By Erica C. Barnett
The Seattle City Council is prepping to adopt the city’s 2025 legislative agenda—the list of policy issues the city’s lobbyists advocate for in Olympia each year—and this year’s version looks notably different from legislative wish lists of the past.
For starters, it’s just two pages of large-font bullet points, including a photo of downtown Seattle that takes up a third of the second page. Including interstitial headlines, the legislative agenda clocks in at just 574 words—about 7 percent of last year’s 16-page document laying out the city’s priorities, and a fraction of the city’s previous legislative agendas.
PubliCola asked the city’s Office of Intergovernmental Relations director and the city council’s communications director for information about why the legislative agenda has been reduced to the equivalent of a two-sided flyer. The city council did not respond to our questions, and our questions for OIR were redirected to the mayor’s office.
Mayoral spokesperson Callie Craighead said the city “received direct feedback from State legislators that they would prefer a condensed, concise, and readable version of our legislative priorities, as the previous format was very long and unwieldy,” and pointed out that King County’s legislative agenda is also a list of bullet points.
“The legislative agenda is meant to be a high-level, public-facing document that aligns Seattle’s delegation with the most pressing needs and priorities of the City in a concise format,” Craighead said. “It is not intended to define or limit the scope of work for City lobbyists.”
As an advocate for transparency, I tend to think more information is better; if state legislators want bullet points, it would be a simple thing to produce a high-level version of a more detailed explanatory document. But accepting the premise that less is more, it’s worth a closer look at the list of bullet points.
On closer examination, the city’s legislative agenda is a mix of general talking points (“Champion legislation that fosters a safer environment for everyone by giving local jurisdictions tools and funding to uphold justice, protect communities, and hold those who violate the law accountable for their actions”) and hyper-specific requests, such as allowing Seattle Municipal Court to hire pro tem judges who live outside the city and increasing funding for Red Barn Ranch, a former youth camp that the city is working to redevelop as a recreational facility for BIPOC youth.
In general, the new priorities on the list represent the city’s efforts to beef up law enforcement and deprioritize police accountability, which has mostly disappeared from the city’s legislative agenda after being a top priority in recent years. (Earlier this year, Councilmember Bob Kettle suggested jettisoning the adopted 2024 agenda because the current council didn’t write it.) It also supports funding for “comprehensive” addiction treatment, but also “secure detox”—forced medical treatment—and an expansion of involuntary commitment for people with substance use disorders.
Despite the city’s claim that the legislative agenda is now clear and easy to understand, some of the items are pretty tough to interpret. “Support special events and World Cup activations by allowing flexible movement of food and drink” could mean pretty much anything, from the addition of more food-delivery loading zones to allowing people to walk around with alcoholic drinks in their hands. (The current council and mayor are inconsistent on the subject of using drugs in public.) Because there’s no further explanation, the public can only guess what the city is trying to do.
Similarly, “improve the state’s encampment resolution program to provide more urgent responses and additional funds for maintenance and activation of WSDOT rights-of-way” could mean expanding the successful Co-LEAD program, which provides case management and (crucially) guaranteed hotel-based lodging for people living in state rights-of-way; or it could mean changing the right-of-way program to focus on getting people out of sight quickly, regardless of where the people end up.
It’s also noteworthy what’s absent from this year’s agenda. An incomplete list of the things city lobbyists will no longer prioritize includes comprehensive tax reform; funding to expand human services; measures to improve voter turnout and increase access to public records; laws protecting access to abortion, including for people traveling to Washington state from states with abortion bans; reforms to the eviction process and financial assistance for renters; efforts to reduce racial disproportionality in the criminal legal system; expanded labor protections, including for gig workers; restrictions on police union bargaining; and increased funding to prevent and help survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault.
Ultimately, Seattle’s legislative agenda is just that: An agenda, not a list of items the city actually expects to pass in Olympia. (If anything, Seattle might get further in Olympia by advocating against the things it actually wants to happen). Still, as an agenda, it does spell out clearly what the city now prioritizes and what it doesn’t. In the former category: Arrests, punishment, and coercive treatment, along with vaguely worded commitments to “stabilization for a range of affordable housing options” and improvements to pedestrian safety “through safe systems improvements”—the phrase de rigeur that has largely replaced “Vision Zero.” In the latter: Reforming the criminal legal system, improving transparency and public access, and protecting tenants and workers from evictions and stolen wages.