AN ORDINANCE authorizing Seattle Parks and Recreation to enter into an agreement with Seattle Preparatory School to replace the Montlake Playfield and continue an ongoing relationship in the Montlake community consistent with the Non-Government Agreement in Attachment 1 to this ordinance.
This will be Councilmember Lewis's legislation. Madam closely, please read item number two into the record. Agenda item two Council Bill 120. Excuse me, three or four to an ordinance authorizing Seattle Parks and Recreation to enter into an agreement with Seattle Repertory School to replace the Montlake playfield and continue an ongoing relationship in the Montlake community consistent with the non-government agreement and attachment one to the ordinance. Thank you. Let me. Councilmember Lewis, if you could just let me read something into the record and then I'll hand it over to you. The reconsideration of Council Bill 120342 is now before the Council. Council members at the June 24 City Council meeting, we considered Council Bill 120342. The bill did not secure the needed five votes to pass it and council member Alice moved to reconsider the bill. The motion carried in the Council Bill was held until this city council meeting. Until the city council meeting pursuant to the city charter. The Council will first consider the motion to reconsider. If the motion to reconsider is adopted, we will move to the passage of the bill as presented by the Public Assets and Homeless Committee. We now have before us a motion to reconsider the bill. Before I ask for a vote on whether or not the Council should open up this bill for discussion and another vote, are there any comments on the pending motion to reconsider the bill? Okay. Not seen any motion or any comments to reconsider the bill. The City Council will now vote to reconsider passage of Council Bill 120342. Will the clerk please call the roll? Councilmember Peterson. Yes. It's a member slot. So just to understand this is to reconsider the vote, not the bill itself. Right. Yes. Am I correct, Madam Clerk? Yes. Yes. Okay. Yes. Councilmember Strauss. Yes. Councilmember Herbold. S Councilmember. Lewis. Yes. Councilmember mosqueda. Councilmember Nelson. I thank the president whereas I seven in favor and unopposed. Thank you. The motion carries in Council Bill 120342 is before the council. Councilmember Lewis as a sponsor of this bill, the floor is yours. Thank you, council president suarez and thank you for that procedural overview as well. I'll keep my comments to the substance of the legislation. This legislation was reported out of the Public Assets and Homelessness Committee a couple of weeks ago as a two part departmental requested legislation to continue the arrangement between the Seattle Parks and Recreation Department and Seattle Crab, with the Montlake playfield located at Montlake Park in the Capitol Hill Montlake neighborhood. Just as a little bit of background a little over a decade ago. The precursor arrangement to this was that Seattle Prep would pay to replace a turf playing field at Montlake Playfield Park, and in return, Seattle Parks and Recreation would give exclusive access to that play field for a string of weeks in the spring and a spring of weeks in the fall, string of weeks in the fall for school related sports and activities. Otherwise, the space would be an open and programable public park in accordance with the standard rules and procedures for all other Seattle Public Park facilities. The turf field wore out after a decade of use and where Seattle Parks is proposing to go back and do this agreement again and have Seattle Prep replace the turf field in exchange for the same programmatic access that they've enjoyed over the past decade. The only material change in this deal to the one that was previously negotiated by Parks is that Seattle Prep will provide 50 hours of community based programing as part of the requirement for this arrangement. So it is a better deal for the city and for the public than the previous iteration of the deal. We did have a robust discussion about this legislation in committee and ultimately passed out of committee with four votes in favor and one abstention and. I don't have any other comments on the legislation, but I would encourage passage and that's just the only remarks I have. Council President. Thank you. Mr. Lewis, I'm going to open the floor to any of my colleagues that would like to address Councilor Lewis's bill, reconsider the bill itself. Cast member, so on. And then after that, we have Councilmember Herbold. Thank you, Councilor Brendan Morris. As I said last week when we were first discussing this bill, I'll be voting no on this contract. Our parks are treasured by the resources that should be available for all. This contract gives a private school exclusive access to the play field for a substantial part of the day, which unfortunately means that it will be unavailable during those hours by anyone else, such as students from Seattle Public Schools. New Astroturf on the play field is no doubt a real benefit. However, I do not think that outweighs losing public control of the space for so much of the day. So for that reason, I will be voting no. