Planning, Land Use, and Zoning Committee Public Hearing 12518

Hello.

Well, good afternoon, everybody.

Today is Tuesday, December 4th.

It's about 2 p.m.

My name is Mike O'Brien.

Welcome to the Sustainability and Transportation Committee.

I'm chair of the committee, joined by my colleague, Councilmember Rob Johnson, and another colleague of sorts, Councilmember Joe McDermott from King County.

Councilmember McDermott is here because we have an agenda item into the meeting.

about Sound Transit.

And Council Member McDermott and I co-chair the elected leadership group overseeing some of the work around Sound Transit 3. And so I really appreciate you joining us today.

And you get to sit through some bike advisory board appointments first.

So thanks for being here for that.

Really quickly on the agenda today, we have six appointments to the bike advisory board.

We'll move through those swiftly.

Then we'll have an update on Sound Transit 3's West Seattle and Ballard Link extensions.

We'll have a conversation on an update to the levy to move Seattle.

We'll consider an ordinance related to an agreement between the city and the state for the State Route 520. No plan to vote on that, just a briefing and discussion today.

Then we'll take up two pieces of legislation we're planning to vote on today.

One is an ordinance finalizing some street vacations on Harbor Island with the Port of Seattle.

And the other is a clerk file doing initial review and approval of street vacation for Seattle City Light at their Broad Street substation near the Seattle Center.

So with that, we're going to jump into public comment.

We have a pretty long agenda, so we just have a minute each for public comment today.

There's seven people signed up.

We'll start with Alec Zimmerman, and then Knut Ringen, followed by Julia Beebaum.

Thanks.

Bebel, show my face.

Oh, good.

Hi, my Dory.

Hi, my lovely console, my Dory Nazi garbage rats.

are pure antisemite and human garbage.

What is you can talk for one minute, nothing can you talk for one minute, where is the problem?

It's okay, no problem.

I won't speak about appointment of dozen people.

I try doing this for many years.

Dozen time, nobody approve me.

I'm totally confused.

Why you don't doing this to me?

But you approve nine my trespasses for 930 day.

Last trespass expire yesterday.

Why you so different?

For 10 year, I come to this place more than 2,000 time and speak and speak and speak.

And you give me nine trespass, but for 10 year, you can appoint me somebody for committee.

Not for one.

Stand up America Seattle.

Need to clean this dirty from this Nazi Gestapo pig.

Thank you very much.

Knut.

Good morning, my name is Knut Ringen and I live in the Fisher Studio building, a historic building downtown, and I just want to talk very briefly about the upzoning of 2nd Avenue and Virginia Avenue and the tremendous pressure the new high-rises are placing on our alleys.

On the west side of 2nd Avenue between Pike and Pine, there is now proposed a 500-foot high-rise that will have close to 500 apartments, 310 underground parking spaces, two loading docks, and a portcouche.

And all of that's going to be in an alley that has an effective width of 11 feet.

The developer says it needs the garage because market conditions require it.

None of the historic buildings around there have garages, and we rely on that alley both for our safety and for our transportation.

This overwhelming congestion that this project would create on that alley will not work, and we can't figure out if it's SDCI or SDOT that's responsible for it.

Thank you.

Thank you, Kineet.

Julia?

I'm going to give these to you.

Okay.

My name is Julia Beabout, and I am also here to talk about the alleyway that Knut was discussing.

I'm also a LEED-accredited professional and a registered professional engineer with over 20 years' experience in the building design and construction industry.

As Knut mentioned, the new development occurring on 2nd Avenue between Pike and Pine will be on the rear of our building.

It will add over 500 residences to our alleyway.

That's over an eightfold increase of the current residences.

In addition to causing the congestion that you see in the photographs there, that occurs on a daily basis.

Our alleyway is the narrowest in the city.

It is 11 feet wide at its narrowest point.

That will not change because of the existing to remain structures and historic structures anchoring the alleyway on both ends on Pike and Pine Street.

You can see the Pine Street, excuse me, the Pike Street point there.

So that will not change.

Our gravest concern is actually the life safety that this creates, issues that it creates.

Our buildings depend on that alleyway for our fire suppression, proper fire suppression.

We have over five historic buildings on the alleyway, many of which do not have fire sprinkler systems.

So that alleyway provides essential life safety access to our building.

So we would like to request that the Sustainability and Transportation Board seriously consider the consequences of this development on the alleyway while we are generally supportive of the transition of vehicular delivery and residential traffic.

to the alleyways.

In this particular instance, it needs serious consideration, and we ask you to consider mitigating the number of residences in this building and or requiring them to relocate the Port Courtshare to 2nd Avenue.

Thank you, Julia.

And I appreciate both your comments today and showing up yesterday, too.

I believe that the decision ultimately will be with SDCI, but they will be doing that in consultation with SDOT.

And we can have a conversation.

It's not a decision that will come before the committee, but we can ask the conversation to make sure that they're paying attention to it and ask that they respond to the concerns and figure out how they address them.

Doug McDonald, you're next.

Doug, you're going to be followed by Megan Cruz, and then Ryan Packer, and then Megan Murphy will be our last comment.

This is on the levy.

It's time to assign some responsibility and accountability for the fact that the total failure of due diligence by this council in 2015 is the reason, one of the reasons, why the taxpayers now find ourselves in the mess we're in.

And a total default in 2016 and 17 to pay attention at the council as the wheels were falling off the bus.

The council has yet to ask for a report on the CDM report in mid-2017.

In the report today, the earnest and hardworking report from SDOT about trying to pull something out of this mess, in the first page are references to two things still not in place.

There is still at SDOT not a workforce analysis designed to figure out whether an agency can develop a capital delivery program.

There is still not, as recommended by CDM, a portfolio risk management system at SDOT to deal with major capital program delivery.

These are things to which the Council should be paying attention and has paid none.

And so when we ask ourselves the question, what can taxpayers now expect?

It's time to start asking oversight and accountability questions of the people who are supposed to be watching this.

SDOT has done a remarkable job over the last few months of retrieving this mess from where it was left by a bunch of people in 2015. But until the council starts to take some accountability and responsibility for some of the missing pieces, still missing, not for lack of effort at SDOT, that have been recommended in place for over a year and a half, we are not going to find the way to the end of the levy and a successful renewal of the correct funding for SDOT in the future.

Thanks, Doug.

Megan?

I'm Megan Cruz, a downtown resident concerned about congestion also.

I'd like to comment today on the proposed change to transportation level of service standards.

I think it's the wrong move at the wrong time, and I'd like this committee who has influence over this to please withhold approving it until it's studied further.

The current standard is not perfect, but a volume and capacity standard shows where new development will overwhelm current arterial capacity.

The proposed standard won't.

It just measures SOV, single occupancy vehicle traffic, and that's a really good measure, but it's not the only one.

The proposed legislation also exempts towers from any mitigation for its transportation impacts.

It assumes without proof that their proximity to multimodal transit options means they've met their obligations.

An example I wanna leave you with, I think it was passed out, is Virginia Street.

It's a problem that's really gonna be terrible if we don't take some actions.

It shows from 1st to 5th Avenues on four blocks on either side of Virginia Street, There are 12, 12 towers going up.

It will add 6,500 new residents, 2,500 new parking spots, and thousands of office workers.

They're all going to be converging on Virginia Street at peak hour going back to I-5.

So this is something that new LOS standard, if it releases the volume capacity thing, isn't going to measure.

And we really have to capture everything and try to head off some of these problems at the pass.

Thanks.

Ryan?

Hi there.

I just want to highlight two things for the new updated work plan for Move Seattle.

Number one, new sidewalks.

The math here is updated is only 120 blocks of permanent traditional sidewalks to 130 blocks of the so-called low-cost sidewalks, a downgrade from the original 150. It's hard to imagine a voter checking a box for this levy in 2015 with the knowledge that Southeast Seattle would see only 10 and a half blocks of permanent sidewalks.

And the low-cost sidewalks are essentially temporary.

Second, the Vision Zero corridors.

There's no standard for what the corridor improvements are, much less what the outcomes result from them are.

For example, 23rd Avenue Phase 3 is simply repurposed one travel lane of four We're a street where drivers are going nine miles over the speed limit right now.

People are afraid to cross the street.

That's not really a safety improvement, even if they're not getting hit by cars.

Only 132 months left to hit Vision Zero by 2030. Thanks.

Thanks, Ryan.

Megan?

Yeah, last week on Monday at University of Washington, they had the movie Chasing Ice.

And I think instead of airing commercials, they should air the photography of James Belog of the icebergs melting because it's really serious, this carbon emissions problem.

And with the congestion in Seattle, it's the perfect opportunity to make it more easier to ride a bus, because I hear people struggling with having to own a car, and I could not own a car here.

I don't understand how people do it.

So I just hope that if we aired the ice melting every day for an hour on TV, to let it sink in, maybe 1631 would have passed in our culture.

But seriously, I like the Vision Zero, though, and I'm glad to be here.

Thanks.

Thanks, Megan.

That's all who've signed up for public comment today.

So we'll go ahead and close public comment, and I'll invite presenters forward for the Bike Advisory Board appointments.

And Jasmine, if you want to read these into the record.

We have agenda items 1 through 6, appointments 01197, 01213, 01212, 01199. Appointment 01200, appointment 01198. Appointments of Andrew Dannenberg, Charles Y. Hall, Amanda Barnett, Meredith Hall, Patrick W. Taylor, and Kashina Groves to the Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board for terms to August 31st, 2020.

Why don't we start with a round of introductions?

I'm Serena Lehman, and I'm the SL liaison to the Bicycle Advisory Board.

My name is Charles Hall.

I'm a candidate for the Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board.

My name is Patrick Taylor, and I'm a candidate for the Seattle Bike Advisory Board.

My name is Kashina Groves, candidate for the Bicycle Advisory Board.

Andy Denenberg, same.

Meredith Hall, candidate.

Great.

Serena, do you want to lead off with a little overview?

Sure.

Just really briefly, the Bicycle Advisory Board was created in 1977 to advise the city on concerns and needs of the growing bicycling community here.

The board advises the mayor, city council, and city departments on projects, policies, and programs that improve and or affect bicycling conditions in Seattle.

Would you like me to go around and introduce everyone?

I will let everyone introduce themselves, but if you want to say anything about any appointments, you're welcome to do that.

No, I think we're very excited to have this new group of people joining us on the Bicycle Advisory Board.

They all come from very different backgrounds and bring a unique perspective.

I'm excited for the next couple of years.

Great.

So why don't we start, and we can start on either side, and each take a few minutes.

Tell us a little bit about your background, your interest in serving on the board, what you hope to accomplish in the next couple of years on the board.

So again, my name is Charles Hall, currently employed at Capitol Hill Housing, where we develop affordable housing in Seattle.

Particularly interested in joining the Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board, first because my family commutes every day to work via bicycle.

And second, as an affordable housing developer, we feel like alternative transportation models are important to our residents.

The majority of our residents don't have cars.

The majority of our buildings don't have parking.

And so bicycles, buses, et cetera, are fairly important.

So we think bridging the inequality gap within Seattle.

This is great.

Thank you.

Patrick?

My name is Patrick Taylor, and I live in the Othello neighborhood in the Rainier Valley.

I'm an architectural designer.

I work in a small firm that focuses on infill housing in the city of Seattle.

I'm really excited about being on the Bike Advisory Board because I want to help the city fulfill its vision of an all-access, all-ages bike network that will connect our neighborhoods and provide alternative modes to getting around the city, which I think will help fulfill the city's greenhouse gas reduction commitments, and I also really want to focus on Vision Zero and reducing pedestrian and bike rider injuries and deaths in our city.

I'm Kishina Groves.

I'm a nurse practitioner, and I live in South Seattle.

I've been happily biking around Seattle for 10 years.

And this year, I got a family cargo bike to introduce my love of cycling to my young son.

And we don't use it as much as I would like, because I don't feel safe on a lot of our designated bike routes.

besides being a person who feels safe riding by myself.

So I want to help.

And I know there's a lot of people that feel that way in Seattle that would like to be riding but aren't.

So I want to help amplify those voices and make sure that those voices are heard as we choose how to plan our bike networks.

I'm Andy Denenberg.

I'm a physician on the faculty at University of Washington with faculty appointments in both public health and in urban planning.

I work at that intersection of how the built environment affects health.

I've been a cyclist for many decades, both recreational and commuting.

I've worked a lot at the national level.

I retired from the Centers for Disease Control before moving here, and I'm interested in sort of seeing what it's like on the ground.

How do you improve the city, particularly from the equity point of view, to be able to get more people cycling?

I'm Meredith Hall, and I've been living in South Park for the past 10 years, and I've been cycling for the past 20 at least.

And like Kashina, I have a young child, and I've been commuting with her to take her to preschool downtown.

So I'm particularly interested in the all ages and abilities aspects of improving our infrastructure, but also in improving the routes through the Duwamish Valley, connecting us to the resources north, south and getting people into the valley from Beacon Hill and West Seattle.

And I think we've done a great job as a community connecting to the other communities as activists.

And I'm looking forward to really seeing all of that through.

Great.

Well, Serena, you're accurate.

I really appreciate the passion and the broad perspective you all bring to this.

Colleagues, do either of you have any questions for the candidates?

Not a question as much as a statement.

I mean, I think as a city, we are trying really hard to stay on the cutting edge of the intersection of the built environment, climate change, and transportation alternatives, to put it in your words, Mr. Hall.

in my words, sort of, you know, I would say options.

And I think one of the things we really rely on the bike board for is advocacy for a complete and connected network.

And I look at the report that we're going to get later on this afternoon about the work that the city has been doing, and I think that there's some good work in there.

But if you look at it, what we're highlighting is a .3 extension here, a .2 extension there, a .8 extension in some places.

And I can not speak for any other council member than myself.

What I'm interested in are those 1.5, 2, 3, 4, and 5 mile extensions that really do a good job of imitating what a street network for cars looks like.

that is missing for those of us who choose to either occasionally or regularly ride our bikes to and from the things that we want to do on a daily basis.

So as somebody who's really interested in access and mobility for all users, I really rely on the Bike Board and your expertise to be building that vision and holding our city accountable to those goals and objectives.

So I would ask you and encourage you to continue to be bold and continue to have an open door to my office at least about what we can continue to do to make sure that we're building well for all ages, all abilities, and all throughout the city.

Welcome Councilmember Bagshaw.

