Tag: Mike McGinn

City Council, City Hall, Morning Crank

Morning Crank: Net Worth

1. Money remains a significant factor in which candidates become frontrunners in Seattle’s mayoral, council, and city attorney races, despite the fact that both council and city attorney candidates can now benefit from public funding through democracy vouchers—those $25 certificates that showed up in your mailbox earlier this year.

Most of the frontrunners in the mayoral race—with the exception of educator and attorney Nikkita Oliver, whose disclosure form did not list her net worth (but whose job at the nonprofit Creative Justice is not exactly a six-figure gig) and state Sen. Bob Hasegawa—have a net worth between the high hundreds of thousands and several million dollars. And before you say, “Well, of course they’re worth a lot—they’re all homeowners!”, keep in mind that net worth only includes the portion of a candidate’s house that’s paid off; the rest shows up on the ledger as debt. All net worth numbers are estimates provided by the candidates; all documents were obtained through a records request. (Oliver is a renter.)

Former US attorney Durkan2, a partner in the white-shoe law firm Quinn Emanual Urquhart & Sullivan, who holds large accounts at both Wells Fargo and Chase, two banks that have been targeted recently by anti-Dakota Access Pipeline activists: $5.75 million.

People’s Waterfront Coalition Founder Cary Moon, whose family owned a manufacturing plant in Michigan: $4.1 million.

Former state legislator Jessyn Farrell, who owns a house in Wallingford and whose husband runs a real estate investment company: $2.8 million.

Ex-Mayor Mike McGinn, who owns a house in Greenwood: $800,000.

State legislator Bob Hasegawa: $250,000

I also requested the financial disclosure statements for both candidates for city attorney. Incumbent Pete Holmes is worth $1.5 million, and challenger Scott Lindsay, who’s married to Microsoft attorney and Port Commissioner Courtney Gregoire, has a net worth of $875,000.

Finally, here’s a rundown of the frontrunning candidates for Position 8, several of whom haven’t yet reported their net worth. Compared to the mayoral candidates, the leading council contenders (with one exception) have relatively modest wealth, suggesting that city council remains a more accessible position than mayor, at least from a personal financial perspective.

Sara Nelson, CEO of Fremont Brewing Company: $2 million.

Former Tenants Union director Jon Grant: $150,000.

Washington State Labor Council lobbyist Teresa Mosqueda, who will be the only renter on the city council if she wins: $134,328.

Attorney and NAACP chair Sheley Secrest: -$120,940.

I’ll update this post with additional information about the mayoral candidates when I receive it.

2. Last night, the King County Young Democrats gave Jessyn Farrell their sole endorsement in the mayor’s race, in a competition that, unlike other Democratic organizational endorsements, allowed candidates from other political parties—like Oliver, who’s representing the new People’s Party—to seek endorsement. Betsy Walker, past chair of the Young Democrats, received the group’s sole endorsement to replace Farrell as 46th District state representative; Farrell resigned her seat last week.

3. In exchange for an agreement from the city council not to tax diet sodas, the American Beverage Association—which spent millions of dollars on an initiative to roll back a statewide soda tax in 2010—has reportedly agreed not to finance a campaign against the proposed soda tax. Mayor Ed Murray proposed taxing all sodas, including artificially-sweetened ones, on the grounds that diet sodas are disproportionately consumed by white, wealthier people (the inverse is true of sugar-sweetened drinks). Last week, lefty council members Lisa Herbold, Kshama Sawant, and Mike O’Brien backed a version of the mayor’s more equitable soda tax proposal, supporting an amendment, sponsored by Herbold, that would have lowered the tax from 1.75 cents an ounce to 1 cent and levied the tax on both sugar- and artificially-sweetened sodas. The full council will vote on the soda tax this afternoon.

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the substantial time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as costs like transportation, equipment, travel costs, website maintenance, and other expenses associated with my reporting. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support!

Affordability, City Council, City Hall, Density, Development, Drugs, Equity, gentrification, land use, Morning Crank

Morning Crank: Shutting It Down in the 37th
State senator and mayoral candidate Bob Hasegawa

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the substantial time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as costs like transportation, equipment, travel costs, website maintenance, and other expenses associated with my reporting. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support!

1. Last night, the 37th District Democrats made endorsements in the races for Seattle City Attorney, City Council, King County Sheriff, King County Executive, and a number of other in-district seats including Renton City Council. One race in which the Dems did not endorse: Seattle Mayor. After two rounds of ballots failed to yield the required 60 percent majority for either of the leading two candidates, Bob Hasegawa (far ahead with 55 percent) or Jenny Durkan (at 22 percent), the Dems decided to call it a night, arguing that—at 10:15, 15 minutes after they were supposed to vacate the meeting room at the Ethiopian Community In Seattle’s community center in Rainier Beach, too many district members had left for a representative vote.

In the first round of voting, former mayor Mike McGinn—who noted his support for Bernie Sanders in his stump speech—was dropped off the ballot, with the lowest support of the five nominated candidates. (The other two who remained were Jessyn Farrell and Cary Moon).

