AN ORDINANCE adopting a budget, including a capital improvement program and position modifications, for The City of Seattle for 2019; and creating positions exempt from civil service; all by a 2/3 vote of the City Council.
The bill passed ensures Chair of Senate any comments on resolution 31853. Those in favor of adopting the resolution. Please vote i i those opposed vote no. The motion carries and the resolutions adopted in the show assign it. Please read Agenda number 34 into the record. Agenda Item 34 Cancel 119 392. Adopting a budget including capital improvement program and position modifications for the City of Seattle for 2019 and creating four positions exempt from civil service all by two thirds vote of the City Council. The committee recommends that the bill passes amended with a divided report with council members back shall Gonzalez, Harrell, Herbold, Johnson, Juarez must gather and O'Brien in favor and councilmember silent opposed. Just from the clerk's perspective, I might have sort of mis described sort of the numbers earlier because we have several budget items after 34. So should we treat 38 as the final approval of the budget? I think that may make sense. This is actually the CFP piece of it. So if everyone is, I'll let. Sorry. Could you explain? Sorry. So 34 is okay. So, so okay. So I did accurately describe it. So let's treat this as the final budget action for 2019, not the endorsed for 2020. So this this one here is where I will we will have to suspend the rules. I'll suspend the council rule relating to the circulation of a city council amendment, which requires 2 hours before the meeting to allow the Council to consider two amendments that would be accountable. 119392 in resolution 31849, which are forthcoming. And what I need a vote on that as well. Or is that just within my discretion? If there's no objection, we will suspend those rules to allow those amendments. Hearing no objection. Seeing no objection. Consider the rules. The Council rule relating to the circulation suspended but also council president. I have a. You have you want to make an amendment? Sure you got. It. I want to move to amend council bill 119392 by substitute substituting version three for version two of attachment and by substituting version three for version two of attachment B second. Okay. And just for the viewing audience, these were the changes that were recently made in open session and debated. And so we want to make sure that our record is clear. Any comments on the amendment? Those in favor of the amendment as described by Councilmember Bagshaw, please vote i. I those oppose vote no. And those substitutions are made. We'll wait to get to 35 before we do that when there will be amendment there as well. Okay, so there you have it. So any comments on council bill? 119392. I'm sure we will have a few if I just do that. Awkward pause. I sometimes do. That's. But I'll do that after comments. Okay. I will move to pass Council Bill 119392 as amended. Okay. Now we have some comments. We're like. I'll do like we did in law school. I'll start calling on you in a minute here. Okay? Okay. Please call the role on the honor. I know. We know. I would like. You know, it's not a clean up, so I'll take that. Okay. But I think everyone's realizing part of your customers wants, so you may have to go. Okay. Friends and fellow activists. This agenda item and the next agenda item were just I do it for the approval of the city budget as a whole. Just like in previous years, I intend to vote no on the budget, even more so than in previous years. This year's budget is an austerity budget, a budget based on the interests of big business, which makes further cuts to the needs of working people and the services they rely on. Every year since I first took office in 2014. We have built a people's budget movement to fight for progressive changes to Seattle's but business as usual budget. And every year our movement wins important victories that make a real material difference in the lives of regular people. On November 7th this year, we held an inspiring people's budget town hall on affordable housing at the Yes Community Center . And I want to thank the activists and the organizations, including labor unions, that made that such a powerful event. And I've had the courage to fight back against this austerity budget. As a representative of working people, it is my job to talk openly about the realities and challenges and setbacks we face. Our movement faces and to not define things. We have to be clear about what is happening in the movement for affordable housing. Last summer, when Amazon issued its threats and big business fought back against having to pay even the modest tax, the Amazon tax, the majority of the council marched in step behind the chamber's drum and betrayed working people by repealing the Amazon tax in a quintessential backroom deal. They robbed the movement in Seattle of the right to fight it out at the ballot box. To answer big business lies by going to the doors of working people around the city. Fortunately, in several other cities around the country. The talk of taxing big business to address the growing national affordable housing crisis was carried forward, inspired in part by the tax Amazon movement here in Seattle, in California, San Francisco, East Palo Alto and Mountain View. All put big business taxes on the ballot and in some cases, far bigger ones than we had in Seattle. And in every city, they passed by large margins here in Seattle, I promise you, we will be we will continue to fight to tax Amazon and big business to fund housing for working people, our people's budget movement. One important victories