Seattle City Council Finance & Housing Committee 3221

Good morning, everyone.

Today is March 2nd, 2021. The Finance and Housing Committee will come to order.

I'm Teresa Mosqueda, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Mosqueda.

Present.

Vice Chair Herbold.

Council President Gonzalez.

Council Member Lewis.

Present.

Council Member Strauss.

Present.

Council Member Morales.

That is four in favor, Council Member.

Four present.

Thank you very much, Madam Clerk.

And we do have a note from the Council President that she is excused today.

I appreciate that early heads up.

And good morning, Council Member Herbold.

I see you on the line as well.

We have five present.

I want to welcome Councilmember Morales.

Thank you for being here as an alternate to the Finance and Housing Committee meeting.

It's great to see you.

Thanks for being here, folks.

Today we have a pretty full agenda.

We have the first item is Council Bill 120006, which is the proposed legislation and suggested amendment that would authorize the amending 2021 Multipurpose Limited Tax General Obligation or LTGO bond ordinance.

we'll have a presentation and opportunity to talk about those amendments as well.

We have the capital projects watch list resolution and amendments that have been suggested by at least two council members.

Thank you for your ongoing review of that.

You'll remember this was a carry over item from two weeks ago.

So I appreciate you having time to sit with the proposal and offer some suggested amendments for our discussion today.

The third item on the agenda is a presentation on ongoing deliberations regarding federal funding to respond to the COVID crisis.

There is great news coming out of the new federal administration regarding additional funding to support small businesses, workers, make sure that we have our infrastructure prepared to have a robust public health response moving forward, and really excited about the support that we've seen from the federal government.

including support for food assistance and child care.

So we'll get into those details and hear a little bit more from central staff on a proposed resolution that our office is putting forward with all council member input to help provide some guiding principles around receiving those federal funds and allocations.

And last on the agenda, we have an update on the hoteling strategy that's been going on in our city and in King County.

We'll hear a little bit more about how those federal funds are being used or can be used, made available to help hotel those who are living unsheltered in our community and hear a little bit more about what's going on across the region and in other jurisdictions.

Colleagues, that's the full agenda for today.

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

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

We're going to move on into public comment.

We do have 12 people signed up for public comment.

We are going to give folks two minutes this morning to provide public comment.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Please remember to unmute yourself when you hear that you have been unmuted.

That is your cue to hit star six on your end.

please hit star six, begin by speaking your name and the item that you're here to talk about today.

When you have about 10 seconds remaining in the rest of your allotted time, you will hear a chime.

That's your indication to go ahead and wrap up your comments so that you do not get cut off.

If you have additional comments that you'd like to send, please send them to council at seattle.gov and all council members will receive that information.

Again, we're going to try to get through everybody this morning, two minutes, and the first three speakers that we have on today's agenda are Chris Woodward, Nicole Alexander, and Annie Johnson.

And then when you're done speaking, please do hang up on the line and dial in on the listen in line published on today's agenda or the web link offered by Seattle Channel.

Good morning, Chris.

Are you with us?

Hi there.

Just star six to unmute yourself.

Thank you.

Good morning, Council Members.

My name is Chris Woodward.

I am the Business Development Director with the Alliance for Pioneer Square.

I'm here today, virtually, to voice support for the Public Defender's Just Care Program.

To take a step back, the Alliance for Pioneer Square is a 501c3 nonprofit that serves the Pioneer Square neighborhood through business development, marketing, communication, public realm, advocacy, and leadership.

Our stakeholders include all who work, live, and do business in Pioneer Square.

The Just Care Program has had a profoundly positive impact on the Pioneer Square community during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

The pandemic caused some shelters in our neighborhood to close or de-intensify, leaving many individuals who would seek services in those shelters to survive on our streets.

Before pausing intake of new clients, the Just Care Program was immediately impactful on this issue and directly addressed the neighborhood's needs through a targeted outreach effort.

Pioneer Square community members have repeatedly expressed that the Just Care program impact clear and visible.

Neighborhood leaders, including business owners, property owners, residents, as well as the Alliance for Pioneer Square, want action and impact.

Together, we support achieving that impact through the Just Care model, an offer of lodging and support rather than enforcement in all cases where that can be effective.

Just Care demonstrates that impact through a thoughtful, functional program framework.

The Alliance for Pioneer Square and our partner organizations in Pioneer Square and the Chinatown International District are responsible for asking for reasonable measures to address the challenges in our neighborhoods.

We ask you, our public officials, to determine how to support the Just Care program through a funding solution.

Thank you for working to get the Just Care program back in operation, and thank you for listening, and have a great Tuesday.

Thank you very much for calling in, and we really appreciated the letter similar to this from many in the BIAs and the Downtown Seattle Association as well.

Thanks for being here.

Good morning, Nicole.

Good morning, Council.

My name is Nicole Alexander, and I am the Just Cares Project Coordinator.

Just Cares has been changing lives and breaking the perpetual cycle of addiction and homelessness and incarceration.

Each day, you will find me in encampments where society is much rather ignoring our problems.

I'm going in building trust, I'm trauma informed, I've lived experience and I've got the resources.

This is something that is almost never offered.

With my knowledge of the justice system, addiction and crime, I outreach someone's daughters, fathers and loved ones.

They have survived outside through trauma and loss only to become part of a never ending cycle of homelessness.

As I build trust with my clients, I respond to the neighborhood issues and concerns.

As our clients move inside, we wrap services around them and continue with neighborhood care and outreach.

I work with the most vulnerable, mentally ill, and chronically homeless.

This is sadly what we are talking about throwing back onto the streets on March 15th.

I have a client who many of you know from Pioneer Square.

Many say the only thing that was left for her was jails, institutions, and death.

She would have multiple calls a week from the community to SPD and even 911 for mental health crises, not wearing clothing, and unsafe behavior.

We have successfully brought her into our program and are treating mental health and extensive trauma from years of homelessness.

If we put her back on the streets, she will most likely return to Pioneer Square, where she will return to her abusers until she is used to the point where she mentally breaks again and is screaming in the streets naked, where 911 will be called and the response cycle will continue.

Jails, institutions, and eventually death.

There are 125 of these stories, each different and each is powerful, that will be forced back out onto our streets.

Seattle City Council has the ability to break Seattle's historical homeless cycle.

We know it works, we've been doing it, and we have definitely been successful.

Please continue to support Just Care.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for sharing that heartbreaking story, but also a story full with hope.

If we can continue to work together.

Thank you.

Anne Johnson will be followed by Dorothy Esquivel and Lily Nguyen.

Good morning, Anne.

Good morning, and thank you for allowing me to speak again today.

I am speaking on behalf of the Just Care program with PDA.

I represent a small hotel in downtown Seattle that, as many of you know, has faced tremendous challenges during this pandemic.

Our hotel has closed for 65 days last year, and our restaurant has now closed three times throughout the past year.

During this pandemic, we have furloughed and laid off over 50 employees who have not only been longtime colleagues, but many are friends.

As a leader in hospitality for over 17 years, I have never experienced anything like what the pandemic has done to our field.

When PDA first approached us with this opportunity, there was hesitancy on our part, as this was truly a pivot from the day-to-day hospitality business we were used to doing.

As we learned more about the program and the support that PDA and ACRS would provide, we knew we had to answer the calling to help support the crisis happening within our city.

We've now been in partnership for almost five months, and we absolutely would make the same decision again if presented with it.

There has certainly been challenges, but with PDA and ACRS' support, we've been able to work through them.

We've also had the opportunity to bring back 20 additional staff members to help support the day-to-day operation.

As of today, my team provides housing, security, meals, maintenance, housekeeping, and so much more.

We've had a lot of success stories at the hotel, too.

One couple was able to secure housing and will be moving out next week.

Another participant has bonded with our security team members and is now taking medication to help with his mental health.

Winds like this happen every day within our hotel.

Big or small, it brings value and purpose to the work we are doing with ACRS.

If this program does not continue to be funded, all the ground that all of us have made together will be lost.

I come into downtown every single day, and the unhoused population continues to grow and take over our streets.

The crisis within our city continues to impact tourism, and if not fixed, it will continue to impact our potential.

The market is seeing an average of 6% occupancy and cannot sustain our staffing level.

The likelihood of our hotel closing is very high if this program is not funded.

We hope you will consider funding the program through the end of the year.

Thank you.

Really appreciate you bringing here today again, Ann, and thank you for your leadership in that effort.

Good morning, and please do correct my pronunciation of your name, Duerthav?

Duerthav?

Let me just make sure that I can see my full screen here.

Okay.

I see you present, and all you have to do is hit star six one more time for me, and then I think you'll be unmuted.

Two and a half, just star six one more time.

If you can hit that on your phone, then I think you'll be unmuted.

Okay.

I'm going to go to the next person.

Dior Hath Esquivel, if you hit star six one more time, we will come right back to you to get you in the lineup.

Let's go to Lily Nguyen, and then Victor Liu, and we'll come back to Dior Hath.

Oh, good morning.

I'm sorry.

One second.

I hear you.

Hello.

Good morning.

Hi.

Sorry, I was having an issue.

Hi, this is Deo Esquivel.

Hey, I'm sorry for the pronunciation of your name.

Yes, you probably it was on me for not saying that right.

So yes, you have your full two minutes.

Let's start you again.

Thank you.

Good morning.

My name is Deo Esquivel.

I work for the Chief Seattle Club.

I'm the shift leader at the Just Care program at the Wallingford Inn.

Our program specifically houses Native participants that they're finding in the encampment.

Since November, we have housed 20 Native clients.

And we have only had two positive cases of COVID during our time here.

Both of them had recovered.

And a good thing to remember is that this program is about getting folks out of the encampments and isolating them in non-congregate shelter so that they can be safe from the pandemic and also the trauma of living outdoors.

Many of our clients now have started working on their personal goals.

A few of them are starting to get job interviews.

One is accepted to film institute, the Seattle Film Institute.

We had one client give birth a week after she moved in, and she's now in the YWCA shelter.

Some of our other clients have been working on their mental health and getting treatment through Evergreen.

This program has really helped our clients in a way that most of the shelters can't, just haven't had the funding or the dedicated staff to do the things that we've done for our clients.

And it just doesn't make sense to approve more shelter than the Shelter Surge Fund and let this current shelter with at least 125 people, just let that go and let them return back to the street without any claims.

I just urge everyone, please, please support this effort.

And that's my time.

Thank you.

Thank you for your testimony today.

I really appreciate it.

The next person is Lily Nguyen, followed by Victor Liu.

Good morning, Lily.

Good morning, council members.

My name is Lily Nguyen, and I work for Asian Counseling and Referral Service, ACRS.

And I am the program coordinator for one of the hotels where I work closely with unsheltered folks.

Since November, we've enrolled clients into the hotel and I got to meet and build a strong rapport relationships with each of them.

I see them every single day and I've witnessed the engagement level increase drastically.

I see motivation for substance use treatment and improvement with mental health as well.

Clients are job searching and getting back into the workforce.

They're applying for ID replacements with so much barriers.

And some are reconnecting with family that has been lost in contact for years.

We are seeing the change and impact because of the environment they're in now, which is a temporary housing setting in hotels, an environment they can feel safe in, stabilize and grow as they work towards their goals.

How can anyone expect change in an environment where there's always SPD involved, someone getting into an ambulance, just worrying about getting survival needs met day by day?

With Just Care, people are moving beyond survival and contributing back to the society.

And many clients have told me that they would have never been able to do what they needed to do without Just Care.

So please continue to fund Just Care.

We can't turn our backs on our own people of Seattle.

Thank you.

Well said.

Thank you, Lily, and thank you for your service to those in most need right now.

Appreciate you calling in this morning.

Victor, good morning.

Hi, Victor.

Hi.

Good morning, Council.

This is Victor Liu.

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

I'm the Director of Practice Innovation from ACRS, and one of the programs that I oversee is the Deaf Care programs that I had the opportunity to share many times with the Council.

I just want to reiterate a number of individuals that we had assisted since we operate in early November.

We had assisted 66 unduplicated individuals in a short period of time in partnership with Evergreen Treatment Services, assisting a client in Chinatown International District and Pioneer Square.

With our intervention and coordination with our partners, we have been able to hear feedback from community stakeholders, from CID and Pioneer Square, about how that neighborhood has become safer.

The unique thing about ACRS is that we are the only licensed behavioral health provider that is doing this body of work through Just Care.

And as a licensed behavioral health provider, we serve the highest acuity clients with serious mental illness, chronic substance use disorder.

100% of the clients that we serve have chronic substance use disorder issues.

The clients that we serve.

Victor, you just went on mute accidentally.

We'll give you back another minute.

We lost you at the clients that you serve.

Yeah, so the clients that we serve, 100% of them have chronic substance use disorder.

And among all the clients that we serve, they are from the BIPOC community.

And the multidisciplinary team that ACS has consists not just behavioral clinicians, but we also have medical provider with nurses that can assist the clients to do the work.

And our multidisciplinary staff are also from the BIPOC community.

And I want to share two short stories.

I also just heard from you about a baby being born.

I also want to share that we also had a newborn that happened during the stay.

And just think about it, when somebody was unhoused, unsheltered, leaving an encampment, having transitional housing, and then have a new life.

I just think that it's amazing.

Another close to 80-year-old a Black individual has limited or no resources and funding support and has been unsheltered and homeless for years.

And now she has a temporary transition in housing.

And most recently, our staff was able to help him to get his Washington State ID for the first time recently.

And that is just amazing.

So I really urge the council will continue to sustain this program to protect the safety net and not let this individual be exited on March 15.

Thank you very much.

Appreciate you calling in today.

The last three speakers present are Lisa Nitzel, Dominique Davis, and Lloyd Ball.

I want to note that Gigi Hung and Navani Devine are listed to speak but not present.

If you do dial in, we'll be happy to get to you before we close public testimony.

Let's go back to Lisa.

Good morning, Lisa.

Thanks for being here.

Good morning.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak today.

I'm Lisa Nitzel with Nitzel Stegen.

a firm that has a long history in Pioneer Square and has made a large investment in its future.

We have an apartment building going up now at 2nd Avenue Extension and South Washington called Canton Lofts.

The level of tent encampments on sidewalks, pedestrian attacks, garbage on the streets, unsheltered people with mental illness or addiction pathologies has escalated enormously due to COVID and during the COVID period in Pioneer Square and been really devastating for the neighborhood, the residents, the employees, and the small businesses.

And Just Care has had a transformative impact since it started its work there.

It's worked very closely with a public-private partnership group started in the area to restore safety and security on the sidewalks and to move unsheltered people into shelters.

And many have been successfully moved into shelters, hotel rooms with support services.

The sidewalks have been cleaned up.

Centers of illicit activity have been removed.

Pedestrians are coming back.

and small businesses can open their doors unimpeded now for the first time in a number of months.

Just Care is operating with a strategic impact framework, accountability metrics.

It's cooperating and collaborating incredibly well with the other stakeholders in the community so that everybody's efforts are leveraged.

And we must build on this positive progress.

So I'm just pleased to have the opportunity to ask you to please not allow ourselves to slide back, but to keep moving forward by funding Just Care.

Appreciate you calling in today.

Thank you so much, Lisa.

Let's have Dominique.

Good morning, Dominique.

Hi, good morning.

My name is Dominique Davis.

co-founder of an organization called WDC.

We provide community safety for these for Just Care.

And community safety the model that we've been able to to be able to build with collaborating with these community organizations is to be able to communicate, do de-escalation, build relationships, and support staff at the hotels, staff for the for the Just Cares programs and relationships with participants is the most important piece.

And so we've been able to deescalate any issue that's been able to come up.

They haven't had to call the police since we've been around.

911 has not been called.

We've been able to be in that position to stop them from even needing to call 911 because we're proactive and preventive by building these relationships.

We're developing a model of how community safety can look throughout the whole community.

One of the things I'm frustrated about is that we're having a conversation about whether money and funding should go into a direction of keeping 125 people housed, 125 people getting wraparound services, 125 people getting their issues dealt with in a very strategic way and collaborative way through community.

