Tag: Sara Nelson

City Council, Opinion, Speech

Let the People Clap! (And Speak!)
City Council chambers shortly before Council President Sara Nelson shut down a meeting because people shouted at the council to let them testify.

By Erica C. Barnett

Over the past few days, city council members have objected repeatedly to public commenters expressing their support for one another by clapping—an innocuous, brief burst of joyful noise that council members argue is a disruption that slows council meetings down and prevents everyone from being heard.

Ironically, they’ve also terminated public comment before everyone signed up has had a chance to speak, leading audience members to shout and jeer, then compounded this own goal by locking down council chambers and retreating to their offices, where they can vote on divisive issues without having to hear people boo.

City council members have certainly expressed exasperation in the past about vocal crowds; former council president Debora Juarez was well known for chiding clappers and deriding people whose comments sounded too similar for her taste. (Juarez often made a point of dismissing people who used advocacy groups’ templates to express their disapproval by referring to their feedback as “form letters.”)

But the contempt the current council has shown for members of the public who oppose their policy proposals has gone further, and is now a feature of nearly every council meeting.

Last week, for example, Bob Kettle instructed commenters at a sparsely attended public safety committee meeting to snap their fingers instead of clapping, which he suggested would be disruptive. On Wednesday, Dan Strauss told advocates for student mental health spending, many of them current or recent high school students, to use silent “jazz hands” to express approval, and admonished them repeatedly for clapping instead.

And of course, on Tuesday, Council President Sara Nelson repeatedly warned people who showed up to testify against a long list of council proposals to stop being “disruptive” by clapping and cheering supportively. Then she cut off public comment, prompting many in the crowd to yell at her to let them speak. Instead of defusing the situation by extending public comment, Nelson pulled the council off the dais for a recess, then another, before shutting down council chambers and reconvening the meeting remotely.

This lockdown marked the second time in Nelson’s seven-month tenure as council president that she kicked the public out of council chambers. The first time followed a nearly identical template: Nelson cut off public comment, called two recesses, and ordered the public out, leading to an angry standoff in which Councilmember Cathy Moore demanded that police “arrest those individuals” who were shouting from outside the locked council chambers.

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This is going to keep happening as long as the council does not think of people who disagree with their policy decisions as constituents they have to listen to. Right now, a lot of people happen to be extremely pissed off at a vast array of policies the council is attempting to fast-track with minimal public process—a new law criminalizing sex work, jailing people for low-level misdemeanors, and the creation of special no-go zones for drug users and sex workers, to name a few. It isn’t a conspiracy when advocates on these issues show up in council chambers to sound the alarm—it’s a sign that people without access to the council are using the one avenue they have to make them listen.

If the council doesn’t want to hear from people whose views, or mode of expression, they find disagreeable (cue Kettle saying “this fucking drives me nuts” after people chanted “when we fight, we win” two times earlier this week), that’s on them: The job of being a council member is inseparable from the duty to listen to the public, including during official public comment periods, even when the public’s message is basically, “you suck.”

City Council members, especially those whose previous jobs didn’t involve interacting with the public, have responded to public criticism since time immemorial by decrying the “current lack of civility,” or by suggesting that public commenters have been duped by media misinformation or4 just don’t understand how the city works. (Here’s a brief history of “civility” as a political concept, for those seeking extra credit.)

Yesterday, for example, after a large group of young people testified in favor of a budget proposal to release funding for student mental health care, Kettle said they had mistakenly brought their concerns to the wrong place, and that the adults that brought them to City Hall should have taken them, instead, to Olympia. Maritza Rivera accused Morales of making false promises to “the students who were here, who were expecting that if we pass this money, that somehow they’re going to get it immediately.”

The council’s condescension to young people (who, incidentally, were the instigators of the proposal to spend money on mental health care, which Kettle repeatedly claimed “came out of nowhere”) is the flip side of their enraged response to frustrated public commenters on Tuesday. Kids who disagree with the council are confused; adults who disagree with the council are dangerous. My advice for the council is to try something that might feel radical: Just let people speak.

erica@publicola.com

City Council, criminal justice, Elections, Police

Wild Day at City Hall as Council Blocks Social Housing from Ballot, Shuts Down Meeting, Retreats to Their Offices to Approve New Jail Contract
City Council President Sara Nelson, after reconvening the meeting from inside her council office.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council delayed a vote on an initiative, I-137, to fund social housing, citing unspecified legal concerns, on Tuesday. The council’s last-minute maneuver prevents the measure from going onto the ballot in November, when progressive voter turnout is likely to be high. A majority of the council appears to oppose the measure, which would impose a 5% tax, paid by employers, on employee compensation above $1 million a year.