this year. Thanks to our collective organizing, it is important to recognize these victories of social movements, even though they are less than what is needed, because they underscore an essential message that when we organize and fight back, we can win. The LGBTQ community did fantastic organizing and won funding for LGBTQ senior services to backfill the trans services, funding unacceptably cut by the mayor, and funding for the LGBTQ Health and Wellness Center at Noble High School. The People's Budget Movement Activism made sure that the residents of share and real shelters can continue to keep their shelters open this year, despite the ongoing IT terms of the establishment to shut it down. And I don't think we've seen the end of it. This is the second year in a row that the mayor tried to close their doors, driving them to the streets. And this is the second year that they have organized and that we are one we successfully won the first ever eviction. City funded eviction. Defense attorney to help Seattle residents facing evictions to defend their rights. This is an important precedent and we will be back to fight for more attorneys so that in the ongoing assault against tenant rights, where the rampant evictions in this city, working people have access to legal help, we need to fund the right to counsel so no one is expected to go to eviction court unprepared. And we will be pushing next year to overhaul the predatory tenant eviction system. Renters have far more right in eviction court in other cities and states, and that needs to change. Here in Seattle, the indigenous community finally won stable funding for the annual Indigenous People's Day celebration. Our movement has fought for this every year since we first forced the establishment to end Columbus Day and create Indigenous Peoples Day in 2014 . And this time we have won the funding in an hour movement one funding for many other things that will make a real difference in people's lives. We also won what are called statements of legislative intent to continue to push forward the process of creating a public bank in Seattle and to demand progress from the mayor in choosing a location for a safe consumption site. But while all these victories by our movement were important on the burning crisis of affordable housing facing working people, the establishment was completely unwilling to match its flowery rhetoric with action. When she delivered her State of the City address in February, Mayor Durkan said, quote, Our first priority, though, must be to build a more affordable Seattle. Number one, we have to build more low income and middle class housing as quickly as we can. End quote. But the reality is those words are a lie. Building code, more low income and middle class housing, unquote, was not the mayor's number one priority. It was not her number two priority or even her number one priority. It was less than 1% of the budget that she proposed for affordable housing, and that included only funds that legally could go nowhere else. Not one new dollar was proposed for affordable housing by Mayor Austerity Durkan. And we have to be honest. The majority of the Council has also completely failed to do anything substantially different. The people's budget movement put forward 11 different options to fund building, more affordable housing, and made it clear that we would support other ideas also. The majority of the council voted down all of them while proposing no alternatives. The majority of the council voted against funding affordable housing again and again and again. They would not authorize a bond for affordable housing. They use bonds again and again to benefit big business approved projects in addition to the billions of state funds to dig the tunnel. They are investing hundreds of millions of city funds to build the waterfront, to make millions for the big developers and increase property values of super wealthy people downtown. But they will not bond for housing. They refuse to bring back the Amazon tax. This is not surprising, but neither did they put forward any alternative ways to tax big business or the rich in this increasingly unequal city in this state which has the most aggressive tax system in the nation. But the burden of taxes falls overwhelmingly on working people instead of on the richest man in the world and his billionaire friends. They would not fund affordable housing with revenue from not opening a new big business tax loophole for Big Pharma's drug research. They prioritize spending 1 million on studying how to create new downtown street tolls, which are yet another regressive tax. Instead of using that money for affordable housing, they funded sweeping homeless encampments on one corner to another, rather than using those funds to build affordable housing. In fact, we have now heard most councilmembers extoll the virtues of the euphemistically named navigation team with zero evidence. After hundreds of sweeps last year and hundreds every year before that, the city has failed to provide evidence of even one person transition to permanent housing by the navigation team. They measure every other homeless service based on transitions to permanent housing or even hygiene services, which are only meant to provide shower, bathroom and laundry services to homeless people so that they have a lifeline to be able to get to their jobs, are asked to drag their transitions to permanent housing. But the sweeps, which are 100% about moving people are never asked where do people actually go and how many get permanent housing? Council members talk about data and in the same breath they support the sweeps with zero data. Councilmembers talk