A MOTION relating to deleting the requirement of the executive to provide to the council a monthly report showing vacant positions by department; and rescinding Motion 11154.
Thank you. I'd like to move the minutes of November 29, 2017, as written. It's been moved and is before us. Any comments or changes? All those in favor please signify by saying I. Motion carries item five and six are to ordinance to proposed items. One Motion one ordinance that will be presented together because they both are related to probably my favorite projects of 2017. This was like a New Year's resolution that I'm I'm I'm having a lot of help making come to you before the end of the year. It was a yearlong effort to review all our ongoing reporting requirements and code. So everywhere in the county code that says to somebody that they must report to us to determine which ones are useful and should continue, which ones can be combined or changed in frequency, and which ones are no longer useful and can be eliminated. We briefed the committee on this project in September. We have had a tremendous amount of staff work on this and so I just really want right up front say thank you for that because we're getting to the point where we can now start to update the code, but there are quite a few little technical ins and outs that need to happen in a multiplicity as code update of this sort. So Tara Rose from staff is here to present the staff report. Aaron Osnes is also here. Don't you go ahead and take it away. Excellent. Well, do Madam Chair, members of the committee for the Record, Tara Rose, council staff. And as the chair noted items five and six on today's agenda concern making changes to reporting requirements to council the materials for these two items begin on page 11 of your packet. And Madam Chair, with your permission, I'd like to brief item 6/1 and then circle back to item five. Please. Please do whatever order makes the most sense. Thank you. So then I'll begin on page 12 of your packet and start with some background on the project, just a little refresh. So at the direction of the chair this year, council staff are engaged in a research project reviewing the King County Code to identify required reports to council and focusing on those that are at a regular ongoing frequency. Proviso responses and reporting requirements to other entities such as the Executive were not included in this effort. And as the Chair noted, the committee received a briefing on this project in September. Staff found 119 of these ongoing reporting requirements to council and also identified the enacting legislation for each requirement. And some of these date as far back as the 1970s, reporting requirements generated by state law or in a local agreement are not included in this number. Council analytical staff and other legislative branch staff were consulted about whether these reports generated by code requirements were used in their analytical work, or if they could potentially be eliminated or streamlined through consolidation with other reports or a reduced frequency. And as part of this effort, analysts were encouraged to think about if the reports were used in their analytical work, if the information was easily available elsewhere, or by request, if circumstances had changed relative to when the report requirement was created, and if a reduced frequency would still give sufficient information. Proposed Ordinance 2017 0501 Item six on the agenda is the culmination of this work and would eliminate 28 ongoing reporting requirements, change the frequency of eight combined 13 reporting requirements into five ongoing reports, and make miscellaneous changes to seven. And I'll describe some of those miscellaneous changes in a moment before I go into more details on the changes that would be made by the proposed ordinance. I want to pass out and orient you to a handout. No pause for a second while it's passed out. Council member Mike Bowers on the phone. So if he doesn't already have this, maybe describe what you're talking about. We'll do a first. So this handout is an updated version of attachment three in your packet. There's been an update to the work plan portion of the attachment, which I'll go into later. I will be using this handout 4 to 4 page numbers, and I'll try to be very explicit that when I'm giving page numbers for the packet and the staff report and pages for the attachment, but if I'm being unclear, please, please ask and I will provide any clarity that I can. So as you can see, this updated attachment that was just passed out provides additional background on each reporting requirement and the specific change that would be made by the proposed ordinance. It's sorted by change type, and by that I mean reporting requirements that are eliminated on one list that have a change frequency on another list, etc.. In the September 20th committee of the whole briefing, reporting requirements were assigned an identifier consisting of a number and a letter. And these identifiers have been continued from that briefing. In addition to the changes described in the handout, the proposed ordinance 2017 0501 would make the changes to gendered pronouns and historically gender terms in King County Code titles one through four A And this is to match the changes in proposed Ordinance 2017 0489, which passed the Council this week. The proposed ordinance in front of you today also would make technical corrections to the code suggested by the code adviser, such as updating outdated names to reflect current names, deleting duplicative words