Tag: Pete Holmes

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, Elections, homelessness, Mayor Murray

Morning Crank: “Let’s Actually Do It.”

1. For a few weeks, a rumor has been going around that Scott Lindsay, Mayor Ed Murray’s public safety advisor and the most vocal defender of encampment sweeps in the mayor’s office, was thinking of running for city attorney against longtime incumbent Pete Holmes. Yesterday, Lindsay put those rumors to rest, announcing that not only is he running, he’s leaving the mayor’s office in one week, presumably to campaign full-time. Perhaps most interesting, Lindsay’s announcement included two unlikely endorsements, from Mothers for Police Accountability founder Rev. Harriet Walden and Public Defender Association director Lisa Daugaard. Walden is a longtime police accountability advocate and Daugaard has been highly critical of Murray’s homeless encampment sweeps; both serve on the Community Police Commission, the civilian body that oversees police reform efforts at the city.

Daugaard’s decision to support Lindsay is surprising not only because she supported Holmes in the past (over two campaign cycles, Daugaard  contributed $246 to Holmes’ campaigns), but because Lindsay is widely seen as a law-and-order guy and a strong defender of Murray’s encampment removal policies. (Shortly after Lindsay announced, Safe Seattle—a group opposed to homeless encampments, safe drug-consumption sites, and Murray’s pro-density policies—sung his praises on their Facebook page.

I asked Daugaard why she was supporting Lindsay. Her response: “We need to do more with the office of City Attorney. We’re entering an era when we had better be doing things worth defending here in Seattle. If we’re saying safe consumption [sites for drug users], let’s do it. If we’re saying we can care for people and reduce crime through community based alternatives, let’s actually do it.

“Scott’s analysis that we can take a more serious approach to all of these issues is correct. I haven’t always agreed with him and that may continue, but I respect his energy and openness to evidence about it what works.”

Daugaard says she’s concerned that after eight years with Holmes as city attorney, misdemeanor defendants “still serve long sentences on cases with excessive probation, are held in lieu of bail because they are poor, and are made to give up their trial rights to get services in too many cases. Jail utilization has climbed.”

“I give Pete great credit for hiring Kelly Harris as his criminal division chief last year. Kelly has made important improvements. But we need to get serious about making more effective city wide use of community based diversion. This has to work—we don’t have an infinite time frame to get it right and take it to scale. Scott is very serious about showing that we can achieve strong neighborhood-level outcomes through a public health-based approach. We need that kind of energy or people are going to get fed up.”

Murray’s campaign confirms that he will continue to support Holmes, whom he endorsed before Lindsay got in the race. The timing of Lindsay’s announcement puts Murray, who is running for reelection himself amid allegations that he sexually abused teenage boys in the 1980s, in a tough position—having a top staffer abandon ship during a tough reelection campaign does not exactly inspire confidence.

There may be another reason Lindsay decided to leave Murray in the lurch: Because polling suggested he could win. So far, Lindsay has reported one expenditure: A $20,000 phone poll, conducted between April 21 and April 23.

2. Four years after denouncing a soda tax proposal by his then- (and future) opponent, Mike McGinn (and getting trounced by his opponents as a shill for the beverage industry) on soda and sugar-sweetened beverages, Mayor Murray rolled out the details of his own soda tax proposal Thursday. The proposal would impose a 1.75-cent-per-ounce on all sodas, including diet sodas, to be paid by soda distributors, who would almost certainly pass the cost on to customers. (This, I should note, hits Crank where she lives. Don’t mess with my garbage water, Mr. Mayor, SIR.)

The money—an estimated $18 million a year, depreciated from the $23 million the city budget office estimates it would taken in on current soda sales to account for the fact that soda taxes reduce consumption—would pay for programs that support education and access to healthy food in low-income communities, including: $469,000 a year to expand school-based mentorships; $1.1 million a year for workplace learning programs for kids in high school; $1.1 million a year for case management and training to reduce racial disparities in discipline; and a one-time investment of $5 million to create an endowment that, Murray said Thursday, will provide “one free year of college at Seattle colleges [formerly known as community colleges] to all public schools students who graduate.”

Acknowledging that a soda tax is regressive—not only does it hit lower-income people hardest, lower-income people buy more soda—Murray said, “To those who say that we are resorting to a regressive tax, I say, you know what is more regressive? You know what is really taking money out of African American communities? Tolerating an education system that is failing students of color every day and leaving them without a future and giving them food that will only lead to health problems.” Excessive soda consumption has been linked to obesity, diabetes, and heart and liver problems, Murray noted. Murray said he decided to include diet soda in the tax for equity reasons—higher-income white people are more likely to drink diet soda than sugar-sweetened drinks—but the expansion to diet drinks also allowed him to lower the tax slightly from the 2-cents-per-ounce tax he originally proposed in his State of the City speech in February.

The soda tax requires council approval; two council members, Rob Johnson and Tim Burgess, flanked Murray at yesterday’s press conference.

