Seattle City Council Civil Rights, Utilities, Economic Development & Arts Committee 92419

2019 there we go.

I'll say that again.

Good morning and welcome to the Civil Rights Utilities Economic Development and Arts Committee.

It is September 24th, 2019. It is 9 39 a.m.

I'm Lisa Herbold.

I am the chair of the Civil Rights Utilities Economic Development Arts Committee as well as councilmember representing District 1 West Seattle and South Park and I'm joined by councilmember Mike O'Brien.

We are going to start off this morning with a monthly edition of our cultural spotlight.

We then will move into public comment followed by the items of business for the day.

We have, let's see here, one, two, three, four, five, six bills that are tenants' rights bills.

One relates specifically to protecting survivors of domestic violence from being held liable from charges associated with damages to a rental unit done by a perpetrator.

The other relating to specifically the ability of tenants to live with their family members as well as roommates.

Another related specifically to the requirement of landlords to provide certain information about landlord tenants' rights, information and resources on certain notices that tenants receive.

And another related to the acceptance of rent payments.

and ensuring that tenants are not barred from providing non-electronic payment options.

And then finally, a bill related to the end of residential tenancies and the requirement that landlords, before issuing notices to terminate a tenancy, be in full compliance with the rental registration and inspection ordinance.

After that, we're going to move into another area of this committee's responsibility that related specifically to Seattle Public Utilities.

And this is a piece of legislation dealing with an easement.

And then we will get a report from the Office of Arts and Culture, their cultural space update.

And we'll also hear from the Office of Civil Rights, their race and social justice initiative update.

And then finally, we'll have a presentation also from SPU and from other jurisdictions around their experience with every other week garbage collection.

So with that, I'm gonna just turn it right over to Jenny Ku of the Office of Arts and Culture to present to us our offering for the cultural spotlight today.

Good morning.

Thank you so much.

We are joined this morning by Hilary Lee and Michelle Bufano of Chihuly Garden and Glass to talk about the Refract Festival coming up in October.

Great.

Well, thank you so much for inviting us.

We really appreciate it.

We're here today to talk about Seattle's first annual celebration of glass in our city.

Back when we were celebrating in Seattle the World's Fair, the very first glass program was started at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

And just about 10 years later, Dale Chihuly started and founded Pilchuck Glass School.

And within about five years after that, Pratt Fine Arts Center was founded for access for arts for all in the Central District of Seattle.

During that time, we call that time the Studio Glass Movement because it took glass out of the factories and put glass in the hands of the artists to create.

Ever since that time, glass has really flourished in our state and in our country and across the world.

But nothing's really been written that much about the studio glass movement since the very beginning.

And so we thought it was important to do a study in 2015. We partnered with the Glass Art Society to really try and understand what are the trends in glass.

Where are the hubs of glass in our country?

And what's the public interest?

And we were pretty surprised by our findings.

I think probably one of the most important things is that we found that Seattle is a main hub of glass and glass art in our country.

And the study that we did was across the country.

So we had thousands of responses.

And it's not surprising that the Pacific Northwest is really a place where people want to come to make glass.

One of the reasons is because we have so many resources for glass.

We have a gallery like Traver Art Gallery that's been around for 40 years.

We have Pelchuk.

We have Pratt.

And most importantly, we have jobs.

If you want to be a glass artist, you move to the Pacific Northwest, because that's where you're going to find support, and that's where you're going to find jobs and the opportunity to work around artists from all over the world who come here to live and work.

So it's only fitting knowing all this information and understanding something that we see every day at Chihuly Garden and Glass is that people are introduced to glass for the first time, and they are excited and want to learn more.

So we decided to partner with Visit Seattle.

We started by bringing in a community of people and saying, what do you think about this idea?

And I can tell you that the response has been overwhelming.

And now I'm going to turn it over to Hillary so she can talk a little bit about what we're doing.

So Refract, the Seattle Glass Experience, is happening October 17th through 20th, so in about three weeks.

And it's very exciting.

It's the first of its kind.

It's a glass art festival to really celebrate this region.

So it's from Everett to Tacoma, from Bainbridge to Bellevue.

and everything in between that celebrates glass art.

And when you think of glass art, it's not just Dale Chihuly and glass blowing, but it's also stained glass, fused glass, different types of flame working, and also different genres that kind of happen within that industry, such as most women in glass, and mixed media, and how glass art's really pushing the boundaries in contemporary art in general.

From the study Michelle talked about, we really are the American Venice, and we really want general audiences to understand that.

Sure, yes, we work in the industry where lots of people who are artists know that Seattle is a destination for glass, but partnering with Visit Seattle has been a true gift to really get Seattle synonymous with glass art the same way it is with coffee, or mountains, or Boeing, and so that's really exciting through this festival.

So we reached out to, we did a call to artists and organizations, and the response has been overwhelming.

We have almost 100 different events happening throughout the region, from glass demonstrations, to classes, to open studios, to tours, to different ways of exhibiting glass, and everyone's very, very excited.

And one of the best parts is that a lot of these organizations and artists are already community-based, so many of that is free and accessible to a lot of different audiences, and we're already engaging with the already existing networks and kind of coming together to really showcase what we have to tourism and the city, and also really bringing in lots more people to the city.

So we just want to end by saying art changes people's lives.

Please, please take the time to go to our website refractseattle.org.

This is hopefully the beginning of what will be an annual event.

We hope, you know, we can barely fit into four days.

It's probably going to end up eventually being a month, we hope, to celebrate.

We really need to let our city shine.

So thank you very much.

I'm also leaving this.

Thank you for noting the findings from the Arts Fund study.

We had Arts Fund come and present their findings a couple weeks ago, so it's good to make sure that we are reinforcing them.

Not only the finding that arts benefit the individual, but one of the findings that I found really striking is that the arts actually help us accomplish as a city our public policy goals, many of them, and that's really, I think, important for me in my job to remember when trying to make sure that art is integrated into all of our discussions.

And then I also just wanted to just say from my own experience moving here in 1992, I'd lived in a lot of different places.

And I echo what you've said.

I first experienced art blowing as a thing when I moved here.

I hadn't experienced it in other cities that I'd lived in.

And I learned very, very quickly that its vibrance as part of Seattle's life is really tied to the fact that there is a strong community of folks who support one another in producing this art.

And because there's that strong community, there's also this infrastructure that has developed over the years.

So just really interesting as a non-artist to observe and experience what y'all have brought to us today.

Council Member O'Brien.

Thank you.

Website, I assume, has lists of locations, times, events, and all that stuff?

Absolutely.

That's great.

And what's the web address again?

RefractSeattle.org.

Awesome.

Thank you.

And the date of the upcoming event is October 17th through 20th.

17th through 20th.

I'll invite you personally.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much for joining us today.

Thank you.

All right.

We'll move into public comment.

Two speakers signed up.

And I will read the items in, or read the speakers into the record.

Just join us at the mic, and Noel will be keeping time.

Everybody has two minutes to speak.

First speaker is Devin Silvernell, followed by Xochitl Makevic.

Good morning, council members.

Nice to see you, Council Member Herbold and Council Member O'Brien.

My name's Devin Silvernail.

I'm co-chair of the Seattle Renters Commission, also executive director of BC Seattle.

I'm here to just add my voice in support of agenda items one through six.

Very important items that we have here.

Particularly, I wanted to talk about 1 and 2 and 5 and 6 themselves.

1 and 2, I wanted to share a little story about myself.

When I was younger, when I was six years old, my birth mom and I moved into a house in White Center.

with a person who was not very particularly a good person.

And he, it's hard for me to talk about actually, he, when he, before he did anything, right, when he was starting to get angry, he would damage the property.

And so, you know, that was things like holes in the walls and kicked down doors and, you know, It didn't make the place a great place to live, and obviously when moving out as a tenant, normally you would be required to pay for those damages.

It's great that you're working on this, so abusers aren't.

keeping that power over victims who are trying to get away from that.

Also wanted to add my support for five and six just because, you know, on my day-to-day life at my day job, I talk to folks all the time who maybe don't have access to internet and can't pay via an online portal.

who have a very hard time finding out how to pay that, you know, they might get late fees and things like that.

And then also, you know, just wanted to finish out by saying, you know, that requiring the Rio inspections for termination is really great too, especially since we're already doing that for eviction.

Termination makes sense.

So thank you so much.

Have a good one.

Okay.

Hi, my name is Sochi Makevich with the Washington Community Action Network.

I'm here in support of the various bills that are coming forward to improve tenant rights.

In particular, the bill to prevent DV survivors from being liable, as well as the bill that has the right to have a roommate.

So the majority of folks that I organize are women, and I think the majority of them, from what they have shared with me, have survived domestic violence, and that has been the thing that has pushed them into housing.

instability, whether it was like they left a violent relationship and then half their income was gone, or things along those lines.

And so the fact that landlords are charging DV survivors for damage that they didn't cause, I think is abhorrent.

and that we don't have any legislation to prevent that is wrong as well, but I'm glad that the council is hopefully going to rectify that.

And then on the roommate piece, living in Seattle is incredibly expensive.

Even though I have a good job, I still have to live with three other people, right?

And if we want to be able to ensure that people can still live in the city, we need to make sure that they can find living situations that make that possible.

And the other thing I'll mention is, as one of the authors on the losing home report that was released last year, both living with other people that were not allowed to be on the lease, as well as domestic violence were factors that led to eviction and housing instability.

And so I'm really glad that the council is taking the recommendations from that report seriously.

And then just one other thing I'll add, sorry, I've got a lot of things rolling around in my head on all these bills.

But if I remember correctly, I think one of the bills is about having, you have to have a re-inspection before termination.

notice.

I think one thought is maybe a Rio inspection before any pay or vacates or other just notices can be given.

Just a thought, but that's it.

Thanks.

All right, thank you.

So that ends public comment.

One thing I neglected to do at the start of the meeting was to make note that unless there are objections, well, first, actually, since I did not actually move to approve the agenda, if there were no objections, I'm going to actually take this opportunity to Again, if there are no objections, make a change to the agenda.

The agenda starts with item 1. Item 1 is an old version of the bill as it relates, the bill relating to rental agreements and tenant liability for damages.

Item 2, it covers the same subject, but it is the new version of the bill.

So I'm going to, in the interest of time, suggest that we move right into item 2 and not discuss item 1 on the agenda.

Is that right?

No objection.

Okay, great.

So let's move right into item two on the agenda.

Agenda item two is Council Bill 119658, an ordinance relating to rental agreements relieving a tenant experiencing domestic violence, sexual assault, unlawful harassment.

or stalking from liability for damage to the landlord's property caused by a perpetrator of domestic violence, sexual assault, unlawful harassment, or stalking, creating a landlord mitigation program, and amending section 7.24, 020, 030, and 22.206.170 of, and adding new section 7.24.003 to the Seattle Municipal Code.

Great, thank you.

Introductions, please.