or inserting missing words, etc. Examples of these technical corrections and their associated line numbers are provided on page 13 of your packet, so not the handout. So moving ahead to page 14 of your packet. As noted earlier, the proposed ordinance would eliminate 28 ongoing reporting requirements, and the full list of reports proposed for elimination can be found on pages one through seven of the attachments of the Matrix. Some common reasons for elimination are identified in table one in your packet and the staff report portion. Some reasons include that the group responsible for the report is no longer active. The information request in the report is accessible elsewhere or that conditions have changed since the enacting legislation. In addition to eliminating 28 reporting requirements, the proposed ordinance would also change the frequency of eight. In the full list of those items can be found on pages eight and nine of the handout. The Matrix. With one exception, the changes represent reduced frequencies. So for example, semiannual two annual. The exception is related to the county's affirmative action plan, which was identified as Report 18 C on the attachment and current code requires the Executive to transmit the Affirmative Action Plan every five years, and executive staff have requested that this be changed to a four year reporting cycle in order to reflect a federal requirement for the county to apply for certain federal funds. So I want to pause there for a second because I think this is a good example of what we're trying to do here. We have got, for good reasons, a code requirement that says make a report every five years and the federal government saying make a report every four years, which ends up with multiple reports doing the same things in successive years as opposed to just one time every four years. And we all get the same information. This is just sort of the efficiency that you can have when you go in and clean up every now and again. So I think this is a good one. I'm looking over the H.R. people. They're nodding. So that's good things. Moving ahead to the next section of the staff report, which is on page 15 of your packet. Proposed ordinance would combine 13 reporting requirements into five ongoing reports, and the full list of these reporting requirements and their associated change can be found on pages ten through 12 of the attachment handout. And then finally, the proposed ordinance would make miscellaneous changes to seven reporting requirements. And these changes do not fall cleanly into the previously described categories of eliminated change frequency combined. And the full list of these reporting requirements and their associated change can be found on pages 13 through 15 of the attachment. That handout four of these changes concern what I am referring to as one off reporting requirements, and these are things that were inadvertently codified back in the day. So these reports, these were a one time only reports. And according to the King County legislative drafting guide, in general, ordinances that are of a general and permanent nature should be codified. And then those ordinances that are temporary or relate to very specific circumstances are not codified but kept in the clerk's office, for reference. And so three of these one off reporting requirements are more than a decade old. And council staff have raised no issues with eliminating these one off requirements. And then the fourth that I would point out, is more recent and concerns the best starts for kids, youth and Family Homeless Prevention Initiative Implementation Plan. And this plan has already been adopted by council. So additionally, for your reference, a list of reporting requirements that are left unchanged in the proposed ordinance can be found beginning on page 16 of the the handout attachment. Additionally, a small subset of the unchanged reporting requirements have been flagged as potentially in need of further updates, but that required additional research and consultation outside the scope of this project. And these items were placed on a list to be considered for a future work plan, and the work plan can be found beginning on page 28 of the handout. At the beginning of my remarks, I mentioned that this portion of the attachment had been updated. And I just want to point out that item 12 W, which concerns revisiting the Harborview reporting requirements, was added to the workplan. So that is the difference between the attachment that's in your pocket and the attachment that I handed out. Switching gears. I'll now brief propose motion 2017 0500. Unless the chair wishes that I pause for questions. And have any questions here, I'll just state that the side conversation back here was about the vacancy report. And one of the things that you may have mentioned is there's a couple at least in here that were reports that are ongoing reports. They're actually happening. They're valuable reports, but they're only listed in a motion. And so sort of the reverse of what you were just saying about one time reports that shouldn't have been codified. These probably should have been kind of filed since they were in a motion. We don't codify motions. So what we're doing with those and the vacancy report was the one we were talking about back here, is that we're going to codify that and make it at a reasonable free frequency and continue receiving the same information, but quarterly instead of monthly. And now it will be in the right place, written the right way. That is correct, yes. Since that relates