Budget Committee Meeting Session II 09-25-26

Thank you and welcome back to the Select Budget Committee meeting.

The September 25th Select Budget Committee meeting will come back to order.

It is 1.01 p.m.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Rink?

Present.

Council Member Rivera?

Council Member Saka?

Here.

Foster.

Here.

Council President Hollingsworth.

Here.

Council Member Juarez.

Council Member Kettle.

Council Member Lynn.

Here.

And Chair Strauss.

Here.

Six present.

Thank you.

Council Member Kettle is excused for the remainder of the afternoon and the remaining council members are excused until they arrive.

Vice Chair Rivera is now present.

I want to take a moment to thank Council President Hollingsworth and Council Member Rink for being early, which is on time, and for Council Member Linn and Foster for being on time, which is, well, Bob's not here, so I won't say the whole thing.

So with that, we have been through a marathon of a day.

We have two presentations left to go.

Clerk, I think I omitted reading the first item into the record, so we're gonna read the first and second items into the record.

We did, well, fair enough.

Then we're gonna read the second item into the record.

We're gonna go directly over to the committee table for the presentation and then we will take questions and Council President Emeritus Juarez is present as well.

Agenda item two, community assisted response and engagement for briefing and discussion.

Chief Barton.

Committee table, please take it away.

All right.

Good morning, council members.

I'm going to go quickly through this and reserve a lot of time for any questions you might have.

I am here with our chief administrative officer, Tommy Roland and Ali Panucci again.

Next.

As you know, CARE was established as a third co-equal public safety department in 2023. Since that time, Council has supported us in expanding and stabilizing Seattle 911, establishing and expanding citywide the CARE Community Crisis Responder Team, and most recently, assuming the lead, the co-lead in the We Deliver CARE contracts.

Our mission is to answer the call, providing the best first response to every neighbor.

Next.

This proposed budget reflects our current budget reality and urgent public safety priorities.

It acknowledges that 911 centers are experiencing industry-wide staffing shortages and our commitment to growing the care responder team prudently and responsibly.

CARE's assumption of community violence intervention work is crucial and imperative.

I applaud Mayor Wilson for making this structural and strategic change and strongly encourage council support.

And I also support the sustained co-lead investment, which has demonstrated significant effectiveness in homeless response and emergency stabilization.

We have continued to develop new recruiting, retention, and training processes and strategies for Seattle 911. It is reasonable to assume and acknowledge that we will maintain at least eight position vacancies despite our best efforts because of the 911 industry reality and the significant challenge of attracting and retaining staff who are able to work all different shifts, are willing to work mandatory overtime, and are capable of the resilience to dwell in the space of human suffering, a lot of anger and emergencies around the clock.

We are proposing to maintain eight dispatcher one vacancies.

That's the entry level position in 911. We currently have those vacancies, so there will be no adverse impact to call handling standards and capacity.

Next.

I do want to pause to commend this council for your ongoing support of Seattle 9-1-1 as a critical public safety priority.

Our growth and development has resulted in a 60 percent reduction in non-emergency hold times and a dramatic reduction in overtime staffing hours, saving the city hundreds of thousands of dollars last year over the year prior.

While it is not ideal to slow the expansion of care responders, there are several strategic and operational advantages to growing incrementally.

We launched the pilot nearly three years ago, and we expanded quickly.

The team needs time to prioritize increasing their effectiveness and utility, resource mapping to make sure we know who does what and who does it best in a rapidly changing environment, developing better integration with police, with fire responders, outreach workers, and ambassadors.

I prefer to not add more responders until we have established they are at maximum capacity and we would like to refine the way that we're working with other parts of the system and how we proactively case conference to ensure more neighbors come into services that provide long-term solutions in their lives.

The vision has always been much more than a simple triage and then move on to the next call.

Much of this calendar year for me has been spent better integrating the 911 and 988 systems with support from University of Washington, Crisis Connections, Fire Department, Police Department experts, and King County leaders.

It's important to divert calls into the right system and also to send the right responder in a way that's frictionless to the caller.

Our collective recommendations were just published last week.

I mention this because CARES should play a significant role in improving not just coordination and process in public safety, but we should be driving fiscal efficiency, less duplication, more coordination, person-centered design instead of process-centric design.

I am really pleased with the care responder growth and expansion this year.

When I last reported to the Public Safety Committee, we were hovering around 30% utility, meaning the team was not being used fully and for maximum impact.

Due in part to new support in the mayor's office, renewed support in the Seattle Police Department, and the continued support of the Seattle Fire Department, the care responders are now consistently working at about 80% capacity.

We know that they will be at 100% capacity this year as we strengthen our partnership with King County Jail, with Harborview, with local nonprofits, and through new coordinated emphasis patrols with our precincts.

I do want to remind you that the 17,000 calls that we've been to represent about 25,000 hours of officer time that has been alleviated.

Every time we free up law enforcement to do the work that only they can do is significant.

Getting officers to priority one calls in under seven minutes continues to be the top department priority.

Next.

Care has been studying gun violence reduction and intervention strategies since 2023, always contemplating and expecting that that body of work would move over to us because it was legislated by the council.

I'm really excited to better coordinate the lifesaving work of community providers, to center community recommendations in new ways, to elevate the crucial partnership between community, case managers, and violence interrupters, law enforcement as we help young people mixed up in cycles of violence to redirect their lives.

And we do know what works.

Councilmember Rivera, I really want to compliment you and affirm the comments I've heard in the past and also this morning.

Focused deterrence was first explained to me technically by Dr. Atherley when I first started and other people in law enforcement.

That year, 2023, in SPD, I was there, kind of on the front lines, cheering as the Community Violence Task Force, was first established and started to have really meaningful impact on the issue of youth gun violence.

A weekly gun call was established with major partners in different parts of the criminal justice system, and I was again on that call yesterday for the first time.

and so those are different components of the focus deterrence model that started to be invested in but it means something specific to your point and has not been fully implemented and it has never been connected to the community side of the work which is very imperative.

I want to pause and acknowledge and thank Director Tanya Kim and HSD and Maggie, Erica Pablo for their exceptional leadership, their hard work in this space.

HSD has advocated that this needs to be a significant public safety priority and focal point and have been really supportive as we've been thoughtful about how we should move these contracts over.

The new budget positions proposed will be fully focused on the objective of gun violence reduction, which I think is really important.

We are also adding our first data scientist to care in a couple weeks.

That's part of our existing budget, and I'm excited about that because we need to, again, identify what impact we want to see and then establish metrics and really transparently track our progress against those metrics.

To me, this part of the CARE legislation in 2023 was the most significant conceptually.

You have to have a coordinating, convening entity, synthesizing information, and then actively reporting what's working and what's not.

Accountability and support are two sides of the same coin.

We know that the right deterrence and the right incentives are required to repattern behavior, especially in young lives.

and these concepts and investments cannot be antagonistic toward one another.

We must work together to ensure we're providing the right response at the right time and the right referrals to the right resources.

And I agree with you, Councilmember Rivera, our kids deserve our very best.

They deserve to be safe.

I applaud you all for your advocacy in this space and for being very practical about improvements in public safety.

We should be doing what works.

Next.

I think most of you know I've been a fan of CoLead from the beginning.

It's important to provide housing options that first stabilize and assess needs, and then help neighbors move into independence and autonomy.

I do think of homeless response as a crucial aspect of emergency response, and so I appreciate the sustained funding for CoLead in the context of a very difficult budget season.

And then finally, just a reminder that this increase happened at the end of the Harrell administration.

The public had lobbied for the city to add a cost of living inflation for human services contracts back in 2019. Three of those contracts have moved over to us from HSD, and so we're including the 3.5% inflation adjustment to our budget.

And that is the end of my remarks.

I'm happy to engage in conversation or answer questions.

Thank you, Chief Barton, Director Panucci, Director Whitson, anything more to add here?

Councilmember Kettle is excused for predetermined excusal for this afternoon.

I'll just say looking at the seven year look back that we use to have a more holistic understanding of our budget.

What I appreciate about the care department's section in the seven year look back is it is different than everyone else because the first year that we could look at it was 2021. So that's different than all other departments held in that seven-year look back.

Colleagues, I'll open it up for questions.

I've got some at the end as I usually do.

And I see Vice Chair Rivera has her hand up.

Take it away.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you all for being here.

And I want to say, because I didn't say it earlier, I was very appreciative to have Interim Chief Sales here and really appreciate his partnership and his team's partnership since he's been here.

I mean, he's been a really great partner, so I didn't say that and I didn't want to left that unsaid.

Again, thank you all for being here, Chief Board.

And I wanna ask about 911 calls and the quality of the calls and how they get dispatched.

I had a couple incidents in the district about constituents.

I mean, one in particular was a DUI and it didn't, in Wallingford and hit several cars.

they didn't get police response for many hours and it really had to do with the dispatchers and not police.

So I wanna say, because constituents don't know the behind the scenes and they're looking to SPD, but if SPD doesn't know about it, they can't respond.

So can you address the training?

Sounds like there's some training issues for 911 call takers.

And then also I wanna, know about the impacts of the reductions to the call takers, because I think this is a really important piece.

And as you know, every year I sound like a broken record, but the non-emergency line does not get answered within a reasonable amount of time.

And I hear a lot from constituents who are not trying to call 911 and tie up at the 911 call line, but then they can't get through to actually report.

And we're telling folks to report because we don't have accurate information on crime if folks aren't reporting.

Yeah, I agree with everything.

First, on the point of studying what went wrong, I always encourage the public, you can reach out to me directly, Carrie InfoLine, anytime you wonder, about what happened.

Why a non-response?

Again, it's usually how I end most days is in studying those calls.

The Deputy Chief Joseph is very responsive always.

And it's interesting, sometimes it is absolutely us.

Sometimes more information became understood and the call was not updated.

It should have been priority two, but it was still priority three.

Sometimes it is purely about staffing.

It's about staffing in the field.

We've got Suddenly 12 priority one calls come in.

Sometimes a caller didn't communicate what they thought, they communicated in a way that we understood it.

So all different things go wrong.

The most important thing in the world to me is that people ask, that they report it, that my people are always non-defensive about that.

We want to be better.

and anytime we can circle back and own our part in it, what we got wrong.

There was a call that held a couple of weeks ago when I looked, 16 hours, 16 hours somebody was waiting for a response and they deserved a response.

It was priority three, but it's still, any 911 call, you would want a response in 30 or 40 minutes, even priority three.

So that's the short story.

On my watch, training has been a top priority.

There really was not any, Continuous learning improvement.

Learning science is my academic field.

I care a lot about it.

We have really overhauled the call-taking academy.

We've got our first supervisor academy, our first handbooks, our first policy manuals.

since care became independent.

And so it is a point of pride for me that it's improving, but we still need to basically build out the technology that analyzes every single call.

You would want, we call it QAing, you would want to know anytime there's consistently a deviation, even in the call takers tone, right?

There's no way really for me to know that until a complaint comes in and then we go and pull the footage and find out what happened.

So I just want to validate that.

The main pressure still is police staffing.

I mean, that is generally probably 80% of the time what happened was I just did not have enough resources in the field and you deserved better and were not prepared to provide better.

On the non-emergency hold times were about three minutes, and that's pretty reasonable.

It's interesting, there's no national standard for non-emergency, but that is such a precipitous drop from when I arrived.

When I arrived on the website, it was like, maybe we won't answer at all.

There was this disclaimer.

And so I'm pretty happy with the three minutes.

Ideally, there would be no lag at all.

but a lot of that is because we've developed out the phone tree, we've got better online reporting.

Again, that's why I talk about 988. Some of those calls immediately should go either to 988 or 211. If it's just a resource that's needed, I'm going to be evicted next month, I don't know what to do, that's a 211 call.

But if my dispatchers don't know that and don't have protocols to quickly redirect, we're not using the resource.

Was there another part of your question that I skipped?

What the impacts are to these reductions?

Yeah, great question.

And we really looked at that.

We have always had, basically we promote internally.

So D1, D2, D3 supervisor.

And so generally there are vacancies at the bottom.

It's very similar to police staffing where we have a ton of applicants and not as many qualify to get all the way through the academy, and then even once they do, it's kind of like the FTO pressure.

Basically, the real training starts on the floor, and so we can only hire six to eight at a time.

So I do think it's...

I always want full staffing.

I don't want mandatory overtime, but it's reasonable from a budget perspective to assume there will be eight vacancies despite our best efforts.

And it's not going to obviously it's not going to be worse than it is today with eight vacancies.

Right.

So thank you for that response.

I will say going back to the the priority calls and training and the need for training.

in this particular case, this was a DUI and the person got away, they left.

And so, and fire responded, but SPD didn't.

And so again, constituents thought SPD was not doing their work when really they never got dispatched.

The prioritization was not accurate for the dispatcher.

That's why I asked about training.

So wanted to say that for the record, because I know constituents are listening to these proceedings.

Please send it to me if you have that one.

That particular incident is going to be interesting because, you know, we have a separate fire alarm center, a separate dispatch center.

So it will be interesting to see where the breakdown was.

But I would like to know for myself.

We did.

We always do reach out to your staff and we've gotten responses back, which is why I know there's a training issue and it was a prioritization issue.

I'm just bringing it to your attention in terms of these reductions and what impacts reductions are going to have on your ability to both respond timely and to make sure things are getting dispatched timely as well.

If I can clarify, the main impact will just be financial.

We staff the way that we must staff.

We're the only department with mandatory overtime.

We do dynamic staffing, meaning we know if there's going to be an event, a likely surge in calls.

We have to be staffed.

So when you have fewer dispatchers, then you are using more voluntary overtime first, ideally, and then mandatory overtime.

I'm not going to staff less.

That is not an option.

So is it more expensive to do OT than to to recruit for those eight, and then what would you have to do?

Because I do understand what you're saying in terms of being able to recruit for the positions and train them up, but that's what you have to do.

Otherwise then you're relying, overtime is more expensive, correct?

Yes, correct.

And also it's not advantageous, you're overworking the staff that are there.

So rather than do reductions, to me it sounds more like a training, being able to recruit folks, that can do the job and then train them.

So I'd love to hear more about that, if not here, later.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Chair, if I may, I have another question.

Please.

Related to, let me just like level set on, because you brought up the focused deterrence piece.

Yes.

There are various efforts to dealing with gun violence.

Focused deterrence is a specific thing.

So I think that Many people across the city, particularly as I've kept talking about the National Network for Safe Communities, a safe deterrence strategy, have started to talk about focus deterrence sort of as an all-encompassing other things.

It's not that.

It is a very specific strategy, which I know you know about because I heard an interview with you recently.

So it basically is identifying the folks that are engaged with gun violence.

and you have community with social services with law enforcement, police delivering a message.

You have to stop what you're doing.

What do you need to stop?

Do you need a job?

Do you need housing?

What do you need?

Making a credible offer that we can get you that and that you must stop.

And if you don't, then law enforcement is there to deliver the message.

You know, we're not going to continue to have you engage in this behavior, and they give the consequence.

That is focused deterrence.

It involves all those partners.

We are 100% aligned.

That was nicely summarized.

And so my concern is we're calling other efforts that don't involve those three partners, including law enforcement, we're calling it focused deterrence.

And this is my concern with confusing the public, because it very much also includes law enforcement as a partner.

We are very aligned.

I am spending a lot of hours this week trying to explain the difference.

And that early intervention, violence interruption in community without law enforcement, these are all valid, critically needed, in my opinion, designs, investments we want to make.

Most of the prevention, the investments that we make for kids that we know are vulnerable and at risk, That's not what's moving over.

That is not what the care department is doing.

I really appreciate you trying to articulate the difference here.

Focus deterrence is we know kids are engaged.

Again, I was in the gun call yesterday.

I can see.

what is happening, what is likely to happen next, what the Investigations Bureau is doing about it.

And focused deterrence, it's very complex to pull off well because it requires this trust between the community providers and law enforcement, it does.

I'm most familiar with Portland, that's where I'm from, and I know that bureau really well, the leadership and then my counterpart.

and they have established really good trust, where it's not about community disclosing information, it's about trust in the provider to say, you do not need to make an arrest, we are on it, this is where we are in the process.

And when it goes well, it's going both ways.