about race and social justice initiative, which is based on asking affected. Community is what is needed. But then they ignored what we have never heard one single homeless person say, which is that the navigation team actually helped them get permanent housing. In my committee we have heard testimony from someone who has been swept eight times. It has been such a cruel and ineffective waste of money, but councilmembers would not support using these funds for affordable housing instead, which is the real solution to homelessness. We proposed funding affordable housing by collecting the costs of staffing special events. Council members voted no. Council members voted against redirecting funds to affordable housing instead of prioritizing new computers in police cars. Council members voted against capping city executive salaries or reducing the number of city executives, or slowing police hiring to fund affordable housing. Council members voted against reducing their own salaries to the area median income of $17,200 in order to fund some affordable housing. In fact, when there was money left over from the balancing during the Budget Committee meeting last Wednesday, council members voted against using that extra money for affordable housing. Budget Chair Bagshaw said that at that time that she suspected Gordon there would be another need for that funding and so she couldn't support using it for affordable housing. In other words, this political establishment has spent interminable hours talking about affordable housing, but those words could not be more empty. This budget increases the police budget by over $70 million, but it cannot find $1 more for affordable housing. We need to be crystal clear the housing crisis in Seattle is not because of a lack of ideas or creativity. This crisis is purely a result of a lack of political will to stand up against Amazon and big business. The political establishment has made it clear working class people are not welcome in Seattle. If you are Amazon, if you are downtown real estate interests, Seattle will give you whatever investment you want paid for with the ever increasing regressive property and sales taxes on working people. But if you are a hard working Seattle struggling to pay rent, they are happy to push you out of your home, your neighborhood, and possibly out of the city. Remember, not only as homelessness continued to rise, but for working renters that are housed, almost half are rent burdened who are making ever greater sacrifices in other aspects of their lives to be able to stay housed. So like in previous years, our people's budget movement one important victories. But big business interests continue to dominate the large swaths of the city budget. What we are able to win depends entirely on the strength of our movements. That is why the same council voted against the Amazon tax first, then in favor of it, then repealed it all in the course of a few months. Their votes were not based on facts or evidence or data. Their votes were certainly not based on principles. They were being pushed by the balance of power in society between big business and the affordable housing movement. When the movement has a greater balance of power, then we will see the right votes. The way will push them back again is by building our movement. 50 years ago, Martin Luther King Jr said, quote, If our nation can spend $35 billion a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam and 20 billion to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God's children on there to feed right here on Earth and quote his words from 1967 are, if anything, more meaningful today in a city. But a single billionaire is financing his own spaceships. While thousands of people have been driven into homelessness, have overflowed their shelters and are living on the streets. We did not win a people's budget today, but we are building the sort of movement that can win one in the future. And I am proud and honored to be part of that movement. This movement is not limited to Seattle either. It is building in other cities also, including in Queens, New York, where working people are right now protesting in their outrage at the sweetheart deals given to Jeff Bezos, while New York housing and its transportation infrastructure are in crisis. I also want to thank central staff director Kirsten Armistead and her staff Greg Dawes, Don Edo, Patricia Lee, Ali Banerjee. Asha Benko Drummond. Lisa Kay, Tracey Ratcliffe, Adam Lee, Eric Son. Brian. Goodnight, Jeff Sims and Kelvin Zhao, who all were directly instrumental in helping my office prepare the budget amendment. Particularly, I want to thank them for putting together the 11 different amendments with 11 different ways to fund affordable housing, which can seem like a thankless task, particularly when the majority of the council rejects all of them. However, I want general staff to know your work has given hundreds of regular people throughout Seattle a concrete solution to the affordable housing crisis to fight for and to also show that it is not this or that technicality that the Democratic establishment objected to. It is the very idea of standing up against big business by taking action on the housing crisis. And we have seen that while we have won some things today, even the budget amendments we lose are a starting point for people to organize to win changes in the future. Like happened with the Amazon tax last budget. So thank you all again for everything you do. Let's keep building this movement. Thanks to all the hundreds of working people who came together this year to fight for a people's budget. You have collectively, yet again, set an example