Land Use Committee 5152024

Good afternoon.

The May 15th, 2024 regularly scheduled meeting of the Land Use Committee will come to order.

It is 2 p.m.

I'm Tammy Morales, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Moore.

Council Member Rivera.

Council Member Wu.

Present.

Vice Chair Strauss.

Present.

Chair Morales.

Here.

Three present.

Thank you.

Folks, we only have one agenda item today.

We will hear from the Department of Construction and Inspection, informational item 2469, a briefing and discussion on the unreinforced masonry retrofit policy creation.

And I do wanna acknowledge Council Member Rivera is here.

So if there is no objection, today's agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, today's agenda is adopted.

We will now open the public comment period.

I believe we have three people in person, is that right?

And none virtually?

Okay.

So we've got three folks signed up.

You'll each have two minutes to speak.

You'll have, we'll begin here in person.

And when you have 10 seconds left, we will hear a chime, so that's your sign to please wrap up your comments so we can move on to the next speaker.

The public comment period is now open, and I will ask Naomi to read the first speaker on the list.

Up first, we have Peter Manning, followed by Millie A., followed by Steve Rubustello.

Okay.

Yep, please.

Peter Manning.

I did hear my name.

I thought you said...

Yes, I did.

Hi, I'm sorry about that.

Hi, my name is Peter Manning.

I'm with Black Excellence Cannabis.

I'm the president.

We've been fighting for inclusion for cannabis in Washington State for going on nine years now.

We finally were successful.

We got social licenses that were allocated to...

the beginning of this year to residents here in Washington.

Seattle has a zoning issue.

We would like to get that fixed.

The special equity license cannot open up because of other stores and different zoning issues.

We don't really have equity.

It's like, it doesn't exist unless we fix the zoning for here.

Keep this in mind, there is zero black or brown ownership of a cannabis store in King County.

That says a lot there.

So we need to pay close attention on what we need to do to fix the zoning, to make it more equitable in that industry here, as far as the retail sector, and if that even applies as well as to the processors and the producers as well.

I ask this council here to look into that, meet with us, our organization, try to figure out how we can resolve the issue.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Next, we have Millie A. Yes, sorry.

I'll have to get a new secretary.

Good morning, Chair Morales and council members.

My name is Micah Sy with Irma City Collective.

First downtown dispensary in 2010, unjustly shut down by the city of Seattle State.

I'm also vice president of Black Excellent Cannabis.

We're here in regards to the zoning.

And this is my father.

So give me a moment.

He passed away in 2009. I had to take him off by support.

And because of that is the reason why I was already in the cannabis industry.

But what I saw during that time in 2009, I saw people going to Raggedy locations.

The medicine was crap and I knew I could do better.

I had regrets because I wish I had gave my dad a joint.

He needed more water.

He had a brain hemorrhage.

And so I got into it for the right reasons on the medical part, not thinking about all the millions that have been made and to be unjustly shut down and cut out and to find out years later the corruption that has been made.

We have locations here in Seattle right now that LCB gave license to and they didn't qualify.

Okay.

Um, as Peter said, we're hearing regards to the zoning.

I have obtained a social equity license now and I'm looking to get back into Seattle.

But the problem is you can only have two locations within a thousand feet.

Um, right now it's a form of redlining because as Peter Manny stated, there's zero black African American ownership, descendants of slave and Hispanic in Seattle, full ownership.

We have to change this, and we're here to talk with you, the zoning committee, to get some dialogue, have some positive dialogue, and to make a change.

We have to make a change.

I want to be open during the World Cup, okay?

I want to see the city cleaned up.

I've been a part of the city since 1978. I have passion for the city, and I want change, and I want to be part of the...

Thank you.

Thank you, and I'll ask both of you to leave your contact info so we can be in touch.

Yeah, I also will be emailing you letters as well.

Thank you.

Good afternoon.

The agenda isn't real heavy today, but it is important.

I also would like to remind you that earlier in the year, I mentioned that We should be taking a look at trees again.

Developers ought to be brought in unless you of course believe in lot line to lot line buildings and a no tree city.

You know, we, uh, claim to be major league, but, uh, we're becoming in the tree area, Bush league, uh, way time, anything gets any size.

It's about ready to be gone.

And, uh, and put your environmental hat on for a minute, and you'll probably notice that large trees are the ones that actually do the most for the environment.

Bushes, shrubs may be aesthetically pleasing, but they don't help for shade unless you're extremely short.

And they don't help with the air.

And I think that Seattle is well on its way to becoming an equal place for trees.

None.

And that's not a good target to make.

The other thing that I mentioned at the beginning of the season here for your year is MHA fees.

The goal when it was passed was 50-50.

And we are not reaching 50-50.

I think that we need to raise those fees.

You know, all this numb, dumb nibbies were telling the council that the fees were too low and that, uh, everybody would opt out.

And of course they did.

But, uh, if you're really for housing, you should be raising those fees to get the housing faster.

