provide a broad spectrum of services to meet a broad spectrum of needs in the city.

Our staff are smart, skilled, and dedicated.

Many have been with Solid Ground for years, myself included.

I've been an employee there for 14 years, and some for decades.

They have incredible specialized knowledge, and we ask a lot of them every single day.

They travel around the region to meet with community members and provide trauma-informed care.

Every year, the cost of our, oh, I'm sorry, they also rightly receive annual cost of living adjustments to help mitigate the cost of living in our city and region.

Every year, the cost of our wages, training, and health benefits increase, while many of our funding sources fail to keep pace.

And this leads to staff turnover, which in turn, of course, has a negative impact on our program participants, and it makes it difficult for us to adequately address our current needs, let alone plan for our future.

This is a smart investment in our city's infrastructure.

Investing in quality services and skilled workers helps us all reach our desired outcome of a healthier, safer, more just city to live and work in.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Marci.

Alison, followed by our last speaker is Jeanne Falk.

Jeanne Falk.

Thank you.

Right here, yes.

Council Members Mosqueda and Herbold, thank you very much.

I understand Council Member Bagshaw is on her way, and I hope that all of your council colleagues have a chance to see and hear these remarks.

I am here of course on behalf of the Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness and our member organizations and as a member of the Seattle Human Services Coalition because this is a sector-wide issue.

What I am struck by as we contemplate your proposed legislation to adjust for inflation just to keep up with inflation for human services providers is that what you've done is to create an opportunity for people whose work is so vital but is often both unseen and discounted to speak about the pride that they have in the work that they do.

There have been people here who are janitorial staff, senior services case managers, you'll hear from someone who operates an important food bank and senior center, shelter, housing providers, health care providers, people who do the work that keeps the city running.

And it is actually quite inspiring, but also a little sad to me to think that we are having this very basic conversation.

I simply want to note that in the course of working on this effort, I have learned a lot more than I ever knew before about the different forms of the CPI.

And in fact, the work that you did last year to build on Mayor Durkan's budget proposal to create a modest and necessary 2% across the board inflation adjustment was below the CPI for 2018, which was 3.4%.

So, I think what you are proposing is common sense, it is necessary, and it will change in a subtle but vital way the culture of this city in terms of how we value the work that we say we value.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Alison.

Welcome.

Hello, my name is Jeannie Falls.

I'm the executive director of the Pike Market Senior Center and Food Bank.

We're right in the Pike Place Market and serve a lot of people who are homeless.

And I just want to say how heartening it is to me that you're supporting this initiative.

It is, experience is, more important than degrees, really, in serving people that are very high needs.

And if you can't retain the staff, you can really not do the work well.

And so I cheer you on, and I'm very supportive.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

That concludes all the folks we had signed up to testify.

Is there anybody else that was inspired to testify that still would like to say something?

Okay, seeing none, we're going to go ahead and close today's public testimony.

I want to thank everybody who came.

We had about 30 people who testified today, so thank you for your generous time and for being willing to be here again.

You know, we have heard that there's folks from Cairo, Seattle Times, Crosscut, and others who are following online, and I think that you continuing to speak up about what you've done for this city, what you can continue to do, and the challenges that have been created by not investing in these contracts fully and providing an inflationary adjustment helps to underscore exactly how we can come together to help solve the crisis of homelessness, prevent more people from falling into homelessness, to treat our seniors, to serve those who are youth and to do so requires us investing in you all just as much as you all have invested in those very vulnerable populations.

So we're glad that they're watching from afar and this will be one of two conversations that we will continue to have in this committee that again follows on the heels of last year's discussion and the very packed standing room only house that we had two weeks ago during our work session.

So thank you very much all for being here and thanks as well to the folks who came to testify on the housing ANF plan.

That is our moral compass for how we invest in housing.

If we don't have housing that's stable for folks that you're serving, then you're going to continue to see them just as much as if we don't invest in those who are serving them, we can never actually get them housed.

Appreciate you all being here and we will go ahead and move to the first item of business.

Farideh if you could read in the first item of business and while we're doing that if we could be joined by Amy Gore from central staff at the table.

Agenda item one council bill 119542 an ordinance relating to contracting by the human services department for briefing and discussion.

Welcome.

Thank you, Amy.

Do you want to introduce yourself for the record?

Sure.

I'm Amy Gore with Council Central Staff.

Excellent.

And Amy, this is the first time I believe that you have been at the table with us, so thank you so much for your role at Central Staff and for all that you've done previously with Council Member Johnson.

We are so appreciative of your current work and your past work, so thanks for helping us walk through this legislation.

I want to thank Council Member Herbold for being here as an alternate to our committee.

It's really really wonderful that you were able to be here for all that full public testimony today and we know that this is an issue that you've been working on for a while as well with Council Member O'Brien.

So thank you for being here and I know we'll talk later about really important housing issues that you've been also tracking with us so thank you.

I just want to say a few words if I might about the importance of this legislation that we're beginning to consider.

We've had the opportunity now to, as I said, hear from the direct human service providers who were here last week, from frontline workers, from the CEOs like Estella, Teresa Pataiola, Mark, who was here last week, the directors, management, frontline staff, and directly from the people who've received these services.

Our alum who've been through various programs that help get folks stabilized, individuals who've received human services from our city and the importance of having their case managers be able to remain constant and the importance of having these organizations fully funded was something that they underscored better than anybody can.

We heard a few things from last week that I just want to call out and remind folks of.

First, human service provider contracts and the individuals who work for those contracts provide services such as youth and development services to senior care services, community clinic services, to domestic violence and sexual assault prevention response, food banks and meal programs.

We heard from the folks at the food bank down at Pike Place.

And also they provide services in our homeless shelters as well as preventing people from falling into homelessness.

If Marcy Bowers is here still from Solid Ground, one of the most important things she said was the role that they provide in helping to prevent people from ever getting into homelessness in the first place, that requires funding.

The second thing that we heard was that the reason that we contract out the work, and I think Councilmember Herbold and myself and others have been very vocal, we are not interested in outsourcing work that the city should do, but in this case, the reason that we have these contracts with human service providers is precisely because of their expertise and the strong relationships that they have, especially with vulnerable communities.

The direct community connections that they have, both as non-profit trusted organizations and the individuals who are providing those services cannot be replicated at the city.

They are efficient because of their focus and these non-profits help us create the trust and network to actually get people stabilized and get them the services that they need.

in a way that the city can't because of that trust that they've created.

The third thing that we've heard is that the nonprofit work has provided not just a trusted relationship, but they have proven to be efficient.

I want to underscore that.

In this day and age, and as somebody who comes from public health who believes in data-driven solutions, these organizations have a proven track record of helping to stabilize folks, provide needed services, and help prevent people from falling into homelessness.

and or losing the stability that they currently have.

We heard from Tristan, Tony, Susanna, who shared their stories about the connections with frontline service providers and how they couldn't have done it had there continued to be high turnover rates and the very individuals who helped them get stabilized.

We also heard, and I think this is really important if I can borrow this document and we have some slides that we will show later, that we heard from, like Youth Care, who provided this chart that talked about the high cost of doing operations in this city.

We talk about the high cost of doing business.

These folks are not for-profit organizations.

They're non-profit.

And even on these very slim margins, we're talking about increases in the cost of water and utilities, electricity, Internet, gas, recycling.

rent, these are issues, along with health care and wages, that we know really cause the inability to provide the direct services that we need if we're not actually adjusting for inflation.

So the charts that were provided by youth care show the inflation over time.

What hasn't happened over time is the contracts to keep up with that inflation.

We also heard from folks about the need to be able to adjust to these rising costs.

And without actually having the ability to see an increase in the contracts, the only thing that many of these providers have actual control over is wages.

And that's where we see compromises in our system.

With 40 and 50 percent turnover, as we heard, with the fact that people, as you heard today, are staying on the job between 10 and 12 months.

That is not how we create stability and it would not be acceptable for any of our positions within the city if we really saw that type of turnover and high vacancy rates.

We have an opportunity to respond.

and to thrive and to continue to address the housing crisis.

But without actually doing so, we are harming our efforts to address the crisis of housing and homelessness in this city.

So I wanna thank the council members very quickly for all of your work last year.

I know this has been an effort that you've been discussing over the last few years.

Last year, we were able to get the 2% inflationary adjustment for all contracts.

And why that's important is it wasn't just general fund contracts, it was all contracts that come through the city.

And what we heard from folks at the time, and some of them were in the audience today, is that, yes, a 2% increase on your paycheck is hardly noticeable.

But the fact that we're increasing contracts by hopefully an inflationary adjustment that, as Allison said, actually meets the inflationary costs in our city is so significant.

It is meaningful for the not just the organizations, but the workers to see that work respected and invested in so that more people can get stabilized.

So I want to thank the council for last year's commitment to finding the 2% increase that we applied in the 2019-2020 budget.

And without the stability, we know that we are not on track to meet the needs in our city.

with stability and with the work that Amy has provided with identifying a way to tie inflationary adjustments to the Consumer Price Index, CPI-W, for our region, just like we have done at the state minimum wage since 1998. We've tied inflationary adjustments to minimum wage to recognize that then the $4.50 that we were offering as minimum wage was not going to keep up.

We tied CPIW to the minimum wage in Initiative 1433, recognizing that even as we took a step up, we needed to continue that inflationary adjustment.

This is not something that we're coming up with on our own.

It's used in many other ways, which we'll hear from Amy.

So why don't we go ahead and turn it over to Amy to talk about the policy that's baked into this legislation.

We talked about the why, so help us understand how we're going to get there.

Thank you very much, Councilmember.

Today I am here to provide an overview of proposed legislation sponsored by Councilmember Mosqueda, Council Bill 119542. The legislation would amend the Seattle Municipal Code to require that Human Services Department include annual inflation adjustments for renewed or renegotiated contracts.