for working people around the country fighting for an alternative to austerity, inequality and the bankruptcy of corporate politics . I will vote no on this austerity budget today. Three. Thank you. Cancer Research Council member Beck Shaw as chair. Would you like to say a few words? Good. Thank you so much. Thank you again, all of you, for being here. I want to talk a little bit about the budget that we balanced, and it's taken us a couple of months to get here. But it reflects our collective commitment to invest in areas that we believe need our attention most. And we did this with revenues that we have in hand, those that were estimated to come in. And our balanced budget is focused on making our city a safer and more welcoming place for everybody who is in Seattle. And while we've taken many steps to accomplish these goals, what we all know is that we're going to have to have sustained efforts in 2019 to implement what we're doing and to really look at the regional housing that we've been talking about. So when I started off with this budget, I identified what available revenue sources we had so that we didn't overcommit or that we didn't expend money in areas where we couldn't continue next year and into 2020. I really wanted to focus on an action oriented budget as well, which meant I didn't want us to be spending money on more plans that we'd already been planning. Let's build on what we already know and get some things done. We identified individual council members, top requests and their values, and I did what I could to make sure that people were able to get and to put in for their own districts or their own most important items the money that they needed to accomplish their goals. And also, I wanted to prioritize, and we did the kind of coordinated investments that we can make with King County and with our other counties going forward. So I've got a number of thank you that I want to make, but I do want to just express that through this budget we have managed to expand services for our most vulnerable populations, things like treatment on demand and services to address substance abuse abuse disorders. Many of you have heard me talk over the years about wanting to have expanded buprenorphine systems, places where people could get methadone. We have organizations like Evergreen Treatment that will now have more money and resources and more capital money. We're also going to be reforming our criminal legal system. And I want to express my thanks first to Councilmember Gonzales, who's been my vice chair throughout this. But working with her over the next year, there will be a lot of things that we can do where we're coordinating with our municipal courts, with our city attorney, with our prosecuting attorneys, with our defenders. There is much that we already know, but the coordinated effort is something that's going to not only save us money, keep more people out of jail, and make sure that we are providing to individuals the services and the help that they need. I also want to extend my thanks for the help in improving some of the systems that we have identified specifically. One of my top goals this this year, which we have managed to accomplish, is to create a low acuity response team. And this was something that we modeled off other cities Colorado Springs, Mesa, Arizona, for example, have what they they call a care program. What we're going to be doing is responding and helping our first responders to people who are chronically ill. Those people who are oftentimes on our streets or were calling or the people are calling on their behalf over and over again, whether they have behavioral health or mental health problems or chronic illnesses, rather than sending out multiple ladder trucks, multiple ambulances. We can have a system set up to ensure coordinated and effective responses that were our first responders with behavioral and mental health folks can arrive in something less than ladder trucks, but with the supplies that they need to be helpful. I also want to acknowledge that we have increased funding for mental health outreach, our expanded treatment for individuals with substance use disorders. We made whole the navigation team. I want to say thank you right in advance, Councilmember Mosquito for working with me on that. We have made sure that the 217 beds were protected, the additional beds for emergency shelter. From the beginning we agreed that that was not going to be cut and we have some additional day center work. And I want to acknowledge that we have additional services that will help Native American and Alaska Native women. More on that in a moment. So also, we have made some great capital improvements in neighborhood investments, such as in South Park that Councilmember Herbold had brought up. And again, something I'm excited about for 2019 is a child care facility. We put $100,000 into the budget to make sure we've got a child care center here at City Hall that will be dedicated first for our city employees and open to the public if there's spaces left. I'm anxious to. 2019 to make sure that that happens. I also want to say thank you to my Parks Department, Christopher Williams and crew who are here. Thanks for your good help around the U.S. or Crescent. The help that we have for some additional capital money to really make some effective safety health and just really public vitality improvements between city hall and the courthouse next door and then towards Pioneer Square. And really, before I get into individual thank you. I want to acknowledge what I really believe is that we've made some important investment here that are going to improve people's lives. But in no way do