Category: Transportation

City Council, Crime, Elections, public safety, Transportation

Transportation Levy Funds Leary Bypass of Burke-Gilman Trail; Council Escalates Street Racing Rhetoric (and Fines)

1. The Seattle City Council voted Tuesday to approve a $1.55 billion, eight-year transportation levy for the November ballot, and Mayor Bruce Harrell signed the legislation Wednesday.

In a reversal from its previous position, the council decided Tuesday to earmark $20 million to “complete” the long-disputed Burke-Gilman Trail by rerouting cyclists and pedestrians off the current route and onto new path next to busy Leary Way NW. Cycling advocates and industrial businesses have spent decades locked in a legal battle over the “missing link” of the trail along Shilshole Ave. NW, with business groups opposed to a straightforward link between two sections of the trail through Ballard.

By explicitly funding the Leary detour, Strauss said his amendment will finally settle that debate, “putting this 30-year problem to rest.” But the debate is likely to continue, even assuming voters approve the transportation levy and secure the $20 million for the Leary option. The proposed route, as we’ve reported previously, would require cyclists to cross 13 active intersections, the most of any alternative the city has studied, plus 33 driveways and loading docks—each presenting its own opportunities for collisions.

Three council members—Sara Nelson, Bob Kettle, and Maritza Rivera—voted against Strauss’ proposal, with Cathy Moore and Rob Saka reversing their previous “no” votes. Rivera said she supported completing the Missing Link, but that she didn’t support earmarking so much money for a specific option when there would be more opportunities to discuss the alternatives and finalize the details later; Nelson said she was concerned about stripping all but $6 million from an arterial maintenance fund that was supposed to help leverage millions of dollars in other investments.

Model T speedster photo via ModelTPix.com.

2. Also this week, the council’s public safety committee, chaired by Kettle, approved legislation that will allow police to issue tickets to anyone engaged in illegal street racing in Seattle.

The new ordinance (much like last year’s controversial drug law, which incorporated an existing state law into a local ordinance) imposes a fine of $500 for the first infraction and, thanks to an amendment added by Councilmember Rob Saka, escalating fines that top out at $1,500 per infraction. Another Saka amendment, modeled on a law in Kent, makes it a civil infraction for people to be “spectators” at street races.

“Many of these races are occurring because they’re putting on a sideshow. They’re putting on a show for people,” Saka said, adding that spectators can number in the “hundreds—hundreds!” The “key delta” between the Kent law and Seattle’s proposal, Saka added, is that Seattle’s only imposes a civil fine, while Kent’s allows criminal penalties.

“We can’t be afraid of taking risks and taking strong action to solve this problem that has plagued our city over and over again,” Saka said.

A council spokesperson said it “will ultimately be up to SPD” how to enforce the ban on watching street races, which could include issuing tickets on site or using footage from nearby surveillance cameras to track down and ticket people after the fact.

None of these measures are likely to end street racing, which has been illegal in Washington state since the age of the Model T. State law has banned street racing since at least 1915, suggesting it has been a perennial problem. The original law banning street races allowed officers to arrest drivers for “racing on the public highways,” except when local authorities set aside time for “speed trials or speed contests.”

City Council, Elections, Equity, Mayor Harrell, Transportation

Final $1.55 Billion Transportation Levy Saves Equity-Based Projects Committee Chair Saka Derided as “Slush Fund”
Little Brook Street Mural in Lake City, a Lake City Collective project funded by SDOT’s Neighborhood Street Fund

The council also decided not to fund a controversial Burke-Gilman Trail alternative and to hold off on studying impact fees on new apartments.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council’s transportation levy committee, which includes all nine council members, approved a $1.55 billion transportation levy package on Tuesday, one of the final steps before the levy heads to the November ballot.

Progressive Councilmember Tammy Morales didn’t manage to pass her proposal to add $150 million to the levy for sidewalks, arterial paving, and other projects, but she did score a significant victory: Her amendment to restore funding for the neighborhood-initiated safety partnership program, a revamp of the Neighborhood Street Fund designed to increase access to city funding for marginalized communities, passed 4-3 after two of the nine council members, Sara Nelson and Maritza Rivera, abstained.

