welcome everyone my name is sarah wyler i am a member of the district for neighborhood action council and i'm also an organizer for the general greater seattle neighborhood action coalition thank you all for coming and it's so great to see so many wonderful faces here so before we get started i'm just going to go through an agenda for the night first of all i just want to thank everyone who helped to put this event together and we have three incredible organization both the greater seattle neighborhood action coalition transit writers union and three fifty seattle all came together to put this together and it's basically all volunteers people taking their time out of their busy schedules to do something that they're passionate about so that's pretty incredible and as well because it is a volunteer event  this was not put on by the city council or any particular person this is all just passionate volunteers that are excited about this and as well we will be hosting six other town halls throughout the next couple of months so this is the first of seven town halls to make sure that we can we can address all of our city council members all throughout the city and make sure that they're all have a chance to talk to us about this income tax initiative so stay tuned for details on the other events and other city council districts we don't have set up for them yet but we will see so before i go into the agenda i want to talk a little bit about the neighborhood action coalition and what we're all about the next formed just after the election as a method of addressing the very real fact that a lot of vulnerable communities in seattle may not be getting the respect or the rights or the privileges that more more privileged communities in seattle may get so the next formed as a way of really bringing a lot of people power together totally grassroots movements all over the city to make sure that as a as a city we are well equipped to protect our most vulnerable communities and our most targeted communities and each neighborhood action council and each city council district is entirely autonomy this basically the thread that connects us all is our desire to be entirely grassroots just people power coming together to make sure that as a city that we are protecting everyone that if we have a budget cut to any service of any kind that as a city we can still protect our most vulnerable communities even if we don't have as much federal funding heading into our city budget so a little bit about the agenda for tonight so first we're going to start with katie wilson and she is a member of the transit writers union and she's going to give a slideshow about that and compaction issue to ven go through and more details about the initiative itself  and then we're going to have michael tell me also from the theology cation association he's going to he's back he's waving in the back and he can come on if you would like and then we're going to have  from upgrade seattle have a short talk and then we're going to have kevin fenwick from three fifty seattle and then the bulk of the evening is going to be a time for rob johnson our great district for city council member to talk and then have the opportunity for all of you all to ask him questions and i'll be moderating that to make sure that we do our best to stay on topic because i know that we all have lots and lots of questions to ask our city council member but we want to make sure we have as much focus as possible so we're not going too much over time and then after we're done kind of sitting formally we'll have an opportunity to break up and we have a couple of really cool kind of action based stations outside for everyone to get plugged into what i'm going to hand the mike to katie to talk about the ok i'm going to get this project or started also i want to say when we get to the questions they don't have to all be directed at rob we're not primarily trying to put him in the questions about the campaign or welcome so my name is katie wilson and i spend most of my time organizing with the transit riders union here in seattle and i'm just going to talk a little bit about about this campaign so i don't know about you but i'm pretty sick of seeing trump's face so i thought i would feature a couple of other people here so we have some a couple of friendly billionaires to people recognize those faces up there sounds like ok so those are the koch brothers and they're you know really a convenient symbol of the oil industrial financial corporate elite and over the past few decades  they and their their class have sort of gone from their idiology has gone from being sort of a fringe thing to a really driving force in american politics now they didn't actually back in the election they sort of felt he would be an unreliable vehicle for their agenda but since he got elected since the election they've been busy making lemonade out of lemons and they've been doing a pretty good job of it so their staffers are populating his administration and the trump budget that was proposed last week really comes out of the heritage foundation which is which is part of their network so well trump is out there talking about travel bans  walls while he's exacerbating the culture wars and doing a thousand things to divide us people like those guys are advancing policies that really clearly and unequivocally are against the interests of the majority of the population and that really sucks but on the other hand on the other hand it means that we're dealing with a ruling elite that really doesn't have any credibility so as soon as you know what the these guys are about and the policies they're trying to push no one likes it ok they're not you know let alone sort of the future of the human race on this planet the short term effect of the policies they're pushing are really against the interests of all of us and so that means that they can only advance their agenda through deception and through distraction and it also means that the more they succeed the harder it is for them to distract us now what that means i think that really gives us a lot of reason for hope because it means that they're vulnerable and what they're vulnerable to is an effective movement and that's really what i think selection has given us the opportunity to build that means we need to hit the streets as we've all been doing so that we can feel