to proposed motion 2017 0500. Would you like me to please clean up? Okay. Perfect. Madam Chair. Councilmember D'Ambrosio. Before we say, is this the right time to ask the questions about specific reports? Please chart. Yeah, please do. I'm trying to give you a reference here. All right, so if. You just give me a subject, I might be able to find it quickly. The Special Duties Report. The one that H.R. produces. This is 23 on in the materials, 23 executive boards on the number of employees on special duty assignment. Can you remind me? I think I know what that is, but remind me what a special duty assignment is and the rationale for proposed elimination of this report. I would have to follow up on the specifics in terms of special duty assignments. But this this report is something that the council does receive. However, staff provided feedback that it was unclear what analytical value it provided and that it wasn't used in their analytical work. Hmm. You know, that certainly that's, you know, staff's perspective. And so council members may have different feelings. A generation may be able to help us out here. He looks like he's halfway out of a. I'm going to dove in while Mr.. Issue comes up because i recall working on this report in h.r. And in a department. My understanding is my recollection, i should say, is that this is a way to keep track of how many people are working out of classification and presumably receiving some kind of of out of class pay so that that doesn't become used all the time and result in reclassifications. So there's different ways of getting a reclassification, right? One of them is you look at you don't have the right kinds of staff. You need different kinds of staff. You have for budget, for a different kind of staff that may cost you more. And you have to go through the regular budget approval process and the possibly the FTE approval process to do that. Another way is if you work somebody out of class, intentionally or unintentionally, that then that employee can later on, sometime down the road apply for reclassification through the personnel board and actually get themselves reclassified without any of those approvals. So I imagine that this was a means of keeping an eye on tracking and managing so that reclassifications are intentional and not unintentional. That would be my guess. Mr. Issue Councilmembers John Rich Just after King County Council. Madam Chair, you are correct. This might even go one step further in just being able to keep track of those individuals who have been given that clock, that special duty assignment, so that it isn't an end around a reclassification process either. It allowed the members to understand the different kinds of special duty and just to know what was going on. That information is available in a variety of different forms as well today, and any work that's being done on this, it just wasn't used for analytic purposes. And in the check ins on this, staff have mentioned this has been of minimal additional value. This was also instituted at a time when we didn't have as good of an H.R. system, and that information was a little more difficult to draw it together. So that's all I have on that. The only additional thing I would add is for all of these reports that are recommended for elimination, there were a number of different reasons. One is we're not actually getting this report. It doesn't exist anymore. And that could be for a variety of reasons, including there used to be a committee. We were supposed to get reports about the committee. That committee hasn't existed for 20 years. So, of course, we no longer get reports about that committee. I mean, could be that obvious. There are reports that we are getting that staff advised they don't use for any purpose and or the information is available to them in a more useful format in other ways than an annual or routine report, etc.. And we could possibly either in a systematic way for all of these or for targeted ones that councilmembers have questions about, provide information about the why it's not really. This chart is on eight and a half by one sheet of paper I imagine they're tracking goes quite a bit beyond that and we could probably provide more information if that's helpful. So I appreciate all all of that and I appreciate that there's reports that staff doesn't need, but there's does and I've gone through in a lot of these, it looks like they should be gone and it's good work. There are some that I think are informative to members as we make sure we understand to the best we can kind of what's going on in the government from budget making decisions and operate policy setting things. And this one, it's pretty fresh as a 2011 originating legislation and the report is being done. We have a 2016 version of it. I confess to having not read that, but I think I might go look at it and just just see. It's absolutely fine. I was the special duty thing I had. Maybe it was another thing in mind. So our commitment going into this work was that if a member raises their hand and says, I received this report, I use this report, this report is useful to me. I would like to keep it that we will do so. Also on the seventh, see the lobbyist reporting. That's pretty. Stay 1998 originating legislation doesn't look like it's been done. What's the rationale for eliminating the reporting requirement? That is correct, that the original legislation is from 1998. And so within the ombudsman role is the investigation of alleged violations of the lobbyist disclosure code. And the OMBUD has indicated