This annual increase is intended to reflect the actual operating cost for contract grantees, which have been escalating rapidly during the current period of economic growth.

In this briefing, I will discuss the current contracting practices and recent budget actions related to this topic, the proposed legislation, and potential budget impacts of the legislation.

This information can also be found in the central staff memo attached to today's committee agenda.

I want to note that there is a revised memo, which is slightly different than the memo attached to today's agenda.

The revised memo, which is located on the table, has updated calculations for attachment one, and I will work with the committee clerk to make sure an electronic copy of the revised memo is added to the council bill supporting documents, so that's available for everyone.

And momentarily, we will make sure that that gets also projected onto the screen, and there should be copies as well on the dais for folks who are interested.

First, I want to talk about current practice at HSD.

As you know, our Human Services Department achieved its mission in two ways, by providing direct services by city employees and through contracts with partner organizations.

HSD services are funded through the general fund or through federal or state grants, for example, the Community Development Block Grant Program or Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS.

In 2019, HSD contracted $118 million in services with 62% supported by general fund and 38% supported by non-general fund sources.

Because HSD is designated as the area agency on aging for Seattle and King County, HSD contracts sometimes cover services in Seattle, in King County, or a combination of both.

Currently, HSD funds services through a competitive bidding process that awards funding to organizations for multiple years, usually for four years.

Though the award is for multiple years, funds are dispersed through successive single-year contracts, and each year of the award, the contract is renegotiated or renewed.

Increases in contract amounts or changes to scope can be made during the awards process or during contract renegotiation, but are not required during either the award process or contract renegotiations.

Over the past several years, the city has included an inflationary adjustment in the adopted budget to apply to HSD contracts.

From 2014 to 2018, the budget included an inflationary adjustment ranging from 0.6 percent to 2.3 percent to be applied only to general fund contracts.

The 2019 and 2020 mayor's budget proposal also included a 2% inflationary adjustment for general fund contracts.

Council amended the budget to apply a 2% increase to non-general fund contracts in 2019 at a cost of $903,000.

Council added the same amount to the 2020 endorsed budget to maintain the 2019 increase, but did not fund an additional increase for 2020 non-general fund contracts.

I'll pause there for questions.

Thank you so much.

I really appreciate it.

So it's really helpful to know the past.

I don't know if it's only practice.

That kind of lines in with my question.

The inflationary adjustments that we've seen in prior years is reflected by this chart.

We know it's not a result of council established policy through legislation, but is there a standing or has there been a standing HSD policy or are these just decisions that are made sort of year by year based on consideration of other often competing factors?

My understanding is that these are included in the budget when either the mayor or council feel that the funds are available to cover them.

Thank you.

Anything else?

Okay.

So moving on to the proposed Council Bill 119542. This council bill is sponsored by Council Member Mosqueda and would amend the Seattle Municipal Code to require that HSD contracts, both those funded by general fund and non-general fund sources, include an annual inflation adjustment when renewed or renegotiated.

The bill would apply to contracts issued under the authority granted to HSD in the Seattle Municipal Code with four exceptions.

One is that the city is solely acting as a pass-through agency for services that are not provided in the city limits.

The second exemption is that the contract is solely supported by state Medicaid funds or funds appropriated by Title 19 of the Social Securities Act.

The third is that the services are provided by a consultant, as defined in the Seattle Municipal Code, or that it is explicitly prohibited by or otherwise incompatible with requirements of the funding source.

The proposed bill states that the annual adjustment will be based on change in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue Consumer Price Index for urban wage earners and clerical workers, which we refer to as CPIW.

Amy, do you mind telling us where the other CPIW indicator is used?

Yes, that is the indicator that is used for the minimum wage increase for the state of Washington as well as a few other places.

It's a common practice to use CPIW as an inflationary adjustment.

Yes.

Okay, great.

The proposal is currently agnostic about how exactly the CPIW is used to calculate the annual adjustment, though there are many ways to calculate an annual change.

For the purposes of your memo, I have looked at year-over-year change in the December CPI-W, though we could also look at annual averages, year-over-year change for a different month, or a rolling average.

Council members might be interested in being more specific about that calculation in the bill.

If the annual change for CPIW is negative, the annual inflation adjustment for the contracts will be 0%.

That is to ensure that the contracted amounts do not go down.

For context, I provided you the annual change in CPIW from 2001 to 2018 on page 3 of today's memo.

As you can see, it ranged from a low of 0.4% from 2009 to 2010, to a high of 4.8% from 2006 to 2007, and averaged a 2.4% increase from 2001 to 2018.

If you could find the chart that shows the 2010 to 2020 chart so that we can all see that.

So when the CPIW increases, so does our general fund.

Is that the biggest takeaway?

Most years when the CPIW increases, our general fund also increases.

However, particularly during significant downturns in the economy, usually as we are coming out of those downturns, for example, I believe in 2010 and 2011, there have been instances where the CPI increase is more than the increase in our general fund revenues.

And so since 2010, there's been one year in which the increase in CPIW was more than the increase in our adopted general fund resources.

If we just, for example, if we just look at the last 10 years, 9 years, I think one of the things that we see is that our general fund increased at twice the rate of the CPIW.

Is that a good takeaway if we just look at the last 10 years here?

Yes.

Let me pull up that table.

In the period that you're talking about from 2010 to 2018, the general fund has...

went from $905 million to $1.4 billion.

That reflects in some ways our big construction boom, because a lot of that comes from construction taxes.

It also reflects our very high population growth.

We have more people paying taxes.

It also reflects some new tax resources like the sweetened beverage tax resources.

But over that time, our adopted budget general fund resources did increase about 40%.

Over the same period of time, our CPIW increased 20% from 231.3%.

to 269.47.

Okay great uh thank you for that and I know council member Bagshaw is watching and is on her way.

One of the things I think that we have an opportunity to underscore here is that if we just look at the last 10 years for example folks have asked well how do we know if the CPIW is not going to you know, cause undue harm to our budget here at the city.

And I think, you know, there's obviously the important reasons that we heard from our community colleagues about why we would continue to invest because it's a high return on our investment to make sure that the human service providers have adequate contracts.

But also when we see just over the last 10 years that the general funding budget increased, by about 40 percent and the CPI only increased about 20 percent.

I think that helps us understand that the math will pencil out, at least if we look at the last 10 years and it's a modest increase.

I think the same thing can be said about the state's revenue forecast.

When we tie the state minimum wage to CPI at the state level, many of the businesses that we worked with who were interested in making sure that the minimum wage was adjustable in a reasonable way that wouldn't necessarily cause undue harm.

One of the things that we saw is that when CPI does not increase, neither did the minimum wage.

I can think of, I think, 2010, 2011, if I'm correct, maybe 2012, where the minimum wage held stagnant for at least two years at about $9.47.

And that's one way to make sure that we are not creating an indicator that would outpace the actual cost of true inflation.

So, hi, Council Member Bagshaw.

I don't know if your ears were burning.

I was just talking about you.

I might regret asking this question and it's not information that I need to have now, but I would like to have maybe a short summary of the pros and cons of the different types of CPIs.

Just so I can get a sense of how we're weighing the tradeoffs between the different approaches.

I've sort of heard that there are tradeoffs, but I'd like to get a better understanding of them.

And there are two things that I can do.

One is comparing CPIs.

So there are other ways of looking at CPI.

There's CPI-U, which is a different population.

Okay.

And we can also talk about, again, the methodology that we use when converting the CPI-W to an actual annual inflation adjustment, whether that is a rolling average, for example.

And so I can produce both of those for the committee.

All right.

Thank you.

Happy to do that.

Appreciate it.

Council Member Benshaw, thank you so much for joining us.

I was singing your praises earlier today when we talked about the work that we were able to accomplish in last year's budget with the 2% inflationary adjustment across the board and really appreciate you as the budget chair.

helping us make that significant investment last year as a down payment.

And then again, when we were walking through the memo here, I know Amy's just begun walking through it, so I'll let her talk here in a second.

But one of the things that she was talking about is the indicator that we've used for inflation in this budget is tied to CPI-W.

The Consumer Price Index in the W category is what we use at the state when it comes to minimum wage increases and a few other strategies to make sure that contracts keep up or wages keep up with the actual cost of inflation.

And then I asked about how our general fund budget has compared to CPIW's increase over the years.

And if we look just at the last 10 years since 2010, there has been one year in which the increase in CPIW was more than the increase in the adopted general fund resources.

But since 2010, our general fund increase has been twice the rate of CPIW.

So to break that down a little bit, our general fund budget has increased by about 40%, while CPIW only increased about 20%.

So hoping to find that correct balance in this legislation is part of what is needed.

Amy helped me answer and what I'd love to underscore.

Thank you.

And thank you for allowing me to attend my other meeting.

You know, I chair the Retirement System Board, and I just came from there.

And just to complicate things, for our 2019, our employer actual contribution rate is going to go up significantly.

And so all of the other things that we're looking at in our budget, including you know, negotiating collective bargaining right now.

This is something that I'd love to talk with you more about when I get all of the numbers, but just rough round numbers, the employer, that's us, contribution for this year will be $130.5 million.

And this takes precedent almost over everything else.

So as we're looking at it and smiling at the good news, I just keep reminding all of us that I am your grumpy, Finance Committee Chair, and I'm going to be bringing all of these issues to us because the value statement of making sure that our providers have the money that they need to do our good work, I think it really means us to take a whole look at how we're spending our money in the Human Services Department.

So I'm just putting people on alert that we got a lot of work to do, but I'm taking this holistic approach to how we're spending our money.

in the city, not just in the Human Services Department.

In the city, right.

But I am particularly concerned when we see underspend year after year from certain departments on projects that we've asked.

