WA State legislature

End-of-year wrap-up and looking around the bend

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I’ve been winding down a bit for the holidays, but let’s do a round-up of the week, shall we?

On Monday, we had the last Seattle Council Briefing and City Council meeting of the year. The next ones won’t be until after the Winter Recess on January 4.

The Black Brilliance Project presented on their preliminary research. Their full report will be completed on December 21, aka Monday. So far they have five main areas they feel need more investment:

  1. Housing and physical spaces, especially Black-led, both residential and commercial
  2. Mental health networks that are culturally responsive and have a new and equitable payment structure
  3. Childcare and out-of-school time supports, especially for children facing/recovering from trauma
  4. Economic development/economic relief, especially because of the pandemic
  5. Alternatives to the 911 and crisis response system, staffed by community members

The goal is for this research to ultimately inform the participatory budgeting process happening next year, and some more details about that (and the associated steering committee) should be included in the report on the 21st.

Also on Monday, the Council voted to accept all the grants received, including the one from the Department of Homeland Security, after being assured by Director Noble that the money won’t be spent until any outstanding questions are answered. They also voted to approve the extra spending of the SPD in 2020, with the intention of cutting the SPD’s overtime budget by $5.4m in 2021 to make up the difference.

The Office for Civil Rights just announced the recipients of $1m worth of grants for investments in public safety, which are going to the Collective Power and Capacity Building Coalition (which includes Choose 180, Community Passageways, Collective Justice, and Creative Justice) and the Seattle branch of BUILD.

There was a minor kerfluffle this week when the CPC asked the SPD some substantive questions about their recent changes to their use-of-force and crowd-control policies, only to have SPD Assistant Chief Leslie Cordner back out of attending their meeting at the last moment, saying she couldn’t discuss the policies in depth with the CPC until after the OPA and OIG review them in January. Not exactly a move to inspire confidence or community trust. You can read more about the policy changes at SCC Insight, which the CPC feels have little overlap with the recommendations they made in August.

Looking ahead, the legislation we talked about last week to give the OPA and OIG subpoena powers has been voted out of committee and is slated to be on the introduction and referral calendar on January 4, which means a vote of full Council as early as January 11. There will probably also be continued discussion about creating a needs-based legal defense, with potential legislation on this possibly being introduced in the Public Safety and Human Resources committee. We can expect further developments in the participatory budgeting process and its associated steering committee, as well as hopefully some more transparency from the Mayor’s task force that will also be distributing funds in 2021.

Meanwhile, the Washington State legislative session will begin on January 11 and run for about nine weeks until mid-March. Police reform is one of the three top priorities of the session, and we can expect to see many bills introduced on the topic, so there will be a lot more to discuss in this vein come January. The SPOG contract negotiations here in Seattle are due to begin in the New Year as well, and while the details of those negotiations are private, the final outcome will have huge implications for public safety in Seattle for potentially years to come.

And we can expect the Mayor’s race to begin to heat up. The primary isn’t until August of next year, but with the incumbent not running for re-election, the field is wide open and we could see a large range of candidates declaring their intentions to run.

And with that, I’ll wish you a very happy weekend! If anything critical happens in the next few weeks I might send out a quick update, but I expect/hope things will be on the quiet side until we cross over into 2021. Please have a safe and happy holiday season and New Year, and thank you from the bottom of my heart for your engagement and support.

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And the wheel continues to turn slowly

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Just a quick update to keep you apprised of current happenings in Seattle, starting with yesterday’s Council Briefing.

During the briefing, there was a second presentation on Seattle’s state legislative lobbying agenda. This agenda will be voted on at the full Council meeting on either December 7 (their goal) or December 14. You can read the current draft of the agenda.

Apparently there is still a chance of a short special state legislative session before the main one beginning in January. However, there’s not much time left to make this happen. There was also another state revenue forecast last week, with positive news that the projected state deficit has shrunk from $10b to $3.3b. The downside to this news is that it may reduce the urgency of lawmakers to pass more progressive taxation legislation this session. Also of note is a new section in Seattle’s lobbying agenda calling for the decriminalization of transportation activity:

We support the decriminalization of transportation activity to improve safety for travelers and the public. We support ending the use of weaponized enforcement for traffic violations and allowing non-uniformed officers, including those working for a local city department that is not a police department, to perform garage and event management activities. We support decriminalizing pedestrian activities such as loitering and jaywalking, which disproportionately impact BIPOC communities. We support setting traffic citation amounts based on income to avoid perpetuating cycles of poverty while ensuring enforcement remains an effective deterrent regardless of an individual’s income and providing additional mitigation for marginalized communities.

