Seattle City Council Finance & Housing Committee 4/20/21

We are recording.

Excellent.

Well, good morning, everyone.

Thank you so much for joining the Finance and Housing Committee.

Today is April 20th, 2021. Will the clerk please call the roll?

President.

Vice Chair Herbold.

Here.

Council President Gonzalez.

Present.

Council Member Lewis.

Present.

Council Member Strauss.

Thank you very much and do we have any alternates here today or guests?

Seeing none.

Wonderful.

Well, good morning, everyone.

I'm Teresa Mosqueda, chair of the committee.

We do have a lengthy agenda with us today.

I want to remind folks that during this time where we're considering federal dollars that the city will use to respond to the COVID crisis, we have invited various council members to join us throughout the meeting, especially for the first half as we take on discussions and conversation about what community members are interested in for the American Rescue Plan Act dollars.

for the continuation of the COVID relief fund dollars that were allocated by Congress last year.

And we will have that first part of our discussion really focused on those federal dollars.

So you may see other council members joining us.

I did get a message from Council Member Juarez that she plans to pop in around 10 a.m.

On today's agenda, we have a number of items.

In addition to that, we will have a community panel that has a robust set of community organizations, including small business associations, housing groups, folks who works with the homeless, folks who are working to make sure that our most vulnerable are able to get inside, and folks who are working with the immigrant and refugee population, as well as child care provider advocates.

We will then have a conversation of the COVID relief funds, the CRF extension of the $18 million that's available to us to use in 2021 now.

And thanks to Ali Panucci for being on the line already.

We will get to that presentation.

We then have the opportunity to hear from the city budget's office on the economic revenue forecast for the spring presentation.

And then we will go on to other items of business, including Northgate Commons acquisition from Seattle Housing Authority.

We'll get a chance to say hello to Director Loftin, who has joined us this morning as well.

and an opportunity to talk about the transparency requirements for contract workers, an effort that is being championed by Councilmember Hurdle.

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

hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

Let's move on to public comment.

We do have a handful of folks signed up for public comment, and we want to make sure to get to everyone.

We do have the next 25 minutes to hear from you, so we will try to wrap this up by 10. If it looks like we're not going to be able to do that, I will shorten your time, but we will start with two minutes for each person.

The public comment period this morning will end at 10 a.m.

I'll call on three speakers at a time.

If you'd like to sign up and you haven't yet, you can do so by going to Seattle.gov backslash council.

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

Once I call the speaker's name, you will have the chance to unmute yourself.

You need to push star six in order to do that.

That's on your end.

And make sure your own phone's off mute as well.

We will look forward to hearing from you on the items that you'd like to talk to on today's agenda.

Remember to introduce yourself at the beginning of your remarks.

You will hear a 10-second chime.

before your remarks are slated to end, and then we will have the chance to move on to the next person.

Once you've completed your public comment, we ask that you please disconnect from the line and go ahead and listen in on Seattle Channel or the other listening options on today's agenda.

Okay, let's go to public comment.

The first three people that we have are Paul Quiñones Figueroa, Nancy Callahan, and Lata Ahmed.

Lata, good morning.

You are not listed as present, so please do dial in.

If you get the chance, we will get back to you.

And Paul, good to see you as always.

Thank you for joining us this morning.

You are up first.

Good morning, Chair Mosqueda and council members.

I'm Paul Piones-Figueroa with Work in Washington.

I'm here to thank you for taking up the issue of transparency for independent contractors today.

We know that Seattle has been a leader in this area with the domestic workers' bill of rights, the gig worker premium pay, and sick day ordinances, and the fair share pay standard for Uber and Lyft drivers.

While the current draft transparency policy being discussed today does not do enough to address the needs of gig workers, It is encouraging to see that you're considering excluding sorry, including expanding protections in this legislation as it does move forward.

I urge you to take this step and expand the current draft to include the key payout policies, including a pay floor of minimum wage plus expenses with tips and top flexibility protections and meaningful transparency about prices and pay rates.

I know you have already heard from dozens of workers in public comment previously and hundreds more via email about how important it is to address subminimum wages, flexibility, and transparency in the gig economy.

And today, you'll continue to hear directly from workers about how critical and urgent these issues are.

I also wanted to make sure you're aware of the broad and growing coalition of immigrant rights organizations, worker rights orgs, housing justice orgs, and other community-based organizations who have officially signed on to support the Pay Up campaign.

including Casa Latina, Civic Ventures, El Centro de la Raza, LGBTQ Allyship, National Employment Law Project One America, Seattle Restaurants United, SEIU 775, Teamsters 117, Washington Low Income Housing Alliance, and many others, some of whom you'll be hearing from today as well.

Together, we're calling on you to expand our city labor standards and end what is effectively a subminimum wage for the most marginalized workers.

those who rely on gig work, including people of color, immigrants, workers with disabilities, and single parents.

I encourage you to listen to these workers, expand the scope of this legislation, and help jumpstart an equitable recovery by making the gig economy pay up.

Thanks so much for your time.

Thank you, Powell.

The next person is Nancy.

Good morning, Nancy.

Hi.

Good morning City Council.

My name is Nancy Callahan and I am excited to be here.

I have quite a story.

I I am a survivor of domestic violence and I have lived through many chapters of the kind of power and control where jobs were affected for many, many years.

So when the gig economy came along for me, it was such a godsend because my health had started to deteriorate so much.

That I finally had to apply for disability after losing so many jobs.

So when there was the opportunity to start working for Uber and Lyft in 2016, I was overjoyed.

I finally had something that was in my control.

I mean, as long as you were able to provide yourself with the vehicle and upkeep all of the business expenses.

So at that time it was perfect for me.

And of course I was only doing it part time and.

I loved it and enjoyed it while trying to finish a bachelor's degree to try to better myself.

During that time, I learned just how difficult it was to maintain all of the expenses and make any money at all.

simultaneously, even though it was so wonderful.

I mean, it was, it was just turning money and there wasn't very much protections, but for me, it was a godsend because I at least had a way to make some money.

And I know that there's many other victims or survivors or other people in disability situations or various situations that do gig work for that very reason.

So, um, I just want to, um, We're really counting on the Seattle City Council to help gig workers by taking up the payout policy this year just because of the things that I have watched happen in terms of how expensive it can be to keep going to maintain yourself, yet it might be the only thing that you can find to do for work.

And so I'm definitely not the only one in this boat.

There's so many of us.

Here we are today.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Nancy.

Thanks for sharing your story.

Really appreciate it.

The next person that we have is Lata.

Lata, you are still listed as not present.

I'll go on to the next three people.

You can still dial in.

The next three are Kidane Benye, Jeremy Newton, and Katie Wilson.

Good morning, Kidane.

All right.

We can hear you.

Can I talk?

Yes, please go ahead.

Okay.

My name is Kidani Bejenen.

I am a gig worker.

I work for Uber, Lyft, also for Amazon Prime.

Today, I'm going to say something what I experienced with these companies.

I'm here to give some example about how what is being paid for below the minimum wage, and we need Seattle to prioritize raising our pay and setting standards in the industry.

I was working for Amazon for three years.

After three years, they deactivated my account.

The reason they said that is your selfie doesn't match with our photograph we have on fire.

So basically, there are two reasons I'm going to put it here.

It can be, because I have a little bit, I'm a computer savvy too, it can be the colored people or the minorities that have issue with the artificial intelligence software problems, as well as also Amazon, they are doing a lot of tactics to remove people or drivers who are experienced, they stay with them for a long time because they know the system very well, and then they can't make money from these drivers.

For example, Uh, they tell you that you have tips, but they just take it back.

Even, uh, they don't pay you.

Even sometimes what they do is sometimes they give you like a two hour blocks.

They call it blocks two hours, $40.

For example, you just come up for that $40.

All of a sudden they send you like, uh, Kent say that all the way up to Tacoma area.

And then they say, I don't want to go.

You have to go because you sign for it, they say to you.

So basically, the city has to have some kind of policies or regulations to control this stuff and then to fight for the rights of these gig workers.

Besides that, I want to say a little bit also about the Uber and the Lyft as well, because the driver, they got harassed by like passengers.

They don't care about the drivers because they don't have anybody to defend for themselves.

So I'm a victim of that myself.

Oh, thank you.

Thank you so much for sharing both of those examples.

And we would appreciate any additional information if you can send it to counsel at Seattle.

Thank you very much for your time this morning.

Jeremy, you are up next.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Hi, my name is Jeremy, and I'm a gig worker currently with Instacart, formerly Grubhub and Amazon Flex, and I'm a member of the Pay Up campaign.

I'm here because Seattle gig workers are still being paid less than minimum wage, and we need Seattle to prioritize raising our pay and setting standards in the industry.

I started doing gig work because I was going to school and needed a job that worked with my schedule, and I had also been injured recently, so I needed something that wasn't too physically demanding.

Most recently, I've been doing Instacart to cover my rent and also to help some friends in financial need during the pandemic.

I accepted orders that looked decent, but I couldn't tell exactly how long they would take.

And some of those orders ended up taking so long time-wise that I made $10 an hour or less, not even counting gas and mileage.

And I was waiting for the bad orders to be evened out or balanced out by good orders, because I assumed that's how it would work.

But it didn't really seem to happen that way.

So this year, I ended up having to make some major repairs on my car due to the wear and tear of putting so many miles on it.

And I didn't realize until then just how much cost there was in mileage.

And those repairs were so expensive and I needed my car to work that I had to go into debt.

And I still have, I'm still dealing with that debt.

And I can't afford basic things like a new pair of glasses.

So many good workers are led to believe if they invest time into it, they'll make enough to be worth it.

But when you actually add up the cost, which is gas and mileage, you realize that it wasn't a good deal at all.

So we need transparency and we need Seattle to pass the payout policy for gig workers.

Thank you.

Great.

Thank you.

And good morning, Katie.

Hi there, council members.

This is Katie Wilson representing the Transit Riders Union.

I'm speaking today in support of gig workers' demands for higher pay, transparency, and flexibility.

Thank you for taking up this issue today.

Seattle deserves to be proud of our labor standards laws, which are some of the strongest in the country.

Our city was among the first in the nation to pass paid sick leave, a $15 an hour minimum wage, secure scheduling, and more.

But the growing gig economy is left out of these laws.

Workers for companies like DoorDash, Instacart, and TaskRabbit are not guaranteed a minimum wage.

They shoulder all the risk and often have no idea how much they're going to make in a given week or why rates change.

Subminimum wages and unpredictable pay make it impossible to plan your life.

How are you supposed to be confident that you can even pay your rent?

This is unacceptable.

And the problem is growing.

Many workers who lost their jobs during the pandemic have turned to gig work to make ends meet.

Delivery jobs have expanded rapidly along with the rest of the gig economy.

On behalf of the Transit Riders Union, I hope you'll listen to the calls of gig workers for higher pay and transparency while preserving their flexibility.

Gig workers absolutely deserve a pay floor that guarantees they'll make at least minimum wage after expenses, and not including tips.

We wouldn't accept anything less than that minimum standard for other workers, and we should demand it for gig workers, too.

Gig workers deserve to know how their pay is being calculated.

Gig worker wages should not be a black box.

I hope you'll act with urgency to start regulating this industry that so far operates according to its own rules.

Seattle can again lead on raising labor standards as we have so many times before.

Please don't leave gig workers behind.

Thanks for hearing my testimony today.

Thank you, Katie.

The next three people are Alex Bacon, Lindsay Franklin, and Ariel Ordon.

Good morning, Alex.

Good morning, council members.

My name is Alex.

I'm a gig worker on Uber Eats and DoorDash and a member of the Pay Up campaign.

I live in the U District and drive primarily in North and Central Seattle.

I'm here because my family depends on my wages from driving for these apps to contribute to our basics, rent, food, health care, child care.

And I need a reliable wage floor, a guarantee virtually every other worker in our city enjoys except for gig workers.

There is currently no minimum wage for workers like me, and in order to make the advertised 20 to 25 bucks an hour that the app claim is possible, workers like me are forced to run multiple apps simultaneously while driving, accepting and declining orders even while on the freeway.

Although I drive defensively, I fear it is only a matter of time before I get into an accident and injure someone or myself, which for many drivers means an end to this kind of work, a totaled car, and even worse.

If I accept a, quote, bad order where the combination of pay and tip won't allow me to make above the minimum wage, which is true with the majority of the so-called offers I get on Uber Eats and DoorDash, then I'm stuck stressing whether I'm going to make my goal that hour and whether I'll even be making money as a driver that day after factoring in expenses like additional insurance, maintenance, and gas.

And even with my system, without customer tips, I would never make the Seattle minimum wage of $16.69 an hour.

These bad orders are not going undelivered for the most part, unfortunately, and instead other drivers I see are picking them up.

I can only imagine the financial desperation and limited options that leads a worker to work for less than the minimum wage and keep coming back and ask you all to pass the pay up policy for gig workers in 2021 to lift up all workers.

Thank you very much.

The next person is Lindsay.

Good morning, Lindsay.

Good morning, Chair Mosqueda, Vice Chair Herbold, and members of the committee.

My name is Lindsay Franklin, and I'm a constituent of 98122 and a second year law student at Seattle University.

But I'm here today in my capacity as a volunteer organizer for the People's Parity Project.

The People's Parity Project is a nationwide network of law students and new attorneys organizing to unrig the legal system and build a justice system that values people over profit.

As law students, we believe we have a responsibility to demystify and dismantle the coercive legal tools that have stacked the system against the people.

We're fighting for a justice system that works for working people, especially those from marginalized and oppressed communities.

I'm here today in support and in solidarity with the gig workers of Seattle who are calling on the city council to pass permanent laws that raise the working standards for gig workers.

Companies assert that gig workers are not protected by the same labor standards as other workers, so many of these companies are paying workers less than the minimum wage.

with some companies paying as little as $2 per job.

As you've heard today, these workers are suffering due to the actions of these companies.

Raising pay and other labor standards is one way that the Seattle City Council can address the independent contractor loophole and labor standards while maintaining the flexibility of the job that is important to these workers.

The People's Parity Project strongly urges the committee to take up broad policy recommendations that properly addresses the issues gig workers have been raising around pay, flexibility, and transparency.

I want to say thank you for your time and please take action to support gig workers by passing the recommendations in the pay up campaign.

Thank you.

Hello, can you hear me?

Yes, thank you for bearing with me.

I'm sorry, I could not get myself off of mute.

Is this Ariel?

Yes, this is Ariel.

Wonderful.

Please go ahead, Ariel.

So I'm Ariel.

I'm a gig worker with a wonderful platform right now called TaskRabbit.

I am a member of the pay up campaign as well.

And I I volunteered this year with VITA through United Way of King County.

So I volunteered assistance with tax prep for many other gig workers.

And I just want to share my experience.

I started out as a single mom with building my own business from scratch, initially as a gig worker.

I, you know, I had to learn a lot of things along the way.

And I realized a lot of people who start out in gig work, they really don't know how to run their own business.

And this has created an environment for gig platforms to take advantage of a lot of people who are really in need.

So people with disabilities, single moms, immigrants, people who really don't have a lot of options in the traditional job market.

So, yeah, I think it's really important that we do provide protections for gig workers, especially those new to the arena of small businesses and running your own business.

I've seen people report their income taxes from platforms like Instacart, DoorDash, and more.

And, you know, they are showing either they barely break even or they take a business loss.

And that's really unacceptable.

We need protection and we need them now.

And I don't know, there's not a lot more I want to say.

So thank you for your time.

Thank you very much for calling in this morning.

The next three speakers that we have listed are Jason Reeves, David Hines, and then I'll go back to Lata Ahmed.

Lata, again, you are still not listed as present, but we'll call you last.

OK, go ahead, Jason.

Good morning.

Do we have Jason with us today?

Yes, Jason's on the line.

Hey, Jason, if you can hear me, just star six to unmute yourself.

There you go.

Okay.

Sorry about that.

Hello.

My name is Jason.

I've talked to you all before.

Um, I'm a gig worker.

I've done this for six years now.

Uh, worked in Seattle.

I've worked in Tacoma.

I worked all up and down the corridor.

What I have seen has been talked about here all from many different experiences, and I'm here to say it's very true.

We need Seattle City Council to really help to back us up here.

We need standards.

from the working Washington policy that is important and it affects most communities, including those of immigrants, single parent households, which you've heard from disabled workers, which we've heard from communities of color, which I am part of.

And above all else, the essential workers that have been providing the frontline you know, keeping people connected, providing foods and services throughout this pandemic.

The creation of pay standards, tips on top, and transparency as laid out in our policies, clear framework that would help the worker and those who have been marginalized out of even earning a decent living and reclaim some of their power.

Just like other people mentioned today, found gig work because I needed something flexible.

As a student, I'm an animator, so I need a lot of time to do a lot of art.

So this worked out until I came around to tag season the first time.

And I thought, no, it has to be something I did wrong.

Came around to the next tag season.

And again, I was at a loss and even farther behind.

And this trend has continued.

And the lack of standards is really what's hurting us here.

Guys, please back us up.

Support working Washington's pay up policy.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Jason.

And then we have David.

Good morning, David.

Good morning, City Council.

I think it's time to finally solve the homeless crisis with the American Recovery Act money.

Too many people have suffered at the hands of policies that imploded first world society.

There has been too many policies that are correlated to the homeless crisis proliferated throughout this region.

And it's high time that we solve an oppressive problem that's been furthered by the lack of accountability with government and non-government partnerships who are using the homeless as a lifetime career, trading reelection support for Democratic Party loyalty and protection from investigation at the expense of innocent homeless people being predatorized by all the evil criminals who have been exempted from jail by the city council, the mayor, and the prosecutor's offices, who should be overthrown out of principle of endangering our lives.

