Speaker 0: Thank you. And that takes us to item eight on today's agenda. This is proposed motion 2019 476, which would approve the initial framework for the King County Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Inclusion Task Force as required by earlier motion, which established the task force. Jeff Mumm will offer a brief staff report and when you're ready, invite panelists up and we'll proceed. And as we begin, I want to acknowledge and apologize and acknowledge that you've been here for a full 2 hours of committee hearing. Appreciate your being here through this. And even more so appreciate the work that you're bringing to us today. Is it Councilmember.
Speaker 1: Lambert? Thank you. Thank you. I just wanted to say that I won't be able to hear your presentation in total because I have 75 homes that are in trouble right now. So I will be leaving. But I want you to and I'll be watching it on tape.
Speaker 0: Thank you, Mr. Mayor.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Mr. Chair. I heard the request for a brief briefings, but I will be brief. So, for the record, Jeff, ma'am, counsel, central staff, before you is motion 2019 0479, which would improve an initial framework for the County Gender Identification and Sexual Orientation Inclusion Task Force. The Staff Report, which was authored by Sam Porter, who can't be here today, is found on page 15 of your packet in. And to be brief, the framework is in compliance with the with the initial council motion 15162 which the Council adopted to establish the task force. And it lays out a timeframe, a goals and a budget for the task force to do its work over the next year. And I think the major or not the major the the one issue I will highlight is in the budget implications. The task force, the second 2018 omnibus budget included expenditure restriction within the Office of Performance Strategy and Budget for 100 and $100,000 to support the task force work and the budget outlined within this document and ranges between 175,000 and $240,000 to support the work. And that would be for a consultant to hire one term limited position. And then the support honorarium of $100 a month for task force members. The executive has stated that they don't intend to seek additional funding to support the task force. So it's so I'm assuming in the executive staffing speak to this more that they would absorb those costs within the department. And that concludes the the very brief report. I think you wanted to save time to hear from the task force members themselves.
Speaker 0: Very much so. See no questions of Mr. Ma'am. I invite the members of the Task Force Forward. And while they don't have a complete list, I also know that at least one of your members seems to have had to leave, I assume, due to the due to the hour. So. I apologize again. And we have the Mr. Members stood up with the chair at the end as well. Good afternoon and welcome.
Speaker 6: Thank you. Terry McDermott and members of the Council. And my name is Kelly McDermott. I work on external relations in the executive's office, which means I have the pleasure often to work with our community partners and different taskforces and community engagement opportunities. I prefer she and her pronouns and I am the Deputy Director of External Relations in the exact office that Jack Kennedy can go quiet askance.
Speaker 1: A la de Channel E Jen.
Speaker 6: My name is Samantha Bhaskar from the Haida Conquer and Inupiaq nation. And I'm here. I prefer she here, her pronouns as well. And then I'm here with Na Elihu friend as their community engagement specialist Inc.
Speaker 3: Hello, Honorable Council members. And I tell you what. Waiting is not a problem when real democracy is happening. So thank you, Marsha Boxer. She and her Ingersoll gender senator Martin Luther King County Labor Council, the new Washington State LGBTQ Commission, Equal Rights Washington. But so honored to be a part of this project that we're going to present today.
Speaker 1: Tal Afar. Armenia is a society for Hanon and thank you for having us today. We're really honored and humbled to be here. Pronouns are she her and so one feminine pronoun. And I'm here on behalf of Pride, Foundation, Utopia, Seattle, Trans Women of Color, Solidarity Network and the Washington State LGBTQ Commission.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Good afternoon. Steven Sawyer, executive director of Spokane, formerly known as People of Color.
Speaker 3: Against AIDS Network.
Speaker 2: Also with the State Western State LGBTQ Commission. Thank you.