Asha Venkatraman, Council Central Staff.

Thank you, Asha.

You want to just give us some background about how we got to where we are now and then go through the fairly significant changes that have been made to the bill in response to concerns that we've heard from the providers of rental housing and how we're proposing to address some of those concerns.

Absolutely, so as was mentioned this bill came out of the losing home report which was in this committee presented in this committee last year around this time and It was one of the things that were was in the report with the obstacles to survivors of domestic violence and all of the housing related issues that come up and when you are a survivor.

And so one of the items that came up was that survivors are often required to pay for damages to their unit that they did not cause but that the perpetrator of domestic violence causes.

And so the initial version of this bill essentially removed liability from the tenant if damage was done while they were occupying the unit by a perpetrator of domestic violence.

The item, the substitute bill that came up, that we are now currently discussing, which is 119658, incorporates a variety of amendments that we've been discussing in this committee, both in August and September.

What it does is the bulk of the bill removes liability from the tenant if they provide appropriate notification and documentation to a landlord that they are a victim of domestic violence, stalking, sexual assault, or unlawful harassment.

Just to note, the reason for the substitute bill was to add in those additional crimes.

And that required a title change, which is why we have the substitute.

So the tenant would have to provide the landlord with the documentation that says that they are a survivor, that it is the perpetrator that caused the property damage.

And if they provide those pieces of documentation, then they are no longer liable for the property damage that was incurred.

So what this bill does, this bill incorporates all of the amendments that were previously discussed, but has one significant new piece, which is the creation of a landlord mitigation program.

And so the intent of the program is in line with the rest of the bill in that it tries to keep any costs or consequences of the perpetrator's property damage to the unit from the survivor.

And so the mitigation program creates a, or will create a program under which a landlord can access funds to get reimbursed for the repairs of the costs of damage caused by a perpetrator of domestic violence, stalking, sexual harassment.

Nope, sexual assault or unlawful harassment.

And so essentially this program would be administered by the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections.

And so I'll just go through the pieces that a landlord has to satisfy before being eligible for reimbursement and then what is actually eligible for reimbursement.

So prior to applying, a landlord must make sure that their rental unit is registered under the Rental Registration and Inspection Ordinance.

They need to comply with the state law that requires completion of an inspection or a move-in checklist.

The landlord and tenant both have to sign that, and then the tenant has to be given a copy of that.

That's all just state law.

They have to have repaired the property damage.

Quick question.

Can a landlord under the second eligibility requirement, can they ask for a move-in check-in?

any time through the tenancy, or is it consistent with the requirement in state law that says it needs to be done at the beginning of the tenancy?

It's consistent with the state law, so it should be done at the beginning.

All right, thanks.

I'm just thinking, like, I could imagine the circumstances under which a landlord was anticipating the need, you know, based on damage done to the unit, anticipating the need to access the fund and then would go to the tenant at that time and ask them to do a checklist and so that would not be permitted.

That's correct.

The third item would be to actually repair the property damage and then the fourth is that the landlord will have had to submit an insurance claim and have had that claim denied.

So if all of those things are satisfied, then the landlord must submit materials to SDCI within a year's of the tenant's vacation of the rental unit.

And it's anticipated in the legislation that SDCI will be developing rules to govern exactly what needs to be submitted and what the application looks like.

But the legislation outlines that they would need to, the landlord would need to submit an application.

materials that substantiate the damage itself and the cost of repair.

I just note that the costs need to be normal and customary with work that has been done in the city of Seattle for similar damage.

The landlord would have to submit evidence that the property damage was caused by the perpetrator of domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, or unlawful harassment.

and that the damage occurred when the rental unit was occupied by the tenant, a member of their household, or their intimate partner, that one of those people is a victim of domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, or unlawful harassment, and the perpetrator was the same person that damaged the property.

And those last two are the elements that a tenant would have to submit to a landlord to be able to be eligible for the liability being taken away.

So my assumption is that that sort of documentation would be the same thing that would get submitted to SCCI.

And then, so the limit for the mitigation fund is for up to $1,000 in damage with the expectation that the landlord would contribute $500?

Yes.

And is that $500 part of the $1,000 or is the $1,000 what they can get above their payment of $500?

The $1,000 would be what they could get

above the $500, so they would pay the $500 and be eligible for it to get $1,000.

And again, this sort of cost sharing arrangement is the model that is used in state law for a landlord's ability to recover costs associated with the, that was enacted as part of the source of income discrimination legislation.

Yes, the state fund reimburses up to, I can't remember at this very moment, but it reimburses a specific amount for unpaid rent, utilities, attorney's fees, and recently for 100% of an eviction judgment.

But again, with the expectation that the landlord has to, it's a cost sharing model.

Yes, that's correct.

Just a couple additional pieces on the program.

Accessing the funds would require that the landlord waive any rights that they have to seek compensation from the tenant for those property damages.

It does not require that the landlord pursue the perpetrator for cost recovery, primarily because even though they're allowed to submit an insurance claim, if the city were to require that they pursue a perpetrator to be able to access the fund, conflict with safety issues in terms of whether the tenant feels it's safe to go after the perpetrator.

And so we did not include that as an actual requirement to access the fund.

However, if the landlord does choose to go after the perpetrator and receives recovery and has also received reimbursement from the fund, they would have to refund what they were reimbursed by the city for.

Lastly, the SCCI would be asked to develop rules to run the program and the legislation asks that those rules be completed by July 1st, 2020, which is the same date as the effective date of the Landlord Mitigation Program portion of the legislation.

the remainder of the legislation around the tenant not being liable would go into effect January 1st.

And so in those six months before the program is up and running, landlords would just have to make sure that they were keeping track of the substantiation and the receipts and all of those things, and then could submit their claim once the program is up and running.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

I have a couple just technical questions to understand how it functions.

On the amount, essentially there's a deductible that the landlord has to pay up to 500, then would the city reimburse the next 500 or the next 1,000?

The city would reimburse the next 1,000.

Got it.

So the landlord, so if there was a $3,000 worth of damage, the landlord would pay the first 500, the city the next 1,000, then it'd go back to the landlord.

Right.

Because that would be the maximum they could get.

That's correct.

It says the insurance claim has to have been denied.

So that would mean if a landlord, the insurance claim was approved, but they had a $2,000 deductible or something, the city doesn't come in and pay some of what they're liable.

It's only in the case where their insurance has refused to pay it.

That's right.

And I think there also was another addition that was requested from the housing provider stakeholders, the landlords, was they had asked, because it would assist them in making claims, language included in the ordinance itself that specifically says that the perpetrator is the liable party.

Were we able to include that as well?

So that is in a recital and so there we've added in a whereas clause that specifically says the formation of the program allows the city to relieve the burden on survivors to pay for damages and also support landlords who may not be able to recover damages from the perpetrator and who should be responsible for paying repairs.

Thank you.

So I really appreciate all the work that you've done, Asha, on this.

This has been a struggle, a challenge, a lot of competing important interests here.

I think it's really important in that we are, this legislation now creates a damage mitigation fund.

I think it's really important that we remember Why we started this effort in the first place though.

It wasn't it we didn't start this effort in order to compensate Housing providers for damages done to to apartments by the perpetrators of domestic violence we started this effort out of a belief that the victims and survivors of domestic violence should not be held and responsible for these damages.

And as I've said before, I'm frankly astonished that anybody would want to send a survivor of domestic violence a bill for the damage done to a unit by that person's abuser.

Nevertheless, in order to accomplish the underlying goals of the legislation, I recognize that we have to balance our principles with practicalities.

And in this case, the practicalities include addressing the concerns of landlords as it relates to these costs.

I also want to speak to the very real fact that these kinds of damages can be not just a burden to accessing rental housing after leaving a unit.

It can actually be a contributor to a person's homelessness status.

When you have a large bill hanging over your head, It can be very difficult to access a new unit.

So in our ongoing efforts to address the scourge of homelessness in our communities and in recognition that a significant portion of the population is homeless because of domestic violence.

incident, I'm really appreciative of your work and of the work of the tenants rights advocates who've brought this forward in helping us address all of these different policy goals.

So with that, if there are no further thoughts or questions, I'm going to call this to a vote.

Call away.

All right.

I move passage of Council Bill 1196-58.

I second.

All those in favor, vote aye.

Aye.

None opposed, none abstaining.

This will move on to full council on Monday.

Thank you.

Item three.

Agenda item three is council bill 119606, an ordinance relating to rental properties, restricting a landlord's ability to limit the number of persons residing in a rental unit, prohibiting the use of conditions that are applied to persons residing in a rental unit who are not tenants, and amending section 7.24020, and 030 of and adding new sections 7.24031 and 032 to the Seattle Municipal Code.

Asha Venkatraman, Council Central Staff.

And on this bill as well, we haven't been here quite as many times as we have been on the previous, but this is maybe the third discussion?

Take it away.

Okay.

So this is Council Bill 119-606, and the current state of the legislation is, we had discussed it primarily, or excuse me, we had discussed it initially on August 8th, and again on September 5th, and incorporated several amendments during the, I'm sorry, September 10th meeting.

And so what this bill does as amended is allows a tenant to live with their immediate family with one additional person who is not a member of their immediate family and that additional person's immediate family.

And the total number allowed in the unit is limited by the occupancy limits put in place by federal, state, and local law.

In addition, the proposal restricts a landlord from changing the number of people allowed in the unit if some roommates move out.

And it also prohibits a landlord from imposing any conditions that a tenant would not be subject to when adding people to the unit.

Currently, there is one exemption in the bill and it is an exemption for federally assisted housing units.

If the occupant is subject to a lifetime sex offender registration or is convicted of manufacturing or producing methamphetamines on the premises, that would require a landlord to deny tenancy.

And lastly, the proposal would require notice to the landlord of any residents in the unit who do not become parties to the rental agreement within 30 days after each of those persons begins occupancy.

So between the August meeting and the prior September meeting, there are a variety of issues and potential amendments that have come up for discussion.

And so if it would be helpful, I can go through each of the amendments.

And I don't know if you want to vote per amendment or wait till the end, but either way, I can take us through the next nine amendments.

Let's see, let's go one at a time.

So the first amendment is mostly technical and clarifying changes, but it looks a little complicated, so I'll just take us through it.

It's the first four pages of your attachment A.

The first correction is to the ordinance that last updated section 7.24020 and 030. It was previously, before we passed the harmonization bill that came out of SDCI a couple weeks ago, So we needed to correct the most recent reference.

The deletion of the definitions and the addition of the housing cost definition on page one are just a draft in code issue because we amended the term family and household members to immediate family.

It just needs to be in a separate place alphabetically.

On page two of attachment A at the top, this is just clarifying language.

It used to read factors that the court may consider in making this determination in the definition of immediate family.

We're just making that clearer to state that factors a court may consider in determining the existence of a dating relationship, as that is a term that is used previously in the definition.

Again, updating the last time the ordinance was amended.

