Category: City Hall

Business, City Council, City Hall, gentrification, homelessness, Morning Crank, Taxes

Afternoon Crank: I Don’t Understand the Evidentiary Value

 

Image result for cascade bicycle club

1. For the past week, local right-wing talk show host Dori Monson has been on a jag about Cascade Bicycle Club, accusing the bicycling advocacy group of engaging in “gangland” tactics in their years-long effort to complete the “missing link” of the Burke-Gilman multi-use trail in Ballard. Monson’s evidence for this “gangster” activity? A single email from 2014, sent by Cascade policy director Brock Howell to former executive director Elizabeth Kiker, which reads, in full:

  Tue, 28 Oct 2014 16:23:00 -0700

Re: Josh Brower’s jacket Brock Howell <brock.howell@cascadebicycleclub.org> Elizabeth Kiker <elizabeth.kiker@cascadebicycleclub.org>

I would love to go around the litigation. Our best bet is to get this C.D. Stimson development project funded & built. Once it’s built, the operations of Salmon Bay Sand & Gravel and other light industry will likely have to be limited during evening hours due to noise issues —- especially if the development is a hotel, apartment or condo. Once their operations are impacted, it’s only a matter of time before they sell out and give up the litigation. Also, Brower’s “Plan B” will likely be completed in 2016 during a major maintenance project to Leary Way/Ave. Or, rather, we’ll at least get a road diet with bike lanes on Leary. So, in terms of meeting the needs of bicyclists in Ballard, some of the pressure should be lifted from us, and we can push for a true completion of the Burke-Gilman Trail no matter how long it takes.   In the interim, I’m looking forward to shoulder improvements to Shilshole Ave, which is supposed to go to bid this November (basically 1.5 years late) with construction soon there after.   The Connect Ballard team is working on an end-run-around the anti-business framing by building a business coalition in support of fixing the Missing Link. And Mary & I have talked about using Ballard as an ideal pilot neighborhood for creating Seattle’s first Bike-Friendly Business District.   So lots of good things potentially happening. With 240 Connect Ballard team members, hopefully we can make some things happen quickly.   -Brock

No context is provided for the email, and I was unable to obtain the rest of the email chain. However, here is some context that might help explain why a nearly four-year-old conversation between two people who have long since left Cascade might be surfacing now: After waging battle against the Missing Link for years, a group of business owners, including Salmon Bay Sand and Gravel, are trying to convince the new mayor, Jenny Durkan, to kill the project. The email, which the coalition attached to a letter rejecting a proposed settlement in their ongoing lawsuit against the city. bolsters their argument that bike activists really just want to destroy local businesses.

Absurd as that idea might sound, it’s basically the story the anti-Missing Link coalition’s attorney, Josh Brower, has been peddling for years. In fact, Brower tried to introduce the exact same email as evidence of an anti-business plot last year in a hearing before the city hearing examiner, who rejected the email as irrelevant. Here’s an excerpt from the transcript of that hearing, which begins with city hearing examiner Ryan Vancil expressing skepticism about Brower’s claim that it proves Cascade’s plan is to gentrify Ballard so that industrial businesses won’t be around to complain anymore.

EXAMINER VANCIL: [T]he concept you’re getting at is this land use pressure. We had an expert witness addressing those land use pressures, the tensions between the different land uses that are coming. I’m — I’m not sure how we’re getting at that through this. And we had this discussion when we didn’t admit this — this email. Even if this is an accurate — you know, if I sort of apply, sort of, a summary judgment standard, if — if this is exactly how Cascade feels about this and they would love to see every business gone in Ballard, I don’t see how that’s a land use pressure. It’s the opinion of a — of a nonprofit organization. It — it’s  not a … zoning or land use code pressure that’s coming from a use. And this is a hearing inherently analyzing — we are looking at the  analysis of different land uses and whether it’s adequate or not. So I’m just not — I mean, I get it that this is a good stick in the eye to Cascade but I don’t understand the evidentiary value of it.

MR. BROWER: Sure. And it’s not meant to be a stick in the eye, Mr. Examiner.

EXAMINER VANCIL: It comes across that way  very strongly.

MR. BROWER: Okay.

EXAMINER VANCIL: And, so I’m having a hard time understanding why —

MR. BROWER: Certainly.

EXAMINER VANCIL: — particularly with the limited time we have, how this is something we really want to be spending our time on.   