Law enforcement trusts the providers, the providers trust law enforcement, but it's for people who are actively engaged in the activity.

and so I do think we should do that.

I think SPD is very well poised to do that.

We have to have an evaluative partner.

You and I completely agree on that and I also like all of these other investments we're making in community that are completely independent of any law enforcement involvement.

Yes, we are doing and making, and we have for many years, many investments on the prevention side, and those would continue.

We're all aligned in that.

Focus deterrence, though, however, is not community saying, we got this to police.

It's actually everyone in the same room with that person at the table delivering that message.

So communities at the table with that person, social services are at the table, with that person at the same time and law enforcement.

That is what focus deterrence is.

It's very specific.

Yeah, I do understand.

I'm sorry.

To clarify, what I mean is there's this wraparound conversation where there is trust about the recommendations in the same room.

So again, this is why ceasefire is going well in a lot of cities, the cities that you're looking at with the partnership.

And I talk a lot about the shared data, that it can't just be the police side, shots fired, homicides.

It has to be who is actually moving into stability and safety.

I've learned in a lot of cities where this is going well, people have to be relocated.

It's very, very hard to get out of a gang.

psychologically, it's very terrifying.

And so you do need a very specific team and the right balance of incentives and deterrence.

And I do appreciate you know that, and I am aligned with you on this.

Right.

And so then you know that NNSC, the National Network for Safe Communities, was established to help cities implement this, and this is why I've been focused on the NNSC effort.

I will also say There is this, you know, adult versus kids with committing violence.

There is very much an adult component that seems to get skipped over in the conversation.

Sorry.

The point I'm trying to make is that this isn't just youth involvement.

So it's important to do prevention with youth.

Absolutely.

A long time ago I was involved with Youth There to Care and we did a lot of community programs to get the kids engaged and involved and that was prevention efforts and similar types of efforts are done today and like I said earlier, we fund all of that at the City of Seattle.

That's not what this is and there are a lot of adults involved and that's another point of conflation.

So there's conflation about what focus deterrence means and there's conflation about just putting all this on youth.

It's not all on youth.

There are a lot of adults engaged with gun violence.

I'd venture to guess most of the people involved with the gun violence on North Aurora and trafficking those minor girls are adults, not children.

So it's important to make that distinction, and this is another reason why this particular partnership with and NSC is important.

So I'll just leave it at that and we can follow up later.

But I do think that that is an important piece.

And I will say, I understand not just because council put it into the budget last year, but it was one of the recommendations of the auditor that the human services contracts related to prevention should move over to care.

So it was under one umbrella of public safety.

However, That's not public safety, that's community safety.

And there is this element of we need to do this particular focus deterrent strategy with the folks that have already committed the crimes, not the ones we're trying to prevent, right?

These are folks who've committed gun violence, who are engaged with gun violence, and that's why it's called focused deterrence.

We're focusing on those individuals, which is a very small part of the folks engaged in the city.

The folks engaged with gun violence are a very small percentage of folks in the city.

So that is really an important distinction to make.

And that's why in other cities who have seen reductions, it has worked in those cities because they are truly doing focused deterrence.

They're not calling other prevention efforts focused deterrence.

So I'll just leave it at that.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Vice Chair Rivera.

Can I make just one note?

I'm sorry.

I'm very sorry.

Sorry.

We have been in a strict facilitation mode this morning.

I was being a little bit more relaxed just now, but I have been giving either nonverbal with eye contact and head nods.

I came to, and for colleagues, when I came to council, there were people who, in my opinion, were not as nice up here.

and that is where some of my strictness comes from.

But I was just about to say, committee table, if you have anything else to share.

I see Council Member Rivera has one last thought and then we're gonna go to committee table for last comments in this zone and then I'm gonna go to my colleagues.

So thank you for understanding of the facilitation of Robert's Rules today.

Appreciate you.

Over to you, Council Member Rivera.

Thank you, Chair.

My last point actually was Thank you for addressing the non-call taker, the three-minute.

That's not the experience of the constituents.

So there's a disconnect there, and I would like to learn more about why there's that disconnect, because that is not how constituents have experienced it.

So thank you, Chair, that's all.

Back to the community table.

I will take more questions.

You shouldn't have gotten me started on gun violence.

It needs to be a separate committee.

We've got all afternoon.

Let's not take it.

One interesting note that came to mind that I didn't mention is what I hear around the country is that the care department is really distinct and has a strategic advantage and that I work in West Precinct where I'll see just backgrounded.

I am really part of the SPD research and analytics team seeing real time what's happening.

There's usually a lot of information lag and so it was just a bright spot.

That's all.

Fantastic.

We appreciate everything you're doing.

Colleagues, do we have additional questions?

I'm not seeing hands on Zoom.

Now is the time.

Council Member Rink, you're up next.

Thank you, Chair Strauss.

And I'll take this opportunity to thank you, Chief Barton, for your leadership and the work of the care department.

Huge thank you to our crisis care responders and the work that they're doing.

Having crisis care responders being dispatched for mental health crises is one of the foundations of ensuring that we have a diversified public safety ecosystem.

I'm a firm believer that we need to have quick responses, but also correct responses for given scenarios.

And so I want to uplift that to kind of ground this conversation today.

And thank you for the overview presentation.

My colleague, Councilmember Rivera, focused on the reductions for the call taker positions.

I wanted to take us to the reductions for the crisis care responder positions and just talk about those a little bit.

and so wondering if I can just get an understanding.

I understand those positions are vacant right now.

If I can get an understanding of how long the pause on filling those 14 vacant CCR positions will be, that would be great.

thing about that is I myself, ahead of any budget conversation, elected to slow down the hiring.

I presented very candidly about the utility data in the winter because I don't believe in spending dollars in a way that is not the most useful.

It's just where I was.

I felt like we've got to figure out this utility.

We've got to figure out how the current contract is being interpreted.

What other ways can we deploy them?

And so I didn't stop the hiring, but we slowed.

We had planned to have these four cohorts hired quickly the first half of the year, and I said, let's not do that.

you know, let's grow, let's get a couple more cohorts, really focus on the supervisors and quality assurance in the field and then start some of these other strategies that I talked about, the non-emergency line, different partnerships, co-location with the libraries, things like that.

So we did that.

Then the budget conversation started and I already had these 14 vacancies and so I was not surprised when It was suggested, let's just pause.

Let's really focus on better operationalizing this team.

And I do believe in making intelligent recommendations based on the data.

I want them to be well beyond capacity, calls around the clock.

I would prefer they not even really have time for sort of the on-view work.

They're designed to be first responders, not outreach workers.

My assumption was that it was for this budget cycle.

I believe that Mayor Wilson is a firm believer in diversified response.

I think that it's actually a shared priority across every office that I'm aware of right now in our area.

I think people just understand what you said was really articulate, that you want the right first response.

and so that is the vision going forward.

But I also am really keenly interested in using the 988 system.

The county is making significant resources in mobile crisis response, and so we want to make sure that we're redirecting as appropriate.

Chair, if I may?

Please.

Thank you for that response.

That's helpful.

So hearing that, and I actually wanted to turn next to Director Panucci just to confirm that the notion that our understanding is holding these positions vacant, at least in the interim for this particular budget.

Thank you.

Yes, it is assumed to be an ongoing reduction, and we're not eliminating the positions because it is a shared priority for the mayor, but right now, based on our available resources, we don't have funding to sustain that, but it is, as Chief Barger mentioned, a shared priority.

So this is one of the many things we'll be looking at.

If there are resources available, we would want to bring the funding back for those positions.

Thank you both for that response.

And just one additional question to this point, since there's been recent announcements around, of course, changes to how we are structuring our city's response to gun violence prevention.

And there was some great discourse just happening here on focus deterrence.

And so I'm wondering, Chief Barton, if you can just speak to a bit more how you define CARE's role in the mayor's gun violence plan, both from an administrative perspective with the coordinator and the grants positions, but also from an operational perspective.

Yeah, I'm very enthusiastic about what I consider the third division of care, which is the coordinating entity across public health and public safety.

I've taken to quoting Chair Kettle when he talks about the scene.

It is really interesting.

Most days, yesterday I was in, I think, six different meetings with SPD, with Jail Health, and then I was in community.

listening to young people talk about just their experience with gun violence.

And so I get this really interesting intersectional perspective on what's working and what's not.

There must be staff in this city full-time dedicated to gun violence reduction on the community side, working tightly with the SPD side, also the prosecutor's office, juvenile detention, driving forward solutions that work.

and so that's how I think about it.

Third division, I don't think that we need to own all of the work.

I also like to articulate the temporal nature of care.

We're public safety department responding to emergencies.

So the way that I think about the LEAD contracts is similar.

That's sort of our, usually one of the last chances to help somebody redirect their life before they get really impacted by the criminal legal system.

So late stage diversion before coercion.

I see us as the diversion department.

And so when you think about community violence interruption contracts, I do think about intervention and interruption when we know that harm is happening, is befalling the person or they're causing it.

we don't have the bandwidth nor do I think it is a good design to be upstream, right?

The school-based services and all of those different opportunities that a person should be availed and we should be intervening early and thoroughly so that we don't wait until an arrest has to be made.

So that's just, I know that's philosophical, but the way that HSD and the mayor's office were proposing to sort of disaggregate the work I think is very intelligent.

I'm a first responder department, and so that's how I think about what should move.

Is that helpful?

And if I may, Chair, just as a follow-up to this point, and I appreciate just your philosophical approach on how we have this, and I'm excited to see kind of the restructuring of functions for the purposes of deploying improved response.

I'm actually thinking back to something Council President Hollingsworth raised in the last session we just had, just on kind of what are the outcomes we can expect to see from the investment, and particularly with this kind of restructure.

Another comment I could make is if you look at South Precinct, which I think was referenced earlier, that is the design, right?

You've got law enforcement working with the five principles, weekly basis, and then all sorts of other concerned persons, right?

Parents and coaches and counselors and healthcare providers, all with one objective, which is safe, thriving community, particularly for young people.

and so that is, it's not even a formal design, it's really just the right people with the right relationships advancing the conversation.

We desperately need somebody to direct and coordinate the work.

It's what I'm doing kind of informally, but I don't have the bandwidth to think about nothing else.

You know, I've got all these other components of my job and so I think somebody who is helping to define what is the impact we wanna see, if we do this well, what would the data be in three years?

What types of reductions are we talking about?

Again, Council Member Rivera articulated the difference between different types of gun violence, and the strategies for under 25 are very different than the strategies for gun violence and encampments.

But we need to define what are we focused on, what are the strategies, and is it working?

So we can course correct it's not is perfect math.

This really is, you have to start with a theory and then work toward it.

And Portland has seen, it was mostly gang and group violence that they were experiencing in 2023. That's now 40% of their gun violence.

It's dropped precipitously.

And so we need to establish some sort of objective like that.

Certainly.

Thank you for that response.

I know our city from reporting over the summer, we have seen a drop in crime.

And so, of course, we want to be continuing that trend and reducing crime across the city.

And I think by having a diversified response system and using our resources effectively to do so is important and being able to bring those numbers down even more.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you.

Anything else from the committee table on this?

I'll go to Councilmember Lin.

You're next.

Thank you, Chair.

Thanks to everyone here presenting.

A few threads.

One, excited to hear about all that coordination work, especially with King County Jail Health.

You know, Council Member Kettle's not here today, but it's something that I know he's been working a lot on, both on sort of the front end, the medical declines issue, but also on the back end in terms of like people being released without resources.

And I know that the county is working on breaking the cycle.

And so very excited to hear more about how you are making the most use of your staff to address folks exiting jail, exiting Harborview, who too often end up right back at 12th and Jackson, North Beacon Hill.

I see so many people in wheelchairs with hospital bans on the street there.

I would be happy to hear a bit about that work.

The other part that you mentioned was the co-deployment with police.

We've talked a lot about hoping to see more kind of proactive efforts by the care department.

And I was speaking with, we've had an emphasis patrol with SPD in Little Saigon alongside LEAD, obviously under your department as well.

And one thing, the one piece of feedback I have gotten, obviously things continue to be very dire there.

I have heard from LEAD that one positive thing that has come out of the emphasis and sort of the neighborhood dedicated officers is that they've had improved referrals.

And I think that comes along when you have, you know, officers there every day, understanding sort of the population and the folks, and also working hand in hand with LEAD more closely.

And so I could see a strong sort of benefit with CARE folks as well with that sort of code deployment.

Just want to pause there, see if you have anything.

Yeah, I'm excited about this.

We're actually launching the pilot in West Precinct next Friday, and the basic idea is we've studied the crisis hotspots as police staffing improves, and also Chief Sales is doing a very good job.

He has a really good grasp on neighborhood policing, you know, and basically the first responders need to know who to hand off to.

So anytime law enforcement's in an area, if the care responders are also in the area, it kind of sidesteps any contract restrictions, right?

Because the officers can still use their judgment to say, yes, why don't you go check on this person?

So it's just a simple workaround.

and I also think it's good for relationship building.

Both sides need to understand what the other side does, so we'll do that.

I've talked to Captain Britt about a similar design with nightlife.

Councilmember Hollingsworth has advocated, again, we need more We Deliver Care in that neighborhood, and then how are they working with the police and care responders so that we have coverage in our neighborhoods that are really chronically troubled.

Thank you.

And transitioning to gun violence, and in particular youth gun violence, and appreciate the discussion.

I am excited for the transition, overseeing those contracts, but I also have some concerns, and I appreciate the dialogue, including from Councilmember Rivera.

And I do think there's, as I mentioned before, I think there's a lot of alignment, and glad to hear that coming from from you, Chief Barden.

My sort of one caveat is I do understand focus deterrence is a very specific model.

I'm not sure that, I don't think it's a specific provider.

I absolutely understand that National Network are experts in focus deterrence.

but I don't, I'll just sort of caveat that I don't think it has to be National Network.

I voted again in favor of the resolution.

I'm happy to have National Network be our consultant.

I do think we need a consultant to do the focus deterrence.

And what I heard is that there is budget.

There is some funding there for some sort of consultant.

So, but, One of the concerns I have is just about the transition.

There has been a lot of sort of turmoil just in terms of a lot of our investments in CVI.

And then if we're changing paths, like we need to make sure that we are working very closely with our partners.

They need some predictability and stability.

You know, there was an RFP this last year that caused a lot of turmoil in the community and down in the Rainier Beach area.

and it always seems like we're being reactive and in crisis mode.

And so I'm very excited to, and I'm hopeful that this consultant can help us develop a long-term vision and a long-term plan, but there's gonna be a transition period as well.

And so I just wanna be very mindful as we update contracts, as we change approaches that we're not leaving our partners in the lurch as they develop their budgets, as they develop their staffing plans.

And so I just think that we're gonna have to work very closely with our partners as we shift, pivot a little bit in direction.

I agree, and there is no plan to do anything abrupt or different.

I think what I don't understand when I look at the different providers is who's doing what part of the intervention.

So again, who is really already doing the focus deterrence part, but they're not actually connected formally to the law enforcement, to the model.

I have no doubt that there is fantastic work being done on the front lines.

As a city, we need to know how to provide technical support and be able to share impact with the people in a budget hearing, for example.

And so that's what I've learned.

I'm from the nonprofit sector, and generally people are doing all that they can on the front lines, and we need to better support them in that.

So thank you for the note.

And just finally, Chair- I see Tommy has something to add.

Yeah, I wanted to speak to that as well, Councilmember Lin, that we've already been in conversations with HSD about the particular contracts that are proposed to move over.

We've been doing analysis with them and getting updates about what HSD has been doing and transition efforts with them.

So we've already put that plan together and we'll be working with them.

The providers can expect that care department personnel, including the chief, will be reaching out over the next several weeks so that we can get everything finalized and new contracts up to date before January.

Okay, wonderful, thank you.

Just one final, and I see Director Holcomb here as well.

Thank you for joining us.

And I just, one sort of question concern is, I mean, you'll be overseeing the contracts with some of our providers.

There's obviously a lot more to this work.

You know, SPD, I mean, you're not, you don't supervise SPD, right?

And so, and as you mentioned, there's a lot of collaboration and coordination that has to happen and you're dealing with 911 calls.

and so you're gonna be stretched thin.

