Remarks by Rami Al-Kabra
45 remarks on the record, newest first · Page 2 of 2
- Play at 2:36:48
“100%, I was wondering if the number can approach zero more than this. That's the question.”
City Council · Sep 9, 2026
- Play at 2:47:32
“To answer your questions, I heard one is yes. I mean, for me, I'm not speaking on behalf of council. I think let's reduce the speed and see what that looks like and then have a conversation again in the future. And the second one is, yes, the caveat is the privacy, and I know we have a solid policy on that, but it's just ensuring that that's part of the analysis and the conversation we're going to have at that discussion. I think that would be good.”
City Council · Sep 9, 2026
- Play at 2:50:20
“So that picture up there was of you standing with that Buick or whatever it was?”
City Council · Sep 9, 2026
- Play at 1:55:09
“Thank you, Mayor. And thank you, Council Member Nadal, for the great question, because there is a concern. I'm not worried about cancellation. It is a very important project. And my worry isn't the short term, isn't the long term. We are borrowing from the future money. And I wonder what it's going to be like next year or the year after and the year after, once we get to Phase 3. How are we going to, and we just heard the update, the funding isn't, revenue isn't that great. How are we gonna, I know you wanna solve the phase one, phase two issues right now. There's a very short-term thing, but…”
City Council · Sep 1, 2026
- Play at 1:57:48
“Can you remind us again the timeline, like very high level of the whole project?”
City Council · Sep 1, 2026
- Play at 1:59:22
“In the grand scheme of things, in 50 years, when our kids and grandkids are looking at this, and the project would be costing $100 billion, they'll say, you guys are arguing about $20 million, really? So I think it is what it is. We are learning from what we did, like the low estimates in the beginning. Engineers are brilliant. I'm sure they're going to figure out. Engineers are really good because we give them a lot of constraints and they're really good at coming up with really cool solutions. So I think we have, I'm optimistic, two year delay in the grand scheme of things. It sucks right…”
City Council · Sep 1, 2026
- Play at 2:00:38
“Oh, time left, meaning the grant periods and all that expire?”
City Council · Sep 1, 2026
- Play at 2:01:09
“Thank you. Pushing two years, again, to use Councilmember Dodd's terminology, sucks. But, you know, it is what it is. Two years is not much in the grand scheme of things. Again, we're working on a 50-year project, not, you know, a two-year project. Yes.”
City Council · Sep 1, 2026
- Play at 15:36
“every day, so I was a daily commuter back and forth. And it was nice to have, sometimes it was a minute overlap, and as bus service, Transit Claire would attest sometimes they're one minute apart, sometimes they're 20 minutes apart. But that's not the issue for me. The issue is that there was enough service that if I was a couple minutes late getting out of the house, I was actually able to get on a bus that took me to the UW versus having to wait 10 or 15, 20 minutes For the for the next one, so I feel like it's a good one and I agree with my colleagues and it's okay for Our friends in other…”
City Council · Jul 21, 2026
- Play at 58:21
“Thank you, Mayor, and thank you. As the city manager said previously, and depending on who you talk to, this conversation has been going on for a couple of years or a couple of decades. So I'm glad that we are finally putting it up for the voters to decide on this. There's a reason why corporations merge. It's because for operational financial efficiencies as well as which is the most important thing for me, is improved service delivery, right? We've been focused on financial and operational efficiencies a lot. We've been talking about how service will also improve, but can we, one last time,…”
City Council · Jul 21, 2026
- Play at 1:02:05
“Yeah, thank you. That's a good explanation. And I think we have talked about cost and how distribution of cost across now the one region called the shoreline RFA is a good thing. I think from the other perspective, you know, how when Steve Jobs once introduced the iPhone or iPods back in the day, it's like 3,000 songs on this device. It's not 200 gigabytes or one megabyte at the time or whatever. It's something that people will understand and resonate with. That's what I was asking. I know service calls have been increasing. How have we been responding to them? And then how is this going to…”
City Council · Jul 21, 2026
- Play at 1:18:10
“Did Amanda just take credit for this moving forward? I would do no such thing.”
City Council · Jul 21, 2026
- Play at 2:45:20
“This is a very interesting topic. So I just want to put on some X daytime day job type hat and product management and understand what problem are we trying to solve.”
City Council · Jul 21, 2026
- Play at 2:47:07
“This is good. Thank you. So because the other question, as you were talking, I completely agree we need to have any type of housing, not just micro. affordable, you know, less than 80% AMI. The layer that we have to also, if I remember our comp plan housing table, we have 80% or less is around 80% need of the home, right? We've over-indexed on the higher-end housing than the more affordable housing. Would this tool help make a dent in that, on those goals that we have? Because we're gonna come up on a reporting time, you know, in five years. It took a couple more years to go.”
City Council · Jul 21, 2026
- Play at 2:48:25
“You can grow trees in the backyard, no? Yeah. Here in the courtyard, no? So this is good, because if the tool is trying to solve a problem, because we also know one of the problems is if you start going lower and lower affordability, it becomes less and less feasible to pencil out, right? So that means we have to, this tool may or may not be the solution to the less than, call it 70%, as you put it, AMI, right? So maybe if our target, we can target that range of housing, which I like the idea of taking out 40 to 70 because nobody's gonna build the 40%, everybody's gonna go and do the 70, and…”
City Council · Jul 21, 2026
- Play at 2:51:17
“So as long as we're starting to narrow down our target units that we're going after, it's just a mindset thing. So that's a good thing. And I like the idea of we passed something, we counsel, passed something in the past, it's not working, we're going to change it and make it a little based on feedback that we've gotten from the development community. as well because they're the ones who are going to build the housing, whether, you know, some folks like it or not. We need those folks to build our homes, you know. So it'll be good to incorporate that feedback into this and see and run a test.…”
City Council · Jul 21, 2026
- Play at 2:53:02
“I like the idea that Christian mentioned also. It's good to mention that here's the menu of options and here's the combos that will work well together to produce, you know, versus each one of those in a silo by itself. So that's a good thing to also help us think about also in the future. So here's the menu of things and combo one, combo two, you know, $1.99, $2.99. Get fries with that.”
City Council · Jul 21, 2026
- Play at 3:03:52
“We're reviewing this, oh, We are reporting on this every year, are we? But can we review this every year also when the report comes out?”
City Council · Jul 21, 2026
- Play at 3:04:07
“Because we can have a conversation like this at that time, and maybe ask, like, we did this, and then a year from now, okay, how did it work? Did it achieve some goal that we want to achieve? And then we revise.”
City Council · Jul 21, 2026
- Play at 3:06:24
“It's fine. We'll come back. We'll have another conversation about this. And a year from now, we'll have another conversation to discuss it. I mean, I don't have a problem with revisiting even within a year.”
City Council · Jul 21, 2026