Morales’ amendment also zeroed out a proposed $14 million “district fund” that would have empowered council members to direct the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) to build specific projects in their districts. The proposed levy still funds Councilmember Rob Saka’s new “neighborhood scale traffic safety programs,” which Saka said could be used to fund various types of “smaller scale safety improvements in neighborhoods and communities” that emerge in the future.

Councilmember Cathy Moore expressed confusion about this late addition, wondering aloud how it was different from the neighborhood-initiated projects, which came out of the work of a task force focused on creating more equitable access to small-scale transportation funding. Saka responded by saying the new fund would be a kind of catch-all for many types of projects. “The idea is that it could be for neighborhood-initiated safety [or] it could be for the district projects fund,” Saka said. “You can call whatever you want, whatever bucket or subcategory you so choose, but broadly what it is, it’s all the same thing. It’s smaller scale safety improvements in neighborhoods and communities.”

The neighborhood-initiated projects initiative, an equity-focused revamp of the popular Neighborhood Street Fund, has proved surprisingly controversial. (On Tuesday, several council members groused that most of the money would probably just end up in Morales’ Southeast Seattle district, the most diverse in the city.) The basic idea is that SDOT, with the help of its equity work group, would reach out to historically marginalized communities without a history of applying for or receiving transportation grants and work with them to develop small-scale projects.

Saka, who previously refused to hear a presentation on SDOT’s strategy for incorporating equity into the levy, derisively called the entire program a “slush fund” while cross-examining SDOT director Greg Spotts about whether the program would really do anything new.

“In the absence of this slush fund, does SDOT not undertake any of that work, currently, now?” Saka asked.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t see it as a slush fund whatsoever,” Spotts responded.

“Does SDOT engage—so, characterize it however you want—does SDOT not engage in this underlying work you’re talking about now?” Saka said.

“This program is proposed by the executive to supplement previous waves of investment and make investment in a new way, to bring people into the circle of power who previously have not felt included.,” Spotts said.

Morales’ amendment restores all but $1.5 million of the $41 million Harrell initially proposed for the program.

An amendment from Councilmember Dan Strauss that would take $20 million away from a proposed arterial road maintenance program and spend it building the controversial Leary Way alternative for completing the Burke-Gilman Trail through Ballard failed on a 5-4 vote. S

trauss has been a vocal advocate for the Leary option, a dog-leg detour preferred by industrial businesses who have spent decades fighting against a direct route connecting the two long-finished segments of the trail through Ballard. In hyping his amendment, Strauss derided the option long preferred by cyclists—a direct connection between the two incomplete segments of the existing path—as “a narrow strip of asphalt through an industrial area without a sidewalk.”

Another Strauss proposal to spend $5 million turning Ballard Ave. NW into a more pedestrian-friendly “curbless street” failed 8-1.

A proposal from Councilmember Cathy Moore to study transportation impact fees on new housing to pay for sidewalks also failed. Last year, the council considered, and ultimately rejected, legislation that would have amended the city’s comprehensive plan to allow the city to charge the fees, which are based on the premise that dense, urban living causes negative impacts on the city’s transportation system.

Sara Nelson, who joined last year’s narrow majority in defeating the impact fee proposal, said that because transportation fees would still require amending the comp plan, the council should consider them as part of the “big, long discussion and legislation on the comp plan update this coming year.” Mayor Bruce Harrell released his proposed update to the comprehensive plan earlier this year. “We’ve had developers, yes, weigh in on this. We’ve also had affordable housing providers weigh in in opposition to transportation impact fees, and so it’s clearly a discussion that merits a lot of sort of complex thinking,” Nelson said.

The final version of the levy proposal, which would cost the median Seattle homeowner around $45 a month, heads to the full council for approval next week.

City Council, Elections, Equity, Transportation, Uncategorized

It’s Decision Day for the Seattle Transportation Levy
Photo by Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 4.0 license, via Wikimedia Commons

By Erica C. Barnett

The city council’s transportation levy committee will approve the final version of the 2024 levy proposal on Tuesday— one of the final steps before it heads to the November ballot.

