yes hi everyone maybe ms emily myers i am a scientist and parkinson's disease research at the university of washington here i'm also an executive board member with my union u a w four thousand one hundred and twenty one which represents over five thousand five hundred employees a d post acts here at the university of washington i do have to leave immediately after this so i am so sorry and i am so glad you all are here i do live right down by goes so if you see me walking around with my little dog sometimes you know i walk twice a day around here please stop and say hi and please say hi to my dog because he is very needy but yeah i would love to stay and chat with you my campaign manager is going to stick around and answer any questions that you may have for our campaign and i just want to say thank you and please check out my website it is actually for seattle dot com thank you the end of the meeting and please check us out i did want to mention my endorsements just in case i didn't get to do a closing statement that's the th district democrats council members richard conlin and tom rasmussen ellen durning had the jerry large rb a mars in demand and a lot of other wonderful community people that's because i've been working in community for the last three decades i worked for the parks department put in forty parks and community centers as a planner and project manager i work for the seattle planning commission and i've started nonprofits i'm a person that's really good at talking to people and building community coalitions and getting things done and i'd like to get things done in this community and the more i'm talking to you the more i'm seeing that i'm on that side of saving the let's talk more about you know kathy total stuber i'm not leaving early but i did come a little bit late thank you all for your patience i'm so excited to be among the small business people here today i'm a small business leader i have been for many years and i came  just off a classic small business emergency and property management which is an alarm going up and knowing no one knowing what the security code was that i was like today i run a small business i have about fifteen employees i'm raising a special needs child and i'm running a campaign and i'm able to do all those things successfully because i'm somebody that gets things done i'm very effective and i work hard i know how to prioritize and i'm running because i want to see seattle change for the better i think we can do a better job addressing the big issues facing us like affordability homelessness crisis climate change and our schools and i want to see the next city council member create a more livable affordable and sustainable city right now and for the next generation thank displacement is one that i saw up close a lot of times as editor of that paper and so for me i'm looking forward to a very robust discussion hearing from as many community partners longtime residents of the university district as possible about what it is that we need to do to make a district for as inclusive a district as it can be and make seattle a city that goes into the future but doesn't leave behind a lot of the things that made us getting to this point so look forward to a great discussion thank you for attending everybody hi everybody my name is alex peterson i will be here for the rest of my life because i live just a few blocks away and it's great to have a form of focus just on the university just it's really the heart of this seattle city council district that we're all running for and it's really a special place i've knocked on the doors in every precinct in the your district and it's a neighborhood as all of you know it's a special neighborhood city planners down at city hall view it as an urban center or a transit but those of us who live here know that it's a special neighborhood with small businesses that we all cherish and we want to preserve so i was door belling today have knocked on the doors of twelve thousand voters already in the district because we've got to be that responsive district council member and i was in view ridge today and i met somebody named patricia and what she said is what i hear from residents throughout they want somebody seattle i remember seattle the way it was ninety nine in two thousand and i know that our future can be just as bright even as we cope and deal with the growth and manage for climate change  mounseer wanted to welcome you all the university heights tonight i'm the board chair and have been on the board here since two thousand and twelve i may not have knocked on your door but i probably met a lot of you through the volunteer work that i've done in this neighborhood since i lived people and but i'm running in introduce myself i worked for king county now work for city of redmond have worked on policy issues my st love and my entree into government was working on affordable housing issues that they known john fox for some thirty years and the displacement coalition because that was part of my back story of how i made that transition from practicing architecture to working for a local government and since then i've worked on nearly every kind of policy issue i'm currently a small business owner still running that business but when it came time to find an office i had to look around the city and what did i find but the alvin the whole office to rent for five hundred dollars a month that rent went up to  businesses and then we also grow it outside of the av and don't ask me out to take on too much of a burden i hope to talk more about it tonight thank you all hi my name is ethan hunter and since moving to seattle eleven years ago i've seen so many neighborhoods in seattle change and not always for the better i've gone to seattle public schools and have seen st hand how differently some minorities have been treated in our public schools i also know what it's like to go to school  with the risk that one day maybe i could be the victim of a next school shooting i would think a lot of people here including myself unhappy with the current