Speaking of endangering lives, we need to boycott and ban all american recovery act money from the so-called public defenders association who should change their name because all they're doing is aiding and abetting evil criminals and acting like they're the most sophisticated liberals in the history of man-made important comments directed at council members that'd be great uh...

please direct your comments to city council All right, well, shame on the Public Defenders Association who does nothing but run interference for that evil that conducts uncivil war on community with self-destructive suicidal customs violations embraced by political operatives and donors using wraparound services that discriminate against innocent, sober, drug-free homeless citizens and prioritize housing and services.

David, I'm going to ask you to keep your comments directed to City Council and the items on the agenda.

Go ahead.

Well, stop giving money to the Public Defenders Association who's running interference for the criminals who are making life a living hell.

Thank you, David.

And the last person that we have is Lata.

Is Lata still present?

Okay.

That does conclude our public testimony for today.

Thank you all very much for dialing in and really appreciate the breadth of the examples and personal stories that we heard today.

Thank you all for your time this morning.

Next, we're going to go ahead and get on to items of business.

Madam Clerk, will you please read item one into the record?

Item number one, American Rescue Plan Act Community Panel for briefing and discussion.

Thank you very much and good morning to you.

Thank you for staffing us as always in our finance and housing committee.

Today, we have a handful of organizations and individuals who are present.

I want to welcome Phoebe said Anderson from child care resources, Matt Landers from greater Seattle business association, the GSBA.

Mallory Van Abema from Housing Development Consortium, Derek Belgrade from Chief Seattle Club, Chloe Gale from REACH, Tara Dearborn from Public Defenders, and Victor Liu from Asian Counseling and Referral Services.

Are you all with us today?

Wonderful.

If you are there, if you could raise your hand in the chat function, that will allow for you to stay at the top of our sheet here as we watch the panel presentation.

And if you can just keep your hand raised, then I think it'll pop up at the top of our screens.

And then as you speak, the Seattle Channel will be able to broadcast you to our entire viewing audience.

Really appreciate you being here with us today.

We have dedicated the first part of our meeting to really hear directly from folks who have been working with some of our most vulnerable community members throughout this pandemic and before.

As many of you have spoken to us before, you have illustrated and highlighted the ways in which COVID did not create the crisis that many of your clients and families and.

Members that you're working with, it did not create many of the crises that they're going through.

It, in many ways, exacerbated them or exposed some of the inequities that were already in the system.

So we've asked you here today to give us a little example of the ways in which you are seeing COVID manifest in communities that you're serving and to provide for us some examples of the ways in which you'd like to see the American Rescue Plan Act dollars be used in the future.

We did have the chance last month, I'm sorry, last meeting, to hear from other council members as well, including in Austin and in Denver and in Minneapolis.

And many of the stories that we heard from those cities resonated with what we're hearing here.

A strong interest in making sure that we're stabilizing the foundation of what working families and small businesses, parents or caregivers need, and really how we're addressing this crisis of homelessness and housing through some of these dollars.

So much of us, many of us have had the chance to talk with individuals over the past few months and year to hear how you are responding to the crisis of COVID.

But this is our huge opportunity for us to talk about the tranches of funds that are coming through our American Rescue Plan Act dollars.

So as a reminder, The city is about to receive $239 million over the course of two installments.

The first installment will be about $119 million.

So today's bill that we'll discuss later is actually just a carryover from the first round of COVID relief funds that Congress allocated.

And what we're excited to hear from you all is actually what do we do next with the $119 million that's about to come forward?

You've seen our resolution.

That resolution was informed by past conversations we've had with all of you.

The values and principles associated with how we want to protect our most vulnerable and really invest in small businesses and create a thriving, local, more equitable economy is what is in our resolution.

And now it's time for action.

So we will be pulling together our recommendations for how to use those COVID relief dollars in the two meetings in May.

So this really helps us with those conversations.

Thank you all very much for your presentation today in advance and again you have about five minutes.

I want to welcome Council Member Juarez.

Thank you very much Council Member Juarez.

I let folks know you'd be joining us around 10 a.m.

and you are prompt as usual.

Thank you.

So let's go ahead and start.

Why don't we have Phoebe speak first, then we'll do Matt, Mallory, Derek, Chloe, Tara, and end with Victor.

And I didn't give you a proper introduction, so as you begin speaking, if you could introduce yourself for the record and let folks know a little bit about the organization and the folks you represent.

Again, we'll start with Phoebe.

Good morning, Phoebe.

Hey, I'm just going to share screen.

Are you all seeing this?

Yes.

Thank you.

Okay.

Well, thank you.

Council Member Mosqueda and members of the committee.

It's great to be here to talk about everything that's going on.

I'm the CEO of Child Care Resources.

We are a 30 year organization.

We have been helping families find and navigate and pay for early learning through state.

We have a statewide no cost call center.

We have a very specific focus on families experiencing housing instability.

We work with a vast family friend and neighbor network across.

across, actually, frankly, across the state as well as in other states.

And we do a lot of work with families around navigating subsidy and advocating around our state system.

On the flip side, we have about 60 coaches and trainers who are on the ground working with our licensed child care providers.

We work across King and Pierce County and we have been implementing our state's quality rating improvement system, early achievers.

We have a very specific focus on infant early childhood mental health as well.

So we've been really.

Expanding that and.

And as you can imagine, over the last year, our work has changed dramatically.

It has really been working with families and providers in whatever way they needed to navigate COVID.

So for providers, it was really about helping them sustain, adjust to the shifting landscape, try to stay open, get as much PPE supplies as they could, and then really thinking about how to support families as they're experiencing so much trauma.

So that's a bit of who we are.

I wanted to just give a sense of sort of like the landscape of child care right now in Seattle.

We're looking at about 689 providers.

It's about 25,000 slots.

The majority of child care, which is consistent around the state and the county, is family child care.

So that really is a much smaller volume, up to 12 children, mixed age, in-home.

This is where we start seeing non-traditional hours, so overnight and extended care that's really flexible to shift work.

We see the most culturally and racially responsive child care in these settings.

And I think the best is an important thing to think about as we think about small business and the impact of it.

And then about 30%, 7% of our child care is centers, which is, as you can sort of imagine being much larger, all different sizes, separate classrooms.

About 30% of children and child care on subsidy.

Working Connections is our state child care subsidy, as you know.

And in Seattle, we currently only have about 31 sites licensed for overnight care.

And that's significant as we think about all the flexible care, the shift work.

And that's, you know, I think supply is going to be a considerable issue.

And so I just want to sort of leave that information there.

More than 60% of the available childcare slots are preschool and school age.

So we know that infants and toddlers has been a dropping supply and we really need to think about that as we're thinking about getting families back to work.

About a third of all childcare in King County is in Seattle.

And what we're seeing based on census numbers is that for every.

Every, like, available slot, there's, there's a minimum of 3 kids vying for that slot in some areas.

It's much higher.

And the significance of that is, you know, is that we have just had a very competitive market and we're seeing families unable to.

unable to find care, unable to pay for care.

And all of this has sort of been exacerbated with the impacts of COVID.

Access and supply are the two things that I think are the most important for us to consider.

So if we're seeing supply drop, then families are just going to fight over fewer slots.

The good news is that we had a significant drop in child care during COVID, but we're seeing reopenings.

There's only about 8% of the centers are still closed and only about 5% of family child care.

Family child care never really closed.

That's the most community responsive Child care people trying to keep their doors open struggling.

And just because we have open sites, it doesn't mean that they're sustaining or stable, but it does mean that we have something to work with.

And I think that's really important.

Seattle has invested heavily in the Seattle Preschool Program, which is great.

We are seeing ECAP and Head Start as well.

But as we see more preschool, we really have seen a drop in infant care.

It's more expensive to run because of the smaller ratios, and we're a highly regulated state.

So there's a lot of expectations.

But we have to increase the supply of infant and toddler care.

In our state, working connections is our primary subsidy.

What we have seen for years, and it's, again, been exacerbated with COVID, is that the reimbursement rate from the state does not meet the cost of running childcare, especially in Seattle.

Like, it is just amplified in a place that has such a high median income.

And the things are getting better, but I do see that a place where the American Recovery Act can really support families and providers at the same time.

And I'm going to get into that.

This is a workforce that often has no medical or retirement benefits.

And that sort of blew up as we were watching COVID happen.

So if somebody needed to not be at work because they had been exposed or at risk, there was no safety net.

And we have to fix that because what we're seeing is really high cost of turnover and an instability in the workforce, which means it's an instability for families who are trying to maintain work, maintain jobs.

What we have seen because of COVID in King County is about a 46% decrease in income for child care businesses.

So that's significant.

So the ones that are open are just hanging on by a thread.

And we are trying to support them as best we can.

And 50% of Washington's child care workforce are people of color.

So this is a significant equity issue for us.

I'm trying to talk quickly because I know there's a lot going on today.

I don't want to go through this whole slide, but we've had a significant task force happening in the state of Washington with a lot of great stakeholders.

And finally, reports are coming out about really what they're finding.

I'm just going to point you to the final three bullets, which really are support is needed for providers participating in the state's child care subsidy program.

So we really need to think about working connections.

We need competitive living wages and access to health care for child care providers if we are going to support the sustainability of this infrastructure.

And we need to do some major change.

So the good news is the Fair Start Act in the legislature is going to make some significant changes.

It's not going to fix everything by any means, and it's going to be slow.

So as we sort of think about the next few years, this American Recovery Act funding is timed really well.

What it will fix, which is significant, is the co-pay issue that families in poverty have been dealing with working connections for years.

That it has been reaching cliff-like levels where families cannot choose to take the subsidy anymore, and they're pulling kids out of childcare.

So there will be some changes there.

And the most significant change is that we're moving from a federal poverty level as our metric of qualification to a state median income.

So that's great for families because we will see more families able to access working connections subsidy.

But what it's also going to do is it's going to put a lot of pressure on our supply.

So if we do not make sure that we stabilize our current providers and even increase, we will not be able to address the ability of more families to actually afford child care, which I mean, it's kind of a good problem to have.

We want more more families, but we really need to make sure that there's places for them to go.

Thank you so much, Phoebe.

Okay, so I'm so so this is just sort of the last 1. so I would suggest and what I'm what we're thinking about is.

Continuing to think about childcare vouchers for families who are ineligible for working connections.

So that's undocumented children.

That's a significant group that will never access working connections.

And then also all of the families that sit between the eligibility line and actually making living wages.

So in Seattle, there's a huge swath of families in poverty who are not eligible for working connections because they make too much money, but they do not make enough money to afford rent, childcare, et cetera.

We need to incentivize infant and toddler care.

And I think that we can do that with providers and really bulk up the supply.

Continue to invest in recruitment and expansion of our existing supply.

And then this is the one that I think is probably the most interesting and innovative, is really that some of these funds could be used to pay child care providers the difference between the working connections, reimbursement, and market.

Because what we're going to see is more providers taking working connections as it slowly increases, which is great.

But in Seattle, it will never reach market rate.

And so providers are not going to be able to sustain their business model and actually do things like healthcare and have adequate staff and handle all of that.

I think this is an area that could be a really wonderful investment for the dollars because it could absolutely right-size childcare in Seattle, and we could be a model.

It would be an amazing pilot.

Thank you so much.

No clue.

Phoebe, that was wonderful.

Thank you very much.

And Farideh Cuevas is sending the PowerPoint slide to everybody in the second floor, including our LAs and Ali Panucci to share with central staff.

So thank you.

And folks, feel free to just speak if you don't have a PowerPoint.

No problem at all.

I appreciate all of the presenters here today.

We will go on to the next person, who is Matt.

And Matt, if you can introduce yourself.

Thank you very much, Phoebe.

We really appreciate your presentation this morning.

And folks, we're going to do questions at the end.

So please do take note of the questions that you have.

And we'll get to Councilmember questions.

Good morning, Matt.

Good morning.

Thank you, Councilmembers.

I'm really happy to be a part of this panel today.

My name is Matt Landers.

I use he, him pronouns.

And I am the Director of Public Policy and Government Relations at GSBA, which is Washington's LGBTQ and Allied Chamber of Commerce, as well as the Capitol Hill Business Alliance representing that neighborhood.

We had about 1,400 members pre-pandemic, including hundreds in Seattle itself.

But of course, our members, like small businesses around the country, around the world, have been hurting really bad.

We estimate that around a quarter of our members have permanently closed their doors in the last year.

Relief efforts have been slow to materialize and they often don't come close to addressing the true scope of the economic crisis and we recognize that that would be nearly impossible given the scale that we are dealing with.

However, there are a lot of small pieces of the puzzle that we think the city can help address that can come together to revitalize our neighborhoods and our small businesses.

I think first and foremost, we want to urge the city to keep the laser focus on the sectors and the demographics who've been hit hardest by the pandemic.

This includes doubling down on the city's focus on investments on BIPOC, LGBTQ-owned, and women-owned small businesses.

This includes restaurants, arts and entertainment venues, small retail, really the entire hospitality and service sectors.

They often have the thinnest margins and employ so many people in Washington and they are having the hardest time coming back.

And I think related to the previous speaker, across the board it is also recognized that childcare is essential to an economic recovery for employees, for those businesses, for all of us all around.

But across the board, the number one most needed piece of assistance that we hear from our members is that need for that direct cash assistance.

So we hope that with these federal dollars, you can allocate some more of them to the Small Business Stabilization Fund.

We know it seems small in the big scheme of things, but this direct cash really does help.

And then as more people are vaccinated, as it is safer to do more things indoors, and as this glorious weather is coming back to Seattle and Seattleites want to be outside more often, doing everything possible to facilitate a fuller reopening, again, as safety allows.

I think first and foremost among this, an ease in permitting.

making it easier wherever possible, whether that's sidewalk cafes, sidewalk sales, streetery, street festivals, any of those options, of course, I think of the ones that come to mind first.

Extend those permits far out, waive the fees where possible, and then make them easier for the businesses to get.

With so many empty commercial spaces around the city, we want to make it easier for new entrepreneurs also to be able to get established quickly and fill those physical holes in our neighborhood.

In late 2019 and early 2020, the mayor's office was leading a pretty good effort with a lot of the departments on cutting red tape and easing permitting.

We need to keep that up, but it's not quite enough.

We've still got some room to improve here.

Again, plenty of good work with SDOT and OPCD, but we need to make sure that it's actually working for those small businesses on the ground, that they're actually able to act in a timely manner as we are reopening pretty quickly.

For example, we do have a member in Wallingford who's been trying to get an outdoor seating area.

Their permit was waiting with OPCB for seven months and then was rejected kind of out of hand because of an argument over a potential 0.1% difference in slope of the sidewalk and that structures for lighting and heating, generally considered essential for outdoor dining, were deemed decorative instead of essential.

So first we need more people in to adjust this permitting backlog as much as possible to get those permitting permits out there as we approach the summer season.

And we urge the city to, wherever possible, work collaboratively and with those small businesses to find that common cause.

Start that conversation with the business owner so that they can address the permitting concerns and get to the solutions that work for everyone, that allow that business to reopen, hire back their employees, get more revenue into the city, and support our revitalizing neighborhoods there.

And as has been often brought up in council, as the eviction moratoria at some point come to an end, we need that assistance with commercial tenants as well with leases.

We need to make sure that those neighborhood businesses that still exist, that have managed to hold on this far, that they can stay in our neighborhoods.

We don't want them to see them ejected just because they went through the hardest economic year in memory, and they've got work to catch up on, we want to make it as easy as possible for them to stay there, to stay in business, to keep their employees.

Across all neighborhoods, we have heard requests from our businesses for assistance from the city on graffiti cleanup.

I think we can see that whenever we go out.

And then finally, any marketing and promotion efforts that the city can assist with to encourage Seattleites to shop small, to patronize their neighborhood businesses that support their community.

We know it's not the easiest option always, and it's not often the cheapest option, but it has the biggest impact all around us when we support the small businesses in our communities.

And we'll take that concerted and collective effort for us to restore our neighborhood business districts as we are able to open up this year.

But I really appreciate the time you've all been able to give me this morning, and I look forward to answering any questions.

So thank you.

Appreciate it, Matt.

Thank you for being here again.

And we look forward to having more discussion.

The next person that I have on my list is Mallory.

Good morning, Mallory.

Good morning, everyone.

I'm Mallory Van Abema.

I'm the Policy and Advocacy Manager with the Housing Development Consortium of Seattle King County, or HDC, and we are a nonprofit association with over 190 organizational members, all actively working to meet the affordable housing needs of all residents within King County.

And our members design, develop, finance, and operate affordable housing communities in Seattle and surrounding cities and adapted big time to COVID-19 when the pandemic came on.

It introduced a new layer of challenges into our regional housing ecosystem.

And we saw some incredible adaptation from direct service providers, developers themselves, and of course, residents accessing services as well.

So we see the American Rescue Plan as a really vital piece of the puzzle to ensure that renters and homeowners are able to maintain housing stability.

This is a top priority for us.

And we see that renters in particular in the state, the most recent census poll survey shows that we have an estimated 12% of renters who are still behind on rent across Washington.

And the housing provisions that are in the American Rescue Plan We are very pleased to see the emergency rental assistance included in the package and just urge the city to swiftly allocate these resources to renters in our community, really employing the lessons learned from previous rental assistance administration to ensure that equitable distribution of resources is achieved, prioritizing language access, working with community-based organizations, a hub and spokes model, just taking lessons learned so that folks are not waiting on a waitlist for a long time, trying to cobble together resources that are difficult to accumulate.

