Select Budget Committee Session II 10120

Thank you, councilmembers and council colleagues for joining us again.

Today is October 1st, 2020, and session two of the Select Budget Committee will come to order.

We have been in recess for the last hour, and I want to welcome back everyone who is joining us.

Also want to note that we will have the next three hours here for a public opportunity to hear more about the mayor's budget as it has been transmitted earlier this week on Tuesday.

Council Member Morales.

Council Member Peterson.

Here.

Council Member Sawant.

Here.

Council Member Stroud.

Present.

Council Member Gonzalez.

Here.

Council Member Herbold.

Here.

Council Member Juarez.

Council Member Lewis.

Present.

And Chair Mosqueda.

Present.

7 present.

Thank you very much, Madam Clerk, and I will make sure to note when Councilmember Juarez has joined.

I want to make sure that we did get Councilmember Morales for the record as well.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

All right, let's go ahead and move into item 2 on the agenda.

Madam Clerk, could you please read item 2 into the record?

community safety for briefing and discussion.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

We do have a handful of folks here to join us.

I want to recognize that we have three slides that are left over from this morning's presentation.

Thank you to Director Noble and the folks from the Seattle Police Department for carrying over these three slides as they do lead into this item on our agenda.

Today's item includes a presentation from a handful of departments under the umbrella of community safety.

I want to welcome Deputy a senior deputy mayor Mike Fong From the mayor's office Jason Johnson interim director from human services department director Matia from the Department of Neighborhoods and director Noble from the city budgets office.

We do have a handful of other participants from different departments and the mayor's executive team as well.

So I As we get to various presentations, if I did not call your name, please do let us know that you are here and introduce yourself for the record.

Senior Deputy Mayor, I think I will turn it over to you first, and then we will turn it back over to the slideshow presentation.

Welcome.

Thank you, Council Member Mosqueda, and good afternoon, Council Members.

I appreciate the opportunity today for the executive to share some thoughts on threading together our efforts around community safety.

And I had the opportunity to listen to most of your discussion this morning on SPD.

And just wanted to mention that I actually feel that there is a fair amount of alignment on a number of the major areas of focus.

While we may have some policy differences and some operational and implementation considerations that we want to inject into the budget process.

Overall, I think that we're fundamentally talking about the same framework with elements that are really inextricably linked to each other.

And we'll have a chance to walk through some of that in detail this afternoon in our presentation.

But just to preview, the mayor's executive order from this morning is a continuation really of some foundational work that we've already initiated over the last several months, but really focused in on our efforts that are really mid-flight in terms of our deep dive into SPD.

You all had some healthy dialogue with Chief Diaz and his team this morning.

in terms of the fundamental reform elements that we are looking at with regard to the police department.

And I want to just echo what Council President Gonzalez talked about extensively this morning, which is that, you know, fundamentally, we're talking about the bodies of work and functions have been core to be and to what extent that we're open to shifting those bodies of work outside of the department.

And I would say that the initial proposals from the mayor, many of which were consistent with some of your earlier dialogue this summer, this initial $60 million effort of reductions and functions that are being transferred out of the department is precisely that, a look at shifting and reshaping some of the core functions and responsibilities of SPD.

And we'll have an opportunity to talk about those functions in a little more detail here in a moment.

And you've got some of that preview this morning when we walk through some of the budget transfer components.

The second piece of the puzzle that we all have talked extensively about and have multiple efforts initiated is around centering our efforts around community, engaging community, and letting community lead the thinking around systemic transformation but also at the specific programmatic level in terms of strategies and design and prioritization.

And our hope is that the ecosystem that we've built around this work going forward will have community engagement centered in that process.

And we look forward to working with all of you around the participatory budgeting process that you've identified.

Director Mantilla will talk a little bit about our thinking around engagement.

And so there's an opportunity to further bring us into alignment in that conversation.

The third prong, I think, of all of this, these three concentric circles, is investment.

Divestment, investment, allocation of resources.

And I don't think those are just financial in nature.

They also include organizational, staffing, other city assets, and you'll hear a little bit about some of the structural elements that we're thinking about through Director Johnson within the HSD framework.

Of course, separately, we've all for some time have had parallel and concurrent efforts related to criminal legal system reform, whether that be around the jail, youth detention, probation reform, alternatives to incarceration.

All of those elements are moving in parallel and concert to this ecosystem that we've built around these core areas of community, investment, and SPD Deep Dive.

So I hope that the discussion this afternoon, which is still an evolving one, as we build out the clear elements that we want to be focused in on how they connect with each other, and we also welcome the council's engagement in that process as well.

Just this morning, I've reinforced our invitation to the council and council central staff to participate with us in the working group and IDT process.

We've had some success in those kinds of collaborative models before, and I look forward to working with the council president and the public safety chair going forward with this process as well.

One thing I want to emphasize before we launch in is that, to be clear, and I think it's entirely consistent with much of what the council has talked about as well, I think the mayor believes that while we go through this process, we want to make sure we are not compromising our existing response, not to 911 calls, as well as public safety in general, while we're moving through a period of discussion around transition.

And I think that's entirely consistent even with the council's actions related to the $14 million investment in community safety.

The initial $10 million is earmarked specifically for capacity building, which is a recognition that there is the need to build capacity in order to move towards transition.

And I think that foundational work is going to take time, and we're prepared to do that.

But we hope that we can have a meaningful discussion around the process and the implementation and the framework for how we get to that future state.

So with that, we're going to walk through several components this afternoon and turn it over to our PowerPoint here.

And I think some of the initial slides, and I missed the last part of the discussion this morning, so I know there was a little bit of carry forward, but I think Julie Klein was going to kick us off on a few of the elements related to the functions that we're transitioning from the police department and speak to that a little bit more as we launch into the EO and the other components of community safety work.

Thank you, Senior Deputy Mayor.

Will you be with us for the remainder of this presentation?

I'll be here.

Just before we move into those three slides, and thank you, Julie, for staying with us for this presentation.

Colleagues, are there any comments or questions for the Senior Deputy Mayor in his opening remarks?

Okay.

I'm seeing none.

I have some, Deputy Mayor Fong, but I will hold those specific questions related to your remarks as well regarding the $14 million, but I will hold those until we get through these first few slides.

Thank you, Julie, again for waiting, and looking forward to hearing from you.

Absolutely.

So good afternoon, everyone.

Julie Klein, Mayor's Public Safety Advisor from the Executive's Office.

And let's see.

Brian, if you want to go ahead and advance one.

There we go.

So the functional transfers, this is essentially a recap of some of the things that we talked about this morning.

And council members seemed well-versed in the functional transfers that were made.

And I hope I was able to answer any questions about the policy decisions behind these transfers.

Just to name, I won't go into the details again, ad nauseum, but just to recap, the parking enforcement officers have been, for the 2021 budget, moved over to the Department of Transportation from the Seattle Police Department.

The Office of Emergency Management, which was already sort of functioning as an independent office, also moved out from under the Seattle Police Department.

The director of the Office of Emergency Management has been acting as a cabinet-level position for some time now, I think, for the last two administrations, or three, potentially.

The 9-1-1 Communications Center, we moved that out from under the Seattle Police Department as well.

creating an independent entity called the Seattle Emergency Communications Center.

We're hoping that this is a first step towards being able to civilianize 9-1-1 call responses and diversify the 9-1-1 responses.

Potentially, depending on where the community engagement takes us and consensus takes us, we can explore the idea of a citywide communications center as well that includes both emergency and non-emergency.

So we felt that was a step in the right direction.

And then finally, the Victim Advocacy Team, which was done in effect by the Council's budget moves and the 2021 Mayor's Budget makes permanent that transfer of the SPD Advocacy Team to the Safe and Thriving Communities Division that will be newly arranged in HSD.

And I'll let Director Johnson fill everyone in a little bit more on that.

So were there any questions of regarding any of these budget transfers that I wasn't able to answer this morning or that may have come up since this morning.

I'd be happy to answer those.

And this next slide here just, again, recaps the monetary changes and the actual budget numbers and FTEs that have been transferred out of SPD through this process of moving towards civilianization of responses, so.

Councilmember Herbold, did you have a question?

Please go ahead.

You're so good.

You see when I take my mic off mute.

I appreciate it.

I see some indication about some changes related to overtime, but I haven't seen a picture of how much in total overtime is budgeted for SPD in the proposed 2021 budget.

That would be a better question for either Caramane Hester, who I do not believe is on, or Angela Sochi, who's not on this afternoon either.

I apologize, Council Member, but we'll get you that information.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

I also want to just flag the fact that there are several pending questions that I have related to overtime policies.

I think some of them dovetail into special events as well.

I have a letter that I sent to chief Diaz on September 17. significant concerns that I have about the lack of overtime controls, as well as the lack of progress on not just implementing the recommendations from the auditor's report, because I don't think, even though those issues have been framed as if they're wholly issues that can be resolved with technology, there are actually some Manual things that can be that can be done to improve overtime controls in the interim that I'm I certainly hope The police department has been doing but I don't I don't know if they have and then there's of course the issue of not just overtime controls but off-duty time and the I can't say that there's not been progress, but I certainly am not aware of any progress to the Mayor Burgess's executive order on September 13th, 2017 related specifically to off-duty work.

And then finally, Chief Diaz has said that by redeploying officers, 100 officers from specialty units to patrol, that that will help reduce reliance on overtime.

And in this letter from September 17th, I have requested an estimate of the anticipated overtime reduction that will result from this redeployment.

or even just a projection.

So if there's somebody else I should send this letter to, I'm happy to do so.

But I think these are really pressing issues, not just as it relates to ensuring that taxpayer dollars are being spent in a way that are consistent with overtime practices and limitations on the number of hours that officers should be working, this whole issue of people getting paid for more than 24 hours in a day is one that I think is really befuddling and troubling to a lot of people.

So thank you.

Yes, Council Member Herbold, and I don't know if Mark Baird is on the line.

I'm hopeful he might be able to expound on that.

But as you mentioned, Chief Diaz's staffing changes will hopefully have a significant impact on overtime.

There also is a new computer program, WST, and I can't for the life of me remember what that acronym stands for, that's going to be helping to better track overtime as well.

So I know those two things are in play.

I also know that this was a very specific ask from the mayor and is included in the EO that we really drill down and examine that.

So that sounds like a shared interest between you and the mayor and something that is certainly on our agenda.

Yeah, and I just want to underscore the technology fix is still a long ways away.

And we have questions about the use of overtime that need to be answered now.

And there are things that SPD could be doing manually to help us get some of these answers.

So thank you.

Thank you very much, Vice Chair Herbold.

For our IT team, if you could please mute the clerk's line, that would be helpful.

I think there's just a little bit of background noise there.

Thank you for doing that.

Are there additional questions on this slide?

Okay, I am seeing none.

Thank you, please continue.

All right.

Senior Deputy Mayor Fong, did you want to give a brief overview of the EO or would you like me to kind of jump into the nuts and bolts of it?

Yeah, Julie, while you go into the nuts and bolts, and I'm happy to overlay as we go, and we've got a number of members of our team on the line that can speak to some of the specifics as well.

But I think this discussion started in earnest this morning, and Julie can provide a little more texture to some of the things we've contemplated in what is effectively amounting to two work groups, a community safety work group and then a functional analysis IDT specifically focused in on SPD.

But Julie, why don't you go ahead and walk us through it.

Thanks, Mike.

And so I apologize again this morning if it felt like we kept punting to the EO and then we didn't actually get to it this morning.

But essentially what this executive order does is it's designed to help reimagine policing and community safety in Seattle.

And what it does is it creates and outlines a timeline, an accountable timeline for the community to expect analysis on SPD 9-1-1 dispatch call volume, current functions, expenditures related to those functions, staffing models, discussing and analyzing new ways of staffing.

and personnel deployment.

And our intent is to make sure that all of this analysis and all of this data is made publicly available.

We understand there are a lot of different public engagement processes going on, and we want to make sure that everyone has access to this data and analysis that we intend to do in regards to SPD staffing and as it relates back to their functions.

What we are intending to do is to review and identify SPD functions that could be transferred, eliminated, reduced, civilianized, or potentially in some cases expanded.

What immediately comes to mind is CSOs.

And to develop or identify areas where unarmed civilian responses can replace a lot of those police functions.

So the IDT, the concept here is that the functional analysis IDT is sort of the laboring or in gathering and analyzing the data.

making it available to the Community Safety Work Group, which is going to be headed up by the HSD Director, Jason Johnson, Department of Neighborhoods Director, Andres Matia, and OCR, the Office of Seattle Civil Rights Director, Marco Lockhart, and also the Interim Chief Diaz will be involved in that as well.

And that will be sort of more of a coalescing policy body that will help to sort of make decisions based on the analysis and data collected and made public by the Functional Analysis IDT.

One of the other primary things that we're hoping the Functional Analysis IDT will do is to help us get community consensus and a good understanding of what the functional priorities are of the community.

Meaning, what does the community want to see SPD still doing?

And in essence, a bit of a ranking so that there's an understanding of how to operationalize that through various policing models and staffing decisions, ergo budget decisions.

Once that occurs, and we're hoping that it's an iterative process based on our understanding of requests for information and analysis may be coming from multiple sources, including the community safety work group, including potentially council, and putting that together to help inform policy development and a state legislative agenda.

We can talk about that a little bit more.

We have a separate slide on that.

The mayor has some initial ideas of what the state policy agenda or what the state legislative agenda should be, but it is by no means meant to be an exhaustive list.

At that point, I think once there is the ideation phase has sort of finished, we need to start building capacity in community-based responses to substitute in for those SPD functions and implement those new models of community safety.

