i would like to introduce katie wilson i have a feeling that many people here know katie she's a founding member of the transit writers union and the general secretary of the transit writers union and she is going to get us started in oriental on the program before us today so please welcome katie wilson thank you thank you nicole and thank you everyone so much for coming and being here today so before i give a little introductory presentation bathrooms in case anyone doesn't know there are bathrooms  out this door here and to your left so please feel free during the program to you know get up if you choose the bathroom if you need to get food do do what you need to do ok so can everyone here ok excellent ok so i'm going to start the slideshow here hopefully ok here we go so i'm going to start by saying just a few words about how this summit came about so a little over a year ago the transit riders union organize large delegation of transit riders to meet with their local elected officials we called it the delegation for affordable transit and we had several big meetings with king county and city council members seattle city council members where we laid out a number of goals were goals i'm just going to read them real quick here so roll back to figure increases this was last spring right after the fare increases to go into effect free transit for low income senior and disabled riders free transit for low income youth and all public school students reduce fares for college students keep the access paratransit program affordable extend the work to lift low income fair to all sound transit services commit to lowering fares rather than raising them in the future and more progressive funding for public transit including greater contribution from business so clearly those are some ambitious goals and we also created a report there which there's a few copies or should be a few copies back on the table and it's also available on our website so these are some ambitious goals and now a year later we haven't of course won all of these things but some impressive progress has been made and that's due to hard work organizing collaboration and solidarity among dedicated people and organizations many of whom are here today so we're chart that progress to celebrate the solidarity that made it possible as well as preparing to take next steps so before the panelists speak about all the great work that's been going on i want to preface their remarks with a little background and context why should we care about affordable transit why build a movement around it and why now so we're all aware of rising transit fares but what you might not realize is that this is not a new phenomenon actually transit fares have been rising for decades so this graph is showing fares since the early seventy's and it's adjusted for inflation of course so this is the real cost of transit that's rising so let's look at some other trends over the same period here's a trend that might go some way to explaining why fares have been going up so at the same time since around one nine hundred seventy public investment in transportation systems including public transit has declined and it's not only funding for public transit has declined funding for social services have also  d so this is a graph showing funding for temporary assistance for needy families one of the most important federal welfare programs and that's been going down pretty much since around one thousand nine hundred so we have a fraying social safety net and people in this room who have struggled to find adequate services and those who struggle to provide those services i'm sure no stranger to this and then finally over that same time period wages for low and middle income americans have stagnated so this is a graph from two thousand and twelve showing us what the minimum wage would be if it had continued to rise in step with the productivity of labor or even with the compensation of all workers including the highest paid but instead real minimum wages have fallen and of course in seattle we can be proud to be a national leader in the movement to start reversing this trend so in summary all of these trends coincide over the past four or five decades adding up to not a very pretty picture we have transit fares rising public investment in transportation systems declining wages stagnating or falling and funding for social services declining now of course there's way more to this story that we don't have time to get into today but since we are in labor territory here in sci you seven seven five building i would be remiss if i didn't at least mention the war on workers in the decline in union membership over the same period and that's what that graph over there is showing so then two thousand and eight we had a recession and all of these problems deep and so this shows the funding crisis that metro is plunged into when sales tax revenues plummeted during the great recession and so that red area is funding deficit that suddenly metro had to try to make up if they weren't going to cut service so one of the things that metro did to make up their shortfall was to raise fares and so here we see off peak fares doubling from two thousand and eight to two thousand and fifteen very rapidly but it's not only adult fares that have risen you it's also went up rapidly and so did senior and disabled fares so we had the situation where fares are rising just when many people are having a hard time making ends meet and really need public transit to be accessible and affordable so all this was going on when the transit riders union was founded and although we began our organizing around the issue of service cuts in late two thousand and eleven affordable transit was big issue right from the start so these are photos thanks to alex garland from our first big public campaign protesting the end of the ride in fall of two thousand and twelve and you're going to hear more about the right for your area shortly so the transit writers union and many other organizations got busy and we made transit affordability into an issue that could not be ignored and within a couple of years we won a low income fair so that's great right everything's great but everything is still not fine and that's really why we're here today so here we are eight years after the start of the great recession and