Community has the answer to these issues.

We need to replicate it.

We need to build off of it.

I mean, fighting for funding is ridiculous.

We were sitting here having this conversation like this should even be a conversation.

It's a no brainer.

Let's invest this money into these people.

Can you imagine when, when, if, if this money doesn't come and we got 125 people being displaced, put back out in the street, setting up tents, getting them sleeping bags and putting them back onto the street and not getting services the way that they deserve to be served.

That would look ridiculous politically.

That would, that would be really bad politically for anybody that doesn't agree that we should be funding this period.

Thank you very much, Dominique, and I agree with you.

Thank you for all that you're doing in partnership right now.

We'll have more on this topic on item number four.

Lloyd, good morning, Lloyd.

I think you are our last speaker.

Thanks for waiting.

Sure.

I'm Lloyd Ball, calling in support of Just Care.

I've been a landlord for about 19 years and currently have 20 units, 20 keys turned over to the Just Care program.

We were doing fine when we got the proposal.

In fact, we were no vacancy four or five times a week.

We actually want to do this work.

So we have shut down our hotel operations in order to acquire more space to create this capacity.

It's been great for us and I'm an uncommon type of investor.

I touch properties, come from the private side, I've done a lot of community work, but from the private side in real estate.

And based on what we're seeing per room, per tenant, we could do this again.

We could not only serve with the capacity that we have, but we can create more capacity.

And I'd be willing to commit you know, another 100 keys to the program if you guys can come with something sustainable.

You know, kind of jumping back and forth between maybe this will happen, maybe this won't.

We're just operating like it is.

In fact, four of our staff members live in this community amongst the people.

I've spent 100 nights there myself.

And to see 20 people have to move stuff, I mean, in bags, plastic bags, out of their units on the 15th.

That's pretty heartbreaking because we know these people and they are our family now.

The organization that works there, we bonded.

They're part of our team.

We're part of their team.

And I know that we can even do better than we're doing right now if we have that confidence that this is going to be sustainable.

Love to see this continue and I'm in full support.

Thank you very much, Lloyd, for calling in today and for your ongoing partnership.

And Gigi, I saw that you did join us.

Good morning.

Please go ahead and we will have you wrap us up, actually.

Go ahead, Gigi.

Just star six to unmute yourself.

Great.

Hello.

I'm going to write about this.

This is my favorite memory.

said by one of my clients when I asked him to journal his favorite memory as we work on his PTSD symptoms resulting from chronic homelessness.

He said, Just Care is his favorite memory.

I'm an ACRS counselor at the Just Care program.

As a service provider in homelessness field for years, at this point, I don't know what to say or what to prove that could show everyone the changes we see every day.

But I can speak on a factual level that if we let this 100 people leave, not only people are going to die, for so many, it will actually be worse than death.

It means being raped, assaulted, and so much more completely preventable violence and trauma.

Just Care is not only short-term assistance.

We are changing people's lives on a permanent level in ways I've truly never seen in this field.

Just Care is the best program I've ever seen and Seattle can be a pioneer for it.

I urge the city to maintain the founding as we know it is not only safer for our health neighbor, but it is also safer for every single person in the city.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you for calling in and for sharing that story today.

Folks, that does wrap up our public testimony.

And I want to thank everybody for your comments.

I think every single one of those comments was related to item number four on today's agenda, which we will have more information to share.

Just a note that how much we appreciate our county partners as well, who have been actually leading the effort for Just Cares and funding the program.

And we know that this is not a county only issue.

I'm excited to see what the city and county are going to do in partnership as we talk about the neighborhoods that you all have just referenced, especially in pioneer square, the CID, we know these are in the heart of Seattle.

I'm excited about potential information that will be shared later today about how the city and county are going to work in partnership to continue some of these efforts with some new caveats and next steps that will be outlined in item number four.

and while the county has been funding the program to date, I am excited about the partnership that is potentially going to happen here with our city, stepping in in partnership with the county, as we know that the examples of individuals lining up and leaving shelter is the exact opposite of what we want to be accomplishing, especially in the middle of a deadly pandemic.

Thank you all very much for calling in today, and I do hope you stay tuned to that last item on our agenda.

Let's go ahead and move on to item number one that closes out public comment for today.

And if you could read item number one into the record, we will get started.

Item number one, Council Bill 12006, an ordinance relating to contracting indebtedness and amending ordinance 126219 and modifying and confirming certain prior acts for briefing discussion and possible votes.

Thank you very much.

Well, good morning.

Thank you very much.

I see with us.

Brian, good night.

Thank you for being here with us.

And he also sent out a memo on this topic.

So you should have that in your inbox.

We also have with us Robert Nellens, executive director and Tom Israel, financial director.

of the Seattle Center and I mentioned Brian to goodnight and I see that Ben Noble is with us if we need him.

Good morning gentlemen, thanks for being here with us today and I know you have a presentation as well.

Why don't I turn it over to Brian to get us kicked off here and then you can introduce our guests.

Great, thank you very much, Council Member.

Good morning, all Council Members.

Brian Goodnight, Council Central staff.

Council Bill 120-006 would authorize amending the 2021 Multipurpose Limited Tax General Obligation for LTGO Bond Ordinance to include financing for a Seattle Center signage upgrade project.

Council passed the LTGO Bond Ordinance, which was Ordinance 126-219, last November as part of the package of budget legislation.

As approved, the ordinance authorizes the sale of up to $212.7 million in bonds to support 13 projects, along with the costs associated with issuing that debt.

The bill before you today would amend that legislation to include $8 million for the Seattle Center signage project, as well as $240,000 in associated issuance costs.

So if approved, the new LTGO bond limit would be $221 million.

If you're interested in seeing a complete list of projects that are supported by the LTGO bond, including the Seattle Center project, you can find that in Exhibit A to today's bill.

And then lastly, before turning it over to Seattle Center staff to describe the signage project in more detail, I'd just like to remind you that there is one potential amendment for your consideration that is not related to the Seattle Center project, but is related to the repayment of Interfund loans for the West Seattle Bridge.

And I'm happy to describe that now, or we can wait until after Seattle Center's presentation if you'd prefer.

Let's hold it, if you don't mind, Brian, and we will get through the sort of heart of today's initial presentation and then the great catch that you and others identified for us as an opportunity for a possible amendment today.

Good morning, Robert and Tom.

I really appreciate you being here with us.

I'll turn it over to you, Robert.

It looks like you are off mute and ready to go.

Oh, thank you.

Thank you so much for allowing us to be here.

Let me share my screen and I'll bring our presentation up.

Okay.

So thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today.

We are here to discuss a proposal to invest in the Center's signage infrastructure, which will significantly benefit the public, the Center's resident arts groups, and our event clientele.

This proposal will convert approximately 150 signs into less than 50. It will also allow us to integrate the new Climate Pledge arena more fully into our campus, and it's hard to understate the impact that the privately operated arena is having at the center.

We believe this proposal will help take advantage of that transition to improve our operations, increase revenues, and ultimately provide better customer service to center visitors.

I want to note three conditions which inform our proposal.

Our current signage is inconsistent, outdated, and in need of replacement.

Current signage is a mixed bag of older reader signs, signpole banners, static map kiosks, poster display cases, and sandwich boards.

This results in a cluttered visual landscape that lacks cohesion or consistent clear messaging.

Our visitors are poorly served.

Existing digital reader boards are at the end of their useful life and in need of replacement.

The new signage plan will install a comprehensive upgrade for all campus signage.

The plan will consist of a new wayfinding, entry signs, campus and facility reader boards, pole banners, art, information, and digital posters.

It will raise the level of interaction with our visitors, and when needed, allow us to communicate directly to them in real time.

The proposal is expected to have wide-reaching impacts for Seattle Center, And the council approved redevelopment agreements, including language contemplating a comprehensive scientist program to help integrate the new arena into the Seattle Center campus.

Three, the new signage plan will provide a new approach to an old system at Seattle Center.

It will improve visitor experience, simplify and declutter the campus, promote arts, promote campus arts and cultural institutions, provide a sustainable revenue stream to support public programming, align campus signage and arena signage for consistent look and feel, Eliminate waste associated with temporary signage.

Allow for flexibility to communicate in multiple languages.

Allow coordinated communication during emergencies.

Maintain the center's competitive edge as a public gathering place.

Upgrade existing reader boards which are at the end of their useful life.

provide goodwill, community feedback has been overwhelmingly positive to these signs.

Bond finance signs will be owned and operated by the city, and it will provide an integrated system for location-specific campus-wide messages to create a consistent look and feel to visitors.

Our original plan was to use incremental sponsorship revenues to pay for campus sinus improvement.

Unfortunately, the financial impacts of the pandemic forced us to reprioritize our revenues, including our sponsorship program.

So our proposal today is for financing.

The cost is approximately $8 million, funding proposed as taxable LTGBO bonds, repayment over a 10-year term with debt service shared between ArenaCo at 75% and the city at 25%.

ArenaCo has guaranteed the debt payments and they've done that because they already have about $3.2 million associated with sponsorship proposals going towards a goal of $8 million this year and more in future years.

Debt repayment will commence in 2022. Sponsorship revenue tied to the signage will produce approximately $4 million annually, which is what I just said.

And the revenue split for the first 10 years, 75% to ArenaCo, 25% to Seattle Center.

That's an estimated $630,000 additional revenue to Seattle Center above the required base level payments.

Starting in year 11, that funding proposal goes from $7525 to $5050.

And the funding will include annual maintenance and replacement funding.

And this is really about the city owns and will operate the campus signs.

The Seattle Center will approve all the content in the sign and the bidding and construction of the signs will be done by the time the arena opens.

We all have our fingers crossed.

So at this point, I would like to turn it over for questions.

I would just like to say that we've been doing sponsorship signage for decades.

It's just that what we've been doing has been pretty ugly.

Seattle Center is the decision maker on all these issues on the interior of the campus, and Seattle Center and SDCI are the decision maker on the exterior, or within 20 feet of the right of way.

This is sponsorship, not advertising, something that we have done for decades.

And this is a city asset that we, the city, will control.

And with that, I'd just like to turn this over to any questions anyone has.

Excellent.

Really appreciate the presentation.

Colleagues, I want to also reiterate that you see the point in the presentation that ArenaCo will be paying 75% of the project's debt service, while the Seattle Center will be paying the other 25%.

Really appreciate the due diligence that went into this proposal today and the research by my office to ensure that we have the capacity to execute these bonds.

Thanks to Andrew Houston from my office for doing a lot of research on this.

Councilmembers, are there questions?

Councilmember Herbold, Vice Chair, please go ahead.

Thank you.

I see, according to the slides, that the additional annual revenue that the city anticipates, I believe the number was about $800,000.

Was that right?

A year?

The additional revenue is around $630,000.

$630,000, okay.

What I don't see is what the additional annual payment that the city or that Seattle Center will pay.

I'm assuming it's a comparable annual number.

Yeah, the total payment that is around $930,000 or something like that, and the city's portion of that is $200,000 and some thousand, which comes out of the $600,000 that we will be getting.

So about $200,000 extra a year?

Yeah.

And then on the sponsorship question, you mentioned that the decision-making is exclusively in the hands of Seattle Center, and that sponsorship is not at advertisement.

Can you just talk a little bit about the difference between advertisement and sponsorship, and specifically, uh, to the extent that you described that the decision making around sponsorship is in the in the hands of the Seattle center.

Um, how, how you go about making those decisions?

Thank you.

Yeah.

Um, well, um, advertisement is, is, is trying to get you to pay or purchase something.

Um, sponsorship is, is, is trying to align with the, the, the, the system or the, the, that, that drives, uh, the, excuse me, sponsorship is trying to align with the products that the host entity has.

So if we have programming or we have an event or we have something that sponsorship is designed to be something in support of what we're already doing or in support of what comes on to make happen, et cetera.

Advertising is not what we do.

We don't do advertising.

We do sponsorships, so we would do something like Winterfest, or we would do something like Festal, or we would do something like Folklife, or something like that, that would allow something to happen on our campus that couldn't happen without that.

And that's one of the bigger differences that I see in that.

And the sponsorship is we don't do tobacco, we don't do drugs, we don't do things that are going to be negative for our societal views.

And so those are things that we take into account as we're going through our decision-making process.

We don't do things that would allow us to put a bad foot So everything that we're doing is going to be something that's going to be family oriented or something that will be aligned with the city's values, the center's values, et cetera.

And that's how we go about doing that.

And I'm sorry for the misspeak earlier.

Thank you, that's helpful.

Who does the sort of the decision-making though?

Is that sort of within the,

the final decision.

Do you get advice from the Seattle Center Advisory Board or just want a little bit more texture on that process?

Thank you.

Okay, thank you.

So what we do is the final decision is made by the director.

But however, the way we've structured this is that all of these decisions will go to the Seattle Center Advisory Commission.

The Seattle Center Advisory Commission is leading an effort to identify and lay out our corporate guidelines for sponsorship.

And we take all decisions like this to them, they approve them, and then they come back to us, and we go forward with that.

Thank you.

Very helpful.

Much appreciated.

Great questions.

Thank you very much, Vice Chair.

Are there any additional questions for Seattle Center or Brian Goodnight from Central Staff?

Council Member Strauss, please go ahead.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Director Nelms and your entire team.

I want to start by just with a moment of gratitude because this sign amendment or this presentation that you bring before us today is quite complex and there are a lot of intricate and important details to this and it pales in comparison to the deals that you and your team have put together around Climate Pledge Arena, around the monorail, around the partnership with Seattle Public Schools in both Memorial Stadium and with the Center School.

Just looking at this campus map, I start at the 11 o'clock hour and go clockwise, I see we have KEXP, we have the Vero Project, we have the Repertory Theater, we have the ballet, we have the opera, we have, again, Memorial Stadium with Seattle Public Schools and so many different, Things going on there.

We've got Mopop.

We've got the Space Needle.

It's not iconic at all, I swear.

And, you know, we've got the Chihuly Art Museum, Glass Museum.

We've got the Children's Theater, Seattle Science Center.

And then, yeah.

And if I've missed any, just let me know.

I just want to ground us in that context, because the sign code, it is complex, and it pales in comparison to everything else that you've already done.

And so I just want to start with thanks, because I was maybe a little bit flippant there about the Space Needle.

It is incredibly iconic, and it is within the footprint of your campus.

And so I do have a number of questions.

I believe that I know the answers to them, but I just want to put a fine point on them.

And so this change would allow the city to issue additional $8 million in bonds to fund the science project, but it would not stipulate the cost sharing of that project between the city and ArenaCo.

Is that a correct understanding, that the cost sharing agreement would be spelled out in a separate agreement?

I believe so, but I don't know that to be true.

OK.

Brian, do you have that understanding?

Yes, it looks like Tom might want to step in as well, but yes, that's correct.

So the Seattle Center and the law department are working right now with ArenaCo to finalize an agreement that will formalize the cost sharing split with ArenaCo and the city.

That's correct.

That's correct.

Thank you.

And then if for any reason that the tentative agreement with Arena Co cannot be finalized, is the city obligated to sell these bonds with the passage of this bill today?

I'll let Brian answer that.

Okay, thank you.

So my understanding is that given the timeline and sales center can specify the timeline that they're working on, but that the bonds likely would still be sold.

They're currently planned to be sold at the beginning of May.

And there's a lot of steps that happen with FAS kind of leading up to that plan.

So likely the bonds would be sold regardless.

The city does have ways of, if the project doesn't come to fruition, bond proceeds are not very fungible.

They can't easily be applied to other projects.

So they would have to make arrangements to repay the bonds or to hold the funding to repay them when it's appropriate.

Right, I might just step in, Council Member, sorry, but I think what would happen is we wouldn't go ahead with the project and then the bond funds would be available to defuse the bonds.

If that, and then unlikely occurrence, that's most likely what would happen.

So if I was a, which I am a risk averse person, this would be a safe, um, a safe measure to pass today.