So anyway, there's my grumpy moment and I'm all in.

Yeah, thank you for underscoring that.

And something I didn't mention earlier is sort of the general theme that we've heard from many of our community partners as well as our council colleagues that I think we take for granted the fact that every year we know that there's going to be a inflationary adjustment for our cost of living adjustments here at the city and we apply that to our city workers to the folks who are on the front line here and today's legislation that we're considering helps contemplate how we take this issue that we assume every year and really apply it to those who are providing equally important services on behalf of the city so that we're not engaged in this race to the bottom mentality.

So appreciate you bringing that up and we'll turn it back over to Amy to walk us through more.

I just have a few more points about the actual policy and then we'll move into some budget projections.

Council Bill 119542 requires that new awards consider previous contracts when determining what would be an accurate and fair assessment of the cost to fulfill the new contract.

This language is trying to balance two goals.

First, we want our contracts to be fair and do not want the bidding process to result in less fair contracts for our partner organizations.

However, we do want to allow organizations to find more efficient ways to provide services, such as leveraging philanthropy or reducing operating costs when possible.

Additionally, Section 2 of the proposed council bill makes a technical code correction requested by law to clarify that HSD contracting is governed by Section 3.20 of the Seattle Municipal Code rather than Section 20.60, which governs city contracts granted and administered by FAS.

The current code is contradictory, and this change would clarify the code and make sure that it reflects current practice.

Are there any questions about the policy before we move on to discuss the potential budgetary impacts?

So can I just take a quick moment here?

I just want to scan that last sentence you said.

Would you mind going back to that last sentence and unpacking it a little bit?

Sure.

Right now, in our Seattle Municipal Code, we have a section that talks about how FAS should do its contracting.

And for example, in that section of the code, it says that only the FAS director is allowed to enter into contracts on behalf of the city.

Obviously, that's not actually what we do.

And in the HSD section of the Seattle Municipal Code, it allows the HSD director to enter into contracts.

And so what Section 2 does is it exempts HSD contracts from the FAS section of the code so that those types of contradictions are cleared up.

And again, it puts it in line with what is actually going on in the day-to-day business of the city.

Thank you.

Would you classify that as a technical correction that was suggested by Friends at Law?

Yes, it was a request from the law department.

Thank you.

Thank you for that.

Sure.

Finally, I want to talk a little bit about budgetary impacts.

As discussed previously, the 2020 endorsed budget includes an additional 2% contract increase for general fund contracts and maintains the 2019 2% increase for non-general fund contracts.

An additional 2% increase for non-general fund contracts would cost an estimated $633,000.

If the CPI, if the increase in CPI-W is more than 2%, additional funds will need to be budgeted for that item in 2020. There are two underspends which could be used to help pay for an additional 2% increase for non-general fund contracts.

Due to exempted contracts, there is an underspend of approximately $281,000 from the 2019 adjustment for non-general fund contracts, which could be applied to a 2020 contract increase.

In addition, there is an estimated $200,000 underspend from the general fund contract increase in 2020. If both of these underspends were applied to the non-general fund contracts, only an additional $152,000 would be needed to allocate to cover that.

Is that on your revised sheet, those numbers you just gave me?

It is not.

Let me see.

But I can provide a table with that calculation.

I can't write as fast as you're speaking.

And that again is really about this 2% increase from the green sheet that was adopted in last year's budget.

So you're saying for at least the next year, based upon underspends, we could do the 2%, over and above the 2% that we budgeted and are allocating, I hope, in 2019, that we would have money to proceed.

based upon underspends for 2020.

But I would like to speak more broadly about the long-term budgetary impacts of the proposal.

The memo has an attachment which shows the budget cost in 2021 and 2022 under different inflationary increases, 2.0%, 2.4%, and 4.0%.

I chose those percentages because 2.0 has been a frequently used adjustment, 2.4 was the average increase in CPIW since 2000, and I chose 4.0% because that was the highest CPIW annual increase during this economic cycle.

I think it's very, very unlikely that that type of increase would be sustained, but wanted to include it for illustrative purposes.

As a reminder, there is a revised memo, which has corrected amounts for this.

And the table you are looking at should have the previous numbers marked out and a table in red below, which are the correct numbers.

But either could you scroll to that last page for us as well for the audience?

Do we have the updated memo to add?

Okay, so as we're getting the updated memo loaded there, do our council colleagues have the updated spreadsheet here?

Okay.

So Amy, we love it when you show us a reduction in cost.

I know.

Thank you for doing that.

And I really appreciate you walking us through this number.

One thing that I think is important though, so as Council Member Baggioz knows, I'm very interested in continuing to be able to underscore our, the way in which we do budget in the city versus the difference that we do at the state level.

One of the things that the city does differently is that we add the numbers for the biannual budgets together for that second year.

So even though in the second year it looks like it's about twice the cost annually, that's actually not the case, right?

What we reflect in that second year is the combined total.

So Amy, do you mind just breaking down for us the difference between years one and years two, for example, if we were just to look at a two-year budget and the difference over time, or if you want to do the next four years through 2020, that's great.

I think your memo shows that.

Okay, so as you mentioned, the attached table reflects the cost in the budget.

As you know, we have a biennium budget, as you explained, which means that every other year we adopt the next year's budget and then endorse the budget for the year after that.

So in 2018, we adopted the 2019 budget and endorsed the 2020 budget.

In the second year of the biennium budget, the cost of any budget item must include the cost for the first year and the cost for the second year.

So in this context, the second year of the budget needs to include money to cover the contract adjustment for the first year and the second year.

So that is why when you look at the revised attachment one, usually the 2022 number is approximately double what the 2021 number is, which reflects a, so the 2020 number, one number, for example, under a 2% increase is $2.362 million.

The next year, 2022, the budget add would need to be $4.771 million, which includes the 2.0% increase in 2021, as well as a 2% increase in 2022.

If I break that down just slightly, because I'm trying to do math here on the fly, if we look at the revised numbers in your chart up here, and we are just looking, for example, at that 2.0% increase, is that the example you just used?

If we look at the actual increase in cost over a year, the difference between 2021 and 2022 would be $47,000.

It would be $47,247 exactly.

That's the difference in the increase that we're talking about year over year.

Just by way of example, by using 2%.

And I think that's a helpful number to think of versus the million dollar figure that folks usually see.

Right.

And I think what our friends in the finance and budget department would say is that that may be accurate, but you would be paying $2.3 million more for 2021. And then in 2022, you're actually paying $4.7 million more than what you were in 2020. That's how that adds up.

So what the concern is, first of all, let me just underscore, we are all completely 100% in alignment around the value of what we're doing and trying to provide additional support for the human services providers.

Ben Noble would say to us is that as this compounds, we need to be realistic about what it's going to cost for the general fund going forward.

So I'm back to my, look, let's just make sure we're holistically looking at this and that we're not pretending that it doesn't have an impact.

Just to clarify one thing, the difference that you see, you know, if you were looking at 2022 to 2021, The amount that you gave Councilmember Mosqueda that if you subtract out the $2.362 million and then say what is the difference, that additional, was it 40,000?

I don't have a calculator.

47. 47,000.

That is the increase in the increase.

Right.

So you have the 2% increase, which is $2.3 million.

Then the next year, that increase will still be $2.3 million plus $47,000.

And because the way that we talk about this in the budget context can obscure what is actually happening year over year, I do have a handout that you should have that's the larger piece of paper.

Yeah, which shows the yearly increase in the HSD contract budgets under the three different inflationary increases 2.0%, 2.4, and 4.0% and also goes out a little bit farther from 2019 to 2029.

So this is where Councilmember Muscata, I appreciate your your quick addition.

The increase in the increase, that's where your 47,000 comes from, from 2020 to 2021. And if you're adding those two numbers together, that's where we come up over two years, that the increase over 2020 is 4.7 million, just for the 2%.

doesn't talk about contracts.

We're just talking about the increase that we would be asking for.

That's correct.

And I do want to underscore that I don't want folks to take away from this conversation that it would be somehow a $2 million or $2.5 million increase year over year.

That's a combined total for a biennial year.

And so the way in which we sort of delineate in our budgeting, it almost makes it look like you would need to add these two numbers together when we've already added them in the second year.

And we'll keep working on ways to demonstrate these calculations, because I think it is very complex.

Thank you.

And I just want to add, though, this scenario that we're talking about, about these, you know, I don't think anybody is pretending that this won't cost money, but it's the same scenario that we have to deal with.

in our city labor contracts for city employees.

And so we have made a commitment to do that with our own workforce, doing the city's work.

And when we contract out with people who have expertise that we don't have here in the city, we, I think, need to also factor that into the cost of doing business.

Right, and I just want to circle back.

Value, we all agree.

It's should we be looking at all of these contracts and even the ones internally, the work that's being done to make sure that the people who are doing the work on the outside are getting the fair wages that they need to sustain their programs.

And just to underscore the value statement that I think we're all saying, we want folks who are doing this hard work to have an inflationary adjustment.

We recognize that we've done the internal funds for the cost of living and inflationary adjustment for our own city workers, and we haven't done it for all contracts across the board for HSD service providers.

And to underscore that with data, when we look at Seattle general employees, they have received an increase every year since 2003. When we look at what the average of those increases were, it was 2.45% over that time period, which is almost the exact same increase in CPIW since 2000. So as we think about the rationale behind using a CPIW inflationary adjustment, as a tool, as we think about the rationale for how these workers compare to our internal city employees, we do see that the data backs up, that we have used this very calculation in a way to increase inflationary adjustment for our own workers and how easily we can then underscore the rationale behind why we would do it for external workers.

And I think that data point is really important.

Again, a 2.45% increase for our Seattle general employees since 2003 means to me we're on a good track here in terms of policy rationale.