we're told the recession is over now we know that for much must much of the country doesn't feel that way of course here in seattle we're in one of a number of urban hotspots that are booming so there's lots of money there's rapid development and many people are doing very well but not all of us we're increasingly living in a divided city and a divided region so we all know this we hear about it all the time and we live the reality of it all the time housing costs have risen out of sight so you need to make twenty nine dollars and twenty nine cents per hour to comfortably afford a one bedroom in king county these days a high percentage of household under fifty percent of the median income are severely cost burdened and that's mainly with housing and transportation costs and of course we have a homelessness state of emergency to show for it so here's a quote from the seattle times comparing the devastation of homelessness  flood and fire local leaders monday declared states of emergency in seattle and king county more than forty five people have died on the streets of the city of seattle this year and nearly three thousand children in seattle public schools are homeless mayor ed murray said so that's where we're at so the question for us as a transit riders union and transit advocates is how do we make sure that this same story does not play out in our public transit system as population growth and development accelerates we're also investing in transit maybe not nearly enough and not nearly fast enough but it is happening so in fall two thousand and fourteen seattle passed prop one which is putting forty five million a year for six years into bus service in the city of seattle and then last fall the move seattle  nine year nine hundred thirty million dollar investment in seattle's transportation infrastructure including transit and then this fall we're going to have on our ballot sound transit three fifty four billion twenty five year plan for regional light rail expansion so again it's not happening enough or fast enough but we are expanding our transit system but the question is who are we building this transit system for is it mainly for people who have lots of money we know that private development is happening for people with lots of money but the question for us is is public investment in transit also mainly going to serve people with money and that's something that we can influence a hugely successful program our low income fair program over thirty one thousand people have enrolled and over three point seven million trips were taken in the first year of the program but it's not enough and frankly many thousands of people are being left behind so i'm going to read these quotes the first one is from lisa barnes who works at queen and help line or cliff does not help the people i see daily at work who are living on the most fixed and bare bones incomes social security child support s s i disability or veterans benefits and unemployment insurance i see people in their seventy's who are not in perfect health trying to walk up queen anne hill to get to our office for one of our pre packed grocery bags in the rain and then this next quote is from who's here today  the homeless have to spend their time getting one ticket a week here into a month there and for every other month at another place it's very exhausting i wonder have a metro considered a homeless rate for the orca card do they understand how much time and money that would save this is my and especially if you consider people trying to raise children in our city on a low income here's a quote from a writer well we live on insufficient income to pay for food for an entire month if i want to give my child the access to the kinds of classes that give her skills and greater financing herself i have to pay both for myself and my child whenever i transport her to her classes doubling the cost of her transportation i have a disabled bus pass but the added cost of her fare which is higher than mine is still prohibitive i grew up in seattle when you could pay the rent with a part time job when you could make lifestyle choices and still retain your dignity when those living in poverty with disabilities did not need rent subsidies when you could get a good job and take care of your family it didn't even have to be a career to be able to save and buy a house so what we have to recognize here is that high housing costs which the vast majority of people cannot avoid suck up money that could have been used for other necessities like transportation and you can imagine how this is especially a problem for low income families who often have to deal with car expenses for a primary breadwinner as well as transit costs for multiple other family members so what happens when people can't afford transit fares it's pretty obvious just go through it loss of mobility and diminished quality of life you can't get where you need or want to go barriers to opportunity conflicts between riders and bus drivers fare in for some and law enforcement so the bottom line is when everyone can move around freely freely everyone benefits and finally i just want to add something here which is we're going to spend a lot of time today talking about transit affordability and access for people with low incomes or even no income but i also want to point out that when we talk about transit affordability we're not just talking about the poor as a global society we're beginning to suffer the dire consequences of climate change as a city we suffer daily the less catastrophic but still significant consequences of traffic congestion and making transit inexpensive an attractive for everyone is part of the solution so i'm just going to read this from the victoria transport policy institute combinations of fare reductions in discounted passes higher vehicle user fees such as price parking or old road tolls improve transit service and better transit marketing can be particularly effective at increasing transit ridership and reducing automobile use commuter transit pass programs in which employers subsidize transit passes can significantly increase ridership so i'm going to end here by asking for all of your help and participation so the transfer augustine is hoping to work with the city of seattle maybe king county as well to pass a visionary resolution on transit