In other news, the next Public Safety and Human Services committee meeting will be next Tuesday, December 8 at 9:30am. On the agenda are a discussion about granting the OPA and OIG subpoena powers, a presentation from Co-LEAD, and a discussion about the principles behind CM Herbold’s previous proposal to create defenses for people committing certain misdemeanors when poverty, mental illness, or substance abuse is involved. I plan to live-tweet this one.

Other issues discussed at Council Briefing this week included a COVID relief package for restaurants and restaurant workers; a new project on permanent supportive housing and ways to adjust land use controls to make building it cheaper and faster, presented by CM Lewis (expect more discussion of this in future weeks); and the skyrocketing numbers of COVID-19 cases in our area.

Also yesterday was a legislative preview of police reforms from the Washington State House Public Safety Committee. Among the speakers were several family members of victims of police violence, a few proponents of police reform such as Tim Burgess and Anne Levinson, and representatives of various police groups and unions. The committee chair, Rep. Roger Goodman, said he expected there to be around a dozen proposals to discuss in January, and that they will dedicate entire two-hour hearings to individual bills as necessary. Among the issues under discussion are a state-wide use of force policy; a bill on police tactics that would include a ban on all chokeholds and neck restraints, more limitations on police dog duties, and cessation of no knock warrants; an independent state agency to investigate and prosecute police misconduct relating to deadly force; a statewide requirement for deescalation; a robust decertification system and reporting on officer misconduct by other officers; a publicly searchable database of officer misconduct and also potentially various effectiveness measures; arbitration reform; reforming collective bargaining so that accountability laws aren’t part of bargaining; etc. It’s going to be a busy session, although it’s also good to keep in mind that the legislative process is designed to cause the majority of bills to fail.

The representatives from police groups and unions spoke about the need for more education and training, including implicit bias training, as well as the importance of health, wellness, and resiliency programs for officers. While there are a few areas of overlap for support of reforms depending on the group, overall these groups are not in favor of many of the reforms discussed above.

A moment worth highlighting was when Rep. Lovick asked Tim Burgess why reforms up to this point have not worked. Mr. Burgess had a lengthy reply to this question, and among other things, he said, “The ability of police unions to build in obstacles to reform is extremely detrimental.”

Finally, San Francisco has launched a pilot program for a Street Crisis Response Team now responding to 911 calls related to mental health and addiction. We’ve talked about developing a similar response team in Seattle based on the CAHOOTS model, and it’s great to see other cities jumping on board with this idea.

And the wheel continues to turn slowly Read More »

The Seattle budget process is nearing the finish line.

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Today the Seattle City Council completed its budget deliberations on Form Cs, which were proposed amendments to the budget. You can take a look at all the Form Cs under discussion here. There were no major changes to the SPD portions of the budget from what we’d discussed earlier. Depending on your source, in 2021 the SPD budget will be cut 17-20%. CM Sawant kindly did the math for us to let us know if you remove the transfers of units outside of SPD from these numbers, the cut to the SPD budget is 7.7%.

Twitter avatar for @amysundberg

Amy Sundberg @amysundberg
All right, let’s listen in to this budget meeting, shall we? We just heard 156, which would require SPD to report on policies that would re-militarize officer tactics, equipment, and culture.
10:58 PM ∙ Nov 18, 2020
Twitter avatar for @amysundberg

Amy Sundberg @amysundberg
Wow, CM Morales is really going to bat for an SPD hiring freeze, or at least a partial hiring freeze. This was proposed by CM Sawant, but CM Morales is speaking very passionately about it.
8:27 PM ∙ Nov 19, 2020

 

The Form C about the SPD that got the most discussion was CM Sawant’s proposal to maintain the SPD hiring freeze through 2021. When it became apparent that wasn’t going to fly, CM Morales proposed a 50% hiring freeze through 2021, which was also backed by CM Mosqueda. Nevertheless, neither of these proposals had enough support to move forward.

This echoed what CM Herbold said at a town hall last week. We’ve talked a lot about how police union contract negotiations and the consent decree are barriers to resizing the police force, but another barrier is the CMs themselves, who are reluctant to cut the force any further until community alternatives are stood up, scaled up, and ready to respond. Those alternatives are less ready than we hoped due to the rigamarole earlier this year with the Mayor’s veto, which delayed the promised investments from being dispersed. Several CMs have stated that they remain committed to the process of shrinking the SPD, but they wish to do so in a methodical and data-driven way.