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor. Silent. Yes, Herbold. Thanks. I did vote in favor of this and in committee. I know. In the committee vote. I believe Kasper Morales abstained. I'm interested. I wasn't here at full council last week. I'm. I am interested to know what is what has transpired since last week. I believe there are some specific questions asked in the interim. And just I'm interested to know the sort of the substance of of the answers of the questions regarding the public benefit provided by parks, if anybody has that information. Before I move to you, Councilor Lewis, I want to see if there's anyone else, and then I'll move back to you to do concluding remarks. Would you like to respond now to Councilmember Herbert Council member Lewis? I can read some of the remarks that we received in response from Parks to Councilmember Morales as questions in the open session here today. I Campbell released before that. Can you share that. The date on that because I think we all received that that memo. Correct. Well, public. Yes. Yes. The entire council. Council president, as you indicate, was keyed on policy response to Councilmember Morales. Those questions. That email is dated Friday, June 24th. Thank you. And because there was a lot of public discussion at full council last week, I just think it's useful for the public record to hear what those responses were. I think Councilmember Lewis is going to do that. Yes. And Councilmember Herbold and council president, I am happy to summarize the response, the responses that we received from Parks. So just indulge me for a moment. I do have it available and in front of me. One of the questions raised by Councilmember Morales had been How many agreements do we have that offer reserved access for private entity entities in exchange for some level of investment in the parks? Seattle Parks and Recreation responded that the following principles are used to assess the viability of the private entity investments, which are namely determining determining project impact to neighboring communities and their uses of the field. Ensuring community field usage hours are maintained and are not reduced for the general public. Our community benefits from a higher quality field with with the investment. So weighing the benefit of the field against any potential lack of programing time consideration of the location of where the investment was going to be made. So, you know, what is the equity of how we're distributing these arrangements, whether Seattle Parks and Recreation is in a position to make their own investment in the site instead of a private partner, the size of the investment and the entity being able to provide public benefits, which as we establish is a bigger emphasis in the renegotiation of the deal. They then provide a list of the current standing arrangements that are similar to Montlake, including Montlake. So in addition to the Montlake arrangement, South Park Play Field with Seattle Academy in our base stadium with Seattle City University Bar as play fields with West Seattle Little League and the Magnuson Cricket Pitch with the Seattle Cricket Club. So five total arrangements across Seattle Parks and Recreation that have this kind of contract. But the and I won't go into the rest of the details. But if colleagues want to review, Parks did provide a significant amount of detail on all of those agreements and additions that they can review for the level of investment and public benefit that is detailed in the memo. The next question from Councilmember Morales was What analysis has been done on Seattle Park facilities to assess local neighborhood access for private school access? And Seattle Parks indicated they're currently conducting outreach to assess what each of the local neighborhoods desire for park play fields. And this is also sort of been a component of the Metropolitan Park District outreach that we're familiar from from that process. They track play field use through our use reports for known play field users. And very high utilizers of playing fields include public schools, private schools, youth organizations, adult rec leagues, Seattle Park, parks and Recreation, official recreation programs, and of course, just individual groups for private events. Seattle Public Schools have first priority scheduling rights through the Joint Use Agreement for all Seattle parks, which is a point that they that they note. But that is that excludes the facilities where there is a unique arrangement with a private partner. But again, that's only in a couple of scenarios Montlake, South South Park and the West Seattle Stadium. The final question, two questions from Councilmember Morales that were answered. How is the public benefit in this particular at the Montlake agreement calculated, and how are we measuring their success in providing a public benefit? And Parks responded that in the original agreement, Seattle Craft was not required to provide an explicit public benefit component. And the new proposal does enumerate, as I've indicated, a requirement of 50 additional public programing hours, which is a new component of the contract, and that is going to be tracked and recorded as