Tag: Ed Murray

Elections

Chamber Spends $88,000 on Braddock, Johnson

pplrob

This post has been updated.

Two new Seattle Chamber of Commerce-funded independent expenditure groups, People for Shannon and People for Rob, have spent $44,000 each on media buys (presumably cable TV ads) for Shannon Braddock​ and Rob Johnson​. The $88,000 total spend comes on top of the $48,000 the national Realtors Association dropped on long-shot North Seattle candidate Kris Kris M. Lethin​ a few days ago. (Read Lethin’s reaction when I told him about that surprise gift here.) Johnson is also, as of 5:00 this evening, the beneficiary of a $20,000 spend by the Washington Restaurant Association PAC.

Additionally, a group calling itself “NW Tribes for Debora,” funded by the Northwest Tribal PAC, has reported spending $15,000 to support Debora Juarez, a frontrunner in North Seattle’s District 5.

The ad buys, both funded by the Civic Alliance for a Sound Economy (CASE), which endorsed both Braddock and Johnson, make one thing abundantly clear: The influence of money in Seattle elections isn’t going away. If anything, it’s getting more explicit and more potent.

One argument for district elections was that smaller geographical districts would reduce the need for candidates to raise so much money (in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars) to communicate with voters and get elected. While this is somewhat true for individual candidates (so far, Johnson has raised $77,000 so far and Braddock has raised $59,000, though those numbers are difficult to compare to previous campaigns because of the sheer number of candidates and the unprecedented nature of this election), the independent expenditures more than make up for any fundraising disparity between, say, 2013 and now.

In fact, it’s likely that big IEs like these will become more common under the district system. With fewer eyeballs to purchase, a targeted IE can go further in a district than it could under the previous citywide system, giving moneyed interests more bang for their buck than they ever had trying to influence elections citywide. Seattle’s election laws allow unlimited independent expenditures.

Also worth noting: Both Screen Strategies Media, the East Coast film company that’s doing the ads, and Blue Wave Partners, the fundraising firm associated with both IE groups, are closely affiliated with Mayor Ed Murray. Screen Strategies did several cable TV ads for Murray back in 2013, and Blue Wave is Murray’s longtime fundraising firm. Murray has endorsed Johnson’s opponent, incumbent council member Jean Godden, so it’s interesting to see two firms associated with the mayor doing work for one of Godden’s top opponents.

Affordability, City Hall, Density, Development

Density, Affordability, and Livability Are Compatible: The HALA Report

Screen shot 2015-07-15 at 10.48.46 AM

I’ll be on KUOW’s live show from the District 4 this Friday at 10, countering the anti-development, pro-NIMBY narrative you may have caught on last week’s Week in Review. Listen in on 94.9FM or on KUOW’s website.

It’s a rule in Seattle that policies having to do with density, neighborhood “character,” and development tend to get hacked down to a nub by the blunt machete of consensus, even more so when that consensus is reached by a committee numbering in the dozens.

It’s even more of a rule that when committees like the 28-member Housing Affordability and Livability Committee announce multiple delays, that means they’re on the verge of imploding.

Throw in a disgruntled committee member who leaked a draft copy of the group’s long-anticipated report to the press, and there was every reason to believe that the HALA committee would come up short; the day the draft leaked to NIMBY apologist Danny Westneat of the Seattle Times, in fact, the committee frantically disavowed the draft, calling it “outdated and inaccurate.”

So it was a true jaw-dropper when Mayor Ed Murray’s HALA Committee recommendations emerged Monday largely intact. The plan (which replaces controversial linkage fees on residential development with inclusionary zoning, upzones multifamily areas across the city, eliminates many parking mandates for new development, and promises 20,000 new units of low-income housing) fully embraces the reality that it’s impossible to create an affordable city while simultaneously protecting the two-thirds of Seattle land that consists of unaffordable single-family houses on 5,000-square-foot lots. We live, essentially, on an island–an island where tens of thousands of new people want to live. The built environment must change to welcome (and “accommodate”) those new neighbors.