Any other comments on that?

Amy, did you have more for us?

You know, I think the charts speak for themselves.

I just wanted to note that as we discussed before, the annual adjustment tied to CPIW would vary from year to year, but if historical trends continue, would most likely be similar to the 2.4 percent increase on that chart.

I also want to note that these increases reflect only the cost increase for existing services, and if Council wants an increase in services provided, that would not be reflected in these estimates.

And again, I think that the legislation that you've written has also underscored that This doesn't take away from any of HSD as the agency's ability to write new contracts as needs change, as services change.

So those contracts wouldn't necessarily have to be applied to a past amount for a contract if they're completely new services.

We wanted to make sure that we weren't hamstringing HSD in any way in that regard.

And also, just for the record, to clarify, I had gotten a cranky email from somebody that said, oh, you're just doing this so that you can raise your own salaries.

Council members do not get COLAs.

So no matter what we do here, this has nothing to do with council members' salaries.

That said, I also think it's important for us to keep pushing back on the narrative that somehow this type of work and other municipalities shouldn't be funded.

We are one of the biggest cities in the country, but even our smaller cities, when we don't pay folks who are doing this kind of work, a living wage job, then you get folks who are more likely to be independently wealthy, have their own funds and not necessarily from the community that they're representing.

So I'm proud of our city for having living wage jobs.

Yes, we do not get colas, want to make sure people know that, but we do value the work of our frontline workers and we have included a cost of living adjustment for those frontline workers.

We do not provide those services.

We on City Council are not frontline human service providers and We also want to recognize the hard work that they do every day to carry out the policies that then we all pass So it is an important distinction To make this is not applying to us.

And if so, we wouldn't even be able to vote on it Thank you So I have two follow-up items which is to

dig in more to the CPIW question, as well as finding some different ways of expressing those budgetary impacts.

Is there anything else that, leaving this conversation, you'd like me to work on?

Thank you for underscoring that.

Remind us again when this is coming back to our committee.

I believe that the next committee meeting will be July 11th, 2019.

So this will be on our Housing, Health, Energy and Workers' Rights Committee on July 11th.

That gives us just about a month to work through any questions and comments, concerns that folks have.

Our intent is to try to work with all of you in the meantime before that committee hearing to follow up with the packed room.

It was a packed room again today.

It was so good to talk to some of the folks that were here and then to have a discussion and possible vote on July 11th.

Council members, any comments?

I know you both have underscored the value components.

Any other comments or questions?

I'm good.

highlighted the information I'm hoping to get, but otherwise I appreciate your taking the initiative to move this policy forward so that, you know, we've created a baseline for the budget process and we're not having to do one-offs every year.

Yeah.

Council Member Bechtol.

No, I have lots more questions.

We'll talk about, you know, again, the holistic approach, but I am interested in thinking about if, should this pass, what the implications would be during the budget process, um, if our favorite friends in our human services coalition will be back asking for something else.

And I'd like to know that up front if possible.

Okay.

So this year we, I do have actually a few requests that I don't know if are possible, but this year we provided the 2% increase to general fund and non-general fund contracts across the board at a total increase of $2.3 million, which was about 0.2% of the 2019 general fund.

budget, which was around $1.4 billion.

What I'd be interested in is if we looked, for example, at these three options that you provided, most notably recognizing the 2.4 percent increase mirrors the exact average increase in the contracts that the Seattle General employees received.

If we did a 2.4% increase, what would that be in terms of our projected overall budget for the upcoming budget?

That could help us put it in perspective because alone these numbers look big and then when you think about it in comparison to some of our other investments, it might be helpful for context.

The second thing I would love to know, and Amy, do feel free to push back now or later.

I know that there is a way for us to look at the return on investment and if there is turnover rates in the 40 to 50 percent range, if there is an estimate for us on what the dollar figure could be for both retraining folks, vacancies that are going unfilled, appointments that are getting unseen because the case managers are not available.

If we can quantify what the existing consequence is of not having some of these positions filled, that would be helpful and that's specific to the positions.

And then lastly, Farideh, I don't know if you have the ability to share this slide that we received last time from the folks at Youth Care as one example of But we have a great chart here from the Youth Care Committee meeting.

Oh, thank you for pulling that up.

And what you can see in this chart is years 15, 16, 17, and 18, and the increase in costs, especially for utilities.

Utilities, rent, healthcare, for example.

Amy, if there's any way, even just from this sample that was provided, to show the increase in the cost of doing operations, that would be helpful.

Because my assumption is, just from looking at some of these initial numbers, is that this far outpaces a 2% increase.

And when we look at water and utilities, for example, or the cost of rent.

There was a number that I had in terms of the cost of square footage.

So, for example, if we look at just square footage in the city of Seattle, it used to be just under $20 a square foot in 2012, and now the commercial retail rent has increased to over 26% or $26 a square foot in 2018. I can do that math quickly, and that's about 12% increase since 2000, 2010, 2012. And I think that that type of data to juxtapose what we're talking about in terms of cost for these contracts versus the cost that these contractors have to pay in these types of services would be helpful.

So those are my three buckets.

And if they're not possible in the next month, we understand.

No, I think it's very possible to come up with some indicators related to the cost of doing business in Seattle.

I think translating that to exact service providers will be a little bit difficult because, you know, obviously somebody who provides meals probably has a lower water bill than somebody who allows showers.

in their facility.

So I think making that exact connection, we'll need to rely on the service providers about what their actual cost increases are, but I can absolutely find some sort of broader indicators of the increased cost of doing business here in Seattle.

Yeah, and thank you for bringing that up, Councilmember Mosqueda.

This chart from youth care we met with Melinda G.

and Van Gogh and Allison Eisinger were there and a number of others earlier in the week.

This is, this strikes me as being information that's really critical for us to pursue because what Melinda was showing here was not anywhere close to a 2% increase.

It was significantly higher, like you said, from utilities.

You know, they do offer showers.

When they're moving to a 24-7 model, and they're getting young people inside, they want showers, they need that, they need the food prep, all of it.

And then what you were saying too about just the rental, what they have for building, paying for the rent just for the building, and then you add on to that utilities, and we're trying to raise wages for the people we need the most to provide the stability to the youth.

Tristan, I just thought, was so great.

He needed three years of stability to be able to get that kind of stability back in his life.

It's going to cost us way more than 2%.

And so I'd like us to really be, as a sidebar, evaluating what it would take to really get the system in form to do what we're actually asking them to do.

So I know that's not just 2%, but as you're doing this research and analysis, maybe you can help us.

And I know that Tracy and Allie are here to, they're involved in it too from housing.

So anyway, thank you.

Yes, and go ahead, Council Member Baxter.

Council Member Herbold.

And I just want to underscore, restate my shared interest with Council Member Mosqueda's request that we also look at what you referred to as the return on investment.

I think we could do a much better job in the city system-wide across our investments in showing how those investments, if done wisely, actually save dollars.

And I remember during the discussions around paid sick and safe leave in 2012, we relied heavily on some studies from economists that looked at how the rate of turnover is impacted by investments in workers.

And so when you improve turnover rate, reduce it, there are costs to the cost savings to the employer themselves.

And that is, I think, a really, really important story to tell in our efforts to be fiscally responsible.

So that would be really super helpful if we could get from our providers information about their rates of turnover and we could make some projections about how addressing this might reduce those rates and attribute some costs savings associated with that.

Well stated, and another thing, and another thing, Chair.

We've been talking about this for years, of being able to capture those savings.

So an example within our criminal justice system, when we finally built our crisis solution center, so that people had a place to go that was neither the jail nor Harborview fifth floor, that the cost savings for the taxpayers, but most importantly, for the improvement on the human being that we're taking someplace where they can get stability and get whatever they need to get stabilized in their physical life, mental life, that saves the system a lot.

And if there is an accounting way that we can recapture that and reinvest it somewhere else, we always talk about it, but then it comes to the end of the year and the budget and we're, you know, just so up against the wall to have a balanced budget.

I'm not sure how we move in that direction, But if you geniuses can help us, that would be really helpful.

Great.

Thank you.

So, again, July 11th.

Is that the next time that we talked about bringing this phone?

Okay.

Thank you.

The memo says July 13th.

Okay.

So, it must be the 11th.

Okay.

Excellent.

So, we will bring this back within the month.

And I want to thank, again, the folks who came to testify.

Amy, thank you for your presentation and committee.

And one of the things I think is important for us as we think about return on investment for the direct human service providers and the concerns about those vacancy rate, it is also a return on our investment to make sure that the very folks who are being employed by the city to do this work, in effect we're employing them through the contracts.

Many of them are waiting in the food bank lines, are eligible for housing because of their low wages are in some cases, as we heard, living in their own cars.

And when we have folks who we are funding to do this work who are eligible for those services, that also must be a consequence that we should potentially calculate as well that we can potentially save on the front end by paying these contractors better.

So I don't expect you to do that level of analysis, but I think it's important that we not forget those stories that we've heard too and the cost consequences to the city and society when we have not fully funded these contracts.

Thank you for your time, and I know we're running short on time, so we are going to move to the administration and finance plan.

Farideh, if you could read into the agenda item number two, and we have had the chance to go through this in a lot of detail, so potentially we can get through these amendments today.

Very excited about this, and Farideh, go ahead, and then we'll do introductions.

Agenda item number two, council bill 119531, an ordinance relating to housing for low-income households adopting the housing levy administrative and financial plan for program years 2019 and 2020 for briefing discussion and possible vote.

Great.

And do you want to introduce yourselves?

Tracy Ratzliff, Council of Central Staff.

Emily Alvarado, Office of Housing.

Excellent.

So this is following a really long conversation that we had at last week's meeting.

We have had this issue in our committee now for three times.

