Dev Mode. Emulators used.

Seattle City Council Land Use Committee Special Meeting 11/29/23

Publish Date: 11/29/2023
Description: View the City of Seattle's commenting policy: seattle.gov/online-comment-policy Agenda: Call to Order; Approval of the Agenda; Public Comment; Audit on the Construction Permitting Process; CB 120674: relating to land use and zoning - Master Use Permits; CB 120675: relating to land use and zoning - Medical services uses; Adjournment. 0:00 Call to Order 7:03 Public Comment 13:44 Audit on the Construction Permitting Process 2:15:22 CB 120674: relating to land use and zoning - Master Use Permits 2:30:16 CB 120675: relating to land use and zoning - Medical services uses;
SPEAKER_17

29th, 2023 Land Use Committee will come to order.

I am Council Member Strauss, Chair of the Committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

SPEAKER_12

Council Member Mosqueda.

Council Member Nelson.

SPEAKER_06

Present.

SPEAKER_12

Council Member Peterson.

SPEAKER_06

Here.

SPEAKER_12

Vice Chair Morales.

Chair?

Chair Strauss.

Present.

Four present.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you.

We have three items on the agenda today.

An informational item 2358, a briefing and discussion on the audit of our construction permitting process.

We have Council Bill 120674, a briefing and discussion on extending the term of master use permits.

And Council Bill 120675, a briefing and discussion on removing the maximum use limit The maximum use of the maximum size for medical uses within the maritime manufacturing logistics zone.

So before we begin, the agenda is adopted.

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

I'm going to do a little bit of housekeeping and then we're going to get into these items.

Colleagues, we passed a transportation resolution out of this committee regarding the maritime and industrial zoning changes.

My office has reached out to many stakeholders for additional input.

We will be presenting the substitute bill for public review as soon as we finish meeting with stakeholders this week and we plan to vote on or this bill on or before our December 12th meeting.

We also had discussed a tree resolution within this committee to outline the next steps for our tree protection ordinances.

We have worked to prepare a resolution outlining these next steps and In council member Peterson's wisdom, he prime sponsored a statement of legislative intent that I co-sponsored requesting further study of the tree protection ordinance.

And to quote from it, to ensure that the regulations are advancing the city's goals, OPCD and SDCI are requested to develop compliance and effectiveness monitoring processes and to provide regular updates to the public and council on topics such as, but not limited to, tree removal, replacement trees, preservation of trees on lots undergoing development, tree related complaints and other, and the report requested that within attachment one to the ordinance, which also has a bunch of reporting requirements due in July of this coming year, This statement of legislative intent is also due in July of this coming year.

And so rather than having two competing streams of requests and outlining next steps, we're going to pause on the tree resolution until we receive these reports.

Then we will formalize the next steps and continue moving forward to continue protecting, enhancing and expanding our tree canopy in our city.

We have, so, Right now we are in the first of two meetings in our quote unquote December time, because it's currently November 29th.

I use December in air quotes.

And so colleagues, as you all know, I like to have bills in committee twice before passing them out.

So today is the first of the two meetings regarding our two bills, the master use permit expiration extension and the industrial and maritime medical use size limits.

At our next meeting, we will have a public hearing And I'll be asking colleagues for you to suspend the rules to vote on a bill the same day as a public hearing.

And so I'm prepping you for that today, as well as the next committee meeting is after the Thursday noon deadline ahead of our final full council meeting.

And so I'll also be asking us to suspend the rules to send those bills out of committee to full council past the Thursday at noon deadline.

Just want to take a pause right now to check to see if there's any questions, comments or concerns on that.

Council Member Mosqueda.

SPEAKER_01

I thank you.

No concerns.

Just wanted to say thanks for convening these meetings and apologies for being late at the beginning.

SPEAKER_17

Not a problem.

Allow the record to reflect.

Council Member Mosqueda.

And I believe we have full attendance today.

Yes.

In addition to all of this work at our December 8th meeting, we will have a contract rezone and design review board and equitable development initiative board appointments.

Today, we have our permit audit review So this is now the second time that we've had auditors and SDCI in committee.

Thank you for being present in October.

Thank you for being present today.

There are so many other departments that have permanent review desks beyond SDCI.

SDCI holds the lion's share, which is why I appreciate you all being ready to present how you are addressing the issues outlined in the audit today.

You've worked quickly since October to address some of these issues.

There's more work to do.

And so for the general public, we will be coming back to the Land Use Committee regarding the permit audit with the other departments.

They are not ready to present right now because we have been focused on SDCI, who has the lion's share of these permit review desks.

That to say, I did meet with every department this week.

We will continue to have these meetings and next year I look forward to going through recommendation by recommendation and meeting with the relevant departments and review desks because we've got a lot of work to do and there's a lot of different departments as well as jurisdictions that complicate a process that for every customer in our city, they just need good customer service and need to get their permits reviewed and issued in a timely manner.

And so this is the work to accomplish those goals.

That is the general overview.

We are gonna go into public comment and colleagues, if you wanna join us at the committee table, I know things are a little bit different than pre-pandemic.

We now sit at the dais, but please anywhere at the table, you are welcome.

I am not going to play the video today.

I think everyone knows the rules, which is please be nice and speak to an item on the agenda.

And so at this time, the public comment period is now open.

Clerk, do we have in-person speakers?

SPEAKER_04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_17

So we're going to go with in-person speakers first, and then we're going to go to our online speakers.

And so please just remember to speak to...

an item on the agenda.

Welcome, Sandy Shetler.

SPEAKER_00

Great.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, I'm actually speaking to two items.

I'm speaking to vesting and also the city auditor's report.

So for vesting, I wanted to let the council members know, few may not know, that SDCI has a new program called Choose Your Own Vesting Date.

And it allows developers to choose the vesting date that works best for their project.

Unfortunately, it also allows them to choose to work in a period of time when rules were not as stringent as they are now.

So what we're seeing is, and I can provide addresses and evidence, that developers are submitting very thin paperwork on properties that they don't even own, that the homeowner has not agreed to sell yet, and so they've not designated an authorized representative, and this is being used to extend vesting.

How does that affect the average person in the community?

Well, the Tree Service Provider Registry does not need to be followed.

Two weeks ago, Two men in a rental car with paper plates that they printed on their home machine took down a 120-foot fir tree next to a home in the fall line that had a three-year-old and a seven-year-old playing inside.

So when we choose to allow developers not to follow rules that have been passed for public safety and transparency, we are actually putting the public at risk.

So this vesting is not a small thing.

Extending to 2029 when developers are allowed to use anyone they want is an issue.

Separately, I have something fun for you.

I want to thank the city auditor for doing such a good job and tree advocates have done their own report based completely.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you, Sandy.

Happy to take your handouts as well.

I'm going to move on to our online public commenters.

We have two public commenters online.

We have Megan Cruz followed by Steve Zemke.

And Megan, when you are in, I see you're there.

If you want to press star six, there you are, star six, two minutes at your convenience.

Megan, welcome.

SPEAKER_06

Okay.

Hi, I'm Megan Cruz speaking today on CB 120-674, a bill to extend master use permits through 2026 and relax renewal requirements.

I'll start by saying that Extending the MUP window for these 200 plus market rate projects is a good idea due to the economy.

However, other bill provisions will undermine the city's financial and environmental goals.

Currently, permit extensions require that a project adopt code changes made since the original MUP was issued, but that's not the case with this bill.

Under this legislation, projects approved six years ago in very different circumstances will be allowed to disregard new codes, effectively negating tree protection, and other current and future environmental legislation.

Under this same provision, projects approved before MHA will not have to pay MHA fees, causing the city to lose up to $5 million in revenue.

And MHA projects will pay 3% to 5% less just because, unlike current policy, they won't have to adjust their payments for inflation.

The city is in the middle of a major comp plan and transportation plan update.

These will take effect before this bill sunsets and should set the standard for new development.

We need to support these plans and retain the code updates as part of this bill.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you, Megan.

And up next, we have Steve Zemke.

Steve, I see you're there, star six at your convenience.

I see you're off mute.

Anytime you'd like to speak, two minutes.

Thank you, Steve.

Welcome.

SPEAKER_07

Good afternoon.

My name is Steve Zemke, and I'm chair of Friends of Seattle's Urban Forest.

We oppose passage of Council Bill 120674 as written, delaying for up to six years at a time legislation the council may pass on dealing with land use regulations and code enforcement for extended long periods is not good public policy.

Let them up be renewed for three years, but have it comply with any new regulations.

that only makes sense 2026 for instance and saying you apply in 2026 and you can do six more years means that any new code legislation for six years would not affect those projects other issue i want to comment on is sdci is currently not requiring developers to use registered tree service providers and reporting of trees is being removed on vested projects the code is what tree service providers need to do to do work in the seattle including registering with the city, posting work online, posting signs on the site the day of the work and five days afterwards and signage on the vehicle.

It is not affecting zoning or the ability of developers to legally remove trees and their requirements to replace trees 24 inches DBH on site or on city property, which has been in the ordinance since 2001. You need to verify and act, work with the council, the law department, et cetera, the tree service provider legislation is not something that the Municipal Research Council of Washington would say is a vested item since it's not, does not affect the zoning or land use of the property.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you, Steve.

And seeing as we have no additional public commenters remotely or physically present, this does conclude our public comment period and we'll move on to the next agenda item.

Clerk, if you could read the first agenda item, the short title into the record.

SPEAKER_12

Item 1, informational item 2358, audit on the construction permitting process for briefing and discussion.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you.

The first thing we have up today is a presentation about the audit that I requested regarding our permitting process for construction permits.

We have Auditor Jones, Melissa Alderson, and Andrew Scoggins with the city auditor's office with us today.

We have Nathan Torgelson from SDCI and Andy Higgins from SDCI.

We also have Marco Lowe from the Mayor's Office as well as Wayne Barnett from our Ethics and Elections Office.

As I said in our opening remarks regarding the overview of the entire committee process this week and next, we will continue to meet with the additional departments because we have SDOT, we have Office of Housing, we have, I should, I almost have this, Information Technology Department, City Light, SPU, Fire Department.

We have Seattle King County Public Health, all involved in our permitting process.

SDCI holds the lion's share.

They're here with us today because they've already gotten to work in addressing the issues raised in the permitting audit.

And again, we will continue working with these other departments and we will likely be back in committee.

For today, I'm going to pass it first.

Well, first I'm going to pass it over to the auditor's office to do introductions.

I know David Jones, you're here in person.

We have Andrew Scoggin online as well as Melissa Alderson online.

And then we'll pass it down to Marco and then to SDCI and Wayne, I know you don't have anything to present, but I really appreciate you being here to answer the questions we don't know the answers to.

So with that, over to Auditor Jones.

SPEAKER_03

Thank You chair Strauss for inviting us back to your committee to present the findings of our October 18 2023 on the construction permitting process and today as you requested we're going to go through the audit reports findings and recommendations in more detail than we did during our initial October 20th presentation to this committee and I'm also glad that we have officials from the Seattle Department of Construction and inspections SDC I are here and they can share their responses to our our recommendations.

And I know talking with Andy Higgins, you know, they've already started working on implementing those, which is a great thing.

I should say, because I'm a professionally skeptical auditor, we haven't verified any of the status updates that SDCI will be sharing today on the implementation of our recommendations.

We'll be doing that verification work as part of our normal annual audit recommendation follow-up process that's going to be starting next year.

We always follow up to make sure what happens with our audit recommendations so they just don't disappear into thin air.

Just for members of the public who are watching today's presentation or interested in reading The full audit report, you can get it on our website.

Go to seattle.gov slash city auditor slash reports and choose 2023. You'll find the report there.

I do want to say both members of our audit team are recovering from illnesses.

That's Melissa Alderson and Andrew Scoggin.

So out of abundance of caution, they're attending remotely.

And Andrew is going to take you through the report's findings and recommendations.

Nathan Torgelson and Andy Higgins and Marco will be offering their commentary as we go through.

Hopefully, this will be interactive.

So, Andrew, take it away.

SPEAKER_18

Great.

Thank you, David and Chair Strauss.

SPEAKER_17

Andrew, we're going to just do introductions first, and then we'll jump into the presentation.

Oh, yeah.

I'm sorry.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So if you just want to say hello, and then we'll pass it down the table.

I apologize for the breach in etiquette.

We're all very suspicious.

SPEAKER_03

But you named my name a couple times, and I figured the audience would be sick of hearing it.

But I am David Jones, the city auditor.

SPEAKER_18

Awesome.

I'm Andrew Scoggin.

I was a member of the audit team.

SPEAKER_17

And we know Melissa's with us and did a lot of work on this.

I'll give her that kudos and then I'll pass it over to SDCI, Nathan.

SPEAKER_05

Nathan Torkelson, Director of Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections.

SPEAKER_14

And Andy Higgins, I'm the Engineering Services Director at SDCI.

SPEAKER_16

Marco Lowe, Chief Operating Officer for the City of Seattle.

SPEAKER_02

Wayne Barnett, Executive Director of the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission.

SPEAKER_17

Wonderful.

And with that, back to you, Andrew, take it away.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you.

And I should say, Melissa is here.

Her voice is on the mend.

So last time when we were here before the committee, we both spoke, but you just get me today.

So our audits, if we can move to the next slide, please.

So I'll talk a little bit here about which parts of the construction permitting process our audit looked at.

So this, you know, construction permits are one type of permit that the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspection issues.

And construction permits can be for things like for new buildings or for alterations.

Our audit focuses on just part of this process from intake, which is the first highlighted box here.

And that's when the city checks an application for overall completeness.

And then our project looked at the process through corrections, which is when reviewers provide comments on how to fix issues with an application.

The time period for our audit was construction permit applications that were under review in 2021 and 2022. The next slide, please.

