I'd like to call to order the city council study session of August 5th, 2025.

Clerk, will you please call the roll?

Councilmember Bushnell.

Present.

Deputy Mayor Daniels.

Councilmember Diaz.

Virtual.

Councilmember Hines.

Absent Councilmember Remba here.

Councilmember Sidalgay?

Here.

Councilmember Scott.

Councilmember Walker.

Absent Mayor Woodards here.

This study session material sent to you at 11.

All right.

And I'm going to call on interim city manager Kim to begin the presentation.

Thank you, Madam Mayor.

Deputy Mayor and members of council.

We are here to continue the conversation from last week.

Mayor and Council.

We're going to emphasize some of the questions that are still left outstanding in terms of enforcement.

And just by way of background, going a little bit to the last time a non-dissimilar, I think that's probably a different way of saying we had another effort for minimum wage in 2015, in May of 2015.

But just by way of background, in 2015, the City of Tacoma had both a paid leave as well as a minimum wage ordinance on our books under TMC, Title 18.20.

Tax and Licensing through this process did an extensive public outreach process when developing rules.

A dedicated web page for minimum wage as well as paid leave, as well as social media efforts as well.

We built the standards through a program that was focused on public education while providing a high level of support to businesses and protections for workers, kind of balancing the needs at that time.

Questions and complaints came through email, online submission through a web form over the phone, as well as in-person here at TMB, or Tacoma municipality of living.

And then additional background in 2016, voters passed initiative 1433.

This is that one year effort of having that task force look through a whole host of things over a very intense number of months.

So this is for the state process.

So on a biannual $700,000.

We have looked through Initiative 2.

We probably would need we it's not a problem, but you a lot of the things that staff has been doing over the last three, four weeks now has been focused on how would how might we actually enforce initiative two if council or the voters or another way in which this actually comes to fruition and this becomes ordinance.

We looked to the city of Seattle, and our city attorney brought some information for your consideration last Tuesday.

And just by way of just context, the City of Seattle's Office of Labor Standards enforces a variety of local ordinances, including minimum wage, paid sick and safe time, secure scheduling, app-based workers, wage theft, domestic workers, hotel employee protections, transportation network company legislation.

That's really essentially the gig workers that work for Uber and Lyft.

And looking over their budget, most recently for 2025, they had their adopted budget.

They employed 43 FTEs for an annual budget of $8.5 million.

So we took that for context and took a look at what might this look like to do a potential repeat of enforcement through tax and licensing.

And you did hear from the city attorney who's going to talk about some more enforcement in terms of what responsibilities the city attorney's office may have.

This is what we've looked at.

We estimate that recreating an employment standards division within the city of Tacoma to enforce initiative two enforcement, not adjudicate, not take a look at legal challenges, would it would cost approximately about 1.5 million to $2 million per year.

So three to four million dollars on a biannual standpoint.

This is probably light.

I just want to preface that because we did not want to say this is gonna cost millions of millions.

We just wanted to take a look at what might we start with a process.

And cost estimates are usually higher.

Inflation is a real thing.

So the costs could go up.

And you know, there's there continues to be a number of areas where we have unknown unknown uh material impacts to how we enforce this from an administrative standpoint.

Um that goes with saying the questions that we fielded from you all were both welcome and I have to say genuinely from a staff perspective.

I wish we had more answers for you all.

Um, but with the time that we've had so far, this is where we're at, and then we're gonna need more uh guidance from our legal team through our city attorney's office for enforcement.

For that purpose, I'm gonna pass it over to our city attorney Bacha for a little bit more on enforcement.

Thank you, City Manager, Mayor, Deputy, Mayor, and City Council.

Um, I'm gonna talk about the enforcement components of the initiative and how that might compare to what the city of Tacoma has done previously.

Um what I'd note first is um that the enforcement provisions that are in the initiative are not detailed, they don't contain procedural requirements, they simply contain enforcement.

So, for example, subsection 100A authorizes the city to enforce this chapter.

Um, and also authorizes and directs the city to adopt regulations within 120 days of the effective date of the initiative.