Raw transcript is available as the primary artifact for this meeting, so downstream LLM parsing can use the original source material directly.
This meeting will surface recalled facts here once an ingest run writes Hindsight artifacts successfully.
Meeting metadata file x177662.json.
Transcript file 2025-07-23_general_x177662.srt.
Normalized hash 72ca31ee7094110eed33b4ef2828543a2e7a234632ec0e16aae9d4442f970299.
Raw hash 0acd7282760d2a8b34dd80ffcd75dfef9608f81a277be03620ce2831fd0eb27c.
Well good morning everyone. Thank you for coming out on this gorgeous day today. And, it's it's short notice. I know. Must be, we're getting into the long weekend, so thank you very much for being here. First, I want to thank our speakers, Doctor Mercy Waingina, founder and CEO of Hope and Chance integrated Health, Daniel Malone of, executive director of the downtown emergency Services Center. Brandy McNeil and Lisa Dugard, who couldn't be with us today with Purpose, Dignity Action. And Steve Woolworth, CEO of Evergreen Treatment Services. Thank you all for being here. And I also want to alert you to the fact that we've got other guests, including Uplift Northwest, Seattle Indian Health Board, the Salvation Army, we have Seattle Reach, The More We Love, Battlefield Addiction, Sodo BIA, Ballard Alliance and the Alliance for Pioneer Square and the City Attorney's office. City attorney. Thank you all for standing here with me today. All right. You've heard me say this before, but I'll just say it again for good measure. The fentanyl crisis and addiction in general is inextricably linked to our chronic homelessness and our public safety problems. And you don't have to be in recovery to realize that, expanding access to evidence based treatment is a is a good way to help solve both problems, or at least chip away at them for too long. For too long, we've watched people suffering from untreated addiction in mental illness deteriorate in our streets. While our neighborhoods become less safe. And there's a reason why we're right here. This area pioneers, you know, Pioneer Square, Occidental Park is is one of the Ground Zeroes in this city for, for gun violence, for, and for the heartbreak that is associated with addiction. So, that is why I put forward my pilot project a couple of years ago. That enables caseworkers, to refer people to rehab at Lakeside-Milam Treatment Center. It's over there in, in Kirkland. After which Lakeside. after 28 days of residential detox and treatment, they just build a city. That's a simple way of getting people the help they need right now. Because the last thing we want is for Medicaid recipients to wait weeks to get into one of the exceedingly few spots because we know what can happen in the meantime. It's working. Caseworkers with Co-lead, We HeartSeattle, The More We Love have taken advantage of this resource because everyone everyone deserves the same chance at recovery that I had almost five years ago. People in Medicaid shouldn't have to wait, and the city shouldn't have to wait for, for better solutions. What I'm fighting for is simple, and it's to put treatment at the heart and the center of the city's agenda. Policy agenda. We can't keep deferring investments in treatment while watching the same people cycle through homelessness, overdose, emergency rooms in jail over and over and over again. So bringing people together, putting forward a package of proposed investments isn't just fiscally, responsible. It's a break from what we've been doing in the past, deferring constantly, which is a moral failure. The time is now for a zealous push for a righteous cause, using an opportunity the legislature gave us by authorizing local jurisdictions to increase the sales tax by 0.1% for public safety. And the way that the legislature writes public safety in that bill does include behavioral health. While Mayor Harrell has not yet announced implementing this new funding source, he has indicated interest in doing so because it will raise over $35 million for public safety, and my resolution calls for allocating up to 25% of that to the pathway to recovery. HB 2015 was sponsored by Representative Inman and pushed by the Black Caucus, likely because the Black community is disproportionately impacted by violence, particularly as violence surrounding the drug trade and overrepresented in fatal overdose statistics. No one likes to increase regressive taxes, but I am I am suggesting to you, a little bit of the background why it was put forward. The legislature carved out this funding source. Perhaps someone who needs treatment. Anyway, the legislature carved out this funding source for public safety, specifically for this kind of intervention. This is not about raising taxes on working families. This is about helping working families. Because there isn't one working family I would suggest that has not been touched by addiction. Many of you people standing behind me as well. When we invest in getting people off the streets and into treatment, we prevent crime, reduce emergency room responses, and make every neighborhood safer. And that is smart public safety. That is public safety. So our speakers will talk today about sustaining the investments we're already making in treatment and bringing new interventions to fill in the gaps in what has been up to now, a more limited set of options for people who are struggling with addiction. Because take it from me, when someone struggling with a substance [preview truncated]
A local summary artifact has not been generated for this meeting yet.