Thank you for joining us.

We're just wrapping up board appointments.

Serena, I also have Amanda Barnett on here as a reappointment.

But the notes show that she was just appointed last year, and so help me understand why we're reappointing her now.

She was filling in for someone who had stepped down, and so her term is up, and then so she's up for appointment.

Excellent.

Great.

And just for the public, we like to have new appointments come to get a chance to introduce themselves and be on TV and have the part of the record.

Reappointments are always welcome to attend to, but not required.

So thank you all for being here.

Council Member Bakeshaw, we have an amazing group of folks here.

I don't know if you have any questions for them.

Otherwise, we'll move forward with the appointments.

So colleagues, I'll go ahead and move approval of appointment of agenda items one through six appointments of these five members plus reappointment of Amanda.

Second.

All in favor signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Any abstaining?

Yes, exactly.

Great.

Thank you all so much for your work here.

Obviously, this is an exciting time for all modes of transportation.

I'm noting that next month, We're going to be under some serious constraints that will last for a couple years.

But I haven't heard anyone say that they expect the bike lanes to be congested.

So it's a mode that's going to be, if we can make it safe, should not be too much congestion.

So we got some work to do to make it safe.

Thanks for being here.

And we'll be considering the full appointments of the council next Monday.

You're welcome to attend that, but you don't need to be here for that.

Thanks so much.

All right.

Jasmine, do you want to read agenda item two or seven, I guess, into the record?

Agenda item number seven.

We'll invite presenters forward.

This is an update on Sound Transit 3 West Seattle and Ballard Link extensions.

I'm glad you're here.

So as folks get seated, we'll get going with introductions in a second.

I just want to, for the public, as I mentioned at the opening, Council Member McDermott and I co-chair the elected leadership group.

My other two colleagues here are members of that, along with a few other council members, the mayor, representatives from the Port of Seattle, and King County Executive Constantine and Snohomish County Executive Summers.

I'm not sure if I'm missing anybody, but I think that's just about everybody.

And that group was set up to be one of the levels of review as we're considering preferred alternatives for alignments within Seattle for the Sound Transit 3 investments.

And we had a briefing last month, a private briefing, individual briefings as opposed to a meeting.

And so I asked the folks to come to this committee and present to both give an update on, to share publicly some of the things that we already have heard.

And also, to have a little more in-depth conversation about the racial equity toolkit work.

I'll hand it over to Dr. Rose.

I just want to note there, we have about 40 minutes for this, including some discussion.

There are 60-some slides.

So, as we jump into it, I'm going to ask folks to, that we move through the stuff that's, that we've seen a bunch relatively.

So, why don't you start with introductions, and Carrie, you can start.

Cheryl Bryan, members of the committee and guests, thanks for inviting us here to give a briefing on our project and talk more about the Racial Equity Toolkit.

Very happy to be here.

I will speak quickly through the intro slides, but wanted to make sure that we took a moment to cover some of the background and the information on process so far for members of the committee and the public.

And then we'll hand it over to go over the end-to-end alternatives and then discussion on the racial equity toolkit.

So...

Do you mind doing quick introductions from Cahill and Lita, just for the record?

You can introduce yourselves.

I'm Cahill Ridge.

I'm the CARDO Director for the West Salem Biolink Extension.

Thank you.

Lita Shaheem, Government and Community Relations Manager at Sound Transit.

Thank you both.

Great.

So we kicked off alternative development at the beginning of last year after Sound Transit 3 passed.

And you'll see on the graphic there that the ST3 project for West Seattle and the Ballard Link extensions identifies the mode and corridor and the number of stations and the general station locations along the entire corridor.

And that's where our project development and alternative development process kicked off with the ST3 representative project as a base.

It informs the cost and the schedule and operating needs for the two projects in this corridor moving forward.

So the alternatives development process is broken down into three sections.

We're currently in the planning phase that lasts until 2022. And for the West Seattle project, we'll go into design in 2022 to 2025, and then construction from 25 for a grand opening start of service in 2030. For the Ballard project, we are on the same time frame and same process for the planning phase.

Then we go into design in 23 to 26 for construction in 27 to 2035. And the Ballard project does include a new downtown tunnel through the city of Seattle.

So with the risk and construction timeline on there, the grand opening is slated for 2035. Breaking down the planning section a little bit more, We are in the first phase of planning, which is the alternatives development, where we take the representative project and we go out to the public and we get input and we refine and measure and analyze and make decisions and on the alternatives that have the most promise and the most and external support moving forward.

In the spring of 2019, we hope that our board will identify a preferred alternative, and that will kick off our process going into the environmental impact statement.

Breaking down that a little bit more, in our alternatives development, we broke it down into three levels.

We are just entering level three, where we'll continue to refine and screen alternatives and kick off the early scoping period for the future EIS.

Getting into a little bit more detail about this phase of Alternatives Development, we've designed and implemented many levels of engagement and collaboration.

And you see the different levels there on the left side.

We have our community updates, which occur through open houses and then neighborhood forums.

We have a stakeholder advisory group, Chair O'Brien mentioned the elected leadership group, and then we have Sound Transit Board.

So for each level, we have gone through a rotation of outreach and engagement with all of these different levels for collaboration.

So we did through level one, we did through level two, and we're just kicking off our engagement and collaboration for level three.

Earlier, you mentioned the members of the elected leadership group.

It is a majority of the Seattle City Council and then members of the Sound Transit Board.

And thank you again for serving as our co-chairs of the elected leadership group.

And as members, your engagement has been key to identifying issues earlier and focusing on alternatives with the most promise.

I also want to tell you about more details on the stakeholder advisory group.

It's almost 30 members from communities along the corridor and groups that serve regional interests along the corridor as well.

So since we kicked off Alternatives Development in January, we have had, and this is till October, so we've actually done a few more through November, but 112 community briefings.

We've been to 14 fairs and festivals.

We've held 10 stakeholder advisory groups through Phase 1 and 2. We've had four elected group meetings.

Those are all on Seattle Channel that you can go back and relive.

We've had 13 open houses and forums, two online open houses, and then we have just over 4,000 members on our email subscription list, and we've done 14 email updates.

And we're working on a licensing agreement with Netflix to stream the elected leadership groups on demand.

It's a new revenue source for the city.

It will pay for three stations at least.

Trying to get creative.

Here's all the fairs and festivals that we attended over the summer.

A great place to connect with members of the public that aren't traditionally part of our processes.

And then we also have held eight design charrettes with agencies and members of communities to look at specific design issues and ideas for stations along the corridor.

And so now I'll hand it over to Cahill.

I'll describe the Level 3 end-to-end alternatives.

So as Kerry mentioned, we've gone, we're in the third stage of screening right now, Level 3. Before this, we went through Level 1 and Level 2. And just before I get into Level 3, Just to remind you briefly of what we looked at in Level 2, you can see here all of the Level 2 alternatives are listed by segment, and then in pink with the strikeout, those are the alternatives that were screened out as part of the Level 2 process.

So what we're left with coming out of Level 2 were these alternatives shown on the screen here.

You can see we've got several alternatives in each segment along the corridor, West Seattle to Amish, Soto, Chinatown ID, Downtown, and Interbay Ballard.

Moving into level three, we've taken those recommendations from the elected leadership group and created three end-to-end alternatives, and I'll describe each of these in detail.

First is the representative project, which we described in outline fashion at the very start.

That hasn't changed.

It's been the same from the SD3 plan process.

And we'll continue to look at that through Level 3. Our second alternative here, we're calling the West Seattle Tunnel, CID 4th Avenue, Downtown 5th Avenue, Ballard Tunnel alternative.

Essentially, it includes tunnel alternatives in West Seattle and in Ballard, and the 4th Avenue and 5th Avenue alignments through downtown.

And there are also a number of station options associated with that, which I'll, once again, I'll describe in detail.

in a moment.

And the third basic alternative is the West Seattle Elevated CID Fifth Avenue Downtown Sixth Avenue Ballard Elevated Alternative.

It has elevated configurations in West Seattle and in Ballard.

and then Fifth Avenue, Sixth Avenue alignment through downtown.

So starting with the representative project, I won't describe this in great detail because we've talked about this for a long time, but essentially it's an elevated configuration starting in West Seattle.

It's got elevated stations at the Alaska Junction, Avalon, and Delridge.

It crossed Duwamish, gets into Soto area.

It goes along the E3 busway.

It has an elevated station in Soto.

and then that great station is Stadium.

And then through downtown, we have six tunnel stations at the International District, Chinatown, Midtown, Westlake, Denny, Southlake Union, and Seattle Center.

And then again, it transitions into an elevated configuration through Smith Cove, Interbay, and downtown, generally along 15th Avenue, terminating at a station near Market Street in Ballard.

The second alternative, as I mentioned, West Seattle Tunnel, CID 4, Downtown 5th, and Ballard Tunnel.

And it is comprised of these different options that came out of the Level 2 process.

So if you're trying to track how we got from Level 2 to Level 3, this graph helps you.

To describe it in detail, this is an overview of the entire corridor, and you can see little call-outs explaining different design options in certain areas.

I'll go through these one by one.

So starting in the Alaska Junction area, as I said, we're looking at tunnel options in West Seattle through this alternative.

And there are three tunnel options being examined, one on 41st Street, one on 42nd Street, and one on 44th Street.

They're all oriented in a north-south configuration.

Moving across to the Duwamish crossing area, this alternative would cross over the Duwamish on the north side of the existing West Seattle Bridge.

Then as you get into the Chinatown ID area, we're looking at options on 4th Avenue, and we're looking at two configurations, a mine station option, that would be a deeper station option, and a cut-and-cover station option on 4th, that would be a shallower station option.

As you get into the South Lake Union area, this alternative would have a station on Harrison in the South Lake Union area, and then it would transfer or transition over to Republican as you get into the Seattle Center area.

And then finally, in the Ballard section of the alignment, we're looking at two station options here, a tunnel station option on 14th and another option on 15th, both of them terminating around Market Street.

The third end-to-end alternative, West Seattle Elevated CID Fifth Avenue, Downtown Sixth Avenue, and Ballard Elevated Alternative.

It also includes station options in the CID area.

It's comprised of these elements of the Level 2 alternatives that are highlighted on the screen.

And just to describe it in detail, this is an overview of the entire alternative end-to-end and describing each call-out individually.

First of all, starting at Alaska Junction, The particular station here would be oriented in north-south configuration.

It would be elevated in the vicinity of 41st Avenue.

As you get down into Delridge, this station would move the Delridge station further south than was envisioned in the representative project.

If you recall the ST3 representative project, imagine that station being north of Andover.

This would push it further south of Andover.

Then as you get into the Chinatown ID area, this alternative would be on 5th Avenue, and we're looking at two configurations here.

A board tunnel option, so that's a tunnel that would be board, but with a cut-and-cover station adjacent to the existing IDS station.

And then a mine station option also on 5th Avenue, so that'd be a deeper station option in that location.

We'd be looking at a 6th Avenue alignment through downtown, serving Midtown and Westlake.

And then at the other end of the alignment in Ballard, this would include a high-level fixed bridge over the Ship Canal on the 14th Avenue alignment terminating near Market Street.

So once again, those are the three end-to-end alternatives.

I'll hand it over to Lita now to describe the racial equity toolkit process.

Pause for just one second.

I want to first acknowledge Councilmember Herbold came a while ago.

I'm sorry I didn't mention that.

Colleagues, I believe all the information we've seen here is stuff that folks have seen before, but if folks have any clarifying questions or things you want to highlight before we move into the Racial Equity Toolkit, you're open to do that.

Just one quick question.

On some of these, during our last meeting we saw that one of the other options were significantly more expensive and you were throwing around 300 million numbers.

So I think the deep bore tunnel or the station in the international district was one that was significantly more expensive.

Can you talk about, is that still a serious, I don't want to call them competitors, but An element you're looking at or is that off the table and you're really looking at the shallower one on long fourth?

No, everything that I just described has been examined on level three, so we'll have end-to-end cost estimates for all of these alternatives available when we produce the results, which we hope will be in February.

Council Member Herbold.

On slide 36, the alignment through Avalon would have some pretty significant impacts on the residential population of that neighborhood.

Is that something that we are at a point now where we're going to do an analysis of those impacts?

Obviously, there are impacts on all alignments, but I think this particular location through Avalon was identified as one of the higher impacts because of the multifamily housing there.

Yes, we'll be applying the same criteria in level 3 that we looked at in level 2 and in level 1. So we'll be quantifying the displacement impacts as well as all of the other 50 plus evaluation criteria that we used.

And we're going to go through that same exercise.

Same exact exercise went through in level one, level two.

All we're really describing today are the alternatives.

We don't have the results.

Once again, we'd have those results early in the new year.

And in going through that exercise again, is it going to be sort of a deeper level of analysis?

It's primarily the same evaluation measures, they're becoming more quantitative, and also the real distinction in Level 3 is that we now have end-to-end alternatives, so we can look at ridership, for example, across the corridor, which we were not able to do before, or cost of the alternatives from an end-to-end perspective.

So this is always the point that we wanted to get to, to be able to look at the alternatives as a whole.

And as we jump into the racial equity toolkit, I know the City of Seattle has been partnering on this work.

And if there's anyone from the City of Seattle who would be willing to join us at the table just in case questions for the city come up, that would be great.

Don't all get up at once.

Colin, if you want to just introduce yourself really quick for the record.

Collin Drake.

Nesta.

Okay, thanks.

All right, Lita.

And you guys have done a great job on slide per minute ratio.

You don't have to go quite as fast on this one, but I appreciate the getting here.

We have some practice.

All right.

Well, thank you for having us here to talk about the project, but also about this important topic.

I'm going to start with just a little bit of context.

So for background, the voter approved Sound Transit 3 plan that was passed in 2016 included a number of projects in the initial sort of go at it.

We heard a lot from the public about how much they'd like to see those projects delivered sooner.

And so as part of that process, we are really, we took a good look at ourselves to determine how we could shave a few years off of that timeline.

And a really key component of that is how we enhance collaboration with the community.

So we developed a system expansion implementation plan to guide how we plan, design, and construct our whole capital project program.

And I just wanted to highlight that, you know, that enhancement of commitment to early engagement with the public, including traditionally underrepresented communities, is a really important component of this.

We want to enhance collaboration, transparency with all affected communities.

We also are looking at ways to enhance access to the system and recently adopted, our board adopted a transit oriented development policy to promote equitable development near the transit station.