our collective power in numbers but we really have to do more than that we have to fight a policy war we have to fight bad policies with good policies and in order to win that policy war we have to organize and that's why i really think it's so important that we're all here today because we're here to talk about a policy and we are here because there are organizations and people in the room that are organizing to push this policy forward and this is a policy this is really a game changing policy for seattle and for all of washington state so with that let's talk about where we're at here we have trump's quote unquote skinny budget now if you are a weapons manufacturer or a big corporation that doesn't want to be hindered by environmental regulations or if you want to privatized the education system there's a lot to love about this budget if you're anyone else it really sucks so basically trump is proposing to massively increase department of defense spending and to fund that by bit cutting basically everything else things that we really need like housing and a things like arts and culture so basically he's talking they want to take away our bread and they want to take away our roses to essentially so what does this mean for seattle so over the past week different city departments have been publishing memos about the effects of the trump's budget on them if it goes through we could lose over four million dollars for affordable housing over a million dollars for weather is ation programs for low income homeowners five million dollars for emergency shelter homeless services and assistance to low income homeowner homeowners and public transit is really a the big loser here so there's a lot of transit projects that rely heavily on federal grants the madison bus rapid transit that a lot of us have been looking forward to for a long time could be in danger the first of street car and a lot of projects associated with sound transit ok so what are we going to do about it first of all we're going to fight back we're going to do everything we can to make sure that trumps budget doesn't become a reality but at the same time i don't know about you but i can feel sort of helpless about what i can accomplish at the federal level so we also need to protect people and that means acting here in seattle and in washington state and doing what we can to make sure that everyone has a dignified standard of living no matter what happens at the federal level but in that regard we have a problem and that problem is that we're already not doing a great job of protecting people so we have a housing crisis we have a homelessness crisis we're already not able to insure everyone a dignified standard of living and it's not just seattle so as i'm sure everyone knows in washington state we have an education funding crisis the state supreme court has held the legislature in contempt for failing in our paramount duty according to the washington state constitution which is to  education schools for the education of all children so this sort of begs the question how are we going to cope with these new threats if we're already failing to fun things and the basic question why is it so hard for us to raise money for the things that we need here in washington state and the answer to that is pretty simple we basically have the number one most equitable tax system in the whole country here in washington state the most regressive tax system and what that means is that the poorest people are paying a very high percentage of their income in state and local taxes compared to the richest people and this chart which i don't you might not be all the read from or yet but washington's number one and if you're in the poorest twenty percent you're paying sixteen point eight percent of your income in state and local taxes on average statewide and if you're in the top one percent you're paying two point four percent of your income in state and local taxes and so the effect of this on our state's revenue is pretty clear basically even though we have very high taxes for poor people in washington state we can't raise a lot of revenue because we're not taxing the people who have the money we're taxing people who don't have very much money so when we inquire a little further into why this is it becomes pretty clear that the problem is that washington state is one of only a few states in the country that have no kind of income tax and if you look at income taxes the all the other states that have income taxes state and local income taxes tend to be progressive and because we don't have an income tax we rely very heavily on sales taxes and property taxes sales taxes in particular in particular are extremely regressive and proper basically because poor people tend to spend way more of their income buying taxable goods and property taxes are mildly regressive and we all know in seattle how how dependent we become on property tax levies so this means that we here in seattle in washington state we basically created a tax haven for the rich so this graph shows how over the past few decades how personal income has grown so that you know our population has been growing wealth in our region has been growing enormously but the lower bar there is taxable retail sales so basically our revenue which comes primarily from sales tax is not at all keeping pace with the wealth of our region and i wanted to include this this was in the seattle times just a week or two ago and it's always nice when they when they help us with our campaign but this is showing how seattle in particular comparing seattle to fifty one u s cities we are the fourth we are number four for the highest taxes at a income level of twenty five thousand dollars a year and we're also number four for the lowest taxes at an income of one hundred fifty thousand dollars a year so basically as far as taxes go seattle's a great place to be rich and a really sucky place to be poor no that doesn't sound very progressive and here in seattle we really like to be progressive  so we better do something about that well what are we going to do the obvious thing is well let's tax some of that well now whenever you start talking about taxing rich people someone start saying oh why do you hate rich people so much so i think it's important to recognize that over the past decades the wealthiest people their federal taxes have been