Brower says he did not provide the email, which was one of “hundreds or thousands” his team obtained through the discovery process, to Monson, his fellow talk-show host Todd Herman (who called Howell to confirm the email), or Safe Seattle, which posted the email in mid-April. Brower says he does not agree with Monson’s characterization of Howell and Cascade as “gangsters,” but adds, “I do believe CBC, Brock and other CBC staff have a very heavy handed and personal-attack approach to their advocacy. When CBC does not get what it wants it resorts to personal attacks, which I think is inappropriate in civil discourse.” Brower went on Monson’s show on Tuesday, where he posited that Cascade is “truly trying to put those [Ballard industrial] businesses out of business.” Although Brower stayed on message and avoided personal attacks, he did not object when Monson accused Cascade of engaging in “gangster stuff,” “raw corruption,” and “collud[ing] with developers to put condos on the waterfront where maritime businesses used to be.”

2. Learn to trust the Crank: At last night’s meeting of the 47th District Democrats, Debra Entenman, a field representative for Congressman Adam Smith, announced that she will be challenging state 47th District Rep. Mark Hargrove, a Republican, this year. Entenman has the support of the House Democratic Campaign Committee, which funds and campaigns for Democratic candidates.

Earlier this week, ousted King County Democrats chair Bailey Stober told the Seattle Times that he was running for the position as an “independent Democrat.” The surprise announcement came just two days before Entenman was expected to announce she was running, and just one week after Stober was forced to resign from his $98,000-a-year job at King County over allegations of sexual harassment and workplace misconduct. (Three separate investigations and a 14-hour “trial” by the King County Democrats’ executive board concluded that Stober was guilty of the vast majority of the charges against him, which also included allegations of financial misconduct.)

The 47th District won’t have its formal endorsement process until later this year, but the district’s chairman, Aaron Schuler, announced that he was removing Stober from his position as sergeant-at-arms for the district, citing the fact that Stober had threatened one of the group’s members via text message and is running for office without the support of his party. (I have seen the text message and can confirm that Stober threatened the recipient if she spoke against him politically.) During the same meeting, another member said she felt threatened by Stober’s supporters during the process that resulted in his resignation. “I felt that I was a potential target,” she said. During a panel discussion later in the meeting, Washington State Democratic Party Chair Tina Podlodowski said she hoped that what happened in the King County party would be “a cautionary tale around the state. … I’ve gotta say, as Democrats, one of our tenets is that we believe women,” Podlodowski continued. “I think we could have done a lot of things better.”

3. The One Table task force, which was charged with coming up with regional solutions for the root causes of homelessness and came back with a plan that included just 5,000 units of housing over the next three years across the entire King County region, was supposed to hold its final meeting today in Auburn. But the long-scheduled meeting was canceled quietly and abruptly earlier this week, and removed from the One Table website with no public notice.  One possible reason for the cancellation: An upcoming vote on the city’s proposed employee hours tax, the outcome of which could dramatically alter the task force’s final recommendations. Yesterday, after Amazon effectively threatened to pick up its toys and leave if Seattle passes the tax, the City Council’s finance committee decided to postpone additional discussion on the proposal, prompting speculation that the council will not hit its own self-imposed mid-May deadline for voting on the tax. The tax is expected to bring in $75 million a year.

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site or making a one-time contribution! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as reporting-related and office expenses. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

City Hall, Mayor Durkan, neighborhoods, Renters

Kathy Nyland, Who Worked to Make City’s Neighborhood Department More Inclusive, Is Out

Late last Friday afternoon, Mayor Jenny Durkan announced that she is replacing Department of Neighborhoods director Kathy Nyland with Andres Mantilla, a veteran of the Nickels Administration who worked as a political consultant for the firm Ceis Bayne East before joining the new administration as an external-relations advisor in November. Mantilla, who responded to my questions about his plans for the department by directing me to Durkan’s communication office, has reportedly proposed reorganizing DON, perhaps by subsuming some of its wide-ranging duties—which include everything from the P-Patch program to historic preservation to funding for small neighborhood projects—into other departments such as the Office of Planning and Community Development and the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections.

