Speaker 3: Agenda item 30 cancel 119609 link to certain city owned properties located in the South Lake Union neighborhood and declaring them as surplus to the city's needs. The committee recommends the bill passes amended.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 2: Member O'Brien Thank you, everyone. This is the bill that would authorize the sale of what's been referred to as the Mercer Mega BLOCK. And I want to reiterate just what I said this morning. First of all, a lot of work's been done, including some community input in both the front end and the back end to get a deal. That appears to be certainly when you measure it in terms of dollar value the city is receiving per square foot. It's a significant parcel of land with a lot of value and we're getting a lot of that back to the city. With this bill I want to speak briefly with is what this ordinance does and what it doesn't do. This ordinance authorizes the executive to execute transaction documents with proposed purchaser of this is Alexandria real estate and it gives the clarity of what the price will be and the other terms of that transaction will be. I want to speak to a couple of pieces of that. It includes a commitment to affordable housing. They will build on one of the sites, 175 units of affordable housing. It includes a commitment of $5 million towards homeless services, includes environmental remediation, responsibility for all environmental remediation of the parcel parcels. It also includes, of course, the sale price, which comes into the city in a variety forms of dollars, and we will get allocated a future date. One last thing I want to mention is it requires that they develop and lease a site at the ground floor of the building to as a community center for Seattle Parks and Recreation to operate. Thanks to some questions by my colleagues here, specifically councilman and based on Councilman mosqueda, we continued to get clear that we are putting a daycare facility in a community center is a is an outright allowed use. There's still work to do from the Parks Department in their work to design the build out of that and make sure it's compatible and do the feasibility work. But I appreciate my colleagues being very clear on the priority and importance of that that has been agreed to and was incorporated in this legislation at committee level. It's agreed to by the real estate developer as this is a kind of bilateral agreement. What this does not do is talk about where we're going to spend the dollars that we will receive. I know when the mayor made an announcement about this, she has a series of buckets that the $138 million would go to. I imagine everyone up here has their own buckets, but that is the work of the budget. And I'm looking at Councilmember Bagshaw. I imagine that a week from now we will hear some specifics on the mayor's proposals and we will go into two months of negotiating that and lots of other items. But this transaction is between the city and the seller and it's about the price and the other terms of that sale, not what we will do with the future proceeds of that.
Speaker 1: I think it comes from Brian Casper and Mosquito.
Speaker 8: Thank you, Mr. President. Thanks to Councilmember O'Brien for his due diligence to work with our office as we engage on this concept that you heard him describe, including child care in the Mercer megawatt block project. It's really important that we get this language included at this juncture because we know that this is a critical time to direct the Department of Parks and Recreation, to work with the developer, to actually include child care as a permitted use on site. Ideally, as we talked about this morning with an outside play area for folks in the community to also be able to access during off of our times and the fact that we're directing the Department of Parks to include space and design in the construction and building within the recreation center means that we will in all likelihood see at least three licensed child care facility rooms on the site. And the goals are outlined in the legislation to provide access to child care for kiddos 0 to 3. But this is not a study and this is not a test. This is really a policy solution to a pressing crisis that we see throughout the city of Seattle. We know that the average family spends about 20% of their budget on child care. In many cases, some child care facilities can be charged as much as $30,000 per month. On average. We see many in the. Families having to spend more on childcare than they spend on rent and mortgage. And when we see waitlists continue to pile up and pile up, families are spending 5000. In my case, I spent $150 on just to be on the waitlist and then often folks don't get calls back. So we have a crisis in terms of access, anything that we can do, especially on public land or formerly public land, to make sure that there's a public policy tied to that transaction is going to help address the access issues and ideally the affordability issues. I see this as a continuation of the legislation we sponsored last year to implement House Bill 2382, which made it more possible for us to put requirements. Conditionalities on public use are on public land. When we are going to sell it. We need to make sure that we have affordable housing included and things like child care and health care. So it's really exciting to see this language works in there with the developer. I want to thank them and the work of Councilmember O'Brien, Office of Housing and Parks and Rec, as we've work to make sure that this language was included from the get go. It's so much more affordable to do it on the front end than to have to retrofit a building and build out walls or knock down walls to create doorways or facilities for little kiddos. So really excited to see this move forward. And again, this is the real deal, not just the test. I'm looking forward to working with them as we get this up and running.
Speaker 1: Very good. Any other questions or comments? If not, please call the rule on the passage of the bill.
Speaker 3: Herbold I was Macheda O'Brien All right. Chaco Swan. Big Sean Gonzalez, President Harrell hi. Eight in favor and.
Speaker 9: Unopposed.
Speaker 1: Bill passed and Cheryl Senate. Please read the next agenda item.
Speaker 3: One Constable 119 561 Vacating the alley and block one wits edition on the petition of 2026 Madison Corner LLC and LMC 2026 Madison Holdings, LLC. The committee recommends the bill pass.
AN ORDINANCE relating to certain City-owned properties located in the South Lake Union neighborhood and declaring them as surplus to the City’s needs; removing the properties from the limited access highway purposes property designation previously assigned to them; authorizing sale of the properties for an aggregate selling price of $138,500,000, together with additional cash and non-cash consideration, including the purchaser’s covenant to develop affordable housing and to negotiate a lease with the Seattle Parks and Recreation Department for a recreational facility to be located upon a portion of one of the properties; authorizing the Mayor or designee to execute a Memorandum of Understanding for the sale of the property consistent with its terms; authorizing the Superintendent of the Parks and Recreation Department or designee to negotiate, execute, and deliver a lease of the recreational facility; authorizing the Director of the Seattle Department of Transportation or designee to negotiate, execute, and deliver all other documents necessary or appropriate to effect the foregoing 