Category: Transportation

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.

City Council, Density, homelessness, labor, Mayor Harrell, Transportation

This Week on PubliCola: May 4, 2024

A roundup of this week’s news.

Monday, April 29

Planning Commission: Harrell’s Growth Plan Will Worsen Inequities and Keep Housing Unaffordable

The Seattle Planning commission weighed in on Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed comprehensive plan update, which proposes a continuation of thepr “urban village” strategy developed to preserve single-family enclaves in the 1990s, calling it unrealistic and inadequate. ““In order to ensure everyone has a home they can afford in the neighborhood of their choice, we need to plan to increase, not reduce, our current rate of housing production” to allow “five to eight story multifamily housing in many more areas of the city,” the commission wrote.

Burien Moves Forward on Tiny House Village as Mayor Vilifies Police Chief for Not Enforcing Camping Ban

The city of Burien tentatively approved a zoning change that could help advance a long-planned tiny house village on property owned by Seattle City Light (see below, though, for an update). Meanwhile, Burien Mayor Kevin Schilling claimed the city is selectively paying the King County Sheriff’s Office for police service except for what they would owe the county for enforcing the city’s homeless ban—a claim the sheriff’s office couldn’t verify, since the city doesn’t owe them a payment until next month.

Tuesday, April 30

“I’m Losing My Temper”: Moore Accuses Morales of Calling Her Council Colleagues “Evil… Corporate Shills”

In comments that rattled some of her colleagues, Cathy Moore accused her fellow council member Tammy Morales of “vilifying” Moore and other council members in the media, saying she had called them “evil… corporate shills” who “don’t care about our fellow human beings” because they voted against an affordable-housing pilot Morales had been working on for years. Morales did express disappointment in the vote, but there is no evidence for Moore’s specific accusations. Moore also threatened to use council rules to silence Morales if she failed to be “civil.”

Labor Fizz: City Reduces Delay for Workers’ Retro Pay; Harrell Praises SPOG Contract for “Enhancing Accountability”

City workers learned this week that they’ll get retroactive pay increases in July, rather than October. Last month, the city told employees working under a new contract that the city would have to delay paying back wages because they’re implementing a new payroll system later this year. Also, Mayor Bruce Harrell released a tentative police contract that would make Seattle police the highest-paid in the region, boosting their starting pay, before overtime and bonuses, into six figures.

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Wednesday, May 1

Council Kills Morales’ Affordable Housing Bill, Arguing for More Process and Delay

The Seattle City Council voted 7-2 to kill legislation aimed at helping community organizations with “limited development experience” build small-scale affordable housing developments. Morales had been working on the program, called the “Connected Communities Pilot,” since 2022. Council members called the legislation premature, saying such proposals should get in line behind the 2024 housing levy and what will likely be the 2025 comprehensive plan.

Thursday, May 2

Officer Who Joked About Pedestrian Death Will Speak on Traffic Safety at Conference; Moore Calls for “More Vice Squads”

Daniel Auderer, the Seattle Police Officers Guild vice president who laughed and joked about a fellow officer’s killing of pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula, will speak at a prestigious conference on traffic safety later this year. The conference program says Auderer will be representing SPD, although SPD denies this and says they aren’t paying for him to attend. And: At a meeting on public safety, Councilmember Cathy Moore said that in addition to bringing back an old prostitution loitering law, she wants to see “more vice squads” on Aurora Ave. N.

Friday, May 3

Harrell’s Transportation Levy Proposal Boosts Tax Measure to $1.45 Million, Front-Loads Sidewalk Construction

After advocacy groups expressed disappointment that the proposed transportation levy renewal backed off on bike, pedestrian, and transit projects, the mayor proposed a revised version that adds $100 million to the ballot measure and pushes sidewalk construction to the first four years of the eight-year levy proposal, which now heads to the city council for amendments.

