Seattle City Council Finance & Housing Committee 11823

Good morning, everyone.

We are recording.

Good morning, everyone.

Thank you so much for joining the Finance and Housing Committee meeting.

Today is January 18th, 2023, and the time is 9.33 a.m.

The Finance and Housing Committee meeting will come to order.

I'm Teresa Mosqueda, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council member Herbold.

Excused.

Council member Peterson.

Present.

Council Member Nielsen.

Present.

Council Member Lewis.

Present.

Madam Chair Mosqueda.

Present.

Madam Chair, that is five for present, one excuse.

Thank you very much, Madam Clerk.

And I want to say thanks to our clerks for being here.

Farideh Cuevas has been our clerk in person throughout the last five years and has done an incredible job.

And as she transitions to mostly remote work, we are going to welcome Melanie Cray, who will be with us in person and we'll have I want to start by saying thank you to both of you for joining us today for this dual clerking for the finance and housing committee, so thanks to both of you, and welcome, Melanie, and thank you, Farideh, so thanks to the two of you and our team for helping to manage these meetings.

In front of us today, we have an opportunity to have a robust discussion.

folks might remember this is a report and blueprint that we requested that we commissioned via the passage of Jump Start Progressive Payroll Tax.

The Jump Start Tax legislation included a robust and very detailed spend plan in which we asked the Office of Economic Development to work with business and to talk about how these dollars could be deployed.

And over the course of the upcoming biennium, we have $40 million that is going into workforce development.

For 2024, the blueprint that we will hear today is how those dollars in the second part of the biennium will potentially be deployed.

So they're seeking feedback and giving us an update on the stakeholder process that they have been engaged in.

The second item on our agenda is an update from the housing connector community partners.

This is the second time that I can remember that they have been in our committee.

So I want to thank housing connector for being here, who will provide us an update on how not only their platform is going, but the partnership that they have with regional partners and city partners and housing folks who housing, affordable housing, but also stable housing.

So that will be a wonderful presentation.

And then we will wrap up our presentation today with our partners from King County.

I want to thank the King County executive and the council members as well who have put forward a levy for the April ballot that will help create the infrastructure needed for folks who have behavioral health crises to go to.

As we hear from people across the spectrum, from firefighters to human service providers, they need a landing zone.

There's no place to refer people to, to make sure that they can get the health care they need and the stable support services they need so that people can get stabilized.

So this is a wonderful opportunity to hear about what will be on the ballot for April, and voters will get the chance to make a decision on how to support that effort.

This is our agenda for today, the first meeting of 2023, and I'm excited that we are kicking it off with all of these things that together create a more healthy community and really, I think, represent the social determinants of health.

Had to get that in.

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

Hearing no objection, seeing no objection, today's agenda is adopted.

Council members, I want to thank you for continuing to participate in a remote public comment and remote hearing opportunity.

Thanks to the community members who continue to dial in remotely and practice social distancing.

If you are in the audience, along with wearing masks, which I will be putting back on after I'm done speaking.

There was just some headlines yesterday from the Seattle Times and New York Times about the increased numbers of folks who are contracting the flu, let alone the ongoing pandemic that we have that is pervasive within our own community.

So continue to mask up indoors and especially in crowded areas.

and ensure there is good ventilation.

That's why we always open the doors in here.

Today, I understand that we have no one signed up for public comment.

Is that true for remote and in-person?

Okay, thank you, Madam Clerk.

There is no one signed up for public comment today, so we are going to go ahead and get right into it.

The public comment period has been opened, and now it is closed.

If you do have public comment that you'd like to provide, you can always email us at council at seattle.gov, and the full council will receive your comments.

With that, Madam Clerk, do we have our presenters from the Office of Economic Development on the line here?

I see Director Markham McIntyre.

Wonderful.

Good morning to you, sir.

I see Donna Moody.

Is she on?

There she is.

Good morning, Donna.

Wonderful to have you here.

I see Aaron Goodman.

Welcome back.

It's great to see you as well.

Executive Director of the Soto BIA.

And I see is Angela.

She's logging on right now.

Wonderful.

We will look for her.

Angela Dunlevy will be with us as well, the CEO of Fairstart.

So if there's anyone else, Director McIntyre, that you have invited and you want to make sure that they get in, just let us know and we will make sure to do that.

I want to thank you for being with us.

And before I turn it over to Director McIntyre, I want to explain for the viewing audience, you will see folks continue to participate remotely.

We do full remote presentations in the Finance and Housing Committee to make sure that we're reducing the number of people in person.

And I want to thank you and the team here of community partners for not just being here today, but for the months, if not over a year's worth of work that you've done in helping to create the report that we're going to look at here today.

I'm really thrilled that this is an opportunity to get an update from the Office of Economic Development and community partners who've helped to create the blueprint for the Jump Start Seattle Progressive Payroll Tax Implementation of the Economic Resilience section.

And good morning, Angela.

I just want to welcome you and acknowledge that we have you in the Zoom with us as well.

Colleagues, I think one thing is true when we think about Jump Start and that is the large number of advocates and the breadth of community partners who came together across the political spectrum, across labor and business, across environmental justice and transit advocates, folks who work on food security and immigrant rights and much more.

and together they helped us build the spend plan for Jumpstart that includes as well the tenants of the economic development section or what we call economic resilience as part of Jumpstart's spend plan.

We had at the time in early 2020 a series of compounding concerns and mounting crises as we saw not only the COVID pandemic spread across our globe, but we also saw local ramifications on our local economy, both in terms of small businesses losing their workplaces and workers themselves losing their livelihoods.

Everybody dealing with these stressors as their families and friends and neighbors also were potentially contracting COVID and losing their lives or being seriously harmed by the crises.

So we wanted to act with urgency and that was part of why we passed Jumpstart Progressive Payroll Tax to respond to the immediate needs that COVID was presenting.

but also be prepared for a more just and robust economy so that we could sustain the crisis that was coming down on us for our local economy, but make sure that we recovered in a more equitable way and that we did so in a green way as well.

We wanted to make sure that we set aside funds for small businesses and workers during the moments of crises, which we thought might be a year, maybe two.

We are now in year three of COVID, but we are beginning to see a recovery and more folks coming downtown and more folks having places of employment open and small businesses have opportunity.

And we want these jumpstart dollars to be a direct infusion into our local economy to create that more just and equitable recovery.

So following discussions with a number of the Seattle businesses, business associations, labor unions, worker representatives themselves, workforce development leaders, we decided to dedicate 15% of Jump Start's dollars to small business support and workforce development with a strong emphasis on a just transition to a green economy.

I just want to sort of read from resolution 31957. And again, that was unanimously passed by this council.

Specifically, it says 15% of the proceeds may be used to support local businesses and tourism to spur local economic recovery and provide economic stability for the city's workforce.

Investments will prioritize programs and services that diversify the local economy and improve job quality.

This should include investing in labor management training programs and partnerships with organizations whose work focuses on innovative workforce strategies that support and create jobs with strong pay and benefits and provide workforce training.

I just love that we collectively defined what economic resilience means.

We codified it in the spend plan that was passed.

And I hope that that reminder of the language itself is a good refresher, as it's been a long three years, and we are now at the point of hearing from the Office of Economic Development, our community partners, including from labor.

and business and our community at large to hear about how this framework is going to be implemented over the next year.

And then this will be our blueprint, if you will, for the lifetime of Jump Start, really beginning in 2024. So thanks again to Director McIntyre.

I know that you are almost a year, a full year into your director position and you've really taken this work head on and it was something that I think you were able to do whole cloth.

You did this from scratch because a lot of work in this specific arena hadn't been done prior to your arrival.

Thank you so much and to your team at OED for taking this so seriously and for the work that you did with the diverse work group of community members to really center their feedback in the report that we're about to receive today and to make sure that this outline is in front of electeds and so that we can act on it and maintain the investments that we have in front of us.

And that's what we need to do to make sure that we can continue to move forward into our local economy.

Colleagues, again outlined in the resolution is that at least $650,000 for the contract with an organization was to go through OED to make sure that a report would be So I'm going to turn it back over to you.

the executive will convene this work group that has been convened by the director of office of economic to develop the scope of the work and to carry out this work going forth.

So I want to thank you again, Director McIntyre.

I will turn it over to you and to the team in front of us, Erin Goodman, Donna Moody, Angela Dunleavy.

We really appreciate your time.

I know that there's going to be a number of questions from our colleagues about what was in front of us.

And you have plenty of time, about 45 minutes.

So with that, I will turn it over to you, Director McIntyre.

And I believe you have a presentation?

I do indeed.

Okay.

Wonderful.

Just one moment, Madam Clerk, what was that?

We need to read the item into the record.

We need to read the item into the record.

2023, first meeting.

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

Agenda item number one, a future of the Seattle economy report for briefing and discussion.

Wonderful.

Okay.

And Director McIntyre, do you want us to pull up that presentation or would that be something that you want to do on your end?

I'm going to share it on my end.

Perfect.

All right.

We'll turn it over to you.

Thank you very much, Council Member Mosqueda.

Let me share my screen.

Give me one second.

And then let me start the slideshow.

Can everyone see that?

We can.

Thank you.

Great.

Good morning.

Finance and Housing Committee.

My name is Mark McIntyre.

I'm the Director of the Office of Economic Development here at the City of Seattle.

And Council Member Mosqueda, I really appreciate you giving kind of that background.

I'm going to echo some of your comments as I kind of refresh the group on what we tried to do here, the kind of background and intent of this project.

Then we're going to walk you through the process that we used to get there.

talk about what we found and the really interesting and cool community-informed investment agenda that we've developed, and then talk about what OED is going to do next with it.

So that's kind of the outline of the presentation.

I am joined today with some community all-stars.

We have Angela Dunleavy, who was the chair of our Talent and Workforce Development Workgroup for this project.

She's also the board chair for the workforce development of Seattle-King County, as well as the CEO of Fairstart.

We've Aaron Goodman, who is the chair of our place based investments work group and is the executive director of the Soto business improvement area, the BIA.

And then Donna Moody, who is chairing our supporting Wimby and small business enterprise work group.

Donna has many titles, including the executive director of the capital eco district, executive vice president of community development and community routes, housing and the owner of Marjorie restaurant, which if you haven't been, please do go.

I'm so grateful that you put all those titles in there because I don't think I had, you know, the capacity to read all those.

So now it's for the official record.

Yes.

Very impressive panel.

Thank you for organizing that.

We really had some incredible participants.

I guess I'll just start there.

I'm probably going to thank them later on, but I just want to thank everyone who participated in this.

We did kind of a hustle up project, but we had a lot of folks putting a lot of time and energy into this project.

And so I just really want to thank everyone who showed up and participated.

It was great to have everyone's input.

So again, just reiterating some of what Council Member Mosqueda outlined.

The background for this was the pandemic was rough on our local economy.

Certainly it was rough nationally and globally, but here locally, we just felt some deep impacts to our small businesses, to our neighborhoods, to our workers.

And then it's important to note that there were disproportionate effects, particularly on communities and people of color for those deep impacts, deep economic impacts.

So we've been living in these uncertain economic times since 2020. We know that those continue in 2023 as we continue to face challenging headwinds, whether it's due to supply chain issues or interest rates or inflation, like it's been uncertain.

So we're navigating this, challenging environment.

And again, those impacts are felt disproportionately by marginalized communities who are often left, have been historically left out of the process of how to recover or solve those problems going into the future.

And so it was with that context that the City Council charged the Office of Economic Development with charting a community informed effort to not recover Seattle's economy, but really rebuild it, as Councilmember Mosqueda meant, in a more equitable, just, and resilient manner.

And so we needed to focus on developing a plan that would highlight investments to make Seattle a desirable place to live, work, and visit, but also how we were going to address some of the disparities that were laid bare due to the impacts of COVID.

So we took that on, and again, we've created this community-informed investment agenda that's gonna promote inclusive economic growth and did it ideally in cooperation with a lot of our community members.

I'll also note here that during the pandemic, the chair of the Atlanta Federal Reserve, Dr. Raphael Bostic, wrote a piece that really spoke to me because he outlined that there's a clear moral and economic imperative to end racism in America.

And I just want to say that that's really driving a lot of our work at OED, that it's not just the moral imperative, but that economic imperative, and that that's actually the pathway to a more prosperous economy.

And so that really formed our guiding principle, that an inclusive economy is a competitive and prosperous economy, So the theory follows that if you create a more inclusive economy, you'll be more competitive and more prosperous.