SPEAKER_17

Andrew, before we jump on, and colleagues, if you've got questions along the way, please feel free to ask them.

They might be answered in the upcoming slide.

If that's the case, I'll just say, I think we're about to get to that.

But for this one, for the clarity of the public, could you or Andy want to share with us what happens between the last set of corrections and permit issuance?

SPEAKER_14

Sure.

Thank you for that question, Council Member Strauss.

Actually, what happens after the final correction is approved by any various review location, whichever is the final one to approve their plans, we have a quality control step that the plans go through.

They go back to the final reviewer.

which is typically the ordinance and structural reviewer to consolidate any outstanding comments or details that may need to be wrapped up.

Once that person validates the quality of that plan set, we move it on to our plans routing group who does the final prep to issue process.

And basically what that is is finalizing the final issuance fees and then any outstanding documentation that may be required as outstanding documents that aren't handled during the correction cycle process.

Once that happens, they upload an approved plan set that's held behind the scenes, and then the system notifies the applicant automatically what the final fees are that are owed.

And then it's incumbent upon the applicant to pay those fees.

And as soon as they do, the Accella system is automated to go ahead and issue that permit, produce the report that is the permit face.

It releases the approved plan set to the applicant.

And it also produces a cover sheet that the applicant can print out, all of which need to be on site for the field inspector to be able to actually inspect that project once the permit is issued.

Great.

Thank you.

Council Member Nelson.

SPEAKER_11

So I'm following along in part in the report, and on page four it talks about round one, round two, round three, et cetera.

So this slide that's up right here, the last box is corrections.

So am I to assume that a correction is a round, or are these rounds different rounds for different permits from different departments?

SPEAKER_05

The corrections are the rounds, yes.

Your section is correct.

SPEAKER_14

So cycle one would be the initial review, and then any subsequent cycle is dealing with corrections.

SPEAKER_11

Okay.

Then I'll save my comments about corrections until later in this section.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_18

Wonderful.

Back to you, Andrew.

Thank you.

So we grouped our findings into four categories.

They are for the city to reinforce a customer focus, promote transparency and fairness, strengthen a citywide approach, and to standardize review comments.

I'll also briefly summarize our recommendations, the full text of which can be found in Appendix B of our report.

And throughout the presentation, folks from SDCI will also provide an update on their part.

Next slide here.

So our first category that I'll discuss is about the city needing to reinforce a customer focus in the permitting process.

I'll discuss two points here that STCI should reevaluate its tracking metrics and reporting methods to reduce review times and that the city lacks a process to routinely collect customer feedback.

We found that SDCI focuses most on the first round review, which is when reviewers do a first pass through, and often they'll send the application back to the customer with correction comments.

SDCI does a good job of tracking this first round.

However, we found that SDCI does not prioritize total review time while applications are being processed.

Instead, SDCI setup focuses on excuse me, focuses on holding reviewers accountable for how long each individual review round takes.

This setup creates an incentive for reviewers to clear applications from their queue rather than focus on how long an application is taking overall.

Also, we found that reviewers are largely meeting the internal SDCI target for first round review time, but not later rounds of reviews.

Each of these vertical bars in the graph here on the slide represents the median amount of time that each review round is taking.

It also shows SDCI's internal targets on the horizontal bars.

The first round is 49 days, and subsequent review round targets are for 14 days.

You'll see the first round takes a medium of 36 days, which is within STCI's target, but then later rounds are not within later targets.

The second finding here is that STCI lacks a process to routinely collect customer feedback and may not be meeting customers' needs.

Customers are frustrated with aspects of the permitting process, such as knowing who to contact at the city and how long the review process takes.

As part of learning more about customers' needs, SDCI should complete a racial equity toolkit to understand the full extent of barriers to the process.

Racial equity toolkits are part of the city's race and social justice initiative and can uncover equity impacts.

Thank you, Andrew.

I'll pause for a minute here.

SPEAKER_17

Yeah, thank you.

I think your recommendations here are spot on.

I've got a couple questions about the information that you've reviewed, and it's to no one's surprise that we're excited that the first round of corrections are underneath the 49 days.

There's definitely, we want to get those other correction cycles down below those 14 days.

One of the issues that I've noticed, but I'd love to either have your from the auditor's team or from SDCI share with me, are all of the corrections from that initial plan set included in the first round of corrections?

If not, as there are corrections in the additional rounds, are these corrections that are on that first plan set that are outside of life, fire, and safety.

I'll kind of give you the leading point here that I'm trying to make, which is it is absolutely okay to put as many corrections as you want in the first round of corrections.

It's not okay to put corrections from the initial plan set, so not on revisions, in the subsequent rounds of corrections what we're trying to do here is minimize the amount of times that an individual needs to come back to sdci so my questions here are are the correct are all corrections included in the first round and how many corrections are occurring in other rounds that are not related to life fire or safety andrew i'm going to pass it over to you for your initial feedback and then it looks like sdci and the mayor's office might want to jump in as well

SPEAKER_18

Yeah, and I should say here, too, if Melissa wants to and is able, seeing as her voice is on the mend, wants to jump in here, too, but that was something that we heard about anecdotally, but we...

Since we were not the subject matter experts, we felt like it was best for SDCI to have some kind of systematic way to evaluate whether or not that's happening.

Later in the presentation, there's some findings that speak more specifically to correction comments.

SPEAKER_17

Sounds good.

So did you notice that there were corrections to the initial plan set after the first round?

SPEAKER_08

I can answer that.

Because we did not do that testing specifically because we did not have the expertise to make that determination as to whether subsequent corrections were or necessary or whether they were a result of the customer making changes to the plan set.

But as Andrew said, we did hear from customers and from permit reviewers that that happened on occasion.

SPEAKER_17

All right, we'll dig into this a little bit more.

Marco or SDCI, do you want to jump in here?

Andy, take your first shot.

SPEAKER_14

Yeah, I'm happy to answer that.

So our plan to review philosophy training that we give within SDCI, and I can't speak exactly for the other departments, but that's part of the effort is to eventually consolidate the philosophy trainings across the city, does speak to this.

It speaks to the intent of trying to gather all initial corrections through that initial review, right?

the substantial compliance with the code is what we're trying to get to.

We're not trying to get to perfect plan sets before we issue them.

The fact is that, you know, we have humans reviewing these plans and sometimes people miss things.

I know when I was a reviewer, I missed a thing or two and I learned from the feedback that I got from both the customer and my supervisor when they complained directly about it.

But there are also maybe pieces of the process where there might be corrections that happen after the first cycle.

For example, with the master use permit process, since we allow that process to run concurrently with the construction permit process, the sequence of when the public comment period happens versus when our initial plan review happens may not be in alignment.

So the zoning reviewer and land use planner on that project may not have the conditions and everything they need from the MUP to fully complete an initial review.

So they may add a correction to the plans that says there may be subject you know, corrections later based on the outcome of the MUP.

Another example might be as if during screening we didn't realize that the plan might need a geotech report or a structural calc or a drainage review calculation or any various other kind of analysis that might be needed to be included.

And it's incredibly difficult for the plan reviewer to do a complete review if that initial analysis hasn't been provided upon, you know, the initial application.

In those cases, the complete review doesn't really happen during cycle one.

It happens during cycle two, and then you may end up having correction cycles from there.

To Melissa's point, there could be applicant-initiated revisions that happen.

There could be responses to certain reviews, like maybe the setback isn't being met and the applicant needs to revise the building to comply with the setback or whatever.

and then that impacts their structural calcs or various things like that do lead to the potential for later corrections, but absolutely the intent is to try to gather all of that that we can as much as possible on that first round of corrections, and we train our staff to exactly that expectation.

SPEAKER_16

Great.

I was just going to add that we talk a lot to both the market and affordable community, and we hear this a lot, that later corrections are a real issue.

Was this worth a correction?

This wasn't brought up earlier.

We appreciate this point and hear it quite a bit.

SPEAKER_17

Yeah, and I, you know, Andy, what I shared with you in our pre-meeting, and I'll share on the record right now, which is that, yes, with those examples that you've just provided, that makes sense, right?

And if there are people reviewing permits in our city that are, whether intentionally or unintentionally, missing corrections and then adding later in, again, on the first for the first plan review, if those corrections are popping up later on that are not due to life fire or safety, we have to be able to get those in the first round.

If we are not able to create, and again, the external variables on individuals That's their project.

But from a city side, from a customer service standpoint, we have to be able to provide the full set of corrections in that first round.

If there's a geotech or some of these other examples that you're bringing up, we can address those when those are the exceptions.

But right now, the sense that I'm getting is that the exception is the rule, and that's something that we have to address.

SPEAKER_14

I appreciate that.

And I think the auditor's finding about engaging customers directly and having feedback loops built in.

I think we'll talk later about that.

But that's absolutely critical because when those things do occur, to Marco's point, we really need to know about it as it occurs so that we can address the specific situation.

If it's a particular individual that's reputatively doing that, you know, we need to address that with that individual.

If it's a team thing or a training issue, we've clearly got to address that.

But when it's anecdotal feedback that it happens all the time, it's really difficult because we hear the same thing.

But yet when it's not identified, I'm not sure what we can do about it in that moment.

SPEAKER_17

Yes.

And I appreciate the anecdotal story that I shared with you earlier this week where you said that person would have a professional review occur if it was within your department or within.

And I think at this point we need to have that feedback loop because things are slipping through the cracks.

If they had, I won't make a dad joke there.

Council Member Nelson.

SPEAKER_11

I was on the edge of my seat.

I completely agree with you, Chair.

And I come at this from also the, as Chair of Economic Development, because I hear complaints about small business projects being slowed down, tenant improvements that can't happen.

And so to my mind, when I was reading this, I was thinking if the correction is due to something that was missed by SBCI staff, that's one thing.

If it was due to something that changed in the plan because of something else, that's a different thing.

And so the baseline being health, fire, and whatever that term of art that he used, definitely I want to make sure that the builder or the small business owner, the homeowner is not being penalized for an internal fault of the city.

time is the biggest driver of cost overruns in a project.

And if we're trying to reduce the cost of housing, then we have to reduce the time to build.

Same thing is if we want to promote economic activity in our neighborhood districts, same thing.

You know where I'm going with this, and it is a big concern with me.

I do have a question because on page...

You mentioned the RET analysis.

On page seven of the report, right before the second recommendation, it notes, basically, the RET should...

Recommendation number two deals with difficulty accessing the online tools, right?

And there's a bullet point that says the city does not offer in-person appointments for permit customers to meet with city staff.

So if there's an access problem with online tools and the in-person counter is closed, is there any, would that solve a big part of the problem instead of having to do enlist studies about how to give people access, give more forms of access?

SPEAKER_05

I'm happy to address that point now, but that is part of our presentation, how we're improving access to our customers and in-person access.

Okay.

SPEAKER_17

Thanks.

Let's pass it back over to Andrew, because I think we're going to get into some of those slides that Council Member Nelson's interested in.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you.

Yeah, so we, you know, our three recommendations to the previously mentioned findings on how to reinforce the customer focus are to track applications by total review time, to complete a racial equity toolkit for the permit process, and then include that in developing a strategic customer engagement program.

SPEAKER_17

And Andrew, just to clarify here, when you say track by total review time.

Yes.

It is being tracked currently.

The total review time is currently being tracked.

What I believe that we're trying to focus in here are that the metrics in which we evaluate our success are based upon the responsiveness to the round of correction.

Yeah.

What I'm hearing from you is that we need to be more mindful of the entire process rather than the segmented process.

Is that correct?

SPEAKER_18

Yes.

Yeah, that's correct.

SPEAKER_17

And I know SDCI's slide is up next.

I will also just provide commentary that I really appreciate that the racial equity analysis is becoming such commonplace within recommendations across the board that, you know, this is still a quote unquote new program, I believe about a decade old or younger.

And every time that we go through these reviews of how our city's working, this comes up as how we should be leading this work.

So I appreciate that, Andrew.

This is an SDCI slide.

So for the viewing public, we have merged two slide decks, one from the auditor and one from SDCI.

So you will see at the bottom, if it's a green ribbon, it's an SDCI slide.

If it's a blue ribbon, it's an auditor slide, although I'm seeing that the Seattle Channel banner might be covering it up.

So I'm going to pass it over to Director Torkelson, please.

All right.

SPEAKER_05

FIRST, I JUST WANT TO REALLY APPRECIATE COUNCILMEMBER STRAUSS, YOU, AND THE AUDITOR'S OFFICE ON THE PARTNERSHIP THAT WE'VE HAD ON THIS AUDIT.

AND WE ARE CONSTANTLY LOOKING FOR WAYS THAT WE CAN IMPROVE OUR PROCESS.

SO APPRECIATE THE WORK THAT WE'VE BEEN DOING TOGETHER ON THIS.

I HAVE TOLD MY STAFF THAT THIS AUDIT IS A TOP PRIORITY.

AND JUST WANT YOU ALL TO KNOW, COUNCIL MEMBERS, THAT WE TAKE THIS VERY SERIOUSLY.

AND WE ARE CONSTANTLY LOOKING FOR IMPROVEMENTS.

THIS AUDIT WAS LOOKING AT THE PERMITTING PROCESS IN 2021 AND 2022. OBVIOUSLY THIS WAS IN THE PEAK OF THE PANDEMIC.

WE HAD A LOT OF STAFF WHO WERE WORKING COMPLETELY VIRTUALLY AT HOME.

We're in a completely different scenario right now.

We have staff back in the office, and I think that's really helping to improve communication and improve our permitting process.

This slide just shows how we have improved our progress on the permitting time.

The slide we saw before had 36 days for round one, 27 days for round two, 25 days for round three, 22 days for round four, and 21 days for round five, and you can see that those numbers have decreased.

Of course, we're still not beating our targets for rounds two and five, but we are improving.

You can go to the next slide.