So this is a little bit of context.

That's not to say that we won't continue to do what we do during the environmental process.

We have an environmental justice analysis during the EIS phase, so the phase following this one where we describe the demographics of the project corridor, evaluate whether the project would disproportionately impact minority and low-income communities.

We review those potential impacts in greater depth and who may be affected and consider potential mitigation and benefits.

We also document the efforts to involve communities of color and low-income populations in the planning process.

So that will all continue going to this next phase.

Of course, now we are in the alternatives development phase, so I'm going to talk to you about what we've been working on in that phase.

We're also cognizant of the race and social justice initiative that the city of Seattle has and the mayor's early on affirmation of that.

So again, a little bit more context as we talk about the racial equity toolkits.

I'm glad to have our partners here from the city as well to speak to any questions if they come up specifically about this or our process together.

So that just provides some context for how we are partnering together with the city of Seattle.

regular meetings in which a interdisciplinary team from the project, the West Seattle Ballard Project at Sound Transit, meets together with department folks, various department folks from the City of Seattle, from the Department of Transportation, Department of Neighborhoods, Office of Planning and Community Development, as well as Office for Civil Rights.

We have a working group structure that's focused both on data analysis and external engagement.

We've been collaborating with a focus on elevating issues and considerations to better inform this alternatives development process and provide information that the data alone, all those evaluation measures may not be able to provide.

So this is a snapshot of how the Racial Equity Toolkit has informed our work so far.

We established shared outcomes early on.

We, which I'll talk about, I'll talk about a lot of these a little bit more in detail as we move forward.

Conducted data analysis to understand where our focus areas should be along the alignment.

We did that during level one, so during that first period.

made modifications to the screening criteria which are applied to all the alternatives so that informs the evaluation.

We have collaborated on how we engage the community as well as, so it's informed how we engage the community where we focus on proactive engagement, as well as how we look at even station planning.

So we planned a Delridge station charrette, for example, as opposed to doing our West Seattle stations all together, recognized that maybe Delridge would need particular attention.

And then we also have been documenting the findings as we go along both from the community engagement component of this as well as the data and sharing them with the public as well as with the stakeholder advisory group and the elected leadership group before they make their recommendations.

The idea is that it's embedded into our process and so that it helps to inform the process.

We're also committed to having an iterative conversation with the community about the equity outcomes as we go along.

Can you talk a little bit more about that?

What does that look like, the report back piece?

Sure.

So what we are trying to do is, as we go through, we have our Level 2 memo, which I'll talk a little bit about.

We've shared that with the public.

We're now going into engaging the community again in level three.

I think just making sure to have touch points about sort of what our process is, how the racial equity toolkit can inform that process, but also just how their engagement feeds into the process and informs it.

So it's, I think it also helps inform.

So as we get that engagement, it gives us suggestions and guidance on how we might do the evaluation.

what kinds of pieces of information it would be good for us to dig further into.

And I think as we go through the presentation a little bit more, you know, it's helped us identify some questions that maybe even through this process we can't necessarily resolve, but that are important questions for us to consider as agency partners.

So these are those outcomes that I mentioned, the Racial Equity Toolkit outcomes that are a starting place for our conversation with the community and can be refined as we go forward.

So for communities of color and low-income populations, enhancing mobility and access, creating opportunities for equitable development, avoiding disproportionate impacts, and meaningfully involving communities of color and low-income populations in the project.

So just to take you through the story of our year, so starting at the beginning of the year, we mapped concentrations of communities of color in the project corridor.

The darker purple color there indicates a greater concentration of communities of color.

So just zooming in on the Chinatown International District, which is a transit hub and is close by here, this station area emerged as one that was the most densely populated with communities of color along the whole project corridor.

So this definitely became a focus area of ours.

And then looking at West Seattle and at the Delridge Station location, as well as Avalon, what was interesting about this process is as we looked at the station area, while the populations of communities of color right around the station area may be pretty similar to the city average, when you look further south and the bike shed, walk shed, or the bike shed and the transit shed, you start to see communities of color that may be accessing the system.

So it gave us a, that's part of why we looked at doing a Delridge Station charrette and thinking a little bit more about how we engage communities further south that may be able to access the system this way.

I really appreciate you walking us through this and how you thought about it, because it'd be so easy for folks to just take a one-level crack at this and miss the populations that these stations are serving.

So this is really illustrative, and I appreciate that work.

Thank you.

So now I'm going to walk through, as we did our Level 2 evaluation, we did look at both the data as well as community engagement feedback, focusing in again on the Chinatown International District and the Delridge Station areas.

I'm going to touch on this fairly quickly as this is all documented in our Level 2 memo, but if there are questions and it would be helpful to discuss it further, I'm happy to do so.

So, for the Chinatown International District, the evaluation component, looking at the alternatives, there were 4th Avenue alternatives as well as 5th Avenue alternatives, deeper station options and shallow station options.

So, just from looking at the potential construction impacts, they're more proximate with the 5th Avenue alternatives, as you'd imagine.

And then with the 4th Avenue alternatives, there are more potential traffic impacts.

So those are just some of the considerations.

Station access opportunities are better for those shallow stations than the deeper stations, according to our evaluation.

And then, you know, based on those, the measures that we have, it's unclear which alternative poses the greatest net benefit for the communities living in the CID and near the CID station area today.

So that is why that community engagement component is so important.

So our community feedback, we've heard time and time again that projects happen sort of to the community as opposed to for the community.

So inclusive ongoing engagement is really imperative to ensuring that these outcomes can serve the neighborhood, low income, and communities of color all surrounding the station area.

construction impacts are a top concern for these communities, and that there's a lot of support and interest from both CID and Pioneer Square communities for leveraging a new station to improve connections from Union Station across to King Street Station where there's Amtrak and Sounder.

There's also a lot of interest in activating Union Station and reconfiguring the plaza.

Some feedback about whether there are transit-oriented development opportunities that could benefit the community in partnership with the community as another just piece of feedback.

There was support for continuing to explore both 4th and 5th Avenue alternatives to really understand what benefits there might be for the community and understand those concerns a lot better.

User experience and comfort using light rail were sort of key factors for understanding mobility and access.

We talked a lot about access to opportunity and what does that really mean for the Chinatown International District community, which is a transit hub.

So understanding how folks use the system will be important for that.

Strong interest in, there was a lot of concern about displacement, as you might imagine, and gentrification, and understanding those pieces as well as how there might be cross-agency coordination and strategy around how to address those things in the CID.

And then for Delridge, the key drivers here with respect to racial and social equity included bus-rail integrations.

How do you create the best transfer environment to other modes that could serve those communities of color living further south and that are reliant on transfers at Delridge Station?

And then also the alternatives that might have a more predictable redevelopment scenario to support equitable transit-oriented development, that that's another factor.

You know, as across the entire corridor, understanding displacement, how those might, that might disproportionately affect communities of color is, of course, an important consideration, and one here, too.

And is the thinking with equitable transit-oriented development that would include affordable housing and maybe even affordable opportunities for small businesses?

Yes, yeah.

And, you know, there's interest in particular, we heard time and time again about this particular location with a grocery store, yeah.

So then the community input component really just builds on that.

We did, you know, hear about for those that are really dependent upon transit that do live further south, immigrant, refugee communities, that there both needs to be, you know, sort of how that transfer environment works for folks is important, but also kind of wayfinding and ensuring sort of language neutral to an extent.

So there were some pieces that were kind of further in time to be implemented.

were noted in this process, as well as, again, the grocery store component and how to address displacement pressures was brought up.

Just a question about the community input into the RET for Delridge.

I understand you're doing greater engagement in the Chinatown CID in that RET process so that we can actually get to a true level three for that community.

But I'm just concerned that the level of engagement for Delridge has been somewhat limited.

And I don't know if there have been inputs beyond in Delridge beyond the community charrette.

I know we've had obviously some community workshops, but there's a lot of concern that there has not been any, or enough I should say, intentional engagement with folks in Delridge.

Yeah, thank you Councilmember Herbold.

We are very interested in deepening and furthering engagement in the Delridge community and have been working as a group and with some of our partner stakeholders to identify opportunities for doing that as well as with the city.

And so we will, we hope to in January and February as we move forward, have more meetings with the community so that we can hear more from the Delridge community.

if there's anything at all I can do.

Yes, absolutely.

We'll be in touch.

Participate.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Is that the specific Delridge event?

I know you're planning a specific Delridge outreach opportunity as well.

Yes.

Yes, we are.

And that would be, we don't have a date yet, but we are working on that.

And then we'll advertise it and share that with you.

But yes, that will be an important engagement opportunity in Delridge.

We've also identified a number of community organizations and social service providers that we've reached out to for interviews, following up on that to get deeper engagement ideas that they've brought up to us.

I'm glad you're doing that and I look forward to deep outreach for that upcoming community meeting in Delbridge as well.

Thank you.

So that actually lends itself nicely to thinking about level three, so this next phase.

So as this is an iterative process I mentioned earlier, you know, some of what we heard through our engagement in level three, again, the focus for Delridge on bus rail integration and equitable TOD.

transit-oriented development.

And the Chinatown International District sort of more clearly put, we heard, that as scope and sort of focus and to help guide our conversations, limiting harmful impacts, maximizing connections for all users, and supporting the 100-year vision for future generations that the community has is a good way to sort of think about our work in Level 3 and our engagement.

So that sort of identified our scope there.

And then there's a number of different ways that we're looking at for engaging the community and deepening that engagement, both in Delridge and the Chinatown International District, employing listening sessions, briefings with community groups, direct one-on-one meetings.

hosting potentially community workshops or events, neighborhood forums that are addressing issues, and then really targeting social service providers and community organizations in those neighborhoods that can help us get to that next level.

And so we continue, we look forward to continuing to work with all of you on that.

In addition to the two advocates that you have to my right and left, which you can really count on, I'd like to ask you whether you've reached out to our Department of Neighborhoods because they have a lot going on right now and trying to reach into various deep dives into communities.

Absolutely.

So yes, we have regular meetings with a number of city partners, but with Department of Neighborhoods included.

And I see some of them over here behind me.

But yes, Department of Neighborhoods coordination is an important component.

They're also part of our RET team.

And Council Member Bakershire, I appreciate you highlighting that because specifically, well, actually both these communities, Delridge and Chinatown International District have a lot going on in those communities.

Chinatown International District recently went through some zoning changes.

There's a lot of development happening.

Delridge, there's a bus rapid transit proposal to come online there.

And these are also communities that can be overwhelmed with that change pretty easily.

And then a major project like this coming on top of it.

And so my understanding is one of the both challenges and opportunities is with so much going on, how do we get folks' attention to give some direct input to this, whether we're also asking for input on so many other things in those communities.

And, you know, it'd be easy for folks to say, well, this is a low priority for me because this is a whole generation away.

It's 15 years away.

And yet, now is the moment where you can influence the outcome.

And if you show up 5, 10 years from now, it's going to be a little late to change the outcome of a project like this.

It's a challenge.

I don't know if there's more to say, or Council Member Grumman.

Well, you know, I mean, what's worked really well is where we've had opportunities where it's made sense, you know, to actually have, you know, both agencies at the same place.

So if there's an event that's going on where we can be a resource at a table on the side, you know, if the community has gathered and it's relevant, it makes a lot of sense to try and give them sort of more at once, as opposed to dividing.

Council Member Dermott.

Thank you.

And I know you're aware that as you said at the beginning of the presentation we want to deliver this set of Sound Transit projects sooner than we have earlier projects and therefore we're trying to streamline how we plan and develop so we can do that and as we do that have this process for the first time trying to have one preferred alternative before the EIS process, we're learning that maybe when we develop alternatives and when we're communicating them to the neighborhoods they would impact and benefit, maybe needs to be adjusted or at least looked at differently.

And so I appreciate your awareness of that and recognize It's new territory, and we need to figure out how to do that best for, in some of these questions, particularly Delridge, but for the entire system, not only for these lines we're talking about, but for the agency as we go forward with the rest of the work in the new program.

And so I think some of that's challenging, and I'm glad we're leaning into it to try to figure out when to go knock on doors, when to talk to people.

about specific alternatives that will impact their immediate neighborhood and not to be behind the ball on that.

This is it actually.

Great.

I have a question about what happens next on this because I want to first applaud the folks at Sound Transit for the work you've done in all the communities.

I've been to a number of the meetings and workshops, and I've been really impressed at both the engagement, getting people to show up on evenings and weekend days to participate, and you get a room full of folks that range from a retired transit planner to, I'm just hearing about this, and I'm curious how my kids will be able to use light rail in the future, and to have a conversation that appears, from my perspective, to be meaningful to that whole range of expertise, and collect input in a way, and report back to the stakeholder advisory group and elected leadership group.

I mean, I know it's a monumental amount of work, but I've been really impressed at that work of outreach.

And I know that the extra level with the racial equity toolkit work doing in these two communities we just talked about is really exciting to be happening.

And it's also highlighting some of the challenges we're facing, and I think specifically in the Chinatown International District.

We're entering this phase where we're going to start to, I mean the expectation is we're going to start to really foreclose the options and narrow it down to where we're going to invest going forward.

And so those decisions have the potential to lock us into some outcomes that have significant impacts on folks.

And I'd love your thoughts on how we're going to take all this great feedback we're getting specifically through the racial equity toolkit And we're going to narrow down our technical solutions.

How are those going to line up in the next couple months?

Because if it were easy, frankly, we would have solved some of these problems earlier.

And I know that specifically in Chinatown International District, there's some real technical engineering challenges and some really important needs in that community.

So I'm curious what your thoughts are.

And help us think through what's going to be happening in the next few months.

I'll take a crack at that.

Thanks, Cahill.

You have been in all the different engagement events we've been doing throughout the year and you've seen as we went through level one, we started with a lot of alternatives and we screened down some and then we refined some coming out of level one.

level 2 I think we actually had more alternatives than we had in level 1. We got a lot of input again on the technical analysis that was done in level 2 and made refinements and now we have alternatives in level 3. So you saw today what the level 3 alternatives are.

We will again be describing these alternatives to the public just as we did in level 1 and level 2. We'll be informing them about the technical analysis and then gathering that feedback again and that will be presented to the stakeholder advisory group and elected leadership group and ultimately those recommendations will go to the board.

So we're hoping to learn a lot over the next few months as we move towards a board decision in April.