Our goals throughout this project were not only to define the future of Seattle's economy and chart that path, but figure out kind of what's the Venn diagram of shared priorities, because I strongly believe that economic development and workforce development are team sports.

And so you really have to figure out where you align to really make progress.

It's not enough to kind of for the city of Seattle or for OED to kind of talk about what it's going to do.

It has to be in relation to all those other organizations, people, and entities that make up our economy.

Second, we needed to figure out within that alignment, what were the investments required?

It can't just be the city of Seattle spending dollars and hoping that that's gonna have the impact.

To really have the broad and deep impact that we're talking about for transforming our economy going forward, we've got to align those investments across the public, private and philanthropic sectors.

And then through all of that, this was an important moment for me stepping into this role and Council Member Mosqueda, it's about 10 months, so not quite a year, 10 months.

We needed to figure out the role of OED in that environment and the city's role relative to key partners.

We can't try to do all of it, that will just peanut butter our money and our energy.

we've got to really kind of clearly define our identity and role for economic development.

So again, that led to us creating this community informed investment agenda to promote inclusive economic growth here in the city.

I want to talk a little bit about the process, because while we were doing it on a fairly tight timeline, we did a lot of work in there and had a lot of scholarship kind of undergirding all of the recommendations that we're making going forward.

So first, we recognize that Starting out, we didn't want to start with a blank piece of paper, that there were a lot of really smart people who had done a lot of thinking about what some of the challenges were, as well as what some of the solutions might be.

So we wanted to start by kind of reading and doing kind of the information scan of what was already out there.

We read a lot of strategic plans from various economic and workforce development organizations.

We also recognized that not every organization in this ecosystem has a strategic plan.

So we also did a number of one-on-one interviews and group interviews to try to elicit information about where those priorities might be, and then try to figure out where they're shared and how they might map together.

So once we synthesized that, we came up with five pillars for our work going forward.

We have supporting Wimby and small business enterprises, growing key businesses and industries, Asset ownership is a pathway to build wealth, place-based investments, and investing in diverse talent and growing our workforce.

So we then took those five work groups, or five buckets, and created work groups for each of them that were tasked with coming up with some immediate investments that the city could make to kind of chart that course and put us on that trajectory for that more equitable, just, and resilient economy.

But also what were some big bets in each of those buckets that would be transformative, that might be harder, more complex, more expensive, but if we were to do them, would really change the game.

And through it all, as I mentioned, just trying to figure out what's OED's role, knowing that we can't do some of these things alone, that we've got to kind of play a role and do it really, really well.

We can't try to do things that are kind of out of our wheelhouse.

With that, I just want to pause and turn to my fellow panelists and see if they've got anything to say about the process or kind of how we set this up, because they were instrumental in making this work, being the chairs of three of the work groups, and their leadership and commitment to this work was really what made this successful in the long run.

So I'll pause here and see if anyone else has anything they want to share.

I'll go ahead.

Good morning.

I just wanted to say, I was very impressed with this process.

As many of, you know, I've served on many city committees commissions task force over the years and was really pleasantly surprised by the amount of support that gave the chairs and the whole process.

And I'm talking about support, not only in city staff, but in consultants, and that really was a structure that allowed chairs to work directly with committee members.

And, you know, focus on the meat of the issue, rather than on administration.

I was also pleased with the inclusivity.

There were a lot of people on my committee and others that.

were from neighborhoods that are often represented, but new voices from those neighborhoods.

The fast timeline and the laser sharp focus.

This required a lot of work from my committee members, both in meetings and a lot of reading homework.

I just want to take a second to thank my committee members for their investment of their time, energy, and experience to this committee.

Thank you, OED.

Thanks, Erin.

I could also echo what Erin has said, just expressing some gratitude for the effort that was volunteered by the committee for the Women and Minority Business Committee, and also just point out that, you know, when we're asked to serve, so many of us ask immediately, will my time make a difference?

And this was so well put together and so organized that it was a resounding yes.

we were able to analyze something, evaluate it, and offer to you today something that I think could be a game changer for how the city supports small business.

I really appreciate the opportunity to have been able to participate and be supported in the way that we were.

Thank you, Donna.

Yeah, if I could just quickly piggyback on both of those again, gratitude for this process, the team and and the consultants were really worked hand in glove with the committee chairs and the committee members.

And I think that what I can reflect from our committee, which is workforce talent and workforce.

It is such, there's no one size fits all solution to workforce.

And I really think that a lot of thought and time was put in to make sure that we had the right mix of committee members, which included labor, business, education, government at the city and county levels, the port, workforce development providers, service providers in and out of Seattle.

And everyone has some different agendas based on the groups that they come from, but everyone came together, I think, in a really respectful and thoughtful way to get something done that will be meaningful and impact workers and businesses and the economy in Seattle.

So much gratitude to you, Markham, and your team.

Thank you so much.

That's wonderful to hear.

I just want to echo the thanks and appreciation for your time, and I'm really excited to hear that it was a valuable use of your time.

I know many of you participate in a lot of work groups.

The city asked a lot of you, and it's in addition to the multiple titles that you already have, so thank you for your time.

Just in the spirit of the conversation that you all just brought up, can you talk a little bit more about the process that you used for I know that on page 12 there is a list of the work group members.

as chair of economic development is doing a lot of work with the department on the overall work plan.

So I'm excited to see this range of people providing feedback to this specific report and know that this work will continue to live in other arenas as well.

So if you don't mind just elaborating a little bit more about how the folks were chosen and the process that you went through.

Sure.

Oops.

Let me go back a slide.

First and foremost, we wanted to have diverse representation that represented kind of the look and feel of the Seattle economy in each of these work groups.

Second, we wanted to, you'll hear me say it in every presentation, I love alignment, especially regional alignment.

And so we wanted to drive regional alignment, make sure there were players on here that had different roles in the regional economic and workforce development system so that as we were coming up with these ideas, we could naturally try to reach some alignment.

on whether that's through funding or programs or what have you.

Third, as Aaron mentioned, we wanted to find some voices that aren't always included in these conversations.

So we needed kind of a balance of folks that were kind of old hands at doing this.

We also wanted to make sure that we were bringing new and fresh ideas to the table.

And then finally, I think it was just, some of it was who was, as we were doing kind of that scan of what the current thinking was and who was, really putting forth some interesting ideas or strategies to come out of the pandemic, that highlighted some folks that we thought should be on these different work groups.

I don't know if any of the other chairs wanted to speak to that, but I think those are some of the factors that we were trying to include as we were bringing this together.

We also talked to a lot of these folks and got their ideas.

So sometimes it was kind of a, we didn't want it to just be our, who was in kind of our networks, but who was in like two or three steps out of somebody's network.

That was another way we found some of these names.

I just want to make a quick comment that I really appreciated the openness for a couple of additional suggestions when I was given who my work group was and noted that there were a couple of people that I think could really contribute.

They were quickly welcomed, brought up to speed, and were able to participate in a very meaningful way to the outcomes that we presented.

So while we're on this slide, I also just want to mention, I mentioned this earlier, but like my, my goal is we were, one of our goals that we were going through this was to not just have the payroll expense tax dollars be the only money on the table.

And so that's why we had this sixth.

So we had the five kind of issue work groups, and then we had a sixth work group that we called the investment alignment, where we were trying to make sure that as we were coming up with these ideas, we were checking them with other folks that had funding sources or were thinking about uh, ways to bring federal dollars to the table or, or what have you, so that we can try to build layer cakes to really broaden and deepen the impact of, of these ideas.

Um, and that's going to be an ongoing thing, uh, in the future.

That's not, that is not end kind of with this project.

That's going to be a constant thing that OED is looking for.

So just wanted to highlight.

Real quick on that previous slide, it would be wonderful.

Thank you for that background.

That's really exciting.

And I want to thank every name that's on here and the team at OED who helped to provide support.

It might be helpful to have a list of the organizations or association that folks came from or the sector if that's more appropriate.

But I just think that this is going to be a group that will continue to want to glean information from.

So having the the individual's representation or title would be helpful to have at some point.

And then also if there's folks on here that are specifically interested in the green economy tied to Green New Deal, that would be of interest as well as the other components of the Jump Start Progressive Payroll Tax.

relate to Green New Deal implementation.

We've been heavily reliant on the Green New Deal advisory board, but knowing if there's people with that type of expertise in this list as well can allow for us to continue to have greater synergy amongst those parts of Jumpstart.

So thank you in advance for sharing that with us.

Yeah, happy to share a roster with contact info and organizational info, which actually brings up another point.

We were also intentional about including staff from a variety of other city departments in an effort to kind of figure out what's already on the table and where there can be alignment.

And Council Member Muscat, I think that was particularly important for the Green New Deal, because it does span a number of different departments.

And so making sure that they were included and that that's an ongoing conversation was also important in how we made some of our selections.

Wanted to highlight, so we sent these work groups off to dream big and kind of come up with their agendas.

But there were some common themes that I wanted to highlight across.

One is this, this idea of interconnectedness, and you can see our cool Venn diagram here.

These, these, uh, these issues don't exist in silos.

They are all really deeply connected.

And that came up, even though we sent them off and they could have kind of developed completely separate lists.

Once we started synthesizing them together, and you'll see this in a moment, there was a lot of cross-pollination of ideas and, and needs identified.

Second was that we don't need to start from the beginning or kind of run a bunch of pilots.

There are a number of current initiatives and current programs that are working and driving outcomes that we want to see in economic and workforce development that could be scaled or diversified to, again, broaden and deepen the impact.

So that was exciting that we can kind of move with things that are already working.

And then finally, this is just kind of repeated drumbeat that You can develop the snazziest program in the world, but if it doesn't have access baked into it from the beginning, where you're thoughtful about who's able to access it and how and what kind of outcomes that's going to drive for them, it's just not really, it's not going to actually achieve what you want it to achieve.

And so that's something that OED is going to carry forward as we think about program development, as well as kind of the programs that we're currently using.

How do we make access kind of a core pillar of our thinking?

So just very quickly on the result, as I mentioned, there was a lot of scholarship kind of undergirding everything you're gonna see for the investment chart.

That phase one, where we kind of took all the stuff that was on the table and tried to synthesize it, was this 63 page reports that has just a lot in it.

And then this phase two, this investments, as mentioned, a ton of work group members, and then 95 pages of reports really kind of spelling out where we're going.

So when we talk about kind of the investment agenda, it's an iceberg where that's kind of the top that we synthesized out of it, but there's a lot of ideas and thoughts that are beneath it that I encourage the council to take a look at to inform your thinking about economic and workforce development in the future.

I'm only gonna flash this, cause it's kind of an overwhelming slide with a lot of information, but this is the list of investments.

that the groups came up with.

So on the left, you can see that it's divided by the, uh, uh, different work groups.

And then on the right, we kind of crosswalk them across the different work groups.

Cause again, some of these ideas came up in different, uh, multiple times in different work groups.

And then the big bets are denoted by the stars in each of the, in each of the buckets.

Um, I'm going to move now.

We're wanted to just talk quickly about some of the specific investments.

that we think are going to be really meaningful.

And then also, this is going to kind of bleed into how OED is planning on doing this, planning on implementing this into the future.

So, first up, we've got investing in building city navigation support for small businesses and women and minority-owned businesses.

As we think about kind of the broader technical assistance landscape, one of the ones that the city needs to do really well is navigating the city.

There's no one else that can do that but us.

And so that's, I've seen that as like a chief role of if there's a need for permits or a need to get in touch with SDOT to understand construction impacts, we've got to do a really good job of making it clean, simple, and easy for businesses to get what they need from the city to be successful doing business in and with the city of Seattle.

So that's, You can see here, there's a column that has the plan for in 2023. that's going to be a big project for us is to figure out how we do that better.

The type of infrastructure we need to build the technology might need to build.

And the staffing that we need to skill up to make sure that we're, we're doing that really well.

Donna, I just want to give you a chance to see if you want to say anything in additional since this was your coming out of your work group.

You know, the one thing I would say is that as we continually reach out to women and minority small businesses, a lot of them become frustrated with their inability to access the systems or to know how to navigate them.

And sometimes just providing not just that initial helping hand, but a follow through to see how people have done with applications, with programs that the city is offering checking back and having the kind of technical assistance that actually creates a closer contact and provides a path to completion of getting those small businesses, not just up and running, but also scaling to become medium and larger style businesses.

And I think this is an essential product that the city can offer.

Thank you.

That's something that I hear about as well, Donna.