So reinforcing a customer focus, just want to talk a little bit about the progress that we've made.

We are in the middle of a strategic planning process right now at SDCI, and the key cornerstone of that process is how can we improve customer service, and that's both external and internal.

So that is a key component.

of how we can serve the customer better.

We know that a lot of customers are accessing our virtual applicant service center, and we have really high ratings on that, but we know that we still have customers who are getting lost in our system, and those are the customers that we need to reach.

We are working on a framework for key permitting metrics for the entire process.

Council Member Strauss, you had mentioned that a lot of our public focus has been on the time it takes to do that first correction round, but we are now focusing on the entire process.

and we'll be putting those metrics on our website.

Feedback from customers is very important.

We get a lot of feedback through people who access our Virtual Applicant Service Center, but we are looking for feedback from all our customers, regardless of whether they're accessing SDCI, and we will have an update and a lot of progress on that next year in 2024. FINALLY, I KNOW A VISUAL DASHBOARD WITH OUR PROGRESS IS SOMETHING THAT'S OF KEEN INTEREST TO ALL OF OUR CUSTOMERS, AND WE ARE DEVELOPING A PROCESS TO PUT THAT ON OUR WEBSITE FOR NEXT YEAR.

SPEAKER_17

THANK YOU.

COLLEAGUES, ANY QUESTIONS ON THESE ITEMS?

I'LL SAY I APPRECIATE THAT WE'RE GOING THROUGH THESE ITEM BY ITEM, AND WE'LL BE BACK NEXT YEAR TO FIND OUT THE PROGRESS.

IF YOU WANT TO GO ON TO SLIDE 8, THANK YOU.

SPEAKER_05

Yes, so at SDCI, we have anti-racist task force.

We also have a joint change team with the Office of Planning and Community Development that focuses on a lot of our policies.

We are focusing on training, looking at cultural differences, looking at all of our applicants.

We are looking at how we go about recruiting and hiring our employees, how the interview process works, how we brought our employees back to the tower, and also working on that equity toolkit for our entire permitting process.

We are incorporating those race and social justice principles in all our human-centered design work.

And one of the ways that we're addressing the race and social justice issue, and Councilmember Nelson, you brought this up, I'm really, really, really excited that in December, We are going to be opening up an information desk on the fourth floor of the Seattle Municipal Tower.

This will be a great opportunity for people who want that face-to-face communication.

Somewhat surprisingly, we still have a lot of people in Seattle who do not have technology access.

I, a month ago, met a couple In the SMT lobby that security pointed me to, they had a rental unit and found out that they needed to register that rental unit through our rental registration inspection ordinance program.

English was their second language.

I was able to get staff in our department to come down and help them fill out the forms manually so they could get registered.

We still have a lot of people that don't have technology access, and that in-person information desk is going to be a great tool for them.

SPEAKER_17

And Director Torkelson, just spinning off of that a little bit, I read in the audit as well, some permit reviewers will take phone calls, some won't, some use the Bluebeam chat, some won't.

Is there a way to have a consistent method across reviewers, and is there a barrier to just picking up the phone?

SPEAKER_05

We are constantly pushing our staff that you need to return phone calls and you need to do it within 24 hours.

That's very important.

Okay.

Yeah.

SPEAKER_14

We'll speak a little bit more to that on the next slide when we talk about the customer success team as well.

SPEAKER_17

Okay, great.

SPEAKER_14

Thank you.

SPEAKER_05

We are also constantly looking for ways to better connect with the public.

One of my favorite events is our annual home fair.

We recently had our annual home fair at the Filipino Community Center in southeast Seattle.

We have multiple staff and staff from other city departments.

It's a very low key, customer friendly way for members of the public to come in and talk to a variety of city staff about how to get a permit.

They can sit down and talk with those staff.

We have virtual presentations and in-person presentations on how to get a permit to build a detached accessory dwelling unit, how to earthquake retrofit your house, and many other sessions.

So that really is one of my favorite public outreach events that we do on an annual basis.

I also wanted to mention that we are in the process of completely revamping our phone line system.

We have several phone lines.

Some of those phone lines don't work well for our customers, so we are going to set up a whole new phone system so that people get faster and better customer service, and that will be coming online in 2024. Great.

SPEAKER_17

Colleagues, any questions on this slide?

SPEAKER_11

When you say new phone lines, you mean phone lines for people to call in if they have a question to their reviewer about some correction that they have to make?

Is that what you're referring to?

Correct.

SPEAKER_05

Okay.

There's a variety of different phone lines.

Like, if you want to call in and you have a code complaint, if you wanna check on the status of permit.

If you're just a member of the public and you have a basic question, can I build a detached accessory dwelling unit in my backyard?

Is it okay that my neighbor has a car that doesn't work and it's parked in their front yard?

Things like that.

SPEAKER_11

Got it.

Well, I am really glad to hear about the fourth floor.

What did you call it?

The customer service desk.

Because even if one does have computer and internet, sometimes people just want to talk to a human so they can ask a follow-up question.

And so offline, I'll just talk.

I do have some questions about how many of your staff are back in the office so that if Somebody else can answer a question better than the person that's right in front of them if that's possible, but that's a different topic.

SPEAKER_05

Thanks.

That's absolutely part of that plan is that we can bring staff down that are up in the Seattle Municipal Tower, can bring staff down to help those customers if that person at the SDCI desk is not able to assist them.

SPEAKER_11

Great, thanks.

SPEAKER_05

And also I should mention that SDOT's street use section will also be joining that information desk early in 2024. Because a lot of times permits involve a street use permit and a building permit.

SPEAKER_17

That's really great because I also am a paper person where speaking to a human is easier for me than trying to navigate a chat or a chat bot or anything like that.

So that in-person connection really is important and I appreciate you getting that office reopened.

Marco.

SPEAKER_16

Another thing we hear a lot from the community is the back and forth because you say something and how long does that person have to respond versus when you're in person, it's an immediate discussion.

You can cover a lot of ground very quickly.

SPEAKER_17

That's the bit about picking up the phone.

Can a phone call resolve a round of corrections?

If you're in the second round of corrections, And there's a couple issues rather than making your best guess resubmitting for your third round of corrections.

If you can get on the phone with the reviewer to say, do I need to go left?

Do I need to go right?

Do I need to go up or down?

This is the type of customer service that we are trying to create so that we can get permits issued faster.

SPEAKER_05

We want to meet customers where they're at.

The chat bot that you all mentioned that can convert to virtual phone calls so you can actually talk to someone over a screen.

We know we have many applicants who love that feature and don't want to drive downtown and pay for parking, et cetera.

So we try to meet people where they're at and what's most convenient and most helpful for them.

Wonderful.

SPEAKER_17

Andrew, let's go on to the next slide, still with SDCI.

SPEAKER_14

So, yeah, we've got one more slide here, and just a continuation of what Director Torkelson was talking about, about our revamped customer phone lines.

We have a multitude of phone numbers, and really the phone tree has just needed to be redone for a long time.

So this is our opportunity to revamp that, and in alignment with that, We're going through a strategic realignment process along with our strategic planning process that's actually going to put together a customer success team in 2024. And this team is actually going to be made up of various parts of the department that already exist, but then kind of reassembled to provide this end-to-end customer service that we're really talking about.

Basically, we allow application facilitation for everything pre-application, status checks, and facilitation during the permitting process.

So if something appears hung up or feels hung up, that they'd have someone to contact and go to.

And then next, it also talks here about using those continuous feedback loops for customers to prioritize investments and ongoing improvements.

One of the things we've talked about is adopting a more real-time survey-type technology that we could pepper into the process throughout so that we could have that real-time access more readily.

So to the examples before about corrections being added or, you know, something being not provided in good customer service, that feedback could be more direct and also be able to get good feedback about when we are doing well and so that we can tell that story as well because right now, We have the anecdotal feedback on both sides of that.

We just don't have the data to support how much of either is really occurring.

So we definitely want to get that in place as well in support of our human-centered design efforts.

Providing internal training, ongoing coaching and support.

Director Torkelson talked about that.

You know, we definitely have expectations around what reviewers should be picking up the phone on call, you know, immediately.

And other reviewers, we ask to not interrupt their review if they get a phone call.

Stay in the line of thinking.

Don't break your thought process.

Be efficient in your plan review.

But then take the time after you've completed that review to make that call.

So giving folks 24 hours to make return phone calls is, I think, incredibly important in those particular cases.

We also, I think we mentioned this before in an earlier question, but developing a centralized location to share our key permitting metrics.

As you can see before, we've already made significant progress in 2023 in bringing down the throughput time on correction cycles.

And the focus on initial plan review is really a carryover from our prior permitting system that we implemented at Accela in 2018, did a lot of data conversion and cleanup into 2019. But that prior system didn't have a method for us to really track corrections cycles in an appropriate way.

Accela does have that mechanism, and so we're totally in agreement that we need to and want to move into measuring and reporting on our ability to meet correction turnaround targets for those as well.

And when you see, you know, two, three, four, and five cycles, not every project goes through five cycles.

There's definitely a moving graph on that and two-thirds of the projects typically end up in the two to three cycles then there's a potential you know slice that goes to four to five and then some that are six plus and usually they're the outlier projects but we definitely want to reduce correction cycles across the board and to your point being able to make corrections on behalf of an applicant If they're simple corrections picking up the phone and saying can we do that on your behalf?

Absolutely.

We we've done that historically in paper plan world We used to take a red pen out and make those notes on the plans and stamp those things By hand and every sheet and send it out to the applicant But these days we should be able to do that really easily electronically We just have to be able to implement it consistently across all review locations

SPEAKER_17

And as much of a Luddite as I am with paper, if we hadn't been on Bluebeam and Acela during the pandemic, we would have stopped.

SPEAKER_14

Thank you for pointing that out.

We made a full transition to electronic plan review beginning in 2014 and officially in 2016 for construction permitting.

And then the rest of our processes went electronic when we implemented Hanson, or sorry, Acela.

in 2018. We did that thinking about an earthquake situation and being prepared for a natural disaster of that kind.

Thank God we did it when we did it because when the pandemic happened and the emergency order hit in March of 2020, we were literally able to send everybody home and not skip a beat in terms of our ability to do plan review and processing of permits.

So it's really important that we were able to continue doing that work while also realizing that those that don't have the capability or the tools or the resources to be able to do that easily that we provide resources to support them as well.

And then, lastly, the thing on the last bullet on this slide is really to ensure that decision-making accountability are clear and that escalation points are also clear.

We do have documents on our website that talk about escalation points, and if you are an applicant running into a concern, who to contact.

But making that more transparent and clear, and if someone doesn't know where to find that, if they can pick up the phone and call, and our staff and our customer success team can point them to that resource and get them to the right person more quickly.

we really want to shorten that timeframe from that initial contact and inquiry to the resolution of their issue.

SPEAKER_17

And just, this is not a question that I had previous, but from this conversation, let's say we had a place to report a reviewer for whatever reason, right?

Whether it's a phone call, an anonymous tip, or however you want to, how are we understanding if it is the same review desk or the same reviewer time and time again, not including and i'm going to go back to this example because it's the simplest not including all corrections in that first round because if i'm an applicant and i go through this experience i don't necessarily know i don't see that pattern but how are we going to catch for that yeah i think the tools are going to be critical in that and what what tools we adopt to be able to insert that feedback mechanism into the process is going to be key

SPEAKER_14

We're aware of some tools on the market right now that will allow you to tie that to the record number and to the review task that's associated with that.

So we would know inherently with that record number of the review task and when it was issued who the reviewer was.

So anonymous feedback could come back, but yet we could deduce where that feedback was to be directed.

So there's ways that we could do that directly and make sure the customer gets feedback about what we've done with that.

And there's also ways that we could potentially do it anonymously and be able to gather that feedback more holistically.

Ultimately, we would like to see other tools in place that might be able to do that before we ever issue a correction to an applicant, but I don't think technology is far enough along yet to get there.

Fair enough.

SPEAKER_11

I have a question about why are we talking about anonymously?

Is it because if one is a frequent...

user of your permitting services?

Is it because people are afraid of identifying problems because the next time they go to do a project, they might, it might be slowed down?

Is that why you're referring to the importance of that?

SPEAKER_14

So we have heard anecdotally that people are afraid of retribution, and that's something consistent across the industry.

I hear that through my colleagues and through WABO and other jurisdictions across the state.

I haven't personally seen that happen, but I know that there are applicants out there that feel like that could be an issue.

And so whether providing that feedback directly and putting their name associated with it or whether providing it anonymously and giving them that sort of outlet to be able to give that feedback and not tie their name to it, I think both are important.

SPEAKER_11

That makes sense.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_14

Thank you.

SPEAKER_17

Clerk, happy to go on to the next slide.

Back to the city auditor.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you.

So our next category here is about transparency and fairness.

First, I'll talk about how permit applications are prioritized.

It's important because it determines when an application is worked on relative to others in the queue and how fast permit reviewers are expected to turn it around.

We found that the city prioritizes construction permit, the way that they prioritize applications is inconsistent, which means that not all customers could get the same experience.

For example, SDCI has internal guidelines for how staff should prioritize applications, but other city departments that also do permit review were not aware of these guidelines.

At the time of our audit, SDCI did not publicize these guidelines, which would make it difficult for first-time permit applicants to know what they need to put on their applications so that they could take advantage of a priority ranking.

Beyond the official prioritization process, we found that sometimes a project will be prioritized if a customer calls and asks about it, either to the permit reviewer directly or to a supervisor or manager.

This again creates a transparency and fairness issue, especially for customers that are new to the process.

Our next finding relates to SDCI's ethical culture.

During our audit, SDCI employees had questions and concerns around ethical behavior as it relates to the permitting process with the biggest theme being around conflicts of interest.

Our goal with this audit was to find ways to make the permitting process better for customers.