And then starting in the middle of the page, on page two, we are, because we know which date the, when the ordinance is going to go into effect, we just put that in instead of the language around the effective date of the ordinance.

You'll see that the previously, the language that was previously in the bill has now been numbered and titled to make it a little bit easier to understand.

And so most of what you'll see under H1 is clarifying language.

The language that is crossed out and italicized in green is removed from the subsection one and placed into a new subsection four, which is in the middle of page three.

At the top of page three, this is just reordering the sentence to make it clearer about the notification to a landlord.

Subsection three moves language that used to be in 724031. You'll see the cross out of language at the bottom of page three that is now located in subsection H3.

And as I mentioned before, the language in subsection four is taken from what used to be just subsection H.

Lastly, on page four, we just removed a reference to subsection 7.24030I because it does not exist.

And again, just to summarize what you said when you started going through each of these, these are reorganizations of the bill, correcting typos and other drafting errors.

So all wholly technical changes.

Yes, nothing substantive.

All right, I will move amendment one.

Second.

All those in favor vote aye.

Aye.

None opposed, none abstaining.

Amendment one passes.

Okay, two.

Amendment number two, you'll see the specific language on page five of attachment A.

What this does is clarify the definition of immediate family.

So when we started discussing this bill, it was with the definition of family and household members, which included a very broad number of relationships.

And so in refining the bill, we've narrowed it to those persons that would typically be understood as immediate family.

So what we've done is removed adult persons who are presently residing together or who have resided together in the past.

That seems like it fits more accurately into a roommate definition.

Persons 16 years of age or older with whom a person 16 years of age or older has or has had a dating relationship.

It seems like a subset of the preceding relationship, so we've removed that.

and then removing stepchildren and grandchildren simply because the remainder of that sentence is referencing parents and step-parents.

So it doesn't remove the relationship, it just removes the terms that would be from a child's perspective as opposed to a parent's perspective, if that makes sense.

Councilmember Ryan, did you have, no?

Excuse me, and my recollection is that this is mirroring the immediate family definition in state law, is that correct?

No, this is the definition that we've been trying to put together over the past couple weeks to differentiate it from the family and household members definition that we got from the domestic violence bill.

Okay, thank you.

So, in that the efforts to make it more narrow, are we, are there concerns that we are either making it so narrow that folks that we should be considering have been taken out or that it is still too broad.

I was under the impression for some reason, I don't remember why, that there was a family member definition in state law that we were trying to replicate.

That's obviously wrong.

But it just, I guess I, would like to understand a little bit more about the impact of these changes.

Absolutely.

In terms of the adult persons who are presently residing together or have resided together in the past, that is a reference that could be, that is the relationship itself in the context that we want it to be, which is for partners to be able to live with each other, could be under the next relationship there.

So a person 16 years of age or older who are presently residing together or have resided together in the past.

who have or had had a dating relationship.

So anybody that would have been covered in that person's 16 years of age or older that we wanted to be covered in this definition would be covered.

And so taking out the adult persons who are presently residing together or who have resided together in the past doesn't remove partners from that definition.

It simply removes basically friends who would be living together that we wouldn't ordinarily define as immediate family.

Understood.

The piece around person 16 years of age or older with whom a person 16 years of age or older has or has had a dating relationship is also covered in the partners piece.

And so it's really more of a repetitive inclusion that I assume was in the domestic violence piece of the bill for a specific reason, but is not necessary in our definition of immediate family.

I said, okay, I think you've said it now twice and it took the second time for me to catch it.

There was an alignment issue with family, the family definition in the domestic violence legislation.

Yes.

That's what I was confusing with state law.

Okay.

Because family or household members is very broad in the domestic violence bill.

Got it.

And I mean, I think the reason why this distinction is important is because The folks who are defined as family members have different rights than the people who are defined as roommates, specifically as it relates to the definition of their participation in the tenancy and screening and so on and so forth.

So all right, thank you.

No further questions?

All right.

I will move passage of Amendment 2. Second.

All those in favor, vote aye.

Aye.

None opposed, none abstaining.

Amendment passes.

Okay.

Amendment number three, you'll find on page six of attachment A.

This essentially just replicates the language that was already passed in amendment one.

This is an error on my part, just the conditions of qualifying for and obtaining occupancy of a rental unit.

It just puts that language into the substantive language of the excuse me, into the substantive language.

So it just includes the term on the last line there, so that are beyond those imposed on a tenant to qualify for or obtain occupancy of a rental unit.

Thank you.

I'll move passage of Amendment 3. Those in favor, vote aye.

Aye.

None opposed, none abstaining.

Amendment passes.

Amendment four.

Amendment four clarifies the language around early vacation from a rental unit.

As the language was originally included, it didn't clarify that the vacation had to happen before expiration of the tenancy, and it didn't specify that the number of persons allowed to remain in the unit would be for the remainder of that tenancy.

And so it just makes clear that we're talking about before the term of the tenancy is completed is when these provisions would apply.

So help me understand the practical implications of that.

How would that function on the ground?

So without that language, it's not entirely clear that a tenant, let's say a tenant had a rental agreement for a year.

If they vacated the rental unit at the end of the year, these protections don't necessarily kick in because the term of the tenancy is over, you'd have to start a new term.

And so there isn't any remaining time for the tenant to have left or for the people that are residing in the unit to stay.

So practically, this would happen if the tenant left at nine months out of a 12-month term.

And so they would vacate before the expiration of the tenancy because the term was for a year.

And then you'd have the three months remaining for the persons who are occupying the unit to remain in the tenancy.

That makes sense.

All right.

And the passage of Amendment 4. All in favor vote aye.

Aye.

None opposed, none abstaining.

Amendment 4 passes.

Amendment 5. Okay, Amendment 5 you'll find on page 8 of Attachment A. And what this does is add specific provisions around who the landlord can require to be a party to the rental agreement.

In this, I just note that in this amendment and in amendment seven, there is a provision around the landlord being able to issue a written notice.

That's still, those provisions specifically are still being reviewed by the city attorney's office.

So it's possible that there may be changes that require further amendment, but it's just those specific pieces.

Substantively, what this amendment does is allow the landlord to require that any resident who is not a member of the tenant's immediate family become a party to the rental agreement.

If they fail to do so within 30 days after receiving the notice, then they are required to vacate within 45 days after receiving that notice.

And so the distinction here is, as you mentioned, between the tenant's immediate family and any other residents that are in the unit.

And the rationale for it is that a tenant doesn't have a choice about who their immediate family is, for better or for worse.

They are who they are.

And so you could end up in a situation in which the right to live with the tenant conflicts with the landlord's rights around who they are renting a unit to.

And so to avoid that conflict, the landlord thus is not required, excuse me, is not allowed to require the tenant's immediate family become a party.

They are just allowed to reside in the unit.

In terms of a roommate, so the additional resident and their immediate family, the identity of those persons aren't particularly relevant.

I mean, you might like to live with someone, but it doesn't prohibit you from living with somebody else.

And so those residents would have to, if the landlord would like them to become parties to the rental agreement, they would be required to.

So they would have to go through the same process as the tenant did to be able to live in the unit.

go through the same process and be held responsible for fulfilling the obligations under their rental agreement, just like the tenant, be subject to the same screening criteria.

All the same rights and responsibilities of being a tenant would accrue.

And so there's the possibility that they can be denied tenancy based on screening criteria at that point?

Yes.

And that's only for the roommate, not for the immediate family.

Thank you.

I move Amendment 5. Second.

All those in favor, vote aye.

Aye.

Aye.

None opposed, none abstaining.

Amendment 6. Amendment 6 is on page 9, and it sort of mirrors the one we just discussed.

A landlord can screen anyone in the unit.

They can screen a tenant, the tenant's immediate family, the additional resident, the additional resident's immediate family.

The distinction here is that the landlord can screen but cannot exclude any member of the immediate family from occupancy except subject to the federal exemption.

And so they have the information around screening for everybody that's in the unit.

And if the additional resident or the additional resident's immediate family doesn't meet the screening criteria, then they can be excluded from occupancy or denied becoming party to the rental agreement.

But that just doesn't apply with the immediate family for the same reasons that we just discussed around becoming party to the rental agreement.

The immediate family, the identity of that family is more relevant than the roommate's identity.

Thank you.

I move Amendment 6. Second.

All those in favor vote aye.

Aye.

None opposed, abstaining.

Amendment 6 passes.

Okay, amendment seven, you'll see on pages 10 and 11 of attachment A, and what this does is deal with what happens if a tenant vacates a rental unit early.

And the initial intent of this was to deal with a situation in which a tenant dies, for example, before their term is, before the, excuse me, term of the tenancy is up, and what happens to the remaining people that are residing in that unit when that happens.

And so, In terms of, so this is separated into subsections A, B, and C.

A deals with the tenant's immediate family.

And so in the same way as they were, they're going to be treated under the previous two amendments, the landlord can require that they become parties to the rental agreement.

subject to the same terms in the agreement that applied to the vacating tenant.

They can also screen the tenant's immediate family, but cannot exclude anybody from the immediate family from becoming a party to the rental agreement based on that information, except for the federal exemption piece.

For additional residents of the rental unit, the landlord may excuse me, they may become parties to the rental agreement as well, subject to the same terms as the vacating tenant, but they have to have resided in the rental unit for six months prior to the tenant's vacation, and the landlord may screen, excuse me, may screen these additional residents to determine whether they are allowed to become parties to the rental agreement.

Subsection C will allow the landlord to issue a notice to the parties already discussed.

And if the resident fails to become party to the rental agreement within 30 days of getting the notice, they're required to vacate the unit.

And this subsection C is another one of them that is being reviewed by the city attorney's office at the moment.

And so roommates, have the right to continue occupying the unit if they've lived, if they've fulfilled the rescreening requirements, but they have a period of six months that they have to have lived in the property.

Yes.

Family members, there's no particular time period, is that correct?

That's correct.

Okay.

And...

And just, if you could just talk a little bit about what does it mean to become a party to the rental agreement?

It simply means to sign a rental agreement.

Yes, but it's worded like that because sometimes rental agreements aren't in writing, and so it would, if it was an oral agreement, they would become parties to the rental agreement by, through orally agreeing to that.

Otherwise, it's just signing the lease.

All right, I move passage of Amendment 7. Second.

All those in favor vote aye.

Aye.

Opposed and abstaining.

Okay, amendment eight.

Amendment number eight you'll find on page 12 of attachment A.

And what this does is adds one additional exemption to the bill.

And so it would exempt owners that occupy their dwelling unit or an accessory dwelling unit from this legislation.

And the intent here is really to protect the owner's right to live with whoever they want to.

So if they own the property, they're living in their home, and they have a renter in the property, they are exempt from sharing their living space, essentially, excuse me, not exempt, they are entitled to figure out who they're living with and sharing living, eating space with.

And so that specific circumstance is exempted from this legislation.

