1. Members of Seattle’s Equitable Development Initiative board, along with dozens of community organizations, signed a letter of support for two EDI leaders at the city’s Office of Community Planning and Development who wrote a scathing letter late month accusing Mayor Jenny Durkan and OCPD of emotionally abusing EDI staff while sowing division among the communities EDI is supposed to support.
“As community stakeholders and EDI Board members, we… have witnessed the emotional labor required of EDI staff, valued for their deep ties to community, but directed to lead this program in a way that has perpetuated inequities for those it purports to serve,” the letter of support says. “The City of Seattle, OPCD, and the EDI must do better by BIPOC staff and community organizations.”
EDI manager Ubax Gardheere and EDI strategist Boting Zhang wrote an open letter last week saying they were taking a “mental health break” from the city. “Our bodies have been weaponized in an institution that historically and presently has actively fought against you, and you have sensed this,” they wrote.
The Equitable Development Initiative began in 2015 under then-mayor Ed Murray as a revolving fund intended to advance community-led projects in areas of the city with a high risk of displacement and low access to opportunity. None of four demonstration projects that were chosen to launch the initiative have been built.
By saying “it is city policy” to avoid dispersing people unless they’re impeding the use of public spaces, the former city attorney argues, the amendment will make it impossible for the city to sweep anyone, including, potentially, someone who is “blocking traffic by pitching a tent in the middle of 5th Ave. downtown.”
During last year’s budget process, Durkan proposed eliminating a long-promised $30 million fund to pay for EDI projects out of the proceeds of the Mercer Megablock sale, citing the pandemic; the council restored the funds, but EDI proponents saw Durkan’s willingness to defund the initiative as a betrayal.
Since then, the mayor has appointed her own Equitable Communities task force to recommend spending priorities for $100 million in investments in BIPOC communities, which includes the $30 million; some advocates have criticized the makeup of the task force, saying it is composed largely of Durkan allies and groups that are seeking a slice of the money.
“When she set up the task force, a lot of people didn’t want to join,” Yordanos Teferi, of the Multicultural Community Center, recalled. “And then we learned that those who did join the task force were not coming into the process trying to advocate for communities at large—they were just advocating for their own projects or their own organizations.” The MCC, along with Africatown, the Ethiopian Community in Seattle, Puget Sound Sage, Friends of Little Saigon, and more than two dozen other groups, signed the letter of support.
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2. Former Seattle city attorney Mark Sidran—best known for defending the Teen Dance Ordinance, impounding people’s cars over expired driver’s licenses, and, oh yeah, supporting a zillion laws aimed at criminalizing homelessness—opposes the Compassion Seattle Charter initiative. In an unpublished piece, Sidran wrote that the measure—which would temporarily amend Seattle’s constitution to require the city to spend 12 percent of its general fund on human services—violates “good government” standards by using the city charter to adopt policy and spending priorities, which is the purpose of legislation.
“This lack of flexibility and accountability is ‘bad government,’ because budgets should weigh all the competing needs at a moment in time and then allocate limited funds based on judgments about priorities,” Sidran wrote. If advocates for other priorities realize they can just use the charter to mandate spending, he continued, they will follow suit, “locking up” city dollars so they can’t be used for emerging needs.
So far, so good. But before initiative opponents welcome Sidran into the fold, they should know the main reason he opposes the measure: He believes it will make it too hard for the city to remove encampments. By saying “it is city policy” to avoid dispersing people unless they’re impeding the use of public spaces, Sidran argues, the amendment will make it impossible for the city to sweep anyone, including, potentially, someone who is “blocking traffic by pitching a tent in the middle of 5th Ave. downtown.”
“During last year’s budget process, Durkan proposed eliminating a long-promised $30 million fund to pay for EDI projects out of the proceeds of the Mercer Megablock sale,”
Has anyone covered what the proceeds of the proposed ground rent for the Mercer project would have yielded vs the fee simple sale of $150M? If the RFP numbers are plugged into a future value calculation (excel or google sheets, whatever you like) it would have paid $1.3B to Seattle over 99 years: annualized that’s just under $13M/year. $150M looks like a giveaway and that $30M would be less than 3 years annualized revenue.