In the other races, the district dual-endorsed labor lobbyist Teresa Mosqueda and attorney and NAACP leader Sheley Seacrest for Position 8; incumbent council member Lorena Gonzalez for Position 9; City Attorney Pete Holmes; King County Sheriff John Urquhart; and King County Executive Dow Constantine.

I was live-tweeting the whole thing, and I’ve Storified the entire, sweaty blow-by-blow here.

2. One candidate who wasn’t on the Dems’ ballot last night—because he isn’t a Democrat—was Jon Grant, who is running as a Democratic Socialist. Grant touts his work on the $15 minimum wage campaign and last year’s statewide minimum wage initiative. Yesterday, his campaign put up an ad for a campaign organizer position that pays $2,500 a month, or $14.42 an hour assuming a 40-hour work week.

Grant responded to my post on Twitter, saying that using a “standard 2,000-hour work year,” the pay for this campaign job works out to $15 an hour. Payroll professionals, the federal and state governments, and simple math show that a standard work year (52 weeks at 40/hours a week) is 2,080 hours a year. At this rate, Grant’s campaign is offering less than the $15 minimum—and that’s assuming that this campaign employee never goes over 40 hours a week. My own very limited campaign experience (Jim Mattox for Texas AG ’98!), and the experiences many campaign workers have described to me over the years, suggest strongly that “campaign organizer” is not typically a 40-hour-a-week job, especially as Election Day approaches. Since the job is a salaried position, rather than hourly, that means that the more the campaign organizer works, the further below minimum wage his or her salary will drop.

Of course, a $15 hourly wage (rather than the flat $2,500 fee) would mitigate this issue. (It would also likely increase the amount Grant would have to pay his staffer.) And of course, campaigns jobs often pay sub-minimum wages. But it’s worth noting that Grant is, so far, the best-funded of all the candidates for Position 8—largely, as Grant himself has frequently pointed out, thanks to $25 donations in the form of publicly funded “democracy vouchers” to the candidate. A well-funded candidate running on his record advocating for higher wages for people struggling to afford to live in Seattle should probably make sure he isn’t contributing to the problem.

3. The Seattle Planning Commission issued a set of recommendations for implementing the Mandatory Housing Affordability program, a centerpiece of Mayor Ed Murray’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda. As Dan Bertolet of Sightline pointed out yesterday on Facebook, the recommendations call into question one of the key principles behind the program, which sets higher affordability requirements in areas, like the Central District and the Chinatown-International District, that the city has identified as areas at “high risk for displacement” because  of rising housing prices combined with a vulnerable population. The Planning Commission writes:

MHA is an essential anti-displacement tool when paired with complementary antidisplacement strategies. The Planning Commission is concerned that increasing MHA requirements in areas with a high risk of displacement may have negative consequences on Seattle’s historically marginalized communities by stagnating growth, exacerbating housing shortages, and further limiting access to jobs, housing, and amenities. While we acknowledge that some communities hope to combat displacement by deterring growth, discouraging new development to retain existing naturally-affordable units, this does not preclude rents from rising, and may in the future cause land to be underutilized. A lack of new units contributes to an overall scarcity of housing options that drives up competition and cost.

Instead of requiring larger payments toward affordable housing in high-risk areas, the Planning Commission recommends “alternative anti-displacement strategies,” like the city’s equitable development strategy, which seeks to prevent economic and cultural displacement by providing cultural, housing, and economic anchors. Read the Planning Commission’s whole letter, which includes nine other recommendations, here.

City Hall, Density, Development, Equity, Mayor Murray, Morning Crank, race, Women, zoning

Morning Crank: Keep Seattle What Now?

 

1. In announcing plans for a 1.75-cent-per-ounce soda tax last week, Mayor Ed Murray emphasized what he considers the nexus between sugary soda consumption (which has disproportionate impacts on low-income and minority communities) and what the tax will fund (programs that attempt to close the education and opportunity gap in those communities). As he did during his State of the City speech in February, Murray placed a particular emphasis on improving outcomes for young black men in Seattle Public Schools, by expanding mentoring programs aimed at keeping black male teenagers in school and out of the school-to-prison pipeline. The city’s program, Our Best, is based on an Obama-era program called My Brother’s Keeper that was widely criticized for focusing on male achievement while ignoring the specific, and different, challenges facing young black women. For example, African American Policy Forum director Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw wrote in the New York Times that young black women are more likely than other young women to be victims of sexual violence, become pregnant at a young age, get suspended from school, die violently, and be victims of sex trafficking than other girls. “The disparities among girls of different races are sometimes even greater than among boys.”

Crenshaw notes that “supporters of My Brother’s Keeper use the analogy of ‘the canary in the coal mine‘ to justify both a narrow focus on individual-level interventions — as opposed to systemic policies to narrow the persistent racial gaps in education, income and wealth — and the exclusion of women and girls. Black boys are the miner’s canary, the argument goes, and so efforts to save them will trickle down to everyone else.”