I'm seeing nodding heads across the zoom room.

Um, and can you remind me what the revenue split between, I know you mentioned this before, but just to put a final point on it, can you remind me of the revenue split between arena co?

and the Seattle Center for Sponsorship Revenue, and how does it relate to the 75-25 split in cost sharing?

It's basically the same for sponsorship revenues.

It's 75% in the first 10 years to ArenaCo, 25% to the city.

Then after the first 10 years, it's 50-50.

And the beauty of this from our standpoint is that not only do we get the science we need, but that the science will most likely last longer than those 10 years.

And then when we're getting into a 50-50 split, our revenues will go up.

Wonderful.

Thank you.

I know you answered the follow-up question for Councilmember Herbold about the sponsorship between the difference between sponsorship and advertising.

And I guess I'll ask some more clarifying questions because it was such a privilege to get to work with you to put forward the original sign code amendments.

And one thing that you shared with me at that time was one of the difference between advertising and sponsorship.

Let's say Alaska Airlines wants to be our sponsor.

they can put up a sign that says, sponsored by Alaska Airlines.

What they could not put up is a sign that says, for this weekend only, you can get a $25 flight to Los Angeles.

Can you kind of expand on that concept so that we have a better understanding of the difference between sponsorship and advertising?

Well, yeah.

In advertising, the goal is to try to get you to do something.

In sponsorship, the goal is to try to get you to feel something.

And so in sponsorship, you're trying to feel that the product or the sponsor is associated with the thing that you love or the thing that you're doing or the thing that you're going with and so on.

That's why it's attractive for people to be engaged in this process with ArenaCo and about Seattle Center, because there's a lot of things that are happening at Seattle Center that they would like to be associated with, etc. that allows us an ability to drive some revenue to us that allows us to do other things besides, you know, some of the things that we're doing.

So, you know, our Fest All, our Winter Fest, or any other program that doesn't cost anybody in the city any money to attend.

Thank you, Director Nelms.

What I'm hearing you say is anyone who wants to put their name on a sign is saying that they support your work, not here, come get the greatest, latest deal from us on X, Y, or Z.

And I think that that's just such an important nuance.

The sign code that is around the Seattle Center has exceptions for what the sign code is in the rest of the city.

And this is one of those really important details that makes me support what you're doing.

I also, could you speak just briefly?

I know we're not here to talk about the sign code, but just for reference, the Seattle Center has changes or exceptions to the city's sign code regarding backlit signs.

And can you just remind me This does not allow for flashing signs.

We have to keep a consistent panel.

We're not going to turn out like Las Vegas.

Oh no, no.

Over my dead body.

We would not do anything like that.

We will have some digital signs.

There'll be some changing images that will happen.

They will not be things that will be disturbing or distracting to drivers, et cetera.

We will have some signs that will change periodically, et cetera.

And they will tell the story of all the things that are happening at Seattle Center, and they will tell the story of all those people who are promoting Seattle Center as part of their way of saying, yeah, we're with them too.

Excellent, thank you.

And one thing that you mentioned is that these new signs will allow us to be able to communicate in multiple languages.

And I just want to highlight that again.

My last question here is, and maybe it's more of a statement about the, when I started my comments at maybe 10 minutes ago now, we talked about all of the different entities that are on our public land in the Seattle Center.

Seattle Center and your work, Director Nolens, unifies all of these very, I mean, there is the glass museum and KEXP, very different.

The ballet and the science center, very different, you know, and can you speak to why it is so important that we have, or I guess on one hand, having so many different types of science creates a disjointed feeling.

And having a consistent type of science is able to unify all of these different types of entities on our public lands.

Do you have any I guess maybe I answered my own question there.

Anything else to say on that?

I'd just like to say that the ability to have a one type of sign that goes across the campus that is uniform, that is consistent, and that doesn't beat you over the head because it's around every bin or whatever, is what we're trying to do here.

And so being able to communicate to people, being able to share what's all happening, because, you know, you mentioned all the entities that are at Seattle Center.

If you come here, it's almost impossible to know what's all happening.

And so we're going to try to communicate a lot of that to people and give them an opportunity to discover so much more than maybe what they came to see.

I can't wait.

I really can't wait.

Thank you so much.

You and Director Foster's team are literally changing the face of Seattle.

I have one last comment and it's not for you to respond to.

This is just an opinion, a personal importance and significance to me is that I do believe that it is important that we use our bonding authority to move this project forward.

I also find it very troubling that we are not using our bonding authority to the fullest extent possible to address the homelessness crisis.

As we heard this morning with all the callers calling in We have urgent needs.

We have the solutions that we know that work.

We have effective programs.

We just don't have them at the scale of the crisis, and we need to get these solutions up and running.

So again, Director Nelms, don't respond to that.

We need to keep your project moving, and we need to address homelessness.

Government can do more than one thing at once.

Thank you.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you very much.

Council Member Strauss, And I think that that helps lead into conversations that I've also been having with central staff about the both and given the ongoing conversations that we will soon hear about regarding some other potential bonds that we may not have to do.

I think that there is a lot of potential for us to use bonding going forward to address other issues like housing and homelessness services.

So looking forward to working with you to make sure that we do the both and approach here.

On this topic, I don't see any other hands raised.

I do want to tee up, Brian, good night to talk about an amendment.

Colleagues, you saw it in an email from me and I spoke to it yesterday during council briefing.

I sent around an amendment number one to this bill to help correct an issue that central staff have helped identify.

The proposed amendment clarifies that up to 70 million bonds issued to repay the Interfund loan for the repair of the West Seattle Bridge, approved by the Seattle City Council last September, may be issued as tax-exempt bonds.

FAS anticipates that the issuance of tax-exempt bonds would result in an interest savings of approximately $5 million relative to the issuance of taxable bonds over the life of the bonds, which is 20 years.

Mr. Goodnight, would you like to provide any additional context to the amendment that we circulated yesterday?

And thank you for your good work on that I'm catching this as an opportunity for us to fix that in this ordinance in front of us.

Thank you, Council Member Musqueda.

I've just put the amendment up on the screen.

I think you have pretty much said all of it.

I'll just add that the section that it adds is a section four to the bill, and it renumbers the following sections appropriately.

As you said, it corrects an oversight that was in a previous bill passed last September.

So this does just make clear the council's intent that the inner fund loans may be reimbursed with tax exempt bonds.

So I think you've said it all.

Thank you.

Important catch to make sure that we are able to capture that 5 million back and potentially use it for things like what Council Member Strauss just spoke to.

I don't see any questions on this.

Colleagues, any questions before we consider a vote?

Okay, looks like we're right on time.

I want to thank the presenters.

Thank you very much.

And I really, you know, do anticipate that there will be a few more questions probably before full council.

So if you do hear from other council members, we are happy to try to answer those questions, but also happy to pass them on to you.

Colleagues, I move the committee recommends passage of Council Bill 120006 to put this bill in front of us.

Is there a second?

seconded.

Thank you.

It's been moved and seconded.

The bill is now in front of us.

I do have amendment number one.

Are there any comments or questions or additional amendments folks want to talk about before I move amendment number one?

Seeing none, I'd like to move to amend council bill 12006 as presented in amendment number one.

Is there a second?

Second.

Thank you very much, Vice Chair.

It's been moved and seconded.

Are there any additional comments besides what we just heard from Ryan and myself?

Interim Director Eder, did you have a comment on this?

I don't see any additional comments or questions.

Madam clerk, can you please call the roll on amendment number one to council bill 120006.

Thank you very much.

Is that five in favor?

Go ahead and pass the final bill as amended.

Will the clerk please call the roll on the passage of Council Bill 120006 as amended?

Vice Chair Herbold?

Yes.

Council Member Lewis?

Yes.

Council Member Strauss?

Yes.

Council Member Morales?

Yes.

Council Chair, that is a six in favor, nine opposed.

I hope they bring on the quotes.

I'm sorry about that.

That's okay.

Unanimous passage.

Thank you very much.

The motion carries on the committee recommendation that the bill pass as amended will be sent to the March 8th Seattle City Council meeting for a final vote.

Thank you all for being here with us today and look forward to future conversations about this going into play.

Wonderful.

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

I'm sorry about that.

Agenda item number two, resolution 31991, a resolution establishing a watch list of large, complex, discrete capital projects that will require enhanced quarterly monitoring reports for the 2021 calendar year for briefing, discussion, and possible vote.

Thank you very much.

Interim Director Eder from Central Staff, thank you very much for being here with us today.

You were also with us two weeks ago when we delayed this topic, so appreciate your patience on this.

We do have a memo dated February 18th, as you were slated to present at our last meeting.

Thank you for providing that and for your patience as we got to this item.

I appreciate you being here with us and for our council colleagues who have clearly read your memo in detail and have offered some suggested enhancements to the bill in front of us or the list in front of us today.

So thank you for all of your work.

I'll turn it over to you to give us a quick overview of the item in front of us.

Pretty good.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Good morning, for the record, Dan Eater with central staff.

And as you mentioned, there is a memo attached to your agenda about the 2021 proposed watch list that would be adopted through resolution 31991. I'll just spend a couple of minutes providing some context from that memo to set the stage for your discussion today.

As you are aware, the city's capital improvement program includes several hundred capital projects ranging in size and complexity from major street projects to parks, infrastructure, utilities, investments, and many other types.

In 2018, the Council and the Executive worked cooperatively on a separate resolution, Resolution 31853, That resolution established a proactive approach for increasing Council's oversight of capital projects, particularly those with a range of, quote, perceived significant questions about scope, schedule, and budget.

Among other things, that 2018 resolution established a reporting framework and anticipated that each year the council would adopt an annual watch list of, quote, large, complex, discrete capital projects, end quote.

The idea was to provide both the council and the public with regular updates about the watch list projects.

so as to provide not only a sense of emerging challenges on those projects, but also a perspective view of the potential strategies that the city may be considering employing.

During 2019, the council adopted a watch list of about a dozen to 15 projects, and the executive provided quarterly reports on each of those projects.

During 2020, the council also adopted a similarly sized watch list.

However, due to staffing constraints related to the pandemic, the executive was only able to provide high-level summary information about those projects during 2020, rather than providing information in the enhanced quarterly reporting format.

Today's action, resolution 31991, would once again request enhanced quarterly reports for the current year on a select list of capital projects.

Consistent with provision in the 2018 resolution, the executive has duly proposed a list of projects for the council's consideration.

And that project list is included in the resolution on today's agenda in section one, and it's also provided in the staff memo.

The council may, of course, choose to adopt the 2021 watch list as proposed or to make any changes.

And as the chair mentioned, I understand there are a couple of proposed amendments for the committee's consideration.

The executive expects to be able to resume providing enhanced quarterly reports during 2021. So I think that's good news.

For each project, the reports are expected to address costs in the context of the overall project's lifetime budget schedule versus the established baseline milestones for the project.

And also, and I think most importantly, an analysis of the potential risks that each project faces.

And that's accompanied with a discussion of the strategies that the executive anticipates employing to manage those risks.

Resolution 31991, consistent with previous iterations of the annual watch list, anticipates that the council's finance and housing committee will be the forum for reviewing those, the enhanced quarterly reports.

And that concludes my staff report, Madam Chair.

And as you mentioned in your opening remarks, there are, I believe, two potential amendments that council members may be interested in moving.

Thank you very much.

Before we move to amendments, colleagues, are there any questions for Dan?

Any general comments on the watch list or process or report back as you read in this staff memo?

Okay, I am not seeing any general comments.

Let's go ahead and move to the amendments and we may have more discussion there.

Professor Barbara Strauss, I see you are listed here as the first amendment.

You are recognized to move amendment number one.

Thank you, Chair.

I move Amendment 1, Smith Cove Park.

I'll second that.

It's been moved and seconded.

Please, Council Member Strauss, speak to your amendment.

Thank you.

I just want to thank you, Chair, for your indulgence on this item.

My amendment would add Smith Cove Park back to the capital watch list.

Smith Cove Park was added to the 2020 watch list in It was attempted to be removed from the 2020 watch list.

I returned it there.

It is, again, attempted to be removed from this year's proposed watch list, in part because the executive's justification for removing the project is that it is currently on hold.

Other projects on this list are on hold, such as the Center City Connector Streetcar remain on this list.

And Smith Cove Park is important to me to remain on this, because it has experienced so many delays over the years, and it's important that we keep this project on the watch list to highlight the delays and keep attention to moving it forward.

With the project on hold, it should not cost departments significant time or resources to include Smithcote Park on their watch list reports, and it will keep it at the top of their minds.

I am very committed with, I know Councilmember Lewis has I'm just very committed to seeing Smithfield Park completed.

There, this is a, as Council Member Lewis will probably speak to, this was an inter, many different levels of government working together.

The county, the port, the city, we need to do our part to get it finished.

There's phase one and phase two.

Phase one, in my opinion, should have been completed many years ago.

We should be on to phase two yet.

We're not quite there yet.

So with the chair's indulgence, I would love to add this amendment back because I am very committed to seeing Smith Cove Park finish.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you very much.

Are there any questions for Council Member Strauss on amendment number one?

Council Member Lewis, please go ahead.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Not a question.

Just want to thank Council Member Strauss for bringing this forward and thank him for his work and his previous role working directly for the people of District 7 as a legislative aide to my predecessor, Councilmember Bagshaw.

I still remember last year when we had this exact same discussion at approximately the same time, Councilmember Strauss entering into the record a picture with sort of the groundbreaking at Smith Cove with then Mayor McGinn.

Just to give an indication and to date how long this important project has been pending, I want to just briefly lift up The community members who I know have been organizing and working really hard for this, you know, Don Harper in my district, Bruce Carter on the Magnolia Community Council.

people that have been really working with the port, with the parks department, with the city to get this over the finish line.

And I do think that this is an important measure today to just remind that community that we are still here with you pushing on this important project.

You know, we want to see it completed.

And Councilmember Strauss, I thank you for continuing to to be able to keep this as part of your portfolio, despite now representing District 6 in a more official capacity.

So, appreciate it and look forward to voting for this today.

And thank you for taking the torch and running with it.

Excellent.

Thank you very much.

I don't see any additional hands.

Council Member Strauss, anything else to add to Amendment Number 1?

Okay.

Amendment Number 1.

Just to say, Council Member Lewis has taken the lead on this.

and just very thankful to get to work with them on it.

Excellent.

Thank you very much to both of you.

Amendment number one has been moved and seconded.

Seeing no additional comments, Madam Clerk, will you please call the roll on adoption of amendment number one?

Chair Mosqueda?

Aye.

Vice Chair Herbold?

Yes.

Council Member Lewis?

Yes.

Council Member Strauss?

Yes.

Council Member Morales?

Yes.

I move to amend resolution 31991 by adding a new section 5 as presented on amendment

Fantastic.

So in addition to sort of background around how we got to the process for creating a watch list, we've had numerous discussions over the years since 2018, where we talked about including sort of programmatic elements as part of the watch list.

The Capital Improvement Program is not just distinct for individual projects.

It also includes programmatic multiyear projects.

And so the legislation requested back in 2018 in Section 9 that the executive work with the council central staff to develop a method for enhanced reporting for selected ongoing programs or components of ongoing programs for potential inclusion in the watch list.

The budget director, Director Noble, Dr. Noble, has committed to working with central staff to develop an approach to implement Section 9 of Resolution 31853, while noting that reporting for programmatic projects would require a different approach than for individual capital projects.

So this amendment is designed to try and pilot a new reporting format for ongoing projects.

There are 300 or so ongoing programs between the various departments.

An example that I think we've all become familiar with over the last year is, for instance, bridge maintenance.

But the departments that include ongoing programmatic CIP projects are – is not just I'm seeing none.

Councilmember Herbold?

Madam Clerk, will you please call the roll on adoption of amendment number two?

Chair Mosqueda?

Aye.

Vice Chair Herbold?

Yes.

Council Member Lewis?

Yes.

Council Member Strauss?

Yes.