But I guess partially, like how do we make sure that there's the collaboration coordination with kind of you as one department when, you know, we talked earlier about like some people might need to be relocated you're not going to be relocating people.

That's going to be, you know, maybe it's our nonprofit partners.

Maybe it's working with our housing partners.

Like, how can you do that?

What support do you need from the mayor's office or from us at council to support, you know, help from other departments, other agencies, whether it's King County, Office of Regional Gun Violence Prevention that are outside of your purview?

Yeah, again, hiring that director position is top priority.

That's already, we were working on the PDQs because the money is there basically as fast as we can hire for it.

And we will, it is a critical hire.

We will make sure that that is the right person who is an outstanding collaborator and understands that we are a city sitting in a county.

with a lot of resources sitting inside a state, you know, and even a national legal and policy system.

And so I think as we get the right people in the conversation to illuminate, where are their gaps?

I don't know today, Councilmember.

You know, I don't know for sure what pieces are in place.

Do we have a swift relocation exit strategy?

I think about human trafficking in the same way where it's just specifically psychologically complex and you need a whole bunch of supports and you need them at the ready.

So I'm sure that we will be having a lot of conversations about this.

But I agree with the need for a technical evaluative partner because there are a lot of cities doing this well.

And it is like the care pilot.

That just took me a few months to lift off because I was able to look at the national landscape, have candid conversations with a bunch of people who shared with me not just what was going well, but what not to do.

and then we put pen to paper and got it going and we can do the same thing here.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Council Member Lynn.

We've got Council President next.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Chief, for being here and just really appreciate your attention to detail and your willingness to work in collaboration that we've had, especially with Capitol Hill, Pike Pine, and trying to figure out having more people on the ground for violence interruption and violence interrupters.

and I know that that is a program that we're going to try to figure out what are the next steps, what do they look like.

So really appreciate your partnership and your department's partnership on that because we've talked about it for a long time and so just happy to get that going.

One thing that would be helpful, and I shared this with SPD, and we'll talk offline, Chief, is to be able to kind of understand more of LEED in the sense that, and could you guys go back to the LEED investment piece?

Thank you, the funding proposal.

Thank you, and co-LEED.

And I think what would be helpful for me, because I'm two and a half years in, I understand the concept, the talking points, I understand all of that.

The one thing that I'm still struggling with are the key performance index, the KPIs of LEED to understand what is the impact.

And I know I've heard all the stories and the people, but how that fits within our model.

Because I can tell when you all put the chart up about 911 data in terms of call time, I can see the investment.

and the improvements that's made with us saying these investments for these people have created shorter wait times for people getting someone.

Now, we don't know about response times, that's not what you all do, but just to collect that data information, I'm able to literally see that right in front, because that's one of your KPIs.

And so that would be super helpful and important.

And I think this is a bigger question.

And this is probably not a question, it's more of a statement.

is when we the city are figuring out our safety plan and our contractors, us having the same metrics so we can understand where we're making these investments or departments coming here and saying, this is how much money we're pouring into housing, this is how much money we're pouring into prevention, intervention, whatever it is, that we can actually see what those outcomes are.

and I think that's really important.

So I just want to say really appreciate the call time response.

We can see that.

And then also for the co-lead investments that we've been doing, strong believer in co-lead.

I just want some KPIs so I can be able to advocate for the program or able to articulate it to other people about the impact.

The last thing, and this is more of a question, the contracts that have been transferred to you or just that new responsibility that you have and you all are going to be stretched thin.

I've talked about it before.

We have prevention, intervention, and enforcement.

That's how I'm able to, you know, break up public safety.

And that's actually not mine.

That's Cheryl Parker from Philadelphia, the mayor.

So I got to give her credit.

That was her thing when she came on and ran and talked about prevention, intervention, enforcement.

and the one thing, wanted to know the contracts that have been passed, so let me just say this, for prevention, I think it is after school programs, piano lesson, camp, mental health, more things as well.

The intervention, I think is something as like LEAD, also think of something as the violence interrupters that are on the ground and then obviously the enforcement is the SPD and 911. the contracts that have been transferred and shifted to you, where are they on that pie chart?

Are they the people that are doing the intervention?

Is it prevention?

Like, help me understand when those contracts, where does that land in that ecosystem?

Yeah, they will actually move January 1st, and so I have just had my first look at them this week.

They're organizations I'm familiar with and I admire and I understand what Choose 180 is, but I would rely on and defer you to HSD because they really did the analysis looking at that.

You know, what is preventative?

What is upstream?

That's really a human service department investment or a deal investment.

What did we consider?

I always say late-stage intervention.

Meaning there's some formality to this.

We need an actual plan for this person.

This is not going well.

And how do you actually wrap support around?

I keep saying kids because it's just my background.

I'm more familiar with the 25 and younger brain and to affirm what you just said, Councilmember Hollingsworth, Council President, it is so often the protective factors are access to employment, access to a mentor, access to a place to be on Friday night at 10 p.m., sports, arts.

I was explaining to someone we can't really actually even process complex trauma when we're 14, right?

Your brain cannot do that, but there are things that can be addressed in ways that kids can feel hopeful and like they're on a path that is safe.

and we know how to do that.

I think sometimes we over-intellectualize it and over-complicate it, but most of those investments remain in HSD.

My assumption is that the contracts moving are all related to people who are known to be engaged in activity where we think they are going to wind up with sentences.

You know, we think that they are going to wind up in the system, and that's, again, the design of LEAD.

is we know that you are likely to have to spend time in the carceral system.

We also know that the causal factor here is behavioral health.

It's a behavioral health issue, and if we can treat that, then we can probably avoid this system altogether.

And I think the tension in our society is people don't understand.

The theory isn't no accountability.

the theory is accountability, but it's can you incent somebody on a more productive path using sort of the deterrent that's on the books that will be applied consistently.

So more to come as I study the contracts, we can talk about that.

I know what's thrown at you.

One more comment, Chair.

Thank you.

And I think the reason why this piece is very important about the contracts that are going to be transferred over to you versus what is an HSD.

And now I'm going to go into my little equity box that everyone loves.

And the one thing, because I'm most concerned about is we've learned and we know that 50% of the victims that are gun violence are black males.

And then we also know that these are between ages of 13 and 24. and then you go higher when it's like 18 and 24, and I don't know if that's the target demographic that LEAD is going after or doing.

And so to have more information and ensuring that if we know that 50% of black males, 13 to 24, are the ones that are dying, and caught up in this type of activity, then those should reflect some of the contracts and then the targeted approach during this process.

You know, I find out I am looking forward to the gun violence plan.

I know it was put on paper.

about it with a press release and an email, so I'm looking forward to, you know, helping with the implementation of that and I'll continue to share with the mayor's office my willingness to collaborate on that.

However, when I'm looking at the contracts and the execution and the KPIs, that we're ensuring that we're targeting, number one, that demographic, that the people that are doing that work are also targeting that demographic as well.

And then we also know which geographical areas within the city that we need to be focused on as well for a lot of that work too.

So I know you have a lot on your plate, Chief.

I look forward to working with you on that, especially the shift in contracts.

But I think if we can start splitting it up and understanding There's prevention work that we need to do.

There's intervention work and enforcement.

That's how I'm able to break it up.

Because you might have one group, one organization that might do two of them.

They do prevention, they do intervention.

Enforcement's different.

We know that's the law system, that's SPD, that's more of the city side.

We do the enforcement, the city.

But we also fund the prevention and intervention, which I think is important.

And so the holistic plan of having some KPIs so we understand where we need to target more, I think is really important.

So we'll be working with you about the contracts and finding out the intervention piece on that piece as well.

So thank you.

Yeah, thank you.

Thank you, Council President.

Anything else from the committee table right now?

Not seeing any.

I've got Council Member Foster up next.

Thank you so much, Chair, and as always, I appreciate you, Chief, for being here and for your work and your leadership.

I'm going to pick up where the Council President left off discussing lead and co-lead, but first I just want to seek a little bit of clarity and understanding.

I'm trying to find this slide number here.

So for the co-lead contract increase here that you've got up on the screen I just want to make sure that this says 1.6 million dollar increase and then it goes on to say that it's maintaining Capacity and so I'm looking for a little bit clarity are we adding capacity or are we maintaining capacity and this represents an increased cost to maintain capacity

Yeah, so I can answer that, Councilmember Foster.

It is an increased cost to the city to maintain our capacity.

This is replacing one-time funding that we don't have anymore through King County.

Thank you.

That's helpful.

So this is increased cost for us, same capacity that we were providing in the previous year.

because there's been a fund shift that the funded agency is experiencing, so we are covering that cost so that we don't lose capacity.

Yeah, absolutely correct.

Okay, thank you.

And then do we know what this...

Councilmember, just a second.

Thank you, by apologies, Chair.

And just I think to clarify, though, we paid for this contract this year using one-time funds, and I believe last year as well the contract kind of spread across calendar years.

And so it's been funded one time, maybe two times at the city, and this is providing the ongoing funding.

And I will also share, just at the end of last year, as this transition was occurring, it was one of the first things I flagged for Director Panucci as she was coming in is that there was a contract that we had not fully paid out.

and so we were contractually obligated but had not reserved the funding.

So while there's a lot that you see going on here, there's also additional work that we're always doing.

Thank you for letting me facilitate and interrupt.

Back to you, Council Member Foster.

Almost made me a director.

Thank you so much, Chair Strauss.

I appreciate that, and I appreciate the longevity of the memory there and the institutional knowledge.

That's really helpful for me because I know that one of the things that we are often talking about is our ability to increase service delivery, and so it's helpful to understand we're not talking about increased financial commitment here.

We're talking about ongoing commitment, and I think it's important for us as a council to be clear on that.

so that as we look for, as Council President talked about, KPIs, which we should see, and I think that's an excellent point, but we understand that we are not making an additional commitment here, so we're not going to see necessarily an uptick in people served because this is a commitment to do what we have been doing.

So I think that's helpful for me to understand as I'm going to be monitoring impact and change over time of this work.

So thank you for that clarification.

Okay, I wanna move to, something you said previously, Chief Barden was around the capacity for the staff.

And I think what I heard you say was earlier, you felt like folks were at about 30% utility and we're now getting closer to 80%.

And I'd love to hear you share more about what's made the difference and that 50% change, or well, it's more than 50%, but going from 30% to 80%.

Yeah, the short story is we have always needed more deployment strategies.

The idea that all crisis calls come through 911, it's just not quite the right idea, right?

Some do, but a lot of people who are in great crisis, they don't know they're in great crisis.

That's sort of sometimes the nature of mental health crisis.

and also sometimes people are despondent and are not motivated to call on their own behalf, either 988 or 911. And so I've always been concerned about designing a system where we are naturally in the space of people who desperately need help.

and need to be acknowledged in their suffering and need to be connected.

That is why I've enjoyed our library conversation so much, because I spend a lot of time at Central Branch, and I know that's naturally where people are.

And while people are still going inside and engaging, you have a better chance of actually getting them help.

I talk about the food banks a lot, Recovery Cafe.

There are these places where we know that our neighbors are likely to wind up worse off if we don't actually help them to redirect their lives.

and so some of it's been implementing some of those partnerships.

MOU's more formal coordination with Recovery Cafe.

One story I like is we were actually picking people up from Plymouth Housing who wanted to go to Recovery Cafe in Soto but couldn't get there.

And I felt like, well, we can solve for that.

We have the bandwidth to do that.

The jail partnership is so important.

45% of those people are exiting homeless every single day.

What do we think is going to happen, right?

Even if they found some stabilization or maybe a little bit of hope or feeling a little bit better, what people tell me is you exit and it's devastating.

You don't know where to go.

And, you know, 2 a.m., you sort of wind up in the same cycle.

And I have real heart and compassion for those people.

People do not want to languish and die on our streets.

It's been that, it's been activating the 625, the non-emergency line, press zero for a non-law enforcement care crisis responder.

We still triage the same as we do at 911. But what it allows is somebody to identify, now I think that this is the care team.

I think that's what I need.

And then we sort of back into and we don't need law enforcement, right?

And so that has helped.

It's about 60 to 70 calls a day that come in that way.

And then also, again, I have to compliment Chief Sales and the other leaders in SPD, really encouraging law enforcement.

If it's clinical in nature, radio, get the care team out there, flag them down.

And that has improved dramatically the last few months.

And it's harder to measure, but I can feel a cultural shift that's really positive.

Thank you so much for that.

I appreciate that.

And I think that's something I'll just mark my interest in this as we, you know, heard earlier in the year to ensure that for the CCRs that we do have that we're able to have the impact that I know we all want to see with the use of those folks in their time.

So I'm happy to hear that kind of mix of things that have been contributing to the increased utility of those.

I want to turn to the non-emergency call time and the slides that you have, I think, earlier in the presentation.

Yeah, this is perfect.

So it's good to see the co-occurrence in terms of the reduction in the overtime hours as well as the reduction in the average wait time.

I wanted to pick back up something I think Councilmember Rivera was getting at earlier, which is we do sometimes hear from constituents who say, well, I was waiting for a really long time.

And I wonder if those are, you know, obviously outliers, you know, occur.

And I know that even our average, if with those outliers, our average continues to go down and that's great progress.

I'm curious if the department or how you track the data for those sort of max and min numbers and whether we're seeing those go down as well.

Yeah, one thing that occurs to me as you're talking is I really should pull the median for you as well, because it would be interesting to look at that, because I don't know off the top of my head, again, you do have outliers.

The feedback I get, it's like Yelp reviews, right?

It's people who are thrilled or furious, and so it's important to analyze what the average person is experiencing.

We do track call stats.

There's a number of national standards we have to meet, so we're looking at them every single week.

Do you have anything you wanna add, Tommy?

Yeah, we do analyze the call stats.

We have records on everything that comes in, so we know the precise call times, wait times, for everything that comes in on all of those lines.

And in the reporting that we do every week, which you may or may not have a copy of, but we can provide to you, it talks about what the outliers are in all of those.

What we've seen in the trend data is also, while the average wait time has been decreasing, the number of outliers have also been decreasing.

and also remember that the way the 9-1-1 functions, it's the same call takers that are answering non-emergency line typically as the emergency calls that are coming in.

We do staff dedicated non-emergency people during the highest part of the day or the most significant volume of the day, but at 2 a.m., that's not something that we're doing dedicated staffing, for example.

And so if there's a large event going on in the city, we're going to prioritize those emergency calls over a non-emergency time, and that's when you can see longer wait times.

That's really helpful and I might suggest if I may, you know, as you're back with us in the future for future budget years, showing that those outlier numbers, given that you're already tracking them, is helpful because we do hear those issues from constituents and clearly that you all are committed to working on that and continuing to bring it down, but seeing those come down or being able to monitor that I think would also be helpful information for us to have.

So thank you for bringing that up earlier, Councilmember Rivera, I appreciate that.

Okay, my last kind of questions here are just around, checking with the chair.

My last questions here are just around some of what's already been discussed in terms of the gun violence strategy and some of the contracts that are moving over.

Something I'm curious about is obviously you all have access to, hopefully I do the acronym right, the CJIS data.

And I'm sort of curious about the opportunities that could be in front of us with, the data that you have access to because of being an emergency and public safety department and the contracts coming over.

I know we're early, the contracts are coming over in January, but can you just give us insight into how you might be approaching, you know, having both of those under one roof and where we could see potential benefits?

Yeah, the short story is the way that I think about public safety, whether we're talking about crime or crisis, I think about everything as behavioral health related, right?

That these are not our healthy neighbors that are causing harm to community.

There's, for me, a degree of compassion for all, and the objective is to break the cycle.

Send the right response first or the right intervention first, but then ensure that the system is accountable to redirecting a life.

And so, again, that's sort of beyond the scope of my first responder position, but it's really important that there's consistent application of the law and that the system is designed to know, again, the jail health pilot's fantastic because it's basically saying, all right, we've got you here.

What do you need?

Do you qualify for Apple Health?

Do you need a prescription?

Has there been a risk-needs assessment?

Do you have a place to go when you exit?

I think it's the most important work happening right now in the county with great potential to change lives.

When you're in a CGIS environment, which is that FBI category of sensitive information, it means that you are protected in some ways from public disclosure, which is good for vulnerable neighbors.

There's a sensitivity.