affordability and access sometime in the not too distant future and we want your help building this vision so if you look in your program there is a pink piece of paper and it has hopping and it has a bus on it and it says what's your vision of affordable and accessible public transit so sometime today what we want you to do is right on there and there's some questions there to sort of help you out and and then maybe stick it up on the wall or pass it so freddy over there has got pens so if you don't have pens he's going to pass around some pens and we're going to stick these up on the wall and then we'll collect them and we're going to transcribe them and post them on our website and then we hope are going to inspire us as we work on ideas for this resolution  also want to acknowledge there's many more issues related to transit affordability and access than we're going to have time to really get into today so we're really focusing on affordability there's all sorts of issues especially related to access for people with disabilities that the transit writers union is  very much wants to work on and so even if we don't get to discussing a lot of these things in detail today to get involved because there's a lot of work to be done so  solidarity so i hope i've convinced you all if you weren't already convinced of the importance of affordable transit and i'm going to pass the mike back to r and c so that we can hear about the work that's being done to address this issue but i want to end on a not solidarity so what we've accomplished so far has been possible because of the collaboration of many people in organizations not all of them listed here by any means these are just the groups that endorsed today's event and i'm sorry if i left any out and we will be successful in the efforts to come to the extent that we all work together to organize and build this movement thank you very much next up we have a panel of experts an advocate and i i like to ask that our panelists join us at the microphone one by one so that we can  all hear you and then we're going to have some discussion in the room here i'd like to start by introducing allison izing her she grew up writing the new york city subway which she sees as both a great public transit system and a tool for democracy she directs the seattle king county coalition on homelessness a membership organization united social service and housing providers and community members through education advocacy and organizing the coalition works for safety housing and justice for people while they're homeless and to end thank thank you nicole i'm a little short for this microphone but can you hear me all right ok thank you sir all right thank you a i'm always uncomfortable being introduced as an expert i'm more comfortable being introduced as an advocate but what is especially exciting about the chance to be here with you today is that we actually have a room full of experts and advocates i really thrilled to just have an opportunity to take a few minutes because we have many good people and awesome campaigns to hear about  talk about some of the work that the coalition on homelessness that transit writers union and many others did to win the low income orca lift fair  sometimes tell people that the fact that we won the broadest deepest most robust affordable transit benefit anywhere in the country is one of the most powerful public policy wins that i will probably ever get to be part of in my lifetime and as is always the case there are many kind of behind the scenes factors that went into making that possible and sometimes when i am talking to elected officials or people from other parts of the country i do sort of have to kind of laugh to myself and think about the fact that when katie wilson and i were sitting on the taskforce about the idea of whether or not some day maybe we should have something that we might call a low income fair we had absolutely no idea that we were actually going to win that two year which is pretty amazing just going to give you a quick little rundown we i think in this community many folks know that we had what was called a ride free zone or the free ride zone in the downtown part of seattle and to make a long story short that benefit which benefited everybody people with money people without money tourists residents people who were going to work people who were going well who were meeting folks for medical appointments  that fell victim to the fact that we do not only live in seattle we live in king county and the politics of this region are complex and sometimes the politics of this region are so complex that they result  in benefits that really do serve everybody being seen as benefits that serve only a few we all know that plenty of people who live in king county were using the right free area and benefiting from it but it was branded as this seattle only benefit so the county council made a vote to eliminate that and this is of course in the context of not only the really dramatically in adequate transportation funding that we have in this community but some of the much bigger economic forces that katie outlined earlier well that did not sit very well with members of the coalition on homelessness and even some surprising elements like the downtown seattle business association so there were conversations there were work groups there were task forces what's the need how is this really going to affect people and one of the things that we organized for and  in obtaining eventually was to maintain some free for taishan in the downtown core because there are so many people who absolutely depend on it and will not i think the well i'll keep talking and when this comes up you'll see what what the slide represents so there is now a solid ground circulat which is running in our community not as many hours then not as many days as we had wanted and needed it but it still serves hundreds of people every day  and the advocacy that we all engage then to ensure that we could maintain that oh yeah that's that is a little ride free area plaque that someone who shall remain nameless obtained for me on the last day of the ride free area that sits in my office but it's really the next one there we go ok so the bus rider mad libs this wasn't thought out by one of our members and it was basically just a way to you know give people