Council Member Morales?

Yes.

Madam Chair, that is five in favor, none opposed.

Thank you very much.

The motion carries and the amendment is adopted.

Folks, in front of us, we now have the bill as amended with amendments number one and two included.

Are there any additional comments on resolution 31991 as amended?

Council Member Herbold, please go ahead, Vice Chair.

Thank you.

One of the things I have mentioned in the past when we've heard the annual watch list resolution is expressing my hope that we internally as a council commit to sort of daylighting the projects that fall in our committee when the watch list reports come back to us.

They come back, I think, to you, Madam Chair, as the chair of the Committee with Oversight of the Budget Office, but you certainly can't be expected to hear the updates on projects from departments all over the city.

And so my hope has always been that committees that have, for instance, parks in it or dot or the utilities, like, that we sort of collectively agree to have that sort of higher level of scrutiny when we get the watch list reports back to us in our own committees.

And that's sort of a piece of it that I think some committee chairs do informally, but it's one of those things that I think would be great if we figured out a way in the future to formalize that expectation amongst ourselves, and just highlighting that desire.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Director Eater, is there any sort of process that you might recommend to formalize that or ensure that there's a more transparent calendar of when we could expect that to be shared in various committees?

Should we brainstorm on that suggestion?

Yeah, I think that's something that is a discussion that I can continue to have with council members on this committee and the chairs of the committees with jurisdiction over the capital heavy departments.

Well, thank you very much, Council Member Herbold.

I do remember you bringing that up before.

So last year was obviously a hectic year for all, but we need to recognize that this is somewhat of a new normal in terms of the amount of work We have a lot of work ahead of us.

We want to make sure this doesn't get lost as well.

I look forward to following up with you.

Wonderful.

We now have the resolution as amended in front of us.

Are there any additional comments?

Seeing none, will you please call the roll on the adoption of

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Okay, folks, we are moving right along.

We are on time for our next two items and really appreciate the discussion this morning so far.

Thank you very much, Director Eder, for being with us and for your work on that central staff memo.

Colleagues, let's move into the third item of business.

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

Agenda item number three, federal funding and council priorities for briefing and discussion.

Thank you very much.

And I want to thank the entire team of central staff members who are with us today.

You did see a very helpful document that was sent around by Yolanda Ho.

Thank you very much.

Leadership from Ali Panucci, Tom Mikesell, Amy Gore, Tracy Ratzcliff, and Jeff Sims.

I think that's all six members of the team who had been working on this item for us.

And this is just the beginning of a conversation.

I really appreciate the amount of work that has gone into this initial document.

As you will see from the presentation in front of us, this is an opportunity for us to really have a better understanding, a more transparent conversation both with the public with members of council and our regional partners about how federal dollars could potentially be used to continue to support the vital services that this council has already prioritized.

Assistance for small businesses, worker support, child care assistance, making sure that our core government services are ready to open again to infuse opportunities for resiliency, equity, and more equitable recovery as we think about reopening our local economy here.

There is a really important conversation to be had, not just about the federal funds that are going to be I want to talk about not only what we discussed today, but also about what council would like to do.

As you will see in one of the slides that will be in the presentation, this is really one of four items that the council will have a chance to engage on.

We are today talking about a potential resolution outlining council's principles and spending priorities for use with the American recovery plan act and how that There is also a chance for us to come back as soon as and in anticipation of the congressional action to pass the $1.9 trillion that Congress is currently debating right now.

And we will begin preparing a second item for your consideration.

We will prepare and begin deliberations on actual legislation that would accept and authorize spending of direct aid as quick as possible to make sure that that funding gets directly into the hands of those who most need it, anticipating the final passage in D.C.

and wanting to be prepared for that.

The other two items that are going to be very important for this council to continue to deliberate on and provide direction is accepting and authorizing the expenditure of the $22.7 million of emergency rental assistance provided by the Consolidated Appropriations Act from Congress.

Again, that passed in December, and we have yet to receive that spending directive.

We will continue to have deliberations on this.

This is something the Council will have a chance to look at, amend and provide direction on for the appropriate use and dispersal in the city.

Finally, the fourth item that we as a Council also continue to have deliberations on and potential action is the ongoing conversation that will continue on to item number four on today's agenda.

Which is considering any or a robust hoteling strategy such as that.

This is really, I think, an exciting opportunity for us to continue the hard work that council engaged in a year ago, almost a year ago to date.

We have all been engaged in various conversations about how We as a council can act locally and with urgency to respond to the crises that we are seeing unfold as it relates to COVID.

You all as council acted very quickly when we passed our initial COVID relief bill.

Again, $86 million was what we had anticipated to try to get out the door for things like cash assistance, food assistance, childcare, housing support services.

And it is with that in mind that we asked our incredible team from central staff to work relatively quickly to come up with a resolution for us today.

Yolanda's email that she sent yesterday about 3.20 in the afternoon really outlines the principles that we will be discussing today as we think about receiving federal dollars and the way in which council would like to look back at this one-year history of us trying to be preemptive and proactive about how we utilize resources available to us, both in reserves and in partnership with the state.

And now with additional partnership from the federal level, really acting with urgency.

So I really want to underscore the importance of this work building on the past support that this council has already authorized and the importance of us acting quickly to provide direction.

And I think some assurance to community members at large that we are going to be working with the utmost urgency to get these federal dollars out the door.

As Yolanda noted in her email, the priority investments draft resolution in front of us was helped by the previous priorities that the council identified through the 2020 budget revisions, the jumpstart COVID relief plan, and the 2021 adoptive budget.

So thank you for all of your past work on this, council colleagues and central staff.

The work that you have done we know is already making a tremendous impact and yet there is so much unmet need out there in the community.

I really appreciate that the council's central staff appreciate the leadership here and the way in which Yolanda outlined that the following considerations were kept in mind when drafting the resolution.

The need to begin pivoting the city's effort from acute emergency relief to really the longer term strategy and the longer term community recovery so that we have that resilient to make sure that we have the capital to make sure that we have equitable recovery on the horizon.

Number two, the potential to leverage other local, state and federal dollars to make sure that we are multiplying our local dollars to the greatest extent possible that we capitalize on the multiplier effect.

would limit our ability to continue to deliver services.

We are very aware that the national data shows that if we engage in austerity budgeting, if we cut city services, the projected longevity of the depression to our local economy will only be worse and more harmful, especially to smaller businesses.

We saw all those charts when we were considering the COVID relief bill and Jumpstart.

So in an effort to try to make sure that we are both being prepared to reopen our community We want to also invest in continued city services and deliver our services, especially to the most vulnerable.

With that, I will stop, and I will not steal your thunder, Yolanda, about the eight principles that you have built the resolution around, but I did want to lift up some of those pieces in the email that you sent around to our council yesterday, and I'll turn it over to Allie.

Are you on?

Allie, great.

I'll turn it over to Allie, and if you want to introduce yourself when you begin speaking for the record, that would be fantastic.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

Good morning, members of the Finance and Housing Committee.

I'm Allie Panucci of your central staff.

As Chair Mosqueda just described, today we will present information that builds on the discussion that has been ongoing in this committee and what was presented two weeks ago by the City Budget Office and Office of Intergovernmental Relations.

where they provided an update on known and potential federal funding for the city's COVID response.

The idea here is to have these discussions inform decisions council will be considering in the next month or so on how best to use the anticipated additional federal funds that are intended to address the ongoing public health needs and both the short and long-term economic and social impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this presentation today, we will update the committee on the use of the coronavirus relief funds received in 2020 that will likely refer to as CRF moving forward and requests made to date for federal emergency management agency reimbursements or FEMA reimbursements.

The updated information we were presenting about what has changed was provided to us last week by the Budget Office and Office of Emergency Management.

And this is really presenting the changes from what was presented last summer to what we know today.

We have some understanding of why certain changes were made compared to what was presented last summer, but in many cases, CBO and others in the executive branch are likely better positioned to respond to questions about the why.

I also want to note that related specifically to the information about expenditures that the city has or is planning to submit for FEMA reimbursement.

The numbers are estimates based on incurred costs to date.

The Office of Emergency Management is on an ongoing basis reviewing spending and other supporting documentation from departments in order to determine how much will eventually be submitted for FEMA reimbursement.

So again, these numbers will likely change and are just estimates about what we know today.

Following that update, We will provide an overview of some of the appropriations in the 2021 adopted budget that support COVID response efforts.

Describe known and potential future funding and what we know about the possible use of those funds.

Present some analysis of the city's fiscal reserves and future use of payroll expense tax to inform your future decisions about how best to use the anticipated federal funds and we will brief the committee as Councilmember Muscata described on the draft resolution that identifies council's principles and priorities for that funding.

Following that, I'll briefly describe some next steps for this ongoing discussion.

And I'll just note here that following committee later this week, we will be distributing a memo with more details that fill out some of what we're presenting today.

But as Chair Mosqueda noted, we have been working in real time, sort of building the bicycle as we tried to ride it.

And so that will be following in a few days.

And with that, I will turn it over to Tom.

Thank you, Allie.

Good morning, Chair Mosqueda, members of the Finance and Housing Committee.

So I believe Ali did a good job of talking about the overview for the presentation.

So we'll just dive in with this next slide.

This slide here covers just some general terminology that I'll be using, talking about the different types of funding that have been deployed to the COVID response so far.

And it just helps to just understand largely with regards to the timing and availability of the funds.

So first we have grants.

And so grants are direct aid dollars that are given to the city to use on the expenditures defined by the donor.

So these are characterized by the way that they provide an immediate infusion of additional resources to meet the emergent needs.

And it increases the pool of resources that the city has to deploy towards those needs.

To receive this type of aid, as you will be familiar with, the council passes one or more ordinances to accept the monies, indicating which department directors have the authority to spend, what funds receive the monies, and those types of things.

So it's a very specific process that can coordinates and controls the money and where it's allocated for immediate use in the budget.

Another category is reimbursable expenditures.

And so these are monies that the city pays out of existing budget lines to also meet emergency response need.

Though they're different from grants in that they, in order to be reimbursed, the city engages in a process stipulated by the granting agency which in many cases is the Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA.

They engage in the reimbursement process to collect all the expenditures and basically keep the receipts and fill out the applications and try to meet the requirements to meet the guidelines that are stipulated in that available aid.

So because of the fact that this is a reimbursement process, this doesn't, unlike grants and direct aid, this doesn't give the city any enhancement to the pool of resources that are available to deploy to the emergency.

And also, oftentimes, it's not a one-to-one match.

Sometimes the city has to come up with a portion of the expense, and then the grantor agency or FEMA would apply the share.

So just to put it another way, this is talking about the matching provisions.

So for the example, and I'll cover this a bit later, With the FEMA response, there was a 25% matching requirement.

So the city would incur expense, 25% of which was on the city's dime, and the remaining 75% would come from potential for reimbursement in the future.

And when I say reimbursement in the future, that can take a number of years.

Every civil emergency is different, though some less complex civil emergencies than the one we're in now have have taken up to three years.

Thank you, Tom.

Vice Chair Herbold has a question.

Thank you.

As it relates to the types of reimbursable expenditures that the city seeks, I have heard reference to a pre-approval process.

sort of on the front end, that if the city is anticipating in the future seeking reimbursement under, for instance, FEMA, that there is a process on the front end to get preapproval of a project.

Can you, can you, am I remembering correctly that that relates to FEMA or is that only related to the CRF funding or potentially both or neither?

And if you could talk a little bit about what, if my recollection is correct, that there is a pre-approval process, if you could talk a little bit about that as well.

Sure, Council Member Herbold, thank you.

So the CRF monies are the direct aid where it's basically specified in the federal legislation what they can be spent on.

And so it's really that money Council passes the ordinance to accept it.

And then as long as we spend it according to the directives in the CARES Act, Coronavirus Assistance and Recovery Act, I think was what that acronym stands for.

But as long as we spend that money according to those provisions, we're good.

As far as FEMA, I'm not specifically aware that there was a pre-approval for those, but that would be the type of, program where where if there was a preapproval process you could stipulate it and set it up.

However that would not even if that were the case would not take away our responsibility to come up with the money on the front end and then submit reimbursement and reimbursement for it later.

And then it would be whether or not the the reimbursement application fit within those preapproval guidelines.

But again, I'm not specifically aware and there's there probably is greater level of specificity about this particular civil emergency and FEMA applicability that the executive could fill in.

And then we can question and answer as I was doing some of my research, which I did, we did ask Jeff a very similar question.

And Jeff, I think you might have a little intel onto that and to complement what Tom has said.

And then I see Council Member Lewis as well.

Yeah, so the pre-approval process for FEMA is limited to, well, at least to my knowledge, it's limited to non-congregate shelter options.

Typically, FEMA pictures that there would be a disaster like a hurricane.

You need to house a lot of people whose homes were destroyed.

So moving them into a congregate facility, which is cheapest and most efficient, is the pathway they would look for a municipality to use, for example.

That's obviously because of the nature of COVID-19, not the ideal response.

In fact, my understanding is now that FEMA is not reimbursing for as of September for congregate shelter programs.

In fact, they are only reimbursing for non-congregate.

Um, the, uh, so the non-congregate, um, for any FEMA reimbursements, uh, this, uh, emergency declaration or others, uh, pre-approval is needed for a non-congregate shelter, uh, intervention, you know, where you have to provide certain information and then we would receive back approval for doing that, uh, that project before being eligible to receive any reimbursement for it.

So we couldn't, uh, begin the project, ask for pre-approval, and then hope that we'd, and then, like, try to backtrack or anything.

It does have to be received first.

Last year in, actually I don't know the date of our pre-approval, but I do know that we sought and received pre-approval for the expansion of Lake Union Village, the creation of TC Spirit Village, the creation of Lakefront House, which is near Bitter Lake.

So all three of those are non-congregate shelter programs and that were intended to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

And then also the hotel that was provided for first responders.

and eventually emergency personnel, though the approval was limited at the time to our first responders who would not have the ability to return home.

Maybe a family member would be especially high risk if they returned from doing their duties, they would expose their family and things like that.

That's what we did receive approval for, and I'm not aware of any other approvals at this time.

Thank you.

Council Member Lewis, did you have a question as well?

Thank you.

Councilmember Mosqueda, my first question is on the next agenda item, because it seems like we're sort of bleeding a little bit into the next agenda item.

Will we be joined by folks from the executive?

Yes, we will.

Okay, great.

So I just wanted to know to hold maybe some of those questions for them.

But I just wanted to jump in here just to clarify maybe from our central staff folks, whoever wants to take this.

But there's obviously been a lot of discussion in the media based on publicola reporting about sort of what is and isn't eligible for reimbursement around the services that are attached to some of these non-congregate shelter options.

And I wonder if we could get an assessment from central staff on like really what the dividing lines on that are in terms of what is and isn't reimbursable, just to sort of set that straight for the council and for the public based on the work you've done looking into this.

Tom is okay if I take that one?

Sure, go ahead.

Okay, so I'm going to give an inadequate answer to your question, Council Member, because there are areas that we don't have strong insight.

For example, FEMA has been clear, even if you look at, for example, what was approved for Los Angeles in Project Roomkey, that support services and case management services are not eligible for reimbursement.

And that goes back again to how FEMA was envisioned.

They were looking at a situation where someone's homeless, destroyed by a hurricane is my example.

And so you're going to put them in a place where they can temporarily reside until they can sort out their things or have their home fixed or rebuilt and return to that spot.

So it was not envisioned as a way to respond to, in our case, not only the needs of allowing social isolation for people that are at heightened risk for COVID-19, but also people that are experiencing homelessness and need those supportive services.

So we know that those are not permissible, What is unclear is the degree to which something that is required staffing might be categorized as case management or some type of a sort of port of service, rather than the essential actions that are necessary to make that non-congregate approach possible.

For example, if you're thinking about putting a large number of people that have been experiencing unsheltered homelessness into a hotel, just leaving them there without any interactions and dropping a meal off every now and then may or may not be the most efficient or safe or considerate or efficient way of operating that.