And that will have to happen in some cases in conjunction with advocating for the state law change.

So while this is sort of displayed in a circle in the sort of order that we think these changes need to happen.

We do envision this being an iterative process and not necessarily a one-way circle at that.

So those are the high points.

Senior Deputy Mayor Fong, anything that you want to add for an overview of the EO?

Yeah, no, thanks, Julie.

I think you did a great job summarizing some of the key elements.

The only thing that I might emphasize, and you touched on this already, is that while this visual suggests sort of some level of sequential Uh, uh, movement, uh, through these components.

I think a lot of these pieces are actually going to be in, in flight concurrently.

For instance, um, uh, you know, community engagement will, will flow throughout this process, but also community capacity building, uh, as I talked about earlier, given some of the council's direction and what you'll hear from, from director Johnson later.

will get initiated sooner rather than later.

And so while we show this as almost a sequential move around the horn, if you will, here, I think a lot of these actions will actually be moving in parallel.

Is that fair, Julie?

That's absolutely fair.

I think divestment from SPD is going to continue as we shift functions away from police alternatives.

Those are going to happen at different speeds depending on what we're talking about.

And I know that there is discussion later on about the 100 million in investments.

And I think the primary reason for that is that the mayor knew that investments couldn't wait for divestment to happen.

And so actual divestment we think will be happening to some extent in the rebalancing, the 2021 rebalancing, depending on the results of our analysis and engagement.

And then probably further reflected and more fully reflected in the 2022 budget.

We do have a timeline slide coming up to just kind of let everyone know what the sort of timeline, here it is, the milestones slide here.

So, This sort of just demonstrates really nicely visually the sort of where we are in the process and when we're hoping to get things stood up and moving.

So we're currently in the 2021 City Council budget process as of this week.

And so you can see sort of the concept of when we're going to be able to get all of these things moving.

We need to do community engagement around SPD functional changes and 9-1-1 transformation.

The Community Safety Work Group and the SPD Functional Analysis IDT need to set their work plans.

And the budget allocations are all going to flow from the decisions that are made there, that are guided by the community engagement.

The legislative session begins at the beginning of 2021. There are going to necessarily have to be some changes there for us to do some of the work that we're envisioning, but we're trying really hard not to get ahead of our skis in making policy decisions or major changes without first understanding what community is prioritizing, functionally speaking in SPD, before we start and then letting our budget decisions flow from that messaging that we get from community.

So as you can see, this contemplates supplemental 2021 budget process where we fully anticipate we may be ready to make some budget changes to SPD based on functional changes.

But as we indicated, the full extent of those may not be ready to be stood up and to be those functions to be removed from SPD until we are at this time next year.

But since those are going to happen at different speeds, we didn't want to tie ourselves necessarily to waiting until everything was ready to effectuate the changes that we're looking at.

Thank you, Julie.

I think that there's a number of questions on this slide and the previous slide.

Council members, I have Vice Chair Herbold, and then I have, I believe, Council Member Morales.

If you had a question, I just didn't want to miss you.

I will double check with you before we get there.

Councilmember Herbold, please go ahead.

how that would work, what the community outreach and engagement is, and the mechanism for that engagement for each of these steps.

I, of course, appreciate receiving Senior Deputy Mayor Fong's invitation.

to the IDT.

I do not believe that that is a external body, though.

And unless I'm mistaken, I don't believe that that body is intending to report out to the public, but maybe it is.

Would love a little bit more understanding.

I don't believe that you're suggesting that the community engagement element here is constituted by the mayor's task force of 40 individuals, so would really like to know a little bit more about that.

I'm going to just say I'm concerned that this process, as it's been scoped, is likely to delay change even further.

The council passed its rebalance budget eight weeks ago.

And in that rebalance budget, we did a 911 call analysis.

I'm not going to suggest it was robust, but it was certainly thorough enough.

Thank you, Dr. Fisher, to let us know what our next set of questions should be from the analysis that we did.

requested, this is now my third time mentioning it, I'm sorry I'm beating a dead horse, we requested by September 30th an analysis of what functions at SPD could be civilianized.

I would have expected in the last eight weeks rather than spending time going back and forth about whether or not we were going to sustain or override the veto, that some of this work would have been done because it was work that we agree, the executive and the council, is work that we both want done.

So again, I would like to be further along in this sort of reimagining process so that we can begin to stand up some of the other support functions.

And again, just back to the question, that was not the question.

The question is going back, the question about what is the mechanism for for community outreach and engagement for each of these steps.

I really don't want this effort to be shifting attention away from black community designed and led processes that are already underway to generate plans for public health and safety, that being a separate process and conversation.

And it too is designed to provide solutions.

Thank you.

And I know that Director Mentea and Director Johnson will be addressing the public engagement aspect of this plan a little bit later on in the presentation.

Suffice to say that there's going to be a community engagement report available at the end of October under the EO.

And to answer one of your other questions regarding the IDT, we anticipate making the IDT to be reporting out publicly regularly on its analysis and gathered data.

and its understanding of functional priorities.

So to just beg your pardon for just a little bit, and I think your questions regarding public engagement can be best answered by Andreas and Jason, yeah.

Council Member Morales, did you have a question or comment?

I do.

So going back to the previous slide, although I guess it doesn't really matter.

I'm interested in, you explained a little bit about who will be on these two different entities.

So it's department heads on the work group and I'm assuming department staff on IDT.

And so I'm interested to know how those decisions were made and how these folks or this work will be able to engage in a racially equitable way.

What we're hearing from community is that all of this work should be community-led when it comes to what we're identifying as priorities.

Having a kind of top-down approach to that issue identification is somewhat problematic.

So that's my first question, how will that be able to happen?

But my second question in terms of how these groups were formed is what racial equity principles were used to create these two work groups and were the RSJI co-leads involved in helping think through how to create these?

So to answer your second question first, I think ultimately the Community Safety Workgroup is comprised of the directors who some of this work will land with.

And some of this work, in specific, some of the public engagement needs to kind of rely upon their advice and counsel.

So that would be the Seattle Office of Civil Rights is going to play an important role in that.

That was how the Community Safety Workgroup was formed.

You are correct that the IDT, the Functional Analysis IDT, is a smaller group of sort of working staff that are there to be sort of technical advisors and gather information and data from subject matter experts to answer some of the bigger policy questions that the work group is going to encounter through their public engagement work.

I think one of the guiding principles that we're really focused on here is we have general areas or ideas of places where there could be functional change or shifts, but we are trying not to preordain any results before there's public engagement.

Sorry, I didn't hear anything in that answer about how the actual engagement will work, how the IDT will engage with community to get the information that will inform the functional decision.

Absolutely.

As I indicated to Council Member Herbold, Director Montilla and Director Johnson, we'll go over sort of the public engagement aspect of this later on in the presentation.

Okay, if you can just address then how whether racial equity principles were used in creating these two groups, that would be helpful.

Council Member, if you'll indulge me, I'll interject here just for a quick second.

So, and again, Director Mentea can go into this in more detail, but our engagement around this body of work isn't something that we're just initiating as part of this IDD process.

In fact, we had done a round of engagement with all of the Office of Civil Rights commissions prior to shaping this EO.

So that effort has helped inform, and we brought the functional analysis discussion, the 911 elements to the table for conversation that has helped inform our thinking as far as how we've established these two working groups internally.

And as Julie has mentioned, clearly the As we've talked about community engagement being a key piece of this body of work, our intention is clearly to have that be driving both what we will be looking at and then the continuous feedback loop as far as how prioritization flows from there.

Both directors, Jason Johnson and Andres, could talk about some of the specific strategies that we've outlined for community engagement, but at the same time, This is an area that we welcome continued dialogue around.

We know you and your colleagues have been invested in a participatory budgeting process.

And we want to also hear from you how you see that research to be integrated into this conversation.

So by no means do we feel like we have identified the entirety of how to proceed with the community conversation here and at the same time welcome sort of your perspective as well as your colleagues as we continue to shape this.

This is precisely why we have anticipated ongoing engagement with council staff as part of this effort.

So I know folks are eager to move to the community engagement piece.

I think it's just a couple slides from here.

So if you'll indulge us to get through this, we will certainly address community engagement here in a few minutes.

I still don't have an answer to the question about the racial equity principles.

I hear you that the commissions might have been contacted about this, so I would be interested to hear what feedback they had.

But if you can answer the question about whether RSGI co-lead teams were involved or what principles were used to form these groups, I would appreciate it.

I think we just tried to be include, since these are not necessarily going to be the decision makers, I think we wanted to make sure we had the right department heads.

And that's how the IDT, I'm sorry, that's how the work group was formed.

I think the public engagement aspect of it is where the RSJI, The key is, or I'm sorry, the real need for the RSGI analysis and inclusion is going to be is in the public engagement analysis of this.

The work group is there to essentially take the public engagement guidance and turn it into policy and implement it.

Once we are hearing clearly what functions they'd like to see replaced and what they'd like to see them replaced with.

Councilmember Morales, thank you for your questions.

I think that they are prudent at this point.

I just want to make sure that you made a note of the questions that did not get answered for the slides that are coming on community engagement.

Anything else?

I have Councilmember, Council President Gonzales next.

Anything else, Councilmember Morales?

Okay.

Council President Gonzales, please go ahead.

Thanks so much, Chair Mosqueda.

And I think what I'm hearing in terms of the response is that in RSGI analysis wasn't, was not completed or done as it relates to the concepts of whether or not the community safety work group and the IDT should exist, right?

So it's sort of the RSGI tool, the RSJ toolkit wasn't used to drive the creation of the concept of the work group or the IDT, is that accurate?

that's accurate council member.

And what you're saying is that there's an op and what I'm hearing senior deputy mayor Fong say is that there's an opportunity now and moving forward to hear directly from council members about those kinds of bodies of work that we want to see incorporated in the community safety work group and the IDT now that the mayor has issued an executive order declaring her intent to head in that direction.

That's the invitation I'm hearing.

Is that an accurate characterization of that invitation?

That's correct, Council President.

Great.

And so I think, you know, what I want to just highlight a couple of things sort of in the spirit of hearing that invitation and wanting to accept it and help to, you know, potentially shape this into something that will be, that will have great utility, not just to us as policymakers, but will also feel legitimate and important and meaningful to particularly BIPOC communities.

And so there's a couple of things.

One is you all might be aware of some of the criminal legal system realignment work that the council has been doing over the last two years now, maybe year and a half at this point.

That process does include a broad set of stakeholders that are looking at a host of recommendations and bodies of work that have been done across the legal system and criminal legal system that just kicked off last week.

Carlos Lugo from our Council Central staff has been leading that work along with Asha Venkatraman.

and Brianna Thomas, my chief of staff in my office.

And so I wanna encourage us to make sure that we are not duplicating community engagement efforts, particularly in this space.

I think we hear a lot from stakeholders that they get community engagement exhaustion of being engaged repeatedly on the same issues or similar issues And that it's important for us to try to, as the owners of bureaucracy, to streamline those engagement processes to the greatest extent possible, to not create fatigue within community.

That's one point.

The second point is, as we're looking at structuring the community safety work group, I do think it's important for us To apply the race and social justice toolkit to the concept as it's being described to make sure that structurally we're not.

creating any unintended consequences in terms of excluding those voices who need to be at the center of the conversation, which again, are the voices of BIPOC community members.

So those are two pieces that I just like to give feedback on now.

And then just sort of from the 30,000 foot level, I know that there are folks, including members of this council who are skeptical of this body of work.

Part of our work as council members is to apply scrutiny and to take our function as oversight really seriously.

And I think we all are doing that.

And I just wanna say from just the 30,000 foot level that in our conversations with you all around negotiating a potential substitute bill, depending on how the override on the mayor's vetoes went, we talked a lot about the concept of how important it was to bring a diverse set of voices to the table to help guide these critical and important policy conversations about public safety.

So I'm gonna, until I see otherwise, I'm going to believe that this proposal is being set forward in that spirit.

And I am heartened to hear that there is still an invitation for council and council central staff to participate in the IDT process and to be engaged in the community safety work group process.

I think it's important for us to have a voice in those conversations.

I think that people we represent expect that we will be able to come together and to sort out our differences.

And again, we may not agree on the outcome here, but I do think it's an important effort to undergo together and to see if we can find some alignment here and if we can at work together to make sure that both the Community Safety Work Group and the IDT is going to be representative of Council's priorities and of the constituencies that we represent.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you very much, Council President.

I know, Chair Mosqueda, in the interest of time, I want to keep moving.

The only comment I want to make is I appreciate the Council President's comments And I concur that throughout our conversations, through the negotiations related to the compromise, we talked about looking at how we can work towards a framework, both centering around community and to be able to proceed together between legislative and executive branches.

So that commitment still stands, and I look forward to working with you and Council Central staff.

At the same time, I just want to also mention part of the interest and ensuring that we are true to our RSHAI commitment and values is partly the reason why the co-chairs of the Community Safety Workgroup involved department heads that are beyond just the Seattle Police Department.

I mean, there's a reason why SOCR, Human Services Department, DON, is part of the coordination of this work.

And again, I will defer some of this discussion component to Director Mejia because I think he can speak much more in depth about some of the council's interests with regard to engagement and community.

So I'll leave it at that.

And I'm sure Mosqueda, if there are other questions, we'll take them before we keep moving on here to some of the other components.

I appreciate that.

Thank you very much, senior deputy mayor.

I will echo what the council president said as well.

I do think it is important to hear that you continue to want to include the council in the interdepartmental task force.