When I asked Murray last week why he, like Obama, planned to emphasize young black men to the exclusion of young black women, his response was straight out of the Obama playbook. “Lots of the programs I listed—STEM, extracurricular activity programs, and other programs that will be enhanced—those are for young men and young women in our high schools,” Murray said. “They’re not limited to just men.”

Dwane Chappelle, director of the city’s Department of Education and Early Learning, jumped in. “At Aki Kurose Middle School, they are doing My Brother’s Keeper for young black men, but they’re also focusing on young black women and Hispanic women as well, making sure that students are all taken care of. They just use the My Brother’s Keeper framework” for both boys and, Chappelle said. But when I asked Chappelle whether the Aki Kurose program focuses on problems that are specific to girls, like teen pregnancy, he said he didn’t know the specifics.

2. A neighborhood effort to prohibit a four-story, 57-unit apartment building from going in along a commercial stretch of Greenwood, where the zoning has allowed apartments for many years, has passed the point of absurdity and is becoming downright surreal. Neighbors of the development, which is located right next to the frequent Route 5 bus line, argue that its residents will have to have cars because they won’t have access to transit, that by building small apartments, the developers are trying to “force” people to live in “Soviet-Union-like” dwellings, that it is “inhumane and unacceptable” for people to live without air conditioning in Seattle, and that a small garden on the roof would be an invitation for renters to “party” and cause disturbances.

Encouraged by a city planning and development department that subjects small projects like this one to design review, and the passivity of a design review board that failed to challenge or reject any of their complaints (virtually none of them the province of design review), the residents filed a challenge to the building under the State Environmental Policy Act, arguing, among other things, that the apartments will inconvenience neighbors by making it harder for them to park their cars.

livablephinney.org

Last week, the group opposing the building, which calls itself (of course) Livable Phinney, released the list of witnesses they would like to hear from and exhibits they hope to introduce at their first appearance before the city’s hearing examiner. (That hearing examiner, Sue Tanner, recently found in favor of Queen Anne homeowners who argued that allowing people to build mother-in-law apartments would harm the environment by, among other things, making it harder for people to park their cars.) A typical witness list might include five or six witnesses; Livable Phinney’s includes a dozen, plus 47 separate exhibits. The proposed witnesses include a Metro employee who will testify that Metro’s Route 5 is often behind schedule, making it less than “frequent,” an architect who will testify that the new apartments will create shadows on a nearby high-end condominium complex, a resident of that complex, and several nearby neighbors who oppose the project. The hearing, which is expected to last three days, starts on Tuesday.

3. Washington State Wire, which “relaunched” in January after several years as a conservative-leaning blog whose chief writer, Erik Smith, now works for the Republican-led Majority Coalition Caucus, has given consultant John Wyble a weekly column, where, last week, he tried to explain his client Mike McGinn’s perplexing campaign slogan, “Keep Seattle.” Says Wyble: “It simply means keep Seattle a welcoming place for all.”

Wyble continues: “I understand that this shorthand phrase could be confused with nostalgia. I remember riding in my Dad’s Ford Falcon along Boeing Field in the early 70s when Seattle was a blue-collar scrappy fishing town and SeaFair was the biggest event of the year. While I remember that fondly, this campaign knows that cities evolve and change. But for who?

“This is a campaign about keeping the promise of a great city for every person who lives in it.”

I guess that… clears that up?

Washington State Wire editor DJ Wilson says Wyble will write a total of eight columns for the website. No word yet on whether they plan to give equal time to consultants or spokespeople for the other mayoral campaigns.

4. David Preston and Harley Lever, two of the activists behind the Safe Seattle Facebook group, announced on their Facebook page that they plan to announce their candidacies for unspecified city offices this afternoon. (I’m guessing council Position 8 and mayor.) Anyone who reads my Twitter feed has a pretty good sense of my thoughts on Preston, who has mocked me relentlessly and even filed a frivolous city ethics complaint after I published a public record that showed another activist in an unflattering light, but you can find out even more about him by Googling his name and checking out his web page, which is a pastiche of conspiracy theories, images of city council aides and other private citizens lifted from their Facebook pages and Photoshopped, and overwrought imitations of hard-boiled journalism, minus the journalism.  You can also check out the video of his appearance before a flabbergasted Ethics and Elections Commission, starting around the two-minute mark.

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the substantial time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as costs like transportation, equipment, travel costs, website maintenance, and other expenses associated with my reporting. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

 

Density, Development, Diversity, gentrification, housing, Mayor Murray

The C Is for Crank Interviews: Cary Moon

Cary Moon, a civic activist and urban planner best known for leading the fight against the downtown tunnel (read my 2004 story about that effort here) is an unlikely candidate for mayor. A wonk who recently cowrote a four-part series about neoliberalism and gentrification for the Stranger, Moon has never made herself the center of attention, and seems more comfortable debating the granular details of housing policy than she does speaking directly into a camera, as she did in the video announcing her candidacy. She’s running, she says, because she wants to address the growing divide between Seattle’s “haves and have-nots,” with progressive taxation, a crackdown on speculative property buyers, and by having a conversation with Seattle residents about “what kind of city we want to be.” I spoke to Moon by phone on Thursday.

