Committee on Transportation and Seattle Public Utilities 2/1/22

Recording.

Good morning.

The February 1st, 2022 meeting of the Transportation and Seattle Public Utilities Committee will come to order.

The time is 9.31 a.m.

I'm Alex Peterson, chair of this committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Herbold?

Here.

Council Member Morales?

Council Member Sawant?

Present.

Council Member Strauss.

Present.

Chair Peterson.

Present.

For present.

Thank you.

If there's no objection, today's proposed agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

Good morning, everybody.

Welcome to the Transportation and Seattle Public Utilities Committee.

We are starting off 2022 with presentations from both of the departments that we will monitor, the Seattle Department of Transportation, or SDOT, and Seattle Public Utilities.

They are here at our request to discuss their responses to the most recent winter storms.

Our committee will also consider Councilmember Strauss' bill with SDOT to extend the waivers of the fees we would normally charge to permit businesses to use our public streets and sidewalks, including the Cafe Streets Program.

SDOT is also here to brief us on their broader program called Safe Starts, which will provide additional context for the proposal to continue to waive those permit fees.

So at this time, we'll open the remote general public comment period for the Transportation and Seattle Public Utilities Committee.

I ask that everyone please be patient as we operate this online system.

We are continuously looking for ways to fine-tune this process of public participation.

It remains the strong intent of the City Council to have public comment regularly included on our meeting agendas.

However, the City Council reserves the right to modify these public comment periods at any point if we deem that the system is being abused or is unsuitable for allowing our meetings to be conducted efficiently and in a manner in which we are able to conduct our necessary business.

I will moderate the public comment period in the following manner.

The public comment period for this meeting is up to 20 minutes, and each speaker will be given two minutes to speak.

I'll call on the speakers two at a time and in the order in which they're registered on the council's website.

If you've not yet registered to speak but would like to, you can sign up for the end of this public comment period by going to the council's website at seattle.gov forward slash council.

The public comment link is also listed on today's agenda.

Once I call a speaker's name, staff will unmute the appropriate microphone, and an automatic prompt if you have been unmuted will be the speaker's cue that it's their turn to speak, and the speaker must then press star six to begin speaking.

Star six.

Please begin speaking by stating your name and the item that you are addressing.

As a reminder, public comment should relate to an item on today's agenda or to our committee's oversight responsibilities.

Speakers will hear a chime when 10 seconds are left of the allotted time.

Once you hear the chime, we ask that you begin to wrap up your public comment.

If speakers do not end their comments at the end of the allotted time provided, the speaker's microphone will be muted to allow us to call on the next speaker.

Once you've completed your public comment, we ask that you please disconnect from the line.

And if you plan to continue, Following this meeting, please do so via Seattle Channel or the listening options listed on the agenda.

The regular public comment for this committee meeting is now open, and I'll begin with the first speaker on the list.

Please remember to press star six before speaking.

Let me just check one more thing.

Okay.

So our first speaker is Travis Rosenthal, followed by Grant Gutierrez.

Go ahead, Travis.

Hello, council members.

My name is Travis Rosenthal of Pike Street Hospitality Group, owning Agua Verde Cafe, Rumba, and Inside Passage, and I'm a proud member of the Seattle Restaurant Line.

I want to thank you all for your support in the current extension of the Safe Start outdoor dining program, giving operators the certainty to plan ahead and make investments in their outdoor space throughout this pandemic.

The street use permits have been really critical in helping many of Seattle's diverse restaurants and offer alternative dining options in all the seasons.

And we have tremendous support for the program from our customers and our guests.

Extending this program will continue to provide businesses with a little bit of predictability as we continue to work towards permanency.

The Seattle Restaurant Alliance I've been working with the city to extend this program, and we look forward to continuing to work with council, the mayor, and SDOT on a path to permanent guidelines.

Thank you, Councilmember Strauss, for the proposal to extend until January of 2023.

Thank you, Travis.

Next up, we have Grant Gutierrez, followed by Alexander Lomas.

Go ahead, Grant.

Actually, we may not have Grant on the line yet.

Grant has signed up, but not on the line yet.

So we're going to go ahead and go to see if Alexander Lomas is available.

Looks like that person had signed up, but is not here yet.

Just going to wait a couple seconds here to confirm with the information technology folks that those two speakers are not present.

Is that correct?

There are no further public comment registrants.

All right.

All right, colleagues.

Well, that will then conclude our list of speakers here from the general public.

So we can move on now to our first item on the first legislative item on our agenda.

Will the clerk please read the title of the first agenda item into the record?

Agenda Item 1, Seattle Department of Transportation and Seattle Public Utilities Winter Storm After Action Report for briefing and discussion.

Thank you.

I'd like to thank several of my council colleagues for sharing my interest in having both the Seattle Department of Transportation and Seattle Public Utilities present what they're calling an after-action assessment.

This is regarding the winter storms that hit Seattle from December 26th through January 4th.

I also appreciate the new Harrell administration in office for just one month agreeing to provide this thorough assessment so quickly.

I know the Harrell administration prioritizes taking care of the basics for Seattle and I think we all agree keeping our roadways safe for all modes of travel and handling recycling and waste are core functions of city government.

I do want to thank the city government's frontline workers and the solid waste truck drivers who braved the rough winter conditions to serve the public.

I requested that the two departments cover several topics, including the clearance of arterials and side streets and sidewalks and snow, fixing potholes, picking up solid waste, clearing storm drains.

There are two PowerPoint presentations that will be going through, one from each department, but they'll be both here during the entire discussion because some of the issues that SDOT faced and impacted Seattle Public Utilities and vice versa.

Let's see.

And I do want to thank Councilmember Herbold also for reinforcing a request to have the presenters describe the city's ongoing efforts to mitigate landslide hazards as well.

So let's start by welcoming I want to thank our interim director, Kristen Simpson and her team, as well as our interim general manager, CEO of Seattle Public Utilities, Andrew Lee.

And I do want to thank central staff, specifically Calvin Chow and Brian Goodnight for their work on these.

with the departments to make sure we're getting all the information.

So counselors, there'll be plenty of time for questions during these presentations.

I think we should try to get through the presentations, each department, and then have questions at the end.

And if there's a burning question in the middle, that'll be okay too.

So why don't we go ahead and turn it over to Kristen Simpson first.

Good morning.

We're not hearing your audio yet.

And that, we can't hear that yet.

We might have, what we could do is we could turn it over to Andrew Lee to introduce first, and then while Director Simpson works out the audio, And I know she's got a team here from SDOT as well.

So we're well covered here.

So good morning, General Manager Lee.

Hey there.

Bob Hennessey, I think, is going to bring up some slides for us.

So Bob, I'll just start the introduction as we're doing that.

Thank you, Chair Peterson, and sorry.

Thank you so much for this opportunity to talk about SPU's work responding to the snowstorm the region experienced at the end of last year, and then also the extreme weather and tide events that occurred at the beginning of this year.

And like Council Member Peterson mentioned, we will also describe our efforts at landslide mitigation.

Can we go to the next slide?

So we're gonna be focusing this morning on three areas of service that SPU provides to the city.

And so first Hans Van Dusen, who manages SPU solid waste and recycling collection contracts, will discuss the interruption of solid waste services that occurred from December 26th through January 1st because of snow and ice conditions.

And he'll also talk about the subsequent recovery that occurred during the following two weeks.

Then second, I will go over the flooding and sewer overflows that were experienced primarily in the South Park neighborhood when we had a 10-year storm event that coincided with an extraordinary king tide event.

And then lastly, Tanya Treat, who oversees our engineering and technical services division, will provide an overview of the city's landslide program as it relates to the seven recorded landslides we had in January following both the snow and storm events.

So at this point, I will pass it off to Hans.

Good morning, council members.

Thanks again for making time this morning for us to review some of the service interruptions and storm recovery we had earlier in the year.

Appreciate the interest.

So from the solid waste side of things, as you all recall, there was significant snow on December 26th, and then cold temperatures, sub-freezing for another week after that, and additional snow falling during that week.

So that made for some pretty dangerous roads and icy conditions in the neighborhoods throughout the week.

And what it impacted was nearly all solid waste collections were interrupted for the week of December 27th through January 1st.

We did have our contractors They were out there at times during that week when they could, servicing accounts that they could.

So they ran partial routes.

They put additional staff on those trucks to mostly service larger sites, multifamily, commercial sites that they could access through arterials and through additional staffing on the truck to access those containers where they could.

And I just want to highlight a little bit what goes into the decisions and the consequences of trying to service and not service during icy and dangerous conditions like this.

I think you can all probably appreciate the operating vehicles.

The trucks are large, 25,000-pound vehicles trying to operate on what is often fairly narrow residential, sometimes steep grade streets with often near or just below freezing, slick ice conditions, and also in Seattle, parked cars on the streets.

So those are all challenges that they face when they consider servicing, and the decision to service is theirs.

And they are in close communication with us throughout the whole time.

They'll be out there inspecting each neighborhood, the targeted area that they need to service multiple times a day.

They're prepared with chains for their trucks and with spikes for their drivers.

So they're prepared to service in challenging conditions, but they are looking at the safety of being out there first and foremost.

Certainly they and we and you all are committed, as mentioned, to providing high quality service and collecting these materials whenever we can, wherever we can.

But also understanding that safety is at the top of the list there and there's significant risk to pedestrians, to the public, private property, and to the staff themselves.

So they do need to make sure that it's a safe condition to be out there and not jeopardize and risk public, private, or the staff themselves.

So that's just a little context in terms of making those decisions to try and service our customers.

And then for our own facilities as well, we have the two transfer stations, SBU, staffs and owns, and those were closed for one day on Sunday the 26th, but then opened late on Monday and stayed open the whole time after that.

So they were available during that whole snowy and cold week for services for the contractors when they needed them, as well as for the public, both business and residents, if they had access to services.

vehicles and they needed to use those stations.

So we maintain that availability throughout the whole week.

Next slide, Bob.

Great.

So moving on to the recovery, which was basically the subsequent week, as the roads did clear up, contractors were out there every day collecting materials on those weeks.

There were some limited spots that remained challenging, especially early in that week as the clearing completed.

And so some of those needed to be delayed.

And in some cases, neighborhoods were delayed by a day to allow us to get as much materials as possible off the ground.

And so we were successful, the contractors on the city's behalf, in collecting nearly all the scheduled collections that week, over 95% of the scheduled collections, despite collecting double volumes from the prior week.

They were able to remove.

The most challenging element in this situation, when we miss a whole week of collection like this, is collecting the recycling that was missed the prior week.

As you're all familiar in Seattle, recycling is collected every two weeks.

So when we run that following week, were not scheduled to be out there collecting half the city's recycling.

And so we did ask the contractors to go and collect what they could of that delayed recycling so those customers wouldn't need to wait till their next regular collection.

But considering the volumes that they were collecting on the other waste streams and the other recycling.

They got about 20% of that.

And so the other 80% of the folks needed to wait to the next schedule to recycling the following week and have it collected at that point.

So they did attempt to collect some of that what we call the off week recycling that wasn't scheduled with additional overtime and additional long hours there.

But with all the other elements they were servicing now, they couldn't get more than that.

And so that meant that by the end of the following week, by January 15th, all the materials had been collected.

Any of the small pockets that were delayed were restored, and then that other additional recycling was collected at that point.

And so that provided for a full service recovery at that point.

Next slide.

So in terms of SBU's activities in this, just as a brief summary, certainly we're a lead on coordination with the contractors themselves, of course, but also we have downstream facilities, our own stations.

We have recycling and composting and disposal facilities downstream.

And so we play a coordination role to make sure that the whole system is especially during recovery, is effectively working to move what is double normal volumes through.

So not a lot of room for extra capacity there, so we have to work closely on that, as well as providing internal communication during both interruption and recovery, so everybody knows kind of what's going, what's not, and how best we can be coordinated internally and externally.

And then first and foremost, we're the lead on customer communication.

So we're fortunate now to have a lot of platforms to reach our customers by text alerts, by email alerts, social media.

So we have a lot of opportunity to reach the customers.

So we're updating them regularly on whether services are running or not, what the recovery plan is, what you can expect as a customer, what's asked of you.

so we are able to do that throughout the whole period and so we're lead on that and then of course we have the stations and so we do allow if we end up missing a customer twice that they can bring their waste to the station and tip it there for free if they have once again if they have access to vehicle and they have access to safe roads so we provide the stations as an overflow and then of course not charging any of the customers any extra charges when we resume service.

So yard waste, garbage, recycling, we'll collect all that with no extra charges during the whole recovery period to make sure we can get all the material collected for them.

And then we certainly hold the contractors accountable to an effective recovery.

So when the roads are safe, we're reviewing the services day by day and making sure that all services are being recovered.

We're assessing penalties where appropriate when they're resuming services.

And then only a minor adjustment if they didn't deploy services for any particular day there, that comes into play as well.

So we're holding contractors accountable to full and robust recovery as the roads allow for.