a little script so what's your name what's your walk in life what and when you go downtown are you usually there for work play tourism shopping who's the last health care provider whom you saw this person wrote  nurse practitioner what's your favorite weekday and what's what's your favorite weekend today and what's your favorite weekday and then if you pull it out  you get a lovely little mad libs message which we sent to the mayor of seattle king county executive the seattle city council and king county council members we collected hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these and and yet we knew that circulator wasn't going to completely cover the need and of course seattle alone isn't the issue so we knew that we needed to get serious about a low income fare and king county council member larry goss said when we sat down and met with him uttered his classic line which is if you bring the street i will bring forward the resolution and so we did it one of the reasons that it is great to partner with organizations like the transit writers union is the creative direct action and  visibility and so as we were fighting to keep the circulator in play we were also showing up and packing the king county council chambers to the rafters one of the most powerful pieces of testimony was from one of our members who worked at plymouth housing group who said that she had asked woman who was actually no longer homeless lived in one of their affordable housing programs designed for people who had been homeless and had had a hard life and had a number of serious health problems and so this this social worker said you know mary i want to make sure that you're planning for how you're going to manage to get to your appointments when the ri free area is gone and i am really curious what you are planning to do and mary's response was it's no problem i know that it's happening and i just figure that i'm not going to go to my appointments and i can always call nine one one if i have an emergency so that really made an effect on the king county council members because they know that that's an expensive way to respond to basic health care needs and that's not a good investment of public resources so we sat on you know endless task forces and there were people in this room and i really want to credit you who showed up during a long hot summer of three our task force meetings to keep it real in the back of the room and just observe and bear witness to the conversation that was highly theoretical at times and highly detailed at times and again transit riders union had people at the table katie was  was one of them who really understood the nitty gritty of the policy issues and together we i think were able to explain to the folks from metro we're not against you we are your best allies people need to ride the bus and we need you to work with us to make that possible and it was a really interesting process when we got to the point of talking about well who is going to be eligible if there is a low income fare the fact of the matter is i just want to end on this one kind of strategic thought as katie said when we talk about affordable transit we're not just talking about transit for people who are poor we pushed damn hard in those conversations when it was still just an idea and not a program that we were helping to design that this is a benefit that is for people up to two hundred percent of the federal poverty level you know that means for a single person that's twenty three thousand dollars a year still not a lot of money for a family of four it's forty eight thousand dollars a year and the reason that we found that that was important is not because we thought that this was a fix all we knew and we flagged all along the way that this is not going to be the solution that makes transit accessible for extremely low income and no income people but we did it because not only is there a huge need among working people but because we are more powerful when we are advocating for public goods and public investments of public resources that benefit a broader spectrum of the public than if we are just talking about people who are so often marginalized and ignored so the fact is that the orca lift program became this thing that everyone wanted to claim credit for and be part of and that actually has a tremendous amount of power to it we have a whole lot of additional work that we people county wide so while we see horrible not just decreases in social service funding but a destruction of our safety net in this state that is one of the biggest public benefit wins that we have gotten for poor and working people in quite some time and what i think is powerful is that it convinced a lot of powerful electives and and others that we are actually really good partners looking to maintain public infrastructure and not in opposition to them so that's my little blurb year and community colleges to try to get more affordable transportation options for them and so we have a little clip here from some testimony that students gave at a joint meeting of the city and count transportation committee a couple of months ago so i'm just going to play that and then i'll see if i can find this testimony from a student go for it good morning council members and thank you for all in this meeting my name is shame brooklyn i'm a student  seattle college and i also service chairs or service activities fee board and was a student body president last year as soon as i started serving in student government the orchid car concern was one of our top issues that kept coming  up two years ago we had a kind of shift our focus from orca card to saving metro's service at our schools with the threat of service being cut after no cuts to service happened at our school we were able to refocus on the worker issue and what we did similar to lee with what we've already heard of the subsidies from the schools our students were looking for more of a solution to help them get through the entire quarter because the cars are running so what we've done is on our service activities fee board allocated additional money to help subsidize the cars to get through the quarter and that has helped students tremendously to get through that quarter and the end of the quarter like i was with the finals extremely important time for their success however