By acknowledging the fundamental incompatibility of protectionist NIMBYism and affordability, HALA spit in the eyes of the pitchfork-wielding old guard that really just wants to keep “outsiders” out, that resents new residents, that sees growth as numbers, not neighbors.

The city council will undoubtedly come under tremendous pressure from hardline neighborhood activists who think ceding 6 percent of their protected land area to slightly greater density will bring their homes and property values crashing around them. Those activists are organized, and they are loud. Their allies on the council, including the departing Tom Rasmussen, have amplified their voices and encouraged them to drown reality-based advocates for density out. And it will take all of urbanists’ effort to keep them from scuttling the plan, from preserving the old Seattle (which was, as HALA points out in its report, created and sustained by restrictive racial covenants) and keeping everyone new outside the walls protecting suburban-style city development patterns.

But Murray didn’t call this plan a “Grand Bargain” for nothing, and the HALA committee wouldn’t be making its plan public now if it didn’t have rock-solid support from the vast majority of the players. (One outspoken exception is committee member and council candidate Jon Grant, who not only abstained from the vote but held a press conference immediately after HALA’s announcement to roll out his own sour-grapes plan, flanked by supporters including Kshama Sawant, Position 9 candidate Bill Bradburd, and North Seattle neighborhood activist Sarajane Siegfriedt, calling for rent control and the reinstatement of linkage fees.) Despite the volume of shouting from the old guard, I’m hopeful that the consensus and determination HALA has demonstrated will hold together despite the shouting, and despite the possibility, remote but real, that a renegade developer could sue the city and scuttle the whole deal.

It’s been a crazy few days. Between life and work and blogging, I haven’t had much time to sit down and process my thoughts about HALA in black and white. Instead, I’ve been talking to friends and fellow urbanists about what the plan will mean and how we can convince our friends in the world of affordable-housing advocacy that growth is not just inevitable but good and how we can help hold the plan together until the city council passes the goddamn thing over Tom Rasmussen’s dead body. (Sorry, Tom.)

So I can’t add much to the already rapturous (and detailed) coverage from the density proponents at Sightline, PubliCola, and, well, The C Is for Crank.  Nor can I thumb my nose more disdainfully at the hardline NIMBYs at Crosscut and the Seattle Times. I can, however, encourage you to cross your fingers, write your city council members and neighborhood representatives, and urge them to support the plan that represents the best shot we’ve had in decades to preserve what’s best about our city while making sure it’s livable for the tens of thousands of people who want to become our newest neighbors.

City Council, Mayor Murray, Transportation

Licata’s Move Seattle Alternative Isn’t Progressive

nl1City Council member Nick Licata, who’s retiring after his term ends at the end of this year, would like his legacy to include amending Move Seattle, Mayor Ed Murray’s proposed $930 million transportation levy, to be smaller and less dependent on regressive property taxes.

Arguing that voters are approaching tax fatigue and that his alternative is more progressive than the mayor’s proposed property-tax levy, Licata has introduced amendments that would reduce the overall package by $100 million and cut the levy itself to $600 million, with the $230 million difference paid for through the commercial parking tax (which would increase from 12.5 to 17.5 percent) and an annual employee hours tax, paid by businesses, of $18 per employee.

He also proposed an amendment explicitly barring SDOT from spending any Move Seattle Money on streetcars, and another requiring the department to file annual reports showing how they’d spent levy dollars each year.

The cuts and substitutions, Licata said during a briefing on Move Seattle last Tuesday, would reduce the size of the average homeowner’s annual property tax bill to $179 in the first year, compared to the Murray option’s $275. It would also reshuffle the tax burden to employers in a way that appeals to the economic-lefty crowd (the bigger the company, the more it would pay), and to drivers in a way that appeals to the transportation-lefty crowd (drivers would pay more to maintain the roads they use).

Dig about an inch under the surface, however, and the Licata amendments are far less progressive—in both the economic and the political sense—than they appear.