going down so wealthy people wealthy households used to pay a lot more in federal taxes than they do now so that's important to recognize and also that it's going to get worse if congress succeeds in repealing the affordable care act because that basically will amount to a tax cut for wealthy households twenty four million people could lose health insurance over the next ten years premiums could go up presumably people would die basically so that millionaires can get a tax break so what we're proposing is a seattle income tax and we are proposing that this would affect only households with income in excess of two hundred fifty thousand dollars a year and i should emphasize that the income threshold is still under discussion among organizations in the coalition and also the council members were hoping to pass this to counsel and so it could be higher but it's not going to be lower so we're talking about households that make two hundred fifty thousand dollars a year or more and the tax and this is important to recognize because people get hung up on this the tax would only apply to income in excess of that threshold so if you make two hundred fifty one thousand dollars a year you would only be taxed on that one thousand dollars that's over that threshold and the tax rate that we're looking at is one point five percent so a one point five percent tax on adjusted gross income over two hundred fifty thousand dollars would raise over one hundred thirty million dollars per year in the city of seattle that's serious money so for comparison the housing levy that we all passed last year was forty million dollars a year and the homelessness levy that marie is proposing  put fifty fifty five something like that so anyway that's a lot of money it would affect a little bit over twenty one thousand households that's about five percent of taxpayers and again only income above the threshold is tax your first two hundred fifty thousand dollars is tax free ok so then this sort of raises the question why hasn't this been done before sounds like such a good idea we're such a progressive city why aren't we already doing this so this is very important to understand with this measure we are entering into two disputed areas of washington state law one of those is the question of whether an income tax is constitutional a progressive income tax is constitutional in washington state and the other is the question of what the scope of municipal authority is does seattle have the authority to pass a tax like this and for a very long time for decades and decades the assumption has been that no you can't do an income tax in washington and that  city's taxing authority is very narrow so we the campaign has been working with lawyers who've been doing research and we believe that that's not the case that actually an income tax is fine in washington state and that cities actually have a lot more authority than has been commonly assumed so those are sort of the walls that have been boxing us in and where the bomb we don't anticipate any actual bombs will be used in this campaign but with a metaphorical bomb that's going to burst open those walls and so we do expect that when this measure is passed it will be challenged in court and so there will be a legal process which could take as little as one but up to several years that will end up at the washington state supreme court and so our hope is that and this will give them a chance to basically rule a new on these disputed questions and so we have a very progressive state supreme court right now and also very cognizant of our state's need for revenue so we're hopeful that they will decide in our favor and if they do then that creates a very robust funding source for cities and builds the momentum to  so full statewide effort to change our tax structure so we are hoping that seattle can take the lead and we are looking to our council members to be bold and to move forward with this this year so that we can get that legal process started and start getting that revenue and finally i just want to say that we have a big broad coalition working on this this is a letter that we submitted to the mayor and city council on march first when we had our sort of kickoff forum at city hall and we now have i think forty organizations that of have signed on campaign thank you katie i know i'm proud to say that the seattle education association's logo was on i was on was on that introduced myself again on my name is michael to my i'm a fourth grade teacher here in seattle public schools and i'm currently serving as vice president of the seattle yes all about i wanted to speak from two different hats one being my educator a public educator hat i've been an educator and see how for the past ten years and also as a progressive citizen of seattle my wife and i live here in seattle two young daughters six years old and two years old and i miss in their bed time but that's ok that's yeah that it's all for some i'm happy to be here but what i wanted to talk about a little bit is why why this is important and why specifically to seattle education association and our over fifty two hundred members have an interest and have an interest in stake in this campaign we face serious challenges not only in the public education realm but in in the state the states in fiscal crisis the funding for public is you know get ripped off every every time and they expire and then we try to put it back on when the levee passes and get rich gets ripped off again and when it gets put back on gets ripped off what happens when you put take a band aid off and on and off and on and off gone you don't have any skin left you  any skin off and when that wound is and so that's where we're at right now that's we're out with public education funding as a state and that's going to be a problem and right right now we just got back from libya a couple couple weeks ago and i'm  not not encouraged by what's coming out of a limpia right now as far as a permanent fix to our to our fiscal crisis so that's my edge of educators educator but more important more importantly i wanted to go into what's happening in seattle with education  over there's a little over three thousand homeless students in seattle public schools and those are just the students that are reported being homeless that doesn't count the folks who want reporting for homes for any for many