Voters approved a separate measure, Initiative 135, last February; that initiative created a new public developer to build permanently affordable, mixed-income public housing for people making between 0 and 120 percent of the Seattle median income. Initiative 137 would provide a funding source to build that housing. The campaign for I-135 and I-137, House Our Neighbors, collected about 35,000 signatures to support putting the measure on the November ballot.

The delay gives the council more time to draft and approve an alternative ballot measure that would appear alongside the social housing measure. Last week, the Seattle Chamber put out a poll testing messages on I-137 and an alternative measure, “Proposition 1-B,” that would amend the housing levy voters adopted last year to use some of its funds for social housing, defined as “housing with a mix of income levels not to exceed 80% of median income, that is developed or acquired by, and then owned in perpetuity or as long as lawfully possible by, a public developer.”

A question from a Chamber-sponsored poll testing messages against I-137, which would fund social housing.

Ordinarily, when a council majority opposes an initiative, their recourse is to put a competing initiative on the ballot—something that happened with voting alternatives in 2022 and with the Families and Education Levy in 2014, to name just a couple of examples. What councils generally don’t do—what appears, in fact, to be unprecedented in recent history—is use delay tactics to keep a measure out of the election for which it qualified, in order to push the measure to a later, less favorable election cycle.

Councilmember Tammy Morales, the only council member to vote against the delay, later called the vote “one of the most undemocratic moments I’ve seen in Seattle,” noting that not only did the council vote to keep I-137 off the Presidential election-year ballot, Council President Sara Nelson also cut off public comment, refusing to hear from people who showed up and signed in to speak.

Nelson had already cut the allotted time for each comment from two minutes to one, a practice the city council once used far more judiciously, and admonished the audience repeatedly for clapping and cheering, which she said slowed down the public comment process.

Near the end of in-person public comment, Councilmember Bob Kettle—whose legislation approving a contract with the SCORE jail many members of the public had come to City Hall to oppose—could be heard on a hot mic, immediately after a person spoke against the jail contract and proposed anti-drug and prostitution laws, muttering, “This fucking drives me nuts” (listen below):

Nelson herself was responsible for most of the delay in Tuesday’s meeting, because she called two ten-minute recesses, which were both followed—unsurprisingly—by shouts from the crowd, who chanted, “You didn’t let us speak!”

In the past, council members in charge of meetings have often defused similar situations by letting people speak, or (less productively) forcing the public to leave, using security or police to move or arrest people who refuse to go. This time—perhaps hoping to avoid the spectacle of arresting members of the public—Nelson  stopped the meeting and had the entire council retreat to their offices, where they reemerged, virtually, a few minutes later. (Nelson, somewhat ironically, has insisted that in-person meetings are infinitely superior to virtual ones.)

Back in the relative solitude of their offices, the council resumed its discussion about the city’s contract with SCORE, a jail in Des Moines where the city hopes to jail people accused of committing misdemeanors, such as public drug use and (soon) prostitution and drug loitering, in all parts of the city. Councilmember Bob Kettle, the council sponsor for Mayor Bruce Harrell’s legislation, said he was assured by a visit to SCORE that their facility was high-quality and the medical care was stellar. “They’re fantastic at providing care at SCORE,” Kettle said.

Shortly after the meeting, Andrew Engelson, who’s been covering SCORE for PubliCola, reported on X that a 42-year-old man died at SCORE one week ago—the seventh death at the jail in less than 18 months.

The downtown King County jail recently began booking people on misdemeanors committed in the so-called Downtown Activation Zone, but generally only books people accused of crimes that endanger other people directly, such as domestic violence and DUI, or people who are on City Attorney Ann Davison’s “high utilizers” list.)