We want to be able to track the progress of our most vulnerable neighbors, and we also don't want that broadcast to the public, what somebody's going through when they're very vulnerable.

and so coming back to the potential anytime there's community investments that are then sort of partnered with CJIS environments, an easy example would be if, and actually this happens, a law enforcement officer goes out to a call, Somebody's in possession or somebody is dealing.

If they can see in their records management system, oh, this person has a lead case manager.

They've actually been doing really well for six months.

This looks like a relapse.

Can I call CARE?

Can I get the lead case manager contacted to get back out here to intervene quickly?

And in a perfect world, case managers will also advise when they're failing, you know, we have tried everything.

This is going from bad to worse.

We're going to need a law enforcement intervention.

And so that is a potential.

There's a technology in SPD called Force Metrics.

I am in that technology.

And so I can see if I'm to pull, okay, crisis calls, this particular call type, who are the high utilizers in the system the last 30 days?

That is really powerful information, especially if then we can act on it and start to proactively problem solve for people.

Does that make sense?

It's kind of complicated, but I love the topic.

I think it does.

I think it's something I'll continue to explore as we go through the budget process.

And for me, it's really as we move these contracts, I know this was something that was in the enabling legislation for the care department, look at Councilmember Charles, however many years ago that was, and so sort of making good on what was this original intent, and I think given there's been a lot of changes in leadership since then, my curiosity is how do we have, as the contracts move over, obviously that's administrative in a sense, and I hope you take that in the way that it was intended, that sort of an administrative change, and how do we ensure we're getting the co-benefits that are intended from that change?

That's what is interesting to me and I'll be tracking.

And I just got one more thing on this that I'll just flag for future exploration here, which is, you know, as I've engaged with some of the community organizations, but also with the King County Regional Office of Gun Violence Prevention and through my role where I serve as Vice Chair of the Board of Public Health, having a presentation from some of the coordinated work that happens in South King County already.

And it's clear to me there are people in our region who are implementing a different approach today.

And so I'm just quite curious about what we can learn there.

And I wanna say it's Chief Padilla.

Chief Padilla and Mayor Dana Ralph.

I already know exactly who you're talking about, yeah.

So I look forward to more engagement, but please go ahead and respond.

And I think it's an area for us to keep exploring.

One thing I haven't mentioned yet is that the council enabled us to invest in software that basically allows access by user.

So HealthONE has certain HIPAA constraints.

Law enforcement, you have to have CJIS access.

There are community providers who have neither.

and it's a technology that, again, knows who has what access.

And so it's really important to know if we have invested some supports in somebody, if there is a mentor, we think that we have provided the right intervention, we need to refer to that intervention.

So I've heard several of you talk about that.

There are some individuals who have lots of services, duplicate services from organizations, and then some who have none.

and we need the first responders but also the outreach workers and case managers to know that.

So there is a technical solution also that is underway actively.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you.

Anything further, Council Member Foster?

Thank you so much, Chair.

Thank you.

I'm gonna check in with Council President Emeritus Juarez and Council Member Saka, if you have questions, comments, concerns, now is the time.

Council President Emeritus.

Thank you, Council, I mean, thank you, Mr. Chair.

Yep, you got Mick Jagger.

Oh, there, sorry.

I was gonna make you get this right.

So let me just, Chief, how many, how many SPD, how many crisis calls do we get now?

Do you remember?

Do you mean crisis, like there's about 13 categories of call types, and those 13 are about 60,000 a year.

60,000 a year?

A year?

60,000 a year, but if you think about related to a behavioral health crisis, it's about half the calls.

but that's many, many, many call types.

So it depends on how you're defining it.

But when we were analyzing what the care responders should go to, where we know by the data law enforcement are never involved or useful, there's not even a citation, we came up with just over 57,000 calls a year that could safely immediately be responded to by care responders.

Well, you're going to love this because somehow I found all my notes from September, October 2020 when we were doing the jumpstart and when we were in the process of creating care.

and my notes reflect 17,000 SBD crisis calls, but that police should not be addressing these, build a community resource to deescalate, intervene, and disrupt.

That was kind of the birth of care when we started doing the, Ally's laughing because she remembers all this, and Jumpstart and the original implementation plan, oh yeah, I got notes, girl, I keep receipts, okay?

I know who people are when and who they are today, so unless they've evolved and told me different, I'm gonna hold to that.

So what I was gonna ask you is, Since the beginning that we started, and I know you and I have had these kind of conversations, how CARE birthed or grew out of post-2020, the community's response to create this upstream programs, budgeting staff, doubling the staff, being more deliberate and intentional and interrupting and bringing in, I know people use the word community all the time, but what it really means So just, and I'll close on this note, just from your perspective, from your vantage point, what have you seen since we've created this?

Now, 2023 is when it actually came to fruition and then we start funding it more.

And, you know, we fought hard.

I know you had some, you had your issues about the SPA contract and some issues there and some barriers and challenges.

How far you think we've come since then?

What is the nicest question you could ask me?

First, I would say thank you.

It is, I take for granted how much we've gotten done since that time and how painful that time was for people, how divisive it was.

By the time I arrived in early 2023, people were sort of calmed down and again, I've joked that I thought it was gonna be fun and easy because I was just saying, oh, by the call data, you need this fourth branch of public safety and you, I always say configuration because there's so many calls where I think in a perfect world, I would have police, fire, medic and a clinician on that call.

If you could have that staffing, that would be ideal.

I think that we have the best design in the country.

Actually, I really do.

I think that I've benefited tremendously from other leaders in the field who are about two years ahead, a year ahead.

And my bias initially was let's outsource everything to the nonprofit sector.

And then I spent so much time in 911 and out with law enforcement and started to understand you have to have an integrated system of first responders who can radio to one another.

who can share the same records because you have the fire department responding to the same people as the police department, as the clinicians, and then you've got this level of outreach workers.

And 911 is always going to be an imperfect system.

Somebody calls, they're guessing, they're describing what they think they're seeing, and so you have to have this tight integration.

What fire goes out many times a week and they realize, oh, we need law enforcement here as well, at least on standby.

An important data point I didn't share was that in the 17,000 calls, we've actually only called police back for support about 15 times, which is stunning to me.

I would have expected it to be much more often again, because it's unpredictable, but it tells me we're getting those protocols right.

On the front lines, again, it's like, yeah, there's unions and there's bargaining and there's contracts.

The first responders are brilliant.

They're brilliant in the way that they work together.

The mutual respect is astonishing.

The best days is, you know, a health one calling this team who calls this team.

There's many calls where it's also a victim support team is there.

They are all on the front lines, doing everything they can to help our neighbors.

They're collaborative and respectful of one another, and so I'm very appreciative that Seattle set it up that way.

I have never held a deficit perspective.

Setting up a new branch of first responders is based on the need for mental health first response, and it needs to be in support of our existing first responders.

and so even slowing the expansion a little bit to make sure that the system is getting coordinated.

I don't have a problem with that because I am working toward 50 years from now, right?

I mean, we are just almost to the three-year anniversary and I want this done in a way that can endure that my grandkids will be like, yeah, of course there'd be a care responder go to that call, of course.

and so I overall, very positive, very grateful to be part of this important movement.

It should be more like medics, it should be more like Freedom House, which wasn't a thing, and then everybody understood, oh, that's a different discipline, we need that, and then 10 years later, it was everywhere, and that's how it needs to be with mental health first responders.

I just want the public to hear this and some of my colleagues that this was born out of George Floyd, defund the police post 2020 COVID.

And I worked with Councilman Rivera on the ECI to get $10 million out the door, 30 million.

30 million.

30 million out the door.

And so this was a tangible program that started with what happened and it should have.

And I guess, as you know me, I wanted people to see that we heard them and we created this and funded it and wanted to move it forward without always having to slap the word progressive in front of it and politicize it.

That we looked at people on the ground you know disruptors you know what we were talking about programs upstream things that are that exist in reality not a political slogan and the facts and how do we address those and then we got to the point where and Ali remembers these days and getting to the point where we could actually articulate what that looked like what it looked like in a budget how we funded it, how we expanded it, how we are here with you today again to talk about its growth, its birth, and where we're going, and that it's working.

And that at a time, five, six years ago, people didn't think that we could do that, and we're doing it.

So it's not always all gloom and doom.

And I know some people, that's kind of what we get in this world, but this is what we signed up for.

So I just want people to know that there is hope out there.

And one thing that Council President and I were focusing on kind of offline and we're hoping to look at more in the future is not just young folks with guns, African American boys and girls or boys, and how they're arrested, but also being victims, but also within the juvenile justice system in the decline hearings.

When you have someone under 18 where there was no disruptor, there was no, as Council Member Rivera is saying, what was the term again?

Intervention or what's the, you know, your program?

Oh, focused deterrence.

Focused deterrence.

It's a fancy way of saying where I grew up, it was elders and aunties and cousins that called you up and said, you know, get your ass home.

You're supposed to be in now.

You know, the neighbors told me you're out here, out running the streets, right?

That's kind of what it is.

And so I'm hoping in the future after I leave that there is going to be a focus on the juvenile court system in the decline hearings.

So we look at where were these kids when they were 16 or 17 and picked up a gun and shot someone, went to juvenile court, are now going to be tried as adults.

And that's, you know, when I was a public defender, I think the saddest thing was is to represent a young man in juvie.

and then go to felonies and represent them in felonies and then be a judge when they're a full-fledged adult and they're back and I'm sentencing them again.

I can count about six or seven instances of that.

And I think that's the saddest thing.

And I was just telling the council president this, all of these are kids of color.

And so when I go back to those are our babies being shot.

Those are our kids picking up guns.

And so I don't, you know, I get a little irritated and this is the nice part about getting old is, you know, you become a witness to a lot of things.

So I just want to thank you for all your hard work.

I know that it's been a slog since 2023. And I want to thank Allie too, because she was there in the early days to post 2020 and during COVID and Council Member Rivera and Council Member Strauss.

So we kind of, you know, we did it.

I mean, we worked really hard.

So thank you.

Thank you, Council President Emeritus.

Anything else from the committee table at this time?

We're going to go to Councilmember Saka next.

Councilmember Saka.

Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Chief Barton for being here today.

Really, really appreciate the overview, the presentation, and let the record reflect.

I was bobbing my head in firm agreeance with Council Member Juarez's comments.

Appreciate that.

And frankly, I really appreciate all the comments from my colleagues.

Agree with everything that was said.

And plus one on Council President's notion about KPIs being important and lack of clarity there.

I too have some lack of clarity on that.

and also a related kind of a construct of OKRs, Objective Key Results.

But help me better understand, Chief, So really appreciate all the great work going on in the districts and across the city and would love for you all to do more.

And I think some really specific things need to happen to fully unlock the capabilities of the care department, at least with respect to the response capability.

But I'm glad that you all exist and I'm glad you all are there to provide this really good service.

and we can improve through some things, A lot of people are doing a lot of work and I know my constituents appreciate it, especially in high use areas like Georgetown and Soto.

So on one of your slides, it says the current model is, I think it's slide eight or seven or something like that.

It talks about the current operations model and seven days a week, presumably.

And out of those five locations from those specific hours, Is that seven days a week?

Yes.

Seven days a week, okay.

So with the plan reductions in those vacant positions, what's the longer term impact likely to be?

You mentioned earlier that the department needs to do some things, be more intentional, focus about kind of scaling.

and ensuring the outcomes are a little more effective.

Maybe that was my interpretation of what you said, but I generally agree.

What does that mean?

What do these reductions mean both in the short term and especially long term for growing and scaling the care team ideally or potentially to be a true 24-7, 365 response capability which would make the department truly co-equal.

to fire and SPD, which it is.

But yeah, what's the impact?

Well, there's no impact deviating from this slide.

So we have expanded to those hours citywide.

We were always seven days a week.

We started out 12 hours a day.

And so now we've expanded to all of the hours where there are many, many crisis calls coming in.

Between the hours of about 2 a.m.

and 6 a.m., there's not as many calls, and I would like in the short run to be able to redirect some of those calls to the county team who is 24-7.

I share the urgent priority to get to 24-7.

I just think that is sort of the definition of first responder, right?

If you call 911 at any hour, any place in the city, you can get this response if it's appropriate.

and so not expanding beyond 32 will limit our ability to do that.

I will also be very clear and collaborative.

When we are beyond capacity, we're getting more calls than we can possibly take.

I will let everybody know so that we can think about that in future as we balance the public safety budget and think about investments.

Sometimes CARE qualifies for grants and other funding revenue sources in ways that traditional public safety teams do not.

We've gotten a whole bunch of grants.

and thanks to our congresspeople too, Jayapal and Smith.

And so I can imagine that being a short-term strategy.

But these will be the hours and the days going forward with this staff.

Okay, got it, thank you.

Finally, I just wanna do a special plus one Councilmember Rivera and her non-emergency line comments and prior leadership, consistent leadership on that.

It's a vital service and we need to do better.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Council Member Saka.

Council Member Rivera, I see you have had a hand up.

If you can be quick, we're, but we've got some time.

Thank you, Chair.

This is just, it's an important day, Chair.

So thank you for letting us all take our time with asking questions because this is really our one opportunity to ask questions.

for the public who really are watching, because I've heard from folks who are watching these sessions.

So thank you for that.

I just wanted to, well, first of all, I wanna thank Council President for her distinction between the prevention, intervention, and enforcement, because that's really important.

and it is also important in the context of the national networks focused deterrence because that effort was born out of this intersection between the intervention and enforcement piece because really it was this idea that we can identify or we have researched and identified that it is a very small segment of the population who's actually involved with gun violence.

So why don't we focus on them?

We know that they have numerous crimes that they've committed, and so they would be, you know, folks that were involved in the criminal justice system leading into incarceration.

And is there a way we can intervene specifically with those folks, not with the ecosystem writ large, on gun violence, but with these particular folks, can we partner, should we partner with community, those moral voices, the aunties, as Councilmember Juarez likes to say, I agree.

When I was growing up, that's how we kept kids, you know, on the street and narrow.

By the time you got home, someone made a call to your mom if you stepped out of line at all.

So those moral voices, and the providers because we provide services as we should as a city and then also law enforcement at the same table as I described earlier.

And so I will say when you talked about Operation Ceasefire, that was also the same person who created the focus deterrence model and it was first piloted as part of Ceasefire in 1996 in Boston.

So it was, I know you know you raised it earlier today, So I say that to say that that's what this particular effort is.

And colleagues, I also wanted to address the National Network for Safe Communities.

There's a lot of conversation about, you know, why them and not someone else?

And I will say that one is they're the experts, they created it.

The other is subsequent models have have come after that, but they don't involve law enforcement in the same way.

They involve law enforcement in the way you described earlier, Chief Barden, in that they might consult with law enforcement, but they're not all at the same table together with that individual, literally at the table in the way you are now.

So that's why National Network.

And to the point about, you know, this would be a consultant contract for implementation of this program.

Mayors have, over the years, direct contracts with consultants to help advise and implement different strategies.

And I will say this particular mayor consulted with NYU on the CCTV study.

NYU is one of many consultants, but that's the one she chose to partner with.

Looking at the FAS website, it looks like it was authorized to be up to $233,000.

And she went with NYU because presumably she liked their program.

This is not dissimilar to that.

And again, I say this to say, If folks don't want to work, if the mayor doesn't want to work with the national network, she should say so.

But the idea that this is different from what we've been doing, mayor's direct contract with consultants for services, why NNSC?

Because they truly are the experts and they work with law enforcement in the way we should be working with law enforcement.

as a partner at the table.

So I really wanted to say that, but also thank Council President for her distinction, because we've done a lot in the prevention space, a lot in the intervention space, but we're not doing this focus deterrence thing.

CARB was born out of the audit.

I'm sorry, not CARB, the transferring the work to care was born out of the audit, so was this focused determines piece described in this way with law enforcement specifically, and we haven't implemented that, but we've implemented the now this year, starting to bring the contracts over.

And then, Chair, I know we have to move on, but for the record, I just want to say, I am confused about then what contracts are actually coming over to care, because I thought I heard you say my assumption is that Certain contracts are coming over which leads me to believe this is not fully baked, but we can follow up offline because I really want to understand what's staying at HSD and what's actually moving to care and what the expectation is for the care department.