council but i see it for the future of seattle and for the next city council as a real opportunity to lead on things like climate change affordable housing dealing with homelessness crisis and helping those addicted to drugs get the help they need what i'm asking for you is to go out on august th for more compassion and a new leader and city council thank you in polite company and he want to keep it that way don't talk about politics it used to be that we could avoid it polarizing subjects but just not discussing them but these days that's just not possible w the i think an important thing that we have to address with our homelessness crisis is the fact that we have a lack of restrooms throughout the city especially two hundred and forty seven restrooms now the your district is very special because we have the urban  is a program that has demonstrated that the community means that people need a place that they can get to in the morning get cleaned up and leave so when it comes to the question of whether we should have restrooms at the station itself which is also  so that we have these facilities for everyone i'm always worried about urban rest op is going to go away we can't have just one we need multiples of these things around town thank you very much so i go to the bathroom about i don't know four or five times a day i think we need bathrooms i mean you know public bathrooms are something that are important not just for people who are homeless not just for people who you know have special needs we all need you know of the that my kids had that book and everybody goes i mean we have to this makes it much more livable city we need more public benches we need more drinking fountains we need more bathrooms we need to have a city that is actually accommodating all of us and it keeping public bathrooms out of the out of the public right of way is not serving any of us so yes we do need bathrooms around the stations absolutely i would agree i think that the question of public space who owns it who is going to be able to have control over it in the future which candidate is most robust and vigorous in their pursuit of maintaining it and growing it is a lot of ways of defining question for this election and this election cycle i think that one of the things i understand that there are a lot of small business owners and representatives of small business here one of the things that we really need to see to help stimulate a lot of small businesses in the city and in the district specific is a culture of people getting out and walking pedestrian centric culture a culture where people feel unable to actually explore a public space on foot as opposed to only on their cars i think that we would also like to see something like a policy like commercial rent control in the city so that a lot of small business owners who are at risk or if they are being displaced maybe have some of those fears mitigated but as far as public restrooms are concerned i think it really does speak to a real philosophical concern about making sure that we have a city that says accessible to everyday people as possible so yes a public rest shopping done in our small businesses so it makes absolute sense to have a restroom there for people to use my previous candidates mention about the homeless the homeless need a place for those who are on the streets to be able to use the restroom you yes we do need public restrooms especially air tran's and centers i've been that dad rushing his young child off to a restroom or buying a cup of coffee i had planned to do in order to use the private restroom actually i was that dead yesterday  there is a challenge it's not quite a no brainer because public restrooms do need to be maintained and they cost money most of us probably remember the interesting but ill advised experiment with the automated restrooms downtown they didn't quite work out so we will need a plan to fund the operation and maintain those public restrooms we need to figure it out maybe the solution is to have a public private partnership with the city maybe doing ownership in the local business community just a suggestion but managing it in some way to meet the expectations of the local community but the logistics of having a public restroom are not straightforward but we can figure it out be paying these impact fees for these new developments that are going in and again and wonder time but yes i do support the current measure by the council yes i like the idea of an impact for you specifically because it addresses the issue of small businesses versus large businesses i don't want to put an undue burden on small businesses any more than more already suffering through already in the city but i should say that i do have a small problem with that it's that it's a one time fee at a time of development as we all know these buildings have a recurring fee not just a maintenance speed but an infrastructure cost around the city and around the neighborhood that it's in i would rather see something more like taxes and more progressive taxes that are long running rather than this one dollar time thing that's not going to fix anything it's a short term solution but it's a solution in the right direction  well i think this is a really good question and it goes to the heart of who's paying to provide whether it's amenities like parks or i would call those necessities but schools and other facilities and those sorts of things one of the books i think i gave away to bill brad bird going he was running a number of years ago was a study about california and how they do impact fees when we just say most cities to charge impact  school so they don't come anywhere close to paying for the new classrooms that you need and the same thing you should recognize about all impact the one concern that i have is the burden is being put only on the new housing coming into the area i was one who thought just going into mandatory housing affordability that really the tax that ought to be there as on new commercial development which drives the need for housing matched matching