AN ORDINANCE relating to the 2018 Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise Levy; amending the levy implementation and evaluation plan adopted by Ordinance 125807 to provide for emergency childcare services; ratifying and confirming the Mayor’s Civil Emergency Order - Emergency Childcare Services for Front-line Essential Workers; declaring an emergency; and establishing an immediate effective date; all by a 3/4 vote of the City Council.
Agenda Item two Council Bill 119771 relating to the 2018 Families, Education, Preschool and Promise Levy amending the Levy Implementation and Evaluation Plan adopted by Ordinance 125807 to provide for emergency child care services provided by and confirming the Mayor's Civil Emergency Order. Emergency Childcare Services for frontline essential workers, declaring an emergency and establishing an immediate effective date all by a three fourths vote of the City Council. Thank you. I will move to pass cancel bill 119771. Is there a second? Okay. It's been moved on second. It did pass the bill and as the sponsor of the bill, I'll go ahead and address the substantive parts of the bill and then I will open it up for an amendment that is a friendly amendment from Council member Herbold. And then we'll go ahead and take your comments about the bill as amended so really quickly. In June 2018, the City Council approved Ordinance 12560 for submitting a proposition to voters to fund education services with a property tax levy that would generate approximately $619.6 million over a seven year period. The Families, Education, Preschool and Promise Levy or FAP lays out four investment areas for levy funding, preschool and early learning K through 12 school and community based grants K through 12 Health and Seattle Promise Section seven of the adopting ordinance, provided that levy proceeds may only be spent in accordance with an implementation and evaluation plan approved by the ordinance and by the City Council. That plan was approved by the Council in April 2019 originally, and this plan provides detailed information about Council's funding expectations in each of the four areas that I just previously outlined and March 27, the mayor issued an emergency order that would provide emergency child care services to essential workers, as defined by the Washington Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. These workers include health care workers, first responders, pharmacy workers, and Grocery Store Workers. Council Bill 119771 was originally transmitted to us by the Mayor's Office and the Department of Education and Early Learning. This legislation would amend the Families in Education, Preschool and Promise Levy Implementation and evaluation plan to include temporary emergency child care services for essential or frontline essential workers consistent with a mayor's emergency order that was issued on the 27th of March. These would be FAP Levy funded services in order to formally include these childcare services as an eligible expense for use of levy funds. The executive transmitted this proposed legislation to Council amending the Levy's implementation and evaluation plan and the total and total expenditures by the child care services is limited to the amount of funds that otherwise would have been used to fund the Seattle Preschool Program during the same period of time. Contracts. All contracts under this bill will be limited to an initial term of 30 days, and the Director of Deal may extend these contracts for up to two additional 30 day periods. This proposed bill would declare a finding of the council that child care services with developmentally appropriate activities provided on an emergency basis during school closures. Closures are consistent with a suite of education services defined in the enabling ordinance, and that this bill would also declare that there is an immediate need for essential workers to have access to child care services, and it would ratify and confirm the mayor's emergency order. The proposed bill attaches as attachment two to that is listed on this agenda an emergency addendum to the FAP Implementation and evaluation plan that effectively operationalize the Mayor's Emergency Order on child care services for essential workers. The agenda makes clear that child care services will be paid for by using funds that were allocated within the preschool and early learning investment area only. These dollars, under normal circumstances, as I previously mentioned, would have been used to support the delivery and operation of the Seattle Preschool Program and the Seattle Preschool Pathway Program. However, with the closure of schools and the governor's stay at home order, many of the SBP and STP pathway programs are not currently in operation. That means that FAP levy funds are available to be redirected to support these emergency child care services. Importantly, the executive cannot exceed an amount equivalent to the funds that would have been spent on these strategies during the emergency time period. This is an important provision to make sure that future years of SBP and the SBP pathway programs will continue to be fully funded as originally intended in the implementation and evaluation plan we adopted in the spring of 2019. And then lastly, I did receive written confirmation from Deal that the FEP Levy Oversight Committee was consulted as required by law, and the Oversight Committee agreed that the implementation of emergency child care services is. Inappropriate use of Beth Levy funds during the civil emergency. So colleagues, out of the abundance of caution, I wanted to make sure that we have this bill before us to make sure that we continue to have the accountability and oversight necessary for the expenditure of these important but limited taxpayer approved levy funds in the space of early learning. So that is the structure of the bill and what is before us and what this bill will do. Councilmember Herbold has an amendment that she'd like to make to the underlying bill that would require additional reporting requirements. So I'm going to hand it over to Councilmember Verbal to introduce formally introduced her amendment, and then we'll take up her amendment and then come back to the substantive bill as amended for comments. Councilmember Herbold and you are on mute, Councilmember. I certainly am. Thank you. So I am moving Amendment One to Council Bill 11 9771. Back in. So it's been moved and seconded. So why don't you go ahead and address the amendment? Sure. So this amendment just simply requires a monthly report from the executive on the emergency child care efforts. I've been hearing from people in my personal network that today, in the efforts of both SPS, Seattle Public Schools, as well as DIAL, that the demand for child care for the identified populations has not been what they initially expected . And of course, we know that one thing that often happens is once it's provided, then the demand grows. And I just want to make sure that sites don't end up having excess capacity and that there be consideration to expanding child care, a child care provision to other groups of essential workers, for instance, transit workers, the folks who are putting their their selves in in harm's way to do the essential work of getting people around, as well as our homeless service providers that are on the front lines. Just want to make sure that if there is excess capacity within the system, that there is an ability to to serve more families. And so the required monthly reports from the executive includes the number of emergency child care sites currently open operating and their locations, the number of staff at each site, the number of students at each site, including this aggregation, but the type of essential worker that the parents of those students perform. The amount of funds spent on emergency child care services and the fiscal impacts to other families. Education, preschool and promise levy investments from redirecting resources to emergency child care services. This amendment was circulated on Friday to council offices by a central staffer. Brian Goodnight. Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember Herbold. Any questions or comments about the amendment? Hearing and seeing none. We will go ahead and take up the amendment. Will the clerk please call the roll on the adoption of Amendment One? Councilmember Morales. Councilmember Morales. Hi. Sorry about that. Councilmember Macheda. I. Councilmember Peterson. I. Council members want. I. Councilmember Strauss. I. Councilmember Herbold, I. Councilmember Suarez, I. Councilmember Lewis. I. President Gonzales. I. Nine in favor, nine opposed. The motion carries and the amendment is adopted. Colleagues, are there any further comments on the bill as amended? Councilmember Herbold, the floor is yours. Thank you. This is more of a just a flagging of an issue. And. Council President Gonzales, you may you may know whether or not Jill is planning to to address this. But one of the issues I think that was in some ways raised in the letter from the advisory board relates specifically to a really important equity issue . Given that child care providers provide care for the children of doctors and nurses who are on the front lines and exposed to coronavirus every day and through the children that they're caring for, child care workers are facing are facing the same exposures. And there's been a movement towards hazard pay for grocery workers, hazard pay for homeless service provider providers. And I'm just wondering if the department is considering whether or not to consider hazard pay for this this group of professionals that are doing essential work that is critical to the functions of our first responders. I do not know the answer to that question. I know that the question has been posed. I think it's an important question, and I know that there's been, at least as it relates to the contracts with childcare providers in in school public school buildings, there's been a lot of conversation about sanitation and how to make sure that the environment is is as safe as it can possibly be under the circumstances. But I think that it's a it's an important question to get a follow up information from from deal, and we'll make sure to do that and circulate it to you. Thank you. You're welcome. Are there any other questions or comments? Councilmember Mosquito, please. Thank you. Council President. I thank you for your work on this legislation. And thanks to the Mayor's office for sending it down. I agree with all of the comments that Councilmember Horrible just outlined as well in terms of. Who needs access to these critical child care services. So I appreciate. That friendly amendment. I also note that the Department of Early Learning director. Chappelle has received. A email from the folks at SEIU 925 who are contract workers who provide childcare to individuals throughout the city and SEIU. 925 represents family childcare providers throughout the city. I'm hoping that they will continue to be used as an. Important resource in this effort. To make sure that all of our essential. Workers have access to high quality childcare. As we current for the current population and for any. Expanded population. Just want to note from the email that they sent, they note that the city of Seattle is a strong has a strong. Labor history and that. SEIU wants to help provide. Workers across our region with access to high quality childcare and also make. Sure that they're accessing high quality childcare. For those who are organized and have a. Voice on their job, especially in this time. We know how important. It is for people to be able to raise their hand and speak up if they feel unsafe at their place of employment. And that's true for the grocery workers who we help protect by removing the five cent fee for bags last week and also. Includes childcare providers as we look to make sure that their services are available across the city. So just want to ping. That for our department as they're looking. To deploy not just our city dollars, but also the King County PTA money and look forward to their ongoing. Participation with our friends at SEIU United five. Thank you for those comments. Really appreciate the the note there. I will say that in my conversations with the executive, it's my understanding that there's they're looking at at every single opportunity they can to figure out how to meet the childcare needs for essential workers. And so that includes not just contractors in center based facilities, but, you know, sort of making sure that we're keeping an eye on how we can make sure that the system is being fully responsive. And I think that the amendment that was advanced by Councilmember Verbal that we've now adopted is going to help us fine tune exactly where the gaps are to the extent that there are gaps. And so I think that that that those data points will be absolutely critical to understanding how else we can modify the model in order to meet this critical need for these workers. Are there any other questions or comments from my colleagues? Okay. Hearing them. I just want to say that I'm I'm I'm really excited that we can advance this legislation. I'm also mindful of the impact that it can have on levy existing levy funds and programs and services that we fund through it. That's part of the reason why I wanted to make sure that out of the abundance of caution, we had a legislation to formalize this as opposed to just relying on an executive order. I think it's important for us to have that accountability and that transparency around how these dollars are going to be spent and having sort of additional details out in the public about our expectations around how the executive order was going to be operationalized in this space. I will say that that that doing this work just really highlights for me that we still have an absolute crisis around child care in our city. It's part of the reason why we are scrambling. And so it's not not just a crisis for these essential workers, but for everybody. And I think we're seeing that during a period of a public health crisis, in a pandemic like this, we are experiencing the gaps in our child care system and in an even deeper, more profound way. And that's part of the reason why I've been working with so many of you and former council colleagues on on really, really making sure that we're having a conversation about how to best meet the needs of working families who have children in our city. So I think this is a good step, good step forward for this small body of workers, but look forward to being on the other side of this coronavirus and continuing to have a conversation about how we meet that, how we close the gaps in the childcare space in the long term. So with that being said, I am going to ask the clerk to call the roll on the passage of the bill as amended. Councilmember Morales. I. Councilmember Mesquita. I. Councilmember Peterson. I. Council members. So what. I. Councilmember Strauss. I. Councilmember Herschel. Council member Herbal. I. Councilmember Suarez. Right. Councilman Lewis, I. President Gonzales. I. Nine in favor and unopposed. The bill passes as amended and the chair will sign it will court please affix my signature to the legislation on my behalf. All right. Agenda item three. Will the clerk please read agenda item three into the record?