Durkan’s decision to remove Nyland—who has been assigned a new job as “senior advisor” somewhere in the parks department—wasn’t entirely unexpected (Nyland had been on tenterhooks for nearly six months), but it should disappoint anyone who liked what the city hall change agent was doing at DON. Although the Murray administration will be forever tarnished by the scandal that forced him from office, Nyland was the brains and the muscle behind one of the administration’s real achievements: Empowering people who are not traditional neighborhood activists to participate in neighborhood planning and define and shape Seattle’s changing communities. Nyland’s efforts to make DON more inclusive and responsive to people outside the traditional neighborhood power structure met with staunch resistance from both inside and outside the department, including traditional neighborhood activists who viewed community input as a zero-sum game. Nyland’s mission at the department was to prove, as she often put it, that inclusion (of renters, people of color, people who work for wages and can’t attend daytime meetings) isn’t the same thing as “silencing” the people who have dominated neighborhood conversations for decades.

Durkan’s reason for removing Nyland now—and for keeping her on at the city, instead of simply cutting her loose as she has other department heads—is unclear. (In her announcement Friday, Durkan had only praise for the outgoing director). What is clear is that Nyland has had a target on her back since at least 2016, when she rejected a move by the Pioneer Square Historic Preservation Board to grant historic-landmark status to a 107-year-old parking garage on Alaskan Way at the behest of neighboring condo owners who would have lost their views to a new 200-apartment development on the waterfront. (Nyland’s decision to overturn the preservation board’s ruling was later overturned by a city hearing examiner.)

Later that same year, at Murray’s behest, Nyland cut formal and financial ties with the city’s 13 neighborhood district councils, which had served as informal advisory bodies since the 1990s. The councils, which have generally opposed density and whose members often characterize renters as “transients” with little investment in their neighborhoods, are mostly made up of older white homeowners, and are not representative of an increasingly diverse Seattle where half the residents are renters. The district councils continued to exist, but no longer receive city funding; instead, under Nyland’s leadership, the city  funded a 16-member Community Involvement Commission and charged it with helping city departments improve their outreach to all city residents, including underrepresented communities such as low-income people, homeless residents and renters.

Back in 2017, Nyland told me that her mission was to help dismantle “systems… that are not easy to navigate,” especially for people outside established neighborhood groups. “What if someone works at night? What if someone has kids and can’t get a babysitter? What if someone can’t speak English? What if someone just didn’t know about the meetings? They’re not making a choice not to come. They can’t come!” Nyland said.

Unsurprisingly, Nyland’s dedication to inclusiveness riled the old-guard neighborhood movement—and Durkan has appeared responsive to their complaints. During the campaign, Durkan talked about “bringing back the district councils”—which, again, were not dismantled—and said she thinks “the city has quit listening to the neighborhoods’ needs.” This, as Nyland pointed out long before Durkan was elected, is a false narrative. Inclusion, in all areas of public life, doesn’t mean silencing the people who have traditionally dominated the conversation. It means that their voices no longer get to be the only ones in the room.

While it’s unclear whether Nyland’s ouster was hastened by complaints from traditional neighborhood activists, the move is hardly an encouraging message to renters, immigrants, and other marginalized communities who felt that Nyland was making progress toward opening up the city to everyone, not just the people who show up at every meeting and shout the loudest—and that she still had a lot of work to do.

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site or making a one-time contribution! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as reporting-related and office expenses. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

City Hall, Density, Development, homelessness, housing, neighborhoods, Seattle magazine

Why Fort Lawton Is a Tipping Point in Seattle’s Housing Debate

This piece originally appeared in Seattle magazine.

Photo Credit: Alex Crook

The Fort Lawton army reserve center—an old military outpost in Magnolia, established in 1900 to defend Seattle and North Puget Sound—isn’t much to look at these days. What was once a bustling, 703-acre military base, housing as many as 20,000 soldiers, has shrunk over the years to a mere 34 acres abutting 534-acre Discovery Park. Abandoned barracks, windswept parking lots and boarded-up windows make it obvious to the visitor who wanders inside its boundaries that this is a place frozen in time—frozen, specifically, in 2011, when the U.S. Army formally mothballed the facility.

But the battle over the future of Fort Lawton can be traced back to 2008, when a group of homeowners in Magnolia sued to prevent the city from building a 415-unit mixed-income housing development, including 85 units for homeless families, on the site. (The Army ceded management of the land to the city in 2005 in preparation for its closure, and offered the land to the city for free on the condition it is developed as affordable housing.) In 2010, a state appeals court ruled that the city would have to produce a full environmental impact statement (EIS) before moving forward with the housing proposal; that requirement, combined with the recession, has kept redevelopment plans on the shelf ever since.