The C Is for Crank: A lot of people seem to be jumping in to this race because they perceive that Murray is newly vulnerable. Do you have a specific critique of Murray’s record and positions?

Cary Moon (CM): I think he has done quite a bit and he deserves to be proud of that. He’s made a lot of good changes for the future. [But] I feel like we have had a lot of big, transformative changes in the city. We’ve become a city of haves and have-nots, and I don’t think he has the right analysis of why that’s happening. I feel like in a time of change, we need a really strong vision and idea of what we’re aiming for, and we need an action plan to get there, so people feel like they have a voice on housing affordability, and on building a local economy that circulates [wealth] back into small businesses and local businesses. There’s things the city and state could and should be doing to increase the ability of the city to share prosperity.

“Housing used to be local. It used to be local players, building housing for local people. Now they’re acting more and more like Wall Street, where outside predators are piling on just left and right.”

ECB: Can you give some specific examples of times when Murray has used the wrong analysis to inform his policy choices?

CM: I think we missed some opportunities with HALA. There’s some good things in it. I like the mandatory affordability proposal. I like the proposals about what to do in single-family zoning to add townhouses and duplexes and accessory dwelling units—building the missing middle. But I think we’re missing some good opportunities. We’re not really understanding everything that’s driving up demand. So yes, let’s build houses for everyone who wants to live here, but there are other causes that are escalating housing prices that the city is not considering. We need to figure out what to do with those.

ECB: Like what?

CM: If you look at what’s happening in other world-class cities, you see this phenomenon of outside investors piling on and taking advantage of everyone wanting to move here. It’s just like Wall Street—when Wall Street sees a stock go up two days in a row, all of Wall Street piles on to that stock. That same phenomenon is going on in our housing market.

Housing used to be local. It used to be local players, building housing for local people. Now they’re acting more and more like Wall Street, where outside predators are piling on just left and right.

ECB:  You’ve mentioned this theory before—that foreign investors from places like China are snapping up properties here as investments and leaving them vacant, which helps drive up housing prices. But all the available data seems to show that while this is happening in Vancouver, it isn’t happening here. I’m not saying it couldn’t happen in the future, but what evidence do you have that so-called hot money is driving up housing prices now?

CM: I don’t have any secret information that nobody else has, but the dynamic is there. I’ve read enough articles that have said that investors that have been in Vancouver are now looking at other cities, and Seattle is one of their choices. It’s not just hot money, it’s not just foreign investors, but everything has changed in the last 10 years. It used to be, you buy property, you build a building, you get a certain rate of return, and you get your money back, maybe 7 percent in 20  years. It’s completely different now. Now, you buy a building and sell it right away, and the return on investment comes not from the slow, long revenue stream of rents coming in, but from the quick turn of selling at a higher rate and doing the same thing again and again and again and again. Our development world is behaving more like Wall Street than it used to. It’s developers leaving buildings vacant, it’s people buying investment properties, it’s Airbnb, it’s people building second and third and fourth homes that might not have anybody living in them for most of the year. Real estate is a great place to put your money, if you have money.

“It’s very attractive to anybody that’s trying to find a place to live that’s affordable, so everyone piles on. ‘We can live in the Central District. It’s close to downtown, close to work.’ It’s escalating.”

ECB: Isn’t the bigger problem that a lot more people want to live here, and that housing supply isn’t keeping up with demand? Wouldn’t the obvious solution to that be just—build more housing?

CM: I think people are moving here because there are jobs here, and that’s great—I don’t want people to stop moving here—but there’s additional pressure on neighborhoods that have been traditionally redlined, where society and government and banks and the real estate industry kept prices low and kept segregation happening, and now those prices are different than the rest of Seattle. It’s very attractive to anybody that’s trying to find a place to live that’s affordable, so everyone piles on. ‘We can live in the Central District. It’s close to downtown, close to work.’ It’s escalating. We need to take a very careful look at what can we do to preserve access to the neighborhood for people from the community, with cultural ties and family ties in the community, so that we’re not blasting out those people and filling the neighborhood up with a bunch of wealthy white people.

ECB: So what do you propose to prevent displacement from those communities?

CM: Strong tenants’ protection rights are a part of it. I think looking at rent stabilization—not rent control, but are there things you can do to dampen rent escalation, to slow it down? Are there things you can do with the community to benefit the people from the community that already live there? There are a lot of subtle things that you can do that are going to benefit folks from the community.

I think [HALA] wasn’t enough. I think it was a good step. But where we were three years ago when HALA started—that was as far as developers were willing to go. I would like to revisit and look at some of the solutions we proposed, things we didn’t do yet in single-family-zoned lands, like townhouses and duplexes and accessory dwelling units. I want to have that conversation.

ECB: Those things were all originally part of HALA, and they all got shot down during that process. How would revisiting HALA change that outome?

