Seattle City Council Select Budget Committee 10/13/22

Good morning, everyone.

Thank you so much for joining the Seattle City Council's Select Budget Committee meeting.

Today is Thursday, October 13th.

The time is 9.31am.

I'm Teresa Mosqueda, Chair of the Select Budget Committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Councilmember Nelson?

Present.

Councilmember Peterson?

Present.

Councilmember Sawant?

Council Member Strauss.

Present.

Council Member Herbold.

Council Member Juarez.

Here.

Council Member Lewis.

Present.

Council Member Morales.

Here.

And Chair Mosqueda.

Present.

Seven present.

Thank you so much, Madam Clerk.

I will make sure to announce our colleagues if they join us and when they join us later today.

I want to thank you all for being here with us today.

This is day three of week three in a four day long process of us doing a deep dive into the mayor's proposed budget for 2023 and 2024. Today, we're going to spend our time focused on the following departments, Department of Transportation, the proposed enforcement officer PEO transfer from Department of Transportation to the Seattle Police Department, then the Seattle Police Department, And finally, the Community Safety and Communication Center.

So the four departments today are SDOT, the discussion about the PEO transfer, the Department of, excuse me, SPD, and then CSCC.

If there's no objection, today's agenda is adopted.

Hearing no objection, today's agenda is adopted.

We are very appreciative of the ongoing conversations that we've been able to have with the departments.

and to walk through the issue identification memos as well with central staff.

I wanna welcome to the stage here today, our fearless leader, Esther Handy, who is the director of central staff.

And she will be with us here throughout the day.

I wanna thank deputy director Panucci for her participation over the last two days.

And of course, we will continue to have with us the director of the city budget's office, Julie Dingley.

Thanks again for being here with us today.

Throughout the day, colleagues, we're going to continue with the same process that we used yesterday.

Thank you again to Councilmember Strauss for getting us going in the morning.

But we have worked out a process that I think allows for some real robust discussion, but also questions throughout.

So as a reminder, as we get to each of the presentations, depending on which department it is.

If there is a council member who has purview over that department in their committee, I'll turn it to the council member to add any opening remarks that they'd like to say reflecting on the work of the department and give them the chance to welcome colleagues from that department since they all see each other quite frequently.

The department will walk through their PowerPoint presentation.

I want to encourage council members If you have a question, of course, feel free to raise your hand and I'll recognize you throughout the presentation from the departments.

And that's also true for our central staff members.

For the team from central staff, if you have something that you want to flag for us, if you have an issue that might be addressed later in issue identification, or if you have additional context or questions that you've already submitted to the departments, we are also encouraging the central staff team to chime in as well.

And then we'll get to the opportunity to hear from central staff on the issue identification memos that they've created and walk through the PowerPoint presentations.

This is a chance for us on the legislative branch to hear from the nonpartisan central staff team, their analysis of the proposed budget that's been sent down, any questions, concerns, or issues that they have identified.

Council members, please do feel free to raise your hand and ask questions.

You're also welcome to weigh in with any thoughts that you might have at this early stage in the budget deliberations.

And if needed, we have Julie Dingley from the city budget's office as well for any clarifying questions that you might have of CBO in that time.

But of course, the departments feel free to take yourself off of camera or log off if you have other things to do.

We have combined the two efforts in this one week in this go around for budget to try to really get to the heart of where there might be questions or concerns and use this public forum in a transparent way.

to have a discussion about where there might be points of question or concern.

So that is the two-pronged process that we have for each department.

First, we'll walk through departments, then we'll walk through central staff.

Council members encouraged to ask questions throughout.

All right.

Seems like it worked okay yesterday after we ironed that first part out.

With that, Madam Clerk, let's go ahead and get right on in.

We are on time at 9.35 AM.

Let's read item number one.

Seattle Department of Transportation for briefing and discussion.

Thank you so much, Madam Clerk.

And we're really thrilled to have the team from SDOT here with us.

Greg Spotts, who is our new director of SDOT, as well as Chris Castleman and the central staff presenters will be Calvin Chow and Esther Handy, our director.

of central staff when we get to that panel presentation.

I want to welcome Councilmember Peterson.

Councilmember Peterson, as chair of the committee that has oversight on transportation and utilities, would you like to make some opening comments?

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

Good morning, colleagues.

I want to thank Director Greg Spatz and Chris Castleman for being here today and for your upcoming presentation, which was posted online.

I appreciate all the work that the Seattle Department of Transportation has done in preparing for this budget season and for all the collaboration from SDOT and the city budget office and responding to questions from our city council central staff.

A big thank you to our central staffer Calvin Chow for all the research and analysis he provides to the council.

We look forward to his presentation this morning as well.

As we know the budget for this particular department is complex, with both operating expenses as well as fluctuating capital projects for multiple modes of transportation with multiple sources of funding.

There's a lot to like about the department's budget proposal, such as the budget support for public mass transit.

I also have some significant questions about two key items.

I'll just sort of lay out some big picture things before we get to the presentations here.

So pedestrian safety and bridges.

So I'm looking at this budget and does this budget do enough to increase pedestrian safety?

Does this budget do enough to prioritize Seattle's aging bridge infrastructure in light of the 2020 bridge audit and the closure of the West Seattle Bridge?

These were two items mentioned by Director Handy as well in her opening remarks.

So I'm glad to see an increase in investments that aim to reduce traffic fatalities and serious injuries, what we call Vision Zero, because our goal is to reduce traffic fatalities and serious injuries to zero by the year 2030. As chair of the transportation committee, I appreciate that safety is a shared priority.

I support the leadership of our new SDOT Director Greg Spatz in launching a top-to-bottom review of our Vision Zero strategies and implementation.

While we are actually projecting at least a 20% reduction in traffic fatalities this year, dropping from the COVID-era spike of 30 fatalities last year to a projected 23 fatalities by the end of each year, Each fatality is unacceptable it's a tragedy.

We must increase our investments and improve the effectiveness of Seattle's programs to eliminate these horrific collisions.

I want to report the most recent data from the Vision Zero team regarding fatalities through September 30 of this year, seven pedestrians have been killed, seven people in cars or on motorcycles have been killed, and three people on bikes have been killed.

Since 2015, the majority of traffic fatalities are similarly pedestrians, 51%, followed by 39%, people in cars or on motorcycles, followed by 9% on bikes.

I'm so as I look at the budget in terms of the investments.

I just will probably have questions about this going forward so just a heads up that we're seeing a 34% increase in funding for pedestrians, just terrific.

Also seeing a $20 million increase or 147% increase for bike lanes.

So we want to learn more about that.

to understand how the data is being addressed through the budget process here.

A pedestrian in a wheelchair was killed just earlier this week on Aurora Avenue.

I want to understand the timing of the capital projects.

Maybe that explains why there's a lopsided allocation or what appears to be that way.

I'm concerned that the pedestrian and bike safety project across I-5 on Northeast 45th Street that council provided the design funding for is not being implemented in this budget.

That was something that was also promised as part of move to Seattle.

Regarding bridges, another safety concern that I see in this proposal is a decrease in funding for maintaining or replacing our bridge infrastructure.

As we've talked about a lot at city council bridges connect our communities to keep our regional economy moving the city suffer through the two and a half year closure of the West Seattle bridge so I appreciate the leadership, the new leadership amplifying bridges as being necessary for our communities and economy.

And of course, mobility.

I'm hearing those words.

I'm appreciating them.

I'm just not seeing it reflected in the dollars.

So, in fact, the bridge funding seems to be going in the wrong direction.

We'll talk about this more.

Page five of the Central Step PowerPoint and page eleven of the Central Step memo show capital capital investments for bridges declining by forty two million forty percent.

Or from 42 million to 25 million which is a 41% reduction in bridge investment so we're going to want to, we're going to want to dig into that a bit.

I do want to acknowledge that Greg spots just started as director of stat and it did not personally put this budget together.

I appreciate his early leadership and his visits to several of our districts to see firsthand our unique transportation needs.

Colleagues, I believe that as is typical each year our transportation needs and hope for projects will exceed the funding before us today so I will be open to increasing some revenue sources for increased investments for bridge safety and pedestrian safety in preparing for today for example we learned that.

school zone speeding cameras.

They're at only 14 public school locations and we have 100 public school locations.

So 80% of public schools at least do not have this pedestrian safety benefit of school zone speed cameras.

They cost about $60,000 to $70,000 to install and they generate four times as much revenue.

So that's something I'm excited about exploring with my colleagues as we move forward.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

I appreciate the opportunity to have opening remarks.

Absolutely.

I want to thank you, Councilmember Peterson, for your leadership on transportation.

Look forward to having those discussions about some of those issues, including possible revenue.

And thanks for the early identification of some issues that you'll be looking for as the chair of transportation.

I also want to make sure that we welcome for the record Councilmember Herbold and Councilmember Sawant.

Thanks so much for being here with us.

And I will turn it directly over to Director Spatz from SDOT.

Good morning.

Thanks for being here.

Good morning.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to be with you today, and it's great to have this experience, my first budget hearing in Seattle.

It's an exciting time for transportation in Seattle.

Amidst revenue challenges, we are resourced to deliver for the present and prepare for the future, centering safety and equity.

I want to take this opportunity to update the council on two public commitments I made during the confirmation process.

On safety, we've appointed an executive sponsor and a project manager who have commenced a top to bottom review of Vision Zero.

This review will be completed and published in early 2023. To strengthen the asset management of our portfolio of bridges, I've transferred a senior manager into the roadway structures division to drive completion of the bridge audit recommendations.

This fall, we will implement the recommendation to focus our SDOT bridge maintenance staff on SDOT-maintained bridge assets rather than diverting their time to reimbursable work for other projects or entities.

We're excited about major planning efforts that will shape the future of Seattle.

The mayor's budget proposal thoughtfully invests in these vital efforts.

The Seattle Transportation Plan has begun a public conversation about our transportation future.

Co-created with our communities, the completed plan will inform the elements of our next transportation funding measure.

The Sound Transit West Seattle Ballard Link Extension offers our city a once-in-a-generation opportunity for low-carbon mobility, neighborhood vitality, and world-class placemaking.

Having served as Mayor Villaraigosa's lead on a $10 billion portfolio of transportation megaprojects, I know that the most consequential decisions for our urban fabric are made in the early stages of a project.

So now is the time to staff up and fully engage on design and engineering decisions.

Finally, SDOT staff are delighted to have the opportunity to bring a One Seattle approach to contributing to multi-departmental efforts to enhance the vitality and economic development of Seattle's downtown.

Across all of these policies, projects, and programs, SDOT will be a responsive, innovative, transparent, and accountable agency.

And now I'd like to introduce our Director of Finance and Administration, Chris Castleman.

Good morning, Council Members.

Thank you for having us here today.

Again, I am Chris Castleman, SDOT's Director of Finance and Administration, and I'll be getting into some of the more specific detail about our proposed operating budget and capital improvement program.

I'll start with a look at our financial outlook and then highlight some of the discrete changes proposed for the coming biennium.

Transportation funding for the city remains unsteady.

While SDOT has seen revenue increases in some areas, including new grants and partnerships, these are largely tied to specific or restricted purposes and are not available to support many of our general Transportation service activities, key transportation funding sources, such as the state gas tax and the city's commercial parking tax have not yet recovered to pre pandemic levels.

The rebound to the commercial parking tax or CPT in particular is very uncertain.

Current forecasts have CPT revenues rebounding to pre-pandemic levels in 2024, but that includes the additional revenue generated from the CPT incremental increase put into place this year, and also assumes significant changes in behavior from what we see now.

CPT is also a highly leveraged funding source.

Its flexibility in supporting a variety of the city's transportation needs means we have had to maximize our use of existing and future CPT dollars to balance this two-year budget.

In addition, fare revenues from our two streetcar lines continues to fall short of pre-pandemic levels and are unable to fully cover operating expenses, causing a further strain on the CPT, which is used to keep the streetcar operating fund solvent.

As a result, we are also relying heavily on use of limited transportation fund balance, as well as increased use of non-transportation fund sources, such as the general fund, REIT, and the payroll expense tax, to see us through the next two years.

With regard to as thoughts general fund allocation.

As you can see on this slide, our 2022, excuse me or 2023 2024 proposed general fund budget is reduced by $13.5 million.

and $11.8 million in each year, respectively, compared to the 2022 revised budget.

This change is driven largely by the proposed move of the parking enforcement program, a general fund activity to the Seattle Police Department, almost $20 million in 2023 and $20.5 million in 2024. We have also reduced our general fund baseline budget in the coming biennium by $2.8 million each year to support overall city balancing needs.

Those reductions are offset somewhat by new general fund investments elsewhere in our portfolio.

For example, funding for Clean Seattle work is mostly coming through a new general fund appropriation, which will be reviewed in more detail at tomorrow's special presentation on Clean Seattle.

Turning to non-general fund or other resources, you can see that our 23-24 appropriation levels have increased over the 2022 adopted budget, but are significantly less than the 2022 revised budget.

The 2022 revised budget increase is mainly due to capital carry forward of unspent 2021 funds to support project continuation this year.

The 2022 revised budget is also significantly higher than future years due to a variety of factors.

For example, many discrete capital projects are under construction or on course for final delivery in 2022. You'll note too that the 24 budget is lower than 23 since many move Seattle levy projects are wrapping up by the end of 2024. The increased appropriation amounts and other funds over the 2022 revised budget comes from smaller increased investments in a variety of projects.

some of which I'll turn to in a few moments.

But first, I want to review the proposed changes to our staffing levels.

As you can see from this slide, SDOT's proposed budget includes an overall decrease in our position count.

The majority of the change is related to the transfer of 123 FTEs in the parking enforcement program to SPD, as well as the transfer of another position to the Office for Sustainability and the Environment.

At the same time, these positions are moving to other departments, we are proposing the creation of 27 new positions across eight work areas within the department to perform critical services that can't be provided with existing staff.

This includes services for the city's Clean Seattle program and support for Sound Transit's very complex and multi-year West Seattle Ballard Link extension project that will have an enormous impact on our city.

We'll come back to that project in a few minutes.

This budget also identifies 34 temporary or term limited positions which represent regular ongoing work essential to our delivery of the program services and projects, and we are proposing to establish regular ongoing positions to do this work moving forward.

The cost for those positions is already built into our 2023 base budget and will not require any additional budget authority.

And with that, I'd like to review some of the more discrete proposals in our budget.

All right, excuse me, I have to advance my own speaking notes.

Greg mentioned our ongoing commitment to meeting our Vision Zero goals.

I want to highlight three investments in the proposed budget.

The first two are on this slide.

Enhanced school safety, traffic, pedestrian funding.

We are pleased to be able to invest this funding into 13 projects within a quarter mile radius of schools throughout the city.

The scope of these projects include safer and more comfortable places to walk and bike and walking routes to schools.

Busy arterial intersections will receive safety improvements such as curb bulbs and flashing lights.

The school community and neighbors will be engaged in walking audits.

and I just lost my slide, and here we are.

Neighborhood streets will be calmed with speed humps and stop signs will be installed to improve traffic control.

And then the Aurora Avenue North safety improvements.

This critical safety project is included in the proposed 2022 year-end supplemental.

Thanks to the earmark of state Move Ahead Washington funding.

And we want to thank you, Council, for your support through the process of securing this resource.

We are excited to move forward with this project that is key to moving the needle on our Vision Zero goals along this critical corridor.

A planning study is now in progress with the bulk of the work getting underway in 2023 and 2024. Next slide, please.

The third investment comes via the proposed material change to the Seattle Transportation Measure to support increased safety improvements by lifting the annual cap on allowable spending on small capital projects.

These investments across the city would likely include traffic calming, signal upgrades, and pedestrian crossing improvements like pedestrian islands or curb bulbs, which enhance safety, reliability, and access.

Of course, we have many more Vision Zero investments in our budget, but I just wanted to touch on those three.