If it's built, it's built.

then it comes up when the building is built.

And the other thing is if it doesn't, if they pay their way out, actually get some more housing.

Thank you.

Is that the last public speaker?

Yes.

Great.

Okay.

At this time then, I will close public comment and ask Naomi to please read item one into the record and ask our guests to come to the table.

Agenda item one, unreinforced masonry retrofit policy creation for briefing and discussion.

Thank you.

So as they're making their way up, we're joined by Amanda Hertzfeld, Kai Kimau, and Nathan Torgelson from SDCI.

Thank you all for being here.

If you will go ahead and introduce yourselves for the record and go ahead and begin your presentation.

Good afternoon.

I'm Amanda Hertzfeld.

I am the URM program manager with SDCI.

Good afternoon.

My name is Kai Kimah.

I'm the principal engineer with SDCI.

Hi, Nathan Torkelson, director of SDCI.

Great.

Thank you very much.

You have the presentation ready?

Is that, is it working?

Are you able to?

I don't know where it is on here.

I've got it on a thumb drive that I can pull up, so.

Okay.

Chair, I can share a screen if you want.

Let's give it a minute.

Yeah, if we, thank you, Vice Chair.

If we need to go there, we will.

You got it?

Okay, here we go.

Thank you, Naomi.

Okay.

There we are.

We'll just run it over here.

Thank you.

Okay.

I was trying to figure out where it was coming from.

So I'm just going to do a short introduction.

I wanted to thank the Land Use Committee and you, Councilmember Morales, for bringing this issue to your committee and to your great interest in this topic.

Just advancing on to the next slide.

If you look at SDCI's vision, purpose, and values, it talks about helping people build a safe, livable, and inclusive Seattle.

And that's what this topic is all about.

And literally unreinforced masonry buildings is the one issue that keeps me up at night.

And it's of paramount interest to people who live and work in Seattle.

And it's an issue not only for people who are working and living in these buildings, but also for pedestrians that are walking by and motorists.

And unfortunately, it's not an issue of...

if there's going to be an earthquake in Seattle, but when that is going to happen.

And one of SDCI's other values has to do with equity.

And I just wanted to point out that a lot of our unreinforced masonry buildings also just happen to be in neighborhoods in Seattle that have not seen the same level of investment as other neighborhoods or where we have disadvantaged populations.

This is a crucial issue for all of us in Seattle.

And again, we just want to thank you for bringing this issue to your committee.

And we are continuously trying to get the word out about unreinforced masonry buildings.

Thanks, Nathan.

Good afternoon.

So we'll start with some basics.

So what is URM?

It's an acronym we used for unreinforced masonry building.

They are classic brick building.

They are typically built prior to 1945. These bricks that make up the walls and the arches over these window openings are unreinforced, which means that they do not have steel rebar within them.

and they also lack structural support.

As such, they pose a danger to people within the building if the walls were to fully or partially collapse or to pedestrian and motorist as Nathan mentioned, if the parapets were to fall onto the streets.

We know how poorly these URM performs in previous earthquakes.

As you can see on this slide on the right hand side, these are the two most common failure mechanism associated with URM buildings.

The left one shows that the unreinforced parapets could potentially fall away from the building and potentially injure a pedestrian.

This is a known hazard, and we actually seen quite a bit of this during the 2001 Nisqually earthquake.

And since then, we've been trying to rectify this issue through our construction permit process.

The one on the right shows that because the wall isn't connected to the floor properly, it could give away and potentially cause total or partial collapse.

Unfortunately, it doesn't take a lot of large earthquake to induce these type of failures.

Next slide, please.

The good news is we do know how to retrofit these buildings to reduce these risk collapse, the risk of collapse.

Basically, we want to tie the building together, These retrofit items include bracing the parapets, strengthening the connection between the floors and to the wall, as well as potentially putting strong back or other structural elements behind the walls to prevent them from failing outward.

This slide shows a couple of typical examples of what these retrofit looks like.

The middle picture shows a series of steel braces, brace angles to connect the parapets to the roof, preventing them from falling outward and causing injury.

The picture on the right shows rosettes, which are the face of the bolts that are connecting the URM walls to the floors behind it.

These retrofit strategies of URM buildings are largely known and have been tested in real-world scenarios and have shown to make a difference in recent earthquakes.

Next slide, please.

Now let's focus on Seattle's URMs.

As you may know, Seattle has about 1,100 URM in our jurisdiction.

A previous policy committee classified him into different vulnerability category based on occupancy type, number of stories, as well as proximity to liquefaction and landslide hazards.

By retrofitting our URMs, we can increase our city's seismic resilience, decrease the risk of death, damage, as well as potential disruption to our economy and daily life post earthquake.

More than half of Seattle's URMs, as Nathan mentioned, are located within our disadvantaged and most disadvantaged areas, indicating that if an earthquake happens, it will disproportionately affect low-income neighborhoods as well as marginalized communities.

And with that, I'll turn it over to Amanda.