The proposal currently on the table is a $1.55 billion levy that would cost the median Seattle homeowner $499 a year, up from about $275 a year under the levy passed in 2015, which expires this year. So far, the council has added $100 million to the plan Mayor Bruce Harrell sent down in May.

Councilmember Tammy Morales has proposed boosting that number to $1.7 billion, a level polling has suggested voters would support, to restore funding for equitable, community-created projects and add funding for sidewalks, bike lanes, and road maintenance, among other projects.

Last week, transportation committee chair Rob Saka (D1, West Seattle) released a version of the plan that includes both changes he announced two weeks ago as well as amendments that the council will discuss publicly for the first time on Tuesday. They include:

• A proposal from Dan Strauss (District 6, Northwest Seattle) to reduce bike safety funding by $500,000 to fund a feasibility study for using private funds to build a lid over I-5 through the Roosevelt neighborhood and near the North 130th Street light rail station;

• An amendment from Saka to create a new $7 million fund for “neighborhood scale traffic safety programs.” This new category would be separate and distinct from both the new “district funds” council members could direct to projects in their district and the new, grassroots “neighborhood-initiated  safety partnership” program proposed by Mayor Bruce Harrell and slashed under Saka’s plan.

Councilmember Cathy Moore  (D5, North Seattle) proposed eliminating the entire program, developed by a transportation equity work group charged with recommending ways to make city transportation funds more accessible to marginalized groups. The latest version of the plan would still cut $15.5 million, or 38 percent, from Harrell’s $41 million proposal.

• An amendment from Tammy Morales (District 2, Southeast Seattle) to stipulate that the city will spend the $6 million previously added for transit security “in coordination with” transit agencies, rather than unilaterally putting more officers on buses and trains.

• A formal guarantee that at least 36 percent of new sidewalks funded by the plan will be in North Seattle’s District 5; 22 percent will be in West Seattle’s District 1; and 17 percent will be in Southeast Seattle’s District 2. Districts 3, 4, 6, and 7 would split up the remaining 25 percent.

• $20 million in new spending, proposed by Strauss (D6, Northwest Seattle and Magnolia), on improvements to freight mobility in Interbay, SoDo, and elsewhere.

• An amendment from Saka increasing the minimum number of sidewalks the levy would build from 280 to 320, on top of 30 new blocks of sidewalks onAurora Ave. N.

• Amendments from Moore that would fund “auditing and professional services” for the Move Seattle Levy Oversight Committee, which would also expand to include the transportation committee chair, currently Saka. The committee provides oversight and is supposed to hold the city accountable to spend levy funds according to the language of the levy; the amendment would also expand the volunteer group’s responsibilities to include auditing and performance evaluations of levy programs under a new “Good Governance and Equitable Implementation Initiative.”

• Another amendment from Moore adding $5 million to “investigate and propose a comprehensive strategy” to dramatically improve the state of the city’s bridges and arterial streets, and consider transportation impact fees—fees on new multifamily housing, based on the idea that apartments have a negative impact that requires mitigation—as a strategy for funding sidewalks.

• Amendments to the nonbinding “recitals” section of the legislation—in theory, the place to establish whatever problem a new law attempts to solve—have swelled the number of “whereas” clauses from 15 to 41, increasing the length of the proposal by several pages; additions include new clauses supporting electric vehicles, asserting that traffic safety measures shouldn’t unduly slow down emergency responders, and establishing that Seattle wants to “create and maintain a safe, efficient and reliable transportation system.”

• Amendments from Strauss to spend $5 million turning Ballard Ave. into a “curbless street” by reducing funding for sidewalk spot repairs and sidewalk construction and to spend $20 million completing the Burke-Gilman trail through Ballard by cutting funds for arterial street maintenance.

The transportation levy committee meets on Tuesday at 9:30.