I agree with what the council president and council member Morales said as well, that it's really important that we all set community feedback, given that that's an insular body.

I'm looking forward to hearing more about that.

But I heard the invitation there and I hear Council President echoing the importance of that.

I also think that it's really important as we move forward that we continue to have honest conversations both amongst ourselves and in the press.

There is a question that I have about The third bullet here regarding building community capacity or building capacity as we think about investing into community to reduce funding in SPD.

It's got to be that right teeter-totter.

And Julie, I think you were alluding to that this morning.

I'm sorry, Julie, it wasn't you.

It was Executive Director Sochi.

And if she is not on the line right now, we can follow up with her.

But the comment was made that the budget as assumed included sort of the status quo maintenance of existing FTEs because there was a, I guess, a question mark on how quickly those dollars could get out to community for the $14 million.

The question that I have for the executive team is regarding the press release that went out yesterday and in the bottom half of that press release regarding the $14 million for community-based organizations, It says from the mayor's memo, however, my concern centers around council seeking to borrow money with no identified source.

But it's your hope that we can identify a way to address the $14 million as part of the 2021 process.

Deputy Mayor, you also mentioned the 14 million as you began your comments this morning.

I think it's really important, though, that we clarify, and thank you, Director Noble.

I see you on the line there, too.

We've chatted about this this morning.

It is important to note that the council did have an identified source.

In Section 3 of Council Bill 119863, which was vetoed and then overridden, it provides two approaches for repaying 13.1 million of that through an inter-fund loan.

So while the mayor may not have liked that, even though I did have conversation with her and she said that she this was last Tuesday morning, did not have a concern with using the Interfund loan at that point.

Even if there's disagreement about the approach, it's a far cry from not actually being able to have an identified source.

In Section 3, it clearly identifies using the Interfund loan or if the Interfund loan savings are not able to be realized, then we would use the savings from SPD.

I'm sorry, if the SPD savings are not able to be realized, then we would use We did not receive any funding from Jump Start if necessary, but we clearly had an identified source for the Interfund loan.

Can you please comment on whether or not we are misunderstanding or if there's folks from central staff who also want to chime in?

There's clearly a $13.1 million principle that we had planned to pay back in our Council Bill 119863, so I'm confused why that language was included in the press release from yesterday.

The issue is that the proposed budget that we have submitted to you doesn't assume further reductions in SPD that could be used to repay that 14. And the proposed budget uses the available general fund resources, all but approximately $5 million that are left in the rainy day fund.

So our proposed budget doesn't anticipate, does not anticipate the repayment.

If council makes changes to that budget to facilitate the funding of $14 million, that's your purview and that will work.

And what we're suggesting is that if we move forward with the $14 million as requested, and we intend to, as council begins its review of the budget, it needs to understand that in some sense, the first $14 million of reductions that it makes are gonna be needed to pay for that $14 million that we intend to proceed with starting now.

So, because again, that 14 million is not in our 2020 proposal to you, and it's not in our 2021 proposal to you.

And it is entirely your purview to make changes to those proposals to free up that 14 million.

And if we're gonna move forward per your direction, it then becomes incumbent upon you to do that, because otherwise the budget would be out of balance.

And that's not, that is just a statement of fact.

It's not anything more than that.

We just need you to understand that if we're gonna move forward with the 14, our budget doesn't have it in there.

So you guys are gonna have to work on that, but you seem quite prepared to do that.

So I think that's all fine, which is why we're ready to move forward.

Okay, Deputy Mayor.

Yeah, Madam Chair.

I think Ben has articulated the technical aspect of this.

I guess I just want to assure you, I think we're actually on the same page here as far as intent and interest.

Council's made it clear that we want to push these resources out the door.

Director Johnson can elaborate a little bit later on in this presentation as far as some of his planning and approach to the next couple months of work to make that a reality.

I think the budget mechanics are largely associated with when those dollars will need to be available for contracts.

And at the end of the day, the 21 budget needs to needs to reflect the identification of that 14 million.

Otherwise, I think we're on the same page and we have every intention of moving moving forward as quickly as we can with the one piece that was discussed this morning, which is the council action.

I believe did require us to come back with an ordinance to actually articulate our game plan for release of those funds.

and we'll want to have some conversation about what level of detail that you're expecting for us to be able to get that proviso lifted for those resources to go out the door.

But again, conceptually, we are on the same page, and I don't think intent is lost on the executive as far as what your expectations are.

Okay?

Thank you for those comments, Deputy Mayor and Director Noble.

Ali, I did see you come off a video for a second.

Did you have anything you'd like to add?

Not, you know, nothing, I wouldn't disagree with anything that Director Noble or Deputy Mayor Pong just said.

I just want to sort of put up maybe a finer point on I think where there may be disagreement here and just pointing out that the council provided policy direction about how they intended, how you all intended to fund those $14 million of investments.

The mayor transmitted a budget that didn't fullfill that policy direction, which would have been either reducing the SPD budget by an additional $14 million or 13.1 to back that inner fund loan, to pay back that inner fund loan, or to dedicate $13.1 million of jumpstart money, which is part of the general fund for this purpose.

And that is not what was in the budget that was proposed.

So now the council is faced with looking at making those reductions in SPD or reprogramming other general fund spending in the proposed budget.

So I just wanted to maybe put a finer point on that.

Thank you.

And happy to come back to this.

I think that underscores the point that I'm making.

We're now in a position of either having to take that funding from Jumpstart, which we had already anticipated for something else versus having it come from the SPD budget So it's really a matter of the policy choices versus what I think was in the press release yesterday and noting that council had failed to articulate a plan.

We had a plan.

We have a plan.

I'm happy to hear between the lines and explicitly stated as well from both the director and deputy mayor that there is commitment to move forward with getting those dollars out the door.

I think it's really just a matter of I'm going to turn it over to councilmember Herbold.

I know we all want to move on from this topic.

I really appreciate director noble you explaining what the steps are moving forward.

that the mayor's concern centered around council seeking to borrow money with no identified funding source.

Why are those words in a press release when they're just completely untrue?

I'm not sure I see the semantical difference, but We're moving forward with a $14 million expenditure that is going to require cuts that have not yet been identified.

That's all we're saying.

But we're moving forward because that council has been clear about its intent.

And we were clear about our intent before.

We identified a funding source to pay off the borrowed money.

The proposed budget that we have delivered to you doesn't save $14 million in 2021 to repay this.

It wasn't.

Again, if anybody's fault, this is mine.

We were preparing the budget in this space where the mayor had vetoed.

There was no set law in that space.

So we made a set of assumptions about it.

But in any case, you have the final word.

And we're doing as requested.

We are moving forward with the 14. And I just want to highlight for you That is going to need some some offsetting funding to get there.

And again, you have identified a couple of ways to do it and conversations today have indicated.

specific opportunities potentially run.

I don't think you should take the blame.

This is not about how the budget was prepared.

You made a choice, which you can do, to not, in preparing the budget, to not have used JumpStart dollars as a fund source to repay this loan.

The issue that Chair Mosqueda is raising is in moving forward and building trust between the executive and the council We need to know that there are accurate statements being said in the press about our actions, and this statement says that we did not identify a funding source when we voted for this $14 million, and we did.

You chose not to use it, and that's your prerogative.

I'll also add, thank you, Council Member Herbold.

I'll also add, I believe, Director Noble, you probably didn't author the press release yourself.

I think that this is an important message, Deputy Mayor Fong, that I'm hoping that you can take back as well as we talk about building trust and figuring out a way that we can both, both the executive branch and the legislative branch continue to move forward past these past few months.

I think it's an important note that we have honest conversations amongst ourselves here and also via the press as this is a tool that's often been used in the last few years to get messages out.

I think it's important to underscore what Councilmember Herbold said and the questioning I was asking.

That's the message I'm hoping you can bring back because the press release was just released yesterday, not prior to the budget.

Thank you, Deputy Mayor.

Thank you, Councilmembers.

Appreciate it.

All right.

Let's move on to the next slide.

All right.

As I mentioned earlier, there have already, through various other means of community engagement and messages that we've gotten clearly from community and our partners in this area, a number of places that we've already identified that we will need to advocate for changes in state law.

We can't just effectuate change how we would like at the city level or even at the county level.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of legislative changes that we should be seeking in this arena.

This is a starting point that we've identified based on, like I said, prior community engagement.

I can tick down these quickly, but it goes to law enforcement certification, a statewide system, and changes to the statewide decertification system that don't take years.

so that we're not recycling police officers who are pending decertification into other jurisdictions across the state.

Statewide reform of policing labor laws.

I think we've talked about those previously.

The limitations that we face in negotiating with SPOG and SPMA.

And statewide standard policies and training on use of force, body cameras, badge numbers, crowd management.

creating an independent statewide agency or entity of some sort to investigate and prosecute police officers.

And I think the important part of that is fairness and the appearance of fairness both are quite important in there, taking that investigation and determination out of the hands of what are essentially local law enforcement partners to the police agencies that that member may be a part of.

And then increasing subpoena power for police misconduct investigations for civilian oversight entities.

And then a statewide standard inquest procedure that reflects the reforms that were attempted to be embodied in the King County executive order that was just overturned, that reflects the transparency, accountability, and the support to the families of the deceased that need to be there.

So those are just like I said, this is a starting point, a jumping off point for state legislative changes for this next session in January.

And through community engagement, we fully expect this list to grow, so.

I'm seeing no questions.

Oh, excuse me.

Council President Gonzales, please go ahead.

Sorry, if we can go back to that last slide.

Okay.

So I appreciate this.

Thank you so much.

Good to get this out early.

There on the second point that talks about statewide reform of police labor laws.

That's pretty generic.

Can you tell me what the intent is there?

I would defer to our labor policy experts in this arena on what needs to be changed going forward.

I think we're still identifying areas that we need to change as we are in the very early stages of planning for negotiations for the next FOG contract.

So I'm not qualified to answer those questions.

We can get you those answers of the specific areas that we've already identified.

Yeah, I think that it would be important, particularly as it relates to any issues related to labor laws that those be.

That my request would be as the chair of the select labor committee for the city council and as a member of the labor relations policy committee that.

that there be an opportunity for discussion about that body of work in terms of lobbying efforts, that that conversation be queued up in the Labor Relations Policy Committee, again, to ensure that there is opportunity for maximum alignment between what the council members would like to see prioritized in this lobbying agenda and what the mayor would like to see prioritized there.

The earlier and the sooner we do that, the less likely we're going to run into issues once our lobbyists are down in Olympia doing the hard work that we know they do.

Absolutely.

I know the mayor previously sent a letter to the governor that has slightly more details than I was able to give you off the cuff, but we'll get more details to you all.

And I'll just sort of, in the sake of transparency, daylight the fact that for me, it is really important to address issues of discipline, particularly as it relates to arbitration.

That is an area where even when officers are disciplined or terminated, there is a lot of opportunity to overturn those decisions in those binding arbitration processes.

And I think there's an opportunity for us to take a second look at the equity issues related to the arbitration system, binding arbitration system, as it relates to police unions.

I know for a fact, Council President, that that is on the mayor's list, top of mind, probably for the same reasons it's on your list.

So absolutely, that is included on the list.

Vice Chair Herbold, please go ahead.

Thank you.

I just wanted to also note that I'm aware that both the Community Police Commission and the Office of the Inspector General are both also preparing state legislative agendas.

So in your community engagement and perhaps through our Select Labor Committee or an LRPC meeting, we can have that discussion there with them as well.

Great flag.

Okay.

Brian, you want to click forward?

There we go.

So this is a little bit more detail in the interplay between the community safety work group, which is sort of the.

a receiver of the ideation and the workhorse, which is sort of the functional analysis IDT.

So together, they'll be facilitating outreach and engagement, collaborate with accountability stakeholders, specifically CPC.

OPA, OIG, and other subject matter experts.

For some topics, that's going to be the commissions, as Council Member Morales mentioned earlier.

For some issues, that's going to be labor experts.

We want to make sure that we are drawing on as much resource as we can.

So we're looking at doing an SPD fiscal analysis, and I detailed this a little bit earlier, but how those expenditures are tied to the functional priorities that community wants to see.

A functional analysis, so current functions, looking at specialty units, recommendations again of what should be eliminated, reduced, civilianized, or expanded.

and the 911 call analysis, deeper dive than Council Member Herbold, that then the council asked for earlier, and a little more of a analysis versus just a data, sort of a data dump on y'all, and how that relates to the functional priorities that we're hearing from community and what that means for staffing.

So we're gonna do the next step, I think, essentially, in that analysis.

And that's the last bullet there is how all of the above figures into personnel and staffing analysis and what changes can be made to what the minimum staffing needs are and reassessing attrition trends, recruitment needs.

Overtime is specifically called out in the EO of how we can eliminate or significantly reduce that by proper staffing.

And a lot of other things that I've heard being mentioned by other council members before.

I know Council Member Mosqueda, you've talked about early retirement incentive options.

So all of that is sort of on the table as we work through figuring out what's going to be workable, what's going to make a difference budget-wise, what's going to make a difference staffing-wise, and rooting it all in the functional priorities that we're hearing from the community.

Please continue.

And now I'm going to turn it over to Director Matia, and I don't know if Director Johnson's weighing in on this one as well, but Andres.

Thank you, Julie.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

And I know there's a lot of questions that have come up through the presentation, so I'd like to address some of those first and then go through the slide and then.

I think Director Johnson's gonna weigh in on it in a different slide, but also welcome his input as well.

It might be helpful to think through how a concept around community safety and that work group came to be.