People who've said, you know, thank you for the opportunity to have additional resources and excited to learn about the application, but then they need so much assistance to get through the process.

And that's often where our technical assistance stops.

And more lately I've been hearing, but then we need assistance with how to actually deploy the funds.

And often they, some of our smallest businesses have said, It's a portion of the overall need that they've applied to for the city and what they really need is technical assistance to be able to braid that funding with other funding resources and leverage other investment opportunities.

Is that part of what you're hearing as well in terms of leveraging or braiding funding after the city provides support?

Council Member Mosqueda, not only is that what I'm hearing, but I'm also finding that we're not kind of calculating or accounting for the reduced labor force and that many small business owners have become one, two or three positions within their small business.

So adding a lot of paperwork or things that are very complicated.

to the process of getting help only magnifies their already kind of overbearing workload.

And so I think just to make things simpler and to provide support in accessing a lot of these applications and having some kind of follow through when you don't hear back from someone, maybe just having that personal touch of checking in and seeing if they need further assistance.

would be really great and I think that would support an increase in seeing more minority and women owned businesses in the city.

And after all, they are the fabric of an innovative and vibrant city.

I really appreciate you lifting that up and so succinctly, too.

I want to capture that video and repeat that over and over.

That was also part of the reason with some of the American Rescue Plan Act funds when we dedicated about $5 million to child care provider wage enhancements.

We asked the Department of Education and Early Learning to do a one-page attestation.

to be able to get the paperwork through without additional burden on their shoulders.

to support workers and small businesses.

This is something I know Director McIntyre and I have spent a lot of time talking about.

And if we can learn from that example in other departments, not just OED, about how to use an attestation, a single page attestation when we deploy resources in these moments of crises would be wonderful.

But I'm so glad to hear you lift that up and really excited that this is part of the approach that you're using, not just for applying for funds, but how do you support people afterwards?

I'm going to call on Council Member Nelson.

Please go ahead.

Thank you very much.

So to that point, Donna, about staffing issues, I had a question just brought up a question about another big lift that is doing right now, which is workforce development.

And you're going to be presenting that later in our in in my economic development committee.

But I to what extent will some of these recommendations feed into the work in the workforce development.

I'm just assuming that there will be interplay between these bodies of work.

Absolutely.

I appreciate you calling that out.

One of the deliverables was this community-informed agenda that, as Council Member Mosqueda said, sets a framework for the economic resilience dollars, the payroll expense tax.

was a citywide workforce development strategic plan.

Because we have kind of a messy workforce development system here at the city.

And as well as we need to align with the Seattle King County Regional Workforce Development Council.

So yeah, they're very interconnected.

And this is like when we're trying to evaluate Workforce development needs to partly be driven by what workers need to be successful, but it also needs to be driven by what businesses need to do their business.

And I think that's what you're getting at Council Member Nelson, is if there's a need with small businesses for talents, we've got to figure out how we're doing a better job of connecting workers with those opportunities.

Since we're already there, let's actually skip to the bottom.

Since Council Member Nelson, I knew was ready to go to talk about childcare.

This is one of our big bets and I'll, I'll tee up Angela to talk about this.

This was, this was in her.

Her work group, but it's Councilmember Mosqueda said, like, I think it's just really exciting that this came up as a, as a big bet opportunity and really want to put some thought into the city's point of view about the broader care economy and kind of our role that we're playing in that.

So, I think this is an exciting development, and I think it links with a lot of other efforts with other departments, but as well as other partners within the region and the state.

So, Angela, if I can just ask you to chime in here about this particular recommendation, this big bet.

Sure.

Thank you.

Well, as a parent, I also feel incredibly passionately about investing in child care workers and our child care system.

And as we were working within our group, you know, across the board again, labor, business, education, service providers, it came up time and time again, that if we are going to create an inclusive economy in which we're upskilling workers and those most marginalized from Traditional work, non gig economy work that we really need to get back to the basics.

And 1 of those very basic notions is that folks don't have access to adequate child care, either in proximity to where they live or proximity to where they work.

And we can't start thinking about all of the ways in which we're going to invest in our workforce without thinking about how we're taking care of people at home.

And so we feel like this is a really great opportunity for some cross-departmental and some cross-governmental total regional approach to how we approach childcare, not only from the childcare workers and making sure that those childcare workers receive a living wage and beyond, But also, how can we make sure that our workers and our workforce have access in the way that they need?

And it's not listed on here, but the other big bet that we came up with was really looking at the benefits cliff and how we can reduce some of those barriers, especially as low wage workers.

continue to increase their skills and that workforce ladder.

And it's all really connected.

Folks should not be losing childcare subsidies and transportation subsidies because they get a raise.

Much the same, that really needs to apply to childcare.

And we feel like this is probably the best first initial investment that we can do to ensure that those who are furthest from opportunity have the basics that they need then to get where they're going.

If I can also echo what Angela is saying, working for an affordable housing developer, what we're seeing as a trend right now is family housing that has multiple bedroom units and also child care on the ground floor.

So gaining some kind of support from the Office of Housing to see more of these.

Especially as we look at communities where there's many vacant storefronts and Aaron can continue to try to fill those and try to reactivate neighborhoods, but we also have that need for child care.

And if we start supporting the building of those child care units in ground floors of some of the family housing.

I think we could see a really aggressive change in our city, provide an ability for people to make it to work and choose work over staying at home and kind of start to rebuild our city.

Thank you for saying this.

It resonates with everything that I hear as well out in communities.

I know we have a BIA representative with us, but as I've gone to the BIAs and to the local chambers, that's exactly what I hear from small business owners as well.

For example, and I'm gonna share the story.

I'm sure people have heard me talk about this before, but in West Seattle, when I was visiting with the West Seattle chambers, some businesses along California Avenue, I asked one of the business owners, if there was one thing, what could I do to help today?

And this was pre-pandemic even, and they said, look across the street at that empty parking lot.

If that had housing and childcare, then my workers would not be so stressed out about having to commute home in heavy traffic and wonder if they're going to make it in time to get their kid from daycare.

If we had more childcare and more housing in this city, then we would be able to support the workers and thus support me.

That was their number one ask.

And I don't think people often think about that when they think what's the number one thing we can do to support small businesses because we clearly have a menu of things that are needed.

I think there's some good conversations that we should be having with sound transit as well We want there to be transit next to childcare, transit next to multi-use buildings, including childcare and housing.

And I think there's some conversations that we need to have with our Sound Transit partners as well, especially when we look at West Seattle.

But I want to thank you for that, those comments, and really appreciate as well from the worker perspective, that as we invest in more childcare centers and opportunities, around our city that doesn't just help the child care, that doesn't just help the worker who needs child care in order to go to work and the employer who needs that worker.

It also is really good for us to continue to invest in the workers in the child care industry and really see that as a skilled workforce that it is.

And if that can be part of our economic revitalization plan to think about how we support workers in that industry, I think it could go a long way given the immense need in our region.

So you're seeing the The opportunity with these big bets, right?

But they're transformative and, but they are complex.

They're going to require kind of, as Angela said, kind of multi-jurisdictional, multi-departmental approaches.

But so us setting this out there is kind of creating that.

We're trying to create the intention that OED wants to be part of those conversations and figure out again, what our role is to help drive that forward and exert some leadership, but also recognize that we can't do it, do it all alone.

And it's going to require kind of a team, a team effort.

Oh, I see.

I might call on Councilmember Peterson.

Thanks.

Thank you very much for this explanation of vacant storefront initiatives.

A lot of what I hear from small businesses in my district is the concern about crime and that vacant storefronts attract illegal activity.

So really appreciate your focusing on activating these vacant storefronts.

And also we're seeing some I'm getting some small business reaching out to my office who are concerned because they're getting displaced by redevelopment.

So as we we put in new buildings.

The owners are asking, they're not renewing the leases with those small businesses.

The small businesses then have to find another home.

And so I don't know if there's a win-win here where as we see redevelopment occurring, if we can connect those small businesses that are being displaced To the empty storefronts elsewhere in the city to activate them.

So if can act as sort of a go between to connect.

Those those 2 dynamics that are happening.

Yeah, thanks for bringing that up and I guess I'll answer.

Yeah, get in there because it was a perfect intro section and an issue that I deal with very clearly.

My committee focused on a lot of place-based investments.

Our neighborhood business districts are the heart of our city.

That is how people identify is with their neighborhood, and one way that they identify, and the heart of what they do, and they were hit very hard.

We saw in Council Member Nelson's committee where we talked about an OED in the city, we thank for doing the storefront repair program, But we were really focused on looking at how to increase recovery for current businesses and to invest in emerging businesses, specifically BIPOC, LGBTQ, women-owned, so that they were creating this equitable pipeline to grow, to wealth generation and grow.

And one of the programs that we saw during this recovery period that seems like it had the best potential to continue and expand was the Seattle Restored program that was funded with federal LEAP dollars but allowed businesses to come in, you know, that might not be quite ready for a full traditional commercial lease, who needed a pop-up opportunity, who needed, you know, an opportunity to engage a customer base.

And another element that's on our big list.

That's not on the highlight list with here was what we call space matchmaking.

And this is something that we do here at the, and we do it a lot in an ad hoc fashion with with a perfect example was we were given outreach by.

the owners of our place from OED asked to look for a new space because they, like you just mentioned, had lost their long-term lease.

We were able to work with them to create a new space, to find a space, to work with them, to navigate all the permitting processes.

Building on that model, that is one of our other strategies, is creating that matchmaking capacity within the city.

And it could be, as you said, within the redevelopment so that a business that has developed neighborhood relationships can maintain those or finding a comparable or new space, but that a business shouldn't just be left hanging and not knowing what to go.

And so I think that kind of highlights how Intertwined all of these are, and that you need the city navigation, you need the access, you know, and so I totally hear what you're saying.

Councilmember Peterson and agree.

And I think that the place based investments committee was.

Taking that perspective when we were looking at our work.

Thanks, Aaron, just to build on that, and this actually go into that asset ownership bucket.

You know, what Aaron's describing about kind of the, the matchmaking and I think what you're asking for counselor Peterson of like.

Um, partly hinges on commercial affordability and the change that our city's going through and so wants to have a kind of a continuum of strategies of how are we getting businesses in in the door as Aaron mentioned for maybe somebody who's like an entrepreneur to kind of test the waters with a brick and mortar.

How are we getting them to improve or expand their space?

And then.

And then for some, how are we getting them to actually own their space?

And so Aaron mentioned a couple of examples.

Another that I'd point to is up on Beacon Hill at the new Colina West building.

So it's a new development right near light rail on top of Beacon Hill.

And because of our investments in capacity building with the Beacon Hill Merchants Association, they had staff that were able to help Two displaced businesses, Baja Bistro and Shea Boggs, work with the building owner to secure commercial space in the ground floor.

And then we were able to layer in some of our tenant improvement funding to help them build it out.

So two businesses that had been displaced through kind of some longer term investments, as well as some new programs, are able to come back.

They're not open yet, but if you have a chance to go to Beacon Hill, you can kind of see what I'm talking about, because I think it's a perfect distillation the need for a continuum of support for those businesses throughout a long and challenging process.

But if we're doing it right and doing it in partnership and kind of being thoughtful about how we align funding, can generate some really cool results and make sure that we're not losing those businesses, even as the city grows and transforms.

Final thing I'll mention here is just this middle one of specialized assistance for growth-ready midsize businesses.

We spend a lot of time on like very, very small businesses that are struggling or trying to get going, or large businesses that often have staff dedicated to talking to government and interfacing with government and navigating regulations and whatnot.

So we sometimes have a missing level of support for midsize businesses.

And yet when we're thinking about trying to create quality jobs and pathways into those quality jobs, especially ones that don't necessarily require a four-year education, A lot of that job growth is going to happen with midsize businesses.

And so we need to have some strategies and some specific support for those businesses that are moving out of small business into midsize and perhaps onto a larger size business.

So again, we have a continuum of support.

We don't have kind of a barbell where we've only got support at the front end and then we kind of leave them.

And then if they make it to that larger stage, we're back helping them again.

We've got to have something in kind of that middle.

And I think that's really going to be important for Not only wealth creation opportunities, but also again for generating those quality jobs.

So, again, this is a snapshot.

These are some of the highlights that we wanted to kind of bring to your attention, but I do in the interest of time want to move on.

Talk a little bit about next steps.

So, as mentioned at the top.