we were able to our orca card purchases from the school increased by over twenty five percent when we added the additional subsidy to them and unfortunately with enrollment can going down o the fees we collect is going down as well and we're faced now with this year to not be able to resubmit eyes again for next year so we're extremely concerned for the students coming to school next year of how they will be able to  have funding for their transportation needs to school as college students it's difficult to have enough employment to make enough money to pay your rent and food intuition and transportation so it's a real issue on she's just got a little update on what's happened since this transportation committee meeting so she says after the joint county city transportation committee meeting king county metro organized a workshop on transit fares for college and university students from this representatives from the king county community colleges were able to directly voice concerns in areas such as student fairs it ministering the orca and or college programs outreach and college provided subsidies for example many colleges provide subsidies to reduce the financial impact of purchasing an or card for students the subsidy becomes increasingly difficult to provide every year as funding sources are not always available in addition students find that their dollar value doesn't even cover a full quarter of classes and they may need to choose between other expenses or attending a class in the workshop metro identified six items for further development an exploration most important is the opportunity for a potential college and university student pass program or a student fair type like a reduced student fare this would make a significant difference to make transit accessible and affordable for all students as well as reducing single occupancy vehicle usage and carbon emissions we look forward to continuing to explore the options with king county metro and thank them for their efforts to date so that's where we're at thank you katie next up laura harrington lauren spent a university of washington employee for ten years working with the air force r t c she's been a union activist for more than twenty years first as you local five a three and now with one of my favorite unions as a united two five for nine of last ten years she's represented suu nine to five on the university wide transportation committee and over the last three years she was co chair of the faculty staff you pass subcommittee please of washington now for ten years and of those ten years i've spent nine of them on this thing called the university wide transportation committee the you'd have a license committees a lot and so the goal of the committee has always been to monitor the universities transportation products and how people get to and from the university the you passed program this is the twenty fifth year that there's been a you passed program in effect and it's kind of a really awesome product because you can take your you pass and it looks like a lot like an orca card except it has a husky photo things on it because we're dogs right and you can pretty well go anywhere in the king county region and it's not limited to any one particular writer ship organization right you know and you can run pierce county my son used his orca cart this morning to get on a bus to go over to an island you can do the same thing with your husky card says a really awesome product and when it started it started out at seven dollars a month for the employee and the remainder of the cost was picked up by the university of washington and this was significant because up until that point in this region there was no employer that was teaching other employers how to take care of their employees transportation needs and the youth stepped up and it was a leader the problem is that the huge ups funding levels it looks like a flat line when you look at it on a chart you might as well call it a loss because it's flat lined the transportation influx from the university stayed stable for twenty five years and the cost of the you passed kept going up and up and up and up and so they got brilliant and they decided to use funding from parking services if you were driving your car you were paying a tax basically on driving that car onto the campus and that tax was being funneled to the you pass program in two thousand and nine when the students blit and said we were all en every student has to have a you pass and we're going to negotiate independently with king county metro we knew the faculty and staff we knew we were in trouble because we lost some of our negotiation and we lost some of that power and so we started talking to the university we started analyzing we realized the product is a great product we don't want to change that what we need is to change the funding structure the funding has to change and so we took our dog and pony show on the road around the university to all the administrators that we could get to listen to us and they just all politely sugar hands and said thank you very much and they went on their way and nothing changed little tiny tweaks here and there but nothing significant until this year this year the director of transportation services came up to me and my co chair and he us some sun r e o s excel spreadsheets i hate excel spreadsheets and they there were four of them i'll never forget this there were four of them and we were in my conference room because i got lazy and didn't want to walk twenty miles across campus to where he works and so i made him come to me for a change and i looked at these four spreadsheets and they showed an increase in the cost of the you pass from fourteen percent up to forty three percent and i looked at them and i swallowed hard and i said you know i have to take this back to my union this is not acceptable this is where the you pass breaks we have had a huge increase the year before we've had increases in increases increases math so yeah over six hundred percent increase in twenty five years even adjusting for inflation in seattle king county metro and throwing in everything else it's absurd it's of seen it hurts employees because the employees are the ones who are paying this right the employees and and it's disproportionately hurting the lowest of the lowest paid employees