Economic Development Committee - Regular Meeting

Board of the Economic Development Committee meeting of June 30th, 2026. Clerk, will you please call the roll?

Thanks, Commissioner.

Councilmember Palmer here. Councilmember Smith here. Chair Beasley here. Moving on to public comment. Questions or comments? Great. Thank you. All right, with that, I will let you read the public comments. Thank you. Kit, if you want to come up to the table, state your name. We'll start our clock for two minutes. If anybody online decides they want a default comment, feel free to raise your hand. Otherwise, we'll call it for the day. And the clerk will start the clock with you. All righty, Kit.

All right. Thanks. My name is Kit Burns. I live in Tacoma. I've been in Tacoma for the last 15, five years or something like that. And so I just want to comment. Today, the agenda is Minimum Wage and Stakeholder Engagement. One of the things I'm hoping to hear about is what the LEAP program is doing and what the status of that is. Because I looked at that last week and there were 17 open positions. And I see that as a support community commission to engage people and plan for the future. So that's one thing. The thing is, I started last time. I was a week early in Paris, which is fine. It's nice to be ahead of the game. I was surprised the council actually approved that nonprofits like Haven Hat for Humanity can have people work on their projects for free. And it seems to me if we're investing in our future generations, it's like, how does somebody working for free, doing electrical work, supervised even by a plumbing fellow, how do they pay for their rent? And so I think when somebody's training, especially a trade like carpentry, you know, even professional laborers and electrical workers, Why would they work for free? I know the state law says you can do that. I know the Tacoma Public Utilities said they could do that. That's not something that I think city council should do. Although it's already done. I recognize that the horse has left the barn. But I just want to, as a point of information, just make the council aware of that. And then, you know, as far as can they afford to pay, that same evening with they actually, there was actually on the agenda a multifamily tax exemption for houses for sale. The cost of the units, $250,000. The sale of the affordable unit was $430,000, and the market rate was $450,000. So I look at numbers, and so I'm not advocating for anything other than we should look at some of these things. Anyway, thank you.

All right, with that, I don't see any Zoom hands. Perfect. All right, we'll close public comment period. I will call on Deputy Vice Chair Bushnell for our Tacoma Minimum Wage Community and Stakeholder Engagement Report presentation. Take it away.

Thank you, Chair. Good morning, everybody. And for those online, I'm Joe Bushnell. I'm Vice Chair of the EDC and Deputy Mayor of Tacoma. I'm excited to share with you a project I've been working on for most of the year. And as interests have continued to grow in changing the city's minimum wage, I have recognized the importance of hearing directly from the people and organizations who may be most impacted by any future decisions around this area. That's why I dug into this topic and why I'm here today to present my Full-Long Minimum Wage Community and Stakeholder Engagement Report. This, and I have the clicker here, which I've never used before. Oh, perfect, it works, okay. We have a lot of slides, so we'll try to get through them. This is high level. I want to start by saying that the report that I just sent out is almost 40 pages long, and it does go into a lot more depth, additional background. I didn't want to do 40 slides here today because we'd be here for a while, so I'm going to keep it kind of at a high level. The slides outline three of the four big initiatives that impact our local minimum wage here in Tacoma. and demonstrate how voters have been essential to raising wages here in Tacoma and in the state of Washington. In addition to this history of ballot measures report also outlines how big of an issue the cost of living is in Tacoma. And according to the 2024 community survey among economic issues asked about in the community survey, 56% were dissatisfied with the cost of living in Tacoma. We'll actually be hearing a survey result on the 2026 community survey today that just got completed. And I imagine that will continue within that 2026 community survey as well. And my takeaway for this is that the community wants to work on this issue, and it's important that we prioritize it in California discussion. With that, there's a few things that I wanted to share in background. In the report, Appendix A provides an overview of all the local minimum wages in the state of Washington. Some of these kind of get a little complicated, but I wanted to highlight two fairly simple examples of how other municipalities have raised their minimum wage. And the state's current minimum wage is $17.13 and will go up each year based on CPI. Bellingham, the city of Bellingham, keeps their wage at $2 per hour higher than the state's minimum wage. And Seattle sets it at a higher threshold, and it goes up each year based on CPI as well. When speaking with stakeholders, I asked them to review what their municipalities did and provide feedback on those proposals. And while there's a range, a broad range of municipal minimum wages, when thinking of a higher minimum wage in Tacoma, most folks thought of $20 an hour and a lot of feedback was based around that number specifically. And so, as a slide, you can kind of see a little bit of a comparison to where state that, city of Bellingham and city of Seattle. And those are some simple adjustments. Some other jurisdictions like CTAC and others, it gets a little bit more complicated very quickly.

So there's a couple of high-level simple ones that have been changed.