This update again happens every two years.

This is the Administration and Finance Plan for the 2019-2020 Office of Housing Program years.

Dealing with funds like the housing levy, incentive zoning payments, mandatory housing affordability payments, and other fund sources.

I want to say this is our moral document, our guiding compass for how we use these funds.

And I'll reserve some other comments for later.

Tracy and Emily, if you have any opening comments, feel free to do so.

But we would love to walk through the various amendments that we heard last week and maybe focus on the ones if there's any questions or concerns that we'd like to address today.

Cool, cool.

As you said it all, we did have quite an extensive conversation about the amendments that are, most of the amendments that are in front of you today.

And I will highlight when I go through these amendments quickly, the ones that are new to the conversation, there aren't that many actually.

The majority of these you had conversation about, and if I may, seem to be supported by the majority of you all.

So with that, I'm happy to start running through the amendments.

There are, so if you would like, I can just actually highlight the ones that are new and the ones that may be in dispute.

Is that a most efficient way to do it?

And then we can then move through those amendments and then help you get along with the adoption of the legislation in front of you.

Okay, so if you look at amendment number four, And this would be a new section that we would add to the Council Bill 119531. It would request the Office of Housing and Finance and Administrative Services to evaluate strategies to advance labor equity outcomes in city-funded rental housing developments, including a comprehensive evaluation of the K-site housing project.

So just to remind council members and the public, the K-site is a housing project that the city will be undertaking, which we are using as a pilot to test the imposition of priority hire program.

Priority hire program is the one that requires apprentice utilization, WIMBY, usually in the context of a community workforce agreement.

It can also include other requirements, but the core of that is the priority hire program requirements.

So that project is our pilot project.

It is what was decided would be the best approach in terms of rushing to apply priority hire to housing projects without understanding the cost and benefits of doing that.

And so the concept here was to test the priority hire requirements on this project.

inclusive apprenticeship as well, yep, WIMBY, and then to see at the end of that construction of that project, where do we end up in terms of the benefits and the cost, and then to determine at that point whether priority hire program requirements should be imposed on all city-funded housing projects.

So, just not to pick a nit here, but And when you talk about apprenticeship, paren, minority and women business enterprise, I separate those two things.

They are separate.

Okay.

Yes.

You were saying, you had a comma in it.

Sorry, yes.

The priority hire has a number of different requirements.

Yes.

Apprenticeship, WIMBY, so forth.

And distress, employment of distress workers from distress zip codes.

So I want to offer a little bit of context on this one and to also celebrate the fact that I don't think that there is any controversy on the various amendments that we're considering.

We've had the chance to work together with various colleagues over the last week, thanks to Tracy's quick work on this.

We want to also underscore on amendment number four here that we're discussing.

Correct, Tracy?

Correct.

We did receive a letter from the Housing Development Consortium.

Council Member Baggio, I'm going to share this with you just in case you haven't had a chance to see that yet.

Council Member Herbold and I did have a chance to talk about it.

Specifically, there's two amendments there that they are referencing and one is Amendment number four, which relates to the labor equity outcomes for city-funded rental housing projects.

This is an amendment that we're both jointly offering at this point, given our joint interest in the earlier conversation and having some language that referenced labor standard policy.

What you'll see from the Housing Development Consortium mirrors what we've heard from the Washington, sorry, Seattle Building and Construction Trades Council, which have underscored an appreciation for us trying to gather this information.

So on that second page there of the memo is where they reference their support for the language that we've now come together to put forward to create a comprehensive strategy to advance labor equity in housing.

You heard from the folks from Northwest Energy and the Housing Development Consortium earlier today that they're supportive of this revised amendment.

It basically says that when we're creating affordable housing, we know that we're investing in community, we're investing in economic justice, and we want to see those commitments to justice also reflected in those good living wage jobs.

As we heard from HDC, they have 180 members who are interested in working with us.

and the labor community and the city and the executive specifically to help come up with a strategy that will be then reported back to us in September.

It will look at issues that we've already included in legislation in the past, like our language that we've included in the K-site pilot that had just got awarded to Plymouth Housing that was intended to create stronger labor protections and policies.

and how the city is using those labor protections that in many cases, as we heard from HCC, are already being used, but how are we actually seeing those reflected in the projects that go forward that the city's funding, recognizing with city-funded dollars, we want to invest in the public's good as well as building units, and I think that was underscored this morning from folks.

What we've done here in the legislation in Amendment No. 4 is we've drawn from the language that we worked on with the building construction trades last year, who helped us come up with MEETS-like legislation.

I heard it was not exactly MEETS, which is energy efficiency standards that we had applied to the Seattle City Light retrofitting legislation.

We've also pulled from language from, as I mentioned, the evaluation of the K-site project, that looked at issues like priority hire, apprenticeship utilization, apprenticeship preference, priority for local workers, utilization of women and people of color in both contracting and direct workers.

So my excitement comes from the ability to pull together all of these efforts and look at apples to apples.

And contained within this amendment is a plan for labor and the city and our providers to come up with a data collection strategy to look at all city-funded contracts so that we can make sure that we have baseline data on existing practices as we move forward to create greater pillars of our commitment to labor standards across city-funded projects.

So again, the report will come back to us from Office of Housing and FAS on September 30th of this year.

I will still be around, this daughter is not coming until October, and then we will have a chance to work broadly with labor, affordable housing partners, and the rest of council as we think about what to do with that.

And just to add my two cents on this, I'm really excited not just to evaluate what the K-Site pilot has accomplished as far as these goals for our workforce, but also to collect the information about other housing projects, because that's really how we started to create priority hire in Seattle, is we collected data At that point, on a lot of different things, but we're really, really focused on looking at the number of workers that were from Seattle that were on these taxpayer-funded public works projects and we found that only 5% of the workers on those projects were actually residents of the city with our tax dollars and so I think collecting this information will create some focus with a lot of different stakeholders on the goals and on the needs to make sure that we are using city tax dollars not just to provide affordable housing, but to also help create pathways for people who live in the city to have livable wage jobs.

So I want to acknowledge Office of Housing and the work that you have done on this.

And the K-site is a big deal.

Acquiring the property, planning, getting your partners, and I also want to acknowledge our friends in Uptown.

They've been very supportive of this and really demanding that Office of Housing have more low-income and affordable housing in their neighborhood.

Do you want to just address this paragraph?

Is there anything that you want to tell us from the Office of Housing standpoint?

I would say that we've had a longstanding commitment to labor equity, and over time you see more and more explicit policies included within the administrative and financial plan.

We do have requirements already for prevailing wages.

We have goals set around WIMBY utilization and we continue to see projects exceeding those goals.

So our housing developers are doing a really good job at intentionally implementing those strategies.

We have taken a cursory look at some data that we know we do have and see really strong outcomes for priority hire zip codes workers with those zip codes on our projects.

We're excited to follow this approach.

This approach works for us to all get together, continuing to advance labor equity by analyzing the data and actually reporting on, in some cases, how well our projects are performing.

So just to underscore sort of the process here, what I'd love to do is talk about a few of the amendments to the amendments we discussed last week.

We'll go through each one of those amendments and then at the very end we'll consider the full legislation and then we'll vote on each of those amendments to our legislation as amended as a package.

So we won't discuss after each amendment, we won't vote after each amendment, but we'll do that at the very end if that works for you.

May I, as a former grammarian, point out a conservation of punctuation problem on Section 4?

We also have two periods on Line 6. I'll accept that as a friendly amendment.

All going to be wrapped into the amendments.

Let's move to the next amendment, which we actually did discuss and there isn't any controversy.

I just wanna let you know, we came to a conversation with OH.

This is about the forward commitment policy where the Office of Housing Director has the authority to forward commit some future funds in a current NOFA.

The current policy allowed up to 30% or $8.6 million of only 2016 levy dollars, which meant they had the ability to forward commit these other funds.

we have now got a policy in front of us that says, nope, those other funds count toward the four-hour commitment, but we're gonna increase the amount from 8.6 million to 15 million.

So OH is fine with that.

That seemed like a reasonable alternative kind of in between.

So that's incorporated into the substitute.

There's no dispute about that, but I just wanted to let you know we came to resolution and what that resolution was.

Okay.

Okay, moving to amendment number 11, and this is one of those issues that we talked about last week, has to do with mutual termination agreement policy.

So the housing funding policies does have a management plan that has certain elements that are required to be submitted by housing providers when they get ready to open project.

Councilmember Herbold had suggested that we should add some language that relates to housing providers who use mutual termination agreements to say that if they are going to use those agreements that they have to have a written policy.

that allows the use of such agreements, and when conditions for eviction might otherwise be acted upon.

So this last phrase, or part of the phrase, I think is the thing that HTC has now raised as a concern, because in their experience with their providers, sometimes mutual termination agreements are not used in situations where there's actually an eviction.

And so I think what they have requested and what Council Member Mosqueda is now recommending is to delete that last part of the phrase, and just say that they will have a written policy if they're going to use mutual termination agreements, and that this coupled with the language that we have in the ordinance that has OH talking to stakeholders about when are mutual termination agreements used, what are best practices, what might be some sample policies that could be provided to providers, seems to go nicely.

I think that's fine.

The actual impact of this amendment, where I absolutely consider it friendly, is we're asking for a written policy.

I was only asking for a written policy in the instances where they were using it in place of an eviction.

I wasn't asking for a written policy in the cases where the tenant actually wanted to leave.

So if they want to give a broader policy to cover both situations, I'm fine with that as well.

So I really appreciate your interest in accepting this amendment and the conversations that we've had over the last week.

Also, to HTC for flagging this late yesterday, one of the things that I think we saw in the letter is that the concept of limiting the mutual termination agreements to situations when a legal eviction is likely to occur potentially could be unintentionally disadvantageous to the tenants.