 

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, Equity, Mayor Harrell, neighborhoods, Transportation

In Transportation Levy Amendments, Councilmembers Saka and Moore Propose Cutting Program to Fund Community-Led Safety Projects

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle City Council members have proposed stripping away funding proposed as part of the 2024 transportation levy for small, community-initiated transportation safety projects and giving themselves the authority to decide which neighborhood projects get funded in their districts.

The program, known as the Neighborhood-Initiated Safety Partnership Program (NSPP) is an expansion of an existing participatory budgeting program that gives neighborhood residents a direct say in which small-scale local projects the city funds. The current program, called the Neighborhood Street Fund, has funded work on the Garfield Superblock, safety and connectivity improvements on the Delridge Greenway, street lighting and traffic calming at Bailey Gatzert Elementary, and dozens of other projects.

According to SDOT spokesman Ethan Bergerson, the new program would “co-create safety projects with residents to directly respond to emerging community requests for safety improvements. The community engagement would go beyond the nomination and selection process of the Neighborhood Street Fund, and would also incorporate ongoing and iterative neighborhood engagement similar to our Home Zone Program,” an equity-focused neighborhood street program.

The proposal came out of the work of the Transportation Equity Workgroup, which recommended that SDOT “include a participatory budgeting process in the next transportation levy package” specifically to “meet the priorities of BIPOC and vulnerable communities.”

Harrell’s levy proposal included $41 million for the neighborhood-based projects, plus $14 million for a new spending category called District Projects, which would fund emergent safety concerns and requests” in each council district.  Transportation levy committee chair Rob Saka proposed an amendment that would cut funding for neighborhood-initiated projects to $25.5 million—a 38 percent reduction—and increasing the District Projects fund to $21 million.

At the levy committee meeting on Tuesday, Saka said he considered the new District Projects program a mere “rebranding” that would accomplish the same purpose as the Neighborhood-Initiated Safety Partnerships program; the only difference, he said, was that instead of community members, “the seven individual council members would decide” how to spend the money. “At that high level, it’s intended for smaller-scale capital projects, so there’s alignment and consensus” even if “we have competing visions right now, currently, for what that looks like and who specifically decides on the neighborhood-initiated safety, neighborhood street funding.”

Earlier this month, Saka abruptly shut down a presentation by SDOT transportation equity program manager Annya Pintak, which Bergerson said would have been about “how the levy proposal is integrated with the City’s Race and Social Justice Initiative,” telling SDOT director Greg Spotts that the council already had “a good baseline on that.”

A proposed amendment by Councilmember Cathy Moore would go further than Saka’s, eliminating the entire community-initiated program and adding $21 million to the District Project fund, tripling it to a total of $42 million. Moore had to leave when her amendments came up and did not discuss this amendment when she returned.

Not everyone on the council supports cutting or eliminating the participatory budgeting program, which has been around since 2007.

Council member Tammy Morales proposed an amendment to Saka’s proposal that would restore funding for the neighborhood-initiated projects program to the $41 million in Harrell’s initial proposal by reducing the District Projects fund to $7 million.

“I know that as district council members, we know our districts best, but the truth is, we can’t know every corner of our neighborhood because we don’t live on every corner of our neighborhood and see how traffic moves around,” Morales said. “So this funding would allow residents to work directly with SDOT to implement transportation solutions directly that directly affect them

Council president Sara Nelson also proposed an amendment to Saka’s proposal that would reduce the new District Projects program to the $14 million in Harrell’s, but would do so by restoring the old Neighborhood Street Fund, rather than increasing the size of the new participatory budgeting program.

“I am putting this forward as a way to bring [the Neighborhood Street Fund] back,” Nelson said. “I am open to conversation about this. I’m not completely wed to this. I would like to understand more what the new program will do versus what the old program did, but I’m just saying that [the Street Fund] seemed to be something that was working well.”

In a letter to the council, Harrell, and SDOT, the co-chairs of the Transportation Equity Workgroup, Jessica E. Salvador & LaKeisha Jones, said the work group was “disappointed to see the recommendations from Committee Chair Saka to divert funds from community to district-level decision making.