She'll go over some of the history of our work, our current progress, as well as some of our next steps.

Amanda?

Before you move on, colleagues, I do want to invite you to just ask questions as we go.

It's a short presentation so we can have a discussion.

So looking at this map, the areas in red, it looks like, are areas that are...

higher equity, more disadvantaged.

Do you have a similar map or can you talk us through what areas might be most vulnerable due to being in the liquefaction zone, for example, and how that falls into this criteria?

Yeah, a liquid faction area typically surrounding our Duwamish area, as well as some of the Georgetown area.

Rainier Valley also have certain area that are falling to the Harbor Island is another concern.

So we do have what we call environmental critical area maps on our websites, and those are probably accessible.

And so liquid faction have clearly shown on those maps.

I'll just also add, so we have taken liquefaction hazard into consideration.

So up on the screen, there's the vulnerability classification, and the high vulnerability is areas that are located in liquefaction-prone areas.

So when we get a mandatory ordinance in place, those areas with liquefaction will have a shorter compliance timeline than those without.

Okay, thank you.

Chair.

Yes.

And thank you.

I see some dark red spots, dots.

So that's, is that even higher?

The dark red spots are the URM buildings, the locations of them.

Oh, and then the surrounding color just is.

The surrounding color represents the, it's pulled from the city's socioeconomic disadvantage index.

So it's based off of.

Full index.

Yes.

Sorry.

It was throwing me off.

Thank you.

Yeah.

I do wanna acknowledge Council Member Moore is with us as well.

So yeah, please go ahead.

I have a question, sorry.

Regarding liquefaction in certain areas, you said that there's a shorter timeline to fulfill URM, upgrades or compliance.

Can you tell me a little bit about your reasoning behind that?

Yeah, so proposed, so again, the compliance timelines won't go into effect until there's actually a mandatory ordinance in place.

And the proposed policy, this was presented in 2017, is that the critical vulnerability structures will need to retrofit within seven years of adoption.

The high vulnerability will have 10 years, and then the medium vulnerability will have 13 years.

That 10-year timeline for the high vulnerability structures is informed by liquefaction.

and as well as occupancy type of the building.

And the intent there is just that those buildings have a higher vulnerability to earthquakes, thus the need for a shorter compliance timeline.

Why don't we...

Are you on the next slide?

Sorry, I think I kind of interrupted your flow here.

Oh, yeah, we can go to the next slide.

So there we go.

So the real reason we're here today is to discuss progress and next steps on the implementation of resolution 32033 that directs a phased in mandate for URM retrofits.

This was passed in 2021. It was a joint resolution with city and council.

And I think there's some important things to note about just how descriptive this resolution is.

This is a really complicated issue and the resolution does a good job of highlighting what those complexities are and what the city needs to accomplish in order to have a successful program.

So the intent behind this resolution is to first identify that the goal of a URM retrofit program would be to reduce collapse hazard, which would prevent injury, death, reduce destruction.

But additionally, the resolution directs us to preserve historically and culturally significant structures.

Many of these URMs are historic or landmark structures, and we really want to prevent demolition of these buildings.

Additionally, the resolution has us identifying a variety of funding resources.

We'll get into this in a minute, but retrofits can be really expensive, and we want to reduce the financial burden associated with this as much as possible so that we can keep existing affordable housing, we can reduce displacement of occupants.

And we also want to continue culturally and linguistically appropriate community outreach.

Again, many of these URM buildings house affordable housing.

They're in underserved communities, many of which are non-English speaking.

And so it's really important that we...

communicate the importance of this program as well as the impacts associated with retrofits so that they understand what the retrofit entails, what resources are available, as well as the impacts of not retrofitting.

So we can go to the next slide, please.

Before we dive into all the work that we're currently doing, I did just want to touch on the history of this effort.

So I know that the font size on this is really small.

I don't expect anyone to read this.

But the point here is that that first bullet there is 1970s.

This is a longstanding issue that has been informed by a plethora of stakeholders and scientific experts.

So in the 60s, Seattle had two damaging earthquakes.

And as a result, in the 70s, we actually passed legislation for the retrofit of buildings in Pioneer Square.

And this was really quickly repealed because it was too expensive.

It was cost prohibitive to building owners.

So, we didn't really do anything after that.

After the 2001 Nisqually earthquake, interest was renewed, and the city started to develop an inventory of URM buildings.

And then in 2011, there was a big earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand that caused over 185 deaths, most of which were from URM buildings, and it closed their central business district for years.

So the impacts of an earthquake on URMs is significant not just to occupants of the building, but the economic impacts are also significant.

And I'll just point out that that New Zealand earthquake, a number of deaths were attributed to people on a bus.

A parapet fell, hit a bus, and killed everybody on board.

So it is really important.

This is an issue that impacts not just building owners, but the occupants who often don't know it's a URM building.

Anyways, I'll keep going on our timeline here.

But in 2016, a group of engineers proposed a standard for a minimum level of retrofit for these buildings.