Let’s start with that streetcar amendment. It reads, in its entirety, “None of the Levy Proceeds may be used to build or operate streetcars.” In other words (as an increasingly agitated SDOT director Scott Kubly pointed out last week), no matter how circumstances may change, or how priorities may evolve, or how much outside funding may become available, not a dime of the Move Seattle money could be used on streetcars for the nine-year duration of the levy.

This is no small prohibition.  Currently, Kubly noted, the city is finishing up the First Hill streetcar and may want to extend its northern terminus to Aloha in the future. Under the Licata amendment, the city would have no “flexibility to use the funds [for] the streetcar to have better access to light rail.” With per-mile ridership projected at about double what Link light rail is currently carrying, Kubly said, “This is a real transportation option. It’s not a toy.”

msLicata, a frequent rail opponent during his 18 years on the council, noted that Move Seattle currently includes no explicit references to streetcar, making it only logical to make the prohibition official. “This simply memorializes what was seen as the intent from the mayor,” Licata said. After a test back-and-forth with Kubly about whether the streetcar was or was not inherently a boondoggle, Licata concluded with a pretty cheap shot—”This is new information, that the levy’s intent is to build and operate a streetcar”—to which Kubly responded tersely, “That’s a mischaracterization of what I said.” Continue reading “Licata’s Move Seattle Alternative Isn’t Progressive” →

Mayor Murray

Murray Releases Revised $930 Million Transportation Levy Proposal

I’ll have more to say about the latest iteration of the ever-costlier Move Seattle levy (Mayor Ed Murray says the tacked-on $30 million will come from higher revenues from new housing), but I wanted to throw up a quick side-by-side comparison of the two proposals. (Original proposal here; latest version here.) My initial reaction (other than frustration that Murray refuses to release the full details of any new proposal, opting instead for a standard-issue series of blue-and-black handouts), is that this is a good proposal with something for everyone that will inevitably be “right-sized” by a council that’s largely aligned with the mayor but scared of imposing a major property tax increase.

I could be wrong, but last I checked, $275 (the amount a typical homeowner would have to pay per year) is more than $130 (the expiring Bridging the Gap levy’s annual price tag). Readers desperate for sidewalks in their neighborhood at any cost may find charges of “tax fatigue” tiresome (I know I do), but this is a big tax increase, and the council (five of whom are running for reelection) will surely have something to say about that.

My other reaction is that this proposal leans heavily on neighborhood greenways and segregated bike lanes, potentially at the expense of safer bike facilities on streets that already have heavy bike traffic. The recent Metro bus collision that put a cyclist in the hospital with life-threatening injuries happened at an intersection (12th and Jackson) where cyclists from Mount Baker, Capitol Hill, Beacon Hill, and many other parts of the city converge, and which may be even more dangerous now, with the streetcar tracks posing a new threat to cyclists.

Much the same could be said of high-bike-traffic intersections across the city. Yet the emphasis on neighborhood greenways (which were never meant to be major commuter corridors) could–and I say could, because the devil’s in the details of this still-somewhat-opaque proposal–come at the expense of streets that will always be filled with cyclists.

I have a call in to the mayor’s office for a more detailed project breakdown for the $930 million proposal.

Screen shot 2015-05-06 at 12.57.28 PM
Then…

 

... and now.
… and now.

 

Here are some other changes the new plan proposes:

• The new proposal reduces funding for maintaining and improving the city’s traffic signal, sign and marking system, reducing that line item from $67 million (with $20 million in additional leveraged funds*) to $37 million (with $7 million in leverage).

• It slightly reduces protected bike lane and greenway funding, which is down $2 million from $67 million; that money would pay for 50 miles of protected bike lanes and 60 miles of greenways.

• It includes an additional $1 million for curb ramp and crossing improvements.

