The council also decided not to fund a controversial Burke-Gilman Trail alternative and to hold off on studying impact fees on new apartments.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council’s transportation levy committee, which includes all nine council members, approved a $1.55 billion transportation levy package on Tuesday, one of the final steps before the levy heads to the November ballot.

Progressive Councilmember Tammy Morales didn’t manage to pass her proposal to add $150 million to the levy for sidewalks, arterial paving, and other projects, but she did score a significant victory: Her amendment to restore funding for the neighborhood-initiated safety partnership program, a revamp of the Neighborhood Street Fund designed to increase access to city funding for marginalized communities, passed 4-3 after two of the nine council members, Sara Nelson and Maritza Rivera, abstained.

Morales’ amendment also zeroed out a proposed $14 million “district fund” that would have empowered council members to direct the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) to build specific projects in their districts. The proposed levy still funds Councilmember Rob Saka’s new “neighborhood scale traffic safety programs,” which Saka said could be used to fund various types of “smaller scale safety improvements in neighborhoods and communities” that emerge in the future.

Councilmember Cathy Moore expressed confusion about this late addition, wondering aloud how it was different from the neighborhood-initiated projects, which came out of the work of a task force focused on creating more equitable access to small-scale transportation funding. Saka responded by saying the new fund would be a kind of catch-all for many types of projects. “The idea is that it could be for neighborhood-initiated safety [or] it could be for the district projects fund,” Saka said. “You can call whatever you want, whatever bucket or subcategory you so choose, but broadly what it is, it’s all the same thing. It’s smaller scale safety improvements in neighborhoods and communities.”

The neighborhood-initiated projects initiative, an equity-focused revamp of the popular Neighborhood Street Fund, has proved surprisingly controversial. (On Tuesday, several council members groused that most of the money would probably just end up in Morales’ Southeast Seattle district, the most diverse in the city.) The basic idea is that SDOT, with the help of its equity work group, would reach out to historically marginalized communities without a history of applying for or receiving transportation grants and work with them to develop small-scale projects.

Saka, who previously refused to hear a presentation on SDOT’s strategy for incorporating equity into the levy, derisively called the entire program a “slush fund” while cross-examining SDOT director Greg Spotts about whether the program would really do anything new.

“In the absence of this slush fund, does SDOT not undertake any of that work, currently, now?” Saka asked.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t see it as a slush fund whatsoever,” Spotts responded.

“Does SDOT engage—so, characterize it however you want—does SDOT not engage in this underlying work you’re talking about now?” Saka said.

“This program is proposed by the executive to supplement previous waves of investment and make investment in a new way, to bring people into the circle of power who previously have not felt included.,” Spotts said.

Morales’ amendment restores all but $1.5 million of the $41 million Harrell initially proposed for the program.

An amendment from Councilmember Dan Strauss that would take $20 million away from a proposed arterial road maintenance program and spend it building the controversial Leary Way alternative for completing the Burke-Gilman Trail through Ballard failed on a 5-4 vote. S

trauss has been a vocal advocate for the Leary option, a dog-leg detour preferred by industrial businesses who have spent decades fighting against a direct route connecting the two long-finished segments of the trail through Ballard. In hyping his amendment, Strauss derided the option long preferred by cyclists—a direct connection between the two incomplete segments of the existing path—as “a narrow strip of asphalt through an industrial area without a sidewalk.”

Another Strauss proposal to spend $5 million turning Ballard Ave. NW into a more pedestrian-friendly “curbless street” failed 8-1.

A proposal from Councilmember Cathy Moore to study transportation impact fees on new housing to pay for sidewalks also failed. Last year, the council considered, and ultimately rejected, legislation that would have amended the city’s comprehensive plan to allow the city to charge the fees, which are based on the premise that dense, urban living causes negative impacts on the city’s transportation system.

Sara Nelson, who joined last year’s narrow majority in defeating the impact fee proposal, said that because transportation fees would still require amending the comp plan, the council should consider them as part of the “big, long discussion and legislation on the comp plan update this coming year.” Mayor Bruce Harrell released his proposed update to the comprehensive plan earlier this year. “We’ve had developers, yes, weigh in on this. We’ve also had affordable housing providers weigh in in opposition to transportation impact fees, and so it’s clearly a discussion that merits a lot of sort of complex thinking,” Nelson said.

The final version of the levy proposal, which would cost the median Seattle homeowner around $45 a month, heads to the full council for approval next week.