It might be useful to have some people coordinating some of the interactions.

You might need people on site that are managing when things are provided to ensure that social isolation is happening, things like that.

And it's just not clear to my knowledge at this point that we have gotten clear guidance from FEMA on what would be categorized as what.

And I know that in talking with CBO, there is a general perception that we need to be, that we need to assume that we're not, that we should proceed assuming that FEMA is going to be very restrictive in what we'll approve.

I think that might be a non-issue because I think that with all of these costs, we're doing them because they're seen as the essential services that are necessary to make that possible.

And so hopefully that's some insight into your question, but I can't fully answer it.

Can I just do a quick follow-up, Madam Chair?

Yes, and I will note we have the next hour for these two items.

So we, I think this, as Council Member Lewis just noted, this is a good sort of I think this is all encompassed in the two items that are left on our agenda, but we will definitely have a chance to talk more about noncongregate shelter specifically coming up on agenda item number four.

Councilmember Lewis, please go ahead.

Like, if we could just get an idea, I'm just kind of curious, you know, when, like, the handful of sand becomes a pile of sand on, like, when a service transitions to being, you know, something to just operate a congregate shelter to being an essential service.

Like, for example, you know, someone manning the front desk and handing out towels, I guess, is running, is just essential to manage the shelter.

But if people are doing like, you know, referrals for like opioid inhibitors or something, that's clearly like case management.

So I think maybe just an explanation.

I mean, I understand that it requires more FEMA guidance, but maybe like.

to the best extent that we can do an assessment of like when does it bleed over into something that's more, I think is an essential question for the public and for our discussion between council and the executive on the fourth item.

So I just want to bookmark that for when we move on.

So thanks, Madam Chair, for letting me get that out there while it's fresh in my mind.

appreciate it yeah nope and it's uh challenging to dissect these conversations but we did want to give it its own um section on the agenda so appreciate you doing that i think we're good to move on and thank you for the distinction on grants versus reimbursable expenditures um let me unmute here um so

Just to wrap up, the city's response to the coronavirus COVID emergency includes a mix of direct aid that we'll cover in the next few slides, fee reimbursable expense, which will also be part of this presentation, and then use of existing city resources to fill in gaps and to adjust for the economic impacts of the emergency.

Pivoting to the coronavirus relief funds, which I'll call CRF from now on, at the July 2020 meeting of the Select Budget Committee, executive provided an overview of the city's COVID response so far.

And that proposed use of the monies from CRF monies totaling $131 million that were made available in the Federal Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security Act or the CARES Act.

These are so far the largest source of direct aid the city has received to respond to this emergency so far.

So this table here takes a lot of detail provided by the city budget office and categorizes it down by broad spending category.

And it shows the 2020 original plan that was shown to the Select Budget Committee in July of last year.

some revised estimates that the executive derived in the fall, re-strategizing some of the use of some of those funds, and I'll cover that on the next slide, where the large changes are.

Then the 2020 actual spending, and then the 2020 remaining amount.

And then this will be a familiar amount, the bottom line total in the bottom right-hand corner, the $28 million.

So this is basically The CRF dollars from 2020 that were not spent that roll into 2021. Biggest chunk of this is reserves.

It's slightly higher than the $17.2 million figure that was shared with the committee two weeks ago.

And this is largely due to the reconciliation process from citywide accounting essentially figuring out what remained unspent and where it should have been categorized.

And that was a beneficial adjustment to the reserves.

The other pieces in all these various rows above the $18.9 million in the CRF reserves row, those amounts, the CBO has indicated that though they have rolled into 2021, they most likely will be largely spent through the end of February.

So this is just a way of kind of record keeping the plan of the actions against plan and where where that aid was deployed.

So if we just look at the.

Oh, so sorry, Tom.

I just want to say thank you.

I know that this took a lot of work to really dissect the information and to provide it in this type of graph that's very easy to read so I appreciate all the work that you did to pull this together for the council's benefit, and to be able to do the side-by-side comparisons is very important.

I appreciate all of that time and energy that it took.

Yeah, thank you for that.

I'm happy to do so.

And then, as Allie mentioned, there will be a memo from staff later in the week that actually has greater detail than this.

So this is the high-level view of a more detailed table that will be forthcoming.

But if we can move to the next slide, Ali, I'll talk about some of the major places where the plan changed just for visibility for the Finance and Housing Committee.

So in the Maintain City Services and Support Employees category, there was approximately a $4.5 million shift.

So this is a function of a couple different things.

One, there was originally a $10 million allocation to Department of Finance and Administrative Services for reopening costs.

So those reopening, unfortunately, did not occur last year, could not occur.

The emergency is still present.

So there was a decision made at the executive to shift those monies to other places.

particularly given that at the time there was a sense, not a sense, there was the firm knowledge that the CRF monies would not be available for spending after the end of the year.

And that subsequently changed late in December, but these planned shifts were made with that pending deadline in sight.

So the $10 million for reopening was decreased to the $633,000 that it spent And then there were increased allocations made for emergency labor and teleworking support.

So a lot of city staff have shifted to telework.

So that basically funds a portion of that.

And then also the emergency labor is basically logistics and facility personnel, FAS, who operate the COVID supply warehouse.

So that explains that shift in that broad category of maintaining city services.

Next, responding to emergency COVID-19 impacts.

So the original plan had a $3.1 million for that line.

Subsequent to the plan in the summer, CRF or the FEMA guidance indicated that hotels for first responders would be eligible for future reimbursements.

So there was a shift in the plan to In light of the fact that there was a few reimbursable expense would bring in that cost down and then also the total cost spent on that category of spending in the entire city response plan was lower.

I'm moving down supporting essential household community needs priority area.

So this is the, you know, the external help for the community.

There was a shift in the supporting food security allocation from $3 million to $1.9 million.

Again, this was strategy to ensure that at the time the CRF monies were spent by the year-end deadline.

And the executive allocated $1 million to rental assistance as a use of CRF monies in a plan.

And they were actually spent for that purpose based on information sent by CBO.

So that was the shift in the plan for that category.

And then finally, the largest amount is again, the reserves.

And at the time there was, I believe it was communicated a couple of weeks ago, there was an amount held to meet expenses that were potentially not FEMA reimbursable.

And ultimately it was determined that that money had not been needed in 2020 for that amount.

And so it is retained now in city accounts.

Though it does, I believe, need to be spent by year end, but it is the largest portion of remaining CRF monies.

And I think that's the extent of the CRF money.

So maybe we could pause if there are questions about.

That sounds good.

I think there are a few questions.

Just very briefly to orient myself and colleagues, when did we learn about the changes in the I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the allocation amount versus what was actually spent.

It's quite a big shift, obviously, in the amount of money for additional maintenance for city services and the support for housing for folks.

When did the change in the dollar amount for allocation get

in the kind of the total context of the entire plan.

And that was when it became apparent where all the individual shifts were made.

I believe there was some portion of this took place in the third quarter supplemental, but not the entirety of it.

So it was a mixture between the two, but I'm not aware of a full plan.

I'm not sure if that's the right way to put it.

It's similar to the one that accompanied the July COVID spending proposal.

second bullet related to the hotel first responders allocation.

My recollection was that the city has spent about $3.9 million on rooms for quarantine and isolation for first responders at the Executive Pacific.

And my recollection was that those dollars that we were spending, we expected FEMA reimbursement.

Did we pay for it out of non-CRF funds?

And if so, what's the funding source if that's what we ended up doing?

Thank you, Council Member Herbold.

So when we moved actually to the next few slides for the FEMA reimbursement, there was actually an element of this demonstrating that there was actually a higher FEMA reimbursement request made for that purpose.

It's not the $3.1 million.

It's a lower number than that.

So I'd have to do more research to tie those two numbers out.

And as far as the original city fund that is supporting those costs in the interim, I don't know.

Again, I'd have to check back with the executive to get the specific details.

But there is, I guess, just to say that future slides will show some element of that and how the explanation of shifting from relying largely on CRF towards relying on FEMA reimbursement does bear itself out through the analysis of the data that we've received from CBO.

I can add a little bit more for Councilmember Herbold.

I know that I will, while we're on the call here, I'll put my spreadsheets and double check our expenditures on this and how much went to CRF to the degree I'm able to.

I do know that, again, we have to have pre-approval for this project.

It was one of the ones we received pre-approval for.

however, it was pre-approved for first responders.

And so the expansion to serving essential personnel was not considered something that, or as I understand it, was assumed to be something we would not be pre-approved for, and therefore not sending in a request for FEMA reimbursement for those costs, but instead that they'd be incurred by the state.

I'm still struggling with that.

As I've mentioned before, I sort of, because we were receiving this information from CBO, I sort of monitored the use of the hotel rooms.

And there wasn't a day when there was more than 20 of those rooms being used.

And so we paid for many, many, much, much more than we used under the assumption that we would be using them for first responders.

Now, it may be true that a few rooms here and there were used for somebody other than first responders.

But again, we paid for much, much more than we used.

actually used.

I think the capacity was something like 251 rooms.

And like I said, on any given night, I don't believe there was more than 20 rooms being used.

So I'm still very confused about how we determine that, and perhaps we simply are only being reimbursed for the rooms that we actually are able to use, and so the rest of the cost associated with the unused rooms, we don't get to be reimbursed.

That's another question I have that I haven't been able to get an answer to.

So do we actually have information on what reimbursement we're seeking for these rooms that the number of dollars.

Go ahead Tom.

I think that a large part of your questions we're going to have I'm going to have to get back to you on.

My recollection from the fall is that Seattle is not the only municipality that faced a situation where obtaining a hotel at the time required leasing the entire block rather than just getting it per room rate.

And I am not familiar enough with the subsequent guidance from FEMA on how to handle that to make a statement on whether or not we are eligible to receive all that.

I want to double check that before I make a statement there.

And then so I think that would have some bearing on the response.

And then also there's that separate piece that if some rooms were then used for some purpose that was not pre-approved, that might affect what is our projected FEMA request for reimbursement.

So I'll have to get, as I said, I'll look at the spreadsheets as enabled to while we're on this call, but it probably will have to get back to you specifically.

Thank you.

Council Member, if I could just add, I think maybe Tom said this, but I just want to restate, I think what we understand from CBO is that FEMA eligibility guidance change so that we're reducing reliance on the CRF funds to support these services, but as Jeff and Tom both alluded to, we'll need some time to sort out exactly where on the chart that I now have up on the screen, all of those different costs are falling.

And then I just, if I could just add to Chair Mesquita's question about when we knew about these shifts, as Tom said, some of it came through in the third quarter, some of it in the fourth quarter, but to be really frank about it, by the time we get to the fourth quarter supplemental, it was a very, quick turnaround in terms of the council's consideration of that legislation.

And I don't, we central staff didn't have an opportunity to fully compile all of that information to present it in this way to compare against the original plan.

I think we have now provided this update and can work with CBO on better methods for providing, um, I think it would be helpful if we could provide more timely information to counsel in a format that is more consistent with how we are presenting the data today so that we are all sort of on the same page.

Acknowledging that we may have not summarized it in this way at the end of November, beginning of December.

join conversations about a format or a template that can help make sure that this information is easily digestible and helps everyone make sure that we're comparing apples to apples.

I think that'll be a helpful format going forward.

Also appreciate that you included the total for the 2020 actuals in this chart so we could do some of the 2020 plan compared to 2020 actuals total column.

Thank you for throwing that in for us this morning.

We have quite a bit to go through, folks.

And I want to make sure that we get through the presentation and get a chance to have eyes on the resolution, as well as hear from Director Noble before we wrap up.

So please go ahead, Tom.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

So just again, cite that there will be a memo forthcoming that will have more detail on these items.

And so Council Member Herbold's question about the hoteling is, is covered in the first line of this particular table.

So what this represents is a look at the original FEMA reimbursement plan with leveraging CRF funds as a match, and then the FEMA request, and then the total amount, and then comparing that with the actuals that we know so far.

And then in the public safety and first responders row here at the top, the FEMA request line generally matches both request and plan.

And that's actually a function of a couple of things.

There was a reduce, a reduction, or actually, maybe I'm mixing things up, I think.

Largely what this does is shifts money that was originally going to be requested for PPE towards hotel and expenses instead.

And so there was lower expenditure for PPE, but because of the shift in FEMA eligibility of funds, their original plan for first responders in request was $244,000.

And now the city is requesting reimbursement of $1.9 million.

So there was actually, that bears out the shift from just directly relying on CRF funds towards using city funds and then requesting for reimbursement.

But again, It's a fairly detailed table that will be in the memo that will draw some of this stuff out given the time that we have on the committee today.

This is just a high-level review.

Also, if we could just stay on this slide a bit, just looking at the shifts for protecting our most vulnerable neighbors, the original FEMA request was intended to be around $7 million, and it turned out to be $3.5 million.

This is because a number of two things.

One, the original request for congregate shelter was to be $3.2 million, and instead it's actually going to be borne out at $1.7 million.

This is because FEMA changed its eligibility criteria, and as of September 15th of 2020, congregate shelter is no longer FEMA eligible for reimbursement.

For non-congregate shelter, The original plan was to request reimbursement for $1.9 million and the actual reimbursement request is $200,000.

The OCBO is aware of additional costs that may serve to bring that total higher.

This is just the amount that has been requested thus far.

In the responding to emergency COVID-19 impacts row, there is an original FEMA request in the 2020 plan of $6.6 million.

The actual request is more on the order of 2.1.

CBO reports that this is largely a function of timing.

They indicated that the state advised the city to break up the project's middles within certain timeframes.

And so the amount that's been requested so far represents public casting that has occurred through September 14th of 2020. So the indication there is that there will be additional expense that will that will beef up the actual request that gets made of FEMA.

And then finally, supporting households and community needs.

The original plan had about 7.4 million, and as you'll see, the actual request is only on the order of $564,000.

The largest variance, or rationale for the variance here, according to CBO, is that a significant chunk of that request was for food banks and food assistance.

And their indication, again, from CBO, is that the state ended up picking up those costs.

And so it's not a matter of that the city is even incurring that expense.

That expense is being borne by the state.

And again, I won't say it any further, but there will be a more detailed on table for categories within these individual lines that will be accompanied, that will accompany the memo that's forthcoming.

Appreciate that.

Vice Chair Herbold, please go ahead.

Thank you.

It's my understanding that, as you described the situation for food assistance, Tom, for 2020, that that is the case that that the funding was picked up by the state, but my understanding is that it created a funding cliff.

And so the agencies receiving funding that are providing food assistance are pre-spending on their 2021 grants, which is going to create an eventual deficit in 2021 for their services.

And so I am interested to know whether or not a future FEMA request I'm not aware of the specificity of that.

I'm not aware of how that might be used to address that.

Because, again, you know, we've created a short-term solution that creates, I think, a long-term problem for the

of the financials behind that.

I do know that later on in the presentation, we'll talk about some of the aid that's actually in the 2021 adopted budget, though I'm aware that the resolution that staff has been working on also does include this component of aid as well as one of the topics to consider, particularly with regards to the $221 million that I'll talk here in a bit about in the pending federal aid.

But other than that, I would have to follow up with the executive and others on central staff to find out specific details about the potential funding cliff.

Let's go ahead, Ali.

Thank you, Chairman Skater, Council Member Herbold.

My understanding is, and I think Director Noble sort of mentioned this in the previous committee meeting, but to some extent, that the funding clip, the pre-spending on the 2021 contracts with the city is somewhat of a risk, assuming that we will receive additional federal funds.

So I think the expectation is that some of the anticipated federal money that the city will receive will be used to ensure that that funding extends through the end of the year.

And as I noted previously, I believe that CBO and OEM are continuing to look at expenditures and those sorts of things and continuing to follow FEMA guidance as it changes.

So it's possible that certain expenditures may be eligible for FEMA reimbursement and we would I think it is a plan to assume that additional funding will come one way or the other to ensure the services don't fall off the cliff in June.