That work group and the issue of community safety is based on now weeks and months of work with different directors and different staff, many frontline staff and those who are involved in a lot of the programs that are centering kind of impacted communities, BIPOC communities, in this work.

And to build on a comment that Council President Gonzalez said, understanding that we've heard different feedback for not just weeks, months, but years in terms of what community is asking for.

It's really something that has driven the Department of Neighborhoods and then specifically the groups and the departments that are working on this.

But through that process, we really identified, and this gets to the question that Council Member Morales talked about, a set of guiding principles and a set of kind of north stars, if you will, really around centering race and centering most impacted communities in the decision making and the policy making of these efforts, allowing for kind of empowering communities to make their own decision and forge their own solutions.

And then also making sure that.

That the community had the resources available to do that.

So the community capacity question that's been brought up before.

Those grounding principles, I agree, need to be now translated into this work group.

And the work group itself has evolved as we've talked now about the IDT.

We've talked now about the Equitable Investment Task Force.

And I think the next step of what we need to do, and thank you for offering that partnership, is really center and ground ourselves in those common principles, as well as invite the co-leads in a more formal way to come and be part of that conversation.

What is clear to me as we go through this and several of you council members have brought this up in the conversation is that there needs to be clear alignment across all of these engagement opportunities that are happening.

So we want to make sure that that we're understanding the overlap and conversations we're understanding that There's conversations that are happening on slightly different timelines, some that are focused on divestment, some that are focused on investment in kind of upstream investments into community.

And we want to make sure that broadly the citywide engagement includes perspectives that can reflect on the racial and cultural realities that are happening in our communities.

That's going to require us to look at a menu of engagement options.

I know that there's been conversations around participatory budgeting.

We understand, as you all know, participatory budgeting well as the primary neighborhoods through our Your Voice, Your Choice program.

We'd love to partner and continue partnering with the community on that to understand kind of their roadmap and understand how we can provide some assistance and technical assistance to that.

And we understand that the broader engagement has to happen and be aligned with also the 100 million Equitable Investment Task Force that I think we're going to go into a little bit later.

What's crucial about this, though, is regardless of as we do either online engagement, the prioritization tool to understand the policy and functional shifts, is that too often the engagement stays as just engagement.

We need to intentionally tie it to policy decisions.

And so this is why you've seen this kind of cycle of engagement that is ongoing, even if as you've seen the report is due in October, it needs to be an ongoing cycle of engagement so that we are not only bringing in the feedback from all of these alternative ways that we're talking into policy decisions, but also reflect it back out to community so that folks are understanding how the feedback is influencing and affecting the decisions that are made.

So that's when we talk about this iterative roadmap for community feedback.

The purpose of the engagement is not to shift away attention from anything that's going on.

True engagement has to bring all voices to the table.

We've heard clear from community some priorities, We want to honor those priorities and we want to incorporate them in the engagement that we're talking about.

But I want to just echo and thank you for that partnership offer, and we would love to continue this conversation and involve yourselves or your staff in these processes as we move forward.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I see no questions.

Council Member Morales, please go ahead.

Sorry, I was delayed on seeing the hand.

That's okay.

I'm still kind of forming the question in my head.

I guess my first question is, what is the plan for funding this community engagement?

As you know, Director Mantilla, if we are planning to use the RSJI principles, then part of the budget for this work would include funding community members for their participation translation services, child care if necessary, all of that.

So what is the plan for funding that work?

And then my second question is, how will the IDT and the work group, what is the relationship between those two groups and this equitable investment task force?

Yeah.

We've been allocated some funding for, and we believe strongly in paid participation, as you know, in conversations we've had together.

And we believe paid participation as part of the equitable task force is essential in honoring and respecting the time of community.

We plan on building in a budget, and we have resources allocated for translation interpretation, for paid participation as well.

I think what's key in just hearing and thinking about your question is the internal coordination of how we are receiving it and kind of processing this feedback and then bringing it back to community.

There obviously has to be alignment.

Part of the work group, and this is why some of the functional analysis in the equitable development or the equitable investment task force need to be brought in internal alignment closer together, because we understand that there are overlaps in terms of the feedback that we're going to be getting.

You know, we've been doing, as Senior Deputy Mayor Fong spoke about, this isn't the start of the engagement.

We've been doing engagement with our partners, OCR, SPD, the Human Services Department as well, you know, prior.

And it's clear that what we hear from community as they talk about kind of a functional analysis of SPD is not just the investment, this investment, but also kind of the upstream investments as well.

So we need to make sure that we're really coordinated internally in terms of that feedback.

Sorry, the equitable community.

I'm sorry, Director Matea.

Was there a follow-up, Council Member Morales?

Okay.

Thank you very much.

I don't see any additional hands.

Let's continue.

All right.

Mark Baird?

Where are you?

There you are, Mark.

Good afternoon.

I'm Mark Baird with SPD.

And in terms of reimagining community safety, really as part of the outreach and engagement that was just discussed, facilitated through the community safety IDT, it'll involve looking at new models of policing and community safety.

Robert Parkhurst, Applicant, PB – Peter Vitale PB:" Roughly organized into about four categories. Most of the topics and ideas have come out between this morning and this afternoon already, but I'll go through them briefly. The Robert Parkhurst, Applicant, PB – Peter Vitale PB – Peter Vitale PB -"Patrol and community based policing." We'll need to take a look at different and new ways of putting together patrol models, perhaps with prioritization with neighborhoods and looking at police staffing differently in order to better meet the community's expectation, but also to address the racial disparities that not only were a component of the consent decree, but were also highlighted in the disparity report in 2019. The second one, which is transforming 911, here is really where the work related to putting together, you know, community-based or civilian responses, where currently we have police response and working to coordinate a better coordination between a police response and some of these new things that will be created. You know, one of the first steps of that is putting together a new department for the 911 center and then taking a look at how the coordination of calls that come in can be. in a way where there's a unified emergency communications element where a call comes in for service, it's dispatched to the appropriate entity, and there's also a flow of information that goes back to the appropriate entity as well. The next one is reforming overtime policies, and Councilmember Herbold, I think, We talked about this a little bit earlier. In 2016, the auditor did an audit looking at SPD over time. As part of that audit, there were a host of recommendations. I believe there were 30 of them in total. A large percentage of those SPD has been able to put into practice, and there are a number of them left, many of them tied to some technology that I think was referenced earlier. we want to continue to take a look at. Part of that audit also stressed the importance of SPD having a realistic overtime budget. And as part of some of these ideas of taking a look at how patrol deployments are going to go, the right size of the agency, what types of calls are going to be handled, the next look at that will be in what type of overtime resource is appropriate for the department. And then lastly is technology and data analysis. The SPD needs to continue to develop innovative ideas for utilizing technology and data and making it available. We make a host of information available through our dashboards and we want to continue to look at how we can put information out to make sure that we are transparent and people can see the work that we're doing.

I don't see any additional hands.

Please continue.

All right.

Great.

Johnson.

Yes.

Hello.

Jason Johnson with the Human Services Department.

It's good to be with you this afternoon.

If I might, just before diving into the slides, today, October 1st, begins a month-long awareness campaign to end domestic violence.

In partnership with community-based organizations, the Human Services Department has helped provide support services to over 10,000 households experiencing domestic violence, sexual assault, and sexual exploitation.

Every Thursday this month will be Purple Thursday.

Today, I'm wearing purple to bring greater awareness to the impacts of domestic violence.

And I invite each of you and the public to join the awareness campaign by wearing purple every Thursday throughout October.

We cannot have safe communities when people are not safe in their own homes.

So it seemed appropriate to mention here.

Thanks for allowing me just a short moment to highlight domestic violence awareness month.

Dr. Johnson, thank you for noting that.

This is one of the rare days I am not wearing purple.

I have my purple pen.

And I know Council Member Juarez, who's with us as well, has her purple pen.

We, I saw- Got my purple pen on.

That's right, I got my purple pen.

Excellent.

And we will be using these purple pens to make sure that we do some highlighting in the budgets for additional investments in programs and services that help prevent domestic violence and address it.

So I really appreciate you highlighting that and then walking us through the existing investments in the proposed 2021 budget.

Thank you.

Great.

Will do.

Thanks.

So back to the slides.

This first slide is really just an acknowledgment that many departments across the city invest in community safety.

Below are some examples from Parks, Department of Neighborhoods, Office for Civil Rights, Municipal Courts, and the City Attorney's Office.

But the Human Services Department administers most of the community safety funding for the city, roughly $21 million, and it is that funding that goes to community-based organizations to conduct this work.

Next slide.

So in the movement to reimagine safety as part of a community-driven model, it made sense for us in the Human Services Department to stand up a new division, the Safe and Thriving Communities Division, to consolidate and elevate the city's safety investment.

The work across the entire department is either related to safety or tightly intertwined with it.

When I think about the root causes of violence, it goes back to things like racism, poverty, access to education and healthcare, and family and neighborhood dynamics.

HSD invests in organizations and programs that address these root causes.

And we know that people usually need to access a range of human services, not just one at a time.

So while we consolidate and elevate safety as a division, it's important that we keep community safety firmly embedded in the continuum of human services so that we can use a whole person approach.

Next slide.

So this is how the division would be organized.

We took a minimalist approach here.

And that means that we used existing resources to create a very basic skeleton of a division work.

We pulled existing funding for community safety from our youth and family empowerment division into this new division.

And you'll see that as the investments team.

As you'll recall, we funded 19 organizations last year to provide trauma-informed care to young people involved in the criminal justice system.

We refer to these as our HSD community safety investments.

And again, those will be pulled from YFE into the new Safe and Thriving Communities Division.

We also pulled the Mayor's Office on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault into the new division because community safety cannot be achieved without ending gender-based violence.

You'll see that team under the direct services and advocacy team.

This is just a sort of holding spot, may very well need to be branded.

In fact, we may keep the domestic violence, sexual assault branding for this team, but that's TBD at this point.

We welcome the crime survivor services team from SPD.

who tirelessly advocate on behalf of crime survivors so that they can navigate the legal system and a web of human services.

A minimal approach also means that we kept to a simple structure that can maintain basic functions, a place where community would have a central point of contact.

That'll be the division director and the administrative assistant.

An entity that can help organize a community collective.

You'll see a position called out as the community liaison.

And a place where funding could land in order to be distributed to community organizations.

And there you'll see the policy and system coordination.

We anticipate that the community will determine how to best further build out and steer this division.

And more importantly, its investments.

And, you know, a first order of engagement will be to get communities help in hiring these new roles, defining what these roles, further defining what these roles are that will lead this division to work.

Next slide.

So under strategies, we categorize human services work into three buckets, prevention, intervention, and system coordination.

Prevention is making sure that people never experience violence to begin with.

That work can be as upstream as anti-poverty, anti-racism, and family support work.

It can also mean outreach and education so that people make better choices when they are confronted with a potentially violent situation.

Intervention is for people who have already experienced violence and require trauma-informed care to heal from that violence.

And finally, system coordination That is built around a whole person approach.

We want to wrap services around an individual and build a system that is easy to navigate.

These are broad strategies that help organize the work.

And again, we look forward to engaging with the community and our community stakeholders to develop a plan to invest in programming across this continuum.

My next slides are the budget-specific, so I just wonder if this is a good moment to pause and see if there are any questions about the intent of this new division.

Or, Madam Chair, if you'd like me to go into the budget detail and take questions at the end.

Thank you, Director Johnson.

I am not seeing any hands.

Just double-checking.

Council Member Herbold, please go ahead.

Thank you.

I'm just interested about sort of the long-term vision for the Safe and Thriving Communities Division.

In the resolution that I've referred to throughout the day, the resolution that sort of constitutes the council's plan for reimagining public safety.

The resolution itself calls out the interest in creating a civilian-led department of community violence prevention and doing so by fourth quarter 2021. Is there work contemplated in these community safety plans related to this possible new department?

Is the vision that this division might become this new department and then become home for the sort of the centralized home for other community safety functions that we might move outside of SPD?

Is it anticipated that the work itself might grow?

So I think there's a lot to be determined and there's a lot of potential within this division.

As I mentioned in my comments, I believe strongly that community safety, especially those community safety investments along the human services continuum really belong in the human services department.

And so I think there is a good continued placement of our current investments And I think this divisional structure creates a good landing space for future investments that could come through continued community dialogue.

I do believe that, you know, this is just a really bare bones basic structure that can, is intended to be nimble.

And so if there are other aspects of community safety that the department would hold, we would see them sort of being part of this division and part of this divisional structure.

Especially the functional elements that are going to be up for consideration, items like 911 and emergency management and those kinds of things.

I think that there are, you know, as those discussions continue, I think we'll have to continue checking in and seeing if there's alignment and possibility for those to be human services efforts.

We have not done that analysis to date.

Again, we wanted to really stand up a very simple structure of organizing around community safety that we thought made sense at this moment.

I'll say that even if no other investments come to the Human Services Department, I think this structure of organizing around community safety makes a lot of sense.

Having our domestic violence investments, having our community safety investments, these are investments that work across the spectrum in this space, having them organized together really sets us up well to achieve our ultimate result, which is creating safe communities.

Well, that's one thing that we did in the 2020 rebudgeting package that you guys like, so that's great.

Council Member Herbold, I'll just add one.

I think Director Johnson has very eloquently articulated some of our thinking at this moment, right?

I mean, we have a number of, as we've already talked about, a number of transfers that we have identified structurally, organizationally on the executive side that makes sense.

But clearly, the conversation, there's a longer term conversation that we've described in great detail here.

And the future stage of where this work lives is an open question that we are looking forward to continue to talk about.

So, but for now, as you and I both know, the HSD has long had some of these core foundational elements within its organizational structure.