The reason why we highlight this issue is because a positive ethical culture contributes to a positive workplace culture, which impacts all aspects of an organization.

If employees have concerns about fairness and access, it's going to impact the city's ability to have a fair, transparent, and ultimately effective permitting process.

We did not perform an ethics investigation to substantiate any of the concerns we heard.

However, we did examine the policies that SDCI has in place to support a positive ethical culture.

And we found that SDCI could put more emphasis here, particularly around employee expectations and ethics training that is specific to employee's role.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you, Andrew.

And this is also why we have Wayne Barnett with us today.

And after this section, Wayne, you're free to stay, but you can also take off because this slide and the next couple slides are why you are here today.

All right, I might take off.

Fair enough.

We've got a very exciting and lively topic here.

There's a couple issues here.

I'm going to start with the prioritization of permit applications.

I know SDCI, through our conversations, and have you at this time made public your internal documents?

SPEAKER_16

Yes.

SPEAKER_17

And so that's very helpful.

But again, this is beyond just SDCI.

And so I'm going to pass it over to Marco to speak about how SDCI has prioritization guidelines.

Not all departments do.

How do we, from moving from here, how do we sync that all up so that it is not opaque, that the public has a clear understanding of that, our employees also have a clear understanding?

SPEAKER_16

Do you want me to start?

Sure.

So, yeah, I think it's really important, and you alluded to earlier in the meeting, that there are many departments that touch these projects, and them being synced up is critical.

You can go very quickly through one and be held up very long at the other.

And we have initiated the housing subcabinet, so all departments that touch permitting, and you've listed them.

I think OH is also a member because they have a role in most permits with OHS.

some of the fees we assess and we are all meeting monthly and everybody's seen everybody's work because one of the greater challenges we found is not just the synchronizing of permits and how it's moving through the multiple departments to come to an issuance, but also the lack of understanding that what one department may do that may put a slight delay or fee on a project may be in concert with nine other actions in the last year also put on that project.

So that you may look like a very small step when actually together it is an incredible burden to put on these projects and they may not get built.

So with the sub cabinet we're trying to daylight both again the synchronization and the effects that our decisions, fees, permits, timelines have on these projects to try to bring everybody to row together.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you.

And I'll just also take this moment to thank everyone who works at a permit review desk.

I understand everyone is trying to do their best and trying to move our city forward.

And a lot of these issues that we're talking about today are systemic.

And Marco, I really appreciate that your housing sub cabinet with these departments being executive departments, you representing the executive right now, that thread between these siloed departments is what will be the solution to a lot of these problems.

But I'll pass it over to SDCI if you want to speak a little bit more to how you prioritize permits and what that looks publicly, and then I'll pass it over to Councilmember Nelson.

SPEAKER_05

Next slide, please.

SPEAKER_17

Oh, well.

Oh, yeah, I can.

Yeah, hang out.

We've got a couple of you.

So I'll come back to you there.

Council Member Nelson, do you have questions?

SPEAKER_11

Yeah, this has to do with this whole section because because I have to admit that I was prepared to be more concerned about all the processes and how to fix permitting.

But I this really wasn't on my radar.

The ethical concerns that are talked about here.

So elsewhere in the auditor's report, the the sample size is enumerated.

I think that you spoke with 38 customers and just how many, I would like to know if it's not too difficult of a question, how many of the staff raised ethical concerns?

Like I'm trying to get a sense of how bad this is.

SPEAKER_17

Pass that back to Andrew or to David or?

SPEAKER_18

Yes, yeah, thank you for that.

You know, we involve, or we interviewed 38 SDCI employees that are involved in the permitting process in about 30% shared concerns.

30%, okay, thank you.

SPEAKER_11

And so when we're talking.

How many employees do this work?

Just 30, 30% of 38 is how many, is that a big part of the department

SPEAKER_05

So SDCI has about 420 employees.

Obviously not all of those employees are doing permit review.

I would guess about 200, Andy.

Okay, thank you.

SPEAKER_17

And one of the concerns I heard was that permit reviewers do not understand how a permit is prioritized.

Is providing this, I mean, you had internal guidelines.

Was it that they were unaware of them?

How did this come about?

SPEAKER_05

I'm happy to address that in the slides that we have coming up, sort of a more comprehensive view of that issue.

SPEAKER_17

Fantastic.

So then I'm going to just let Andrew keep going, and I'm going to hold my questions just like I ask my colleagues to do sometimes.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you.

Yeah, I'll wrap up our part of this section here with our recommendations, which is that SDCI should review and formalize how they prioritize permit applications and communicate this to customers, and also that SDCI should evaluate its ethical culture and make any needed improvements.

And the next slides have more information from SDCI.

SPEAKER_17

And before we go there, this is where I'll jump over to Wayne.

Wayne, in these conversations that we've had about that, there was not an ethical investigation here.

This was an audit on our permit review system.

One thing that I've heard you say, and maybe you can explain it in a better way than I'm going to try to regurgitate it, is that an action might not be unethical.

if there's not a policy prohibiting it, but the action might be something that raises eyebrows, a gray space, if you will, between what could be perceived is not above board, but is not outright unethical because there's not a policy or a rule against it.

Can you speak to this gray zone?

SPEAKER_02

Um, yes, I understood a little better.

Could you just try one more time?

Sure.

SPEAKER_17

So, so if there's something that I, that I don't think people should do, but is not against the rules, there's a gray space in ethics.

Can you explain how that might work in the real world?

And I look at maybe I'll use a secondary employment as, as an example, if it's not If somebody has a second job that could touch their city job, if it's not explicitly disallowed, it might not be against the rules, but it might raise some eyebrows.

SPEAKER_02

Yes, yeah I just think you know I think it goes to prioritization it does sound like I think that's where a lot of it comes up this concern about ethics people wonder like why is that project getting.

preference in mind is languishing so I think this is also an area where like people are at stc I because they really need a permit I mean they've got all kinds of people lined up and.

it's very critical to them.

So I think those are two things that really make it possible for people to jump to bad conclusions.

And I do think if the prioritization is made more clear to people, that might help in cutting down the number of people who suspect, true or not, that the basis for one project getting prioritized is not ethical.

SPEAKER_17

Sure, and fair.

And so you do not have ethics complaints outstanding at this time, is that correct?

SPEAKER_02

Not against SDCI, no.

SPEAKER_17

Fair enough.

Not against SDCI, fair enough.

But if somebody did feel that there was an ethical violation that occurred, your office would be where that complaint is sent to, is that correct?

Yes.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, they should contact us, yes.

SPEAKER_17

And you are a complaint-based organization.

Largely, yes.

Largely.

So for the most part, if there is not a complaint filed, you don't have the staffing to go look under every single rock in our city.

Is that a fair estimation?

That's very fair.

Okay.

And so we might get into some of these more ethical.

I just wanted to preface that before we go into the next round of slides.

Thank you.

Anything else that you'd like to share about ethics?

SPEAKER_02

Not particularly.

Just happy to be here.

SPEAKER_17

Fantastic.

Clerk, happy to move on to the next slides.

And we're back to SDCI slides.

SPEAKER_05

So a lot of discussion about the permitting prioritization guidelines.

We have put that document on our publicly facing website so all our applicants and members of the public can see that.

We have always had a good partnership with other departments on prioritizing 100% affordable housing projects.

That's been something we've worked really hard on.

Where we need to do a better job is educating the other departments on the entire prioritization matrix.

So we're absolutely...

working on that, and this is now publicly available.

I will say that staff doesn't 100% agree on this prioritization.

I'll just give you one example.

In previous years, the city had a huge priority for Climate Pledge Arena, THAT BECAME A PRIORITY FOR OUR DEPARTMENT BECAUSE KEY ARENA WAS A CITY ASSET IN A CITY OWNED FACILITY, SEATTLE CENTER.

IT HAD PRETTY AGGRESSIVE TIMELINES TO BE OPEN BY A CERTAIN TIME.

SO WE PRIORITIZED THAT PERMIT.

I KNOW THAT ALL CITY STAFF DIDN'T AGREE ON THAT.

That was a priority that was given to me by the mayor at the time and also by council members who were very invested in that project.

So that's just one example.

Okay.

Also, queue management guidance.

That's something that we have right now with staff about how to prioritize the permits that are coming across their desk.

What we need to do is better educate the other departments, as I mentioned, on how to go about doing that.

And I think this permit prioritization guidance will help with that effort.

Some of the other ethical issues I wanna talk about, financial interest statements, and we can go to the next slide.

This is a requirement for staff to fill out that have authorization for expenditures.

WE DID NOT HAVE 100% COMPLIANCE ON APPLICABLE STAFF NEEDING TO FILL OUT THIS DOCUMENT.

WE NOW HAVE 100% COMPLIANCE AND WE HAVE INSTITUTED A SYSTEM TO MAKE SURE THAT STAFF THAT NEED TO FILL THIS OUT ARE FILLING OUT THIS DOCUMENT.

AN EXAMPLE IS IF A STAFF CAN ACCESS EXPENDITURES WITHIN OUR DEPARTMENT, THEY HAVE TO DISCLOSE IF THEY OWN PROPERTY WITHIN THE CITY, FOR EXAMPLE, OR THEIR OWN PLACE OF RESIDENCE OR RENTAL PROPERTY.

Wayne Barnett and I have had discussions about this form and how we file this with ethics and elections.

SPEAKER_17

Director, I don't want you to bury the lead there, which is that Auditor Jones and Melissa and Andrew conducted an audit, found an issue, you worked with Wayne to resolve that issue.

That issue has now been resolved before we even had the second committee.

SPEAKER_05

Correct.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you.

We have some really big problems here.

The purpose of this exercise, and thank you to Auditor Jones and Melissa and Andrew for for highlighting it because as many times as I tried to take permitting 101, 201, 301 with Andy, I don't have the resources and the bandwidth to do this professional work that Auditor Jones's team has conducted.

So thank you also for being responsive quickly to this issue.

I've got some other questions, but keep going.

SPEAKER_05

We actually hired a lot of new employees during the pandemic.

We had a lot of retirements and people who left for other jobs.

We're in the process right now of rescheduling more intensive ethics training with Wayne's office and with Mark Mayo.

Andy Higgins' division has training scheduled in January, and we will be in the process of scheduling training for all of our employees.

in 2024. It's an important refresher for our existing employees and for all of our new employees for that training.

I also wanted to mention that we are creating and advertising a safe space if people do have ethical concerns, that they can file those concerns with Wayne's office.

They can go to the employee ombud and they can go to our own internal human resources department.

It's important that we have that venue.

And also, I had an employee who was pursuing a development project within the city of Seattle and did not disclose that.

I took care of that in that I told that employee that they need to disclose that to leadership within their department and to their supervisor.

I also, before the pandemic, frankly, had a very unfortunate situation where I had an employee who was reviewing a permit on an addition to his own residence and that employee was terminated.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you.

And so, and Clark, if you could go back one slide, there was one question I had.

The published permit prioritization guidelines you said it completed in 2023. I just want to clarify, was the internal document also completed in 2023?

SPEAKER_05

The internal document has existed for many years and we have revised it over the years as our city has changed, but that's been available internally for many years on our internally facing website.

SPEAKER_14

And that actually goes back probably 20 years to the work plan 2000 work and the process improvement regulating construction and process improvement regulating land use out of the mid 90s.

And when the state went and implemented the 120 day clock, there was a big effort to redo the permitting process at that point in time.

And for historical context, Plan review took a heck of a lot longer back then, six months to initial plan review.

But anyway, those guidelines have been in place since then.

And a lot of the handshake agreements with the other departments that were all under the common understanding of those same guidelines at that point in time, you know, players have changed out over the years and I think that's led to where we've gotten today.

So thank you to Marco for talking about how we might get that back in place and maybe formalize that going forward with all the other departments.

SPEAKER_17

And so was there an issue within the department that staff did not know about this?

PRIORITIZATION FRAMEWORK AND THEY DO NOW?

OR THAT WAS ONE OF THE THINGS THAT I HEARD IN THIS AUDIT WAS THAT STAFF DIDN'T UNDERSTAND HOW PERMITS WERE PRIORITIZED.

SPEAKER_05

NEW SPEAKER I THINK SOME STAFF KNEW ABOUT IT AND SOME STAFF DIDN'T.

SO WE AGAIN APPRECIATE THE PARTNERSHIP WITH THE AUDITORS OFFICE AND WITH YOU, COUNCILMEMBER STRASS, FOR RAISING THESE ISSUES.

SPEAKER_14

NEW SPEAKER I THINK TO ADD TO THAT, IF YOU LOOK AT THE DOCUMENT, OBVIOUSLY PRIORITY EMERGENCY PROJECTS ARE STRUCTURAL OR LIFE SAFETY RELATED TYPES OF PROJECTS.

When you get into priority two projects, it's mayoral, council, or director priority.

And sometimes staff either don't agree, like Director Torkelson talked about, about climate pledge, or they just don't know what the backstory is.

And so when someone comes and talks to us about a critical funding issue or a critical timeline issue or whatever it might be, we're always looking for the story first, not just because they contacted us and they're a squeaky wheel, but if they've got a story that is legitimate and we're trying to provide good customer service, we may decide for the sake of many different reasons to prioritize a particular project within the correction cycle rounds to try to get that permit issued in a timely way, either for housing or the school district, or there's so many different potential examples there.

the understanding of what that means and the agreement with it, I think there's kind of two layers to that.

SPEAKER_17

Thanks, that'll take me to my next point.

Clerk, if you could go to slide 13, which is if a staff member, the last bullet point here is that if a staff member feels that there has been unethical behavior, that's where they go to the ombuds.

Is that correct?

SPEAKER_05

Ombuds or they can go to Director Barnett's office.

Or they can go to our human resources employees.