Zero in a little bit here on the reimbursement for the tiny house villages, which might be instructive to some other discussions that we're having.

Is reimbursement being sought for services?

And if so, what are the nature of the services that were pre-approved and are being sought for the tiny houses?

I do not know the answer to that.

I'll have to get back to you on what specific things are or are not being requested for reimbursement, as Ali noted before.

we didn't get these numbers really far enough in advance that we could really delve into those amounts.

That's actually an area that I had also noted in one as a good example that might give us insight for other potential expenditures.

Thanks, Jeff.

Is there a master list then of questions you all are compiling that we can kind of look at before we get sent off?

Okay, great.

I saw some nods.

Okay, thanks.

And colleagues, I know we already had noted that this meeting was going to go a little bit over today.

I am hoping that there might be some flexibility.

So, we will keep plowing through the presentation.

But this is really important and very timely considering that Congress is poised to potentially pass the ARPA on the 14th.

So, TBD on the actual date.

but we want to make sure that we get a chance to get through this today.

Okay, keep going, Tom.

Okay, thank you, Madam Chair.

So next slide, we'll wrap up just what we are at a high level with FEMA reimbursement.

So this is just reiterating the high-level analysis that was provided a couple weeks ago.

So far, pending and actual requests are a total of $13.5 million.

The city continues to work to increase that number.

But that's what we are aware of so far.

And of that amount, 4.3 million has actually been submitted and 9.2 is being prepared.

So if we could just go to the next slide, we'll move to what's in the 2021 budget thus far for continuing COVID relief.

So these are items that are in existing budget lines as passed by council.

So there's $23.5 million for sheltering and providing housing for people experiencing homelessness.

$2 million for expansion of non-congregate shelter, particularly in hotels.

$8 million for rental assistance and eviction protection prevention.

$5.8 million for emergency shelter providers.

$2.7 million for 125 new shelter beds.

Next slide, please.

$350 for mortgage counseling services, $6.3 million for the public hygiene program, $3 million for small business stabilization, $3.4 for emergency grocery vouchers, and then $5 million for COVID testing costs at city departments.

So this totals around $60 million in public assistance that's included in the budget right now.

I just would note that this doesn't include It doesn't include costs that the city has and will incur on the part of first responders, so items that are already budgeted in those emergency response lines.

And other organizational measures that may be necessary as the city responds to the public health emergency.

So slide seven and eight, you said total about $60 million already in the budget.

That is correct.

To assist relief.

Correct.

And is it accurate then to say if you look at that first And then the 5.8 to support emergency shelter providers as they increase cost.

So about half of that is for those experiencing homelessness and to try to

I think that is a good point.

It is probably more than half.

I think as part of the follow-up to the questions that we are going to be collecting and this may be related to Councilmember Lewis' question, having a better understanding of the line items that go within that portion of the half of the 60 million will be helpful as we respond to some of the questions we receive.

So now we're going to talk briefly.

Sorry, customer stress please go ahead.

Thank you, Chairman Mosqueda I have withheld my questions in the interest of time because I know that we are short on time.

And as Council Member Lewis and Council Member Herbold specifically, and yourself, Chair, have asked many of the questions that I've been so interested to know the answers to, whether it is about what is the delay in hoteling, what are services that we can provide as, you know, defined as providing the basic shelter, or if it is defined as addressing homelessness at large.

I just have kind of two questions amongst this entire presentation I've wanted to get it in before the buzzer.

I want to clarify that can I, as a council member, expend dollars?

I believe the answer is no, but I just wanted to have that on the record.

No.

You can authorize spending.

Great.

So that might be a follow-up question that I have later.

So I asked that question just to demonstrate that even if I, as a council member, wanted to house everyone that is homeless in my district, I could not do so.

I could authorize it, but I could not do it.

And then I wanted to highlight the risk that we incur with the FEMA reimbursement is the risk in timeline of reimbursement, not a risk in whether or not we are being reimbursed.

Is that a correct understanding?

Council Member Strauss, thank you for the question.

The timeline isn't so much a risk as a function of the bandwidth for the federal program to distribute the funds.

The risk in terms of eligibility is whether or not the record keeping of the city and the way the application is processed meets the specific requirements for the reimbursement.

So if records weren't kept appropriately, there would be a risk that we wouldn't get reimbursed.

So we make an application, but there is no guarantee that we would receive the monies.

But if we are spending within the guidelines that are given to us at the time for the reimbursement program, that helps to the extent that we're meeting those, crossing our T's and dotting our I's, well, then that mitigates that risk to some extent.

So I hope that helps at least provide a little bit more detail about the ways that that I guess the risk profile of the FEMA moneys plays out.

Yes, it does, Tom.

And I guess I was trying to put myself in Director Noble's shoes regarding risk, risk in timeline of what is our available cash on hand.

And I trust Director Noble so much, which is why I asked that question about the risk in timeline.

I think that it is important for us to keep that in mind because he has done a good job keeping our city budget in line.

And I do trust him well enough to keep the appropriate records to to receive the reimbursement.

I will probably ask him to clarify whether it is his office or another office that is required to keep that detailed record keeping.

And then the last point is just to highlight what Chair Mosqueda had mentioned about austerity budgeting.

We know that in times like this, we as the government need to be spending money to keep the economy rolling.

It is a different understanding than typical for-profit business, which has a very clear, budgeting resource, the profits and losses need to be managed in a different way for a for-profit company than for a public entity such as the government.

We need to make sure that people have dollars in their pockets so that they are able to buy the products from the private businesses to keep economic activity moving.

So just wanted to highlight that, and thank you, colleagues.

I just want to put a bit of a finer point on something, Tom, that was included in Tom's response is that I think what is clear through these ongoing conversations about how the city is financing the COVID response and what is or is not eligible for for FEMA is that the guidance from FEMA has changed or iterated over the course of the year and there are some things in terms of the risk that we won't know until we have submitted for reimbursement and FEMA issues a decision or issues a check that is some or all of what we reimburse for.

And so it's always a choice of, in response to the emergency, just going forward and expending existing resources with the risk of not having them available for other services in the future.

It is, I think, just want to put a finer point, there is risk involved, as we won't really know until we get checks from FEMA if the expenditures met all of the eligibility requirements, regardless of documentation.

Thank you.

Risk, other cities are also considering as they put forward their proposals.

Great.

Thank you, Tom.

Please continue.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

So this slide.

It's a high-level view of the most recent federal aid that the city received from the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021. So this was passed or signed into law in late December.

There's $22.7 million for rental assistance programs that is directly available for the city.

And I believe it was mentioned earlier that there's pending legislation with the executive to accept and spend this direct aid to the city.

So that's forthcoming.

The next piece is the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. So ARPA, I'll just use the word ARPA for this.

So this is currently under deliberation in Congress.

It's passed the House, I believe it's in the Senate now.

This package includes $1.9 trillion for COVID relief across the United States.

And that relief takes many different forms.

Some of it is direct targeted programs where it may not perhaps go directly to the city, they'll be through an intermediary level of government of the state of the county.

There's money in there for rental assistance, homelessness services investments, funding for vaccines and 25 billion in restaurant grants.

We don't have any additional specificity on what the City of Seattle's share, if any of those monies would be, but that significant aid that's in that bill.

More acute and more estimable, I guess, for lack of a better word, is direct aid for cities and counties, somewhat similar to the CRF bill, wherein the City of Seattle received $131 million.

There's estimated to be about approximately $221 million of aid that the city of Seattle will be able to use towards COVID response.

And if we can go to the next slide, I'll talk about some unique characteristics of that aid.

So this is pretty much whole cloth from a draft of the bill as it was in the House.

And so these are the uses of that $221 million.

So similar to CRF, money can be used to respond to mitigate public health emergency costs, cover costs because of the emergency.

So that's very similar to the CRF.

This third bullet is the one I want to highlight because CRF monies were not available for using to offset any revenue losses.

This money from the ARPA bill actually are available to replace revenue that was lost and they set that the benchmark of making determination of when revenue losses can be assessed as of January 27th, 2020. So this is important because as you will recall, the city did experience a fairly significant hit to its general fund revenues because of the COVID emergency and the social distancing impacts and things of that nature.

So that's a unique characteristic of this aid and it provides greater flexibility for the use of these funds.

And I think that's a good pivot point to the final two points that I'm going to make before turning over to Yolanda about how this aid may find some place in adjusting for some of the fiscal measures that the city took to respond to the emergency.

Just as, again, by way of a high-level overview, The city has two general purpose fiscal reserves.

It's got an emergency fund, which is our resources that the city holds to respond to unanticipated emergencies.

So like earthquakes, public health emergencies, things of that nature.

There was approximately $61 million in the emergency fund at the start of 2020. And then next is the revenue stabilization fund, which is also a pool of resources that the city holds to respond to unanticipated shortfalls in general fund revenues that basically would have resulted in decreasing the scope of government services that can be provided.

I believe there was about $66 million in that revenue stabilization fund prior to the emergency.

So unfortunately, the COVID emergency has a dual characteristic of both needing to accelerate spending to help the community and continue to provide services in response to the emergency.

Also, it has the impact on city revenue streams.

So we did, in fact, as you will recall, tap both of these reserves fairly substantially.

And I think the next slide shows that.

So this is a fiscal reserve trend that tracks the level of those supportive balances going back to 2006, so 15 years ago, we had a little bit over $40 million, and we have built that reserve, even through the Great Recession, never drawing it below that amount up until last year and then the 2021 budget, where in total, we drew on about $90 million of those reserves.

And in fact, council action in the 2021 budget brought those reserves up to the level that they were as proposed.

It was approximately $6 million.

And given some favorable information on the revenue forecast in November, Council positioned some of those monies to redeposit back.

Though it's worth seeing that this trend, because with regards to the $221 million, because Just to just to ensure that this is captured in the strategic decision-making about how how those monies are used given that they can help with with respond to fiscal fiscal measures that we have to take to to respond to the emergency.

So I'll just pause really quickly I think this is a familiar chart but it's an it's an important one.

It is an important one, and I think if there was a bar between the 2020 and 2021, it would be the proposed mayor's spend down to near zero, $3 million in total reserves.

Then you would see it build back up like the council did in our adopted budget.

Council Member Morales, I think you have a question.

Please go ahead.

I do.

If we could go back to, I think it was slide 9, a couple questions about the rental assistance.

You mentioned here the $22.7 million.

Is that in addition to $8 million that you mentioned previously?

Yes.

So that's 31, roughly.

And then for this pot of money, again, for rental assistance, do you know if that will go through the city, or is that going to go through?

I know the United Way, for example, had a program where that money went.

Do you have a sense yet of what that's structured?

Tracey, Tracey Rasliff is on the call.

She may be able to add more, but I, to my knowledge, the full 22.7 does flow through the city and will be accepted and spent through a pending ordinance that's in the works right now.

That's correct.

Okay, then one more question going back to the food issue.

Do you have any sense of the kind of Equity in the distribution.

In South Seattle, we have a lot of smaller food banks, food pantries that particularly support immigrant and refugee populations.

And so when our food dollars just go to the very large food banks, there's a large part of the community that is left out of that allocation.

So do you know if there's any conversation about addressing that gap?

Council Member Morales, I do not have that level of detail, but we will add your question to our list for follow-up.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

So if there aren't any further questions about the fiscal reserves, I'll next move to the other piece.

And this is just rounding out the fiscal analysis of the COVID response.

So this is a table I like to show my work.

And so that's what this is.

But this is generally showing you how the payroll expense tax that was recently passed by council last summer with first revenues being available in 2021 and then continuing in the future.

It's basically showing how those revenues are deployed in the future.

And so just as a high-level caveat, the calculations that are being made in this table are based off of a six-year financial plan that is included with the adoption adopted budget.

And so what it does what the financial plan does is it it takes the adopted budget and then applies a set of assumptions to those to those lines and projects in the future what the financial status of the fund of the in this case the general fund will be.

So it's not a policy statement.

It's not making future policy decisions.

And so that's just an important thing to know.

So this isn't a statement of policy.

It's more a given what decisions were made in the adopted budget and then various assumptions about how revenues will grow and wages and salaries will grow, what does the status of the fund look like?

And at the bottom line, I guess row C and row F on this table, you'll see that in the financial plan, the general fund is essentially balanced at $1.6 million in 2020. And so this is projected, so not this year, but next year and the two years thereafter, going from $1.6 billion to $1.7 billion.

And within those lines, you can see base general fund revenues and then general fund expenditures.

Base general fund revenues in 2022, for example, 1.36 billion.

But base general fund expenditures are 1.495 billion.

And so what I've done here is I've included the new payroll tax revenue projection for 2022 through 2024 to show how that balances that out.

And then in the end, there's an unallocated piece, but then some assumption that the payroll tax would support base services.

in 2022 and beyond.

And so if you look at the next slide, you can see some extracted pieces from that table.

So the payroll tax brings in about $233 million.

This is projected number.

And then it grows to $255 million by 2024. There's a line in the financial plan that is an unallocated piece.

So this is just in reserves.

without a specific decision being made about how that's spent.

And you will recall that during the jumpstart Seattle discussion, so the proposed payroll expense tax, there was also a resolution 31957 that was adopted by the city council that characterized some broad, some actually fairly specific guidelines for how those new payroll expense tax monies would be spent.

And in 2021 given that we were in the midst of the or expected to continue to be in the midst of the COVID emergency there was an allowance that the payroll expense tax would support services that would otherwise have been cut.

And and as I and as you saw in that in the prior chart that that's exactly what was what was happening.

It was used to support a fairly substantial amount of existing services.

However, 2022 and beyond, that's not what the spending plan indicates.

The spending plan indicates that the monies are to be used for affordable housing, Green New Deal, small business assistance, and those types of expenses.

So this table here shows that right now, based on a set of assumptions and based off of the most recently adopted budget, there is an unallocated piece of around $100 million so that is available to to dedicate towards those Jump Start Seattle spending plan provisions in the 2022 budget process.

But based on everything known so far the payroll expense tax would still be supporting on the order of $133 million of just basic basic governmental services.

So Of course, this is a point in time analysis.

There is new information that will be available from the revenue forecast that council will receive from CBO in the summer.

Hopefully, it will be favorable and will lead to the identification of additional revenue, though it could go the other direction as well.

That's the point of the exercise is to see where we are at that point in time.

Further, the actual funding decisions won't be made until the fall, and there will possibly be an additional forecast update.

But this is just to show that the payroll expense tax now, as everything stands, is supporting some level of base services.

So given that the identification of the new monies from the ARPA, the $221 million, and how it can be used to offset revenue losses, There may be an element of, for Council consideration, building into the resolution, as discussed earlier, a way to deleverage some of these payroll expense tax revenues out of supporting base services in the future and moving them more towards supporting the purposes in the Jumpstart Spending Plan.

Thank you very much for the orientation to slides 13 and 14. Just want to reiterate a few important points.

When we talk about the six-year general fund financial plan, this is the mayor's proposed.

This is not coming from council, necessarily.

And I would, if I could, Council Member Esqueda, I wouldn't even characterize it as the mayor's proposal.

It's really just applying technical assumptions to the 2021 adopted budget.

It does come from the executive.

built by city budget office staff, but there's really not a specific decision about any policy measures in the future being made specifically in this plan.

And so that's, it's really just, the calculations I've done are just to identify for full visibility, excuse me, for the committee that as everything stands right now, given the amount of projected revenue we have in the future and the anticipated projected expense that we would have in the future, the payroll expense tax will be supporting base governmental services at a larger proportion than was contemplated in the Jumpstart Spending Plan resolution.

Just to put a finer point on that.

Go ahead, Ali.

Sorry, I just wanted to add, well, I don't disagree with anything Tom said.

It's not necessarily a statement of policy.

It is an analysis of a point in time, and so it's not adopted policy.

But it is worth just noting, I move back to this slide, there is a footnote in the financial plan that indicates what these unallocated funds may be used for.

And it's not even necessarily being Assumed for implementation of the jumpstart of the jumpstart spending plan So that's noted in in footnote 2 that's quoting from the financial plan.