Next slide, please.

Now we'll turn to two projects related to furthering economic development and community vitality in our city.

The East Marginal Way Corridor Project, supporting heavy haul movements and safety along the roadway for all users is the first one I want to note.

With this $2.6 million investment over the coming biennium, the north segment of the East Marginal Way Corridor Project will be fully funded, and we will be able to proceed with that segment.

However, construction for the center segment is not yet fully funded, and we are working with all stakeholders on the project to determine the size of our funding gap, and we will continue to pursue all potential available resources.

Next, the Center City Connector Paws.

We are eager to partner with the Office of Economic Development and all downtown stakeholders on the Downtown Mobility Study to understand how transportation system improvements can best support all members of the downtown community, as well as greater connectivity throughout the center city.

The study will also inform future decisions related not just to the proposed Center City Connector streetcar project, but also Third Avenue improvements, the West Seattle Ballard Link Light Rail extension, and transportation system improvements around the city.

Next slide, please.

Actually, I'm going to ask you to pause here real quick.

I want to just take a few questions, or I have a few questions on Seattle City Connector streetcar.

Let me understand here.

This project is clearly a key component of the TNC tax package that the stakeholders came up with.

We talked a lot about concern around stakeholder priorities for the spend plan for the TNC package on Tuesday when we did an overview of the revenue assumptions in the proposed budget.

We know that this was a big priority for the coalition that worked on the tax.

They agreed that they wanted to see this missing piece of the downtown transit infrastructure move forward.

We've heard concerns from the coalition members that they have not been part of the conversation and decision making to defer progress on this project.

And I'm wondering if you can elaborate on if there was any stakeholder engagement with the original coalition that came up with the components of the TNC tax.

Obviously, it's a big concern of mine that my entire time that I've been in office, this project has now been delayed because of the previous administration, but I'm I'm concerned that I see that the decision here looks like it's going to continue to defer making progress on this project.

And I just wanted to flag my concern about the project, but also my concern around stakeholder engagement.

Do you have anything else to add about the process the department may have gone through or the administration?

That we have remained committed to engaging with all stakeholders for the, not only the center city connector project but also of course the entire downtown community, and I.

and I see that Calvin has his hand raised, so I'll be quick.

I would suggest that this is really an important time to continue to pause the project while we take up the concerns that not only council members, but also residents and workers and people in the downtown population have expressed about 3rd Avenue and downtown in general, and to really understand best how the C3 project fits in and can support those concerns before we actually continue proceeding with design at this time.

And so it's meant to be a temporary pause that allows us to really have a better understanding of where the project is in today's Seattle and then also is a nod to the constraints we have with TNC revenues and other funding sources that support transportation.

Okay, I see a few hands, so I'm going to call on Calvin from Central South, then Director Dingley, and Council Member Morales.

I do also want to note, yes, there is support.

I think unanimous support from this council for the reimagining, I don't know what the right word is, reshaping of 3rd Avenue.

And I just don't want that vote of support for the visionary work that needs to be done.

to be used as justification for keeping this project on hold.

So my vote was not indicative of wanting to see this project go on hold, though I understand there's broader discussions to happen.

Those will take so many more years.

So I just want to make sure that we were all, at least that I'm clear about the vote to support 3rd Avenue not being a desire to see this project be further placed on hold.

Calvin from Central Staff, welcome to the stage.

Thank you, Council Member Calvin Chow, Council Central staff.

I just wanted to highlight that there's sort of two outstanding issues, I think, with the streetcar.

I mean, one is how is downtown mobility coming back in pandemic and where do we expect to get back to sort of the previous times when the project was first proposed to kind of understand how does it fit into that broader transportation needs?

The second issue which has also never been fully resolved is the financial plan for operating the streetcar and having an actual financial plan that supports the long-term operations of it.

So I'll wish to say that there are still a lot of outstanding questions before you'll be in a position to actually vote yes or no on the project.

Okay thanks for that reminder.

Director Dingley.

Thank you, Budget Chair.

Good morning, everybody.

Julie Dingley, Budget Office.

I wanted to just, you had asked a question around outreach and I wanted to add to what Chris Kausman was saying that, and just to let you know that the Mayor's Office has met with the coalition that was in support of this and is working with them.

And we really, as you heard from Calvin, really need to work on the feasibility and technical issues, as well as how this fits into sort of overall downtown mobility needs.

So just wanted to let you know those connections are indeed underway.

Thank you so much.

Council Member Morales.

Thank you.

This just raised a whole bunch of new questions for me.

I think the, the first question is regarding the downtown mobility study, and the timeline and scope of work for that, because I feel like, as it relates to the streetcar project we're sort of moving the goalpost on getting that done by including it in that study.

so I'd like to know a little bit more about that.

And then regarding the comments that Calvin just made, there, this, as you said, Chair, project has been, you know, in the works for quite some time.

I'm interested to understand why a financial operating plan has not been completed and how we complete that plan so that we can answer these questions and move on.

Jump right on in, Director Dingley.

It looks like you have an answer to that.

I wanted to just remind council members that this was going to be supported, as the chair said, with TNC revenues and under the pandemic, TNC revenues were a zero.

So we did not actually collect the tax for two years and we just started collecting it very recently.

And so with that anemic start to the funding source, that is why a lot of this work had to had to wait.

And so I just wanted to introduce or reintroduce that Peace.

Thank you.

And Calvin, something to add?

Yeah, if I could just jump in a little bit and remind the council that the original pause came from increased cost estimates on the project as there was vehicle procurement issues in terms of how the vehicle design fit with the program that led to a longer sort of pause to reevaluate the project and identified a funding gap, which kind of put things on hold.

At the time, especially as ridership has changed and expected ridership has changed, it does affect sort of what type of ongoing operation support is needed for the project.

And so I think that's the part that is what I refer to as sort of a financial plan for how we account for that support, because that could be a significant draw on transportation operations funding into the future.

Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember Morales.

Any follow-up?

Are you good for now?

Okay.

Why the conundrum when we need revenue now that relies on a ridership base that's not going to be reflective of the future ridership that we're trying to build for and the population that will continue to grow in this city?

Okay.

Councilmember Lewis, please go ahead.

Thank you, chairman skater and councilmember Morales alluded to some of my questions, but one that I have, I'd like to sort of go back in time to a discussion we had yesterday with the office of economic development and the mobility study that this line item touches on.

We had a bit of a discussion about where that transit study would live, that it would be based in the Office of Economic Development, who would in turn collaborate with SDOT and other relevant departments.

And, you know, I'm fine with that arrangement to be clear.

And I understand the rationale for it.

What I want to avoid and why I want to ask it now in the context of this is I don't want us to be here like a year from now and the study never happened and never went out to bid because there was disagreement between the different departments on how to do it.

Executive comes back to us to say oh you know what it really would have made much more sense for this to be with s dot or with whatever so and then we lose a year of progress in this really critical work.

You know, I would hope that 2023 could really be a year where we make significant progress on third avenue and.

reconfiguring downtown Seattle for the future of what a dynamic diversified downtown is going to look like.

And I just really want to make sure that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing.

So this is your opportunity to weigh in on that topic that we discussed yesterday, since we have the SDOT team here with us today.

I would really like your feedback on how that's going to work and your vision for cooperating with that study so that we can move on to all the things that will unlock, including Third Avenue changes, you know, Center City Connector, all these other things that seem to be gatekept by completing this transit mobility study.

So can we can we get the department's sort of take on how that work is being organized and whether that makes sense?

Good idea, Council Member Lewis, thanks.

Director Spatz, please go ahead.

Sure.

You know, I want to Completely agree with the urgency that I'm hearing across the Council and the comments that Council Member Lewis just made.

I'm a student of cities and how they function, and I'm living in South Lake Union, and I'm in and around the downtown continuously, and I'm concerned about downtown vitality, and I think this study is extremely timely and urgently needed, so I'm going to personally invest in this myself.

and work very closely with Markham, my colleague in the Economic Development Office we've already been meeting.

And both of us can commit that this is a critical piece of work that can't wait.

And I'm actually very excited to engage in this.

Any follow-up Council Member Lewis?

I mean, that's great that you guys are talking about how this is going to work going forward.

Happy to be a resource and helping to to keep that coalition together.

And I just really want to make sure some of this I don't want my question to be perceived as skeptical.

I think interdepartmental efforts work all the time and we can do it really well at the city.

I think I just have sort of a a callous built up from the previous two years and different sets of directors and an inter-department collaboration being perceived as ambiguity that allows work avoidance and nothing ever happens.

So that was the only reason I wanted to kind of cue it up.

I don't think that's the case with this team.

I have huge confidence, Director Spatz and your leadership and Director McIntyre.

I guess that at this point, the question is just, as we're organizing this work through our budget priorities.

It sounds like from your answer, you're totally fine with that study sitting in OED and that you're confident the collaboration and partnership there is going to produce a product and produce it in a timely way.

And that's fine.

I have complete confidence in the ability of you guys to do the work.

I just wanted to confirm that in open session and I look forward to following up on it.

Thank you.

Councilmember Nelson, did I see a hand?

Not right now.

Okay.

Director Spatz, thanks for that answer.

And while we have a pause, can I just go back one slide?

On the concept, on the theme of continuing to move forward, worried about losing time, reconfiguring the priorities, can you talk a little bit about The Seattle transit measure what kind of material changes is the projects that will be what type of material changes are we talking about specifically funding and what specific projects are being deprioritized?

Are we are is funding being reduced across the board?

And is there certain projects that are being put totally on hold because of any of these changes?

And I see, Calvin, please go ahead.

Just Council Member, this is one of the issues that I've got keyed up for later in the presentation and might be helpful to hold.

Okay, sounds good.

And of course, since the departments have the stage right now, if you have anything that you'd like to identify for us, you're welcome to do that as well.

Thank you, chair.

I'm looking forward to what for Calvin's conversation with you later, but I will tell you that we are not reducing we're not reducing any projects with the proposed material change the need for investing in Orca card.

Fair coverage for example or service change changes is no longer.

or is not currently as much of a concern, given changes at the state level with regard to youth or youth transit fair provision, and then also where we are currently with regard to transit ridership and this is a good time right now for us to turn our attention to increased small capital improvement projects across the city.

that improve safety and accessibility for transit users, current and would-be transit users.

Calvin?

Yeah, if I may, I think the short encapsulation is that transit ridership demand has not rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, and we have limited ability to actually request more service from Metro right now.

So because of that, our spending on transit overall is a little bit lower than you know, historically.

And so that leaves more money in fund balance, which we can look for other things to spend it on.

And so the proposal here is to increase the spending on transit capital.

And as I said, later in the presentation, I have a little more detail on the spending categories and how those are interrelated.

Okay, this is exciting.

Thanks so much for teeing that up for the issue identification later.

I interrupted you, I think we were about to go to slide five.

I will note the 1st time since, you know, March of 2020. The rapid ride C line was totally full, barely any 3, 2, or 3 seats the other day and.

A little covered panic because I was like, trying to crawl over people to open the windows, but yeah, it was exciting to see the line full again and.

I, I recognize that, you know, that might be on just a few days as people are spacing out the times that they come in to the office still some interesting times.

Um, let's go ahead.

Thank you.

And yes, I've noticed my bus is a little more crowded too, which is exciting.

All right, so we are on slide five, and this slide focuses attention on the Wisbly project, which both Greg and I have mentioned already.

This project is entering a new phase as we begin work in support of the final environmental impact statement.

and we are also preparing for the design and permitting of the largest infrastructure project in Seattle's history.

SDOT needs to expand our team to work in partnership with Sound Transit with design, permitting, planning, and engagement activities as we steward this project through various city permitting processes.

permitting and review processes.

But because Wisbly is not the city's project, it belongs to Sound Transit, and we do not control the timeline, we won't have another chance to ensure the alignment and the stations reflect the city's priorities or the values we have learned from engagement with communities throughout Seattle.

This project, if done correctly, will make incredibly meaningful strides toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions and advancing the city's climate goals with a strong emphasis on meeting the needs of local communities, as well as improving our city's transportation system along several key travel corridors.

And if we are ready, I'll move to my next slide.

Okay.

This provides just a quick peek at where we are with the levy to move Seattle.

In prior council presentations, budget presentations, SDOT in recent years has included this slide, which I recognize is a little aberration from the template, but because the levy to move Seattle is such a significant investment for our community, we feel it's always important to provide a quick update here, although we do provide other reports to the council.

So the levy to move Seattle will be entering its final two years.

And we are focusing on meeting our voter approved commitments across the portfolio, despite the financial constraints we've faced in recent years, including cost increases.

This slide briefly shows you how we are reallocating levy funding from programs that are ahead on delivery and will meet all their targets.

to those programs that are in need of additional funding to reach their 2015 goals.

This reprogramming has been done in consultation with the levy oversight committee, and I'm excited to say that we are getting very close on pretty much every program with a couple of noted exceptions, one of which is we have a project in the levy portfolio for the Graham Street Station for Sound Transit, and due to Sound Transit's schedule changes, that project no longer fits within the time horizon of the current levy.

And that's one example where we won't be meeting stated commitments from 2015. But otherwise, we're really doing wonderfully.

We had a levy oversight committee meeting on Tuesday, and we were able to share with them our progress across the portfolio.

Council Member Herbold, please go ahead.

Thank you.

I was going to hold this until after the presentation.

Thank you, Mister chair.

Thank you, Mister chair.

of the conversation in the move levy oversight committee recently, and that is the future of the Fauntleroy Boulevard project.

This is a project that was fully funded in the 2015 move levy.

Construction was put on hold in early 2018 because of concern that the investments would be, I think about $14 million of investments in an area might be torn up for light rail, depending on where the alignment was chosen.

I supported that decision to put that on hold until the alignment decisions were made.

But I supported that decision with some contingencies.

The project website notes that SDOT will move forward if Sound Transit Light Rail for West Seattle does not impact Fauntleroy Way.

And the preferred alternative adopted by the Sound Transit Board is for a tunnel that would minimize impact on this project.

And that was a commitment that was made to me, it was made to the constituents who worked really hard to get full funding for this project in the move levy.

And in the community around around font Leroy our, our, our supporters of end users of alternate modes of transportation, our cycling community in West Seattle, and, you know, given the fact that the board plans to adopt a final alternative I would love to hear a status update on planning for this project because my understanding is the conversation in the MOVE levy oversight committee meeting recently was that the project wasn't moving forward and there's no funding listed.

For your question.

We what we want to remember is that the, the one thing that we do with the capital improvement program is we shift funding within the time horizon of the six years to reflect where we currently are with projects.

That flexibility allows us to advance projects that are moving forward in the near term and move funding out for projects that have been delayed or postponed for whatever reason it might be out into the out years, and I.

I am trying to recall the conversation about Fauntleroy from Tuesday night, but I believe that the project is appropriately paused while we work through the final EIS and while the Sound Transit Board makes its decision, as you've noted, and that at the time that we understand the full alignment through the West Seattle Peninsula and across the Duwamish and into Seattle will be in a much better position to appropriately pick back up on the Font Laurie project at that time.

Calvin, did you have something to add?

Just to acknowledge Council Member Herbold that the CIP does not show any Move Seattle funding for the project for 23-24.

This is a line of questioning that I can follow up with the department.

Thank you very much.

Really, really appreciate your doing so.

Again, this is a project, one of the few large projects of this size that was fully funded by the levy.

And I understand that a bureaucratic document may not be able to capture the ongoing commitment to the project.

But I want to make sure that we have memorialized that investment.

We've spent, I think, over a million dollars in planning for the project.

And again, the voters of West Seattle voted on the levy with the understanding that this fully funded project would move forward when we agreed to pause the work because we didn't want to spend I just want to say thank you to councilmember Herbold and councilmember Morales for putting $14 million in an area that might just in less than 10 years get dug up again.