Just to make sure I understand, so if the property owner is renting out a room or part of the house or whatever to, then that tenant doesn't have the, the rights that we talked about here.

They can't bring in family members because they'd be roommates with a kid.

Great.

I move Amendment 8.

Second.

All those in favor vote aye.

Aye.

And opposed, abstaining.

Amendment 8 passes.

Last one.

Yes, amendment number nine, excuse me, is on page 13. And what this does is changes the effective date of the legislation to, and it pushes it out to July 1st, 2020 to allow for outreach for SDCI to be able to stand up the resources they need to operationalize this bill.

And the other changes adjust instead of December 31st, 2019 for rental agreements, it changes it to June 30th, 2020. So any rental agreement that's entered into after that date is subject to this legislation.

Great.

Thank you.

Really appreciate the work of SDCI.

We'll talk more about that in a minute with some of these other bills.

But definitely want to be able to give them the opportunity to engage with rental housing providers about the new obligations under this bill.

So I think it's a good idea to give them a little bit more time.

Move passage of Amendment 9.

Second.

All those in favor vote aye.

Aye.

None opposed, none abstaining.

Amendment 9 passes.

So if there's nothing further I think we'll have the main motion in front of us.

Again, really appreciative of the work of tenant advocates as well as landlords in collaborating and proposing changes to the bill that I think does a nice job of balancing a lot of needs in a high rent environment that we experience here in Seattle.

As we all know, living with roommates and family members can be necessary to help afford rent.

And we know here in Seattle that the average housing wage, what it costs to afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rate, is about $36.52, a salary of almost $76,000 a year for the Seattle-Bellevue area.

So that's twice the minimum wage.

So you can certainly see why it is that folks would need to have more than one income earner in order to afford to live in the city.

And I think this helps make that more possible while also protecting the interests of rental housing providers to be able to screen tenants and be aware of who they're renting to.

I think in a previous version of the bill, we also included language that said that landlords have a right to be notified of all the tenants in the building, including roommates.

So with that, I'd like to move passage 119606. All those in favor, vote aye.

Aye.

None opposed, none abstaining.

This will move on to full council.

Thank you again, Asha.

Item number four.

Agenda item four is Council Bill 119619, an ordinance relating to notices to residential rental tenants requiring certain notices to contain a reference to city landlord tenant information and resources and amending section 22.206.10180 of the Seattle Municipal Code.

We've had this is our second discussion.

We had Seattle Department of Construction Inspection come and present on the legislation when we actually had it.

They also came and talked to us a little bit before when it was still in the introduction referral process.

Asha, I want to give a quick overview of what this bill does.

So this bill requires a statement on all notices to terminate tenancies, to enter units, or to increase housing costs.

And that statement would refer tenants to city resources to find out their rights, their responsibilities, any resources.

And so SDCI plans to promulgate a director's rule to develop the specific statement language.

But as it stands, this is already required on notices to increase housing costs.

And so it would just additionally require as that statement appear on notices to terminate tenancy and notices to enter a tenant's rental property.

STCI just indicated that the intent of the bill was to be able to provide resources to tenants as soon as their rights are impacted so that they can access any resources or information that they need, hopefully before they end up in a housing crisis.

So again, the information about folks' rights relates to specific actions that a rental housing provider might take.

So when you get a notice to terminate tenancy, what you're that you have a right to be evicted with cause and all that stuff.

But also, so not just information about your rights, but information about resources of folks who you can turn to, is that correct?

Yes, I believe that is correct.

All right, with that, I move passage of Council Bill 119619. Second.

All those in favor, vote aye.

Aye.

None opposed, none abstaining.

Council Bill 119619 passes, and we'll move on to full council.

Item five.

Item 5 is Council Bill 119620, an ordinance relating to residential rent payments requiring receipts and non-electronic payment options and amending section 7.24.030 of the Seattle Municipal Code.

Thank you, Noel.

So again, this also is the second time we've discussed the bill.

This is the third time we've discussed the topic.

SDCI has been and visited us twice about this topic and once was when we had the actual bill before us.

And there's been some confusion about this bill and that it does not create an outright right for tenants to pay in cash, which was some of the confusion that folks had had before.

But what it does do is it doesn't allow landlords to require electronic payments.

Is that correct?

Yes, that's right.

Thank you.

And you want to give a quick overview on that?

So currently state law requires, so this bill has two pieces to it, the requiring receipts for cash payments and the non-electronic piece.

So in terms of the receipts for cash payments, state law already requires that a landlord is required to provide a receipt and upon for, excuse me, required to provide a receipt for cash payments and for any other type of payment upon the tenant's request.

So what this does is puts that piece of the code into the Seattle Municipal Code so that SDCI can enforce violations of that requirement.

The second piece of the bill is a new right, which would require landlords to provide tenants with a non-electronic means to pay rent and housing costs.

So as you mentioned, this is not a right to provide rent or housing costs in cash, simply a non-electronic version, which could be something like money orders.

And so the reason for this is because paying electronically can be problematic for people that are not technologically savvy, don't necessarily have access to the internet, don't use traditional banking services.

And in addition, because many online portals can add convenience fees for credit card payments, which essentially raises, in practicality, raises the rent for people that are low income.

And so this additional right, I just reiterate, the payment does not have to be in cash.

Landlords don't have to change any current practices around not accepting cash payments.

It's simply non-electronic means.

And what is the means by which SDCI would enforce this?

So if a landlord was trying to make a tenant pay electronically, what would happen?

The tenant could essentially call and say, tell SDCI that this is happening, and SDCI would then go through their normal enforcement provisions to tell the landlord that that is not something that they're allowed to do, and to that extent could issue a citation or a notice of violation.

Great.

Thank you.

Okay, any questions?

No?

All right.

I will move passage of Council Bill 119620. I'll second.

All those in favor, vote aye.

Aye.

Opposed and abstaining.

The final Tenants' Rights Bill, item six, null.

Okay, item six is Council Bill 119621, an ordinance relating to termination of residential rental tenancies requiring compliance with the rental registration and inspections ordinance before issuing notices to terminate a tenancy and amending sections 22.206.160 and 22.214.075 of the Seattle Municipal Code.

Asha Venkatraman, Council Central staff.

I know, it's a shocking appearance by me.

So as mentioned in the title, this would require compliance with RIO before issuing notices to terminate a tenancy.

Under the current law, landlords are required to register under the Rental Registration and Inspection Ordinance, but only before a court order that enters an eviction judgment.

That can be as late as the day that the court actually orders the eviction.

So they could do it this morning, that morning, and then the court could issue an eviction.

So what this does instead is to amend the code to say that landlords have to register their units before even issuing a notice to terminate the tenancy.

So landlords are required to remedy any failure around registration before they can issue a notice to a tenant that they are evicting them.

Any notices that were issued by unregistered landlords would not meet the provisions for just cause.

They wouldn't actually be able to evict the person.

But landlords that aren't currently required to register with Rio aren't affected by this new change.

And so the practical effect of that would be that landlords who fail to meet their obligations under Rio, and they're heading towards the eviction process, maybe they have a court date scheduled, they would actually have to start the process all over again.

Yes.

And reissue a new notice.

Yes.

Great.

That's great.

All right, move passage of Council Bill 119621. All second.

All right, all in favor vote aye.

Aye.

Aye.

None opposed, none abstaining, and this will move on to full council on Monday.

Thank you so much, Asha.

It's been great.

I really appreciate it.

It's a bit of a slog, but we've got through it.

All right, let's move on.

Your expertise has been very valuable, so thank you so much.

Yes, for sure.

We will move on to item number seven, please, Noel.

10 item 7 is council bill 119639 an ordinance relating to Seattle Public Utilities declaring certain real property rights to be surplus to the needs of Seattle Public Utilities and authorizing the general manager CEO of Seattle Public Utilities to execute an easement agreement with Little Green Valley LLC, a Washington limited liability company, Nancy J. Gleason, Ron L. Nickel, a.k.a. Ronald L. Nickel, and Sandra Flint Nickel, husband and wife, William H. Flint, the heirs of Charles Eugene Flint, and Joan H. Zimmerman, allowing the use of certain City of Seattle property in the north half of the southwest quarter of Section 5, Township 22 North, Range 6 East, W.M.

and King County, Washington, for access purposes.

All right, great.

Thank you, Noel.

Before we get started, I just want to make a quick note that this item does require a public hearing.

So after the presentation, we'll take a pause, see if anybody signed up for public testimony.

Hear that if there is any, and we'll move on from there.

Introductions, please.

Brian Goodnight, Council of Central Staff.

Bob Gamble, Seattle Public Utilities, Senior Real Property Agent.

Good morning.

Judith Cross, Director of Real Property, Seattle Public Utilities.

Who would like to get us started?

Noel, could you provide some assistance with the presentation?

Thank you.

Legislation we have today is for an easement agreement with Little Green Valley, LLC.

over the City of Seattle Cedar River pipeline right-of-way.

The purpose for entering this easement agreement are to clarify the rights to use access road by neighboring Little Green Valley property owners and protect the city's utility operations, assign maintenance responsibilities to the property owners, and settle a 2017 lawsuit filed against the city and King County.

The location of this easement is near Fairwood, between Fairwood and Maple Valley, out near our Lake Youngs Reservoir site.

And a close-up to this shows, what we show here is, in yellow, is the Seattle Public Utilities right-of-way for its Lake Youngs supply line pipeline.

You have Petrovitsky Road that crosses the right-of-way on the left side of the picture and more or less follows parallel south of the right-of-way.

And the red indicates where the easement would be to serve the property that's outlined in the blue as shown up there.

And is that, sorry, is that property like a single property or is it like a community within that?

It's a community, a family community.

Okay.

I believe there's six parcels there with one family.

One family.

Got it.

And that's Little Green Valley?

That's the Little Green Valley LLC.

And so that is, Little Green Valley is an LLC that's been created for the purposes of jointly owning this property.

Apparently, I don't know all the details could just wasn't sure if it was a place or a business or I got it now though a family corporation And can you talk a little bit about what the the lawsuit against the city and the county that we're settling with the seizement alleges The big problem for them is there is no legal access to their property

that's convenient.

Nobody knows exactly when this all started, but when the pipeline was put in probably 100 and some years ago, there were very few roads out in the area.

So the pipeline road was used.

by folks to access property and come into Seattle and all kinds of things.

So at some...

So there's a road above the pipeline or, you know, in the pipeline easement?

The pipeline right-of-way road, maintenance road, basically.

And when Petrovitsky was built, I believe in the 60s, it's up on top of a hill that cannot, you can't get down to this property from Petrovitsky.

So they've continued to use the, right-of-way.

And it's not fenced off or anything like that?

We do have a fence that controls access.

They have a key to that fence to get in and out.

Isn't it true that the dirt road is currently used to access the King County Park as well?

The King County Park is just north of our right-of-way there, including that lake that you can see.

And the right-of-way near Petrovitzky is used quite a bit by people that go to the park.