And we totally understand that sometimes those tenants do want to move.

They have a life change.

They have a job change.

in recognizing that sometimes these mutual termination agreements are used to be advantageous to the tenant to get out of a lease.

One of the things I love about this is that this will help us get the data that we need.

As HDC suggested in their letter, this process that you have agreed to amend here would allow for the city to have a better understanding of how our city-funded housing owners are using these policies, so getting a written policy so that it's very clear to the tenants and very clear to, I think, our departments as well on how these are being used, and then to collect these policies.

That's great practice.

No, absolutely.

I just want to understand.

Your intent.

Right.

This is actually asking for a broader policy than the one I asked for.

Yes.

And actually, I think that's helpful clarification because I actually walked away thinking, That'll be great.

We'll have a baseline understanding.

And so if that's not what we were getting with with the initial language, this is an even better step.

Because I had absolutely no concerns about instances when mutual termination agreements are used when a tenant wants to leave.

My concern, it was only when mutual termination agreements were being used as an alternative to an eviction.

But if folks want to, you know, provide us with a broader policy, I think that's fine.

I love it.

And I appreciate that clarification because you were clearing that in your statement last week.

Yes.

And so the intent again just to underscore for folks is that on page 22 under the management plan, sub D, we would basically be just striking in instances when the conditions for eviction might otherwise be acted upon.

A very small amendment, but I think has a great impact.

And I'll share this with our council.

Oh, you have one Council Member Baxter as well.

Yes, I do.

And can I just acknowledge the work that went into this?

Thank you for being cooperative and collegial, because it's really moving this forward.

And I also want to acknowledge the Housing Development Consortium.

Thanks to Marty and to Patience for getting this letter to us so quickly, because it's obviously their opinion matters to us.

And again, thanks to OH for always being right there when we need help.

So thank you Councilmember Herbold for bringing the amendment forward when we do vote on this in just a few minutes.

Can I say one thing on mutual terminations?

Just as this amendment relates to including items in our management plan.

I just want to flag that our Office of Housing Asset Management team has the difficult task of reviewing those management plans.

And so really for us, the most essential piece on this issue is doing that exploratory work to identify what the best practices are so that then the asset management team is in a position to assess whether or not the policies that are being proposed are useful or not.

Otherwise, folks may include them in a management plan, but we're not in a position to say, well, we've agreed that this is or is not best practice.

So just flagging how those work together.

And I appreciate the inclusion of the language in Section 3 to help you do that.

So that was not something I was thinking of, but I understand how that how that dovetails into the larger objective, and it's super helpful.

Okay, moving to amendment 13, which also is included in the substitute.

This is the amendment offered by Council Member Herbold that would, as it relates to the homeownership program broadly, it would increase the maximum amount of OH funding for development of resale-restricted homeownership units.

from $90,000 to $100,000, only for units with three or more bedrooms.

And I think you did mention this at the end of committee last week, your intention to bring that, but we didn't have it in front of us formally.

So just to let you know, it's in there.

We heard a little bit from folks at Homestead Community Land Trust about this.

The current amount of sums that are available is up to $90,000 a year, but we know that a family of four has to have a household income of 110% of AMI in order to afford a mortgage on a $500,000 home, or with down payment assistance, they have to have a household income of 90% AMI or $90,000 a year, and our funding doesn't allow for funding of low-income homeowners up to, well, they're not considered low-income owners when they're 90% AMI, so our funding is not available for down payment assistance for folks who are in that position.

And so what this would allow us to do is it would allow us to provide sufficient down payment assistance for folks who are at or below 80 percent AMI, but it tags that that funding amount only for development of units with three or more bedrooms.

Again, recognizing that we're tying the size of the household and the AMI of the 80% AMI of that household and what the gap is for affordability for that size household for these size houses, homes, I should say.

Okay, and then the final amendment is amendment number 18, and this is one that is actually not reflected in the substitute.

It is from Councilmember Herbold, and this was one that was not discussed last week.

So this amendment would amend the housing funding policies, which exhibit B, for the rental housing program to acquire housing projects developed by Seattle Housing Authority that receive $5 million or more of city funding to include a goal of hiring at least one apprentice that is a graduate of a pre-apprenticeship program recognized by the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries for every five apprentices that are hired for such projects.

Yeah, not a whole lot to add on this other than thank you, Tracy, for the work that you did with SHA on getting them to agree to not having this as a requirement, but as a goal.

I also want to thank the folks at the Seattle Housing Authority as well and the work that they've done to, in the past, step up on many of the labor protections that you have mentioned, Emily, as well.

And their interest, I think their interest in really strongly working with us as we use the platform of publicly funded projects and a public entity like Seattle Housing Authority to underscore the joint partnership and joint interest in both not just creating units but creating good living wage jobs as we build the housing.

We don't want the folks who are building the housing to also then at the same time be qualifying for the varying housing that we're building.

So I look forward to that continued partnership and they are not here for me to thank today, so I want to thank them publicly for their stepping up on this amendment.

What is our building trades think about this?

Did you have a chance to talk with some folks?

Erin House, go ahead and introduce yourself for the record.

I'm Erin House with Councilmember Mosqueda's office.

They're supportive.

I think they're supportive of this broader labor strategy in particular and had done a lot of work on the case site to really come up with what are the standards, what's the data we want to collect, so that when we go back and evaluate the pilot, we can think about broader policy direction.

And so I think that they're generally supportive of the direction.

So I haven't talked with Marty Anderson about this.

What I want to make sure is that our apprentices are prepared.

They come to work prepared.

What struck me was being a graduate of a pre-apprenticeship program recognized by LNI, does that limit our pool for qualified apprentices?

No, because this is for the pre-apprenticeship program.

It's not for an actual apprentice program.

So this is a kind of baseline training program that gets offered to people who have no experience in the trades that actually gives them some really basic understanding of what the skills are and skill development that actually then positions them potentially to move into the trades and potentially to then get in line for apprenticeship programs.

So like SVI has a pre-apprenticeship program, Youth Care has a pre-apprenticeship program for homeless youth, and this...

And they're qualified?

Okay, that was really my concern is that I didn't want us to get so tight that we didn't allow for other programs that are doing good work.

to be qualified for this.

And this is also what priority hire program requires in terms of their pre-apprenticeship program.

As far as the background of my thinking on this is that looking at the different components of priority hire as zip codes, priority zip codes, apprenticeship, and pre-apprenticeship programs, The proxy that SHA uses because of requirements of federal funding that looks a lot like priority zip codes is Section 3, and they are performing very well.

They are exceeding what our requirements would be for priority hire for preferred zip codes, for instance.

Similarly, SHA projects are performing very well on apprenticeship participation generally as compared to city projects that use priority hire.

The piece that was missing of the components of priority hire for SHA is that pre-apprenticeship pathway.

in identifying this as a goal for SHA, that allows us to kind of add that missing piece of the priority hire puzzle.

Does it cause OH any problem?

No, it should be fine.

Excellent questions.

Thank you.

And I really appreciate you double-checking, especially for our friends at the Building Construction Trades.

And we will do some follow-up after this as well.

And I want to underscore for folks, this will not be coming to full council on Monday coming up.

It will be the following council on Monday, June 24th.

So a little bit of time.

And I think that concludes your amendments you wanted to highlight.

Is that correct?

Yes.

Okay.

Ready to move on with the vote.

Right.

So any other comments before we move forward?

A tremendous amount of work.

Thank you for being so thoughtful about this.

Yes.

So carrying on on the thank yous.

Thank you, Tracy, for your work with us.

And this is not just conversations you've been involved with with the offices at City Council.

It's also our larger community housing roundtable that we've pulled together to walk through the various components of the ANF plan.

Thank you, Emily, to you and your team.

I know that this was something that we had way too much excitement for, that is a bunch of alphabet soup, and you helped us understand the exciting opportunities for us to channel the policy ideas that we had into the ANF plan.

And you've been very generous with your willingness to adopt many of those, especially our commitment that we've peppered throughout that we talked about last time.

As we build housing, wanting to build child care, health centers, community centers, and to do so in a way that is reflected throughout the plan, you will find little jewels throughout this document that have come directly from community.

Really want to underscore as well some of the amendments we talked about last time in terms of the community preference policy, the affirmative marketing policy, the opportunities for first-time home buyer to have the chance to now have a home.

Love what we've done on expanding the number of bedrooms so that really families can afford to live in this city.

As we elevate housing, we also are elevating worker protections in this piece of policy.

So, you know, just a lot of work went into this.

The mayor's office executive team led by Emily and Director Walker So just thank you very much.

And Erin House, thank you for your ongoing work on this and for helping us get all these amendments in and then also work with the community.

It's been really, really a badge of honor to have you on our team.

And I think that the document here is more informed because of your work and work with the community.

So thank you.

Before you call the vote, I'm sorry, and I know I always do this.

You just did this wonderful job.

I just wanted to flag an amendment related to another piece of work that we're doing.

Could we do it after the vote?

Would that be okay?

Oh, sure.

Okay.

I mean, it's in the package.

Okay, go ahead, go ahead.

We just didn't talk about it.

Okay, go ahead.

Just the amendment related to the Adu-Dadu pilot.

Oh, yes.

And I want to thank Ali Panoushi, who's not at the table, for identifying that we did not intend to have the pilot be exclusively for ADUs within the existing structure.

It could also be used for the accessory detached unit and that with this pilot, we can make those spaces more livable and that's really tied to the work that we're doing under the leadership of Council Member O'Brien.

Yeah, thank you.

No, that directly ties in.

So, very excited about that work.

Again, thank you both for your input in the administration and finance plan.

Emily, is it okay if I keep calling this a moral document?

Okay.

That was an official approval.

I second that.