Last year, shortly after an annual count of the city’s homeless population tallied a record 4,000 people sleeping on Seattle streets, the city revived the plan, issuing an EIS that laid out its preferred alternative to the earlier plan. It includes less housing, more open space and several acres of playfields on which a school could eventually be built. Public interest was revived, too: The plan, which includes 85 supportive housing units for formerly homeless seniors and veterans, 100 subsidized units for low- to moderate-income families and 52 Habitat for Humanity townhomes, has garnered more than 1,000 public comments.

Many of the comments strike a familiar tone, arguing that the new residents will drive down property values, overwhelm local streets and damage the historic single-family character of a close-knit neighborhood.

But something has shifted since 2008: More Magnolia residents—and former Magnolia residents who’ve been priced out of the neighborhood—are stepping up in support of the project. At a January public hearing at the Magnolia United Church of Christ, near Magnolia Village, dozens of speakers voiced support for the city’s proposal—a dramatic shift in tone since last summer, when the public comment at similar meetings was overwhelmingly negative. True, some of the speakers had found out about the hearing from the pro-housing Housing Development Consortium, but just as many speakers identified themselves as current or former Magnolia homeowners—the very demographic that torpedoed the project 10 years ago.

George Smith, who has owned his Magnolia home, less than a mile from Fort Lawton, for 26 years, was one of those who spoke up in January, and he says he’s seen a shift since 2008. “I think in the years since then, the homelessness and affordability crisis has gotten so much worse that you’d have to be living in a hole underground not to understand, at some level, that we’ve got a huge problem in Seattle,” Smith says. While he still has neighbors who oppose the plan, he also sees a new group of people who welcome the project. “I think that the folks that move into the Fort Lawton housing will be folks that are able to contribute to the community in positive ways,” Smith adds. “Hopefully, they’ll also be a little more diverse than the Magnolia demographic.”

Magnolia, generally speaking, is wealthier (average income in the Census tract immediately adjacent to Fort Lawton: $90,951), whiter (81.6 percent, compared to 69.5 percent citywide) and less likely to be in the workforce (67.5 percent, compared to 72.3 percent citywide) than the rest of Seattle.

But even in Magnolia, there is demographic diversity. Over on the eastern slope of the hill, near the Burlington Northern railroad tracks, the median household income goes down—to $69,865 by the Magnolia QFC, and $66,455 farther south by the Magnolia Bridge, where the city periodically removes homeless camps. “I call it ‘Forgotten Magnolia,’ because I don’t think the people who actually live in the houses up in Magnolia ever think about us,” says Lisa Barnes, a longtime Magnolia renter who lives in a small apartment in the area, along with her husband and daughter.

Barnes, who works at a small social service agency, says that early on, she was surprised to discover so many of her neighbors opposed the city’s plan. But by January, when she showed up at the Magnolia United Church of Christ expecting to be one of just a few speakers in favor of the plan, the mood had shifted. “I kind of give it up to the city,” Barnes says now. “I think they have been responsive [with the new plan] to what people have said they want.”

Among other changes, the plan now sets aside 6 acres for active recreational space—think sports fields, not virgin forest—that could be purchased by the Seattle school district for a new school or environmental learning center. Local schools are crowded, and the neighborhood is getting younger; Smith, the longtime homeowner, says many of his elderly neighbors have sold their houses to young families, and nearby Lawton Elementary is already over capacity, according to the city’s EIS. (Magnolia Elementary School and Lincoln High School, both reopening next year, are expected to lighten some of the burden on existing schools.)

That’s important to Valerie Cooper, the legislative representative for the Lawton Elementary PTA and a member of the Fort Lawton School Coalition, a group that originally organized to advocate for a middle or high school on the Fort Lawton property. “I’m not opposed to housing, by any means, but I want to make sure that if it moves forward, we have the infrastructure that goes with it.” She notes, “My son [now in third grade] had had 29 kids in his kindergarten class when he started, and that was out of control. It has continued to grow since then.”

Another change since 2008 is the addition of acres of parkland; the 2008 proposal included just one neighborhood park of less than an acre and a 1-acre greenway. The new plan calls for 13 acres of new passive park space, along with up to 4.7 acres of forest from existing Army land. But for activists who want the entire Fort Lawton area turned into an extension of Discovery Park, that isn’t enough. They support an alternative plan that would sacrifice the housing and active recreational space for 4 additional acres of undeveloped park space. They say that plan would create avenues for migrating wildlife to travel through Kiwanis Ravine, a few blocks east of Discovery Park, and into a part of Magnolia that has long been fenced off and inaccessible.