different reasons whether it be their immigration status  or otherwise seattle has the fifth largest opportunity gap in the country are students of color are choosing at a far lower level than their than their white and asian peers the reason why we have the reason why i bring that up is because you could parse that out anywhere it is economic justice housing be able to find good paying livable wage jobs those all affect the families that are most affected by that opportunity gap that's why seattle education association educators are on board with this campaign is because seattle has an opportunity to be able to be the leaders in raising revenue to address the challenges that face not only just us as a city but face the most fun or vulnerable which are our children because they don't have a voice they don't vote we do we are able to elect leaders on the city council we will able to elect leaders in libya to do that so i'm speaking as an educator to advocate for those students the opportunities now gave kind of a political landscape you know windows like this don't happen that often the political landscape as such where see out progressive cities like seattle we need to take the lead on this issue the political landscape in olympia it's gridlock i'm not going to expect anybody in olympia to be able to take the lead on progressive progressive revenue sources we're looking to our leaders in seattle and i think we have an opportunity with the city council to be leaders on finally offering permanent fixes for for the lack of r system not just for students but for our communities for adults adults in need and seattle has that opportunity that's why we're here that's why the seattle education association our five over five thousand members will be fighting this campaign that's why i hope each and every one you whether we have students in the public school system or not will join us and helping lead the way i'd like to thank council member rob johnson for you know hosting this event and hopefully we can all come together to keep this campaign wrong thank you so much  campaign is incredibly near and dear to me actually just finished my public policy degree and when people asked me why i was going to school i said it was to raise taxes and they would look at me like i was crazy and i would say because we need to fund things that really matter and if you look at washington state and if you look at seattle and king county imagine many of us hear about those moments or lives where because we're broke we have spend more money than we than if we had access to money up front happens all the time with your low income also happen to your starving college student but you know you can't buy toilet paper and bowl you r on this panel i can tell you what amazing things we could invest in if we had access to the rest of sources of revenue and right now we don't have them and i should add my voice to this great chorus i don't know i mixed metaphors but so i'll tell you how i ended up here with the hearing they brought me in two thousand and seven the city to study about internet and they found that we could basically save two billion dollars over a twenty year period if we were to build our own public utility right at the that's billion with a b and that savings for every single one of us who has internet at basically the reason we haven't looked to take advantage of us the reason that we're still spending more money than we need to with the reason our money is being sent out of state to companies that no one really likes and no one wants to deal with is that we've been too poor to invest in public utility there's currently about fifty miles of a city who can't afford their bills at all and then the rest of us are paying way too much i think that with a good stable source of revenue we could actually be investing in things that would save us money over the long haul whether that's housing whether that's our and i think now is the time that we can really do this if you look around you can see that there is so much wealth in the city there's just epic growth there is lots of people moving here with high incomes and you know i grew up here my whole life i'm really happy to invest in a community and help pay for things we care about and like to see the same thing from the people who are doing slightly better than me and they're also very much welcome in the city but they can help us build the right see that we believe in that we really need so that's why i'm really excited campaign that's why we're really excited as a brit seattle to put energy behind everybody here and every everything going to do i'm very excited to have come over johnston here tonight and i hope that everyone gets involved after this i think that we can do a whole lot together everyone so actually before i start to have a technician all right so before i before i introduce myself i want to invite our friend time i actually to the microphone for a minute to play from the indigenous community to put a little context to the speech that we're holding right now i'm going to start something and that we would do within our own communities this was originally the police of chief seattle which is true de mint not seattle or not so and this is a song from the sale you see it's part of the creation story and the song is the way that we start things off and if you learn to sing a song as you sing a song your breath begins to coordinate with the other people your breath goes into synchronization you become of one heart you become of one breath and this is a very special song from the creation story and it goes oh oh oh oh you oh oh oh  carter way tom tom oh it and those words in english mean that our hearts will be different it's singing that we're going to try to be better people and that's why you're coming together tonight with all the rest of the people here to be a one heart and of one breath and to start making this place what it should be thank you so my name is kevin fenwick i'm a volunteer organizer with three hit the seattle one of the campaign coordinator has on the trump roof seattle campaign i have also been a resident of district four for three and when we talk about making seattle a more progressive space we really cannot start to truly liberate ourselves from denial until we recognize that we are perpetuating a narrative of oppression and exploitation so