At this time, this really, for us, we really feel strongly this makes the most sense for where this work should live.

incredible confidence in Director Johnson and his restructuring here to to to deliver.

So.

Yep.

I'm not seeing additional comments Director Johnson if you'd like to continue.

I will.

Thank you so much.

So back to the program budget slide.

So once we consolidated our safety investments and put positions in place to support the new division we determined that the division would stand up with a baseline budget of just over $21 million.

The consolidated investments represent funding that we contracted, funding that we contract out through our Youth and Family Empowerment Division and the Mayor's Office on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault.

So you'll see those investments captured here.

Next slide.

So on transfers to the Safe Communities Division, HST has an existing Safe Communities Budget Summary Level, or BSL, that has traditionally housed our gender-based violence investments.

We will now consolidate all our safety investments under this BSL, and the BSL will represent the new Safe and Thriving Communities Division.

To accomplish this, we'll execute three transfers.

We'll be moving the Crime Survivor Support Team, listed in the org structure as the Victim Advocate Team, from SPD to the Human Services Department.

We'll be moving budget and pockets from the Navigation Team, that's four positions, and from the Youth and Family Empowerment Division, two positions.

to the safe and thriving community divisions.

And those will make up some of the new roles and functions that exist, including a division director and the strategic advisors that will focus on community engagement.

And then third, we're moving safety investments from our Preparing Youth for Success BSL into the Community Safety BSL.

And yeah, those are the three transfers.

Please.

Thank you, Vice Chair Herbold.

Thank you.

This is more of a logistical question rather than my efforts to highlight a policy dispute.

How do you transfer six FTEs from a navigation team that has zero FTEs?

We've zeroed out the navigation team FTEs The intention was that the money from those positions were to be spent on outreach and navigation, housing navigation services and financial services for people living unsheltered.

We understand from the correspondence that we received from the mayor that those positions are not, have been ended from the correspondence from the mayor yesterday, did not receive any any indication that the mayor intends to spend the money realized from those positions in the way that the council required in the 2020 rebalancing.

So again, I am, despite my statement, highlighting a policy disagreement.

I just, I think, I think it is harmful to communities to not spend those dollars to help people who are outside.

And I'm very concerned about the impacts to people living outside, not still receiving outreach services.

But that aside, just logistically, functionally, how do you transfer FTEs from a function where there are no FTEs?

So we are going to dive much deeper into this discussion tomorrow when we talk about our efforts to address homelessness.

The 2021 budget has a outreach team in the human services department, eight FTE that make up that team and moves four positions and their funding that were formerly with the navigation team into the community safety division.

two of the six positions that you mentioned will be coming from the Youth and Family Empowerment.

I can provide a purely technical answer.

Yeah, it's really a technical question.

I'm sorry.

I have to do it.

It actually relates to the conversation this morning.

The budgetary actions that Council has taken this year provides a funding that they do not eliminate authorized positions.

So unfunded positions can be transferred.

Okay.

So it's the positions are what's being transferred even though it says transfer budget and FTEs.

Well we've proposed a 21 budget to include funding for these positions and the positions we don't ask the budget doesn't include a request to create the positions because the positions A position is a authorized legal thing, if you will.

It has a number, their position numbers.

So those position numbers still exist.

And our budget proposes funding to support them in, again, purely technical answer, but you asked a technical question.

Yeah.

I just want to pause there real quick.

Are there additional questions on that?

Council President, please go ahead.

Thank you so much.

So if I understand what I'm looking at here then so that the.

The crux of the issue is that the 2021 Mayors proposed budget.

Um, proposes bringing back the navigation team.

Through funding these six FTE positions and housing them in the safe communities division administration.

No, that is not correct.

The position change.

Excuse me.

I was just saying, help me understand then.

Yeah, sure.

So the six positions here that are transfers from navigation team and YFE are that four pockets.

who that were this year associated with the navigation team are going to be kept.

They will not be abrogated.

And those pockets are going to move over to the safety division.

And in the mayor's 2021 proposed budget, those pockets in the safety division are funded.

The navigation team is not a part of this division.

This division is, you know, would not house homeless outreach or have any homelessness-related investments managed within it.

So this is to capture a change in where FTEs, where pockets will be in the budget.

And four of those pockets will be coming from the navigation team.

Two of those pockets will be coming from the youth and family empowerment.

Okay, and the $902,000, that's going to be just for funding the six FTEs or their programs and services funded with that amount of money?

No, that is just the amount of funding that would support the FTEs in the Safe and Thriving Communities Division.

Thank you.

I just wanted to just really quickly say a few things about the Office of Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Prevention.

Director Johnson, I've had an opportunity to talk to you in the past about how important I think it is for us to elevate the work of DVSA.

They're a small and mighty division within the Human Services Department.

They do really important and innovative work that is modeled on a public health harm reduction approach.

And they've been doing a lot of important work around thinking differently about domestic violence and really getting at the root cause as opposed to a punishment model, which is what is generally used.

And even this morning, we heard some rhetoric from Chief Diaz about how It's important to have law enforcement around to address domestic violence.

But in reality, what's important is having investments in divisions like the Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Office that is really looking at how to go further upstream to interrupt the cycle of domestic violence, to educate batterers about how to control their own behaviors, and also empowering survivors of domestic violence about how to create a safer environment or how to enter into a safer environment for themselves and their families.

And so I'm really happy to see that that is going to be memorialized in the safe communities concept and just want to signal my early support for that and my hope that we can continue to focus a lot of attention on ways to address gender-based violence, which right now are primarily addressed through our law enforcement and carceral systems.

And I think that that's a mistake to use that blunt tool as the solution for these issues.

And DVSA has certainly been creative in other ways to address those issues that don't require law enforcement and carceral response only.

Council President Gonzalez, thank you so much for elevating the incredible work of Lon Pham and her team.

I think that you're absolutely right.

And I see so much opportunity in this restructure for that team to continue to innovate, to continue to look upstream, and partner with some additional resources like strategic advisors who can connect with community, who can be thinking upstream, and really, I think, make the most of, which at this point is an underinvestment in the domestic climate space.

So I couldn't agree with you more, and thanks for honoring Lon and her team's work.

Okay, I think I'm at my last slide.

On that slide, the previous Director Johnson, just a quick point for clarification.

You may have already mentioned this.

FTEs, 11 FTEs for the transfer victim advocate team.

So you are maintaining the team, you're just transferring it, right?

We're not eliminating 11 FTEs or a $1.28 million cost savings, right?

Yeah, this is just recognizing that we're receiving those staff at the same level.

Yep.

Thank you, thank you.

Chair Mosqueda?

Please Council Member Morales, please go ahead.

Thank you.

So I want to first thank Council Member Herbold and Director Noble for asking a technical question and giving the technical answer.

appreciate learning the difference between some of these budget transfers that are happening.

I do have a question about the six FTEs.

I understand that the transfer is coming from the navigation team.

It's still not clear to me, Director Johnson, what those six FTEs will be doing.

What is their role within this division?

Yeah, so we can go back maybe to the org chart.

So you'll see here, I've tried to highlight where there's some existing pockets and did that in a way to show that I'm not highlighting any new pockets that were needed.

So it's not showing up in the mayor's 2021 budget that I'm asking for additional staffing in order to stand up the community, safe and thriving community.

And so those pockets will be used to bring on board a division director, to bring on board an administrative assistant, and these two strategic advisor positions, one community liaison and one policy and system coordination specialist.

And then the existing pockets from YFE, will be in the investment space and also in the contracts and planning space.

So that accounts for the six.

One, two, three, four, five, and six.

Okay.

And are they necessarily a lateral transfer then?

An existing position classification?

There might be some opportunities in the human services department for some level of transfer, but as a department, we try to have open and competitive processes for all positions, especially sort of new roles.

And so I do expect that, especially the division director, the community liaison, policy and system coordinator, those will be, you know, open competitive recruitments.

There's great expertise, great talent in the Human Services Department, and so individuals currently with HSD may wind up serving in these roles, but it could be that we hire outside folks in those positions.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Council Member Morales.

Okay, Director Johnson, I believe you have one more slide.

I have one more slide.

So this is ads reductions and cost savings.

So the new division will receive initial ads.

So there's $2 million in the proposed budget to embark on participatory budgeting process with community that will determine alternative solutions to policing response.

There's also 428,000 for community passageways to continue their critical incident response program.

And then there's the standard 1.9 inflationary rate that all human services contracts will receive per your ordinance and continuation of several council one-time ads for gender-based violence services.

So I wanted to just call out that there are some additional funds that you'll see in this BSL and wanted to call those out specifically.

And then finally, you know, this was discussed earlier, and it's not on this slide, but the $14 million in capacity building funding for community safety agencies.

You just can't get past that, huh?

I'm glad you're going back to it.

Thank you.

I'm going back.

And so that will be managed initially right now by the Youth and Family Empowerment Division.

Great.

But transition to this new safe and thriving communities division wins.

So that work is being developed now to immediately get $4 million out as soon as possible.

And we'll be back in communication with city council with a plan on how to get the remaining 10 in community program capacity contract.

So just wanted to let you know, I heard you, I didn't want to forget that important note.

Thank you very much.

We appreciate that.

I think that as you've heard, there's a strong interest in wanting to hear more about getting those dollars out in 2020. So that will be our first priority.

I think that will help us understand better where the scaling up and scaling down could potentially occur in 2021. And just before I have a few more questions, I want to note for our friends at IT, I believe you have come unmuted.

I just wanted to flag that in case you wanted to mute yourself or if you have something to say, please go ahead.

But I will also note the importance of you indicating that there will be a 1.9% contract inflation allocation per the ordinance that we passed.

Was that 2018 now?

I'm trying to remember.

I think it was 2018 and not 2019. Director Johnson, do you remember?

It was for 2019. Well, that's a good question.

I think it was 2019. Okay.

It's been a long few years, huh?

So I appreciate you flagging that.

I know that Director Noble fielded that question for me yesterday, and he did indicate that it was part of the proposed budget.

So that was, I think, a huge relief to some in the community who had questions about that.

I just want to ask one more clarifying question about that piece.

Is the inflationary adjustment also being assumed for the contracts that are going to be transferred to the new homeless response entity?

They will.

So as you know, our plan at this point is that the money that will go to the regional authority will come through the Human Services Department.

We will enter into a single contract with the regional authority and that contract will have the inflationary rate adjustments apply.

Great, thank you.

So that's the mechanism by which we can make sure that city human services contracts continue to get that inflationary rate.

And I know that that will be a relief for many to hear.

And for folks who weren't present at the time, it was a long, long conversation that predates me.

But what we were able to accomplish ultimately was applying the inflationary adjustment after almost a 10-year period of not having those two various contracts.

And I really, really do appreciate, Director Johnson, your work to help get those dollars allocated out after the passage of that bill.

And then seeing it here reflected in this budget and in the I think it's very reassuring.

So thank you very much for that piece.

Council colleagues, questions on either this HSD element?

And I think we are at the end of the presentation.

So happy to go back to any of the slides that you have questions on.

I will note for the viewing public, our friends at Office of Economic Development, we did have them on standby in case we had extra time today.

We have let them know that we will need to use this last hour of today for the SMC presentation.

I assume that there will be a number of questions about that as well.

So we will not have them come back today.

Do appreciate their time.

And we again will help to field any questions that they have.

And if we can work them back in during these presentations tomorrow, we will do so.

But I just wanted to make sure that they knew and we've let them know about a half hour ago that they were free to not be on standby anymore.

And we appreciate their generous offer.

Before we do council member comments, I see council member Morales and council member Herbold.

Deputy Mayor Fong, I saw you come back on video.

Did you have anything else you wanted to add before questions?

No, not really, Madam Chair.

I just wanted to close by saying, you know, we've had between this morning and this afternoon, four or five hours of spirited discussion around community safety and SPD.

I think you've given us a number of things to think about.

I hope that while enormously complex and a number of elements to it, to the process going forward, we hope that we can find the right opportunity to work together in this entire policy space and look forward to working with you and your staff more in the coming the budget process, as this all helps lay the foundation for the effort going forward.

So thank you for your time.

We appreciate that.

I appreciate the words today.

Thank you very much, Deputy Mayor.

Council Member Morales and then Council Member Herbold.

Thank you.

Deputy Mayor, I think this might actually be a question for you.

I had a So the last slide, Director Johnson talked about another participatory budgeting process that was budgeted at about $2 million if that entire line item was for participatory budgeting.

So I want to ask about that.

And I want to go back to the question I had asked Director Mantilla about How the, what is the relationship or the, the interaction between the IDT and the community safety work group, and this equitable investment task force.

how will all of those work together for what end?

And then now seeing this line item about the separate participatory budgeting process, I'm just trying to understand how all of these pieces fit together and what the vision is for how these all work for some outcome.

Thank you.

And can we go back to that slide as well?

Who's ever managing that?

Thank you very much.

Deputy Mayor, please go ahead.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I'm gonna.

I may call in Director Noble here on this.

I actually think, and I apologize, I missed this a little bit earlier when Director Johnson referenced this $2 million.

I actually don't believe this has been earmarked specifically for the participatory budgeting process.

Clearly, the council has identified $3 million of resource for participatory budgeting.

We had identified, and Director Noble clarify for me, what it says in the budget book, but I was under the impression that this $2 million had been identified for actual community safety investments pending some recommendations that come out of the community safety work group.

Now, that could be in very short order.

That could be a longer-term set of recommendations.

We haven't actually pinned that down yet, so to speak.

But I believe this $2 million was set aside specifically with in mind the idea of investing in services and programs, not necessarily for a participatory budgeting process.