Next slide.

And in our review of this particular event, we're going into greater detail, as we always do, with after action.

And so we'll have kind of a full internal report.

But just at a very high level for this setting, our assessment includes, first and foremost, no injuries.

As I described earlier, safety is the paramount concern.

And as far as we're aware, no injuries to the public, to the staff.

I am aware of some vehicle damage.

They were out there trying to collect whenever they could.

And in some cases, the trucks do slide when you're collecting on those conditions.

And so there are some vehicle damage, which in those cases, they follow up and provide liability coverage for that.

But for the most part, no personal injuries that we're aware of.

So that's first and foremost.

Other than that, the effort was considerable.

Of course, they're collecting double volumes here.

And as the council member mentioned, the chair mentioned, these are frontline staff that have been working out there every day for the last two years.

And in early January, with the COVID conditions spiking, there was some quarantining, so they did have some staffing challenges, but they were able, in January, which can be a tricky staffing month, to get full staff out there, long, long overtime hours.

And yeah, just for context, not only are they trying to remove double the volumes, but the holiday week, post-holidays, early January, is one of the biggest recycling weeks, biggest volume weeks of the year, and then you have additional holiday greens.

So they certainly had their hands full.

And then the subsequent rains also created wetter materials, which takes extra time and effort to collect.

So all of those significant significant effort, a couple weeks there, long, long hours for everybody involved on the collections front.

So we were appreciating the efforts of the frontline staff there for sure on making that happen on our behalf.

And then downstream, certainly some challenges as well that we're aware of.

Our stations pushing through double the volumes there, as well as the recycling facilities having to handle wet volumes, which just can slow the processing down there and create a challenge.

Our rail to the landfill had some landslide interruptions along the I-5 corridor.

And so that can slow things down as well.

But basically, without a lot of room for error there, they were able to keep all the materials flowing and successfully remove those extra volumes and recovery.

And then our assessment of our customer outreach is fairly strong.

We did that recovery week, we received increased volume of calls from the customers, but certainly below what we've seen in prior events.

So the call center was able to handle those and it looked like certainly during the interruption and then after our ability to use all the platforms we have access to now to notify customers.

seem to go pretty well.

So that looked favorable as well.

Next slide.

So next steps for us, we'll continue to enhance those communication platforms.

We learn something every time.

We get a lot of feedback from customers.

We know kind of where we have robust outreach and where sometimes there's gaps in who we're able to reach.

And so we're always improving on that and how we use our communication tools to outreach there.

And we know, too, when we have a long interruption like this, that the every-other-week recycling cadence is the most challenging piece there in terms of, as I described earlier, we can't fully collect that off-week recycle prior to the next scheduled collection.

And we know that is a challenge for our customers.

So we're working with our contractors to identify any other ways we can increase the amount of that off-week we collect.

as well as look at opportunities to notify customers with even more precision about what we're doing so they know how that particular element is recovering.

And then internally, we're working to just firm up some of our policies around customer support here.

I mean, these are practices we have in place, providing free tips at the stations as an overflow and other resources to our customers so they're aware going into it and during.

And then we did identify the opportunity to kind of firm up our internal policy and official capture of that so that we can be prepared to share that with the customer and provide additional resources that we think appropriate.

I think that is pretty much it.

It sounds like the chair recommended we just do questions maybe at the end, unless there's anything really pressing right now.

I think, thank you.

I think this is actually a good point to see if there are any questions just about the solid waste pickup impacts.

I do want to note Councillor Morales joined us at the beginning of the presentations.

I appreciate you covering issues of safety, service, as well as costs.

You mentioned about We obviously have contracts with companies that pick up the trash and the recycling and the compost.

The overtime, that's covered by those existing contracts.

That's not a cost passed along to the rate payers, is that correct?

Yeah, yeah, that's correct.

Yeah, the collection services are provided by contractors, and they're accountable for providing that full recovery at no additional cost to the city, so we don't incur anything related to the overtime there.

Obviously, we're doing the downstream transfer station handling, so we'll have, you know, additional overtime costs internally, just keeping the stations flowing for that additional materials in the recovery week, just internally at our stations.

Okay.

And I think we're going to hear a little bit more about this perfect storm of actual storms, COVID impacts, holiday vacations, extra holiday packaging that had to be picked up, and then we're going to get to the slides about, you know, what really happened during the excessive rains as well.

But, colleagues, are there any questions at this point talking about Seattle Public Utilities and the solid waste pickups?

Councilmember Herbold?

Thanks.

I just would like to go a little deeper into the solid waste service interruption.

I mean, I appreciate you covered it, but I'm still having a hard time understanding why the overtime routes were only able to collect 20 percent of missed collections and the for the length of the interruptions given my recollection is that we You know, SPU was really, really good about communicating with the public about the miscollections, but it just seemed like there was a little bit of a misconnect about setting public expectations about the length of the miscollection and what people actually experienced.

Sure, I can I can try and speak to the both of those.

So during the service interruption that that basically that last week in December.

Generally, our encouragement of the contractors is to go out and service whenever and wherever it's safe to do so.

And so when we have snow like that, especially in Seattle, and then freezing conditions, usually we cannot be sure when we will resume service.

That's almost always the case.

And if all possible, we try and resume service that week and delay it throughout the week to allow us to get all the customers' materials served.

So often we're messaging to the customers, and that is our message.

If we're not able to collect you today, please put it out the following day.

We'll try and come back the following day.

And if not the following day, then put it out the following week.

So we always try and maintain that messaging.

So there may be concern there where we are messaging.

We'll try and get it the following day, and if not the following week.

So I could appreciate that there could be some disappointment if we weren't able to come the following day.

But we do try and be fairly clear on that note.

So if you're, say, a Monday customer, we will encourage that Tuesday in case we're able to resume service, but then the following Monday.

So to the degree we're able to reach customers, I feel like we've messaged pretty well that expectation.

You know, and I appreciate certainly everybody wants their waste removed, especially that week.

So I'm sure there were expectations that we resume sooner.

But hopefully we try and be fairly consistent on that.

And I don't know if that fully covers your second part of your question.

So we can come back to that.

Sorry, go ahead, Hans.

Yeah, well, let me just, I'll answer the first part of the question as well, and then others can help out here.

And that is about the recovery.

And so that might, I think I might've breezed through that and that might've been confusing.

So that recovery week, the first week of January, the contractors were out there working overtime with additional staff and did collect over 95% of all the scheduled stops that week.

So they were very successful in recovering all the scheduled stops.

I also did mention that they were also trying to get unscheduled services, which is the recycling from the prior week.

So they did, beyond all the overtime that went into collecting the scheduled stops with double volumes, they also tried to reach some of the unscheduled services that week, which would have been the recycling that wasn't collected the prior week.

And that's what they're not able to do fully.

pushing their existing fleet, existing drivers, already in additional overtime, long hours, all week to get the scheduled stops.

They're not able to additionally in that situation collect all the off-week recycle, which isn't normally scheduled.

So yes, they were successful in that recovery of collecting the scheduled stops.

It's just that additional off-week.

So, that's probably right.

So, that 20 percent is referencing the unscheduled stops?

Yes.

Sorry about that.

Yeah, it's above and beyond what we asked them to do.

Yeah.

Thank you, colleagues.

Any other questions at this point in the solid waste discussion?

There'll be time at the end of SPU's presentation as well.

So, let's go ahead and continue with SPU's presentation.

Thank you.

So again, I'm going to segue now away from the solid waste services to our drainage and wastewater line of business.

And I think this just actually speaks to the fact that we have quite a breadth of services at SPU, and we shift from one service to another immediately as the weather changes.

So as I mentioned earlier, on January 6th and 7th, we experienced a major storm event, the type we expect only once every 10 years.

That in and of itself would have put strain on our system However, on January 7th, we had a king tide that was nearly two feet higher than predicted.

And so that severely impacted, obviously, the ability of our system to perform.

The chart on the right-hand side of this graphic shows mean sea level, and you can see that.

It's just below that 7.5 feet level.

And what you see there is kind of a mean high tide, would be right under 12.5 feet.

And this one hits close to 14 feet.

And so it was the highest tide in the past century of Seattle's record keeping.

And that should give you a sense of how extraordinary the tide situation was.

However, what is extraordinary today is not expected to be extraordinary in the future.

And because of sea level rise, the king tide we saw last month is actually projected to be the level of standard monthly high tides by 2060 to 2070. So that is a big concern.

In the event that we saw January 7th, the tide peaked just at the point where our drainage system and combined system were at maximum capacity from rainfall.

And so as you can see from the picture on the left, the combination of the snowmelt and the storm plus the extraordinary king tide produced substantial street flooding in South Park.

We also had sewer backups in a residential section of South Park, which I will show on a map on the next slide.

If we go to the next slide now.

So this is a map of the South Park area.

You can see the Duwamish on the upper right hand side of this map.

The blue and blue hatched areas of this map show approximate flooded areas in South Park on January 6th and 7th.

So you can see kind of at the convergence of certain intersections there, the flooding was fairly severe.

I want to pause for a moment to say that South Park has both stormwater issues that are shown in the blue, but they also have sewer issues.

And the sewer issues are primarily shown by those red dots that you see there where it says sewer backups.

And so you can kind of see on that right-hand side of the map, especially on South Kenyon Street, between 7th and 8th, there is kind of a prevalence of sewer backups that were experienced on January 7th and 6th.

With respect to the sewer system, the green lines that you can see, kind of those north-south green lines, and then there's an east-west line at the top of the map, those are King County combined sewer pipes.

And on January 7th, the King County pipes, as well as the SPU pipes along 8th Avenue South, were full due to the heavy rains.

This system is designed to overflow into the Duwamish when it's full, and that's called a combined sewer overflow.

But because the tides were so high, the system couldn't overflow as it was designed.

And in that situation, instead of overflowing, the sewer system backed up into the homes, as I mentioned earlier.

And you can see, again, the incidences of sewer backups, especially at the intersection of Kenyon and 8th.

Our crews responded to these issues and under normal conditions, they can alleviate issues by pumping flows out to another location in the system.

But under these conditions, there was actually nowhere to pump to.

Everything was completely full.

And so we had to wait for the rains and the tides to subside in order to reduce impacts to the community.

SPU staff, myself included, and King County staff were on site in South Park on January 7th to meet with impacted customers.

And so this included connecting them with accommodations and also cleanup services.

I will say I was able to walk through the neighborhood, meet with some of the residents the day after the rain event and high tide occurred before the tide had actually receded.

And I came away with several impressions.

The first impression I came away with was that the community is incredibly resilient.

They know how to get through these events because they've experienced them and they support one another.

The second is we have some projects that are underway right now and I was glad that we have moved and tried to execute on those projects and I wish we had done them even sooner.

The third is we have a gap in terms of sewer system and dealing with the tide issue.

And that's one where we need to have a solid partnership with King County to address the gap in terms of the sewer and the high tide.

Let's go to the next slide, slide number 10. So I'd like to shift now to, again, a little bit more about how we're addressing these issues and how we have worked historically to address them.

And I'll start off with the sewer system.

In 2016 to 2017, we completed a sewer improvement project at 14th and Concord to reduce the severity of sewer backups in South Park.

And you'll hear me say this a number of times.

Under normal conditions, that project would have helped.

However, because of the high tide, the benefits were likely minimized.

Since 2016 and 17, we've worked with the community to install backflow preventers.

And just last year, we partnered with King County to kind of do another push on backflow preventer installation on private properties.

I believe that effort was helpful at reducing the severity of the sewer backups.

However, backflow preventers are not foolproof.

They typically require maintenance and sometimes there is leakage through them.

In the summer of 2021, so again, just last year, King County identified a sewer constriction in one of their pipelines, and we worked together with them to remove that constriction.

So they completed that in the fall of last year.

Again, under normal conditions, that should have helped to reduce the backups.

However, because of the tide, it likely did not reduce it very much.

And lastly, King County has a regulator station.

You can see it at the right-hand side of this map.

called their 8th Avenue South Regulator Station, and they can adjust the level of the water in the sewer system, and it can reduce sewer overflows.

It can also reduce the frequency of backups.

They made adjustments last year and are continuing to make adjustments to reduce the frequency of backups to the residents.

But again, normal conditions probably would have helped, but in a high tide situation, very minimal benefit.

Switching over to the storm system, and the storm system was really kind of the cause of the big intersection flooding or the street flooding that you saw in the previous picture.

I'm excited that this year we're going to complete the South Park pump station project, and that will enable us to pump out stormwater from the neighborhood into the Duwamish during the high tides.

And so this pump station is shown in the yellow circle at the top of the map.

And so it's gonna be exciting, but those pictures with flooding in the streets will be significantly relieved when that pump station comes along.

And so this will counter effect the high tides for the stormwater system, for the sewer system though.

Next year in partnership with SDOT, we're completing the first phase of street and drainage improvements in South Park's industrial area.