SPEAKER_17

And for an external stakeholder, would they just go to Wayne, or is there a process within SDCI that they could come to?

SPEAKER_05

They can contact me, and that has happened, or they can go directly to the Office of Ethics and Elections.

SPEAKER_17

Wonderful.

That's helpful.

And so I want to talk about secondary employment, which came up.

You had raised an issue of an individual who's reviewing their own permit.

They have been terminated, but people are not prohibited from having a second job.

And when their secondary job interacts with their primary job, what are the standards that you put in place?

What are the parameters in place and how is that enforced?

SPEAKER_05

So obviously if someone has a secondary job, they cannot use any city resources.

Uh, to facilitate that second source of income.

We do have some employees who may be doing development activity or consulting outside of the City of Seattle.

We have a couple of employees who may be doing development within the City of Seattle.

I have talked to Wayne about this extensively, and the guidance there is to be above board about it, to disclose it, and if possible, If you have a partner in that activity, use that partner's name.

SPEAKER_17

Yes.

Wayne says yes.

Anything else to add there, Wayne?

SPEAKER_02

I mean, really, the Venn diagram, there shouldn't be any overlap between your external job and your city job.

If you're at SDCI, you shouldn't be contacting SDCI on behalf of one of your clients to help them get a permit.

That's just not allowed.

Yeah, you can work in Renton, you can work in Kent, but by God, stay away from the city of Seattle.

SPEAKER_17

If you work at SDCI, you should not be working with permits that are coming through SDCI.

SPEAKER_02

Right, exactly.

SPEAKER_17

That seems very clear to me.

SPEAKER_02

It does, yeah.

It's not very hard to understand.

And when people run afoul of that, I think Nathan's been very good about, you know, taking personnel actions that mean that I don't have to take anything, so.

Once somebody's been fired, I don't really see there's much of a role for us anymore.

SPEAKER_17

Right.

But I think that the point that I'm hearing very clearly is that if you work for the city regarding permit review, you should not have a secondary employment that touches permit review within the city of Seattle.

Right.

Okay.

That seems very clear to me.

Exactly.

And so I will...

Do you have a question?

SPEAKER_11

Sorry, I'm like looking over here.

Jump in.

What kind of jobs, secondary jobs are we talking about here?

If they're not, I mean, if they're not a permit reviewer, I mean, can you just sort of contextualize, like, are these builders that are also working at SDCI?

What are we talking about?

SPEAKER_05

We could have an employee who is doing a development project in Everett, for example, or they could be a consultant helping a home builder in Bellevue, something to that effect.

Providing code development advice to a client outside of the city of Seattle.

SPEAKER_14

We also employ a lot of licensed structural engineers and geotechnical engineers and architects and things like that who may have business entities outside the city and do permit applications in other jurisdictions.

doing that inside the city of Seattle.

They've been trained over and over again by Wayne's department for particularly engineering services, who employs a lot of those employees, that that's the line that they can't cross.

And so when we have had that happen, and we have a handful of times over the last 15 years or so that I've been overseeing engineering services, they've been dealt with swiftly.

And to Nathan's point, we've had multiple terminations in those cases.

SPEAKER_11

Okay, well, thank you for that context because I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that that kind of expertise is good to have around.

It was mentioned that there was a lot of turnover after COVID and you lost, you know, staff left and a lot of those people had a lot of experience in the field, lot of years looking at projects and different ways of interpreting the application of the code.

So I just wanted to note that I don't, I think that it could be good as long as there is not the ethical issue here that we should embrace having somebody with on the ground experience if that is, because that helps the department.

understand the specifics of different sites and also that really practical knowledge is a positive thing.

I'll just want to put that on the record.

SPEAKER_05

And we have employees who leave our department and will come back at a later time in a consulting role.

Ethics and Elections, again, has very strict guidelines on how long you have to stay away from city business before coming back.

SPEAKER_10

Vice Chair Morales.

Chair.

Yeah, thank you.

So I've heard lots of agreement that a bright line is or should be that if you have the second job and your projects involve permitting in the city, that's not OK.

So we should not employ those folks or should not be allowing them to have that work.

They can have projects in other cities.

Is there an actual policy or rule anywhere within the department or within the city that clarifies that?

Or is this just something that comes up when you, on occasion, find out somebody has a project before the department they work for?

SPEAKER_02

It's in the Seattle Municipal Code, Councilmember.

SPEAKER_10

It is in the code.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, that's the ethics code.

SPEAKER_10

And so, OK.

So I guess the question then is, if it's continuing to happen, what is the process and how are we more regularly providing the education?

You just indicated that there is regular training, so I'm just trying to understand why it seems to be happening.

And even if it isn't that folks are working on a project that is before them in the department, if there is the perception that there is unfairness or unethical behavior happening in the department, what is the solution to making sure that there is clarity and that it is very public information about when this is happening and what the consequences are for somebody?

SPEAKER_03

COUNCILMEMBER, JUST IN RESPONSE TO COUNCILMEMBER MORALES' QUESTION, I THINK RECOMMENDATION 5 IN OUR REPORT SPEAKS TO THAT.

WE DIDN'T DO ENOUGH WORK, AND I'M GOING TO LOOK AT ANDREW AND MELISSA AND TELL ME IF I KNOW MUCH MORE THAN I DO.

you know, to make definitive conclusions about whether or not there was an ethical violation or not.

But what we did find out, we heard enough people say that they had concerns.

And one way to deal with those concerns is to be very clear where that line is drawn.

And you can do that, you know, we say like do a survey, find out what people in your department are concerned about from an ethics point of view.

Do training so they know what they're supposed to do.

Have policies that are specific to your environment.

And I don't know, and maybe our team knows, and maybe SDC, I can speak to this, you know, having things that are as tailored as specifically as you can to the work environment in which these folks work in so that it's very clear.

You know, the ethics code is a great thing.

It's very general.

I think we note that in the report.

And people may be confused about, does this apply in my work environment?

So I think our recommendation is geared towards, you know, Let's just be as clear as transparent as we can.

People may be making up things in their minds about whether or not there's something wrong going on.

Maybe they're right, but if we can do these things, hopefully that will minimize the concerns or false inferences about whether or not something's ethical or not.

SPEAKER_10

I appreciate that there's work happening right now with the Ethics Commission and HR and would just be interested to know what comes out of that in terms of the ability to measure improvement.

If there hasn't been a thorough ethics investigation, then what do we know is the perception now, the actual occurrences now, and what happens after intervention so that we know if that was the right intervention or if we have to actually take it a step further?

SPEAKER_14

So I was actually gonna make a comment just about that too.

And unfortunately around the transparency around HR actions, you know, if we do take action to follow up on something and terminate somebody, we can't go telling everybody about it.

So it's sort of a catch 22 where people don't really know what the follow through was.

And our hands are kind of tied by the, or the, confidentiality requirements of those HR processes.

So again, doing our best to try to clarify and train.

And when there is a gray area question, it's always the recommendation to go talk to ethics and elections and either disclose if it's your situation or ask the question and maybe initiate an investigation.

If not, I mean, we're ha we're more than happy to investigate any kind of complaint that comes across.

And obviously we haven't dealt with them when they have, but again, it's really hard to deal with the perception, especially when you can't give them the follow-up about what the outcomes were in situations that were egregious.

SPEAKER_17

So top line from here is if the public or an individual of the public believes that there is an ethical violation that is occurring, that it is best to either go to Wayne Barnett, the Director of Ethics and Elections, or to Director Torgalsson, the Director of SDCI, or...

I guess you could either email me or Marco too.

I guess maybe I shouldn't offer Marco up to the public.

SPEAKER_16

My emails are publicly available.

SPEAKER_17

And that's really helpful because that does create a clear channel.

And I think that we do need to do a little bit better of a job of being pushing this information to the public.

Now, before we move on, I do want to give you a hypothetical because let's say we have an individual who's a homeowner in Seattle that works at a permit review desk that they are a single individual, so they don't have a partner or kin or another family member to put forward their permit, but they want to make an addition to their house.

That permit has gotten stuck somewhere in the rounds of corrections or something that has gotten stuck in the black hole, for them to make a phone call to inquire or send an email to inquire, is it that they need to go off of city property to make a phone call from their personal device?

AT LUNCHTIME, HOW DO THEY, BECAUSE I HEARD THERE'S A BRIGHT LINE YOU CAN'T WORK ON YOUR OWN PERMITS, YOU CAN'T ADVOCATE FOR YOURSELF, YOU CAN'T HAVE A PERMIT WITHIN THE CITY, BUT THERE ARE INSTANCES WHERE THAT HAPPENS.

SO WHAT ARE THE BEST PRACTICES THERE?

SPEAKER_02

I should make clear here first, you can work on your own permit because because you as a homeowner, that person in your hypothetical, they can't rely on anybody else.

You have to be able to put your own permit through because there's no other alternative.

What you can't do is represent somebody else.

They can't be out there selling their services to like to get that done.

So you can't help somebody else.

But of course you can handle your own permit.

But I think the second part is you really should not identify yourself as like, hey, it's Ted, I'm calling from three doors down, could you help me out?

So that's, you shouldn't do anything that would make it look like you're trying to get a shortcut.

So that's, yeah, you should go outside and, you know, call from the lobby for Pete's sake, so.

SPEAKER_14

Yeah, personal sale.

The other training that Wayne has given us is that if you are doing that, disclose it to your superiors and to Wayne, get that in writing that you've disclosed it and then not be a part of the review process either because you can't be involved in reviewing your own house or inspecting your own house and you should keep your name as far away from that as you can.

But you're right, people are going to own homes in the city and they have to have a way to obtain a permit.

SPEAKER_17

So for city employees who have a permit within the city, the best practices are to alert your supervisor, alert Wayne, take it on your lunch break, take it outside of the office, go to the Columbia Tower lunch zone.

There's great chairs there.

I know I've used them in the past myself.

And to not use your city employment as a way to get forward.

I will tell you, as I was city staff previously and I needed to go look at microfilm, I did go up to, I don't know if it was the 34th floor or whatever floor it was with microfilm.

I'll tell you, I had a horrible customer experience.

Okay.

But they also didn't know that I was a city employee.

Right.

Right.

And so for me, that was revealing what a everyday person experiences in the grinding gears of our bureaucracy, because I had a very basic question and it took me my entire lunch period to get to the point where I needed the answer.

And then once I had that information, I only had five minutes left and I had to get back to my desk.

Um,

SPEAKER_14

So on a separate note, we're digitizing all of that and that should be way more accessible in the future.

SPEAKER_17

So just fantastic.

As you know, I'm a Luddite.

That's really helpful clarification on what employees should be doing, how to disclose it to your supervisor, to Wayne.

And the bright line that I heard you clarify there, Wayne, is that it is okay to work on a permit for yourself.

It is not okay to be representing another individual on their permit.

Fantastic.

Councilmember Nelson.

Sorry, I got carried away.

SPEAKER_11

We just got a stat a jail card here.

Yeah.

So this discussion has been mostly driven by it seems as though employees of SDCI calling out improprieties that other employees are doing violations of the prioritization, which is written down now.

But I am also, that's one thing, it's internal issues that were brought up.

I'm looking at this whole thing from my constituents perspective and I have to say that I think that maybe we won't be talking about this as much next year because it sounds like if we improve the process of permitting, then there might not be as much frustration on the part of the customers who It seems based on these quotes in here, you know, on page 18, what the chair alluded to, nobody will take phone calls.

Reviewers regularly ignore requests for status or info.

If I'm a customer that's used the permitting in the past, I would basically call somebody I know whose direct line I have to get them to help me.

And then some of the quotes on page nine and 10, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

If I'm complaining, I can get mine faster.

How would you know if you haven't done it before?

Such and such manager is great because we call them and they can push things through.

These are manifestations of frustrations with the process.

Corrections that go on endlessly, not because of the fault of the customer, but because something was missed in a previous round.

So I do want to point out that thinking positively that some of those, and it seems like that's what's engendered some of this perception of unethicalness because somebody's helping somebody out and somebody's skipping some step or using some kind of influence.

And on that note, I do want to say that I was concerned, and this is the last comment I'll make on this section, but I was really concerned when I read on the, The information about the Master Builders Association that there are notes in here on page 10 that there is concern that the Master Builders Association of Snohomish and King Counties has undue influence.

And so I called them to try to get a sense of what's going on here because are they acting on behalf of their members' projects.

What's going on here?

And it was explained to me, and I saw one of the last, an agenda from the, I think it was July, It seems like these are regular meetings with people from the master builders that give the department input on what's going well and what isn't, and if there's a change in a regulation, how is that impacting the real life experience of trying to build a home or a townhome?

I wanted to mention that because when we talk about getting customer input, like them or not, they build most of the homes and town homes in the city.

So on the one hand, having their experiences, their input on what is going well helps everybody, I would like to say.

So this is some of the feedback that I got from just talking to them.

Obviously, that's their side of the story.

But I just wanted to say we don't want to lose sight of the value of customer input from whoever it is because that helps.

That's my point.

Oh, and in here it says, in particular, the Master Builders Association, that they're big developers.

They're numerous developers, but they're not the big downtown people or, you know, they're HOMES AND TOWN HOMES.

SPEAKER_17

CAN I ADD ON TO THAT QUESTION THERE, WHICH IS, YOU KNOW, WHAT I READ IN THE PERMIT AUDIT IS THAT IT WAS THIS CONCERN WAS SPECIFICALLY ABOUT SDCI MEETING WITH THE MASTER BUILDERS.

CAN YOU SHARE WITH ME, DO YOU MEET WITH OTHER STAKEHOLDERS AS WELL?

COUNCIL MEMBER NELSON ALLUDED TO IT.

IT SOUNDS LIKE THESE MEETINGS ARE NOT ABOUT SPECIFIC PERMITS, RATHER ABOUT the industry as a whole and your connection?