They park on our right-of-way there.

Is there not a fence on that end of the pipe?

The fence is further to the right.

The gate is actually quite a ways down.

I believe it's very close to where it leaves our right-of-way and goes onto the park property.

And so this, there's been a relationship for years, formal or informal it sounds like, and then something happened recently that triggered a lawsuit and this resolution?

Probably the biggest thing is finance institutions have gotten probably more sophisticated about what they expect to have.

As far as legal access rights, when people go to refinance a property or finance a property, they look at the title, and if they can't figure out how they have a legal access, then that restricts their financing ability.

And they did have a permit from us to use this right-of-way all this time, but that wasn't good enough apparently for the financial institutions, and so they, had the problem with ourselves and King County crossing the park there.

So they filed this suit to get a resolution to a permanent access.

And this is what they agreed to was an easement access across our property and King County's property.

And so this settles their claim against King County as well, this action.

And this easement, is it in perpetuity?

And so $3,500 and I'm assuming it doesn't impact our ability to maintain and service the pipeline and No, we feel that it actually in many ways will help protect the integrity of our right-of-way in our pipeline because there are limitations put in the easement as to how many Properties can be developed.

It couldn't be hundreds of units out there.

It probably couldn't happen just organically, but you never know.

Yeah.

If somebody decided to put a hundred unit apartment complex down there.

A lot of traffic back and forth.

We could have a lot of traffic, whereas this way we're limiting to how much will be there for now.

Great.

All right.

Let's move into the public hearing portion of this item.

And there's nobody signed up for public comment.

All right, great.

Do you have any other questions?

With that, I will open and close the public hearing and move passage of, get back, get my bill number, move passage of Council Bill 119639.

I'll second.

Can I ask one other question?

Oh, of course.

Sorry.

The $3,500, was that arrived at a typical how we do a land value assessment or legal negotiation or?

It was part of the settlement.

Yeah.

And the number was decided on as part of the settlement of the case.

Okay.

Great.

With that, I move.

Do you second it?

I call for a vote.

passage of Council Bill 1196-39.

All in favor?

Aye.

None opposed?

None abstaining?

This will move on to full Council on Monday.

Thank you all.

Appreciate it.

Thank you.

Suspend the rules to vote on the same day of the public hearing.

Why don't we do that just for fun?

Okay.

I don't know if that was just for land use, but let's just do it just for fun.

Yeah, move to suspend the rules.

I second that.

Thank you.

All in favor?

Aye.

Retroactively suspend those.

Thanks, great work on this.

Item eight.

Agenda item eight is a cultural space update.

I can move on if you want.

Welcome, hello.

Thank you all for joining us.

Let's start off with some introduction, please.

I'm Randy Engstrom.

I'm the Director of the Office of Arts and Culture.

Thank you.

I'm Sarah Wilke.

I'm one of the chairs of the Facilities and Equitable Development Committee on the Arts Commission.

Alice Lockhart, 350 Seattle.

Thank you.

Matthew Richter, Office of Arts and Culture.

Fantastic.

Hi, I'm Cassie Chin, also on the Seattle Arts Commission and co-chair of the Facilities and Equitable Development Committee.

All right.

Wonderful.

Thank you all.

I can't do the wrong thing.

I thought we were on the last thing.

I am so sorry.

I was like, whoa, Alice is involved in cultural space too.

This is crazy.

I adore cultural space.

We'll see you in a couple minutes.

That's really funny.

Lisa must have invited somebody in Delos.

That's a blast, you guys.

All right, let's get right into it.

This gives me like a hope for future when I'm no longer on the council.

I'm going to start.

You can just sneak in the presentations and grab a seat.

Although I shouldn't be telling the security.

Hashtag pro tip.

I think I'm supposed to set this up, if that's okay.

So thank you for having us.

And Council Member O'Brien, I don't know how many more times I'll sit across from the table with you after seven years in this job.

It's been a pleasure.

So anyway, appreciate you.

So as you know, we've been stewarding a cultural space program aimed at creating affordability solutions for artists and cultural workers and creatives in our city for the last six years under the leadership of Matthew Richter.

And before that, under the leadership of Cassie Chin and the Facilities and Equitable Development Committee of the Seattle Arts Commission, championed for a long time by Nick Licata, and then also by Council Member Lisa Herbold.

About a year and a half ago, we released the CAP report, which is 30 ideas for the creation, activation, and preservation of cultural space in our city.

One of those ideas was so substantial that it led to its own report, which is now the Structure for Stability, the exploration of what a cultural space public development authority could look like, how it could be designed, and what it could do.

I'm mostly teeing up this first slide, one, to just acknowledge the absolutely heroic work of both Matthew and the Arts Commission, but also of all of these other people on this slide.

I've never in seven years worked on a project that had this much collaborative support from community, from departments, from the mayor's office, from city council, from the commission.

We've done multiple racial equity toolkits on this through the process.

It has only strengthened our work.

And I think the predicate of all of this is that in a city that has 100,000 more people than when I started this job, and where rent is going up seemingly by the minute, we need new tools to create and preserve long-term affordability, and specifically we need those tools to stand in our racial equity values.

And so I hope that what you'll hear today is our best thinking towards that end.

We are still in the process.

This is an incredibly complex instrument that we are aiming to design.

And so we are still sort of on the road, but the mile markers are getting smaller as we near what I hope is reality.

So with that, I will turn it over to Matthew.

But thanks again for your continued support of this work.

Absolutely.

I'm so excited about this report and your recommendations and was excited when I first heard about the idea.

Really glad you guys are thinking outside of the box and being creative and keeping the problem that we're trying to solve at the center and the people who this problem impacts.

So thank you all and Matthew, take it away.

Thank you.

I'm actually going to turn it over to Cassie Chin who's going to start us off with the values in which this organization is being centered.

Sure, we definitely want to give thanks to the Build Arts Space Equity Cohort, the Seattle Arts Commission, the Facilities and Equitable Development Committee, as well as the many focus group participants who wanted to ensure going forward that we articulated and centered values.

and wanted to establish them as an ongoing guiding foundation going forward to be able to keep whatever is created on a sure path.

You can see the values that they've articulated.

They want to continue this focus on racial equity and centering that through the work.

They also noted that this was an exciting opportunity to find and propel the nexus between cultural capital, social capital, and financial capital, and how to bring all of those together in amazing, innovative ways.

With that said, they noted that we also need to be continually learning.

I'm excited about the cultural space potential for this PDA because it's not set on one single fixed single project.

There's many possibilities for its application and for its ability to be used as a tool to address affordability issues as well as displacement issues around cultural space.

So we're excited about that.

The last two values are also significant and important and probably at the crux of this proposal as well because the idea is to use this as a tool to build community ownership and wealth.

And really think of it as that aspect we know that inequities exist historically a long time in Seattle based on race, on the ability to accumulate and acquire wealth and this is a way to be able to do that.

And then they noted that governance is key.

Who decides?

Who decides?

Being able to ensure community-led decision-making and guidance, ensure ongoing community engagement, but also that decision-making power.

Quick question on that.

Because that is so important, I think that really speaks to the governance model of a PDA.

And I note that in your acknowledgements, you have identified Mr. Jerry Johnson as a contributor to this report.

And as we all know, he has been instrumental to the creation of many, many PDAs in the city.

Maybe he might have had his fingers on most of them.

Definitely not all, but most of them.

Is, are we anticipating a different type of governance structure than we've seen before with this understanding that the who decides is so important?

It is important and it shows up in another couple of slides in the presentation.

I'll see it later.

You're going to see it later.

And yeah, Jerry was one of the first people that we reached out to and will likely be one of the last that we'll loop back around to again in the process.

This is one of those slides.

You know, taking that idea and really trying to figure out what is the best way to govern that can advance the city's priorities while keeping that oversight and the deep investment and process from community that we continue to hear really is going to be a continuing balancing act as we move forward and looking for mechanisms that can allow for that balance.

And one of those opportunities is really in board membership.

And we've been looking at a model where a third of the board membership could be the city-appointed board, but looking at that coming from a cross-departmental team of people who already have the expertise because they've been working on these types of initiatives.

And then balancing that with a third of community from the facilities and equitable development and a third brought in by the EDI project and kind of creating a balance that way.

Also in looking at kind of the city powering of this and the bonding authority, looking at the Office of Arts and Culture bringing forth operating subsidy funds that are already allocated from our budget right from the start.

And then once that bonding mechanism comes into place, reallocating those towards that debt repayment in a similar way analogous to Langston.

And then kind of as we're thinking about good governance and looking at what is responsible stewarding of those resources, using the expertise of city and the passion of community, really thinking about the successful models that already exist, one of which being the Office of Arts and Culture's long history of peer panel reviews to be able to allocate, at this point, over $50 million in a really responsible way.

So looking at those examples that already exist.

And the real crux of this, as Cassie pointed out, is really building community wealth and doing everything that we can to continue to bring together the gap that disproportionately exists between those that are adding vibrancy and value into a community and those that are typically benefiting from that value that's been added, which are often non-local developers.

And building community wealth can come from a lot of different strategies.

Just a few of them are here, but we think about equitable equity as.

kind of proportional ownership and proportional benefits coming out, and that that really needs to be the center of this.

There can be strategies, anything that we've looked at from individual shares that are owned by community members to partnering with social impact investors who are capping what their return is on a project, and then anything above that goes back into the project from which they've benefited.

Stacked affordability strategies is something that's come right out of our work.

And that is always partnering affordable residential and commercial along with new cultural so that the entire community can grow from an area like that rather than displacement.

And that's really what it's about.

It's about being able to share and grow that wealth from the people who have developed that value.

And so this concept of individual shares being owned by the community, is that the Mercy Corps model that we've seen in Portland?

analogous to that, yeah?

Yeah, that's super exciting.

I'd be really interested in maybe having another focus conversation about that model.

It seems incredibly powerful to be deployed in a targeted way.

And would love to get those folks up here to talk about what they've been able to do in Portland.

Glad that you guys are taking a look at that as well.

There are three different projects in Portland that are all experimenting with individually owned shares out in community and we're looking forward to bringing folks from all three up for a conversation.

Yeah, I've probably printed out and given copies of that the report that I happen to have, to anybody who talks to me about equitable development.

So it's really an exciting idea.

I think to Cassie's point about always be learning, there are really interesting models popping up everywhere because this issue of affordability is a crisis in most cities.

And so who's doing what, how can we learn from each other, and how can we ground that in our values?

There's a real opportunity, and Portland is doing some really interesting stuff.

How does With community ownership who holds the ownership is the entity or individuals or is that kind of the thing?

We're trying to figure out it is one thing.

We're trying to figure out ideally it is both individuals in the community who can own individually scaled shares, something that individual folks can buy.

It would also be represented by nonprofits, community organizations that could aggregate some funds from the community and could leverage philanthropy into those investments.

And then it would be social impact investors, folks who are willing to cap their return on investment and let anything above that cap return back to the project itself.