OK, so what we're going to do is I'm going to go ahead and move that to bring the bill forward.

Then I will have to move to remove Amendment 11. Then Councilmember Herbold will move to include her revised Amendment 11 and then also include Amendment 18 and then we can vote on the whole package.

So I'd like to move to pass Council Bill 119531. Second.

Are there any other comments?

No.

All in favor of moving Amendment All in favor of considering removing Amendment 11, which is Exhibit B, I'd like to hear from you.

So I'd like to move amending Council Bill 119531 by substituting Version 2 for Version 1A, by substituting Version 4 for Version 3 of Exhibit A, and by substituting Version 3 for version two of Exhibit B, except for Amendment 11, which just to underscore, removes Amendment 11. Second that.

All in favor say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

None.

Okay, it's unanimous.

We have removed Amendment A from our documents, plural.

We are going to consider the revised Amendment 11. Council Member Herbold.

I'd like to move revised proposed Amendment 11. Great, which we can find in Exhibit B, Chapter 4, Section A, 10d, as presented by Council Central staff, which Council Member Herbold refers to as revised Amendment 11 for simplicity.

Excellent.

Appreciate that.

Second.

Great, it's been moved and seconded.

Are there any other discussion?

Seeing none, all in favor, vote aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

None opposed.

Council Member Herbold, thank you for moving that motion forward.

The motion carries and the amendment is adopted.

Council Member Herbold, would you like to move amendment 18?

Oh boy, yeah, sure.

I would like to move Amendment 18 related to the, what is this related to?

This is related to the apprenticeship programs.

Amending Council Bill 119531, Exhibit B, Chapter 4, Section E, Apprenticeship Programs by adding a new paragraph as presented in Amendment 18.

Excellent.

Second.

All in favor?

Aye.

Any opposed?

None.

Great.

It appears that Amendment 18 has carried and the amendment is adopted.

So here we are with our amended legislation.

If there are no further comments, I'd like to move that the committee recommend passage of Council Bill 119531 as amended Any other additional comment?

Oh, all in favor say aye.

Aye.

None opposed.

Great.

It is unanimous.

We will bring forward the various pieces of legislation and we will recommend passage of Council Bill 119531 as amended on the June 24th City Council meeting for final consideration.

Thank you all for your work on this ANF plan and look forward to working with you as we do the implementation.

Just thank you.

I know we've been doing this and really appreciating and diving into the thank yous, but seriously, this has been a ton of work.

Erin, I'm glad you're part of the team.

Tracy, you've been a star the number of times you've been in explaining all this to me.

And as always, Emily, Office of Housing, we really appreciate you.

And if anybody wonders, we keep calling it the ANF plan, administrative and financial plan for our Seattle housing levy.

This is the thing voters vote on.

We want to make sure that it works.

So thank you.

Good point.

Excellent.

So we have about 15 minutes left.

We have extended this to noon.

Hoping you guys might be able to stay for the last 15. We had delayed having a conversation of this last item on the agenda, which is notice of intent to sell.

It's just a briefing today.

And then we will get you out of here on time.

Thank you very much for joining us, Erin, and all your work on this.

If anything, if you could read into the record item number three, that would be great.

Agenda item three, Council Bill 119537 in ordinance relating to the sale of low-income housing requiring owners of certain multifamily rental housing to notify the Seattle Office of Housing, the Seattle Housing Authority, and the tenants of the owner's proposed sale of that housing for a briefing and discussion.

Tracy and Emily, you want to introduce yourself for the record one more time?

Sure.

Tracy Russ of Council Central Staff.

Emily Alvarado, Office of Housing.

Okay, great.

So I'm going to try to be very brief.

We know that the cost of housing continues to skyrocket in this city.

We are trying to look at every tool that we can add to our toolbox because there's no one tool that can help us address affordable housing across the board.

But as we see the cost of housing mean that units go up for sale and get sold just like that, what happens is that many of the folks who are living in multifamily structures, think of apartment complexes, even duplexes and triplexes, those units go up so fast.

What we'd love to do in this legislation with your help is to create the ability for both tenants who are in existing structures and for our nonprofit developers to have access to these multifamily structures before they go up for sale on the open market.

One of the things we've seen from other cities is that when we create this window, for individuals who are tenants and for non-profit developers, including Office of Housing and SHA, Seattle Housing Authority, to have access to make an initial bid.

It doesn't change the cost of the sale, but it does create a little bit more opportunity for especially our non-profit developers to have access to help create more affordable units across the board.

So very briefly, are you going to go through the existing legislation?

Yes, I will.

Okay, so Tracy will do that.

I just want to say thanks for the ongoing conversations that we've had with many of your offices and for the other cities who've given us the chance to learn from them.

This is not the end of the conversation today.

We have had some conversations with some folks in the industry to talk about various ways in which this can be made implementable.

I love that word because it's not just the vision, it's how do we make it work.

So I want to flag for folks that this will be coming back for consideration in this committee again on July 11th.

So this will be the beginning of the conversation.

Tracy, why don't you walk us through what existing law is and how we're proposing to change it.

So to remind Councilmembers, the City Council adopted the first notice of intent to sell policy in 2015. That policy requires owners of multifamily rental housing units with five or more housing units with at least one of those units renting at a rate affordable to households at or below 80% of area median income which today would be about $1,500 for a studio, $1,600 for a one-bedroom.

The owners are required to provide this notice to the Office of Housing and the Seattle Housing Authority.

The owner must provide the notice at least 60 days prior to listing a property with a real estate listing service or advertising it in a print newspaper or on the Internet.

The notice must include the owner's name, phone number, and address of the property.

The Office of Housing is responsible for enforcing these requirements.

They do it on a complaint basis only.

The Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections is authorized to impose a penalty up to $500 for any person who fails to provide the existing required notice.

In terms of moving to the proposed legislation, it would make a number of changes to the Notice of Intent to Sell Policy, and that includes the following.

It would expand the notice requirements to owners of multifamily rental housing units with two or more housing units, again, with at least one of those units renting at a rate affordable to a household at or below 80 percent of AMI.

This does not apply, to be really clear, does not apply to single family homes.

to ADUs or DADUs, and that is just because of the definition that we use in the legislation, which excludes those from this policy.

It does increase the notice period from 60 days to 90 days prior to a building being listed for sale.

It requires an owner to submit a signed declaration under penalty of perjury, affirming that the owner has complied with the notice requirements when they submit their written notice to the Office of Housing.

It also requires an owner to prominently post a notice in the building notifying tenants of the owner's intent to sell the building so that the tenants are informed of this impending action.

The notice must be posted no later than 90 days prior to the building being listed or advertised for sale.

The notice must include information on the availability of homeownership assistance from the Office of Housing.

as well as information from the city on programs that can help renters who might have some need of assistance in the event of a building sailing.

It also requires an owner who has not actively marketed their property for sale, so not gotten to the point of being able to list, but actually has gotten an unsolicited offer, it requires them also to provide a notice to the Office of Housing, to SHA, and to the tenants within two days of receiving the offer.

I know that this is an issue that you're not thinking about selling your property, but somebody calls up and says, hey, I would love to buy that house and here's an offer.

So that would not be enough.

So the language is very clear that they receive an offer and they intend to act on that offer.

So it has to not just be that, oh, they got a call or a flyer that says, you know, we want to buy your place.

It's that the owner is intending to move forward with that offer.

So we made it really clear that that has to be part of the equation.

And just, I'm so sorry, I caught the tail end of that question.

I just want to underscore something I know you've already said, but this would not apply to single family homes and it would not apply to any home that has a dadu or an adu.

So in case folks are thinking, oh my goodness, what does this do to me as a homeowner?

It wouldn't apply there.

I was going to actually hold this question, but since you underscored the fact that it does not include single-family homes, I have a question.

So one of the urban villages within my district is really, really interested in pursuing some sort of an overlay of their neighborhood.

because they want to make sure that as single family homes are sold, that they're not just flipped.

And one of, you know, an affordable neighborhood for young families, for home ownership, they're worried that it's going to lose its affordability.

And so they are actually interested in creating some sort of an overlay just in the Morgan Junction four single family homes.

Just what do you think about that?

So I know that the mandatory housing affordability accompanying resolution directed our office to work with community members from the Morgan Junction on this issue.

We have met with folks several times.

And I think that part of that conversation, what it reveals is that really in this existing ordinance that we participate in and from those community members, the real interest is in finding willing, sellers who will then sell to an entity like a land trust or an affordable housing developers to help try to maintain affordability.

And so we've talked to your constituents about how do we both educate owners about opportunities and how do we inform them about the ability transfer their properties to affordable housing developers, and that can come in many ways, and it's partly about building a relationship with property owners to let them know about what exists.

So sometimes in these cases, carrots or information or education sharing is really what's important.

And so for the purposes of the existing law, this is a little bit of a pivot, one of the things that our, acknowledging it, one of the things we focused a lot on in implementing the existing law is how do we educate property owners of their requirements under this law.

Because We are unlikely to get owners who are interested in transacting their properties with affordable housing developers if they don't know about it and they don't have confidence in the ability to sell the property that way.

So we did mailers to all property owners.

We posted information on our website.

We worked with the Rental Housing Association and we had a real education-focused implementation of that.

Similarly, in sub-neighborhoods where there's an interest in moving property from private to non-profit ownership, that education piece is going to be critical.

So let's keep going.

I know we only have a few more minutes.

Just last two provisions that are worth noting.

One, the ordinance would prohibit an owner from executing a purchase and sale agreement for the building until 90 days after the required notice has been issued or posted.

And this would apply to either the case in which they're getting ready to list the property or got an unsolicited offer.

So 90 days before they could actually move forward with executing a purchase and sale agreement.

And then finally, the penalty for violation goes from $500 to $2,000.

Great.