And there was a policy committee that was created that developed a series of recommendations for what this program would need to address in order to be successful, looking at different financial mechanisms, looking at displacement issues and mitigation techniques.

And then in 2019, a group of stakeholders, mostly developers, they called themselves ASAP, which stands for the Alliance for Safety, Affordability, and Preservation.

They helped to develop a proposal for what's essentially a transfer of development rights program that would allow URM owners to sell unused development rights to support the funding of seismic retrofits.

And we'll get into that in a few more minutes.

But it was because of the coordination and support of these developers, along with SDCI and the Office of Emergency Management, as well as support of the mayor and council that was able to get this resolution created.

So that was a very long-winded effort to show that this isn't anything new, and there's a lot of science and engineering as well as equity concerns that have gone into the development of this resolution.

Do you have a question?

Chair, may I?

Yes, please go ahead.

Thank you for this long history.

It is definitely an issue that we need to address.

And it's been tried before, and it hasn't worked.

As you presented, there was a law put on the books, quickly repealed.

We watched this movie again play out in Portland in the last decade.

And that was...

even worse than what happened here in Pioneer Square because the cost is expensive.

It's very expensive.

And really, we have to approach this, and it sounds like ASAP and yourselves are also approaching this, with the understanding that financing almost has to lead lawmaking because it's really difficult for an individual to...

to pay this and so tying the the financing and the funding to the property and not to the property owner is critical ensuring that we can have zero percent loans if possible loans without down payments i you're nodding your head so i'm worried that i'm taking the rest of your present this is somewhere else it's a little further down but all right well i mean it's yeah I'll hold back.

I'll prep you for the question that I'll ask in just a couple minutes is, as part of the industrial, and I've got the liquefaction map up here too, so if, Chair, you want me to share that, always happy to.

But, you know, in the industrial maritime protections that we passed last year, instead of including MHA in some of the development cost, we did include some of the URM redevelopment.

And so later on in the presentation, I'll ask you how that's going.

Great.

Thank you.

So I'll just reiterate what this resolution asks us to do is to define what a URM is, develop the retrofit standard, so the minimum standard for retrofitting, develop a timeline for compliance, an enforcement strategy, and then develop funding, multiple funding opportunities and incentives to help reduce the financial burden of retrofits.

So we can go to the next slide.

So where are we at today?

We have completed the retrofit technical standards.

So this is the minimum level of safety, minimum level of retrofit, ensuring supporting collapse reduction of a URM building.

And we finished this last year and met with city council last year to get a resolution passed.

It was resolution 32111 that is kind of celebrating the milestone of creating this.

And in...

recommending that we do an interim phase of a voluntary retrofit informed by the standard.

And the reason for that is that while financial incentives are very important, there's a number of URM owners that want to retrofit now but have been concerned about moving goalposts.

So what this resolution says is move forward with a voluntary retrofit program for now, continue pursuing retrofit, a mandatory program with funding resources.

And so we're looking forward to bringing to you by the end of this year, what we're calling a retrofit recognition code change.

And so this will be part of the Seattle existing building code, and it will adopt and I'll get into this in a minute, it will adopt the alternate method for URM retrofit, which is a reduced standard from current code that maximizes life safety while reducing design and construction costs.

So our long-term goal still is adopting a mandatory retrofit ordinance, but to Councilmember Strauss's point, we don't want to require this until we've identified these funding resources.

So our short-term goal is this voluntary retrofit recognition code that will establish what you need to do as a building owner to be considered retrofitted and allow people to do that now.

So we can go to the next slide.

So again, we've talked a little bit about costs.

The first I'll point out that the code-based method is shown here in the middle of the screen.

This is the method that is currently part of the substantial alteration process of a building.

So that's what the code says you need to do in order to retrofit your building.

Informed by California's success, we've created the alternate method.

California calls it the Bolts Plus method.

But this is, like I said, it is a reduced standard that still maximizes collapse prevention while supporting life safety, minimizing design costs.

This was tested in the Northridge earthquake and in the Napa earthquake, was shown to be successful.

And the cost estimates that we have before COVID are $650,000 for the average three-story building.

We're working with a contractor right now to update those costs, and we are using that to inform our funding solutions moving forward.

So we can go ahead to the next slide, and I'll start talking about some of those funding considerations.

So existing currently is CPACER, the Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy and Resiliency Program.

It's essentially a low-interest loan or lien that stays on a property.

So if the property owner sells it, then the loan stays on the property.

Like I said, this is existing.

King County manages the program.

It is proving to be a little challenging for lower income, less capital possessing building owners, but it is a tool in the toolbox.

We're also exploring tax credits.

So there are existing tax credits for historic preservation, as well as for greenhouse gas reduction.

And so there is opportunity to combine these to take a larger chunk out of that retrofit cost.

Additionally, we're working very closely through the State Seismic Safety Subcommittee.

It's a lot of S's.

But we are requesting a legislative working session in the fall, and we're coordinating with OIR on this.