Additionally, I wanted the feedback that I was receiving to be grounded in the problem that we're taking to address. I really appreciate the United Way of Cure County for being with me early on in this process and pointing me in the direction of the University of Washington Center for Women's Welfare Living Wage Calculator. This is the closest estimation available to a living wage within the City of Tacoma. The state uses it as a metric for all program tracking funding tied to workforce development. This information was shared in every single roundtable that I was participating in. And you'll notice that for a single adult, it has $20.34 for the Tacoma County City Area for a living wage. So this is a kind of a – this does not include folks that have reached out to me individually or had individual meetings, but there was a lot of intentional outreach done starting in April 16th with our labor partner going all the way through most recently our June 17th. And we all know I could spend probably another year doing outreach, and every new conversation would be of value and contribute to a fuller understanding of this issue. However, I had to prioritize the areas that I had outreach to. In particular, I was very targeted. I used data from our comprehensive plan and Workforce Central to talk with our largest industries in Tacoma and those with most workers earning under $20 per hour. I sought to connect with key pillars of our economy, small and local businesses, child care, health care, nonprofits, and outreach to large institutions was focused on our Tacoma anchor networks and not on corporations specifically. The report also includes a lot of background and past studies, including GRIT, the Growing Resilience in Tacoma, which is our program around guaranteed income. and the city's community survey that outlines low-income earner perspectives. To supplement this, I connected with labor unions and students who would be seeking to enter the job market soon. The majority of the report captured the feedback heard from all of these discussions And in the following slides, I'm going to outline some of the high-level themes for each discussion. And again, this is high-level. If you go through the report, there's significantly more feedback and information included there. And for those that are online, the report is public, and so you also have the opportunity to go read through that. So starting with the outreach I did with our labor partners, in partnership with the Pierce County Central Labor Council, AFLPIO, I identified labor unions with workers at or near minimum wage who are interested in minimum wage policy discussions. I had eight labor representatives that attended. And then I also want to caveat for folks that may be wondering, well, why aren't you listing out the specific unions and the specific individuals? I assured every single stakeholder group that I was a part of that as I was seeking feedback that would keep their keep their organizations and themselves anonymized, so that way I can get the best and candid feedback I could from every single group. And so that's part of why I don't have any specific unions listed out or specific individuals listed out. But during this roundtable, they shared that minimum wage is a reference point in bargaining, raising the wage, raising the floor, and it helps drive wages for all workers. A minimum wage that attracts more employees. One union was able to share how workers will request to transfer to location city that have a higher minimum wage. Labor advocates are fighting for a living wage, and I've heard stories of union workers living out of their car because they couldn't make enough to afford an apartment or simply be able to fix a broken vehicle. Seeking a path to make this work for businesses, folks shared ideas of how they could make a higher wage more tolerable to businesses, and overall shared that families with more money in their pockets is good for the economy. For the unions, $20 an hour is the floor for discussing the correct wage. The recommendation was to raise their wage to be one of the highest in the state. And so that kind of came out of that curriculum. Next, I had an outreach with some of our nonprofits. I consulted with our city's Tacoma Community and Economic Development Department and local nonprofit leaders to identify a list of nonprofits to invite to a nonprofit roundtable discussion. Seven nonprofits attended the roundtable specifically, and five additional nonprofits provided some feedback outside the roundtable discussion. Some things that they shared was that there was no one size fits all look at nonprofit wages. Some organizations have a policy that all workers will earn a living wage. Some hire people for job training as part of services they offer. Some operate in a large scale providing recreation or childcare services. Funding currently is up and down. This is across the board with government funding as well as private donations. Right now, there's a lot of uncertainty in terms of revenue generation for nonprofits to be able to do the work that they do. There are broader budget impacts in raising minimum wage for workers. Several nonprofits spoke most clearly about the issue that came up around a state law recently that changed to require higher pay for exempt employees, as well as changing regulations for 16- or 17-year-old workers. And when the minimum wage goes up, there's compression across the pay scale that drives up costs for the work that they're doing. Nonprofits could have to make hard choices to meet a new minimum wage. And a couple examples were whether or not to cut benefits, which are one of their biggest recruitment and retention tools, or shutting down key programs that serve our community. They wanted to balance the minimum wage with workforce training and other community benefits. And as mission-driven organizations, nonprofits past the city support nonprofits in achieving their missions. So additionally, did some small business outreach. In consultation with the Tacoma Pierce County Chamber of Commerce and the Washington Hospitality Association, I assembled a small and local business roundtable discussion. We had about 20 business representatives attend, primarily in the retail, hospitality, and restaurant industries. What I heard from them