By Erica C. Barnett
Mayor Katie Wilson issued two executive order on Thursday. The first is aimed at speeding up the production of shelter in the run-up to this year’s World Cup games and beyond. The second will help speed up the city’s slowest bus, the 8, by finally painting a long-planned bus lane on Denny Way.
Wilson announced the orders at a meeting of her transition team at El Centro de la Raza on Beacon Hill.
More news is expected out of Wilson’s team in the next week, including the dismissals of several high-profile department heads appointed by her predecessor, Bruce Harrell.
City Light CEO Dawn Lindell, appointed in 2024, is out, internal sources tell PubliCola (no word on her replacement yet). So, we’ve heard, is interim Office of Labor Relations interim director Chase Munroe—a Harrell appointee who worked, on city time, on behalf of the Royal Esquire Club, a private men’s club with longstanding ties to Harrell. Adrienne Thompson, a onetime labor policy advisor to ex-mayor Jenny Durkan who applied for the labor relations in 2022, will reportedly be Munroe’s replacement as interim director.
Other departments that could see changes in the next week include the Office of Housing (currently headed by Maiko Winkler-Chin) and the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs (headed by Hamdi Mohamed, who’s also a Seattle Port Commissioner.)
Wilson’s first executive order, on homelessness, sets a deadline of March for a multi-department work group to “identify all possible financial incentives, permitting changes, and policy changes” that could help the city build new shelters and housing quickly. The group will also “identify City-owned property that could be used temporarily or permanently to support shelter and housing opportunities.”
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
The order also directs the city’s Office of Intergovernmental Relations to work with other governments to identify additional public land that could be used for shelter and housing, and directs the Human Services Department to identify existing shelter programs that have room for expansion.
Wilson has pledged to add 4,000 new shelter beds and housing units by the end of her term, with a short-term goal of adding 500 before the World Cup games here in June.
Wilson will have to find funding for the new shelter projects in the existing city budget. Last year, the city council set aside a little over $11 million to help address potential funding cuts from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, which had changed its guidelines for funding housing projects to emphasize short-term housing over the type of permanent housing projects that rely on HUD funding locally.
After a judge ruled that HUD couldn’t change its standards in the middle of a funding cycle, the department allowed the application process to move forward under the old criteria. HUD could still pull the rug out from under providers by refusing to fund projects next year, but if it doesn’t, that $11 million could be used to fund Wilson’s shelter push.
There’s also the 116-member Unified Care Team, which removes encampments and costs the city upward of $30 million a year. Although the council adopted a Rob Saka-sponsored amendment prohibiting Wilson from spending the UCT’s budget on other purposes, some creative reallocation could put the giant team to better use.
Wilson said she’s evaluating how the UCT prioritizes encampments for removal and may change them. As an interim step, Wilson halted a planned removal of an encampment in Ballard after meeting with encampment residents earlier this week; on Thursday, she said she wanted to gain an “understanding, from the perspective of folks who are living outside, what can we do to make the process of an encampment removal more comprehensible and just maximize the the opportunities for people to get into a better situation.”
Wilson’s second executive order directs the Seattle Department of Transportation to immediately paint a long-delayed bus lane on Denny Way, a change that will help the most infamously delayed bus in the city, Metro’s Route 8, be a little less late. Last year, under Harrell, SDOT rejected the bus lane, arguing that giving buses priority would make drivers late. Wilson said the bus lane would run, at a minimum, from Fifth Ave. to Fairview, the most congested section of the route.
“I know the feeling of waiting at the stop for the bus to come and it’s 30 minutes late or 40 minutes late,” Wilson said. “I know the feeling of sitting on the bus knowing that you could be walking up that hill faster than that bus is going.”
ECB wrote that the Denny Way or Route 8 bus lanes are “long planned” and “long delayed”. What is long? I have been following Route 8 issues since its inception in 1995. The “bus lanes” should be termed BAT (business access and transit) lanes, as general-purpose traffic will need to make right turns. The ask for transit priority is relatively recent and comes from the community; the planning will stem from this executive order. That is fitting, as the original Route 8 arose from the community; Metro held a process at the behest of community demand.
This is why we supported Katie! She gets the perspective of the unhoused before taking action on encampment removals, she remembers riding the bus and uses that experience to guide her transit policy. Policy from the bottom-up, not top-down like Bruce.
Ah, buses…someone I know bought a beater bike the other day after getting fed up with bus service on the 61 from Lake Shitty to Green Lake. Services delays are common, even at the start of route, and after sitting on a stationary bus for 8 minutes as their work start time approached, they just left the bus and hoofed it. Why are buses not prioritized? As https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes mentions in every video, if you have to have buses — not trams or other separated modes of transportation — they should be prioritized. Why should 30+ people in one vehicle be impeded by 30 vehicles with one person each? I’m hopeful she can make some needed changes here, not a comprehensively as Ann Hidalgo did in Paris but there is a lot more room for improvement here in this car-brained collection of suburbs that thinks it’s a city (“hey, we have a big airport!1!”).
Part of the problem is that every transit worker who gets anywhere near the light rail is nuts about trains. Buses don’t matter because they aren’t cool, not because they aren’t necessary.
Trams/streetcars > buses if busses have to share the road with cars and their drivers of varying degrees of engagement. But then Seattle was largely built-out in the streetcar era, as were so many other American cities who are slowly rediscovering this fact. It’s not an accident that the light rail, as it stands now, closely mirrors the old Interurban that ran from Everett to Tacoma. Imagine if that still existed?
Ha! A Hidalgo of Seattle would be good, but Wilson could only come close if our transit construction costs could be cut by 3/4 while delivering in 1/4 of the time. There are too many college tuitions, second homes, and private yachts at stake for such a thing to happen here. I do not doubt Wison’s bonafides on public transit; I do doubt that Public Private Partnership parasitism can be easily dislodged.
A lot of the costs are to purchase land that should belong to the public (since no one made any of it…but eventually they will figure out to charge us for air, water is already monetized). With a system of land rental vs ownership, land use could be radically different and projects like this, as public goods, could be more easily built out. But the choice to claim the land and name it after ourselves (the names Denny and Terry and Yesler and many more live on) was made long ago. Undoing would take some understand of it and then a pretty deep commitment to put that wealth back into the commons. The speculator class who own so much of Seattle would howl and call in every favor they have to defend their unearned wealth.
ata girl!