CM: I think it’s a matter of leadership and vision. The way I think people perceived HALA was that it was a power struggle between stakeholders, and everybody fighting for their own interests. I would like to set aside that way of operating for a minute and ask the people of Seattle what kind of city we want to be. How do we want to welcome young families? How do we want to welcome all communities and restart this debate towards a constructive goal around what kind of city we want to be? We need to change the framework, change the context, and talk to  people about what kind of city we want to be.

ECB: Homelessness has become a huge issue during Murray’s term. What do you think of his approach to homelessness—from the ongoing sweeps of homeless encampments to Pathways Home, which focuses on rapid rehousing and rebidding city contracts with service providers?

CM: The proposal that was put forward by the organizations involved in homelessness and Mike O’Brien and the ACLU—that was much closer to what we should be doing. I would like to go back to that proposal and figure out the best way to do this in a way that respects people’s human rights and dignity.

[In general] ,my feeling is that there are a few things we need to do differently. First, we need to get better data, a better sense of collaboration, and a commitment to those values across city agencies and the nonprofit community and providers. It feels like Barb Poppe was possibly right that there was a lot of duplication of effort and a need for efficiencies. I like the idea of housing first—people need shelter to get back on their feet, and you can’t really accomplish anything if you don’t have a place to sleep. I like low-barrier shelters, and I like the idea of looking at the shelters where people are staying for months and months and months and not moving. I like the idea of figuring out what those folks need to do to move on.

I’m concerned about the voucher system. Unless we address the root cause of affordability, vouchers are not going to do it. Vouchers might work for a family that just had a temporary crisis and lost their job and had a fairly easy time getting back on their feet. But for people whose incomes are low and are going to stay low, the voucher system is very impractical. We need to figure out how to build more affordable housing or people are going to be back out on the street.

“Low-income people, middle-income people, have been generous enough. They pay, as a proportion of their income, seven times more than wealthy people do in taxes.”

ECB: You and ex-mayor McGinn hold a lot of the same views, support many of the same policy positions, and seem likely to draw support from the same set of progressive young urbanists and social justice advocates. What distinction would you draw for voters who are torn between you and him?

I’m wondering what he’s all about with his slogan of Keep Seattle, because it’s signaling, like, a direction I don’t quite understand. We might have a lot more policy differences than I thought we did. Definitely, our style of leadership is different. I want to build will and momentum toward a common vision, and I think he loves the street fight of scrappy power struggles. And I believe I have a much deeper analysis of how to tackle the affordable housing crisis and how to build affordable housing. I’ve spent the last two years working on that as well as democracy reform—how to spread power across spectrum, not just to wealthy white people.

ECB: Do you agree with McGinn that people in Seattle are overtaxed, and that the city should adopt an income tax, even one that’s unlikely to hold up in court?

CM: I see the same problem as he does. Low-income people, middle-income people, have been generous enough. They pay, as a proportion of their income, seven times more than wealthy people do in taxes. I want to have a big, broad conversation with the city and all the most creative lawyers in the city about how do we do this. Wealthy people should be paying their fair share, and a lot of wealthy people believe that too. We have to build the public will and the right legal strategy. I’ve heard that a capital gains tax is a better place to start [than income tax] because it’s more likely to hold up, but I need more information on that. I would say yes, I’m for finding new sources that are more progressive.

 

ECB: When they were teasing your candidacy before you announced, Moxie Media described you as a “well-resourced” candidate. How much of your own money are you willing to put into this race?

CM: I don’t know. I’m fundraising like hell, because that’s important to building commitment and credibility and expanding the movement. I’m going to do that first.

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the substantial time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as costs like transportation, equipment, travel costs, website maintenance, and other expenses associated with my reporting. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful foryour support.

Mayor Murray

The C Is For Crank Interviews: Former Mayor Mike McGinn

Last week, former mayor Mike McGinn took many in the local political community by surprise when he announced he was running again for his old position. Although McGinn’s name had certainly circulated in the past as a potential challenger to Mayor Ed Murray, who defeated the then-incumbent in 2013, he always demurred when asked, calling the question of whether he planned to run “unanswerable.” It became answerable, it appears, after a man named Delvonn Heckard sued the mayor, alleging Murray had sexually abused him when Heckard was a teenager in the 1980s. McGinn announced his run with a press conference in his Greenwood backyard and the perplexing campaign slogan “Keep Seattle,” which he told me means “Keep Seattle for people.” I sat down with McGinn on Capitol Hill last week.

The C Is for Crank (ECB): I know you don’t want to comment on the charges against Mayor Murray, but I do wonder whether your decision to run now, instead of declaring before the scandal broke, is a bit opportunistic. Did you decide to run because you have specific issues with the mayor’s record, or because you saw an opportunity open up and you want another bite at the apple?