We were kind of constantly thinking about the role of throughout this and we really narrowed into kind of 3. Three kind of strategies so responding and implementing and that is those businesses as Donna was talking about that really need some support navigating either city resources or connection to other resources or other types of technical assistance.

How are we really as the front door for the city for business is doing a great job of navigating and doing that kind of dot connection for them.

Second is looking at LAT as a system, as both workforce and economic development as a system, and understanding where there are gaps.

How can OED help fill the gaps, do that kind of long-term sustainable capacity building in neighborhood business districts and elsewhere to make sure that there's a coordinated continuum of support and it's not the scattershot approach, nor is it kind of over-indexed in certain areas and kind of leaving others vacant.

And then finally, and this was I think the most interesting coming out of the work groups was really that there is an expectation that the city has a clear and compelling vision about the future of Seattle's economy.

And that we do try to have some of these big bets, these moon shots that are gonna be transformative, that we're working on those and we're not just kind of being reactive, but we're being proactive and thoughtful about kind of where we wanna go and the big investments and the challenging things that we might need to do and the big choices that we need to get there.

So for next steps, one, you're going to get a budget proposal from OED that's going to include a lot of these investments ideas.

So see this as a prelude to what we're going to be talking about in our budget presentation later this year for 2024. Two, the nice thing is, as all of these work groups were off and running, OED was building its current budget proposal.

So we were able to put a bunch of those ideas and work into this 2023 budget.

So right now, OED's teams are working on their work plans and using the input from this report as one of the main kind of drivers for their work plans.

And then we're using our results-based accountability framework to hold ourselves accountable and measure progress over time.

So I'm really excited about us having some clear work plans for each of our teams.

and seeing how we're kind of embedding some of these recommendations.

And if I scale back, you can see here, there's again, that the column that shows that we're already planning on a lot of these items in our 2023 work plan.

So we'll be able to keep you updated there.

We're also going to be reconvening the investment alignment work group.

Again, it's not just city money on the table.

We need to think about how SBA and the federal government are playing a role, state department of commerce, the county, the ports, there's plenty of partners out there.

But we need to get coordinated so that we can really make some of these things go.

And then finally, just continuing to work with you all, making sure that we're listening to what you're hearing from constituents or the ideas that you have, but also that we're getting out and about.

So if you guys want to go on any sort of neighborhood tours or visit business districts or kind of see some of these projects, I welcome you to do that because I think it's important not to just Um, kind of talk about it and see in theory, but to really go and visit with some of these business owners, some of these workers and, uh, and see on the ground, what some of our investments are doing, um, to then inform kind of future investments that we might make.

With that, I'll pause before we get to questions, just want to pause and see if anyone, uh, either Aaron, Angela, or Donna, if you've got any kind of final closing remarks that you want to make, and then we'll open it up for questions.

Well, I want to reiterate what I said before, you know, having worked with the city for decades.

the proactive and forward-thinking, fast timeline.

You know, City Atoll gets accused of being process-heavy sometimes, and process is important, but also action is important.

And so I am really excited to see this new iteration of the Office of Economic Development as our partner, as working on things that are important, that are coming up from the communities that they work with.

Thank you.

Excellent.

I think I just wanted to once again express gratitude for the opportunity to work with this plan.

And also to mention, as Markham has pointed out very articulately, that these things can't be done alone.

It can't be from one department.

It has to be a city perspective.

And the city really has to take a point of view that these small businesses are the fabric of the city.

They're what makes Seattle unique.

and without support and reinforcement and collaboration with different departments, we have to be looking at housing, we have to look at childcare, we have to look at what the community is developed like and the whole idea that when big developments come into a neighborhood, we have to retain some of the small business presence and whatever it takes to support those things to keep our city vibrant feeling safe, attracting not just the residents of the city, but tourists and out-of-towners to freely and safely walk throughout the city and city neighborhoods.

Until we start doing that, I think we're going to be stuck in a spot.

And so this plan really aggressively moves forward a growth and development of Seattle that's so needed for our recovery from the pandemic.

Excellent.

Any additional comments?

Just close by saying thank you again to our wonderful co-chairs, our wonderful chairs, and then also all the folks that participated.

It really was a team effort and everyone really stuck with it.

So thanks to everyone.

Thank you.

A few questions.

Council Member Nelson.

Thank you very much, Director McIntyre and the whole team, Angela, Aaron and Donna, that I I know, having been sort of on the background listening to the processes, this is unfolded.

It was really intensive work and and and you produced wonderful recommendations.

And I just want to say that, you know, the subset on page of of ideas of recommendations on page, I believe it is eight.

you know, really does point to the full list on page, the previous page with the full list.

I like the fact that the ideas range from easy to do, I say that relatively speaking, or implementable to the big stretch, the big bet ideas.

So from, for example, the fund a small business matchmaking team.

That's something that you do, Erin, all the time.

And I think that what you're getting at is matching small businesses with building owners in the neighborhood.

You can do that because you have those connections, but formalizing that service to small businesses in other neighborhood business districts.

That's a pretty much a pragmatic service that the city can provide, all the way to increasing access to affordable capital, a big bet.

That is one of the hugest barriers to any business owner, but especially our BIPOC business owners.

And so that requires really specialized knowledge like people in the finance community.

So I just want to say the uh the ambition uh that's uh that the the range of ambition in these ideas is is inspiring and i'm looking forward to getting to work on a lot of these things and i also wanted to note that it's really uh it's it's important to have new people at the table that's kind of the beauty of having unfamiliar names is that they bring ideas that we might not have thought about um and uh help bridge our policy goals with the real needs out there so thank you very much for and I'm sure that we could talk a lot longer and I look forward to doing so.

Thanks.

Thank you so much.

Any additional comments or questions?

Councilmember Peterson, please go ahead.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

Just for the viewing audience, that report referenced on page 8 of the PowerPoint, Shaping the Future of the Seattle Economy, is that on OED's website?

No, we are actually working on kind of the public facing documents.

We did want to get through this and make sure that we got.

Some of your feedback, and then we're, uh.

We're working on what the public facing look of this is this is all going to be.

So, that's part of our that's part of our communications work plan.

Actually.

Okay, then chair, if I might just add 1 more.

Comment, um, so since we are our cities growing, uh, we are.

going through our comprehensive planning process with the city.

We expect that to energize additional development activities.

The transportation department of the city is working on several projects where we're hoping to improve bus, the frequency and reliability speed of buses through our city.

This comes with growing pains.

SDOT's tearing up they have to tear up the street so that our utilities our utility departments can put in new utilities so we can put in the additional access to those bus stops and so and again with with as I mentioned before the new real estate development and up zoned areas creates displacement but also new opportunities and so I guess when you know in traditional city that might be struggling with to generate growth, I would see an Office of Economic Development working hard to, you know, generate new jobs and retain businesses.

Here we have a situation where we're growing so fast, we need to take the the sharp edges off of that growth and help those impacted negatively at least initially by some of these growing pains, whether it's tearing up the street or redevelopment, which we're doing for good reasons to improve transit or to, you know, to manage growth.

But I'm wondering if this report is going to delve into that as well about what OED's role is in terms of helping with displacement.

When SDOT is tearing up streets, how do we help those businesses that have limited access now for a year or two like we see on Madison Street right now with the G line?

Yeah, glad you raised it and I appreciate I always appreciate your, your dedication to kind of mitigating the impact of city activity on those businesses because it's been a challenge for a long long time and unfortunately the city does not have kind of a compelling strategy to mitigate those those impacts.

Some of that is due to the restrictions as we've talked about of kind of gift of public funds.

You know, we've got to get more creative in thinking about how we support those businesses.

You and I have talked about, you know, for brick and mortar businesses, is there anything that we can do in helping there with digital access or kind of their online profile?

And if that's one way that we could maybe support different revenue streams, particularly while some of those businesses are being impacted.

But I also believe that we've got to have some more direct assistance to those businesses.

Putting some A-frame signs out front saying businesses are open isn't quite enough.

So, we've got to get creative and thoughtful with how we might be able to provide some more direct assistance to those businesses.

That's a conversation that wants to lead as part of the city navigation.

Conversation that Don and I were talking about, because again, that's a, it's a direct.

It's, it's kind of within the city span of control and it's something that we're doing.

So we've got to have a thoughtful approach for how we're mitigating those impacts.

And it's something that we're talking about with the mayor's office want to continue talking with you about.

to try and figure out what's the range of strategies that we can offer.

And similar to what Council Member Nelson was just describing, it's probably gonna be, there's gonna be some things that we can do kind of quickly and kind of within kind of current budget and staffing constraints.

And there's some things that are probably gonna require either some policy changes or some longer term conversations there.

But I think we're looking forward to kind of trying to lead those conversations within the city.

Thank you, and Chair, one last question, if I may.

Quickly, please.

Thank you.

So we are hearing a lot about vacancies downtown with commercial leases, as we know, or multi-year leases, so that there might be a three-year lease that's coming due now and a business might downsize because workers are telecommuting or they might be relocating.

to another jurisdiction.

And there's been talk about converting office buildings to residential housing to deal with the housing shortage.

And I know that that's easier said than done, having worked on types of projects like that in the past.

But could you confirm Which city department do you think would be taking the lead on that?

Would that be the Office of Planning and Community Development that would be taking the lead on converting office buildings to residential?

Yeah, OPCD is definitely taking the lead on it.

So I highly recommend checking in with Rico and his team.

But similar, it's not like a one departmental thing.

Those are complex conversions that are going to require kind of multi multi-departments coming together and agreeing on kind of the outcome that they're looking for and then what are the steps to get there.

So, but it is a hot topic here and around the country.

I think we've seen other cities kind of releasing plans.

And I know that OPCD is looking at this keenly as part of a strategy to both get more residents, get more housing options out there, but also as a way for kind of converting that office space.

So I check in with OPCD.

Thank you.

I know that's an expensive and complicated conversion as the infrastructure around our small business and workers.

I want to thank you for your time here today, for the work that you've done to put together this presentation, and really the deep community engagement you've done to bring forth such a robust list of proposals.

And as you mentioned, We have to make sure this does not sit on a shelf and gain dust.

It needs to gain traction.

And that is what we are committed to doing with you.

Also want to thank you for lifting up.

I can't remember the exact words that you use, but I want to memorize it.

And I think Director McIntyre, you mentioned how workforce development and employers go hand in glove and it is a dance or it's a partnership and we really should be lifting up and celebrating workforce development opportunities across our city.

I think this is a great example of how those investments in workers and workforce development are complementary of how we support local entrepreneurs and businesses in our region.

So Thank you so much for being with us today.

And thanks for lifting up that partnership and the importance there.

And we look forward to having more conversations specifically about the jump start spend plan for future deployment as we put many of those dollars for 2024 on hold for flexible use for the department and the city to use going forward.

to support our local economy in all aspects.

So thanks again for all of your work and for being here with us today and for this presentation.

My pleasure.

My final remark is that I'm a proud board member of Housing Connector, so I'm looking forward to the next presentation as well.

Great representation.

Thank you so much, and thanks for taking that up.

All right, Madam Clerk, could you please read item number two related to Housing Connector into the record?

Agenda item number two, an update on Housing Connector for briefing and discussion.

Okay, very exciting.

We have with us Skelcham Kelmendi, the Executive Director of Housing Connector along with Elizabeth Kirk and Chanel Davis.

I want to thank you all for being here with us from Housing Connector.

Again, we've had you in our committee before COVID and your name, the organization came up recently as we went to a regional homelessness committee meeting.

Let me rephrase that.

The regional homelessness authority has daily briefings with community partners, King County, city providers, internal to the city, folks who work at RHA, folks who work at the county, and your name continued to come up as being a critical partner for helping folks find stable housing in our region.

So we thought it was a great opportunity to have you back in our committee.

Obviously, we have a lot of work related to housing coming up this year with the upcoming work on the housing levy, which will be on the ballot in November for voters to consider.

And we wanted to start with a foundational setting in our housing committee here about how Housing Connector is evolving to support folks finding access to housing and any other ways that this tool has continued to grow to respond to the most pressing need in our region, which is the need for a stable housing for all.

So thanks again.

And Scott, I think I'll turn it right over to you.

I see your presentation, Tita.

And after this, we'll go to King County to hear about how we help folks stay stably housed by getting them access to behavioral and mental health services to address that first need as well.

Welcome, Skelstrom.

Thanks again for coming back to our committee.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Actually, the last meeting I attended before COVID was presenting to this committee, so it's good to be back.

