AN ORDINANCE relating to land use and zoning; amending the Seattle Comprehensive Plan to incorporate changes proposed as part of the 2021 Comprehensive Plan annual amendment process.
President Gonzalez High nine in favor. Nine opposed. The bill passes and the chair will sign. It will affect my signature to the legislation on my behalf. All righty. Well, please read item 13 into the record and I am 13. Cancel Bill 120 154 Blaine 26 Downing of Ending Sale Comprehensive Plan to incorporate changes proposed as part of the 2021 Comprehensive Plan Annual Amendment Process. The committee recommends the bill passed as amended. All right. I'm to hand back over to Councilmember Strauss to walk us through. Thank you. Council President. Colleagues, two more bills than I promised will be done. Council Bill 120154 amends the comprehensive plan as part of the 2021 annual amendment process. As we just discussed, this leads us to a major update and these amendments we considered a year ago. If I have that right now, I'll text me if I have said that incorrectly. This legislation makes other changes to the comprehensive plan as part of the 2021 annual amendment process. As a reminder, state law allows us to amend comprehensive plan one time per year. The Council engages in a two year process for amending the comprehensive plan first by passing a resolution that sets the docket of amendments to be considered and then considering seven amendments the following year. The amendments in Council Bill 120154 were docketed last year. There are two amendments being made as part of this legislation. The first is a proposal from the community, from community members to add a half block in the new district to the University District Urban Center. The second is a set of changes from the Office of Planning and Development for early implementation of the key aspects of the 1/30 Street Station area plan to encourage denser housing near the future lot transit station that is on schedule. Thank you to Councilmember Juarez. This legislation as transmitted also includes amendments related to manufacturing district areas as part of the mayor's maritime and Industrial Strategy's recommendations. Those amendments had to be removed in committee because CPA has not been concluded on those proposed changes. The mayor's office has shared its intention to conduct an environmental impact statement on most of the proposed changes, which could allow the amendments to be considered next year. The Seattle Office of Planning, the Seattle Planning Commission and Pcdi recommended all the amendments included in this legislation, he added, and the committee mittee urges a vote. Thank you, Council President colleagues. Eight. Are there any additional comments on the bill? I'm not seeing any other hands raised. Oh, I see. One hand raised comes over silent, please. Sorry. Give me a while. To get my I.D.. I. I just want to make sure this is item number 13, Murray. The amendments to the comprehensive plan. Yes, this is item 13. Thank you. I will be voting yes on the comprehensive plan amendments this year because I do not object to any of the amendments this bill contains. But the fact that yet again council members have left out developer impact fees is just stunning and it's completely unacceptable. Developer impact fees are the fees that the city could charge corporate for profit developers to raise tens of millions of dollars in progressive revenue to fund roads, parks and public transit. And in fact, other cities in Washington State charge developer impact fees. As an illustration, developer impact fees in Seattle could have funded $40 million worth of public transit expansion. I want to quote what I said on September 29th of last year, one year and five days ago. Quote, I want to be clear that I object to what has been left out of the bill. In particular, there is no mention of developer impact fees. Developer impact fees can only be passed into law after they are put into the city's comprehensive plan, and the comprehensive plan is amended only once each year. So the fact that the developer and back fees are not included in this bill means that we have to wait another year or two to vote for them for the opportunity to make developers. Big developers pay, corporate developers pay for the impact they have on our city's infrastructure. Unfortunately, there is a long and bureaucratic process for establishing developer impact fees before they can be passed. They need to be in the comprehensive plan and before they can be put in the comprehensive plan, they need to be studied under the state's Environmental Protection Act, CBA outrageously, even though developer impact fees were included in the Resolution Council passed last year, listing the issues that should be studied for this year's comprehensive plan, the mayor refused to do that study. If we had developer impact fees available this year, we could raise the funds to reimburse all the cars to metro busses and ports. And keep in mind, these are, quote, my thoughts on my comments last year. So when I say this year, that meant last year and last year meant two years back. Here we are once again, one year later. And again, this data, my collection agency study. This study has not been done to allow it to be included in the comprehensive plan, despite the fact that it was placed on the list of things that would be done to prepare for this year's comprehensive plan. And despite many, many false amendments from council members, in fact, and from successive councils, you know, it's based on the numbers and from the current ones. In fact, in July of last year, the Council voted yes to include an amendment from my office to our transportation funding bill that added the following various clauses and I quote Whereas developer impact fees would be established as early as 2021 to increase funding to buy bus service hours from Metro. And. WHEREAS, Developer impact fees are a progressive funding source paid for by large corporate developers. And. Whereas, the Seattle City Council intends to complete in 2020 any required CIP analysis to enable developer impact fees to be enacted in 2021. And. WHEREAS, the Seattle City Council is committed to enacting developer impact fees in 2021 raised not less than $44 million, which would allow Seattle to