Now, having said that, I suppose that dependent upon the council's conversations and what comes out of the research work from the $3 million body of work, These dollars would be available for potential investment in specific services or programs that that effort may identify But but I don't believe we were intending these to be used for or not on top of the three million You you have already identified for PB that thank you But that's that's my understanding, but I I look back to director Johnson and director.

Thank you I

That is absolutely right.

And maybe I'm being a little too loose with terminology here.

And my apologies if that causes confusion.

Absolutely right.

It's $2 million that can be allocated to put forward what comes from community through this work group.

And so I think of that as very participatory because we're engaged.

We're hearing from community and funding the things they need funded immediately.

So didn't want to didn't mean to cause confusion about this sort of budget process.

And, and, and my apologies for being a little too loose with that terminology.

That's okay.

Then, Councilmember to your to your other question.

So I may also bring in, I know Deputy Mayor Ranganathan is with us on this call as well, but I will emphasize that the Council's identified participatory budgeting process, research effort, and the community engagement components that Director Mentea uh, identified earlier in the discussion is something that we, we still want to engage with, with you and, and your colleagues, uh, and legislative branch on exactly how those two pieces of, um, uh, feed community feedback into this process are going to work together because I, I, I don't have a, have an answer for you for that in part, because I think we're still, we're still building this ourselves.

And at the same time, want to learn more about the council's scoping of that PB process.

So I think there is room for us to continue to refine that, which is my way of saying there's still work to be done to make sure that the information will feed into the workgroups and IDTs that we've created with intentionality to center around that feedback as we build priorities and investment strategies and policy decisions for you and the mayor to to consider.

As far as the Equitable Initiative Task Force, and I'm going to defer a little bit to the Deputy Mayor here on this, but given the also emphasized community-led nature of that process, I'm reluctant to presuppose what recommendations or policy space or strategies that process may yield.

It could very well lead to specific interest or recommendations in this same space that we're talking about.

And in which case, presumably, there would be a question about the potential resources within the $100 million allocation that may be appropriate in this space.

And we'll have to, as that work can, again, I mentioned earlier about this work is all kind of happening concurrently, if you will.

So our hope would be that there's actually a pretty tight thread connectivity between the analytical and staff work that might be happening to the extent that that information can help inform the community conversations at various tables, but then also have that two-way communication so that it is not intended to be entirely separate.

But at the same time, I don't know where that process or conversation may go.

once they start meeting.

So, and Deputy Mayor Rogodoff may have more to add to that, but it certainly could very well be a component of the community engagement and investment thinking in this space.

So, but Shafali, did you want to add anything at this point, if you're still on the call?

Sure, I can, I can just sort of round that out.

Good afternoon council members and for folks on the phone, it's Shefali Ranganathan with the mayor's office.

The only thing that I would add in terms of kind of those, I agree with everything Senior Deputy Mayor Fong has said related to the needing connectivity and a tight thread amongst all these pieces of work, the equitable communities initiative, the $100 million investment, has a broader scope than just community safety.

No doubt that is going to be an important topic of discussion as the community does their work to make both focus on priorities as well as make recommendations around investments.

And the intention here is to also have connectivity with the cabinet So directors Johnson, Montia, and several other directors will also be supporting that work.

And that way, there's a way to feed back of information that we're getting from that, from the equity, excuse me, Equal Communities Task Force, back to the, the staff working group and the IDT, so that there is a, a continuous cycle of feedback.

And as, or as Senior Deputy Mayor Fong said, there may very well be community investment recommendations that emerge from that work that are part of that $100 million investment.

And so our goal here is to keep those conversations very tightly aligned.

And the final piece I will add is, as we have talked about, as I said yesterday, there is a hope that the community-led research that is happening this fall will continue to inform all of these different bodies of work in a way that sort of elevates those priorities that we're hearing from community and also the solutions that we're hearing from community.

And so that's one way that we can make sure to be able to lift up that community voice.

Council Member Morales, did that answer your question?

I think it's really important to

The community research process process is much broader than the traditional community safety.

And I think.

I think there's a lot more alignment about possible investments with the mayor's $100 million than you might imagine.

They are really focused, not just on criminal justice, alternatives to criminal justice programs.

They're talking about housing and homelessness investments.

They're talking about educational investments.

uh...

they're talking about the kinds of upstream investments if made in these communities which historically haven't been made in these which uh...

are themselves uh...

create alternatives to the uh...

the schools to jail pipeline so i really uh...

i'm i'd try not to bristle every time i hear somebody say that out of that that the scope for that The breadth of the mayor's equitable investment task force is much broader than what the community research project is.

I don't think it is.

And so maybe that's a place where we can start.

is to take a look at the breadth of investments that the community research project is looking at, so that on the mayor's side of things, you can have a sort of a better understanding of where there might be possible alignment.

So I can't remember I should I should be clear and on the record.

I never said that the scope of the community research was narrow.

In fact, yesterday, you may recall, I actually did say that I thought there was tremendous opportunity for the community research work to inform the broader.

work of the task force because of that alignment.

What I was referencing to here is a specific question around community safety and how that will be addressed as part of the task force work.

And I was only meant to respond to that, which is that the task force scope is going to be broader than just community safety.

They are going to be looking at upstream investments.

And I do think that both the community research work that's happening this fall as well as the work that is happening through the task force are complementary and can inform each other.

Okay.

So, but the community research project is not focused only on community safety.

Yes, I understand that.

Okay.

When I heard you say broader than community safety, what I thought you were saying was broader than the community safety type projects that the community reinvestment.

And I've heard that before from other people.

So if I assumed that that's what you were saying as well, I apologize.

I don't think there's a need to apologize.

I heard the same thing.

Deputy Mayor, I think that that was helpful clarification.

Thank you for that.

I guess the question that still remains in my mind is why do we not then have a system that is waiting for the results of the community-led research project that is going to be underway here very soon to have that information then feed into what the executive would like to do.

Again, yesterday and this morning, we were talking about these dual paths and not only the fact that we want to be efficient in all of our time and resources at the city, but the fact that we're asking so much of community who have other jobs and other obligations, wanting to be conscious and respectful of their time.

Why not wait until that community-led research project comes up with their recommendations to then feed into a process that the mayor has envisioned?

So, Council Member Mosqueda, thank you for that question.

As I outlined yesterday, sort of in a high-level timeline, that the task force, and again, they will determine their own priorities based on On kind of how they organize themselves and sort of timelines, but at the anticipated timeline to come up with.

Initial recommendations are on focus areas, so not investments themselves, but focus areas was going to be somewhere around the end of the year.

That, I am presuming, based on what has been shared publicly, aligns with the work that is anticipated to happen this fall related to community research, the community research project.

So I don't think that those timelines are in opposition to each other.

There is work that needs to happen both in terms of sort of work that we will need to support this task force, just in terms of grounding them around city programs and other kind of supplemental work that needs to happen, but also they will be doing, they, they will be doing their own engagement in their communities.

Right.

And so I, again, I said that I think that they are complimentary.

I'm mindful of the timelines and I think this is something the task force will consider.

as part of their work of how it aligns with the community research work that is already underway.

And hopefully there's some good synergy there that will eventually inform recommendations that won't happen until spring of next year.

So I think that those could be aligned.

Thank you, Deputy Mayor.

I don't see anybody else raising their hand.

Peterson, anybody else?

Okay.

I have a few follow-up questions and maybe we'll just take one or two more minutes and then we'll turn over to SMC.

Just in terms of the IDT, I'm wondering, you know, we have received notification that the RSGI co-lead sent a letter with concerns From the human rights commission.

I'm wondering how those concerns from the human rights commission have been factored into the decision to move forward on this.

And then also, I'm less familiar with this, the recommendations, but I do know that the council.

I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about how the criminal legal system alignment in the fall of last year to avoid repetitive or overburdening task force.

How was that work of the criminal legal system alignment built into the concept of building this IDT?

I'll defer to my team.

I have not actually seen that letter as of yet that you're referencing.

Was that specifically to the formation of the EO that we discussed earlier today?

Or is that a reference to something else?

I'm sorry.

I don't think it was from the EO this morning.

I will double check.

OK.

So I'm not sure what what that reference is to.

I mean, I will ask my team right now that's here if anyone has any specific response to that.

If not, then we will circle back with you on that piece.

Yeah, Mike, this is Julie.

I think I can kind of answer that question.

So the Human Rights Commission saw an early draft of the EO that didn't contain the full context of the IDT working in concert with the work group.

And I think their big concern was that OCR wasn't on the IDT.

And so we reworked the EO to provide full context of how the IDT really fits in with the work group, which is co-chaired by the Office of Civil Rights.

So I think that was one of their primary concerns.

They did have more, but that was one of our responses to one of their concerns.

The other thing we did was make sure to specifically call out consultation with the different commissions as subject matter experts.

So we did adjust the EO in those two ways in response to what we heard from the Civil Rights Commission.

Okay, that's helpful.

Great.

And then on your other point, Madam Chair, is that certainly, again, with Director Lockhart's engagement as part of the co-chairs of the of the community safety work group.

And my comment at the beginning of the presentation, which is that we fully recognize that we've created a body of work here specifically related to the SPD reforms, potential divestment, future investment.

community engagement process, but that by no means diminishes the various tables that have been set, specifically around criminal legal system reform that's been happening for some time.

Council President Gonzalez mentioned the same body of work earlier.

We have every intention of continuing uh, to engage, uh, on multiple tracks here.

And this is, and in some ways it illustrates just how we have both very specific elements, um, related to SPD and then the concentric circles out from there, uh, tie in a whole host of other issues, uh, that include, uh, um, jail reform, probation reform, many other criminal legal system efforts that have been underway.

So as far as the, I can't give you the precise details of how that integration will happen, but I assure you those issues are on the radar and will be part of the go forward conversations.

Thank you so much.

And then my last question, just getting back to the numbers.

I'm sure Director Noble highlighted this yesterday, but can you remind us what the total dollar amount in the proposed budget is for managing the task force?

And does this include compensation for the participants?

So I think the question earlier came up in the context of DON and resource allocation for our community engagement efforts.

But as far as the, oh, I'm sorry, are you referencing the equitable initiative task force?

Yeah, okay.

Well, I'll defer back to Director Mentee and Deputy Mayor Ranganathan about that piece.

My apologies.

Thank you, Deputy Mayor.

And just to go quickly back to the other committee or the other question around the criminal justice work and then the feedback from the cohort, that will be integrated into the Community Safety IDT and that work group.

And so confirming with Director Lockhart around that to make sure that there is a good coordination of that outreach and understanding kind of how that's informing the broader process.

In terms of your other question, we are in the process of putting out a request for qualifications for a facilitator for the task force itself.

And part of the budget as well is with the anticipation that there will be paid participation throughout the entirety of the process.

And so we have resources that we're ready to allocate towards that.

We logistically have to still figure out how we would do that, organizations versus individuals.

But our intent is to make sure that there's paid participation all through this process.

So there's not a specific line item, though, Director Mattia.

It's embedded within your department's overall budget.

Is that accurate?

Yeah, there was about $500,000 that was allocated as part of the 2020 budget.

where we're going to be drawing both for the facilitation contract and also for the paid participation as well as any other interpretation language access needs as well.

Okay thank you.

Director Noble to wrap us up.

I just might be able to clarify there.

We had previously identified about $500,000 of SPD resources that we're in a position to transfer to DON.

Excuse me.

I think the technical transfer is proposed in the third quarter supplemental, which we submitted along with the budget.

I can confirm that.

Okay, thank you very much.

folks, thank you very much.

I know it's been a long presentation.

We have about 45 minutes for SMC.

Thank you very much to the deputy mayors and to the department directors, the team in the executive office and all of our colleagues for your questions.

I appreciate your time today.

I'm sure that this will be the first of many conversations to come on this topic.

So thank you in advance for your time and anticipate more discussion to come.

Thank you.

Madam Clerk, could you please read into the record the next item of business?

Agenda item 3, Seattle Municipal Court for briefing and discussion.

Excuse me.

Thank you very much.

I had a tickle in my throat I have to clear.

I appreciate you all hanging on the line here.

We are excited to hear more from the judges and the team about what is currently underway at SMC.

Would you like to introduce yourselves very briefly, and then I'll turn it over to, I believe, Council Member Herbold.

Is this also within your committee?

Great, I'll turn it over to Council Member Herbold for some opening comments.

Good afternoon, Presiding Judge Willie Gregory here.

Good afternoon, Beth Baldwin, Court Administrator.

Good afternoon.

Carol Bell Daniel, Probation Manager.

Good afternoon.

Kwan Wong, Finance and Administrative Services Director.

Thank you all so much for joining us and I appreciate your generous time today.

I'm excited to hear more about the initial conversation that we had earlier this week and great news to share, I think, on your end.

I'm sure there will be a few questions today.

Council Member Herbold, if you would like to make some opening comments, that would be wonderful.

I'm not seeing Council Member Herbold.

Sorry about that.

You're okay, and you're...

I'm here, just turning on my things on.

Appreciate it.

Real briefly, my opening comments are mostly in a way of thanks.

I've been uplifting the recent work coming out of Seattle Municipal Court over the last few months.

The Vera Institute of Justice recently released a report in July.

This report was commissioned by the court evaluating the court's probation services.

Then just a few weeks ago, in early September, in response to the Vera report recommendations presiding, Judge Gregory issued a new administrative order to require personal recognizance release for nearly all non-DUI domestic violence defendants.

The Bail Reform Working Group from 2018 reviewed new pretrial strategies and helped lay the foundation for these new policies.