we have the ample resources that we need to make that big jump. In part what councilmembers want just talked about. I believe that we need to make significant investments in our regional programs as well, that the city taxpayers cannot do it all by ourselves. But we need to coordinate with the county and with our other cities within King County. Mayor Durkan has already gotten this started. A number of our council colleagues, including Councilmember Johnson here, Councilmember Claudia Balducci across the street, have been working on this. 2019 will be a year, I believe, where we're going to make some big progress. So to Mayor Durkan and her departments, I really want to acknowledge that we took their budget and built on that and spent it just extending my thanks to all the departments that continue to work with us and once again acknowledging the good work that our council central staff had. The clerks. Thank you to Amelia, Jody, Linda, for your constancy and your help. And you're creating scripts that would help me get through substituting motions once again. And then I just have some very direct, personal thanks to my colleagues up here and just starting from my left at the end, Councilmember was always the advocate for D5. Thank you for the good work that you did in bringing money forward for the food banks and the additional shelter Mother Nation, God's Little Acre Aurora Commons. They'd never seen the kind of help that you brought to them this year. So thank you for that. The Lake City Community Center, I know, is thrilled that that is going to be a place that will be really extended and expanded. So thank you for that. Councilmember Mosquito, since I'm just going to state coming down the row here, your 2% increase across the board for our human services providers. Thank you for taking the lead on that. It was wonderful today to be with you as you were bringing some workers forward and just tell me what a difference that's going to make in their lives, small but mighty and symbolic. And I also want to thank you for working with me on the idea of getting a child care center here in city hall. And. One thing I just have to say. Councilmember Mosquito, I appreciate you about you so much is just the amazing good cheer you bring every day to this dias. I'm very thankful to be a colleague working on these things with you and just the ways you seek compromises. It means a great deal to me. So thank you so much for that. Councilmember Sawant, I want to thank you for working on the basic shelter, the 217 bed, something that you and I agreed on from the very beginning. I appreciated your advocacy for the eviction attorney and of course getting some stable money for the Indigenous Peoples Day. So thank you for that. Councilmember O'Brien, it's always a pleasure. Thank you for working on the green jobs, for expanding lead, for expanding the evergreen treatment hours that we know so important. The work that you did on the Equitable Development Initiative and frankly recognizing the importance of our Office of Sustainability and Environment Climate Director. So, you know, you led those charges, and I thank you for that. Council President Harrell sitting right next to you. Thank you for helping me through all this. But for your investments in historic Seattle and Northwest African American Museum. Of course, you did a lot around our community outreach, but also the money that you were able to add at the last minute around the central area community PDA so that we can get more more affordable housing in that area and apprenticeship programs. Councilmember Gonzales, it's just been a real pleasure working with you. Thank you for your help. Helping me through as my vice chair on this. I think it was a very effective process having you there, helping and focusing and reminding us about the needs of many communities that you're very close to. So I appreciate that. And you know what? You did what you did with helping us get defense services for sexual assault survivors and immigrant and refugees, the LGBTQ senior community services, it's all going to make a difference. Councilmember Johnson, you've done a lot for your district around Magnuson athletic fields, getting those advance in the Sippy and the Magnuson Community Center. Ours open more investments in our community health engagement locations, as well as increasing dollars for food delivery services and some very important small but very important visual things such as your suicide prevention signs on the bridges. That was something that hadn't been brought up before. Thank you for that. And Councilmember Herbold, already one advocate. I'm very grateful to you for all of the things that you brought forward, whether it was a South Park public safety coordinator or increasing the pool hours in your community and getting additional funds for your school. But you've done a lot around making sure that 35th is paved. And you really brought home many of the things that I know the people in your community have needed. So I just want to recognize you and recognize you all for being super colleagues. And I know that there's been some stressful moments, but I appreciate the fact that everybody's worked together to reach that compromise. And again, thanks to all of you in the community who've been willing to come forward, provide your comments, your thoughts. Jonathan, thank you for wearing the walk with not by sweatshirt. I appreciate what you're doing as well. So to all of you, to those of you that are representing share, that are living in our community. You are always welcome here. And I appreciate so much the words that you brought to us. It helps us. Thank you. Chair Becky