A MOTION requesting that the executive develop a regional operational plan for extreme weather centers and disaster sheltering, with a special focus on the most-vulnerable King County residents.
That, of course, is just fine. Okay. Our next item on our agenda is the motion sponsored by Councilmember Sali Reck, requesting that the executive develop an operational plan for sheltering the most vulnerable King County residents in the event of extreme cold heat or wildlife smoke, which is going on right now in central Washington. We were briefed on the proposed motion at our last meeting, and as I understand, we have a proposed striking amendment today. We will hear from council members July, but we have, I believe, Jennie Giambattista with our central staff to provide a short briefing on this item since we had one earlier. And also on the striking amendment, we also have Mina Hashimi, Brenda McClusky and Caroline Whalen here from the executive branch to answer any questions if they come up and four members. Just a reminder, we are going until noon today. We started half an hour early and I expect we will be able to finish all items. Okay, Jennie, please go ahead. Thank you. Councilmember Cole Wells. Good morning. Members of the committee, Jennie. John but Keith, the council staff. I will be discussing the proposed motion 2020 20197, which does begin on page 25 of your packet as a recap of the discussion on July six in CAO. The proposed motion requested the executive develop an operational plan for sheltering the most vulnerable residents in the event of extreme cold heat or wildfire smoke. I've updated the staff report to respond to questions from the last meeting. The updates are in blue. On page 27, you can see an update from executive staff. They provided more information on the current status and their planning efforts. On page 28, the third of the packet, there's additional information on fatalities and EMS calls from the heat dome. And on page 35 of the packet, executive staff note that they will need to assess the budget availability for the work, but they anticipate needing at least one dedicated resource to manage the work. If there are no questions on the underlying motion, I can now go over council members striking an amendment which was developed with executive staff . Thank you, Jennie. Just one moment. Does anybody have any questions on what Jennie has briefed us thus far? I hope you all had the opportunity to to read over the additions to the staff report that reflected the executive branch's comments from the last meeting. Okay. And before you start, Jenny, going over the amendment. Councilmembers, I do you have anything you want to say at this point is wait till after Jenny's through. After Jenny, please. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Jenny. Go right ahead. Okay. Thank you. Councilmember. The striking amendment is on page 43 of the packet. I have also included a version showing changes and that's on page 53 of the packet. There's also a title amendment as well. So starting with the striking amendment on page 43, I'll walk through some of the substantive changes. The most substantive change is the body of work is expanded to include planning for disaster shelters, not just extreme weather shelters. Executive staff requested this change because they noted that if they were bringing together all the stakeholders to do this planning work, it made sense to discuss emergency sheltering overall, given that they would be talking about sheltering for particular types of emergency. The next substantive change is the striker removes the date by which the executive shall begin to offer expanded sheltering. The next change is the requirement for the executive to conduct community outreach in low income communities and unhoused communities in unincorporated King County, to gather information on the location and features that would result in the highest shelter utilization. It's changed, and it's changed such that the outreach to unhoused communities is removed, and instead such outreach is encouraged by the Regional Homelessness Authority. Additionally, the request that such outreach also seek to identify other community needs in responding to extreme weather shelters is also removed. The striker adds language to clarify and provide details on the information requested for those King County facilities that are currently serving as disaster and extreme weather shelters and those that could do so with improvements. There is also language added to clarify and provide details on the requested information for non county owned facilities. And the information on whether long term care assistance facilities and family care homes have air conditioning is now requested only if it is available from the State Department of Social and Health Services. The request for a plan to offer hotel vouchers that was part of the motion as well as introduced is changed so that it's now a request to consider with the Regional Homelessness Authority and City Partners the use of vouchers for accommodations, or they use activities for the most vulnerable residents. And the due date for the operational plan is changed from February 28th, 2023 to June 30th, 2024. Councilmember. I would also note that there's a title amendment so that the title conforms to the strike. So those are the major changes in the strike, or I'm happy to answer questions and as you indicated. Councilmember Cole. Well, we also have executive staff here as well. Thank you, Jenny, for your outstanding staff report, as always. And we do have a question from Councilmember Bell. Did she. Sorry. That was an error. I apologize. I'm good. Okay. No question. Are there any questions? Council member Perry. Thank you, Chair Coles. I appreciate that. I am wondering, you know, that originally or in our last discussion about this, I had mentioned language specific to providing equipment heating, cooling and air filtering equipment. So the language is outreach. Efforts should also seek to identify other community needs in responding to extreme weather events. And after. The whole. I'm just wondering if there's a place in this to call those specific things out, because part of the issue is people not a big part of the issue with the deaths was people not having access to air conditioning, cooling, heating and air filter filtration areas that are not able to move to different spaces. So so people can locate and if they're living outside, that hasn't has a specific focus in in making sure that folks get to appropriate shelter if they're living inside and they don't have heating, cooling or air filtration systems as senior citizens, as of folks living with disabilities, different kinds of experiences who could benefit greatly from those those specific kinds of equipment. I'm just wondering if it can be called out more specifically or if there's just if we're wanting to keep it that open and that that that made. Councilmember Perry, if I may, just clarify the language specifically requesting information on other needs that language is and struck. So okay. So and so with that clarification, I will turn I think it would be appropriate to ask the executive staff what their plans are in addition to conducting outreach on the location and features that would result in the higher shelter utilization. That to ask the executive staff what additional. Information they're going to be querying on in terms of the needs of the community? Well, exactly the question I would like to