And this is shown in those red lines, the boxes there.

There is more work to be done and we look forward to potential opportunities to expand this work to more streets, potentially with the input of some of the infrastructure bill funding that's going to come from the federal government.

And then lastly, the orange diamond shows where we're planning to build a water quality facility to reduce pollution in stormwater before it enters the Duwamish.

So the objective is before we pump it out, we're still gonna put the pump station online again, probably around the spring of this year.

But before we pump it out, eventually we'd like to have it treated.

And so this project will involve property acquisitions, site cleanup prior to construction, and we hope to complete the project before 2030. Go to the next slide.

And so just in closing, you know, we've, again, we're hearing the community needs.

I would love to move quicker and we're going to look at opportunities to move quicker.

And we also have a really important obligation, I feel, to address the tide situation.

This is a long-term issue, but we're already seeing some of the effects of it right now.

We have other partnerships underway to help South Park.

We have one with the Office of Sustainability and the Environment and the Office of Planning Community Development and Economic Development along with many other stakeholders.

And we're in the early phases of planning for a resilience district.

And where our intent is that this collaborative effort will help to address infrastructure gaps as well as sea level rise.

And it will also be something where we're empowering the community to make decisions.

And then lastly, I mentioned the King County partnership.

We're actively working together with King County in a very productive partnership, and we're going to continue to do that to address things like the tide issue.

So I'll stop at this point, and maybe if there are any questions, I can field those before we move on to the landslides portion.

Thank you for that thorough presentation on the challenges that we face and also the projects that you have underway to address those challenges as we see rising water levels and increasing storm events.

Council Member Herbold.

Thank you.

I want to really show my appreciation for the work that Seattle Public Utilities did down in South Park during this time and especially the willingness and availability to go and meet with people door-to-door, folks who were experiencing these impacts of these events in their homes, really appreciate that.

Wondering, how does SPU make a determination of when they will address sort of that sort of site visit type of attention.

There was some coordination with my office around whether or not it was King County who should be working with folks or SPU and again I really appreciate SPU's willingness to to go out there and talk to folks when perhaps the site visits were more appropriately done by King County because it was more focused on the sewer issues.

But just wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.

Also, would be interested to know, I heard you say loud and clear that the pump station will help with the stormwater issues, but not prevent or address sewer backups.

I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about what we should be seeking from King County to ameliorate those impacts.

Yeah, so with respect to the first question on kind of what is our policy with respect to kind of cleanup assistance to customers, I will be the first to say that I think we need a clear, clearer policy on this under normal conditions.

The way that we were kind of intending to operate this was the connections where the residences are directly connected to the county system.

They would work with the county to address any sort of housing situations or cleanup issues.

And then parts of the system that were directly connected to SPU, they would work with us.

And so that's kind of the division of responsibility depending on whose system they're connected to.

We identify that we have means under emergency situations to provide people with things like accommodations and cleanups, et cetera, as opposed to getting them to work through the claims process.

which typically takes more time and also puts more burden on the property, the residents.

And so we did exercise that during this particular event in partnership with the county.

But bottom line on that is I think clarity is important.

And so we're actually, it was one of my requests kind of immediately after the storm event, let's actually put a clear policy together on this so we can have that consistency in the future.

With respect to your second question on working together with the county to address the high tide issue, I think that is an ongoing effort.

I've been having a lot of conversations together with the county and there's a, I would say, very, very good kind of commitment on both of our parts to address the issue.

It is likely going to be a capital project that will take some time to implement.

We don't know the scope or the scale of that, but we're going to kind of start to initiate some work on planning work on that and work together in partnership with the community as well.

So there's more to come on that, but I don't have a specific kind of timeline or project that we've envisioned yet, just knowing that we will plan on doing something.

Thank you.

Ed, just a real quick follow-up.

Director Lee, you reminded me also I wanted to as well thank you for your willingness to work with my office in helping folks navigate the claims process after the fact.

Really, really appreciate that.

Appreciate your giving us information to share with the public and once we send people your way, working with them.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So General Manager Lee, I think we can move on.

I think we'll move on to the Seattle Department of Transportation part of the presentation.

If SPU is able to stick around, that would be great in case we have some cross-cutting questions to ask.

Councilor, if it's okay, we have a few more slides related to landslides.

Oh, yes, please.

Yeah, so I'll at this point segue over to Tanya Treat and she'll review those slides, but it should be relatively quick.

So thanks.

Excellent.

Thank you.

Thank you, Andrew.

Thank you, Council Member.

So I want to talk about SPU and some citywide landslide response as well as SPU's work.

We This is also related to rain, as you might have noticed.

So it's kind of a segue into our next project.

So across city departments, we know that landslides are a very real risk.

We work together and we perform a consistent set of activities.

I'm going to go over three topics.

The first is citywide landslide preparation and coordination.

The second is the citywide landslide prediction.

And the third is a little bit about SPU's landslide program.

So SPU is a designated lead for an annual citywide coordination workshop.

This happens at the beginning of the wet season, which is typically the last week of October, early November.

At this workshop, everyone gets together, all the leads for landslide work across about seven different departments, including law.

And at the workshop, we ensure that all staff, all of our contact lists are updated, all of the information is correct.

We have a clear understanding of what each other's protocols are.

and shared approaches, tools, et cetera.

So that is what we do on an annual basis to make sure we're ready for the wet season.

During the wet weather months, SPO is also the lead for sending out a weekly notification.

Sometimes it's a little more frequent depending on the precipitation events that occur or anticipated.

So the weekly email tells us where we are on the landslide threshold, which I will talk about on our next slide.

But basically, it's essentially what is our risk?

coming into the upcoming weekend and week.

When there is a landslide, the first thing that happens is the health and safety departments, fire and the police respond immediately.

All the other departments do a lot of quick research.

So once we're notified, we look into our systems, we figure out what the impacts are to our infrastructure.

So before SPU visits a landslide site, we look at the landslide history, the geology of the area, any information we have about our infrastructure that may be impacted.

And then during the landslide, coordination among city departments is usually via phone.

And usually the primary departments are SPU, SDOT, SCL, and parks.

A lot of things happen on parks because they have a lot of vegetated steep slope areas.

Lastly, any department enters their data into a database run by the city OEM.

It's called WebEOC.

So that's where everything is tracked.

I know that was something that people were interested in.

Usually the lead department enters the information, but any of the departments that are working on it and the staff have access to go in and enter updated information about the slide itself.

So that's always available.

So moving to the next slide.

How do we predict landslides in the city?

Well, the graph on your right is the way that we measure what our level of risk is.

The graph plots the most recent three days of cumulative presentation, and that's on the y-axis, the vertical axis.

The horizontal axis, we have the 15 days cumulative rainfall that precedes the three days.

And there's a method to this madness.

So the USGS in 2006 did a historical look at where the landslides were happening and what the precip conditions were and came up with this line.

And if you were to the right of the line, then you're at higher risk.

So the graph that you see in front of you is from January 7th, and this is the one that SPU sent out say, notifying departments that, hey, you want to be on alert, you want to have people on call, because we're pretty high above that landslide threshold.

And the one that you're seeing right now is fairly atypical.

You know, I've been seeing these for probably the last 10 years, and this was a pretty high one in terms of cumulative rainfall.

And as you know, there were over that weekend, January 7th to January 10th, there were about what we have recorded seven initially, and that's what the landslides said.

In the subsequent days, there were additional landslides or repeat landslides in the same area.

And so that number is probably more like a dozen, and you'll see that in SDOT's reporting coming up.

So we had seven landslides.

On that day, SPU staff that were on call, they researched the area, they figured out what they needed to find out about, what roads were impacted, what infrastructure might be impacted, visited the site.

I had multiple teams go out there to take a look for different things, different infrastructure, but it indicated that we didn't have any issues.

So basically, SDCI took the lead on this one, and they red-tagged the house.

I think some people are aware of that.

It was unfit to go into, and that was the Perkins Lane specifically site that I referenced here.

But none of the other seven sites did impact SPU's infrastructure, so kind of unusual, but it was nice.

So we didn't have to actually deploy any temporary fixes, immediate fixes, and emergency contracting to get things done.

Next slide.

So a little bit about our landslide program.

This is kind of informational.

What we call our program is the Landslide Prone Area Program, or LPA for short.

We focus on these areas.

They're active known slide areas that pose risk to our assets.

And for us, it's typically in the right-of-way because that's where our infrastructure is typically located.

A lot of times it's street ends, undeveloped streets.

Sometimes in those areas, we have infrastructure, but they are right-of-way.

So what we do in our program is we mitigate potential issues by improving our stormwater conveyance system and installing drains collection where there are issues with stormwater adding load to a slide area that could exacerbate and it could create a slide.

We are currently studying a new approach for monitoring using satellites.

And that is something, once we get going, may be helpful on a citywide scale.

It gives you retroactive soil movement.

You can go back two years.

You can go back seven years, depending on how much you get and how much you want to pay for it.

But basically, it shows horizontal and vertical movements you can track over time via satellites, as opposed to some of the other traditional infrastructure we use.

So our landslide program is relatively small.

We have an O&M component that's about 100K and about $800,000 a year we spend on capital improvements.

Some of that is proactive and some of that is reactive if we do have a landslide.

And that depends on activity throughout the years.

So I'm going to stop there.

I do want to acknowledge that SDOT was requested to respond to some specific issues around Highland Parkway.

They will cover that in their slide presentation.

We did not have a role in that slide, so that's why I'm not speaking about it here.

But I do want to know if we have any questions.

Thank you, Tanya.

Council Member Herbold.

Thank you, and really appreciate SPU addressing this issue broadly.

And though my request originated of SDOT, which we'll hear later, originated around the experiences of constituents in District 1 who live in the area of Highland Park and like most people, since it is a detour route, travel through that area.

But my questions for both SPU and SDOT, which will come later, are not specifically about Highland Park Drive.

It's about how we identify locations at risk of landslide and monitor them and try to mitigate those risks.

So on the slide about SPUs, I think it was the LPA program.

I know that STAT, so that's really focused, as I understood you to say, it's focused on identifying locations where there are risks to SPU assets.

STAT also has a landslide mitigation prioritization list, which I'll direct my questions specifically about how that list has been managed to SDOT.

But I'm wondering, how many locations are on the SPU's LPA list?

And do you cross-reference, do you sort of do an overlap with SDOT on their landslide mitigation program list as a way of, you know, one of the issues that we've found with the SDOT program is that there's a certain level of investment that I think is needed to do mitigation programs, like lessen the likelihood that landslides are going to occur rather than, you know, as SPU is doing, protecting infrastructure for when they do occur.

And so I'm just thinking, you know, the SDOT landslide mitigation prioritization list was created back in, I think, 1997. There's a certain amount of investment that is needed to address the locations on that list.

And we are definitely not keeping up with the investment necessary.

I'm wondering if we were to overlay the SDOT locations with the SPU locations, might that be a way to, given that we have limited resources to mitigate the likelihood of landslides happening, might that be a way to focus our efforts if you're not already doing that?

Thank you.

That's a great question.

I would say just on the face of it, because our infrastructure is in the right-of-way, there is an automatic tie, right?

Because anything that's going to impact our pipes, generally speaking, will impact the pavement above it.

So if it is an improved right-of-way, then there would likely be overlap.

In an unimproved right-of-way, probably not, which a lot of them are in unimproved right-of-ways.

To the extent that we do an overlay of our prioritization, I currently can't answer that question.

And maybe, Esthat, you have someone who can.

But it is a fantastic idea.

And if we're not doing, we absolutely should be doing it.

And how many LPAs?

You know, it's in the dozens.

OK.

But as I understood, you're The purpose of that list, it's, and I think maybe we're thinking of protection of right-of-ways maybe differently, or maybe I'm just misunderstanding.

Protecting the pipes that are under the street is, yes, it still affects the street, but it's not stopping, it's not preserving the right-of-way for vehicles.

It can it actually a lot of times it does because our source sewer systems are in the middle of the street.

So if our sewer system or drainage is in, you know, adjacent to the street.

So when we see movement that that affects our pipes, it actually can close the road.

So there is there is really a direct tie if it's an improved right of way.

There's a direct tight.

Now, you may be thinking of You know, the project where the retaining wall to keep, you know, something, you know, from hitting the roadway, that's more of a like the land slide is going to cover the roadway as opposed to like move the roadway so there's that difference, but I feel like if you have an alley that's halfway down the slope, then everything moves.

Right.

So, there are different situations.

Yep.

And is this again, is this program, you actually doing sort of mitigation projects at these locations?

Reduce the likelihood of a landslide?

Yeah, we have monitoring to see how it's moving and then the mitigation projects minimize or we'll try to get, generally speaking, it's getting water away from that slide.

So it's not going to continue.

Or, you know, sometimes we have to put in pin piles to actually stabilize it in order to put in drainage.

We just had an emergency project where we did that.

Just my last request, and a follow-up is fine.