Are there other groups that you meet with?

Is this a regular meeting?

Is this an ad hoc meeting?

And what is the purpose of these meetings?

SPEAKER_05

Thank you, Council Member Strauss, for that question.

We are here to serve the public and people who wanna get permits from SDCI.

We meet with a variety of groups.

Yes, we meet with the master builders.

We've met with AIA.

We've met with the Downtown Seattle Association.

We've met with the Chamber.

We, for a long time, met with BIPOC developers who were going through the design review process and how we can better serve that constituency.

That's part of our job is to reach out to the public and to meet with the public.

SPEAKER_17

And so are these regular meetings?

Are they ad hoc?

SPEAKER_05

Some of them are regular and some of them are ad hoc.

SPEAKER_16

I was going to add, we also meet with HTC regularly on the affordable side.

Thank you.

The counterpart to our housing sub-cabinet is a group that we have builders from towers to townhomes, the affordable community, and they meet with department directors as well.

So the directors hear what their impact is on these builders firsthand.

SPEAKER_05

Thank you.

Yeah, we also meet with the Port of Seattle and with the Seattle School District.

The school district obviously is constantly getting permits through their capital levies.

SPEAKER_17

And they're constantly asking for departures because they haven't given us the list of the things that they need changed in the code, if you're listening.

Andrew Scoggins.

SPEAKER_02

Can I just close by saying one more thing?

I think there's very little confusion about the rules on this.

I really do think, I mean, I'm not sure what your experience has been, Nathan, but I think the people who you're terminating likely knew they were doing something wrong.

I don't believe there are many people who are surprised to hear they shouldn't be trying to get a permit through their own department.

So maybe I'm wrong on that, but I'm pretty sure that's pretty well known.

SPEAKER_17

Fair enough.

Agreed.

Andrew, I saw you had a hand up.

SPEAKER_18

Yes.

So I should clarify that by highlighting this in the audit.

We're not saying that meetings with the Master Builders Association should occur This was something that came to our attention because employees were concerned about how it might be giving more access or advantage to applicants with more experience or more resources to advocate for themselves.

And so that's why we recommend that STCI be strategic about how it engages with customers to ensure that it's making decisions about the permitting process that reflect the interests of all customers.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you.

That's helpful clarification.

And Andrea, if there are employees who have these concerns, it sounds like the correct way to address this is through Human Resources, the employee ombud, or through Wayne Barnett in Ethics and Elections.

Well, thank you.

Shall we move on to the next slide?

SPEAKER_18

Yes, I think, yeah, I'm next.

SPEAKER_17

Director Barnett, thank you for joining us for the ethics refresher and conversation.

We'll see you soon.

SPEAKER_18

So yeah, I'll talk about the next group of findings here about how there could be a stronger citywide approach to the permitting process.

Many construction permits require the review of multiple city departments.

We've talked about that earlier in our conversation.

However, we noted that while SDCI is seen as the department responsible for the process, they do not have control over what other departments do.

The first item on the slide notes how the city has engaged in multiple prior permitting improvement efforts, but not all identified changes have been made.

We found that the city does not have a system to manage and follow through on these efforts, nor is there an owner to implement recommendations across department lines.

Also, customers noted coordination between departments as an issue, including communication and inconsistencies between departments.

The second finding here is that there's not a unified approach to funding staff across departments, nor is there an effective strategy to support the software that is used to process and review permits.

While SDCI has a core set of reviewers and has contingent budget authority to hire when application demand is high, other departments do not have this.

Also, the city's permitting portal, which is called the CELA, has experienced issues since its launch in 2018. While the city has made efforts to improve the portal, staff and customers that we talked to told us that there were issues, such as it working slowly or not saving information.

also the city's goal for uptime for the online portal was not always met during the period of our review the city's internal goal is for the portal to be up 99.5 percent of the time but for december 2022 which was felt in the period of our review that uptime was 90.4 percent We also noted that departments other than sdci who are involved in permitting or not fully integrated into a cella which creates a disjointed experience for customers who may view the city as one holistic entity.

And i'll pause here before the next slide where we have our recommendations.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you.

And with this, there are, we've multiple times over and I appreciate Andy bringing up the previous attempts to redo permitting to create these improvements.

And I have found as an elected leader that it is not always helpful to restart.

We see that with Acela right now.

We'll get into that in just a little bit.

It's not performing to the level that we want across every single permit review desk, but to restart that process from scratch would create more unintended consequences than problems it solved.

And so we have many times overlooked at these permitting improvement efforts.

Not all identified changes have been made.

And if you want me to wait until the slides that are coming up, I'm happy to do that.

But are these recommendations all held in the same place and how are we reviewing implementation of these recommendations in addition to what the auditor and David Jones is gonna be coming back and reviewing his and Andrew and Melissa's recommendations, but what's the internal process and where are they stored?

SPEAKER_14

Yeah, we'll be definitely talking about that in our slides.

Fantastic.

SPEAKER_17

LAST BIT HERE AND WE'LL SAVE THIS SECTION OF CONVERSATION FOR THE FUTURE REGARDING UNIFIED APPROACH TO FUNDING STAFF, SPECIFICALLY CONTINGENT BUDGET AUTHORITY AND FEE-BASED REVENUES THAT SUPPORT STAFFING.

THIS IS SOMETHING THAT IS VERY CONSISTENT WITH AN SDCI, WHICH IS WHY WE'RE NOT GOING TO GET INTO IT DEEPLY HERE.

AND FOR OTHER DEPARTMENTS WHO HAVE ONE EMPLOYEE THAT PART OF THEIR WORK IS PERMIT REVIEW, IT IS VERY DIFFICULT TO UNDERSTAND HOW MUCH FUNDING FROM PERMIT FEE GENERATED SERVICES OR CONTINGENT BUDGET AUTHORITY IS ABLE TO FUND THAT POSITION OR THOSE POSITIONS WITHIN THERE.

AND WE MUST identify a way to hire the amount of staff that are needed to review at any given desk.

Andy gave me the example of if you have a review desk that has 28 people and two people are vacant or on long-term leave or out for vacation, there's a very small impact.

When you have a permit review desk that only has one or four people and one of those people are on long-term leave or out for vacation.

You have a quarter-year staff down, and those four people may also have other job duties.

And so that's been one of the things that will...

That is one of the things that we will be investigating as we move into the other departments as well.

Not a question there.

More of a statement to support Andrew, David, and Melissa's work.

SPEAKER_11

You brought up...

I have a question about this.

Is it...

Do these staff have to be compensated by the fees, or does it have to be user paid for, or does that matter?

I mean, could we just general fund more staff, or does it have to be paid for by increased number of, well, permit fees?

SPEAKER_05

It can be permit fees or general fund.

SPEAKER_11

Okay, thank you.

SPEAKER_14

Yeah, and state law, the 82020 talks about the color of money and that, you know, if you take in building permit fees, those fees need to be used to process building permits.

Electrical permit fees need to be used to process electrical permits.

Building permit fees cannot be used as general fund to fund general fund activities, but vice versa, it could be.

General fund could supplement building permit fee activities.

So I think there are some slices and dices to that, but it is part of why some of the smaller departments do have challenges because they are general funded and not fee funded.

And so, you know, when they're competing for resources for many other priorities, sometimes the volume or capacity that they get isn't necessarily equal to the demand that they face from the public getting permits.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_17

And could you, in a more articulate fashion than I am able to, explain contingent budget authority?

SPEAKER_14

Sure.

So contingent budget authority basically for our department allows us kind of an approved budget amount that is not tappable without approval from the mayor's office and CBO, but allows us the opportunity that if demand is higher than what we anticipated and we need to ramp up capacity very quickly, we can basically make a quick justification to show what those demands are and tap the resources that we would need to basically add capacity quickly and not wait for a budget cycle, for example, to add capacity, which we all know in an economic upturn after a downturn takes a year or two to really realize you're actually in that upturn.

that volumes are increasing.

And at that point in time, we would be way behind the curve trying to chase that dog up the hill.

And so instead, we were able to quickly tap those contingent resources and staff up more quickly.

This time around, we actually now also have a core staffing reserve so that in a downturn or slowdown, like we're experiencing now, we're not having to go into layoffs, even though our revenues may be lower because we've set aside funds to hang onto those staff.

So to Council Member Nelson's point is to hang onto those resources through a downturn, so that when the upturn does happen, which we know the cycle will always come around, that we've already got those resources in place who have the experience, who have the training, who have been on board and have the consistent interpretations of code to facilitate economic recovery rather than being the roadblock or the bottleneck to economic recovery.

So we've instituted that since the Great Recession.

I mean, one of my first jobs coming back to Seattle from building the building official in Sammamish in 2008 was unfortunately to go through the layoffs and make decisions about people's lives.

I never wanted to have to do that again in my career.

And we found a way between then and now to basically justify a contingent budget authority and core staffing.

We did a whole fee and funding study in the 2014 to 2016 kind of range and then implemented a new fee subtitle that adopted a lot of those changes to be able to be in the position we're in today.

So not every department has been able to do the same.

I'll tell you, not many cities around have been able to do the same and You know, we're not facing layoffs at the moment, nor are we anticipating any, but I am hearing about a lot of other jurisdictions around the state and around the region who may be because of the pending slowdown in this economy.

SPEAKER_05

We know the economy will pick back up again, as it always does, and we won't be in a position then where we go through a year-long process, advertising, hiring, and training.

We won't be way behind will be ready to pick right back up again because of that court reserve, which is huge.

The other thing I wanted to point it out is with the contingent budget authority, those are temporary employees and it's usually a two year term, but there's always turnover in staff.

So those temporary employees are getting excellent training and then they are very competitive candidates when permanent positions open up.

SPEAKER_17

Fantastic.

Shall I keep moving on?

And Council Member Nelson, if you could operate committee, I'll be right back.

SPEAKER_11

Okay.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you.

SPEAKER_18

Go ahead.

Yes, so I can go through our recommendations here.

And I think the first one is something Council Member Strauss was speaking to, which is to evaluate and prioritize past recommendations to improve the process.

So it's sort of a recommendation about recommendations.

And the other ones here are that to look at governance and funding structures to ensure there is enough staff to meet fluctuations in demand, to create a strategy for how to support the ongoing use of permitting software, and to evaluate how to better integrate departments who use Acela for construction permit review.

And the next slides are from SDCI's perspective.

SPEAKER_05

So we already hit on some of these points, but the first bullet is really working with the city budget office, other city departments, and the mayor's office to look at other departments that handle permitting and if those positions can be funded by permit fees to better meet permitting demand at that time.

The second bullet and CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER LOWE CAN HIT ON THIS AS WELL.

THE MAYOR HAS A HOUSING SUBCABINET WHERE WE LOOK AT WAYS TO PROMOTE AND IMPROVE THE PROCESS TO INCREASE OUR HOUSING SUPPLY IN SEATTLE.

AND AS PART OF THAT HOUSING SUBCABINET, WE HAVE AN INTERDEPARTMENTAL WORK GROUP THAT'S LOOKING AT HOW WE CAN IMPROVE THE PERMANENT PROCESS FROM BEGINNING TO END.

SO THAT'S REALLY LOOKING AT system-wide improvements, and we hope to have recommendations and implement those recommendations in 2024. And finally, SDCI in the last two years has created dedicated teams to improve the user experience for customers and employees.

And I just want to give some specific examples.

Those teams have worked out new processes to better track our mandatory housing affordability contributions, the permit history research that Andy alluded to, and putting all that information online, figuring out a better way to collect on delinquent fees, figuring out how better to process cancellations, how to better look at code changes that are necessary in the future, looking at how to better handle our performance evaluations, all of our internal processes.

So those teams are up and running and making improvements that are benefiting our customers and our employees.

SPEAKER_17

Fantastic.

SPEAKER_14

So for a little further context we all we kind of wanted to point out here that this is not a new concept this Strengthening this citywide approach.

This is something that we've been advocating for for at least a decade We've talked about permitting system integration ever since STC I or formerly DPD adopted excella as a platform in 2013 2014 we bought an enterprise license at that time with the hope that other departments would come on board kind of fingers crossed and Not sure if others would, but at that time we were sitting in a Hanson system that didn't talk to SDOT's Hanson system, same system, but not integrated whatsoever.

And we were all as managers frustrated by that.

So we launched this effort with permit system integration with a number of active city departments involved in that.

I think OED, the fire department, SPU, and others.

So we've done a lot.

I wanna point out that since 2017, we started with our department, but now it's up to 11 city departments that are at least somewhat integrated with Accela.

Our public user volumes have jumped from about a thousand users to about 195,000 users in that six year period for a variety of reasons.

There's over 1200 staff.

city staff that are using the Accella system.

There's 31 integrations with other city systems that Accella touches.

And then we do routine usability studies with our users as well.

And so a lot of what this audit is talking about goes directly in line with what we've been trying to accomplish for many, many years.

And we're not there yet, which I'm glad the audit's still pointing out that we still have work to do.

But to your point, Council Member Strauss, to start over from how far we've come, I think would be a mistake.

This trendsetter award that the city just won recently at the Accelerate Conference was all about being a trendsetter in permit system integration.

So across the country, we're actually leading that charge.

This next year, we'll be converting from an on-prem, self-hosted Excella system, which to their finding caused a lot of those trouble or problematic uptime, downtime percentages.

There was a particular finding after the audit occurred of an issue that was occurring that has since actually dramatically increased uptime.

So I think Seattle IT could probably talk specifically to what those percentages are today.

Unfortunately, I don't have the numbers on that.

But we are making significant progress and have made significant progress in the last 10 years and are set to take this to the next level as we integrate into the SaaS migration or the software as a service cloud migration in 2024. We'll be moving off the on-prem self-hosted solution into their cloud solution.

And there's a number of other services and opportunities that come along from the vendor with that at the same time.