Just for context for folks who don't know about Housing Connector or me, I'm going to provide a real brief overview about what Housing Connector does and the impact that we have.

and kind of the model that we take to reduce barriers to housing for individuals in our community.

And then just talk a little bit about the highlights from last year, as well as some of the lowlights, and then discuss the vision moving forward.

So just for context, my name is Skelcham.

And just so you know a little bit about me, I actually am originally from Kosovo, immigrated to the US as a refugee, and struggled firsthand, my family did, in identifying housing.

So this is very personal to me.

And it's something that with Housing Connector, we are hoping to provide the access that my family was given when we moved to the US to other members in our community, but to try to do it at scale.

Now, as far as our purpose, one of the things that we need to think about when we talk about homelessness, there's about half a million individuals across the country that are experiencing homelessness on any given day.

But at the same time, a recent St. Louis fed study showed that there's about two and a half million units that sit vacant every single day.

And now let me be clear, not all of those two and a half million units are necessarily a good fit for the individuals who are experiencing homelessness.

But if even one out of the five could be a good fit, we need to do everything possible to try to connect folks to the existing capacity that we have.

And so for us at Housing Connector, we believe that those units should not be sitting vacant while there are people in need of a home.

What's a little different about us as a nonprofit is we're a B2B organization.

So we're kind of at the intersection between property owners and managers and all of the amazing service provider organizations in our community that are trying to address this problem.

The specific area, and we have a very unique and kind of a narrow scope, which is really eliminating the barriers that keep people from accessing a home.

Things like credit score, past evictions, rental debt, criminal history.

These indicators are often utilized to determine whether somebody has that second chance at housing.

And unfortunately, these are barriers that continue to exasperate our homelessness crisis, both here locally and nationally.

The solution, though, is a simple solution.

We looked at best practices in other industries, and we realized that the solution here is one that requires a streamlined approach to remove the friction in the housing search process and also remove some of those concerns and barriers that the business community has, that the property owners have, and why they often utilize these criteria to determine whether somebody gets in or not.

Specifically, when we think about properties, the reason why properties utilize screening criteria is because of risk.

And as we think about risk, this is something that other industries have determined how to address.

Really, the best way to address the issue of risk is utilizing insurance products.

And so what housing connector has done is we have generated a solution that addresses the main business concerns of property owners and managers.

specifically around filling their units, making sure rent's paid, making sure property's not damaged.

And in exchange, what we ask from them in return is that they lower or eliminate those criteria, making units that are currently in our community more accessible to more folks.

But that's just one side, that is the supply side.

On the demand side, what we do is we work, as I mentioned, with the nonprofit organizations, organizations like Mary's Place, Catholic Community Services, DSC, to make sure that their case managers and clients have a centralized location to go to, identify units in real time, and ensure that these units have those reduced barriers so that their clients can be accepted at higher rates.

And what we also do in this process is make sure that folks are accessing these units quicker and reducing the amount of days and time that they're spending experiencing homelessness.

The final piece in our equation is the mechanism by which we bring these two sides together.

And we're really fortunate that we have a leader in this space here in our backyard in Zillow, And Zillow from the beginning has been a part of this model and came to the table to say, look, instead of Housing Connector designing their own product and their own platform, what if we embed this functionality within zillow.com?

What's incredible about this is we get the benefits of all the Zillow developments, all of the updates, but also what it does is it increases the adoption rate because Zillow is a known quantity and entity for case managers.

And so they're already utilizing this.

But in a sense, what happens now is that when one of these case managers or clients logs into Zillow, their account is flagged on the backend by our team, and they're able to see units that aren't visible to the general public, directly filter for these units that fit their needs, and then get their clients or themselves housed.

And this is just a quick screenshot of what that looks like for the case managers in the community.

Now, since I last talked, we've had quite a bit of growth.

In the last three and a half years since we launched, we have connected over 4,000 individuals to housing.

We right now have over 1,300 properties that are partnering with Housing Connector.

It's about 75,000 units in that portfolio.

Most of those properties are in King County, but we do have some in Pierce County and now just recently launching in Denver as well.

Another thing that I think is really important to call out here is, as I think this committee knows, is the housing sector is one that is obviously really, has a really bad track record around discrimination and racism.

And oftentimes these levers of discrimination, such as criminal history or credit score, are used to disproportionately impact households of color.

And so by Housing Connector pre-negotiating these criteria, we're in a sense making these levers of discrimination obsolete and allowing more families to be able to access a home.

Now I know, My friends at King County are gonna talk a little bit about the prevention, making sure folks stay housed.

And that's a key area for Housing Connector as well.

Everyone that moves in, we stick around for two years so that we don't just have a revolving door back into homelessness.

And what's been incredible is that through that process, about nine in 10 households stay housed in the exact same unit after a year.

And we're seeing eight in 10 stay housed in the exact same unit two years later.

And what this indicates is that if we can get households to that one year mark, the likelihood that they will be able to maintain stability is incredibly high and allowing them to have that self-sufficiency.

So let's talk a little bit about 2022. It was an interesting year.

The highlights, we connected over 1,400 individuals to housing.

It was a 35% year-over-year increase.

As we think about engagement, we had close to 5,000 messages that were sent by our community partners to properties, which was a 76% year-over-year increase.

And we had over 1,000 case managers that utilize our services.

Now, I just want to put a caveat.

This is also a little bit of a challenge.

The fact that there's 1,000 case managers also is an indication that there's so much turnover in this space.

And I'll talk a little bit about that as well.

But there are not necessarily 1,000 case managers in our community.

However, because of the turnover, we're seeing more and more folks kind of go through the system.

And it also is causing us to have to spent a lot more resources training new staff given the high turnover.

But the positive is this is a resource that's being utilized by our community and seen as a value.

In that timeframe, we were able to unlock over 4,000 units that were below FMR to the community.

And as I mentioned, close to a 78% aid in 10 households reached the two-year graduation mark.

Some more community-wide impacts at Housing Connector was able to help kind of foster We helped achieve the highest emergency housing voucher utilization rate in the entire country.

King County led the entire nation in EHV utilizations.

And while I do not take credit for that by any means, we were just a small part of that.

The fact that Housing Connector was in the community, the fact that we had the connections to properties meant that we already had a smooth path to get these EHVs utilized and get folks into housing, whereas a lot of other communities did not have that.

For context, places like LA, We're hovering at around seven to 10% for a large part of last year when we're upwards of 70, 80% in our community.

And finally, one of the things that I'm really proud of is we're trying to find new ways to keep people housed.

And one way we've been able to do that is by meeting the needs of our partners, and that is by launching a mediation and conflict intervention service.

And so what we've realized is we can prevent folks from going down the eviction route if we can step in early and deescalate issues.

And oftentimes there's miscommunication between a renter and a property and us coming in as a third party and providing the service has been really critical in making sure that people are staying housed and things are not escalating to the point of evictions.

Now, it's not all good news.

Some of the lowlights from last year, one of the biggest ones is that we saw a 341% year over year increase in the amount of rent payments we paid.

We paid over $900,000 in rent support.

And obviously this was something that was unexpected.

It put us in quite a deficit from a financial perspective.

And part of that is that when the moratorium lifted and suddenly folks were able to be evicted, what we saw was that so many people had no other resources and the rental subsidies in the community had dried up, that Housing Connector was being asked to step in more and more at higher rates.

to make sure that we're able to provide folks that bridge to stay stably housed.

Now, this is something that is not sustainable long-term and I'm happy that it's tailored off a little bit, but nonetheless, it just indicates the need in our community for rental support because while COVID, well, it's actually not behind us, I just had COVID last week.

While some of the financial impacts may feel like they're forgotten, the impacts on renters is still there and so many families are still struggling.

That really hits the point number two, which is, As we talk to property partners, they're indicating the number of households that are still behind on rent and on the verge of losing their housing.

And I know we have protections that, and there's steps that properties have to go through before they can go down the eviction path.

But nonetheless, even if that timeframe is elongated, folks are having notices issued and they're on the verge of losing their housing unless we can find ways to step in and provide support on the rental side.

I mentioned this earlier, there's high turnover rate in the case management.

And what this does is it creates disruption in the support for residents.

When somebody's case manager is leaving the organization, constantly turning over, there's not that continuity, there's not that relationship.

And what we are seeing is higher rates of disengagement for residents when they have that high turnover in their main support partner.

And for us at Housing Connector, this impacts us because now we are trying to basically find ways to fill that gap so that that resident can get the support that they need and avoid having a behavioral issue lead to a 10-day notice or an eviction.

And then the final piece is, again, it's kind of married to that case management, is one of the things that was really critical around the Emergency Housing Voucher Program was that they came with stability support dollars.

The challenge is, is we were able to house so many folks through our community with the HV program.

However, what's happened now is a lot of those support services are not necessarily being actually provided, and they're very inconsistent.

And we're starting to hear grumblings from properties around the fact that they are now not getting that follow through on the case management for residents when they're struggling.

That was promised at the start of the HV program.

And again, that obviously is a ton of coordination that's being done between the RHA, between SHA, King County Housing Authority, But nonetheless, it's something that, for me, is a red flag.

If we don't figure out how to address this, it could become a gap that could see a lot of these EHB households potentially lose their housing in the future.

Now, I'll pause here.

Next, I was just going to provide a little bit of a kind of our vision for the future with Housing Connector.

But before I do that, I'll pause and see if there are any questions regarding what I've covered so far.

I think maybe we should go through the whole presentation and then we can see if there's questions at the end just for the purpose of time and then having the fuller picture.

You bet.

You bet.

Okay, thanks.

Yeah, of course.

And this will be brief.

For us, one of the things that we've realized is, again, getting folks into housing is step one.

Keeping them housed is just as important.

And so what we're doing more and more is leaning into that prevention work and trying to find ways that we can leverage technology and automation to get early indications of when issues arise for residents so that we can activate resources.

That looks like automated reminders for properties every single month on the 5th of the month to say, hey, here are the residents that have been housed through Housing Connector.

Are any of these folks falling behind on rent or have any type of lease violations so that that property can let us know and we can provide services earlier?

We're also planning to scale our mediation services across the community.

And then the final piece that we're trying to do is we've tested out a new technology and product with the Seattle Housing Authority that we're looking to scale, which is actually helping automate the housing search completely for individuals in our community.

And what I mean by that is when a case manager does an enrollment with a client and gets some basic information around their preferences and their barriers, that in that exact moment when they upload that information with Housing Connector, we are able to scrub the web in our platform and basically pull all the units that match their needs and get those units immediately to that case manager and that client in about 30 seconds, so they can start immediately engaging with units.

The key here is, as we know, when you have somebody's attention, when you have an individual's attention in that moment, part of the goal is to also give them options and hope.

And what we're trying to avoid is the scenario where you say, hey, thanks for all this information, I'm gonna go look for units and come and try to find you in a day or two or a week, because oftentimes they might not be able to reach that client.

And the goal for us is to say in that moment, when you have somebody's attention, How do you give them real tangible results so that they will stay engaged with you and increase the likelihood that they'll move into housing?

Again, this is a hypothesis we have that we're testing out, but I think it's something that might have a ton of promise as we began testing and scaling for our community here locally and hopefully nationally as well.

So with that, I will end my presentation and happy to take any questions.

Thank you so much.

Elizabeth or Chanel, did you have anything you wanted to add before we get into some questions?

we are so thankful that you are all here and for the work that Housing Connector does.

I want to just reiterate a few of the points that I think provide literally the connection between what either Seattle is trying to do, King County, Regional Homelessness Authority, and our community partners.

I'm very thankful, for example, that we were able to include $1 million again in this year's budget for rental assistance.

But as you noted, housing vouchers and doing these investments cascading events that happen to an individual or a family when they don't have affordable housing to begin with or the ability to stay stably housed.

So really thankful for your work on the prevention side and the work that you're doing in partnership with RHA and King County and Seattle to find housing units that are available when people are ready and able to move in.

So it's really, you know, you're coming at this from all sides and we greatly appreciate the work you're doing and we know that there's so much more needed.

Support, protect Jump Start funds, make sure that the levy passes this year, continue to get those mandatory housing affordability dollars into building new units, and continue to support the work you're doing on the prevention and quick application side.

I just wanted to thank the Housing Connector for the role that you're playing with property owners.

You mentioned a lot of that.

The property owners and the managers and in partnership with you So thank you so much for all of the work that you're doing.

You are helping to lower the barriers to making sure people can actually access the housing and increase the options that folks have for affordable housing.

Navigating this system is incredibly complex, as we know, and you're truly breaking down barriers and breaking through walls.