We need to be clear on the expectation so that we know about, as many of us here have said, the outcomes.

and if we're not clear, then we won't know what outcomes to track.

I should clarify that many people are expert.

I have seen the nine contracts that are coming over the dollar amounts.

I have not even met with the providers yet, so I am new.

I can see the line items and the budget and understand, okay, this is violence interruption, but to your very first point, people often use a series of words to mean many, many different things, and so I'm not clear who is doing what, in what neighborhoods, that's just my ignorance.

It is known in HSD, just not by me, yet.

Thank you.

So it's important for us to get clarity on that.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Councilmember Rivera.

Colleagues who are new, I guess it's adding Councilmember Foster and Lynn, it's new.

You'll see throughout this process that I will start Google mapping our time of exit.

Currently, if we continue on this trajectory, we will be here till 5. So the...

from here on out I'm gonna ask everyone gets one opportunity to speak and then we're gonna move forward.

I have potentially up to 15 minutes of conversation so that's part of why I was asking for a little bit quicker.

So I might make a lot of statements and just put my questions on the record for us to follow up on in the interest of time and yes my timer is on and yes my timer counts your responses as the time that I have occupied here in committee.

I wanna start where Council President Emeritus Juarez left off, talking about the six or seven youth that she had in her life that had put a lot of bodies on the ground.

I was speaking to another elected official yesterday of a neighboring city to Seattle about the youth gun violence that's occurring because it's not just within our city boundaries.

We've read the stories about the two kids walking in, I believe it was Tukwila or SeaTac where only one came home and we've been reading the news about all these kids with guns.

And the person I was talking to yesterday mentioned person that they know who is under 18 and has already killed five people and is still on the streets.

We gotta get the guns out of these kids' hands.

I don't know what more to say.

I'm not gonna sit here and pepper you with questions on the who, how, why.

I'll just say that I don't care whose bright idea is what, but we have to do it all.

It's the afterschool programs, it's the food, it's the interventions, it's the whatever the phrase is, deterred intervention or deferential intervention, focused intervention, It's the metal detectors at schools when the kids are asking for it.

It's the cameras outside the schools when the kids are asking for it.

It's all of the above because when the kids are asking for safety getting home, that's all that matters.

So that's what I'll say to that.

And so that's why when you said earlier I could talk about gun violence all day, I said right back at you because when I started working in gun violence prevention here in Washington State, Democrats in the legislature would not allow a hearing to occur in committee about extreme risk protection orders.

That was 10 years ago.

And so I appreciate where legislatively we have come, but when kids are dying on the streets and when they're shooting each other, because that's what happened at Seattle Center.

That's what happened in Rainier Beach, what, this weekend?

Last weekend?

It felt like yesterday.

It's always every day.

Every day.

That's the seriousness that we got to take this with.

And I appreciate you bringing this under your umbrella, but in my decade in gun violence prevention work, I've seen a lot of infighting and I got no patience for it.

The only thing that needs to get done is getting the work done.

And that's all of the above.

And so when people and organizations become defensive and turf, create turf, there's no room for that, in my opinion.

where we had bounty hunters who called 911 to let the police know what they were up to.

And that call never made it to North Precinct.

Have we been able to make the changes to ensure that doesn't happen again?

Yeah, we addressed that one quickly.

That was jarring.

So I can follow up with your office about that.

Fantastic.

And I've got a lot of questions that I'll just add to SharePoint so that I don't actually take up 15 minutes of conversation.

But in my perspective, the care department is not an alternative.

It is a responsiveness.

It is a program, it's a practitioner.

I'm gonna just, from here on out, and I'll follow up with Council Member Kettle onto the side, but if people say, continue talking about police alternatives, I'm just gonna ask you to change the language because this is not an alternative, this is a response, in my opinion.

and I'll share that throughout today we've heard a lot about fiscal reasons for reducing investments and it's a pause, not a stop, or it is what is within our fiscal ability where I'm challenged today is. for both the police, for CARE specifically, we'll get to the fire department in just a minute, but for both of these organizations, we have been in a place of momentum building and momentum is not built, it's not an on off switch.

Momentum is built over time.

And I have seen in government where a two week delay to a program has, it was just supposed to be two weeks and we're not talking pandemic stuff.

We're talking very normal stuff.

A two week delay created a two year pause.

And so what you're gonna see from me throughout all of these three departments and more is my worry about momentum.

because it has been council's intention since 2021 that care department is in every sector of this city, is 24 seven, is responsive in quick manner, is able to respond to the calls that are appropriate for them without question.

all of this and that's where I have concern today because if it takes waiting for the next mid-year supplemental that is I'm teasing here supposed to be here by June 20th but then we finally voted out by August you know and then it's finally implemented in fall like this is where my momentum concern comes in and so I appreciate the fiscal perspective on this issue because it's what you're sharing with us all day today.

But I get concerned when we talk about, or when we don't discuss how a two-week pause can create a two-year delay, and I appreciate very much how you are thoughtfully putting together your teams about the CCRs and how what you have right now and where you can build to and holding those pockets in legislation but not filling them.

I appreciate the perspective on this but I'm just sharing my concern today because a pause can create a delay, a pause can oftentimes inadvertently and unexpectedly and unintentionally create a stop and and I don't wanna see the police department lose momentum.

I don't wanna see the care department lose momentum.

I don't wanna see the fire department lose momentum.

These services are also critical to me.

I'll turn it over to the committee.

I would just, I had never considered that momentum point and I think it's very intelligent and I appreciate it.

Thank you, and I'll wrap up here.

Wow, I am almost taking 15 minutes, my apologies.

Just to say that the lead and the co-lead coming into your department has been very helpful.

I will just say as far as when we're looking at neighborhood impact frameworks and we are looking at geographically specific places to make those types of interventions, it's been very helpful to have the care department involved.

I believe I saw Dr. Nicole somewhere around here, maybe she took off, but she's just been so helpful.

And so this was a very helpful transition that occurred last year and I'm excited to continue building that momentum.

I'll give it over to the committee table for last words because Chair Kettle is not here right now.

This will be the last word and then we'll switch.

If I may, I just want to respond to both you, Chair Strauss and you, Council Member Rivera.

about your concerns with the specific 911 calls that you mentioned.

And I just wanted to underline the seriousness of what you guys are talking about, because that's what we talk about with our call takers in our training, because what we do every day is often dealing with people on the worst day of their lives.

Pardon me.

And we get it right the vast majority of the time.

We take about 900,000 calls a year.

And so the evidence, the data is telling us we get it right the vast majority of the time, but we're not perfect.

Most of our call takers have been there less than two years.

So that's over 50%.

So it's a very young group.

And it takes a long time for a call taker to really become very seasoned with anything that they might be able to, you know, come across in their day.

Because while some calls happen quite frequently and they're very familiar, like maybe an automotive theft or something like that, Other events are very infrequent, and so they still have to know how to handle all of those.

So I just wanted to echo that we really do appreciate your comments and understand the gravity of all of those.

So we look at all of those situations and try and learn from it every time.

Wonderful.

Thank you all so much for your work.

We're going to now make the transition.

So, colleagues, you need a quick break.

Now's the time.

We'll be at ease until Seattle Fire Department has their presentation up.

And before you take off, I want to thank you.

You have been here since 9.30 a.m.

with us.

You've been waiting here all day.

and so I just appreciate you being here early and as we're making this transition, oh, you can jump.

But also the Seattle Fire Department was also ready this morning to jump in earlier than scheduled and I just appreciate their flexibility as well.

So we are at ease until Seattle Fire Department comes on up.

Thank you, everyone.

Thank you, sorry about that.

You're fine.

Did you see me?

I was trying to do these.

Hey, Nate.

Oh, I need to stretch.

No, we're not at ease anymore.

Where are my council members?

We're ready to go.

No, I'm not doing that ever again.

That was it.

One-time deal.

All right.

Good to see you, Eddie.

Shouldn't have said it.

That'll teach me.

Fool me once.

Fool me twice.

All right.

Chief Scoggins, thank you so much for being flexible this morning.

Helen, thank you for all your help as well.

Absolutely, hopefully we'll have you out by five.

I am hoping we will have you out by five.

My timer's not on for me though right now.

This is free time, this is free time because they're not here.

If my team is watching from my office, can you start walking the hall, get folks coming back to council?

We've got, and I've got council member Sokka.

We've got Lynn, Strauss, Hollingsworth.

As soon as the next council member comes back into the chambers, we will roll.

Oh man, now we lost another one.

Or all of them.

getting a little punchy on a Friday afternoon.

It's a serious day, and laughter is still important.

Need more space, G?

No, no, I'm good.

Got too many paper clips, though, because I keep dropping, though.

I tried to give you a binder.

Rob, thank you for being punctual.

She's going on tour, really.

She was one of the first concerts I went to.

Janet Jackson's going on tour.

And for your awareness, folks, mics are hot and it is broadcasting.

Okay, great.

I don't know if you knew that.

I saw her in 1991.

People just learned about our love of Janet Jackson.

I can't hear you, but Seattle Channel can.

At the Great Western Forum in 1991 was the last time I saw Janet Jackson.

Joy, can you go walk the hall and get everyone back here?

Thank you.

Chief, are you expecting anyone to join you on Zoom?

No.

Is it Deborah?

They're here, they're here.

If they're not, they'll watch them.

You might want to ask Deborah's staff.

Is there someone trying to sign in on Zoom?

Just a phone call or something, I'm not sure.

and we are out of ease, so I'm gonna turn it over to the Seattle Fire Department.

Chief Scoggins is here with us as well.

I should probably bring up my script.

If the clerk can read item number three into the record, we've got Chief Scoggins and Tricia, the finance director.

Thank you for being here.

Agenda item three, Seattle Fire Department for briefing and discussion.

Thank you, and before you begin, Chief, for my colleagues, we're never doing that again.

That took too long.

Thank you, over to you, Chief.

All right, thank you.

We appreciate the opportunity to share the information about the Seattle Fire Department.

And before we move forward, we'll just do a couple of quick introductions so you know who you're talking to.

Harold Scoggins, Fire Chief.

Trisha Ellermeyer, Finance Director.

And before we click through the slides, I think I always invite you all somewhere when I come, so I'm going to stick to that.

If you're available next Friday morning, October 2nd at 9.30 a.m.

We'll be doing our annual Fallen Firefighters Memorial in Occidental Park at our memorial down there.

That's a place where we take the time to remember all the Seattle firefighters who have been lost in the line of duty.

And we have a ceremony and we read all of the names because that's how we remember folks when we say their names out loud.

So if you're available, please come down to Pioneer Square.

at 9.30.

All right, so we're gonna get moving.

As always, I like to start with hitting the refresh button on why we are here.

Our mission statement is what drives us.

It talks about protecting property, saving lives and the environment, and we're anchored in that in everything we do.

And the second sentence is always very meaningful to me. and is probably relevant for today's discussion.

We respond immediately when any member of our community needs our support.

That's really important for us.

That's something that every member of the Seattle Fire Department focuses on day in and day out in living out our mission.

And what you have on the next slide is a layout of the Seattle Fire Department and our resource distribution.

We have 33 fire stations, 32 engines, 12 ladder trucks, eight medic units, five aid units, 24 hour aid units.

And the slide actually says two peak time aid units, but it's actually three because last year when we were here, we had made the request to add more aid units.

I think we had three or four on the table, but we were successful in adding a 12-hour peak time aid unit at Fire Station 25 on Capitol Hill.

And July 1, that unit went into play.

And it's running a lot of calls because Station 25 is a very busy place.

That aid unit runs about 6,500 calls, the engine almost 5,000, and that latter truck about 3,500.

So that was very needed.

We also have three Health One units, four fireboats, and we'll be talking about one of those today, two air trucks and two hose wagons.

And you can actually see our station distribution around the city, very evenly distributed and gives us a chance to get to most calls in a timely manner.

And the next slide gives us a call of our fire alarm center calls that come in to break down.

So you can see it's a very busy place, and we project it out to 2027. But, you know, we think they're going to take in about 184,000 calls, and that's a pretty busy place.

We generally have eight firefighter dispatchers at the fire alarm center 24-7.

They work a four-platoon system just like our firefighters in all of our stations.

and that seems to work really well for us in getting calls in and out.

Now we really work hard to comply with NFPA 1225. That's our National Fire Protection Association 1225. That is the standard that guides call taking for the fire service.

We have goals that we try to meet, we don't always get there, is taking in the call, answering the call in 15 seconds or less and getting the calls dispatched in 60 seconds or less.

So those are the goals that are set for the fire service as for call taking.

That's really important.

And then we go to the next slide, is our total responses.

And Seattle Fire is a very, very busy department.

We run a lot of calls and we're busy.

When we think about that, you can see the down year in 2021, that was a COVID experience.

If we would include it in 2020, it would have said about 79 calls.

But we started to get back to normal in 2021, and we quickly started rising annually.

and we added some other bars on there that we think is relevant because we have added some help to our system.

Because if we would not have added our MIH, which is our Health One, Health 99 units, all of the green bar would be on top of the blue bar.

So that gives us an option, I'm sorry, the orange bar.

Those are our MIH calls.

The green bar is our nurse line calls.

That's pretty important.

We put that in play February in 2022, and that allowed us another option to send those lower level EMS calls to so they can actually have a nurse line.

But before 2022, All of those calls would have been dispatches.

So that would have really extended the blue bar.

But you can see the growth that's expected this year and next year.

And you can kind of see the pace we're on right now.

So it's a busy place out there for our firefighters.

We're running a lot of calls.

And Tricia and I, we're going to tag team this.

So this is when I think I hand it to you.

Yep.

Good afternoon.

So as the chief was mentioning, the fire department provides fire protection, prevention, technical rescue, and of course emergency medical services for the entire city.

So to help address the city's long-term general fund deficit, our proposed budget does reduce the department's overtime operating budget by $7.1 million.

The net reduction in 2027 is 2% of our total department budget.

So if we look at the table below, in 2026, our adopted baseline is about $350 million.

In 2027, it drops to $346 million and then back up in 2028. So that reduction is offset primarily because of our citywide standard cost increases, such as healthcare, workers' comp, and smaller increases for IT services at FAS.

I want to go back to the FTE count.

Most of that FTE count is sworn firefighters who are responding out the door.

So you see the number in 2026, 1,220, and then it bumps up a little bit, and we'll get into the reason why that's bumping up.

But the bulk of all of those positions are sworn firefighters, probably 1,110, and that number will be bumping up a little bit higher.

So that's what the FTE count is.

Okay, we'll talk next about the reduction.

So as I said earlier, we are reducing our operating overtime by 7.1 million.

So this change reflects the budget constraints that we're in while we're still maintaining our ability to provide that emergency response service.

However, this reduction requires the department to manage staffing within those available resources, so that includes planned unit outages.

So if units are temporarily out of service, the department will continue to maintain those core services of fire and emergency response with the apparatus and the staff we have on hand.

Yeah, and to give a little perspective here, you may say, well, what does that mean?

So what that means for us, in order to achieve a $7.1 million budget reduction, our daily staffing needs to go from 222 per day to 209 per day.

So that's 13 bodies that will not be staffed each day.

Now that's not taking a single unit out of service.

So I need to explain this so you have context.

So our 222 firefighters we have on duty every day, They get vacation time.

They have PPL because we have a very young department and we're having a lot of new babies.

Just to give you perspective, we have hired about 630 firefighters since I've been here in 11 years.

We have truly gone through a department transition, so we've been busy hiring.

So they have PPL, they have sick leave, they have disability.

At any given time, we have between four and seven percent of the department on some sort of disability, as you can imagine.

Most are musculoskeletal.

We do a lot of strange moving with a lot of heavy equipment.

And then there's a number of those PTSD.

So dropping from 222 to 209 will be done by not hiring overtime.

And overtime is a bit misleading.

it helps us achieve our minimum staffing.

When you think overtime, you think of ancillary duties and things like that, but for us, the bulk of our overtime is minimum staffing.

Only about six to seven million dollars is other types of overtime that we get grant funding for, we have contracts with the stadiums, and then we have some overtime to maintain some of our competencies, like our medics and our rescue technicians, our hazmat technicians, but the bulk of that is really minimum staffing.

So to go from 222 to 209, what does that mean?

