AN ORDINANCE relating to the Seattle Transportation Benefit District; authorizing material scope changes to Seattle Transportation Benefit District Proposition 1; authorizing the Director of the Seattle Department of Transportation to execute an interlocal agreement with Seattle Public Schools to provide transit passes to Seattle Public Schools students; changing appropriations to the Seattle Department of Transportation to fund the ORCA Opportunity Program; and amending Ordinance 125493, which amended the 2018 Budget (Ordinance 125475); all by a 3/4 vote of the City Council.
The report of the City Council Agenda Item one Council 4119 256 relating to the Transportation Benefit District authorizing material scope changes to the sale transportation benefit district Proposition one. The committee recommends the bill passes amended. Councilmember O'Brien. Thank you. This was discussed in the committee a few weeks ago. It came to full council two weeks ago today, and we put a hold on that because of some concerns we heard between the committee meeting and the full council. I'm going to give you an overview of what the legislation does at the base level, and then we'll move forward with an amendment to make some changes. The base legislation essentially goes and make some adjustments to the Seattle Transportation Benefit District Initiative that was passed by citizens a few years ago. There are four areas where the changes are being made to allow greater flexibility to invest those dollars into transit outcomes that folks are hoping to see. The first would allow up to $7 million a year to be invested in or capacities for students in Seattle public schools. We currently do this for low income students, but the proposal would allow more flexibility to a broader range of students. And the mayor has proposed making sure that all high school students have access to our campuses, regardless of how far they live from school and also in the summer. And this legislation would allow that flexibility. Another change is where we can invest in buying additional service hours. The original legislation said service hour, additional service. Our investments can be made on routes as long as 80% of the stops on that route were within the city of Seattle. The ordinance before us today would adjust that to allow routes that have 65% of the stops to the city of Seattle. There are a couple high, high volume routes that are could benefit from some investments but are not currently allowed to have those investments because slightly more than the criteria, number of routes are happening just outside the city's borders. So that adjustment would allow greater flexibility. This would also the change would also allow us to make investments and capital improvements. We heard a little bit about that in public comment today. The city has made some great investments in capital improvements in particular. What I'm familiar with is along the 44, where some modest capital improvements on curb bulbs for in-line stops, queuing lines and huge jumps in the traffic signals allow busses to operate more efficiently in the corridor and has the same effect as buying more service hours because busses can complete their routes in shorter time and make more trips with the same busses and riders. Busses and operators, I should say. The final change is in the current legislation, which we're going to propose to remove, would have allowed flexibility for Metro for the city to contract with private operators as a pilot project during the periods of maximum constraint, which is a series of construction projects and other events happening in the next couple of years where we're expecting significant congestion downtown. So that is what the underlying legislation would do, and I'm happy to take questions on that. But first, I'd like to go ahead and move our amendment and maybe I'll ask it Councilmember Skate, if you want to move that, and then I'll second it . Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'd like to move Amendment One to Council Bill 119256, which strikes subsection C from section two and deletes section four. Second. I would describe that as Amendment one. So would you like to comment on Amendment One before we vote on the amendment only? Yeah. Okay. Thank you, Mr. President. And thanks again to the good chair for his work to work on this amendment with me. I think that what you see in this amendment is a recognition that while we understand that there are limitations that are currently presenting itself to King County Metro, the answer is not a pilot program without consultation and work with workers and the community at large. The answer instead is, I think, as we heard today, greater investments in infrastructure and investments making sure that we have transit only lanes, that we look at the limitations around what we understand to be spaces for parking busses and work collaboratively to address some of those issues. And what you see in front of us is a recognition that the heart of this legislation, as it came down from the mayor's office, as I read it initially, was really around the worker card. This concept around a pilot program appears to have been included without the due diligence to have conversations with the folks who are doing the work, the drivers here, the community at large, and the labor community at large. So what you see in front of us is an effort to really try to pull that piece out with the recognition that we need to have longer conversations with the executive, with King County Metro, with the drivers, with community, with the labor movement , to make sure that we're actually looking at how to meet our goals of moving individuals, commuters, families, students, and do so in a way that's inclusive. And I think I'll save some of my other comments for later on. Mr. President. Thank you very much. Any other comments? Just on the amendment. Amendment one. Customers want. Thank you, President Herrell. I support this amendment. While it is true that the privatization that the mayor proposed would represent a small section of our public bus service. Opening the door to privatization would be a major mistake. It could give private companies an opening a foot in the door to undercut our public transportation system, replacing living wage union jobs with low paid, precarious labor, and setting prices not to maximize public usefulness, but instead to maximize private profits. Those things would not happen immediately, but that is the direction inevitably that privatization points towards. In Chicago, corrupt Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel is pushing a private mass transit system to be built by billionaire Elon Musk. And with revenues, decisions and benefits going to that private corporation and privatization does not necessarily stop there in the neocolonial world. As in my home country, India, in the wave of neo liberalism that has marked the last several decades, all of the most profitable and beneficial sections of the state sector have been sold off to private corporations to profit from the workers there and from the deeply impoverished communities in the surrounding areas. And as a matter of fact, decades of research from the U.S. itself shows that privatization of public services, whether it is transit or electricity or garbage pickup, ends up costing municipal