Mike McGinn (MM): I do care a lot about the city, and I’m interested in how we can make it so that people can move here and live here, and that we’re still a place for immigrants and refugees to land, that we’re still a place for young people and artists, and that we’re not driving people out. This has been the dominant issue of the day. I’ve been watching the land use and transportation issues with concern. The homelessness issues also concern me. And all of this is in the context of a budget that’s growing and growing and not really being managed very well. When I saw Ed come out at the State of the City speech and say, ‘Here are my solutions: two more taxes,’ [a tax on sugary soda and a property tax increase to address homelessness], I just decided we’re not managing the city for the people who are here or who want to come here.

ECB: In your announcement, you said specifically that growth has been responsible for driving up rents, and that the city needs to adopt policies to mitigate those impacts. To me, that sounds very different than the Mike McGinn of 2013 or 2009, when you ran as a pro-growth candidate. What’s changed?

MM: I think that my views on land use and transportation issues have really been consistent over time. I think the biggest thing that’s changed is the incredible growth in jobs at Amazon and other companies. It’s like a different environment. That’s the biggest difference. Things really change when we have a situation where tens of thousands of jobs are being added, and that puts demand on housing and increases rents and housing prices. And then the taxes. Our overall tax system is very regressive. So it turns out that there are people benefiting from the growth, but the people who are objectively benefiting the least, those with the lowest income, are actually getting priced out. And that’s a different place than the city has been. When I was at Great City [the pro-growth nonprofit McGinn co-founded], we were still working on, how do we get major employers to locate downtown? And that, historically, has been the issue for cities like Seattle that saw big employers depart for the suburbs, whether it’s Microsoft or T Mobile or A&T Wireless—all of these companies were moving out.  We went from zero cranes in my term to many, many cranes now, and that calls for a more aggressive policy response than we’ve had.

ECB: What do you mean by a more aggressive policy response?

MM:  I’m in favor of the policies that I’ve always been for. I’ve been a supporter, as you know, of missing middle housing. In my term, we tried to make it easier to build small apartment buildings, microapartments, backyard cottages, and the like. We were for those things. The critique I’ve had—and this is, I think, where some of the confusion arises—was of the HALA process. It was good-hearted in the sense that a bunch of people came together to promote their best ideas, but coming from my own experience as mayor and my own experience in the green community, I could sense what was going to happen, and it did happen, which is that there were a lot of people who were left out of that process and there was an immediate backlash against the proposals, which led to some of the more promising proposals just being dropped entirely right off the bat.

ECB: Are you actually saying that you don’t think there would have been a backlash if Murray had included all the groups that feel they were left out of the process, even if they arrived at the same set of recommendations?

“The HALA process was good-hearted, but there were a lot of people who were left out of that process and there was an immediate backlash against the proposals, which led to some of the more promising proposals just being dropped.”

MM: There may have, but we know the result we ended up with. The debate over growth, as we can see ,is becoming a really polarizing one in the city. People want to label each other—’Oh, they’re an urbanist,’ or ‘Oh, they’re a NIMBY’—you’re not going to make that go away. There are people on either pole who aren’t necessarily going to be persuadable, but in my experience working in neighborhoods, there are people in the middle who are persuadable. But if you can’t overcome the process objection, your’e never going to be able to get there.

ECB: So are you saying that you think the HALA process should be revisited, even though the council has already adopted a lot of the upzones?

MM: I think that process is going to obviously run its course through the council. There’s a number of things happening and we can quibble over specific policy details, but I do think it’s not going to produce the types of changes in housing policy that we ultimate need. It’s just not the scale that we need. So we’re still going to have to revisit the issue of, how do we make it so that people can live here.

ECB: One specific thing Murray has done is to distance the city from the neighborhood councils, and as you know, there was a backlash to that. His response to that backlash, and I think it was a appropriate one, was to say, ‘We’re not excluding you, we’re just including other people too.’

 

“Now I’m not saying that all of a sudden everyone says, ‘Oh, I’m for a bike lane.’ There are going to always be some people who hate a bike lane. But when you have neighbors talking to neighbors about what an outcome should be, you remove the process objection.”

MM: I personally was bothered by the way Ed kind of got rid of them. I do think they have a place but—you should go reread the article I wrote on Crosscut. I expressed that there were weaknesses. But I think that [cutting ties with the councils] was a divisive act. It was perceived by those folks as an attack. And I think there’s a way to say, ‘Look, you’re a voice and we’re going to continue to solicit your views, but we’re also going to invite more people in. That’s a process issue as well.

ECB: But I feel like those people hated you anyway. So how are you going to convince people that Ed is divisive but you’re not?

MM: You have to define what you mean when you say [divisive]. Are there are people in every neighborhood who are resistant to changes? Sure. But I think there are also people in every neighborhood who are open to change. I’ll give you an example: Bicycling in the the city. When it was portrayed as, the mayor is imposing his will on neighborhoods on biking, that was not something that went so well. That was one of the beauties of the road safety action plan. We actually brought folks in the room and we found a different way of talking about and approaching the issue. That helped change the debate. Now I’m not saying that all of a sudden everyone says, ‘Oh, I’m for a bike lane.’ There are going to always be some people who hate a bike lane. But when you have neighbors talking to neighbors about what an outcome should be, you remove the process objection. I look at the HALA focus groups. The reason people dropped out is that ultimately, it didn’t feel meaningful to them, for whatever reason. And so that’s what I’m trying to get at, is you need to have that engagement on the front end. When I went to a town hall and had a group of people saying we can’t do something on this street, and we had other people saying, ‘I live in this neighborhood, and I do those things.’ That fundamentally changes the debate.

