Category: Transit

City Council, Density, legislature, Police, Transit

Friday Fizz: A Timid TOD Bill; Plus, More Committee Shakeups for the New City Council

1. Upzoning property adjacent to transit stations to promote walkability and maximize housing, AKA Transit Oriented Development (TOD), has become a basic tenet of sustainable city planning.

However, per Josh’s New Year’s prediction, state Rep. Julia Reed (D-36, Seattle) proposed a TOD bill this week that allows cities to go small, with zoning requirements well below the standard for adding the number of units our housing-shy region needs. Reed’s bill sets the minimum allowable “Floor Area Ratio”—an equation that determines the amount of housing it’s possible to build on a lot—at 3.5 within a half-mile of a stop on a light rail and 2.5 within a quarter-mile of bus rapid transit lines.

An easy way to visualize this: Under a 3.5 FAR, you could have a 3.5 story building that completely covers one lot, or a seven-story building that covers half the lot. Since cities have all kinds of requirements for setbacks, landscaping, and maximum lot coverage, it typically takes a FAR of 4 or more to make a modest six-story apartment building feasible. Seattle, for example, uses a FAR of 4.5 to allow six-story apartments, and Redmond is already building six-story buildings adjacent to the coming light rail.

Last year’s more aggressive TOD proposal, which won support from a broad coalition, including the Housing Development Consortium, Futurewise, the Washington State Labor Council AFL-CIO, and Transportation Choices Coalition, went with a FAR of 4 in the station area and 6 around the station “hub,” a designation Reed’s bill doesn’t mention.

In other words, Reed’s bill is not an upzone for a city and region that’s currently in the process of building and planning the largest light rail expansion in the country. And it will allow cities that implement mass transit (like bus rapid transit) in the future to limit housing to densities far below what the Seattle region is already building.

By the way, Josh also predicted that this bill would come with “steep affordability requirements that will chill development.” Et voilà: Reed’s bill would require every new building in a station area to include 10 percent of units affordable to people making 60 percent or less of the area median income, a requirement that goes well beyond Seattle’s Mandatory Housing Affordability law. It would also allow up to a 5 FAR for a building that’s 100 percent affordable.

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2. We reported earlier this week on the emerging shape of the new Seattle City Council, whose new president, Sara Nelson (citywide Position 9), wrote an op/ed in the Seattle Times this week laying out her priorities, including a vow to “break our reliance on new revenue (taxes) to pay our bills.” But council members also serve on a number of important regional committees, helping shape policy on homelessness, transportation, mental health care, and more. Here’s a summary of those regional assignments.

City Councilmember Dan Strauss (D6) will take over the seat formerly held by ex-city councilmember Debora Juarez on the Sound Transit Board, King County Executive Dow Constantine announced Friday afternoon. Juarez, who was council president, held the position for the past four years. Strauss was the vice-chair of the council’s transportation committee, but never led it. The council’s new transportation chair is Rob Saka (D1).

On the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA) governing board, Nelson and new councilmember Cathy Moore (D5) will replace Lisa Herbold and Andrew Lewis. Nelson hasn’t weighed in that much on homelessness directly from the council dais (and wasn’t a member of the homelessness committee, which—along with the renters’ rights committee—no longer exists), but the brewery she owns, Fremont Brewing, uses illegally placed concrete “eco-blocks” to prevent homeless people from parking around its location off Leary Way. The company also worked actively to remove people living in tents on a piece of city-owned land immediately adjacent to its production facility.

Nelson championed legislation empowering City Attorney Ann Davison to prosecute people who use drugs in public spaces, who are mostly unhoused. (People who possess or use illegal drugs in their houses are not subject to the law).

Nelson has also expressed skepticism (verging on outright opposition) to harm-reduction approaches to drug use and homelessness, such as Let Everyone Advance With Dignity (LEAD), which diverts people from arrest and prosecution and does not make sobriety a condition for shelter. On that note: Kettle, who vowed to hire more police and end the culture of “permissiveness” toward drug use and crime in Seattle, will replace Lisa Herbold on the LEAD policy coordinating group, which oversees the program.