We're pleased to see the housing counseling funding in the plan, and it's incredibly important that an unintended consequence of the foreclosure moratorium at the state level was that deposits into the state's foreclosure prevention program were halted.

And those resources would supplement that program itself and support mediation and foreclosure prevention counseling for homeowners that are on the edge at this time.

And we're also pleased to see the Homeowner Assistance Fund.

I think there's a total in the federal package of $10 billion.

That's going to aid homeowners directly who've fallen behind on mortgages and utility payments.

So to avoid foreclosure, which we know can be a very difficult challenge and hurdle to recover from.

I think another component of the rescue plan that's really exciting is an investment in fair housing activities.

So we know that housing discrimination happens.

It's really difficult to enforce.

And there's $20 million within the federal plan to strengthen enforcement, to provide investigative resources for discrimination complaints.

And it is so desperately needed when we've had quite a rollback with our previous federal administration on fair housing laws.

So it's great to see that investment there.

And we are looking forward to folks being able to access the legal supports and counseling that is available through the Attorney General's office.

And we also know that new housing options are badly needed.

And I know that this council and this community knows that very well.

And we really continue to strongly support the leadership of the Seattle City Council on ensuring that deeply affordable housing and housing with embedded services is available.

And you've taken great steps also to support frontline workers.

The HSD wage inflation was a really huge win for direct service social.

social service providers, yet they're still being asked to shoulder an incredible burden in a system that is under-resourced when it comes to mental behavioral health services and also substance use treatment disorders.

So we really need to do better in supporting frontline staff, adequately compensating them even beyond potentially the phenomenal work that's happened recently from this council.

They are essentially standing in the gap in a system that's under-resourced to support them in their work.

We also see the huge asset of investment in housing choice vouchers from the American Rescue Plan as a great way to get folks that are either currently experiencing homelessness or at risk, survivors of domestic violence, other folks that are struggling to get into housing, to be able to use the resources that are being invested into the Housing Choice Voucher Program to secure housing in their desired neighborhood, which is wonderful.

And we have an extensive wait list, thousands of households on both, I believe, the Seattle Housing Authority and King County Housing Authority wait list for those vouchers.

So it's excellent to see an investment there and we're very pleased about that.

I think further, we wanna see the wonderful work of this council around permanent supportive housing complemented by the investments from this plan.

The Home Investment Partnership Program is going to deliver resources that can help us as a community acquire, rehab, and construct permanent supportive housing at a swift pace.

And so we're very pleased to see that.

It complements all the work of King County Council, Seattle Council, that have really put an emphasis on scaling the production of permanent supportive housing recognizing that it's a very proven solution to ending experiences of homelessness for many.

And it's going to complement the work and expedite the production.

And we are very pleased to see that come through.

So beyond that, I think that we also just want to see these resources as rapidly deployed as possible, particularly when we're talking about rental assistance and mortgage assistance.

I think high level, we are very intent on adequately supporting and shoring up our frontline staff, because they are asked to do really difficult work.

And we as a state have not done very well on our mental health system and providing access to treatment when folks want it when that door is open.

So we're very pleased to be here.

I'm very pleased to be here with you today.

And I think we are excited about what this plan can do for residents in the city of Seattle and We are also just pleased to hear all the other priorities from the other organizations that have presented today.

And thank you so much for having us.

Of course, thank you very much, Mallory.

And I should also note that while we're dealing with the Coronavirus Relief Fund today, we're doing ARPA next, the American Rescue Plan Act next in May.

We will soon be dealing with the Jumpstart Implementation Efforts and the 2021-2022 budget.

So all of these ideas are great.

We're trying to capture as many of them as we can so that if we don't get it all into ARPA, we can then sequence coming forward.

So I just want to make sure that you all put all ideas out there so that we can continue to try to capture those.

Derek, thank you so very much for being here today.

And if you can introduce yourself, that'd be wonderful, and look forward to hearing from you.

Good morning, everybody.

I'm Derek Belgar.

I'm Deputy Director for Chief Seattle Club.

So Chief Seattle Club, we are a nonprofit downtown Rainier Square.

primarily served the urban Native American community and targeting homelessness and chronic homelessness really mostly.

Early on, we were historically probably a day center, just so everybody knows, you know, do the hot meals, the showers, the laundry, the rest area, that type of thing.

But we've really grown the last several years, the last five, six, seven years, we've expanded our services.

We have wrapped around everything from domestic violence, sexual assault counseling, to mental health.

You know, we have a housing service team, you know, rapid rehousing, eviction prevention, all those things.

We have an art room.

We have a workforce development program.

Yeah, we just really have a really holistic model.

And our mission is to create sacred space to affirm, renew, and nurture the spirit of our urban Native people.

I always tell people that it's not about feeding people.

It's not about building housing.

Our thing is to actually give our community sense of belonging again and re-heal their spirit.

So we provide everything in Indigenous holistic way.

We believe in treating the whole person, not just physical symptoms of homelessness.

We know our people are suffering emotionally and spiritually as well.

So we provide a lot of cultural appropriate services, sweat lodge, other ceremonies, talking circles, even our AA, we provide well brighter to the native spin on that program.

So everything we do is very culturally appropriate and relevant.

That's why we reach into our community very well.

Before pandemic, we were serving about 130 to 150 natives a day at our day center.

Right now, our numbers, because the pandemic is really off, but because we're serving a lot of food outside our doors, we're not checking, you know, we can't check everybody in and we're serving a lot of non-T-South members.

But our numbers have really dwindled down.

This pandemic is really destructive to our community as far as our model and our mission of bringing people together and building community.

It's really blown that up with not being able to bring people together.

Um, for ceremony or just to break bread and actually place.

Cause I, one thing I don't like really call it yourself club is a, as a day center, because it's more than that.

It's really a social hub for our native community to come together and actually feel part of the community again, because it's sitting isolated out of it.

Um, that being said, a lot of things that we've done over the last several years, targeting housing, we've got two projects we're currently working on.

And the third one, uh, all is about 50% done.

Here in October 1st, it will be completed.

We'll start lease up and that'll provide 80 units of low-income housing with the Seattle Indian Health Board partnering with a clinic on the ground floor.

We'll have a cafe on the ground floor.

And then about that same time, we'll be breaking ground on our second project with permanent supportive housing of 125 units in Lake City Way.

That'll be done in the fall of 2022. At that point, we'll have 200 units of housing target in our community.

But as we know, that ain't enough.

We need so much more.

And so we're talking about some of these future dollars, especially this ARPA.

I would like to see it enable ways for organizations to build more assets and build more capacity, especially smaller organizations as well.

You know, we know these small organizations that don't have access to funding have access to very marginalized pockets of communities that large organizations don't.

So I'd like to see an investment in that area.

And yeah, and just in assets.

And another issue that's federal funding that comes through usually has a cap of 10% on admin costs.

And it seems the way things are going, programs and services, all that is getting more stringent.

coupled with less cap on that, which creates a nightmare trying to get the services done in an efficient and effective way.

So maybe creative ways to also lend unrestricted city dollars to actually offset some of that burden.

But yeah, definitely.

Like some of our short goals for Chief Seattle Club, we know we need to actually buy, acquire a reentry house for people coming out of the prison system, jail system, integrate back in.

And we're having a hard time trying to make that work without having to lease one.

So that's an asset we know that we need here in the short term.

We also know we need safe houses for women fleeing, people fleeing from domestic violence, sexual assault.

And we also know we need elder housing.

It's going to be a long, long, long uphill climb to actually get to where our community needs to be.

So I'd like to see a lot of that funding go that direction.

And I would just imagine a lot of other communities that aren't native actually have some of the same similar issues of trying to acquire some of those things.

One thing we do know, with our track record at Two South Club, The best success comes from community-led, community-driven approaches.

Like I said, we serve 130, 150 Native Americans a day.

Native Americans are 1% of the population.

We know they're 50% of the homelessness rate.

Because they're all coming to our doors.

We need to expand our capacity.

Maybe not even Chief Sealth, but just like all the Native organizations need to get that capacity built up to actually start serving our community.

And I'm sure a lot of, like I said, a lot of the communities I'm sure are the same way.

So I think we need to invest heavily in some of these smaller organizations, give them a chance to build their capacity to that next level to serve their communities.

Eric, that's wonderful.

Thank you very much.

And I'm taking notes as you speak.

Thanks for being here today.

Good to see you again.

Thank you.

The next person we have is Chloe.

Good morning, Chloe.

Hi, good morning.

Thanks for including me, council members.

And Derek is a hard act to follow because they do such beautiful work and it's wonderful to hear him speak.

I'm here from the REACH program.

I'm a co-director of the REACH program.

And I'm going to speak a little bit about the folks that we see living outside today.

That's really the focus of our organization.

REACH has been around for 25 years, serving people who are living outside in our community.

We focus on higher needs adults.

There was substance use disorder, mental health disorders, medical issues, and those have been disproportionately targeted by the criminal legal system.

So that's folks who are Black, Indigenous, and Latinx.

We've really shifted our outreach model to be a neighborhood structure over the last several years so that we try to actually build community within neighborhoods, really identify what the needs are in that neighborhood in terms of the people who are living unsheltered and what services are needed there and then move them inside.

And so that we can have stronger relationships with people.

We have a very relationship-based model.

And we currently have probably the largest street outreach team in the county.

The city funds of about 17 folks who just do outreach inside of Seattle.

So I'll speak a little bit to what we saw over the last year and where we see things need to go.

There was an unprecedented increase in people living outside.

We didn't have the ability to actually count numbers, but it should be clear to almost everyone living in this community that the number of people outside has really vastly increased.

people are in new locations, people are trying to live in a more secluded area, and then people are also in very public areas near amenities.

So we and kind of the folks that we've seen showing up who we've not seen before have been newly homeless folks who've lost housing because of their unemployment, their employment security or because of affordability issues in the community.

So that they're living in vehicles more often or They're doubled up, they're trying to figure out how to survive.

And then we've seen a vast increase in trauma and desperation for folks living outside.

Unfortunately, that has come with increased mortality rates as well.

So we had multiple people die outside that we were working closely with.

It's been a really hard, hard year.

I think over the last year in the pandemic response we've reached, similar to Chief Seattle Club, has started our relationship, started our building relationships with people by building community, building support networks, creating affinity groups, and just bringing people inside who may have been outside for years and years.

We do focus on a chronically homeless population.

And so we've had drop-in centers where folks could come inside and just be in relationship with one another and start to heal together.

Unfortunately, during the pandemic, we've not been able to really staff those safely.

So our staff really went outside mostly.

And we had to bring basic survival needs to the people who were living out there.

That included hygiene and sanitation, significant needs outside for just basic living survival needs, Shelters, tents, food, medical and behavioral care were very hard to access.

And then just fundamental needs that most of us have in this community, which is financial needs.

People could not get documentation, people with the stimulus checks that just came out over the last several months.

We signed up hundreds and hundreds of people to be able to get there.

money from the federal government to be able to support them in moving forward with their goals.

But it's been incredibly difficult with offices being closed and having to have access here.

So we really shifted our model to be outside and help people survive.

And unfortunately, our community is still there, I think, as many of you can see.

So I will just speak a little bit to what we see as highest needs right now.

I will mention that I think that we're going to still have the need to help people survive outside.

That's going to be basic hygiene and sanitation, including things like trash removal, access to bathrooms, and just fundamental survival needs is going to continue for a while.

I also want to speak about really what we ultimately need in our community, which is places for people to go inside, people to live back into their homes, reconnect with their community.

And I know that the city has invested in many pathways towards housing and interim housing solutions.

I think other panelists here who are following me will also be able to speak better to that.

So I will just speak about the transition for folks who are living unsheltered and trying to move into this care.

One of the opportunities we've had this year has been to try to create some really innovative models, and one of those has been a partnership with multiple providers.

Some of them are on this panel, including Derek, Karen, Victor, who will be able to speak further about this.

But the Just Care model, which we established with the Public Defender Association this year, really was looking at can we bring effective community solutions on the street for folks to move off the street and into, and then continue to move on into stabilization, healing, and support.

And we were able to implement Just Care really well in the Pioneer Square and the Chinatown International District.

It's been a consortium of multiple providers working together that really are from the community, that represent the community.

And we chose these neighborhoods partly because they have a significant representation of BIPOC community, unfortunately, who have been left outside in those neighborhoods.

Also people with very high behavioral health needs and other barriers to getting into care.

In fact, one community of folks that we were able to really investigate in this, group that we were working with closely that we were able to pull up a lot of data on them.

They had 70% of them right in the Chinatown or National District of 90 individuals that we looked at.

70% of them were BIPOC.

90% of behavioral health issues.

Most of them had substance use disorder.

including methamphetamine use.

All but one individual were chronically homeless, and almost all of them were involved in activities that exposed them to law enforcement and really created legal system barriers for them to move inside.

We also did an assessment of them in the homeless management system, and only 60% were enrolled in any homeless services.

So they were really left outside and not engaged in any care other than enforcement practices.

We were able to engage with them, work with them, build trusting relationships, and support them to move inside.

And 95% of them moved inside into the staff motel models, which my colleagues will be able to describe a little more thoroughly.

So this is just one example I want to share with all of you about how we can support people to move inside and how we know that it's not that people don't want services outside.

It's that we have to bring the services that actually meet their needs and support them to move forward.

So I'll just add, I'll wind up here, but I'll just add what we've learned from Just Care, what we've learned being outside is that it is critical that we move people inside to care and that that is what's most needed for them to start healing, for them to start moving forward in their pathways to stability.

That means that we need to not invest in any kind of displacement strategies, but continue to build that forward.

I think that the REACH model of doing a neighborhood, locally focused outreach model is really effective because different communities, parts of our city, and that really it's the one-on-one trusting relationship that helps people move inside.

I think we need to continue to fund housing wherever possible and also interim options similar to Just Care.

We've had other providers come forward and really do a fantastic job of creating staffed hotel areas where we can really bring a wraparound care and support for people to move inside that actually match their needs.

And then finally, I think that we will continue to need a relationship-based outreach model, similar to what REACH does.

Other agencies do it very well.

Chief Seattle Club is one of them.

But it really builds relationships with people.

It is neighborhood-focused, equity-focused.

It's staffed by skilled and experienced folks, and most of whom have had lived experience and can really relate to people outside.

Thank you very much, Chloe.

I appreciate that overview, and I think it's a good segue to Tiara, and we'll also note we have about 20 minutes left for this section, so there's plenty of time, and we'll still have a chance to hear from folks who have questions.

And on the Just Cares note, there is 5 million in King County's proposal that they are debating right now over in the King County chambers and in their budget meeting.

So looking forward to seeing how we can support that.

Tiara, please go ahead.

Thank you.

Thank you, council members, for having me here.

And Chloe, that was excellent.

Derek as well.

My name is Tiara Dearbone, and I work for the Public Defender Association as a project manager for the LEAD program in West and South precincts of Seattle.

We advance social and racial equity and community health through reform of the criminal legal system through a number of different projects and programs.

And one of which is LEAD, who works with individuals who are engaged in low-level law violations related to behavioral health conditions or extreme poverty.

So a lot of LEAD clients are experiencing homelessness when entering the program.

More recently, what we've been working on that Chloe spoke about is the Just Care program that we stood up as a result of the conditions in the neighborhood related to COVID and individuals living outdoors.

So we really started the efforts in October of last year and we got off to a really promising start, but the efforts have been paused by funding uncertainty a few times, which has, you know, prevented us from being able to move individuals indoors quickly from a geographically focused area.

However, we have had really good success in some of the areas that Chloe was speaking about in CID and Pioneer Square.

With the AARP funding or FEMA, we can complete the neighborhood impact that we had planned.

And in doing so, create a model for street to shelter work that's effective for people with high barriers and complex behavioral health needs.

We keep close communication with neighborhood leaders and business owners, many of whom who strongly support this approach.

We have lots of neighborhood leaders and business owners who show up to the meetings that we have.

There's a lot of community coordination around specific areas or individuals who are living like specifically in front of a business or in other areas that are obstructing, maybe obstructing walkways or interrupting people's attempts to reopen business after COVID.

Many of these community leaders are advocates of the work.

They contact us regularly.

It really is like a combined community effort and engagement, and there's so much support for this work.

Neighbors really want a response to the conditions in common spaces.

that's not displacement or dispersal and not enforcement, but care and response.

Knowing the individuals living outside are being met where they're at, offer desirable services that actually meet their complex needs.

And that is an alternative to 911 response.

Engaging with people pre-crisis and responding to conditions where many people are having to engage in the illicit economy.

And 100% of the people placed in hotels are dealing with substance use disorder.

So I'll let Victor talk about some of the work that he and his team does with the individuals in order to stabilize people and really work with them.

But I just wanted to emphasize the fact that this really is like a community effort and so many people are involved and supportive of this sort of approach.

It accomplishes the desire for public order outdoors and giving people the resources that they actually need in order to stabilize, in order to address substance use disorder, in order to address other chronic needs that people have.

Just want to acknowledge Chief Seattle Club for their contribution to this and serving our indigenous neighbors.

And I will end there and pass it over to Victor.

Thank you.

Thank you again, Tiara, and appreciate the presentation and how this is all connected.

Victor, much of what we've heard reminds me of conversations that we have had in the past as well.

So please introduce yourself.

And thank you very much for being here today.

Good morning, council members, and always good to see my fellow colleagues at this meeting.

And again, my name is Victor Lu.

For this work context, I use he, him, his pronouns.