We heard loud and clear that SDOT was going to still be committed to doing the work.

I really appreciate any help I can get in moving this forward.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Well, I have the similar line of questioning.

Maybe Calvin can weigh in on the Grand Street station, too.

This is a project that has been on and off the radar.

Well, not the radar on and off the list of projects for seven years now and would just like to understand if, you know, understanding that Estad is moving funds for a particular reason.

But if there's any additional information, from the Sound Transit side that would be helpful to understand.

Council Member, I'll follow up on that as well.

That is a project that is wholly dependent on Sound Transit to deliver.

So I think we are mostly just following their schedule.

So I will follow that down and try to understand what the funding plan is for it.

Thank you.

Okay.

Thank you so much.

Anything else from the department on this side.

Okay, let's keep going.

Okay.

Thanks.

Absolutely.

Final slide.

I want to acknowledge two of the reductions included in the proposed budget that represent the difficult choices we have had to make.

to balance a budget in the face of so many competing needs and such constrained resources.

So there are two programs that are identified here well one program one project, the first is the your voice your choice program.

And as noted, we are sunsetting this program in lieu of the proposed implementation of the participatory budget program in 2023, and the support that will give to community and neighborhoods.

I want to assure everyone here today and everyone who's listening that SDOT will be able to deliver and complete all projects that are currently in our pipeline.

for your voice your choice.

And so, everything that we have committed to and have initiated in one form or another, we will see to completion.

And then the second project that I wanted to draw your attention to is the Thomas Street redefined project.

This is an interesting project on many levels.

The project will retain two important funding sources city light funding and L clip revenues, and we are already developing a revised scope for the project.

to maximize our ability to meet community and partner expectations with the funding that remains in the project.

We will also be continually seeking creative funding solutions to store the full scope of the project, if possible, in the future.

All right, a number of questions on this.

Council Member Lewis first, please.

Thank you.

So I want to focus in on the Thomas Street measure a little bit and first ask some clarifying questions.

So when it says the base budget for this in 2023 is 5.4 million, is that the amount that is required to get the Thomas Street project all the way through and over the top?

Like that's what fully funding would be if it were to be fully funded?

CoB, Joan Lippincott and CoB, Dan Burke are present.

proposed budget, what we had assumed or what was in the base for 2023 for the budget.

And we then had construction funding available to complete the project.

Much of that construction funding, as you can see, comes from very vulnerable city resources that are needed to balance a variety of competing needs across the city of Seattle and across all communities.

And so for right now, during this time of difficulty, the general fund and the REIT and some of the transportation fund are being removed from this project.

And the 5.4 million is what remains.

And as I noted, we are re-scoping the project now to see what we can do with the 5.4.

Does that answer your question, council member?

Yes, partly.

So what is the delta between 5.4 and what would be required to build out the Thomas Street project?

I would have to just add up all the little red numbers right there.

But that 5.4 plus what you see in that column for those numbers represented nearly, I think, nearly full construction funding.

So it's a $2 million question, it looks like adding all that that's about 2 million.

Yes, a little over.

Okay, so I just thought I'd pause real quick to see if Calvin had anything you wanted to add to that answer for your question.

So Councilmember I yes just to follow up the project, the elements of funding that are available for the project are really focused on the frontage of the CLC light substation.

And the crossing improvements at Dexter and Thomas, I believe, and I think the, the issue here is they were all proposed to be delivered as 1 project 1 contiguous connection and get the efficiency of a mobilization, et cetera.

So, we're at a stage now where the department's trying to figure out, can they accomplish those individual elements with the available funding?

Or does it make sense to hold on and try to deliver this all together as 1 project?

The number they gave me as the funding gap was at least 2.5 million pending, deciding how that construction phasing works.

Would it be fair then if design is completed to say this is a shovel-ready project at this point?

If the capital money was there, it'd be ready to go.

not being the PM for the project or the program owner, I don't want to go on record to say yes or no.

But if we could follow up with you afterward, I'd like that opportunity.

The department has said that they expect to get final design complete with the available funding.

So I think in next year, you would be, there are significant decisions that would have to be made about the construction methodology and the like, but you would be complete with design.

Yes, design is will be complete is what should be complete next year, I mean excuse me next month for the original project scope.

Okay sorry I thought I guess I misheard earlier, I thought I heard design was complete, but I guess it's it's nearly complete.

I believe within one month's time, if not less, it will be 100% complete.

At the same time, we are going through the process of re-scoping to reflect the proposed reduced budget.

Yeah, so I do just want to flag for central staff and colleagues that restoring this funding for Thomas Street to keep it on track is something that will be a transportation budget priority for my office.

It's a project that My office has partnered with colleagues to keep keep going forward throughout the pandemic and it sounds like that's led to a lot of the pre construction work.

You know, like it's allowed that to go forward, which has been good.

But it's a incredibly critical project for a lot of the work that we're doing in the uptown and South Lake Union neighborhoods.

25% of the people who've been going to Climate Pledge arena are using Thomas Street according to the data Climate Pledge is collecting.

Um, so, you know, that's not to mention the promises made the community in terms of the post divide transportation landscape of downtown.

This was one of the few.

you know, pedestrian and bike infrastructure improvements for downtown that was part of that overall deal that didn't emphasize car infrastructure.

So making sure this commitment is kept and stays on time is going to be a big priority.

You know, I want to thank Council Member Bagshaw for her leadership and in really being the architect of putting this into the budget and our planning for this part of the city and and Councilmember Strauss for the work he did, not only working with Councilmember Bagshaw on that in her office, but in being a big supporter of this project on the council over the last couple of years.

So I just want to flag that that's something I'm going to be looking at.

It sounds like it's a $2.5 million question and appreciate the answers to my questions today on this.

Thank you, Councilmember.

Similarly, I had some questions.

I wanted to, of course, express that this has been a Council priority, as Councilmember Lewis has noted, for quite a while, including from the previous Council members.

I, too, was very supportive of the Thomas Street redesign.

I am disappointed to hear that it's being potentially put on hold.

I want to make sure that we understand better how the funding that is available might continue to be available, but looking forward to chatting a little bit more when we hear about the finalizing of the design process next month.

That's promising.

And look forward to chatting with you all a little bit more about that.

So I think that that's the end of central staff's presentation.

Is there any other question or slide that council members wanted to go back to?

Well, you must have answered all of their questions, Chris.

Thank you so much for walking us through that.

Director Dingley, please go ahead.

I just wanted to provide at first, thank you to Chris and her team and director spots for the great presentation, I just wanted to.

It sort of goes without saying, but this is just for my health, so please indulge me that going into the SDOT budget, knowing that we had to figure out a way to come to balance, given a significant challenge just within SDOT, there are no easy choices in that space.

And there are a lot of tradeoffs to consider as you look at all the different projects.

And every project is there because it was championed at one point, right, by either one of you or a previous administration or this administration.

And so there are no easy choices.

And we have to figure out how to make sure we can keep Estat living within their means.

And so we really appreciate your partnership as we're going to get to continue to keep Estat in balance moving forward.

Thank you so much, Director Dingley.

And again, thank you to Director Spatz for your leadership in this realm, as well as we know you are starting new.

But as you can tell, there's a lot of interest in helping to bring many of these projects and the visions and the support from voters to fruition.

Council Member Nelson, comments or questions?

Yeah, I'm sorry, one last question.

I've been Director Spatz, when we spoke on the Zoom, I mentioned my thoughts about some maintenance issues in the CID, and I've engaged central staff and Bill Laborde about changes or increases to just basic street repair, not curb cuts necessarily.

Are there any reductions to allocations for those sorts of things anticipated going forward in this year's reduction, in general, in that pot of money?

I don't think so.

And I did do, subsequent to our conversation, I was taken on a listening tour of the CID, pretty much walked almost every single block of the whole CID neighborhood advocates and not-for-profits.

And it was very compelling to me, all the cultural richness and great value to the city and the CID.

And in fact, I had some staffers who've been working very closely in that area for many years, and we all sort of made a commitment to, you know, improve the maintenance and the small-scale streetscape improvements there.

We talked about some pedestrian safety issues we observed, and I'm gonna be very closely associated with those efforts.

Great.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate it.

for the SDOT team here, but I've been thinking of ways to potentially, through the budget process, structure some kind of collaboration between the legislative branch through our oversight function and the department, just more broadly on the cost of infrastructure.

There's been lots of national conversations about infrastructure in light of the Biden administration's emphasis on building more high speed rail or urban transportation networks and There's been an emphasis on the fact that in the United States, it's far more expensive, takes a lot longer and is a lot less efficient in our ability to deliver large capital projects.

And a lot of that can be attributed.

It's like sometimes misleadingly attributed to cost of labor.

But Western Europe, Compensates people who do the labor and building infrastructure quite well so it's clearly not that it really kind of comes down to the.

the different laws and systems and modes of appeal that are unique to the American system that add up and delay and delay and make things take forever.

And I wonder if we might collaborate, because some of those things might be within our power as a city to change.

Many of them will not be.

They'll require changes to the state law, or they might require seeking some kind of federal action.

But I wonder if there might be a way, maybe not, maybe the through the budget process isn't the appropriate way to do it, but some way to collaborate on a list of requests that we could make as a city and use through our lobbying arms to drive the cost down and somehow quantify what some of those reforms would lead to our bottom line as a city.

You know, I just cite I'm not going to, you know, cite extensively because we're limited on time.

But there's a really good piece in the New York Times by Ezra Klein that was published on May 29 earlier this year called what American needs is a liberalism that builds that discusses a lot of these themes.

And I would really like to see us as a city taken head on to be innovative to try to cut red tape to reduce the amount of time it takes for things to get permitted to exempt certain projects from needless delay and redundant.

reviews that don't really do much of anything except cost the taxpayer money and slow down our ability to deliver this critical infrastructure.

And I just wanted to flag that as a future area of interest to me in kind of just calling the question on some of these practices we take for granted, but that make everything take forever.

Uh, because that's been a running theme throughout today's session.

We're talking about projects that we've been talking about for, you know, for seven years, 10 years, 15 years that never get done because of endless appeals, um, the impact of SIPA and a bunch of other things.

So I would just like us to have that discussion and, and boldly confronted that, uh, we have a sense of urgency to get a lot of this stuff done.

And we have all these regulations that inflate costs, and we should figure out a strategy to take that on and call the question.

Yeah, thank you.

I can respond to that.

I'm equally passionate and all of those things.

You know, most of my roles in government over the years have been to accelerate or troubleshoot large capital projects.

And, you know, my favorite book about the public sector is called instruction to deliver by Sir Michael Barber who ran the Prime Minister's delivery unit for Tony Blair so.

You know, once we get the top to bottom review of Vision Zero finished, a project that I have as a leader at SDOT is to really look into our whole, you know, capital projects delivery system and where efficiencies can be found both within and, you know, with reforms, like you were mentioning, Council Member.

So I'm very passionate about these things, and I intend to bring, you know, a decade and a half of experience to, to raising that up as an area of collaboration across our very talented staff and folks beyond.

I do want to say one bright spot, right, is there's a huge talent shortage in infrastructure right now.

And my colleagues at major engineering firms are having a tremendous trouble staffing their projects.

And the vacancy rate at SDOT is very low.

And I'm very, very happy about that.

Like, we are attracting, developing, and retaining engineering and design talent and the other associated professions, better than many of our private sector competitors for that talent.

And that's something I want to make sure SDOT is an even better place to work in the future so that we can keep having an edge in that regard.

Thank you.

Thank you all for that discussion and conversation.

I think we're going to transition to the central staff walkthrough of their issue identification.

Some of these topics in the issue identification have already begun being discussed by this previous conversation.

So it's a continuation and an opportunity for us to dive deeper into the issues that council members have raised and hear more from the central staff's analysis of some of the things that they have uncovered in their review of the proposed budget so far.

So with that, I want to again welcome Calvin Chow back to the dais and thank him for the deep dive that he's already done on the proposed budget and for helping to field some of those earlier questions.

And colleagues, this is a chance for you all to ask additional questions.

weigh in with some additional thoughts.

I'm appreciative that nobody's been shy this morning.

We're sharing their thoughts.

That's good.

We want this conversation.

This is very helpful for understanding where people are coming from and issues that they're looking at.

So thanks again for all of that work.

And for our department folks, I just want to say thanks as as that was a lengthy discussion and really appreciate you fielding those questions.

Kelvin, good morning.

Thanks for being here.

Thank you, council members.

I have a brief presentation here highlighting some issues that I wanted to raise for your consideration.

These issues are all numbered in more detail in my memo that's attached to the agenda.

So and we've had a good discussion on many of these.

So I'll try to keep the framing a little bit shorter.

and kind of get into the conversation with you to see if there are issues that you wish to delve further into.

So the first issue that I want to raise is the department spending for the Seattle Transportation Plan and for the future transportation funding plan.

These are two very interrelated efforts.

Beginning in 2022, SDOT began work on An overhaul of their transportation plan documents, a way to integrate all of their modal plans under a new framework.

And the idea was to use that as the basis for the transportation element of the comprehensive plan update.

The proposed budget adds $700,000 to support the outreach component of the plan, particularly with translation and language dependency outreach.

That would be work that would happen next year to try to complete the plan for council consideration at the end of 2023. Then following that, That whole Seattle transportation planning effort will also inform the idea of what we might plan for a future transportation revenue package.

So a future transportation funding plan, which would really have to be in place by middle of 2024 to go to voters if we wanted to replace the move Seattle levy, which expires the end of 2024. So to that end, the budget adds a significant amount of money, 2.5 million for the future transportation funding plan.

And I wanted to just make sure that this was highlighted for your consideration as options.

We could revise the spending.

You could provide policy guidance or direction on specific issues you want to make sure are covered in either the transportation plan or the funding plan or no change.

Thank you very much, Calvin.

A few questions on this.

In the 2022 adopted budget, council imposed the proviso on ESSAT transportation funding to ensure that there was equitable outreach and engagement.

So I'm wondering, does this proviso remain in effect?

Do we need to reinstate this language?

I think the proviso, well, there is some money carrying forward that stays with that money.

So it remains in effect on the existing funds.

The 700,000 is really geared towards additional community outreach and specifically language and translation services.

So I don't think an additional proviso is necessary.

I think it's in line with the council's direction last year.

Okay, that's helpful.

Director Spatz?

Yeah, I just wanted to really emphasize our commitment to the transportation equity framework.

One of the reasons I took this job is I thought that the SDOT's transportation equity framework was really category leading in the United States.

And it's a great personal interest of mine to fully realize that.

And then here in the larger planning for the city, especially.

So you have a commitment from us as an agency and all the people working on this to be centering equity and some of the very innovative practices that are described in that framework.

Thanks so much for that reaffirmation.

Okay, Calvin, I think you can keep going.

Next slide, please.

So this issue is the spending on the Vision Zero series of programs.

Just as a reminder, Vision Zero is the goal of eliminating traffic fatalities and serious injuries by 2023. It is a little bit difficult to touch on all the spending that's in the SDOT budget because really traffic safety should affect everything that the department does.

On the next slide, I've got a list of sort of the programmatic CIP projects that I feel really contribute to the delivery of Vision Zero.

The department is, Patty, if you could please go to the next slide.

The proposed budget does significantly increase spending in 2023. Some of this increase was planned previously in the six-year spending plan, but the proposed budget actually adds probably about $14 million more to these programs as a new additional funding proposed with the budget.

A large part of that is tied to the Move Seattle portfolio, readjusting some funding to some programs that support that work.

And then you can see that after 2024, the level of identified funding does go down significantly, and that's largely due to the expiration of the Move Seattle levy.

So again, as options, you could consider revising spending levels or no change.

Thanks, Calvin, um, some comments have already been made about this throughout the last few days.

I think that to echo some of my colleagues.

see the headlines every day.

And as my colleagues have expressed, it's not just about the numbers, any one death or injury is too much.

