1. In one of her final acts as council president, Councilmember Sara Nelson passed a watered-down version of a plan she introduced earlier this year, which in its original form would have prohibited political consultants from working for the city while also working on campaigns.
The legislation targeted consultants like Christian Sinderman, who—under an unusual arrangement—worked as a kind of de facto city staffer for Mayor Bruce Harrell, complete with his own office at City Hall, while also working as a campaign consultant to both Harrell and Foster, who defeated Nelson roundly in November.
The bill would originally have also required political consultants who contract with the city to wait one year before working on political campaigns.
In its final form, the bill only requires political consultants to register with the city, similar to existing requirements for lobbyists. Council members raised concerns about whether the bill—proposed in November—was rushed, with Maritza Rivera saying all the late amendments were so “confusing” that she would just “vote no all the way across the board.”
Even though her colleagues effectively neutered her bill, Nelson said it was a step in the right direction. “Will this fix all forms of undue influence on policy at City Hall? No, but it is a meaningful start,” she said. “It shed lights on an area where the lines between politics and policy are blurred in ways that erode public trust.”
2. In the first major shakeup of her transition period, Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson announced on Wednesday that she’s picked Angela Brady, the current head of the city’s Office of the Waterfront, Civic Projects, and Sound Transit as interim Seattle Department of Transportation director. She’ll replace Adiam Emery, a former deputy mayor for Mayor Bruce Harrell whom he appointed as interim SDOT director earlier this year.
The decision to replace Emery was widely expected: New Seattle mayors almost always pick their own transportation directors to reflect their own priorities, and this may be even more true than usual for Wilson, the longtime director of the Transit Riders Union. We’ve asked Wilson’s team whether she plans to do a national search for an SDOT director.
For those with long memories, Brady is a somewhat surprising pick. Although the pedestrian-friendly section of the waterfront development near Pike Place Marker has been widely lauded, the rest of the downtown waterfront is dominated by a wide surface highway that’s up to nine lanes wide (in Pioneer Square, the city’s most historic neighborhood). The decision to build a surface highway and waterfront tunnel was made before Brady was at the office of the waterfront, but her 12-year tenure does put her on the hook for choices the city made after transportation planners decided to design waterfront road for cars instead of people.
Brady was in charge when the city decided to massively expand Mercer Street, another wide expanse of asphalt that got several lanes wider in each direction during her time as SDOT’s Mercer Corridor Program manager. Expanding the roadway didn’t fix traffic, as boosters promised, but it did make the corridor more dangerous for bikes and more frustrating for everyone who uses it—a reflection of the mid-2000s logic (incorrect, as we knew even then) that widening roads makes traffic go faster.