Category: Transportation

Mayor Harrell, Transportation

City Transportation Director Greg Spotts Will Leave After Two Years on the Job
SDOT director Greg Spotts in 2022

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Department of Transportation director Greg Spotts announced Tuesday morning that he will leave the department, one day after PubliCola contacted him to ask him if Mayor Bruce Harrell had asked him to step down. Spotts’ tenure, at just over two years, was short by SDOT standards; previous permanent directors have generally served for at least one mayoral term, although former mayor Jenny Durkan didn’t hire Spotts’ predecessor, Sam Zimbabwe, until more than a year into her term.

In his letter, sent late Tuesday morning, Spotts said he wanted to spend more time with family and friends in Los Angeles, where he was assistant director and sustainability officer for street services before moving to Seattle in 2022. “Early 2025 seems like a good moment to pass the baton to the next leader of SDOT, an agency which now has the plans and the resources to maintain and modernize Seattle’s streets and bridges,” Spotts wrote.

During just over two years as SDOT director, Spotts managed to rapidly implement projects that stagnated during and after the pandemic under Durkan, including protected bike lanes, bridge maintenance, and spot improvements such as leading pedestrian intervals at crosswalks and “no right on red” signs at intersections where collisions between vehicles and pedestrians are common.

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In the past year, Spotts found himself on the defensive at City Council meetings as transportation committee chair Rob Saka, whose top budget priority this year was removing a traffic safety barrier that prevents illegal left turns into the parking lot of his kids’ former preschool, clashed with him publicly over spending priorities. During deliberations on the transportation levy renewal, which voters passed overwhelmingly in November, Saka (along with Cathy Moore) tried to strip funding from a program that gives community members a direct say in which small projects get funded in their neighborhoods; Saka wanted that money to go to a “district fund” in each council district that would be controlled not by community, but by council members themselves.

The city hasn’t made much progress toward its “Vision Zero” goal of ending traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2030, but many of the improvements SDOT implemented under Spotts improved safety for vulnerable road users, and Spotts appeared genuinely committed to making Seattle safer for people who don’t drive.

A spokesman for Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office said Spotts made the decision to leave on his own. In a statement, Harrell praised Spotts’ “collaborative” working style and his “thoughtful leadership toward our shared priorities with a comprehensive focus on safety, completing projects, and investing in the future of Seattle’s transportation system.”

Harrell’s spokesman declined to provide details about how the mayor will choose a new SDOT leader or whether he will appoint an interim from within SDOT (such as senior deputy director Francisca Stefan) after Spotts leaves on February 12.

 

City Council, Police, Transportation

Seattle Budget Update: Rob Saka Has Questions
L’il Sebastian, one of the horses that will soon be unemployed under SPD’s current budget plan.

By Erica C. Barnett

City Councilmember Rob Saka raised a number of concerns during this week’s budget briefings, asking questions no one else thought to ask. Questions like:

• Can we bodega our way out of this?

At least twice this week, Saka asked whether it made sense to encourage “bodegas”—which he defined as “small, locally sourced, organic kind of stores”—when many neighborhoods are losing large grocery stores. “We’re not gonna bodega our way out of this,” Saka said during a presentation by the city’s Department of Construction and Inspections. He repeated the quip at a presentation by the Office of Sustainability and Environment, adding that in his West Seattle district alone, “we can expect to lose at least two grocery stores, big grocery stores. They’re on the chopping block as the result of a proposed merger” between Albertson’s and Kroger.

The city (unlike federal regulators) can’t do much to impact the decisions of national corporations, but they do have the power to support or oppose land-use policies that make it easier to build small grocery stores as part of the upcoming comprehensive plan update; currently, as we’ve reported, the mayor’s proposal would once again make corner stores legal, but only on literal corner lots—a proposal unlikely to make much dent in the existing food deserts in Saka’s West Seattle district and other parts of the city.

• Speeding cameras that “just send you a ticket in the mail”: Y/N?