But we're requesting a study of different tax incentives that could be used.

So we know the historic preservation tax credit exists, but could be more meaningful if there were some more modifications made.

We'd like to understand opportunities for changes in property taxes, for example, but we know that you have to balance the budget somehow.

So we need to bring in the county assessors, the Association of County Tax Assessors to help support this, thus our coordination with OIR and State Seismic Safety Subcommittee.

I'll just also point out, well, Seattle has roughly 1,100 URMs.

Statewide, the estimate's 33,000.

So working with state legislature on this, it's not just a Seattle problem, it is a statewide issue.

And then the last two bullets here are federal grants and transfer of development rights.

And I have a slide for each of those because they're a little bit more in depth.

So let's go to the next slide.

So we have an application out right now for a FEMA grant.

It's called the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities or BRIC grant.

My little cheesy joke is that FEMA didn't talk to the seismic people because if they did, BRICs are bad.

And we would have told them not to call the grant that.

But our plan here with the FEMA grant program is to start with a small grant for a benefit cost analysis for a number like three to four, what we're calling archetype buildings.

And the intent here is to copy a very successful program that Berkeley established, where they've done cost estimates for buildings.

They've shown this type of building is cost effective.

So then it alleviates a whole bunch of paperwork with FEMA in the future when you get a larger grant for construction.

So then any building that matches those three or four can get reimbursed for retrofit costs.

And we would be able to determine what those buildings are, where they're located, and what the level of retrofit is.

It just is dependent on the grant.

I will say before coming to Seattle, I worked for FEMA for 12 years, so I'm really familiar with their grant process and the challenges associated with them.

As a result of that, that has informed our strategy a bit.

So FEMA does give extra points in your application if you start with a small grant and then apply for a construction grant.

So that's part of the strategy.

Additionally, FEMA's has been pretty focused on climate change initiatives and its unintentionally disincentivized seismic projects.

So we've met with Congresswoman Jayapal to help advocate for increased funding and increased access to funding for seismic retrofit projects.

And we also had the opportunity to meet with the council that advises the administrator of FEMA to bring to her awareness challenges associated with seismic retrofit funding.

So the next one on our page here is transfer of development rights.

So again, this is largely informed by the ASAP proposal.

We've had multiple virtual meetings to discuss the proposal and what would make transfer of development rights useful for URM owners.

And we actually had an in-person meeting on February 27th.

It was while all the protests were happening, which made for some excitement.

But we had over 50 people here attending the meeting, providing input on what would make the program viable, what their concerns are.

It was mostly the cost of retrofit versus the cost of the or the value of credits and how we would control the market.

So we've taken all of the feedback from that.

We're putting it into a report, and the intent is to scope a feasibility study on what that program would look like and what the investment from Seattle would be needed.

So I see there's a few questions.

Yeah, can you talk a little bit about, I know especially in the CID, for example, we have buildings where there are multiple people who own, family associations or several generations who own.

And if you're talking about either the transfer of development rights or a loan, finding all the right folks to sign on to paperwork like that can be a challenge.

So can you talk a little bit about how you manage that kind of a process?

Yeah, so I would say that the first step is getting engagement with the community and the right stakeholders of those buildings.

It's going to be a case by case basis.

And our intent is to develop a lot of supportive resources to help guide building owners through the process and help identify the right funding resources for them.

So we're working with the Department of Neighborhoods right now to meet with the CID Visioning Advisory Group and kind of start planting the seeds for engagement with them and use their, develop a relationship with them so that the resources that we create or the financial resources that we obtain are actually accessible and meaningful to them.

I would just add, sorry, I would just add that several months ago, many of the city's department directors met with several of the leaders in the Chinatown International District.

We talked about a number of issues, but this is one of the issues that we discussed.

So will those programs and opportunities be provided in different languages and different translated materials and all of that?

Okay.

And then for the...

Sorry, there was one other thing you were talking about that made me...

Oh, for the voluntary program, is that already established or is that something that you're still...

Okay.

We're working on the code language right now and plan to bring that by the end of the year for adoption.

Okay.

So any retrofits that may currently be underway are sort of outside the...

conversation.

So voluntary seismic improvement to any building has is in the building code in the existing building code.

So any building owner can proceed with voluntary seismic improvement at any time is already in place.

And so what we're trying to do is, as mentioned by Amanda, the building owners have been holding off and proceeding with the URM retrofit because they don't want to move in goalpost.

And so the huge milestone that we have accomplished in 2023 was to lock down the technical standard that we have presented to the council last year that now we know the engineering, how to get them fixed from an engineering perspective.

And so as a matter of fact, over the past few months, we have already had a few projects coming into our department.

discussing how to implement those alternate methods into the project.

So those are actually in the works.

So what Amanda was alluding to is to actually codify what it means to be a retrofitted URM building into the code.

But those folks who may be proceeding on their own or don't have the benefit of whatever funding mechanisms you're trying to put in place.