I would note, as I think you've noted, there are some areas, particularly in Chinatown ID, where we're hearing a lot of input, a lot of interest in looking at alternatives and continuing to look at alternatives and explore the issues.

So there will be, you know, the need to continue to lean in there and hopefully illuminate the issues to inform your recommendations.

I know there's not an easy answer for this question, Cahill, I'm going to give you and put me on the spot a bit here.

But, you know, I hear from a community member in Chinatown International District that who's just come through a big city project a couple years ago with a streetcar.

And they've seen what, in a relative sense, is a minor project compared to what's potentially going to happen.

And they've felt that disruption.

They have some distrust, because I think the city could have done a better job in our work in engaging with community.

And they're telling all of us, like, if you do this project the way I think it's going to play out, I will be out of business, and I'll have to leave.

How do you take, and they're not a transit expert, they're not going to say, I suggest using the machine that I saw in Peru and bring that up here to fix it.

How do you take that really high level but important feedback and incorporate it into a design of a transit system in a way that meaningfully changes, potentially changes the design in a way that addresses that?

Well, it's a continuous process where, as you mentioned, as you noted, we're in the alternatives development right now.

We're trying to figure out what alternatives we should look at in the environmental impact statement process.

As we get into the environmental impact statement process, we'll dig down into a lot more detail.

We'll start to look at all sorts of particular issues, whether it's displacements or construction impacts or traffic impacts or noise impacts, all of those things will be looked at as well.

And that will be a conversation again with the community, just as we're doing right now.

This is what we understand at this point.

Given these alternatives, we'll get input again.

We'll refine to try and address some of those concerns, whether it's particular impacts or whatever the concern might be.

And so it's not a conversation that ends in April.

It's a conversation that continues as we go through the environmental process.

And indeed it will continue as we go through the construction process, design construction process.

So I think what we're trying to do is through this process is get people engaged in this process earlier, not waiting 10 or 15 years as you described, but because there is input that we can get even now that informs that outcome 10, 15 years from now, it's much easier to get a better outcome in 10 or 15 years from now if we start to have those conversations now and get that even sometimes input that it seems very specific, very detailed, it is actually good input to get at this point in time.

It does impact how we define these alternatives or refine these alternatives as we move forward.

I appreciate it.

That sounds, that's a good answer as I would expect from you, Cahill, so thank you.

One of the things that I've been really impressed by, frankly surprised by, is, you know, this whole process in part was designed to help narrow some things early on so that we can save some of the planning and design cost and timeline.

And when I look at the number of geographies we've looked at just today, it does feel like communities are narrowing around a consensus alternative.

Now, these alternatives still have some design risk and certainly some costs we have to resolve.

But I've been really impressed that it does feel like there's at least a potential that in most of these geographies, by the time we get to EIS, there'll be a sense that from community leaders and elected leaders, that we know what we want to get out of it.

Now, how many options we carry through the EIS, for a variety of reasons, will be open.

And the exception for me right now is in the Chinatown International District.

And I hope that if we're going to use the EIS process for continuing engagement and resolve resolutions, that we don't narrow it down to a single alternative to look at and resolve around that, if that's the reality there.

Yeah, we've been hearing that input.

It was expressed at the LG.

It's also reflected in some of the community engagement we've heard.

And of course, we'll learn more as we go through the next couple of months, but that's consistent with what we've been hearing.

Council Member Bakeshaw.

Thank you.

We've been patiently waiting.

Thank you.

Maybe patiently, but it sounds like a broken record for me.

One of the things I haven't heard are the words age-friendly.

And I know you've talked about seniors, and I think that's really important, but we are really promoting age-friendly Seattle.

And what that means is that any intersection, whether it's a parent with a stroller or someone who's in a wheelchair or someone who simply is having difficulty, a little slower to get through, that we keep that in mind on the front end.

And that means You know, the age-friendly means exactly that, that the city is welcoming to all.

And I'd just like to focus on that disability or abilities side, that we're thinking about that too on the front end, because it really is going to make such a difference for people to feel included.

So thank you.

When you talk about race and social justice, I just always keep adding, remember our seniors, remember people who have a little difficulty getting around.

If you will just say age-friendly Seattle when you're talking to the audiences, that will go us a long way to recognize that you're thinking about it on the front end.

Thank you.

Great.

Thank you for that, Council Member Begich.

I really appreciate your focus on that, and I know the agency's response to that.

Trust me, I am well aware of that.

Council Member Herbold.

Thanks.

Going back to the RET, I just want to get a sense of when it's going to wrap up and whether or not the results of the RET will be available along with the Level 3 evaluation.

So at this time, so the level three evaluation will be early next year.

We'll have our scoping period, our big public comment period, likely in February.

We'd like to get that feedback as part of our racial equity toolkit.

So shortly right after that, before recommendations are made, we'd like to wrap up the racial equity toolkit and share that with you.

So I have a couple requests.

One is, As we're going into that kind of final phase of the RET and going into the level three report back, it would be really helpful for me, and I think others at the city too, if sometime before we go into our recess in the next couple weeks, to have a bit of a plan from Sound Transit to describe how the continued input we're getting from community through the RET process will influence the work that's gonna come out that we're gonna see in February.

And I think you've done some of that today, but I think if we could have, you know, if you're willing to do something in writing that could help get our head around it, I think that would be really helpful for us as a city's kind of figuring out collectively kind of our work going forward.

And the second thing I mentioned, Council Member McDermott and I sent a letter over, I don't know if it was a week ago or maybe a little longer, and, you know, trying to elevate this issue too.

And one of the things we asked for would be another ELG meeting at some time in that first quarter that would be focused on Chinatown International.

We're looking at five or six geographies.

There's a lot of information, and there's some really important stuff.

And even when we schedule a three-hour meeting, which seems absurdly long for our lives these days, we still only have a few minutes on each geography.

And so it would be great if we could schedule a meeting that was dedicated to that.

I imagine there's various layers to respond to things, but it would be great if We could get some clarity on what that might happen between now and say that middle week in December.

Colleagues, any other questions or comments on this?

If I may, just briefly.

Board member Johnson, Councilmember Johnson.

In this case, I'm wearing a couple of different hats as somebody who serves both on this committee and then also on the Sound Transit Board.

I think, you know, we have spent a lot of time and energy to get to this point.

And I think a lot of folks would have been surprised to find that we have really done a good job of getting to that consensus position that you described earlier in most of the geographies in which we're contemplating the expansion of ST3.

And so, for me, I don't want us to lose that thread, which is we've done a lot of really important work and we've got a pretty great set of consensus positions both with community and amongst elected leaders in most of the neighborhoods that we're talking about.

And for, in particular, the Chinatown International District, I think the highlight of some additional staff time and some additional technical work, not just technical work informed by the Sound Transit staff, but in support of community members who might either consciously or subconsciously emulate that transit nerd voice that you used earlier, Council Member O'Brien.

You know, I think generally finding a way for us to make sure that folks feel confident in understanding the tradeoffs here in many of the neighborhoods is going to be a thing that we can put off for future days.

As we get into the EIS, it may not be one of those luxuries that we have in the CID.

So feeling like we've got the right set of folks with the right set of technical proficiencies sitting across the table from, Our very strong Sound Transit staff, I think, is going to be just a really important thing for us to continue to focus on over the next six months as we try to get the project across the finish line.

And along that, I'll remind folks like everyone at the table is well aware, but in the city's budget, we allocated about $100,000 from the kind of SDOT planning money to go to basically hire some support for that community, the Chinatown International District in Pioneer Square, to have some more expertise kind of embedded in community through this process to help them with that.

And so I don't want to pretend that that's magically going to resolve a lot of things, but I think it will add a little capacity to help through this process.

Colin, I invited you to the table, and no one has come up with any specific questions for SDAP, but if you have anything you want to comment on, I want to just make sure you're welcome to chime in here.

Thanks.

I don't have anything to add.

I think it's been great to be a partner with Sound Transit on this, and I'm looking forward to what the next few months and the next few years will bring.

Great.

Thanks for that.

There's nothing else.

I really appreciate you all coming to present to committee today.

I hope you were treated well enough that you'll come back at a future invitation.

And Council Member Thurmond, I also really appreciate you being here.

You're welcome to sit around for the rest of our meeting.

We've got some street vacations coming up.

We're going to talk about 520. You're always welcome at the table.

Where do streets like to go on vacation?

Ireland.

It's the Harbor Island one.

Jasmine, do you want to read the next agenda item into the record?

Sure, agenda item number eight, an update on levy to move Seattle.

Okay, colleagues, time to switch gears a little bit, but another important conversation.

As people get settled, I will just keep the short version.

The levy to move Seattle early last year, there was a recognition that projects were not being delivered on schedule.

There were a variety of reasons for that and a sense that in this nine-year levy that voters generously approved with a high set of expectations, a lot of work had to be done to figure out how we can both up our amount of delivery and recognize the cost realities and the funding realities that we have in our community.

And so there's been a concerted effort led by the department, the Seattle Department of Transportation, and with a lot of oversight from the Oversight Committee for the Move Seattle Levy over the last, it was probably six to eight months now.

And the result is a work plan that SDOT released publicly, I think, last Thursday, just not coincidentally, I guess, but just moments before the Levy Oversight Committee met.

And today we have a chance to review that.

And this is, I put a little words in, you're all mouse, but I think this is S dots, you know, here's what we're going to do.

We have six years left in the levy, six years in one month.

And here's the plan for how we plan to hopefully meet the commitments we made.

There's a couple places where some of those have to be adjusted and how we plan to meet them and a higher level of specificity on the timing and what the expectations are because we're still relying on some outside sources of money and those aren't all locked in yet.

So with that, the other thing I'll just mention is the council has signaled clearly as we work through this process in updating this work plan that we are going to take affirmative action to kind of bless it or maybe propose modifications to it.

And so this is the first opportunity for us, frankly, to get briefed in detail on this work plan and we will ultimately have future conversations too.

So why don't we start with introductions.

Linnea, you can be first and then I'll let you all lead this presentation.

All right, thank you.

I'm Linnea Laird.

I am the Interim Director of the Seattle Department of Transportation.

With me today is Lorelei Williams, who's our Deputy Director of Capital Project Delivery, and Elliot Hembrech, who is our Deputy Chief of Staff.

And before they kick off, I just want to say a few things.

And you did a great lead-on, which...

Well, thank you.

We are really pleased to be here today.

This is a big step for us.

The team has worked really hard, not only focusing on program delivery, but on developing this work plan that we think provides a very great tool for us that is transparent and forward-looking.

It has the right kind of detail, and we think it can actually provide a really good baseline for moving forward.

In developing that, you know, I want to acknowledge and thank the mayor because she actually was the driving force in that you need to take steps to put forward what is the right kind of plan here.

And that allowed us to move to develop this really forward-facing plan.

And then the council, because being part of the livery oversight committee, holding us accountable, creating an opportunity, and working with us to deliver.

So many, many things have been in play.

I've only had the opportunity to be with SDOT for the last three months.

But I can tell you, the work that they have done, not only in delivering the program, but developing this plan, I think puts us in a really good place to move forward from.

So I just want to acknowledge that great hard work and then turn the presentation over to them.

So thank you.

Thanks, Linnea.

Great.

Thank you, Linnea.

So our presentation today is going to be split into two separate parts and we can get through the work plan part and then stop and take questions and then move on to our quarter three.

The work plan portion of the presentation is really in response to your resolution that you all passed in August as well, Resolution 31830, where you've asked us to deliver a work plan for the remainder of the levy.

for review.

And then the second part is our quarter 3 2018 update that we give to the Levy Oversight Committee and that we're committed to bringing back to you all here quarterly if you'll have us.

So with that why don't we move forward and jump right in.

So looking at where we've been like Linnea mentioned We have to thank the mayor's office for really providing a lot of support in this, and earlier this year in April, asking us to dig into this levy and really look, take a deep dive into it.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't say a great deal of thanks to our interim director, Linnea, as well, and then Jaron before.

I think we have a lot of work to do to get that big rock down the other side of the hill carefully, but we're in a much better position than we were earlier this year.

And then throughout the year, like was mentioned by Councilmember O'Brien, we did a lot of work with the Levee Oversight Committee and our boards to inform the recommendations that we'd be putting forward in this work plan.

And it was a exhaustive process, took us longer than I think we thought it would going into it.

So I just wanted to assure everybody that the projects were still happening.

We're still in construction as we'll get to in our Q3 report.

Things are still happening out on the ground while we were doing this assessment and work plan report.

All right, and then before you, or I have a few copies here in front of me, and then Available Online is our 2019 to 2024 updated work plan for the remainder of the levy.

It is about 70 pages long, so a lot, some serious time to go through it.

And I just wanted to point out, too, it's available online, and translation services are available if anybody listening or watching at home wants it in a different language.

Those resources are there at the back of the report.

But for a levy of this size, it's divided into 30 different sub-programs, and the report provides an update on each of the 30 different sub-programs, which is why it's 70 pages long.

And all of those effectively...

are functioned differently, but we put them in a template for the report so that they all look and feel pretty similar to a reader and folks looking at the report.

So we've included items like the original levy commitment from 2015, a status update for each of those sub-programs, and then an updated project list, including a spend plan information and total budget information for each of the 30. For those that we are requesting and advocating for adjustments on, we've also included some risk mitigation strategies and techniques that we're going to be employing over the next six years as well.

So you can get a well-rounded picture of where those subprograms are currently at.

And then we talked about this when we came here in August as well, but with such a focus of the last several months being on our cost estimating, we wanted to show everybody that the current work plan that we have now reflects the current environment that we're seeing out there on the streets to the best of our ability in November 2018. Things will still change, but we've accounted for what we know now.

And like Linnea said, we have a good baseline of moving forward.

All right.

One of the first things that folks will see when they dig into the report is a summary overview of how those 30 sub-programs are doing.

One of the first things to mention is that of the 30, 22 are in good shape and are marked accordingly with the green checkmark.

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There are some big programs in here that are doing well and are on track to deliver as they had promised.

Of the 34 of them are being closely monitored.

We're closely monitoring all of them, but four of them we've listed as yellow and we can answer questions on those as we get through the report if you want.

And then four of them we're really monitoring closely and are recommending adjustments based on the 2015 original commitment and we'll get into all of those here in a few minutes.

All right, so the first of those that we are recommending a potential adjustment for is the bicycle safety BMP subprogram.