And is it, how do we think about long-term affordability?

I mean, we look at, like, limited equity co-ops where, you know, whoever's in at the front end, hopefully there's some equity there, but also when they move on to something else and someone else comes in, it's not like.

It's a one-time deal.

Yeah, clearly it's not going to be a very liquid market, but that there is some liquidity built in so that there's some fungibility, some replacement of capital in these projects, and that that replacement pool be limited to the community as defined, whether that's geographic, community, cultural community, et cetera.

Great.

I get the really fun slide.

So this gets into a little bit more technical detail about what we're talking about actually launching.

At the center there, you see two, what we're referring to as twinned organizations, a public development authority and a nonprofit corporation.

We're referring to all of this as a constellation of organizations because that's really where this report landed in terms of organizational recommendations is that you need a little bit of everything in order to make this actually work.

So at the core, you see a PDA and a nonprofit that from the public's perspective, there's very little differentiation between them.

They would likely share a board of directors, share staff.

They would each do functions that were more suited to the corporate type.

but from the public's perspective, it would be one organization there in the middle.

At the upper left there, you see governance, and there's three prongs of that governance structure.

One is an interdepartmental team.

So in a public development authority, typically city government gets to place a certain number of seats on that board, and typically you pick community members whose work aligns with the work of the PDA.

The twist on that that we're proposing is that it'd actually be city staff, that it'd be folks who actually represent the departments involved in the work.

And so we would create an interdepartmental team, and the members of that interdepartmental team would sit on the board of directors of the PDA and the nonprofit as well.

The second prong would be the Equitable Development Initiatives Interim Advisory Board, or Permanent Advisory Board, once established.

Representatives from that board would have a third of the seats, and representatives from the Facilities and Equitable Development Committee of the Seattle Arts Commission would be the final third of those seats.

There's some mechanisms built into again, marry both community vetting and city government vetting in each of these sort of three prongs that we'll get to when we get to that lower right as well.

So hold our questions about the governance.

You said you're going to...

No, now's the time.

Now's a good time.

Okay.

So the interdepartmental team, those will be representatives of city departments whose work touches on the issues related to cultural space.

The EDI board, that's a mix also, not also, that is a mix of city staff and members of the public.

The board, I believe, is just members of the public, is that right?

Yes.

Yeah, I'm actually on the interim EDI board as well.

And it, they're in the process of establishing the, the not interim board and what guides that.

But the baseline for that is that it's directly people who are involved in the work, involved in, Members of the public, yeah.

And what we found over this past work that there's a lot of overlap actually between folks who are involved in EDI with the build art space equitably cohort and then individual security and cultural space.

So we can see that this is a really strong opportunity to build strength together.

And then the third leg, that also is a group of folks that are exclusively members of the public.

There have been other city staff from other departments, like from the EDI team or from OFM on the Fed in the past.

I think the goal here is that those two thirds would be community members, not city staff.

The city staff would be the other third.

And specifically drawing from housing, OED, DON, EDI, the folks who we've built this model closely with.

The shared equity instruments is the mechanisms that actually own the properties that we're talking about, and those would likely be LLCs or another type of for-profit corporate structure.

The shares of those instruments could be, they would be subsidiary to the PDA.

Community partners would be investors in that, and that's both individual investors, share investors, and also non-profits.

Housing partners would be involved in that.

Again, we're talking about And constantly stacking affordability strategies, combining residential, commercial, and cultural affordability on a single site.

And so housing partners would be equity members of those instruments as well, and social impact investors who again would cap their return.

The connection to community in the lower right.

There's a mechanism in when you create a nonprofit or a PDA.

In nonprofits, they're called memberships.

And in PDAs, they're called constituencies.

And they're basically an option that you can either create or not to ensure community control.

Members of REI get to vote on a slate of board candidates every year by mailer.

That's one of the benefits of membership.

So, that is another layer of community control of these organizations.

I don't know how many of our PDA, I mean, obviously, the one that comes to mind is the Pipe Place Market PDA.

They have a separate group called the constituency.

Right.

I don't know how many of our PDAs have that.

About half of them do.

SCIPTA comes to mind as an organization that had a constituency and then let it lapse, moved to a non-constituency model.

Okay.

The BASE cohort, so we've been running this cohort for about a year and a half now.

It stands for Build Artspace Equitably, and it's a group of about 20 people, all people of color, coming from both the cultural community and from the commercial real estate community, working together for a year to learn about the other side of that divide and to create, ultimately, an army of folks who can then turn around and hack commercial real estate to make it more equitable.

And there would be some role for the base cohort in this structure, whether it's that is the membership and constituency, you need to be certified in order to serve on one of those boards.

We've also talked about them as an advisory board that brings projects to the organization.

And then the Fed Committee, Facilities and Equitable Development Committee of the Arts Commission, again, providing a layer of connection to community.

And then in the upper right, the funded development, we're talking about philanthropy and what the city can leverage through its investments in this organization from the philanthropy world, from development partnerships with, for example, housing providers, and from the investment caps, again, from the social impact investors.

That's all money that accrues to that central area that is the nonprofit and the PBA.

I'm going to leave this slide unless there's more structural questions.

Let me state back my understanding of this.

So there's this parent entity, which is a hybrid of a PDA and a nonprofit, but fairly transparent to the public that it's just this parent agency that is doing this work.

Years from now, they will, in theory, be invested in multiple projects around the city.

Each project will have separate partners.

So there might be some investors that come in that are mission driven.

There may be a partner that's a straight-up affordable housing that is running a couple floors on that and brought some own resources to that.

And each project might have a different mix of this.

But the overall mission of the parent organization is we'll be driving that.

And that's controlled by the mix of governance and there's other access for community members to.

Correct.

So each of those individual projects, basically each of those spaces or each of those buildings would have its own where I say shared equity instruments, its own LLC, its own corporation that would own it.

And each of those LLCs could have a different mix of investors in it.

And that's not, I mean, I don't know a ton about commercial real estate, but it's probably not terribly different than.

oftentimes we'll see a company's name on it, but each project is like, oh yeah, banks, investors, we got a different mix and everything.

They're all separate LLCs.

It's the 123 Main Street LLC that owns 123 Main.

When I got hired to run Youngstown Cultural Arts Center, there were six different ownership entities for, there was the housing, there was the tax credits, there was the cultural condo on the ground floor.

It's not unusual to have to use layers of ownership in order to access the various resources that exist.

And I should say too that that pairing of the non-profit and the PDA is also really common.

We didn't find, I think we found one of the eight PDAs in Seattle that didn't have a paired non-profit.

Sorry.

Yeah, just back on that one more time.

Sorry.

But the input to, under the connection to community, for the membership and constituency, in this model, it goes up to the nonprofit corporation instead of over to the PDA.

That looks like that might be a little bit different.

That's a little bit misleading, actually, because the arrows are all pointed to that central core.

They're not necessarily intended to point to one side of the PDA or nonprofit, yeah.

All right.

Thank you.

In terms of what mechanisms of property control this thing would employ, it's really a spectrum from sort of the lightest touch, which might be management for a fee, where the PDA nonprofit does not have site control, but it manages a series of projects in the space for a landlord, for someone else.

It could master lease space and then sublease it.

It could buy individual spaces in a larger building as commercial condo space.

It could acquire Property and soup to nuts and manage it or it could develop property from the ground up with partners as well So a spectrum of site control options there And then a spectrum of projects that would go into these as well.

And so each of the footprints would contain both I'm sorry, not each of the footprints would contain all of these but could potentially contain a Individual artists, and what we really mean there is generative space, studio space, rehearsal space, project space.

Presentation projects, a show, an exhibition that pops up and intentionally has a lifespan and then closes a month or two later.

Pop-up experiments, which are new organizations or organizations taking over space for the first time that are intended to stabilize, but maybe not in that space.

Using that space as the safety net, the training wheel space to launch a new experiment.

Arts and cultural organizations partnering with Onyx Fine Arts, partnering with Northwest TAP to go into a space together.

And then communities serving small businesses.

So we're not closing the door to small locally owned for profit community facing, community serving small businesses in these footprints as well.

So you might have a coffee shop in one of them as well.

And so in the instance that you would have a community-serving small business within the arts space that's owned by the PDA, what would be the relationship there?

Is it just a rental relationship or something also unique?

I would imagine that it could be any of the relationships that we would have with arts organizations as well.

That it could be a co-ownership model, it could be just a simple lease model.

And it would be always in a mix of uses.

I don't think that the space agency, as we've been referring to it for short, would go into a site where the sole tenant, the sole presence on the site would be a for-profit small business, that that would be an ancillary use to a visual arts use, a music use, a theater use, an artist studio use, would also then have potentially a small business added to it.

I would also note one of the strengths of this model is the ability to help and provide capacity building for organizations or individuals, depending on where they are in the spectrum, towards cultural space.

I think about the experience of the Wing Luke Museum itself.

In our previous home, we were renting, leasing in a building that was managed by the Seattle Chinatown International District Preservation Development Authority on our pathway to ownership.

definitely can help meet the need that we've also heard from a host of people saying, how can we find and learn about how to do this along the way?

Ta-da.

So what are the next steps?

What happens next?

There are multiple paths that this organization can take over the course of the next 12 months and we're really planning for three different options depending on how various funding discussions and property use discussions play out in the next two to three months really.

There would be likely the launch of a non-profit before the end of this year to begin with some administrative tasks.

And then we would be looking at launching the PDA, which would be a legislative act in the first quarter of 2020.

One of the interesting things is the city hasn't legislated a PDA in several decades.

There are no digital copies of however we did that before, and the person that did it is now retired.

So there's- We've got one right now.

Well, and we want to measure twice and cut once.

and we want to make sure we get it right.

We also want to make sure this is complementary and not competitive with our housing affordability agenda, our strategic investment agenda.

There's a lot of moving parts that this entity could play a helpful role in.

But if we get ahead of ourselves in legislating it, we could miss out on some opportunities.

So it's a little bit about timing.

I do think that The nonprofit is our opportunity to incubate the governance model and really dial that in.

At the end of the day, that might be the most important decision that we make.

Who's going to decide?

Who's going to decide?

And so really spending our time with that.

And then if we feel like the city is really ready to go, then I think we have to do some due diligence around our potential funding partners and philanthropy partners and know who's going to go with us.

And how will this PDA be different than, for instance, 4Culture?

Well, 4Culture, who is one of the partners we talked to in this work, they're dedicated revenue of their lodging tax is committed to doing all of the things that the Office of Arts and Culture currently does.

They run a public art program, several grant funding programs, they maintain a gallery space.

They could do this if they wanted to.

This is not where they are choosing to go as an organization, which is completely fine.

I think Matthew said this a number of times, that this organization at the end of the day will be about developing and sustaining physical space.

That's its mission.

That's what it does.

It isn't a funder.

It doesn't do public art.

It doesn't do programming.