So I want to recognize that work from the oldie days now.

And also really want to, the work of the Bail Reform Group kind of met a little bit of an impasse.

But I think the fact that the court commissioned this Vera report study really helped to break that impasse and point the direction of working to make sure that we are not detaining people who we do not need to be detaining because they are neither a flight risk nor a risk to themselves or other people.

Related to this, the court has also announced recently that they'll be decreasing their 2021 probation budget by 25% rather than relying on probation services for cases that don't require it.

They'll instead collaborate with organizations to build community-based intervention where judges can refer individuals to obtain critical support and services.

Again, this is a change that has been called on by community for years, notably the budget for justice in 2018 and again in 2019. And so they were, community members were again, on the cutting edge of calling for these changes in probation policies, as well as funding for probation services to overly monitor people who would do better if they were working with support organizations in their own communities.

Under state law, domestic violence and DUI cases will still require probation intervention.

And for that reason, the funding, there is still funding in the Muni Court budget for some probation supervision.

want to also uplift the Seattle Office for Civil Rights and their report on an analysis of court-imposed monetary sanctions in Seattle Municipal Court.

The report details the disproportionate impacts of legal financial obligations on people of color in Seattle.

I haven't had an opportunity to have very many committee meetings this year, but I made sure that one of the few committee meetings I have had this year that I was able to hear this report.

It was presented by Drs.

Alexis Harris and Frank Edwards.

And really, you know, again, I don't know if it was in response to the report and the recommendations or just some happy serendipity, but last week, Seattle Municipal Court judges announced that they would eliminate all discretionary fines and fees imposed in criminal cases, representing yet another step in a court-wide commitment to lessen barriers and increase equity in the legal justice system.

We know that probation and record check fees can be $600 and higher for just one person.

And we know that more than 1,000 individuals per year are expected to be helped by these changes.

And then finally, community court is starting up again.

We had community court many, many years ago that was begun under former city attorney Tom Carr.

It was suspended in part because criminal justice reform advocates were very critical of the model that Seattle was using at the time, where participants had to waive their constitutional rights to a trial in order to participate.

but this new community court provides pre-trial justice for participating individuals to be immediately released from custody and connected to community-based services while maintaining their constitutional trial rights.

We think this might be the only such model in the nation where both people are able to maintain their constitutional trial rights to participate in community court and criminal history is also not a barrier to program entry.

These are tremendous steps forward in municipal court reform, and I really wanna thank the judges for their actions and their commitment to reevaluating our systems.

And again, I wanna thank folks who've been in the trenches outside of those systems for years, pushing us to make changes just like the ones that we're making now.

So thank you.

Thank you.

All right.

And good afternoon, Committee Chair Mosqueda Vice Chair Herbold, we really appreciate those words.

We have done a lot of work in Seattle Municipal Court, and we appreciate you and the council acknowledging the work that we have done.

But we still have a lot more work to do.

And thank you to all the other council members present.

I have some opening remarks.

I want to thank you all for inviting us here to talk about the Seattle Municipal Court budget priorities for 2021. As presiding judge, I have challenged the judges and the staff to transform themselves into an equitable court members, where the individuals leave better than when they entered our court, and to ensure that all people in our courthouse are treated with dignity and feel they were heard.

To drive us forward in this time of prolonged change, the Municipal Court has created three guiding principles.

Number one, we're going to engage the community to guide our court programs.

Number two, we'll eliminate disproportional impact upon Black, Indigenous, and people of color.

Number three, we'll collaborate with our stakeholders to transform the system and improve outcomes.

Seattle Municipal Court, we acknowledge our role in inequity and the ongoing struggles people of color face in the criminal legal system.

We commit to authentic community engagement, focus on community-based solutions, All of that, we also, as has been stated earlier, made all warrants issued on community court eligible charges, non-DV and non-DUI, will be eligible for personal recognizance release.

People will not sit in jail for low-level misdemeanor warrants.

We also eliminated all discretionary criminal fees, including probation fees.

We look forward to working with the council, the mayor, and the system stakeholders, as well as our diverse communities, to create a new justice system for all.

Our proposed 2021 budget will further our commitment to criminal legal system reforms in several ways.

Number one, we will transform probation services.

We will decrease the budget control level by 25%.

And that's in alignment with the recommendations from the Vera Institute.

We're going to focus our smaller restructured probation on case management for statutorily mandated domestic violence and driving and influence cases.

and critical mental health court clients.

For all other charge types, we're reforming pretrial justice, again, with our Seattle Community Court, which the court is very proud of.

And this is a collaborative approach that includes the city attorney, the King County Department of Public Defense, and community to reduce system-based harm.

Four, we will collaborate with organizations to build a future community-based intervention system where judges can refer individuals to obtain critical support and services.

At this time, I will ask our court administrator, Ms. Beth Baldwin, to go through our proposed 2021 budget.

Thank you, Judge Gregory, and thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair, Madam Vice Chair, and Madam President, as well as the full council.

So I'm here to talk about the numbers.

So the court's 2021 proposed budget is approximately $38.4 million.

And as Judge Gregory shared, we're making several changes, and I'd like to talk about them in context of the budget in the next few slides.

Next slide, please.

So the first is a reduction and, um, vice chair, uh, herbal has already kind of stole my thunder on this, but this reduction of, uh, probation services or the programs and services division is a 1.4 million reduction or a meaningful 25% reduction of the probation budget.

And as has already been talked about, in 2019, we independently sought an evaluation from the Bureau Institute of Justice.

That's a national leading criminal justice reform nonprofit organization out of New York.

And as Judge Gregory highlighted, as well as Vice Chair Herbold, The 25% reduction in the overall probation budget responds to the Vera Institute.

And there's the intersects I'd like to talk about in a little bit more detail.

So as we've talked about, we're reserving probation for DV, DUI and mental health court clients.

And therefore we're likely to have a smaller portion of people charged with misdemeanors in our city on probation.

Then we are collaborating and engaging with the community to identify interventions that support the needs of justice-involved persons.

This includes through restorative healing circles.

We've completed a court user survey.

We had focus groups and then stakeholder listening sessions.

And we've also engaged with OCR in some recent community engagement and are looking forward to participating in Mr. Lugo's work with city council.

We are realigning our pretrial staffing and services to allow for the expansion of community court.

And then we are phasing out our day reporting program by the end of this year.

And just so council is aware, we have suspended the operations of day reporting since March because of the COVID safety precautions.

Next slide, please.

This next slide is an ad that came out of conversations recently with the mayor's office.

It's to connect community court clients with agencies.

It's a one-time pilot funding of $100,000.

The funding would support the relaunched community court via a social worker, a contract social worker who would be embedded within our community resource center.

And specifically, I would note, we will work with a nonprofit to provide culturally appropriate case management services and make referrals to community-based agencies to support the clients with the goal of self-sufficiency outside the court, outside the criminal legal system.

Next slide, please.

So two reductions that I will briefly mention.

We are also this year proposing to eliminate a vacant information technology position.

We have the case management replacement process, our EMSAS 2.0 project.

We know our court technology division will look different once that project goes live.

So we believe we can start the making the court technology division look different by abrogating this position.

And the work can be absorbed by existing staff and the project, the current project team.

And then we are also wanting to reduce our computer equipment line item for $260,000.

And that would be for reducing purchases from general fund.

And we would temporarily use trial court improvement account funding for replacing that equipment.

And I would also note here that we would need council support to approve using the funds in this manner through the third or fourth or a supplemental budget process.

Next slide, please.

And so the rest of the budget changes are those technical adjustments, the 3.1 million rate adjustments for FAS, Seattle IT, Seattle HR, insurance.

The $653,000 for AWI and then a reduction of $27,962 for the Central Cost Manual.

So I will now turn the floor over to Carol Bell, our Senior Probation Manager, to speak on the slides related to racial equity.

Carol?

Thank you very much, Beth.

I just wanted to say, Carol, very briefly how excited we are about those changes that were made.

I know that you mentioned that Council Member Herbold stole your thunder.

It's really exciting to have third party validators for the important work that you're doing.

So excited to see those pieces there.

And then also, Carol, to have you walk us through the racial equity lens in which this is all being applied.

Thank you.

Thank you, Councilwoman.

It's funny because I was thinking the same thing.

Oh she stole our thunder.

But like you said I guess it's exciting for us to know that you all are more in alignment with the way that we are seeing things in the direction we're moving in.

So it's really important for the court and more specifically for programs and services that you know that we are being very intentional about our use of the remaining resources that we have and ensuring that we're using a racial equity lens and have meaningful community engagement as we seek to reimagine what our role is in public safety.

The very evaluation of probation services It identified some desperate impacts on Black and female probation clients.

It identified ways to provide more equitable case management and reduce overall system involvement.

We believe this is going to be realized in a few different ways.

We're going to start out by shifting to a goal-based supervision approach focusing on short-term system engagement and really aligning clients with treatment needs and community-based supportive services.

We're going to ensure that we make meaningful client engagement and interaction and that we use incentives for early release from probation.

For those placed on probation the judges have committed to impose conditions that respond to the risk and encourage pro-social behaviors.

We're going to be engaging community organizations and individuals with lived experience and other identified stakeholders to make sure that we reduce any race or gender inequities in our probation services model.

Now, just really kind of looking at where we are with people of color, we saw that their disproportionality in the charges with low level misdemeanors.

So with the new community court model, we've been able to see, or we're hoping to see a reduced level of system involvement as it really seeks to address racial disproportionality.

And it allows individuals with low level misdemeanors to be released from jail right away.

And we're looking at individuals that have had criminal history, not have that interfere with any of their opt-in opportunities for this program.

When we kind of looked at the numbers, For community court eligible cases in July of 2020, 26% of those individuals were identified as Black.

The diversion program of Community Port, it really, like we said, supports a media release, and it's gonna connect individuals to critical services.

To increase the effectiveness of this model, we'll be working with community-based agencies, as Beth alluded to earlier, to provide a social worker that's really culturally competent to be ensured that these individuals have the proper level of engagement long after their involvement with the court system.

Now, another thing that we're looking at is where we are with the day reporting program.

As you know or as has been shared in some of our prior conversations we're going to be phasing out the day reporting program by December of this year as it currently is designed.

We saw in some of our research that really this was inequitably impacting people of color.

In some of our data from 2018 we saw that 34 percent of those assigned to day reporting were Black.

7% higher than the overall percentage of Black individuals charged with cases in Seattle Municipal Court.

This program is designed typically to serve those that are low-income, high-need individuals, and those that have frequent issues with reporting and have been identified as having barriers to success.

The completion rate overall for day reporting we found to be pretty low, only at 22%.

With this in mind, we decided that it was time to redesign the program.

So one of the things that we're doing or we started doing earlier this year is really phasing out the traditional day reporting model where an individual was having to come in on a daily basis and started instituting things like text reminders, phone reporting, and other modified reporting models.

What you will see is by year's end the day reporting program will be completely phased out and fully replaced.

We are already starting to see some of these individuals being supported by our new community court program.

And beginning this fall we'll also be working with the Harvard Kennedy School of Government to look at national bill reform and we're going to be participating in a project to further reduce disproportionate impacts of bill in the bill decision making intersect.

And Judge Gregory can probably share a little bit more with you all about that.

Thank you.

Judge Gregory, please.

We also have a question from Councilmember Herbold.

Would it be helpful if we had Councilmember Herbold's question and then maybe you can address that in your comments as well, Judge Gregory?

Okay.

Councilmember Herbold, please go ahead.

Thank you so much.

And this is, I think, a continuation of a conversation that we began a few days ago.

As it relates specifically to day reporting, when we talked about the population that day reporting serves, one of the points that was made made, just like it's been made today, is that you're shifting to other ways of serving this particular population of folks, and you named texting reminders as one of those those new strategies.

But we've also acknowledged that that is not effective for many of the folks that use day reporting because a lot of folks don't have phones.

This is a high homeless population and not everybody has phones that receive phones or phones that receive texts.

And so I'm just wondering, Given that the program itself is intended to create an alternative to increase the likelihood that folks in the program fulfill their legal obligations.

And given that there is this disproportionality associated with the program, rather than just eliminating the program, was there ever any consideration as to Um, just eliminating the sanction.

I mean, still offering the service and still offering the help, but but removing the sanction.

So as it is now, as I understand it, there's an F.

T. A. If you don't, if you don't show up as assigned today, reporting, um, I just, I mean, Councilwoman, you're right on the right.

You're on the right track of where we're going.

So like we said, so what we're doing is really reimagining the program in the way that we've removed the sanction component of the individual having to come in every day.

And we're looking at other ways of engaging them.

So one of the things that we have identified is if a person, once they're booked into custody, bringing them over, introducing them to the court's resource center, getting them connected with resources, and then making ourselves available for them to check in with us every day.

but not requiring them to check in with us every day.

And then allowing them to sign up for like the text reminder program if they do have a cell phone, because a lot of people had been able to sign up with cell phones that were issued through the federally funded programs.

And some of those cell phones, they wouldn't have minutes for them to make phone calls, but they continue to be able to receive text messages.

So we found that to kind of be a viable opportunity for them But even during this time of COVID, doing our best to find a way to keep some of the doors of the court open for those individuals that are homeless and we're not able to reach via phone or via text.

And we'll still have that opportunity for them to come in, but maybe now it's only once a week.

We're looking at other ways to check in so that it's not a burden on those people, especially if they are low income, but they're still working.

That was one of the populations we were concerned about.

We didn't want to pull people away from employment, having to come in and check in in person.