Yeah, just before we get into the individual areas that we're looking at adjusting, it would be helpful for me to understand sort of what the principles were in identifying areas for adjustment.

I'm assuming there's some common set of factors that you used in making these decisions.

So before we get into the individual work plan items that are being reconsidered or reprogrammed, it would be helpful to understand a little bit of that thinking.

So, we went through an effort.

One of the big instigators was we knew costs were going up.

So, that was a starting point for sure for us to look at what we had planned these programs to cost us based on the deliverable commitments and what we would estimate now because of the conditions we've seen.

So that was one of our starting points.

And then as we looked at based off of the prioritized project list we had in each subprogram, how much that would cost us, that kind of backed us into a plan.

So we said, well, we only have this much money.

We had planned to have this much.

We only have this much.

Or we have the same amount of money, but it's going to cost more.

So using the prioritization framework for each subprogram, we then backed into decisions about what we were still going to be able to build.

And I'll just jump in and speak to paving, because that's probably one of the most noted ones aside from transit corridors.

But the paving, the costs went up from what we expected, so that was one impact.

And then our prioritization process stayed the same, but some of the conditions continued to modify.

So we took a new look at conditions.

And then we looked at how much money we had and how much the projects were costing.

So we ended up also then with the transit corridors, because we weren't able to get as far with the funds in the transit corridors, we said, well, we're not going to be able to do the paving or certain other things that we had hoped to do.

So we had to then look at our paving program and And we chose to turn paving dollars into the transit corridors also rather than some of the original just paving program explicit commitments that we'd made.

I get that part as it relates to paving and transit corridors and the thinking about that.

But there are increased costs across all subprograms.

So I don't understand how the increased costs are playing into your decision making about which subprograms to reduce.

Let me, I'm trying to figure out the best way.

And Elliot, if you have a thought, you can definitely jump in.

But essentially, some programs ended up with less money than we planned.

So AMM is one.

So if we had had the original amount of money that we had made the 70 lane mile commitment on, then we wouldn't actually have to reduce the number.

So it was essentially how far can we make the money that we have In some programs, such as sidewalks, we actually got more money, which allowed us to still be able, even with the increased cost, to fit in the original commitment.

And so the whole effort was updating the cost estimates for each project and then checking that against the funding amounts that we had.

And we no longer wanted to present an overly optimistic picture for what we could get.

And so when it comes to the transit corridors, for instance, we, a lot depends on the FTA Small Starts Grant.

And so we wanted to be really clear about what scopes we were depending on tied to those.

And I'm not sure if I'm getting right at the point.

did you look at, I'm sure you did, whether or not there, I mean, there's the question of increased costs associated with inflation, different estimates, and then, you know, increased costs associated with labor, and reduced money that was expected.

But is there a sub-program where you saw that we, we're just really more off the mark for our estimates than another subprogram?

Is there sort of an outlier like, not to harp on the topic that we're going to talk about later, but for instance, repaving, is that an example of a subprogram that we way underestimated and that's why it's one of the programs that we're looking at under adjusting or did we kind of, underestimate evenly across the board?

Well, in some cases with the inflation number, we underestimated consistently across the board.

We, with the transit corridor specifically, when we put out the levy, the expectation that we had in the department was that we'd always be able to scale those based off of scope and money and things of that nature.

And between The optimistic cost estimates that we ended up putting forward, we assumed we could always get something if we scaled it.

That's essentially what we've ended up with here, is some corridors are getting less scope than others.

Madison versus the Fremont corridor, for instance.

But also when we recognized that we weren't going to get Small Starts grants for every corridor, then we had to start looking to other programs to be able to get that money.

Paving, when you look at the total number of miles we're still able to get, we're at 162 minus the Madison corridor, which if you're able to add back in Madison, we get up to 172. So we're about, you know, eight lane miles off.

Yes, exactly.

So that's, we're eight lane miles off.

And we do have some contingency in our paving program too.

So when we reanalyzed it, we are trying to make sure that the work plan we put forth is realistic.

But hopefully some things will cost less than we plan and we'll be able to reallocate that money and do a little more.

But we did not want to over promise this time.

All righty, so back to slide nine.

I wanted to point out too since I passed around the work plan reports, the slides show the levy ID number and the page number in the report that it refers to if you want to kind of flip around and get more information.

But we include some prioritization.

information for each sub program too.

So you kind of know why we, you know, a little summary of why we made the decisions that we did and how the department prioritizes its projects.

But for the BMP sub program, this is one of the outliers in the work plan report and that this sub program is currently going through its BMP implementation plan process with plans to be complete in the spring of 2019. So we have all of the information for this sub program in the report, looking backwards and then looking forward with their budget and spend plan.

But we're waiting for the process to conclude that we're working on with the bike advisory board, the mayor's office, and of course your council for approval in spring of 2019 to put that in there.

Yeah.

Are you keeping talking about bicycles or are you moving on?

I was going to say a little bit more.

I wanted to point out that while the future list is not in the report at this time, and it will be put in there later, our current commitment is still there to the downtown network and to neighborhood connections to connect the facilities we already have.

And to date, we've completed 23 and a half lane miles of all bicycle facilities.

Can you talk a little bit more about the downtown connections?

I am specifically interested in that for a reason that I live downtown and ride my bike downtown.

But I'm also interested, how are you, and maybe you want to answer this later, how are you working on separating bicycles and pedestrians as well?

Because I know that it is a giant issue that if bikes feel safe and there's a safe place to be, they will be where we're designated.

If not, they're ending up on the sidewalks.

And as our friend Doug McDonald continued to remind us, that's not safe for the pedestrians.

It really isn't functioning as smoothly as it could.

So could you talk a little bit more about downtown?

I guess I would say one of the tools to be able to separate bicycles and pedestrians is having those designated facilities like you referred to.

So protected bike lanes, bike lanes, greenways.

And I think for the department and the city as a whole, making good choices about where we install those facilities so that they really are the places that people are going to use them.

So that they are an attractive place to go and then I might be reading into what you're saying a little bit, but if they have a protected bike lane, a good route to follow, then we're not going to see them as much on that street or the next street over on the sidewalks competing for space.

So I just want to reemphasize and say thank you that we've gotten as far as we have.

I still think that we are failing because we have a few blocks that have Even paint on the ground is helpful because the drivers know where they can identify or where they can expect to see bicycles.

That makes it more predictable, right?

We all agree with that.

But then it ends.

And the one that's been, that I've been harboring on for, I think it's been, well, since 2011, when I first was introduced to neighborhood greenways and protected bike lanes, is 4th Avenue.

I mean, it is...

When you want to ride from here to South Lake Union, as an example, you get a nice painted lane up to Spring Street, and then all heck breaks loose.

From that point north, there is nothing but, you know, traffic weaving.

You're dealing with trucks coming into hotels.

You're dealing with lots of different lanes trying to turn left.

And I frankly feel like it's sort of the good luck school of bike riding.

Nonetheless, I will take fourth over driving down the hill to second, because you can go faster.

On Second Avenue northbound, you stop every two to three blocks for an entire signal system, and it takes a minute or two.

And you can ask any bike rider who is a commuter, northbound on second is a safe choice, but it's a slow choice.

very hopeful that we can be mindful of that so that bikes have a place to be where they're going to use it then Doug McDonald's going to feel better about us on the sidewalks.

because we won't be on the sidewalks.

You know, I want to thank you for that comment.

I mean, 4th Avenue is a challenge for us as well.

We would like to have that bicycle lane installed.

There were some decisions, and I think they were the right decisions to defer the construction in the short term because of the other construction that was going on and the constraints.

And the thing that's going to continue to challenge us as we move forward in this downturn core is some of what's going to be coming up with all of the constraints during the viaduct the viaduct closure and the tunnel.

And so we're very carefully watching the work that we have planned, the work that needs to be done, and knowing that we need to schedule that work in as soon as we can without trying to really stop all of the traffic movement in downtown.

And our focus isn't just on general traffic, it's really on transit mobility here.

So we're aware of that.

I'm, you know what, I know you are, and I just bring it up once again because I just think it's important to, you know, it's like Ms. Manners used to say about raising teenagers, it's constant repetition and nagging.

So I'm in the constant repetition and nagging mode.

Okay, thank you.

And one last thing I would just add is message received for making quality connections.

It's one of the things that you'll see throughout our work plan is We in the end could get the mileage, could get the numbers if we really wanted to just do that.

But we're trying to make sure we make good decisions about where they have the most value in addition to that.

I know, I appreciate your, your, I'll use a different term, but your focus on this Council Member Begshaw.

And I think it's, I think it's really important, you know, we're entering this period of maximum constraint.

We're going to have a briefing in a couple weeks here on what's coming up.

And we know, and I know you all, We're doing some great work.

But to remember that cycling is also a congestion relief tool.

And we heard today from a potential new member of the Bike Advisory Board that trying to get her kid into biking in a cargo bike, but she doesn't go out very often because she doesn't feel safe with her kid on the bike.

And if we can actually make it safe, I think we can unleash the potential of so many folks.

We know, you all know, that we're at a couple percentage points right now of bike commutes.

And we know there are cities around the world that have similar weather patterns to us that have 30 or 40% riding.

And the difference is that almost every street has a safe facility.

And if we can do that, then it becomes a viable alternative for folks, maybe even a preferable choice.

And so it's not, it's encouraged that we're not viewing this as, well, we can't take it away from this, we can't take it away.

It's like, no, we're actually adding a new mode that feels safe and it takes pressure off our transit system, which is at almost full capacity during rush hour.

and our roads, which are certainly at full capacity in Rush Hour, too.

You're kind of haloed right now, Elliot.

You have this glow about you from where I'm sitting, so go for it.

All right.

Moving on to the next subprogram that's a focus of ours at today's presentation is our Arterial Roadway and Maintenance, or the AAC subprogram.

So this is one of the two levy-funded paving programs, and it's our large capital project paving program.

And like Lorelei already mentioned, one of the decisions made was to move $72 million from that sub-program to fund both the Delridge Corridor and the Eastlake Corridor, both a part of the Transit Plus Multimodal Program.

What then we did is we, once that $72 million was shifted, we looked at the remaining funds that were unencumbered and reprioritized the paving list for the remainder of the levy.

Now the report mentions the opportunity to revisit this annually and look at that prioritization methods.

I know we have a current prioritization Or a paving analysis in the works right now, of course something Catastrophic could happen and result in a change to that list as well But as it stands right now, like Lorelei mentioned our current paving list has us getting to 162 miles of paving Outside of the Madison Corridor and to date we've paved 60 lane miles of paving profit projects with levy funded dollars through this sub program only I assume I'm Envisioning a few questions here.

So why don't we Go for it.

Thanks.

So the 72 million from this program going over to the multimodal quarter program, is that reflected in the budget that the council has passed?

Yes, it is.

So we've already made that adjustment, but that's confusing to me, that we've made that adjustment prior to getting this report.

So let me ask some questions just to make sure I'm clear on this.

I'm looking to you for help.

Yeah.

Then I'm going to defer a little bit here.

So we budget at budget control levels, which are fairly large buckets of the types of stuff can be invested.

The $72 million, is it still going to the same type of projects, it's just at a different location?

Yes.

So the money, my understanding, the money is budgeted away.

I mean, there's a capital project list, which is a list that's not necessarily funded.

And then there's the specifics of where it's going, and whether you're doing paving on road A or road B, we don't pick that necessarily.

It has to be on a list, and these are all on the list.

Correct.

So the multimodal corridor repaving projects are within this category?

They're in a different category, so they're in the congestion relief category, and the paving projects and the maintenance and repair category of the levy program.

So my understanding, Councillor Hurdle, but correct me if I'm wrong, is these multi-molar corridor programs have multi-aspects to it, and includes a variety of things, and the The two paving programs were pretty specific on paving, but the multimodal included paving, too.

And so that's where there was flexibility to, like, we're going to do paving on this corridor instead of that corridor, which relieves some of the pressure from the multimodal bucket, if you will, or to expand to be able to do it when the matching money from federal funds and the costs have gone up.

And I think it's a part of your question, but I want to put words in your mouth, is here we are getting told that we're going to do this, and we just passed a budget a few weeks ago.

And I believe, at least my interpretation is the budget was at a fairly high level, and we're getting into specifics.

There's, I really appreciate, I mean this is not easy work to do and this was how do you prioritize when we can't do everything that we said we're gonna do and how do you think smart about this to deliver and try to come pretty close to delivering what we said we're gonna deliver, although it may be slightly different.

But there's still an opportunity for us as a council to weigh in on this and say, we don't like this.

We want to do something different.

How we will affect that, you know, we talked about a resolution adopting this.

We could also dig back into the budget, do provisos.

I'm not suggesting we do that, but there's still opportunity for us to weigh on this because we're just getting this now.

And we knew all along it was income after the budget just because the reality of the work that needed to be done.

Yeah, so when we built up the budget, we made assumptions with the paving program, putting money into Delridge, but it still stays within the paving program.

But you're completely right that you don't look at it at that level.

And obviously, the conversation about what we've done in that budget, we redo it every year.

So there's room to modify.

And then I really appreciate the fact that SDOT provided a copy of the draft conditions report for, it was useful for our budget discussions and queuing these issues up.

And I understand it won't be final.

for a while, but it's been useful and it's showed that there are several segments, both of Roxbury and of 35th that are identified as failed segments.

And then there was a pavement conditions report back in 2006 that also listed portions of Roxbury and Southwest 35th as major streets meaning pavement improvement.

So these problems go back several years and it appears like this might be the second levy that these projects are getting bounced off.

So if, you know, we talked a little bit about scaling these projects?

Is there a way to scale the, I mean, we already, we did half of 35th.

Is there a way to further scale the project so that we're maybe doing this work on the failed portions of which they're not, they're not contiguous.

There are probably two failed portions on both 35th and Roxbury.

Is that just engineering, not money, money aside, but is it possible from an engineering perspective?

Definitely.

I mean, we can tackle sections of a street and prioritize them.

So, you know, instead of taking the whole $35 million, you know, pie, if we had $5 million or $10 million, we could say, what's the most critical portion of the street?

And we definitely can design to reconstruct it.

We want to make sure we were being smart about how we did construction.

But that's all manageable.

And just a just a side note, I mean unfortunately for the city, the conditions of our pavement, the conditions of our roadway structures, our bridges and retaining walls, Even though we have been incredibly fortunate in bridging the gap and the Move Seattle levy to get money to help us improve that, it still isn't enough to bring those assets where I think we'd all like to see them.