So I want to underscore, you know, we have always been interested in not just passing legislation but making sure that it is workable and that there is enforcement.

When we see a $500 penalty right now and then also recognize over the last five years there's only been about nine individual sales that have been brought to the Office of Housing for notice under the existing ordinance.

It made us think that we need to do a better job of both doing education, as Emily talked about, and also doing a better job of enforcement.

I don't want to pretend that $2,000 is a huge penalty because we know that it would potentially be a drop in the bucket compared to the actual sale.

We've seen some other kind of innovative, more robust strategies used in other cities when it comes to legislation like this.

But I think recognizing that it's not just about the stick, as Emily talked about, it's not just about the penalty, but more about the education and broadening out who gets notice.

When we do things like not just increase the fine, but do a better job of notifying the tenants, which is not a component of the existing ordinance, and we broaden out the number from not just five and more units, but to two and more units, there's more opportunity.

And I think one of the things I'm excited about is potential first-time home ownership opportunities with the changes of the state law that allow for us to think about the condoization of some existing multifamily structures.

There may be more people in the future who would want to take up these first-time homeownership options as tenants.

When we do a good job of posting information at the front, perhaps more of these individuals will want to work with our nonprofit developers to potentially initiate a transaction.

And as we've heard from Office of Housing and Seattle Housing Authority, acquisition is becoming more and more a tool to help us identify which structures we can bring online to keep as affordable housing.

That said, regarding the 90-day window, existing policy, as you know, is 60 days.

We have broadened that out because many of the folks at our community housing roundtable have said within a 60-day period, it's really hard to initiate that transaction to get all the paperwork together.

Ninety days would be more reasonable.

And we are also engaging in folks who are on the seller side who say, hey, we usually get a heads up within a 30-day period whether or not someone's actually interested.

Maybe there's both timeframes that we can look at.

First, is there a notice of interest that we can define in a future draft for our colleagues to consider?

And then if there is interest, then that 90-day period kicks in.

I want to flag for you all and the public and anybody who may be listening, We are continuing to explore that option.

And over the next month, because again, this won't come back until July 11th, we would love to explore with you the potential for the intent timeframe and then the transaction or initiating a transaction timeframe.

Thank you.

That's an area or a couple of areas you mentioned that I'm interested in.

And I understand that San Francisco may have what they call a gate that allows for somebody to raise their hand and say, look, I'm interested.

And then the second gate is, all right, I'm gonna bring forward to you, maybe it's a statement from my bank that says, I'm capable of doing this.

And then the third is, okay, well, we'll extend and give you some timelines to make that work.

I will tell you, I'm interested in that tiered timing, tiered based upon the size of the units, for example.

Having been here, and I know that Council Member Herbold was here as well in a different capacity.

But we worked on this, the notion of the 60 days prior to listing a property, that was quite a debate on how long that was going to be.

And the other was the five or more.

That likewise was a debate.

The real estate groups that I have heard from are saying, you know, four and under, not a big deal because there are a lot of they're not duplexes, they're quadruplexes, but people treat them really as, hey, I'm living in one, and I've got my mother-in-law living in one, so I'd love us to consider, you know, that five units or more.

I'd like to discuss that, just raise it, and maybe talk with some more folks about why did we choose that particular number.

And I also think that 90 days, frankly, is a really long period of time.

If you're selling a home, The gem in the world is a willing buyer.

Now, I realize what we're trying to accomplish is to make sure that others have a right or advance notice to get their financing together.

And like you were talking about with your experience in Queen Anne, had you known You could have had the time to move and there were people with the wherewithal to make that happen.

So those are the areas, the tiered timing, the gate, you know, the gate which is essentially, all right, I'm going to give you a certain number of days notice and I think I understand San Francisco is like five days, which seems really short, but the idea is just raise your hand, tell us if you're interested or not.

But not fair if nobody's home to say the five days starts ticking.

So I would love us to explore that.

But in those areas, let's take a look at it.

You know, I know the 60 days was hard fought.

Let's look at the tiered, what the timing could be.

and then have an actual gate that says whatever the number is, five days, 10 days, 15, to say, I'm interested.

That's all you have to do.

And then have, you know, within the next certain number of dates to say, okay, here is my finance plan, or at least a statement from the bank saying, this person has the wherewithal to do this.

Council Member Herbold.

Thank you.

I just want to say in retrospect, because I do remember in 2015 when this is being discussed, in retrospect I don't quite understand why this was so hard fought because there were nine property owners that complied with the law and we know that in the last four years there have been or three years probably once it actually went into effect, there have been many more properties that have sold in the city.

So that is a kind of fun thing to reflect upon.

I think the verb is awfulizing.

But we want to make sure that we get this right so people comply.

Because the goal is what counts.

And so on that issue of enforcement, just to finish up my train of thought, please, thanks.

On the issue of enforcement, I would like to explore whether or not the Office of Housing might consider a something like what like the Office of Housing I mean sorry the Office of Civil Rights or the Office of Labor Standards does not just waiting for a complaint to come forward that there's been a violation, but having sort of an affirmative enforcement process.

And perhaps what that might mean is periodically checking with the King County Assessor.

It would be after the fact, right?

On notices of violation, you know, maybe check, or not notices of violation, notices of sale.

You know, maybe doing, agreeing to check 5% of sales a year to see whether and comparing those records in the King County Assessors with your own records to see of the sampling that you've looked at whether or not those property sales reflected adherence to this new requirement.

Because these aren't documents that are required to be filed normally with the city.

They are required to be filed with King County.

We are going to be requiring them, but you're not going to know what you don't know if they're not being filed.

I'm going to encourage us to think about it because we got a month and I appreciate you bringing that up because I know Tracy's wheels are turning, Emily's wheels are turning over there and it gives us a few weeks to chew on some of the enforcement ideas that you had and maybe look at some of these other examples Councilmember Baxter had and I like the fact that we're not just putting policy on paper but we're thinking about how to make it workable and enforceable.

So I'm going to ask you all to think about that and work with us as we think about that component.

Any other comments from the two of you?

I did have one other suggestion for us to consider in the next month, and that is to convening a group of stakeholders, tenant advocates, and providers.

And if you can do that, brokers lend.

Sure.

To talk about how we can both create a system where we're monitoring and identifying properties that can go up for sale in advance.

as well as potentially making some recommendations as it relates to creating the budget and capacity building for tenant groups to work together with nonprofits to purchase their buildings.

DC has a model for that capacity building model.

And so perhaps a group of stakeholders could also opine on that as well.

I would love to say yes and.

Yes and stakeholders but let's broaden the stakeholders so nobody feels left out.

And I think there's a distinction between the two conversations that we're having.

So one is we will definitely continue to convene stakeholders as it relates to the legislation.

I think that's a great idea and when I say stakeholders it's broad, believe me folks.

We've been trying to engage in both the sellers, the tenants, and the nonprofit developers, as well as SHA and Office of Housing to get feedback on legislation.

And then I think I hear what you're saying is assuming this passage, we want to make sure that it's not just making available the information, but then how do you do the asset building so that people can actually access those dollars and make a transaction possible, which would be a broader stakeholder process going forward.

So appreciate both of those comments.

I just heard a slight distinction.

Thank you.

So I'm gonna go ahead and, did you have one more thing, Tracy?

I just wanted to respond to your, I thought you wanted us to do that before the legislation was actually adopted and that was gonna be a problematic situation.

I'm like, I don't think I have enough hours in the day to.

I discussed it as an amendment that we would develop.

setting out what we, our goal is in the future.

Okay, so what I heard was five, maybe more things, starting backwards, forwards, amendment possibly to consider pulling together a table so that there is an asset building conversation that would accompany such a policy.

Also reaffirming that we are interested in continuing the engagement with sellers, tenants, and potential buyers from the non-profit world, including our public partners, in the next month as we get to get this right.

In terms of the policy ideas that we've heard is affirmative enforcement, looking at the size of the units, looking at a tiered timeframe, which is sort of what I described verbally, but we'll look at some of these other examples that you mentioned.

Definitely interested in what that looks like for an intent.

and then sale and you mentioned proof capability.

So those are the four policy areas that we'll look into in addition to the stakeholder commitments that we've made.

And with that, we will bring it back on July 11th and That will be a 9 30 meeting.

Want to flag for folks, especially our council colleagues that there's not gonna be a regularly scheduled her committee meeting next week.

We're here meeting because of that.

We're not having one next week, and we will also have a meeting on the 27th.

to make up as well, which is going to be June 27th at noon.

It's going to be a special meeting just focused on the hotel worker legislation.

Remember that hotel worker legislation initiative 124 passed by 77%.

We want to do the legislative approach to getting the policy into statute and to make a few tweaks here and there.

So we've been working with hoteliers and the workers and community at large to come to you all with some legislation.

that I believe is going to be online available for you all to take a look at in the next week here.

So legislation four pieces coming for our June 27th meeting and with that if there is anybody interested in child care for that meeting we will provide child care Let me rephrase that.

We are also going to have an evening meeting where child care will be provided on July 2nd, two days before my birthday, just saying.

And the 4th of July is my birthday.

July 2nd at 5, I'm sorry, 530, is that right, Friday?

5 o'clock.

5 p.m.

July 2nd at 5 p.m.

we will have a public hearing to bring folks in to talk about the hotel worker legislation and there we will have child care so if you'd like child care give us a heads up and let us know.

We will also have discounted parking at James and Fifth Avenue at five dollars and let us know how else we can accommodate you all being here.

We know evening meetings are tough But day meetings are harder for many people who work during the day.

So with that, huge appreciation for all that you've done on ANF and congratulations on today.

And thanks again to everybody who came out to testify this morning on the HSD inflationary adjustment.

With that, today's meeting is adjourned.

Thank you.

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