So we're really excited about the movement we're going to make.

I do want to point out there will be a code freeze from Seattle it within the first half or so of 2024 so making major changes to the system will be problematic during that period as we convert to the cloud.

but we can still be queuing up solutions that address the audit so that we can implement things in the summer and fall of next year if they have to do specifically with Excel integration.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you.

And we had a great conversation, for the public's knowledge, we had a great conversation with Jim Loder earlier this week identifying some of this.

One of...

the things that was presented to me that I think is very important that we recognize is that when we have different review desks where the technology is not integrated properly, that's where the conversation comes to do we need to have a new technology because the cost is very high to integrate that review desk.

And so the operation and maintenance of a system can feel like a lot of money but is actually a smaller sum of money than if we just rebuild.

And the cost of not spending that money is born upon our customers.

who are experiencing that delay and that lag and that lack of integration, which is also unacceptable.

And so it's one of these, we are in the private market, or I guess we're in the public market, excuse me.

We're not in the private market.

The private market, we functionally serve different purposes.

Our corporation of the city of Seattle is set here to run the corporation for the public, for public governance.

And that requires us to, to make sure that we're spending the money that these desks are integrating, even if it feels like a lot of money, especially when we have a budget hole, because at the end of the day, it's our customers who need to have that integration presented to them.

Sorry, that's my soapbox for the day.

or at least for the moment, because this is a topic where I am getting on my soap bars.

Council Member Nelson, anything else here?

SPEAKER_11

Well, you mentioned IT.

I mean, I'm picking up that we're not gonna get a different software program because we're already, I mean, that's I think part of this, but just what, And this is an offline conversation.

What leverage do we have with our vendor to up the performance?

I don't know if there is any, but let's talk about that later.

And I just would...

I was going through my emails, and in May of last year, I remember offering to throw some money at software...

I mean, technological improvements to...

to permitting, to solving permitting.

And that was when I was still quite new and didn't know who was doing what in the city.

And I also don't know who's going to take over technology, but I do think that this is a priority.

So that's it.

SPEAKER_17

Fantastic.

And I know we'll dive deeper there.

Clerk, yes, let's move on.

I'm recognizing we are at our two-hour mark.

We have four more slides in this section.

And we do have two other bills to brief.

They will be quick.

I'm hoping to be out of here in the next 20 minutes, 30 minutes.

SPEAKER_14

On this slide, just a couple of quick things.

I'll make this quick.

We have identified a few things along with the housing sub-cabinet work, really just trying to get all relevant reviews represented in pre-submittal conferences or as early in the process as possible.

we have identified that there hasn't been always clear participation from not only every division within SDCI, but also every department within the city.

And so I think there's work to be done there.

And with the housing sub cabinet work, I think we'll, and the interdepartmental teams that we've been talking about or work groups that we've been talking about, there will be opportunity to continue that effort.

The novice permit system program is something that's been bantered around for quite a while.

I think this would be something that we should continue to do.

It kind of goes in line with the work that we did with the home fair.

that basically training one-time users or new applicants on how the process works.

Often we find, I used to find when I was doing coaching at the front counter that it really is for a lot of folks a choice of time or money.

They can either hire somebody that knows what they're doing and how to get a permit, or they can try to navigate through the system and the process themselves.

And it's going to take a lot longer, to your point about if they do that on their own versus if they're able to have the resources to hire somebody to help them through the system.

So having that in place would be something that we definitely can pursue.

And then we used to also have a consistently prepared applicant program.

We had that all the way through our life of Hanson until we implemented Accela.

Converting that over wasn't within scope of that, but What that program did basically was trained applicants on how to provide a complete building permit application.

And then if they consistently were prepared four out of every five times they came in the door, they didn't have to go through that training or pre-screening process every single time.

They could just go straight to an intake appointment It did help increase our quality of intakes significantly.

People took pride in those numbers and really strove to complete those applications.

I think the person who talked about, you know, taking in complete applications at the front door is something we take pride in and make sure that they have a complete application, which is what locks in the code in effect.

And having somebody that is consistently prepared and knows what they're doing.

saves us time from having to dedicate resources to training them every single time, which then allows us to have those resources focused on the folks who are more novice or new to the system.

SPEAKER_17

Fantastic.

Back to, I don't have any questions on those slides.

Colleagues seeing none.

Back to Andrew.

This is a city auditor's slide.

SPEAKER_18

Yes, so this is our last category.

I'll run through this pretty quick.

So the last two findings here are focused specifically on the corrections part of the process, which is when permit reviewers make comments or corrections on an application.

And we found that the city is inconsistent in how they issue corrections.

This included things like deciding which issues rose to the level of needing to be an official correction or how to communicate with customers, which is something that we had talked about earlier.

More guidance and standardization is important here so that customers know what to expect and they also receive a similar experience.

Our last finding is that the city does not consistently evaluate the quality and necessity of corrections.

We heard from SDCI supervisors that as time allows, they will do a retroactive evaluation of their staff's corrections to see if they're meeting SDCI's guidelines, but this doesn't happen routinely or at the city-wide level outside of SDCI.

And doing this on a regular basis will help the city figure out where to make improvements.

And then our recommendations here are to create a policy for how construction permit corrections should be handled, and also to develop a process to monitor and evaluate permit corrections so that there is consistency among work groups.

SPEAKER_17

Great.

I'm going to turn it over to SDCI for their next slide before I start asking my questions.

SPEAKER_14

Yeah, and these will be the last points we make on this last set of recommendations.

And really, we're in agreement.

I mean, we have existing policies in place, but there isn't one consistent comprehensive policy across all review locations across the department nor across the city.

So we are committed to dealing with that and working on that.

Expanding the use of correction letter audits and collecting feedback from applicants is another thing that we are committed to doing.

We talked a little bit earlier about that.

We do, in different review locations across the department, do proactive correction letter audits, particularly with new staff.

While they're in probation and we're in training, our supervisors are consistently reviewing those corrections that go out before they hit an applicant.

But after they get to a certain point, they stop doing that.

It's more periodic than regular.

It's incredibly time consuming and labor intensive for the supervisors.

So until we can get another better set of tools in place, our hope is that we can use that feedback mechanism we talked about earlier, tying that to the process and then getting feedback from customers more directly and readily about, You know, was this clear set of corrections?

Was it consistent, concise, you know, pointing to a code requirement, et cetera, et cetera?

And then if not, why?

And then addressing those feedback mechanisms in a more, you know, real-time way.

In terms of the last piece, This gets at your point, Councilmember Strauss, about staff-corrected plans for simple changes.

Again, back to the paper days when we could sort of redline corrections onto a plan set.

When we converted to electronic plan review, the locked PDF files and the version control really limited us from doing that.

So we established a policy that said even if it was a small correction, we would call the applicant, tell them what it was, check it out, check it in, review it, and try to get it out the door, which has added to our numbers, of course, too.

The correction cycle numbers are inflated a bit by that policy choice, but we are working on a way to actually eliminate that step and be able to allow staff to actually put those corrections directly on the plans themselves or those notes directly on the plans themselves, which should help our data in particular pretty readily by doing that.

And then lastly, removing elements of the permit review process that don't belong I think Director Torkelson mentioned even like housing is a department that's involved in there and we deal with MHA fees through a correction cycle.

Really that is probably not the way to do that and we've identified a number of different ways both internally and with other city departments that we may be able to take some things like some documents or covenants or special inspections reports and things like that out of correction cycles to be able to not hold up the rest of the throughput time and really focus on what the auditor has pointed out being the total throughput time and the correction cycle processes, both reducing correction cycles and shortening the time they sit in those queues as the priority.

So I think collectively all of these things were in alignment and are committed to making that process better.

SPEAKER_17

Fantastic.

Is there one more?

So before we go into this, we'll go back to that last slide.

Just to state, I'm going to make a statement.

I'm going to tell the general public the questions that I'm asking because we are a little over time, which is that a permit should really only have one round of corrections.

That's the goal.

What did you say?

A permit, a plan set should really only have one round of corrections.

One.

If there are elements of life fire safety that need to come into play, later, that we're not caught in that first round.

That is, we always want to prioritize live fire safety.

This is a message to everyone in our One Seattle.

People tell me that One Seattle is a corny message, but I believe it in my heart because we are all together in this, no matter what department you're in, no matter what your role in our city is.

Our permit reviewers are incredibly important and as is everyone in our community and in our city family.

And it needs to be our goal to get plan sets sent out with one round of corrections.

That is a goal that I'm stating from the dais today.

We'll find out in our future conversations about how we get there, if we need to change policy, implement policy.

But again, like our conversations that we had earlier this week, changing policy for a few people's behavior is not usually a good idea.

Right?

I mean, this is a conversation that we've had about council rules.

Do we need to make rules about things that council members should just be doing?

Hopefully not.

So for the public, the questions that I'm asking in our meetings are, what are the barriers to having all corrections in the first round?

What is needed to review the live fire safety in later rounds?

Corrections to revisions are okay in those later rounds, but it's that initial plan set that we can't continue having corrections to.

What is needed for cross department consistency?

Are there items that need to be streamlined or taken out of corrections, like was mentioned with MHA fees?

How do customers elevate their feedback in real time?

And how are these expectations communicated across divisions within a single department, across departments within a single city, or across multiple jurisdictions that touch the permit?

So those are the questions that I'm asking in our meetings and that I continue to find the answers, that I look for the answers to.

Clerk, if you want to pass the next slide here for folks watching at home or online, you can click this QR code and it'll take you to the report.

You can also find it on the website.

I'm going to say some closing statements.

I'll pass it over to SDCI and then to the mayor's office and then back to the auditor's team.

For the general public, we have just breached the tip of the iceberg here.

We haven't even fully discussed everything within one department and there are multiple departments.

This speaks to the amount of work that Melissa Alderson, Andrew Scoggins and auditor Jones have completed.

This speaks to, we had a nearly two hour meeting earlier this week, focusing and refining what we were gonna focus on for this two plus hour meeting.

And we're gonna need to come back quarterly and more regularly to evaluate our improvements and our performance regarding improving permit issuance times and how we're responding to this audit.

We're going to need to go recommendation by recommendation.

We're probably going to need to go department by department.

We briefly talked about INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY DEPARTMENT, AND THEY ARE SO CRITICAL ON THIS, AND WE HAD A VERY LONG DISCUSSION.

SO I JUST STATE FOR THE GENERAL PUBLIC, THIS IS ONLY THE SECOND MEETING THAT WE'VE HAD ON THIS, AND THERE WILL BE MORE.

AND I'LL PASS IT OVER TO STCI AND THE MAYOR'S OFFICE AND THE AUDITORS TEAM FOR CLOSING STATEMENTS.

AND I'LL PASS IT ACTUALLY FOR COUNCILMEMBER NELSON FIRST, BUT ALSO JUST TO SAY I KNOW MELISSA HAS NOT BEEN SPEAKING BECAUSE OF HER VOICE, BUT IT'S BEEN MY EXPERIENCE THAT SHE'S BEEN LEADING THE MAJORITY OF THIS WORK.

I KNOW, ANDREW, YOU'VE DONE A LOT OF WORK HERE, BUT I JUST WANT TO THANK MELISSA FOR ALL OF HER WORK BECAUSE THIS IS A VERY COMPLEX SET OF INFORMATION, AND BEING ABLE TO Get folks feedback honestly is a unique skill set.

Council Member Nelson.

SPEAKER_11

So first of all, I want to thank you, Chair Strauss, because this is a huge issue and I really appreciate you bringing this forward in this audit to give us a framework to talk about some of these issues.

I it's probably the complaint that I hear most about sort of a general theme out there in the world.

And I do want to compliment the mayor's office for having the housing sub cabinets.

I know that people are focused on the issues.

Couple things I want to say is simply that We don't have to recreate the wheel in how we're going to fix it.

You have in here on page, I don't know, 19 or something.

You have documents and documents of what needs to be done.

And I just want to help you figure out how to get there.

And if it's more staffing, I don't know.

We can talk about it later.

But this is more than I would say even an additional source of revenue.

This is important for the city's economic health and wellbeing.

Because we're talking about permitting does drive economic activity.

And it's also a reason why businesses leave or projects don't happen.

And so that is very important, especially for small businesses.

So I'll get off my soapbox and just say that I'm glad this examination is happening.

Let's not lose sight of the fact that you already know a lot and just let us know how we can help.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you.

Back to Director Torkelson and Andy.

SPEAKER_05

Sure.

Well, I'll just conclude the presentation again by thanking council members and thanking the auditor's office for your assistance and help on cooperation with this issue.

And as far as progressing, I'm going to say it's going to take the three Ts.

Torgelson, that's me.

I'm the director.

At the end of the day, the buck stops with me, and I'm totally committed to improving our process and our ethical climate.

The second T is training.

We need to continue to train our employees.

And the third T is transparency.

So everyone in the city and our leadership and all our applicants know what we're doing, and it's very visible and apparent to them.

SPEAKER_16

I just wanted to thank the chair and the council for their interest in housing and continued expertise and help.

I thought the auditor's office did a really wonderful job on this report.

I will just want to add that the mayor has made this a huge priority and is constantly in contact with me about how we are doing.

And much of what he says is what I heard today.

The only thing I would add to everything, I think that whole, the first plan set, the first revision should be, the corrections should be our goal.

it is ultimately we need a bias for housing in this city.

And as we do codes and as we do permitting and everything else, just leaning towards yes to get that next roof that somebody can live in is key for economic development, as Council Member Nelson said, but simply just addressing our housing crisis as well.

SPEAKER_05

And my next big goal is code simplification.

We have so many regulations and codes that we need to implement, so that's a huge goal for the future.

SPEAKER_17

And as I turn it back over to the auditor's office to close this out completely, I also know Christina Postlewaite in your department in SDCI has been a big mover behind the scenes, making sure that we have been able to...