is that workers making the minimum wage is actually uncommon. Competition in the marketplace is just too high to pay minimum wage alone. There is some frustration over the potential of this cost being added to so many other increasing costs, including everything getting more expensive, especially big ticket items like insurance. Small local businesses are already struggling to make ends meet. There are so many stories about how businesses are straining themselves and cutting costs where they are able. Strong themes of feeling misunderstood and targeted were present, and throughout the entire conversation, there was a lot of frustration over how certain people described businesses as selfish and don't recognize that it is hard to balance the cost of business and business ownerships. Business owners are struggling to make ends meet. There were clear policy recommendations for council consideration, and I'll talk about some of those at the end, but one of the big ones were don't raise the minimum wage. explore what i can do around tip credits and and have it potentially have a different minimum wage oh and don't have different minimum wages uh levels set by the size of businesses I did some, excuse me. So early in this research process, I met with Workforce Central CEO, Katie Conant, who invited me to a future healthcare industry round table discussion. The 22 members of this round table represent healthcare employers, educational institutions, regulatory agencies, and community stakeholders. So it's a pretty big group. And what I heard from them is the healthcare industry is currently under strain and you could probably read in the headlines and we're dealing with it here in Tacoma as well, people losing access to healthcare. This can be used to increase co-pay costs or dropping out of the Affordable Care Act marketplace. Federal policy change and process that's being implemented at the state level are also going to drop an enormous amount of people off their benefits. It's going to further shake our entire healthcare system. Healthcare staff are in high demand and the industry is working hard to fill positions. It is really great to be in a room with so many people seeking solutions to these challenges, but there is an incredibly wide range of healthcare roles, some high paid, some lower paid. The lower paid positions have not increased wages as swiftly as the minimum wage had gone up. There were concerns that other industries making higher minimum wages could lead to increased competition for workers. There can be barriers to a healthcare career, especially for lower wage earners. All the barriers you'd expect in these sort of positions, their physically demanding roles can have regular hours and the wages aren't always enough to cover childcare and other essentials. The healthcare industry would need to make trade-offs to meet a higher minimum wage, especially if Medicaid reimbursements don't increase. The group explained how different reimbursement rates impacted business models and who healthcare providers could afford to take on as clients. Practically, they don't make the same amount of money for every client and they may have to prioritize serving clients with better healthcare coverage, which would further exacerbate healthcare access for members of our community. With our anchor network, this includes Tacoma's largest employers, and they collectively play an outside role in the local economy. Governmental organizations are joined by Tacoma's hospital systems and post-secondary institution, also referred to as the meds and eds, to form the core of the Tacoma Anchor Network. Together, the members of the eight network work together to create shared goals, share best practices, and align data to better support a resilient local economy and workforce. What I've heard from them, funding and costs are often regulated by the state or federal government. It was really fascinating to hear the funding model for local community and technical colleges. The state sets both how much they have to pay staff and how much they can charge students. Sometimes the numbers don't add up. as the institution has to decide how to cut services, consolidate staff, or raise the limited fees that raised against me. So basically in layman's terms, they don't set tuition and they don't set compensation rates, the state does. And so they basically are told what to do and they have to balance the budget within that amount. Subnate anchor networks are already making trade-offs to handle increased costs and limited revenue. And over and over again, people shared they want to pay a staff living wage. And one organization explained their commitment to pay all staff a living wage and how one trade-off was cutting off multiple staff positions in order to make that a reality. Their focus was on the need for career pathways and access to entry-level work. This group in particular is thinking long-term and works firsthand with students and young adults. They explained how fewer youth are getting an early foot in the door with entry-level work. and technical colleges shared how they have to teach more soft skills in school now so that students are qualified for more than entry-level work. There's also a concern that a higher minimum wage would eliminate more entry-level work and it would contribute to the amount of disconnected youth in our region. Another big sector here in Tacoma is our childcare sector. I worked with the Pierce County Childhood Network at a childcare voice action team meeting for a focused discussion on Tacoma's minimum wage. I met with seven participants who represented advocacy groups, childcare centers, and childcare workers. providers shared a high-level information on the business side of providing childcare. Like many of the other businesses, nonprofits, they're seeing increased costs across the board. State regulations have required staffing models, so wage costs are most often passed on to families. Many parents are struggling to make ends meet. This group of providers was very connected to the families they served and shared deeply personal stories about real-world impacts of childcare on challenges on families. Childcare staff can also struggle and face the benefit cliff. The group also shared personal stories about childcare workers who have