Well, that means that we will not be staffing between probably four and eight units a day.

Now, how will that work out to just give you clarity and perspective?

So to get to that number, for example, are three peak time aid cars, one that just went in play in July, one's on Capitol Hill, one to Station 2 in Belltown, and one is Northgate.

They probably won't be staffed.

There's probably a couple of Medic units, Medic 26 in South Park and Medic 31 in Northgate, far ends of our city.

they may not be staffed on some days.

There will probably be some engines not staffed.

Engine 22, which is on Roanoke.

Engine 16, which is near Green Lake.

And there could be a ladder truck not staffed.

Ladder six on Queen Anne or ladder 13 down in West Seattle.

And it's going to be some combination depending on who's off.

And then our staffing team will work to fill all the spots and we'll determine what we leave vacant.

Now we have a staffing matrix on how we do that.

And the reason why those stations and units are listed is our engines, we really focus on engines that can have coverage surrounding, even though it's going to be a longer response.

If you know 16 is right near Green Lake, then we have 17s to the east, we have 21s and 9s, we have 31s to the north.

and but it's a drive to get there to go on those calls.

16's on Roanoke.

Well, we got 25's on Capitol Hill.

We got 17's in the U District and we have other stations, but it's a drive to get there if you know the geography.

So there will be some movement of resources, but there will be some stations or districts that will have some different types of coverage because if we're staffing down 13 bodies, that's what that would mean.

So I want to make sure that that's clear.

It's going to be less firefighters on duty each and every day.

And that could be a challenge.

When we just think about Wednesday night this week, we had the Sounders playing, we had the Mariners playing, and we had the Storm playing.

And we have folks working at all those events, but we have between probably 10 and 20,000 people at those events.

Our firefighters in the stations are the backstops for all of those events, even though we have people on site.

But so the impacts are going to happen, and it's going to mean longer response times.

That's what it's really going to mean.

I'm sorry, Tricia, go ahead.

It's all right.

So the table down below, just to go over that, 2026 adopted baseline is 41 million of our operating overtime.

This reduction would reflect a 33.7 million budget in 2027, ongoing in 2028. That's a 17 percent reduction in our operating budget.

Overtime budget, excuse me.

Okay, so let's talk additions.

Our proposed budget also includes additions into our baseline, approximately $1 million for two areas, utilities and maintenance.

So that makes up that $1 million.

So to go over it, $450,000 is an increase in our utility baseline, and that helps to support our 33 fire stations and administrative buildings.

Additionally, we have $570,000 to support our maintenance budget.

and that is to mitigate the cost pressures from inflation.

That maintenance budget helps our equipment, fleet, fireboats and buildings.

And just like the costs are going up in the world for utilities, they go up for us, too.

So this is going to be very helpful.

Our inventory to keep our 33 stations supplied and all the equipment, maintenance and things like that, that continues to go up.

So we really appreciate these additions.

We think they're going to make a difference in helping move us forward.

All right.

So for our adopted budget in 2026, for those two lines of utility and maintenance, that's two million or just over.

so that adds an additional $1 million at 51% increase.

All right, related additions, not in our budget but for the fire department is a new capital improvement program for Fire Station 25 renovations.

The estimated project cost is $8.7 million and that is to help repair the roof HVAC systems, Hood Project, and some other outdated systems.

So this is partially funded with FAS's fund balance, as well as bond financing.

And the last that we'll mention here, the Chief mentioned on the boat.

So in the 2026 year in supplemental, we have requested $2 million to help get us started on repairing the fireboat Lachy, which has been out of service fully since January.

And that's really important for us.

We have four fireboats in our fleet that flow water.

The Leschi is the biggest of our boats.

It flows over 20,000 gallons a minute.

Generally, it's on the Sound.

And as you can think about, all of the commerce that comes through, the recreation, the industry, that's a really important resource for us.

We also have another fireboat, Chief Seattle.

It flows about 10,000 gallons a minute.

Normally, that is on the freshwater at Terminal 3. but we've moved it over to the Sound right now and we also have two other fireboats that flow about 6,000 gallons a minute.

So the Leschi getting that back in service is really important for us so we really appreciate this support.

Okay, and our last item, position changes.

So this is basically a technical position request.

This is adding, this request is just position authority for 10 firefighter positions dedicated to the mobile integrated health program.

This is budget neutral, as the funding was previously adopted in prior budgets.

As you are all aware, the mobile integrated health program started way back in 2016 in partnership with HSD.

Since then, the program has grown due to its success.

We have multiple health one units as well as overdose and post-overdose teams.

What this is doing is adding position authority to recognize that expanded growth since 2016 and aligning the positions to the funding that already exists.

Yeah, and it's pretty important to recognize.

I think I've seen a couple of news reports.

These are not new positions.

This is cleanup.

We would love to have 10 more positions for our mobile integrated health program, but this is cleanup for the existing program.

All right.

That's it.

Thank you so much, Tricia.

Thank you so much, Chief.

Colleagues, We'll be focusing a fair amount of time, talking about overtime, talking about staffing, talking in this conversation.

I'm gonna go last again, so colleagues, if you all have questions, just giving you a fair warning, filling in a little bit of the role of Council Member Kettle today.

I've got about 15 minutes worth of back and forth, Google Map.

Google mapping this, if we all take 15 minutes, we'll be here till 6. If we spend as much time as we did with CARE, we will be here until 5. If we use SharePoint to ask the questions that we need answers to, make statements and put them on the record, we could be out by 4.30.

So that's the Google Maps version of this today.

And I don't see anyone with their hands, so I guess we're done with that.

Okay, Council President Emeritus.

I'm gonna let you all talk about overtime and we'll get to that.

So how does the delay of the fire station 31 opening in D5, how does that impact staffing and maintenance cost?

You knew I was gonna ring up station 31 in D5.

You knew that was coming.

So are you talking about with the peak time aid car not being staffed there?

So what that would mean is engine 31 and ladder five that are already at that station would run more calls or station 24 in Bitter Lake or station 39 in Lake City.

So when we put A31 there, probably in 2017 or 18, is because those units were running so many calls, we needed to provide them some relief, and we needed that engine and that ladder available, if possible, when the big deal happens.

So what we know is if Engine 31 and Ladder 5 is on the call, that means either 39 is coming out of out of Lake City, or 17s or 16s are coming up from south to north, or 24s is coming over from Bitter Lake.

But geographically, you can imagine that's going to mean a longer response time.

You know, a good example would be up in that area.

The streets between, I think, 98th and 105th were closed on Aurora, for example.

and so that impeded our area for going into the neighborhoods.

So we looked at that the first 90 days, it was taking us 40 seconds longer to get inside that neighborhood just from those streets being closed.

Well, now if we didn't have a unit in that station because those other units are already on calls because they're already very busy, we know it's just going to take longer for the other units from other districts to come in.

And then it leaves their districts vacant if they get a call, so the dominoes will start to fall around it.

Council President, Mayor.

Sorry.

Mick Jagger, please.

And again, I'm not trying to, well, I'll just say it.

So, Fire Station 31 is between Northgate and Aurora.

And it's on 100, well.

It's on Northgate, right next to Epic Life Church.

Right, I know exactly, okay.

So, as you know, from 85th to 140th, we have, that's the corridor, transit spine, and also criminal corridor.

And we had the cameras turned off on 105th, I think.

the cameras turned off a couple places up there and so what I'm hearing from our constituents is how well you just answered and I'm hoping they're listening we'll put in our newsletter as well is we not only have a lot of SPD calls on that corridor but also a lot of fire so now we're gonna have delayed times so that's gonna be I guess we're just gonna have to see what happens

Yeah, it's a very, very busy area of the city.

Whether it's Lake City, Bitter Lake or Northgate, those units run a lot of calls.

They're busy.

So taking a unit out of there, yeah, it means that they're gonna run calls or units from the surrounding districts are gonna come in to help.

But when that happens, yeah, it's gonna take a little bit longer.

That's what this does.

And just so we can just situate it for people can visualize, they also have to, SPD and Seattle Fire Department have to go across I-5, which I believe there's only four major arterials to get over I-5, which is always an issue as well.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Council President Emeritus.

Council Member Rivera, followed by Council Member Rink, Council Member Socken, Council President.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Chief, for being here.

You answered some of the questions from our constituents had about the impacts, and I heard you very loud and clear, less firefighters on duty every day.

That gives me pause and concern, and I know it will too to our constituents across the city.

So let me say something I said when police was here earlier today.

Fire, police, and 911 are chartered responsibilities of the city.

So I would like to hear actually from Ali, if I may, what was the calculation in making cuts to, knowing what we just heard from the chief, which I'm not surprised, what was the rationale for cutting fire in this way?

Please, Director.

Thank you.

Thank you.

You know, we, I will say this was one of the hardest decisions and I'm gonna keep saying some of the same things.

We are facing a significant deficit and we have to work within our resources.

I hear you on the charter responsibility.

The percent of the general fund that goes to the fire department is the second highest investment that we have in the city.

And there are challenges.

I will just, Respectfully for the Chief, they are managing unit outages today due to staffing challenges.

We started at a much higher number when we were facing a more difficult situation prior to the revenue forecast and other things.

We worked really hard to get this down as low as possible.

and there have been years where there have been significant unit outages that have fluctuated over the years.

So it is a challenge.

We are very confident in the ability for our fire department to manage to this reduction and it is an area we will continue to be working on.

Thank you.

Council Member Flew.

Thank you, Ali.

And let me just say for the record too, because Ali, you and I have worked with each other for many years and I very much respect you.

So I know you're in your role today, not just as director of the budget office, but also as the mayor's office representative.

So you're going to hear some things.

And I just wanted to state for the record that we've worked together.

I very much respect you.

And I have to ask these hard questions.

Chief, how does our current, because this came up also in the context of 911 callers and police officers, how does our staffing compare to other cities of our size?

if you know.

That's a very important question.

And when I think through that question, I try to look for more of an apples to apples comparison.

So I think about cities like Boston, like Washington, D.C., like Denver, and like San Francisco.

And you may ask why.

Well, population density is one.

All of those cities have 8,000 people per square mile or more.

All of those cities have a population of close to seven to eight hundred thousand.

San Francisco is a little bit higher.

All of those systems face challenges like we face.

They have mobile integrated health programs.

They have overdoses that they're responding to.

They have a number of fires they're responding to.

and they all face special event challenges.

All of those cities I just mentioned, just like we have the Seahawks, the Sounders, the Storm, the Rain, and all of those special events we do, we have those, we staff those, they have those, they staff those.

So they do a lot of special events.

But that population density was a big deal.

So when I look at those cities as comparables, and I know they're not in our West Coast 7 because our West Coast 7 cities are more for salary comparables because they're on the West Coast and it's more expensive to live on the West Coast.

but when I look at per capita for the cities I just named, we're about 1.3 firefighters per thousand population and they are about 2.2 or higher per capita.

And so I'll just be very specific.

Washington DC, It has over 2100 firefighters and they respond out of 33 fire stations.

Boston, they have close to 1500 firefighters and they respond out of 35 fire stations.

San Francisco, they have over 1800 firefighters and they respond out of 44 stations.

and Denver, which is larger square miles, they have over 1,100 firefighters and they respond out of 41 fire stations.

So they're per capita, per thousand.

All of those agencies I just mentioned, they all respond to over 100,000 calls a year.

That's important because many of the cities in our West Coast, seven comparable cities, they don't come close to the number of responses we're going on.

So when you try to look for apples to apples responses, I look around the country to try to find agencies that are more comparable to the challenges that we're facing.

And we've actually called and talked to because of challenges we're facing.

They're going through them, too.

So that's how we compare to other agencies around the country.

We're lower staffed.

And when you think back, this reduction would take us back to 2008. That's the last time we were staffed at about 209 firefighters per day.

and it's important to note that we were running about 79,000 calls then.

Today, we run over 108,000 calls.

So that's what this would take us back to.

Thank you, Chief.

Councilmember.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chief.

Again, that's stunning to me.

Chartered responsibility, I'm gonna keep saying that because there are other areas in the budget, but we gotta staff our...

Chartered responsibilities should be priority of which fire is one, and I very much appreciate the fire team.

And let me just say, and Council Member Juarez knows this, during COVID, it was our firefighters who stood up our...

that first responders are test sites and gave vaccinations, and they worked many long hours.

And so I shout out to your team chief and you were here.

So really respect.

I've been working with you since before then and I so respect you and appreciate you and appreciate that you've been here all this time with us at the city.

And I say that to say that you have a lot of experience and this was not your first role.

as chief here.

I have another question, chief.

So we recently had this unfortunate fire and some of your staff members were injured.

I'm glad there were no fatalities, but there were, I don't know, seven or eight injuries.

I can't remember which was reported earlier in the week.

How would this impact that type of fire incident?

Sure, and first I want to acknowledge and thank all of you who made comments, recognizing and acknowledging the injuries.

There were eight firefighters injured, and there were three that were transported to Harborview by our paramedics.

But it's important to note there was a gentleman in that residence that our firefighters pulled out, and he's still in the hospital, and he's doing okay.

He's getting better.

I don't know about doing okay.

So how would this have impacted that?

So there could have been a chance that we wouldn't have gotten units on scene as rapidly as we should.

And I guess I should explain why that is important.

So the way our motto is built, it's built off of a time temperature curve on the rapid expansion of fire.

So our NFPA 1710 set standards on what is the expectation that a fire engine and a full response should be on scene to slow down the rapid spread of fire.

And that's basically keeping a one room fire, a one room fire.

and not letting it expand throughout their structure or to other structures.

And in order to do all of the other things you need to do, you need to have a crew attack the fire, you need to have a backup line, you need to have search and rescue, you need to have ventilation done, you need to have utilities, and you need to have a crew out for emergencies such as the May Day that we face.

And that is based on the OSHA 2-in-2-out standard that you have to have a crew on scene.

So what happens early on in a fire, and this is where, when injuries happen or line of duty deaths happen, when firefighters are fighting a fire, this is important to note, it generally happens in the first several minutes, maybe the first four to 10 minutes, because the first crew gets on scene, they know a rescue needs to be done, so they go do it.

but they may not have the appropriate resources outside to help them if they go down.

So if it takes our units longer to get there, and maybe it's not the first unit, maybe the first unit gets there fast, but they feel like they need to go in and they don't have the crew outside to help them, then they go in, something goes sideways, and then there's going to be a delay.

Luckily, on the mayday that was called, because that's what we train for, is a mayday.

So the officer called the mayday, Everything worked like it should have, and basically what happened was they were attacking the fire, they were under a carport, and it's 2.40 in the morning, you know, fires going everywhere, and the carport was burning, and it collapsed on top of the firefighters.

So some firefighters were going by, carrying a ladder, it came down on them.

Some firefighters had hose lines going in the structure, it came down on them.

Because it seems like a big number, but they were all going to do different things when the carport collapsed.

That's what you just can't predict.

So it could have caused either the first arriving company longer, taken longer to get there, or the second arriving company, which is very critical for us, for two in, two out.

And, you know, it's hard to tell a person, a firefighter who's trained for this, that hey, we think there's a person inside, I know I can't go in, and the second unit's not here.

Well, our firefighters are probably gonna go in and try to save a life, so that's what we do.

So it could take us longer to get there.

And it has a huge impact on the officers that are there if they don't get that backup.

Chair, I just have one last question, if I may, because this is important.

In the years I've known you, Chief, you've talked a lot about mental health impacts of the job on your crew.

I know this is really important to you.

And so I want to know what about how will this impact your current folks, you know, having the less folks and then the ability for less of an ability to get current response times, for instance, and it seems like it would put more pressure on your current team.

What impact is that going to have for this mental health conversation we've been having, which I know has been tricky because You've had to teach folks to take care of themselves.

It's been a point that you've made.

And then also just morale in general.

Yeah, the behavioral health has been a big add to the department, and thank you, counsel, who gave us funding several years ago for our behavioral health coordinator, and our program has really taken off since then.

Even after the fire the other night, our behavioral health and peer support team went into action because we needed to make sure our firefighters was all right.

But what does this mean?

Well, this means sets and reps. So if we have more firefighters, theoretically, in the system, that means that there's a potential for them to go on less of those traumatic calls.

And secondary trauma is a real thing.