governments far more than public entities do, while destroying union jobs and workplace rights for workers. I would recommend a really, really good book written in 1997, way back in 1997 by an economist from the Economic Policy Institute called Elliott Carr. And the book is The Privatization of Public Service, in which he shows statistically how every study shows that privatization of public services is actually bad for the public. I wanted to thank Linda Errol, who is a bus driver and a member of Edu, and Jeremy Muni, the ADA co-chair, who volunteered their time to bring attention to this threat of privatization and to all the edu A.I. speakers who spoke today to stop this before it went further. So let's vote yes on this. Thank you, Councilmember Swan. So we're just going to vote on the amendment first. If I hear the comments. So all those in favor of amendment number one as described by Councilmember Mosquito, please vote i. I opposed. The ayes have it. And now we have the base. Legislation comes from Brown. We'd like to see some more remarks. I'll just add my gratitude for the folks who showed up today at a council meeting two weeks ago. I really appreciate all the operators. I really appreciate all the work you do day in, day out to make sure hundreds of thousands of people get around our city safely. And I also appreciate one out for my appreciation for the fact that as the city grows, we're relying more and more on your services and the transit agencies to move people around. And I know that I'm hearing from folks throughout my communities that they want to see more bus services soon as possible. And I know that that's a constraint on you all. And so thank you for working through this rapid growth in your industry and continuing to serve the people of our communities. I also want to thank the transit advocates who showed up and been engaged in this from the beginning. Thanks for your continued oversight and advice on this. I'm really excited about providing some flexibility here, and I'm also proud to be co-sponsoring the amendment to not move forward on the piling projects at this time and move forward on the other issues that I think will have an immediate benefit. That's a very good skater. Thank you, Mr. President. I am pleased to support this bill as amended. I think it's important that we do expand access to worker cards. I know that many of our council members have been working on this for a while, and I think that our amendment to the mayor's proposal makes this an actually fiscally sound policy as well . We don't want to be privatizing or giving the impression that we're moving forward on pilots without full and robust discussions with workers, with the community at large. And I think we all recognize that our current busses are at capacity. I'm sure many of the drivers that are here know on a daily basis that we need more services. And the way to do that is, I think, is exactly as one of the drivers expressed, creating transit only lanes, investing in buying busses, creating that parking space for busses to actually be housed, and investing in drivers. And when we do so that invest in the health and safety of our community, then invest in the health and safety of the drivers. That allows for more individuals to be able to get a good living wage job in this industry. I'm also really interested in working with the community at large and the folks who are here today about how we make sure that the last mile is successful going forward. We want to make sure that people are getting to these rapid transit lines, that we're increasing access for people to be able to take the light rail or bus to work, and that we're creating opportunities for folks to really get out of their cars to meet our environmental goals that this city has established. I also think that it's important that we match these goals with our overall city's vision zero goals, which to date have, I think, in my opinion, taken a back seat. We know that individuals continue to be injured while walking or riding bikes, and we want more people to take the bus and get out of their cars. We need to look at this holistically and think about ways that we get people into busses and out of their cars. So as we move forward, I will be looking forward to working with the good chair and the Council as a whole on investments in worker training, safety investments in infrastructure, making sure that we have pedestrians and riders and cyclists in mind as we create our are our mission to complete our vision zero goals. And I just want to thank again the folks who flagged this issue for us and the ongoing conversation that's happening in community about how we meet our transit needs while being fiscally smart with the public dollars that we have for our good public servants. So thank you so much. Thank you. Astronomer Johnson, just. Briefly want to speak to an issue that was brought up during public comment. This bill that we're going to pass today, in addition to many of the things that my colleagues outlined, allows for up to $7 million a year to be spent on youth work implementation. It's not prescriptive in the way that maybe some of our other legislation that's adopted may have been in the past. This allows the Department of Transportation to then enter into negotiations with King County, Metro, SBC and other folks around the distribution of that additional to up to $7 million annually. So during public comment, the Speaker talked about the need for us to make sure that we are getting kids on busses, regardless of whether they're in private schools or in public schools. And we've received some information from Metro that we've shared in my office, with the mayor's office, about some of the different proposals that we could walk down if the city wanted to choose to partner with the folks on Metro in a different way than just subsidizing kids in high school. So we have a lot of different avenues that we could go down. This legislation today authorizes the expenditure. It doesn't execute the agreement that we're now putting into the mayor's hands to have her and the Department of Transportation then execute those agreements. My hope is that we can really use the up to $7 million a year to really maximize the number of kids that are getting on and off busses, particularly since the number of the amount that Metro generates in terms of youth or every year is 10 to $12 million a year. So we'd be making a very significant contribution to Metro in terms of an increase and hoping that that commensurate resource will allow for an increase for kids at all ages of the system. Excellent. Okay. Before we vote, I just wanted to thank 85, 85, 87 and the Transit Riders Union and the advocates for just strong and effective advocacy gets things done. Thank you very much for that. Madam Clerk, please call the roll on the passage of the bill. Macheda I O'Brien. I somewhat. Bagshaw Gonzalez Johnson Suarez President Harrell. Height. Eight in favor an unopposed. Bill passed and chair of Senate. Please read the report of the Civil Rights, Utilities, Economic Development and Arts. Committee. Three part of the Civil Rights, Utilities, Economic Development and Arts Committee Agenda Items two and three appointments 1034 and 1035 re appointments of Nikki Hurley and Joseph Case Centers members Seattle LGBTQ Commission for Term two April 30th, 2020.