So we end up with these trade-offs and delays, which are hard to stomach when you see failed pavement.

Yeah, I think it's important to note, too, the reason for some of these failed locations is really tied to the increase in metro service and the heavy buses.

And that's certainly the case in West Seattle.

I think West Seattle has seen the largest growth in metro ridership, and our streets are failing as a result.

So I think that's an important thing to consider as part of the prioritization.

which is definitely part of the reason too why we shifted that 72 towards Delridge and East Lake and got that feedback from oversight committee over the summer too, we know.

Okay, I'll move us right along to the AMM program because I like I mentioned there were two This is one where we currently lack the funds available to do the full commitment But fortunately through annual budget adjustments this year the mayor added to an almost two and a half million dollars to this sub program we're fairly confident that If we get additional revenue of that scale every year going forward, we could meet the original.

But as of today, we put forward a list that gets us to 44 to 52 miles in this sub-program.

And to date, we've paid 23.9 because we have received additional funds each year.

And this is our smaller program, so this is what we can do.

If we have to defer a larger project, we might be able to utilize this sub-program if the corridor is right to fix some of those areas that we do have to defer over the next six years too.

I'm going to jump right ahead to the Transit Plus Multimodal since we've spent a bit of time on the AMM and AAC program.

This information is largely similar to the information we brought you in August.

We're wanting to reiterate that we're planning to invest in all seven transit corridors.

The level and the scope for each will be different, and we will go through a different level of outreach for each of those moving forward.

but wanting to be clear that all seven are still on the list and that there is some risk for the two that are currently seeking FDA small starts grants.

We are pushing full steam ahead on getting both of those though, but with a lot of support at the department, at the mayor's office, but wanted to note that that risk still exists.

So before I talk about the different scopes for each of these, what we're talking about when we say transit speed and reliability improvements are on the screen there on the top half.

An example of what we can do with the budget that we have for those, we can still do significant improvements towards transit speed and reliability in terms of bus improvements in certain locations and in-lane bus stops to improve the rider experience and some transit signal priority.

And then what a full scale rapid ride transit plus multimodal project would look like there down at the bottom using Roosevelt as an example.

So for the basis of that differentiation, we have the next screen here that lists the Transit Plus Multimodal Corridor Funding Plan as exists in November of 2018. One of the things people get to this part in the report and are shocked to see is the amount of unsecured funding.

So we wanted to assure you all that the unsecured, while three years in, we wouldn't expect to have all of it today in a nine-year levy.

there are sources behind all of those unsecured, sources that we feel really good about.

We've put some of them in a likely column, some funds from SD3, some funds from Metro, and then some still unsecured but identified.

So different various degrees of certainty there but really moving aggressively on all of them.

Council Member Herbold.

I just have a question about the numbers for the Delridge Corridor.

The total there looks like it's about $35 million, but the CIP listed apparently $47 million and then a presentation in July was $42 million.

Just looking for a little bit of explanation for the differing numbers there.

The biggest difference is what we show in these numbers does not include the paving because that exists in the AAC program.

The 42 versus the 47, I suspect that's just fluctuation as we're in the pre-30%.

But when we come to speak with you on the 18th, we expect to have more solid handle on the numbers.

So if that difference between the 47 and 35 is paving, that's 12. So 12 million is a bit less than what we're talking about moving over from Roxbury and 35th, right?

Or am I?

Correct.

I suspect that that difference has more to do with what Lorelei was saying around the pre-planning, trying to get a solid number.

We would have to go back for the team to get the difference between 47 and 42.

When we come on the 18th we will backtrack to these and explain that.

I hope you have some clarity on what Councilmember Herbold is trying to get at.

If you could help us all map that out.

I appreciate your focus on 35th, but there's a variety of projects here.

And so if you could walk us through, I mean, some of that money may not have been totally programmed, so it's maybe in buckets that weren't quite allocated.

But if you can kind of, what's the term, crosswalk that for us to show us where the money shifted and stuff just for transparency so we understand that, that'd be really helpful.

Yeah, I'd be happy to.

All right.

I won't belabor the next slide because he will.

Pause for one second.

Sorry, I didn't realize we're going to move off the multimodal.

Because I just want to highlight this.

This is one of the.

for me at least, one of the biggest pieces and most important pieces of the levy to move Seattle.

It was what at least I was talking to voters about a lot.

It was the, I mean there's a lot of really important maintenance stuff to do to kind of keep things going, but this was the transformational piece that I personally saw in the levy that was gonna help people get around in different ways.

And so, and I know this is also the place that was significant risk because it relied on both partnerships with King County Metro and partnership with the federal government.

And so, one, I really appreciate the proposal here in the work plan highlighting, giving clarity that we still plan to be doing work in all seven of the corridors that were identified.

Because the federal funding certainty situation has changed, you've walked through some of the shifts are going to happen.

My understanding is that both Madison and Roosevelt are still in those federal funding and we're anxiously waiting to hear what happens there.

If we are successful there, those projects will largely be fully built out as anticipated.

And Delridge, because it didn't anticipate federal funding, is largely going to be delivered as anticipated when we went out to voters.

The other four corridors, we're going to see some reductions.

And I'm curious, because those were also, those were always going to be later year corridors, I don't know when we were talking to voters, if we had specificity that at this intersection we will be building a curb wall that probably wasn't that level.

And so I'm curious, how would you characterize the difference between what we would have characterized three years ago and what we're characterizing today?

And then maybe also add in the metro piece because metro is potentially delaying some of their And I think that's a good thing.

I think that's a good part of the portion of the rollout.

And while it might have been nice to do those concurrently, we can also deliver our improvements and they can come back a year or two later and deliver their improvements and we still get the whole thing.

I would say one, you pointed it out right there, in the conversations in 2015, what morphed from transit multimodal corridors, To be able to make them all rapid ride to the fullest extent, that includes a partnership with Metro.

So some of this is their timing of their budget and how it aligns with our projects.

The pieces that we are still building are a first step towards those future implementations.

So it's not that it's gone forever, and this is definitely an investment into transit speed and reliability and improvements of the corridor that will help us ultimately get to where we all want to be in the end.

We, again, thought that we would have even more federal grants, small starts type leverage for the other corridors also.

And because we won't have that, we're just redefining the transit speed and reliability improvements within the amount of money that we have.

But definitely in the levy in 2015, it didn't have the explicit details of what we do within every corridor, which is why we talked about scaling corridors based on the money we actually had, which is what we're doing now.

So my understanding, at least at a high level, the partnership between us and Metro is we do generally the road improvements.

And Metro comes along and does some station improvements.

And then also they're buying the buses and the bus service.

And the agreement is like, hey, cities, if you can deliver us a corridor where we get the kind of reliability where we can make the investment, we'll bring both those.

And so those investments we're making, the speed and reliability investments, may take a route from running 25 minutes to 22 minutes or something.

Are we still going to see that benefit with these investments in those four later?

Or is it like, well, we're going to go from 25 to 23 minutes, but we won't be able to get you all the way down to 22 minutes because we're going to skip a couple intersections that we just can't quite afford right now?

So that, for these corridors, what we're going through in the zero to 30% phase, which these latter corridors are still in, is figuring out exactly those type of things.

What improvements can we afford and what are the ultimate outcomes that we get from them?

So we have committed to coming at those major milestones to talk about what's going on with the scopes of those projects.

And so that's where we'll have those conversations with the Transit Advisory Board and the Levy Oversight Committee.

And we can definitely come talk to the council too.

That's great.

And so, I mean, the thing that I want to highlight that I hope we get out of this is when I look at like the Fremont corridor, which is the Route 40, I believe, or 62. 40. 40. Route 40. And so as we make investments in that, that may not get rebranded as a RapidRide X or whatever it would be by then.

But the Route 40 will see significant speed and reliability improvements, and it'll be ready for that next upgrade to RapidRide service when King County Metro is.

Similar with the 44 on Long Market and 45th and the other routes that we're looking at upgrading.

I know there's some electrification to do along the 23rd corridor.

I think that's going to be, I recognize that that was always a ways out and I don't, I believe because of that we didn't make promises to the voters that we were going to cut your commute by five minutes in these corridors because we didn't really know yet.

I think the, my assumption is we're not going to be able to do as much as we thought.

And we didn't know exactly what we're going to do, and we're still working on what we're going to do now.

Is that fair?

That was a fair summary, yes.

Council Member Johnson?

Can I just ask a question and then make a quick plug, Lorelei?

As we contemplate the expansion of these seven RapidRide corridors, RapidRide-like corridors, Have we done any analysis about what the benefits might be to speed and reliability if we were to get our bill passed in Olympia this year that would allow us to install red light enforcement cameras on some or all of these corridors?

So, Linnea, jump in here, but yeah, we have, this is all around the money we have and not any new funding that we could get.

We haven't done that definite analysis yet.

We know from an anecdotal that it definitely will, but that is something we could look at and bring back to you.

And my question was less about the revenue, although we anticipate some revenue from the red light cameras, but more about time and speed and reliability.

As we contemplate the continued, I think, expansion of our system, I want to highlight that I'd rather not have us lose that vision of the multimodal future that we're trying to create.

And the concern that I have right now is that by nickel and dime in some of these corridors, we're going to end up losing that vision.

And I'll pick on a couple of things.

When you look at this list of seven, five of them hit at some point a light rail station along the way.

And making sure that we make a set of investments that really get people to and from those light rail stations is critical.

And we have been a city that's bucked the trend nationally.

As we invest in our bus network, more people ride transit, which benefits all of us, particularly as we contemplate both the climate future that we're living in and the potential of addressing that climate future through things like congestion pricing.

That's going to only exacerbate the need for us to have better multimodal connections.

Yet in the same vision, we don't necessarily have the same set of bike infrastructure and pedestrian infrastructure.

around those stations that we are envisioning with the expansion of our rapid ride corridors to get people to and from those stations.

You can look at a place like the Roosevelt Rapid Ride Corridor and say, that's a place where we get almost all the way there, and then we still leave you a couple blocks short, whether you're riding your bike or walking from the station.

Ditto the 45th Street corridor, too.

So I want to make sure that we're not losing that big picture vision as we get into implementation.

And I'm hopeful that we can think about some low-cost solutions like red light cameras as a way to get what we know, which is 30% of our city is paved over for roads.

And if we just really wanted to, we could flip a switch with some paint and some red light cameras and really reorient a lot of the city to be looking a lot different in terms of our transportation priorities than the way that it looks today.

And there is a lot of capital investments that are tied up in these that I think are really necessary, but there's also a lot that we could do with paint, posts, and cameras.

So as we contemplate that in Olympia this year, I hope that we're successful and I hope that the staff considers that and we don't lose sight of that big picture vision.

So I've been accused of delaying our meetings in the past considering we're now over 4 o'clock and we've still got a lot of stuff on the agenda.

I've been trying to be quiet for most of the meeting today.

But I wanted to make sure that we didn't leave this topic without that pitch.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank You councilmember Johnson I really appreciate the focus on the vision and I'm also very interested some combination between you and Metro and If we just understood how many minutes of delay people illegally using bus-only lanes and blocking intersections cost on certain routes, that would be really helpful to both know and in our advocacy efforts to get Olympia to help.

If we could quantify that, I imagine we could at least anecdotally piece something together.

Thank you.

And I'll just second that.

We share that vision, too, as we kind of look at these transit corridors moving forward.

trying to get us, I don't even know if we'll get back on track, but getting us going here.

We did want to highlight the several Move Seattle related green sheets, and I won't belabor that since you all went into depth on those a few weeks ago, so thank you for your work there.

I'll pitch it over to Lorelei to talk about really some next steps and where we're going from here.

So obviously we know that now we have a full work plan for nine years, which for us is hugely helpful in our mark that we have to work from.

And hopefully we can better from there, but we still have some risks, which with the nature of the construction climate right now and workload capacity in the region.

So those are the things that we're focusing on going forward.

Now that we have a plan, We are going to take that plan and check one more time against our workforce and the other resources outside that we need.

And then create a plan to fill those in in whatever way necessary to be able to deliver on the work plan.

That as well as incorporating risks really into our project planning, both from a quantifiable schedule as well as financial piece and incorporating that into our spend plans is something we're continuing to do.

So, just dropping myself, Doug McDonald's name, that's something that he's brought to my attention is the need for both a workforce analysis and a risk analysis.

So, that's sort of the next step of what you're going to be doing.

Great.

And then also, there was a consultant report in 2017 that sort of drove this.

And I would normally ask Calvin, but he's not with us today Do you know if we have a copy of that if we the council has asked for a copy of that?

Yeah, we've I can I'm trying to go back to who we all sent it to but I know it's been central several of you So we can resend it.

Yeah.

Thanks Make sure you have that

All right, and I kind of did a couple slides in one there, so flip through.

So also because this has been a conversation and was explicit in your resolution I wanted to hit on this, is myself and my counterpart at SPU are spending a lot of time to make sure we are coordinating.

It is a tough thing in that SDOT's projects and priorities drive opportunities for SPU, but those opportunities are not necessarily always in line with what they've had in their plan for where they're going to do work.

And then once they take advantage of the opportunity, when we have the pavement open to do an improvement, then they're tied to our schedule.

So recognizing that we have to continue to coordinate as best as possible, as well as resolve issues between the departments at the lowest level possible and keep things moving forward.

And Carrie and I have committed to keep an eye on those things and help that.

I really appreciate that.

I know it's frustrating for you on your end when you get boxed in and likewise for them.

And it has an impact on their ability to meet their rate path.

So that coordination is super important.

Yeah, definitely.

We will continue that.

And I talked about this with the workforce both internally and with consultants and contractors because that's how we're going to be able to deliver our work.

So next step, so as we talked about quarterly updates, we will make an offer every time we have a quarterly report as well as when we update the work plan in the annual report every year to come and talk to you.

Yeah, I'd also just, one thing I failed to mention was that we recognize that the timing of this work plan with the budget process is both kind of complex and not ideal.

So we're going to push it back a little bit next year and so we can incorporate fully the budget actions into this work plan because you'll note throughout the report there are a few points where we say this is ongoing but it hadn't yet passed when we were putting it together, so.

That concludes the work plan portion of the presentation.

Well there's a lot of information in the work plan to digest and I really appreciate today's briefing.