• The proposal reduces funding to repave arterial streets by $20 million, from $255 million with $70 million in leverage to $235 million, with $50 million in leveraged funds, and reduces funds for repaving “targeted locations” (presumably this is the pothole line item) from $20 million to $15 million, with $5 million in projected leveraged funds for each level of funding. Even with reduced funding, the mayor’s proposal says the money would pay for the same amount of improvements—repaving “up to” 180 lane-miles of arterial streets (not the same thing as actual miles) and 65 targeted locations per year.

• Multimodal and “transit plus” improvements (i.e. RapidRide) get a bit more funding in the mayor’s latest plan—$100 million, compared to the original $75, with $246 million in leveraged dollars under each plan. The transit/”multimodal” improvements have been shuffled and consolidated in this latest plan, though, making it tough to tell how much was originally allocated for signal re-timing and “intelligent transportation system improvements,” for example (those items were lumped into larger categories in the original proposal) and whether the new numbers are an increase or a reduction.

• Sidewalks, the hottest topic at every council district forum, get more love under the latest plan, with $35 million in additional funding for sidewalks and improvements for streets without sidewalks, up to $61 million from the original $26 million (leveraged funds are the same under both expenditure levels, at $9 million).

• Neighborhood projects, vaguely defined, get $3 million more under this plan, with $26 million total compared to the initial $23.

• And South Park Broadview gets $8 million less for flood drainage.

Notice anything I missed? Feel free to let me know in the comments or on Twitter (@ericacbarnett).

 

City Hall

What Do Seattle’s Gay Council Members Think of Murray’s Indiana Boycott?

As readers of this blog or my Twitter feed are no doubt aware, I feel strongly that “boycotts” on, or exhortations to “flee” from, “backward” states like Indiana hurt more than they “help” and display a basic, inexcusable ignorance of red states.

More specifically, I think saying “screw them, they’re getting what they deserve” (or even, “this boycott will teach other states that discrimination is bad for business”) fundamentally erases progressives in those states, and elides the fact that even “red states” have progressives that live there, work there, and will be hurt by any boycott of their state or the business that they own or that employ them.

Finally, I think the most effective thing politicians can do to “send a message” to states like Indiana that pass discriminatory laws is to support the organizations fighting back against those laws, especially in states, like Indiana, where rampant gerrymandering makes it all the more difficult to elect progressive officials who’ll pass good laws.

Which brings us to Mayor Ed Murray’s executive order banning all city-funded travel to Indiana. (Murray’s announcement was followed by a similar, state-level ban by Governor Jay Inslee.) Murray, obviously, supports the ban; in his announcement, he said that his executive order “sends a strong signal Seattle does not support Indiana’s discriminatory law” (the “send a message and other states will hesitate to pass anti-LGBT laws” argument).

I wondered, though, what the two LGBT members of the city council thought of the mayor’s ban. Do they think “sending a message” is enough? What about the other counterarguments — that allies in other states should help progressives in Indiana, not tell them to give up, or that blue states aren’t helping by suggesting red states like Indiana are corn-pone backwaters full of ignoramus bigots?

Sigh. Neither council member took my bait. Instead, they argued that a ban on travel sent a symbolic message, which is really the best a government can do, and that it isn’t the city’s responsibility to support specific groups in other states.

First, here’s what Rasmussen, after a long pause, had to say:

First of all, I’m just really appalled by the statements coming from the governor of Indiana, and what I would describe as pathetic ignorance of basic constitutional and legal rights. To argue, in this day and age, that because of your religion it’s OK to discriminate against people in very basic accommodations—that is disgusting.

I support clear and strong action on the part of the city. Spending any of our public dollars or time in a state that blatantly says, “Go ahead and discriminate, just say it’s against your religious views to provide your services or accommodations to people,” those kinds of justifications have been thrown out time and time and time again by the courts. Strong statements are important. Boycotts tend to be broad-brushed, there’s no question about that. But sometimes a boycott is the strongest statement you can make.

I lived in in for three years. That’s where I went to law school. It’s a pretty tough state, in the sense that they’re extremely conservative. Indiana does not have a good reputation with civil rights. I have no problem criticizing them when they make these incredibly hostile decisions with regard to discrimination. This is part of their history and legacy, and they’re continuing to do it today in the LGBT community.