to make difficult choices between wages and access to benefits. One organization shared stories of staff turning down or trying to turn down wage increases because it would push them off the benefit cliff. Another participant shared their own story about how they had better access to healthcare when they were unemployed. Providers shared recommendations on how to make a minimum wage increase work for the child care industry. Overall, this group strongly encouraged the City Council to advocate for children and families on a community level. They also explained how providing time to phase in wages increases would help them adapt and plan for the impact. Additionally, I visited four class sessions, two sophomore classes at Lincoln High School, one senior class at Mount Tahoma High School, and one joint class of GIS students at the University of Washington, Tacoma. Certainly, there's a lot of other schools and classes I could have visited, but there's a lot of them out there. What I heard from our students was that cost of living was on everyone's mind. High school sophomores were talking about the real impact of rising costs on their families, including barriers to housing and healthcare costs. High school students, sophomores and seniors were thinking about wages and employment. The first question I asked everyone was what the minimum wage currently was. And high school students knew it better than UW Tacoma students. Our high school seniors especially were able to talk through why they chose to work or not and their long-term career plans to make more than minimum wage. They viewed wages as something that would increase over time and minimum wage was a short-term prospect. University of Washington Tacoma students have expectations of employers specifically. There are comments such as if businesses can't afford to pay their workers what they need to provide, it shouldn't be on the worker to be homeless. And if you can't afford to pay more, you shouldn't be in business. The mindset was business would pay as little as they could get away with. Future entrepreneurs were already considering costs and risks of owning a business. When talking about starting their own businesses, a lot of students viewed it as a calculation of risk. Even high school students were tracking on rising costs for business space and other inflation. Some even said they'd rather not start their own business because it was too risky. Here are some stakeholder proposals that I heard throughout my engagements. And at our next meeting on July 14th, I'll be leading an additional conversation on Tacoma's minimum wage. And over the next three slides, cover the topics I'll ask us to weigh in on at that time. So the first proposal is to adopt a $20 minimum wage. This slide covers the reasons I heard for the proposal. And I do want to orient you to page 25 of the report, which includes a number of additional considerations. So there's a few other considerations as well. Let's see here. So some additional, did that change yet? So the union round table suggested setting a lower minimum wage for small businesses. But what I am highlighting here is that much more prominent recommendation not to implement wage categories based on size of businesses. I spoke with about 50 employers or the representatives and not a single one of them recommended this approach and many actually adequately recommended against business categorization based on size. Additionally, stakeholders made several recommendations that would require additional policy and legal analysis. This outreach effort did not focus on any of these specific concepts, and additional community outreach would be beneficial should any of these specific policies be pursued. More information on why these were recommended are in the report, and we can walk through them more thoroughly on July 14th. I have not studied whether these things are legal, how what kind of impacts they can have, but those are things that folks in the community wanted us to look at when considering changes to the middle page. So I just really wanted to acknowledge all the folks that helped me with my stakeholder outreach. Particularly, my goal was to have authentic and candid conversations with a diverse range of people all across our community. And I really felt that this report reflected that. And really special thanks to our labor partners at Central Labor, YMCA, Pierce and Kittap, the Tacoma Pierce County Chamber, Washington Hospitality Association, Workforce Central, the Tacoma Anchor Network, the Pierce County Early Childhood Network, Ms. Pearl Colley, high school and Ms. Megan Capes at Mount Tacoma High School, Professor Matthew Kelly, PhD at the University of Washington Tacoma. And I especially also want to thank my staff, Linda and Sheena, for helping me organize all the The calendar, there's a lot of work. She was all over the place. And Linda, just a Herculean effort and amazing work. And if you have a chance to read the report, you'll notice that there's a lot of specific references. We make sure to tie back all the information and facts, specific references. And so if people want to dive deeper into anything in there, they can. It tends to be a lot of reports that now don't necessarily have those references. And so it took a lot of extra effort on behalf of them to put that in there. So I really appreciate that work. And I just want to also extend my appreciation to the Tacoma community as a whole. I know that this is a very big issue for many people, and it's really important that we have good discussion and dialogue of what these policy impacts and potential trade-off to consider in the future are. The next steps that I would like to endeavor upon is for this work to come back together at the next EDC meeting on July 14th so we can have additional deeper conversations outlined from the stakeholder engagement and the recommendations that they provided. And I'm personally committed to tackling the cost of living issues here in Tacoma and want to discuss the right pathway to get to $20 an hour minimum wage here in Tacoma. So that is it. I know that was a lot, so I will, I'll open it up to questions. And I did make sure you guys had a copy of the, the hard copy here of the report. And again, for those that are online, the report is available as well.