I'm from Asian Counseling and Referral Service and the Director of Practice Innovation.

So ACRS is a multi-social service organization.

Even though our target populations are Asian and Pacific Islanders, immigrants and refugees, but during the last few years, we have actually expanded to serve more vulnerable individuals, definitely for BIPOC community, especially during this very challenging time.

I always like to share some stories when I do have this kind of meeting.

So I will share a personal story.

I'm a first generation, Immigrant, I immigrated, I grew up really, really poor, slept on a mattress with my two brothers until I was six years old.

Oftentimes my parents had to go hungry so the three of us could eat.

The reason I share that story because it just really ignites my passion to do social services and the Just Care program that was already referenced.

Even though we had lived so poor in growing up, I was really fortunate that I have never really experienced homelessness and unsheltered situation.

But think about the challenges that our community is facing, especially during this time right now.

And I just want to share with you what is the ACRS care model of approach.

So we partner very closely with which program that Chloe just shared.

So we will take referrers and encampments in Chinatown International District as well as Pioneer Square.

As the licensed behavioral health providers that are licensed in mental health and substance use disorder, we serve the highest acuity unsheltered individuals who have chronic mental health issues, chronic substance use disorder issues.

And majority of our clients that we serve right now are from the BIPOC community from those two encampments.

I want to say that it has been, when we had opportunity to do this work last October, we was on a very time crunch to implement it very quickly because of the urgency.

The program was implemented by ACRS multidisciplinary team in less than three days at the 24-7 hotel.

The reason I was so motivated to do it is I had seen clients in encampments and one particular client, she was living at a bus stop.

And I found out the reason she was leaving that is because there's no more tents in the encampment.

That became a motivation for us and our staff to really do this body of work.

The multi-disciplinary series, all of us are from the BIPOC community.

Some of us have lived experience of the service population.

And within a short period of time, we have served over 67 individuals providing on demand, which means if somebody wants mental health services right now, right, we can provide it.

If they want substance use disorder service, we can provide it.

It's a 24-7 program.

We have served over 66 unduplicated individuals in this short period of time.

Majority are from the Black and Brown community that we serve at this moment.

And the approach of ACRS self-care model is really starting with care.

And the example that I will share is when the clients arrive and come into the hotel.

The first thing that our staff present them is a welcome kit to welcome them to the program with essential items such as toothbrush, toothpaste, snacks.

And then because of the pandemic, we'll do the COVID-19 testing.

Multiple times when the clients were presented with welcome kits, they cried.

Our staff and I, we got really emotional about people couldn't believe that for the first time that there is a program that can assist them from what Chloe said, from the outside to the inside.

I really like that reference, Chloe.

And we address beyond mental health, substance use disorder.

We also have primary care, dental care, vision care.

But taking care of the integrated care that the clients need, we also address social determinants of health issues.

If they need health navigation, to get Medicaid, we assist them with that.

And then beyond that, we also have partnered with public health to provide a need exchange program.

And our medical providers can also provide low barrier medication assisted treatment.

And I want to remind council members that this program by ACRS has stood up in less than three days, and we started it on November 4th.

Oftentimes when I look back right now, our team and I, we have tremendous pride to be able to do this work.

And I really hope that we will have the opportunity to leverage American Rescue Plan, APA, funds, and FEMA to support this body of work to continue.

And this program is effective, and I have shared jokingly about what is the magic formula of ACRS Just Care approach.

It is three words, compassion, integrity, and respect.

And that is what we do for the clients at Just Care program.

And 100% of the clients also have substance use disorder With that, during the pandemic, definitely we can leverage FEMA to support this part of work, which I really hope will continue.

One other story that I want to share is the intention of Just Care is to support our clients from the hotel into more permanent housing.

We have already assisted four clients in housing, which is really miraculous during the pandemic, given their health conditions and behavioral health conditions.

Last week, an older client, he shared with us that he got his housing voucher.

Every time when we hear that news, our staff and I were just elated.

But what he shared with us is he wants to continue receiving services from the Just Care program, even after he moved.

And I just think that it demonstrates how we are able to engage the client.

Providing housing to a client who needs it is critical.

But if they have chronic mental health and substance use disorder, So this needs to be continued because recovery is a lifelong process.

And I will end with one information about the cost effectiveness of the Just Care program.

I had done a very conservative cost analysis that on average, because of zero 911 call, I want you to hear it again, there has been zero 911 call since ACI Just Care program has been initiated at the hotel, and reduced emergency department urgent care utilization, we never involve law enforcement because it's a community-driven approach.

Because of that, we are able to prevent people from using the system, going back to jail, prison, or urgent care.

The average cost saving is about $22,600 per year per client.

So I just want to reiterate that not only is it a caring, innovative program, but it's also cost-effective.

Thank you.

Victor, thank you again for being here.

And I think your story is a good reminder of the type of anxiety and trauma and behavioral or mental health issues that folks are experiencing, whether they're housed or unhoused, and how the crisis the work that you do, and in partnership.

Colleagues, are there any questions for our panelists here today?

And I know everybody was taking notes like crazy, so I just want to give you a huge round of applause for Councilmember Lewis.

Please go ahead.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair, and thank you for assembling this great panel of people that I've had the privilege, many of them, to work with over the last year on some of the things we're talking about today.

And I want to drill in a little on the topic we were just on with the last two panelists.

on just care.

First, I want to start with just a couple of brief comments.

Just say, you know, we talk a lot about the struggles that we're facing.

And when we have the solution staring us right in the face, sometimes it's It takes a while for policymakers to grab it with both hands and say, this is what we're going to do.

But I think we have that opportunity here with the American Recovery Act money.

So I wanted to ask, deferring to the panel, whoever wants to take this question, but just to drill down a little bit.

into exactly what we're talking about in terms of scope.

If someone could maybe talk about cost per person, because there's been a lot of numbers out in the media about what the cost is relative to other potential treatment programs.

And then if someone could also talk about the gap that Just Care fills, to some of the other interventions that are out there.

And like how it might fit with like the hotel surge and some of the other things the city is doing.

I think those would be two useful pieces of information for our deliberations.

If I may, I think I will take those two questions.

And Tiara, please feel free to chime in as well.

And thank you, Council Members Lewis, for those questions.

So Lisa from PDA, she's not shared the ED from Public Defender Association, but she used an analogy that death care program is not a Catholic, it is a Subaru.

So what that means is that it's like, like I said, it's a cost effective program.

On average, it costs about $49,000 per client per year.

There has been some speculation, but actually we don't know where it came from about how much more it costs, which I just want to set the record straight that it's actually not true.

So it's a cost effective model, In terms of the service gaps, I would say that we already know that the BIPOC community are disproportionately impacted, even pre-pandemic.

What this pandemic has done is that it magnified those challenges.

As an individual from the BIPOC community, I just think that we continue to face more institutional and racial barriers, and the pandemic just continue to make it even more challenging.

And then on top of that, you think about chronic mental health and substance use disorder or health conditions.

The service gaps is that there are all about 45 behavioral providers in the King County network system.

However, there's increase in demand for services.

No one is really doing the work that is a 24 seven that can provide on demand.

So I'm talking, as I shared earlier, we are providing on demand.

Somebody wants it today.

If they want the assessment today, will they be able to do it today?

If somebody needs a state food assistant, food stamp, we can do that.

So that's the gap.

And again, I just think that we are doing something really innovative here that you provide care when care is needed and reducing recidivism and reducing hospitalization, going back to using a community-based treatment approach that is culturally accessible and linguistically accessible.

And I need to mention earlier that part of the BIPOC community that we serve through the Just Care program.

Some of them are also from the LGBTQ community.

And if we talk about Black transgender individual, again, they also have highest disparity issue.

So I think we're doing something that is filling the system gaps and addressing the critical and vital needs that our community members need.

Thank you very much, Victor.

Are there any other questions for the panelists?

I want to lift up a few of the pieces that we heard and I think Councilmember Lewis for asking the question about Just Cares and all the other sort of wraparound services that we should be providing.

A few things that I really heard that resonated were ways that we can invest in community organizations to build capacity as Derek was talking about.

But also recognize that in many ways, these organizations were providing cultural hubs, social hubs to begin with.

And that helps address mental health, behavioral health issues, creating social cohesion, especially as folks emerge back again after hopefully folks get vaccinated.

This is a real important opportunity, not only for us to make sure that we're providing important services like meals and social services, but that we're also creating mental health well-being around our community.

So that really resonated.

to the folks who brought up the need for rental assistance, not just for individuals, which we spent a lot of time focused on, but also capacity to support child cares as small businesses and small businesses, as Matt talked about, with direct aid.

That seems like a really important lever that we continue to want to to make sure that there's additional support out there.

Appreciate the comments that were made about using these dollars as great equalizers, really, to invest in where we've seen most harm done by the COVID pandemic, investing in BIPOC folks who serve BIPOC communities, and also recognizing things like childcare assistance and small business assistance, housing assistance, already through, you know, by virtue of many in the LGBTQ, people of color communities, women, folks who are low-wage workers, disproportionately affected by instability prior to the pandemic.

Now wanting to make sure that our investments go to creating a more equitable local economy seems paramount.

And I really thank you for all of your ideas, because I think that we can continue to build on these.

Yes, we have $119 million in ARPA funds.

We will also soon have over $214 million for the Jump Start investments, and we have the 2022 budget that we will begin relatively quickly here.

So I think all of these items are really critical.

Any additional comments or questions?

I am not seeing any.

I want to thank you very much.

This is recorded for the record as well for our finance and housing committee and I know folks will go back and we'll continue to watch this as we pull together the elements of our ARPA funds.

And I also know that this is not the last time, given the ongoing conversations around infrastructure.

And Phoebe, I think you'll be able to lift this up, the ways in which infrastructure is also now not just being seen as pavement investments, but also truly the capital that we need for child care.

And I know housing and infrastructure for community support and resilience is part of what we'd like to see going forward.

So there will be more conversations, hopefully, with additional federal relief and state relief.

Thank you all very much.

A huge round of applause for you all being here with us today and for all the work you do to make our city healthier and more equitable.

We greatly appreciate your time today.

Thanks for joining us.

Okay, Madam Clerk, let's go ahead and read item number two into the record.

Item number two, continuation of the COVID relief funds emergency allocation of $18 million.

Council Bill 120041, an ordinance relating to the 2021 budget.

For briefing, discussion, and possible vote.

Wonderful.

Thank you very much.

And I see with us Allie Panucci from central staff and Julie Dingley from the city of budgets office.

Folks, as I mentioned during yesterday's briefing and at the very top of this meeting, you may recall that we have about 18 million in 2020 coronavirus relief funds or CRF funds.

that were not expended last year.

We now know that these dollars must be expended in 2021, and this is a huge opportunity for us to pair these investments of $18 million with what will be future funds coming from the ARPA funds.

Again, $119 million to be allocated, which is going to be discussed in our two May meetings coming up.

These CRF funds, specifically the $18 million here, are a separate bucket of money that we will be able to use to identify programs and services that are at risk of basically falling off a cliff if we don't continue to provide immediate dollars.

So what we're doing here today is having a conversation about the draft bill in front of us.

We'd love to get your input and feedback.

If there is the possibility of moving it out today, that's great.

If folks still feel like they have a need for additional questions, we can always take it up at our next meeting.

I would love to make sure that we get the chance to walk through this with the CBO office and our central staff office and really identify the goal.

The goal here is to make sure that current programs that are currently being used for CRF dollars and how those dollars could potentially be used to extend the life of various programs and potentially even provide a runway into future services.

We want to make sure that people have those extended services and that no one faces a cliff when we have these $18 million that we no longer need to hold in our pocket and we want to get out the door as soon as possible.

I will stop and let Allie give us more of an overview as to the frame in which we are looking at these CRF dollars.

And Julie, I want to thank you and Allie.

I know you have been together working very hard to come up with a draft bill for us to consider today.

Allie.

And you are on mute, Allie, in case you were speaking.

Good morning, Councilmembers.

I'm Allie Panucci of your central staff.

And as Chair Mosqueda said, I'm joined by Julie Dingley from the City Budget Office.

And given the agenda today, I'm just going to jump right in, but just want to make sure my screen is shared.

OK, great.

So today, we will update the committee briefly on the schedule for these ongoing discussions of federal funds and provide an overview of the process moving forward for the anticipated coronavirus local fiscal recovery funds or CLFR.

Those are the direct aid to cities, more flexible dollars that we're expecting from the American Rescue Plan and provide a summary and more detailed description of the proposed uses for the 2020 Coronavirus Relief Funds as proposed in Council Bill 120041 that is before the committee today.

Julie will then describe it, will provide more details on those appropriations after I provide this high level overview.

So this table is just an updated committee schedule for the discussions moving forward.

I want to highlight on May 4th that there is a public hearing schedule to hear additional feedback from the community about proposed investments for use of those funds.

Following action on the bill before you today on allocating the remaining $18 million of CRF funds, The committee will dive into more details on the potential spending proposals for the ARPA funds, and we will be developing legislation for introduction in late May, and action by the committee and full council in June, assuming we stay on schedule.

And I'll also just note that this updated committee schedule has also been updated on the committee's website for the public's use.

So this process will continue to include multiple appropriation bills with the first bill before you today to consider the $18 million of CRF funds, and then moving into at least one or two additional bills that will appropriate funds from the American Rescue Plan.

That will include both the flexible aid, the CLFR funds that I described previously, as well as some targeted aid, such as the $12.2 million we already know we're going to receive through the Home Investment Partnerships Program, But there will be additional targeted aid for things like rental assistance and that type of thing.

And depending on the timing of when more guidance is issued and when we know what the city's allocation will be, will depend on when those bills are taken up in committee.

So after making a recommendation on Council Bill 120041, the committee will focus on developing a starting point for the 2021 CLFR funds.

that will include about 120 million appropriations this year, and then the second half of that money will be considered as part of the 2022 budget process.

Those investments will support economic recovery and reopening efforts, investments to support people experiencing homelessness, and other significant investments to support the community, including small businesses and nonprofit organizations, and then also decisions on any targeted aid that we've received.

We are working with executive staff to develop those initial proposal based on the priorities identified by the Council and Resolution 31999 and the Mayor's priorities.

The discussions to date have revealed that there's a high degree of alignment in the priority areas.

And as we work through the details, we'll bring more information to the committee.

We will also continue to monitor guidance from the federal government and coordinate with the state and county proposed spending to maximize the impact of the city's investments.

Proposals will also be considered or will be reviewed to understand the impacts the proposals might have on communities of color and social justice efforts for the city.

So I just spoke really quickly on the process so we can move into the details of the council bill.

I'll just pause there for a moment before we move into that discussion.

No questions?

Okay.

So this slide just provides a high level summary of the appropriations that are in the bill.

I'll now turn it over to Julie to walk through more detail of those proposed investments.

Good morning, everyone.

I'm Julie Dingley from the city budget office.

Thank you for having me this morning.

As Ali mentioned, we have been working very closely and it's been a real pleasure.

We are very excited at the high degree of alignment between the council and the executive of where we're headed overall for these dollars.

So digging in specifically into the CRF dollars that we have available.

First up is under a category that we're referring to as community well-being.

So first is 600,000 for child care stabilization grants.

You may remember in February, the city announced grants to 506 childcare providers throughout Seattle, totaling over about 2.3 million.

These grants are prioritized for providers that served a child on state or local subsidy within the last 12 months and operate within a priority geographical area as defined by the city RSGI equity index.

So these dollars are to provide grants for the 74 remaining eligible providers.

in the Tier 2 category overall, which is obviously in addition to those 506 already distributed.

Next is on food services, and we have a number of investments in food.

So it'll be this slide and the following slide.

This first one is $100,000 for emergency grocery vouchers.

This is needed due to higher than anticipated redemption rates in 2021. The office of sustainability and environment is recommending the city transition to a more flexible source of support due to significant investments in administrative and technical systems the city would need to put in place in order to develop a retooled grocery voucher program that could include additional retailers.

So we'll go to the next.

So here on other food services for food bank support, we have 2.12 million and I should say At the outset of 2021, we heard from providers that there was still a need for all of these programs.

And so what the city budget office in connection with mayor's office and we notified council at the time, let everybody know that we were going to start spending on a lot of these programs so that we didn't fall off the cliff for providing service to the community.

So where you see below, these are costs throughout 2021. So starting in January through the end of the year.

So under food bank support, this is providing funding for food, staffing and operational costs such as home delivery and other service model changes.

There's a base budget in this space of about 2.2 million.

So this is additive to that.

For shelter meals, we're providing meals at 12 locations consistent with social distancing guidelines.

And for permanent supportive housing meals providing 3.7 million.

for meals at 28 locations, also to discourage congregate eating.

For these two items, in shelter and in PSH, typically those folks are able to have meals in congregate settings.

And obviously, due to the pandemic, that was not something that was going to be possible.

So we had to very quickly work to completely change the service model.

And these are the increased costs associated with providing that service in that different non-congregate model.

Rounding out the food space is 1.14 million for school produce bags.

This serves 7,500 income qualified SPS families per week.

Each week families receive a two pound bag of produce along with the prepared meals from SPS.

So they actually can just pick it up at the same time, which we've heard has been a real convenience for those families and it's deeply appreciated.

All right, onto public health and emergency response.

The first item here is 5.8 million to extend clean city efforts through the end of 2021. This is to continue to improve public health and safety of parks, green spaces, streets, sidewalks, and reduce community debris.

It continues funding for SPR, sorry, for the Parks Department, for Department of Transportation, public utilities for the Clean Cities Teams, SPU Community Litter Routes, and SPU Graffiti Rangers.