But if we can put them on phone reporting, or if we can do the text reminder, being able to support them in that way, but the overall day reporting structure, we're eliminating that and just bringing these opportunities under our pretrial services umbrella and looking at different ways of connecting with people that better meet them and their needs.

Right.

And another thing we looked at too is why do we have day reporting?

A major reason was so people can show up to court.

And so we found out that the people that were not showing up for day reporting wasn't showing up for court.

And so the items that Carol was talking about, we were trying to create those items to make sure we can get people to show up for court and have their cases handled as soon as possible.

So we are looking at different items, different ways to make sure that people can show up for court and not get warrants and not get that sanction.

So I guess the answer is we have looked at that, but we're looking at other, other items to do other things we can do to make sure that people show up for court.

And again, don't get warrants placed on them.

And one of the big, one of the big benefits we had with our day reporting program is we had it paired with the court resource center and we noticed individuals sometimes would come in for the resources and that's how, and we would constantly have them engaged in that way.

So one thing we'll continue to do is have the pretrial services paired with the court resource center and getting individuals in here and getting them connected with resources in that way.

Good.

Just a little bit about the Harvard University study.

That's a three-year project that's working with state courts across the United States.

And it's going to identify interventions to reduce racial disparity at concerning pretrial bail or at the release decision point.

I'll let you know that all Seattle Municipal Court judges and our magistrates have agreed to participate in this study.

So I just want to give you a little bit more of that.

Now, the one thing I'm very, very pleased about, one of the things that Council Member Herbal, you talked about this, I just wanna address it again, is the court has eliminated all SMC discretional fees in criminal cases.

So that includes probation supervision fees, record check fees, a work crew setup fee, a community service setup fee.

And as it's been stated, the probation and the record check fees, they can add up to $600 and $240 per person.

And we expect this to benefit about 1,000 people per year.

So it's gonna be a nice reduction for people.

And it's gonna be a reduction about an average of $268,000.

And that's gonna go to the city general fund.

What I'd like to talk a little bit more about is our diverse workplace that I'm very proud of.

Our court continues to designate funding for race and social justice training.

and mandates RSJ trainings for all court staff.

I can tell you the judges and the magistrates have also attended RSJ training.

And so in collaboration with the SMC RSJI change team, we're revising job qualifications to address high experience, educational hiring thresholds, with updated recruitment, interview and hiring processes.

We're also reviewing and updating our recruitment guidelines through an RSJI lens.

Because we all know that if you have a diverse workforce, It is much better, especially for anyone that you deal with in Seattle or in any other city.

So I'm very proud of our staff, by the way.

Thank you, Judge Gregory.

Just a quick pause.

We have a question from Council Member Lewis.

Thank you, Council Member Lewis.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

And thank you, Judge Gregory.

I just want to go back to the slide on the court fees.

Oh, sure.

First off, based on my prior work in the municipal court, I think this is great.

And I'm really excited to see this from the court.

I know it's going to make a really big difference.

And that this had been in practice before, so it's good to make it an overall policy.

My question is, I know that there are other fees.

that are established in state law and the revised code of Washington that the court will likely still need to assess and that are mandatory.

I believe there are also some fees, as I recollect, that are set in the Seattle Municipal Code.

And I'm just flagging now, we don't have to go into that now here, because I'm actually not aware of the whole universe of what those fees are.

But I know that there are some that take discretion away from the court, or at least very much limit the discretion of the court.

I just want to flag now that I would be interested in hearing from you and your team an analysis of those mandated fees that are set out in the Seattle Municipal Court and whether there might be some scope to expand on this and potentially, as a council, amend some of those fees that remove discretion from the court to possibly build on this work.

So I just wanted to flag that.

Thank you.

To build on this, and I think that could be a great area of partnership between the court and the council.

Okay and I just want to confirm I can't remember yes we do have an internal team looking at other fees and fines but it would take legislative change in some instance to do that.

Great yes oh sorry Judge Gregory go ahead.

No that's fine I was I was actually gonna say the same thing Juan said that we're taking a look at that but we can also take a further look at that and get back to you all on that.

And if that gets aggregated, um, Judge Gregory into like a report or, or something like that, of fees that would require legislative changes that we as a city council could do, um, very much interested in taking a look at that and, and, um, uh, and working for legislative fixes with the court.

Thank you.

Yes.

Council member Lewis, that information is in the study, uh, from Dr. Harris.

I can send it to you.

Oh, okay.

Well, thank you.

Thank you very much, colleagues.

Please continue.

Oh, yes.

Thank you.

All right.

All right.

So we're also expanding opportunities for advancement within the organization, implementing professional development, interview with confidence programs for all our employees.

We've also piloted a new approach to anti-harassment, anti-discrimination training in partnership with SDHR called Responsive Workplace Culture.

This new training will move from avoiding liability to building trust, meaning it helps employees learn to identify their own biases and learn skills to create a working, a welcoming, excuse me, inclusive work environment for everyone.

So as you can see, we're very serious about diversity and we're very serious about making sure that we, our courts, that when again, a person comes into that court, they feel respected and they also feel that they've been heard.

So finally, and this is a placeholder here, considering additional funding that could further reduce racial inequity in the criminal legal system, having dedicated housing or resource to address the court client's immediate needs, particularly in Seattle Community Court and Mental Health Court.

So we're willing to work with council as well as the mayor and any stakeholders to make that come to fruition for our clients.

So are there any more questions for any of us at this time?

I love that last slide.

Thank you for slipping that in.

I had not seen that previously, so thank you for flagging that for us.

We get to take on finance and housing in my other committee, so this is near and dear to my heart.

Thanks for slipping that in.

Council colleagues, are there questions or comments?

Council Member Strauss, please go ahead.

Thank you, Chair, Judge Wiley, Beth, Carol.

I have no questions, just a statement of immense gratitude for your work and the direction that you are taking in light of the Bureau of Report.

When we met last, some of these recommendations had not been made public yet, and you had not identified to me these these methods of moving forward.

I am impressed and humbled by your work.

Thank you, Judge.

Thank you.

Judge Willie Gregory.

You said Wiley.

Sorry, Judge.

That's OK.

I'm sorry.

It's not the first time.

Thank you so much, Council Member Strauss.

Are there other comments?

I will note that for many of us who were on council before, including council member Strauss, who was within the second floor with the city council family, this is a very different conversation than we had the last time we went through the budget.

I think that from the conversations I remember at that point, we were sort of arguing the merits of I think we are all very appreciative of the policy direction here.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I actually do just have one last question, and it's sort of about how these efforts interact with uh, the Court Resource Center and the delivery of some of the resources that are within the control of the court.

And, you know, one thing that I've heard in the past from my friends who are public defenders, um, from comments that their, their clients have made, and so this is anecdotal, it's not, this isn't scientific, but I think some of it was borne out in an audit that was done to the Court Resource Center.

is that some people don't feel like the court is a welcoming place to receive those services.

So I wonder if part of, because I know that there are some models in some other jurisdictions, I think Cook County, Illinois comes to mind where resources like a court resource center are cited off campus.

So it could still be under the control of the court, but sort of in a storefront or a place where people don't feel the stigma of the environment of the court when they're going to take advantage of those resources, and that doesn't factor into a potential reluctance to go take advantage of them.

So I am curious and looking forward, given the model of community court and given the increase of an outcome and services-based approach, if there is some scope to deliver some of those to do some of that intake or some of that process off campus, or if that's something that's been considered by the court, or would that sort of just be baked in by the service providers themselves not being based in the court and just doing, by just the very act of that diversion, you're sort of accomplishing a similar goal.

But I just thought I'd throw that out there in terms of how often, because I do suspect that oftentimes a lot of folks who are reluctant to engage in data reporting We're doing so because there's a stigma associated with the court and potentially being taken into custody.

I wonder if there's a way, given some of these new delivery methods, to maybe navigate those feelings people have, too, to make sure that we're getting the help out there to the folks who really need it.

Yeah, you know, we've been very...

on behalf of the court.

I just wanna let you know, um, council member Lewis and the other council on behalf of the court.

It is what this is.

One thing I've taken on is more community engagement.

We're gonna seeking to have, and we discussed this with some of the council members, reaching out into the community and seeing what's best for the community.

One of the things I think would be best for the community is to have something like a community, a court resource center out in the community, and that's something we'll be looking at.

So, and I know Carol's gonna touch that a little bit more, but I just wanted to let you know, and it is something we have been talking about and looking at at the house.

Go ahead, me at the court.

Go ahead, Carol, sorry about the interruption.

Yeah, Judge Gregory's right on in, just in terms of some of his vision for what the court will look like in the months and years to come.

It is quite interesting as we are kind of digging into this era of COVID and what that will look like and how we survive that piece.

But some of his long-term goal really that he shared with us and what we hope to partner in is doing, for one, we started out with our community outreach events, which I'm sure many of you are aware of.

We had six up to date and that really started with the vision of getting outside of the court building and bringing some of our services to the community.

We started out with just doing, you know, opportunity for individuals to take care of the warrants.

And then we brought some of our more detailed services into the community where people can start taking care of some of their citations and other things.

And then along with that was the court resource center and how do we build out some of those services and bringing them into the community.

We're also expanding on our partnership with Seattle Public Library and providing some of the resources that we provide through the core resource center in the Seattle Public Library starting with the downtown branch.

We've had them based in the core resource center and then we started over the last year providing some of the resources in that downtown branch and looking at other ways we can build that out as well.

one of Judge Gregory's visions is looking at how the magistrates are supporting us.

And if we can go outside the court walls and we want to be able to do something like that, not only with the court resource center, but with our programs and services division, how can we really meet those individuals where we are?

So what we're going to be doing over the next year is really intentionally engaging the different stakeholders and justice system partners, to see how they would like to see that realized and then come up with a plan to see, to really kind of execute that, getting us outside of the core walls and making it, like you said, a more user-friendly situation.

One thing that you might be interested to know, Councilman Lewis, is that a lot of people actually were coming in to the Core Resource Center and day reporting because they were getting engaged with the services and they would come all the way up until their court date because they loved engaging with the people and they saw, they weren't afraid to come in the doors of the court because they wanted to get some of the resources we had here.

It was like just getting them over the hump of the court date sometimes.

But we do realize that just coming into the building can be a barrier for individuals.

So we do continue to step out there and looking at ways of being more innovative with that.

Thank you so much, Carol, for those comments.

I just want to clarify, I wasn't trying to imply that under the current model, no one was going to the Court Resource Center.

Just that, as you just acknowledged, there has been a subset of folks who have historically had bad connotations with the court and been reluctant.

So I think being cognizant of that, I'm going into this screen and all of those interventions and initiatives sound really rewarding.

And I look forward to working with you guys on that.

It's really great to be here, to hear how proactive the court is being and really look forward to continuing this partnership.

Yes.

Thank you for your support.

Thank you so much.

Are there any additional questions to council colleagues?

I will also note the importance of the previous slides related to the fees and charges.

As we've talked to many in the community, it's been clear that the previous model was really funding the court on the backs of those who are mostly black and brown and people who've been harmed by various systems in the past.

And I think what you've done is to I appreciate the ongoing conversation that Councilmember Herbold and Lewis alluded to in terms of looking at additional fees and ways that we can create a more equitable funding structure.

I also appreciate that in order for us to reduce the amount of people constantly cycling into the courts, we do have to address many of the root causes and that gets back to housing and creating a safe house, a stable housing system and an affordable housing opportunity for folks really, really comes back to the city and our local partners in the region as well.

So I do appreciate that last slide that you've included, because I think it's another way for us to lessen the burden on the court and also hopefully reduce the size of the need that continues to come towards your courtrooms.

I also want to thank folks who worked in the community, organizers and activists with the Budget for Justice who really helped set the stage for these reforms to happen.

I'm really excited to see many of the recommendations that they've been working on for so long, as House Member Herbold noted in her opening comments, come to fruition.

And also, it takes leadership from within.

Judge, you, your team, you all have acted with urgency.

Once I think many of these policy recommendations were being received by people who knew that reform was needed, you did act with urgency.

So thanks also to you and your team here.

and to the many community organizers who've been calling for this.

Thank you.

It's a breath of fresh air right now in a really tough time.

Yes, it is.

And what I'd like to do is thank you all for your support and for acknowledging all the work we've done.

My staff has been very busy doing their number one job, but also making sure that we change the court to a place, again, where people feel respected and where people feel that they can take care of their business in a respectful manner.

We're still looking at other ways how to make the court better and make the system better for people.

Any other comments?

Juan, Carol, also Beth.

Okay, I'm seeing none.

Judge Greger, you said yes, but Beth, please go ahead.

I just wanted to say we are going to, we plan to come back to you with even more action items and I just really appreciate the encouragement that you've given us here today, because we want to make, we want to have a council who's proud of their municipal court.

And so I hope we can continue together along this route.

So thank you.

Thank you for helping us end on a very positive note today.

on the Zoom with us all day.

And to our friends at SMC, we know you were also waiting on the line here for a while for us to wrap up that previous discussion.

So we appreciate your patience.

Glad we were able to get through all of your slides and also that we had ample time for robust questions and participation.

Again, colleagues, thank you for this.

We start tomorrow at 9.30 a.m.

We will have a half an hour of public comment.

Public comment starts at 7.30.

You can sign up for public comment at 7.30 and we will begin hearing from folks at 9.30 a.m.

Unless there's nothing else for the good of the order, we will have a presentation tomorrow from our folks at HSD, Office of Housing, presentations focused on homelessness and housing, and then Department of Transportation and Parks.

Thank you all for your time.

We will adjourn today's meeting and we'll see you tomorrow at 9 30. Take care everybody.