The contract would cost well over the $2 million annual sticker price listed in the legislation, because that estimate doesn’t include any of the new court staff, defense attorneys, and technology upgrades the municipal court has said will be necessary to implement it. The cost to transport people between Des Moines and Seattle—a 30-to-40-minute drive—is also unknown, since the city hasn’t identified which kinds of cases it plans to send to SCORE; most people booked on nonviolent misdemeanors are back out on the street in a day or two, but those with more complex cases may stay longer, necessitating more travel back and forth for court appearances.

According to a fiscal note produced by Harrell’s office, the SCORE contract will have no race and social justice implications, and the city did not perform a racial equity toolkit or any other racial equity analysis on the legislation. “The ability to utilize the jail for misdemeanor bookings is not a new process for the city and has historically been utilized as one of many tools when upstream approaches and community-based interventions have been unsuccessful,” the fiscal note explains.

The city’s Reentry Work Group, established in 2015 by a city council that included Harrell, recommended in 2018 that the city reduce its reliance on jails as a response to misdemeanor offenses, noting that “Black individuals only comprise 7% of the King County population, but account for 36% of the King County Jail population; Native Americans only comprise of 1% of the King County population, but account for 2.7% of the King County Jail population.” That same work group recommended removing drug and prostitution loitering laws from the criminal code. Although that recommendation was released in 2018, the council didn’t pass it until two years later; now, arguing that the previous council went “too far” in adopting progressive legislation, the new council is preparing to reinstate both laws.

As its last act of the day, the council approved the SCORE contract (with an amendment by Councilmember Dan Strauss requiring a report on “identified operational issues”) on an 8-1 vote, with Morales voting “no.”

Note: This story originally reported that Tammy Morales abstained from the SCORE vote, and that the vote was 7-1. This error has been corrected.

City Council, Mayor Harrell

Seattle Nice: Is This the “Do-Nothing” Council?

 

By Erica C. Barnett

It’s been nearly six months since most members the new city council took office (the exception, Tanya Woo, was appointed on January 23), and so far, they haven’t proposed or adopted a single substantive piece of policy legislation—or even managed to overturn any of the laws they criticized the previous council for passing.

Despite coming in with what some of them described as a mandate to make swift, dramatic changes, the new council has spent huge amounts of its public meeting time getting briefed on what various city departments and offices do—homework they arguably could be doing on their own time, or have done in the two months between last year’s election and their inaugurations.

Even the legislation council members have proposed, or are in the process of developing, is focused on reversing previous policies, rather than constructively creating new ones. Reversing a brand-new minimum wage for “gig” delivery workers, rolling back renter protections, bringing back loitering laws and laws that prohibit people arrested for drug offenses from being in certain areas of the city, like downtown—these are all ways of saying “no” to laws and policies adopted in very recent times—a purely negative agenda. And in any case, most of these ideas are still in the discussion phases—the only one that’s made it in to legislation, Sara Nelson’s proposal to reduce delivery workers’ minimum wage, has stalled.

So what’s going on with this new council, and is it fair to expect first-time council members to propose original legislation by this point in their terms? In preparation for the podcast, I looked back at the most recent pre-COVID election in which all seven districted council seats were on the ballot, 2015. (The council elected in 2019 had just over two months on the job before COVID hit, making 2016 the last “normal” first year for a new set of district council members).

The council elected in 2015 had five rookie members. By around this time the following year, that council had proposed, considered, or passed legislation barring landlords from raising the rent on apartments with maintenance violations; requiring landlords to rent to the first qualified person who applies for a unit; limited deposits on commercial leases; limiting security deposits and move-in fees, expanded access to the city’s Utility Discount Program, and banned “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ+ youth, among other legislation.

Even the new 2020 council (with four rookie members) passed substantial legislation during and after the COVID pandemic hit the city in mid-March, including a ban on independent expenditure contributions from companies partly owned by foreign investors; legislation expanding the maximum number of tiny house village shelters in Seattle; the JumpStart payroll tax on big businesses (which has provided hundreds of millions of dollars for affordable housing and other priorities every year since); legislation repealing laws against “drug loitering” and “prostitution loitering”; and a law (which the police have failed to follow) barring cops from questioning children until they’ve spoken to an attorney. That’s on top of all the local COVID relief laws the 2020 council began passing in March of that year.