part of the agreement upon entering into an agreement. This is the final question, Councilmember. I was asked upon entering into an agreement. What is the how do we essentially assess the the and understand the equitable benefit to the community? So so touching on the equity of these arrangements. And. This is broken into several sub questions. The first one is the community outreach to communities of color to receive scholarships and participate in sporting programs at the site. Parks responded that per the agreement, Seattle Prep will be reaching out to community centers around the city, as well as schools in less advantaged areas with specific offers to participate in this supplemental programing. Generally, registrations run through their website for on campus middle school camps, which is one of the things Seattle Prep is offering. Registration for lacrosse, speed and agility camps run offline to eliminate the barriers to entry or in-person recruitment. All fees for those camps will be waived for low income and disadvantaged youth. These camps are meant to serve as an opportunity to introduce new groups, new sports and spread fitness to underserved communities. The other subquestion in that category what are the statistics regarding applications and number of scholarships and participation? These public benefits will be tracked through an annual report, and the report requires Gallup to track participation numbers, hours of service provided volunteers, hours, number of programs provided, and the costs associated with all the public benefits. So there are articulable metrics in the agreement that are going to be tracked and reported on back to the Council as part of the agreement. Seattle Prep has operated programs in the past for the community at no cost, so there is a track record the organization has for this. So Parks doesn't anticipate compliance to be an issue. Seattle Prep run programs and events through the public benefit requirement will be free to the community, so there is no expectation of Seattle Prep charging for those services. And then the final subquestion was what in the past experience and methods of Seattle Prep in reaching out to youth within within those communities. So what is the track record of Seattle Prep as a partner in doing this work? And the past experiences have been in conjunction with the Montlake Community Center, the Seattle Nativity School, Northwest Child and other nonprofit groups that that are local to the Seattle Prep neighborhood. Seattle Prep has partnered with the Montlake Community Center in the past to provide student led tutoring services for children of low income and marginalized backgrounds. Taylor Prep has worked with Northwest Child to facilitate programs dedicated to supporting people with disabilities with recreational opportunities. So that is the summary of Seattle Parks responses. Again, councilmembers can review that memo that was provided last Friday. And the the attachment of the public benefits template and matrix that is attached to the legislation is a good reference point as well to provide a summary of the details of the contract. So thanks for indulging that that long recitation. Thank you. Councilman Lewis, is there any other comments? I just want to wrap up, I think, Councilor Lewis, that so formally as Chair Parks, we did completely redo the public benefits piece that you see that's reflected now in these new agreements. So I want to thank customers a lot and Councilmember Morales and will skate up for bringing some of these issues up. And thank you, Councilmember Herbold, for teen up some of these other issues. And thank you, Custer Lewis, for summarizing the memo that we'd all received. We did insert and make sure that Parks is has a robust race and social justice piece, that the public benefits piece is outweighs the private use of public benefits, that we track the progress and the success and the benefits in the use. And more importantly, as you shared, Councilmember Lewis, that we look at outreach not only to the communities but working with community centers in any other public asset that the private entity is using the public space for. So thank you for that. Okay. So not seeing anything else. Casper Lewis, do you want to say before we go to a vote? No council president. I'll rest on my previous remarks. Thank you. Well, the clerk please call the role on the passage of the bill. Let's remember. Peterson. Yes. Some members want. No. Council member. Strauss. Yes. Council member Herbold. Yes. Councilmember Lewis. Yes. Councilmember Nelson. I council president. Was. High six in favor. One opposed. Thank you, Madam Clerk. The bill passes. I will sign. The chair will signed it. I'm sorry. The chair will sign it. Will the clerk please affix my signature to the legislation on my behalf? Moving on to our agenda to agenda item three. I understand it's Councilmember Herbert's piece of legislation. Madam Clerk, will you please read item three into the record? Agenda item three Council Bill 120351 An ordinance relating to city employment amending sections 4.14.140 and 4.14.150 of the Seattle Municipal Code to expand eligibility for the moving expenses reimbursement benefit for