It impacts our folks.

And our station in Belltown, for example, 8-4 is, one of our peak time aid cars, or Station 25 on Capitol Hill.

They're seeing a lot of trauma, but it's a little bit more distributed right now with the extra bodies in there.

And this is happening a lot.

We don't leave our folks on aid cars more than three months, because they're seeing so much that we already are rotating them.

So what this means is there will be less aid cars for them to rotate to because those engines will be going on those calls now.

So, you know, just like PD is going on all of those scenes of violence calls, we're right there with them.

You know, the traumatic vehicle accidents and we're also seeing the cardiac, the strokes, the suicides and all of those things.

and it's hard, and our team works extremely hard to make sure our firefighters have what they need, but, you know, it's just numbers.

It's less people, meaning more people will see more of the trauma, and there will be more secondary trauma.

Thank you, Chief.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Vice Chair Rivera.

We have five more folks, so if everyone speaks for 10 minutes, we will get out at about 4.30, because there's some closing activities.

And that's the back and forth.

So we've got about half of an hour of extra time, so I'm just letting everyone know where we're going.

Council Member Rank, you're next, followed by Sokka, Hollingsworth, and Lynn.

Thank you, Chair Strauss.

I'll try and do my best.

There's a lot to unpack here.

And thank you, Chief Scoggins, for being here.

And thank you, Finance Director.

Is it Ellermeyer?

Wonderful.

Thank you so much for being here and for the presentation.

Colleagues, I know we all realize just our firefighters do so much for the city.

and I want to also voice that my thoughts are with the nine firefighters members of SFD that were injured in the fire earlier this week.

And I'll take a personal point of privilege just to speak to that I was also reminded myself how important our firefighters are this week, just seeing some members of your team in action, Chief Scoggins, and I think they should be recognized and I'll just note this very quick story that I was riding my bike through downtown on the 4th Avenue bike lanes, crossing 4th and Pine where a cyclist had just been hit.

And it was actually an off-duty firefighter with SFD who was helping the gentleman who was still in the road, helped get him out of the street, was able to stop and help where I could and stayed with this gentleman until and aid car came to get them support.

And again, it was a reminder of just how much our fire department is doing across our city.

I wanted to just express how much I appreciated the candor approaching care that the folks with the fire department were showing this gentleman who had just been struck by a vehicle that turned into the bike lane.

So I had to note that for the record and it really grounded me in a place of appreciation for the fire department.

With that in mind, questions for today and the proposed budget.

I understand, Chief Scoggins, you've unpacked a little bit around what these changes in overtime mean.

Director Panucci also noted here a little bit around this.

I'm hoping we can just unpack this a little bit more because it was noted that there are unit outages that happen today, and I'd like to understand with a little bit more specificity about what that looks like and how the proposed budget would then change that level of unit outages.

Sure.

You want me to take that?

Okay, so I need to walk us back a little bit so we understand it a little bit better.

There's a number of things that's happened over the last five to seven years that has led to this.

Now, most folks may think it was the vaccine mandate, and we lost a lot of firefighters then, but I'll walk it back before that.

when paid parental leave and paid family care leave came into play in about 2017, paid parental leave for the fire department is 480 hours just like everyone else.

And I think it's family medical leave or paid, family medical care, that's another 160 hours.

As I mentioned earlier, we're a young department going through transition.

So those hours, so one firefighter, 480 for paid parental leave, another one for, I think it's family medical leave, it's 160. You have a new baby, you can get that off.

So those are hours that didn't happen before then.

So if we're having 60 to 80, firefighters offer that.

So that creates additional overtime.

So I'll add that.

So that's one thing.

The vaccine mandate came into play.

We lost a large number of firefighters.

That also impacted us.

At the same time, there's a retirement enhancement that happened.

It was 2.5% to the left two system for firefighters who had worked so many years in the system.

So firefighters who maybe were gonna work 30 years, maybe left at 28 years because they can achieve the same.

All these things happened around 2021, 2022. So what we saw was a large exodus of firefighters during that period of time.

So we started experiencing unit outages about 2021, and we really started tracking it monthly.

And so when the vaccine mandate hit and all these other things hit, it was like a four car collision and an intersection all at the same time.

So we have a staffing matrix.

So there's units that go out of service even today.

And last year, thank you to the council, you approved us to hire not just 60 firefighters, but you approved 105 firefighters for this year, because our vacancy count at the start of the year was 130 firefighters.

So that's what leads to the unit outages, but there's more to it than that.

We're having more special events than we ever had in the city.

Our firefighters work all of those events too.

So firefighters are taxed.

So some days, generally Friday, Saturday and Sunday, we have unit outages.

And that could be one aid car, one air unit, to multiple units.

And that's today.

We have been trending in the right direction.

We finished our February class and graduated 49. We have another class in right now that started with 64. We still have 54 in.

So we'll probably come close to hiring 100. Our vacancy count right now is 70 firefighters.

So we have made great progress right now because the bulk of our retirements come before June 30th.

That's when the bulk of the retirements come.

So we got the number down to 70. Next year in the budget, we're approved to hire 60 more.

We'll continue to push that.

We have had the bulk of our retirement, so the retirements will start to tail off.

And so we are starting to catch up.

We have been catching up for several years now, and we're starting to kind of see the light at the end of the tunnel.

But in the meantime, the other car in the collision I didn't mention is we added letter 13. And thank you to the council and in West Seattle.

We added Medic 26, so those were more bodies.

We expanded our mobile integrated health with Health One.

Those are firefighters working on that.

So if we hadn't had all those things happen, we probably would not be having these unit outages, but we have been working through it.

So those are some of the things that led up to it.

So it's not just one thing.

with those unit outages, but anytime we have called our firefighters to help, so I'll give FIFA, it's a great example.

We hired between 150 to 175 firefighters a day on those FIFA games, on top of our 220 that were already on duty.

firefighters canceled their vacations and did everything they needed to do to support the city, just like we've done in the past with COVID or you pick any other experience.

Anytime we have asked them to step up and help, they did that.

So do I see a light at the end of the tunnel?

I do.

It would be great if council gave us 20 more positions for 2027 for our academy, because I think we would be there and you would start to see these unit outages go away.

And I think Ali just kicked me under the table when I said that last part.

I really appreciate that response Chief Scoggins it's helpful to just understand a bit of the history and how we got here and kind of the trajectory of that work just by a matter of if there's any numbers to just understand and like our current status quo place and over the past year you know how often are unit outages, any kind of data points we have around that and just how that might be projected to change under the proposed budget?

With the reduction?

Well, what that means is if there was a weekend day of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday is when it happens most, and if we were short 13 firefighters on a weekend day, it would be right at 209. If we were short 15, that means we would take another unit out of service.

So that's how we would manage it if it did happen.

Understood.

And just to unpack that maybe in a very simple term, I mean, is it possible that any single fire station will be unstaffed on any day in 2027?

Well, the answer is yes.

So if we, because there's some single house stations.

So for example, engine 16, it's a single house station.

So if we couldn't put engine 16 in as aid 16 to at least have an EMS response out the door, it could be unstaffed.

22's on Roanoke.

If we could not put engine 22 to aid 22, it would be on staff.

Our goal today, we at least try to get a unit in every station.

It may not be the pump, which I mean the engine, which is really what we need in every station because if we have the big event on the fire, It's great to have an eight car there, but it's better to have an engine there ready to go to work and put the fire out.

So the possibility is real.

It could happen.

If we took a ladder truck out of service, for example, ladder six on Queen Anne.

Well, there is engine eight in that station.

So there's still a resource there, but the next ladder truck would come from Ballard or Belltown.

So 60,000 pounds, 60 feet long, climbing up that hill is going to take a bit of time to get there.

But there is a possibility of that.

Is it possible that any single firefighter paramedic shift will be unstaffed in 2027?

Yes.

In the 13 positions, I can probably...

predict with the high probability that paramedics, there would be a paramedic unit on staff.

Our paramedic numbers have been low and we've been working hard to increase that.

You may remember we did the firefighter paramedic lateral program.

We increased our numbers last year, so we're working to increase that number, but our paramedics have been working a lot.

They certainly have.

I saw that in action a couple days ago.

And if this reduction goes forward, to what extent will we think about prioritization, like a prioritization metric to apply when determining where and when unit outages may happen?

Yes, we already have that.

We have a staffing matrix.

And it also will depend on the skill set of the individuals.

So if a person is a firefighter paramedic, obviously we're going to prioritize them, getting them on a paramedic unit.

But it depends on the skill sets of the individuals.

Now, our specialty and technical teams, our hazmat team, our rescue one team, our energy response team, our marine response team, our fire boat teams, we work hard to keep all of those specialty and technical units in service every single day.

So that's why you didn't hear me mention engine 25 or ladder 10 or engine 36 or rescue one or engine 10 or ladder one, because they all have specialty and our decon team at engine 27 down in Georgetown.

They all have other ancillary duties that respond out the door.

So we really work hard to stay away from them.

and the other units I should actually provide clarity.

We work hard to stay away from the edges.

So if 24 is all the way in Bitter Lake and it's our most northwest fire station, we work hard to keep that station in service.

Station 39 in Lake City, it's our most far northeast station.

we work hard to keep that station in service.

Engine 33 down in the south end of the Rainier Valley, we work hard to keep that and then so on and so forth.

So we really try to protect the edges with our staffing because we know if we take any of those stations out, it's a long way for the next unit to get there.

I appreciate that.

I would love to know more about this tool particularly.

It sounds very complicated and very complex and taking into account a lot of factors and of course not taking lightly at all when we're talking about unit outages and what it means for response times and who gets the care in response.

Taking that very seriously so would love to follow up to know more I am gonna switch topics.

Cher Strauss thought I was done.

I'm gonna switch topics very quickly.

I'll keep it short, Cher Strauss.

Just to the mobile integrated health program being the one that oversees our post overdose team.

Are we expected to hold more long acting injectable buprenorphine clinics in partnership with Harvard Review and other community partners as a part of this budget?

The simple answer is yes.

fabulous.

And building on that, I'm wondering if you can speak to if SFD is meeting its target for Health 99 coverage right now.

It's my understanding that the goal was seven days a week, 12 hours a day from 9 a.m.

to 9 p.m.

Are we hitting that goal?

We're meeting that goal with the seven days a week.

We may not be meeting it for all of the time frames.

And that's also, it's the same body of people who staff these fire stations who actually staff Health One.

They go down there for three or six months stints to work the unit, and then they go back to their home unit, which is really good for the community because you're now getting a firefighter who's working on another engine who just spent three to six months working on that unit, and they bring that skill set back to the different districts around the city.

And what we see that lead to is our referral program.

Last year, we had over 3,300 referrals from our firefighters in the field that our Health One unit will follow up on with our nurse practitioner, and that's also helping take calls out of the system also.

to thank you for those updates.

No further questions, Chair.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Councilmember Saka followed by Hollingsworth and Lynn.

If everyone speaks for 10 minutes, we will still be out by 4.30.

We're staying on track.

Over to you, Councilmember Saka.

Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Chief.

Really appreciate the update here, and more importantly, the work that the brave men and women of Seattle Fire Department do every day.

The Seattle Fire Department plays a critical role in our community.

And what's at stake now in the proposed budget boils down to response times.

Early in the morning on March 26, 2026, an 11-year-old girl was pulled from the cold water off Elki Beach.

Seattle Fire's marine units located her, brought her aboard Rescue Boat 5. and medics began lifesaving care before transferring her to a hospital where she remained in serious condition.

Now that wasn't a hypothetical training scenario, it was real.

It occurred in my district and it depended on a very well staffed, expertly trained, fully prepared Seattle Fire Department.

and there are stories like that across my district, no doubt across the city.

In fact, I think we all have our own story and experience with the fire department and firefighters.

Almost four years ago today, my son, my then five-year-old son, Wiley, suffered what turned out to be a febrile seizure and It's a really scary thing for a parent when they hadn't experienced things like that in the past.

And then all of a sudden, call 911, very quickly, very quickly, brave firefighters and paramedics responded and provided him with appropriate care and also comfort for a parent, a little bit traumatized by that experience as well.

And again, what's at stake here is response times.

And matter of fact, Wylie, come here.

Working in the home office here.

Wylie, come here.

Say hello.

Hi.

Thank you, firefighters.

Thank you for helping me.

Thank you for helping me.

Thank you for helping us.

All right, go do your homework.

All right, well, these are real stories, stories from my family, our community here in District 1, experiences from shared by, expressed by Councilmember Rank a moment ago, for example, we all have these these stories that highlight the impact of the work that the fire department does.

So really appreciate that.

But now we're facing a proposal to cut the department's overtime budget.

And just yesterday, the Firefighters Union warned that these cuts will delay 9-1-1 responses and force rotating closures of engines, trucks, and even stations.

Reality is clear from my perspective, but alarming.

People will wait longer for help when they call 911. And that is not an acceptable level of risk for District 1 and I suspect other districts as well.

We can't afford it.

First stations across Seattle, including Stations 26 and 37 in District 1, have experienced many years of deferred maintenance as well.

Looking in that capital, the CIP budget.

I appreciate you, Chief, for being so transparent in all this and forthcoming and not at all hiding the ball.

Not only during your initial presentation, but through some of the back and forth and clarifying questions from my colleagues.

Uh, I had some questions, some of which were addressed.

I have some more detailed questions that I'll reserve for the, the Q and a offline process in the interest of time.

Um, but I, but I have heard enough at the same time.

So, uh, thank you chief.

Thank you.

Uh, fire team.

Appreciate your, your selfless service to our city and all the work you do to keep us safe.

Thank you chair.

Thank you.

Council member soccer committee table.

Would you like to share anything?

One thing.

I didn't answer Councilmember Rivera's question when she asked about morale.

So the way this process works, after the mayor's budget speech, I send the communication out to the department explaining what our reductions will be.

I've had multiple firefighters stop by my office and talk about how this reduction will kill morale.

So that's really important to note because we ask our firefighters to do a lot of things, and that's important.

I didn't answer that question when you asked about morale.

Thank you, Chief.

Thank you, Chief.

We're going to go on to Council President, Councilmember Lynn, and then myself.

If we all speak for 10 minutes, we'll be out by 425. Thank you, Councilmember Sockham, for giving us five minutes back.

Over to you, Council President.

Thank you, Chair, and I won't be 10 minutes.

Thank you.

I'll be fast.

I appreciate you.

Thank you, Chief Scoggins, our fire department, for being here.

I want to read an email that I sent you in 2024, and this leads me into my question, no, 2024, December, and this leads me into my question, which is, so I wrote, and you responded, so this isn't a got you or anything.

I just want to set context for this, so I don't want you to be tripping like, did I respond?

Yes, you did.

So last night, I wrote this, when did I write this?

I write this, 2024 in December.

Last night around midnight, I was driving by Miller Park in my neighborhood when I saw medics from Medic One doing chest compressions on an individual who had overdosed on some type of drug.

I sat there in my car and watched as firefighters rotated between team members doing 10 rounds of chest compressions.

I started praying for this individual and there was no way that I thought this person would survive.

None.

On the last set, after 18 minutes of non-stop compressions, when I was looking at the firefighters rotate doing them, you all found a pulse.

And I could not believe what I had just seen.

They never gave up.

I thought I was incredibly impressed with their professionalism, heroism, mental strength.

And unfortunately, I know that is a reality that your department have to deal with a lot of times.

and I've had the wonderful opportunity of having, there's only one fire station in my district I haven't had dinner with, and it's the station over by Seattle Prep in Montlake, so I don't know what station it is, but I will, for the record, I will do it.

But when I had, one of the things that I heard from either Station 25 on Capitol Hill or the one over off of MLK in Jackson was the amount of calls that they had to do to deal with fentanyl or drugs, people that were overdosing, and the amount of time it took, and one place, they had talked about going 900 times, too, for the year, 900 times in one place, because people were experiencing different types of, drug overdoses or mental health, all these things.

Can you explain to us, and the fire department has morphed over the years, before it was a fire, you know, responds to fire, the amount of time calls within a firefighter's day or just the calls in general that are attributed to overdoses.

where your firefighters are putting their lives on the line to revive people, where we have failed as a city and as a county to address some of the health issues that we see go on our street because you're our last safety net.