It would be helpful to understand how much is budgeted for this program every year and how well the funding for that meets the need.

As mentioned, may be wrongly focused more on the SDOT program and the funds there.

But it appears to be that we should be probably thinking about both when we're talking about investing in landslide mitigation efforts.

So thank you.

Absolutely, thank you.

Liz, did you have something you wanted to correct me on or add to?

I wasn't going to correct you.

I was going to add a little bit to kind of where we coordinate.

And Council Member Herbold, I don't know if you remember, I think it was 2017 where we had quite a few landslides in West Seattle, and one of them was Cambridge in California.

That one was an area where we were able to coordinate with SPU.

There was a landslide and also a water main break at the same time.

And so we decided to just work together to install that.

And we often, as we're working on both the response and any mitigation, we'll coordinate with the other agencies that are part of the landslide IDT program to be able to partner.

It usually impacts SDOT and or from our perspective and or more than one other department.

So it's usually a joint effort often either with SPU or parks or kind of the two primary other groups that we work with.

So we do coordinate when it makes sense and when there's usually there will be some drainage infrastructure out there or some other SPU asset that we'll need to coordinate the work with.

So just wanted to follow up a little bit on that that we do.

Thank you.

Thank you Tanya and Liz for that and we'll touch on landslides one more time and toward the end of the SDOT presentation and I think we're ready to go to the SDOT presentation.

And so Director Simpson, we can try your audio again, see if that works.

Thank you, I've switched to a different headset.

Works great, awesome.

Well, good morning again and thank you again for inviting us to share with you how we prepare for respond to Winter weather events, we'll focus on some of the lessons that we've learned, but I do want to walk through some of the things we do in advance of an event first.

One thing I want to highlight here and that you'll hear throughout the presentation is how much we rely on and appreciate the support of other city departments, especially finance and administrative services, SPU who's here today and was a tremendous help during the event, Seattle City Light and Parks as well.

They help keep our vehicles running, provide drivers, keep our supplies topped off.

Mayor Harrell stopped by our Charles Street facility this morning to thank some of the folks.

And I know we've been hearing appreciative responses from throughout the city as well.

Next, sorry, stay on the slide.

We're gonna walk through how we prepare both our equipment and our teams, how we activate in advance of an event, and then how we respond during the event.

And as we've seen, Once the immediate event is over, our work is not yet done.

We then typically have to address things like potholes and landslides, both of which are closely tied to our ongoing asset management efforts.

Finally, we'll share some of the lessons we've learned as we look back and start planning for the next event.

And of course, we'd be happy to answer any questions.

Next slide.

And at this point, I will hand it over to Darren Morgan.

Good morning, everyone.

My name is Darren Morgan.

And I am the Division Director in the Right-of-Way Maintenance and Urban Forestry Division, and also the Interim Director in our Parking Enforcement Division.

As Kristen mentioned, you know, preparation, preparation, preparation is critical to success when it comes to facing the challenges of winter weather.

So we are definitely preparing year-round for winter weather events, whether it be snow and ice or excessive precipitation and the risk of landslides.

We emphasize public education and outreach throughout the year.

We're also focused on employee training and regional coordination with all of our partners, including the National Weather Service, who as early as October is already providing us with some overall climate predictions, whether we might be in a La Nina or an El Nino or a neutral climate prediction for the season.

which doesn't necessarily translate to what we can expect each winter, but it does give some relative indication whether we might see a colder and wetter season like we've experienced the last two years.

So with regard to our public education, the cornerstone of our education outreach really is about letting people know that we can't be everywhere at once during an event, and folks do have a responsibility to clear their sidewalks adjacent to their properties.

We also like to reiterate how important it is for people to stay home and really hit that message if they don't need to get out and about during an event that they stay home and if they have to travel to focus on the transit.

And be prepared in advance.

We're talking to folks constantly about reaching out to their neighbors and their communities to make sure that the neighborhood together is as prepared as possible.

Next slide, please.

So in keeping with the things that we're doing with preparation, we do a lot of training throughout the year when the sun is shining and the pavement is dry.

We have to familiarize staff with new and updated equipment, new and updated routes.

We double check all of our contracts for de-icer and salt supplies, as well as our operational contracts that support road clearing operations.

And this is a piece where, as Kristen mentioned, you know, we are working closely with our partners across the city and SBU and City Light, Department of Parks and Recreation, inviting them to our training sessions to get familiar with our routes and our equipment to make sure that we are looking across the city at all staff and skills to support the winter weather response operation.

Next slide, please.

So this is a, on the right you see an overview of what we call our golden emerald routes.

This is a comprehensive look at the snow and ice treatment routes that we publish in advance and we tweak annually in close coordination with King County Metro in particular.

So the foundation of these routes is transit service, access to emergency services and hospitals.

So we optimize staff and resources to clear these.

Our level of service target for our snow and ice routes is 12 hours to bare and wet pavement.

On the gold routes, that's two lanes in each direction.

On the Emerald, that's one lane in each direction.

And we, like I mentioned, review this very carefully with King County Metro throughout the summer as they look at service level changes and any changes that might might have occurred in the right of way due to construction or any other changes that might impact the ability for a plow to move through these areas.

There are some steep streets on these routes, particularly downtown and access points around the West Seattle Bridge.

But for the most part, all of these critical routes are accessible to our snow and ice fighting equipment.

And it's another reason why we focus our attention on these routes.

Next slide.

So then continuing with some of the public information that we provide as we get closer to events and people start seeing winter snowflakes in their weather apps, we're putting information, reinforcing information on our websites and blogs and social media streams.

We put together in partnership with Rooted in Rights a fantastic video that really helped explain why it's so important for people to do the right thing and take responsibility for clearing their sidewalks and curb ramps around their properties.

We do a lot of translation services and have historically distributed up to 20,000 different brochures in 14 languages, many of which are shown here on this slide.

We actually participate and in fact, lead an annual regional winter weather conference where we invite the National Weather Service, transit partners, and other public safety groups and operational departments and agencies so that we can maintain those working relationships that we rely on for success during winter weather response.

And as there's staff turnover, making sure that people have an opportunity to meet, even if it is in a virtual environment, and keep the information and the relationships flowing.

that's so critical to success.

Next.

When it comes to activation, we are often standing up our incident management team if we expect that we are going to be operating for 24-7 periods.

In this last event, it was as early as Sunday, Monday, six to seven days in advance of this last winter weather event that we had a really solid prediction from the National Weather Service that the Fraser outflow was going to have some impacts to our region.

So that gave us great lead time to begin planning and looking at staffing levels and buttoning up all of our equipment.

Much of our equipment that we utilize in the snow and ice response is dedicated to other programs, operations and maintenance programs throughout the year.

So we began converting our fleet and reaching out to all of our partners.

and making sure that we're all in a joint state of readiness so that we can respond.

Our department operations center that is made up of our incident management team coordinates very closely with the city EOC when active.

We are also then turning on features within our online storm response maps so that the public can see where our equipment has been and also learn a bit information about temporary road closures and a lot of this is happening in real time.

I want to acknowledge here in this image, this is our TOC.

This image is obviously taken before the pandemic.

As you can see, there are no masks here in this picture, but this is an example of all the information and real-time feed that we're using to help refine our information that not only guides our operational response, but shares information to the public in real time as they plan how to get around the city despite the winter weather.

Next slide.

These images here show both contracted greater services as well as SDOT employees and Seattle City Light equipment and employees loading up salt that may either be moving from facility to facility or being deployed out into the street network.

So this last winter weather event, crews worked 24-7 from December 24th to January 5th, almost two solid weeks straight, right in the middle of the holiday period, and crossed over into a change in administration.

Overall, as I mentioned to Mayor Harrell this morning as we were in the FAS facility, our SDOT fleet alone that we were able to track, so this doesn't include all city fleet, but what we were able to track, demonstrated 40,000 miles driven, whether that's patrolling, treating or treating and plowing.

So pretty significant level of effort measured in miles.

And as I mentioned earlier, our level of service is bare and wet pavement on the snow routes within 12 hours of a break in the storm, which for the most part we were able to achieve throughout this winter weather event.

But it was a very, very challenging event with multiple precipitation events, as well as extreme cold, which then translated into thawing and refreezing at night.

So definitely a challenging few weeks.

And it's only February 1st.

So we're keeping our eye on the forecast.

We're not out of the woods yet.

Next slide.

As I mentioned before, we really, really rely on our partners.

And as Kristen mentioned earlier, whether we had drivers from Seattle Public Utilities, Seattle City Light, we had Pedestrian clearing support and driver support from Seattle Parks and Recreation.

SPD is a fantastic partner in communicating with us and working with us on street closures.

We work closely with Seattle Fire and their emergency response operations.

They let us know where they need assistance and we work closely with them to provide access to the best degree that we can.

And then King County Metro, we have excellent daily, if not more frequent coordination and communication Sound Transit, and of course, the Washington State Department of Transportation is another critical partner in coordinating our treatment, as well as they are the primary administer of the contract that governs the use of the salt throughout the region.

Next slide.

I also want to talk a little bit about our mobility, our work in the mobility branch within our operations.

There's a tremendous amount of work that is done on our day shift to mitigate impacts to bike facilities, curb ramps, overpasses.

Notice here, 3,300 curb ramps, 30 to 45 people each day.

Some of those curb ramps, they're going to need to be cleared multiple times during an event.

And so that is related to the plowing operations that's constantly having to move material to the side of the road, which causes the need for us to clear those curb ramps repeatedly throughout an event.

We also work closely with the public health facilities and Seattle School District at different points during a winter weather response.

And as resources allow, we do what we can to facilitate school opening and support for access.

We also, during our day shift and our mobility group, are out with our street use inspectors, communicating with folks, reminding them in real time, based on conditions that we're observing in real time, about their responsibility to clear their sidewalk around their business.

In most cases, we're talking directly with folks.

In many cases, though, we're knocking on doors and leaving literature to reinforce our messaging.

This is also response operation is tracked on our winter weather response map as well.

And next slide.

I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the work we did around bike lanes.

This is not an exhaustive list, but here is an example of some of the equipment and resources and how we manage moving snow out of protected bike lanes.

This year, we did have a little bit of a challenge with supply chain issues for some of this equipment as we don't own, but we often rent to expand this fleet.

But we were able towards the tail end of the event to get our hands on about, I think it was five to seven of these skid steers that you see here.

And you see quite a list of protected bike lanes that we were able to get into and facilitate the reopening as well.

And I think at this point, maybe there's questions, but we're getting ready to talk a little bit about some of the pavement impacts and pothole response that we transitioned to as part of our winter weather recovery.

And that is Gerard Green.

Thank you, Darren.

And thank you for recognizing the workers and the 24-7, as well as the coordination with other departments.

I know we're eager to hear about the pavement issues and potholes as well, so we can Colleagues, if there are no questions at this point, we can keep going.

Oh, Council Member Morales.

I actually have several questions, but I'm happy to just hold my questions till the end of the presentation.

That's fine.

OK, thank you.

Council Member Strauss.

Thank you, Chair.

No questions.

Just want to say how astonished and impressed I am by Darren Morgan's consistent ability to get the city back and moving.

I've called him from everything from trees to litter to now snow.

Thank you, Darren, for doing so much for our city.

Well, I appreciate that, but, you know, I've got to say there is a massive amount of effort by a tremendous number of dedicated employees and frontline staff.

that bring the attitude and the enthusiasm and the love for the job that make it all possible.

But thank you.

Thank you.

Okay.

Let's go to the next section about pavement impacts, potholes.

Hey, good morning everybody.

Name is Gerard Green.

I'm the pavement signs and markings and right away crew construction director at SDOT.

This slide I'm going to talk a little bit about our typical pothole response.

So potholes are called in and they come in a number of ways.

Typically find it, fix it, and that's our app.

Um, or customer care.

They just call 684 roads and call in a pothole.

Um, when that happened, a work order is created and then we will dispatch a crew to go out and evaluate to see if it's a pot.

In fact, a pothole.

Um, sometimes the public will call in a pothole and it could all it could be a utility cut.

So in that case, we work with our street use partner to make sure we work with contractors, uh, to address that utility cut.

If the If the temporary patch has failed, we'll have them address that.

If we do go on, it could also be a void.

In the case of a void, we work with our SPU partners to do dye tests and stuff to make sure there are no kind of underlying issues with pipes and stuff before we actually backfill and then ultimately do the temporary repair and schedule for a permanent repair.

So that's typically how that flows.

Another thing that can happen when we go out to do the more immediate make safe for the public is there will be an assessment.

Sometimes we'll send a pavement engineer out and they'll determine that the road has degraded to a point where Pothole fix is not the solution.

In those cases, we'll kind of put together a project and we have to schedule for traffic control, sometimes coordination with Metro and others if it's near a school.

And that will be a more long-term repair, similar to what you would see on a regular F-stop pavement project.

Next slide.

So this slide talks a little bit about some data in the recent post winter storm response.