Sandeep and I are usually on opposite sides when it comes to the current council, but even he acknowledged that this council has not been particularly productive, although he suggests that the mayor, not the council, may be to blame. We discussed this theory, along with how well Council President Nelson has stuck to her vow to use her “supermajority” to bring “big changes” to city hall, on this week’s episode.

Addiction, City Council, Equity, homelessness, Police, Transportation

Afternoon Fizz: Encampment Removal Recommendations, Transportation Equity, and Police Testing

Council members say no to homelessness recommendations; equitable transportation advocates decry proposals to cut community-based programs; and police recruits won’t get a chance to take an easier hiring test any time soon.

1. Seattle City Councilmembers Joy Hollingsworth, Bob Kettle, and Sara Nelson declined to sign off on a set of recommendations for responding to encampments at a King County Board of Health meeting yesterday; the recommendations, created by the Board of Health’s homelessness and health work group, include limits on encampment removals, adopting harm-reduction policies such as a “housing first” approach to people with addiction, and increasing access to mental health and substance disorder treatment.

“If we do not remove [encampments], resolve, whatever it is, we are complicit in allowing a situation where more and more people fall into or [fall] deeper into addiction and chronic homelessness because their lives are further disrupted,” Nelson said. “I think that it’s also an issue of nomenclature— ‘forced removal’ versus ‘resolution’… so much depends on the words in the statement, and so therefore, for these reasons, I will not be signing on.”

Kettle, who represents downtown, Queen Anne, and Magnolia, said, “I’ve often said that we need to lead with compassion, we need to start with the empathy, but then we also have to have the wisdom to understand that we have the broader community to also look after.” Kettle praised the work of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s encampment removal team, the Unified Care Team, and said he liked the model at the Salmon Bay tiny house village and RV safe lot in Interbay, which “gives people the ability to basically graduate from the RV to a tiny home.”

King County Councilmembers Teresa Mosqueda and Jorge Baron, who are both on the Board of Health, signed on to the “call to action.”

2. In response to proposals to cut funding for community-initiated transportation safety projects from the 2024 transportation levy, the Seattle Department of Transportation’s Transportation Equity Workgroup wrote a letter to the council saying the proposed cuts “will exclude your marginalized constituents who rely on a safe and accessible transportation system for their everyday needs.”

PubliCola reported this week on amendments by Councilmembers Rob Saka, Cathy Moore, and Sara Nelson to scale back or (in the case of Moore’s amendment) eliminate a proposed new participatory budgeting program aimed at building 16 projects identified and “co-created” by historically marginalized communities. Moore and Saka proposed moving funds from the proposed new program, known as the Neighborhood-Initiated Safety Partnership Program, into a separate fund for projects council members themselves would select.

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“After expressing our concerns at the previous two council meetings through public comments and letters, we are disappointed in your lack of commitments to the City of Seattle’s Race and Social Justice Initiative (RSJI) through cuts to equitable investments that center low-income, BIPOC, immigrant, refugee, disabled, and aging communities,” the workgroup wrote.

“Community-driven projects take time in order to engage those who have been historically disengaged from city planning processes due to barriers such as: language access, lack of trust, and capacity. Relying on district-level decision-making only, as outlined in councilmember amendments, does not adequately address these barriers to full participation, and risks neglecting community-identified safety concerns in underserved areas.”

3. The president of the company that created Seattle’s police officer exams, which some City Council members have suggested replacing with a test that has a higher passing rate, appeared at a meeting of the independent Public Safety Civil Service Commission on Thursday to explain how the test is designed to predict future job performance. The Seattle Police Department began using the test, created by the National Testing Network in collaboration with SPD, in the wake of a consent decree by the US Department of Justice in 2012.

To “validate” that the test predicts job performance, NTN president Carl Swander told the commission, the company compares police officers’ test scores, which are ranked, with their subsequent on-the-job performance evaluations. Swander said by demonstrating that “at [a higher score level], people are more likely to do better than at [a lower] score level,” NTN can create a “cut score”—the maximum passing score—that weeds out people who are obviously unqualified to be police officers.

Other tests, like the Public Safety Testing exam that City Council President Sara Nelson has suggested as an alternative to the NTN test, don’t “actually substantiate… that you’re that what you’re doing is predictive of job performance,” Swander said. Ninety percent of applicants who take the PST test pass it, compared to a 73 pass rate for the NTN exam.