And I appreciate that that sentiment was also expressed by Director Spatz.

But we need these Vision Zero investments more than ever, as we see more and more people who are walking and cycling, being hit by vehicles, many of them hit and run like the that I received yesterday.

And I just want to flag that this is an area where I'm pleased to see an increase and want to protect the funding to ensure we're continuing to close those gaps on our Vision Zero goals and also know that there's much more that we need to do.

So I look forward to hearing from our colleagues about priorities within this as well.

Council Member Morales.

Thank you.

I am also glad to see, you know, somewhat of an increase In this area, as I have said over and over again, you know, 50% of the fatalities in the city.

Due to street violence happened in my district.

And, you know, I think my, my hope is that.

you know, we all have a sense of urgency about how to address this.

I think just by way of comparison, you know, we spent $108 million fixing the West Seattle Bridge relatively quickly.

And that's, you know, something that moves cars and trucks, but there's no sidewalks, there's no bicycle infrastructure on that bridge.

And I would like to see us, you know, Invest in a similar way in in the urgency of making sure that the infrastructure, we need to keep people safe on our streets in our neighborhoods through areas like Soto where there is not just freight traffic, but you know pedestrians accessing services and just trying to use the area as a as a neighborhood.

We need to have a similar sense of urgency to get those things fixed as well.

So I'm glad to see this increase and look forward to us committing more as we can.

Thank you, Council Member Morales.

Council President Juarez.

Ooh, we need to change the title.

It says CM.

We need a CP up there.

Oh, yeah.

El Presidente.

All right, girl.

Get on that.

Let me just say this.

So first of all, thank you.

Welcome, Mr. Spatz.

I'm glad you're here.

I'm glad we had a great discussion before the cameras came on about Hip Hop.

And now we're into the exciting world of transportation.

I have a few items, a few things I just want to address quickly.

And since I've been elected, and it's been a while now, I am so happy for the very first time, finally, SDOT put money in the sidewalk for sidewalk improvements around Ryther and the children's, the blind school.

We literally, I mean, if you can't give money for that, I don't know what you can't give money for, but thank you.

It's finally in there.

I want to thank SDOT and the mayor's office and Julie for recognizing this need.

We've been taking a run at it.

I don't know.

What's my sixth budget, seventh budget cycle.

And I really wanna thank Council Member Morales for what she said about the sidewalks and pedestrian safety, high intense traffic areas like schools, bus stops, libraries, community centers.

That's what we're seeing in the North.

I think we did a study and I don't have it off the top of my head about three or four years ago, how many millions of dollars it would take to actually meet some of the federal requirements about sidewalks.

But I remember it being in the billions.

So I'm not asking that every sidewalk, every street in North Seattle or wherever gets a sidewalk, we do keep focusing on those high intense foot traffic areas and particularly now that we have light rail coming on that 10-minute walk shed where now people are starting to walk towards light rail whether it's 130th, Northgate, UW, those are the areas that I've been trying to focus on now but before it was mainly schools, community centers, churches, libraries, you know those type of areas, high intense foot traffic where not everyone has a car I mean, also, I want to think, which I normally don't do this, but I'm going to do it on the 50 million dollars granted from the state package passed by Senator Ruben Carlisle back in March of 2022. And because at least my district has three state highways in I-5, we're encased by it, 522, 523, Aurora, and then I-5.

At one point, I think it was last year, we had the highest incidence of fatalities, pedestrian fatalities.

So again, the money that has now coming through from the state for the Aurora Avenue, North Safety improvements, working with the city or OIR folks and getting that money and getting the attention on Aurora only on one stretch, though, between districts five and six.

And I'm hoping we can continue that and work with you, Director Schmatz.

That's still an issue.

There's a lot more to be done there.

But I just want to thank you for that.

And I want to thank Calvin for doing the issue identification and helping us out through putting together what our needs were in the budget and also, of course, with Sound Transit.

So thank you.

Thank you, Council President.

And Director Spatz.

Thank you.

I just want to respond with a lot of enthusiasm for the needs that you're citing, Council President.

I've done at least four community walks in your district in the last month.

And when you walk with parents on the route where they take their kids to school and there's no sidewalks and they walk on the street and then Waze is telling people to cut through that street to get around traffic on the arterials, you can see a really unique set of challenges that we need to address.

I also do wanna say that I'm very, I find that this Aurora grant is like a once in a generation opportunity, and that opportunity is also magnified by an alignment that we have with WSDOT about modernizing, updating, and humanizing Aurora.

I don't think there's ever been so much alignment about, you know, how these state highways could become more people focused than there is right now between SDOT and WSDOT and my good friend Dongho Chang is the traffic engineer over there.

And we have walked Aurora several times in the time that I've been here.

So I think that there's some very exciting progress coming.

Thank you.

Council Member Lewis, please go ahead.

Thank you, Chair.

I'll just be really brief.

I also just wanted to acknowledge my appreciation for Director Spatz joining myself and some of my neighbors for a bike ride around District 7 to look at issues relating to Vision Zero.

Just in the few short weeks that Director Spatz has been approved, the amount of time he spent on the ground with all of us has been really greatly appreciated, and I hope that that leads to some action on some long-delayed projects.

And I just, I'd be remiss if I didn't also acknowledge and appreciate the editorial published in today's Seattle Times by director spots emphasizing the urgency around Vision Zero.

So I look forward to us crafting a budget that matches the enthusiasm that the department has to tackle this issue with the resources to get it done.

And I think this is a good start, but hopefully we'll be able to put forward some proposals to build on and enhance this mandate for safe walkable neighborhoods.

So thank you.

Thanks so much.

Okay, we have some more issues to walk through so let's keep going with the slides here.

Thank you.

Issue number three is about bridges and structures.

So, as mentioned at the beginning of the presentation by Councilmember Peterson, the city auditor completed an audit of the bridge management program in September 2020 and identified a number of recommendations that are currently in the process of being implemented.

What I've wanted to do is to highlight the amount of spending related to bridge programming in general.

And so, Patty, if you could please go to the next slide.

So you will see that Bridge spending does go down from 2022 to 2023. This is largely, this was reported previously in last year's CIP.

So this doesn't necessarily reflect a change in policy.

The proposed budget actually does increase some spending for the bridge painting program in 2023 and 2024, but reduces some of that funding in 25 and 26. So, largely the bridge program is unchanged from what was identified in last year's tip.

I did want to just mention that these are all just programmatic spending it doesn't include spending, such as the West Seattle bridge immediate response project.

which was, while the bridges has reopened, there are still some elements to that project, including the Spokane swing bridge and some of the accessibility improvements that are still, still have work to be accomplished.

So that project won't fully close out until likely the fall of next year.

And so as options, you may wish to consider revising spending for bridges or no change.

All right, well this has sparked some interest so Councilmember Lewis and Councilmember Peterson.

Thank you, Chairman Skater.

So I do think it's important to acknowledge while we're tackling a lot of big problems as a city and the most exigent problems that we face relate to public safety and homelessness.

I think it does behoove us to put our eyes forward over the next decade, where we know, I mean I'll just put put our cards on the table.

We know that major bridge failures are going to be something that we need to grapple with, based on the audit that was conducted in 2020. and the results that we have several bridges in poor condition and many in fair condition that if not properly maintained or if there aren't plans to, in some cases, replace bridge infrastructure, we're going to have to reactively deal with a lot of major bridge failures the way we dealt with The West Seattle bridge, which was a multi year catastrophe.

So, I do want to work with the department, and hopefully this budget cycle despite our constraints.

might be an opportunity to try to build a strategy around this, to really try to tackle the four corners of the policy problem that that audit really surfaced in 2020. Very strongly believe that we can do it in a way that also centers the urgency around Vision Zero, it centers the urgency around other transportation projects, I want to make sure we build a strategy that does not pit making progress on our bridge infrastructure against safety in our neighborhoods and safety on major arterials through investment in Vision Zero.

But we just do need to acknowledge the reality that in a city with lots of connections over ravines, over waterways, and over hills, These major bridge failures do become massive galvanizing events that can be more expensive and more stressful to take care of when the event is realized and the bridge is unusable, and we have to scramble then to focus on it proactively.

So I do just want to voice my continued support as a member of the you know, the ad hoc bridge caucus on the council to continue this work of investing and planning around our bridges to make sure that we avoid future situations like the West Seattle Bridge and make sure that we do not have future disruptions associated with major bridge failures, which if we don't plan accordingly, we know are going to be coming based on the current state of our bridge network.

Well, I sure hope I'm a member of that bridge caucus.

I want to make sure I'm part of this club, because I appreciate everything that's been said.

And I think we're gonna hear more of that.

So Councilmember Peterson, please go ahead.

Councilmember, you're still on mute.

Sorry.

Thank you, Chairman skater and appreciate the comments, Councilmember Lewis.

And we know that.

First one, just pause and thank the, the workers who were out there on the West Seattle bridge for two and a half years getting that restored so quickly.

When we have proposed $100 million and authorized $100 million in bridge bonds, I know that several of the iron workers and the laborers and carpenters, others were very excited about the idea of of getting to work on these bridge projects, including a couple of the seismic projects that were promised in the move to Seattle Levee back in 2015, which SDOT dropped from the list of seismic projects, which is, I think, one of the reasons there appears to be a decline in the seismic is because they just dropped a couple of bridges from the list.

So I would like to hear some response from SDOT on this if they feel comfortable.

explaining why we're hearing about concerns about bridges, but then not seeing that reflected in the numbers here.

I saw some nods.

Yes.

I can do it.

And I'm also trying to figure out how to put myself back on camera because I did something funny with Zoom.

More used to, I'm sorry, much more used to MS Teams.

All right.

So thank you all of you for the comments that you've made and the questions that you've asked, I completely understand them because when you look at the way the numbers are presenting themselves, it does look odd.

I can't disagree with that.

With regard to bridge seismic, I'll come to that in a moment, but I'll just say that overall what's happening with regard to our bridge investments as you see in these slides is number one, We are, and as you get through the proposed budget and CIP, you'll see that in 23 and 24, we are deobligating some funding that came from grant partners on projects that have closed, and we have to return the unused funding to them.

So that is, in fact, actual decreases to the proposed level of funding that was originally in the CIP.

The projects came in under budget, which is great news.

for everyone involved.

And those funds can't be redirected to other projects.

And then secondly, we are moving some of our funding into the outer years away from 23 and 24 and into 25 post as we give ourselves some leeway and thinking through how best to approach the bridge seismic projects in particular, given the complexity of the projects.

their great expense, and our funding constraints and as has been noted, with regard to the levy portfolio, we did remove a number of bridge seismic projects off of our to do list during the coven during the coven situation we simply ran out of money.

and also bridge seismic projects were proving to be more expensive than, as were originally outlined in the levy portfolio when we went to the voters so when the voters voted in in on the 2015 ballot proposal they saw a list of projects that didn't pencil out in real time when we got into 2020, 2021, and 2022, as we are also upgrading our design standards to meet current regulatory requirements with regard to safety and durability of seismic projects.

And so that has factored into our calculations as well.

So the landscape has changed with regard to the cost of doing a seismic projects, just simple construction changes in cost and then design requirements.

for meeting federal requirements.

So projects got more expensive and funding went down in COVID and we did actively take bridge seismic projects off of our to-do list.

We worked really hard with the levee oversight committee during that time to talk about what our options are.

And we are now committed to taking another look at bridge seismic projects and seeing what we can do and deliver within The remaining life of the levy and also post levy using levy proceeds that are available to put to those projects but we're still sort of in process of figuring out what that resize portfolio would look like and we're definitely looking forward to, you know, potential federal funding opportunities down the road.

to supplement the funding that we have available locally, we don't disagree that bridge seismic projects are important.

And it's simply a matter of getting the projects kind of regeared according to new requirements and design and safety standards and then also assembling a complete funding package.

I want to be clear that, you know, when I mentioned the move Seattle levy portfolio or earlier during my presentation, and I noted that we were moving funding from programs that were on target to deliver their 2015 goals and putting them into programs that were behind target.

We were only doing that in that scenario.

Because Bridge Seismic is behind in its delivery, we have not moved any funding out of Bridge Seismic in the levy program to support any other levy projects.

It remains intact, it's just shifting around, and you're also seeing some of the partnership funding being returned.

Okay.

So I think Director Neely has partial response.

Then Calvin has another comment in response to the question.

And then I'll go back to Councilmember Peterson for a follow-up just to make sure that the question was fully answered.

Then we'll go to Councilmember Herbold.

I want to also flag we still have six more issues, identification items to go through with the goal of having this wrapped up in 10 minutes, but we'll probably go a little bit over.

So let's go through the next Thank you.

Just to be additive to what Chris just mentioned, two quick things.

One, there is an expiring levy that we're working with, right?

And so that's why you see in the out years, those investments are not there because there's an opportunity to potentially go out for another levy.

Right.

And so that's that those are not there because the levy is only over the biennium.

And the second thing I wanted to say is to just lift up, remind folks of something that I mentioned last was just last week or the week before during the oversight or the overview presentation of the budget, that in so many ways, that the budget for Estat really does understate the resources that will ultimately be available to the department.

over this time horizon.

As many of you know that you heard from our friends in OIR in their presentation in the last couple of weeks the bipartisan infrastructure laws bridge investment program is making the single largest dedicated investment in bridges since the construction of the interstate highway system.

It's 12.5 billion over five years and we obviously don't have the details just yet of how and where and who will get those funds But you can rest assured that the SDOT team is working really hard with OIR and with regional and state partners as well to figure out what of those investments make the most sense to try to pursue.

So there's a significant amount of money on the table that we can also be in a position to go after in the coming months.

Okay, thanks.

And Calvin?

And I just wanted to add that it's useful to kind of remind ourselves that this is just the programmatic spending on bridges and that when it comes to.

replacement, especially of some of our large infrastructure.

Those are very, very large projects.

And the Move Seattle Levy, when it was put forward, actually really focused on, are we doing the planning?

Are we doing the conceptual design to be able to go after money in the future for those larger projects?

Things like the Fremont Bridge or the Ballard Bridge, for instance.

So there is that sort of planning that will need to be part of the transportation funding I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

Yes, thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

Just, you know, in terms of working for federal money, I was disappointed Estat did not apply for the mega grant project for over 100 million.

I know when we authorized 100 million in bridge bonds, one of the arguments was, well, you might get federal money, but yet Estat did not apply for that.

What I was hearing is they weren't quite ready to apply, even though those bridge projects promised in 2015, there was six years to to get ready for that.

So I just want to be careful when we mention about renewing the levy.

Just being mindful of what voters might be thinking about with that in terms of keeping our promises on these programs to to not assume that the levy will be renewed.

So we may have to get creative from other revenue sources.

Also, we talked a lot about seismic.

I do want to point out that the structure is major maintenance, the item or row C, and this is showing also a decrease.

And the auditor said we should be spending 34 to 100 million a year on maintenance.

So I want to get creative over the next couple of weeks with my colleagues here to see if we can bump up these numbers a little bit.

Thank you.

Okay, I'm going to keep I'm going to keep us moving.

I'm going to go to Councilmember Herbold.

And of course, the department's welcome to weigh in with additional context via central staff.

But wanted to get Councilmember Herbold's question in and then we can keep going.

Thanks.

This is a question for Calvin Chow on Council Central staff.

Back in November 2016, during the budget process, the Council voted to authorize the executive to issue bonds for housing construction.

It was a modest amount.

This was before robust funding provided through Jumpstart and citywide expansion of MHA, but it was a signal from the council that we wanted to see the city doing much more with affordable housing development investment in affordable housing development than we were doing.

This was a proposal that, again, it passed the council, 7-2, and there was significant opposition in the executive to moving forward.

Both the mayor opposed it, the then finance director opposed it, and our own budget chair at the time opposed it.