Speaker 6: Great. And we'll be brief, but we wanted to take a minute to talk a little bit about the process that led us here today. And I will just say we had three long, wonderful task force meetings that went into the creation of the document in front of you, the initial framework. And we took time to educate and become educated about the work programs and lines of business for each county department, agency and branch of government and separately elected office, which was incredibly helpful to help the task force and winnowing down and determining particular areas of focus for the work ahead. We had a meeting after we transmitted the framework with council members Baldacci and Cole Wells to talk about the budget request. And Jeff was correct that we did make a compromise around executive staff sort of subsuming the role of in place of hiring a TLT to liaise with county departments. And we've worked to identify a roster of points of contact in all executive departments so that when the work kicks off, once we've onboarded our consultants and sort of rebooted in the second phase of our work, that will we'll be able to really easily and quickly respond to the task force's needs as it relates to departments in separate and separately elected offices. And we just want to thank the Council for their unanimous support of the budget request. We are looking forward to the work ahead. And now I'm going to pass it on to Samantha and Steven to talk a little bit about the different elements of the initial framework, including our inclusion of a land acknowledgment at the top of the report, as well as the guiding principles focusing on equity, intersectionality and the centering of impacted communities in the work ahead. Thank you, Kelly. As I said before, in my language, my name is Samantha Basco here at Na Elegy Fund. I was really intent on including a land acknowledgment in our body of work, not as sort of hollow words that make documents and meetings longer, but rather as an opportunity for us all to ground our work in this place and with each other. So I really and truly believe that land acknowledgments are an opportunity and a responsibility to one another and to this land and the people who are here first to work with each other for the care of.
Speaker 1: The land and each other.
Speaker 6: I really believe also that a land acknowledgment is sort of the beginning step. It's definitely not the end step.
Speaker 1: And that with land acknowledgments, it's sort of the opening.
Speaker 6: To a dialog in which we make sure that Native American people are included at the table on which our land, our culture, our traditional knowledge and our labor helped build. I believe that in our.
Speaker 1: Culture, in many Native American cultures, there is a.
Speaker 6: People we call to spirit, people who are diverse in gender expression as well as sexuality, and they hold a very honored and special place in our culture. They are celebrated. They are who we traditionally have gone to in both times of peace and war for advice and counsel and who have unique gifts that they give to community when they feel safe and welcome. And so it is within this work that we really wanted to ground that opportunity for education and learning among each other and look to all marginalized groups within this county to really make them feel secure, welcome and included in our body of work so that they can feel safe and welcome enough to share their gifts with us.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 3: And just to.
Speaker 2: Talk about the social justice and equity piece, you know, so often as the executive director of okay and I'm talking about social justice and equity as we do work.
Speaker 3: Broadly in the community, but we've always.
Speaker 2: Still had a focus around LGBTQ issues as well.
Speaker 3: And it's incredibly important that we think there are folks.
Speaker 2: That are marginalized, especially our trans women of color. You know, African-American men who have sex with men is very.
Speaker 3: Important to kind of center this work around that.
Speaker 2: Oftentimes they don't get a voice at the table. And so they're creating this. By creating this, you allow them to have a voice at the table and have some buy in in the process of government, which is very key and important to this work. Okay.
Speaker 3: So beginning my activism in the late sixties and moving to LGBTQ issues in the mid seventies and focusing on trans sense, I have to say this is a real moment in history and you are making this moment happen and we're doing the part. I wanted to let you know about what we're doing with this task force, what this project is. We're making sure that we're contacting those folks who can really help us do the right thing and the right job. So specific groups that we have identified there in the list, of course, but let me just mention a few. We're definitely now aware, thanks to the work of this task force in our meetings, that the Department of Community Resource, Human Resources, Department of Public Health, Adult and Juvenile Detention and many others are departments and areas we need to talk to to make sure that our project around gender identity, around sexual orientation is understood not only in those departments, but what they can tell us how to do it. We've we haven't just conjured up we've worked to make real engagement strategies that we have, for example, focusing on the key stakeholders. We ourselves, we know many of those folks, but we don't know them all. Although the work of this this taskforce has indeed shown us some other partners that we are definitely going to include. We're also going to create an online tool. No, no surprise there, but we will definitely have that for a public commentary. We'll have our materials up for us to see. It'll be there for us in the way that it is done these days. Very different than it was in the sixties. Let me tell you, we are going to invite county staff, clients, experts, anyone that has been identified to us to join us, to help us. And then finally, we are fully aware of organizations, other organizations that we need to connect. For example, Immigrant and Refugee Commission is one that we will want to talk to, have been talking about and to and so many others, our Community Policing Commission, disability rights and so on. We have the large list. We are aware we will contact. We will do the work. And many thanks to you.
Speaker 1: And we're really grateful that you've all approved the budget around Ontarians, and it's something that's been tricky to talk about even with the other commissions at the table. And and it's really important that we honor the work of community organizers, right? As Council member Buttigieg said before, this is a community investment. Right. When we leave our jobs, we the work doesn't stay there. We take it home. And we work to keep our community safe and to build stronger relationships and keeping those communities safer. So and also I just want to mention that when we're not doing when we're here as part of the task force, every for every $100 that's awarded by a foundation to LGBTQ communities, we get about $0.28 of that. And it's even less for trans communities, it's about $0.03. So it's really important that we seize this opportunity to do something different, to honor the work of organizers like Marshall, who's been doing this since the sixties for free and for a lot of marginalized communities and for a lot of black indigenous people of color, we've always done things for free and it's time to do something different. So I think.