Joy Hollingsworth (D3), Kettle, and Nelson will take over on the King County Board of Health for Lisa Herbold, Tammy Morales, and Teresa Mosqueda. Mayor Bruce Harrell will serve as an alternate “representing the city council” on the health board—an unusual, and possibly unprecedented, comingling of the legislative and executive branches on a regional committee with influence over major decisions about public health.

The board of health makes policy recommendations relating to  mental health and addiction, as well as communicative diseases like COVID.

Teresa Mosqueda, who attended some meetings from home, chided Nelson last year when she made a point of noting that she was present at one particular meeting “in person”; in her op/ed, Nelson said “coming in to work in person” will help spark a “major reset in tone and direction at City Hall.”

—Erica C. Barnett, Josh Feit

Transit, Transportation

Sound Transit CEO Julie Timm Is Leaving After 14 Months at Helm

Executive leadership | Sound Transit

By Erica C. Barnett

Sound Transit CEO Julie Timm, who replaced former agency director Peter Rogoff in September 2022, announced her resignation Tuesday afternoon—two days before the Sound Transit board was scheduled to discuss her performance evaluation. The board’s executive committee went into a lengthy closed session last week to discuss Timm’s review, then ended their public meeting, leaving several agenda items unaddressed, for lack of a quorum.

Officially, Timm is leaving “in order to return to the East Coast to take care of family matters.”

In an email to staff on Tuesday, Timm wrote that she has “been struggling to balance the needs of long-distance care and support for my aging father with the intense requirements of leading Sound Transit as CEO.  Over the past week in collaboration with Board Leadership, I came to the difficult, but I believe the correct, conclusion that my family needs more of my focus. While not impossible, it would be incredibly challenging for me to maintain a split focus while maintaining the intense level of support and stability Sound Transit deserves from its CEO as we enter into a historic level of openings and new construction.”

Timm has come under fire in recent months for delays, cost overruns, and a perceived lack of urgency on big-picture priorities like Sound Transit’s regional light rail expansion, which will require the agency to rapidly ramp up to spending more than $4 billion on capital projects every year.

In a report to the agency last week, a technical advisory group expressed consternation that Sound Transit was behind schedule on many of the recommendations the group issued back in February, such as hiring three directors to oversee major capital projects, empowering staff to make decisions without top-down approval, and repairing “broken trust” between the board and staff, led by Timm.

Prior to joining Sound Transit, Timm headed up the Greater Richmond (Virginia) Transit Company, a smaller transit agency that oversaw bus routes serving about 31,000 people daily.

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During her time at the agency, Sound Transit reinstated fare enforcement, moved toward a flat $3 fare for light rail, and got ready to open a new Eastside-only “starter line” after faulty construction on the I-90 light-rail bridge crossing led to massive delays on the East Link project, which voters approved in 2008.

Other delays were largely out of Timms’ hands, including the decision to consider major changes to the Sound Transit 3 light-rail map voters adopted in 2016, including the elimination of the Midtown station, the relocation of a station in South Lake Union, and a decision to bypass the Chinatown/International District and instead build new stations in Pioneer Square and SoDo, to the north and south of the CID.

The cost of several projects ballooned while Timm led Sound Transit in part because some contractors began charging premiums to Sound Transit to cover what they perceived as the extra risk of working with the agency, such as financial losses due to construction delays.

The technical advisory group noted Sound Transit’s fractured relationship with contractors in its report, saying that contractors preferred to bid for work with other agencies, like the Washington State Department of Transportation, over Sound Transit “You want to be the owner of choice not because it’s a good feather in your cap, [but] because you’ll get competitive bids,” TAG member Grace Crunican said last week.

According to a press release announcing Timm’s departure, the board “is expected to appoint an interim CEO in the weeks ahead.” The board’s next meeting is on Friday.

Finding a permanent CEO for the agency could be an arduous process. Although the position pays significantly more than other executive-level government positions, like mayor—Timm’s base salary was $375,000 a year—the job requirements are specialized and growing more so as the agency enters its biggest-ever capital expansion phase. After Timm’s predecessor, Peter Rogoff, announced he was leaving 2021, it took Sound Transit well over a year to offer the job to Timm, in a process that was shrouded in secrecy.