up what you're going to tax in terms of what comes to be paid for it is very important and i think we need to get it right would we clearly need to have some kind of development some kind of impact on development you can see what happens when there is not enough when you go into north seattle or into southeast seattle where developers nine hundred and fifty s and beyond weren't required to build sidewalks and as a result we're stuck with large swaths of the city now that simply don't have sidewalks so the expectation the new developer the new development contribute immediately to the city into the community is reasonable is kind of part and parcel of growing in the city however we also know that when you raise the cost of a project fewer those projects are going to happen and it's also going to price out some of the smaller developers but developers that that work with and that i know from personal experience that they will be challenged to do projects on their own so we need to strike a balance we do need to provide funding seventy other cities or washington state that charge them their charge throughout the united states but they haven't been done in seattle and i've got a lot of experience in the private sector is in addition to my public service working for the department of housing and urban development and working for city council here in seattle and the developer impact fees are needed for schools sidewalks fire stations to as well as harks and developers i think will pay their fair share they just need policymakers city council members who have the courage and financial aqim and to institute them correctly the mandatory housing affordability fees that have just been enact have to be balanced with those we have to recognize there's a cumulative impact but i think yes we should  think a lot of young people a lot of renters need in this district i think that it's also the case that impact fees as was pointed out earlier are not necessarily a sustainable revenue solution business cycles come and go cycles of housing production especially with as many luxury developers as we have come and go according to the business cycle but one thing that doesn't come and go is the need for transit the need for schools so one of the things that we've talked about in the course of this campaign is actually having a speculative real estate tax which just incentivizes developers from building large towers that are not affordable to actual working people in the city and letting them go vacant we've talked about having a land value tax which i think would serve the same purpose so i would say yes to impact fees with a copy of that it's not a disincentive to this weekend and i think i heard developed nerves come up from every single day and i was really surprised because density can be kind of a divisive issue in our districts but one thing we agree on is that we can ask more developers we want to ask them to replace trees down we want to ask them to include more parking on site and i think we can absolutely ask them to pay into building the infrastructure around the areas where they're developing to benefit us all as a mom i know that our schools are deeply underfunded here in washington state impact fees will not get us where we need to be fully but every little bit helps to keep our schools healthy and to keep our parks kept up as well so yes i support the as i often have people tell me they have that they don't want you know that they feel like they're good people but they don't know that they can put out more money for the libraries for the parks for the schools for all of the things that we're asking people to pay money for i think this creates a lack of trust in government and i think it makes people cynical about any new proposals for for actually just taking care of basic needs absolutely yes i think we have one of the most progressive tax systems in the in the country i don't know where it's terrible but we need to actually get some money from developers and impact fees seem like a reasonable way of doing it one of the things i intend to do as your city council representative is to have a person full time in district who is the representative of the district i think that we this is something that only one of our city council members deborah juarez is doing right now and i think it's necessary to actually work with communities to get what's going on in the communities and so yes i want that person to be able to be the liaison from my office talking to you to figure out how that university district partnership can be working with the business association because i want everybody to be fairly represented at the table thanks heidi stuber i actually didn't know it before i started this campaign and it's something i do know what they are now but i've had to learn about as i go along and i think they're you know they've they've been a little rocky in some areas and i think anytime you have a group of people that speaking for a greater group of people you have to be really careful about the representation that that it's putting forth the voice of the community so i do do believe on all sorts of boards that we need to have it be representative of people in the area that it speaking for to have an open meetings things to make sure people can give input on what the agenda is and what they're putting forth to the city and absolutely any city council member has to be in close communication with the local groups and so that they're making sure we're hearing your voices and we're talking to you having a local office is absolutely something i'd be committed to as a local representative and being present at many of your local events and so that we know what you need from us as your next city council member  i think it's the case that the candidates campaign as they hope to govern and certainly the fact that our campaign or my campaign i should say we're in st place for the amount of democracy voters that have been received not only in this individual race but citywide across fifty six city council candidates is a statement about