So presumably they are paying for it themselves.

Okay.

We have some building owners who may be undergoing a renovation of their building or substantial alteration, and they want to do everything all at once.

And they have the financial resources right now to do that.

But we're obviously very cognizant that a lot of building owners don't have those financial resources.

Thank you.

Council Member Wu.

Oh, I think Strauss is first.

No, I've already talked.

Thank you.

When we tried to, when I say we, I mean the Louisa Hotel, when we went to redevelop our building, we tried to use the development rights, air rights, for some reason it was not applicable in the historic district.

So we were not allowed to use those.

And I don't know any other buildings in historic districts that were able to successfully do that.

I think there's some rulemaking we might have to look at to be able to allow for air rights to be used in historic districts like the CID.

Really quickly, also the CID visionary group, I think their funding is running out.

So I think you might need to reach out really quickly before they transition.

Also, I think when we talk about the CID, what we're really talking about gentrification displacement when it comes to these buildings and mindful going forward and how we require building owners to retrofit their buildings.

I know back in like 2001, after the Squally earthquake, there was, I'm not totally sure if it was a law or a building code, but we were, most of the buildings there were forced to put in wall ties or bracing.

And so you look around the CID, you see that in most of the buildings and then, CODE HAS CHANGED THE LAST COUPLE YEARS, SO I'M NOT TOO SURE WHAT YEAR THAT WAS, EARLY 2000S WHEN THAT HAPPENED, AND THEN CODE CHANGED AGAIN, AND NOW WE WANT TO TRY TO GET THESE BUILDINGS INTO COMPLIANCE.

BUT THE COST IS THE BIGGEST FACTOR, COUNCILMEMBER STRAUSS SAID, AND SO I'M HOPING TO LEARN MORE LATER ON IN THIS PRESENTATION ABOUT Possibly, you mentioned earlier a step-by-step process instead of making people fulfill the retrofit all at once.

Because in areas like the CAD, insurance, we can't even afford insurance because no one will insure us.

No one will offer us insurance.

So when it comes to retrofitting, we also have to look at how do you insure these developments and constructions.

projects, because that was also a very hard aspect with the Louisa project as well.

I had an additional question, but I don't remember it.

When I remember it, I'll let you know.

Thank you.

So thank you, by the way, and I appreciate your experience.

You touched on a few different things, and I will start the insurance topic.

We are working as part of our cost estimate process.

using some new insurance modeling, trying to demonstrate that by retrofitting a URM, it reduces the probable maximum loss that insurance companies use to see if we can get some opportunities for reduction in operational costs.

I don't know if that will pencil out or not, but that is a thing that we're looking at, understanding there are issues with insurance.

Another thing that you touched on was displacement.

And, you know, I've met with the – is it the Headwater people, the group that is doing the visioning process, leading the visioning process for the CID?

And, you know, multiple times in their discussion, they were talking about – revitalization of the neighborhood and economic growth and um you know community wealth and i think there's a lot of opportunities to combine economic development um and with the seismic retrofits so um and again i'll just highlight we're really trying to do a community guided process here and make whatever solutions we have work for that neighborhood so we want to engage the neighborhood in developing those solutions and

I guess I didn't explain myself very well, but when I mean displacement and gentrification, I think the biggest fear is that having these requirements be so onus and so costly that building owners will have no choice but to sell their buildings.

And when they sell their buildings, who would be the people who would be buying?

It would not be the families who had owned these buildings for generations.

And it would be outside people coming in.

And so I think that's the biggest fear is that being forced to sell because they can't afford the upgrades and then losing that building for the community.

And most of these buildings are historic.

So having to...

Retrofit and rebuild cost us three times more than it does for a built new project or being able to tear it down and rebuilding it.

And so I applaud you for reaching out to community groups, and I hope you will continue.

I recognize a lot of people in these pictures.

And so I would love to be involved in how you continue the conversation, especially for communities like the CID.

Yeah, and we would love your support in helping engage the community in a meaningful way.

I will just lastly say, when it comes to resources for communities, so the city's Office of Economic Development already has a program that supports building owners.

They have funding for contractors to help businesses develop plans for financing and improving business operations so that they can get the funding to support retrofits.

And there's also a program within SDCI that helps small business owners in navigating the permit process and expediting things.

And the last thing I'll say is, because I think when we met with you previously, you mentioned concern about that compliance timeline and disruption in the neighborhood.

That compliance timeline is merely a recommendation from 2017 and there's no reason that we can't adjust that or create some sort of MOU with the neighborhood to establish their own timeline.

The point that we wanna make here is that we wanna get these retrofits done.

We wanna move faster than geology and not retrofitting and having an earthquake is going to be far more disruptive to the community than the retrofit process.

The last thing we wanna do is unintentionally create an incentive for building owners to have to sell their buildings or demolish their buildings.

Right.

Council Member Strauss and then Council Member Moore.

Thank you, Chair.

What I always appreciate about Councilmember Wu is, you know, I talk a lot.