Transit, Transportation

Expert Panel “Disappointed” In Sound Transit’s Lack of Progress on Recommendations to Avoid Overruns, Delay
With Sound Transit poised to enter the most intense period of capital spending in its history, an advisory group expressed alarm at the agency’s apparent lack of urgency on key recommendations.

By Erica C. Barnett

A panel of outside experts established last year to help Sound Transit reduce delays to its burgeoning portfolio of megaprojects expressed disappointment last week with the agency’s progress on six recommendations it made in February, noting that many are just now getting underway after many months of delay. With the agency entering the most intense period of capital expansion in its history, members of the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) told Sound Transit’s executive committee on Wednesday, the agency needs to act aggressively to avoid major overruns and delays.

“We’re trying to up your game in order to get the dollar to go a lot further. I want to make sure you understand the value of that,” TAG member Grace Crunican told the board committee. “That’s why we’re nervous about the fact that you’re not up and running. We came to you saying, ‘Hey, let’s go,’ and it’s a year later, and, ‘hey, we haven’t gone.’”

The TAG’s recommendations included restoring lost trust between the Sound Transit board and top agency staff, including CEO Julie Timm; empowering staff to take action, such as signing off on contract changes, without running every decision up the management chain; and hiring an “experienced megaproject capital program executive team” to oversee the expansion of light rail to Tacoma, Lynnwood, Ballard, and West Seattle. The agency’s deputy CEO in charge of system expansion, longtime Sound Transit staffer Brooke Belman, quietly announced she was leaving earlier this year.

“I think we talked about it being a wave, and the wave was coming. The wave is not coming. It is on us right now. And that means the sense of urgency of moving forward with our recommendations is very, very real.”—Sound Transit Technical Advisory Group member Ken Johnsen

Since the recommendations came out, TAG members said, the agency has shown little urgency about putting them into practice. “It’s important to me that the top leadership embrace these changes and work on them diligently, and we’re a long way off from ‘diligently’ at this point,” Sound Transit board member Claudia Balducci told PubliCola.

“There’s been some work—we voted recently to change our contract approval thresholds so that more contracts can be completed and moved by the CEO… but when you get a recommendation that says you need to rebuild trust… that feels to me like something where there needed to be some intentional time invested by the board and the CEO and management to work on that.”

Meanwhile, Sound Transit continues to approach a point in its schedule where it will need to spend between about $5 billion and $8 billion a year to stay on track—a level of annual spending that will dwarf everything Sound Transit has built to date. “We have to change the way we do business,” Balducci said. Every day of delay, Technical Advisory Group (TAG) member Ken Johnsen told the committee, could have cascading effects on Sound Transit’s ability to deliver the projects it has promised, some of which are already running years behind schedule.

Pointing to a chart that shows the amount of money Sound Transit needs to spend on its projects each year in order to avoid major overruns and delays, Johnsen said, “if we sometimes sound overly aggressive on our sense of urgency and why these things need to be moving, it’s because of that chart. I think we talked about it being a wave, and the wave was coming. The wave is not coming. It is on us right now. And that means the sense of urgency of moving forward with our recommendations is very, very real.”

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A key issue the TAG noted in its initial report was that “Sound Transit’s current culture appears to discourage decision-making”—staff either don’t feel like they can make decisions on their own, or don’t do so “for fear of making the wrong one and getting reprimanded.” These issues can produce delays that cause contractors to bid on projects where they know they’ll get paid on time and consistently; already, according to the February TAG report, top-tier contractors prefer to seek contracts with other agencies because of long delays getting invoices approved and paid.

“I feel that our recommendations were pretty clear and concise, but that’s not what we saw in these first meetings,” TAG member Connie Crawford, added. “And just the fact that it’s eight months later, nine months later, when we’re having the kickoff meetings [with staff]—that’s been a disappointment to us.”

After the discussion last week, the board went into executive session to discuss a performance review for Sound Transit CEO Julie Timm, who has been at the agency since last September. When they returned to the dais, after extending the session multiple times, the committee no longer had a quorum and had to end the meeting. However, questions about Timm’s future at the agency may be answered on Friday, when her performance evaluation is on the agenda for the board’s public meeting.