“I don’t want to be flippant or dismissive of the housing or the school option or any other option,” says Philip Vogelzang, president of Friends of Discovery Park, “but really, there is no other land near Discovery Park that can be added to the park, and there’s lots of options for housing.”

Barnes, the East Magnolia renter, takes the opposite perspective: Given that the land for housing at Fort Lawton would be free, why not use it for housing and add new parks elsewhere? “What would be better is putting more small green spaces throughout the city, not concentrating them in these giant parks that people have to drive to,” she says. For that matter, Smith adds, why not build even more housing at Fort Lawton and give more people the chance to enjoy a huge park right in their backyard? “My only regret,” Smith says, “is I think this was a very timid proposal—using so little of the property in an inefficient way, with single-family homes [townhomes] rather than apartment-style flats.… I wish they had been more ambitious.”

Dan Cantrell, a Phinney Ridge homeowner who grew up in Magnolia in the 1960s, agrees. “Even if there were a dozen developments like what’s being proposed at Fort Lawton, I don’t think it would change the character of the neighborhood,” Cantrell says. “I believe that the people who are opposing [the city’s plan] are in the minority, and I believe that, across the city, there’s a clear majority that understands and agrees that we need to build more housing.”

Unsurprisingly, there are still voices of dissent. At the meeting in January, Aden Nardone, a representative of the homelessness and drug policy advocacy group Speak Out Seattle, said that building housing in such an “isolated area” was like “putting people in internment camps.” Social media sites like Facebook and Nextdoor Magnolia bristled with predictions that the plan would bring crime, drugs and overcrowding to Magnolia. Elisabeth James, one of Speak Out Seattle’s founders, provided Seattle magazine with written comments stating that the group largely supports the housing option, but the plan “fails to provide a holistic plan for the existing neighborhood or the anticipated new residents,” such as additional service on Metro’s Route 33, which serves Fort Lawton.

Elizabeth Campbell, the Magnolia activist whose lawsuit back in 2008 forced the city to do a full EIS, told the Magnolia Voice blog that the “way to tackle the city” was to take “a legal approach,” presumably by challenging the final EIS—a common tactic for slowing or stopping development in Seattle. (Campbell did not respond to requests for comment.) The city, according to Fort Lawton redevelopment project manager Lindsay Masters, has taken that possibility into account by securing a five-year lease from the Army. Will that be long enough to wrap up any future litigation? Masters hesitates, then laughs. “It better be.”

City Council, City Hall, Density, Development, gender, homelessness, housing, King County, land use, Morning Crank, neighborhoods, Politics, Renters, Transit, Transportation

Morning Crank: Democrats, Taxes, and “The Ideological Anti-Parking Agenda”
Detail from Seattle frequent transit map; click for link to full map.

1. A last-ditch email from anti-development activist Chris Leman with the subject line “Parking SOS!! E-mails and calls needed to prevent devastation of neighborhood parking” heralded next Monday’s vote on parking reform legislation that will clarify where apartments may be built without parking, require more bike parking at new buildings, and require developers of large buildings to “unbundle” the cost of parking and rent by charging separately for each.  Council member Lisa Herbold has proposed giving the city’s Office of Planning and Community Development the authority to institute parking  mandates, refuse to grant residential parking permits to new renters, or take other steps to reduce competition for on-street parking as part of the environmental mitigation process, arguing (among other things) that cars circling the block for parking produce climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions.

Leman’s email makes several misleading claims, implying that the city wants to define “frequent transit service” as three buses per hour (in reality, it allows that frequency during low-ridership midday hours if a route offers extremely frequent service at rush hour, like the RapidRide buses that arrive every 10 minutes), and claiming that “many more areas of the city will be open to developers putting in dense buildings with no parking.” In reality, while the changes will slightly increase the amount of the city served by frequent transit service (from 18.6 percent to 22.5 percent), the changes will only allow new buildings with no parking in six small portions of urban villages served by six frequent bus routes (full list on page 20 of this report.)

But the biggest misrepresentation in Leman’s letter, which describes Herbold as a lone voice of sanity against the “ideological anti-parking agenda” of North Seattle council members Rob Johnson and Mike O’Brien,  is that eliminating parking mandates contradicts “the majority wishes and interests of [council members’]  constituents.” For months, tenants, commuters, and environmental advocates have been showing up in council chambers and at public meetings to make the case that renters shouldn’t have to pay extra for  parking spaces they don’t want or need. Although the old-guard neighborhood activists may not like or want their input, those people are constituents, too, and their numbers are growing.