Perfect, thank you. We'll start tomorrow. Questions?

Just a few questions. Let me see if I can leave my own hand right here. So I guess I'll just start with the tip credits. So with like inflation, people feeling that they don't have enough money to go out and things like that, maybe they're not tipping at 20% or higher. Do you have an understanding that like the credits would be something that would actually like Or if we did tip credits, would that, would you see a lot of people not reaching out? Or do you think that that would be, the tips would be a solution?

That's a really good question. I don't have that information currently. It's my understanding that tip credits are not, oh, please come on up. Specifically, yeah.

Hey, Linda Foster, Senior Council Policy Analyst here in support of Mayor Fischnell stepping up just because I can support him with some technical background. So in the business roundtable, they did talk about tip credit. The actual proposal listed isn't called tip credit. It's called total compensation. And what we're looking at is a previous ordinance, not currently in effect in the city of Seattle. And I've sent it to legal for review and it would few wages as total compensation. So we will navigate that with more depth on July 14th to further expand upon it. One thing I will say is there are some preemptions in state law regarding TIP credits. And so that's not actually what we're looking at. We're looking at a total compensation package. I think Burien I'm hesitant because I realize I'm being recorded. I think it's Buren and I may be inaccurate, but there's a second city that also kind of took that total compensation approach.

And I think I heard Kelsner and Palmer ask for, did you ask for the definition of tip credits?

That's kind of also going to, there is no definition of tip credit that we're looking into. I do believe state law preempts that approach from a local government. And so the approach we're looking into is the total compensation model. And the report in one of the references does link to an ordinance in Seattle that you could review in full and also identify mayoral receipts on July 14th.

Yeah. And the reason why I brought up tip credits is because that's something the stakeholder group asked us to look at specifically. And we didn't necessarily look at the legalities behind it. But cursory research has shown that tip credits don't follow the brand advice. Yeah.

From what I understand, it's like. For a lot of people, that's essentially just like you can pay a little bit less wage if the tips are there. I kind of bring it up to that.

Correct. I think that's traditionally how it's looked at. In other states, it is legal, but not here in the state.

And so that was my other question. Is that as far as, I mean, maybe that's not, like it's a little bit simpler to talk about total compensation, but if we were to look at the tip credit version of this, is that something the state would have to do? handle as far as like making that legal here is that something you have jurisdiction to do and again just because it's a type of question question i believe it would require stakeholder change and uh is there so yeah is it we're looking at these things like As far as like exemptions, like if we were, I saw that some of the folks are like, you know, we don't necessarily want you to keep us at a lower level. It might be allowed to go out of places. But as far as like those types of exemptions where that's within our jurisdiction to determine, or is that again based on like state law?

I think we can determine. I know that the city of SeaTac has separate exemptions based on industry specifically. I'd have to do a little bit more research on that, on what can and can't be exempted. But it was a very strong common theme even amongst the people across the board to not do specific exemptions because everyone's kind of competing for the similar workforce. But it makes it very difficult. Even the protection of being paid a lower wage might make it difficult for some of the higher teams.

And is that, uh, that is that based on like data from other jurisdictions or is that anecdotal that like, if we do, if we make certain exceptions, if we, uh, you know, keep this industry at this level or so, and like, is that anecdotal or it hasn't been shown in other places that people will leave industry because, you know, would somebody say like, well, you know, my passion is nursing, but McDonald's is going to pay me more and it's not as hard, so I'm just going to do that.

Yeah, so the feedback I've received through the stakeholder groups is anecdotal. I'll also recognize that many of the businesses and organizations have gone through a minimum wage increase that was phased in over time, and if I recall, it was also split out by businesses, so they've actually experienced it before, business size, I should say. And so, but we could try to see if we can find additional data to help with that as well. But all the stakeholder outreach, other than the specific data, we try to get as much data as we could as anecdotal for outreach.

The last question is, do we have an idea when we talk about a basin for smaller businesses or just industries that are concerned about going from $17 to $20 a year? Do we have an idea of that timeline for the basin that would be helpful? Is it over the course of five years? Is it over the course of two years?

Yeah, that's a really good question. And I would really actually have you look at one of the specific... Go to page 26 in the report. And that's something that we'll have to talk, discuss further on July 14th. But I did bring everyone's attention to page 26 in particular. I have two figures, figure A and B. And figure A shows the state minimum wage, including the CPI increases from the state up to 2026. And then figure B, based on current rates of inflation, whether it's low, mid, or high, projects where the minimum wage could be going in the next four years. And so that's something that we'd have to consider on how we make those adjustments, July 14th, and on how any kind of phasing approach may make sense for our community.

And so essentially, if we were to say, change the minimum wage to $20 next year, these percentages would be based on that $20.

so um figure a is the history of the washington state minimum wage and what i did for figure b is i looked at the lowest ami over it's actually pre-covered so it's probably not reflective of the current situation but also the highest ami and i just projected out like if you were to continue if the state minimum wage was to continue over the next four years where would it be in 2030 based on different inflation so if you looked at a midpoint say about five percent which i think might be a little bit higher than what's happening now but not that much higher they'd hit $20, over $20, around 2030. So if you did a five-year phase-in approach, the state law may very well overtake you. And then, essentially, Tacoma's minimum wage increase, the same thing would happen as what happened back in 2012 with the initiative.

Yeah. I guess we'll start with the question that just came up. Would it be possible, I mean, if we did have an increase that eventually met the state minimum wage, is it possible to write to the policy that whichever greater would be the one in effect?