Equity, Guest Contributor, Transit

What’s So Scary About Transit Riders? 

By Anna Zivarts

“I have to ride the bus. I have to deal with the scheduling, the condition of the street, getting to and from the bus. Does the schedule work with common arrival times for work, or are you gonna be stuck somewhere an hour before? Is there somewhere you can take shelter in the case of bad weather? All that stuff that if you’re not a regular bus rider, you’re not aware of.”

  • Aileen Kane, Washington nondriver

“Because many on [transit] boards tend to be car drivers, they really haven’t internalized what it means to be a transit rider. Those decisions determine whether you as a transit rider are going to be able to keep a job, going to be able to continue to be a caregiver, going to be able to continue to go to school.”

  • Judy Jones, Washington nondriver

In the spring of 2022, I can remember sitting on a bus, attempting to keep a five-year old entertained while I dialed in to give public comment at a Ben Franklin Transit board meeting. 

That spring, the board at Ben Franklin Transit (which provides transit in the Tri-Cities region) began discussing a plan to cut the sales tax that funds transit. The resulting revenue loss would necessitate cuts to transit service, including the likely elimination of Sunday service. 

In response to this proposal, Disability Rights Washington joined with labor, local advocates and staff from Transportation Choices Coalition to fight back. We reached out to the nondrivers we knew in the region and asked them to share their stories with the media and in public testimony.

Thankfully, after a series of high-stakes meetings, the board voted against the proposed tax cuts and transit service reductions. But that day in April, as I sat on the bus listening to the first of these meetings, I got angrier and angrier. It was very clear that the transit board members proposing the tax cuts and service reductions didn’t rely on transit themselves, nor had many of them ridden a bus in recent memory.

I thought back to how I’d heard many stories like this from the other nondriver advocates I organized with, advocates who for years had been attending transit board meetings and pushing for service that worked better for the people who needed it the most. 

In the fall of 2020, Disability Rights Washington launched the Disability Mobility Initiative to start organizing nondrivers across our state. We started by trying to interview nondrivers from every legislative district about how they get around, the barriers they face, and what they would change to make their communities more accessible. To date, we have 275 stories that are documented in our nondriver storymap, the visible part of our organizing work that eventually led to state-funded research showing that nondrivers make up 30 percent of our state population.

Blind advocate and Kitsap County resident Kris Colcock recalled: “It was suggested that the commissioners of Kitsap Transit take a day and just use the bus system. The immediate response was, ‘Well, we don’t have time to do that.’” 

In these interviews, I kept hearing anecdotes—especially from the older nondrivers who had gotten frustrated and decided to show up at a transit board meeting—about how frustrating it was to discover that transit boards were made up of elected officials who themselves didn’t rely on transit, and in many cases, thought they were too busy or their time was too valuable to use the service they managed.

Vivian Conger, a blind nondriver from Walla Walla, shared that when she attended her local transit board meeting, she was shocked to learn that one of the board members had ridden transit for the first time that very day. Blind advocate and Kitsap County resident Kris Colcock recalled: “It was suggested that the commissioners of Kitsap Transit take a day and just use the bus system. The immediate response was, ‘Well, we don’t have time to do that.’” 

In Washington State, a Public Transit Benefit Area (PTBA) is a governing body established by state code to create and run a transit agency. Current Washington state laws dictate the composition of PTBA boards, which include local elected officials from the area plus a nonvoting labor seat.

After hearing so much frustration from nondriver advocates, and after the experience with the Ben Franklin board, we collaborated with other advocates prior to the 2023 legislative session on a bill that would have added a voting seat for transit riders on these PTBA boards. Unfortunately, although the bill was drafted, opposition from transit agency lobbyists killed it before it was filed.

It’s unclear why having a voice for transit riders is so threatening. Perhaps it’s because labor has also been asking for a voting seat. Last year, they were successful in getting legislation introduced and will be working to get it passed again during the 2024 session. 