So within that amount, the Clean Cities Teams is receiving $5.5 million, SPU Community Litter Routes is $225,000, and SPU Graffiti Rangers is about $65,000.

Also in this group is vaccine outreach for hard-to-reach groups.

So split out between Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs and Department of Neighborhoods.

So the dollars going to Immigrant and Refugee Affairs would be to contract with community-based organizations for community vaccine events and outreach, and for ethnic media and in-language vaccine outreach, which has been critically needed.

Further, Dawn is gonna receive 183,000 for vaccine outreach to underserved communities to promote more equitable vaccination rates.

And last but not least, we have city return to work and reopening.

This is largely 800,000 for term limited positions in the city budget office, finance and accounting, and office of emergency management to provide needed staffing for proper administration, management, and reporting on federal funds.

So in CBO request here is for positions for budgeting reporting and tracking federal funding activities and FAS it's for accounting staffing for tracking correcting documenting and reporting city expenditures for FEMA and other funds.

And an OEM overall to lift up to provide better coordination for recovery efforts related to COVID-19.

and managing FEMA applications and responding to questions related to FEMA.

I will say in this category in particular, these are items that in hindsight, had we known that the pandemic was going to last this long and have this many complex and interrelated funding sources, we would have requested these in March of 2020, and we are learning from those mistakes.

and need to really return current staff to their day jobs who have been working double duty for the last 13 or 14 months.

Thank you, Julie.

So I think that concludes the description of the proposed spending in the council bill before the committee today.

So we're happy to answer questions.

from the committee, if any.

Yeah, wonderful.

I see Council Member Herbold and Council Member Warren.

I just want to understand, and I'm sorry if you already explained this, this is being described as reappropriating funds in 2021 for continued support using funds that were appropriated in 2020 but remained unspent.

Can you talk a little bit about how these $18 million were originally appropriated and why it was that they were unspent?

I'm sure I can take an initial stab at that and then Julie probably has more more details, but I will say there were a number of assumptions when we were.

considering how to best use the federal funds and balancing, you know, different sources of funds in 2020, some of which was assumptions about required FEMA matches that the council would have to make as well as like, so it was sort of like a FEMA contingency.

So the majority of these funds were reserved for that purpose.

However, I can't recall exactly when the announcement came down from the federal government, but with the transition changing, eliminating the need for the local match.

And so that freed up some resources as well as extending the timing of when those funds could be expended.

So had that decision not be made as well as the extension of the use of funds, the city would have acted swiftly to sort of use these funds by the end of the year, but given the flexibility and understanding there would be additional needs, it was sort of those decisions were delayed until this bill.

And Allie nailed it.

She could moonlight for the city budget office in that response.

Yeah, we found out December 27th that the CRF funds were going to be extended and allowed for eligible for spending in 2021. So that was the very, the very last minutes of 2020, and then found out January 22. So just after inauguration, that FEMA was going to switch to 100% local match.

So it really changed our calculus on that we will still be needing a reserve.

But it's longer term FEMA is much slower than we had initially planned in getting reimbursements out.

So we'll be that'll be a conversation when we take up the rest of the ARPA dollars.

Thank you.

And so there are no other allocations that have to be reallocated other than that FEMA category, that FEMA match category that's no longer needed.

Just want to know if this signals any changes in priorities because of other reasons that we are unable to expend dollars.

No, we're really just, we're going to have to just create a FEMA reserve with the ARPA dollars instead, just on a longer timeframe.

So this is not a change in priority.

This is just allocating those dollars.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Good question.

Thank you.

Council Member Juarez, welcome.

And please go ahead.

Oh, great.

I just, can we go back to the, and you knew I was going to ask this.

I knew you were waiting for it.

Can we go back to the park slide?

and thank you, Allie, for filling me in Friday.

We had a nice, she answered a bunch of my questions that I had when I went through this.

So the 5.8, I can't, I'm trying to remember what we got in the original budget.

I think it was 3.9 million out of the 2020 or 2021 budget that was allocated.

We originally asked, I think for 5.9, I can't remember what we originally got.

That sounds about right.

It was tons of other words.

It was, there was some, um, increased appropriations in the third quarter supplemental for 2020, as well as funding in the 2021 adopted budget that funded these services through April of 2021. And Tracy Reslip is also on the line and may have additional details, so I may ask her to jump in on this area.

Tracy has been frantically emailing me back and forth with numbers.

So thank you, Tracy.

I knew you're on the line.

Let me just say this so we can put this in context.

Since December 28th to April 11th, we have the Clean Cities Initiative.

People have gathered over 48,000 needles.

And since April 28th and April 11th, they had picked up 1,540,000 pounds of trash.

So that's just December to April with 3.1.

So this boost in conjunction with SPU and SDOT is really going to help a lot.

I don't, I think Tracy, you might correct me on this.

You sent me a narrative, but we haven't quite, we haven't quite plateaued yet.

Is that fair to say on the numbers on the trash and the needles?

Or maybe we have.

I don't know what you mean by plateau.

Do you mean we've reached a high?

Yeah, we've kind of reached a high, and I guess we have.

What I'm saying is that when we've been, you guys know, you hear me every Monday morning talk about the pre-K, and you hear me talk about how much food has been given to community members that need it.

And then we talk about how much trash is being picked up and how many needles are being picked up.

And I don't do that to be performative.

I do that so the taxpayers and the chair, chairwoman, and my colleagues can see that the money that we got, the 3.1, originally we asked for 5.9, I think, that this has gone to a good use and a much needed use.

And I don't see that this is gonna go away too soon.

So for me, thank you, Chairwoman, for allocating this.

We had some really good conversations, you and I and your staff and my staff, regarding this allocation of the 5.8, because this, again, will go a long ways.

to cleaning up our city and helping those in need that are living unsheltered, that need the garbage picked up, and also just the health and safety concerns with all the needles.

I know it's not popular to share all some of this information, but I think it's needed because I think people need to know that we are out there, that Parks is out there, that SPU is out there, that SDOT is out there, trying to use this money and use these services, use these funds, to clean up our city.

So I just wanted to share that and to thank you, Madam Chair, for including some funds in here under the leftover CRF money for the Clean Cities Initiative.

So thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Juarez.

Let me see the Council President's hand just before we go to the Council President.

I do also want to respond.

Thank you, Council Member Juarez, for saying that.

I think what you heard from Chloe in the presentation was that there is a need for ongoing garbage pickup, but there is a need I think it's really important to put this investment into context with the funds that will soon come from the ARPA funds.

We know that there will be significant increases for homelessness and housing service programs, along with economic relief.

And I just want to make sure that folks know that this investment is going to be paired with a much larger investment into the root causes of why we continue to see folks without their own garbage cleanup.

they don't have access to a house.

And so if we can get folks inside into some of the non-congregate shelters that have been opened, but more importantly into the housing services, permanent supportive housing, affordable housing across the board, then we know folks actually have garbage pickup like other housed folks.

And that will actually help reduce the need for Clean Cities Initiative, but both are needed at the onset and you will see a much more significant increase in housing and human services to serve those who are living unsheltered outside.

So please take this in context with the future funds to come.

Right.

And that was my point, Madam Chair.

Not so much to say is to emphasize you need you need both ends to work.

And for us, when we the original ask from the mayor's office when we were in budget was five point six million.

and we received 3.1, now we know the extent that people who are living unsheltered, that this needs to get picked up.

You're right, they don't have SPU coming to their encampment once a week to pick up their recycling and their garbage.

So this is the other side of leadership, is making sure that there's a need and making sure that we allocate funds and understand that we do it in conjunction with sheltering the unsheltered, but recognizing the reality that the garbage has to get picked up.

We don't want another public health issue which a lot of issues get leveled at us.

And so I wanted to just share that.

This is what it looks like when you put this money out there to do the kind of cleaning and the picking up of the needles.

Because obviously some of the issues that we hear and some of the comments and concerns we get from constituents citywide is that we're not doing enough.

So hopefully with this, we can do more.

So thank you.

Thank you.

Council President, please go ahead.

Thanks.

I haven't had a chance to I'm sorry to weigh in here a little late, but I wanted to say that I'm also proud to be a co-sponsor of this particular proposal, and I wanted to just chime in on the points that Councilmember Juarez was just making, because I think they're really important points, and I'll try not to repeat what what you, Madam Chair, and Customer Juarez just had an exchange upon, but I do think that, you know, I continue to hear from folks who are both housed and unhoused that there are real public health impacts related to a lack of viable shelter and housing opportunities available in the city, and as a result of living in in the outdoors and in our public spaces.

And so I think that this, you know, $5.8 million to extend the Clean City efforts is really important.

It's not gonna solve homelessness.

None of us are arguing that the Clean City Initiative is going to solve for the experience of homelessness, but it does actually address the public health impacts to both the housed and unhoused individuals are in our neighborhoods.

And so I really think this is an important public health response for us to continue to support, at least through the end of 2021, while also remaining squarely focused on the urgency of increasing our throughput capacity by bringing to scale investments of our rapid rehousing, transitional housing, and also our to make sure people stay healthy, safe, and housed.

I just wanted to lend a little bit of support here to Councilmember Juarez's perspective and thank her for continuing to make sure that we are well-informed on what the metrics are related to the existing investment.

And I think that creates an opportunity for us to continue to work on these public health issues in a way that feels responsive.

And I'm happy that it is included in the space bill.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council President.

And thank you as well for your engagement on this bill.

Thanks to your office as well.

I know Cody has had a chance to be deeply engaged.

And thank you for your co-sponsorship.

I'm not seeing any additional questions.

Is there any additional context from Julie or Allie?

Chair Mosqueda, before, I don't know if you were planning to move the bill, but before moving to that, I'll just quickly highlight the last couple of slides in the presentation.

You really covered this.

This was really meant to just make sure that it was clear that this is just one piece of a larger part of the discussion that will be ongoing for the next couple of months as we continue to develop proposals and coordinate with the county, particularly in the homelessness and housing um, housing space.

And so coming up, um, depending on what the committee decides today on the council bill, um, there'll be a public hearing on May 4th.

We will then continue to develop the proposals and introduce a bill.

If the committee does not act on this, um, on council bill 1, 2, 0, 0, 4, 1 today, we would have it back in committee at the special committee meeting on May 5th.

Um, I think that's up to 2 PM.

and that I think concludes our presentation.

I don't know if you have anything to add, Julie.

No, just to say a lot more to come.

Thank you for that reminder.

Vice Chair Hermel, please go ahead.

I'm sorry to go back to the Clean Cities element of this.

I was pulling up the description of the current funding for Clean Cities and how it's currently being used.

And I just want to get a sense, again, as it relates to this additional funding.

Is this additional funding to fund at current service levels through the end of the year, or is it intended to increase service levels?

And I'm just, for instance, looking at the litter I'm just trying to look at the map.

I see a couple areas that could South in my district, and I'm wondering, does additional funding include going to more places or just continuing to go to the same places for the rest of the year?

So this is sustaining the increase that we did for COVID.

So it will continue at that heightened level through the end of 2021, where it's currently slated to end and go back to the base budgeted amounts at the end of April.

So this is making sure that we don't stop those, that we would continue those through the end of the year.

So it is no additional service.

It is just maintaining the current increased service.

And so that are, I'm just trying to wrap my head around like what was requested versus what the council funded.

I know the council funded a smaller amount than what was requested.

Um, I think the councils, uh, and what we did provide, um, wasn't intended, uh, to, um, to be necessary and correct me if I'm wrong.

What are you, are you saying it was only intended to go through a certain number of months in 2021?

Yeah, Council Member Herbold, the sort of expanded services that were funded through the Clean City, that additional $3.1 million was just for that additional service level.

So there are some things that are sort of base services that then were expanded as part of this.

And so part of why the initial ask was reduced was with the good work of the central staff team in partnership with the budget office.

There were some efficiencies identified in terms of the initial proposal.

to address the needs of the community as well as reducing overall to address other community needs and councilmember priorities.

This additional funding will extend that expansion through the end of the year.

It won't add additional litter routes.

It will allow the team to respond to information provided by the and target specific problem areas or where there's a large sort of.

I think what I'm hearing you say is an understanding of what it would cost maybe to add some additional routes which we can look into and consider as we continue discussions of investments over the next month for the other targeted aid.

understood in answer to this.

I understand these are the funds that the council provided were for enhanced services over the baseline budget.

My question, though, was did we intend those services in the 2021 budget to be for all of 2021 or did we plan for them to sort of turn out?

It wasn't, it was known and intended that the funding would only extend through April.

Okay.

Okay.

Actually, actually, some of them were for, um, funding through April and some, for example, like the needle disposal and the encampment bag program, those actually were funded all the way through 2021. So you don't see any ads for that because we'd actually already funded those in the first, um, dollar money.

Um, but these other portions were funded.

Some of them were funded actually until April, some like the community litter and graffiti rangers, we actually funded until July.

So there was a little bit, there were a couple of these that were funded for a portion of early portion of 2021 and some that went a little bit further into the year.

So- Very, very helpful.

Thank you, Tracy.

Yeah.

Yeah and council member just to follow up on your question and maybe it is just simply that you want to know what would what would mean to add more litter routes but but my I think a follow-up question to the executive would be do those routes go to the same place every week because that I don't have that understanding and I understand more about what Ali was saying which that they can begin to identify places that through the Fix It First app and other things that might direct them to different places.

So I would like to follow up to ask them that question.

Do you go to the same place every week or do you in fact respond to what the community is reporting in as areas that need that attention and can then shift from week to week?

That would be helpful as well.

I'm looking at the website for the clean cities, and there's a page that is called the Clean City Route Analysis, and it is a map of the city with all of the different hotspot areas where there are presumably weekly litter pick routes.

But if that's just a moment in time as opposed to something that is organic and changing, that would be great to know.

Right, and I think there's the clean city teams, which are the four different teams that go rotating around the city.

But then there's also the community litter teams, which are different teams that go to do litter pickup.

So I guess my question is, are you wanting to know the answer to both of those for clean cities?

Do they go to the same places?

Or litter routes, do they go to the same places?

Or can it change from week to week?

You may want it for both.

I think it would be useful and helpful for both, but I'm specifically most concerned, I think, on the SPU program.

Okay, the little route then.

Yeah.

Perfect.

Okay, we'll find out for you.

Thank you, Tracy.

And I see Council Member Lewis.

Council Member Herbold, thank you for that question and seeking clarification on that.

Council Member Lewis.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Tracy, while you're writing things down to get some clarification from the executive on this program, I have sort of a similar line of inquiry to what Councilmember Herbold was talking about, and that is programmatically, if it's built into clean cities, I'm not sure how they plan to taper off the program as we are able to get more people into shelter.

The shelter surge I anticipate is going to add more units.

Hopefully it will in the budget discussions.

reduced demand for this program.

So it would be interesting to see if they're envisioning and they're modeling how those two things interact from a resource use perspective, because I would hope that they're in communication about that.

I don't think that I've not heard from anybody on the executive side that they expect that this is going to taper before the end of the year.

To just reiterate what Ali had said and what I also know is true for SPR, is that there is baseline budget for cleaning up parks and other areas.

SPR has a team that does that work, that has been amplified and enhanced, some with the Clean Cities Initiative.

Clearly, we understand that SPU has the litter routes that have a base level of funding.

for their teams, but I've not heard anybody saying they anticipate being able to taper this surge in activity before the end of the year.

That would be lovely, and I will ask the question, but I've not heard anybody tell me they expect that to happen before the end of the year.

Yeah, and I would also just add that this funding, my understanding is that it assumes that sort of encampments are not like sort of being relocated or ideally, you know, the people are moving moving inside at any increased rate.

So if we are successful at moving people inside at a faster rate, there may actually be a need for additional short-term funds to then clean up those sites after the fact.

But right now, the assumption is that there isn't sort of an acceleration of that because we just don't know what that future looks like.

But I imagine that this will be part of a discussion as part of the 2022 proposed budget as well.

Yeah, I mean, just as a brief follow-up, I would think that that should be a component of this, because for the first couple months of the existence of this program, from fall of 2020 to now, the city really has not had very much additive shelter capacity, at least not highly desirable additive shelter.

And now we have a robust hoteling program.

We're about to get more tiny house villages online.

So it seems like that's a relevant consideration now, you know, while it wasn't for the first, you know, several months of this.

So it'd just be interesting to know how those things interact.

We'll follow up.

Okay.

And Julie, did you have anything else you wanted to add right now?

No, I think that we've covered it.

I think that Council Member Lewis, to your concern, the teams would probably use up more resource more quickly.

This amount is the current rate of service projected through the end of the year.

So if in the event that you're describing, it could be that we just end up needing, if we need resource in November, December, that's something we come back to talk about during budget.

But I think it's a definite, we have to remain dynamic and able to respond.

So I appreciate the concern.

It's a good flag and it's something we're tracking.

And as more people get access to appropriate non congregate shelters or housing, there's fewer folks who are living out in the elements without regular garbage pickup because they do not have the benefit of having a house or a unit that allows for regular garbage pickup.

So I can assume that there is somewhat of a balance as well if we're able to which we should move folks into appropriate congregate shelters and make sure that they have housing as the true alternative to living outside and thus garbage cleanup as well.

we're going to move on to the next item on the agenda.

to provide immediate relief.

Again, I want to emphasize the type of services that we're talking about here.

Child care stabilization grants, emergency grocery vouchers, food bank support, other meals and services, permanent supportive housing meals, school, produce bags, vaccine.

and testing partnership for hard-to-reach groups in combination with our amazing partners at King County, and making sure that we're addressing other public health needs out there, including making sure that there is a Clean Cities Initiative that is funded.