ECB: It’s my impression that the neighborhood-versus-city or homeowner-versus-renter divide is much sharper now than it was when you were mayor. What’s the breaking point, when you have to say, ‘Sorry, you might not like this policy, but we’re going to do it anyway’?

MM: Ultimately, you have to make the call, but first you have to listen.

And I walked into rooms with hundreds of people yelling at me, and I brought my staff with me and I brought my department heads with me. Has [Murray] ever just walked into the room and said, ‘Anybody in the neighborhood who wants to ask me a question, go, one after the other’? I did. And what I learned was, the first meeting, people really unload. And the second meeting, it’s like, ‘Oh, he’s showing up again.’ And by the third meeting, maybe you feel like you’re starting to make some progress. But you need to show that you’re going to have a continued commitment to showing up in the room, and the next time you show up in the room, you show that that you’ve delivered something, and that you’ve heard what they say and you’re trying to deliver an outcome. Who you speak to, who you let question you, changes what you do, and if you’re just in the room with the lobbyists, if you’re just in the room with the donors, certain things are going to become priorities. If  you don’t hold yourself accountable to the neighborhoods, other things become priorities.

When you talk about the divisiveness issue, you should look at who’s getting upset and saying that. I think a lot of groups in the city thought I was far more inclusive than they had seen. But there are hard issues where there are deep divisions, like land use, zoning, bike lanes, and you can do things as mayor, inadvertently, to drive that division.

ECB: Can you give me an example of something you did to inadvertently exacerbate a division?

MM: Fire station 39. [In 2012, Lake City residents opposed plans to use a decommissioned fire station in their neighborhood for shelter and services for homeless people. Last year, the city reached an agreement with the Low-Income Housing Alliance to develop workforce housing at the site.] There were neighbors that were upset about that. They didn’t want it there. And this was an example where we were like, ‘Okay, who are the neighbors who support it?’ And the breakthrough, as time passed, was that we realized that there was a division in that neighborhood that already existed, between people who were fine with it and supported it and people that were adamantly opposed. And we started a Lake City planning process to talk about how we deal with these issues, and projects came out of that that people could agree on who disagreed w other things.

The HALA process is very divisive, it is tense, but we’re going to have to revisit it.

ECB: But the HALA upzones are all passing the council unanimously.

MM: Yeah, but I think at the end of the day, I don’t think that those upzones are going to be sufficient, and the measurement of sufficiency is in the rents and housing prices that we’re going to see.

ECB: So what do you want to see? Higher incentives? Higher payments? Just more process? What would you change?

MM: I think we could have gotten a little more out of luxury condos and we’re probably getting too much out of small apartment buildings, as an example, and one of the ways to get more out of the bigger buildings was to let a tower be more of a tower. It’s harder to get as much out of small apartment buildings. But having said that, let’s not forget that in the last couple years we also saw microapartments ruled illegal as well.

ECB: With the support of your ally, Mike O’Brien. What did you think of that vote [effectively barring new microhousing developments]?

“Murray did not recognize that this problem is scaling up, and that we need to scale up the response—not just ring the fire alarm, ask the feds to come in, and then just run out of the building. You’ve got to be the fireman on this one.”

MM: I think that they were not for everyone, but they are for some people, and it’s disappointing to me that we don’t make that option available. With backyard cottages, Mike had to try to carry that alone, really without much support from the mayor’s office at all, and now it’s tied up in litigation. [A neighborhood activist sued to stop the implementation of rules that would making it easier for homeowners to build accessory dwelling units, and O’Brien announced last month that the city would do a full environmental review of the impact of backyard cottages and basement apartments]. Maybe it would have happened anyway,  but that’s something where the mayor basically walked away from those recommendations because he thought it was too hot.

ECB: The issues you hear people getting worked up about now are not things like a single fire station. They’re, ‘I see encampments 400 times a day.’ How do you think the mayor has been doing at addressing the issue of homelessness?

MM: Not well. I think what we saw was the scale of the problem grew dramatically but not the scale of the response. Declaring an emergency is a good thing, but it was then followed by, ‘Let’s wait for the state.’ The strategy was that [the declaration of emergency] will encourage the state or the federal government to give us more, and I don’t think that was good judgment. When I was mayor, we had Obama as President and community development block grants were being cut. It was happening even without Trump. And the idea that he federal government was going to rapidly change course was not realistic. We spent a lot of time not responding. The number of sweeps picked up and we weren’t picking up the scale of our response. It’s a management issue around effectively handling the sweeps, but there was also the policy issue of prioritizing our resources.