I don't think we can, we can't set our wage lower than state minimum. So if the state minimum reaches or is higher than the state minimum, the state would agree. Yeah, it would automatically.

Yeah.

That makes sense. And then I'm guessing the stakeholder policy, is that mostly what we're going to be discussing on 14?

Those are things that we're definitely going to consider amongst a plethora of other considerations for how we do this, what a policy proposal comes up. And I'll be bringing a bunch of different options for us to consider and have a lot of questions. I don't want us to go too far down in Pacific rabbit holes if it's not something that the council or the body would even consider. So, because there could be, there's a lot of research that needs to go into each and every policy position. So when it's when it's saying in here, like adopt the $20 per hour minimum wage or higher, are we taking into consideration?

Are we taking into consideration, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, I guess, you know, because $20 loop-up was asked, we're going to take that in 2025. So I guess we're going to take into consideration the completion since that date.

Yeah, that's definitely going to be a consideration. And then how we set that. What does it look like? Just like how do we set something similar to like Bellingham or Seattle? Or do we set it like any other jurisdiction? Some jurisdictions set it to X amount above the state's minimum wage. Others set their own CPI based on their own region or area. And so we have all those options ahead of us to consider.

I would just share on page 31, Appendix A is actually two pages. There's a lot of info here. And it just goes through some of how all the different local governments have implemented their own minimum wage. And you'll see some of them get quite complex. So I just share that with you. If there's anything you see in here you have questions about or would like to learn more about from what other folks have done, this is primarily what was asked about. It's like, this is what other cities do. What are your reactions? That's great.

That's fantastic.

I will also mention during a lot of the stakeholder engagement, folks wanted things to be simple. It gets very complicated very quickly on, okay, I take these guys this much at this point in time, at that point in time. And so having something predictable and simple is really helpful for all organizations.

And then I'm Realized we were kind of looking, you did provide like the single adult . I'm wondering if . Obviously, I haven't read through this, but are there numbers that show like how many folks it took online are single adult versus like have a family to take care of, that would be helpful information if we're having this discussion.

Yeah, I don't have that off the top of my head, but we got it written down so we can try and get that information to it. We have it available to us.

That's fantastic. And then the other thing I would suggest, and I don't know if it was looked into at all, I know like healthcare with this kind of It parts out in here as an example of one that they feel like maybe they can't be as competitive with other industry if that minimum wage is increased. I also know that health care could be one of those industries where there's a larger wage ratio gap between the lower, lowest end earners and the highest end earners. And so I'm curious. I know others that eat, I believe, San Francisco. in Portland now are looking into that rate ratio gap to see if there's a way to bring that gap down. So like the CEO of a company makes a hundred times more than their lowest paid worker, that would be an inflate. There's something that they might have to pay and incentivize them to bring that wage higher up. And so I think that that's an important thing to consider when we're talking about why maybe some of these industries aren't being able to compete as much because a lot of times the higher end earners aren't necessarily that's not trickling down to the lower wage earners and so I hope we can include some of that into the conversation as well.

Yeah, I mean, I've been talking specifically about raising the floor, the minimum wage here in Tacoma, and that's a very interesting concept. I'm not sure what all the legalities are behind it, but I think any additional research that you have on that would be helpful. But I'm not sure if it would coincide specifically with our minimum wage conversation.

I think tied in together. I feel like when we're talking about if we have the smaller businesses, right, and Um, the owners aren't, aren't making that much more than their workers. Like we don't want to put as much pressure on them, um, to fill that gap because there's not a gap, but there's those out there that could maybe take that, uh, that burden a little bit more onto their shoulders. Um, and then, so you're not looking necessarily, cause I know one of the things we're looking at talking about is are we limiting, um, minimum wage too, too specific in industries, but I think it's important to look at those ratios within those industries. So I will bring what I have.

Yeah, for sure. I just, I'm not sure. I don't, I'm not sure all the legalities behind it. Maybe it's legal in Oregon, but I'm not sure if it's legal in the state of Washington. So I'd be interested if you have any additional research that you do on that, whether it's something that we can implement here at a local level. We have a lot of corporations that aren't based in Tacoma, but yeah.

So I just don't know enough about it to be able to say.

Happy to bring you up.

Great. That's it. Perfect. I have a couple questions. Mostly looking at this table on page 31, I am wondering if You heard from any businesses or employers or anybody around people who have also any feelings in Everett and if they had anything to report on how that's working out for them?

That's a really good question. I don't have anything specific, but I could certainly ask, reach back out to folks and see if they have business in Everett and we might be able to provide additional context of how that's working for them.