This first figure says that we, crews filled nearly 3,500 potholes last month in the month of January.

Since this presentation has been sent to council, we ran another report and our data analysts just notified us today that crews actually filled 4,700, a little over 4,700 potholes.

in the month of January.

So, um, that's that's a huge number of potholes compared to our normal pothole response.

Um, to accomplish this, we added up to 70 75 staff.

Um, and those staff came from our paving work groups that are normally out there paving the larger paving programs.

A.

M.

paving programs, one to three blocks long usually.

And we also deployed a little over 11 additional paving trucks to assist the four pothole ranger trucks that repair potholes year round.

We did focus on gold and emerald routes because those are the same arterial routes that keep traffic and freight moving through the city.

And then we also addressed a find and fix it request on non-arterials.

And in this case, because of the sheer number of potholes, We did not, we moved away from the, um, the ordinary first come first serve, uh, which is what we typically do with find it, fix it.

And that's tied with the last few mayor, uh, administrations, uh, metric, um, to kind of turn those pothole requests around in three business days.

Uh, we recently, I think last month met, met with the mayor's team and we kind of talked about that.

Um, and some of the trade-offs with that.

And some of the trade-offs are when you have that three-day turnaround, that's what your focus is, to turn those around and get out there and get those fixed quickly.

But when we are not following that, it can provide a more equitable distribution of our services, meaning we're not going off that metric.

It allows us to run those corridors, those Golden Emerald routes, And then we can actually triage based on need and severity as well.

So there are some trade offs.

And so I think we have a follow up meeting with the mayor's team to kind of talk about that a little bit more.

And yeah, to the right, this line graph just kind of shows the spike in puddles in January due to free stall and some of the conditions that Darren mentioned earlier.

And I think now we will transition to landslides with Liz Sheldon, if there are no questions.

Thank you, Gerardo.

Before we get back into the landslides, I wanted to circle back to Council Member Morales and her questions dealing with this sort of core SDOT functions here during the storms.

And then I might have a question about potholes.

Council Member Morales, please.

Thank you.

Good morning.

Thanks so much, everybody.

You will not be surprised to know that I'm interested in hearing about pedestrian safety.

So I've got some questions about sidewalk.

shoveling and responsibility, but I do think it's important to acknowledge first that in South Seattle, and I know in North Seattle too up in D5, there are lots of streets that just don't even have sidewalks.

So the question about who's responsible is sort of moot there, but it does It does bring into relief the peril that people are in if they are really stuck at home because the city doesn't plow the streets and there's no sidewalk for them to plow so they can try to get around their neighborhood.

So I guess my first question is just kind of an enforcement question.

I know we do some kind of public campaign, education campaign, but if apartment managers or small businesses or individual households are having a hard time, what is the enforcement mechanism for not shoveling a sidewalk?

If Liz is on the line could you jump in there Liz.

I sure can.

So the enforcement mechanism really is through we start with warnings and communication and then the Seattle Municipal Code Title 15 has a provision for citations that we could issue.

if there are ongoing needs to clear the snow on sidewalks.

We have not done that as, I don't think at all to my knowledge, and we prefer to really work towards compliance through communication and conversations with the property owners.

And oftentimes we will do a first round of notification.

So with the door hangers and making sure we knock on doors and let people know, And by the time we, and this happened again with this last snowstorm, kind of by the time we make our first round through that, the high priority areas that we're getting communication out to, the event is over.

And we haven't had a situation where we've gone through and done that first round of communication and then looked towards some more significant enforcement later.

Well, I guess I would say from sort of a 30,000 foot level, I'm really interested in understanding how we might shift some of our priorities in these responses so that we are really thinking about pedestrian safety and pedestrian access.

I have a lot of folks in my part of town and I know people are all over town who are wheelchair bound, who have vision impairments, who simply do not drive and still need to be able to get around the city when these events are happening.

And so I'm interested to know if we have any equipment that is suitable for plowing sidewalks.

I'm not necessarily interested in penalizing people because these are infrequent events.

Every time something happens, there's a run on salt, there's a run on shovels, there's a run on So I understand that people aren't necessarily prepared as we would hope they are for these events.

And it is very dangerous for people who are essential workers, who still need to get to school, to get to work, not to be able to use the sidewalk.

You know, I saw people, I saw somebody push, I think this was actually last winter, pushing someone in a wheelchair in the middle of the road because the sidewalk wasn't cleared and the plow had come through and all the snow was shoveled at the curb and that was the only way for them to get down the street.

So I think I understand that these winter events are infrequent.

I understand that it would, you know, there are some resource questions about how we can invest in the kind of equipment that would allow us to do a better job.

But I think it's really critical for us to have a better understanding of what that would, what that looks like.

And really start planning for this because as climate change, you know, leads us toward more severe weather, we are going to have to address this in a different way.

So that was my enforcement question.

And then I guess I would like to just say, you know, when I'm thinking about our kids getting stuck at home for a week or two because they can't walk down the street or can't walk down the sidewalk, I sort of do a risk assessment.

You know, I think it would be safer to try to walk to school if the sidewalks were clear than for me to try to drive my kids to school up a slick, icy road and there's a hill on every side of me.

I can't leave my block without going up or down a major hill.

So, you know, the fear that I have for elderly folks, for people with mobility impairments, is if they do try to navigate that sidewalk and there's a car driving up a hill, they could get taken out easily.

We've all seen the video of what happens when people are trying to drive in Seattle because we simply aren't Our topography just makes it really dangerous.

So all that to say, I am interested in trying to understand what it would take for us to really shift our priorities a little bit and make sure that we're focusing on making sure kids can get to school, commercial corridors are clear so that neighbors can get to essential services without having to rely on getting in a car and driving down potentially really dangerous roads.

Thank you.

I hear what you're saying and agree that pedestrians need to be a priority in these responses.

I think instead of trying to answer off the top of our heads today, what I'd like to offer is to do a little bit of research, look into some of your questions about equipment and resources and prioritization, and then provide that That would be great.

And I'm happy to be working with you.

Chair Peterson would love for this to be an ongoing conversation so that we can try to be better prepared next winter.

Thank you.

Sounds great.

And Council Member Herbold.

Thanks.

And I do feel like we really do make an effort to be more prepared after having these events.

And I feel like sometimes we lose the historical memory and knowledge of what we've done before.

Back in 2019, the council passed a resolution that, and I believe it was scheduled in a way that was intended to be in advance, of weird storms, the work product.

One of the things that we asked for, we definitely received, we asked for SDOT to lead on a public education program, educating residents and property owners about the responsibilities for snow and ice removal.

After that 2019 resolution in 2020, we definitely saw that and we saw education program this past year as well, and really appreciate that.

One of the things that we had asked for is a report back on how to emphasize the clearing of sidewalks by commercial property owners with the goal of doing so within 12 hours of an event.

And we invited a director's rule articulating the policies, if appropriate, and any legislative proposals necessary to strengthen the enforcement of those expectations.

I do believe we got that report.

I was just trying to pull it up to see what actions were recommended and whether or not we fulfilled those actions.

And so we did get a report in June of 2020. And like I said, I'm, as we were talking, trying to compare what SDOT recommended to what we actually did, but perhaps you can, if there's anybody with us today who has the instant recollection of that, maybe you could tell us.

I do not.

Anyone on the team?

Might be one we need to get back to you on then.

Okay.

Really, just like Council Member Morales just said, I think our interest in passing that resolution was both the the public notice of the expectations, but also the expectations for more robust enforcement.

And that's the piece I think that I would like to know whether or not you made recommendations that we didn't act on or whether or not the recommendations did not actually make any suggestions in that area.

And it looks like Calvin Chow from our central staff may have some information.

Thank you, Calvin.

Thank you all.

I'm not sure I can add too much, you know, without a little bit of time to kind of go back and look through the reports myself.

But my recollection is a lot of the focus was on the commercial district areas where You know, there are property owners and businesses and others who it's easier to kind of work with a lot of what I'm hearing today is kind of highlighting that that we really do rely on on residents to help deal with in the residential neighborhoods.

I mean, it's great to get the commercial districts cleared, but if you're still have to walk to get there, you are going to get there through residential streets.

And 1 thing that I just constantly notice on my street is that if you, if, if residents are unable to clear it, when snow 1st happens by the next day, it's a sheet of ice.

And the difficulty it is for some of my neighbors to deal with that, whether we have the equipment, whether we have the manpower.

I mean, I think that is really kind of the big issue.

We've been able to kind of focus our resources in the commercial districts where we can take our limited resources and kind of focus there, but the residential neighborhoods are a much, much bigger area.

So I think there is that resource sort of concern still lurking at the, I think that a lot of what we're talking about still points back to that problem.

Thank you, Calvin.

And, um, if we could get, um, you and I start to work together just to look at that resolution and to see what's been done and what hasn't been done, um, maybe make some recommendations for follow-up, uh, and you can circulate that to the committee members.

That would be helpful.

Yep.

We will definitely work together on that.

Um, I, um, Councilor Herbold, did you have any other questions or go over to Council Member Strauss?

Thank you, Chair.

And thanks to SDOT, I want to say that I know that this storm in particular created more potholes than previous due to the freezing temperatures with the water.

You already said it better than I could.

I'll just highlight and thank you.

There was a pothole in my district that was sending traffic into an oncoming lane on a blind turn.

And while your team wasn't able to prioritize the filling of the pothole immediately because you were out dealing with landslides, You were able to create a flag, you know, to have signs that say go around the pothole on the right-hand side rather than going into oncoming traffic.

And that was able to resolve the situation until you were able to build a pothole.

I just want to thank you for that.

And then also raise the same concerns that Council Member Morales has.

And I don't know that this is your responsibility, but there is an apartment building in the district that is the only sidewalk in between a retirement facility and the rest of the paved sidewalk world.

And that sidewalk in front of the said apartment building doesn't get shoveled and it creates a very dangerous situation for seniors.

So any information that you'd like to follow up please do include me.

Just thank you for your work during the storm.

Thank you for that acknowledgement and that information.

This is a point where we had intended to transition to talking about our role in the landslide issues.

Unless there are any other questions on potholes, we will do that and I do have I do have a question on potholes.

Gerard, you had mentioned.

Normally, the standard that SDOT applies is to fill the pothole within three business days of receiving it.

However, when there's a spike in the number of requests, there may be a different way of sorting the queue so that it's more equitable distribution.

Is there a we are you still able to meet the three business days though?

Or is that something that would would slide?

Yeah, that would.

That would slide when we have a spike like we we recently got hit with just the sheer number there.

And then you know, mainly our focus shifts to public safety.

So from from that response metric, it's more on.

We gotta get out and make sure the most you know the largest and most dangerous potholes are actually addressed.

And so we are not allowed during that period.

We wouldn't be able to meet the 3 days.

So we basically just kind of.

You know, ask for forgiveness for the period kind of like we're still in.

We're still in that period.

But as you can see, 3500 or 4700 potholes last month.

We think within the next week or week and a half, we will be able to resort back to our normal pothole.

They've done just a great job filling a lot of potholes, but a lot of it is using that regional approach where we mobilize into districts.

I mean, in this case, we just kind of divided the city up amongst the seven council districts.

And in addition to those four pothole ranger trucks, we had up to 70 staff with additional trucks out there filling potholes, running arterials in each district.

So that that really helps us be more efficient when we can do that.

So and we will be kind of talking about this more with the mayor's team on some of the tradeoffs when we have to meet that three day turnaround.

Thank you.

That's a really helpful explanation about how you leveraged other crews as well to help with the spike in potholes.

And for us, I guess, when you when you do meet with the mayor's office on this, keep us in mind in terms of our monitoring role, because for us, it's easy to it's easier to look at something like a three business day turnaround when you when you go to it, when you switch to a different mode of of responding, which may make sense for the reasons you mentioned, safety, equity, et cetera, we would need to know what those metrics are.

So we all hold ourselves accountable for what the results are and the response times are when you shift to that new type of situation, what would those metrics be?

So we'd like to know what those would be.

But it's good to know in a couple weeks, you'll get back to the three business days.

That's helpful for us to manage expectations as we get inbound requests from constituents.

But we know to send them off to 684 Road or the Find and Fix It app and the Customer Service Bureau as well.

So thank you very much.

Yes, definitely will do.

Thank you.

And I'll just, before we switch over to landslides, I'll just also point out that the two, the proactive work we're doing on the Golden Emerald routes does not exclude the, there's overlap between those same potholes that folks may be calling in.

So as we're out there blitzing through these priority routes, we're also hitting a lot of the things that folks either have called in or would have called in.

So there's some overlap there.

Thank you.

Yes, Liz, I believe it is time now to transition to A little bit on landslides.

All right, back to landslides.

Um, so I wanted to talk a little bit about the history of the landslide program.

And Tanya mentioned it a little bit, but it, it originated back in out of 1996, 1997, there were.

kind of similar conditions to what we experienced in December and January of this year but much more extreme.