For the general public, we were thinking about doing this meeting on the 8th, this presentation, but that would have run us to 6 p.m., I'm sure.

And SDCI was ready to present today.

The other departments weren't quite there yet.

And so rather than having fewer people from the auditor's team, we pushed forward, pushed this up.

And a lot of that is because of Andy, Director Torrelson, and Christina Postlewaite.

So thank you for that great work.

Auditor Jones, Andrew, I'll let you close this out.

SPEAKER_03

Three things, very short.

Just want to thank STCI, the management there, Director Torrelson and Andy Higgins, just really set a great tone at the top for, you know, hey, telling their folks to talk with our folks, cooperate, getting back to us on time, being very honest, not being defensive.

I know it's no fun to have us come in and poke around, and they just really set, were a model of, you know, behaving appropriately and really taking on these challenges, many of which are not You know, there are a lot of parties involved in some of the things that constrain that led to the audit recommendations that are beyond just SDCI being held.

So I just want to thank them for their cooperation and the tone they set.

Second thing, I want to thank Melissa and Andrew who, you know, did the work on this.

And too bad they couldn't be here in person, but they didn't want to infect all of you with what they had.

And then the last thing I want to thank you, Council Member Strauss, you're the one who requested this work.

So it wouldn't happen without your inquiry and your request.

So thank you very much.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you.

And I know that we'll have more opportunities to have Andrew and Melissa back with us in the future as this is not the end of the conversation.

Thank you all for joining us.

We are going to now switch into the next topics.

We have two more items on the agenda.

I'm hoping that we can get them done in 15 minutes.

Again, thank you everyone for joining us today.

Clerk, if you could read the short title of our next agenda item about the master use permit extension into the record, please.

SPEAKER_12

Item 2, Council Bill 120674, Master Use Permit Expiration Extension for Briefing and Discussion.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you.

We're joined by Mike Podowski from Department of Construction and Inspections and Ketel Freeman from Council Central Staff to discuss this item.

Please.

I'm not sure if Ketel's running the presentation or if Mike is.

SPEAKER_04

I'll just say a few words to introduce the subject, and then Mike has a presentation that he can run through here.

So today there's an initial briefing and discussion on Council Bill 12064674, which would extend the life of master use permits approved for issuance.

By March 1st, 2020 through December 31st, 2026, from three to six years, normally mass use permits expire after three years, but can be renewed for two more.

So this would just provide six year life for mass use permits approved in that time period.

Hang on, do we have a PowerPoint presentation that's supposed to be running?

Mike has one, and he's going to start it here in just a minute.

I'm just going to give you guys a roadmap here.

There's a memo for me that identifies some preliminary issues.

In the interest of time, I won't go through that memo here today and just turn it over to Mike.

I'll just note that there's a public hearing coming up on December 8th.

If council members have any amendments that they want to the bill, please let me know as soon as possible.

And I'll turn it over to Mike.

SPEAKER_15

Thank you, Keto.

Is that coming through?

Yep.

All right.

Let me go on here.

So the goal of the proposal is to help people in the permit process and who are anticipating entering into the permit process deal with some of the economic challenges that we face right now.

The proposal would give more time and some flexibility for permit applicants who have received a master use permit, but need more time to complete the related building permit.

And I'll talk a little bit more about the differences between those permits here in a minute.

The proposal would simplify the process, reduce some uncertainty, and it would help the city realize the benefits of new residential and non-residential development that might not otherwise be able to come through fruition.

without some of the assistance that the proposal would provide.

And the challenges are national and regional in nature.

They pose challenges for new development projects.

high interest rates for loans particularly construction loans the cost of construction materials and labor as well as a very uncertain market in particular for office development and here's the the primer and the two types of permits we're talking about today the master use permit which we did actually talk a lot about in your previous presentation but here i'll just say at a high level it's a conceptual type of a permit it approves the use or uses that would be contained in a development gives you the general building appearance and how the building or buildings would sit on the site and then you would add a building permit to the master use permit that addresses very detailed construction details about the engineering how the mechanical systems work electrical water service and fire and life safety type of issues the idea behind the proposal is to allow more time in particular for people who have mups or are anticipating getting mups to complete that process of having the very detailed and expensive building permit applications completed and approved so that they can start construction So we have two slides that outline the basics of the proposal.

This is the first one.

It's done in words.

And then the next one has a diagram on it.

So we'll try two ways to lay out the basics of the proposal.

The overall lifespan for a master use permit currently in the code is five years.

And what we're proposing to do is extend it to six years.

And the way that one achieves five years currently is that there's a standard lifespan of three years for the permit.

But before it would expire, permit applicants have the option of renewing it for an additional two years.

So the five plus the two, or the three plus the two, gets you to five.

Whereas what we're proposing is just a straight up of six years at that three year renewal point currently under the rules, the master use permits have to be updated so that they would Meet any changes to the codes that have taken place while they were in the review process there.

And so the six year that we're proposing would not include that renewal step in it.

So that's the simplification and the flexibility there.

And just noting at the bottom of the slide that the renewal does not apply to the building permit.

The fire and life safety and engineering standards always must be met.

And so the proposal would not affect the need to comply with the life safety provisions.

here's that diagram so in the middle of the diagram is a dark bold line that's basically a timeline with some milestones shown in it on the top of the slide is the current process and in the bottom is a representation of the simplified proposal so starting with the current process on the timeline there you see a capital letter A and a circle the clock starts ticking on your master use permits lifespan when the master use permit is issued.

That counts for an appeal process that could occur after decision publication.

So, you know, once you reach the end of that process, the three year clock starts ticking and then that's represented in the diagram till you reach the end of that three year expiration date or the lifespan of the initial permit.

And at that point, the permit would either be renewed for an additional two years if it's changed to comply with any code changes that have taken place there or it would expire.

And then at the end of that process, in order to move to construction and then having a building that could be occupied, you would then add your building permits.

Typically applicants get the mass use permit first because it's less detailed and less expensive and then add the building permit on after that, once the building permit is applied for their rules within the building code that Dictate the expiration and and renewals and contrast that current process with the proposal underneath.

Where once the best use permit is ready to issue the clock would start, there would be no renewal step in between, and it would live for six years until the building permit application is added to it when they pause there and see if there are any questions.

SPEAKER_17

Now, thank you, Mike.

This diagram makes this proposal very straightforward, where we have a cycle right now that you could get five, if you include the building permit, to six years.

This proposal makes a very simple and straightforward situation for the six-year MUP lifespan.

In the interest of time, you don't need to answer this question now, but in committee next week, I'd love to hear more about how did we get to six years?

Why not fewer years?

Why not more years?

I know the answers, but I think that that's an important question to ask and answer at our next committee.

SPEAKER_15

Absolutely.

Okay.

In the interest of time, I'll keep going then.

So, a couple other details about the proposal.

As you mentioned, the permit would have a six-year lifespan.

We're looking at making this apply to all master use permits that have reached that issuance milestone since March 1st of 2020. That's roughly three years back from now, which is that initial three year lifespan of the mass use permit.

It also coincides with the declaration of the COVID emergency, which introduced its own challenges into the economy and the real estate market.

And then the proposal would apply also to master use permits that are in the process now or that would reach this issuance milestone by the end of 2026. I'll just mention briefly in terms of answering your question that this proposal is modeled after something that the council did in response to the similar but different economic activities that occurred around the Great Recession.

and adopted a very similar proposal in 2009. And so the time period is built on that.

Although at the next committee, we could certainly talk about potential adjustments to that.

The proposal would apply automatically to projects that fit within that time period and meet the eligibility requirements.

We did do an analysis and we'll look at the number of projects and the locations of them in some upcoming slides here, but there were some 11 eligible projects that would be vested prior to the mandatory housing and affordability requirements.

And so we're just noting here that that that would be one factor to consider in terms of going forward with this proposal, there might be some impacts to revenues, although we think that they are minor.

And then at the bottom of the slide are just some various types of permits for which the state of Washington has expiration of renewals rules for them that are different.

And so those are not part of the proposal.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you, Mike.

Just before you move on to the next slide, I will note for the public, I'm considering an amendment to change the start date of proposals that this could apply to from March 1st to six months prior to March 1st of 2020. We know that at least in our office, we went home and did not return for quite some time on March 5th of 2020. And projects that were getting ready to be have their MUPS issued in the months leading up to the pandemic also did not foresee that pandemic coming.

So this is under consideration at this time.

SPEAKER_15

Thank you.

So this is just a breakdown of the permits that would be eligible in our analysis on the right hand side or the numbers there's roughly 200 mass use permits.

That have reached that decision issuance phase and it's just broken out into.

to one year periods coming back from now.

And then there are approximately 150 permits that are in the pipeline now that we would anticipate being able to be eligible for the longer lifespan.

And then if the council adopts the end date at the end of 2026, there could be some additional ones.

The vast majority of the permits that would be eligible are for multifamily housing, apartments and condos.

And then there are some row houses and townhouses that are the next largest piece of the pie and then some office and hotel projects.

the scale of the projects.

This is focusing mainly on building scale.

Most of the buildings that would be eligible are multifamily and they're in the six to nine story range that's in the middle of the slide there.

There's 67 of those.

And then there are some that are high rise towers that are most likely located downtown or in one of the urban center neighborhoods and then some smaller scale projects.

This is just a map that shows the location of those projects that are eligible or potentially would be eligible under the proposal and When I look at this, I see that the bulk of the projects are located in what we would call the center city area around downtown.

As we would expect.

And then the remaining ones are clustered around the neighborhood business districts that hug the arterial as well as the multifamily zones that also are in those areas.

And that's it.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you, Mike.

This legislation is part of the mayor's downtown activation plan, the package of legislation with the intention of revitalizing Seattle's downtown core and more.

We will have this legislation come back to the land use committee on December 8th.

I will motion to suspend the rules in order to have a public hearing and a vote on the same meeting and then suspend the rules to send the bill to full council on December 12th, 2023 for full council consideration.

Before we close, I just want to check with colleagues.

Are there questions?

I see Vice Chair Morales has a question, so Mike, you might need to pull your slides back up.

SPEAKER_10

Thank you.

Well, I will apologize.

I actually can't stay any longer, so I'm sorry we didn't get to this until just a few minutes ago.

I do have questions, and I can follow up with Ketel about the issues that were raised in the central staff memo, so I will follow up on that offline, and I don't know if that will be require a conversation with you as well, Mike.

But just so everybody's clear, I do want to follow up on some of the issues that were raised there.

So thank you very much.

SPEAKER_17

Fantastic.

I'll make myself available.

Colleagues, any other questions?

Council Member Nelson.

SPEAKER_11

I will be not here on the 8th.

Just so you know, I rescheduled something that was supposed to be this week.

SPEAKER_17

Okay.

SPEAKER_11

Thanks.

SPEAKER_17

Fantastic.

With that, we're going to move on to the next item.

Mike, appreciate you being here.

We will have you back next Friday.

For the final item on the agenda today is a briefing and discussion on Council Bill 120675, which will change size of use limits for medical uses in the maritime manufacturing logistics zone.

Clerk, will you please read the short title into the record?

SPEAKER_12

Item three, Council Bill 120675, Industrial and Maritime Medical Uses Amendment for briefing and discussion.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you.

We are joined by Jim Holmes from Office of Planning and Community Development and Lish Whitson from Council Central staff for this discussion.

This builds upon the work that we did earlier this year passing the strongest protections for manufacturing and maritime zones in our city.

One of the issues there is that we don't want medical uses to expand in a great fashion throughout industrial zones and there are at times and places zones within MML that can take on additional floor area for medical uses.

And so if you'd like to introduce yourselves and begin the presentation, it's a very simple piece of legislation that will ultimately allow a healthcare clinic to be developed for people who need their assistance.

Sorry, gentlemen, let's go with Lish.

And then Jim, you'll run the presentation, I believe.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

Yep.

Liz Swetson, Kansas Central staff.

SPEAKER_13

Jim Holmes with OPCD.

All right.

This will be short.

It's a fairly straightforward piece of legislation.

So this proposed amendment would exempt existing medical service uses from the size of use limits in the maritime manufacturing logistics zone.

It includes locational criteria that limits where this can happen to prevent a proliferation of new medical service uses on industrial land.

And it does facilitate the expansion of existing service providers serving downtown Seattle.

Quickly on size of use limits.

In 2007, size of use limits for medical services and other non-industrial land uses were enacted.

In the recently adopted industrial maritime strategy legislation, we carried those size of use limits forward, in some cases tightening them to move in the direction of protecting industrial land for industrial uses.

The intent is to limit incompatible uses that have the potential to result in displacement of industrial uses.

This legislation is tailored that we believe in a way that will prevent that from happening.

It's only applicable to medical service uses established on or before July 18th, 2023. It can only be on land located east of Airport Way South, which is a long, thin strip that would run from the top of the manufacturing industrial center to the southern city limit.

We know there's at least one medical service use that satisfies these criteria.

It's possible there are others, but we are unaware of them.

SPEAKER_17

Fantastic.

Thank you, Jim.

Is that the end of the presentation?

That is the end of the presentation.

Excellent.

Colleagues, any questions at this time?

I'm seeing none.

With that, I appreciate you.

Again, colleagues, I'm going to be on December 8th requesting to suspend the rules to vote the bill out on the same day as the public hearing and then vote to suspend the rules to send it to full counsel after the Thursday noon deadline.

With that, if there are no further questions for Lish or Jim, we will have this back in committee on December 8th.

And thank you for waiting through that entire two plus hour presentation to get to this very quick item.

With that, this concludes the Wednesday, November 29th, 2023 Special Land Use Committee meeting.

The next Land Use Committee meeting is a special meeting on December 8th, 2023 at 2 p.m.

Thank you for attending.

We are adjourned.