first off on that note i actually do want to thank council member johnson as well as the other council members for making the right and that means that we are moving forward to a system of responsible banking that is not invested in the exploitation of our land and our war of the land in the water indigenous people and not investing in the violation of their human rights and the violation of treaties i want to say that i believe that council member johnson and the rest did that made that choice not only because they thought it was the right choice for the city of seattle but because they understood that this was part of a greater story that has that their power had the chance to to operate in telling a different story where we don't invest in the select wealthy few whose lust for profits are waging a war on the rest of the community of life but instead working to ensure that we respect the human rights and the urgent human needs of our entire human family and i as a climate activist and a constituent i want to invite council member johnson to realize that we're asking him to work with us on this and fight for a progressive income tax in seattle for that same reason yes we can do right by our city we can make seattle a more affordable more equitable and a more just place for all residents but this is part of a greater story and i want to invite the council member to work with us to understand the weight of his office the weight of that power and the responsibility and understand that we are currently creating the story for ourselves in our future generations where we can not only do this for seattle but but lead the way as a city to help washington free up billions of dollars billions of dollars to ensure that we are providing me the most basic human needs in the most basic human rights respecting those rights for everyone and creating a green economy that is a steward to our mother earth and i just progressive tax system gives us so many opportunities to break free so i want to invite everyone to participate in this campaign and to the extent of their passion because we can break free from this mythology that we don't have the revenue in this state to actually meet our most urgent needs to mitigate climate catastrophe to educate our children and the mythology that tells us that week we must these issues against each other that we don't have enough revenue to have a robust robust education program for our kids and can actually act as stewards of our environment have a robust environmental protection program in olympia they're telling us that we have to choose meanwhile a grotesque amount of wealth sits stagnant atop of glass towers so let us break free also from the methodology that tells us that this wealth product of personal and individual ambition and talent when we know that it rests upon a complex web of systemic interrelationships that involves everyone and comes at a cost of environmental degradation climate catastrophe and exploitation of the working class and finally let us free this wealth and use it to break free from fossil fuels and build a electrified grid of mass affordable transit and cooperative agriculture that runs on one hundred percent renewable energy and this can make sure that we are moving everyone moving feeding everyone and housing everyone not just the wealthy but every one of our brothers and sisters and this is the story that we can tell with this campaign if we act now so as a representative of the community both district for and the climate community i just want to invite council member johnson to work with us on this and tell the story thank you so that was my cue thanks everybody for being here tonight i just want to take a moment to just brag you know we in the district four are leading the way on so many different issues and this is one great example as the folks here tonight mentioned they're planning on doing these town halls and all seven city council districts but which one is first district for which council member agreed to do that first rob johnson so you know i'm not big on speeches especially at a forty five on a thursday night but i just wanted to share a couple quick things about why this is an important issue to me the fifth generation satellite i  grew up here my family's from here my my great grandmother moved to capitol hill in the late eighty's hundreds the city of seattle has changed a lot over the last hundred thirty years and one of the biggest changes that we've seen is loss of degradation of our nat environment we're seeing the impacts of climate change today more rapidly than any other time in recorded history we're seeing live we live in a city that prides herself on environmental protection but we're in an environment where the president's budget cuts all funding for cleanup of puget sound we're living in a time where we're watching our native southern orca population be decimated by the loss of their chinook salmon and the response from the federal government is to take more money away from the protection of that endangered species and so i'm a big believer that this is one of the best ways for us to stand up and say we will fight back against those environmental rollbacks coming from the trumpet ministration and i think that this is a good time for us to do so another reason why i care about this campaign is because i've got three little girls i've got two six year olds in kindergarten up of bryan elementary and a three and a half year old who's in a little a little preschool right behind the green like library and when i was down limpid all day today lobby and legislators about fixing washington's paramount duty and making investments in our education system i want to echo what i heard from michael though we didn't hear all whole lot of opportunities for compromise what i heard was guess what seattle you're going to pay more and you're probably going to get less we're going to ask you to help raise up revenues for everybody else or probably not going to give you any increase in revenue for the kids in your school and i'm fortunate enough that we go to a public school where the p t s a very well off we raise tens of if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to help support our kids in our schools but that inequity shouldn't be on the burden of those parents and it should be shared amongst all of us as citizens this campaign is a