So it was I think probably at two weeks of snow that then turned to a significant rainfall and out of that there were more than 300 landslides that happened in the span of mostly a 97 but a little 96, 97. 300 million dollars worth of lawsuits.

And out of that council at the time directed the city to create a citywide landslide team, which is what Tony was speaking about earlier.

And so it was created to really improve coordination of all of the departments, primarily those who respond to.

landslide events.

And it also helped us consolidate all of our landslide information and this is we now put all of our responses to landslides as Tanya mentioned into the WebEOC program so that we can all as we're looking at developing our prioritization list we can all draw from that base data.

As Tanya mentioned, SPU leads a coordination meeting that makes sure that we all have contact information and are able to know roles and responsibilities when we're moving into landslide season.

And then really work together to communicate closely during periods of wet weather.

is pretty typical that we will have a couple of days of really extreme or almost extreme events with landslides.

So the landslide teams from all of the departments are extremely busy for those periods when they're dealing with landslides and often will be in constant communication to make sure that we have and can delegate kind of responsibility to all of the events that are happening.

And then also created the landslide mitigation prioritization list, and that list was created and.

Finished up in 2000, and we're still working through that prioritization.

Next slide.

So for January 2022, there were about a dozen landslides that occurred across the city.

And Tanya had a smaller list, but she was looking at a more constrained time.

This is through most of January.

And SDOT specifically responded to eight locations that impacted public right-of-way.

Again, priority is always on public safety, arterial streets, and then reducing impacts to pedestrian and street traffic.

And next slide.

So the biggest landslide that we stopped responded to during this period was the one at Highland Parkway Southwest.

So this, as you know, is getting more traffic as part of the West Seattle Bridge detour.

And there were two landslides that occurred January 7th and January 11th.

And it was a coordination between SPU, City Light, Parks, and SPD all worked together to clear and reopen the street.

What we did near term is installed some concrete box at the base of the hill to support the land and did some initial erosion control.

Our parks mostly did the erosion control on the hillside and are looking to come back in the spring, hopefully when there's a little bit more of a clear period, to do some more vegetation growth.

So that's what we're looking at Highland Park.

And I think that's, those are the end of my slides.

So, Kristen.

Yeah, thanks, Liz.

Just a couple slides to go here.

Much as we do during a snow or winter weather event, we want to keep the traveling public informed during our follow-up actions as well, including through the Twitter accounts you see here.

Especially for something that's evolving quickly, we've gotten a lot of good feedback on how we kept folks informed on the Highland Parkway response.

And then we always get good feedback as we're repairing potholes.

Next slide, please.

In terms of lessons learned and sort of long-term follow-up, when we talk about potholes, we don't want to just talk about fixing them.

We want to talk about the importance of maintaining our streets to reduce the number of potholes that form in the first place.

We've been able to do a lot of good paving work through the levy to move Seattle.

If you're out and about, it's really stark to see the contrast between a freshly paved street and how few potholes you'll see there versus an older street that has had a lot of that freeze-thaw pothole action And then Liz also mentioned the landslide mitigation projects.

Some of the lessons we've learned, I think we've heard from you here as well.

Folks seem to have a good understanding of the sidewalk clearing message, but there are some barriers to that being fully successful.

We need to continue providing information to people about what they can expect in terms of what streets are plowed.

We want to keep sharing public information about other city services as well and amplifying the information our partners are providing.

And then we do want to continue the very successful partnership working with other departments to have access to drivers and equipment when we have to do these extended responses.

And I think that is a good transition to our last slide where just again, we wanted to highlight both our own staff working so hard over holidays and through pandemic and to the support we received from other departments as well.

So that is the end of our slides.

Happy to answer any questions that have come up so far.

Thank you very much.

Thank you to SDOT and your team here today, as well as the workers in the field, as well as to Seattle Public Utilities.

Council Member Herbold, please.

Thank you.

I do want to thank as I, as I think for being so active in South Park during the flooding that the folks experience.

I really want to thank dot.

for in very, very difficult conditions, being out and serving the public, understaffed, many folks also having their own public health, personal public health issues with COVID infections and whatnot, putting a much greater burden on folks who are left to do the work.

So really, really appreciative of that.

I do have a couple other questions about the landslide assessment.

I thought I heard, the report that the list was done and I'd like to know a little bit more about what that means.

My recollection from reading my notes, not from my memory, but these are notes from a few years ago, I think 2017, there was the landslide mitigation prioritization list and then SDOT in 2000 did a risk assessment of the locations on that list, using eight factors to determine the priority of 73 known potential landslide locations.

And so of those 73, they made 24 of them high-priority locations.

And in 2017, we found out that only 7 of the 24 high-priority locations had had proactive mitigation work done.

So, am I hearing you say that all 24?

Because we did definitely approve additional funds in 2017. We an additional 1.37 million for landslide mitigation.

And I know in the subsequent year, there were more funds also than had been previously allocated, but hopefully we've been able to keep up with the financial costs of addressing these 24 locations.

But if you could just confirm for me that I did hear you correctly, that all 24 of the high priority locations have had their proactive work done.

Council Member Horrible, I wish that was the case.

No, what I meant is the list itself was developed.

We have not made that much progress on the list.

So we have completed since that time, I believe there's been one more project that is completed, the Rainier Avenue South project from that original high priority list.

Yeah, if you could check that because, again, my recollection is when council saw that only seven of 24, we provided funding, I thought, for another five mitigation projects.

So would love if you could get back to us on that.

On slide 15, you noted that the January landslide response that there were eight landslides impacted in the right-of-way.

I'm just wondering, is part of our efforts to proactively mitigate the likelihood of landslides before they occur, we consider tracking those locations where issues have recurred?

And it's my understanding that that's sort of the point of the list.

is, again, to use these criteria to identify those locations where it's likely that something is going to reoccur.

And my last question.

This is related to Highland Parkway.

I recognize that the location of the landslide this year was actually, even though it was still Highland Parkway, it was this different location than the one in 2017. But I'm wondering, are there additional safety precautions needed for other portions of Highland Parkway?

Has there been an analysis or is there one planned?

Thanks.

All right, I'm gonna try to, those were a lot of questions, so I'm gonna try to respond.

I will provide the list of locations that we followed up with the funding for the funding we received.

It was after 2017, so I think 2018, is that correct?

Somewhere around there, the additional funding.

Many of those locations were slides that we responded to that were not originally on the prioritization list, but had significant impacts to the traveling public.

So that was question number one question number two was.

Question number two.

Question number three though was Highland Park Way.

And so we have our original priority list and I think you know Highland Park originally rated in kind of the low priority of those streets.

And so I think, but one of the things that we do look at is the potential and recent history of slides that are occurring at those locations.

And one of the reasons why we decided to complete the Rainier Avenue South project is we had gotten over the past couple of years, maybe five years, independent slides at that location.

And so I think it is something that's worth revisiting as we continue on is some of the locations that we continue to see more frequent slides in those locations.

But that's one of the criteria that goes into the assessment for how we rank the high priority priority locations as you know there are eight eight other criteria that go into that.

I think those were the questions did I miss one?

Okay thank you.

Thank you for answering that about the landslides.

I noticed in the capital improvement program budget that we approved for several years, on page 227 of that, there's a landslide mitigation program.

But one of the things that's concerning is that the budget amount dropped substantially from 2021, 2022, and beyond.

And that budget was approved before these landslides occurred.

That would be something that it would be helpful if the Harrell administration would look at whether they need to revise their request for landslide mitigation work going forward so that when we approve the next CIP budget, you have the funding you need to deal with the actual need at hand.

So appreciate your input.

Thank you in advance for looking into that.

And then we will follow up with you on the 2019 resolution and then trying to do more about sidewalks and safety for pedestrians.

But just a big thank you to both departments for being here in this thorough presentation from both of you.

It shows the benefit of having these two departments in our committee so that we can coordinate along with all the coordination you're already doing at the department level.

All right, well, colleagues, we're ready to move on to the next two items on our agenda, which are related to each other.

Thank you to SDOT and SPU, although SDOT's going to stick around.

Why don't we go ahead and move to the next agenda item.

Will the clerk please read the title of the next agenda item into the record, item two?

Agenda Item 2, Seattle Department of Transportation Safe Starts Outdoor Permits Program Update for briefing and discussion.

Great, and just for the viewing public, this is a larger effort by the city, and then we're gonna zero in on one council bill sponsored by Council Member Strauss.

I know I wanna speak to that on item three in particular, but if you don't mind, we can just jump into SDOT's overall presentation on this.

But welcome SDOT, welcome back SDOT.

Thank you, thank you Council Member Peterson.

I'm happy to be here today.

Casey Rogers is with me and is going to share the slide deck.

I'm Elise Nelson.

I am acting public space manager for our team in street use, a division within SDOT.

And we're just excited to be here today to give you this update.

So Casey can go to the next slide.

We always like to kind of ground our presentations in SDOT's vision, mission, and core values, which is here on the screen.

In public space management, we really see our role as working with people, residents, organizations, and businesses to enhance neighborhoods, strengthen communities, and enliven public spaces, while also promoting economic vitality.

Through our work, we're helping to build livability and bring that to our city streets, while also making sure we're accounting for mobility, safety, and the equity of our work.

Next slide, please.

So today we've been asked to give a brief presentation kind of on where we're at with our Safe Start program, and then we will transition into the legislation that is the next agenda item.

Next slide.

All right.

So just to kind of start off here, we're going to start by talking about the background outreach and learning summary.

So here is our Safe Start program background.

We began this effort in summer 2020. And really it was.

We're here today because our permits are set to expire in May 2022 and the request is to extend until January 2023. We began safe start permitting, recognizing that we had existing permit programs for these types of uses, but we needed to work quickly and needed to reduce our fees with struggling businesses that were really needed to get out and use the right away right away.

came and were able to create a streamlined and free process.

Pre-pandemic, we had about 400 cafes permitted.

We worked with about 115 food vendors and had 20 businesses with retail displays.

Just in the past year and a half, we've seen a significant increase in the permitting volumes, particularly outdoor cafes that have used the curb space.

To date, we've issued 276 permits.

So pre-pandemic, our permit fees range roughly between $300 and $4,000, really depending on what you're doing and where you were.

In 2021, we've received a one-time federal recovery grant that helped to offset some of that lost revenue of about $300,000.

All right, next slide.

So what we've been doing since we've talked to you all last is a lot of outreach.

We really wanted to make sure that we were hearing from people, both businesses, residents, stakeholders, to understand how the Safe Start program was working and to really consider what we wanted to do and move forward into our permanent programs that we already have.

We've had a multi-pronged approach, including a general survey, as well as focused outreach with BIPOC and community stakeholders, and some program evaluations that we've done in-house.

Our survey had an overwhelming response.

We had over 10,000 people provide responses, so that's been a lot of data we've had to sift through, but we also wanted to make sure we were hearing from folks that we didn't hear too much from in the survey, so we've already been buttressing that with stakeholders with BIPOC, businesses and organizations, BIAs, the Seattle Restaurant Alliance, and disability rights advocates.

Next slide.

This graphic highlights the overwhelming positive support we received from our survey.

90% of respondents supported cafes and street closures for dining and shopping.

Food trucks and carts also received a high level of support.

Retail displays received the lowest level of support, although it was still positive overall.

Next slide.

So even though we had overwhelming positive support in our Safe Start survey, we really wanted to understand what was working well and where there were areas for improvement.

We wanted to see those areas for improvement so we could consider that in our future programmatic changes.

So people were asked to comment on what they liked the most and what they liked the least.

And this summarizes, this slide summarizes what we heard.

People felt like it was great to get outside and dine during the pandemic.

And they liked how the streets had some vibrancy, being able to support small businesses and get together with people in their communities.

What could be improved?

People noted impacts to parking, impacts to travel in particular with street closures, sidewalk and mobility impacts, and then generally maintenance around the spaces themselves.

In addition to the survey, we've been doing a lot of listening and learning.

So participating businesses have called out how our streamlined process lowered barriers to application, and free permits have been really critical to them, and we've really been seen as a partner during this process.

As we think about heading out of the Safe Start world and into a future legislative package, there's support for lowering our fees, in particular looking at the fees we charge for occupation of the right-of-way.

Even though our parents have been free and we've been a great partner, businesses still note that there's costs that they're having to take on in setting up and managing these spaces, and that can be a barrier to entry.

We're also talking to researchers at UW and UNC, and they've noted that there are long-term public health and resilience benefits to creating outdoor public spaces.

In addition, we've learned that talking to partners and community when we're setting up programs is really critical to making sure we create great public spaces long run.

Now we'll talk briefly about our draft program mission and themes that are guiding our work.

Here on the screen is our program mission, which is to develop an equitable and iterative approach to continue the success of the Safe Start program to help small businesses thrive, increase the vibrancy of our public realm, and preserve needed access and mobility.

This draft builds on SDOT's core values of equity, safety, mobility, sustainability, livability, and excellence.

Next slide.