So we're flagging this for the committee's understanding as you have choices ahead on how to continue to fund Bay City services as well as implement the commitments made in the Jumpstart Spending Plan.

And so it's going to be somewhat of a, literally a balancing act, but we wanted to continue to flag this issue now so you can consider strategies moving forward on how to balance those decisions.

Thank you for that.

So the 2021 sort of technical assumptions that you have used to extrapolate this over the next three to four years is helpful to provide some sort of indication of how those funds are potentially going to be proposed to be used.

If that's the appropriate way to sort of understand the information that's in front of us.

And I think it's a flag, it's a red flag that the very thoughtful and detailed spend plan that we put together in partnership with business and labor and housing and community we're not going to be able to do that.

We're not going to be able to do that.

We're not going to be able to do that.

We're not going to be able to do that.

We're not going to be able to do that.

We're not going to be able to do that.

We're not going to be able to do that.

We're not going to be able to do that.

We're not going to be able to do that.

We're not going to be able to do that.

We're not going to be able to do that.

We're not going to be able to do that.

We're not going to be able to do that.

We're not going to be able to do that.

We're not going to be able to do that.

We're not going to be able to do that.

We're not going to be able to do that.

We're not going to be able to do that.

We're not going to be able to do that.

We're not going to be able to do that.

We're not going And in that spend plan, we knew that we wanted at least 65% of the funding to go to housing and homeless services.

And that 65% of that was to be able to really invest in the housing affordability crisis that we have in this city.

That was supposed to be 65% of 230 plus, not 65% of 133 million.

So colleagues, I really appreciate central staff flagging this.

I also understand and thank you that this is not a proposal and this is not a directive in terms of what is going to be necessarily reflected in the budget that will be forthcoming, but I think it is a flag for us that it is an opportunity for us to consider strategies, as Ali said, to make sure that we establish some parameters around making sure that the jumpstart spending plan is adhered to as discussed with community and the trust that we built with the broader community who helped create the spend plan that we have some side boards that go with that.

Councilmember Strauss noted earlier that we as individual councilmembers and council itself as the legislative body does not have spending authority.

But what we do have is the ability to pass legislation and to put directives on how we think that spending should be used.

That's what we have done in the budget.

And that is frankly what we have attempted to do in the resolution regarding the spend plan.

I think there's a lot of concerns that I'm going to continue to raise and would like to work with you all and the budget director and others on central staff to make sure that we have a better understanding of when council puts directives to spend, that we know whether or not those dollars have been spent and how much of those dollars and what remains.

That's the crux of all of the questions that I've heard so far today.

So to me, this gets directly to the heart of, yes, as a council, as a legislative body, to the call to invest in certain things, but it also has to be followed through that law that, for example, the budget document needs to be adhered to.

So what I'm very interested in doing, colleagues, is working with you.

I would like to consider setting up a jumpstart payroll tax fund and financial policies that help us ensure the council's intent was clear to provide transparency in tracking those revenue sources.

This includes financial policies that would allow us to use the payroll revenues in 2022 and beyond to support We want to make sure that there is clear adherence to the spend plan as initially discussed when we were considering jump starts progressive payroll tax and that the items we committed to the One, have allocated a certain portion of anticipated future revenue to doing things like supporting core services.

But I think it's really important that we put some side boards around that.

I also appreciate that you flagged this in the context of the $221 million that we anticipate from the American Recovery Plan bill that's being considered in Congress right now.

And that there's the possibility, as you noted in one of your slides, that this revenue can be used as a revenue replacement tool to reduce reliance on We have a lot of funding that is coming from other areas of funds in our city.

In an effort to prevent a grab of payroll tax dollars and put them into general fund, there is a potential now for us to try to backfill some of that with the 221 million, recognizing many of these core services are part of what we envisioned when we talked about making sure that our core engaged in or was not advanced.

So thank you for flagging that.

I did just want to make those two notes about possible strategies for us to come back to specifically address.

I think it's bullet number two on this slide.

Any additional comments?

Okay.

Not seeing any.

Let's get to the resolution.

And I understand that the resolution is not included on our agenda today.

We do have it that will be included in the notes that get sent out.

So any members of the viewing public who would like to see it, we will make sure that gets posted right away.

And if there's members of the press who are interested in that resolution, we will make sure to get that to you.

Please do let my office know and we will make sure to send that out.

Again, this is a draft resolution for consideration today.

and really appreciate the ongoing discussion.

Yolanda, I'll turn it back over to you.

All right, Yolanda Ho, Council of Central Staff.

Just kind of building on the Chair's opening comments regarding this resolution, which she covered very thoroughly in terms of the context setting.

Just would also want to note that I feel like the first two bullets were covered very and that we also want to note that the city is not alone in trying to address this crisis and that the resolution kind of recognizes the need to leverage other funding and programs where possible.

And in addition to the need to continue funding the city's workforce to allow for the delivery of critical services to Seattle's residents, it's important for us to note that the city does have limited capacity in order ability to expand services and distribute funding to the community.

And in some cases, it may be administratively infeasible to deliver a greater amount of certain services or funding in a short period of time, even if sufficient funding is made available.

Next slide, please.

So just wanted to note in terms of the draft resolution itself that we did not include specific funding allocations or percentages, because, as Tom already mentioned, the legislation for the American Rescue Plan Act is still under consideration.

And so we wanted to HAB-Charlotte Pitts, COB.: : Weight on any sort of confirmation on the final amount and whether there would be any strings attached HAB-Charlotte Pitts, COB.: : And also just kind of knowing how much money the city might anticipate from the targeted federal aid as well.

And also noting that we staff need to work with the executive in terms of understanding the costs of extending and expanding the city's COVID relief programs until the end of year and to identify where there may be gaps in services.

Next slide, please.

So the draft resolution is organized around these four guiding principles.

Equity being first and foremost, we know that our Latinx and BIPOC communities, particularly black communities, have been hardest hit by the COVID pandemic.

These populations are also overrepresented in our frontline workforce and thus more likely to be exposed to COVID.

This principle is about ensuring that investments in these communities is a top priority as we receive this federal funding.

Next is the coordination piece, spoke to this earlier in terms of our context setting, but this principle acknowledges that the city is one of many entities addressing this public health and economic crisis, and it should use its federal dollars to fill in any gaps.

Flexibility, the city should be nimble and prepared to adjust its strategy to maximize its response to any emergent needs.

And resilience, these federal funds should be used if possible to help guard against future uncertainty and position the city to make new investments as described in the jumpstart spending plan.

Next slide please.

So, just in the interest of time, I will not go through all the specific spending priorities that are included in the draft, but we'll note that they are grouped under the kind of 7 general categories that you see on this slide.

Many of the priorities included would continue existing city COVID relief efforts.

some of which will end in a few months, such as the Emergency Grocery Voucher Program and other food assistance programs, or others that have been exhausted or will soon be exhausting their funding, such as the Small Business Stabilization Fund, Child Care Stabilization Fund, and the COVID-19 Disaster Relief Fund for immigrants.

Also notable are priorities to invest in child care in the longer term, I'm speaking back to the pivoting to our kind of longer term economic recovery with the goal of encouraging the establishment of more childcare options for families.

And also, as just spoken to by Tom, prioritizing the replenishment of the city's general purpose fiscal reserves.

That was a very quick overview of the draft resolution, but I want to give you all time to discuss.

Thank you very much.

And thank you, Yolanda, for sending the email and for the incredible team of central staff members that worked on it.

Folks, if you haven't had a chance to read through the draft resolution, it's an easy document to follow.

It follows those same eight or so pillars right there.

The issue categories that Yolanda mentioned leads with the equity principles at the beginning.

I know we have a lot of work to do.

I know we have a lot of work to do.

I know we have a lot of work to do.

I know we have a lot of work to do.

I know we have a lot of work to do.

I know we have a lot of work to do.

I know we have a lot of work to do.

I know we have a lot of work to do.

I know we have a lot of work to do.

I know we have a lot of work to do.

I know we have a lot of work to do.

I know we have a lot of work to do.

I know we have a lot of work to do.

I know we have a lot of work to do.

I know we have a lot of work to do.

I know we have a lot of work to do.

I know we have a lot of work to do.

I know we have a lot of work to do.

I know we have a lot of work to do.

I know we have a lot of work to do.

I know we have And if you haven't had a chance to read it, please do.

I'd love to get feedback from you all on any edits that you'd like to see by noon on Thursday.

So basically 48 hours from now, if you have edits, would love to see those so that the actual resolution when it's introduced includes some of your ideas.

Vice Chair Herbold, please go ahead.

No, that's okay.

I hold my feedback because you are letting us know that we can provide it up until Wednesday at noon.

So I want to save time for the next item.

Thank you.

Wonderful.

And Thursday at noon, even more time.

So two days from now, Thursday at noon.

Perfect.

Thank you.

Any other questions for you, Wanda, or the central staff team that worked on this?

I'm not seeing any.

Again, thank you, central staff and colleagues.

This is, I think, built on the core principles that you all worked on, again, in the 2020 COVID relief efforts, the 2021 budget, and all of the work that you all did on the Jump Start Spend Plan.

So thank you, Yolanda.

Allie, I did cover that last slide in some of my opening comments.

Do you want to make some additional remarks about that, sort of next steps?

Thank you, Chair Muscat.

I think you covered it well and we just sort of went through it.

The next steps will be considering the legislation for the rental assistance funds, considering strategies to support Just Care that will be talked about in a moment, and then adopting the resolution and starting work on an appropriation bill.

So I'd also just suggest that if there are very specific programs or services council members are interested in considering funding with the anticipated additional federal funds, It's going to take us some time to figure out what those costs are and work with the executive.

So feel free to reach out early and often and let us know where we should be digging into.

Thank you.

Early and often.

Well, thank you.

Huge round of appreciation for all of the presentation in this category.

Thank you, Tom and Yolanda and all of central staff who helped provide information on this topic.

And it sounds like we have a series of questions to follow up on in addition to the request to get amendments or additions to the draft before it's introduced by noon on Thursday.

Excellent.

Well, Madam Clerk, I think we are ready to move on to item number four, and Director Noble has been very patient with us.

I appreciate his presence with us all morning.

Thank you, Director Noble.

And Farideh, for the record, could you read item four into the record, please?

Agenda item number four, hotel assistance update for briefing and discussion.

We have Director Noble with us and we also have Jeff Simms from central staff.

I wanted to offer Jeff a quick second to provide some summary comments just to orient us to this topic because the folks haven't been following along with either of the conversations and other committees.

Just sort of a ground setting here.

And then Council Member I will turn it over to you, Jeff.

Last, I believe it was a week ago, maybe two weeks ago now, at the Select Committee on Homelessness, there was a update provided on a large hotel sheltering surge strategy that was supported by the council with ESG money for 2021. Because the entire committee of the whole, I won't go into that, that intervention and the status on that as all of those updates were provided recently.

But I will go into the Just Care program.

This was presented to a council committee back in December, but just to make sure everyone has it top of mind.

Just Care is a consortium, actually, of providers.

It's led by the Public Defender Association.

Overall, it is an intervention strategy that utilizes hotels to house people that were unsheltered in the Pioneer Square and Chinatown International Districts.

Generally speaking, a lot of individuals that they're serving are not only experiencing unsheltered homelessness, but also have high barriers to housing, especially there's high rates of substance use disorder, things like that.

The program was initially started by the county when a $4 million appropriation was made to the program in June of last year using CARES Act funding.

I believe that only about $3 million, 2.1, something in that range of that $4 million was used.

And then the county provided additional funding from what I understand to allow the program to continue operating until mid-March Since sometime in December, but generally for the course of this year, the program has been maintaining its capacity so about 128 individuals who have been sheltered in these hotel rooms, it has not been accepting new entrance.

During that period of time and my understanding is that the extension that the county has provided would not make that possible just allows maintaining 128. beds, so to speak.

And then the council has been provided information, or at least some offices have, about what it would take to maintain this program, as well as expanding it to be a total of 310 beds or spaces for individuals through September 30th, which would be the end of what is currently projected to be the end of the public health emergency related to COVID-19.

And that would be around $10.5 million.

in order to not only maintain, but also expand and cover all those costs for the remainder of through September 30th.

So that's kind of a high level summary of what, of that overall program, which again, is a very separate from other hoteling strategies, especially the ones that the mayor's office and CBO have provided on updates on recently.

I wanna also, just because I was prompted to earlier, Council Member Lewis, you asked previously about really getting into the difference between what is, when services kind of move from being on one side of something that is a FEMA reimbursable expense to not.

As I partly covered, but I think that the, I want to reemphasize that that's to a large degree an unknowable answer at this point.

That there's, it's going to probably take us receiving a reimbursement before we really have a strong sense of what is precisely the type of activity and that type of thing.

And there's a lot of pieces that go along with submitting an expense for FEMA reimbursement that will probably come into play there.

I think that a broad rule of thumb, which is going to still be unsatisfactory, if you think about it as if Seattle had been hit by a hurricane and we did an intervention that provided shelter to people or some other city had been, would FEMA likely have covered that expense?

That's how the non-congregate shelter or congregate, well, no longer congregate shelter, interventions were intended and envisioned when this program was established.

I think most importantly for the city, though, is that the decision point is not based on whether or not FEMA would or would not provide reimbursement for some costs, but rather is looking at what is the essential thing that has to be done in order to provide the services necessary so that individuals who are experiencing homelessness are also at heightened risk for severe or contracting severe outcomes or contracting COVID-19 due to co-occurring conditions, things like that.

What is it the city needs to be doing to allow them to socially isolate and protect themselves and avoid those severe reactions?

That's the decision point for the city to act on more so than the nuances of what is precisely what is available for FEMA reimbursement or not.

And so that those are potentially two different questions.

And see, I wanted to make sure I thought there was another question just going through my notes here.

I think that that'll be, I think that's it for a broad overview.

I know that Director Noble has some other updates that he's going to get into much more detail.

Excellent, thank you.

Just wanted to check.

Customer Lewis, did you have any follow up on that or any additional comments for context setting?

Yeah, thank you, Councilmember Muscata, and thank you for letting us, you know, take some time in your committee to keep the discussion going on this issue.

I know there's been a lot in the news about it recently, so I think it's a good opportunity for central staff, for the budget office, and for council members to be able to check in and get some of these questions answered.

I do just want to, as some table setting, say I was very moved again by the broad and expansive public comment that we heard, specifically related to the Just Care Program.

of a coalition that includes service providers, leaders in the business community, Downtown Seattle Association, Community Passageways, also a community organization.

And, you know, I think it's our obligation as leaders to really work I think it is important that we work closely and intimately with the county to figure out a way that we can use whatever resource, regardless of what it is, whether it is FEMA reimbursement, whether it is some of our one-time federal money, you know, any kind of creative option to come up with some kind of solution.

And I know Councilmember Mosqueda, you have also been talking closely with the county, as I have.

And there are potentially some I do want to acknowledge that underlying motivation here to really explore all of these different components of how to do it and really nail down some of these answers on FEMA funding.

Um, and, uh, you know, that's what I'm looking forward to, to getting some answers on here today, knowing that some of this is unknowable, uh, but knowing that there's ways we can plan to mitigate those risks.

Um, you know, we are seeing that, uh, there is a scheduled, um, uh, removal of the homeless encampments at Denny Park that's scheduled for Wednesday.

I know from being out there, with outreach workers on a regular basis, probably on average twice a month, that the most sought after placement of people that are living there are tiny house villages, based on what I hear directly from the people living in that area.

We have to make sure that we are exploring every avenue we can here so that when a removal happens, we are not just sending folks to go camp in front of someone else's small business or in someone's park.

We need to be able to remove them to a place where they can get their needs met and I hope we get more answers on that and how we can plan proactively as a council and a mayor to meet those goals here in this committee meeting.

Thank you very much, Councilor.

Director Noble, thank you very much.

In that spirit of collaboration and maybe aggressive collaboration sometimes, thanks for being here to tell us more about the conversations that are ongoing with the county.