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Ensuring bus drivers have a voting seat on transit boards is critically important too, especially considering how much agencies across the state have struggled with staffing. In their 2022 report, “Bus Operators in Crisis” the national transportation think tank TransitCenter notes: “The disconnect in who holds central office and leadership positions (majority white and male) and frontline staff (majority people of color), can impact people’s commitment to the job, their perception of advancement opportunities, and overall frustrations. … Frontline workers, who are demographically more reflective of riders, have particular expertise about day-to-day operations and regularly interact with the public, yet are typically not included in decision-making.” 

There’s a similar divide between the daily experience of transit riders and transit boards. TransitCenter’s 2022 “Who Rules Transit” report notes: “Most transit agency boards in the U.S. operate without much public attention, and many are unrepresentative of the public they serve, composed of people unfamiliar with transit itself or the communities and people transit serves.”

The path to becoming an elected leader and therefore being eligible to serve on a transit board is extremely difficult for most nondrivers. After participating in the Week Without Driving, Councilmember Neal Black from Kirkland reflected, “It’s kind of hard to imagine how someone who didn’t have access to a car could do the job of a city council member. Our expectations are to be in a lot of different places, and a lot of different times. In a suburban city like ours, it’s a challenge to do that without driving, and that means there’s a large segment of our population excluded from serving in this role.” 

At the same time, many transit boards across the state struggle to get engagement and attendance from elected leaders who have many other responsibilities and priorities outside of serving on transit boards as one of their many committee assignments.

Nobody wants transit to succeed more than the people who rely on it day in and day out, which is why we hope that legislation to add a voting seat for transit-dependent community members moves forward in the 2024 session. And we hope that labor also gets a voting seat, because the expertise of bus drivers is too valuable to overlook.

“Most of our board members are not frequent transit riders. We recognize the direct stake that riders have in public transit, and Clallam Transit’s board discussed adding rider representation but decided against it because current Washington State law isn’t clear about whether this would be a properly constituted transit board,” said Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin, a Clallam Transit board member and Port Angeles City Councilmember since 2018. “We need clear state statutes that make for better representation on transit boards especially by non-drivers. This is a simple policy that ensures ‘nothing about us without us,’” he added.

Intercity Transit in Thurston County has rewritten its bylaws to include community members in their board as voting members. In fact, they have three voting community representatives, and their current chair is a community representative. Since the seats were added, every time the board composition has come up for a vote, they voted to retain these voting seats. 

Nobody wants transit to succeed more than the people who rely on it day in and day out, which is why we hope that legislation to add a voting seat for transit-dependent community members moves forward in the 2024 session. And we hope that labor also gets a voting seat, because the expertise of bus drivers is too valuable to overlook. 

Of note, not every transit agency in our state is authorized through PTBAs, although many are. King County Metro and Sound Transit both have different board structures. We hope that the change in the PTBA structure is the first step in more universal representation across all transit boards. For example, we are eager to support King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci’s suggestion that Sound Transit’s board should include rider representation.

For people who can grab their keys and drive where they need to go, transportation isn’t a major concern. But for those of use who can’t drive or can’t afford to, transportation access is something we think about for hours a day: As we’re waiting in the rain for a delayed bus, as we’re trying to figure out the schedules to transfer between one county’s system and another, as we’re mapping the least stressful, best lit, and least hilly route to an unfamiliar bus stop.

We care deeply about how transit works because it is such a major part of our every day and can make the difference between getting to do the things that connect us to our communities—things like running errands, seeing a friend, or getting to an appointment. Without functional transit, we can be stuck at home—or, if we’re lucky, reliant on a friend or family member having time to drive us. 

Instead of fighting us, transit agencies should harness this passion, this commitment, and our years of expertise to make transit better. 

Anna Zivarts is a low-vision mom and nondriver who was born with the neurological condition nystagmus. She directs the Disability Mobility Initiative at DIsability Rights Washington and launched the #WeekWithoutDriving challenge. Zivarts serves on the boards of Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium, League of American Cyclists, and Commute Seattle. In 2024, her book When Driving Isn’t an Option: Steering Us Away from Car-Dependency will be published by Island Press. 

City Council, Elections, homelessness, King County, Mayor Harrell, Transit

Ceis Gets Another $30,000 from City, Poll Tests Anti-Andrew Lewis Messages, Burien Site May be Too Loud for Shelter

1. Tim Ceis, the consultant who received a no-bid, $280,000 city contract to work on issues related to Sound Transit’s Ballard-to-West Seattle light rail alignment earlier this year, received a $30,000 contract extension this month, bringing his total city contract to $310,000.