But the council felt really strongly that we needed to make this move, and we were finally successful.

We passed the authorization, I think, in 2016. I don't believe the housing bonds were issued until 2018, so it took some doing.

But I'm wondering, what are our options, Calvin, if this is something we want to continue to pursue, acting on, as Council Member Peterson reminded us, our prior action to authorize, I believe it's $100 million in bond funds.

What are our alternatives to move this forward, even in the case that there may be, you know, I think there is a lack of full support in the executive for that approach.

Councilmember, I think all financing decisions are really come down to your financial planning for how are you going to pay the debt service.

It's about moving money around in time, taking up the funding that you would spend in the next 20 years and using it up front.

So in that context, I really think that the strongest opportunity is in the future So if the, if the, if the, if the.

Line items in the proposed budget is to add some money for consultant work for us to sort of rebase line their financial assumptions and how all that works together.

That would be the most comprehensive option.

Council could, of course.

Pursue.

Financing options as, as they have in the past.

But I think in many ways, I think it's the priority among spending that matters more, and that, in my opinion, the financing decisions kind of follow based on what priorities council has set.

OK.

I think in that case, my recollection, I should give credit to former council member Rob Johnson, because he really spearheaded the use of the the short-term rental tax, some of those dollars going to pay off on financing, but I'm more interested, I'm less interested in the planning ask, but I'm more interested in the mechanical steps we would need to take to issue bonds.

Mostly we would have to identify where the debt service would come from.

That's mainly the main thing.

What do we want to cut out of the budget in the upcoming years to be able to pay the debt service to issue the bonds?

or increase revenue to aid some.

Or increase revenue to support otherwise, yes.

Thank you.

And a great question, Vice Chair.

Also, I'd encourage a conversation with Deputy Director Panucci, she, myself, and Director Dingley, also members of the Debt Management Policy Advisory Committee, obviously an advisory body only, but some interesting information shared about the bond market in our recent meeting.

So that might be helpful for your deliberations as well.

Council Member Peterson, was that a leftover hand?

It was a leftover hand.

All right.

I think that we have concluded this slide.

Let's continue, Calvin.

Thank you.

The next option or next issue is the Seattle transit measure that was discussed briefly at the presentation.

So, Patty, again, if you could maybe switch the next slide.

I just wanted to highlight that this is the voter approved 2020 measure that imposed a 0.15% sales tax.

It raises about 52, $53 million a year.

And the proposed spending is sort of limited under some spending categories.

So transit services, of course, unlimited, that's the purpose of the measure.

There was up to 9 million, or excuse me, up to 9 million authorized for emerging needs.

up to 10 million authorized for transportation access programs.

And up to 3 million authorized for transit infrastructure and maintenance capital programs.

Um, that was approved, uh, as part of that measure.

So this table shows you, uh, uh, last year, this year, and, uh, the proposed budget spending, uh, among those categories, you'll see that the transit service is largely, um, maintaining the 2022 levels.

And again, this is partially tied by, um, tied to where we are with transit demand and our ability to ask for new service from Metro.

We are, the proposed budget does basically maintain the same level of emerging needs.

I do not have detail on what the proposed spending for emerging needs is.

This is recognizing that a lot of the 2021 and 2022 spending was really in support of access to West Seattle.

So I'm not able to speak on what the proposed 2023 and 24 spending is.

The transit access programs line does increase to $9 million in 2023 and 2024. And it's worth noting again that in September, the regional transit service providers implemented free youth fairs, which basically does eliminate sort of $3 million of funding that we had been going to support students subsidized ORCA cards.

I do not have detail on what the proposed $9 million of spending is for 2023 or 2024. And then the transit infrastructure and maintenance capital programs.

The department is proposing to basically double the spending up to $6 million.

This does require a council legislation to raise the spending cap for capital infrastructure to $6 million.

So that is legislation that is also submitted for you.

And so with that, you could propose changing spending limits or you could actually propose adjusting the spending caps in the legislation as well.

Thank you, Calvin.

Yeah, I'll I'll echo I don't think we have enough information here on what the proposed spending plan is.

And obviously, the departments here can hear our interest in learning additional details.

I want to also make sure that the much anticipated and still highly desired superblock And I want to thank Director Spatz.

We will soon be going on a walking tour for a Superblock discussion.

And this was, I think, for maybe two years in a row, we've asked for an analysis of the concept of creating broader, like, Barcelona-style Superblocks.

So, look forward to getting additional details.

Director Spatz, did you have something you wanted to add?

Yes, thank you and I love to explore how we could take the world's great streetscape concepts and potentially apply them in Seattle.

So I'm really excited to engage in that with you.

I just wanted to share that I'm gradually getting up to speed in this particular issue.

It's very interesting because we no longer need to subsidize the youth fairs, because that's happening at a macro level now.

That frees up some money, but a challenge is with the shortage of bus operators, buying even more additional service than what we were buying is hard.

So this is a good time to make the legislative change to allow us to make streetscape improvements that improve the safety and efficiency of the bus system because we're constrained a bit in our ability to pass money along to King County Metro because we no longer need to buy fare cards for youth and there's a shortage of bus operators.

So that's why this is a good time to fix some of those small scale issues that are making it hard to get on and off the bus or hard for the bus to navigate the streets.

Okay, thanks.

And thanks as well for the commitment to follow up on the central staff and our concerns around needing additional details.

Council Member Peterson.

Thank you, Chairman skate I just want to echo the concern about lack of information here about the emerging needs category and also the access programs if if somebody else is picking up, you know, $3 million tab, why is certain number where certain numbers going up, maybe we need to increase the infrastructure.

I believe there's a line item that's not here in terms of So that would be important to have that detail.

And also just reminding ourselves that this is the most regressive tax that we imposed with this sales tax.

So if, you know, as provocative as it may sound, maybe we should also be thinking, do we have to actually charge the full amount of a sales tax?

Maybe we Maybe there's a year that there can be a reprieve on part of that if the funding is not needed.

But I think we are hearing the funding is needed for the capital side of things.

You might want to think about going above that six million.

Thank you.

Let me just add that there is additional detail available.

I'm sorry, it hasn't flowed to you yet because I've been briefed in much more detail on this.

There's some things I'm very excited about that I think you might find very exciting too.

Now that we don't need to fund ORCA cards for youth, we're looking at funding ORCA cards for a lot of our Seattle public housing residents.

We're looking at ways we can help add to mobility opportunities for the elderly.

So there's actually quite a lot of opportunity for innovation within the usage of these funds.

And I hope that you'll find this additional detail really interesting and also look forward to collaborating with all of you on taking a fresh look at the most impactful ways that we can drive excellent equitable outcomes using these funds.

Thank you.

Okay, let's continue, Calvin.

The next item is the item five.

It's the Wisley Sound Transit program.

This has come up in your discussion with OPCD and Department of Neighborhoods yesterday, so I won't go into too much detail on it.

Suffice to say that SDOT is proposing to add 12 FTE.

to work on this project.

It would be funded by a combination of jumpstart revenues for the city contribution, and there's also reimbursable work that Sound Transit would be paying for through interlocal agreement that we have in place.

I think maybe at this point, I'll take your lead on to what questions you want to delve into with the department here as I think many of your questions yesterday really should be directed towards SDOT and how they envision this team working.

Okay.

I appreciate you inviting that.

I do want to just have a few comments here for the record in the issue identification section.

Again, I think council members continue to express support for making sure that we have the ability to plug budget holes and protect against austerity budgeting.

I also think similarly, we want to make sure that we are not creating a system where we're using.

I'm going to raise a concern here that I've mentioned before, I want to reiterate a concern about supplanting the investments into outreach and engagement previously housed at Department of Neighborhoods and were previously funded with general fund, with using jumpstart funding, which was supposed to be additive for I'm also concerned that some of the investments that are being proposed with specifically the use of Jump Start are not necessarily focused on the community's hardest hit by climate impacts.

And part of the investments that I think Jump Start, Green New Deal, Spend Plan specifically defined was making sure that the investments were going to, of course, a greener economy in all ways, but that we really focus through an equity lens on those communities hardest hit by climate change.

I think that in this specific example, there is an overly broad interpretation of the jumpstart spend plan.

And I say that in the same vein that we said our comments in the last two days.

That's not to criticize the importance of this work or not to undermine why this is critical investments for our city and creating a greener transportation options generally in our region.

But specific to the use of jumpstart, if we're not seeing these higher than anticipated revenues used to prevent against austerity, prevent against budget cuts and are, in my opinion, are a liberal interpretation of what the spend plan as codified in statute currently has, then I'm going to continue to raise questions.

I am also hearing from Green New Deal advocates that they do also do not think that this falls in line with the scope and the intent of jumpstart.

specific Green New Deal investments and the Green New Deal Oversight Board priorities.

And I want to make sure that we stay true to the intention of that spend plan while also, as we've expressed, showing some flexibility for preventing against cuts.

But specifically, Green New Deal was intended to invest in just transition work with a focus on communities most impacted by climate change.

And while I think that this is important work, the funding from Green New Deal investments from Jumpstart really weren't intended to be additive.

This looks exactly like the definition of supplementation.

So I'm going to continue to see how we can reconfigure this to support this work, but not have it tied directly to Jumpstart.

And I think that that's probably clear from some of the comments that I made before, but I just wanted to call that out.

I don't see additional hands on this.

Calvin, anything else?

Okay, there was a hand.

Director Dingley.

Thanks, but a chair I really appreciate your and the council's statements of support and commitment for the work that's here.

And I think, you know, there are probably 15 or 16 words in a piece of legislation that we worked in good faith to try to interpret, and we can very reasonable people can have different.

determinations of what those words mean.

And so this is our first time going through this together, right?

And so this is a really good opportunity for us to learn about the policy intent and to figure out what makes the most sense going forward.

I did want to just emphasize the point that you made about how critical this work is.

So whether you decide that this is something that is eligible for jumpstart spending, It does need to happen for all the reasons that Director Spatz mentioned previously.

And so we really appreciate your consideration here.

Thanks.

Thank you.

All right.

I think we can move on.

Next item is issue six.

This is Clean Seattle.

And this will be the subject of a broader discussion tomorrow on the unified care team.

But I did want to just highlight what the proposal for SDOT specifically is here.

In the last, currently SDOT basically provides about $1.1 million to parks for their special maintenance team to provide cleanup services for the right of way.

And this year SDOT also received some money from the coronavirus local fiscal recovery fund that let them stand up an additional right-of-way cleaning team using temporary labor.

So the proposal that is in the 23-24 budget is to add 3.6 million of general fund and 18 FTEs to essentially make that team permanent and it would be modeled on the park's special maintenance team.

And so the intent is to kind of stand up the same model that Parks has, maintain the existing level of service that SDOT has to clean up right away, and then to integrate that in the unified care team delivery that will be discussed tomorrow.

Thanks, Calvin, Council Member Morales, and then Council Member Nelson.

Thank you Calvin I am interested to know what outside the right of way means where does this allow the team to work and what the scope of that work will be.

So.

Currently, when parks has their special enhancement team because they have the s.funding going to them they're able to work on parks property and then, if they have to clean up the sidewalk or other associated.

It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, If there were additional cleanup that had to happen on a parks or other city owned property, they could do that work as well because they are funded by general fund to support that.

I believe the idea in the unified care team is that these teams would be somewhat interchangeable.

They could be directed towards a location that's identified and they wouldn't be constrained by their funding source to sort of stop at the borders of the property, if you will.

Follow up, council member.

Just mulling.

Okay.

As you mull, let's hear from Director Handy, who looks like she has another comment on that.

Yeah, I just, Esther Handy, Central Staff Director here, I just want to flag for the committee that we are going to have time dedicated tomorrow morning to talk about Clean Seattle and the Unified We are going to have a deep dive on this.

We are going to have a deep dive on this.

We are going to have a deep dive on this.

We are going to have a deep dive on this.

We are going to have a deep dive on this.

We are going to have a deep dive on this.

We are going to have a deep dive on this.

We are going to have a deep dive on this.

We are going to have a deep dive on this.

We are going to have a deep dive on this.

We are going to have a deep dive on this.

We are going to have a deep dive on this.

We are going to have a deep dive on this.

We are going to have a deep dive on this.

We are going to have a deep dive on this.

We are going to have a deep dive on this.

We are going to have a deep dive on this.

We are going to have a deep dive on this.

We are going to have a deep dive on this.

We are going to have a deep dive on this.

We are going to This sounds like an efficiency, as described by Calvin just now, that that we really do need, that you don't have to do two teams out to clean the same area.

So that makes sense.

And I support this this budget item and would vote for no change.

However, I am not.

However, but is there a graffiti removal included in here or is that a separate?

PB, David Ensign — Her.

He.

PB, David Ensign — He.

PB, David Ensign — He.

PB, David Ensign — He.

PB, David Ensign — He.

PB, David Ensign — He.

PB, David Ensign — He.

PB, David Ensign — He.

Okay, I don't see additional hands on this.

And yes, I'll just repeat what Kelvin and Director Handy said.

We are scheduled to have a broader conversation.

We have a specific agenda item on encampment removal and cleanup investments under the title of Unified Care Team.

That's for tomorrow after the HSD presentation.

Obviously, we are going to remain interested in seeing how we can, of course, provide the cleanup to the community, services needed for those living unsheltered, and where funding can be directed upstream for cleanup activities coordinated with outreach and increased safety and stability in neighborhoods.

That will be the focus that I look forward to having in those discussions.

And I really appreciate that there's multiple departments that have some We will try to have that condensed in one discussion tomorrow so we can see how all of these pieces do or do not complement each other.

Okay.

Let's keep going.

Hello, it's still morning.

I said good afternoon, but good morning still.

I'll be covering the next two issues.

I'm Eric McConaghy, I'm the Council of Central Staff.

This first issue has to do with the transfer of responsibility for maintenance and management of the waterfront parks and open spaces, excuse me, parks and public spaces in the budget as proposed by the mayor.

There's money in 2023 and 2024 from Metropolitan Park District funds.

for the Seattle Center as well as some corresponding position ads.

For these funds to be spent, the delegation needs to happen from the Parks Department to the Center Department.

There is a legislation that came along with the budget package, but central staff recommends that there isn't time to consider that legislation as part of the budget deliberations.

So we have some options.

One is to hold the authorizing legislation for consideration and proviso of budget changes.

And one would be no change to pass the transmitted legislation as it was sent.

We won't really have time to delve into that legislation during budget deliberations.

Our understanding is that this could be taken up in December in committee.

So I'll stop there and leave some space for questions.

Thank you.

Is there any questions for folks?

OK, Eric, I'm not seeing any.

OK, great.

Well, there may be some of the people send you later, but that's fine.

That's fantastic, too.

This issue number nine can be corralled with the previous one in that it shares the need for future authorization by ordinance.

This would add 13 million dollars in real estate excise tax.

to the Finance Administration Services Department would be in a new capital project.

The purpose of the funding would be to purchase buildings down on the waterfront to serve as a waterfront operations and tribal interpretive center.

It does require future ordinance.

We understand that that could be coming through from FAS in February or March of next year.

So the recommendations here for options are to revise all those funds until that future legislation or no change.

Thanks again, Eric.

I am not seeing any questions on this one.

Okay, thank you.

Appreciate it.

Oh, excuse me, Council Member Lewis.

Oh, I had my hand up.

Oh, you were behind my other screen.

I should have used the little hand thing.

I was just screaming.

I mean, let me scoot over my screen here.

Council President Juarez, please go ahead.

I will be very, very brief.

I am very excited about this because we've been working on this since 2016, the Tribal Interpretive Center.

It's the first ever for the city.

And I don't know where else do they have it.

We may be the first again on the West Coast to do something like this.

And second of all, it started out with a conversation about maybe some of the tribes having a kiosk center to sell stuff.

And it grew to, it had to be a centerpiece and a recognition, so all of you who love land acknowledgements, a recognition about the tribes and the Salish folks here.