Yes, I don't have it.

Could you start over?

We lost your audio for a second.

OK, my bad.

You are great.

So I don't have a formal announcement with respect to just cares, but we do want to express some and share some specific information.

One is executive shares concern both about the individuals who are now enrolled and about the population generally served.

So recognize the need there and no desire to not provide some level of services to those individuals.

We are in active conversation with the county about a funding approach and solution near term and then potentially longer term for the populations as well.

I have a meeting this afternoon, but we haven't haven't settled on a precise plan forward.

So those talks are ongoing, and I'm optimistic about a solution.

Again, we all have the shared interest in serving the populations and in addressing the overall issues.

One other point I do want to make, and there's been a lot of back and forth about this, as now configured and procured, the TrustCare program is not FEMA eligible.

It was not bid out that way.

It is not funded that way now.

A simple extension of it couldn't be funded with FEMA dollars as they are now being allocated by the federal government.

So as we look forward, there may be different ways to procure comparable services that could change that.

The guidance from the federal government could be changing on this front as well.

You've heard a lot about that today.

I just want to highlight that point that we have a general sense that the new administration is taking a more helpful approach, if you will, but there has been no additional specific guidance that has been handed out, particularly on this front.

So we are still awaiting that.

And as is indicated as well, we are going to receive federal funding in various forms.

We expect essentially a small BG block grant, which is to say a large allocation to the city for relatively flexible purposes.

Certainly homelessness response could be one of those purposes.

There's also, as outlined for you today, some direct homelessness funding identified in the current draft of the federal bill.

And again, the interactions between those direct dollars, either for homelessness or the direct dollars to the city, and FEMA eligibility is among the things that we will need additional guidance on.

But we're not waiting on all of that or what those options are, as I said.

continuing to work with the county for both near term and thinking longer term as well, recognizing we have been collaborating to date on this front and on others and will need to going forward.

The county itself will, again, if things proceed as we expect now, will receive a significant allocation of federal dollars with comparable flexibility as well.

So we'll want to be partnering with them to explore the best way to deploy resources, both within the city and then for them across the county as well.

So working hard on this, I am optimistic.

I don't have something for you today, but wanted to provide that much of an update.

Questions, colleagues?

Council Member Strauss, please go ahead.

Thank you.

And thank you, Director Noble, for your update.

I will just highlight I know in my conversations last year, ahead of the Ballard Commons encampment removal, my request was to use a Just Care style program.

And the response that I received was, what happens once we are no longer receiving federal dollars?

Here in Pioneer Square, not my district, Council Member Lewis' district, and he's taking a great lead.

We know that Just Care was deployed, it has been effective, and here we are.

where we need to continue funding these units of housing or shelter, however they need to be defined.

And so I guess my concern at this time from the commentary that we heard this morning is that there will be a greater cost to our city if we do not continue to fund this program than if we stop funding the program.

And what I mean by that is, When folks are returned to the streets, returned to the alleyways and the doorways, we heard directly this morning on public comment about how individuals have been stabilized who were so unstable in our community and the direct both financial and quality of life impacts that that has.

And so while I know that We oftentimes in budgeting have to look at the cost benefit, the direct cost benefit.

I think that there is also the need for us to understand what private costs are being associated with when we as the government are not providing for the solutions that we know we need.

And so I guess I don't have a question for you, Director Noble.

I trust your work, and I so appreciate you.

I don't know if you heard the comments that I made in the last presentation.

I'll save them for now in the interest of time.

want to highlight that when we do not provide funding for programs such as Just Care, there is a greater cost to our city.

If I might just really, first of all, thank you for the comments.

I was listening.

My ears were burning, as they say.

So much appreciated.

Your comments also, for me, highlight another dimension.

And I completely agree that that balance between the services we provide and the impacts that are felt if we don't is a constant tension and trade-off.

One of the key dimensions on this new federal dollars that we're waiting to see more about is the timeline over which they need to be expended.

Currently that there is, as we understand it, no specific cutoff date that might change as the bill moves forward.

For some comments that were made in presentations earlier, that's a big dynamic.

One of the things that ended up being a big benefit, but one of the things that hit us I'd say the second or maybe even the third week of December last year was a change with regard to CRF dollars and extending their use into 2021 and not just 2020, which led to some of the allocation shifting that you saw in some slides today to really about taking advantage of that newfound flexibility.

So the timeline will be a critical one.

We'll have to think about, if you will, the pot of resource we have and allocating it.

If we're going to be expanding some set of services, what's the path to either sustaining those at some higher level with some alternative funding source or plotting ahead of time how they might be phased out?

And if so, over what timeframe?

So again, that's one of the really, the size of the allocation, which again, has not been decided, and the timeframe over which it is available will be among the key things that we're going to be watching the next two to three weeks.

Thank you.

Really appreciate hearing this news, Director Noble, about your conversations with King County about the extension of the program.

And so it sounds to me like there is a need for a near-term funding strategy and a long-term funding strategy.

And as it relates to the near-term funding strategy, because I don't think anybody believes that we're going to have access to federal funds by February 15th.

I'm sorry, by March 15th.

It seems like we need a very near-term funding strategy, and I know Councilmember Lewis has discussed potentially proposing legislation using some of the 2020 reserves in order to, in the very near term, help fund Just Cares.

Am I hearing from you that that would be considered useful by the executive?

Sorry, I was on mute.

At this stage, this program was established as a county program, and we think that near term, it makes sense that they provide the financial support near term.

But again, as we move forward and to date, we have been in partnership overall with regard to serving the homeless population, particularly as it's been affected by COVID.

So I think that the discussion is both about the near term and the long term and what that partnership looks like over both time frames.

Thank you very much.

And Councilmember Lewis and I have been working on that legislation.

Councilmember Lewis, I know we had had that teed up and then hearing some of the possibility of this ongoing partnership extension, as I'm understanding, a possible extension for the near term and then the possible partnership for the longer term.

We wanted to keep this item on today's agenda to make sure that we heard to make sure that that near-term extension or funding is filled.

I saw your hand go up.

Do you have more comments on that item?

detailed memo that was sent, or email I should say, based on inquiries from the council.

And I really saw that as something, at least my reaction was, okay, we know what the hoops are, so let's start setting up something to jump through them, right?

And I guess based on that feedback, I mean, we're currently in these conversations, as you say, about the extension of the county program and figuring out ways we can be a helpful partner in guiding that discussion.

But I think the big role that I'm seeing for the city is going to be that long-term support.

So I guess my question would be, am I reading it correctly that if this council were to work with your office to carefully and intentionally put together a process that includes open procurement and that is tailored to what we know FEMA's reimbursable for, and if we're following sort of the model that we have seen be successful in San Francisco and Los Angeles in pursuing the FEMA reimbursable component, that that would be a path forward, thinking more long-term, although it's not available in the short-term because, as you stated earlier, did not go through a lot of those formalities on the front end.

But now I think thinking for the long term, knowing that this is a problem we're going to be staring at for a long time, really taking your memo and then working intentionally to put together what we need to do to make it happen.

So I just wanted to get maybe your insight into that.

And then I have a couple of other quick follow-up questions.

In broad strokes, that's exactly how we're thinking about this.

and all this conversation about FEMA, it's not intended to say, you know, therefore we cannot, but rather to understand that it is, that it is, nor is it a panacea.

We don't have an endless source of funding here that, you know, without restriction, if you will.

So we clearly need a long-term strategy.

And one, as I was just describing, that acknowledges the timeframes over which we will have access to federal funding, whether it be FEMA reimbursement.

And that's another big change that we've had is only in the past month that we've gotten direction from FEMA that resources will be available through the end of September.

Previously, we were working on three months at a time, if you will.

So, yes, long-term strategy, one that takes into account the federal resources, our own resources, and what that – and how those can be woven together short-term and long-term, which, again, one of the reasons I'm very anxious to hear from D.C.

about what's the timeframe under which these resources are available in addition to what restrictions they have.

Right, but but I guess my question I maybe I'll ask it a little bit differently if this council and like let's let's let aside just care for a second and maybe just talking a broader level of abstraction if this council sent legislation.

For example, to get really specific, authorizing, let's say, an Interfund loan for a certain amount of money, backed up with some money in reserve, setting up a procurement process specifically tailored to those requirements of over 65 or vulnerable due to unique exposure, and saying, we would like the executive to go out and maybe seek a hotel specifically for this group of people.

We're authorizing an Interfund loan to do it.

And we want to go through the entire, all the bells and whistles prescribed that are needed to go through for the FEMA process.

would the executive implement that legislation to seek that FEMA reimbursement?

Now, and I'm saying that could be in addition to, we could get some of that other ESG money or whatever else, put that into Just Care or whatever, but there is so much need out there and there are so many people that fall into the FEMA reimbursable category.

I think we could craft some policy here to get them inside and seek FEMA reimbursement.

So I just maybe asked a little bit more pointedly and just curious.

That's a fair question, and you're going to get a non-answer from me, because I'm not the policy expert in this case.

I'm not the one to speak to it.

Again, we need an overall strategy.

I obviously care about the financial side of it, an inter-fund loan in anticipation of the federal money.

My guess is that we're going to get the federal issue to get resolved by the end of the month.

I don't know how it will go if it follows last year, we got a check for $131 plus million, not long after the original stimulus, the COVID relief stimulus bill passed.

So I wouldn't, the cash management is probably not the issue.

It is really the underlying policy.

And I think those policies, again, I'm not the expert, are both about immediate need and kind of the long-term arc and sustainability.

But I know that folks are willing ready and willing to engage in that conversation with you and to identify the appropriate policy path forward.

Well, let me just ask to where it is more comfortably in your field.

What I just said is technically feasible.

Correct, because I acknowledge that maybe there's sort of a policy discussion that would better be answered by a deputy mayor, but in terms of your...

Yeah, I just...

It's feasible.

Yeah, there are a set of FEMA restrictions around non-congregate shelter and those who are eligible.

If we designed a program, we'd have to, again, we are not the lead agency in housing, so we would have to work through public health and partnership with the county.

But technically, that is feasible, yes.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Lewis.

The memo that you sent on Thursday has been referenced, and I appreciate the optimistic sort of interpretation of it.

I think it's helpful to have clarification today that there is ongoing conversation.

I think the two-part strategy, though, help for me to see that the risks that were outlined in that memo are now surmountable.

They're not insurmountable, right?

I think it was my concern is that the technicality of some of these unknowns was being perceived as a barrier to overall I think it's important for folks to hear that those risks, while real, are not actually going to stop, it sounds like, the city from engaging with a the city of Louisville.

We are finding a date, a date certain perhaps to be determined, but a date to extend just cares and we greatly appreciate that.

And that it sounds like the city in good partnership, absent legislation that Councilmember Lewis has discussed, is interested in trying to figure out a joint effort to continue to fund a and into hotels.

We've heard from hoteliers as well.

This is a partnership that they'd like to hear.

So I thought that part of the good news that we were hearing today is sort of this one-two strategy means that the sort of interpretation of risk, while maybe still real, is not necessarily going to be a barrier to trying to pursue this partnership.

And if there are federal dollars that we can recoup as a way to reimburse the city and county for these efforts that are either through a Just Care model or through a more you know, and Just Cares has been very clear, they're happy to engage in a competitive RFP process.

So whoever ends up getting the contract, a Just Cares like model, that when we, if we're able to get federal reimbursement, that would be the cherry on top.

But right now there's sort of my understanding as the conversations have progressed over the weekend and yesterday, and from what you're sharing with us today, that this one, two strategy really makes it so that we're not looking at the barriers or the concerns or the unknowns in the federal reimbursement process as sort of a conservative or risk assessment, a conservative analysis of the risk, and instead we're saying let's go forth, let's figure out a strategy together, and if we can get reimbursement, great, but it's important for this program to continue in some form.

Is that a fair assessment?

use the phrase risk, I just want to highlight that some of these are not just risks, they are just firm restrictions, right?

There is not federal money to do certain things that that we think are critical to do in order to operate an effective system of supports.

And I just more broadly, I'd say that, you know, working with the county on an overall strategy, hoteling a component of that potentially an important component, but not the only one.

So as we look forward, and again, I think critical to understanding what that overall strategy looks like will be the details shortly forthcoming on the resources that are available from the federal government directly in terms of what's in the bill, and then also in terms of guidance from FEMA as well.

And ideally, that becomes more flexible.

So yes, partnering with the county on an overall strategy, we're telling a component, not the only component.

And the key to getting that aligned and settled is understanding the resources, not just, again, really the relevant constraints, not just risks.

But again, those constraints are limiting, but they're not barriers necessarily.

And we have some of our own resource and there may be again, flexible dollars from the federal government that don't have those kinds of barriers.

Okay, but I mean, I think that there's general understanding that it's definitely the case that supportive services, that supportive services that are offered in most shelter programs FEMA guidance clearly states that those won't be reimbursed.

But I think that just looking at that sort of technical and very direct exclusion and applying that to the overall funding or assuming that that type of restriction would apply to the overall assistance that we want to offer to those who are unsheltered is, to some degree, a conservative interpretation of what FEMA has said that they want to reimburse.

So I think what I'm hearing is that there is the ongoing conversations with the county about extending this date.

So there's not that hard date where folks are gonna line up and potentially have to leave on March 15th, which is great news, great, great news.

And that's the glass half full.

The rest is the conversations are ongoing to fill the rest of this glass, right?

And the ongoing conversations are, What additional considerations will we have to do together to a make sure that this pre approval process for non congregate approach is is basically, you know, deemed appropriate by the feds be that we have a competitive process, we all understand that that needs to happen.

even folks in Just Cares have said they want to do it, see that we recognize, as you just said, that a successful model includes supportive services that might not, that probably won't get reimbursed by the feds, but that we have funding, we have other sources, and we also have a commitment to provide those supportive services so that people don't spiral out, especially those who need not just a place to sleep, but that ongoing care.

And so for those providing that supportive services absent federal dollars.

And then lastly, we want to make sure that we are really reaching out to that population that FEMA has identified as needing to have access to shelter first, the eligible folks, which I understand is the vast majority of people who are currently sleeping outside fitting into those categories.

This is where I'm feeling, and you all should tell me, council colleagues and Director Noble, if I'm reading the tea leaves wrong, but it feels like this one-two approach means that people will not necessarily have to have a end date date certain, and we have the possibility of extending that, and that there is openness to trying to address those conditionalities that we know FEMA has outlined, and trying to see it with a more optimistic view about what's possible.

Is that fair?

Yeah, I think so.

Another way I think to describe this, too, is that FEMA may ultimately have restrictions that mean that it's not an appropriate funding source for certain interventions that we want to support.

But then we will have to look to our other resources to do so.

And that's just to acknowledge the constraints we have and to be creative, as we have been, about deploying those resources as smartly as we can.

I won't feel defeated if that's where we end up, is my point.

But rather, we'll have understood resources we have.

Great.

And I know we've kept you long, folks.

Is there any additional comments or questions for Director Noble?

Remarkably, there's not, Director Noble.

And Jeff, is there anything else from your end?

I appreciate that you're in the middle of these discussions, Director Noble, and that it's hard to give finite dates or certain dollar amounts or even 100% assurance on some of these things.

So I'm trying to pull out the good news to fill that glass halfway up.

And with that, we really appreciate your extra long time today on today's council, and we'll let you go.

And good luck with those conversations, and please do pass on our appreciation to the county partners as well.

Thank you.

Okay, we have actually reached the end of our agenda, about 50 minutes over time.

I would love to hear if there's any additional items for the good of the order.

Hearing none, Jeff, thank you very much for your presentation today as well.

Seeing all council members, nobody has an additional comment, so that brings us to the end of today's presentation.

We will have the next Finance and Housing Committee on March 16th at 9.30 a.m., and look forward to getting any feedback on that draft resolution by Thursday at noon.

You've all been very generous with your time.

Have a great rest of your afternoon.

Thank you so much for your engagement today.

Bye-bye.