Is it harming folks that would not be harmed? It is, undoubtedly. There are good people, of course, who I’m sure are very embarrassed and appalled by what the legislature and the governor of this state have done, and we should support them.

I guess I would like to hear from LGBT individuals from Indiana about what they think about the reaction.

Rasmussen’s colleague Clark, meanwhile, acknowledged the “tinge about the middle states vs. the coasts, the elitist east and west vs. ‘those simple people in the middle,” but said she ultimately supported the mayor’s decision.

If you’re a private company, like an Angie’s List (which put an Indiana expansion on hold) or an Apple or a Costco, you have a little bit more freedom to decide to use your philanthropic arm to do that kind of work. If you’re the government, if you’re the gay mayor of a major city, you don’t have a philanthropic arm to say, “I’m going to use my city resources to bolster equality in Indiana.” What I can control is whether the budget of the city supports state-sponsored discrimination.

I think the point is to try to continue to focus attention. There’s no great big travel budget for city employees rushing from Seattle to Indiana, but by doing it and trying to focus attention, he’s contributing to people who oppose discrimination in Indiana.

City Hall

Hey, Mayor Murray: There Are Progressives in Indiana, Too

Leslie-Knope-550x344

 

This morning, Mayor Ed Murray announcd an executive order barring city employees from traveling to Indiana on city business or with city funds.

Murray said the travel ban would ensure that “none of our taxpayer dollars [will] go toward supporting this discriminatory law.”

In the same breath, he said that by participating in #boycattindiana, the city was showing its solidarity with progressive Hoosiers as they “continue [their] efforts to end discrimination and protect civil rights for everyone.”

Murray is also directing city staff to make sure the city doesn’t have any contracts with companies based in Indiana.

This sort of thing, more than lofty declarations like the council’s resolution last week to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership, makes my blood curdle. It’s one thing to say that Indiana’s anti-LGBT law (which explicitly allows businesses to discriminate against gays, lesbians, and transgender people); it’s quite another to say entire cities should “boycott Indiana” by withholding their business from Indiana companies—companies that, incidentally, employ gay, lesbian and transgender individuals.

What the “boycott Indiana” movement is really arguing for is action that would do the most harm to the people with the least, including struggling LGBT-owned businesses. It’s stereotyping an entire state (a phenomenon with which I, as a Mississippi and Texas native, am all too familiar) as a bunch of illiterate corn-pone bigots. Yet there are plenty of progressives in Indiana, and plenty of people fighting against discrimination and the very law Murray and others claim to be standing up against by opposing investment in their state.

As my pal Melissa McEwan noted pungently at Shakesville:

And if you understand that this “religious freedom” bill was a reactionary act by people who were angry that the federal government did something they didn’t like (force them to legalize same-sex marriage), then you should understand that a reactionary act by people angry at our state government because they did something you didn’t like (codify bigotry) is just part of the same damn problem.

It’s not thoughtful and it’s not compassionate and it’s not helpful.

And let’s be honest here: It isn’t like the vast majority of people who are cheering “Boycott Indiana!” had any plans to visit Indiana and spend money in this state, anyway. It’s just a slogan to shout at a state they perceive to be full of fat, poor, lazy, conservative, straight, cis, white people.

Which underlines what’s really the worst thing about this idea: It’s reflective of a vicious stereotype that disappears the existence of the very people for whom the sloganeers purport to care.

Melissa’s Twitter feed is blowing up now over the #boycottindiana meme right now, and I strongly suggest you check out her perspective and positive suggestions for what progressives can actually do to help LGBT people and their allies in Indiana.
Hint: It isn’t withdrawing money from their already crippled economy. Mayor Murray would do more for LGBT people in Indiana by donating money to progressive groups in the state than he is by supporting a misguided boycott that will only hurt the state’s most vulnerable citizens.