because the lowest paid employees live the furthest out where we can find affordable housing which means our transportation costs are more significant so i took those spreadsheets to the union and i'm not going to lie to you if you're sensitive with your language i'm sorry but all effing hell broke loose on campus and the director of transportation services ended up resigning we're dokken to be paying more this year for our you pass we finally got the attention of the administration and we are go have to figure out something moving forward but employees have one more year where it's only costing us fifty four dollars per month in our benefit they call it a benefit but we pay the most of it so something's going to give something's gotta give the unions are now watching closely and as a result of what happened the unions who've never worked together on our campus decided that solidarity is an amazing word so there you go you so much laura for sharing your fight on how workers use solidarity to stop increases of their you pass sense a theme here and that is when people stand up for themselves and fight they win next to it like to invite eliot swanson to join us he manages the capitol hill housing resident services program his interests include the intersection of housing and he and expanding opportunities for people exiting the criminal justice system you might see him right in his bike down capitol hill probably when he is late to a meeting in what it says here please on oh alice ok so these two are going to tag team it let me also introduce alex alex brennan is the senior planner on capitol hill housing eco district team where he works on strategies to tackle climate change and affordability during his time at capitol housing he is lead development of new programs and affordable housing transit passes shared perking pedestrian streets and renter organizing and he's the one that's always on good so we're going to talk about the affordable housing transit pass pilot that we just started earlier this year so we work at capital housing were an affordable housing provider but were years ago how we've people have talked about this before but how many people here have have gotten transit pass through their employer are sort of familiar with how that how that works so so if there's th employer chips in some of the money and then sometimes they cover the whole cost but usually if the employee has to them pay some of the money when we were serving folks on capitol hill we would survey people in market rate buildings about how they how they got how they use transit what kind of pass they used and most of them got a pass through their employer so either their employer was covering the entire cost of their past or their employer was covering half of it neighborhood they were almost all paying for their passes on their own and so you know that seems kind of like the opposite of what you would want the system to be doing so we started looking at well what are ways that we can help people get more affordable access to transit because after housing transit is the biggest expense in general for a household so one thing that we found out in this process is that there's actually a program that's just like the employer program for property managers so a property manager can opt to use the same program to provide transit passes to all of their residents there's a discount of the transit agency provides and then the property manager has to also chip in at least half of the remaining cost of the pass so we really wanted to do that in our buildings and the challenge is that  you know unlike for a market or a property manager we can raise our ran a little bit to then cover to cover the cost of providing this additional benefit our rents are fixed and there wasn't a really obvious transportation and said well what if we chose what if you give us some support to try this out in just a couple buildings and we were really presently surprised that they said yes to that and so they are supporting what would be our half of the transit pass cost in three buildings one hundred twenty two apartments on capitol hill and the idea is that we're going to see sort of how this works how many people participate and and how much it costs next year because the way that the transit agencies calculate the cost the first year is calculated one way and then the after that it's calculated based on how much people use the passes so it's possible that the cost will go up a lot next year but at least for this first year it's a really great deal depending on which building it's in the past has cost between ten and sixteen dollars a month so that dramatically less than the low income fare and and so we've had really high participation even from people who'd already been you know getting a pass through some other program so we're really hoping that it continues to stay in that range and ideally we want this to be something that can be expanded to all affordable housing properties in the city we think that were a great way to deliver transit access to our residents and so we hope that you all as this moves forward will join us in encouraging the city to continue to look into this and and support this it can could be a really cost effective way for the city to support low cost transit access for low income people in seattle and so but it's actually administering the program so i'm going to turn it over to him to talk about how it's been going for thank you alex so i've had the pleasure of actually administering this program i e signing people up for their work of passes it's been a great way to interact with some of our residents because they're getting an amazing deal and one of the things we were really interested in looking at is would people who had a lift pass or maybe a disabled or senior passed sign up for these would be worthwhile for them and there was a resoundingly yes to that over fifty percent of the folks who have signed up were already paying for some sort of pass another thirty percent were getting employer provided passes there's still and up being a fantastic deal for folks anecdotally we've heard of residents saving over you know one hundred some dollars a month on their monthly transportation costs so if you're making seventeen thousand dollars a year that's really a substantial sum of money that's left in