Saka, who chairs the council’s transportation committee, raised objections this week to speed enforcement cameras in school zones, saying he was “default skeptical of of enforcement cameras that have the capability to just send you a ticket in the mail. I don’t support wide-scale mass deployment of those.” The city has slowly rolled out speed  cameras at 19 schools over the last decade, and funded new cameras in 18 additional school zones last year.

School zone cameras have proven to be an effective deterrent to speeding in school zones, which in turns reduces collisions between cars and pedestrians, including school children, around schools.

“Rather than having these cameras as a revenue-generating tool only … I think our approach needs to be guided by data,” Saka said, adding that he worried the city was targeting  “historically marginalized and underrepresented” communities with the cameras.

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“We are being asked to to review and approve a substantial decision, a significant decision, a policy choice, regarding automated enforcement in our city. And is this the appropriate balance and deployment of these cameras relative to the other potential uses that we talked about? I don’t know. I don’t know.”

As The Urbanist reported in 2023, the new cameras will primarily be deployed in more affluent parts of the city.

Saka has been a vocal supporter of a different use of camera technology—live police surveillance cameras, which will be used to keep constant tabs on crime “hot spots” like Aurora Ave. N, downtown, and the Chinatown/International District. In fact, he added an amendment to the CCTV surveillance bill last month to put Alki and Harbor Aves. SW next in line for cameras to deter street races.

• Should horses be cops?

The Seattle Police Department has proposed cutting the police department’s mounted patrol, which includes a half-dozen horses, and moving mounted officers to other duties; in a presentation to the council, SPD Chief Sue Rahr explained that the decision to eliminate SPD’s small mounted patrol was “a decision that has been in the making for more than a decade.”

Saka argued that the mounted patrol plays a vital “community engagement role,” then suggested SPD’s decision might not be final—”maybe it is, maybe it isn’t”—before returning to the horses at the end of the meeting, when he took the time to recite each of their names out loud, like an In Memoriam segment at the Oscars.

“Callum, Blue, Change, Sebastian, Doobie, and how can I not forget the two lovable barn cats, Sully and Katy Perry,” Saka said. “So there’s real-life animals behind the impact of the decision.” He then added the names of the “impacted officers,” calling them “real-life people… that are directly impacted.” The horses will go to other owners, the police officers, unlike 76 other real-life people who will lose their jobs under Harrell’s budget proposal, will be reassigned to other duties.

City Council, Elections, Police, Transportation

Council Wants To Expand Drug User Banishment Zones, Complaint Against SPD Attorney Dismissed, and Ex-Councilmember Pedersen Denounces Transportation Levy

1. City council members Rob Saka, Joy Hollingsworth, Maritza Rivera, and Bob Kettle have all proposed amendments to legislation proposed by City Attorney Ann Davison and sponsored by Kettle that would create zones from which people accused of drug-related crimes, including public drug use or possession, can be prohibited.

The legislation, which Davison proposed in June, expands on the old “Stay Out of Drug Area” zones established and expanded under former city attorney Mark Sidran, who is primarily remembered for instituting a number of punitive laws and policies, among them the “teen dance ordinance,” the poster ban, and many laws targeting homeless people, including a notorious prohibition on sitting down on public sidewalks.

As we’ve noted, banishment areas (whether for drug users or sex workers, who would be banned from Aurora under a different law proposed by Councilmember Cathy Moore) have an expansionary logic: When people are banned from existing in one area, they move just outside the banishment zone, until enough people complain that they are banned from that area as well. The result the last time these zones were widespread in Seattle  was that people eventually give up even trying to stay out of the expanded no-go zone, as Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert discussed in their 2010 book Banished.

In each amendment, the sponsoring council member justifies the SODA zone in their council district with the phrase, “Due to high levels of significant drug activity.” The zones will not stop this significant drug activity, but they will push it outside the zones, which will then require expanding, until most of the city is once again off-limits to people who have no choice but to display the symptoms of their addiction in public. The bill, which expresses concerns about “reducing overdose deaths,” does not address drug use and overdoses inside people’s homes.