In addition, Interim Chief Diaz has repeatedly stated his primary commitment is to maintain 911 response times; he will continue to transfer officers from specialty units to patrol in order to achieve this. This means that modest cuts to the number of police officers on the force (which is what either hiring freeze would achieve) won’t impact the size of patrol in any meaningful way, while pulling resources from specialty units that CMs believe are important, such as units investigating human trafficking and domestic violence. The CMs have discussed at length how to measure public safety, what public safety actually is, and how to best determine the proper SPD staffing plan, and I think we can expect those discussions to continue.

The last budget meeting of the season is on Monday, November 23 at 10am or as soon as the Council finishes their regular briefing. This meeting is primarily to tie up loose ends and make technical fixes to the budget as it currently stands. The final vote on the 2021 budget will be on the afternoon of Monday, November 23 at 2pm. There will be an opportunity for public comment beginning at 2pm, with signups opening at noon. This will be your last chance to weigh in on the version of the 2021 budget upon which the CMs will be voting.

In the meantime, the Black Brilliance Project released their own public safety agenda this week, and you can read more about that here.

In other news, now that the election is over, our State Senators and Representatives are gearing up for the next Washington State legislative session, which begins on January 11. Police reform is one of the legislature’s top priorities during this session, and there are a large number of bills on the topic being introduced. Now is a great time to email, call, or meet remotely with your state senator and representatives and let them know that police reform is a priority for you. If you don’t remember your district, you can look it up here.

This legislative session is particularly important because the issues around police reform have been gathering momentum for the past six months, meaning there’s more of a chance for useful legislation to be passed. This legislation would have impact throughout the state, including King County and Seattle specifically. I’ll be writing more about specifics on state-wide legislation in upcoming months.

Until Monday, and have a lovely weekend!

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On Seattle’s state lobbying agenda

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Just a quick update on this eve of the election, covering today’s Council Briefing.

Today’s Council Briefing included a presentation about the City’s lobbying agenda with the state legislature. The next session of the Washington State legislature is scheduled to begin on January 11, and Seattle has a lobbying team to represent its interests.

This year the team has heard that lawmakers have three priorities: the budget (like Seattle, the state is facing a revenue shortfall due to the pandemic), COVID relief, and police reform. The legislature is still working out the logistical challenges of being in session during a pandemic, and as such, they are focused on only a few issues and will probably be passing less legislation than normal. There is hope that CMs can be more effective advocates for the City’s interests since so many of the meetings will be remote.

Lawmakers are saying nothing is off the table when it comes to progressive taxation to raise additional revenue, with a possible capital gains tax or tax on excess income being seen as the most likely. There are also rumors that the state might preempt the JumpStart tax, but there has been no definitive movement on that front. In terms of transportation, the team is pushing for more progressive options but adding a local option of a gas tax is gaining momentum. There is also talk of a carbon pricing system as a potential funding source. They are also waiting to see what happens with the election, as that will determine the amount of federal funding that might be expected.

In terms of police reform, there are currently over sixty bills on police reform being introduced. Obviously some of these bills will be eliminated or combined into omnibus packages. There is a decertification proposal led by Senator Pedersen and Representative Goodman that is a significant piece of legislation, as well as legislation pertaining to qualified immunity. Much of the legislation being discussed is for reforms that have already been adopted in Seattle at the city level. Both CM Herbold and CP Gonzalez spoke about the possibility of legislation related to arbitration that could change the police union negotiation process; this legislation will be worth following closely come January.

Another presentation on the lobbying agenda will be taking place at Council Briefing on November 30 (aka after budget season), with a final vote on the agenda expected in December.

A reminder about the remainder of budget season: We might get a new revenue forecast sometime this week. CM Mosqueda will present her rebalancing package next week on Tuesday, November 10th. Then the CMs have a chance to turn in Form Cs by November 12th, which must be self-balancing. The CMs will discuss these Form C amendments the following week, with a final vote on the budget scheduled for Monday, November 23, which is a few days before Thanksgiving. Remember that the budget vote generally requires a 3/4 majority instead of the normal 2/3. And, were the Mayor to veto the budget, the Council would need to decide whether to sustain or overturn the veto sometime in December.

Meanwhile, next Monday SDOT will be attending Council Briefing to give a presentation on the West Seattle Bridge.

And tomorrow is Election Day. Whatever the results, there will be a lot of work to continue to do, and I look forward to doing that work with all of you.

Be safe, and during this time of high stress, embrace patience and kindness if you can, both for others and for yourself. I’ll see you next week.

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