increase funding for Metrobus. Our end quote. This is from the amendment from my office that was accepted by the council to a transportation funding bill. Unfortunately, that type of analysis requires the chair of the Council committees that consider land use to prioritize impact fees for the central staff. Time for the committees. And it's clear that neither Councilmember Peterson nor Strauss, who chaired the committees, have agreed to do that this year. But as a matter of fact, the council as a whole, the Democrats on the council as a whole have not prioritized developer impact fee in any way. This is a clear demonstration of the inordinate power big developers have in Seattle's politics and how much Democratic Party politicians bank do that. Despite the endless rhetoric that we hear, the mayor's office refused to be busy for analysis on developer impact fees in 2020. Then in 2021 it was deprioritized by council members and all of this happens behind closed doors to the public, does not even know who to blame and why things are not moving forward. Why is it that a completely sensible idea like developer impact fees is not going forward? I mean, the reality is it's all political impact fees are hated by corporate developers, not surprisingly. And that is why you see the inaction on the city council in the absence of a real. Campaign, a real grassroots campaign, a real momentum on the ground to push for forward. Like the Amazon backs like $15 an hour, like the many renters rights victories that renters have won this year because we've built independent campaigns to win them. So the overall result is that years have gone by and corporate developers continue to make double digit profit rates, just humongous profits, without paying anything resembling their fair share in taxes . And we can see that developers, contractors, big banks, big corporations, all of whom are making big bucks from construction and development. They are also the entities responsible for denying basic and fair contracts to construction workers. And we are seeing courageous carpenters, union carpenters on strike for or for a fair contract for themselves. And so all of this is in the mix here. I voted yes on the previous agenda item, changing the name of single family zones to neighborhood residential. But let's be crystal clear that Bill was nothing more than a name change, having absolutely no material impact. This is where the political is. That is where the political establishment chose to put their time and energy instead of fighting to introduce developer impact fees. They want us to focus. They want to focus everyone on symbolic issues, ignoring the struggles present to pay their fair share. As I said before, I will be voting yes on the comprehensive plan amendments because I do not object to those amendments in particular. But I urge members of the public who want if we want to rent developer impact music, we want big developers to pay anything resembling their fair share, particularly to urgently expand transit hours in Seattle . Then we will need to build a campaign independent of. The council president. Point Order. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Councilmember Strauss. I appreciate it again. Colleagues, our city council rules do require us to keep our comments focused on the legislative matter that is being debated, as opposed to generalized comments about unrelated legislative matters or only tangentially related legislative matters. So I appreciate your help in in staying true to the requirements of the City Council rule, just to make sure that we are staying efficient and equitable. And in Gonzalez, all my comments were 100% related to the comprehensive plan. So I do not share your point, your your claim that it was anything show or peripheral in any way. Council Members. Council Member So what I and I am I am for the record, disagreeing with your characterization that all of your comments were 100% related to the Council bill before us, which are in, in my understanding, routine amendments to the comprehensive plan that have been in the works for a year. I agree that you would like to see them move for be be more robust and you have an interest in advancing the legislation that you just described. But that is not the matter that is before us. The matter that is before us is contained within this Council bill. Your objections are duly noted. And again, I just want to make sure that we are being efficient and effective with the time that we have together. And I'm just asking for you all to work with me in being able to achieve that. Any additional comments on this bill? I'm not seeing any other hands raised. Council member stress. Would you like to close out debate? Thank you. Council President colleagues, just to respond to some of the things that have been said on the record just a moment ago. Understanding the impact fees have been previously docketed and have been docketed for a number of years. Being docketed is a request to have the executive and executive departments study the issue at hand. And not only that, but counsel put forward the resources. And when I say study, that means to have CPA conducted on the policy proposal. Furthermore, the City Council has put forward the resources to have impact fees studied. So there is no we have made the request of the executive to have acted. We have put forward the resources needed to do so. At this time, we are waiting for CPA to be concluded and before we can amend the comprehensive plan to move to include impact fees. That is the schedule of of land use items. It is out of our control at this point because that is the schedule in which it needs to be completed. And so as we are waiting for a CPA to be conducted or concluded at that, once it is concluded, we would be able to take it up for consideration. Thank you, colleagues. That is the committee report. Thank you so much. Will the court please call the rule on the passage of the bill coupled? Yes. Suarez I. Lewis. Yes. Morales. Yes. Macheda. I. Peterson. I. So. Yes. Strauss. Yes. President Gonzalez, i. Nine in favor and unopposed. Thank you, Madam Clerk. The bill passes, and then I will sign it with the clerk. He's affixed my signature to the legislation on my behalf. Well, the clerk please read item 14 into the record.