ECB: You use the word ‘sweeps,’ which is itself a loaded word. Are you now opposed to sweeps?

MM: I did them as mayor too, but my view was always that if we needed to do it, we needed to be able to say to the public that we were providing more options for somewhere to go.

ECB: Murray says his new Navigation Team does offer meaningful alternatives. Do you think that’s b.s.?

MM: No, I don’t think it’s b.s., and I’m sure there are some really good things happening there, but we are three years and three months into his term, and he finally figured out how to do it, and that’s a serious problem. He did not recognize that this problem is scaling up, and that we need to scale up the response—not just ring the fire alarm, ask the feds to come in, and then just run out of the building. You’ve got to be the fireman on this one.

ECB: You’ve said you want to find efficiencies in the city before asking voters for another tax. Do you think there’s enough room in the budget to pay for the growing need for homelessness services?

MM: We may indeed need more resources—I suspect we will, as a way to get through it—but I don’t want to say we need another tax until we take a really close look at spending. I believe there’s real money in that budget to be reprioritized.

“When I was mayor, we had Obama as President and community development block grants were being cut. It was happening even without Trump. And the idea that he federal government was going to rapidly change course was not realistic.”

And if we are going to tax, what I would look at would be what happens if you, for example, increased the business and occupation tax on businesses over a certain size and expanded the exemption so that small businesses have lower costs. There’s actually a lot of money to be had. The dreaded employee hours tax—what came to be known as the head tax—is another example. And these are things, by the way, that the city council can do without passing a ballot measure.

And I think, let’s answer the income tax question, for crying out loud. [State law prohibits a state income tax, but both McGinn and Murray have said they want to propose a local tax to see if it stands up in court]. I would get that going as soon as we could so we could get an answer on that. I actually think a city income tax, if legal, could probably be better than the corporate tax I was just describing.

ECB: Do you think that since you left office, the city council has moved in your direction politically?

MM: Absolutely. Yeah. For example, the city council’s big response to homelessness the first year I took office was an anti-panhandling statute [which Tim Burgess proposed but which never passed]. They opposed the temporary  encampments again and again—in fact they took a vote and told me I had to evict them back then, and for that, some labeled me divisive because I was standing up for the homeless. And now we’re starting to see people putting tiny houses in the encampments, and they’re really better places than they were when the council was trying to stomp them out.

Municipal broadband, while it’s certainly been quashed by Ed, the demand is still out there. (Ed. note: In fact, McGinn commissioned a study that found that municipal broadband would cost between $700 million and $900 million and did not pursue the idea further, instead announcing a partnership with a small, new company, Gigabit Squared. That deal fell apart when Gigabit ran out of funding and left the city with thousands of dollars in unpaid bills; the company’s president soon stepped down over the botched deal.) I remember when I first ran, people were going, ‘Municipal broadband—what does that have to do? Fiber optic—what does that have to do?’ That has changed. When I ran, a lot of people criticized me for wanting to get involved in the school district, and now the it’s taken for granted that the city should be part of education and the school district, and a partner on things like expanding youth violence prevention. So has the city moved more in my direction and the things I was fighting for then? Yeah. And that’s where I thought the city was going.

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the substantial time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as costs like transportation, equipment, travel costs, website maintenance, and other expenses associated with my reporting. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful foryour support.

City Hall, Elections, Mayor Murray, Morning Crank

Morning Crank: It’s On

The big news from the first joint mayoral-city council election forum of 2017, sponsored by the 46th District Democrats last night at the Mennonite Church in Lake City, was Mayor Ed Murray’s announcement that he will propose a local income tax on high earners, taking away a major campaign talking point from one opponent, former mayor Mike McGinn, and potentially overshadowing efforts by a coalition called Trump-Proof Seattle that has been working for months to come up with a local income tax that will pass legal muster.

At the forum, Murray said he planned to “send to council … a proposal for a high-end income tax.” Murray announced the proposal in response to a question about solutions to homelessness, and preceded McGinn in the order, knocking the former mayor a bit off balance. “In my announcement, I proposed an income tax,” McGinn said. “If that is found not to be legal, we need to tax the big corporations that are benefiting from the growth” in Seattle.

Murray said a high-earners income tax would probably face an immediate legal challenge, one reason he has cited in the past for not proposing such a tax. (Murray initially proposed a new local property tax to pay for programs to address homelessness, but abandoned that plan in favor of a countywide sales tax, which he endorsed along with King County Executive Dow Constantine last month.

Of the eight mayoral candidates on stage last night, only one—Cary Moon—raised her “no” sign to the lightning round question, “Do you support a local income tax?” Moon told me yesterday afternoon that she is more interested in a capital gains tax, which she believes is more likely to hold up in court.

I live-tweeted the entire event, including the Position 8 city council debate, and Storified all those tweets here.

Welcome to Election 2017. Much, much more to come.

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the substantial time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as costs like transportation, equipment, travel costs, website maintenance, and other expenses associated with my reporting. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful foryour support.