So I'm really pleased that SDOT, I'm sorry.

Yeah, I'm sorry.

I'm glad to see that this has finally come to fruition.

So thank you.

And Council Member Bagshaw worked with me on this.

That was it.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council President.

Thanks for that reminder and glad to see that it has grown to this proposal here.

Council Member Luce, please go ahead.

Thank you, Councilmember Esqueda.

Similarly, very, very supportive of all of these investments.

Just wanted to comment on the slightly awkward sequencing that Eric sort of alluded to that some of this is going to involve legislation that might be coming later after we've put together some of these budget ads.

You know, just acknowledging as the chair of the relevant committee that all of these policy shifts have my full support.

Some of them are alluded to within the work we did on the Metropolitan Park District.

So I don't envision these ultimately being controversial policy discussions.

And I just don't want that sequencing to weigh on people as something that gives them pause.

We've been working very closely with Marshall Foster, with our tribal partners with everybody to make sure that this comes together.

And if anyone has questions, Marshall is certainly willing to make himself available to kind of just talk about the sequencing.

And I would hate for that to be something that gives people pause in the budget process on this and look forward to supporting these really important ads and look forward to building a great waterfront over the next couple of years.

Thank you, Council Member Lewis.

Council Member Nelson.

Thanks.

So these waterfront maintenance dollars, they were previously committed funds as required into the legislation approving the waterfront LID for waterfront park operations and maintenance that would have been retained in parks were we not shifting most of those functions from parks to Seattle Center, as I understand it.

Um, this shift has been widely vetted after the oversight committee recommended it last year.

And the executive, um, both parks and Seattle center, uh, supported.

So, um, this funding needs to be.

I believe committed now in the positions created in order for that transition to occur in a timely fashion.

So, um, I just want to, uh, I concur that the timing is awkward, but that with Council's recent decision to add still more MPD funding beginning in 2025 for the additional security that will be needed for the park in 2025, that's context I think we should be taking forward into these discussions.

Thanks.

Thank you.

I'm just confirming Council Member Lewis, that's an old hand, correct?

Yes, old hand.

Okay, thanks.

All right, let's keep going.

Thank you.

The next item I have for you, there's two pieces of budget legislation that I just wanted to make sure that we talk about.

The first is an increase to the cost of restricted parking zone permits.

The proposal would be to increase the cost of a residential RPC permit from $65 to $95, and for the guest permits from $30 to $95.

All the other permit fees would remain the same.

These fees haven't been adjusted since 2010.

Okay.

I actually have a question on this.

I'm not seeing another hand.

So, I would like more information about the spend plan.

Do we have any information about the impact on the restricted parking zone parking permit increases on the budget?

And I'm specifically interested in what equity considerations have been put forward with this proposal.

Is there anything that council should be aware of?

Go ahead, Calvin.

I can follow up on that for you.

I think they are two somewhat separate issues.

It does rely on some of the funding increase, but they're, broadly speaking, they're not tied, the proposed funding is not tied to implementing this fee increase.

So I will have to dig into exactly what the budget is proposing to spend the money on, but just wanted to decouple the questions about whether they should raise the rates versus what they spend money on.

OK, so in terms of the spend plan, I'm looking at our friends from the Department and CBO.

Is there additional information you could share with Calvin so we could understand that more?

Absolutely, we we absolutely can do that and will and we will also address your other your other concern.

Appreciate it.

Thank you.

Alright, I think we can go on.

I think that's all I have to say.

Thank you.

trying to get a more detailed list of what projects would be funded by this increase.

I'm seeing nods from the transportation.

Yes, absolutely.

In fact, there is a we received a question already via Cal on asking that information, and I believe it is either in his inbox or will be soon or on our SharePoint site detailing out the spend plan.

OK, well, excellent.

Calvin, does that get us through your Well, presentation yes, it does.

Thank you.

All right.

Great.

This has been a good conversation, a long conversation.

Thank you to the team at to the new director response.

I think everybody appreciates hearing your vision for how to bring some of these projects that have been long in the pipeline to fruition.

And I will also underscore my concern about, you know, really, especially when it relates to our infrastructure in the city, going after every federal penny that is available and every state dollar as well, because we just simply can't address these issues on our own.

And, okay, I'm going to tell you one more thing.

There was this incredible article, I'll drop it into our social media again, but it was featured on NPR two weeks ago and it was on the national stage talking about how cities really are on the receiving end of having to respond to so many years, decades of divestment and infrastructure and housing.

And as we see more people move to our cities, we're having to respond to issues at a much bigger scale that we've never had to respond to.

So that includes housing and infrastructure.

It also includes needing to be prepared for building greener and welcoming climate refugees who are going to be coming to our cities as they get pushed out of their regions and out of their smaller towns either due to economic hardship or climate impacts.

And so it really just underscored for us all of the issues that we work on.

This is where people will continue to come to larger cities like Seattle.

And we just do not have the resources to do this alone.

So I appreciate that there's been shared commitments today to try to look at more progressive revenue options, more revenue options generally.

And we really got to go after any of those federal dollars being made available from the Biden administration because we just can't do this by ourselves.

So thanks again for your leadership and appreciate you all being here today.

All right, let's move on.

I am pleased to I see some of our speakers.

I know you've been waiting on the line.

Thank you for your flexibility.

We do have item number two, Madam Clerk, if you could read item number two into the record.

Agenda item number two, proposed parking enforcement officer transfer for briefing and discussion.

Welcome.

Thanks so much.

Welcome to Chief Interim Chief Adrian Diaz, Brian Maxey, and Angela Sochi from a Seattle Police Department.

They will go through their department presentations specific to the parking enforcement officer PEO transfer, right?

Then later today, we will have our friends here as well to continue on with a conversation more broadly about the department and central staff after the presentation from the department representatives, we will have Greg Doss Calvin chow and extra handy.

I want to remind folks this is a discussion specific to the parking enforcement officers.

And specific to the Parking Enforcement Officer Transfer, Council Member Herbold, you were and continue to be our Chair of Public Safety.

As this relates to public safety and reimagining policing and how we think about personnel within public safety, would you like to offer some opening comments and introduce our panel?

Sure, thank you so much for the opportunity to do so.

Just as far as the context for the discussions, transferring the PEOs back to the police department is not my preferred alternative.

I've advocated previously, and as many of our PEOs themselves have argued for to this council in their public testimony, in prior budget sessions.

The PEOs have a workforce-driven vision for how to contribute to a new public safety department.

This is a new public safety department we created when we created the Community Safety and Communication Center.

Again, the PEOs called on us in council meetings to share their workforce driven vision for taking on work that is currently done by sworn officers but should not be.

They had a lot of really great ideas about how they could do that work and were concerned that a move to SDOT would strain their ability to do that work.

I do understand that the PEOs conducted their own internal survey recently, asking whether or not they preferred SPD over SDOT because of all of the issues that have arisen with their being housed in SDOT.

My strong preference was not that they'd be moved to SDOT, but that they'd be moved to CSCC.

SDOT lobbied the council very vigorously, and I changed my position only after it was apparent.

The council voted once for the move to CSCC, and then we later reversed ourselves, and I changed my position when it was apparent that SDOT had been successful.

in lobbying a majority of the council to support that move.

And so it's frustrating to see the problems that have arisen with that move of the PEOs to SDOT.

Again, given how vigorously SDOT lobbied for them to to come to that department.

I am interested in understanding more about why the survey that the PEOs conducted gave only the options between SPD and SDOT and not the third public safety I would like to understand more.

why those labor issues could not have been avoided.

But I have some specific questions about that that I'll hold until the appropriate time per your direction, Madam Chair.

And again, appreciate the panel being with us here today to talk about this issue as well as others contained in the department budget.

Thank you very much, Councilmember Herbold, as Chair of Public Safety.

I appreciate the grounding and the reminder of how this came to be in the last two years, and it's a good chance for us to do an analysis of where we still want to go.

I want to also welcome Senior Deputy Mayor Monisha Harrell.

Thank you so much for being here as part of the department or executive component of this presentation.

I did not see you on the line earlier, so apologies for that.

And I think I will have Council Member Herbold say the last word and then we'll turn it over to you, Senior Deputy Mayor.

I'm sorry, I wanted to, I should have also included in more general SPD budget remarks.

I want to acknowledge and thank the department and the executive for the increased transparency in the proposed budget.

It's a real improvement.

Thank you as well to CBO for the work thus far to answer questions and to Greg Doss of Council Central Staff for a very informative Central Staff memo.

As that memo notes, SPD incurred I just want folks to be aware that there's a separate update of the in the community safety and communication center presentation follows this department presentation.

So if you don't hear us talking about the development of alternatives, that's because that's going to come in a presentation following.

Thank you.

Excellent, great.

Thank you for orienting us.

So it's 1145 was the start of the parking enforcement officer specific presentation.

We'll go till one o'clock, we'll take a break from one to two, the plan is at 2pm, then we will specifically focus on all things Seattle Police Department related.

And then we will transition to the Community Safety Communication Center and conclude our day at five o'clock.

So just to remind us between now and 1pm, parking enforcement officers is the topic of this morning.

Thank you, Senior Deputy Mayor, for being here with us.

I'm happy to turn it to you to open us up, but we do have the panel with the department as well, and I'm sure you will hand it over to them afterwards.

I want to make sure to give you a chance to say some comments.

Excellent.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Budget Chair Mosqueda.

Thank you, Chair for Public Safety Herbold.

I did want to just add a couple things as context to the PEO conversation before we enter it.

And really, listening to our parking enforcement officers, they came to the new administration sometime in the second quarter, late second quarter, to really share with us their experiences as employees with the City of Seattle.

I think you'll see as we go through this presentation that there is room for there to be 120 parking enforcement officers under their current configuration.

They've atrophied to about 80. There has been no new hires under their current configuration.

And quite candidly, they're having a very difficult time covering all of the territory.

They are a revenue generating source for the city of Seattle.

There have been a number of challenges, as Council Member Herbold pointed out, a number of challenges with the transition to their current department in SDOT.

And I think we've stated this, this may not be their final home, but for where we are right now and who is in the best position to be able to have them effectively do their work and their jobs for the city, this is the best current home.

We did not direct their survey.

They provided a survey to the members.

We had, as the executive, had no idea the questions that they were going to ask their members, no idea, you know, the length of the survey, the topics, all of those things, that came from their membership because they had so many of their members, so many of their staff that were threatening quite candidly to leave.

And so we were trying to figure out how we could support retaining as many of those PEOs as possible.

And so that is the survey that they provided back to us.

I think you'll see the results, but 78.9, nearly 80% have found their current situation untenable.

It's not worked out well for the city.

I think the $4.5 million and refunded parking tickets certainly has not helped our situation in terms of a budget gap.

And so we are looking at what is the best way to get through the next biennium while we stand up what is going to be a more complete public safety package.

So with that, I'm happy to answer any questions, but I don't wanna stand in the way of our presentation, but really available and happy to answer any questions This presentation won't have all of the conversations we've had with SPEOG, their labor union around what has been going on on that side for the last several months.

And so I can provide some color to that as the executive has been meeting with their leadership around their labor concerns and labor issues.

So with that, I wanna turn it over to Chief Diaz and his team.

Well, thank you.

So sorry, Chief.

Welcome as well.

Thank you.

Thank you, Senior Deputy Mayor.

And just to orient us, I think we have about 20 minutes for department presentations with the goal of then being able to get into the council deliberations through issue identification, which I assume will take some time.

So really, this is heavily focused on the department presentation for the next 20 minutes.

And then the remainder of the time would be council interactions with central staff.

and just wanted to set that as the stage, because I know that there's going to be a lot of discussion about this.

If council members do have technical questions and questions about impact, please do direct those to the department, and then we will save the council's questions, comments, or statements that they'd like to make for the section devoted to issue identification.

Chief Diaz, thanks for your patience here.

I saw you on the line earlier.

Thanks for being present.

Well, good afternoon to all the council members and thank you, senior deputy mayor for providing some context to what is going on.

And thank you for the opportunity to present to everyone today.

You know, two years ago, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and a response to community calls for a widespread re-imagining of how cities deliver police services, the city transferred various non-sworn functions like parking enforcement and victim support from SBD to other departments.

And in the two years that followed we continue to work alongside parking enforcement officers, as at special events and operations, and we collaborated with s dot management to ensure service levels were maintained that parking enforcement officers were well utilized as a resource.

But today we're here to explain why we collectively believe that the parking enforcement division should be returned to SPD.

Although this move was well intentioned, a number of unintended consequences have arisen from this transfer.

And we'll go into a little bit more detail, and I'll turn this over to our Chief Operating Officer Brian Maxey, as well as our Executive Director of Budget, Angela Sochi.

So thank you.

And I'll also be online to answer any more in-depth questions or parts of the questions.

Thank you, Chief.

This is Angela Sosi, Executive Director of Budget and Finance for SPD.

I'm going to go through this slide here quickly.

It's just a summary of the actual budget changes that are happening.

As part of this change request, we will be transferring from SDOT to SPD.

roughly $20 million to support the operation in 2023, along with 123 full-time equivalent positions.

In 2024, that amount increases slightly to $20.5 million to account for cost increases and the FT amount is the same for that year as well.

And with that, I will pass it over to Chief Operating Officer Brian Maxey.

Also, next slide, please.

And good afternoon council members and thank you for the opportunity to present on this as well.

I do not think our presentation is going to take the full 20 minutes so maybe we will give you some of your time back and get to the issue discussion more quickly than anticipated.

I think my job here is to really talk about the current state of the parking enforcement division and what it looks like in terms of how to transfer it back as well as what efficiencies might be gained by this transfer.

The parking enforcement officer division did not make very many changes operationally to how it functioned following the transfer to SDOT.

Currently, they still wear SPD uniforms with SPD badges, and at least some of the vehicles are still SPD branded.

Those that were changed were changed to a City of Seattle logo, department neutral.

which was a decision that was made by SDOT but you know wholly supported by SPD in ensuring flexibility into the future as to where the parking enforcement division might land.

The transfer of the division to SDOT did add a new civilian management structure and that Structure will be transferring back to to SPD with the parking enforcement officers and we think that is a good net gain in terms of how to manage and supervise that group of city employees, but certainly there were some significant operational challenges because the Parking enforcement officers, as mentioned earlier, had dropped to 80 as opposed to the funded 123 FTEs, which left the group spread thin and trying to meet their responsibilities for the city.

Additionally, because they were housed at SDOT as opposed to a police department, which has an ORI or origin code, for the criminal justice information system.

They had less information as any sort of criminal investigation information or criminal justice information had to be withheld, even though they were still on our broadcast radios.

We could not provide them the same level of information that they'd had previously.

As mentioned, again, their numbers were significantly reduced, and we're looking at filling the vacancies in the PEO division moving forward.

Next slide, please.

So what are the benefits and the efficiencies of transferring the PEO?

Sorry, Director, excuse me.

I'm so sorry.

Mr. Maxey, Council Member Herbold on the previous slide, I think.

Yeah, I appreciate it.

The language here says the total number of funded PEOs was reduced after the transfer to SDOT.

That's what the words in the paper say, which lead me to believe that it's a different impression than what I thought I heard you say verbally, which was there were funded positions in the department but they weren't filled.

Can you help me understand?

I don't remember.

Yes, Council Member, I think your statement there is correct, that there still were the FD positions, but they were not filled.

Angela, is that an incorrect statement?

I can provide some context to that if it's helpful.

The original transfer over, there was 130. potential positions for PEOs.

Because we'd atrophied so much to the 80, what we've transmitted to you is, you know, in order to balance some of the budget is 120 actual PEO positions.

So we have actually taken, in order to help us balance the budget, 10 positions for the biennium until we can recruit and come back up.

So we have reduced in the budget transmitted to you, where they originally had 130 positions, we've reduced those to 120.