Speaker 6: And to close. I'm happy to talk a little bit about what's next. Next steps for the task force. So we had our I worked with our procurement department and our RFP for consulting services for somebody to come and help facilitate to help us facilitate and work with the exact staff on community engagement and to write our final report. That is the recommended strategy as well as a set of recommendations for how we might be a more inclusive government when it comes to different gender identities and sexual orientations outside of dominant narratives. So that bid is closing next week and hopefully we will have somebody on board at our next task force meeting is in the building on February 26. That's open. So if you want to attend or send your staff or let your constituents know and please feel free to do so, I'm happy to send information to any offices. And additionally. So with the proviso on the honorarium funds in our initial framework, we said we wanted to disperse the funds on a monthly basis, but the proviso asks us to take a look at how we might bring honorarium to scale for efforts such as this moving forward, where we're really asking folks who represent or work with marginalized communities to step away from their regular duties and come and help us out as an institution. And so a small committee of task force members is going to be working with executive staff and folks from PSB, the Office of Equity and Social Justice, as well as our Boards and Commissions liaison to develop some processes and protocols about how we will disperse honorarium and what it might take monetarily to bring it to scale for these types of processes moving forward. And with that, I think we're happy to answer any questions that you might have.
Speaker 0: Thank you. I think that a land acknowledgment is indeed a first step and an important step to recognize a community that stewarded and cared for these lands for so long and has the wisdom to recognize unique people as being as perhaps having unique contributions rather than to be other than shunned as so many other communities have. Thank you. And talking about a ability to evolve in time. Marcia is a woman ahead of her time. Marcia has started with bullhorns and organizing and today is not afraid of organizing with websites and social media. The report and speeches don't follow Marcia at a podium as Councilmember Dombrowski I know very well. But the work that you've all collectively come together to do on behalf of the county and people of the county is really essential. Thank you for bringing this up to us and for the work that you're prepared to do for the rest of the year. In your report, you lay out an ambitious set of work for which I'm very appreciative. Questions come. Councilmember Up the Grove.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Mr. Chair. More of a.
Speaker 3: Comment, if that's okay.
Speaker 0: I11 is I will not rule you out of order.
Speaker 2: Why, thank you. I missed the day of the media. I would suggest maybe just shoot it off to all the council members offices. That would be great.
Speaker 3: Also, what you said.
Speaker 2: About Marsha, that, you know, it's a sign of how far the movement have come that you're now with. Was it generations aging for pride as once as the young leader. But I think we all stand on your shoulders and the work you've done.
Speaker 3: May I come in? I think everyone for these exceedingly kind comments, and for me, it's just such an honor to be with my compatriots who are taking us not only through this stage with you, but to the future. They are the ones carrying us to the future.
Speaker 2: Definitely.
Speaker 3: And the. I also wanted to thank you for, as you said, centering equity.
Speaker 2: You know, I as a I'm a gay man, I marginalized to some degree, but I'm a man and I'm white and I'm financially stable. And that's a very different experience than a low income trans woman of color. But I think building those coalitions and speaking as one is important, and that only works if we put.
Speaker 3: Equity at.
Speaker 2: The center of that. And so I.
Speaker 3: Appreciate that approach as you.
Speaker 2: Move forward. And then finally, one little as you're doing your work and your relationship building with other organizations, I wanted to share with you a a little victory that.
Speaker 3: You might be able to plug.
Speaker 2: Into if you hadn't heard about. Our last county budget included a little bit of funding for our housing agency to do outreach specific to the LGBT community. And I'm I'm not sure how it's going to be administered they might be contracted was ally ship that had requested the funding and I assume they'll be involved in implementing it and there's an opportunity there, as you know well, that the transgender community faces unique challenges, even separate from gay and lesbian population in terms of housing discrimination. And we do have a few resources there and maybe be able to weigh in and help make sure that those are being targeted effectively and that the county's.
Speaker 3: Making good use of. That could.
Speaker 2: Be something that that task force could weigh in on or.
Speaker 3: Participate in. So I want to let you know that body of work was happening.
Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilmember Zala.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want to thank you all so much for your work and for being powerful voices and advocates. The point you made about honoraria is so important because, like you said, so often black, indigenous, especially women of color, are expected to do work unpaid as expected to march and protest and organize on behalf of others unpaid. I would love it if you treated this task force as a model for how we can best engage community. So if you see other ways in addition to honoraria, in addition to be paid being paid things that we should do better as local government in engaging community and partnering with you. We would love to hear from you and using that as a model. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Councilmember Dombroski.
Speaker 4: Thank you, Mr. Chair. In a moment, I'll move adoption of the motion to approve the initial framework. But before I do. Earlier on in this hearing, I talked about a piece of legislation of which I was particularly proud. And the legislation that I wrote that commenced this work ranks right up there with that. I have not had the burdens and difficulties in my life that the folks in which were aiming to lift up with this work have. But you talked, Marcia, about an honor and a privilege do the work. It's an honor and privilege to get to just be a small part of the work that you're doing and all of you are doing. And to me, what makes it so special and important to me is it's about at its core, the dignity of the human being. It's a very emotional thing. The dignity of the human being coming to people and meeting folks where they are and who they are, and setting aside false constructs imposed by society. The history lesson that you reminded us of that this is just a rough go. I had a little sidebar that really it's a westernized contemporary imposition of these gender identities and that our first peoples aren't burdened by that. They had a more complex understanding and it is pretty powerful when you remind us of that, that just because things are what they are today, it doesn't mean that's what they should be or have always been. And so this work at its core to recognize, honor and respect the dignity of each person is what this is about. And I am so impressed with the seriousness with which you have undertaken the work, the thoughtfulness, the way you're in, the depths in which you're going. We have almost 15,000 people here at King County working every day. We come in contact with hundreds of thousands, maybe over a million people a year. We have two and a quarter million here in the county. But delivering these vital services and how we treat not only our own folks, but the public that we're dealing with is really a foundational principle. And when we look at this, we realized we weren't doing all that we could or should be, and your work is going to help us get there. I think it'll take some time, but I am excited that the policy leaders here in the government are open and willing to learn from you, the experts , to take your advice and follow your leadership. And I want you to hold us accountable. And when you say we need more resources, don't be afraid to speak up and you need more resources, I think you'll find open ears. And when you say we need to make, which I hope you will. These kind of changes in policy and practices, I think you have open minds and eager allies here to do that, and that's the work that I'm looking forward to seeing. I'm here. I'm learning myself. The idea was sparked by reading an article when I couldn't sleep about X gender, right? Put an X on your license and start talking to my staff. And they said, Well, look, Ron, it's a lot more complicated and that's a lot more in-depth than that. And that's what has generated this. So I'm just very, very, very moved at a very real and deep personal way about the work that you're about that you are doing and the recommendations that are coming. I'm so excited to see it. And with that, Mr. Chair, I'm pleased to move adoption and a proposed motion 2019 0479.1. And I understand there's at least one amendment.
Speaker 0: Council member domestic has moved adoption of motion 2019 479 and Councilmember Dombroski. There's a striking amendment S1 and page 33.
Speaker 4: Move adoption.
Speaker 0: Council member Debusk has moved adoption of a striking amendment S1 and from members information is technical changes Marines in a striking amendment at more than 2 hours into a meeting. Right. Sneaking anything by.
Speaker 4: Come on. That's not.
Speaker 0: Discussing questions. Oh, there's. Oh, there's a favor. Please say.
Speaker 3: I.
Speaker 0: Those opposing a the striking amendment S1 has been adopted moved to one title amendment on page 35 of our package is before us see no discussion others and favorite please say I oppose May the ayes have it? The title amendment is adopted. We have motion 2019 for 79 as amended before us. See no further further discussion, Madam Clerk, if you please call the roll.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Mr. Chair. Counselor. Founded by John Bolton, Muskie. Counsel you're done. Councilman Folau's chapter on climate can cover up the role of companies that on record hire council members on the right. Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, the vote is seven eyes, zero no's and council members.
Speaker 5: Done in.
Speaker 1: Lambert are excused.
Speaker 0: Thank you. Having received the required majority motion, 2019 479, as amended, is sent to full council with the do pass recommendation. And we will take shall we put that on consent? Without objection, we'll put that on the consent agenda. Again, I want to thank you so much for the work you've invested already and the work that you're invested in doing throughout the year as well. Not only the communities you represent, but the entire county and beyond will be Richard for it. Thank you. And with that having no other business to come before us, believe it or not, we are adjourned.
A MOTION approving an initial framework for the King County gender identity and sexual orientation inclusion task force.