Also Friday, Moore proposed a promised amendment to her legislation that would bring back the old prostitution loitering law and Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP) banishment zones, clarifying that only people accused of being sex buyers to pimps would be subject to SOAP bans and prohibited from going anywhere near North Aurora Ave. As we reported last month, Seattle has attempted to focus on sex buyers in the very recent past, and it did not result in a decrease in the sex trade on Aurora and in other SOAP areas.

Moore’s amendment would also slightly expand the proposed Aurora SOAP zone and add a few more nonbinding recital clauses about diversion and the need for an “emergency receiving center” for women leaving the sex trade, which the legislation does not fund.

2. The Office of Police Accountability declined to interview Seattle Police Department general counsel Becca Boatright when it investigated a complaint about a Facebook post that appeared to dismiss female officers’ concerns about harassment and discrimination in the department as “clickbait.”

“Negative headlines may be the clickbait but for the honest brokers interested in an honest discussion, we’re here to have it. I’m so proud to be a member of the SPD and of the incredible work my teams do. Real change comes from within. Follow the data, lean into the science,” the post said.

Boatright’s post went up shortly after the release of a report in which a dozen women in the department described their experiences, which included sexual harassment, casual misogyny, and story after story of women getting passed over for promotions in favor of less-qualified men.

The person who filed the OPA complaint said the post constituted “harassment, unprofessionalism, and retaliation against female SPD employees who alleged mistreatment by SPD.”

A spokesperson for the OPA said the case was “certified for an expedited investigation. That means OPA and [the city’s Office of the Inspector General] agreed that OPA could issue recommended findings based solely on its intake investigation without interviewing the named employee.” Generally, an expedited investigation means that OPA decided an officer didn’t violate SPD policy—in this case, the policy prohibiting SPD employees from ridiculing or maligning protected classes.

3. Former City Councilmember Alex Pedersen co-authored an opinion piece for the Neighborhoods for Smart Streets lobby group, which formed during the heated debate over a bike lane in Wedgwood, urging a “no” vote on the Seattle Transportation Levy, which would provide $1.55 million for new sidewalks, road maintenance, spot improvements to help buses operate more smoothly, and protected bike lanes, among many other projects. The ballot measure includes the biggest investment in new sidewalks in the levy’s history.

Pedersen, along with former councilmember Margaret Pageler and Latino Civil Alliance board chair Nina Martinez, argues that the proposal is a “$1.5 BILLION boondoggle” (the word “billion” is capitalized like that throughout the piece) that “uses Seattle’s middle class like an ATM machine” to fund projects that only “bicycling clubs”—apparently a reference to the Cascade Bicycle Club, a perennial bugbear for the Seattle Times—will ever use.

“Lobbyists larded the levy with unnecessary projects – including costly bike lanes that are rarely used and impede access to brick-and-mortar small businesses,” Pedersen and his co-authors write. “It’s inequitable because it shoves 100% of the cost onto Seattle residents.”

During his single term on the council, Pedersen was a big fan of “impact fees” that would divert the cost of public street improvements onto housing developers. Based on the premise that new apartments have a negative impact on cities, transportation impact fees drive up the cost of new housing (and thus directly increase rents), but don’t impact incumbent single-family homeowners because they aren’t taxes.

Pedersen and his co-authors go so far as to claim the levy is inequitable to people of color, based on a January 2024 survey that they claim shows “most people of color oppose this levy.” While a majority of people the survey lumped into an undifferentiated “BIPOC” category did say they’d oppose a hypothetical $1.2 billion or $1.7 billion levy back in January, the city didn’t release even preliminary details of the actual levy until almost four months later. The high-level conclusion of that poll Pedersen cited? A strong majority of voters supported a $1.7 billion levy even without knowing the exact details of what it would fund.

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.