great opportunity for us to make sure that we show our kids our values and that we value them as top priority this is a great opportunity for us to do  that almost all i just have the good politics speaking three sarah so our third and then i'll turn it over to you so then the third reason why i care a lot about this issue is because we're living in a very insecure time for a whole lot of folks hate crimes in our city in our region are on the rise i talk to immigrants and refugees every day that are scared to come to even are free of events we're talking to them about opportunities for them to be able to feel safe and stay in this community i was talking with the representative of the nonprofit the other day that does a lot of immigrant rights trainings and she said for the first time in five years they held a training and no one showed up and the reason why they believe no one showed up is because of the fear of coming to an official public and that being at that public meeting will result in someone knowing who you are where you live and telling homeland security and ice that it's time for you to go home that is now the city that i grew up in that is not the city that i'm proud represent and we can do much better the challenge that we have is the cuts that are coming from the federal government and the pressure from the federal government us to really back fill those cuts kitty talked about some of those in terms of our cuts to human services are cuts t housing those are real cuts for us in a time where we are already seeing significant state and federal disinvestment and health and human services and housing mental health crisis is contributing to our homelessness job in equality is contributing to our homelessness income inequality is a huge issue for us to fix and as katie rarely mentioned we're a city where if your if you look at us compared to all the other major cities in the united states we have the fourth highest tax burden on the lowest income in the fourth best tax burden on the highest income it is time for us to change that around to make our city a more equitable city for everybody now there are some challenges we as a council know that this potential income tax is going to be challenged through the courts so we need to be deliberate we need to be working hard to showcase that we've got a strong legal argument secondly we need to work really hard to understand exactly what that income threshold is there's a lot of good data and good policy to point out and some different directions that's still very much under discussion and then the third issue is with a laundry list of priorities we have as a city how do we wan see are those revenues invested in a way that is really consistent with our city's values on the values of our citizens so those are some big to do's that we have but i really thank you all for being here today and i want to encourage you to continue fighting continue organizing continue putting pressure on us and with your support and with your work we're going to get this thing done thank you very much cover the full cut of money that will probably have cut from federal budget so it's really hard to say because we don't know what pieces of trump's proposed budget will end up actually going through from what i've seen for at least the housing and human services absolutely it would cover it if we're talking about all the money for transit projects probably not definitely not if we're talking about regional transit projects but the other thing to keep in mind is just that when we talk about the what we're going to do with this money is that we can't we're not going to get the revenue right away so if there are immediate cuts that we think are going to happen we can't count on this money for that because we are going to go through this legal process and it wouldn't be until after the courts make a decision that we would get the revenue so that does play into discussions about what this revenue should be dedicated to black hat right here so you're referring to initiative ten ninety eight which was in two thousand and ten so that was a statewide initiative  and it failed state wide but if you look at the vote in seattle and other progressive cities around the state it passed strongly so seattle resident voters voted for ten ninety eight by sixty three percent so we seattle so she's wondering about the linguistics behind the words such as rich and how that affects people and how they decide to vote for themselves or maybe against their own needs or against the needs of their city because of the way that something has been written or the words that have been chosen in the legislation so you know i think we're a broad coalition or a broad campaign everyone in the coalition has different thoughts on everything from revenue dedication to income threshold to messaging you know we differ there are definitely those in the coalition who are really about the tax the rich because you know we've seen that that  has a lot of momentum behind it and the grassroots community and the low income community you know when i was preparing what i was going to say tonight i kind of whether i said it or not for me it's important to see this as a  way of seeing everyone paying their fair share you know and i and what i would just advocate is that everyone in this room and everyone in this city is their own advocate and if you have messaging that works personally for you you write it down and call your council member because what we're working to do with this model of organizing is also opening the dialogue and making making our city officials and our constituents together feeling organizers or activists politicians being in a room together being accessible having these conversations and if i would just suggest that there's messaging that works for you then when you take it to the streets you use that  back blue shirt so her questions was one of talking points do we have to respond to people who give excuses about why this is not going to work for to give as much state funding to us because we have a city income tax so i want to address those two questions and the second one i would just say olympia is not giving a shit right now so you know i don't know we just have to push forward and on the first i think i mean that's probably i can promise that we will expand the f a q on the term proof seattle dot org