PSCSC director Andrea Scheele also confirmed that if Seattle did contract with PST in the future, it would have to create a custom exam for Seattle, which “eliminates or reduces, at least, the benefit of working with that company.” Nelson and other proponents of changing the hiring test have suggested that switching to PST would allow applicants to submit their test results to multiple agencies at the same time.

A report the commission issued earlier this week notes that the PST test “is not an option” because the company “does not want to provide police testing services for the City of Seattle right now.”

 

City Council, Police

Report: Police Hiring Test With 90 Percent Pass Rate, Supported by Deputy Mayor and Council President, Isn’t Appropriate for Seattle

By Erica C. Barnett

A “due diligence” review of a potential alternative test for police recruits concluded that a test used by small cities and towns in Washington state is not appropriate for Seattle and would not speed up police hiring. In addition, the report says the alternative test, favored by Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess and City Council President Sara Nelson, “is not an option” because the company “does not want to provide police testing services for the City of Seattle right now.”

An independent city commission, the Public Safety Civil Service Commission, produced the report after Burgess asked the commission to consider replacing the current test, which has a 73 percent pass rate, to one that 90 percent of applicants pass.

The PSCSC’s report compares the test SPD currently uses, developed by the National Testing Network in response to the 2012 federal consent decree, with another test created by NTN competitor Public Safety Testing. NTN created hiring tests for police departments in six of the big “West Coast Seven” cities, while PST’s test is used by suburban cities, rural jurisdictions, and Spokane.

According to NTN’s responses to questions from the PSCSC, which PubliCola obtained through a records request, more than 400 cities use their test, including 13 in Washington state.

PST declined to participate in the commission’s review and did not provide information about which jurisdictions use its tests.

The PSCSC has defended the NTN test, noting that the city worked with SPD and the testing company to develop the test in response to the consent decree and a 2017 police accountability ordinance that, though it was never fully implemented, is widely regarded as a baseline for police accountability in Seattle. Among other factors, the exam tests for “restraint in use of authority, integrity, ability to understand and help with human distress, group bias awareness, and commitment to equality,” according to the report.

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Nelson has suggested repeatedly that the test, and the PSCSC in general, are at least partly responsible for SPD’s inability to quickly recruit and hire police officers, a claim the PSCSC has disputed. The new report notes that new recruits spend, on average, about 28 days in processes where the PSCSC has any involvement, compared to 5.5 months in SPD’s pre-employment screening process, and 1.5 months before they start training at the state police academy.

According to the report, PST confirmed that they would need to develop an entirely new “custom” test for Seattle and then test it for validity, a measure of how well a test predicts recruits’ future job performance, a process that “could take months.”

“The primary benefit of engaging PST would be to give candidates applying to other regional agencies that use the PST test the ability to also send their score to Seattle,” the report notes. “However, that feature would not likely be available if Seattle required a new customized (different) exam.”

The report also cautions against using both tests to evaluate SPD applicants, noting that the two tests measure different things, and that one—PST’s—is easier to pass. Police “candidates may become savvy about which exam is easier and choose the easier exam to boost their scores,” the report says. “From a legal standpoint, [NTN] noted that this practice creates risk if the City were to face litigation related to adverse/disparate impact”—that is, if someone sued because a test excluded more people in a protected class, such as women or racial minorities.

“Typically, exams with high pass rates are masking adverse impact that would be present at higher cut scores or when used to rank order” candidates, the report says.

The report also recommends that the PSCSC conduct an open bidding process, known as a request for proposals, for the police hiring test next year. PSCSC director Andrea Scheele will present the report at the PSCSC’s meeting Thursday.

City Council, Elections

City Hall Fizz: Shakeups On the Second Floor

1. The city council will face a $260 million-plus budget deficit this year without one of its key budget experts, as deputy central staff director Aly Pennucci leaves the city after 11 years—nine of those on central staff, a team of policy experts who work for the entire council—to take a new position as one of two deputy county executives in Whatcom County.

Pennucci is one of two central staffers who’ve been publicly briefing the council on the upcoming budget crunch. Most recently, in response to skeptical questions from new Councilmember Maritza Rivera, she explained the steps the new council would have to take if it wants to roll back legislation that raised the JumpStart payroll tax to raise an estimated $20 million a year for mental health services in public schools.