Ceis’ contract involves meeting with neighborhood advocacy groups and other stakeholders to build “community consensus” around the mayor’s priorities for the light rail extension, strategizing, and advancing Harrell’s views to the Sound Transit board.

PubliCola broke the story about Ceis’ initial contract in March.

At the time, Harrell was pushing a proposal to eliminate a station in the Chinatown International District (CID) neighborhood and replace it with a second Pioneer Square Station across from City Hall, roughly where the King County Administration Building currently stands. King County Executive Dow Constantine has proposed creating a towering new residential neighborhood and new civic center in the area. Sound Transit board adopted this proposal as its preferred alternative in March, but left one potential CID option on the table in response to protests from residents and businesses.

The plan to skip over the CID would add a new light rail station near Lumen Field and an existing Salvation Army shelter, amid a broad swath of land owned by developer Greg Smith. As far back as 2022, Smith’s company Urban Visions had mocked up a proposal to move the planned CID station south into SoDo, suggesting the area could turn into a new destination like Chelsea Market in New York or the food and event center in the revamped Seattle Center Armory.

Documents obtained through records requests show that Ceis, along with the city’s designated liaison to Sound Transit, has met with Smith “to discuss potential partnerships related to the proposed CID south station” on Smith’s property. He has also met with attorney Jack McCullough, who represents the developer that owns the development rights around the proposed second Pioneer Street station.

The newly amended contract says that “due to delayed Sound Transit board action,” Ceis’ work will continue through November. The board spent several weeks this summer debating whether to eliminate a promised station on Denny Way or build it on Westlake as planned; Harrell, who initially seemed to support eliminating the long-planned station on Denny, ultimately got behind a station north of the original proposed site on Westlake that will cause less disruption to Amazon and the South Lake Union developer Vulcan.

Public records show that Ceis communicates regularly with Vulcan, and facilitated a meeting between Harrell and Vulcan VP Ada Healey, who told Ceis that the original plan for a station on Westlake would “put [the city’s] economic engines at risk and “sacrific[e] our downtown neighborhoods.” A spokesman for the mayor’s office said the scope for Ceis’ $250-an-hour contract remains unchanged.

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2. There’s a new poll in the field testing positive and negative messages about District 7 City Councilmember Andrew Lewis, along with positive messages about his opponent Bob Kettle—a former Navy officer who received 31.5 percent of the vote to Lewis’ 43.5 percent.

The poll, which only tests positive messages about Kettle, appears to be from the Kettle campaign. For one thing, it mischaracterizes several of Lewis’ key positions in odd ways—saying, for example, that Lewis is “working…to bring rent control to Seattle” (in fact, he voted against a rent control “trigger” law earlier this month). For another, it describes Lewis’ views in a way that no human working on his campaign would be likely to phrase them—like a question that says Lewis “believes we can make progress… if we center the work and meet the moment with the urgency it requires,” or another that talks about “electrify[ing] houses.”

The real meat of the poll—the messages voters should prepare to hear from Kettle as he runs against Lewis from the right—is more or less what you’d expect from a guy with campaign signs all over the top of Magnolia and Queen Anne: Kettle will represent District 7 neighborhoods outside downtown Seattle, crack down on “open drug use and dealing from Downtown to our neighborhoods,” and “clean up our public spaces” by removing encampments now that “we’ve finally built-up enough shelter space to offer housing to everyone.”

Quick fact check on that last point: There are currently around 6,000 shelter and transitional housing beds in all of King County—a fraction of what’s needed to serve a homeless population that could be as high as 48,000. Even under the most conservative estimates, we have not “built up enough shelter space,” much less housing, “for everyone.”

3. A potential site for a Pallet shelter in Burien could be disqualified because of extreme noise levels from nearby SeaTac Airport. The property—an empty lot next to the Boulevard Park branch of the King County Library—sits inside a “35 decibel reduction zone,” in which all “living and working areas” must be soundproofed to reduce inside noise by 35 decibels.