Harrell Discusses Gig Worker Minimum Wage Repeal, Burien Restrictions Could Prohibit Tiny House Village

Remember what we said about Burien’s tiny house village vote? Well, it turns out the zoning legislation they’re considering on Monday will prohibit a proposed tiny house village unless the council amends it, because it restricts transitional housing to parcels much smaller than the one where the village is supposed to go. And: Will Harrell come out against Sara Nelson’s proposal to repeal the current minimum wage and labor protections for delivery drivers? Organized labor seems to be banking on it.

Elections, Mayor Harrell, Transportation, Uncategorized

Harrell’s Transportation Levy Proposal Boosts Tax Measure to $1.45 Million, Front-Loads Sidewalk Construction
Mayor Bruce Harrell (with ASL interpreter), SDOT Director Greg Spotts
Mayor Bruce Harrell (with ASL interpreter), SDOT Director Greg Spotts

Mayor Bruce Harrell proposed an updated, $1.45 billion version of the 2024 Transportation Levy on Friday that would increase levy funding by about $100 million, accelerate the construction of 250 blocks of new sidewalks, and commit funds to some specific priority projects, providing more specificity than the lengthy “candidate project” lists in the first draft of the proposal released in April. The amended levy would cost the median Seattle homeowner $41 a month and last eight years.

Speaking at Fritz Hedges Waterfront Park in the University District Friday morning, Harrell said his office and the Seattle Department of Transportation heard support from the public for a larger, more ambitious levy. As PubliCola has reported, advocacy groups expressed disappointment that the levy backed off on bike, pedestrian, and transit projects, emphasizing road paving and maintenance over dedicated funding for sidewalks, new bike infrastructure, and safer routes to transit stops.

“If there’s one thing we should be proud of, it’s that we’re not perfect, but we strive to listen,” Harrell said. “I’ve been around the block a few times. You just can’t please everyone, but you can try to listen to everyone and try to calibrate a package that makes good sense, centered around our need for safety.”

The plan Harrell rolled on Friday includes modest boosts to funding for bike, transit, and pedestrian improvements, including $20 million in new funds to “expand the bike network, with a focus on South Seattle” and $20 million to build 30 blocks of new sidewalks on transit routes in the city’s urban centers. Additionally, the proposal would frontload sidewalk construction to the first four years of the levy, with the goal of building all 250 blocks of new sidewalks by 2029. There’s also $5 million for new pedestrian lighting, $3 million more for preventative bridge maintenance, and another $10 million for electric vehicle charging stations, a key part of the levy’s “climate and resiliency” section.

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Growing evidence shows that EVs themselves cause substantial environmental harm and do nothing to reduce car dependence and sprawl.  Large trucks, whether EV or not, are extremely dangerous to pedestrians and smaller vehicles because of their weight and low visibility. The Move Seattle Levy Oversight Board did not include subsidized EV infrastructure in their recommendations for this year’s levy renewal.

In 2023, SDOT released a “Top-to-Bottom Review” of the city’s efforts to reduce traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2030, a commitment known as Vision Zero. Like other cities, Seattle has seen increases in deaths and serious injuries caused by vehicles over the past several years. Asked how confident he as that the nine-year levy will move the needle on Vision Zero, SDOT Director Greg Spotts said, “we’ve infused safety within all aspects of the different categories of investments.”

For example, Spotts said, the latest version of the plan added “modernization” to the the “street maintenance” category, reflecting a commitment to “making investments in better connectivity for walking, biking, and transit” as part of maintenance. “So we’re not just going to lock in an outdated street design from the ’60s, we’re going to actually update it and make it safer.”

Although the new levy will be larger than the Move Seattle voters passed in 2015, it will still spend less, after adjusting for inflation, on pedestrian and transit improvements than previous levies, according to an analysis by Seattle Neighborhood Greenways’ Ethan Campbell. Transportation Choices Coalition, Cascade Bicycle Club, and Disability Rights Washington are supporting the plan, and appeared alongside Seattle Metro Chamber of Commerce CEO Rachel Smith and Lake City Collective director César García at Friday’s event.