On Friday, Mayor Bruce Harrell announced plans to spend up $10 million of those funds on student mental health programming this year, including $2 million for youth gun violence prevention and intervention. The council will have to approve legislation allocating the funds.

Central staffers are among the few current council staffers with institutional knowledge that stretches longer than a council term, so the loss of a veteran budget expert will be acutely felt just as budget season is getting started.

Pennucci will leave at the end of this month, and start her new position in August.

Another second-floor staffer, Councilmember Dan Strauss’ district director Amy Enbysk, is leaving to take over as press secretary for King County Executive Dow Constantine.

2. Dana Robinson Slote, the longtime head of the council’s communications office, left the council after 11 years in late May for a job as media relations director at the University of Washington. This week, Council President Sara Nelson announced her replacement: former city of Bellevue communications director and consultant Brad Harwood.

Harwood, an attorney, has contributed thousands of dollars to state and local campaigns, including $1,000 to the People for Seattle campaign in 2019. Tim Burgess, a former councilmember who is now deputy mayor, established People for Seattle to campaign against progressive candidates and incumbents, including current City Councilmember Tammy Morales; the campaign was known for its inflammatory, highly misleading ads, including mailers that Photoshopped stock photos of tents and graffiti into Seattle locations like playgrounds.

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Most of the candidates People for Seattle went after in 2019 have left the council, but two, District 2 representative Tammy Morales and District 6 Councilmember Dan Strauss, remain.

Harwood’s background prior to becoming Bellevue’s communications director is significantly more political than that of a typical city staffer, particularly one hired to represent a range of political views—including Morales’ and Strauss’—on a council whose membership changes over time.

Prior to, and after, his time as communications director for Bellevue, Harwood worked as a consultant for a number of political campaigns, including No on I-522, the campaign against a state initiative that would have required labeling of genetically modified foods; a successful 2015 campaign to repeal limits Seattle imposed on the number of cars companies like Uber could operate in the city; and the campaign that legalized charter schools in Washington state.

Update: In 2006, the Northwest Progressive website quoted Harwood as a spokesman for the state Republican Party. As of 2015—the most recent date, before last year, for which his profile is archived—Harwood’s LinkedIn page touted his experience as a board member for the Roanoke Conference, an annual Republican event that describes itself as a “retreat-like atmosphere” for “up-and-coming” Republicans. The group’s website quotes the Seattle Times, which called the conference “The ‘must-attend event for … Republican leaders’ in Washington state.”

Before becoming a consultant, Harwood worked for former King County Councilmember Jane Hague, a Republican who was defeated by Democrat Claudia Balducci in 2015.

Harwood has contributed to a number of Republicans as well as Democrats (including, most recently, Balducci’s 2026 campaign.) In 2022, he gave $2,000 to campaigns associated with Federal Way Mayor Jim Ferrell, a Republican-turned-Democrat who ran law-and-order campaign for King County prosecutor. He also contributed $1,250 to campaigns affiliated with now-Mayor Bruce Harrell in 2021. He has also given smaller contributions to the Mainstream Republicans of Washington; former Republican gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna; Republican King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn; and Republican secretary of state Kim Wyman.

Of 13 partisan candidates on Harwood’s lengthy contribution list, eight are Republicans (and a ninth, Chris Vance, is an independent who used to lead the state Republican Party).

The council’s communications staff reportedly had no input into Nelson’s decision, which she told them about last week.

Responding to questions about his political work and contributions, Harwood referred PubliCola to a press release announcing his hiring, and said, “The only thing I’d add is that I’m thrilled to be here. Just like my time leading communications for the City of Bellevue (the second largest city in King County), I look forward to successfully supporting all nine Seattle councilmembers and department staff.”

3. City Councilmember Tanya Woo—the candidate Morales defeated in 2023, only to have the council immediately appoint her to a citywide seat this year—has lost every Democratic legislative district endorsement in Seattle so far (except the 43rd, which will vote next week) to progressive challenger Alexis Mercedes Rinck. Local Democratic endorsements may not mean what they used to, but a sweep of the LDs is a sign of solid support across the left half of the spectrum, from the historically cranky 34th in West Seattle to the idiosyncratic 37th in South Seattle.

Woo’s campaign website, revamped to reflect her incumbent status, does not currently include an endorsement page.