I want to give Calvin a chance to weigh in on that answer too, and then I'll come back to Council Member Herbold because I have a take on her question as well.

Thank you, Council Members.

Calvin Chow with Council Central staff.

My understanding of how this has played out at SDOT is that really this comes down to how SDOT's internal cost allocation is applied across different funding sources.

It's a bit of an esoteric accounting issue, but it means that the amount of funding that was transferred with the positions to SDOT did not fully cover the cost of those positions to be delivered in SDOT.

As a result, to kind of manage their internal budget crunch, the department relied on vacancies in that division to not overspend their budget.

Councilmember Herbold, follow up on that?

I appreciate that, Calvin.

So the intent of the council was to provide sufficient funding for the same number of PEOs in SDOT.

But because SDOT bills basically their overhead in a different way than than SPD did, the cost of those positions was a greater cost, which resulted in SDOT not having sufficient funds to fully hire the number of PEOs that we intended SDOT to hire.

That is my understanding, that essentially the overhead costs were, the difference being that SPD as a general fund department pays those as a line item, whereas SDOT has to allocate them across all their labor.

Again, boy, I would have been great for, given that SDOT so vigorously lobbied council for this move, it would have been great if we had known that this was a problem so that we would not inadvertently together, the city family, create the conditions that I think partially led to the ULP, which is the huge number of vacancies in the PEO division.

Thanks so much.

I was going to echo that comment.

this additional cost at SDOT was definitely not something that the previous administration and the previous mayor made known when she advocated so fiercely to move folks instead of to CSCC, but instead to SDOT.

So I do want to make sure that we are all clear, as Council Member Herbold noted, the intent and the assumption and all of our understanding was that the full number of personnel was being moved from that was not communicated by the previous administration nor was the Okay, I think we have only one more slide, as you mentioned, Brian, pretty short presentation.

So let's go through the next slide, and then we will go back and take some questions.

Council Member Herbold, is your hand resolved?

Excellent, okay.

Please go ahead, Mr. Maxey.

Thank you, Council Member.

So what are the benefits and the efficiencies of returning the PEOs to SPD?

First of all, we will increase the number of available resources and fill those previously unfilled positions.

We also see significant gains in streamlining resource management, especially during events and operations.

This really comes down to the coordinated management of the Seattle Police Operations Center.

Once we have direct supervisory control over the PEOs, we will be able to deploy them alongside officers and have a more robust collaboration between those resources.

It's not to say that we haven't been collaborating with SDOT, but having that direct management and supervisory function will allow us to deploy them more effectively.

And also, strategically, as things in the field change, getting new orders out to PEOs will also be simplified rather than having to route it through their department.

Again, we talked about the issues around facility access and data security.

This is, again, the criminal justice information conundrum with not being able to give them the same level of access to criminal justice information that they had previously.

We will be able to restore that.

This also will, because they are still housed within SPD facilities, they've always had to be CEGIS cleared and backgrounded and They will continue to be so, but the additional data security for on radio information and their ability to run vehicles and get a comprehensive history including whether they are stolen will be restored.

Again, I think there are some efficiencies in having a consistent policy and values expectation as well as processes for both police and PEO employees when they're working alongside each other.

As mentioned before, we did collaborate and we had a good relationship with SDOT.

This will have the restoration of PEOs to SPD will help communicate common policies, common values, and ensure everyone is on the same page as to what the mission is.

And last is really an issue of accountability.

Previously, the PEOs were under the review of the Office of Police Accountability.

They do wear SPD badges.

They do present as uniformed personnel, even though they are not armed personnel.

So complaints often come to Office of Police Accountability because people either mistake them for police officers or assume, given their branding, that they are part of the Seattle Police Department.

Bringing them back within SPD will bring them back within the purview of the Office of Police Accountability.

We think this will restore clearer accountability systems and members of the public that have concerns will have a common avenue to investigate those concerns.

And again, this goes along with being under the same policy manual, same values, same expectations.

So we really think that's an important piece of this transfer.

The last thing I'll say that's not on the slide is that we at SPD are committed to having an effective and efficient retransfer of the PEOs.

The executive has already called for change management and organizational transfer structure that, unlike last time, will have the proper focus, will have the proper resources dedicated to it.

We're going to assign an internal project manager with an SPD to focus on this to ensure that the changes are made effectively and quickly.

That being said, there are relatively few things that we've identified that will be necessary in that change.

There's some fiscal issues with billing codes and those structures.

There is one piece of software that was transferred to SDOT that we'll have to transfer back.

But for the most part, I think we have identified that the systems can simply be reinstated to their previous condition and we are optimistic that it will happen efficiently and well.

At that point, I will turn it over to questions and happy to answer anything council members have on their mind.

Thank you.

Thanks for the summary presentation.

Questions?

Council Member Peterson, please go ahead.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

I just wanted to say regarding this proposed transfer that I believe it's up to each mayor to decide what they need to enforce these laws.

And our current mayor has concluded that this can be the most efficient route to enforce parking.

So I support his decision.

I know the general public cares that this work get done, that parking is enforced, that fines are collected.

We keep the revenue and we deploy that revenue to benefit the people of Seattle.

So I'll be supporting this move.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Other comments or questions?

Okay, I will have a few questions then.

You mentioned that there's change management and organizational transfer functions that the current administration is prioritizing to ensure a smooth transition.

I'm wondering whether or not there's been an analysis of how to address those past barriers to efficiently doing the work under SDOT has been considered first.

Some of the things that I'm hearing and seeing in the presentation, It sounds like it's a function of maybe unwillingness to share information or inability to share information from SPD to the parking enforcement officers under SDOT.

So if the commitment is to try to make sure that these individuals have all of the resources to share information, especially like which vehicles might be stolen, Why don't we start there?

Have we had a conversation about what resources the parking enforcement officers may need under SDOT to have greater access to some of the data while still being housed at SDOT?

So Council Member, these are some of the rules that are not actually run by the department, by the Seattle Police Department.

These are rules that are run through WASC, which is the Washington State Services, as well as our NCIC.

And so because we're a CEGIS protected department, an outside department that is not actually funded by us would not have access to that information.

And so when a vehicle is that is stolen, a PO is not able to gain access to that information.

If they're inside the department and they've gone through our CEDIS requirements, then they do have that ability to have access.

This issue had not come up because they'd been in the department for, you know, 30, 40 years.

And so it never had been an issue prior to that transfer.

Madam Chair, Greg Doss here, central staff, if I could just chime in.

It's my understanding now that the way that this issue is handled is that SPD provides to SDOT, and I'm not sure on the frequency of this, a hot sheet that lists stolen vehicles that PEOs can use to determine if a vehicle is if there's some criminal nexus there or stolen and and I would ask the chief to to verify that and and talk about how that process works.

We can verify that.

So just having the vehicle plate that is listed as stolen, but the actual information of the vehicle would not be something that would be given.

So there's registered owners, there's addresses, there's a variety of different other information that's also associated, whether the vehicle is ready for impound or whether it's not impounded when it's on recovery.

So there are a couple of different information that we will, but I can provide a little bit more in depth to Greg's question of the hot sheet.

Thank you.

Council Member Herbold.

Thank you.

I'm just wondering, as it relates to the access to CEGIS issue, I understand you to be saying that even with a special commission for PEOs, there is no way for SPD to administer the those special commission officers getting approved for procedures.

And that is your legal analysis that has been sort of, I guess, confirmed both within and external to the department.

I think, Brian, COO Maxey, can you can you fill in?

Yeah, I can.

I can certainly I I'm not purporting to offer a legal opinion on this issue, but we did explore this.

The authorization is actually held by the Washington State Patrol and it tracks with the codes on what information can be given out.

And there's different analysis for just like facility access for CJIS access and the data access of CJIS information.

And we certainly were able to clear the first hurdle of giving them access to our buildings as they are currently housed within SPD.

But there was certain information that we could not transfer out via radio to them.

And I think, and I will confirm this, and your question is a good one.

With the hot sheets, I believe what we were able to do is give them static updates as to these are lists of stolen cars, rather than when they find a vehicle, having them be able to confirm it in the field in real time.

I think that is the distinction there, but I will, again, follow up and make sure that we have full clarity on that issue.

And Greg, I see you have your hand up.

Do you have additional information on that?

I do.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

So I checked with Director Lombard, Chief Lombard at the CSCC, because I was interested to know if the PEOs could get CEGIS clearance through the CSCC.

The CSCC has CEGIS clearance for their dispatchers under what is called an NORI code.

And what I had been told by the director is that one of his staff checked in with the Washington State Patrol and was advised that PEOs are not performing a criminal justice purpose.

and would not be issued CJIS access under the CSCC or under SDOT.

And so that's the latest information that we have at the time, whether or not a legal analysis could trump what WSP was saying to this data center manager, we'd have to do more research.

It seems very clear that given that what they are doing is the same, regardless of where they're at, that the words you spoke, Craig, suggest that they think that what they're doing is different, depending on where they're housed.

And that is, of course, not the case.

So yeah, I would definitely be interested in delving a little bit more deeply here.

Thank you, Vice Chair.

Senior Deputy Mayor, please go ahead.

Yeah, just to clarify the point, I think that the, and we don't own these databases, this is just who has access to them.

The databases are provided access to by those working for certified law enforcement agencies, and because they're not recognized as law enforcement agencies, SDOT or CSCC, because they're not recognized as law enforcement agencies, they don't have the same access as SPD, which is a recognized law enforcement agency.

And so that would have to be a changing of laws above city law in order to change the ability to have access.

or hopefully some sort of an administrator ruling based on a clarification.

Greg, did you say that CSCC does have CGIS clearance for dispatch?

Yes, they do.

They have a special designation that is given out to non-criminal justice agencies that are performing a criminal justice purpose.

But as I've said, WSP informed the CSCC when they were doing some investigation that they didn't believe that the PEOs could be designated as doing a criminal justice purpose.

Very helpful, thank you.

Okay, additional comments or questions for the department or senior deputy mayor?

You know, I think that it would be helpful to hear more from the folks who were part of the previous administration and or central staff who was helping us analyze the proposals, the competing proposals at the time to either move the parking enforcement officers to the Community Safety Communication Center, or to the Department of Transportation as requested by then Mayor Jenny Durkan.

The reason that I'd like to have the folks who were working on that previous analysis comment here is because nowhere in those deliberations did I ever hear a concern raised about parking enforcement officers not having access to that data.

There was, regardless of where people wanted the parking enforcement officers to end up, My recollection is that everybody was on board with helping to move them out, along with, as Councilmember Herbold noted, the parking enforcement officers themselves who wanted to be part of reimagining what their work could look like.

So number one, did this come up, and I'm just forgetting about it, in our deliberations two years ago, because it seems like that would have been an impediment to even moving them in the first place.

And number two, And this is not directed at the current administration, because I think you've all been trying to identify where there's been challenges with implementation.

since you've arrived, but why were these individuals never offered a uniform or a badge that did not say SPD?

I think that's problematic if our entire effort was to try to reduce what people perceived to be additional police presence due to parking enforcement officers being in neighborhoods.

And I'm concerned on both of those fronts.

So is there anybody who could offer a reminder on whether or not that issue came up at all in 2020 and why these individuals were never offered a change in uniform or badge.

Director Handy.

I'll just offer a couple of comments.

I was not here at the council at the time that it was discussed, but based on conversations with our team, I think it's fair to say that the council was not provided complete information during those deliberations.

I don't think the council had complete information provided to I don't, you know, I can't speak at this moment whether it was because of the rapid nature, or, or, or sort of the why but can clarify that I based on our conversations I don't think we have all of that on the table.

Okay, thank you, Director handy.

I asked that because I want to make sure that the takeaway is not that a decision was made haphazardly, that it was made solely by a council at the time.

This was a joint decision between the executive and the council in 2020. And I just think that there's been some assumptions that have been made by those who are covering the issue of the refund of the parking tickets at that house somehow was connected to a quick decision when it was a very much joint decision informed by the previous administration.

on terms of where they wanted folks to go.

And I also don't believe that the final decision on where and when and if commissions should happen that led to having to pay out those parking tickets falls at SDOT's feet.

I do think that there's some additional analysis that's needed to understand more of where SPD's interpretation of what the law was, led to having to make those decisions not to get a commission.

And that said, I also want to thank Senior Deputy Mayor and Mayor Harrell who acted with urgency when they realized that there was a gap in the commissions to try to make sure that they righted that wrong.

But this is a much longer conversation that we've had over the course of two years.

So it is frustrating, as you can tell, to have to now learn information that should have been available in 2020. But also, as I think the chair of public safety and vice chair of the budget is noting, It seems like there's some opportunities for us to jointly look at ways to try to mitigate for some of the lack of support or lack of information that some of the parking enforcement officers are able to receive in their current place.

So I do look forward to continuing these conversations with this administration.

and to helping to make sure that these workers have the support that they need, so that they have, you know, an added benefit of being part of community safety, and also that they get the support that they need within the city family.

Senior Deputy Mayor, I see your hand.

Yeah, I just want to, you know, I appreciate your comments and just want to say that You know, we've done everything that we can we walked into a number of surprises, you know, at the beginning of the year, and we tried to put out as many surprises as many fires as we could as quickly as we could.

We did try to act as quickly as possible.

Once we kind of found out where these gaps were, and this is definitely 1 of those as you as you mentioned where.

Uh, it was as much of a surprise to us, uh, as it was to you.

I think when we had to share this information, I will, uh, I will say that, uh, we continue to try to work, um, as clearly as possible, uh, through these challenges.

And, um, you know, we've worked, we've worked really closely and directly with, uh, the PEOs, um, around what they think, uh, can help them do their jobs, uh, right now.

We also have heard from them pretty clearly that they would welcome the opportunity to speak with any on council who would want to meet with them and talk with them as well.

And I know that a number of you have pretty good relationships with them.

And so they did want me to extend the offer to be available to anybody who would want to meet with them and speak to them about the challenges that they've had over the last year.

And so that offer is open.

I just wanted to ensure that you all knew it and that they're anxious to come to a successful resolution for their team as well.

Thank you, Senior Deputy Mayor.

I see two hands, Council Member Nelson and Council Member Herbold.

I just want to express respect for the work that was done in the past that led to the decision to move the PEOs out of SPD.

I understand that.

And coming in new, I'm just taking in all this information now and we can't go back and undo some of the things that happened that led to the ticket issue, et cetera.

I'm looking forward and thinking about what could save the city money and what is the thing that the workers themselves are, you know, what is their preference?

And so that's the decision that I'm, those are the things that I'm taking forward in this discussion.

So thanks.

Thank you, Council Member Nelson.

That might be a good preview of the upcoming conversation that we'll have with central staff here in a second on issue identification.

Council Member Herbold, anything else before we transition to that panel?

You are still, okay, great.

I just want to hand on the numbers again.

and maybe this will become clear in the central staff options, but what you're saying is basically it's going to, for a unit who its total funding I think is or was in the previous budget is $18 million, and I think that's what it's supposed to be with the move to SDOT.

we're proposing to move back to SPD, that $18 million unit is to fund about 120 some odd positions.

But if we keep that unit in SDOT, that $18 million unit needs to increase to 26 million.

So I'm just trying to get a per PEO calculation of the difference of what it costs for an FTE in both departments.

Just to reconcile that $8.3 million, that seems like a lot.

That's more than half the current funding for the unit.

And if you're saying it's going to cost half as much more to fund the same number of officers, I'm just, again, trying to get a handle on sort of the per FTE assumptions there.

All right, I see Greg and Julie in that order so we'll just go ahead and take it in that order.

Go ahead Greg.

Thank you Madam Chair.

I was going to say Council Member Herbold that Cal and I are going to get to some of the fiscal details.

We're not going to have a per PEO cost for you, we could do that later, but we're gonna dive into the detail that will explain SDOT cost allocation and how we get to the, it's actually more like 8.3 million Cal did some research and refined that number.