So thank you for helping folks prevent homelessness and for folks who are experiencing I want to just say that you may have mentioned it, but this has a compounding effect.

The more that you help individuals, the more you're helping families, the more you're helping workers, the more you're helping small businesses.

This is truly part of that earlier conversation we had about a more stable and sustainable and equitable local economy as well.

because we know that many folks who are experiencing homelessness also have a job.

What they don't have is affordable housing or stable housing.

So thank you for helping to make sure that people have a place to go home so that they can take a shower and have a place to clean their clothes and thus be able to keep their jobs as well.

So this is the compounding effect, the multiplier effect that you have throughout our community and our economy.

is countless.

Thanks for the slides you presented.

I would love to make sure that we get those so we can post those to our materials post committee.

But this is really wonderful to see you back in committee again.

Are there any specific questions?

Oh, excuse me, Councilmember Peterson, I see your hand in your bookshelf.

Please go ahead.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

I wanted to get more information about the housing connector funding sources.

A lot of the tenants, they already have a voucher from a housing authority and also there are situations where you're providing vouchers.

How does your funding work in general?

Great question.

I've got a follow-up.

Yeah, you bet.

And I'm just pulling the data so I can give you exact numbers.

But as far as funding, the majority of the funding that we receive in the Seattle King County community comes through the Regional Homeless Authority.

We're at about $1.2 million.

The rest we are trying to raise from private organizations and groups.

You know, just candidly, one of the challenges is that we've been really successful in getting a lot of folks housed.

But as the way our model works is that the more people we house, the higher our liability and exposure is. in our costs, and so it's a good problem to have.

I would much rather go to folks and say, look, we are getting so many folks housed that we are needing to raise more money as opposed to having the other problem, but it is part of the challenges.

Now, to answer your question around the subsidy source, about and looking directly at the data, we see that about 28% of the households we house have a rapid rehousing.

Another 22% or so have a voucher of sorts.

whether that is a traditional voucher or that it might be an emergency housing voucher, we see that about 16% of households have solely diversion funding.

And so for them, it's really just those moving costs.

They have the ability to pay rent, but for them, what they need is those lower barriers.

And then something that's really interesting is that we actually have a decent number of folks that have no subsidy whatsoever.

And what this tells me is that, again, those barriers, those credit score, criminal history, past evictions, there's a portion of our community that for them, that is the sole barrier keeping them between having a home or being on the street or living in their car.

And we had a story of a father who was sleeping in his car, but had a criminal record, had a job, but couldn't get a unit because of their criminal history.

And this was in South King County.

And again, that was an easy fix for us.

Almost all of our partners are able to waive that and we're able to get them connected.

So hopefully that answers your question, Council Member.

Yes, Chair, may I ask a follow-up?

Yeah, please go ahead.

So if the tenants are, some of them have vouchers from different sources, others need help with moving costs, others need help overcoming barriers such as a historical barrier that's there.

In terms of the, your ability to find units.

Are you having trouble finding those available units in Seattle?

How much of a hurdle is that for Housing Connector?

First of all, our ability to even need to be in existence is dependent on us being able to find units.

If we can't find units, then we are not doing our job.

To this point, we've had a good success.

in the Seattle area and identifying units, specifically units below fair market rent.

You know, on any given day, we are able to identify anywhere between, I would say, 200 to 300 units and make them available in real time to our partners within the City of Seattle.

I think the challenge here, Councilmember, is you know, it's easy to take that number and say, well, why aren't we housing 200 people every day?

The challenges is there are other aspects as we think about upstream in the system around how somebody gets from point A to the point where they're connected to housing connector that are still a lot of, there's still a lot of gaps there.

And there's friction in that process that we're trying to address, which ultimately results in us being able to about have a 16% conversion rate from having units to move in.

So about 16% of the units we generate actually result in somebody being able to move into those.

the rest are either gobbled up by the private market or other sources.

And so just to give you a little bit of sense there as far as like our success.

And so for us is if we know if we want to have, you know, 1000 people connected to housing, we need to be able to identify about 4500 units to be able to meet that goal.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much Councilmember Peterson and I know that we all have a shared interest as well in making sure that we can expedite that pipeline and get folks into housing quickly and to get them stabilized.

I see one more hand and then I think we're going to transition to closing comments.

Councilmember Nelson.

Thank you, thank you so much for this presentation I look forward to digging more to your work, I just have to say congratulations because this seems to be a unique model that you are now expanding into other cities and.

This is exactly what we need to do is, is first of all find creative new ways of connecting what appears to be some unused housing stock with people that desperately need it.

And thank you very much because I think that here we are in a tech rich city.

And I have no idea what the relationship is with Zillow if they're providing this back end platform for free or what, but this is what we have to be.

Yes?

Okay.

Thank you so much.

In fact, beyond that, they are investing in a development team that is continuing to add new functionality, all obviously for free and utilizing their resources to do so.

To your point, I think it's a really good example of how we can utilize our local partners.

I do want to give them a shout out.

I would say just the other thing is the success, which I appreciate that, is really a result of the team that we have, folks like Elizabeth and Janelle.

And one of the things that we're really proud of is, we were actually just ranked as the number four best place to work for in the state of Washington.

And I think one of the cool things with that, and something that I'm really proud of is that, I think as a community, we can show that if we're investing in our most valuable resource, which is our people, that incredible things can happen.

And so I'm always going to advocate as a sector that we continue investing in our people, continue paying, the individuals doing this work more so that we can get these types of results for the community.

I got that message.

Thank you.

Basically, this is a public-private partnership that is really working, so thank you very much.

Your vision of the future, I love that.

I remember talking to Mark Dunes, a year ago or so, and they were talking about why don't we have a real-time menu that our outreach workers can use when they're out there talking to people so that in the moment we can help people meet their individual needs.

So I look forward to seeing you work toward that vision in partnership with RHA.

So thank you very much for everything you're doing.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

And yeah, I think that that is part of what was being complimented at that RHA daily morning briefing.

And I think one of the things I'd love to hear more from you about, and if you want to get back to us, that's fine.

But as you think about this vision of the future, you know, what do you need from landlords who are out there?

Obviously, we have a lot of questions about how can we work with landlords to expedite the process.

It's a burden for landlords small and large to have vacant units.

How can we work with landlords to expedite the process?

And are there particular types of landlords that you're working to try to bridge more opportunities with, for example, like are there certain building sizes that you're hoping to get more into the program and how are we trying to increase

And it's again, it's not the thing that's going to get the headlines, but it's around process and eliminating some of the hoops.

And it's something that the city directly controls around some of the process pieces.

And so I'd love to just follow up with you, because I think it's something that unfortunately will take us down a rabbit trail.

I'd love to follow up with you on those ideas and the entire committee, because I think there is a simple solution that we can all implement in partnership with OH that could reduce the application time by at least 10 days for units that the city is investing in around the MFTE program.

And so I'd love to follow up with you on that.

And again, right, it's not gonna get the headlines, but it is actually going to get tangible results in getting people housed.

So that's one area.

And then as far as properties, look, I think one of the things that is really beneficial in this is we're also helping change the relationship between property owners and decision makers.

And we need to do a better job and we need to do more in bridging those and getting everyone to the table One way we did that is we just yesterday had a meeting with Congresswoman Jayapal, Mark Jones, and our property partners at the same table trying to talk about tangible solutions.

And we need to do more of that and making sure that that voice is at the table so that we can be informed in the policies that we're implementing and how they might actually be executed down the road and the potential consequences that they may have that we might not know unless that voice is at the table.

Excellent.

Well, we will follow up with you on the MFTE, the Multifamily Tax Exemption Program, in partnership with Office of Housing.

We actually have a series of conversations coming up about MFTE this year and early next year, so it could be perfect timing.

And if there's something that we can expedite quicker, I'd be all into that.

The second thing is that we heard from some of the partners at the morning briefing table is a reminder out there to landlords about all the types of identification that are valid types of identification for applying for rental units so it doesn't actually have to be a government issued identification and we know many organizations are we're going to continue to work with the city to make sure that we're doing everything we can to make sure that we're helping individuals have the accreditation necessary with that identification.

So, colleagues, I'm flagging for you that we are in conversations right now with central staff and others within the city and our community partners about really highlighting and clarifying the types of identification that can be used for rental units and hopefully that will be a helpful tool in Thank you to the team at Housing Connector.

Yes, and we will look forward to having you back in the committee soon to lift up some of the solutions that you're excited about.

Take care.

Thanks so much.

All right, let's go ahead and move on to our third item on the agenda.

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

Item number three, King County behavioral health levy update for briefing and discussion.

Well, this is really exciting.

I see our friends from King County with us.

We have Karen Gill and Leo Flohr, who have been on the line for a while.

Thank you, colleagues from King County, for being here with us today and for your patience.

We know that you have a presentation and I want to encourage you to take as much time as you need.

But we know that this is a preview of what voters in King County We'll have a chance to consider when it comes to the April ballot.

We've just talked a lot about how we can create economic opportunities for workers and folks who want to create entrepreneur opportunities.

We've just talked about how we create housing stability for folks in our region.

But we know that we can't have a healthy economy if there's folks out there who don't have a place to go.

to get the mental and behavioral health services they need.

We know we can't have folks stay stably housed if they don't have their behavioral health needs met as well.

And I want to just go a little bit further upstream to our first responders, whether they're human service providers who work at our emergency shelter services, whether it's our firefighters, members of IAFF, we have a lot of folks in the city that are saying when they get an emergency call there is not a place to bring people who are in moments of crisis.

And it ends up that people end up at a revolving door at Harborview, or even worse, the jail system.

So what you've packaged in partnership with community organizations after the launch late last year or mid year last year, is truly impressive.

And we wanted an opportunity to highlight what will be on the ballot across our region.

and how it connects to creating stably housed folks and responding to the financial issues in our region.

Again, we hear from folks who are business owners, large and small, that when they go to their place of employment or their business, there's folks who are in need of mental and behavioral health services, often sleeping at their doorstep.

They wanna help folks as much as the folks who are the human service and health providers as well.

And I'm really excited about the blueprint that you've put forward for consideration this spring.

I'll turn it over to Leo and Karen for introductions and just want to thank you as well for your participation today.

Thank you chair, members of the committee.

My name is Curran Gill from the Key County Executive's office and and join virtually in his own box, as you said, here by Leo Flohr, the Director of our Department of Community and Human Services.

Before Leo goes into the presentation, I wanted to thank you, Chair Mosqueda, for your leadership and partnership on this issue with the Executive, really from its inception.

and an extra thanks to both Councilmember Herbold and Lewis for their support in last week's Regional Policy Committee, joining other city leaders in that committee from the cities of Kent, Auburn, Redmond, Bellevue and Bothell where the levy ordinance passed with a unanimous vote.

And so that is the latest update on the levee ordinance for yours in the public's awareness.

The next step is for the County Council's Budget Committee to take potential action next week at their committee hearing and then for potential final passage in early February at the full County Council once.

And if that passes, as you mentioned in the beginning of the meeting, then it will go to the ballot for the public's consideration in April.

With that, I'll pass it on to our subject matter expert and leader on this issue, Leo Flohr, who will go over a few slides that provides more details on this critical work and hopefully leave enough time for any possible questions at the end.

Thanks.

Thank you, Curran.

Thank you also, Madam Chair, for having us.

It's our privilege to join your committee today, and I'll jump right into some slides.

All right.

So a couple of framework issues as we move through this presentation, we're using the term behavioral health to encompass both mental health and substance use disorder.

So this really reflects the way that our system has been developing, but it doesn't necessarily reflect the way people think about behavioral health, mental health, and substance use disorder all the time.

So behavioral health includes both of those types of care.

And then the second premise is that people recover.

And so we do this work in the full knowledge that under the right circumstances, and with the right supports, and the right environment, and with the right resources, people who are experiencing crises get better, and people are able to sustain long-term recovery in ways that they, I think, are really powerful in our community.

We've got a theme of three.

We've got three urgent problems and then a proposal that's really addressed to meet these three urgent problems.

The first is, we have solved this for broken bones.

Any member of the committee who broke their arm right now, I would venture to guess that within a mile you have at least one and probably multiple urgent care facilities that you could go to right now.

You could go there for flu, you could go there to get a bone set, you could go there for any non-life-threatening medical care issue.

If you were experiencing a behavioral health crisis right now, there is not a place anywhere in King County where you could walk yourself in and get the behavioral health equivalent of urgent care.

There's not a single place.