the fact that we hope to be accountable to the people who are on the ground and not to interest from outside of the city and i think that one of the things that we see with small business is that i would like to bring more small business owners who are at risk of displacement and i know that we have a lot of businesses that are immigrants that are pure c e o and that are owned by people of color and district four and so i would like to start the outreach process with the people who are most vulnerable with the march to increase commercialization that i think we've seen in seattle over the last decade in getting them on board because i think it's part of my core philosophy as a council candidate and hopefully as a council member that when we lift up from the bottom and we talk to the people who are most vulnerable and most at risk actually creates a condition where everybody is better off having better representation is that is the key at the university of washington actually is sort of an eight hundred pound gorilla you know involved in that and so i think you know having more small business representation as i said earlier having more community groups have a greater say in what's what's going on a lot of the businesses here are vulnerable they rent their space they're not landowners so that's what's tough about how the structure is you've got landowners and their purpose or shands and formulas used but then at the end of the day there are some eight hundred pound gorillas there are making all the decisions so we need to have better representation but i think we need to we need to renew it so we can continue want good representation but as an engineer i'm a problem solver and when i don't understand the problem or what i'm introduced to a new one i go to look for data and i go and i look to understand what's going on old myth that i wasn't aware that there were problems on the representation with the be one of my strengths is going to get data interviewing people talking with those involved in the stakeholders and developing collaborative solutions so well i guess it's true that all politics is local and there's always some friction on determining what the priorities are and in particular in the b i a s case what are the kind of fees that you're going to charge and how you're going to use those sorts of i think working together as a community is better than just having individual businesses trying to take care of community why enhancements safety other sorts of issues like that but i do think bringing everyone to the table and is mentioned university in their vision for how the university district functions is sometimes they are the one hundred pound gorilla in the room side like to see more small businesses more than that are operating here and i spent this morning reading this year's meeting minutes from the b i a because i wanted to understand better what was going on here and if i can allow me to read something to you that describes its work as pertaining to the economic development neighborhood revitalize ation economic vitality and livability of this neighborhood that means it goes beyond businesses it goes into the residential and the people who live in this community i'd like to actually compliment to be on a few things in their charter they're required to have a maximum of thirty five percent representation from the school they're currently at twenty five percent that's good if you have the public in charge there are eighty percent of them should come from the rate payers as they call them but the tenants are included we can look at small businesses and businesses look at the description of the board look at the distribution of the neighborhood and match that this is easy mathematics i'm an engineer we can solve these kinds of problems i'll leave it there thank you very much  so i support the renewal sorry and one of the one of the things that when democracy is working best everyone is getting involved so that means from people to business owners whether it's a large business or small business i want to make sure that especially here along the i vote where we have a lot of minority and immigrant owned businesses that they have a seat at the table as well so that means bringing them in on the discussion around businesses in the community what i'll be doing if elected is hosting a weekly town hall is with people throughout each community going to different areas of the district each week to hear what their concerns are make sure that what they can put on my agenda in the council is being represented representative of what business is and the people are telling me so really getting everyone involved in the political process is how democracy works best and that's right playing and doing thank one hundred and twenty five dollars to six hundred dollars landmark areas within the district that they feel should be historically marked and i think going forward with that plan will really help small businesses in the area so that they're not displaced i was totally a lot of these takeover of the skyscrapers just yet and i think that we can push that off for longer what i am proud of as a part of m h a is the development we've done around the ave we can't keep expecting one street to carry the full burden of an entire neighborhood i want to see brooklyn developed more i want to see the northern sections of brooklyn and the add up to more i've even go more extreme and i am a fan of the proposal to make the out walkable we have a lot of problems to deal with how we would run around there and we would have to make more use of brooklyn but i'm thinking of the far future where do we want to see the city go and we want a retail out and i think that we can achieve that i think it's really going to take much more action in terms of the kind of support for creative ways that both to be a potentially works but also your council member in terms of the kind of zoning conditions just because it doesn't get up some doesn't mean that you aren't can have properties redevelop along here especially with the proximity to the