And we'll explain all that when we do our presentation.

Excellent.

Well, we will take this as a good opportunity to transition there and Director Dainley, please go ahead and share your last comments as part of this panel as well.

Oh, that's perfectly fine.

We can, it's going to be covered in the issue ID.

So happy to do it.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, with that, I again want to thank the members from the department who've been here.

I want to thank Senior Deputy Mayor Harrell for the overview and the presentation and representation from this administration.

We are going to transition now to the central staff guided issue identification.

And colleagues, I'm going to ask that we let Greg and Calvin and anyone else from central staff walk through the full issue identification because it's only, what, we got two slides here?

Three slides.

Do I understand that correctly, Greg?

It's just one issue ID over three slides.

It is a relatively brief presentation, a few slides, and it'll be quick because COO Maxey quite eloquently went over a bunch of stuff I was going to say.

OK, well, excellent.

Great.

Thanks again.

Please go ahead, Greg, and welcome.

OK, thank you, Greg Doss, Central Staff.

Cal Chow, my colleague, will be joining me.

We're going to ping pong back and forth, but I'm going to go ahead and start.

I think you've already got plenty of background.

I'm just gonna, as I said, dive into some detail on the fiscal transactions.

And so as Council Member Herbold and others have said, we're talking about a $20 million transfer here, and it's made up of three parts, about 18 million that transfers the 123 FTE, and that's the transfer of the actual unit, the salary and benefits, about 1.1 million for the transfer of citywide charges for central costs.

And so what this is, is SDOT is giving back to SPD all of the money that is spent to pay for fleets, facilities, computers, employment, SDHR hiring, all of those central costs that the city charged each department.

Those costs were moved from SPD over to SDOT, and now they're coming back to SPD.

Then the last component is $829,000 that is distinct to the PEO unit for overtime, for parking enforcement, and for special events.

Just for a little background, when it comes to working, any kind of overtime.

Generally, PEOs spend about 75% of their overtime hours working special events and about 25% of their hours working parking enforcement when they're getting paid overtime.

And so that's what's coming over with that $829,000.

And so one of the things I want to point out here, this $1.1 million in citywide charges for central costs, not going to refer to that as overhead per se.

That's a very distinct piece that is just as I said fleets and facilities, tech infrastructure, that does not include the SDOT department costs that we're going to talk about in a minute.

SDOT has its own indirect costs and direct costs, such as their Office of Director of Finance and Administration.

They have indirect costs that include their leadership and management.

They have a pool of employee paid benefits.

I'm not going to get too much into it to say that SDOT gathers its own internal costs and then distributes or allocates those out to its funds.

And so that's separate and apart from this 1.1 million.

It's additive to this 1.1 million.

Those things, when we're talking about those things in SPD, the management, the chiefs, the folks that would oversee the parking enforcement unit at a higher level, like the captain level or the chief level.

those folks are already paid for by the general fund.

So there's no cost to move them back to SPD.

But if they stay in SDOT, then those costs for SDOT get allocated out to the funds.

And with that, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Calvin to explain how that works.

Thank you, Greg.

That's a really important distinction.

I just want to highlight that this isn't really a policy choice so much as it's driven by accounting and staying clear with our funding sources.

And the biggest difference is that the police department is funded by general fund.

It's one fund, we can line item those costs and budget those appropriately.

The issue for SDOT is they have multiple fund sources, including reimbursables, Sound Transit paying for some costs, grant funding coming from the state or the federal government.

And so how do you allocate these department costs across all these different fund sources in a way that's equitable and can be sort of accounted for according to the best accounting practices?

And the way that SDOT does it is by rolling all those into a total cost of of essentially overhead of indirect costs, and then allocating those costs based on employee hours worked.

And so you can imagine this means that if you have a construction worker working on a WSDOT grant project, the time that they spend working on that project They recover a portion of that overhead from washed up through that money spent on that project.

Conversely, they would do that for some other projects with different funding sources.

It leads to a very esoteric and convoluted cost recovery model.

Patty, if you could go to the next slide.

But this slide shows you essentially what is the difference if you left the PEOs in SDOT or not and how those cost allocations change among the different fund sources.

It's not a overall change in the total cost of these indirect costs, but it changes very much who bears those costs.

And it's really because you were talking about 123 general fund supported new SDOT employees that work on general fund work and so get assigned a much higher level of the indirect costs in that sort of labor shift.

I just want to jump in here and just put a finer point on that last piece that Cal said, those for the council members and the viewing public.

It does not cost more to the city as a whole to have parking enforcement in SPD or in SDOT.

Different funds pay.

For the cost of parking enforcement, depending on where it lives.

And so this issue that there has been a lot of concern that there is an additional cost and it would be an additional 8Million of dollar cost to the general fund.

And we understand that there is a very significant general fund deficit this year.

And so that's a choice on the table.

We also heard this morning that SDOT is facing many shortfalls, too, and there's tough decisions there about which projects to prioritize.

So the choice here is not where does it cost more.

It is, you know, council members have a policy choice of where do they think that parking enforcement should live.

Based on that policy choice, a different set of funds are going to pay.

Thank you, Director Handy, and I want to thank as well Greg Doss, who walked me and my team through that point.

I think, Greg, you explained it well, and Calvin, you've really shown the dollar figures here to make the point.

The distinction that central staff made for me was that this is not actually a cost savings mechanism.

It's a cost avoidance mechanism.

I want to make sure that we're I think simply summarize that point that came from central staff as well.

And it is important for us to center this on policy decisions.

I know I've spent a lot of time talking about revenue and our need for joint revenue.

And again, I want to thank the joint efforts between the council and the mayor's office to holistically look at revenue, really appreciate our partnership.

and the co-leadership that we're showing on finding new revenue generally for our city family.

There is no question that we all are trying to address the revenue situation together.

Again, my sincere appreciation for this joint effort.

I think it's important for us to collectively think about the policy choices that we're being asked to make versus just thinking about certain revenue streams.

So thank you for underscoring that.

And again, separate to this, thank you to the administration, to our friends in the mayor's office and senior deputy mayor for the future work we will all do on revenue gaps going forward.

That is a joint effort and I'm very proud of that work together.

and also really appreciate that central staff has elaborated more on the choice in front of us on this.

Council Member Herbold, please go ahead.

Thanks, and Central Staff Director Handy, I appreciate you making that distinction, but I'm trying to get my arms around how that is a distinction with a difference if we make the policy decision to keep PEOs in SDOT, how we avoid a situation that has has occurred and I believe is one of the precipitating factors for the ULP where we have a department who will respond to that policy decision by not hiring the number of FTEs if we don't add the additional 8.3 million in funding.

And so I think there are multiple objectives here And I think one of them is ensuring that the department is fully staffed and that our workforce is supported by our engagement in addressing the vacancies that are, I think, creating morale issues for the department.

and leading to capacity challenges to address other policy needs associated with the work that they do.

So I'm just trying to understand if the end result is in order to ensure that the number of FTEs are hired to serve as PEOs that we want to, and we also, make the policy decision, if we were to make the policy decision that they were to stay in SDOT, isn't it still true that we would have, in order to have both of those things be accomplished, we would have to find the additional funding?

Yeah, thank you for the question and the opportunity to clarify.

I'll take a crack at it and invite Keller Greg if I don't get it across the finish line.

So we, the funding to start from the general fund from PEOs would be different in 2023 than it was in 2022. we would fund the full positions plus the general fund would fund $8.3 million of the overhead of the SDOT overhead so that SDOT did not have to underspend.

or hold vacancies open.

That's different than what was done in the past.

In the past, SDOT, the general fund did not fund the or did not budget for the portion of SDOT overhead, but it did have to pay for it over time.

And when I say there isn't a difference in the absolute cost to the city on cows chart here it shows that $93 million at the bottom, that's the amount expected.

to for SDOT's overhead next year.

That is going to get paid either way, whether it is by the list of funds that is described there.

And so the difference is whether if the PEOs are at SDOT, the general fund will pay for a bigger part of that overhead.

If the PEOs are at SPD, the general fund will pay a smaller part of that overhead.

As you'll see in the last column of change, the red numbers show that if the general fund is paying $8.3 million of that static 93, we expect cost savings in the transportation fund, the move Seattle levy fund, the transportation benefit district fund, et cetera.

Part of what Cal alluded to is it's a little bit challenging because those are not line item overhead items in SDOT's budget.

So the accounting is not quite as crystal clear as just doing a fund swap as we would like.

That said, we know there will be cost savings there.

We're a sophisticated city.

We could think about how to approach that accounting issue.

Great question.

Thanks for the clarification.

Yeah.

I see Councilmember Morales' hand.

I thought I saw it.

Did you have it?

I saw my hand.

I'm just kind of trying to sort this all out for myself.

And really, it seems like this is an internal funding issue and wondering about, you know, if there's a way to give Estada a break on the cost of PEOs or address the difference in indirect cost allocation for them rather than make this giant move.

And so something to talk about offline.

Thank you.

But I'm just brainstorming.

Yeah, thank you.

And that is what this week is all about trying to, what is it called?

I think I saw your hand, too, but I'll come back to you.

defensible accounting procedure for how we allocate those costs to all our other funders and everyone else who, all the money that gets directed through SDOT.

So it's very hard to explain if you're going to cut a special deal for one specific program that we do in SDOT.

I think it's, it would be hard to hold on to our cost allocation for federal grants or state grants or Sound Transit funding if we start making exceptions in our policies.

Good flag.

Thank you.

Director Dingley?

I'm going to be a bit strange for a moment and just take a moment to celebrate the fact that it's very clear for the nerdy among us that our teams are working really well together because director handy and Cal, they have explained it so well and have such a good handle on all these issues.

And so I just want to take that moment to celebrate because that is really encouraging to me that we're all on the same page for the facts around this and not, you know, we're truly having a conversation around what the policy is here.

And it's not just on the cost side, as you heard from SPD, you know, there are many operational concerns as well that they have raised.

And, you know, to go really in the weeds, we have a number of standard indirect cost models in the city that we use.

And, you know, Estat has selected one of those cost models.

There is not a cost model, just to echo the point that was just made, that would eliminate this requirement and still allow the department to have clean financials.

So really appreciate the conversation.

And thanks for letting me take a moment to celebrate our teams.

Well, I appreciate you.

bringing us to where we have really common and shared interests, and that is in greater transparency in our budgeting.

I know that the chair of public safety, vice chair here, and I have said this today but want to again lift it up, the collaboration and willingness to share information between the executive and legislative branches is a noticeable improvement, and I think it's leading to improved discussion about the budget overall, as you can tell some of the frustration about not having this information two years ago.

If anything, it's been very heartening to see the level of open books that are being shared between the legislative and executive branch, and I will credit Deputy Director Fennucci, who suggested this format so that we could have a little bit of this back and forth.

Makes it challenging, as I noted, for the Director Dingley.

It makes it challenging for me to make sure that I'm facilitating a discussion versus a debate sometimes.

But I think that this is a good example of where having folks at the table to talk through questions from a technical perspective, impact perspective, but also a values and policy perspective from the council is important.

with that.

And because I don't see any additional hands, I am willing to wrap this up on that positive note.

And it does sound like there's a lot of work to do still.

I think there's a lot of questions that have been asked today.

I'm sure that we will all be working very closely between executive and legislative branch to get those questions answered.

And I think that there is more to come on this topic.

But we will separate this topic from Seattle Police Department generally, which when we reconvene at 2pm, We will dive into the details of the Seattle Police Department's proposed budget.

Is there any additional comments for the panel that we have here or any additional questions that I may have preemptively cut people off related to PEOs?

I want to thank the team from central staff for really walking through the details of this presentation with councilmembers to get prepared for one of the bigger topics among this and HSD and jumpstart.

We've surfaced a few issues that we'll be jointly working on to try to address in the upcoming weeks, but this has been a really helpful discussion with the senior deputy mayor.

Thank you so much.

Director Dingley and everyone from the SPD team.

Thanks for joining us.

I was going to say this morning, but we have taken you into the afternoon.

Do go enjoy your lunch.

If there's no objection, today's Select Budget Committee meeting will recess until 2 PM.

Excuse me, there's not an objection, but maybe a comment.

Council Member Herbal, please go ahead.

Maybe it's an objection.

I'm okay with that.

It's a question.

I thought we were also going to talk about the options that central staff developed on this one, or are we going to wait until after lunch for that?

Yeah, I would like to wrap up this presentation.

So I thought we were at a closing spot, but I guess we did not get to slide number three.

Madam Chair, that everything on slide number three, Chief Operating Officer Maxey brought up.

I don't, I really don't have anything to add.

Okay, let me just ask that council had questions.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Let's ask council members if you have some questions on that.

And Patty, sorry for the premature takedown of the slides, but I think we're on slide number three.

Go ahead, Calvin.

And I just think that the options are, as has been discussed, you have the option to retain the PEOs in SDOT with the issue of how do we address the general funding or vacancies in SDOT.

You have the option to consider looking at putting them in a different location, the CSCC, or you have an option to go with the proposal.

Council Member Herbold?

Yeah, as it relates to the options of either keeping them in SDOT or keeping them at CSCC, do we have sort of an analysis from central staff on what we would also need to do beyond the fiscal impacts, beyond addressing the CJIS issue, and our likelihood of being able to address those issues?

Again, I know one of the objectives here is to try and resolve unfair labor practice claim.

And I want to make sure, I mean, obviously, there are a lot of policy objectives that we want to accomplish.

And I just want to make sure that in discussing these options, we're eyes wide open on what it will take to address those multiple policy objectives.

Yeah, Council Member Herbold, I think I can address that.

Yes, we are continuing to work this issue and that's why I reached out to the CSCC to see if there was a way that PEOs could get an ORI number within the CSCC and still continuing to work that to see how they might get access to criminal justice or stolen vehicle information.

So yes, we are continuing to work the issue.

Again, my understanding is with CSCC, there are other issues as well that would be challenging, not insurmountable, but it's, I think it's, and it's one of the reasons why we had discussed there being a that we would be essentially doubling the size of their staff whereas moving a 100 a 100 people into SPD or moving a 100 people we would move them into CSCC.

So I think that's another issue that has some potential cost drivers associated with it.

Thank you, Council Member.

Yeah, that's a good flag.

I appreciate the update from Greg about the work that's ongoing to look at how we meet the parking enforcement officers' needs so that they can do their job effectively.

And I think if there's anything The end goal, I believe, right, is to make sure that they have the tools that they can do their job.

And so that will be where I think we all want to make sure that need is being met.

And I believe that that was the intention behind this move.

And so if we can meet that goal and and as we continue to look at options, that will be a big priority of mine.

I also think we might have given initially, we might have given nine months.

It was, I think, September that we ended up moving PEOs over to SDOT, if I'm not wrong.

So we did know that there was a need for a long on-ramp there and obviously, you know, concern and frustrated that it didn't lead to the smooth transition that was envisioned and really look forward to hearing more, Greg, from your analysis on how we can continue to identify the supports that workers need in order to do their job effectively.

All right.

I was so excited to end on such a come-together moment from Director Dingley.

I jumped ahead.

Thank you, Councilmember, for pointing out slide 3 and for the viewing public.

That was the last slide on the PEO presentation.

Definitely more analysis to come from central staff on option B there, which I appreciate Councilmember Herbold raising and look forward to hearing those details as well as we consider this item in our deliberations on the council budget.

And I also failed to mention, there's two items this afternoon.

Again, the remainder of the Seattle Police Department's specific budget, and then we will separately have the communication safety, the Community Safety and Communication Center, the CSCC, to wrap us up for the afternoon.

Okay, now, hearing no objection, we will go into recess until 2 p.m.

Thank you again to this entire panel for being here today, with us this morning, and we'll see you all in an hour.

Bye-bye.