your pocket so we've been really excited to be able to do this for the residents another thing that we've heard sort of anecdotally is that people are actually utilizing transit more frequently we were lucky enough to start this just after the capitol hill light rail station opened so people have been able to get downtown much more rapidly  it's much more accommodating to people with mobility issues so i've heard of people actually starting to go to the doctor for the first time after maybe missing appointments for several months because they can now afford to you know take someone with them and yet we've had really a wide range of people signing up from high school students to people who work downtown to people who aren't working or maybe thinking of getting back to work sometime soon and this is really made it a lot of those things a lot easier for all of those folks administratively it's not a very substantial burden for capitol hill housing respect and just a few hours a month sort of auditing  signing additional people up but we are really convinced that this is a model that other housing providers can adapt and start offering to their resident thank you so much ellie and alex and now we have our last panelists for the afternoon i'd like to introduce a barb ball then if it's generations seattle a and a graduate of roosevelt high school she is a member of the transit writers union and chairs the transit rider union's homelessness and transit committee she also serves on the ballard task force for homelessness and hunger please and after barb shares with us we're going to be going into audience questions and comments so hopefully you guys have been thinking of things you want to share looking forward to it hoping to keep comments to one to two minutes so we can get as many as possible so please i hope you'll come up to them i could share with gentleman friend from watching our cast so i couldn't get here at all i'm going to talk a little bit about what we've done with us and i'm going to throw out a couple of ideas and what if some things like that because we think they have  an imaginative in their help and a couple of things for over twenty years king county metro has had a reduced fare bus ticket program this program allows human service agencies to purchase the tickets at eighty percent discount to give them to their clients so they can get appointments etc shelters homeless people rely on these tickets and so do low income youth students seniors veterans and refugees the transferred writer unioned first became aware of the ticket program through working with share the largest shelter network provider in king county sheriff's members who rely on bus tickets to travel to and from shelter every day in two thousand and fourteen we reached out to many human services agencies and learned that many of them are experiencing a short because the king county code caps the value of the tickets that are available per year many organizations who are not getting as many as they needed the transit writers union wrote a letter to king county elected officials asking them to make more tickets available and over twenty suman service agencies signed on we succeeded in fall two thousand and fourteen the county council passed an ordinance expanding the program by over thirty five percent then in two thousand and fifteen we started realizing that when the new light rail stations opened in march two thousand sixteen this was going to create a problem for people who rely on the tickets the tickets were not accepted on link ly rail only on buses and metro restructured bus service around the new real stations this would make it difficult for people to get around this problem already existed for people traveling to the south and but it was about to get much worse so in early two thousand and sixteen we wrote a letter to king county and seattle elected officials and metro and sound transit urging them to come up with a solution all the elected officials we spoke with agreed it was a problem but nothing seemed to be happening so we decided to hold a big demonstration a righty and a few weeks after the metro service restructure we planned to ride on the line without paying to show the situation that the ticket users were in needing to get around but not able to legally write the real we started a petition and announced our action and very quickly we heard from the county executives office that they were working hard on a solution starting in june two thousand and sixteen agencies can purge combo tickets consisting of a light rail day pass attached to two bus tickets so th clients can ride both buses and ally rail so it was and this is a great step forward but there's still a lot of work to do we want to keep organizing with trans  riders and human service agencies to improve the ticket program and find other ways to make transit accessible for free people who can't afford or to left one problem is that many human service agencies are short on funding themselves and they can't afford to purchase and have tickets we would like the county to reduce the price that agencies pay for the tickets we would also like for homeless and very low income people to be able to have unlimited transit passes at a very low cost or free the bus tickets are a costly and time are very costly and time consuming the homeless on the street get one ticket every week at one church and to every month at another and for every other month at another how can you get your life back together on that and what about a transfer stench and rate like three hours and what about two additional hours of fifty cents each for an option i feel that does justification is the unequal treatment between the bus tickets and the monthly bus passes i can tap my senior card all day long or all month long and it doesn't matter really squat but somebody who actually just has to the u k bus ticket or somebody going up to the v a occasionally or just about anybody who doesn't get it right a lot with a monthly pass they are very penalized on that so we would like to invite you to sign and add to the letter you have in your program please but any ideas you have and if you that you return the letters to us before the end of the day we will submit the letters to county executive and county council otherwise please send them on your own thank you so much