Immediately after Murray’s press conference, a group of Teamsters and other soda-tax opponents gathered in the lobby of City Hall to denounce the proposal.  Pete Lamb, a representative from Teamsters Local 174, said similar taxes had already forced companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi to cut jobs in Philadelphia, where a 1.5-cent-per-ounce tax on soda went into effect this year. (The mayor of Philadelphia pointed out that the two companies saw gross profits of more than $6 billion last year, and called the company- and union-led efforts to blame the tax for layoffs a “new low.”) “We will not support a tax that puts our members’ jobs on the line,” Lamb said.

“Just in the soda and beverage industry alone, we have 1,200 to 1,300 workers, plus distributors and warehouse workers—when you really look at the full scope of it, you’re looking at thousands of jobs being potentially impacted,” Lamb said. “We support … working to combat obesity, but to just target soda when we have so many things in our food chain that are sugary—we can’t support that.”

Interesting foot note: The spokesman for the soda tax campaign, the Seattle Healthy Kids Coalition, is Aaron Pickus—the longtime spokesman for former Mayor McGinn, who proposed the original soda tax four years ago.

3. This morning, the city will once again remove a persistent unauthorized encampment above the Ballard Locks and provide its residents with information about open shelter beds and services in the hopes that some will accept their offers. The Locks encampment has been swept numerous times thanks in large part to repeated complaints by Ballard residents about garbage and erosion at the site.

George Scarola, Murray’s homelessness director, acknowledged Thursday that “of course [the decision to clear a particular encampment] is in part based on complaints. He says the Locks encampment is a “longstanding issue—as long as I’ve been here, I’ve heard people complain about it.” But, he says, the city is getting better about offering real services and shelter, rather than simply directing people to line up at bare-bones shelters downtown. “Are we simply moving people from one place to another? We are doing some of that,” Scarola acknowledges. But, he says, “We are getting 40 percent who are accepting services.” And “moving people around is somewhat useful, because we can remove some of the garbage,” which is a major source of neighborhood complaints.

The sweep begins at 8:30 this morning.

4. A new website that includes a petition to “recruit” 2016 Republican. gubernatorial candidate Bill Bryant for mayor appears to be the handiwork of Matthew Donnellan, Bryant’s campaign manager in his unsuccessful effort to unseat Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee last year. Although the owner of the site paid to register it through a service that hides site owner identity, Ben Krokower of  the consulting firm Strategies 360 noticed Donnellan’s name in the source code and pointed it out on Twitter. Bill Bryant received 32 percent of the vote in King County in his race for governor.

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.

Density, Development, Diversity, immigration, Mayor Murray, Morning Crank, Transportation, Trump, Urbanism

Morning Crank: The War on Immigrants Is a War on Cities

1. “The war on facts has become a war on cities.” 

That was Mayor Ed Murray’s latest volley in his own war against the Trump Administration, launched yesterday along with a lawsuit charging that Trump has no legal right to pull federal funds from “sanctuary cities” that refuse to enforce federal immigration statutes according to the new Administration’s harsh interpretation of those laws.

Yesterday, the mayor and City Attorney Pete Holmes announced they were filing suit against the US Justice Department, whose director, KKK apologist Jeff Sessions, announced this week that he would pull Department of Justice grants to cities that refuse to assist federal agents in tracking down and detaining undocumented immigrants. Seattle’s 2017 budget assumes $2.6 million in DOJ grants for domestic violence prevention, officer body cams, human trafficking prosecution, and more.

The lawsuit contends that Sessions’ order violates the 10th Amendment, by dictating the way the city enforces federal laws, and the Spending Clause from Article 1 of the Constitution, by attempting to coerce the city into aiding immigration agents by threatening to withhold federal funding if it doesn’t.

“We have the law on our side: the federal government cannot compel our police department to enforce federal immigration law and cannot use our federal dollars to coerce Seattle into turning our backs on our immigrant and refugee communities,” Murray said.

Trump’s war on immigrants is a war on cities because cities are made stronger, politically, culturally, and economically, by the presences of immigrants, and he’s waging that war because city values—diversity, inclusion, resistance, queerness, intellectualism, and unconformity—are anathema to his backward-looking vision of a nation united by fear and mutual distrust. Seattle is the first city to formally resist Sessions’ and Trump’s unconstitutional bullying by filing a lawsuit. If cities’ response to the last unconstitutional order targeting immigrants was any indication, we won’t be the last.

2. A Queen Anne homeowner’s dogged, well-financed effort to kill backyard cottages in Seattle won a victory that will further delay a proposal to make it easier for homeowners to build accessory units and cost taxpayers thousands of dollars in the process.