I guess I'll state for context in case folks aren't looking online or don't have what I'm looking at in front of me. Everett passed a higher minimum wage it looks like in 2025 and it's currently 1877 and it's moving up to 1977 in July of this year. So I was just curious if they had any of that came up. And then I'm also curious if any of the conversation around franchisee employees and business size came up in any of your conversations?

It did not. Yeah, it was a pretty strong theme throughout both businesses, nonprofits, even our childcare providers that trying to change it based on business size just wasn't. And I do know that there wasn't any specific conversation around franchising. within our conversation with the stakeholder group. Outside those conversations, I do know that a lot of franchisees are, they would consider themselves business owners. They might fly a certain flag, but they are owner-operators of their, I think, establishments.

And so it would concern themselves like a part of like a large corporation in that sense.

Yeah. I tend to think when people think of franchisees, they think of McDonald's or fast food chains. But there's also Habitats or United Ways or lots of other folks who are also in some ways sort of a franchisee or like good grandparents.

Yeah, I mean, the urban league. Yeah, it would be considered like a franchise of league as well. And then also like tax services, like you have Liberty Tax Service out there, right? Those are franchises as well. So there's just like a lot of different businesses out there that could be considered that.

And non-profit numbers too.

Yeah, I just think of it in terms of people often say franchisee, they're trying to think of a corporate boogeyman, and sometimes it was actually a non-profit industrial boogeyman. And then, I think there's two questions on the folks who, I guess, is this table comprehensive? Is this all the other minimum wages in the state?

Yeah, it's all of them.

I'll say, so I assembled this back in April to help Deputy Mayor just look at everything. And there's so many more differences between them. So this doesn't talk about enforcement. It doesn't talk about a lot of other nuances. But I wanted to highlight cost of moving adjustment because that came up here. I just wanted folks to understand. how everyone tackled that. And then covered employees also came up here. So it only highlights answers to the most common questions, but there's a lot more differences between the minimum wages and the deeper diamonds that we need in the future. Great, thank you.

And then my, oh, sorry. Can I say something? Yeah. So you mentioned enforcement. Are most of the different cities, does the state enforce the minimum wage, even though they're setting their own minimum wage, or who does enforce that?

I'm going to use two examples, which I think offer a broad range, which is not an answer to your question. What I found when reading code is most of them like the word may enforce. Okay. You can write it so the city of Tacoma may enforce. Bellingham does that, but Bellingham actually doesn't staff to enforce, and they refer folks to the state. That's on their website. City of Seattle, of course, is kind of the polar opposite. They have a whole office of labor standards that is fully staffed, and so they're able to do enforcement at a local level. So there's a broad range of how enforcement happens, but the state is absolutely a place where enforcement could happen through their standard processes. And what did Tacoma do last time when our minimum wage was higher than the rest of the state? That's a wonderful question. I don't have an answer. I can tell you in 2015, two policy changes occurred at the same time. One was state paid sick leave and one was the increased minimum wage. And there was at that time in 2015 dollars, a point six million dollar budget impacted. I think it's during both. So did not get an answer on how that was split between the two policies, but if you just split it in half, that's 0.3 million in 2015 dollars. Is that an answer we could get for the next committee meeting? Well, certainly it is a question I've asked to have answered by the next committee meeting, and I will write it down as a takeaway from here. Thank you. Um, just cause we've never had office of labor standards and Seattle continues to have one of our near 30 employees. So let's go how we did that when we did it, if we did it with no staff, we will talk more. I'm, I'm excited by this conversation.

Thank you for the question.

Um, Only other question I had was, I really appreciate if there's robust stakeholders over a whole month, three months? What's April, June? Math. Three months. And I know that you work with a lot of partners to try to get folks to these roundtables. I'm wondering if there is a... a preferred method for you other than coming to the next committee meeting to hear from any employers who were not at any of these round tables who might be interested in waiting and now that they've heard the presentation?

Yeah, I'd encourage them to reach out to me specifically and we'll get, you know, me and Lindo can sit down with them and hear any concerns or things that we should consider. It's not just employers, but anybody that's interested in this topic. And I'll try to capture their feedback where I can and, you know, hopefully before the next committee meeting. But this is certainly going to be a conversation we'll be having for months. And then once it's out of this committee, it'll basically open up to the whole council. And so I think it'd be really important for the council's body to be able to hear from as many people and try to help craft this policy that works for Tacoma. There's one common theme amongst all organizations and stakeholders that I met with was that whatever policy comes out, they want to make sure that it works for Tacoma and it's really important to them that that disengagement happens and people want to see Tacoma be successful. So that's something that I just really appreciated out of every group that I've spoken with.