It holds space, and that's what its last dollar will be for.

It allows for things like 4Culture or the EDI or other folks with dedicated capacity to partner into it.

If 4Culture wants to do that with a part of their revenue, they also have the responsibility of serving an entire county, whereas we're pretty focused on the city.

I think it's helpful to make that distinction.

You know, government is often accused of duplicating our efforts and I think this is a very, maybe using a similar structure but towards a different set of ends and addressing a different set of challenges that I think may not be unique to Seattle may also be shared by the county, but it's one that we've put a lot of smart people and passionate people together to come up with some ways to move forward.

Can we just drill down just a little bit more on the next steps?

So talking about pulling together, launching a nonprofit, where are we at on that?

Where do we expect to go?

We're working with a consultant, uh, right now, uh, to establish bylaws and articles of incorporation that would be specifically suited to a slightly weird situation.

Um, and, uh, that's where we're at right now.

We're in the middle of that conversation with an attorney.

All right, fantastic.

Well, I'm super excited about this work.

Thank you for what you're doing.

I think this is the right solution to a really big set of challenges and I think it will serve the arts community well.

I think it will serve a lot of our broader goals in the city around affordability and economic development and living wage jobs and all the things that we care about daily.

The only thing I would add is that as we talked to 900 people this summer and surveyed another 1,500, the number one issue, regardless of whether you're a studio musician, a filmmaker, a union stage tech, the affordability crisis is hitting everybody.

And if we don't take progressive action to create long-term affordability, we're going to lose our cultural and creative community.

We feel that pressure.

Well, I'm looking forward to figuring out ways that I as a council member and the council as a whole can help move this work forward.

Thank you.

I really appreciate your passion and your dedication and the product.

Thank you.

Thanks very much.

Thank you.

And now we're going to skip to the last item on the agenda, which is item number 10.

Item 10 is every other week garbage collection, other jurisdiction findings.

Thank you, Newell.

All right.

Appreciate you sticking through the long agenda.

I really appreciate it.

I brought my little lozenge.

I have a cold and hope I won't, you probably heard me coughing.

Hope I don't disturb it too much.

I think we're great.

Let's start off with real quick introductions and then we'll set the agenda for this discussion.

Linda Knight, City of Brenton staff of Solid Waste Utility.

Alice Lockhart, 350 Seattle.

Thanks so much.

So this request for you to come and join us from Renton, Linda, really came out of my interest in revisiting the city's experience, Seattle Public Utilities experience, with every other week garbage pilot that was conducted several years ago.

I think it was 2015. We invited Seattle Public Utilities to come earlier this year to give a presentation on the survey results associated with that pilot, and heard a little bit about those results.

And the question, sort of a thought experiment that I'm playing with right now is, you know, 2015 was, you know, relatively speaking, a long time ago.

as it relates specifically to the public's expectations around trade-offs, around our convenience, and our concerns around climate change.

And so, although the executive has expressed a lack of interest in moving forward with doing every other week garbage, I want to hear about other jurisdictions' experiences with doing this, and I think in some cases for many, many years.

Yeah.

So I'd be happy to tell you Renton's experience.

It happened.

I'll tell you, the conditions and the motivations, I think, were slightly different based on the time that we were looking at every other week collection.

We were at the, if it's OK, I'll just give a broad overview.

And then you can ask specific questions.

And then any detailed data that you need, ask Alex to grab for you, and I'll provide that when I'm back at the office.

So we were nearing the end of a contract.

At the time, we contracted with waste management.

We'd been a waste management city for many, many years.

And we were faced, it was 2007, with some indecision, to some degree, about whether to extend the contract or whether to go out for a competitive process.

And at that point in time, we were also approached by King County, who was interested in looking at different models for collection, every other week models, and also looking at the food waste in with the green bin organics cart.

It wasn't as, some cities were actually collecting food waste at that time.

Renton was not.

Renton's system in 2007 was stackable bins, which Seattle had had, but you guys went to a single stream before we did.

So our city had, you know, the three collection bins.

Customers own their own garbage can.

We did not have food waste in with the green waste.

And we had a fairly restrictive list of recyclables accepted in the program.

So we partnered with King County and the Seattle King County Department of Public Health and Waste Management to do a collection pilot in 2007. And what we piloted was every other week all three streams of material, and at the time we were we were weekly all three streams, so very intense collection costs.

So we piloted every other week three streams, and then we also piloted every other week garbage and recycling with food waste and yard waste going weekly.

So two different geographies for the pilots?

Yes, we basically tested, we took similar neighborhoods.

One was a South Renton, one was North Renton, but the demographics were very similar.

There were about 700 households in each of the pilot areas.

And then we had a control group with a similar number and demographic.

So the result of the pilot, we ran that from August through December, and the pilot included both audits.

We didn't actually ask the residents whether they wanted to be participants.

We required them to be part of the pilot.

We did not give them any money or any incentives really to be part of the pilot.

What we did do, which is different than when we launched our program eventually, was that we upsized their container so that if a customer had a 32-gallon container as their regular subscription, we increased it to 64 gallons for them.

And we did street audits, basically windshield audits with the drivers.

We went out a couple times a month auditing to look at kind of what the conditions of the bins.

We also had Seattle Public Health Department.

They did walk around.

routes to monitor up close and personal, looking for vectors and odors and whatnot, any problems.

I'm going to probably lose some of my train of thought here.

And we did two surveys.

We didn't do a pre-survey, but we did do a survey once the pilot had begun.

a mail-out survey to all of the pilot residents, and we did a phone survey.

And basically, at the end of the pilot program, the surveys came back, which were very positive, I think, for that type of abrupt change in a service.

Garbage is very personal to people.

Unless you've worked in the industry, you'll never know what it's really like.

I'm sure as council members, you've heard people complain about garbage before.

We had over 70% of our households that thought, that were satisfied with the program, no matter which one, which neighborhood was tested.

So we brought that to council.

We were also faced with 2007 running in 2008. We continued negotiating with waste management and we were hit with the economic downturn.

Fuel costs were escalating.

What we ended up doing is having waste management bid every, a weekly model.

And then both of the every other week models.

So we had three different cost models to look at.

And, I mean, it doesn't take too much thought to know that a weekly model is going to be the most expensive because it's the most labor intensive and has the most, it's capital and fuel intensive.

Staff actually recommended every other week all three streams.

We thought that we could get the best benefit in terms of reduction of noise and disturbances in the neighborhood plus greenhouse gases.

But council ended up selecting the every other week garbage and recycling and weekly organics.

And actually, I think that that's a brilliant model for a couple of reasons.

We did launch in 2009, and we had a number of different changes in that contract.

It wasn't just the every other week model.

Our customers finally got single-stream bins.

They were able to put food waste in.

Customers no longer had to supply their own garbage can.

We did all contractor-owned carts.

So the system was much cleaner and easier, and we expanded the list of recyclables.

So there were a lot of benefits to the customers.

The disbenefit was the service reduction was seen as a disbenefit and the other was cost because our rates were in the double digits.

Anywhere we have a variable can rate structure, so depending on what level of cart that you would subscribe to, your rate could have gone up.

anywhere from almost 35% to 75%, which is pretty steep.

So in Renton, folks' rates actually went up when you moved partially because you hadn't had a rate increase for a number of years?

Yeah, we hadn't had a rate increase in about 10 years.

The economic conditions, of course, had changed significantly since our last contract, which, you know, contracts are dependent upon what the economic conditions are at any given time.

It's interesting, though, that as far as the reasons for dissatisfaction in Seattle, one of the top reasons for dissatisfaction in Seattle was a perception that rates should be halved because you're getting half as much service.

Ratepayers saw a reduction in rates who participated in the pilot, but it was not as much of a reduction as they expected.

but nevertheless, your experience in Renton, and you move forward with it, was actually a rent rate increase due to a bunch of different factors, but nevertheless.

There wasn't so much dissatisfaction.

Well, I won't say that.

I won't say that.

I mean, I think at the pilot program itself, the pilot residents, which there are around 1,400 in total, were satisfied.

Of course, we had our detractors, people who don't like it.

And even launching forward in 2009, we definitely had our detractors.

But I think of myself as an optimist mostly.

And I also thought back to, okay, back in 1989 when we launched curbside recycling, prior to that, customers had been receiving their garbage service at their back door.

You know, I mean, quite personal service.

And now in 89, and Seattle would have experienced something similar when they launched curbside, is that customers now had to sort their materials, they had to put their carts out at the curbside.

And I know when Renton implemented its curbside program, initially people were I don't know, dissatisfied to a certain extent because of the extra work that they had to do.

But two years into the program, people were very proud of being, you know, environment, you know, helping the environment.

And so I just would use that analogy much of the time with my customers calling in who were complaining.

Basically, the message or the, The issues were the same in Renton as they probably would be in Seattle is that people perceive it as you're cutting my service in half.

What my response was, and our program's different than Seattle's in that we do have variable can rate structure for garbage, we have unlimited recycling, and it's no fee for recycling, it's embedded in the garbage.

Our organic container is also embedded in our garbage, so people don't subscribe to those two streams of material.

Garbage is mandatory.

Recycling organics is voluntary.

We assume everybody's going to participate.

We deliver bins, carts to them, but they do not, they're not required by ordinance to participate.

Our organics is unlimited.

I think we're one of the only cities in King County that offers that.

So I at least had the message to them that, look, we're only coming, garbage trucks only coming, recycling trucks only coming every other week, but you have capacity to handle all of the material that you are consuming in a month's time.

Was that like the ideal message?

I mean, ultimately, as a solid waste professional, I want people to reduce their overall consumption.

That's the goal.

But for that transition, you needed to assure people that they had some place for their materials to go on any given collection day and storage for the non-collection days.

What we found in the end, and part of it was the economic conditions, was that We did not upsize customers for the actual implementation, primarily because we were having these huge rate increases.

We didn't feel it was fair to automatically assume that they should go to the higher level of service.

So we maintained customers in their existing cart, so if you were a There was one exception.

We had 10 gallons, so now we only had 20 gallons of people who were in that minican.

But for a standard 32-gallon can customer, they remained at 32 gallons, and they would have to live with 32 gallons for two weeks.

I'm just going to talk about garbage.

There's also the optimist in you, hoping that they reduce their use.

Well, I do believe it.

Well, I know it's possible.

Right.

I practice it at home already.

I'm a Seattle customer, but I know it's doable.

And so what we did was we just assumed that they would stay at that level.

We were slammed.

I won't mince words or anything.

We were slammed with customer calls.

We did a lot of public outreach.

We did a dozen community meetings that were very well attended.

And it ended up being a lot of give and take between the community and also opportunities to teach people again about what goes in which bin.

That seems to be a really common question no matter what year it is.

And even with all of the community outreach, all of the mailers, all of the public, media going out, I think we underestimated the public reaction when we actually implemented.