Pallet shelters, which are thin-walled temporary structures ventilated to the outdoors, can’t be soundproofed—a fact the Port of Seattle brought up in rejecting a proposal from the city to site the shelter inside the Port’s Northeast Redevelopment Area (NERA). In both locations, the average noise level is between 60 and 70 decibels, a level SeaTac Airport’s director of environment and sustainability said was “not conducive to residential purposes, especially when it is highly unlikely that any temporary housing structures (let alone permanent structures) could be modified to attain the City of Burien’s stringent noise mitigation code.”

A spokesperson for the city of Burien did not immediately respond to questions about noise levels at the potential shelter location and how the site, which has been vacant for many years, first came to the attention of the city.

Elections, Mayor Harrell, Morning Fizz, Transit

Campaign Will Pay for Bagel Giveaway After All; Harrell Backs Light Rail Station that Will Inconvenience Amazon

1. After PubliCola reported on a mailer and billboards from Eltana Bagels that appeared to promote the District 1 City Council campaign of Eltana founder and president Stephen Brown, his treasurer contacted us to let us know that the campaign will reimburse Eltana approximately $33,000 for the promotion, along with a billboard in West Seattle and a June 2023 Youtube video that concludes, “Stephen Brown fixed the bagel problem in Seattle—who knows what’s next?”

The mailers, which went out shortly before ballots arrive for the August 1 primary, read, “Seattle Deserves Better… – Stephen Brown” and open to reveal the word “…Bagels!” along with an offer for free bagels valued at $25. About half the mailers went out to addresses in West Seattle, which does not have an Eltana location. (Brown says Eltana targeted people who live near grocery stores that sell the bagels).

Last week, Brown characterized the billboard and mailers—on which “Eltana” appears off to the side in much smaller font than Brown’s name—as a routine advertising expense. “The intention was to use a banal, stereotypical message as a parody—to use humor to sell bagels,” Brown told PubliCola. Similarly”This effort is not a campaign expense—it is not electoral in nature.”

Brown’s campaign decided to pay for the billboard and mailer after Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission director Wayne Barnett sent Brown a letter posing a series of questions about the promotion, including when the mailers went out and where they went, what vendors Eltana used for the ads, and how often Eltana has sent out similar mailers. Barnett also asked whether previous Eltana promotions have prominently featured Brown’s name, and requested examples of other advertising materials from Eltana over the last two years.

“As you know, all money spent to promote your candidacy must be timely reported, and is limited by your choice to participate in the Democracy Voucher Program,” Barnett wrote. “Therefore, we must resolve this issue before the Voucher Program can release any more funds to your campaign.”

The reimbursement has not showed up yet in campaign filings.

2. Transit advocates were dismayed when Mayor Bruce Harrell wrote a letter to his fellow Sound Transit board members in May suggesting the agency study alternatives that could move a future light rail station north or west of Sound Transit’s preferred alternative. The goal of considering both of these alternatives was to prevent a four-year closure of Westlake Ave. that would impact Amazon, Vulcan, and other large employers in the area. One of those alternatives, the “shifted west” option, would have eliminated the Denny station altogether.

Last week, at a meeting of the board’s system expansion committee, Harrell said he now plans to support the preferred alternative and focus on ways to mitigate the impacts of construction in the neighborhood. “I’m waiting for the ridership analysis [to see] how it affects all of this, but I [am]  leaning towards support for the DT-1 preferred alternative that will preserve the two stations in South Lake Union with a strong emphasis—again, I can’t repeat this enough—on mitigating construction impacts,” Harrell said.

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During public comment, a number of representatives from South Lake Union businesses testified that closing Westlake to cars for the four-year construction period would be like signing a death warrant for the (booming) neighborhood. Dan McGrady, a longtime lobbyist for the developer Vulcan who now lobbies on behalf of PEMCO Insurance, said light rail station construction on Westlake would cause “devastation” similar to the COVID pandemic, creating a “lasting scar on the community” that “I just don’t think the community can survive.”

Sound Transit is hosting two webinars about the South Lake Union station alternatives before the full board meets again on July 27, where they will have an opportunity to pick a different preferred alternative or keep the preferred alternative on Westlake just off Denny Way.