I've, you know, done site visits.

I do the policy analysis.

I get in the weeds.

But Councilmember Wu has actually done the projects, right?

And so bringing that firsthand experience is really, really interesting and helpful.

I'm going to...

kind of take a lay person's approach to TDR because it can be pretty confusing.

I've seen this program work really well to preserve forest and farmland throughout the county.

And in my time as land use chair, we expanded our ability to TDR into Snohomish and Pierce counties as well, which was really important because we'd used up all of the opportunities here in King County.

for tdr essentially what we're talking about is there is a potential to develop that is not actualized and that development is transferred to a different site for money and then we use that money to go either buy farmland or fix urms is that

Correct?

Yes.

Correct.

Correct.

It wouldn't be for farmland, though.

This would be creating an entirely new program.

So the money would only be used for seismic retrofits.

Fantastic.

You were a step ahead of me, right?

And so with the conservation TDR that we currently have on the books, that's farmland.

For the program that you're discussing here, that's for URM.

Yep.

Right.

And so...

Now I want to get into the historic districts a little bit because this is really interesting.

I just, I live oftentimes on SCIGIS map.

Thank you for your whole team for making that happen.

When I pull up, The Chinatown International District, it's zoned for 75 to 85 feet, right?

And so that's seven or eight stories, respectively.

If it is a historic building, then the maximum development potential is what has been photographed in the past as the height of that building, plus a penthouse that you can't see from the street.

Is that generally correct?

I am not the expert on TDR.

We've been partnered with OPCD on this and they've been the lead on taking the concerns about historic districts and what that means.

And what they've repeated is that while we know there are rules with current TDR programs, the goal is to create an entirely new program.

We get to create the rules for a URM TDR.

Let's play this one out just a little bit because it gets a bit to what Councilmember Wu was talking about.

And we've got a historic district in Ballard.

I was a staffer here in District 7 for Pioneer Square.

And what we found is that even though the zoning allows you to go to eight stories, the development potential is only for what was already previously built plus that penthouse.

And so it potentially leaves three to four stories undevelopable because of historic district development.

requirements.

And so council member Wu, you brought that up and that absolutely has to get fixed because I think that that's already creating an issue in our city.

When we look at pioneer square, there are a lot of buildings that could be renovated.

Um, we look at the metropole building that is almost complete that sat empty for, I think a process of three owners.

in so many years, and it actually became a, where we look at the Cannery Building, which is a very historic and important building, but we can't get the owner to develop it.

And part of that is because they're only allowed to develop so far.

Now, if they could do transfer development rights, I think that that's really helpful.

So again, I guess I just talked to myself around in a circle.

But I think that's the problem that we're trying to use, and TDR is really helpful.

And just because insurance was brought up as well, I have noticed a systemic problem in our state regarding insurance.

And if you watch the news, it's about home insurance in fire-prone areas where some people aren't allowed to get insurance anymore.

We're looking at flood-prone areas where people can't get their insurance.

We're seeing small businesses who have their windows broken too many times, unable to get insurance.

And now I'm hearing about these buildings.

The central factor in that is our insurance commissioner.

I believe our insurance commissioner is asleep at the wheel, and we need somebody in there who's really holding these insurance companies to account.

I guess that wasn't a question, Chair.

Thank you.

I will just say the Office of the Insurance Commissioner does have a seat on the State Seismic Safety Subcommittee, and we make sure to bring up the issue of seismic earthquake insurance at every meeting.

That is good to know.

And I think sort of in between the two comments that we're hearing about TDR, I think for me, as we're talking about what the new program might look like, I know there is also a fear in the CID about the potential for very new, very tall buildings going in.

And so where our programs currently might require that that development rights, that the development projects stay in the community where the TDRs are purchased, I think there would be an interest in making sure that those projects actually don't happen in the neighborhood where they're purchased.

So as you're having those conversations, it'll be interesting just to see what makes the most sense for what that program looks like.

One of the primary recommendations for the TDR work was removal of that requirement that TDR credits purchased have to be used within that same neighborhood.

So we're exploring all of those things.

Good to know.

Council Member Wu.

Sorry, no, Council Member Moore.

Thank you chair.

Just a quick plug.

I'm looking at the map and I see that District 5 does have a number of unreinforced masonry buildings and we do have some older areas up there.

So just wondering what would be the best way for my office to, who would we reach out to about connecting those local businesses with this program?

Yeah, you can have them reach out to me.

And I looked right before this meeting.

It looks like your district has around 66 URMs in there.

So not nearly as many as some of the other districts, but still a healthy number.

And yeah, happy to chat with you and help get the news out to your district about changes as well as types of funding mechanisms that would benefit them.

Great.

Thank you very much.

So let's go on to what the next steps are for the creation of this program.

Yeah, so next steps.

Number one is the meeting with the Chinatown International District.

This was a requested meeting based off of some previous conversations that we had with them.