that while relatively rare, I think they've had three, that they would include that in their their report, the Ombudsman's report on their sort of exercise of functions . Okay. So we won't be losing that information. It would be coming from another place. Correct. On the six E, I'm going backwards here. The School Technical Review Committee reports. Can you help me understand? As someone says, Aaron, often someone who sits on that committee, I tell you, this report is never done. Okay. So why what? Why didn't why do we ask? Why isn't it done? This is supposed to come over as part of the school impact ordinance. It never has. Who's required? What is it? So let's talk a little bit more about the requirement, because there's not a column here that says who the code requires to provide the report and. Required to provide the report. The School Technical Review Committee consists of council staff, deeper staff and PSB staff. We spend a whole day with the school districts going over their plans, making sure that they're, you know, compliant with the requirements of the formula for the school fees and that their student generation rates make sense and meet our for our requirements and their couple of facilities plan makes sense. The thinking at the time was that I believe that wasn't here was that a report would come with the ordinance that implements those plans. At this point, those plans are updated on kind of a peripheral basis. I mean, they're they don't change a whole lot other than just the number of projects in the in the student generation rate. So the report doesn't add a lot of value. What is the concurrency that we're looking at? Other school facilities are required to be concurrent with the county's comprehensive plan for unincorporated areas. Concurrent. I understand. I understand. Transportation, concurrency. I don't understand. Let me get back to Ed, what that phrase means. And I am the last one, Madam Chair, if I may, is just the one above that on the interleukin mitigation program, which is a pretty cool program that we do here. And that's pretty fresh legislation. 2016, are we going to get that information and then another from another source to kind of see how that's working? I sense that Mr. Ricci has stepped up to answer the last question. So first of all, let's yeah, let's let's let's let him do that. And then and then we'll ask for an answer to that question as well. Mr.. Dombroski, to answer your question about concurrency, it is actually the exact same concept as transportation concurrency. Concurrency is a land use term that is used to call for all utility and facility support to be concurrent with the development that is being implemented. And schools have been determined to be one of those base utility or base facilities. So electricity has to be concurrent, water capacity has to be concurrent, transportation has to be controller in schools and other of those types. And so it falls into the same concurrency construct and that it has to be funded within that same six year period. And so with that, is that a predicate to, say, approving certain amount of growth and planning and zoning for certain amount of residential growth, which is also why you had the school impact fees like you acted on earlier this week. I should pay for it. Correct. That is to ensure that it can be concurrent. I see. So if we need to have concurrency in terms of school capacity to make sure that we are not over zoning for growth when we need this data, and then you can answer that later. Okay. I'm just I'm thinking out loud on it. It's kind of an interesting question. Thank you, Mr. Ricci. And on the critical area of mitigation, we Murphy and Lou the Willard reports to the federal government as part of their requirements. Right. So the Clean Water Act program. Yeah, it's not exactly the same reporting requirements as the county, but it's again, an elimination of one report that they would have to do. So what I've what I've captured here, Councilmember, if I may attempt to summarize, is that you would like more information about items five E, six E, seven C and 23 E before we get to final passage on this, would that work for you? I don't need anything more than seven C. That was a helpful answer. Okay. I got a couple other notes here, but those were ones that I would like that I'll get with. Start between now and final. Very good. Thank you. Councilmember Lambert, his question, I think you mentioned and thank you for your hard work on this. So I guess they can go back to working on my book at night rather than reading reports. So they'll be great. There's still going to be 50 plus reports to read. So yeah, no worries there. No worries there. Well, I've been reading more than that and that's a good job. But what does concern me is that as we went through this, we realized that there were regulations to do these reports that just never showed up and that's not okay. So I think that now that we've streamlined it and reduced some of the requirements that we need to list, that is, you know, what are the dates, what is due and when, you know, quarterly there's semiannually and and yearly. But I think we all need an annual list. I know you guys have it in the back, but it doesn't always filter up to the council members. I'd like to have that chart and you know, I may have my staff put reminders on my calendar so I know what report should do when so that we don't get in this place before. I mean, in the future. The other thing is that it's got to be more clear that we asked for information that we we get