ask then. There we are. That is a good. Okay. So we do have Caroline Whalen from a director of the Department of the Executive Services and then we also have OPM director Brendan McCluskey available as well. Sharon Wells If you if you would. I don't know how you would like to address that, but I would that would be great. I Council Member Perry. I will leave some room here right now if either Director McCluskey or Director Whalen would like to respond. I would like to remind people we are in a tight time frame, so I appreciate having any questions or remarks being made as brief as possible. So anybody from our executive staff would like to respond. Thank you. Chair Caldwell. So I will just say briefly that we are interested in doing a needs assessment as we do outreach. We are expecting to get a report from the City of Seattle of some outreach work that they did. My understanding is one of the findings is that people will say, yes, they want government to supply. Cooling centers are warm, wet, you know, heating centers, but they want it for other people. They really want to stay where they are. And I really understand, Councilmember Perry, what you're saying is some people can't move. And so what is it that they need? So we will be doing a needs assessment. And doing our best to accommodate, you know, our residents and visitors. And I don't know, Brendan, if you want to add to that, if that would be okay with the chair. Okay. Go right ahead. Yeah. Thanks. I don't know that I have much to add to that. I think that, you know, we want to take a very comprehensive and complete approach to this so that we want to look at every potential option that's out there. Thank you. Thank you. And I'd again like to say, as I did at our last meeting, there are many long term health care facilities and resident facilities that do not have air conditioning. My mother and rather a friend of mine was in one of those before she died, no air conditioning and it was really, really challenging. So I'm hopeful that this issue will also be addressed. Okay. Are there any other questions? K Council member C Yeah, council members. SA Hello, would you like to make a motion? So move chair Caldwell's. Okay. We have a motion for proposed motion 2020 20197 before us. We do have a striking amendment which has been explained. Would you like to move that? Council members. Hello. So move. Check. Okay. Thank you. And would you like to speak to that council members? Thank you. Absolutely. I think making good policy as council members requires that we work collaboratively with the executive branch. They're the ones who will implement our legislation, and they are also subject matter experts, whereas I'm not. So I fully support the striking amendment and making it more implementable and in the spirit of collaboration. I want to thank Director McClusky, Director Whalen, Rena Hashemi, Karen Gill, King County Regional Homelessness Authority, who have been super responsive and collaborative, like I said before. So I, I encourage your support on this striking amendment. Thank you. Council Member And does anybody else have anything to say on this or have a question? Okay. Councilmember Dombroski. I just want to take a moment to thank Councilmember Xilai for this thoughtful and forward looking piece of legislation that's going to, I think, become increasingly necessary as our climate extremes present themselves. And it's a longer term project, maybe with some shorter term deliverables, but it's really good and thoughtful work, and I wanted to commend him publicly for it. Thank you, Councilmember. Thank you. Councilmember building to. Thank you this time was intentional. I also want to say I think in looking through the staff report and listening to discussion, this fits well in with, I think, a multi-tiered plan because we have to work in the short term and the long term. The executive's study appears to look at ways to mitigate heat, which is a very big and long term project. And councilmembers are always not in talks about sheltering people when because we are going to have extreme heat events. And I just really wanted to point out that this morning Craig is already in process of activating their response tier network approach to the projected coming here. That looks like we're going to get up into the nineties next week. And so we have we have. Work going on at. All scales. And then now in the short term, in the long term and just for those anyone who might be watching what the message this morning said is that the Tier one response will make funding for cooling supplies available to homeless service providers up to $2,000. And if if you are someone who provides emergency shelter, day center or outreach, you should reach out to KCR today because the this this money's available now. Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember. That's very helpful information, especially given that from what I've heard, the Puget Sound area here has the least amount of air conditioners of any major equivalent American city and and metropolitan areas. So we're going to be expecting we'll have some hard times next week, everybody, but we worry particularly about our most vulnerable and as citizens, residents. Okay. Are there any other comments? Okay. All in favor of striking amendment one. Please say I. I hear any polls say now, Kate, the amendment has been adopted. We now have title amendment one, and that is to correspond with the changes made in striking Amendment one. Any questions? All in favor of title. Oh, we have to have a motion to move it. Kind of move. Thank you. Councilmembers. Hello. All in favor of title amendment one. Please say I, I. Any no's? Please say no. Okay. With that, we have a title. Amendment one has been adopted and we now move on for a proposed motion. 2020 20197 as amended. I would like to just say that I as well I'm very appreciative of Councilman Rizal I bringing. Forward. It's, I believe, really improving what the executive had already been working on and brings a lot more public awareness to it when we have this. So Councilor Basile, I do have any final comments. In addition to the people I already thanked, I want to thank our legislative branch teammates Jenny, Jim Batista, Jake Tracy, Rosa Mai for all their great work on bringing this vision into a reality. Thank you, everyone. Okay. And I should have asked if anybody else had any comments. Okay with that. Would the clerk please call the roll? Thank you. Chair calls. Councilmember Belushi. Hi. Councilmember Dombrowski. Councilmember done. I. Councilmember McDermott. Hi. Councilmember Perry. I. Councilmember up the grove i. Councilmember Yvonne Reich Bauer. Councilmember Zala. I chair Caldwell's I. Turco. Well, as the vote is eight eyes zero nose with Councilmember Yvonne Reich Bauer excused. Kay thank you. With our vote we've approved proposed motion 2020 20197 as amended, and we will place this item on consent unless there's concern on that and we will send it with the do pass recommendation for the consent agenda to the August 16th Council meeting. Unfortunately, King County TV is having some technical issues, so we will take a brief recess. For how long do you expect? 5 minutes. So we will be on a five minute recess. Thank you. Okay. It appears we are ready to go. So I will call the meeting. The results over concluded and we will be back in our meeting. Now the next item on our agenda is the first of two panel briefings we are having today on the topic of preventing gun violence.