When we were trying to do the planning for the TDR meeting, SCIPTA, Interim CDA, and the Chung Hua Benevolent Association were at that meeting and they said TDR is too much to talk about right now, but they would really benefit from a URM info session.

And so we're working with Department of Neighborhoods utilizing their CID community engagement toolkit to make sure we're doing everything the right way.

And so we're using that to request a meeting with the Visioning Advisory Group, and we're waiting on DON right now for next steps.

Additional things for this year, we are excited to move forward with the retrofit recognition code change that we plan to bring by the end of the year.

We're hiring a URM engineer that was funded through the resolution in 2021, so it's no new funding, but we're excited to have a dedicated engineer that can help building owners kind of navigate this technical piece.

We're preparing for the fall legislative working session, working with OIR, working with Washington Emergency Management, talking with some of the county assessors.

We're working on scoping that TDR feasibility study, taking that public meeting and turning it into a scope.

And then we are patiently waiting for FEMA grant review on our application.

Do you have an estimated time for when you'll hear?

When we submitted it, they said anywhere between one and three years.

That's helpful.

I know that they're trying to move things quickly before a potential administration change.

So that might be our saving grace.

Good to know.

Okay.

Well, thank you.

So let's see.

I think I got through most of my questions.

Other questions, colleagues?

Council Member Vedda.

Thanks, Chair.

You know, I just want to give recognition to former director Barb Graf.

from the Office of Emergency Management.

This was a huge issue for Barb, and she worked so hard when you showed that history.

I mean, she was in most of that.

So I really just, she retired and deservedly retired, but wanted to really just recognize her for all her hard work.

that played into some of this work that you all presented today.

So thank you, Barb.

Yeah, I think one of my first meetings as a new council member four years ago was with her, and representing the CID, it was a huge concern.

I will just use this as an opportunity for a PSA to get your backpacks and water and everything else ready, because...

We go through phases in my house where we're making sure the bags are ready and the food and water and lights and flashlights are all ready to go.

You're channeling Barb.

Yeah, we had a great conversation about all the prep that's needed.

Council Member Stout, did you have another question?

Sorry, I remembered the question.

I didn't take good enough notes here that I was coming back around on TDR to ask the question that I posed earlier, which is, how is the program going, stemming out of the maritime and industrial zoning changes?

I don't believe that we have had any permits submitted yet, but...

just understanding that that was almost a secondary tract to what we have before us today.

And colleagues, stemming from the conversation we had this morning about funding for housing, when mandatory housing affordability was passed in 2018, that was at a time before we had fully funded our benchmark for funding affordable housing.

And so the benchmark that I talked about earlier today was the McKinstry report, We were very far below that report, which is why the density bonuses we created through those zoning changes really just went straight to affordable housing.

We're in a better place.

We're not out of the woods with our funding of affordable housing, which is what allowed us to use these development potentials in industrial maritime areas for the URM.

But can you give us any highlights on the next steps in that program?

I can't speak to the zoning changes, but I can say that when it comes to affordable housing, for starters, a number of URMs serve as naturally occurring affordable housing.

And many of them have vacant upper floors because of the need to do additional building maintenance.

And so when I was mentioning the opportunity for economic development, there is opportunity to add affordable housing as we do these URM retrofits.

And when we worked last year to add the protections to the maritime and industrial zone, that was where we'd put density bonuses in exchange for URM retrofits, much like your TDR program.

What are the next steps there?

We haven't seen anyone apply to use those yet.

Okay.

If they did, what would the process be?

I would need to get that answer from OPCD, but I'd be happy to help facilitate that.

Fair enough, and I should have let you know I was gonna ask those questions ahead of time.

That's my fault.

Okay, Council Member Wu, did you have another question?

Yes, actually a statement.

Thank you so much for doing the community outreach.

And it sounds like you may be doing an equity toolkit.

And so really thankful that you are engaging with communities, talking about the path forward, because I know there's a lot of fear of being forced to sell their buildings because they can't afford the upgrades.

hearing that this might be a step-by-step procedure versus making everybody upgrade all at once, as well as allowing people a chance to have more time when they need it.

Because I know even getting an application for historic tax credits takes about a year, and so all this adds up.

And so thank you so much for all your work, and I look forward to hearing an update in the future.

I'll just add that we have also been working with the Seattle School District and the University of Washington on their inventory of unreinforced masonry buildings and how to address that issue.

Yeah, that's the one that keeps me up at night.

something happens while these kids are in school.

Okay, well, thank you.

I think we're all looking forward to hearing more as the programs develop and as your conversations continue.

I will be meeting with Representative Jayapal, I think next week.

So I'll make sure to ask the question about support from FEMA.

So thank you.

I think this is really important work.

I'm glad to know that the policy development is underway and we look forward to seeing it at the end of the year.

Great, thank you so much.

Okay, there's no further business for today.

So this concludes the May 15th, 2024 Land Use Committee meeting.

Our next meeting will be June 5th at 2 p.m.

Thanks for being here, everyone.

We are adjourned.