This week, city council member Mike O’Brien announced that thanks to activist Marty Kaplan‘s successful effort to delay new rules that would loosen the regulations that currently make it prohibitively expensive for many homeowners to build accessory units, the city will do a full environmental impact statement to determine the impact accessory units will have on the city’s environment. The intuitively obvious conclusion would be that backyard cottages improve the environment, because they add density, which helps prevent suburban sprawl and reduce auto dependence. In addition, they allow homeowners to age in place, promoting multigenerational households and preventing the development of lot-line-to-lot-line McMansions that often sprout in neighborhoods when single-family properties change hands.

O’Brien proposed his backyard cottage legislation in May 2016. With any luck, he will be able to introduce new legislation sometime in the summer of 2018.

3. Bikesharing advocates will say goodbye to Pronto with a group ride tomorrow afternoon. Pronto riders will gather at 3rd Ave. and Broad Street at 5pm (there are two Pronto stations within two blocks, but the clunky green bikes are available all over downtown) and ride slowly up Capitol Hill, ending at a bar TBA. “Ed Murray’s house for bell ringing party optional.” Murray announced he was killing the money-losing bikeshare system in January.

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.

City Hall, immigration, Mayor Murray

“Willing to Lose Every Single Penny”: Mayor Doubles Down on Seattle’s Sanctuary Status

img_0658

At a hastily called press conference Wednesday afternoon, Mayor Ed Murray declared he was “willing to lose every single penny” of federal funding that flows to Seattle in order to protect undocumented immigrants and refugees living in the city. Murray’s remarks came after President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring that the federal government would withhold all federal funding from so-called “sanctuary cities”—a catchall term for cities, like Seattle, that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration agents by handing undocumented immigrants over for deportation.

Calling January 27, 2017 “the darkest day in immigration history since the internment of Japanese-Americans,” Murray said, “We will not, as we did in World War II, allow our police to become deputies of the federal government and round up immigrants in this city.” The city argues that any federal order requiring SPD to ask demand detainees’ immigration status would violate the 10th Amendment, which states that the federal government can’t force states to enforce any federal law.

The city stands to lose as much as $85 million in federal funding if Trump makes good on his threat and pulls every federal grant the city receives. In that scenario, the department that would be hardest hit is the Human Services Department, followed by the Seattle Department of Transportation and the Office of Housing. Anticipating that worst-case scenario, Murray said, he has asked every department to “reprioritize” its budget for a post-federal-funding future; specifically, he said, “I’m going to give them a number and ask them to cut their budget to that number.” When I asked whether he would order all departments to cut a certain percentage from their budgets, as previous mayors have done when economic downturns necessitated major cuts, Murray said, “I need more than a couple of hours [after the executive order was released] to answer your question.”

Turning to legal remedies, Murray said the city “is prepared to take any legal avenues that we need to to ensure that immigrants, regardless of their documentation, remain in this city and that the United States Constitution is not violated.” He also suggested what form that legal action might take, noting that the federal government is supposed to prove there is a “nexus” between any funds they withhold and their reason for withholding it. That’s a potentially risky move, though, because it could leave grants the Seattle Police Department receives through the Department of Justice especially vulnerable to cuts, since police would be the ones refusing to follow federal orders to turn undocumented immigrants over to federal agents.

img_0652City attorney Pete Holmes, who showed up to the press conference with a copy of the Constitution tucked in his inside jacket pocket, said he found it ironic that a “law and order” administration would specifically target funding for police. “[Federal] law enforcement funds help increase the security of the country,” Holmes told me before the press conference. “It’s difficult to match up. The prescribed remedies do exactly the opposite.”

Holmes said he’s “asking all the departments to identify all grants and federal funding” but declined to specify which departments stood to lose the most. “I’d rather not engage in shadowboxing these general assertions about grants,” he said. “I’d rather drill down on the specifics.”

 

Lisa Daugaard, head of the Public Defender Association, which works on police reform was in the audience during the mayor’s press conference. Afterward, she suggested another potential avenue for legal action in the fact that the executive order gives the US attorney general “general, limitless jurisdiction” to define which cities are “sanctuary cities” and punish them accordingly. There’s no official definition of a “sanctuary city,” but the Trump Administration appears to be targeting large cities whose voters did not support him, such as New York and Chicago. By defining sanctuary cities “arbitrarily,” Daugaard argues, Trump and his attorney general are  overstepping their authority under federal law and opening themselves up to a legal challenge by local jurisdictions.

“Federal agencies, and the attorney general as an agency, can’t arbitrarily choose to take action or not take action because they don’t like the lawful choices cities make,” Daugaard says. “The problem with the executive order is it gives the attorney general limitless authority, without any standards, to make arbitrary decisions about who loses federal funding. That’s the poison pill.”

Daugaard holds out hope—if you can call it that—that Trump will be forced to back down on enforcing the order when his own supporters in the hundreds of jurisdictions that have declared themselves sanctuary cities or counties start feeling the impact the loss of millions of federal dollars will have on their communities. “It’s unlawful, but it’s also untenable,” Daugaard says. “It will be devastating to hundreds of cities and counties, which will lead to a huge loss of support and momentum” for the administration.