The Seattle City Council will hold its first discussion of the transportation levy proposal next Tuesday. Once it’s amended and approved by the council, the final measure will go on the November ballot.

City Council, Mayor Harrell, Transportation

Advocates Urge City to Adopt More Ambitious, Less Car-Centric Transportation Levy
Advocates for safer streets gather outside City Hall this week. Speaking: Cecelia Black, Disability Rights Washington

By Erica C. Barnett

Last week, the city released a 22-page transportation levy renewal proposal that would bring in $1.3 billion to fund roads, bridges, and sidewalks over the next eight years, with $218 million for bridge maintenance, $109 million for sidewalks and pedestrian improvements, and $107 million on Vision Zero and school safety projects.

Adjusted for inflation and timeline (the new levy is eight years instead of nine), that’s about $33 more million a year than the Move Seattle levy that’s about to expire—hardly enough to maintain the status quo, much less invest in new initiatives, especially once construction cost inflation is factored in.

After Mayor Bruce Harrell announced the levy last week, advocates for safer streets began pointing out inconsistencies between the city’s rhetoric about the proposal—which Harrell said “will make trips safer, more reliable, and better connected” no matter how people get around—and what the levy would actually fund.

Although the graphics-heavy proposal is noticeably light on specifics, the balance of spending categories skews heavily toward car-oriented projects, including road repairs, new pavement “on our busiest streets,” and bridge maintenance, including upgrades and planning for the replacement of the Ballard and Magnolia Bridges.

Compared to the Move Seattle Levy, the new levy plan cuts spending on transit connections by 30 percent; cuts pedestrian projects, including new sidewalks, by 23 percent; and cuts spending on freight mobility by 45 percent, according to an analysis by Whose Streets? Our Streets! organizer Ethan Campbell. Spending on “climate and resiliency” projects is up 111 percent from the previous levy, but that category—as described in the levy proposal—focuses mostly on planting trees, expanding access to EV chargers, and increasing “low-emissions goods delivery in areas most impacted by climate change and pollution,” rather than shifting people away from cars. Vehicles account for almost two-thirds of all greenhouse-gas emissions in Seattle.

Advocates for safer streets say the levy also represents a capitulation on the city’s Vision Zero goal of reducing traffic deaths and serious injuries to zero by 2030, which is within the timeline of the eight-year levy. In Seattle, as in many cities, traffic deaths—particularly pedestrian deaths—have been trending upward over the past several years, as the Seattle Department of Transportation acknowledged in its “Vision Zero Top-To-Bottom Review” last year.

“Seattle adopted Vision Zero … in 2015, and yet over 1,500 people have been seriously injured and over 200 have been killed since then,” Erica Bush, director of Duwamish Valley Safe Streets, said on Monday, at a press conference held by a coalition of advocates outside City Hall. “We will not see this trend change until we commit to completely reimagining the way we use our roadways.”

At the Monday press conference, safety advocates pushed for a levy of at least $1.7 billion, with at least half of the funding dedicated to street safety and mobility for pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders. Cecelia Black, an organizer with Disability Rights Washington, noted that broken and missing sidewalks often force people who use wheelchairs, scooters, and walkers to “navigate the streets alongside cars,” putting their lives at risk.

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The levy proposes adding just 250 blocks of sidewalks and sidewalk alternatives, like curbless paved “walkways,” over eight years—about 2 percent of the 11,000 blocks that currently lack sidewalks. At that rate, advocates said, it will take the city at least 400 years to complete its sidewalk network. “In the same proposal that cuts pedestrian infrastructure, it also set an ambitious goal of filling every pothole in 72 hours,” Black said. “[The] transportation system that the mayor is proposing [is] one where we measure our response times to infrastructure for cars in hours, and our response to infrastructure for pedestrians in centuries.” Continue reading “Advocates Urge City to Adopt More Ambitious, Less Car-Centric Transportation Levy” →