“Diverting the $15.5M from Neighborhood-Initiated Safety Partnership Program would also divert us from our goal of equitable investment,” they wrote. “Equitable investment means that we are better able to serve communities by creating programs or initiatives that can be quickly implemented. Diverting the decision-making processes from neighborhoods is the opposite of empowerment. We need to ensure that our decisions are driven by community, for community.”

City Council, education, Equity, Transportation

Spending Money Earmarked for Student Mental Health Will Require Action from Skeptical Council; Saka Abruptly Cuts Off Presentation on Transportation Equity

1. Seattle City Councilmembers, many of them still focused on undoing the legacy of the previous, more progressive council, turned their attention this week to an increase in the JumpStart payroll tax passed in the final days of budget deliberations last year.

The 0.1 percent increase, sponsored by former councilmember Kshama Sawant (with current council members Sara Nelson and Dan Strauss voting “no”), is supposed to flow into the city’s Department of Education and Early Learning to “expand educational supports at Seattle Public Schools, prioritizing mental health services including, but not limited to, school-based mental health counselors and culturally specific and responsive programming from community-based organizations.”

That won’t happen, however, without followup legislation expanding the possible uses of the JumpStart tax to include mental health supports for students—and until then, money will keep accruing, unspent.

The council and Mayor Bruce Harrell have already signaled that they plan to amend JumpStart, which is supposed to pay for affordable housing, Equitable Development Initiative projects, and Green New Deal investments, to free up money to solve a general-fund deficit of around $260 million. (The deficit has grown, among other reasons, because of a recently adopted contract with the city’s police guild giving officers retroactive raises of 24 percent).

During a budget committee meeting this week, Strauss said the council did no outreach to the school district before passing the increase for mental health programming, and new Councilmember Maritza Rivera expressed skepticism about the city taking on “a newer line of business” that they had no expertise in. The council previously added $4 million, over two years, for mental health services in schools, with $250,000 of that earmarked for Ingraham High School, the site of a 2022 shooting.

Rivera, whose kids go to Ingraham, said she had “no idea how the money was implemented, how well it’s working. It’s a new line of business, [and] there are no mental health experts at the department or at the city. There’s [Seattle-King County] Public Health, but I’m not sure how plugged-in Public Health was to that [decision], so definitely a lot of questions here.”

Yesterday’s shooting at Garfield High School will make it harder, politically, for council members obsessed with undoing Sawant’s legacy to allow the school mental-health funding (which was prompted by the Ingraham shootingl) to lapse, but anything’s possible; if the city doesn’t allocate the money this year, via the regular midyear budget process, it would go back into the JumpStart fund and be allocated among the current spending categories.

Employers have been paying the increased tax—which is based on the pay of the highest-paid employees at the city’s largest companies—since the beginning of the year.

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2. During a meeting of the council’s special transportation levy committee this week, committee chair Rob Saka abruptly cut off a presentation from the Seattle Department of Transportation about a proposed task force that will, if the levy passes in November, be charged with creating policies to guide levy spending on sidewalks, bridges, and street paving, with a focus on equity and financial sustainability.

SDOT director Greg Spotts had just given a brief overview of the levy and was handing the mic off to SDOT’s transportation equity program manager, Annya Pintak, to talk about efforts to integrate the city’s race and social justice goals into the levy.

That’s when Saka jumped in, telling Spotts, “I’m gonna cut you off here for just a moment. I feel like we have a good baseline on that. And so, you know, you were invited here today with the specific purpose and intent [of] talking about the task force. So I encourage you to direct your comments and narrow them to the task force, and I believe slide 14 is… where that starts.”

A third presenter, levy program manager Megan Shepherd, jumped past Pintak’s presentation to her own slides, leaving Pintak—the only person of color at the presenters’ table—sitting silently (and awkwardly) at the table for the rest of the presentation.

Whatever Saka’s reason for rushing SDOT along, nixing the equity section of the department’s presentation didn’t save much time; the whole agenda item took up roughly 15 minutes of an almost two-and-a-half-hour meeting that began and ended with lengthy remarks by Saka.