transit center what we're really talking about i think is a much better approach to the kind of design requirements that out of the along and if you've been out to basel or other cities in the suburbs who also want to have neighborhoods like they have one of the tricks and the reason you have smaller business owners is having smaller commercial spaces that doesn't mean you don't let in a walgreens but they don't get to explore certainly some some type of community foundations we might be able to explore the idea of mimicking what pike place market has done and creating a foundation that manages even more closely future light rail station to the you just you yes i absolutely support removing the from the zone i stood with the business owners in front of city council months ago calling for them to remove it from the opposite they keep trying to put it back in i hope you join us  color women we've got to preserve them other things we can do there's a great program that was started recently giving legal advice on various issues to a business owners increasing the marketing to encourage people to shop here and making it a historic district to preserve it so i don't actually support exempting be from i want to be very very clear i want to be very clear about why that might be the case i think at the same time that we need commercial rent control i've lived in seattle most of been mentioned is that it moves on so the real question is whether or not we want to have the city actually people want to control what that worth looks like a lot of inspiration from one particular aspect of mayor nickels as to your ship which is that when he built or when he was responsible for it i think small businesses are really important as a small business leader i know that there's a lot of small businesses that are helping build the middle class that are taking care of a lot of employees and i think when i think about displacement of small businesses i don't just think about zoning and rent but i think about all the stresses that go into small businesses and i know as someone who's reading one that businesses are getting stretched thinner and thinner in seattle there's rising rents there's rising payroll costs there's more policies and even great employers employers who want to do absolutely the right thing for their employees and pay a minimum wage a living wage above minimum wage at high business because minimum wage is not enough to live in seattle that they're feeling really stressed then and so i think we need to make sure that the people at city council are responsive to small business leaders that are thinking about how these new policies how they can be phased in over time so that people can absorb them and raise their revenue in step with their expenses so that they can survive oh sorry about that ye a couple weeks ago i was knocking on doors in maple leaf and i knocked on the door of campbell here news and i didn't know it was him he said what do you think about up zoning and i said sure we should have it's a transit corridor or it's going to be serving a light rail station and he pushed back pretty hard and that was good because i went and did some research on it and i found out that it has a lot of history preservation supporting a lot of arts organizations it's got a lot of non profits it's got a lot of low income office space it has a lot of affordable deeply affordable housing already and i think there's a good reason that you're not running  what i want to say is i'm a council member who can learn i think that you need to be able to listen to people and look at what's what's available and actually change your mind and i have changed my mind about ups owning the well i was actually a student of history at the university of washington so i think it would be pretty hypocritical of me to sit up here and say that i don't support historical district designation so i do support it i see the  not having additional actually affordable housing additional actual public investment in housing i would definitely support it and i think that one of the things that's really missing from our civic discourse both locally and naturally is a healthy appreciation for sort of our shared collective past both the mistakes of it and some of the things that we got right need to continue into the future so i would support it for sure so i do support a historic district as a nation for the and as i mentioned earlier the reason why i would want to do that is to really support our small businesses along especially immigrant minority owned businesses who make up so much of our community and are really the fabric of the  i also mentioned we're going to be so much of seattle as more and more people move here this is seattle such a desirable place to move because of our job market so to do with that being said i do want to make sure that some areas in seattle are protected certainly we could have in the street like we have been a occidental street in pioneer square a great you know thoroughfare for people to go down on game day grab a beer go to a coffee shop or something like that i think that those kinds of street activities and a culture of having people out of their cars exploring the city on foot is something that would really be you know something very that would be very very good so i would like to see you district mobility group's recommendations about implemented into actual policy i would also like to see a massive investment in actually public housing not the kind of housing that we have seen go up as a result of some of the less savory aspects of the m h a program which i think has very much been a developer give away of a lot of public space but i would like to see the city actually do more to build and construct actual public housing actual social housing  making sure that they're protecting her not protecting but making sure that the institution functions wiles of her students in the fall for the whole area but i'd like to read off of sons notions also in terms of just what's the kind of community we want to have it's tricky doing