You could go to an emergency room, perhaps, and we are well aware of what's going on inside of our emergency rooms with them being overcrowded and not really being the best environments for behavioral health care.

And as you mentioned, Chair Muscata, too often folks also end up in the jail.

And that can be a place where we unfortunately have resorted to trying to provide behavioral health care.

And neither of those is the ideal setting.

The second issue, and a lot of folks wouldn't know this just by sort of watching the news, we are losing behavioral health beds in King County right now.

And in fact, since 2018, we have lost one third of the mental health residential beds in our county.

I fully expect that absent dramatic action, that trend will continue.

And that number one third would actually be one half had the county and the state not been able last year to sort of step in and purchase in an extraordinary fashion, a facility called Cascade Hall that otherwise would have closed another 60 beds in our system.

And then the last is it takes people to treat people.

You can have all the buildings in the world, but if you don't have a workforce that is well supported and well resourced to provide the care, then you can't assist people to recover, we can't provide the treatment.

And so any solution as we take a look at facilities, crisis facilities or mental health residential facilities, we also have to recognize that we have to support a workforce that can sustainably make a career of providing care within those buildings.

This is a SAMHSA promulgated framework, and what I like about it is it's actually pretty easy to understand as opposed to some of the things that might sometimes come from government agencies like my own.

So in any crisis system, you need three core elements.

You need someone to call or someone to talk to, someone to respond, and then someplace to go if that's necessary.

We recognize this, for example, if you called the police, you call 911, the police would respond, and then if necessary or appropriate, they could take a person to jail, to emergency room, to a place to go.

In our current behavioral health system, we have no place to go in a crisis.

Increasingly, you could call 988 or a regional crisis line.

We are funding and many thanks to the city of Seattle for very strong partnership and continuing to fund the growth of mobile crisis teams within our communities.

We're grateful to be able to work with you on that.

But right now, if the situation warrants something more than a conversation, there's no place to go.

And so that's another way to restate this issue that we need these urgent care facilities.

And anything we do needs to be available to anyone, anywhere, anytime, that regardless of a person's insurance status, regardless of whether they walk themselves in or somebody else brings them there, they should be able to get care at a facility that we envision.

Another way to look at that someplace to go.

This is just sort of the ways that this affects different people, organizations within our community.

Families, I think, first and foremost, have no place to take people in their family in a moment of crisis right now.

Law enforcement, first responders have No place to take people other than jails or emergency rooms.

And we've talked about how those are often ill fits for behavioral health crisis.

The mobile crisis teams that we're investing in, I think important, but also a tremendous expense have no place to take people.

Hospitals are overloaded with folks that don't actually require that level of care within them for lack of places for people to go instead of those hospitals.

And certainly the 988 call line that we are building as a state and are sort of leading as a state across the nation ultimately will depend upon having places to be able to send people for care for its success.

The crisis care centers levy proposal, this is that theme of three, has three parts matched to each of those three problem statements.

This is the overview.

I'll get into more details, but at the highest level, we propose within this ballot measure ordinance to create a regional network of five crisis care centers.

We'll talk about what those are.

To preserve the level of beds that we have for mental health residential in the community right now and then build them back.

And then to grow and make more sustainable and representative, the behavioral health workforce that can work within these buildings.

There is a really clear set about what's associated with this potential ballot measure ordinance.

First, five crisis care centers.

It's required by the ordinance, and it also talks about the original distribution that's necessary.

Second, we would have to build at least 111 mental health residential beds as a result of this ordinance should it pass.

And then again, the behavioral health workforce to work within those buildings.

This really gets into the ordinance structure, so I won't stay here too long, but the paramount purpose of the levy is to establish and operate these five crisis care centers in a regional network, and then two supporting purposes that I've already named as the sort of second and third components of the proposal.

Talking about the regional network, we have ventured to divide the county into four zones.

The City of Seattle is the largest contingent of what constitutes the central zone.

And within the ordinance, it would require that each of these zones host at least one of the five crisis care centers, and then at least one of the crisis care centers specialize in serving children.

These zones aren't to say that if you reside in the north zone, you can only go to seek services at a crisis care center in the north zone.

You could go anywhere in King County to receive care.

The purpose of these zones is to ensure regional distribution across the entire county.

What is a crisis care center?

So we in the ordinance have defined four necessary components.

And these are the things that we're missing in the community right now.

So I'll slow down and spend a little bit of time here.

And remembering here again, that this is both for mental health and for substance use disorder treatment and care.

The first element is that it's got to be available 24 seven, so it's open all day all night seven days a week and that anyone can walk in, or be dropped off and at least get an initial assessment while they're there.

This is the thing that we are lacking just outright in our community right now this is why you could not walk in.

Anywhere else I do want to point out that there is one facility.

It's the downtown emergency services center operated crisis solution center in Seattle.

You could go there if you were dropped off by law enforcement.

It's got 16 of these types of beds.

But again, it's not a walk in facility and it is often full.

The second component is what we call 23-hour observation unit.

But this is the idea that some people in a crisis within the first 23 hours are actually able to attain a more treatable level of stability to come down from their crisis, if you will, within the right observation and with the right staffing present for them.

And so the state-of-the-art in a lot of these crisis care centers that we see across the country is this 23-hour option for people to just have a place to be, and to get some immediate care.

Some folks will need follow-on crisis care, so that's the 14-day stabilization or crisis stabilization unit, so you could stay up there 14 days there.

What we find in these types of facilities is the average stay actually looks a lot more like two to eight days.

There's a lot of variation depending on which facility you talk to, but it is not typical to go the full 14 days, although you could.

And then the last component is on-site access to a designated crisis responder.

So in Washington, entry into the involuntary system requires an assessment by a designated crisis responder.

Right now, the wait times for designated crisis responders out in the community can be days.

That's an unacceptably long period of time.

There are many reasons for that, but we believe that one of the parts to a functional system is having access to that DCR, but providing the options for the voluntary treatment co-located with the potential to be assessed for involuntary treatment.

Some more details about what constitutes a crisis care center that are required within the ordinance.

I won't linger on any of those.

Who would operate these?

Our concept is that they would be operated by providers as opposed to King County staff.

So we would contract with providers through our behavioral health and recovery division, and that the siting of these would not be the county imposing a site saying this shall be here, but that instead we would receive bids from partnerships between providers and cities saying that they would facilitate or accept the siting of a facility in a particular place.

Restoring the mental health residential capacity.

Again, this is a very particular type of longer term bed we have lost one third of them in our community since 2018. And the one of the questions you might have is why 16 beds.

It's actually been covered recently in the Seattle Times I think pretty usefully.

The short version is there's a federal Medicaid rule that requires for Medicaid reimbursability that any new facility be at 16 beds or less.

The idea is to create smaller community-based facilities as opposed to larger ones.

What is mental health residential?

We are using it as a term of art here.

It's places in the community to receive both long-term treatment and practice for basic life skills.

So it's really a community-based place where a person who requires additional care can live for the long-term as they enter their recovery, where recovery applies both to mental health recovery and to substance use disorder recovery.

Workforce.

Vacancies between 2019 and 2021 doubled in our system and they have not recovered since.

We do not have enough people to provide the care at our existing facilities as we seek to grow the behavioral health response in our community.

We have to invest in system-wide supports to make sure that we are bringing both more people into the work making it more sustainable for them, and ensuring that the workforce is more representative of the people that they are caring for.

The levy really does two things here.

It makes some system-wide investments, things like apprenticeships, costs of certification for prospective workers, and then makes very specific investments to ensure the full operations of the folks who will work at the crisis care centers.

And the assumption that we've built into the financial modeling is that we would take the rate of a sort of comparable facility and what people make there right now and increase it by 20%.

And that became the basis for our modeling.

We do have to pay people more in community based behavioral health settings than we do right now.

Uh, property tax levy, uh, it's a 9 year what they call single year lift.

Uh, so that's a little bit confusing, but it's a particular type of lift.

The reason that it is 9 years in duration is that's the longest that you can have a lift like this under state law and have it still eligible to fund costs of bonds.

We don't anticipate right now that it would require bonding but want to keep that open as an option.

I've depicted here the estimated 2024 costs for cities and countywide median for the City of Seattle.

We estimate that the 2024 annual payment for a median valued home would be $133.

Here, one thing to note, homes' likely sales price is often very different than its assessed value.

Timeline, we're in the middle of this right now.

So as current mentioned, we have received a vote at the original policy committee will next come before the budget and finance fiscal management committee of the King County Council.

Should they advance it, we would expect final action in February for an April ballot.

So sort of by way of conclusion, the way that it's structured, the ballot measure ordinance actually prohibits us from spending any money except for a million dollars for planning and ballot costs until another plan is actually approved by the King County Council, including the Regional Policy Committee, which includes seats from the Seattle City Council on it.

Medicaid policies are a huge deal here.

If we're able to increase what Medicaid would pay for, we can then use the funds from the levy to build more facilities or pay the workforce more.

I believe that our 988 system's success hinges on the creation of facilities for crisis care.

If we do not have those facilities, we're missing that third circle in the necessary elements of a crisis response system.

And then a question that we get quite a bit is, isn't this the state's responsibility?

Why would the county with a coalition of cities advance a proposal like this?

One of the answers is that we bear the cost in our community and so many other ways for the lack of these facilities and systems jails emergency rooms shelters supportive housing and overburden involuntary treatment system.

All of these are failing under the weight of not having access to a central component of a behavioral health crisis system.

One way to answer the question is we are already bearing the cost for the lack of these facilities at the county and city level.

Then the last thing that I'll mention here, and it really got to some of your comments, Madam Chair, in the introduction.

I've spoken to law enforcement officers, firefighters, mobile crisis team workers, behavioral health providers, people experiencing crisis themselves, family members.

And one word has come up in every context in a way that was really sort of shocking to me.

People are losing hope.

People don't know what to do when they encounter somebody in a crisis and they don't have any reasonable hope that they can actually help that person.

And they don't like how that feels when they walk by somebody instead of trying to help somebody.

And so in many ways, what we're trying to do is create the types of facilities that people know where you could refer a person to or themselves to in a behavioral health crisis.

And I think hope is really a sort of valuable commodity even if it feels a little bit ephemeral in our behavioral health system.

Subject to your questions, Benham Chair, that concludes our presentation.

Well, thank you so very much for being able to be here with us today for sharing this high-level overview.

And I think it's also a good dovetail with some of the conversation we had earlier today where we talked about it's not just enough to have emergency housing vouchers if you don't have the personnel to support people to stay safely housed.

And the third leg of your stool here is it's not enough just to build the additional facilities, the brick and mortar that we do not have in this region.

We have to also make sure that there's folks who can be present to help people through the recovery and that they are present continuously.

And we do that by investing in the workforce.

So thank you for highlighting the important aspects in the proposal.

this came up in Council briefing last week where Councilmember Lewis and Councilmember Herbold were discussing the importance of this proposal as members and an alternative to the Regional Policy Committee so I see Councilmember Lewis as a member of RPC has his hand up and just wanted to flag our joint interest in making sure that we continue to send messages of support for this work and I know that my office and Councilmember Lewis's office will be working jointly to put forth a resolution to support such an effort, and Councilmember Lewis, thanks for your leadership on RPC, and congratulations to you all on a unanimous vote.

I'll turn it over to Councilmember Lewis.

Thank you so much, Chair Mosqueda.

I'm going to ask a couple of clarifying questions here.

It's been really good to be part of getting this package together in the Regional Policy Committee, and I was really proud to see us stand together as a broader King County Coalition of leaders to unanimously send this as a recommendation to the King County Council to put this on the ballot and move forward with the sense of urgency and purpose that this proposal requires.

Just as a preliminary comment, I think that I don't think it gets enough public scrutiny.

how much the impact has been of losing a third of our responsive behavioral health beds in King County over the course of the last couple of years.

And Leo, the slide you showed indicating that for one of those years, it was nearly half of the beds that have been removed.

I don't think enough regional credit, because it's not as visible, like we don't notice on the street when one of these beds within a building goes missing.

And it's hard to attribute that as the basis for a noticeable increased amount of disorder from people who aren't able to access and receive the help they used to be able to access.

And that disorder can be attributed to other things when this lack of beds is an extremely debilitating issue we're facing.

I just want to put on the record how responsive this measure is and appreciate the leadership of the county and taking this on, putting this together.

And working, not just with the city of Seattle, but our partners on the East side in North King County and in South King County jurisdictions, facing a lot of the similar challenges.