website to address those questions on the one about people moving out of seattle or jobs or whatever i mean california has has high income taxes right san francisco has high income taxes and they seem to be doing ok to do a lot of good but they put up with much worse live in the city and we all think it's worth it for reason and i would say actually you know i'm out here at the farmer's market ever saturday morning either myself or one of my staff members and one of the most common things that i hear from people is what can we do to help how can we do more and that comes from people at all income levels but i hear more often than not from those that are very well to do and so i think that we actually because of what katie said about that sixty three percent of folks who voted yes in two thousand and ten and by the way the city has grown by about one hundred thousand people since then we could very easily find a larger majority of folks that are one to stand up with us for progressive sources  way in the back blue shirt like most things that are citizen driven i think we're working really hard with the folks who are pulling together the concept to make sure that we all know exactly what our and game looks like so a lot of this is about coordination between the forty organizations that have signed on to the campaign and making sure that we're all in lockstep about what a set of legal strategies and other political strategies would look like to make sure we're successful and then the second thing is i commit to as a member of the budget committee making this a priority for us over the next year to make sure that we're really driving a political conversation that helps us get to yes out of council now will that have been this maybe maybe not if it doesn't happen this year i can tell you that by this point next year we'll have a plan well booked well baked and ready to go sorry it's been a long day well baked and ready to go so that in twenty eighteen you'll see something and that back with the glasses so this woman had a great comment about how this proposal is different than the previous proposal because this is a remedial this is a solution to a problem that we're seeing from the federal level so therefore might not be seen as unconstitutional differently than the previous tax proposal that was statewide so i actually only have time for one t you know i think that this is a this has a lot to do a legal timelines right how do we really make sure that we're working with the legal community to develop a sound legal strategy and sometimes that takes time in addition to that we want to make sure that we're doing a good job of working with coalition partners and bringing people long that takes to the political organizing that you guys are doing takes time you know i think that there's a sound way for all of that all those venn diagrams to come together that gives us a pathway for and seventeen but i'm less confident of guaranteeing without looks like especially knowing that there are lawyers involved this stuff just is something that takes time and we want to make sure that we get a ride and i would rather wait a little while and get a ride and know that we've got a sound legal strategy then move quickly and know that we're going to get a wrong and set the movement backwards you know again i'm relying on the work of the coalition is doing right now to build a lot of political movement and a little a lot of political power i know that there are folks within the legal community that are doing the research i haven't been approached by those lawyers yet which makes me think that they're not quite ready to come in and make an argument  to if anyone in this room is interested in you know helping helping our council member out by building that organizing in a quicker timeline we will be actually organizing weekly delegation visits to his open office hours for like at the farmers market or on friday mornings to check in and see how we can make this happen this year that so i just want to say thanks again for being part of this council member johnson it's great to have you on the city council i don't think we've seen each other since working together on sound transit to back in two thousand and eight you played a huge role in winning that campaign and i'm a big fan of yours and now i'm hoping you can play a big role in winning this next big campaign  in the nine years since sound transit two i've been trying to get a wealth tax in washington i'm still an engineer at one of our large software companies so i'm fortunate enough that i qualify for this wealth tax and i can't wait to pay it because because i want to do my fair share to keep seattle wonderful my seattle roots stretch back to my grandfather to get to new york he actually came through the seattle immigration office in fact that's where i got the last name of friend that name was a mistake a welcoming one my grandfather came here to escape the pogroms and build a better life and he did how he sent my dad to a good public school who went on to become a medical school professor at harvard i'd like to think my grandfather would have the same good fortune if you arrive today because i love seattle in our progressive values but we are living up to those values as we've talked about tonight we aren't really welcoming new in immigrants our public schools as you mention are criminally underfunded rent a sky rocketing tents line our highways it home for me a few weeks ago i was driving south on i five with my family and we were all just listening to music and out of nowhere my seven year old daughter says to me i want to get all those people presen i look around and i'm like what people and she says all those people living in tents i want to get people out of those tents i want to fully fund my daughter's public school i want to make to get to work by bus and train and i want to support immigrants like my grandparents i want seattle to invest more in our public services one hundred million dollars more the kind of money we can only raise through taxes but i don't want the poor to pay i want to personally support our city with my wealthy peers and many of them agree with me so let's keep seattle wonderful with a wealth tax i know you can make it happen thank you  to everyone all our speakers and thank you to all the wonderful questions i'm sorry we don't have time for more