I will be checking with colleagues and we may in advance of the next quarter update One has some future conversations about that too.

And as I mentioned, we have work to do to bless, adopt, alter this.

And so, we'll be having some conversations about what that looks like and keep you posted on that too.

Yeah.

Thank you.

So, we've gone over.

Do you want us to flip through the next ones quickly or come back with Q3 at a different time?

Or how do you prefer to?

I don't want to push you too late.

We can.

Colleagues, my inclination would be to defer on Q3 right now.

And.

We can release copies of the report.

Yeah.

You can just tell the public where that is available.

Yep.

Online.

And so I know that was released a week or so ago.

Yeah, I'll put it up here.

Those are all the materials.

The website URL is on there.

It's on our levy website page.

It was released.

And it summarizes the work in Q3, recognizing it's a snapshot in time.

But an important, I will say this is our most robust quarterly update that we've released.

So it's a good deal of information.

Again, readily available.

And if folks have questions, we can either come back or we can.

Yeah.

And there's some important stuff in there.

And so I hesitate to do this, but we're just running over time.

We had a good conversation at the oversight committee last week.

And I'll check in with colleagues to see if folks have questions now and we can just ask questions Or we can talk about if it makes sense to come back to committee at a future date to discuss the specifics on that Councilmember Johnson, I would just ask I don't have any specific questions because I think we Our time is better spent getting through the last three action items that we need to take but there's an overwhelming amount of district for projects in the q3 q4 Reports for this year between 65th 35th 25th 30th and 50th Avenue sidewalk So I would just ask I think we might have a our monthly check-in Linnea coming up later on this week I would ask if you could bring some members of the team to just walk me through in a little more granular detail about the implementation schedule associated with the Cacophony of projects happening in d4 right now.

That'd be great

Great, and yeah.

Just one last question, and you answered so many of the elements today.

Is anybody answering Danny Westneat's article from Sunday where he says, light terrain for a jeep obstacle course, the enduring mystery of why Seattle can't fix its roads?

Because you talk at this table in such a rational way, and it's great if somebody is watching this, but A lot of people read him, and I just would like us to be able to square our shoulders and say, you know, maybe you're right on some of it, but here is where we really are doing a ton of work, and you're wrong on some of it.

You know, we had that conversation today because we actually acknowledge that he's very much read and respected for what he says, and we felt that there was a story that wasn't said about it.

and some of the work that's in our quarterly update, and we just flushed it up on the team, but it was how we're responding internally and externally.

I hope that you look at, and I do think that we need to actually have a conversation and a briefing about where we're at on that, so.

I mean, your story is great, but it's taken you, you know, an hour and a half to go through this and answering questions.

He can write something that is read by however many thousands of people, and they miss what you're telling us now, and I just would love to see us be able to have a response that is as clear as what you've done today.

I agree.

And then I just want to leave us with, now that we're done with this, we are turning towards completely our focus towards delivery.

So we're looking forward to what we can achieve in the next six years.

So thank you guys for your time.

Thanks.

Really appreciate it.

All right, Jesse, do you mind read, and welcome, Jesse.

We had a substitution for staffing the committee today.

Do you mind reading in agenda item number, I think we're on nine.

Council Bill 119416, an ordinance relating to the State Route 520 project authorizing the mayor to execute an agreement with the State of Washington to set forth roles and responsibilities and establish a method for reimbursing costs where applicable to operate and maintain the infrastructure constructed as part of the State of Washington's Route 520 project.

Welcome, everyone.

We'll start with introductions.

John, you can go first.

We'll go down the line.

Thanks.

I'm John Lazer, Seattle Department of Transportation, interagency programs.

Dave Becker, Washington State Department of Transportation, director of construction for the 520 program.

I'm Rod Poninen, engineering manager for the 520 program.

Excellent.

As you all are aware, because you've been sitting through this, we're a little over time.

I don't want to shortchange this incredibly important project.

We're not planning to vote on anything today, but I just urge you to swiftly move us the overview and frame this up for us and the public so we can get some feedback.

Thanks.

Thanks again for having us here today.

The teams, the WSDOT and SDOT teams were last here in July to provide an update on the 520 program, so we're pleased to be back again to provide a brief update and also seeking your support for the ordinance authorizing the operation maintenance agreement for the infrastructure to be built over the next several years.

And so once we get a PowerPoint up, I will turn it over to Dave to provide a brief project update.

All right.

Thank you, John.

So thank you for having us this afternoon.

And I'd just like to give a quick update to some of the information that we provided in July of this year.

So we have actually adjusted our delivery of the projects.

So if you look up at the blue, you'll see a project called the SR520i5 Express Lanes Connection Project.

And that was originally part of the Portage Bay project, but we saw a benefit into bringing that forward sooner.

That actually provides for a reversible transit HOV ramp into the express lanes of I-5, and then allows for a direct connection down to Mercer.

We felt that that was actually a good project to bring forward for transit access.

And so we are proceeding with actually the design of that right now, and we expect construction to begin in 2020 on that, in about three years of construction.

In addition, the Portage Bay project is scheduled for construction to begin in 2023. And then the Montlake Bascule Bridge, the second crossing of the cut, we don't have a final timeline for that yet.

We are going to begin outreach with all the partners interested in that project here in 2020, I'm sorry, in 2019. And that's the same with Portage Bay.

We'll continue with discussions with the community and the city on the scope of that project as well.

Dave, as you contemplate that, I'd be remiss if I didn't take the opportunity here to mention I think there's a lot of concern from folks who live in and around Montlake and travel through Montlake that we will be effectively doing a bunch of construction in Montlake and then abandoning it for six or seven years and then coming back around and doing a bunch of construction in Montlake again.

with the current proposed phasing of going from Waban to Portage Bay and then coming back and doing the second basco bridge at the end of the program so as you contemplate that kind of sequencing.

I would urge you to strongly consider doing all the Montlake phase work together and then moving further west to Portage Bay so that we don't have that confusion by a bunch of neighbors who are very engaged on this project, as you know, and likely don't want to live through a seven-year hiatus and then come back and have construction on top of them again.

That's a good point.

And there is the budget where we could actually bring that project forward.

It all depends on what do we want to deliver there.

And that's where we need the outreach with the community, the city, the University of Washington.

So just to kind of give a quick update on the Montlake Phase Project, when we spoke in July, we were pretty much in procurement of that project.

We have now completed the procurement.

Graham Contracting is the contractor that was awarded the project.

It has been executed.

We expect the notice to proceed to begin in January of 2019, with construction probably starting, I'd say, in spring of 2019. We're looking at a four to five year duration construction project.

And just to remind everyone some of the improvements that are being made on this project, we're going to build a new West Approach Bridge South.

That's the structure that connects to the floating bridge.

We'll remove the old structure, the seismically vulnerable structure that's out there right now.

We'll build a new pedestrian land bridge across 520. We'll also build a new lid across 520 between Montlake Boulevard and 24th.

And that connection will also be a transit multimodal hub, and we'll have direct access ramps for transit and HOV that will go connect to the east side from there.

And with that, I think I'll turn it over to Ron to talk a little bit about design coordination.

One quick question.

Remind me the phasing of traffic on the west approach, what is it, bridge south?

Do we move all traffic onto the West Coast Bridge North?

Will we rebuild that?

That's correct.

Well, actually, the structure that's just been opened, the one that's elevated higher, all the traffic ultimately, once construction starts, I would say probably that's most likely either late in 2019 or early 2020. We'll shift all the traffic onto that structure, both east and westbound, so that we can remove the old structure as well as build the new one.

And so that'll be down to two lanes in each direction, I assume, with shoulders and everything taken up or something?

It'll be two lanes each direction.

It'll be pretty narrow shoulders.

We'll have to lose the HOV lane that's going westbound that's currently out there right now.

Okay, and so then that'll be for a couple years?

So that would be, we're looking at right now, the contractor schedule is showing 2023 for the construction to be complete.

So you're probably looking at potentially three years.

Three years of that?

Constraint over today correct, okay?

So I'm just throw that into the mix on our period of maximum constraint fun that we're having It's a beautiful bike connection.

I'm just gonna touch briefly on kind of how we got here to this point today where we have this maintenance agreement, but washed out in the city have been working closely with community and stakeholders to refine the design and that led to And going back to 2011, with the preferred alternative, the city and the WSDOT entered into a memorandum of understanding adopted by the city, City Ordinance 123733, which memorialized the city's support of the preferred alternative, key commitments by WSDOT and the city.

including the intent to establish an operation and maintenance agreement.

The standard agreements that are in place between the state and the city didn't fully apply to this project.

And it established the next steps.

So 2011, 2012, a lot of work in the Seattle community design process provided additional opportunity to refine the vision and design elements of the rest of the West components.

2014 and 2015, WSDOT again worked with the community, city, and the Seattle Design Commission to complete the 2016 final concept design report that provides the basis of design for the rest of the West project components.

So recommendations from both the design processes were endorsed by city council resolutions in 2013 and 2015. So you can see the Montlake project as a result of years of coordination between WSDOT, the city of Seattle, stakeholder organizations, and the community, and reflects the feedback WSDOT received from this outreach.

In 2016, WSDOT and the city began coordination to identify and document maintenance of the completed project elements that were the result of these outreach efforts.

And I'll turn it over to John Laser now.

Thanks.

So the main topic for today is the operations and maintenance agreement.

It seems like something that wouldn't be that complicated.

We do have state law and state codes as well as guidelines from the Association of Washington Cities that we're following that help us figure out what should be WSDOT's responsibility to maintain versus what should be the city's.

Multiple city departments involved here, SDOT, the Parks Department, City Light, and SPU.

And really the issue is that if we had a state highway that was completely separated from the fabric of the city, it would be fairly easy to draw black and white lines of where the responsibilities lie.

But as you saw from the diagram of the new Montlake interchange and Lyd, we're really weaving back together the city, and so the lines get blurred.

So where the state highway exists very separate from city streets, that's pretty easy.

That's WSDOT's responsibility.

where there are improvements within city streets, that's pretty easy.

That's the city's responsibility.

Montlake Boulevard itself is a city street operating as a state highway, so there's a separate set of guidelines that really guide that.

And then the lid and a lot of the enhanced features that are really We grew out in a large part from the interest of the city and the community and the design commission for a higher quality product for the community.

Drives in some cases for the city to take operation and maintenance responsibility for elements that are really within the state right of way.

Typically the state is taking overall responsibility for the structures in the state right-of-way, but in many cases the city will be Maintaining the surface features to try to try to keep the quality that we that we really want in those features So when you talk about the city maintaining are we talking about?

occasionally, you know, repaving or fixing a sidewalk that's buckled or mowing the lawn or planting the trees or watering.

All of the above.

Some of the park-like features on the surface would be maintained by parks.

WSDOT is actually going to reimburse parks parks for those services, some of the walkway or sidewalk facilities, SDOT would maintain, things like that.

And to a large degree, what the agreement does is find the most cost effective good government approach in terms of who does it make sense to maintain this stuff.

If you have a retaining wall that's accessible from city right of way, we should be doing the regular inspections.

Not have WSDOT bring their trucks out into our right of way, get a permit from us.

to do that work.

So that's a lot of the details in this agreement.

Great.

And the working relationship's been productive?

It has been.

This is really, I will say, this is a little transportation geeky, but we frequently have not developed these agreements until construction has started or the infrastructure is actually built, and it's a lot harder to have the conversations on the back end.

And so I really appreciate the work that WSDOT and the city, various city departments have done to get the clarity up front.

It makes the job a lot easier for the design builder to know who their client is, who they're building it for.

And so I expect it'll help us a lot in the design process.

And that concludes our presentation.

We'd be happy to answer any questions.

Timing on this agreement?

We are, we had hoped to bring the agreement before you got to budget.

We didn't quite get there, so we're first off the deck here, but we did submit an ordinance authorizing execution of the agreement, and we're essentially proceeding as- We're ready, and the hope would be that we approve this in a couple weeks.

Yes.

Great.

Anything else?

Great.

Thank you all for this information.

Got quite a project there, and look forward to seeing you all soon.

Thank you.

Next agenda item, Jesse.

Council Bill 119413, an ordinance vacating portions of 11th Avenue Southwest, 13th Avenue Southwest, Southwest Hanford Street, and Southwest Florida Street on the petition of the Port of Seattle.

Clerk file 301929 in accepting Seattle City Light easements.

I was going to say, we're over time.

So if you come back in 10 years, we'll finish this up.

But maybe let's just see if we can get through it today.

OK.

We'll try.

We'll start with introductions.

Beverly, you can go first.

Beverly Barnett, Seattle Department of Transportation.

David Amble, representing the Port of Seattle.

Excellent.

Thank you.

Welcome, David.

Thank you.

So today the last two items are vacations, and they sort of reflect the beginning and the end of the process.

And usually when we have a final vacation ordinance, we always want to do a little bit of reminder about the process so that if people think this is something brand new, it isn't.

So the City Council has established a two-part approval process for every vacation.

So as we'll see with the next item with Broad Street, the first look that the Transportation Committee gives We hold a public hearing, we have a briefing on the SDOT recommendation, and the council will vote on whether to grant the vacation and what conditions will be imposed.

After that, the project proponent has the right to proceed and develop the project.

And we only do the final vacation ordinance when everything is done as envisioned and directed by the city council.

So utility relocations, fees, public benefit features, everything is accomplished.

And generally now we look at a specific time frame, and we expect to see a project completed.

Depending on the complexity of the project now, we're often seeing five years or longer for larger-scale projects.

So, for example, with Yesler Terrace, the city council granted 15 years to complete work.

With the port, we did not have a specific time frame, and I think this took a lot longer than any of us envisioned.

There's just...

I don't even know how to express that.

It was a lot more complicated than envisioned, and the one thing we did learn, and that is reflected in the policies, is more more accountability around timing and a more realistic timeframe for the accomplishment.

So even though this took a really, really long time, we are very happy to be here and doing the very last steps.

So we have a really brief PowerPoint.

I think the council and the committee members are really familiar with this, but David's going to run through pretty quickly a reminder since this is an historic vacation petition.

So we'll just plunge in and then the ordinance is ready for a vote should the committee be prepared to vote.

Excellent.

Good afternoon.

So thank you, Beverly, for introducing all that.

Again, what we did with this project when it was petitioned back in, what do we want to say?

1998. There was 16 conditions on the petition to do the street vacation.

As Beverly mentioned, it was pretty complicated.