So it is a robust package that we've spent quite a bit of time talking about one element, a robust package, and on that one element, will be paired with ARPA dollars to come that will be more getting at the root cause of inequities that we see out there.

Investments in equitable, resilient recovery and housing and human services and getting at the true trauma that we see continuing to manifest and become worsened due to COVID.

So a lot more conversations to have.

This is the initial bill to help get those dollars out the door.

I'm going to go ahead and move the bill forward.

Thank you.

I'm seeing a nod from Councilmember Herbold and a thumbs up.

Okay, wonderful.

Councilmember Lewis, thumbs up.

Okay, great.

I think that it is a really great conversation.

I do look forward to hearing more from Tracy about those details and we will continue as Julie said to remain flexible and nimble during the pandemic.

This is all we're going to have to move quickly.

We're going to have to move quickly.

We're going to have to move quickly.

We're going to have to move quickly.

We're going to have to move quickly.

We're going to have to move quickly.

I'm not seeing additional questions or comments.

Again, thank you very much to central staff, Allie Panucci, CBO, Julie Dingley, and the Council President's Office herself.

Council President, thank you, as well as Cody and to my staff.

Thanks to Sejal Parikh for her work on this as well.

Colleagues, thanks for your discussion today.

I would like to go ahead and move this out of our committee today.

I move the committee recommend passage of Council Bill 120041. Is there a second?

Thank you very much.

It's been moved and seconded.

Are there any additional comments on the bill?

Seeing none, thanks for the earlier discussion.

Madam Clerk, will you please call the roll on the passage of Council Bill 120041?

Chair Mosqueda?

Aye.

Vice Chair Herbold?

You want to say that one more time, Vice Chair?

One more time, please.

There we go.

Yes.

Councilmember Lewis?

Yes.

councilmember Juarez.

Thank you.

And I will note the motion carries with the affirmative support from our guest councilmember Juarez.

Thank you for your questions and comments as well.

The motion carries and the committee recommendation will be sent to the full council for the April 26 city council meeting for a final vote.

Okay, let's move on to item number three.

Madam Clerk, can you please read that into the record?

And item number three, economic revenue forecast for briefing and discussion.

Thank you very much.

Colleagues, we are just about 15 minutes behind.

Apologies for that.

I want to welcome Director Ben Noble from the CBO's office, Dave Haynes, Jan Duras, and Joe Russell, also from CBO, and Ali Panucci, still with us.

Thank you so much for being here today.

I should have said, Ali, thanks to your whole team as well for their work on the CRF dollars, really appreciate your due diligence to go into detail on what those dollars could be used for in the very near term.

And now we have some slightly good news.

I don't want to be overly optimistic, but slightly good news to talk about the revenue forecast in front of us.

Director Noble, thanks for sharing a memo yesterday with all of the council members.

We did get a chance to see in your brief I want to give you a quick email, a quick preview of the presentation for today, and I'll reserve some of the comments that I have about the importance of this discussion, but I do want to spread a level set that there are some important caveats to be considered when we think about the potential increase of about $40 million.

some of the moving parts in the future, but this is good news because a year ago at this point, we all thought that there was going to be significant decreases in revenue.

Very, very thankful that we are not seeing that trend continue and that we have jumpstart progressive revenue that passed that helps provide additional support.

But we'll turn it back over to you and we'll have a chance to hear what is embedded in this news that you have to share with us today from the spring revenue forecast.

Thank you.

Excuse me.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

I am just going to offer a few words of introduction before I turn it over to Dave Hennis and Yandera to give you more of the technical details, but just to set stage a little bit.

So this is per our normal, excuse me, our normal calendar, the first of two major revenue forecasts that the Budget Office develops.

the first here in April, the second in August.

It's that second forecast that we use in the Budget Office as the basis for the proposed budget that we deliver in September.

We then do provide a third, a shorter update to you, to you, the Council, in late October, early November, as you move through your budget deliberations and make final decisions.

And as you will recall last year, just given the timing of events, there was a significant excuse me, a significant upward revision last November as we got new data, principally actually from the second quarter of last year.

As you'll see today, there has been some updates and revisions in the underlying data as well.

We're going to spend, as typical of us, we're going to spend a fair amount of time reviewing the local economy because it's our model of the local economy that is then an input to the revenue model.

And obviously, we're in very unusual economic circumstances.

This was a recession caused by a pandemic, not something I have seen certainly in my years.

We are, you'll see in the evidence coming out of it.

But again, it's not a shock to the economy that we have experienced recently enough to fully understand.

But so we'll do that economic update, and then we'll give you the detail on the actual revenue forecast.

That will include an update for the 2021 revenues, so for this year.

We are balanced against a forecast as we always are.

So it's important to monitor that forecast to be sure that we will get the resources to support the spending that you have appropriated.

Per comments from Council Member Esqueda, we were here with you a year ago because with that revenue forecast, we no longer had the revenues expected to balance last year's budget.

So two other points I do want to make.

One is that you will not see the new federal dollars reflected in this forecast.

We're having that discussion with you separately.

So we haven't included in the tables that summarize revenues, the additional, as Chair Mesquita described, roughly $240 million that will be coming from the federal government over the next two years.

That is, we're engaged in that discussion with you and your staff in terms of allocating those essentially half those resources for this year and are anticipating including remainder of those as we develop to 2022 budget likely continuing many of the things in terms of supports that we fund here in this year, but there may be new opportunities in 2022. The other thing and then consistent with my email ultimately you'll see there's there's a modest upward revision in the revenue forecast.

We are not bringing to you today any kind of an expenditure proposal with regard to that increment.

Our focus right now has been internally and with your staff on the additional federal resources.

Again, I think it is worth recognizing that as we balance the use of our resources, we are looking beyond just this year, looking into next year and potentially beyond even into 2023 as well.

Currently, much of the city's spending is being sustained by one-time resources, either from the Coronavirus Relief Fund, so the first branch of federal dollars, our own reserves, so we have leaned on the Rainy Day Fund reserves appropriately, emergency fund reserves.

And then again, we're seeing some additional stimulus.

So as we think about expending the resources, I think we do want to think about sustainability as an important aspect of that.

So with that introduction, I'm going to turn it over to Dave and and Jan to give you, and Joe, to give you first details on the economy and then the revenues themselves.

Good morning, I'm Jan Gores from City Budget Office.

We would first like to start with an update, an economic update, and provide an overview of factors which we believe are the most relevant for the revenue forecast.

Can we go to the next slide, please?

All right, so this chart here summarizes the current state of labor market in Seattle area and U.S.

The main takeaway here is that in the second half of 2020 the recovery has been slower in the Seattle area compared to the U.S.

The red line shows that Seattle has been hit less than U.S. and has been recovering slower in that second half of 2020. So it starts at the lower 2021, the first two months.

So a pickup in job jobs created.

And there are certainly this chart does not certainly say that the complete recovery will take longer in Seattle compared to the US.

But again, it's important to realize that we are starting Seattle area starting from a lower position going into 2021. Next slide, please.

This chart here gives some useful insight into which sectors of the economy have been hit harder by the recession and are recovering slower, and which sectors are doing better by comparison.

As you can see, leisure and hospital sector, which accounts just for 10% of jobs, or accounted for 10% of jobs last February, So a biggest drop in jobs and has not recovered significantly yet in the Seattle area.

The recovery has been much faster in US.

Part of it would be the more stricter social distancing restrictions imposed in Seattle area and some voluntary changes in the consumer behavior, restricting some activities, restricting spending on on activities which then leads to job losses in leisure and hospitality.

The second biggest drop occurred in the manufacturing sector.

About two-thirds of those jobs are in aerospace manufacturing due to lower demand for air travel and Boeing moving its production of 787 to South Carolina.

There have been about 17.5 thousand jobs lost in aerospace manufacturing between February 2020 and February 2021. So those two are the biggest contributors to the job losses.

There are several sectors which have been doing quite well.

Information, foremost information and online commerce.

That has grown in Seattle area, even though it has been actually still declining in us as a whole.

What's also important here is that the jobs that have been created and are replacing the jobs that are lost, and some of those lost jobs are never really coming back.

Unlikely at Seattle, we'll see Boeing moving its production back from South Carolina.

So it's important for those jobs lost to be replaced by one that can start the recovery and can provide sustained recovery.

Based on a recent study from Office of Financial Management, the jobs created in software development in information technology industry are the ones that are associated with largest positive employment impact.

So the multipliers are the highest, the employment multipliers are highest for those sorts of jobs.

The 4.67 multiplier for software publishers means that for every direct job created in the information services sector, 3.67 additional jobs are created elsewhere in other parts of the economy, in professional and business services, in education services, in trade, in leisure and hospitality.

are benefiting the most from indirectly benefiting most from the growth of the technology sector.

So there are some ripple effects that are quite significant for each job created in information technologies.

The multiplier effect is much smaller for those jobs that have been lost in airspace manufacturing, for each additional job that would have been creating and replacing the old lost job, an additional 1.42 jobs would be created elsewhere.

So the total employment impact of One job in airspace manufacturing is 2.42 jobs overall in regional economy as a whole.

And as you can see, the leisure and hospitality has the smallest multiplier due to the smallest triple effects, creating a furious number of jobs out of these three groups here.

Thank you very much.

Now, these two charts show that in addition to the slower employment recovery in the region, in Seattle areas, there has been also a slower recovery in spending.

Employment, number of jobs, and spending are the two important factors for our tax revenue forecasts.

The chart on the right shows the drop in the consumer spending in consumer credit and debit card spending in Seattle area and compares that to the U.S., you can see that, again, because of those strict or social distancing restrictions and voluntary changes in the behavior, the overall drop and the overall recovery in spending here in the U.S. area has been slower compared to the rest of the U.S.

Next slide, please.

carefully tracking the consumer behavior.

We are now paying close attention to the outlook of a construction sector, which remains very uncertain.

Construction sector is very important, again, for the tax revenue, both sales and BNO taxes.

have they have generated about 100 million in taxes from construction sector in 2019 and about 11 percent less in 2020. So there has been a slight slight drop in revenue from the construction sector.

The bigger question is what will happen going forward.

We have some data on building permits issued by SDCI which provides some some insight into that tax revenue from construction sector tends to follow building value of permit building permits issued with some delay and we have seen a significant drop in the value of permit building permits issued in 2020 so if if revenue continues in the same kind of behaving in the same kind of pattern as in the past we are likely to see a drop in construction sector revenue after the projects that are currently being finished are all wrapped up and there are fewer new projects starting up as would be predicted by the behavior of building permits issued.

Now, going forward, this is what the U.S. forecast looks like for employment and outlays.

Again, employment and personal outlays, personal spending, are the two most important factors for building our tax revenue forecast.

For US, there has been a very slow employment recovery in the second half of 2020. The As of employment recovery track, the pessimistic scenario that I just published in October and for the last remainder of 2020, the actuals were very close to that pessimistic scenario forecast.

Personal outlays performed better than expected.

And in the U.S., the current forecast has been revised significantly upward, and there has been significant upward revision for personal outlays.

Thanks to the fiscal stimulus package, incomes are going to increase even more, but we are still expecting to see an increase in the saving rate, which would prevent from an even larger increase in personal outlays.

Dan, I wanted to let you know that some folks are texting saying that they're having a hard time hearing you.

So if you could speak up a little bit, that'd be good.

And just want to make sure that we do get a chance to get to the slides 10 and beyond.

So we may want to pick up the pace on on the next slide.

Yeah, we are wrapping up.

Can we get to the next slide, please?

All right, so for regional economic forecast, in addition to those factors that I mentioned for US forecast, there have been two important changes compared to the October forecast.

There has been a downward revision for employment for the last quarter of 2020. The Employment Security Department has revised employment data and lowered estimate for employment by about 1.2% for the first quarter of 2020. So again, we are starting in a lower position in going into 2021. In addition to that, the income data that has been released in November shows a slower income growth in 2019. And because of that, lower income in 2020 and lower starting position for income going into 2021. So those are two additional negative effects that would prevent an even larger increase in tax revenue.

Great, thank you, Jan.

So moving on, we have to translate that, if you could move the next slide, we have to translate all that economic information as well as information about actual revenues that have come in in 2020 into revenue forecasts.

And so the general outlook is for a positive forecast, but we are, as Jan highlighted, some of them, we're looking at some downside risks as well.

So, I think one of the areas where there's some positive opportunity and where we have had a growth is e-commerce, telecommuting, cloud computing.

We've all heard these areas.

They actually have experienced growth.

Meanwhile, a number of other sectors, which I'll show you in a minute, have not.

And so we're trying to balance those.

One of the things we're looking at, we're looking at sort of short-term, mid-term, long-term effects.

And one of the things we're looking at over the mid and long-term is what share of construction and employment activity actually occurs in Seattle as opposed to outside of Seattle.

An example of that is the September 2020 announcement by Amazon, one of the more visible employers, that they were going to try and accommodate 25,000 employees in Bellevue in the next few years, which is up from 15,000 announced in February of 2020, and that they don't have any new development projects, office space and so forth planned for Seattle.

Maybe this only affects us at the margins, but if they start moving employees around and other things, we will start to lose out on some of that activity, not just the construction activity, but the daily, you know, taking lunch and other retail activity that goes on from having employees, not to mention just their wages and salaries.

Next slide.

So again, the longer outlook is positive.

One of the things we've had to do and need factor into any forecast is where have we just been?

And so what we've noticed is that the national and regional employment have tracked the pessimistic scenarios that came out of the national and regional forecasts in the second half of 2020, which is crucial that we feel like we're on track with that more pessimistic, slower growth scenario.

And that's true also for our actual tax revenues that came in in 2020. And so we are believing we should stick with that until we see data that indicates otherwise.

And so that the forecast you're about to see, it does stick to that slower growth trajectory.

And part of that is because we're just not seeing enough data yet.

And we talked about this at our last presentation is just we're always on a lagged position from seeing what's going on in the current time period.

We tend to have a backward view because we're looking at older data.

And so far we're not looking at data that reflects any of the new activity from reopening and so forth.

Couple of the things that we're looking at that affect our forecasts are the work from home.

I believe we mentioned this with our last presentation as well that that that creates some reasonable uncertainty for the you know and the payroll expense tax as as employees may be working from home.

some of that work gets assigned outside of Seattle and therefore no taxes would be paid on that either payroll or business activity.

And we are tracking that as closely as we're able to given the data we have.

And then there's a large uncertainty regarding construction with with the movement of employees.

So it goes construction for office space and so forth.

But I'm sorry I'm getting an echo here.

But again, this is one we're going to have to watch in the short term, in the medium, and the long term about what actually happens.

We could just be at the point where in Seattle, we have saturated the market with office space, and so there won't be any construction.

But it could also be because of movement of employees out, possibly because they're working from home, possibly because they're being moved out, for example, in the Amazon case, if that were to occur.

Next slide.

To look more specifically, sales tax, here's what we're looking at.

So the left-hand side of this chart is showing, of the left of the dotted, vertical dotted line, we're showing 2019 activity.

This has changed year over year.

So on the left side, it's 2019 over 2018. On the right side, where all the drama is, is 2020 over 2019. And as you can see, we're just generally below where we were in 2019. And the big hit, as everyone has already observed, is in leisure and hospitality sectors.

An example of the delay in the data is we received our March 2021 distribution, which reflects January sales tax activity.

And it was somewhat higher than our forecast, the November forecast for the adopted budget, but it's still 7.2% lower than the March 2020 year-over-year measure.

So we're still climbing out of this, and I think we'll be able to see that here when we look at the revenue table a little bit more.

Before you move on, I think that it's important to note as well when we look at construction and that we're trying to do is to take into context the comments we just heard about the delay from SDCI with permitting and some of the complications that small businesses and those who may want to construct in our city are running into, especially during COVID.

If there's anything that we can continue to do to expedite it, it's not only good for those who we're trying to serve, whether it's housing or small business opportunities, but, you know, according to this chart, it would also be good as an we are going to have a little advocacy piece on continuing to expedite permitting.

And then number two, just since I interrupted you, I want to say thank you to Councilmember Herbold, the Vice Chair Herbold has offered to have the item we were going to have last on today's agenda regarding workplace transparency that she has been leading.

We will have that on the next That's May 4th at 930 a.m.

That allows for us to have about 22 more minutes of this presentation before we move on to the housing presentation.

So just want to orient folks to the time in front of us.

Thank you.

I think next slide, actually.

Similarly, for the business and occupation tax, we're looking at Payments relative to 2019, we were down 11.1% in 2020. You can see on the bullets on the left-hand side, the composition of that 11.1% in terms of which industry categories carried the load or represented the largest shares of that 11.1% drop.

Leisure and hospitality again leads the list, but professional business services, but this would include things such as you know haircutting and nail salons and things like that as well as you know accounting firms and what not trade down construction down as well on the right hand side.

You can see the actual percentage changes from 2020 over 2019. And most of them are in the 10 to 15% range.

As is our total But leisure and hospitality, you see that dramatic blue line at the bottom there, down at 56% decrease year over year.

It just got hammered.

But even within that negative news, information and finance actually showed some growth at the end of the day.

So there are signs of growth and what we're hoping is that And what we're forecasting is moderate growth in many of these areas.

And I think what we're seeing obviously is that the policy-driven closures are going to be the last to recover out of all of this.

Next slide.

So in terms of a forecast, what we've shown here is sales and B&O combined with the blue being the B&O tax and the red being the sales tax, the transparent columns are the November forecast for 2021 and 2022, and the more opaque columns represent the current April update.