Shaw and Councilmember Bagshaw. Councilmember Johnson. I just want to say a big thank you to you, Councilman Bagshaw, for helping to get this across the finish line. You stole most of my speech with a little couple of three things that you had on that I'm proud to fight for. But, you know, in addition, there are many advocates who spend a lot of time and energy in city hall over the last several months as we debate and advocate for individual priorities within our purview is and one of those is still hanging out here. And I want to say thank you to her. So for the folks from the Public Defender's Association who fought so hard for the work around community health engagement locations, the additional $100,000 that we put into the budget this year brings our city investment to $1.4 million. When you couple that with the money from the mid coming from the county, we expect that number to be about $3 million. That should be plenty for us to make sure that we site an open a safe consumption site this year, which I think is critical for our city to continue to make sure that we focus on people who are alive, staying alive and thinking of our people as people. Because I don't believe that any human being is a lost cause. Thank you. Okay. We have a bill that's been amended. Councilmember Skeeter, you have the floor. Thank you, Mr. President. First, I want to start by thanking the budget chair, Councilmember Bagshaw. You have welcomed me into this budget making process and made me feel very welcome. Thank you for working with my team and my office throughout this process to make sure that our proposals could jointly be more successful. I also want to thank your staff member, Alison, as well. She has worked with us to make sure that this budget stayed on track and helped to juggle nine of our different priorities up here. So I really appreciate her work along with our central staff. Thank you so much for all your work throughout the last few months here. I do want to thank my staff. This was our first time at going through the budget process. So a huge thank you for SAGE, for her leadership in helping all of us get through this process. Thank you to Michael and Ruthanne Friday for all your incredible work as well. And we know that today we have made some significant down payments on some really pressing issues in our city. It goes without saying that we have a huge task in front of us. And today we make some inroads into trying address trying to address monumental tasks like taking on homelessness, creating more affordable housing, dealing with mobility needs for transportation throughout our cities. And we're doing this with no new revenue. So what we've been able to do in front of us really is an effort to try to address some of the most critical elements that we see in our city. And what you've heard from us is a commitment to come back and find additional revenues so that we can address these pressing issues with urgency and integrity. And I think that we all understand the significant revenue restraints that are upon us, whether it's through the types of revenue or the limitations on how we can spend that revenue. There's compounding issues also at play at the state level, multiple imon initiatives. The fact that the state is the only well, it's one of the most prosperous states without an income tax, without a capital gains tax, without a corporate income tax. We have a lot of issues in this whole state and as a region that we can continue to address to make sure that we're really getting at the heart of the regressive nature of our tax structure. In addition to that, though, as we talk about needing additional dollars for housing, you've continued to hear us call for us to more equitably invest in developing housing throughout the city and outside of the budget. I know myself and Councilmember Johnson and a number of other council members are committed to addressing the fact that 86% of our residential land is still zoned for single family use. When we have such a huge housing crisis, the need for apartments, first time home ownership options, the need to live near transit facilities and child care and jobs. We have to address the zoning limitations as well, and that is something that we will continue to address. And as we do, we also, I hope what you've heard from us in this budget is we're lifting up the words of renters. As a renter, we all know it's important for us to remember that over half of the residents in Seattle are renters. And as we create more house options that are affordable, we also have invested in this budget in tenant protections and tenant rights, which I'm really proud of. So I think I think my colleagues and the community for making sure that we were able to get some of these investments in there. And I will I am committed to continuing to work with you all to make sure that we have the funding that we need for housing, addressing the homelessness crisis, investing in health, and making sure that our communities are kept whole. Part of this work, I think, is going to be done in our efforts to look at the reset of Move Seattle so we can address the need for more transit options. Part of this work is going to be done through the Select Committee on Homelessness and Housing Affordability, which I'm happy to co-chair with my colleagues to make sure that we're not just looking again at what the route is, but trying to figure out how we can invest in the solution. And in order to do so, we need revenue. We also know that our interest in scaling up some of these easements is going to require us continuing to lift up our voices again. And much of what you have done in this budget is because you