Thank you. Can I ask one question? So I was really interested in the context around that you said that the stakeholders didn't think that the minimum wage should change, vary the size of the company, but they did think potentially based on the industry, it should be different. And so that's kind of an interesting, like, I'm trying to reconcile that in my brain.

yeah i you know not every not everybody agrees on everything at every single stakeholder group um but those are things that folks wanted us to consider is it doesn't make the change it may be based on industry or um but i think it's mainly the mainly concern was just based on business size um was the big the big concern about breaking that out

Also, just on page 27 of the report, it goes, everything's in more detail in the report, obviously, but one thing I'll say is limit minimum wage to specific industries. That recommendation really came up in non-profit conversation, and it really came up kind of sideways in the healthcare sector conversation, so it wasn't a universal recommendation. It was specific conversations, and so when writing this, one of the focuses was trying to say, like, these folks said this. You guys could tease out, but... there's a lot of teasing out of recommendations. Okay, thank you. I just heard those two. Thank you. I'm dry. I did not thank you. I want to thank you for putting in the work.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Thank you. Um,

Okay.

With that, we'll close up this informational briefing and hit up topics for upcoming meetings. With that, I'll call on Debbie Bingham, Executive Liaison.

Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Chair Diaz. So, on July 14th, as we've just heard, we have the continued discussion on the $20 minimum wage proposal. And we have Equity and Contracting Advisory Committee interviews. On July 28th, we have SpaceWorks Tacoma Annual Report. And on August 11th, we have Tacoma Creative Advisory Board interviews.

Perfect. Thank you. I do usually offer, if we want to open up public comment again one more time, if you haven't already spoken. And I see a hand online, so I will open that back up and let the clip read, then we'll blurb again. Thank you. To request to speak, you're entitled to comment and write us on the agenda. If you sign up for the room, you're not required to speak. If you can virtually speak, you can press the right hand button. If you want to speak without, turn on your phone. Your name or the last word you're going to use in front of your call is not to speak. You're sure to speak. Sorry. OK, so I do see one hand on the line. You do not have a full name. I will read off the portion of it. Hi, this is Lori Harnick at Goodwill.

Can you hear me?

Yes, thank you.

Okay, great. It's very hard to hear you all. I have just two questions, mostly about process, if you don't mind. First question, again, it's Lori Harnick with Goodwill. First question is, for the stakeholder proposal that was put forth, The stakeholder proposal that was put forth, I'm curious if there are other stakeholder proposals, how do we put our stakeholder proposal forth? I did not see that as part of the process. We were part of the roundtable. We sent additional information in, but I never was offered the opportunity to provide a stakeholder proposal. So is that a possibility? And if so, how do I go about doing that? And then secondly, could you comment on what is the process overall after this goes through the committee and then the council discussion? Is this something that the city council will just simply adopt or will this go to the vote to the voters in November? Thank you.

Thank you, Lori. I appreciate your patience with us. I didn't see your hand earlier. I will ask Deputy Mayor to take these questions since you're leading this rodeo on this topic and ask you to project into one of the mics because I know it is hard to hear us.

Thank you, Chair, and thank you for the comments. Any stakeholder proposals, please shoot them my way to email. These stakeholder proposals that we put out in the report were just things that we had heard during our stakeholder conversations. And so if you have any specific proposals, please shoot them my way. I'd love to hear and know about them. As for how this proceeds forward, we'll have our subcommittee meeting on July 14th. And then from there, it'll be a discussion amongst the council. And ultimately, it'll be up to the council to decide which direction we'd want to go with this, any specific policy proposals. It could be potentially adopted by the city council. It could be sent to the voters. I just don't know yet. It just depends on which way the body would like to go with that.

Can you clarify what you mean by that?

Oh, any minimum wage proposal, policy proposal.

Thank you. Am I still able to speak? Yeah. Okay. Thank you. So just a quick thought. Thank you very much. And thank you for the thorough work. I really appreciate all the stakeholder conversations, et cetera, and a really thorough report, which I read this morning. The last question I have though is, like in the report, there were several stakeholder groups that talked about recommending that we keep with the state minimum wage. So, but I didn't see that come forward as a proposal. So your suggestion, I think what I'm hearing is the proposal has to come to you separately, not just from what you, not what you're just gleaning from the report.

No, not necessarily. That also will be a consideration. Again, I still have to do the break out of all the different quality considerations but if you were to uh look at page 25 uh under additional quality uh considerations um i did i did specify that multiple stakeholders opposed uh the recommendation outright and recommended that the city continue to utilize the state minimum wage so it is actually reflected in the report there as well

Right, but not as a natural proposal. So that's something that we would have to bring to you if that's something we are interested in.

No, an option that will be in the decision tree for the council will include that as well.

I understand. Okay. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Lori. Great. With that, I don't see any other Zoom hands or anyone else in the room. So I'm going to reclose public comment. and ask if any of the committee members have any other items of interest. Great. I will entertain the final motion.

We will do adjourn.

All those in favor, signal by saying aye.

Aye.

All those opposed, we stand adjourned. Thanks everybody.