So briefly, we've pulled out three main themes to help guide our work as we continue for what's next.

So number one, we see equity as really critical.

We want to implement strategies that support BIPOC-owned small businesses.

We want to make sure we're providing excellent coaching in language, education, and promotion materials.

look into fees and how that can be a barrier to entry and other options that we might consider like looking to have some pre-approved designs that could help businesses utilize the program at an easier way.

Regarding flexibility codified rules can be a barrier and and we really see a need to be nimble.

We want to find that balance of having rules that are consistent and predictable that work well for people of all ages and abilities to get in and around Seattle but also provide some flexibility for businesses where appropriate.

We see our program is really iterative.

That's what we've learned as the pandemic has helped us learn.

So we want to make sure to be able to continue to learn from evaluations and then adjust as we go.

And then related to collaborative approach, we've really seen a deep appreciation for SDOT being a partner, which is like kind of worth noting because regulatory agencies can sometimes be seen as an obstacle.

So we want to continue the good work we've been doing to build relationships to help businesses find successful outcomes.

This will take more time and resources, but we really see this as a value add.

Next slide.

All right, last section is just to kind of let you know where we're headed with our draft changes.

So now we plan to take all that what we've learned so far and put together a package that will be ready this spring that will talk about how we want to take what we've learned from the pandemic and the safe start program into our permanent legislation for outdoor dining, merchandise display, vending, and street activation.

Having a draft this spring and having the extension that is in front of Council today will be really helpful because we'll be able to have another chance to talk to people and see if we got it right and where we have room for improvement before we get that final package to Council.

In general, high-level, what we're looking at is having a program that will provide more opportunities for public space activity and support BIPOC-owned small businesses in Seattle.

We want to have more permitting tools, such as seasonal permits.

We're crafting rules and design standards that will focus on safety and mobility, as well as accessibility, but continue to allow structures that help create spaces that people can use year-round, if that's what the business desires.

We're also looking at new ways to do things for merchandise display.

We're thinking about having some guidelines that would allow some merchants to set up retail displays potentially without a permit with guidelines that they have to follow instead.

Vendors have been really hard hit during the pandemic.

So we're looking to create new permit options for people to try out new sites more simply and affordably, and then looking at ways to try out new types of vending with programs, building off programs we've piloted during the pandemic, like Market Street.

For street activations we want to continue to build upon what we've done during the pandemic and create more options for street closures and activations that will create great places for people to gather, dine and shop.

We're really excited to have the opportunity to continue to support Seattle's businesses and think about what we're doing now and what we can learn and bring into the future legislation.

Next slide.

All right.

So here's where we're at.

If the legislation in front of you all is approved, we will move into the winter finishing up our draft proposal and doing a racial equity toolkit analysis.

And then this spring, we'll extend our current permits to their new expiration date.

and have the draft package ready for review and engagement.

Then summer we'll be back with our legislative package and look to finalize an implementation plan that will have great time for people to be able to then come into compliance with the new more permanent program that once their permits expire in January.

So that ends today's brief update by SDOT.

I hope it gives you a good idea of where we're at today.

Casey Rogers and I are here and happy to answer any questions that you have.

Thank you very much.

Colleagues, any questions at this stage?

We're also gonna have the opportunity when we talk about the council bills sponsored by Council Member Strauss to extend the free permits.

Council Member Morales.

Thank you.

So thank you Councilmember Strauss for this work and thanks so much to SDOT.

I think this is really exciting.

I would love to see more activation in the South End, I will say.

Neighbors are excited about this, and we've seen a lot of our small businesses that we know are still struggling.

So this is the kind of improvement that really brings that vibrancy and activation back to commercial corridors.

And honestly, it's also really, I think, a good safety improvement too, just to have more people out and activating the street.

We had the Columbia City patio during the pandemic, part of the pandemic and I know folks are really eager to bring that back to Ferdinand Street and and just be able to enjoy it.

That said, you know, I'm also really hearing from neighbors on residential streets about how we could do something similar, this sort of, you know, tactical urbanism, give permission to do this sort of thing on residential streets.

So, for example, in the last few weeks, my office has heard from parents who live on South Holly near MLK Elementary.

who are asking for permission to put planters outside to create kind of makeshift barriers or to paint the street or to add trees that might slow down people speeding through their neighborhood.

So I'm wondering if you could talk just a little bit about how we might translate the success of this kind of program into a residential version or a more neighborhood version of this.

And if you have thoughts right now, that'd be great.

But I do just want to signal my interest in working with SDOT to try to work through something like that.

Yeah, thank you.

Well, that's really, I think we're excited to hear that.

We do have like kind of some existing programs that you're probably aware of, like our play streets permit that allow parents or community groups to close streets kind of short term for play.

But I think what you're talking about is maybe more longer term kind of physical improvements.

Those sometimes do come up in variety of ways.

You know, and there are ways that we work with our transportation operations division if they come up in the context of a permit review.

But I think I'd be happy to talk more about kind of how those projects might make sense.

And I think in general, yes, we want, you know, we, you know, street activations is kind of a large bucket.

That last bucket I talked about, and it really is trying to create.

space for community to really feel some sense of ownership over the street, either short term or seasonally or longer term.

So I do see that there could be some good conversations to have about how that translates to a more residential context too.

Council Member Strauss.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Elise and Casey.

I'm just so happy and impressed with the way that this program is operating, and I'm really looking forward to the work ahead.

I guess, Chair, we haven't gotten to my bill yet.

I'll probably make these comments and then I won't say much more.

But I'll just note that the bill that I have before the committee today is intended to give SDOT the time that they need to ensure that we get the policies right-sized for our city and that we're able to keep outdoor dining as a part of the fabric of our city forever, or at least through my lifetime.

And we just want to make sure that those policies are right sized.

As I listened to the presentation today, there were a couple things that really stood out to me.

And one is the framework that we've always had sidewalk cafes, we've always had parklets as a tool in our urban space toolkit.

I will say that they were oftentimes too small and oftentimes too expensive.

And the pandemic gave us the chance to look at how we operate this program again.

As SDOT noted in the presentation and Elise noted in the presentation, the survey results were incredibly positive.

I think the lowest rating I saw was 59%, which is still above 50. One of the things that I've heard from skeptics of this program, There are some out there is that during the weather, the cold weather months that we will see a decline in use.

I will tell you over the winter.

During that really cold snap that we just had the presentations from SDOT and SPU about, I was out on Ballard Avenue at Hattie's Hat in 37 degree weather in an outdoor dining situation.

The inside was quite full and the outdoor seating was totally full.

And the group that I was with was concerned about the Omicron variant.

And so, They were not interested or willing to sit inside, so we all bundled up and we sat outside.

And I think that this is the nature of the pandemic where we're still at, which is this.

We will see some variants continue to spike, and at those times people's comfort level with indoor dining will modulate.

And so this was a moment in 37 degree weather where we were all outdoors.

The group felt safe outdoors.

We were warm as hell.

as we could be in the situation, and we really enjoyed the food that night.

So again, the policy that we'll discuss in just a moment is to give SDOT the time to get the policies correct and right-sized for our city, because we do need to make sure that we're regulating the look and feel, and we need to make sure that we're reducing all possible barriers.

We need to make sure that these structures are safe, and we need to remove all possible barriers to doing that.

We need to make sure that our businesses have access.

Permit being free increases accesses because it doesn't create a barrier.

Also, the cost of this permit right now while we're figuring out these interim designs, interim policies, allows more businesses to participate.

In the old program, we were, in my opinion, charging too much money for the amount of space that we were providing.

And so also what I'm very excited to hear S.

talking about is the different types of permits.

So the different types of tools that are in the toolkit, whether it's outdoor retail or just curbside, or maybe it's on the sidewalk or like in Ballard Avenue, where we're running the pilot program, where we're turning a whole street into a cafe street.

We need to get these policies so that they're able to be not only expanded to the rest of the city, but they're easy to use in the rest of the city so that Council Member Morales, you're able to look at the toolkit and the menu of options that Elyse will have for us and just say, I want these two in this area and maybe those two over in this other area.

And so that's the great work that Elyse is doing.

I wanna make sure that I give their team the time that they need to get these policies right.

And so we really need to make sure that the cost of the permit is right sized because these, The use of this public right away is also providing revenue generation.

As I was just talking about, Hattie's Hat, when the indoor spaces is nearly completely full and the outdoor spaces is completely full, we're seeing that net generating, that net increase of revenue.

sales tax for the city of Seattle.

You know, the cost of the structure can be a barrier, and I'm excited to hear about ways that we can reduce that burden.

And just again, that when we're able to create these vibrant places, we are seeing a net increase in revenue in sales tax and other types of revenue generation.

And so that's why I'm really excited to bring the pathway to permanence.

I guess, Chair, I'll hold my comments about that.

I'll just speak briefly as Ballard Avenue is a pilot for what we're understanding to be a cafe street, so an entire street that allows for a little bit wider structures than are permitted in other places.

It ensures that we're taking into consideration the loading and unloading of freights and goods, that we're ensuring that the space is able to be accessed by all ages and abilities, and that we are able to make it a beautiful, way of reducing the speed and amount of traffic so that we're really able to create a vibrant place that everyone can enjoy.

I'll save my comments for the bill for just a moment.

The last thing that I'll say about the Cafe Street Pilot is we've had a really nice and interesting conversation about parking, because parking is still needed in these places.

And how do we do that?

For Ballard Avenue Pilot, what we're looking at is for the spaces that are not occupied by cafe structures that we have three-minute parking, 30-minute parking, and then all ages and abilities parking.

And those three groupings are really important so that we have the quick drop-off pickup so I can run in and grab the sandwich that I pre-ordered.

Or maybe it's a 30-minute parking spot that I need because I haven't pre-ordered my sandwich.

And then also for all ages and abilities so that folks who do have a different experience getting around town that they are able to park near where they want to go.

So we've got a lot of great, and maybe Chair Peterson wants Elise and Dede, and we all come back together with more foundations around the pilot we could present to you in this committee at that time.

But I'll save my comments for the bill.

And thank you, Elise, Casey, and all presenting today.

Thank you.

Let's go ahead and move to item 3, which just is related a lot to this item.

And then we can get moving on that.

I do have some questions, some standard questions about costs and FTEs, risk management, things like that.

So let's go ahead and read item 3 into the record.

Agenda item 3, Council Bill 120256. and ordinance relating to street and sidewalk use, amending ordinance 126474 and the street use permit fee schedule authorized by section 1504074 of the Seattle Municipal Code, and amending section 2 and section 3 of ordinance 126339 for briefing, discussion, and possible vote.

Thank you.

As we'll try to do in the committee, we won't always be able to do it, but we'll try to hear council bills twice.

And so that's the plan with this one.

So we'll hear it back on December, or excuse me, February 15th, and then I'll go straight to full council there to extend the free permits.

And we have city council central staff with us, Calvin Chow, we have the same SDOT team with us.

I do have some questions for Calvin about this, but Council Member Strauss, as a sponsor, did you want to speak to the specifics of the extension request?

Sure.

Thank you, Chair.

What we understood when we did the initial bill, so let me take us back a step, which is we were able to create this free permit, and then we extended the duration because we had not been able to create the, we had not been able to right size these policies because when we're in the middle of a pandemic, we're not able to have that look, feel of our world reopening.

And so when those policies still weren't ready for prime time and that we were still evaluating how the pandemic, where we were in the pandemic, how we are responding to it, the permits were set to expire at May of this year.

And so what I said at the beginning of the year is we need more time with this.

And so the bill before you is the exact same bill that we passed the last time that extended it.

We passed it last April, which extended it from May 21 to May 22. The bill before you today extends it from May 22 to January 1, 23. I will state here and on the record that if As we proceed through this program evaluation, if we need more time, I will come back and ask for more time because it's important that we get policies right so that we don't have to come back and redo them again in the future or so that we're not creating unintended consequences for our business owners, for the people who walk on the street, drive on the street, bike on the street, for the people who live in the communities.

I want to make sure that we get this right the first time.

So that's why we're taking the extra time right now and why I'm requesting an extension of our street cafe program as is until January 1st, 2023. Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Council Member Strauss.

And we have our City Councilor Zimstrap with us, Calvin Chow.

Did you want to make any comments about the bill?

I've got some standard questions I ask about any program that we can get on the record, but do you have any introductory remarks or things to add?

Councilmember, I think the legislation is very straightforward and has been pretty much covered in the previous presentation, so no comments from me.

Okay, all right, and so I support the extension of the free permit, so I'll just say that right off the bat.

Since we're still in the middle of a COVID-related economic impact on small businesses, we heard one of the Restaurant Alliance called in during public comment, for example, in support of this extension.

So these are questions that don't necessarily need to be answered today, but as we Since there has been a signal sort of like, hey, maybe some of us want to do this permanently, then I just want to sort of get some questions out because it becomes less about COVID and more about a new program for the city and the trade-offs there.