And what you see generally is just moderate increases in both columns between the November and the current, and then again, additional increase from 2021 to 2022. And you can see on the left-hand side of the slide, we're adding about $10 million, excuse me, about $10 million in 2021 from the local share of the sales tax and the business and occupation tax, and an additional 22.5 million perhaps in 2022 from these two sources.

Next slide.

Before jumping to the table, I wanted to just share a little bit about real estate excise tax.

This is a major tax for capital projects in the city.

Did we just lose Dave?

It looks like it.

Okay, I will take over while he tries to get back on.

So in terms of real estate excise tax, you can see we had a banner year in 2019. 2020 fell off, ultimately did not fall off as much as we had forecast.

So our actual revenues for 2020 beat our forecast.

So there are some additional resources there.

And based on that and based on what we're seeing, particularly in the residential market, but also in the commercial market, we are forecasting a recovery in real estate excise tax revenues to approximately $80 million a year for this year and for next.

Just a reminder that in general, these revenues are dedicated to capital projects and actually provide the backbone funding for our basic maintenance of city facilities and city assets.

So SDOT, parks, FAS for various community facilities.

So again, this real estate excise tax has recovered more quickly than we had anticipated.

An important distinction relative to the previous recession is that This wasn't a financial crisis, right?

So the banks, banking and financial markets are still working and are able to support financial transactions.

And I see there's a question.

Please go ahead.

Thank you so much.

Shea, this look back as well as a forecast, I see the 2022 bar is counterintuitive to what I thought it would be.

I thought it would continue going up.

Can you explain why it does not?

Off the top of my head, I did not generate this forecast.

We'll continue to monitor this market and update as we move forward.

It's not unusual for a single transaction to have on the margin a non-trivial impact here.

It's a half percent tax, it's actually two quarter percent taxes together, a half percent.

And for instance, I recall a couple of years ago when the, what I still refer to as the Columbia Tower, was sold twice within the span of a year and unto itself generated a couple million, several million dollars in revenue.

So that- Yeah, it looks like the reduction is actually in the residential part of the bar though.

Yeah, we can explore more.

Some of that may also be one of the factors that has driven residential real estate excise taxes, condominiums.

When the condominium building hits the market, every one of those units is transacted, more or less, in a relatively short period of time.

Although we're seeing existing projects reach completion, although there's been strength in the overall residential market, the condominium market, particularly downtown, has been somewhat depressed.

probably not expecting significant construction and new product beyond what's already underway.

So but we can give you more detail on that.

And then we'll move to the next slide.

Can't see David, he gets back on, shouldn't interrupt me.

So this is a summary table, lots of numbers.

Let me take a moment or two to walk you through the format and then to highlight the specific findings.

So the first column is our 2020 revenue.

So having completed year-end, that is the total of the revenues we've taken in.

The upper part of this table highlights the general funds.

So there's property tax, you can see the sources there.

And that leads you to the total in the middle of the table.

The lower part of the table highlights the set of revenue sources that are largely dedicated to one purpose or another.

However, they support general government activities, so I think are very relevant to this conversation.

In particular, over the past year, as revenues for admissions tax and the short-term rental tax and the end of the sweetened beverage tax have fallen off, we've actually used general fund revenues to backfill some of the activities that were funded specifically by those sources.

So you really sometimes need to see this whole page to get a real picture of our general government resources.

Hence the total at the bottom of the page.

So again, first column is 2020 actuals.

The next column, 2021 adopted, that's the forecast to which the current budget is balanced, reflecting the update we provided you in November.

The following column is the new forecast.

So for 2021 April, that is the forecast for this year's revenue as of today, and the changes that following column the 2021 change over adopted that's the delta that is the change in the forecast that we're bringing you.

And then 2022 is next year's forecast we've given a slight preview of that last time in November, but this is really our first detailed forecast of those of those revenues.

And we have begun developing a preliminary developing the 2022 budget.

And we are doing it with that revenue forecast, the final column, as the basis for our initial work.

And again, we will update that in August to provide the final forecast that will underlie the proposal that we bring forward.

So I'm really going to focus most specifically on the 2021 update and the change there to give you a sense of how all the economic information we provided has translated.

So you see, again, looking the 2021 April and the change, quite increased in property taxes.

We had forecast that there might be a higher level of delinquencies, but we're not seeing that.

So that's good news both in general and in terms of the specific revenue.

We've noted sales and B&O have come back slightly more quickly than we had thought.

But again, these are very modest differences when you consider the overall base.

less than 2% difference.

Again, utility taxes up more considerably.

That's both public and private utility tax revenues that are reflected there.

Court fines and parking down slightly, grants and transfers again down slightly.

But the bottom line is approximately $20 million, so 20.264, just reading the right part of increased revenues for 2021. talk quickly about the bottom of the table and then take questions.

So you'll see that we have not changed the forecast for admissions tax or short-term rental tax for sweetened beverage.

So those numbers remain the same.

And again, not a change.

We continue to monitor those.

On the admissions tax side, we had assumed that at some level of activity would resume in the fall.

That still seems to be a fair assumption.

We may be before then as well.

reduced occupancies, we're not expecting a dramatic increase in admissions tax revenues.

Just by way of information, movie theater sales are a major component of that, and we haven't seen that business yet recover significantly.

short-term rental tax, otherwise more colloquially known as the Airbnb tax.

Again, we had assumed some level of resumed activity later this year.

That seems consistent.

But again, we look forward to the potential to upgrade that forecast depending what we see.

So similarly, sweetened beverage.

I do want to stop.

The Mercer Mega Block, this is really an accounting issue.

We had anticipated that those revenues would come in 2020. Sales did not close last year.

It will close this year.

So we've shifted those revenues to show them in 2021. However, we've literally spent those dollars.

We have an inter-fund loan against these revenues that was used to fund a number of activities.

So as soon as these revenues come in, they will go to repay that loan.

So this is not a net increase in revenues.

And then schools on camera fund with schools reopening, increased revenues there.

So again, if you take out the medical block, there's really no significant change in the non-general fund part of the table.

So question.

Thank you very much.

I want to go ahead and just add a few points since I'm not seeing any immediate hands.

I want to reiterate some of the important elements of why I'm both optimistic but also cautious despite the relatively positive news here today.

I think it's important for us to recognize that it's incredibly difficult for us to predict next steps, but on balance, this is good news today.

as the economy begins to recover and as federal dollars are available for COVID response and recovery, there is an opportunity to replenish some of the reserves as base revenues bounce back to brace for future economic downturns.

As you remember, this was really one of the most important things that the city council did last year to at least bake in some additional cushion in case there is a need for those emergency reserves in the future.

I'm very proud of our council for including about $40 million in last year's budget.

that we are able to do that.

You will also recall that the 2021 balance budget included some assumptions about ongoing spending reductions in certain areas, including holding positions open, delaying certain capital investments, levy shifts, other cuts to certain departments like Estada parks.

That may not be sustainable.

We want to make sure we are able to open our economy and provide the services we need, And then finally, as we look at the 2021 budget, we see that it relies heavily on making sure that the jumpstart payroll tax revenue goes to what it was intended to do.

And that was codified in Resolution 31957. We want to make sure that we're prioritizing investments and issues that have long been put on the back burner, including housing and homelessness.

About two-thirds of the funding does go to housing and homelessness.

and I think it's really important as we continue to look at various revenue streams coming in that we are protective and diligent to use those dollars as we committed to with both voters and the broad coalition that came forward and supported council's effort around those funds.

So I want to make sure that we're both looking at avoiding risk in balancing our budget and maintaining integrity of those funds as well.

I'll see if there's additional comments or questions.

I saw a few folks come on screen.

Vice Chair Herbold, please go ahead.

Slide four, please.

Fantastic.

One more.

One more forward.

There you go.

appreciate it.

So one of the really appreciate having a panel earlier to sort of ground some of our discussions.

And Matt Lander from SBA, who was on the panel this morning, specifically called out arts and entertainment as one of the hardest hit sectors.

And I appreciate the slide is focused on on what is driving the recovery, but knowing that the arts and entertainment industry has been particularly hit hard by the pandemic, and they have been uniquely impacted, though their numbers are relatively small, I just want to make sure that their situation is not being obscured by that of the larger industries, and just want to understand whether or not they are captured in any of the categories here.

Yeah, Jan, I defer to you on where, which of the SIC codes you're talking about.

Yeah, so leisure and hospitality includes drinking and food services as well as arts.

That's a part of that.

So category includes arts and entertainment in addition to, okay.

leisure and hospitality includes arts and entertainment.

Yes.

Okay, fantastic.

Thank you.

Um, and I just, you know, I want to, I want to speak to, um, The importance of recognizing what is driving our recovery, but also the importance in making sure that we are supporting the historic industries in our region that have led to a vibrant economic climate.

and looking not only to invest in those sectors that are driving recovery, but looking to those sectors that are, without our assistance, are going to continue to lag behind and that we should really to try to avoid that sort of a scenario and look at really focusing some of our investments in the smaller industries that have a powerful impact on our economy.

And to mix this presentation a little bit with the previous, can you share that in text it's hard to say the county in particular would have a significant role in arts and culture before culture and otherwise have identified the sector might be the wrong way to think about it because why not it is more than just economics but have identified that sector as one of important as we of import as we think about recovery and assisting those who have suffered most through the pandemic.

Are there any additional questions comments.

Vice Chair did you have something else.

Okay.

I'm wondering if you could help put this revenue forecast into context for the upcoming two pieces of legislation that were on the introduction referral calendar yesterday that are not on today's agenda and how those discussions will factor in to the ongoing conversation about what gets spent this year in anticipation of our 2022 budget coming up this fall.

Thank you, Chairman Skate.

I think you're referring to the carry forward ordinance and the budget exception ordinance that will be, I think, on the committee's agenda on May 5th for discussion at that special meeting.

Those bills are somewhat sort of technical or administrative in nature.

They are allowing certain appropriations authorized in 2020 to carry forward into 2021. that is spending the departments are intending to move forward but not all funds were expended in the appropriation authority wasn't automatically carried forward through legislation and then making some adjustments through the budget exceptions ordinance to departments that may have overspent or underspent compared to what their appropriation authority was in in 2020. So those are relatively technical in nature and there's really not a lot of decisions about new spending included in that.

But following closely on the heels of that discussion will be the continued discussions of the federal funds.

And then in June, the supplemental budget ordinance where you will actually see requests from departments for new spending or adjustments to their adopted budget.

And that would be where if any new proposals outside of federal funding are of interest to council, that would be the appropriate time for that.

Although I'll also just note that there have been other sort of one-off supplemental budget ordinances that this committee and others have contemplated this year.

and past in some cases.

And so we will need to be making sure we're keeping that in mind as we're thinking about these additional resources identified to the revenue forecast as well as other spending decisions to ensure that we're balancing at the end of the year.

Because you'll recall last year at around this time, we had a much more drastic negative forecast coming from the budget office that was then not awesome as well in August and then better news in November.

So there we can see fluctuations throughout the year.

So I think that's along the lines of what you started with, which is some optimism, but advising caution and making big changes to the adopted budget outside of those one-time funds, given the uncertainty moving forward.

Okay, great, and I do see that David has rejoined the meeting.

Apologies, David, for having you have dropped off.

Is there anything else that you would like to add before we close this presentation?

Well, having missed the discussion, I think I'll close by saying thank you, and I apologize that I was kicked off.

I don't know how, I think it's on my end, but.

We are all having computer and internet issues today, no problem.

Council President, please go ahead.

Thank you and sorry that I'm doing the old school raise my actual hand.

Sometimes I have the raising hand feature on zoom and sometimes I don't and today I don't I just wanted to.

Make sure that we're we continue to be grounded in in reality in terms of what this revenue forecast is telling us.

I think what it's telling us is that.

The revenue is starting to trend in a direction that we want to see it trend, which is upwards.

But there's still a lot of uncertainty in our revenue.

And I'm hearing a lot of just sort of general, I guess the economic term is pessimism around around future revenue forecasts.

And so I don't want folks to walk away with the impression, people who might be viewing this meeting, that we somehow think that we've reached the panacea of recovery by virtue of seeing this revenue forecast.

There's still a lot more work that needs to happen.

We still need a lot more support and connectivity to federal and state partners for the city of Seattle.

I want to make sure that we have, you know, viable additional revenue to support the ongoing recovery and revitalization needs of the city of Seattle.

I just want to make sure that I am receiving the revenue forecast through the proper filter.

you know, ignoring the reality of the remaining difficulty and challenges that we're going to continue to have in overcoming this once-in-a-lifetime economic crisis.

So I did want to just sort of hear from Dave or Ben or Jan on their perspective on sort of that big macro takeaway of what we should be, how we should ground ourselves with this information.

I think that's exactly right.

I mean, what we're showing you is that we have begun a recovery, right?

Revenues have turned back to positive growth, but certainly not achieved the levels from the pre-COVID period.

And also to highlight, and the data really show it, there continue to be sectors, and use that phrase not to neglect the people who are working in those places, who relied on those industries for their livelihood, that are still decimated and have not turned around.

And we are hoping for some that is short-term.

We know that for others, for instance, in the context of some of the manufacturing, our long-term impacts directly attributed to COVID or perhaps otherwise.

So it is good to be back on a growth trajectory, but there's been significant damage done, and we are not all the way back.

And again, that's why we're going to be thoughtful and cautious about the way we deploy the resources and recognize to use it.

Perhaps, Troy's analogy, there's more of a marathon here than a sprint.

This is going to be a short recession with a period of recovery.

particularly for some industries, will be considerable.

Thank you.

Sorry, I was just going to say that I think that the sort of the grave reality that we're facing right now, right, that this is the beginning of the recovery and we are seeing the numbers trend in a better direction.

makes the work that we're doing around ARPA and advocacy around additional state federal dollars, particularly in that area of housing and homelessness, that much more important and critical to making sure, you know, this information I think is really helpful to making sure that as we are being strategic with how to deploy additional resources, we're doing just that.

We're being strategic with those resources and identifying how we can best leverage our available revenue at whatever level it is with those additional dollars coming into our ecosystem by virtue of those supports from the federal and state government.

So I just wanted to put that out there, and I really appreciate the opportunity to be grounded in this information as we continue to make really difficult decisions about how to best leverage our dollars and how to best meet the needs of those individuals who have been, in fact, decimated by this economic crisis and certainly are not feeling like we are at the start of an economic recovery.

For many families and workers and business owners, they very much feel like this is still the beginning of the end for them.

So I think the challenges are great, but the opportunities I think are there and I remain hopeful that we can thread the needle here.

So, thank you.

Thank you.

And are there any last comments?

Okay.

I am not seeing any.

I think Council President, your summary notes are a good note to leave this on to set the tone for our future conversations.

So thank you for highlighting those pieces.

Director Noble, thanks to you and your team, Dave, Jan, Joseph, and as always, Ali, thank you for providing us with an overview as well.

We look forward to future conversations with you all and appreciate your generous time today.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, Madam Clerk, let's go ahead and read item number four into the record, and this will be our last item for today's agenda.

Agenda item number four, Northgate Commons Opposition and Redevelopment Partnership with the City of Seattle for briefing and discussion.

Wonderful, thank you.

And today we have with us Executive Director Andrew Loftin and Terry Gailey from Seattle Housing Authority, along with Tracy Ratscliffe from Central Staff.

Want to take a moment of personal privilege, Director Loftin, it is my honor to, before allowing you to talk about the great work that SHA is up to, to have a chance to present to you the proclamation that we just emailed to you.

This is the final proclamation with some updates that we wanted to make sure you had in your hands to really honor you and your legacy, both as a public servant and specifically here in the city of Seattle.

As you see in the proclamation, it does declare May 7th to be Andrew Lofton Day.

And this is our opportunity to see you before your retirement on that day.

Thank you for continuing to come to the Housing Committee over the last four years.

I've had the chance to work with you and really appreciated the opportunity to learn more about the work that you're doing at SHA and the direct service that you provide.

So very briefly, colleague, I wanted to highlight some of the features in the resolution and Director Loftin's career.

In the last 16 years at SHA, there has been continued growth in a number of in the number of affordable housing units.

Since 2012, when Director Laughlin first came to SHA, the housing inventory has grown by over 1,500 units.

And that includes both vouchers and SHA-owned and managed units.

And I know you're doing a ton of work right now on strategic acquisition as you head out, setting the organization up to be in a good position for additional acquisition for more affordable housing units.

Throughout his work for the city, there has been more than 10,000 SHA families who were able to get access to the city's utility discount program.

And recognizing that one in 10 students in Seattle Public Schools also lives in SHA housing, Director Loftin directed the initial development of the SHA education initiative, which includes partnerships with Seattle Public Schools and Seattle Universities and other key stakeholders in our area.

Director Loftin's 40-year career in public service includes the work at Department of Commerce and the City of Seattle under multiple mayors and multiple departments.

It's truly been a dedication, a service to the city to be able to have you in the steward position at AHA, and I am honored to be able to recognize your 40 years of work on behalf of the city, and thank you for your time with us in the last four years and our committee specifically.

and want to thank you and your team.

I know that there's a lot of folks who may want to say something before I turn it over to you, and I know there's also a lot of interest.

Council Member Juarez is interested in this Northgate project as well.

So anything else anybody else would want to say before I turn it over to Director Loftin?

Okay.

Director Loftin, thank you so much for receiving this, and excited to celebrate your retirement and wish you the best as well.

Any words from you before we turn it over to you for the presentation?

Council Chair, thank you very much for this honor and to the rest of the city council.