And those people are falling through the cracks and they get to you and the amount of stress that that puts on with our fire department.

Sure, thank you for the question and thank you for the reminder.

I do remember that email.

And the fire station referring to, I believe 900 times a year is station six on Jackson, which their first response district is 12th and Jackson.

So they're the first unit that goes there a lot.

I should have looked this number before I came, but a while back it was 60 to 80 times a week that we were responding on overdoses.

It may be a little bit higher than that right now.

I feel like I had a meeting with John and he told me it's been an uptick, but I think I'm pretty safe with saying 60 to 80 times per week that we're responding to these type of emergencies.

But we'll get that exact number for you and get back to you.

No worries, that to me just draws my point exactly, that until we figure out some of the health disparities that are going on our streets and where we're taking people and all the things with King County, that you are our last line to keep people alive.

And we all know that, but just wanted to, for the public, the amount of time that we're responding to those calls that our fire department's dedicating to those calls versus other issues that we have going on within our city takes up a lot of people's time on that.

So just thank you for that.

I really appreciate it.

I'm glad you remember the email as well.

I didn't realize it was from 2024 when I was looking it up.

Thank you, Chief.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Council President.

Chair, if I can add one more note to that.

So, the Seattle Fire Department is not just focused on what's in front of us right now, we're also paying attention to H.R.

1, which is a big deal.

In Washington, we expect 300,000 to 400,000 people to lose healthcare, and in King County, 75,000 to 100,000 people, and that's starting to unfold.

And what we know is 9-1-1 will become more of a part of the healthcare system.

So we're watching this closely.

We're talking to folks.

We're trying to understand what the impact is going to be.

But what that means is going to be more EMS calls that we're going to be going on if people don't have healthcare and they can't go see doctors and they will wait until it gets to a certain point and they will call 911. So we're trying to pay attention to actually what's coming too.

Thank you.

Director Panucci.

Yeah, I think it's, thank you, Chief Scoggins, and I just, I think we can all acknowledge that as the medical calls continue to rise, the city has been really focusing on this important investment in MIH and aid units, and so I think it's really important as we continue this work together to continue to make these strategic investments as the types of calls we respond to continue to evolve and think about how we are staffing.

Thank you.

Anything else from the committee table before we move on?

Thank you.

We have Council Member Lynn and then myself, if we all speak for 10 minutes, we'll be out of here by 420. So we're making up good time.

Over to you, Council Member Lynn.

Thank you.

Just to follow up on the overtime and just to make sure I kind of understand, I think overtime has increased over the years.

And in part, I think you mentioned how there, you know, loss of staffing due to the vaccine requirements.

but presumably the long-term, and I think I heard this with additional hiring, we should be able to reduce the overtime and sort of that's the long-term goal or hope, is that correct?

That is a long-term goal.

Okay.

Just on overtime, we spoke earlier with SPD, and they get reimbursed for some overtime for staffing events.

Is there any similar mechanism?

Has that ever been explored?

Sure, yes.

And that's why I tried to break it out into minimum staffing, which is staffing the rigs versus overtime.

So minimum staffing is the big number we're talking about here.

But for special events, Seahawks, Mariners, all those special events, we have contracts.

So we get reimbursed for all that.

a lot of our overtime comes from grants.

We have a number of federal grants that fund our training, UASI, Homeland Security, Port Security, AFG.

So we get reimbursed for a lot of the grants.

And FIFA, obviously, we had a lot of reimbursements coming from that.

So a lot of all of the other overtime we do get reimbursed for.

But the minimum staffing to staff those engines to keep them to a certain level, engines, ladders, eight-car medic units, not reimbursement for that.

Thank you.

And I think you spoke to this earlier, but just on the minimum staffing, given current hiring, sort of what is the kind of short-term, medium-term outlook to address that with staffing full-time versus overtime?

I mean, regular time versus overtime.

Well, right now we're at about 70 vacancies, and we have a current group in right now, so depending on how many we lose before the end of the year, we'll determine where we are.

In our current budget, we're funded for 60 new hire positions next year, and so that'll push it down more.

If we retire 40 and we hire 60, we'll be plus 20 more.

That's why this year was such a big deal when the council gave us authority to hire 105, because we really pushed that number down.

Because I mentioned earlier, I think we started at 132 at the start of the year vacancies.

So we've done a good job there.

and I'm presuming that it saves to pay sort of straight time rather than overtime.

So I mean, the additional hires should be helping with that.

They are helping with that, and it prevents the burnout.

It slows down the number of shifts firefighters are working, but I would leave it to the finance folks to do the calculation.

Overtime is 1.5, but a fully burdened firefighter, it may be more than 1.5 with the benefit package and everything else, so the math, somebody else would have to do that math.

Okay, thank you, Chair Thistle.

Thank you, Councilmember Lin, colleagues, because folks have given us a little bit of time back, and I see Councilmember Foster has another question, but if you're quick...

Thank you so much, Chair.

This will be my first question for SF for fire today.

Oh, then take as long as you want.

Thank you so much, Chair.

Thank you so much, Chief Scoggins.

I really appreciate you and your leadership and all the work that the folks in your department do, so thanks for spending your time here with us today.

I was going to do my question as a follow-up, but Councilmember Lin started to get there, and I think the answer that you might give me might be send it to finance, but I'm going to put it out anyway.

Because something I've been wondering is as we talk about the overtime reduction and then the progress that's been made in terms of hiring, so what I hear is down to 70 vacancies, you believe that you can hire 60 of those vacancies next year.

And I think what I'm trying to figure out is where does that leave us on balance with the time in the department, if that makes sense, right?

So understanding we're reducing overtime hours, but we're adding people to the department.

how do we understand where that leaves us in terms of capacity and sort of the balance is not the right word because that assumes that there is a balance but what does it equate to in terms of overall loss in hours or firefighter power if we've got those 60 folks on at the same time that we have that reduction?

Yeah, so there's a couple of things to that.

So approximately 70 vacancies now.

If we end the year with that, it may be a little bit higher, but let's say 70. And then we hire 60 next year.

So there's a delta there of 10, but we'll probably have at least 40 retirements next year.

So that would put us at a vacancy rate of about 50. but there's more bodies to work, and that means the firefighters are working less overtime, which means less burnout.

Now, the goal is to push that number down as low as possible.

I believe there will always be some overtime because of the different leave types, just like everyone gets.

You know, folks get vacation, they get sick days, they have PPL, they have FML, life happens.

So just like everyone else who works, but there's not a backfill because there's not an expectation that when that fire engine shows up, there's four people, sometimes those seats sit vacant.

But our seats, if we sit them vacant, that means that we have some challenges out in the field.

with how our operations are built.

And that's what's important.

We have a standard operating guideline plan for pretty much every emergency we respond to.

And that's built on a structure and a system.

So all this comes into play.

That's incredibly helpful.

Thank you so much for that, Chief.

And I think that gets to some of what my question was.

And I think I really especially appreciate you reminding me, even with those 60 additional folks coming on, as we're thinking about potential retirements, that sort of adds to the equation.

I do think, I mean, I know that this is just a challenging budget year and I also know that we care deeply about making sure our public safety departments are fully staffed.

And so trying to figure out if we can understand that delta a little bit more might be helpful for us in the budget process.

So looking to budget director and to CBO director so that we can do that as follow up, I think to help us understand, to just get a fuller picture of next year.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Foster.

Over to Director Whitson.

We'll follow up and bring information for our department presentations in a couple of weeks.

Fantastic.

Thank you, Council Member Foster.

With one more person left, if we all speak, we'll be here until 5.30.

No, I'm kidding.

And I will start my timer now.

I know.

I'll give my updates for how much time I've taken up at the end of this right now.

First, I want to thank you for your service.

I'll thank all the firefighters within Seattle Fire Department for their service.

Yesterday, Jeff Miller testified.

In Jeff Miller's testimony, he shared that their job is providing people second chances.

The Seattle Fire Department provides people second chances by giving them a second chance at life.

and I shared at the time that I'm one of those second chances.

In September 2004, I was hit by a driver driving a car to the point where I had two collapsed lungs and one of them was punctured.

that was 2.59 p.m.

and by the time firefighters were dispatched at 3 p.m.

and they arrived at 3.04 p.m.

If I had not been able to reinflate my own lungs, I fell off the monkey bars a lot as a kid so I know how to do it.

If I hadn't reinflated my own lungs, according to my Google searches, I'm not a doctor or a medic, I've got four minutes before permanent brain damage sets in.

and so within this timeframe, you would have gotten there just in the nick of time.

But when we're talking about the 40 second delay that we were talking about North Aurora, that starts factoring in.

When we start, if there's stations that go down and we're factoring in another minute, that's the difference between permanent brain damage and a council member.

the future of people's lives.

I couldn't sit here as a council member if I had permanent brain damage 22 years ago.

and so I just want to take this moment to thank firefighter Myron Haig, thank firefighter Patrick Jasper.

We've never gotten the chance to see each other again since that day 22 years ago.

But I think about you often.

That 15 minutes it took to get from Ballard to Harborview and folks it takes a lot longer than 15 minutes to get from Ballard to Harborview without sirens.

I'll never forget those 15 minutes.

I recount those stories many times.

Those stories are not appropriate for Seattle Channel, so I'll save them for a private venue.

But I share this story because it's what we're talking about today, that if we have stations that have to go out or if we have to have reduced staffing, that's additional time and that's higher risk of somebody not having that second chance.

We are snuffing out people's ability to live a fulfilling life, to give back to their community, to be good residents of our city.

So Myron, Patrick, thank you.

because that's what this overtime is about.

And you brought up the additional recruit classes, but this is something that we've been bringing up for a long time.

I think last year we tried to give you a recruit class that you were like, we're not quite ready for.

So that's nothing new there.

But I bring this up because yesterday we had the building fire with eight firefighters injured, the man injured.

Today we've had two fires in buildings.

While we've been sitting in here, there was an accident on the interstate, which is with all the sirens that we just heard.

And I just think to myself, despite what we've got going on with minimum staffing and the staffing issues that we have because people need leave.

It's a problem that we have in American culture where we don't double staff pockets because people need leave, but we should be.

And so when we're talking about this over time, it's not talking about dollars and cents.

It's not talking about minimum staffing.

It's not talking about how fast that rig can get to you.

We're talking about people's lives and the future that they have and the quality of life that they have.

And so there's not a question there.

It's more of a statement to bring it back around to what do each of these dollars mean?

and in contrast to all of the other beautiful things that the mayor has put into this budget, the three topics that we've talked about today are charter responsibilities.

It kind of doesn't matter if you have any of the other things in the budget, if you can't walk down the street without getting shot, if you can't have a medic show up to save your life, if you can't have the right responder right on time, everything else kind of dissipates.

And I say that because I was speaking to somebody yesterday about a skate park that's opening in two weeks and her 10-year-old wanted to go and she was like, I'd love for them to go but I don't want them to get shot.

So that's what we've come back to with charter responsibilities.

You're not the police department.

Sorry, I went off on a tangent.

Oh man, it's gonna be 6 p.m.

by the time we get out of here.

I'm kidding.

I wanna come back to the Leschi and just check in.

I see you've got $2 million here.

Is that the total cost for repairs on the Leschi?

No, the total cost of repair to Leschi is $3.2 million.

And this was gonna be split probably over a couple of years.

Okay.

But the total is about approximately $3.2 million.

And we're using a shipyard inside the city boundaries?

Yes, it's there now, I believe.

It's just sitting right now.

I thought I saw it up in Fisherman's Terminal.

Yeah, that's where it's sitting.

It's over in that area right now.

Oh, yeah.

It's not at Station 5.

Correct.

Yeah, the Chief Seattle is at Station 5, so this one is parked near Fisherman's Terminal.

Okay, so I'm just asking that when we put it up into a dry dock into a shipyard, if we use a Seattle-based shipyard instead of outside the city, we'll get tax revenue back.

That's all I'm asking for.

Sorry.

I bring this up because, colleagues, you may or may not know that when we have two and three alarm fires, our water pressure for our fire hydrants can start dissipating, and the power of a fire boat is to ensure that we have the water pressure that we need.

We had a three alarm fire in the Ballard area just a few months ago.

Water pressure started dropping and we were able to get a fire boat right up there.

And it's what sustained the ability to put that fire out in a timely fashion.

And so it's not just water dependent uses.

We are fighting fires on land with these boats.

just wanted to thank you there.

You brought up that if these reductions went into place, we would be at the same reduction, the same staffing as 2008, which was four years after Myron and Patrick saved my life.

And that was a time when we had 200,000 fewer residents.

So I'm just kind of putting this all into perspective here.

And I'll end with...

momentum, but I'll actually talk about the fire district a little bit.

I know I mentioned it when Kenny and the union was here yesterday, I'll mention it to you.

I know that there are a lot of details to work out I'm not proposing a fire district today, but I am making the statement on the record that the best way to insulate the fire department from any of these budget challenges is if we give you a dedicated source of funding.

There's a longer conversation about not collecting as much property tax for the general fund to offset.

That's what I mean by that there's a lot more conversation.

But when we're talking about people's lives, their second chances, their quality of life, I think that the fire department needs to be insulated.

And when I started giving the examples of what the other trade-offs were, I started to go for murals.

I was like, you can't enjoy a mural if you're dead.

like if the fire department hasn't saved you or if you've been shot or anything like this.

But then I remembered that the murals are coming from admission tax and there's not a direct transfer there.

And it brings up this statement and important fact that of all of the programs that we're talking about in the budget, the things that have budget stability year over year have funding sources that are dedicated to them.

and so when I'm talking about the fire district, that's what's most important for me in this conversation is that the fire department has a dedicated and insulated source of funding.

At Association of Washington Cities yesterday, there's now beginning to be conversations about doing the same type of districting for police departments.

that we don't need to talk about that right now, but I'm just saying it is because these types of services are critical, expensive, and we need to have dedicated insulated funding sources for them.

There's not a question there.

That's more of a statement.

I'll just say, again, I've watched the momentum of the Seattle Fire Department grow when I started here at City Hall as staff.

when there was an emergency down on 3rd and James, it would be a ladder truck, an engine, a medic, a cop, an AMR to take him to Harborview, to have him stabilized, to have him back on the corner, and then we repeated the cycle again.

Today we have Health One.

that Health 1 with the two medics and the social worker is making sure that that situation doesn't have to happen anymore and that momentum was in 2019 that started and it's been amazing to watch it turn into Health 99 and just to watch that momentum continue to roll I want to see that momentum continue to roll with the Seattle Fire Department and I don't want to see us lose any.

Again, not a question, just a statement.

We are at 410, so we're sticking a little ahead of schedule.

Might have sucked up some time there.

I will turn it over to the committee table now because I'm going to dig into a bunch of these questions, but I'm going to do so through SharePoint.

These were the important things that I wanted to get on the record today.

With that, I'm going to turn it over to the committee table for last words and then we're going to do a little bit of housekeeping and then we'll be done.

Well, just to close, thank you for your time.

We appreciate the opportunity to share the Seattle Fire Department's perspective.

Thank you for all your service.

Colleagues, that does bring us to the conclusion of today's agenda.

On Monday, we will have Human Services Department in the morning, Seattle Department of Transportation, and Office of Economic Development in the afternoon.

For the record, I occupied 40 minutes of committee time yesterday and 40 minutes of committee time today.

in case any of you want to take those notes and track it.

I do really appreciate that through this budget process reform of content and process, we have broken these four days up with the weekend.

And I think that that's really, it's helpful as compared to how we've done it in the past, which is just kind of a straight run through.

With that, I'm gonna turn to Director Whitson and Director Panucci for any housekeeping closing out today.

It's going to be a busy week next week, so take some time for yourselves this weekend.

Thank you.

Appreciate all the time this week.

Look forward to the weekend.

I'll close out just by saying there was a lot of agreement, there was a lot of disagreement today, and I just really appreciate the relationship that we get to have with you, Director Panucci, because it is transparent, it is honest, it is factual, and just appreciate it.

Great.

With that, if there's no further business, this does conclude the September 25th, 2026 Select Budget Committee.

We will be back in order on Monday at 9.30 a.m.

We do not have verbal public comments, so we will start the Human Services Department presentation at 9.31 a.m.

Thank you.

We are adjourned.