It also didn't help that in December before our January implementation, but December when we were, when our contractor was out delivering the public education materials and the new carts, we were slammed with two snowstorms that hit just week after week.

So here we had two, You know what snow storms are like, right?

No pickup in two weeks and then people are already concerned about moving to an every other week model and they're nervous.

And so we got slammed with phone calls.

All that said is that we handled it.

And I will say that for the most part, I would say that our customers have adapted, which I think that anyone can adapt.

It's all about setting up your system.

A little story I tell is that in 2017, we went out.

We have a new contractor in 2017. 25 years with waste management, now we're with Republic Services.

That's another really big implementation.

So we are out again in the community holding public meetings.

We are also bringing in another 5,000 new customers from an annexation who had never had One, they hadn't had mandatory garbage.

And two, they had never had every other week's service.

And so there were some very loud voices at those meetings.

And I was at all of the meetings and giving the presentation and answering the public's questions.

And it was heartening to me because customers would stand up in the meeting and say, trying to rile And the rest of the participants, you know, we can't have every other week garbage.

Things are going to stink and we're going to have rats and bears and raccoons and every type of animal that you could think of in Renton.

There are some little bit more rural areas of Renton.

And other members of the public would stand up and say, hey, we're already doing it and we like it.

Like they were there to hear about the transition to Republic.

So do we still have our detractors?

Yes, I think we always will.

But I think our experience has been very good with every other week.

Again, I would say being a Seattle customer, I think the conditions in Seattle are different than the conditions in Renton in the sense of you already have some management strategies for your collection program in that you mandate garbage, you mandate recycling, you mandate organics.

You know, those, not all three of those things exist in the city of Renton.

Diapers are going to be a big issue.

That was one of my questions, how you guys handle that.

So when we did our pilot, customers who were handling personal hygiene products, we just suggested that they double bag the personal hygiene products and put them in the garbage can.

If you remember, we had public health staff walking around.

They basically didn't sense any kind of issue at all.

We had families, obviously, in the neighborhoods that we were running our pilots in.

We did it in hot summer months, and we did it in cool winter months.

there doesn't seem to be a problem with it.

It's more of a public perception than I think the reality.

The other caution I would have is that just in checking that customers are right sized for their container, people in Renton still to this day I think believe that there's only one can size and it's the can that they have.

You know, it's just getting the message out that you have options for sizing up or sizing down and to get your size right.

Sorry, I got to go on a bit.

I would love to stay and keep talking about it.

Anyway, thank you for your time.

Have you in Renton done any calculations around emission savings?

We have not.

We have really limited resources in the city and so we haven't really, we haven't conducted any study on the greenhouse gas emissions.

Essentially, we eliminated two whole routes, one for garbage and one for recycling, and our organics still runs weekly.

And, you know, one of the things that folks have pointed to in our pilot that we did is that the folks who ran that pilot did an analysis on satisfaction according to different demographics of people and found that greater dissatisfaction correlated with family size and zip codes.

And so people who lived in lower income communities of color had larger families were more likely to be dissatisfied and it was that was one of the findings that led to the council not enacting every other week garbage at that time.

What's your experience with large families?

So we do have large families in the city of Renton, and we have not conducted any type of detailed study such as Seattle has conducted.

I have dealt with calls from large households.

Mostly those households subscribe to the highest level of garbage.

Say if you have a seven-person household with young children or elders using personal hygiene products, They're going to be using a 96-gallon container for garbage, which is going to be, yeah, it's right-sizing.

It's really looking at, we do have senior rates and we have disabled rates.

We don't have rates just for low income.

So, again, you're paying for the usage, the garbage that you're producing.

Thank you.

Alice, what do you have to share with us?

Well, I just love this idea and I particularly love this idea at this moment in time because it's like I see sort of across the city council and things that are going on in departments, basically, folks are starting to look at all kinds of policies and programs through a climate lens as well as our usual, and the other thing I love, our equity lens, right?

And putting those things together.

And this just feels like a really sweet example of this.

And from the climate perspective, there's three areas of goodness, one of which kind of reflects a little difficulty in our trash collection.

The first was that the 2012 study found that if we went to every other week, we'd see a 35% decrease.

reduction in emissions, which, you know, that's greenhouse gas as well as air pollution.

And the second is a little bit more difficult, because when I drilled down into what our garbage fleet actually is, we've got a few really nice prototype electric vehicles.

And then by far, the rest of it runs on natural gas.

which has the big sign on the side that says clean natural gas.

It ain't.

Right in SPU's own material, it says, hey, waste management creates some biogas, which they stick right in the national pipeline system, which means those trucks are taking gas right out of the national pipeline system, and it's largely fracked gas, which has a huge warming potential in the very short term, right, when we're trying to avoid reaching an irreversible tipping point, and it's looking dicey.

So anything we can do to reduce that use of fracked gas is a really, really great thing, and our motivation to do it ought to be really, really correspondingly strong.

And then thirdly, and this is something 350 Seattle is getting increasingly interested in, is that our carbon footprint in the city, how we measure our greenhouse gas emissions, we measure direct greenhouse gas emissions that occur right here, and those tend to are largely buildings and transportation.

However, we all have like this hidden huge, I'm so sorry, hidden huge carbon footprint, which is the stuff we use.

And what other cities who since the 2012, you can tell I'm excited, other cities since the 2012 study who have done this and have measured it have found that there's a reduction in waste.

And it's hard to tell how much of this can be attributed to moving compost out of the waste stream and how much of it is using less stuff.

But some of it is using less stuff.

And if at the same time we do this, we talk about it and we publicize it, you talked about that a little bit, I think the more, the better the communication that this is a really great thing that people can do, the better results we're gonna have in reducing greenhouse gas emissions as part of such a program.

I find it really exciting.

I also find it exciting in the context of the Green New Deal, which is all about sort of bold, big transformation, which we must do.

But at the same time, that transformation needs to be transformation in how we do everything.

And this kind of a program is just exemplary in that area where we have something we're already doing, we do it better, we bring down emissions.

And in the big bold area for trash, we're going to have to, if we want to meet the Green New Deal that we signed up for, we're going to have to replace those trucks, those natural gas trucks, with an all-electric fleet, which isn't going to be cheap.

And so this program can give a little contribution to that in the form of having to purchase a few less trucks.

So there's just a lot of goodness there.

And I'm happy to say that our contractors, even though we're in the middle of a contract, are open to having this discussion.

I think that's really, really important that we have them as a partner, given that we are in the middle of a contract.

Linda, what was the implementation period?

How much time did it take from when, I'm assuming there was some sort of a legislative action?

Yes, there was.

I think we had like a, we do things kind of fast, I'm curious.

I think we had about a six month, maybe a little bit less than six month period to implement the program.

That's, you know, The contractor ordering all of the new equipment, which for us it was changing over to clean natural gas from diesel.

So that was an improvement.

I understand.

And doing all of your public education, all of the, you know, community meetings, outreach to the community.

ordering all the capital equipment that needed to be distributed to all the residents.

And if you were to give Seattle advice, I'm soliciting it, what would your advice be on how to move forward this conversation?

Well, you know, I have to commend our council and our administration, because I think that they had some reservations about moving to every other week collection, but they made the leap.

And I think you have to have a strong backbone, because you will have the public, you will have an outcry from the public.

It may not be the majority of the public, but it'll be very loud and vocal folks.

And then the other is just to be really prepared with not only the.

preliminary outreach to the public, I will say that we did a lot.

I don't know that everybody read the materials or came to meetings.

It's not until the public's actually confronted with what is right before them that they, yeah, that they, and that makes people very angsty, I guess.

But I do believe that people can adjust.

It's about developing a system for yourself in your own home about how you handle and how you consume.

And I do think that our program made people wake up to how much they were consuming.

And I agree with you, Alice, that some of the gains were made from the food waste in the green bin, but overall we saw an overall reduction in all three streams.

I mean, we saw increases, I would say we saw increases in yard waste or the green waste and recycling, but overall per customer, if you look at the overall consumption, we saw an overall reduction.

Can you, so the numbers I have is you saw an increase in recycling of 27 percent, an increase in organics 44 percent, a decrease in garbage 18 percent.

What was the overall per capita reduction?

Can I get back to you on that?

I can just provide Alex with kind of the stats on it.

I just didn't have the time to to kind of really pull it all together.

And I think the top line on this, though, again, is that Renton has had every other week garbage for more than 10 years now.

Right.

And we still have our detractors.

So even today, I mean, I could go back to the office and somebody could be calling me up.

Maybe they see this and then they call me and say they don't like it.

Alice, you want to have the last word before I?

Yeah, I have two things to chime in on that.

One, the other cities that have done this have seen similar but in the ones that I was able to dig up even larger decreases in waste.

For instance, Portland in the first year saw a 35% decrease in weight.

The city of waste in the city of Ljubljana in Slovenia, I mean, I know that's a long ways away.

But they've done amazing stuff, and a lot of it has involved what they say to the public.

And I personally find we switched to the very smallest container, and we're down to, you know, less than a bag of chips, just put our garbage in every week.

if we're not doing any construction.

And if we do construction, we save it.

It's super fun.

And I think that how we talk to people and the urgency.

Because it's a challenge, right?

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

The way we challenge people to do good things and the urgency that, you know, we talked about the speed with which you all rolled it out.

I think we don't need another 2012 study.

We need to convey the urgency and leverage the information we have.

Can I just add one more thing?

Absolutely.

It's just that I think that in the first year, maybe even the first two years of the program, you'll see big gains.

But we have seen over...

A plateau.

Yeah, we've seen a plateau, and we saw some, you know, creep up, partly because the economy improves, so people's consumption patterns are changing.

So really, I think In some respects, I think that the program can be implemented, but there also still needs to be a strong priority put towards waste prevention programs in general and that messaging to the public.

And not only that, but working upstream in terms of product stewardship where you're really going to see some improvements in terms of greenhouse gases and overall reduction.

I think the issue of plateauing is really important.

It's one of the things that's inspiring me to look at this.

We have seen, after years of good progress towards our 70% goal of recycling by 2020, we've seen a plateauing of recycling.

And so now it's this question of whether or not we should shift our goals to reduction of consumption of garbage or the accumulation of garbage.

If we have indeed reached what is, you know, a realistic plateau on the recycling piece, we have to think about Maybe changing what our measure is, what our goal is, and coming up with strategies to meet that goal.

Definitely consumption period is really the goal because you can consume a lot of organic waste and still be putting that out, or you can consume a lot of recyclables.

But really what you want is a reduction overall.

All right.

Well, thank you so much.

I really appreciate you sticking with us all this time.

And great presentation.

I look forward to talking to you more, getting your wisdom.

And Alice, I look forward to working with 350 to talk about how we can potentially use this budget process to move this idea along.

And any other questions you have, just let Alex know.

All right.

Fantastic.

Thank you.

And with that, it is 11.55 a.m., and the Civil Rights, Utilities, Economic Development, and Arts Committee meeting is adjourned.