that information. So that was a little disconcerting as we went through this and as we went through this. And there were many good conversations. So thank you for those. We decided that it could be put in the budget. So there are a couple in here that I definitely want to make sure are in the budget. So I'd like to do an amendment that says in the budget these things will be there because as the last council members are there certain things we make important decisions on? And for example, 9ei have no idea how we would make a decision on nine E, which has with animal control without the information that is there. And we have had voluminous negotiations over the past 12 years on that, and we need to be able to track that. So that's an example of one of the things I'd like to see for sure would be in the budget where. Here it says it could be. I want to make sure that there's about five of these. The not only could be but ah so that's that I'll give you that those. And then on page 34 line 351 and 352, what do you. By nine C what exactly of the ordinance I mentioned. Sorry. Yeah, but what's the other one? Sorry. Can you repeat the number in there? It's page 34 of the ordinance lines 351 and 352 leading governance transition efforts for the urban area consistent with the Growth Management Act. So this is actually one of the code revise or technical corrections. So this this isn't related to the reports ordinance. And I think let me have that example specifically. So this was added to the code by a previous ordinance, but not properly underlined. So this is a technical change to fix that previous ordinance problem. And what where on the website does it say leading governance, transition ordinance for the unincorporated areas consistent with the DMA? We'll have to get back to you. Okay. Just it's only half the county matters. And I think that we have a whole county that matters. So thank you. Okay. With that, won't you go ahead and brief the motion now? Okay. Great. Will do. So propose motion 2017 0500, which is item five on the agenda and is the companion legislation to the proposed ordinance that we've been discussing. Reporting Requirement three, which was also previously mentioned, requires the executive to report monthly on vacant budgeted positions. And that was requested by motion 11154 and was not codified. And so in order to change the frequency from monthly to quarterly, the proposed motion in front of you would rescind motion 11154. And that is because it's addressed in proposed Ordinance 2017 0501, which would codify the reporting requirement, given that it is of a general and permanent nature, as well as change the frequency from its current frequency of monthly to quarterly. And with that, that concludes my remarks on both ordinances. But I'm happy to take questions or to brief the amendments. So it seems like there's some desire to just dig in on a few additional details, some of which have been laid out here today, some of which may come up in between now and final passage. I would like colleagues to try to move these forward maybe without recommendation today, because it would be great to get it done before the end of the year so that the new requirements at least will be known, if not fully codified by the beginning of January and can go into effect then. So I think what we need to do is take up the motion first. We have a series of amendments to make these effective. So we take up the motion, if we could, without recommendation, and then we'll do the amendments to perfect it and then take a vote on moving it out of committee without recommendation. So, Councilmember Lambert, can I ask you to please put in front of us motion number 2017. 500. 500. That's right. Okay, I'm ready. Madam Chair, I'd like to move Ordinance 2017 0500 with a do with our recommendation. Okay. The motions before us. There is a technical amendment one which would update a whereas clause with the correct number of the companion legislation. And I move amendment number one. All right. Any comments or questions on amendment number one? All those in favor please signify by saying i, i. Any opposed amendment one passes and then there is a relevant title amendment to one that I'm sure I'm entitled. Amendment number one. Any comments or questions? All those in favor please signify by saying I want any other amendments to proposed motion 2017 0500. Their motion is to improve it without recommendation. With the clerk. Please, Calderon. Thank you, Madam Chair. Councilmember Dombrowski. Councilmember Dunn. All right. Councilmember Garcia. Councilmember Colwell. Councilmember Lambert. Hi. Councilmember McDermott, Councilmember of the Grove. Councilmember Fine, right there. Hi. Madam Chair. Hi, Madam Chair. The vote is ADA is. Known as Councilmember Gossett Excuse. Thank you very much for your vote. Proposed motion 2017 0500 as amended will move to full council without recommendation. Do we need to expedite these in order to get them on the calendar before the end of the year? And would you support a majority of the objection to that? I have no objection, Madam Chair. Does anyone else on the committee have objection? You're the one who's going to have to cram the agenda through. You're the one who has to join me in sitting through it. Excellent. All right, good. We will expedite that. We will expedite it. No, you are proposed. Next, we have proposed ordinance number 2017 0501, which would implement the the changes to the reporting as discussed today. And I would accept a motion to move that forward without recommendation.