urban design and where do you close down streets and where do you open them up this gets debated down in the market as well small business is probably have mixed feelings about whether or not you have a pedestrian mall or whether you green the whole thing or whether you have other ways that things are getting delivered there are alleys around here i think it's a it's an interesting challenge in terms of how considering this is been the main for buses to move through in the future with link light rail it could probably open up some other ways that we are moving buses through the area and moving pedestrians bikes and all the rest of that thank you very  the you don't need to be a leader on this they have been a leader on trying to say she says in the past especially with the you pass and working to reduce the number of car trips to the you they can still do better they can provide heated and we do need to expand the both as transit options expand we need to expand the affordable housing as well as the current market housing that's going up in the district in seattle is your district is coping with this all of seattle is struggling with this as more market rate housing is built not everyone can cope can compete in thank you so i'm glad i'm getting this question i want to go through my fourteen point plan on climate change st thing we need to do is dump donald trump trumps the worst thing we have for climate change right now we need to implement durkin's climate action plan and it's very detailed we can actually implement it faster we need to encourage more use of solar power protect and expand our tree canopy reduce emissions of our green and to make our fleet green faster we need to get more people to ride light rail we're going to more stations opening up we need to renew this supplemental bus service levy but make the buses better so they work for everybody make sure densities focused around transit require large institutions to get more people to commute expand the city's commute trip reduction program which has lots of loopholes and phase out gas leave blowers with a buyback program work more closely with lex just mentioned there's a great plan plan of action that can be executed in the city one of the other things i've been trying to talk to people about though also is some of it is the investment in resiliency in the city working in the future we're trying to mitigate as much as possible and lower c o two greenhouse gases but the other thing is thinking about the future and the climate change that is probably coming and it's already here that means thinking about our infrastructure the water supply in the future one of the reasons that we're doing combined sewer overflow control projects is because we have more of these storms that caused flooding in the neighborhood or sewer overflows into lake union into lake washington so it's those kind of other things that i would also be looking at in the bottom line in terms of the kind of investments that the city out be making to prepare for climate change and to make the city as resilient as possible buses already that's why we have limited routes throughout the city this is something that we have to put our money to and to fix that problem but you know vehicles are only fifty percent of the problem buildings are another fifty percent right now we have a tune up program going around the city where the city will inspect you and give you suggestions on how to make your building more efficient right now this is a voluntary program although the group has enforcement powers they choose not to use them as a council member i would choose to have unfortunate no one is go fix the environment unfortunately out of the goodness of their hearts we have to have a real reason to and that means penalties unfortunately let's be aggressive about fixing not just our vehicles but our building is this question they had tax is one of the reasons i actually thought as a small business leader it was the wrong way to move forward i'm not saying that i don't think big corporation should be a part of the solution to the big problems our city faces i think they can but i didn't think that was the right way to go about it i thought they had tax involved a lot of grandstanding and not a lot of planning on how the money would be a news story how it would be effective for our community and when i knock on doors i hear from can see i'm not the only one who thinks that a lot about homelessness actually hear a lot about the head tax and people say it's not that they don't think businesses should pay their fair share but we need to have trust that city council can use the funds effectively and we need to see the plan for the revenues so that we know where it's going so i think in the future if we want businesses to be a part of the solution i think we have to bring them to the table and we have to give the voters more importantly than the business the voters need to know where that money is going to go and how it's going to be effective to creating housing that is actually affordable and helping people get shelter are i oppose the head tax but let me go on this in detail you can see why it came about because we have the states we have the most regressive tax system in our state and city council has limited tools they were trying to address an urgent crisis homelessness which is the number one concern that people have when i knock on doors to and so but you need to do it right you need to have a plan and i'm running on accountability you need to have a plan on exactly how you're going to spend the money you need to focus on using best practices proven to reduce homelessness you need to have a system in place i think the business community wants to get involved you just saw amazon put up additional money today  they want to get involved and it's the city councils job to prove that we're working we're using affected programs we're working with king county where there's mental health and drug dependency dollars we need to have a show them that they can trust to put their money in city councils plans