came to testify, you shared your stories. You were here every day over the last three months, let alone the last year that I've been here. It's almost been a year. And here's what we I am excited to lift up. In addition to what Chair Boxer mentioned, I just want to highlight a few pieces that I'm really proud about and want to thank you for your leadership in this child care facility, in this building, making sure that we're eliminating funding for jail beds that are not being used and continuing to scale down the number of people that are going into incarceration. We're funding a study for looking at air and noise pollution and Beacon Hill, and we're making sure that our zip code does not contribute to our life expectancy and our health outcomes. We're funding a home zone pilot project to calm down traffic. We're investing in the Thomas Street Greenway. We're stopping our efforts while we're trying to curb our efforts to contract out so many positions, we are looking at how we can get rid of the tax on tampons. We are trying to create a more equitable tax structure, even though it's one of many issues that we need to take on. We're also addressing the need for us to have a more public health response in our communities. And we're scaling up our communicable disease response with our partners in public health. We're investing in creating an accurate census so that every resident in Seattle can get counted and make sure that every federal dollar follows that resident and that we're not leaving any of our community members behind. We've created a racial equity toolkit so we can analyze our Seattle growth strategy and do proactive work before the next comprehensive plan. And as you heard today, we're investing in the frontline workers, the mental health providers, chemical dependency counselors, those who are helping individuals with case management to keep jobs, find jobs, stay in the schools so that they don't go back out into the streets so that we can create true housing stability and hopefully one day build the housing so that we can help move people in. I know that this was not everything that we all wanted because we don't have the sufficient revenue need that we need. But I know that working together, we can continue to make sure that we are addressing these pressing challenges in our city. The pressing challenges that we have are not unique to Seattle, but I think that in the next six months to a year, we will come back to you with additional options for helping to invest in our families, our seniors, our children and our local small businesses. And with that, I thank you, Council President and Madam Chair, for all the work that you put into this year's budget. Thank you, councilmember skater. Councilmember Suarez. Q I wasn't going to say anything, but I will be very brief. This is my third budget. Here in Olympia, I sat through five budgets, and it was it's definitely a different process in the state of Washington. First of all, I just want to really and I really do mean this I really want to thank council member , our chairperson Sally Bagshaw, for doing a great process and taking the time to listen. And. Talk and agree and disagree and be okay when we don't agree. I appreciate that. I want to thank Alison. Alison, you were amazing. Thank you again for taking the time to come in our office and talk to us and work through difficult issues. And of course, a big thank you to director Kirsten Armstead and central staff and all of the people who help us and do the charts, work late at night, work on weekends, call us on Saturdays and Sundays . I don't think people. See what goes on behind the scenes, but I really. Want to thank them. And most of all, I really, truly want to thank my colleagues, all the people up here. We all work together. We work hard. We don't always agree. We don't always get what we want. I think there's a song about that. But we try to work together. With the limited resources that we. Have. I think every year I'm always I'm always awestruck and always still thinking about how we can make our city better. And for 2019, I look forward to a regional response to our most critical issues, and that is. Sheltering the unsheltered food. Scarcity, addressing the opioid addiction, and also addressing missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. I think one thing that I've always known in living in the city is that Seattle. Is a big city with big city. Problems, and sometimes I think we don't see. It that way that we aren't this small little town, provincial town anymore. We actually have big city problems which require us to reach. Out and across the aisle and certainly to have a regional response to the issues that are affecting. All of us. As my Uncle Billy used to say, if a stream is polluted or a watershed. Is polluted, it isn't Pierce County that just get sick, or King County or Thurston County. We all get sick. So it's all. Of our jobs to keep the environment clean, to have jobs. To look at health, to have a safety net for those that don't have what. Some of us are so lucky to have. And so with that. Again, I want to thank my colleagues for. All of us working together. And with that. Again, thank you, Councilmember. Our chairperson Bagshaw. Thank you. Councilman. Worse. Okay. Thanks for those words. Colleagues and I think we are ready to vote. So having said that, please call the roll on the passage of council bill 119392 as amended. Gonzalez I. Herbold I. Johnson Whereas mascara i. O'Brien Sergeant No. Bagshaw High President Harrell High eight in favor one opposed. The bill passes and the chair will sign it. And let's go with the resolution. Please read 35 into the record.