I do appreciate it.

I feel very humbled by it.

I do want to say that the achievements that you have acknowledged, I'm not only very proud of, I would be remiss if I didn't say that those are not my achievements, those are achievements of the staff.

people at Seattle Housing Authority.

I could not be in the position I am now without their support.

And so I'm extremely appreciative and thankful for all of the staff that have put their work behind those achievements that you just described.

And those achievements are also, I think, a reflection of the partnerships that we've had with the city of Seattle, the partnerships we've had with other community partners to really focus on what I think has been the number one driving force for SHA is how do we improve our residents' lives.

And so all of those efforts are driven by that fundamental theme.

And I'm very, very appreciative of being able to have served more people during our tenure and to have done something that I think has created an opportunity and a pathway for many of our residents to improve their situation.

Thank you to the City Council and the City of Seattle staff for your thoughtfulness and this honor.

Thank you very much.

I'm going to turn it back over to you.

We are excited about this.

We are excited about the ability to acquire existing affordable housing.

Again, partnership with you all to make sure we are not just building, which often takes additional time, but can be more, let's say, cost-efficient to purchase existing units that can be updated and turned into affordable housing units.

And this is, I think, an extension of the work that we did in 2018 to make sure that we were looking at more preservation and strategic acquisition options.

Anything else, Tracy, before we turn it over to Director?

I think given the lateness of the hour, and I didn't eat my Wheaties this morning, so I think we're ready to lunchtime.

I'm going to let Mr. Lofton go ahead with his presentation so we can get to lunch afterwards.

Yeah, I know how it is to be in the way of lunch, so we'll try to move very quickly through this, but also give you a great background and overview of the Northgate Commons project that we are developing.

So I'll turn it over to Terri Galany without any further ado so we can move right into the presentation.

Terri?

Terri, you're on mute.

Or we can't hear you.

I can't hear you.

I think your audio might not be working with your earbuds.

Still not working.

Dang, I can read your lips, but I can't hear you.

Do you want to pitch hit, Director Loftin?

I think that's the term.

I don't actually know.

Pinch?

Pitch?

I'm not sure.

Director Loftin is now on mute.

OK.

Here we go.

Is this better?

Yes.

So Northgate, I don't know if we have the slides up, but we wanted to share with you that back in 2019, we acquired the Northgate property, which is that the Northeast and Northgate way.

It's an acre site it has about approximately 211 units that are naturally affordable by that we need the current rents are affordable at about 60% of their median income.

And those units are what we have been pointing to to read about so this is a area of view of the site.

And those are the 211 units.

Currently, they're one and two bedroom or one and two story buildings on this entire site.

And the goals that we had for this was to preserve the existing 211 units, create a very connected and diverse community, partner with local and community partners to develop a vision for the site and integrate the environmental stewardship priorities and health priorities we have into the community.

Andrew, I'm back and can you hear me now?

Yes.

I really apologize.

It worked in the little pre-session and something must have happened along the way.

Okay, so I just gave the opening commitments and so why don't you take it up on partnership opportunities.

And Terry, I have my screen shared so you can just tell me when to move the slide.

Okay, all right, that works great.

So again, so thank you to everyone for giving us the time to talk about Northgate Commons, really thrilled to be here.

This is a wonderful opportunity for us to partner on creating a substantial amount of affordable housing in this neighborhood.

Just a little bit of background.

So SHA purchased this site at the end of 2019 for $65 million.

It was on the market and there were market rate buyers who were interested in the site and the site was at risk of largely going to market at the time.

So SHA, in partnership with the city, stepped up to help preserve this opportunity for, again, creating a substantial amount of affordable housing on the site.

It's a wonderful site.

I don't have to go into all the benefits here.

Wonderful access to transportation services, the mall redevelopment, access to the Kraken, So we're really, really excited about that.

The other thing that's really wonderful about this neighborhood is that it fits within SHA's CMTO program, Creative Moves to Opportunity.

This is a high opportunity neighborhood.

So wonderful location for affordable housing, particularly for families.

And that really fits into the set of commitments on the second slide that's shown here.

Yes, thank you.

So the core commitments that are kind of foundational here are preserving the existing 211 naturally occurring affordable units as long as we can until redevelopment.

So there will eventually be relocation required in order to redevelop the site, but we've committed to deferring that as long as possible.

Create a connected, diverse community, you know, and making sure that it's, the site engages the neighborhood around it with pathways and open space.

Transparency with the local stakeholders and regional, local and regional stakeholders to develop and implement the vision for the neighborhood.

to provide affordable housing across the spectrum of incomes, which is really, really important when you're creating neighborhoods and breaking down barriers across populations.

And then integrate environmental stewardship and health into the community.

SHA has had a lot of success with our Breathe Easy program.

Lots of other opportunities there around stormwater management and interesting ideas for environmental stewardship.

The goals here are to create a substantial amount of new affordable housing on site.

We think that at least doubling the number of units on site is a good goal here.

We do need to balance that with the need to sell off parts of the property to market rate partners in order to help fund the site costs and redevelopment costs.

It's a key component to the redevelopment.

That won't fully cover the costs, but it is key to help offset some of those planning costs.

Thank you.

This slide really outlines the, you know, kind of key roles for SHA and our key city partner, the Office of Housing.

SHA developing and implementing the master plan.

We have spent the last year kind of confirming site conditions, site capacity, vehicular, pedestrian opportunities, and working with various city departments on confirming the infrastructure outside.

SHA will oversee relocation when the time comes, and then also market and sell parcels to our market rate for market redevelopment.

OH, oh, not quite ready, sorry.

I'm trying to be really quick.

I'm trying to be mindful of the time here.

OH, our partner in planning through this, OH is also leading our coordination with other city departments and will also be the lead in identifying who is going to develop the affordable housing on the site.

and be key in helping identify funding sources and the developers.

Thank you.

While the site is somewhat constrained in terms of what can happen on the site, because we do need to achieve some sort of value out of the site that's not set aside for affordable housing, there are opportunities for partnerships with the city.

affordable housing, like I mentioned, what, you know, the sort of the type and focus of the affordable housing opportunities around directing ground floor uses.

We've been talking about childcare and early learning as opportunities on the site, amenities to support families.

And then also we had some discussions with Department of Arts and Culture around opportunities for space for the arts.

Other opportunities, targeted engagement, site infrastructure, particularly around green storm water management, partnerships with SDCI around permitting, expediting permitting to help facilitate the portable housing, and then neighborhood connections, open space, multi-use trails, multimodal connections, et cetera.

There's a lot of opportunities, particularly as it relates to the mall, to the stout, the park, to the east, connections to the freeway, and connections, obviously, to the Sound Transit Station.

We have been discussing partnership assistance and opportunities with various department neighborhoods, excuse me, city departments, including SPU, around green stormwater opportunities, and then also the need to just identify the capacity on the site, given that the site is going to go from roughly 200 units to somewhere between 1200 and 1400 units.

Seems like there is ample capacity on the site, but we've been working with SPU on some of those questions.

Department of Neighborhoods is our key ally in coordinating SHA's community engagement efforts, along with Council Member Juarez, her newsletter, and discussions with various stakeholders in the neighborhood.

Seattle City Light has been working with them on capacity for the site, and then obviously SDOT is our partner on confirming the proposed traffic mitigations that may or may not Community planning is a key component of this.

Fortunately, the neighborhood has had a lot of planning effort to date.

Here are just a few of them.

The MHA rezone from 2017, the comprehensive plan update, and the Northgate urban design framework.

And some of the comments that have been extracted from some of those earlier planning processes are here.

And fortunately, the Northgate Commons redevelopment really does fit well within the comments that were pulled out of those plans and are part of the discussions.

I think we have a good foundation for our proposed outreach and for engagement.

So just wanted to note, there is no rezone or land use legislation approval required.

The zoning there is appropriate.

Like I said, the site can hold 1,200 to 1,400 units at the end of the day.

So that is very, very appropriate for the site.

Our proposed outreach, so prior to the cooperative agreement approval, which we expect to be coming before the council later this year.

Preliminary set of engagement opportunities here, including mailers to residents, neighbors within 1,000 feet, direct discussions with key stakeholders in the neighborhood.

Some of that has already happened, information like I alluded to earlier.

including information about Northgate Commons and Council Member Juarez's digital newsletter.

It's a good avenue for some of that early engagement.

And then after a cooperative agreement, it would be a little bit more robust level of engagement with area stakeholders, including presentations, some of which can be hosted on the SHA website, as well as virtual presentations, and then FAQs distributed to neighbors and other states.

Great.

I'm going to leave this slide up here with the timeline on it so folks can see that and wanted to just leave it up there for context behind our discussion here real quick.

I wanted to see if, before we wrap up here, if Council Member Juarez wanted to add additional context on outreach and what you see in the presentation and any questions you may have.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair, and for inviting me to your exciting committee.

I can see this is the fun place, maybe funnier than my committee.

I don't know about that.

Let me first say thank you, Mr. Loftin.

I know that we honored you with the proclamation, but it's been a real joy working with you since 2016. And Terri, thank you for the overview.

I know you've been briefed our office and we've met with you a few times and you guys have been great about the whole Northgate Commons, that particular block and what we want to do.

What I wanted to share, which is a few little prepared statements, is because there's some other great stuff going on, which this project fits phenomenally perfect within the footprint.

So we know that D5, that's where this is located, has been Dance with Life and Activity and Growth And so this project fits right in with the transit-oriented housing, transit-oriented development, childcare, and we've been working to establish an indigenous footprint in the north end as well.

And so we know now that the North Lake, or I'm sorry, the North Gate Link light rail extension will open in October, and we're anticipating about 50,000 riders.

And from our discussions with NHL and OVG, when the training center opens in the fall, They're anticipating about 800,000 people annually to be circling through that hub, that Northgate, Northgate Commons, North Seattle College, Northgate Light Rail, and the Northgate Mall and the training center.

So what we have is this incredible activity, Dense with Life, that's just buzzing with growth and jobs.

So we're excited about that.

And we will need more housing to house a lot of the folks that are moving out here for the jobs that are coming here, and of course, the people that are already living here, and then the 10-minute walk shed to light rail.

So the other issue that is really exciting for us is that the Chief Seattle Club is going to be putting up 200 units of housing in a longhouse in North Seattle College.

And we have met with the new president of North Seattle College, Dr. Crawford, and she's working with the Seattle Indian Health Board.

and our friends at Bellwether.

So putting that, having that housing unit there where we can double the capacity, and then the pedestrian bike bridge that's gonna be finished soon that connects Northgate to North Seattle College is gonna be phenomenal.

And then on the North Seattle College campus will be the 200 units of housing with the Longhouse.

In conjunction with that, we've been meeting with Seattle Indian Health Board to place a clinic in either spot, hopefully, we've been talking to Mr. Loftin about this, and the president, or Dr. Crawford, and also with Rise Above with Jackie McCormick.

So we provide intervention services and housing and education opportunities for Native American youth, and dovetail that with getting them into the Promise Program at North Seattle College.

So I wanna end with this.

There's so much exciting things going on right now in D-5 in that particular hotspot, and Mr. Loftin has been great in us exploring for the first time, which our community has been asking for for years, is to have a potential performing arts space.

There isn't one in the district.

We use Nathan Hale's auditorium.

So if you look at the footprint from a organic view where people are coming there, the things that we would like to talk about, we're working with SHA, Mr. Lofton, is a potential performing arts space, a space potentially for the Seattle Indian Health Board and what they bring, and other opportunities for housing.

And all of it is just connects perfectly.

Again, the reason why I say this is that when we're trying to build, and I have been doing this since I was elected, this, if you will, this indigenous footprint in the North end is as the South end has really been centralized.

And we're working with those organizations to extend it to the North end because we have what we have at Northgate with the opportunity of transportation.

We have that access for services, not only just light rail, But medical, we had the Northwest Hospital and UW Hospital.

We have the education, of course, North Seattle College.

We have the social services.

And we need to like pull all that together so we can have this neighborhood where people have a 10-minute walk shed to go to work, to go to school, to hop on light rail, to go to the store, to pick up their children at childcare, and, you know, not have to have a car or can actually use light rail.

So as you know, we're also pushing for our second stop on 130th because the numbers that we were looking at before in Sound Transit didn't have these numbers four years ago about what the growth would be at Northgate, particularly with NHL and OBG having the footprint and then just inking a deal with Virginia Mason will have a footprint there as well.

as well as two more new hotels.

So we have a lot of growth on the market rate units, but we're getting more growth on the affordable and low income units.

And we have those folks, Bellwether, Chief Seattle Club, all these great organizations.

I wanna say North Helpline have been working with us.

And so it was wonderful to have Andrew sit down with us for an hour and Terry and again, and the staff, and the charrettes we're putting together, because these are the things that we're hearing that the North community, Northgate community wants, because we want that density.

So I just wanted to share that, and thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Loftin.

Thank you, Terry.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you very much.

I want to say thank you, Terry.

I think that this last slide really speaks for itself.

There is much more work to be done here, but we're all very excited about these next steps for 2021 and 2022. Is there any final comments that you'd like to make?

Just to say that we look forward to the continued cooperation and work with the city on the vision for the Northgate Commons.

And I think some of the goals and objectives that Council Member Juarez just described are aligned with the Housing Authority's objectives as well.

So I think it's a phenomenal opportunity for the city.

I think we are excited about the potential that it might bring and just looking forward to continuing the work.

We are as well, and I do remember exactly where this plot is, because it's right next to the park where I saw Councilmember Juarez get dunked in a tank at her live in D5 events, and excited to continue to think about the connectivity that you described there.

So please note for the viewing audience, oh, sorry, Councilmember Herbold.

For the viewing audience, there's more to come here.

Councilmember Herbold, please go ahead.

Thank you so much.

Can we go back to slide, what is it, slide?

They're not numbered.

I'll put the map on it with the different potential redevelopment scenarios.

I think it was the second slide.

I'm sorry, that's a cue for me.

I need to tee it up.

I'm so sorry.

Terri, can you share your screen?

I can just describe it.

OK.

It shows three different areas, plot A, plot D, and plot E.

And of the plots that look like they run from A to G, AD&E are the areas where affordable housing is proposed to be developed.

And my rough back of the envelope estimate is it's about 450 units of affordable housing there.

And so I'm just interested to know, you know, affordable housing is everything under 80% average median income.

And so I'm just, I'm wondering what is the potential on these three lots for the numbers of units that will be deeply subsidized housing affordable to families struggling on the smallest incomes of 80% AMI and below?

Thank you.

And is this the slide you're referring to?

The one that's up now?

Yes.

Okay, thank you.

So this is a little bit confusing because- Wait, no, actually it's not.

I was looking, I had the right slide up on my screen.

No, it's the second slide.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah.

Yeah, this one.

So what we have done is we have, set as a target, doubling the amount of affordable housing here.

So this slide reflects approximately 422 affordable units here.

I wasn't that far off.

Yeah, no.

You've got good eyes to be able to read those.

So that's what's reflected here.

And when I had mentioned our partnership with the Office of Housing, and the ability to craft the priorities for what affordable housing looks like on this site.

Those are exactly some of the questions that we have been addressing with the wave in terms of what are priorities for what type of affordable housing.

I will also note, in addition to the traditional affordable housing, 60% and below, this would also produce a substantial number of MFTE units as well, so 80%.

The slide here has a mix of typical ones, twos, and threes, affordable at 60% and below, and then also a small component of permanent PSH.

And do we have a sense of what proportion of the units are 60% and below, and what percentage are PSH?

So that's a level of refinement that we haven't fully resolved yet with this.

Thank you.

And the MFTE under 80%, are those going to be in the market rate buildings?

Yes.

I think that's all I have to say.

Thank you.

I appreciate that, Tracy.

I'm thinking that we might want to express our hopes and good to know that there is going to be a cooperative agreement coming forward.

Excellent.

Thank you, Councilmember.

Are there any additional questions or comments?

I want to thank you for this presentation.

I know this was a carryover from a meeting that we previously had as well.

So thank you for your patience as we got to this agenda item.

We did go a few minutes over, but I don't see any additional questions, and I think it's wonderful that we had D5 representation today in our committee meeting.

Thank you so much.

A lot of excitement about this, and Council Member Herbold, I want to signal my support for the flagging of priorities that you just teed up as well.

I know also that today is a pretty heavy day.

A lot of us just got a notice on our devices that the jury has reached a verdict in the deliberation of whether or not to convict Derek Chauvin, who faces murder and manslaughter charges in Minneapolis.

And we know that that verdict will be read here momentarily.

So just I want to note the heaviness in which many of us are leaving this meeting today, not only here in Seattle, but across this country.

With that, there is no other items on today's agenda.

We will reconvene on May 4th at 930 a.m.

We'll have the domestic worker standards board, the LSAC council appointments, the transparency requirements for contractors.

Again, thank you, Councilmember Herbold, for your flexibility today, and we'll have additional time for that on Tuesday the 4th.

We will also have the sound transit property transfer, so maybe we'll see Councilmember Juarez again.

Great, great.

We'll also have a public hearing that afternoon on May 4th.

Again, that starts at 5.30 p.m.

And then specific to the federal dollars, we will continue that on May 5th at 2 p.m.

We'll talk about the carry forward ordinance, the 2020 budget exceptions bill, and again, more details to the ARPA or what we're calling the CLRF, the Coronavirus Local Relief Funds that are provided through ARPA.

Don't worry about the alphabet soup.

It means relief for Seattleites in our region.

And with that, if there's no agenda, if there's nothing else for the good of the order, meeting is adjourned.