So just with any new program, I'm always interested in hearing about the cost or the expenses.

That would be the gross cost, but also the net cost, because as we know, there's some net financial benefits that we could be achieving here.

So looking at what are the costs of foregoing, what is the foregone revenue?

And I know some of this revenue, it depends what type of permits being applied for.

If it's literally taking up a parking space, it normally would be collecting parking meter revenue on, what is the foregone revenue on an annual basis that we could expect on the current fee charges that we would normally charge, and how many In terms of running the program, if we were to keep it going, how many SDOT employees would be dedicated to do that?

I guess we've issued 276 permits.

And then there's excitement about the program.

So does that mean we need more FTEs?

And what's the cost?

So just sort of looking at the cost to run the program.

And are we pulling employees from other parts of SDOT to do this?

Or is it additive?

And then what does success look like?

How do we measure the success of the program?

I know the survey, it was really great that you did the survey, but what does it look like going forward?

I know in the university district, when the program was first discussed, there were different types of opinions about it based on the type of business.

The ave is 65%.

owned by BIPOC or women, and they were split on it in terms of those if they had a takeout business, they were less interested, but if they had a restaurant and they wanted to expand because of the social distancing requirements, they were very much in favor of it.

So I didn't know if you'll be doing ongoing surveying.

And then the liability, risk management, could you explain sort of, are the businesses, the city and they're required to have insurance coverage since they're putting customers into the street.

Just want to know about the risk management.

Obviously, this is a great thing about having this pilot is we already have lots of data on the fact that we haven't had a problem there with that.

So if we could have central staff start with those and then maybe go to SDOT.

Calvin, go first.

Can I jump in there?

Sure.

Just because I think some of the questions that you asked are good questions and are a bit subjective to the, you know, what does success look like?

I think as the elected sponsoring the bill, I'd love to speak to that.

And I will just quickly speak to the foregone revenue.

As early in the pandemic, we stopped charging for parking places.

And so that was a part of how the program initially got off the ground, and during the federal relief conversations, that $300,000 that we discussed coming from the feds to create programs like this, that was, I did some background work to make sure that we were able to ensure that we weren't running at a deficit for this program.

I'll let SDOT speak to the employees and what the internal cost is to run for the program, but from my understanding, This is the exact same team that was running the public space management previous to the pandemic.

So doing the sidewalk cafe program beforehand.

And that team was also tasked with many more public space engagements that have since been put on pause due to the pandemic.

So I'll let S.

speak directly to that.

But this is one of those costs of doing business where we have this team set up already and they were set up pre-pandemic.

When you ask, what does success look like?

I'll speak from a subjective place, and then I'll let Estad and Calvin speak to it as well.

So that we have the right cost to businesses, that we have the right feel for the neighborhoods, that we're adding vibrancy to the neighborhoods and small businesses, and that Estad's public space team has a really great program of measuring public space engagement through watching and tracking how many people are passing through, how many people are lingering in a space.

And it really describes how safe people feel as well.

And they're able to run this analysis to understand the gender, race, and many other types of breakdowns.

And so what does success look like?

looks like a longer linger rate.

It looks like a longer stop in rate to the small businesses.

And these data points will demonstrate with data rather than subjectivity, as my eyes like to point to, that we are increasing vibrancy in the space.

So I'll let subject matter experts answer the technical questions.

I just wanted to kind of share my thoughts at the outset.

Thank you.

So Calvin, in terms of the foregone revenue, do we have an estimate of what we would have collected under 200 sites?

We do have an estimate.

And I wanted before, maybe before I get too much into that, I just wanted to just highlight that, be careful of, you know, focusing on the legislation in front of us, which is really about an eight month extension of the temporary free permit program as a specific, you know, what are the costs, what are the impacts and how is it managed?

The issues that you've raised, I think are great questions that we can hold back and make sure that we get good answers from SDOT as they put together their draft proposal, because I haven't seen that yet and they haven't presented it to us yet.

So I just want to make a bit of a distinction between the ultimate proposal, which we have not seen and this eight month extension right now.

I went through the permit costs with, at least earlier this week, and we came up with about a $420,000 cost.

If all those permits were continued under the existing, what the previous cost of those permits would be, it would be about $420,000.

assuming that they all chose to take those costs and go forward with it.

Is that an eight-month period?

That is an eight-month period, yes.

OK, so annualized would be?

$630, roughly.

OK, thank you.

Yeah, if I can keep asking.

That's a good point, Calvin, in terms of, What are we looking at?

The eight-month extension, which I support, versus when we talk about making a program permanent post-pandemic.

That's where I really would like answers to these, so I just wanted to get those out there for now, and then look forward to central staff analysis when we get the SDOT legislation for doing something more permanent.

I think the expectation is that there will be a new fee structure that's attached to this, and we will have to understand, you know, What is our what is our expectation for parking revenues because that that affects what we think we should be charging for parking spaces, for instance, and those have all been changing over the last couple years as well so.

I think it is actually going to be, when we get the proposal, any sort of formal fixed proposal is going to affect the rest of the street use cost center as well.

So it's going to have to be understood in the context of how we're collecting all our revenues through that cost center.

So it does become a bit more complicated, but I think having your list of issues gives us a great start of things to make sure that we cover when that proposal comes forward.

Council Member Strauss.

Thank you, Chair.

I just wanted to highlight that we are keeping this as a free permit in the temporary moment so that we can get the, and as I said in my initial remarks, so that we can get the cost right sized, because we can't make it so expensive that small businesses won't use, and we need to make sure that there's there will be a cost there.

That's something that SDOT has been very clear with me from the get go.

I think it's also when we're talking about foregone revenue, it is really important to take into consideration the revenue generation that is occurring from people eating or purchasing retail in the streets.

And also that the parking that we are getting revenue from on those same streets, we wouldn't necessarily be able to generate revenue from parking if those small businesses had failed during the pandemic.

So I think of that, especially down on Ballard Avenue, where during the time that those businesses were shuttered, it was really trying times for those small businesses.

And had we not given them this tool, they wouldn't have necessarily survived.

We wouldn't have had a reasoning.

for people to pay for parking.

And lastly, with the foregone revenue, I'll just say that we have had the habit recently of expanding paid parking zones.

And I know that that conversation continues to occur.

And so there is an issue with foregone revenue.

We've got other ways to address it.

Thank you for letting me pipe up again, Chair.

Yeah, of course.

Yeah, for me it's it's really just trying to parse out the pandemic response, which I totally supported.

And then because there's signaling about doing something permanent, just want to get my questions out there early so that make sure that they are answered.

I do have a quick question about the current situation, though, for Calvin or Estat in terms of the indemnification, the liability issues.

Could you explain how that's taken care of currently?

Yeah, Calvin, are you OK if I take that one?

All right.

So our permits have standard language about indemnification and as well as insurance.

So, you know, just like before, those continue to be standard conditions on any permit that we issue.

And so the expectation is that the businesses that are working with us have have the right insurance and, you know, are signing off with the information about indemnification, which is in our permits, but basically it relies on Title 15. The SMC has specifics on that.

Thank you.

I think Council Member Herbold and Council Member Morales.

Thank you.

Just in a slightly different direction, I really appreciate that we are taking the time to get this policy right.

As we saw on the previous presentation, although as Council Member Strauss mentioned, it's still above 50% the survey shows lower support for sidewalk retail display and I'm assuming that this may be related to mobility access issues and I'm really hoping that we are doing everything we can to create a system that proactively addresses those, not in an enforcement approach, although some enforcement might be needed, but really from a planning approach.

And we'd love to just hear a little bit more about what we're doing in that area.

There was a recent Bloomberg City Lab piece looking at New York City's open streets program and looking at how the, just like we are doing, these spaces are moving beyond experimentation and becoming fixtures of the urban streetscape.

And it's really important to proactively before approving like really understand the potential public access issues for folks.

And one of the things it looks like they're doing in New York is that, or they're proposing to do, is making sure that folks with lived experiences are at the literal table on approving these spaces.

There's a suggestion that disabled residents receive a stipend to actually test out new dining structures citywide, perhaps rank strike structures on their accessibility.

I was wondering, we're thinking we have put into not ensuring that we are not using sort of a normative approach to approving these, you know, because when we're, I'm concerned that when we're looking at these surveys, we are in fact, you know, we're looking at the high percentages of support.

And to me, that reflects a potential concern that we are using a normative approach to permitting these very, very popular additions to our streetscape.

talk about that a bit.

Thank you for the question, Council Member Herbold.

It's a really good one.

And I think in SDOT and street use, we see part of the reason we do permitting at all is to really make sure we are thinking about mobility and access and that the uses that we permit in the right of way, one of the reasons we exist is to make sure that they're done well and that we have the opportunity to to both work in more of an education capacity with folks pre-permit or during the permit review process, and then if we need to in an enforcement capacity.

You know, one of the things that I would say we're looking to see how we can really up our game with education and information that really helps businesses understand their responsibilities around the ADA and how to make sure their spaces are available for people that may use a wheelchair, for example.

you know, customers, for example.

And also, you know, SDOT, we really focus on making sure that the space that remains in the sidewalk, which we call, you know, sometimes the pedestrian clear zone, is open and available for people that need to use the sidewalk to walk, whether that, you know, whether they're detecting with a cane or using a wheelchair, that it's really just open for everyone.

And so a lot of our standards we have are guiding that, you know, looking to have, you know, minimum widths that are maintained, We have standards around a pedestrian straight path that looks to make sure that the path doesn't jog unnecessarily.

We've also implemented some rules around having things like diverters at the edges of cafes that don't have fences that really provide bookends so people who are navigating can find that first instead of maybe running into a table or a chair.

I think what I would say at this point is that's a really important and critical piece for us, and we have, you know, to date been talking to disability rights advocates groups as a very key stakeholder in the work done to date on outreach, and we'll continue to do that.

I like your ideas and, like, kind of thinking about how we can maybe bring folks in even maybe past having the policies and the implementation phases.

So thank you for your comment.

Thanks and just one additional point.

I think it's not just a literal question of of access or being able to get through an area in this in this article.

I reference a.

person with mobility issues described a Tetris-like path.

So it's not just that you can pass, it's how difficult we are making it to pass by requiring people to jog in and out of spaces.

So I'm just hoping that we're not being completely literal about the requirements of the ADA, that we're really engaging people with lived experiences about how they interact in the new public space.

So really appreciate that.

If I could follow up really quickly too, I should mention that we worked to produce a video with Rooted in Rights earlier in the pandemic response that's on our website for both the Safe Start permit program as well as other relevant permits that we issue.

And, you know, I think that video was a great first step in that kind of work, and I would love to kind of continue to do that.

But great point about, you know, we want to go beyond the minimum and really, you know, work to create great public spaces that are accessible for everyone.

Thank you.

Council Member Rallis, and then we'll probably wrap it up here.

Go ahead.

Sure.

I'll make it quick.

I just wanted to get back to a little bit of the previous conversation and really just offer an anecdote.

We've heard different points of view from business about whether this is something that they want.

And I think especially the food and drink businesses that I've spoken to, the owners that I've talked to down here in Columbia City, for example, really appreciate the certainty that being able to take a parking spot or two in front of their business gives them, acknowledging that if somebody just parks in front of their restaurant, they're not sure if that person is actually going to come in to dine with them or if they're just going to walk around the neighborhood for an hour or two.

But if there's a street cafe there, then they know that the person who's planted in that bench is actually using the restaurant and enjoying what they have to offer.

So I just wanted to offer that perspective too, because I think it's important to have that consideration when we're thinking about not just the revenue that might be generated from ticketing or something like that, but also what it contributes to the vibrancy of the commercial space and to the revenue of the businesses that are benefiting from having these sidewalk cafes there.

So thank you.

Thank you.

And again, just to signal, I think there's lots of support to extend this, and it'll get out of our committee, I predict, on February 15th and go straight to council at that point.

Councilor Strauss, thank you for your leadership on this and listening to all those businesses, not only in your district, but throughout the city.

And did you want to close with anything, Councilor Strauss, before we adjourn the meeting?

Thank you, Councilmember Chair Peterson.

No, nothing to add.

I know that I'll be happy to answer any other questions at the next committee meeting and really what we're just looking to do is give us the time to get this right so the cost isn't a burden and it's generating some revenue and we're able to, you know, manage all of these things because Like Council Member Herbold said, we don't want people to have to zig and zag.

We want clear pass-throughs.

And so for all of these reasons, we want SDOT to have the time that they need to get policies right-sized for our beautiful city of Seattle.

Thank you, Council Member Strauss.

And thank you, SDOT, for your innovative approach to this and for administering it and really helping so many businesses to survive during this pandemic with this approach.

Well, thank you, everybody.

That is the end of our agenda.

We're going to take this.

We'll vote this out of committee at our next committee meeting on February 15. So if there's nothing else, this concludes the February 1, 2022 meeting of the Transportation and Seattle Public Utilities Committee.

We are adjourned.

Thank you.