And I think that's reflected in our vote and our discussions in regional policy committee over the last several months, culminating in that unanimous vote.

So, 1st, thank you.

Um, that unanimous vote is a reflection of the leadership of the executive's office and your leadership Leo in.

making sure all of the I's were dotted and the T's were crossed before approving this.

So I have two questions I want to ask and then I'll circle back on an action item Council Member Mosqueda alluded to.

So the first would be if this goes to an April ballot which it sounds like it will and really excited and looking forward to that.

Um, how quickly can we start seeing implementation of the different components of this package?

Uh, because, you know, like, like, we need these crisis centers to be up and operational now.

Uh, and obviously these are intensive projects with capital and workforce development components.

But my 1st question would be, uh, what can we expect in terms of timeline?

And it would be very helpful if the county could promulgate, um, things that we can do in terms of.

Um, waving permitting, expediting, permitting, making sites available things we can do as part of that process to make that timeline faster to be good partners.

Uh, because I know that.

Not only us here at the city council, but our executive partners would be.

Presumably interested in doing everything that we can to get these things up and running as soon as possible.

So that would be the 1st question.

And then I, I have a 2nd question that's related to that.

But why don't we just start with that implementation timeline question?

Thank you council member and thank you for your leadership on this issue and your recognition of the way that lack of behavioral health system really does impact many systems and conditions in our community.

The levy delivery of the 5 crisis care centers, you're correct that these are large scale capital projects.

Our internal modeling, and all of this is subject to an implementation plan that would have to be approved also by the King County Council and the Regional Policy Committee, would have the first two facilities opening in late 2026. But the levy revenue would actually start being collected in 2024, and there are several immediate investments that we have modeled in.

One is we do believe that it is necessary to increase the level of behavioral health care that's available within community-based settings.

Supportive housing is an example of that.

Shelters is an example of that.

Until the crisis, care centers would be up and operational.

So there would be the ability to invest in those in years 1 and 2, 24 and 25. The second thing is we would have the ability to immediately reinforce the behavioral health or the mental health residential system that I described.

Again, absent large investment, I do believe that we'll continue to lose beds.

So immediately in 2024, there are 11 mental health residential facilities within King County, and we have modeled the ability to make immediate infusion in those facilities to prevent loss of additional ones.

And then the mental health residential facilities that we would build back new, I would expect that the first of the new beds would be able to arrive in 2025. And one of the things that gives me reason to believe we could move faster there's.

Because we have actually lost so many of these facilities recently, those facilities are still there.

And if we can, the first thing we would do is to go to those recently closed facilities, attempt to restore them, and then reopen them.

They're already cited in many cases, they're already licensed, and they may even have a waiver to that IMD rule that allows them to have more than 16 beds, and we'd want to capture that if we could.

immediate crisis response out in the community investments, intermediate impact on the mental health residential, and then by 2026, the first of the crisis care centers opening, and then the last of those we have modeled would open in 2029.

Additional follow-up, and then I see we have another hand as well, Council Member Lewis.

Yes, so Leo, definitely appreciate that recitation of the timeline.

Obviously, I would really love to see everything realized prior to 2029, but I do understand the practicalities of getting some of this set up.

But again, I would just challenge us to really think, at least insofar as we can be partners in the City of Seattle, you know, what actually has to physically be done and how can we change our laws and our practices to meet the moment of what needs to be done.

And if there's a way to move things faster, like don't hesitate to tell us how it could be done so we can consider it.

So appreciate touching off on the implementation question.

My second question, or my last question, and then I'll turn it back over to the chair, is just thinking forward to how these centers are going to interact with other assets in our region.

We established how folks are going to, in some cases, be able to stay for up to 14 days.

It doesn't really sound like there's going to be a prospect of staying longer.

For some community members who have secured, you know, otherwise sources of housing or places they can be discharged to, that won't be as much of an issue once they've been able to get some care and be stabilized.

But we have a lot of community members will be using these places who are experiencing homelessness and and presumably are going to be discharged to the street absent some ability to.

hook these centers up to some kind of asset on the other side.

I don't really need a big answer to that question in this session.

I'm more just flagging it as something else we need to work on to have transitional housing or housing connection components to this work, and just want to signal my interest in working on that going forward to make sure that we also solve this discharge to the street problem, which is another thing that we're struggling with.

So I'll turn it maybe back over to Leo, but the only thing I'll say before you answer on that question, as Council Member Muscata indicated, we are working on a resolution together to endorse this measure officially as the council has done for ballot measures, school districts, countless other ballot measures in the past, and really look forward to getting that out there so we can all stand together as partners on moving this forward.

So Leo, I'll hand it back over to you, and then Madam Chair, I don't have any additional questions.

Thank you, Councilmember.

Thank you, Chair.

The short version is we still have a severe shortage of affordable and supportive housing across the entire region.

And the crisis care centers can play a part in helping to alleviate that, but they won't solve that problem unto themselves.

As we do take a look at the discharge problem, and I think you described it well, part of that is actually creation of more mental health residential beds that can be a place where a person who receives crisis care can then go for longer term care.

We are looking to the state still to increase the beds that they have access to, particularly the beds that will replace those that have been taken away with the closure of Western State.

And we still are actually in a deficit there and are working with the state and supporting them in creating more capacity.

And then the third thing is we do have the ability, and the City of Seattle has been just a really strong partner in this.

The Health Through Housing Program is a really good example.

We need more permanent supportive housing.

Permanent supportive housing can be both a place where a person lives before to avoid crisis and can go after crisis.

And so we have now more than 500 people living in Health Through Housing-owned buildings, another 200 in City of Seattle-owned.

But Health Through Housing funded the operations of buildings, and we are going to be moving another 500 to 600 folks into health through housing buildings this year.

And I think more initiatives like health through housing that are attempting to create permanent supportive housing, which can be the place where a person lives longer term.

And then the crisis centers where a person can go in that moment of crisis and that we begin to build a system then that is sustainable where people aren't evicted because they experience a crisis or don't get housed because they experienced a crisis.

Thank you so much.

And if folks have some flexibility on time, we'd love to take these other two questions.

Does that work for you, Leo and Karen?

Okay, thanks.

Council Member Peterson and then Council Member Nelson.

Thank you, Chair.

I wanted to say I really appreciate the details of this presentation and I'm supportive of this effort.

And I do this is more for us as a city council, I think we're we're seeing these property tax increases start to to stack up and just to we can.

make an effort to let the public know what's coming in general.

We did increase the parks district by $150 on average.

And this, thank you for disclosing the $132 for a Seattle homeowner.

I know that landlords can also pass these costs on to renters if the market will bear that.

So it does impact renters in Seattle.

But again, this is a very worthy cause that we've been talking a lot about.

And then we add the housing levy which is coming in the future I believe one of the proposals is a $225 increase.

So we're talking about over $500 a year, just for increases not not considering the base property tax payments people are making so as you're encountering folks I don't know if you're having to messages as well but I'm just hoping we as a city council will be able to get that information out to the public about here's the full menu of what's coming your way.

Here's what the impact will be.

These are good causes.

We need to fund these things, but we want to be as transparent as possible about it.

Thanks for letting me just make that comment.

I do not have a question.

Thank you, Councilmember Peterson, and I appreciate how you've asked for sort of how we can articulate that there are complementary components as well to the mounting crises that intersect.

So I really appreciate your comment about how do we explain to folks how these all go together.

Councilmember Nelson.

Thank you very much.

I really appreciate the recovery focused aspect of this of this initiative.

In the paramount purpose section on the slide that asks who will site and operate the crisis care centers, I think that's around slide 11, it says they'll be operated by provider agencies under contract to DCHS's behavioral health and recovery division.

So the important thing for me is understanding better the kinds of substance use disorder treatment that those providers offer.

And I ask because, according to the King County overdose death dashboard, out of the 1019 deaths last year, 49% of overdose fatalities were caused by a combination of opioid and meth, and that was 501, and then 16% from meth alone.

And so my question is, given the prevalence of meth in overdoses and behavioral health crises that we often see, it would be important that these contracted providers do treat this issue in particular.

So there's no medication for meth addiction, but there is inpatient and intensive outpatient and contingency management.

So I don't know if that fits into the rubric of a crisis care clinic, but can you just address how you're thinking about addressing that part of our recovery needs?

Absolutely.

Thank you for the question, council member.

And first, I just agree with what you are seeing.

And I think the data speak for themselves.

It doesn't require my agreement that the types of substance use disorder that we are seeing are changing over time in the community.

And I expect that will actually continue to be the case.

One way to answer your question is that the levy prescribes the four necessary components of a crisis care center, but a crisis care center proposal can and I would expect will include additional elements.

Some of those elements could be what we formally call detox services, could be, in some folks will call it meth sobering, but it's a combination of both mental health and behavioral health approaches in the instance of a person who's experiencing acute intoxication with methamphetamines.

It could also be other types of service that a provider and a city agree to support and propose.

I think that's one way to answer it about what will be on-site I think the other way to that we are thinking about this is that the crisis care centers become a really I think effective first step into longer term care where that's necessary.

And so we would expect and have modeled the funding to support that these really do become referral centers for folks who require care beyond 23 hours or 14 days, and a lot of long term recovery.

as I know many folks know, does take longer than 14 days and can be a lifetime endeavor.

And so we really want to be able to help save lives in the moment and then connect to the other parts of the system of care that are designed for longer term care.

So both within and then by connecting to, we would want to be able to connect to all types and treatments of modality for substance use services.

Could they Just to follow up, could they be referred directly into the residential facilities that you're thinking about?

Is that what you mean?

at longer term?

I'm just wondering.

Absolutely possible.

Lots of clinical discretion that's involved there.

And with the other headline that what we are proposing in this levy is to fund the restoration of bed numbers back to where they were in 2018. To put some numbers to that, there were 355 mental health residential beds for our 2.3 million person county in 2018. It is now 244. Whether 355 was ever enough in the first place, I think the answer to that's pretty clear.

It wasn't.

So there is this underlying capacity issue with all of the behavioral health system that's still going to, I think, exist in the longer term parts of it.

And we have an opportunity to really provide that life-saving crisis care that we completely lack right now.

Thank you.

Thank you all for the robust discussion and for staying a little late.

Thanks to our King County partners for the collaborative work you've done.

I'm proud to have been part of those early conversations and really excited that the City of Seattle is again expressing our support today.

We will have this forthcoming resolution that Councilmember Lewis and myself are working on to formally I'm hoping that this will really be a uniting we are here to support you and wish you and the county the best of luck in your late February vote to get that finalized and out to voters for their consideration, and as I think our colleagues are saying, we will continue to step up to make sure that there's additional support from the city as well as this issue knows no borders.

Thanks for your participation.

Any closing comments, Karen or Leo?

We're grateful for your leadership on this, Madam Chair, and thank you for the opportunity to present.

Absolutely.

Thank you so much.

We'll be in close touch.

As we get to the end of our committee meeting, I do want to flag that Freddy de Cuevas, one of our clerks, has sent out a message to the floor with the Housing Connector presentation.

And apologies from our Housing Connector folks.

As you heard, given COVID and childcare needs, We're not able to send it to us earlier, but they did respond quickly and sent it around.

We will include the housing connector PowerPoint presentation in our materials that get posted as part of the minutes.

Thanks again to Freddie.

They have us and Melanie Cray for being our dual clerks today and going forward.

We appreciate that.

I also want to thank Aaron house for her work with the housing connector and getting folks.

to participate today and the future work that we just previewed coming up on the housing levy.

And I was remiss in not noting Sejal Parikh's work throughout 2020, 2021, 2022 to help create the economic resilience blueprint, the spend plan details and jumpstart progressive payroll tax, her leadership in working with OED and community I want to say thank you to all of you for your hard work.

I want to say thank you to all of our business and worker representatives to set up that initial spend plan has been greatly appreciated and that's a ton of work.

I want to thank the chief of staff in my office and I'm not seeing any.

This does conclude our January meeting, and we will be back for a February meeting with February 1st at 9.30 a.m.

We will have a follow-up conversation on that housing identification issue that we previewed today and an update from the Sugary Sweetened Beverage Community Advisory Board members who provide us with regular updates on how that tax is being implemented, which we talked a lot about during the budget, the decline in revenue, and how critical it is for food security.

They will be back to do a presentation, as well as a few other items we are still finalizing.

So we'll see you in a few weeks on February 1st at 930 a.m.

And thanks for your participation and staying a little long today, colleagues.

Have a great rest of your day.

Take care, everyone.