Most of these ones that I've got listed there on the slide.

We're all done between 1998 and 2002 when the project was completed, the construction work for T-18 was done.

The one that we had the most difficulty on and was the most complex was the utility condition, condition number two.

I don't want to bother reading through these if I don't have to.

Don't have to.

For timely purposes.

We would appreciate you not reading through them.

And, you know, just for the public's perspective, I mean, T-18, I've got the slide up there that shows what T-18 looked like before we vacated the streets.

And I don't have a laser pointer, but I'll try to point that T-18 was really at the time was just this long strip north and south along the east side of Harbor Island.

There was an oil tank farm here and here, a shipyard in this area, the shipyard up here, and then many, many small parcels, privately owned parcels in this area here.

And then there was the fish or flour mill down here, which, or no, they're up here, and then there was the cement plant down here.

Once we did the vacation work, or once we started doing the work on T-18 and completed it, The terminal itself, and there's going to be another slide there, but this is what it looks like now with T18 taking up.

If you looked at it from the air, it'd be like a small D.

It's no longer a, it's a larger shape.

And so this is what it looks like now.

The red area is the area that was petitioned in the vacation in 98. We closed off these areas along the green line.

That's where it became T-18.

And so the 11th Avenue area there was taken out of public right away at the time, conditionally, of course, along with this portion of 13th and this portion of Hanford.

And there's a small portion up here, which is conserved Florida Avenue right there.

That was already done out of it.

The presentation is a summary of a 40-plus page report that I presented to Beverly a few months ago.

So we've put together a fairly detailed report that describes exactly what the port did.

to meet the conditions.

And then there's backup documentation in that report that describes and actually has the links to the other reports that went with the project.

So we have that material available for the council.

Again, the key one here that just got finished up this past year is Condition 2, where we had finished off some agreements with Seattle Public Utilities last year, and they had their ordinance come forward last year, a CenturyLink easement agreement, several easements with Seattle City Light.

Olympic Pipeline, British Petroleum, Kinder Morgan, and Puget Sound Energy were all easements that were within that, those red corridor, these red lines here all had utilities running through them that needed to be negotiated and agreed to.

And that's what took us the longest to do.

Those three simple words, resolve utility issues.

Thank you.

And so just out of curiosity, did it require relocation, or is it a matter of just, they're still there, you just now have an agreement with how they're on your property now?

They're exactly that.

One of the issues that we had had for a long time was a utility, whether or not we needed to relocate it due to basically encroachments.

And that issue was resolved, not by relocating the utility, but relocating the easement.

Got it.

Well there was, and technically it's the CenturyLink easement got shifted over and we've given them less space than they had originally.

Great.

So again I said that in the report that we have a lot of the details behind what was done here.

And then we have a nice little map that shows, you know, ties those different utility, sorry, condition numbers to the areas on the map that happened in the area.

Some of them are off-site.

So we have these, you know, the public access sites along the Spokane corridor for the pedestrians and there's a shoreline access site that's between the Fisher flower mill and the cement plant and then there's the off-street parking that we had to mitigate as part of the 11th Avenue corridor and And then a bike path that we've built for the city.

That's the Spokane Corridor bike path.

And then there's a grade separation from the rail line corridor.

All this rail capacity used to be in the 11th Avenue corridor.

And we shifted it over to this segment that's in the 16th Avenue corridor.

Still maintain two lanes of traffic on 16th in either direction.

And then built this bridge that allows for access onto and off the island without being stuck with the rail.

Great.

Beverly, without going into too many details, I'm assuming that long ago they did all the benefit requirements that we had stipulated 20 years ago?

Yes, so everything was done when the project was constructed.

As David mentioned, it was really the complexity of the utility issues.

And with some of that, there was contaminated soil and all kinds of things.

So it was much more complex than anticipated.

So we think this is done and ready to go.

Great.

Colleagues, do you have any further questions on this?

Well, without further ado, then, I will move Council Bill 119413. Second.

All in favor signify by saying aye.

Aye.

None opposed.

Great.

The 20-year wait will come to an end hopefully on Monday.

Thanks for your ongoing work on this.

Yes, thank you.

And it's quite the project.

Thank you.

Yep.

Our final agenda item.

Yeah, so I have the next one too.

Great.

Justin, I'm reading that in.

Clerk.

I'll invite the other presenters forward.

Clerk, file 314387, petition of Seattle City Light with the vacation apportioned of Broad Street between Harrison Street and Taylor Avenue North.

Lish?

Hi.

Lish Whitson, Council of Central Staff.

Thank you.

Beverly Barnett, Seattle Department of Transportation.

You're on 600 4th Avenue, Seattle, Washington.

Good to know.

Do you want to do an introduction as well?

What's that?

What's your introduction?

Mark Brands with Site Workshop Landscape Architects.

Matt Boyd, Electric Power Systems.

Michael Jenkins, Design Commission.

Claire Lloyd, Seattle City Light substation manager.

Lish, do you have anything to tee this one up?

Just very briefly, this is, I think, the last street vacation that came in under the old street vacation policies.

So everything you see from here on will be coming in under the new vacation policies.

Great.

And we had a briefing from Seattle City Light this summer, I think.

Yeah, it was in July.

And appreciate the conversation of the time, recognizing it is the old set of rules, a nod towards trying to be consistent with the direction we're going to, and appreciate that.

So let's jump in.

Yeah, so Mark is going to go through the PowerPoint, and I think we can be pretty concise.

I did want to note with this that we think City Light did a really good job in being responsive, so we're really satisfied with the total package.

I think with this, when City Light first came in, they're, of course, a very mission-driven organization and looked at how the expansion could serve the utility needs and they're frugal and so when they came in with their initial proposal there were some questions that we raised about how compatible it was in such a vibrant neighborhood and how the utility could meet their needs and still be a more engaging part of the community.

And so that's what we've worked on.

I think Michael Jenkins will probably have some comments on this as well.

But I think the utility was really responsive to how to protect the infrastructure needs and still look at what they can do in the streetscape and recognizing what an unusual and vibrant neighborhood they're in.

So I think overall they did a really good job in hearing the questions that we raised and finding a way to address it.

And so then I think Mark was going to go through the PowerPoint.

Let's go, okay.

So you've seen a large part of this, the briefing that we shared with you previously.

There's the wedge, the triangle that we're asking for the vacation.

It's a remnant parcel essentially from the closure of Broad Street.

We are locating three major pieces of equipment, and these are pieces of equipment that you'd find at the Denny substation.

They're large, and they each have a setback and safety requirement for them.

So it's the inductor, the GIS is the gas-insulated switchgear, and then the capacitor bank, and there's a set of controls that come along with it.

So this is a large overview, a pullback, looking at the Gates Foundation in the foreground.

And one thing I'll point out here is Thomas Street is a green street.

It's had an adopted concept plan for some time.

It's also been part of some planning with Lake to Bay Trail.

So it's a very important connection to the neighborhood, particularly to bicycles.

So the wedge of land we're talking about, again, is in yellow.

And you can see the remnant parcels of the closure of Broad Street along this alignment.

This is a photo from the top of the Gates Foundation.

Again, you can highlight it in pink, as they requested 4,000 square feet of land, requesting it be vacated.

What I'll point out on this slide is the landmark structures.

So there are three primary pieces.

It's the crane building, then the adjacent control buildings, and then what we call, refer to as the dead end tower, which is a brightly painted yellow structure, armature, that does have some function.

The other thing I'll point out here, too, is you'll notice that the curb line is essentially complete.

This has been completed by SDOT as part of the north portal, and so it kind of looks like the substation should be filling out this corner.

Existing conditions of the site, the building, and I'll point out here, in particular, the enclosure, which was, an artist participated in this, so it has a very distinct character, and you'll see that we're essentially extending that in our proposal.

pretty robust community outreach program, in particular with our neighbors, adjacent neighbors of Gates Foundation and an attorney, Richard Adler.

We met with him very early in 2016. And then the Uptown Alliance is a very important group.

They came forward and helped us with the public benefits, identify the need in the community, which is really repurposing of our right-of-way into more people space and for bicycles.

And so you'll see that in our public benefit package.

So vacation, no vacation, as Beverly mentioned, when we started this out, the no vacation scheme started out with a very tall wall.

Through conversations with a subcommittee, a design commission, we came to the resolution in the top there, which is essentially the extension of the enclosure.

So the engineers went back to the drawing table to re-space equipment, accept a little bit less, but still get us the safety and maintenance requirements and access that we needed.

The alternative was essentially really almost a non-starter.

It placed the capacitor equipment on top of the landmark building.

They didn't know that at the time.

There's nowhere else to go in this substation without redesigning parts of it, which really wouldn't fit within the project or the budget.

So essentially, we're really, really left with one solution, and it's just how well we could do it.

And so we've essentially, as you can see, and you'll see in a couple slides here, we've extended the enclosure.

This is almost a one-for-one trade.

So we are repurposing right-of-way space for more pedestrian landscape, sidewalks, bicycles, and almost matching what we're requesting with the vacation.

plan view of the improvements, so it's the filling out of the corner, the three pieces of equipment, the GIS, the inductor, and the capacitors, and then the extension and enclosure.

We do have some solid structure that's required because of safety.

Equipment gets very close to the edge.

of the enclosure and we don't want somebody to be able to poke a stick in there or something and touch this equipment.

So that's why we have solid walls in a portion of it.

The existing enclosure is 13 1⁄2 feet tall, and so we're essentially extending that around the corner.

We do start to pick up some grade, so there'll be some nuances where it might be slightly taller.

as we get around the corner and adjacent to the crane building.

We do have an access point off Harrison that's required to get into the equipment.

We can't otherwise get to this particular location within the substation.

And then there's another small access point.

adjacent to the crane building.

Very importantly, we are not touching the crane building.

That was one of the conditions with landmarks that we keep clear of those landmark structures.

So it's turning around now, looking back up the alignment of Broad Street and filling out of the corner.

And again, you can see the height of the enclosure relative to the crane building.

Again, I'll point out that that corner is complete of Taylor and Harrison.

That curb alignment is already finished.

And then at street level, it gives you some perspective.

We paid particular attention to transparency.

That's part of the existing enclosure so you can see in and see what's going on into the working nature of the substation.

And at the corner, particularly, we have a perch point.

So again, copying the language of the existing enclosure is very important to this concept.

Then to finish with the public benefits, there are two primary benefits.

These were really born out of discussions with SDOT and the uptown community and their preference to do better with our streets.

So we are essentially, on Thomas, copying a language that's been started between Fifth Avenue and Taylor, where they have repurposed on-street parking into wider sidewalks, more landscape, and very importantly, buffered bike lanes.

So it's a, the existing curb line is in the dashed red.

We're extending that out by seven feet, eliminating parking, gaining buffered bike lanes on each side of the street.

So we'll be restriping the street to achieve this.

We will not be affecting from the curb line south as directed by SDOT.

The preference is for the adjacent developer to do that.

And this is an image of what it will look and feel like adjacent to the substation.

The existing enclosure is on the left.

And then you can see the generous landscape opportunities that were afforded as well as pause points.

And there will also be pedestrian scale lighting on here as well.

So help me understand on any of these maps just the before and after pictures.

I see the nice landscaping change and the infrastructure investments.

The actual square footage of change, it was all outside the fence and it's still outside the fence.

So who owned it before and who owns it now?

Yeah, it's really repurposing.

So it's moving that curb line out.

And so instead of vehicular improvements, we're now putting in a pedestrian bicycle improvements.

So it is public land.

It's already available.

It's not like we're creating new space.

We're just pushing the curb line out to get that 4,000 square feet.

And it's almost equally divided between Thomas and Taylor and how we're achieving that.

Is it all still right away?

It is.

Got it.

I get the desire to match square footage for square footage, but the benefit here is the the investment to do the buffered bike lane, to do the landscaping, to move the curb and all that infrastructure.

And you'll see that at the end, I've itemized those in our table.

So again, the dashed red line is the back end angled parking.

It's one of the last places in Seattle where you can get 10 hours of parking.

metered parking.

There'll be a line there tomorrow now, you just gave it away.

So we aren't losing all the parking in this situation, we're just reducing the amount and going to parallel parking.

So again, we work very closely with SDOT to achieve a preferred alignment.

We'd expect this would be matched north or south of this block as those blocks redevelop.

But it does essentially then give us more landscape opportunities, better sidewalks, amenities that the neighborhood is looking for along the streetscape, and pedestrian scale lighting again.

And this is another look and feel of what we end up with when we're able to do that.

And I'll just end on the table.

So this itemizes all of the elements that are above and beyond and not required.

And they're all street frontage improvements.

And there's a dollar value on the right there as well.

that summarizes extensive improvements.

And that's the presentation.

And so will City Light, who will maintain this once it's all done?

Is it City Light as the adjacent property owner or does?

That's the expectation, right?

So we're working with their maintenance crew and facilities folks to understand exact plant material, but the maintenance regime that they'll be expected.

There's maybe one Item which would be the lights like who maintains that I think that's me, but it's city light.

Yes You would think that they would be maintaining them.

There's all stock fixtures to that come out of the s dot right-of-way manual.

Okay Johnson any questions Nothing has changed I think it's gonna be a good project.

I failed to mention that this does require a public hearing We have a public hearing notice for today.

So I will go ahead and open the public hearing I have one and a half people signed up.

I think they may have signed up on the wrong sheet.

Alex Zimmerman was first.

I did not see him here.

And then I believe Knut was signing in on the other sheet.

I got half of his name in here.

And I don't see Knut here.

Is there anyone else in the audience who would like to provide comment during the public hearing?

All right, seeing none, I will close the public hearing.

And if there's no further discussion, normally we do not vote on issues the same day we have a public hearing, but seeing as this has been before the public for a number of months now and nothing has changed, as Council Member Johnson said, and doesn't appear to be terribly controversial, I would ask that we suspend the rules to allow a vote on the same day as a public hearing.

So I'd move that.

Second.

All in favor signify by saying aye.

Aye.

So those rules are suspended.

So we can go ahead and take a vote on this and I'll go ahead and move the clerk file.

Second.

All in favor signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Great.

So none opposed, this will go to full council on Monday.

Thanks for all your work on this.

And I look forward to seeing the things hit the ground.

Thank you.

We'll have to get hockey jerseys on the people in the Ontario though.

Excellent.

We are done with the agenda today, so thanks so much.

We are adjourned.