2. This one is still in the “credible rumor” category, but former state Senator Rodney Tom—the Republican-turned-Democrat-turned-leader of the Republican-voting Majority Coalition Caucus—may be considering a run for the 48th District state senate seat currently held by Democrat Patty Kuderer. And he’d be running as a Democrat.

Tom, who did not run for reelection for the Bellevue-Medina seat in 2014, did not return a call to his office on Tuesday. But Halei Watkins of Moxie Media, which recently merged with Kuderer’s campaign consulting firm, Winpower Strategies, says she has heard the rumor repeated frequently enough, and with enough “fervor,” that she believes it. “I think he is going to run because he thinks he needs to, [and] is probably being encouraged by the business community,” Watkins says. “Frankly, I don’t think that it matters to him if he runs as a d or an r he might as well just run as [a member of the Rodney Tom party at this point.” Tom was one of two nominally Democratic members of the so-called Majority Coalition Caucus, creating a 25-24 Republican-voting majority in a senate that had a Democratic majority on paper. Tim Sheldon, the other Democratic member of the MCC, remains in the senate, which has had a true Democratic majority since the 2017 election of Manka Dhingra in the 45th, another Eastside district that neighbors the 48th.

Kuderer, for her part, doesn’t sound worried about a challenge from the right in her Democratic-leaning district. “I really don’t know” if Tom is running or not, she says, but “it doesn’t change my campaign strategy any” if he is.

3.  As the city council gets ready to take up the recommendation of the Progressive Revenue Task Force, including a new, $75 million employee hours tax on businesses, the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce put a phone poll in the field out this week focusing on the tax proposal, homeless encampments, and Seattle City Council member Mike O’Brien. Summer Stinson, a Democratic Party activist and co-founder of Washington’s Paramount Duty, a pro-school-funding group, live-tweeted the poll. Among the questions Simpson said she was asked (linked and reproduced here with permission):

• What do you think of Mayor Jenny Durkan, Amazon, and city council member Mike O’Brien?

• Do you see “the ineffective city council as a problem?”

• Do you think  “there is too much influence from labor unions on city government?”

• Do you agree “that the Seattle City Council has raised too many taxes and fees?

• “Is homelessness getting worse because the City Council, despite spending millions a year, does not know how to reduce homelessness?”

Chamber spokeswoman Alicia Teel confirmed that the organization is funding the poll. Asked about its purpose—and, specifically, why the poll zeroed in on O’Brien—Teel said, “Understanding public opinion is part of our overall advocacy strategy; we poll on a fairly regular basis to get a sense of how much people are tuned into developments at City Hall, including how Council is stewarding taxpayer dollars. The tax on jobs”—the Chamber’s preferred term for the employee hours tax—”is a proposal that would affect all of our members in Seattle, so it’s definitely top of mind for us. As for asking about specific Councilmembers, we are curious about how well people feel that they are being represented by their district Councilmembers.”

4. After publishing a nearly 9,000-word defense of his behavior as chair of the King County Democrats (a defense that included four sentences that could be generously construed as apologetic), Bailey Stober temporarily ceded his duties as chair last night but did not step down, saying that he wanted the chance to defend himself in an trial that will take place on April 8, followed by a vote by the county’s precinct committee officers on whether to remove him from office on April 15.

For all the details on last night’s meeting of the King County Democrats, and Stober’s non-apology apology, I’ve posted a few highlights from Twitter below, and collected all my tweets here.

Stober remains on paid leave from his job as communications director for King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson while the office, with the help of an outside attorney, investigates the charges against him and determines whether they impact his ability to do his job as chief spokesman for the assessor. Chief deputy assessor Al Dams says the investigation will be limited to the allegations of harassment and other inappropriate workplace behavior; the county will not look into allegations that Stober misused Party funds because he does not have the authority to spend county funds. Dams did not immediately respond to a request for Stober’s salary; last year, when his job was listed as “administrative assistant II,” the 26-year-old made $90,445, according to the Tacoma News Tribune’s public employee salary database.

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site or making a one-time contribution! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as reporting-related and office expenses. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

City Hall, Health, homelessness, King County

Late Afternoon Crank: Resignations

1. Embattled King County Democrats chairman Bailey Stober, who has been accused of sexually harassing an employee he later fired and misappropriating Party funds, was in Eastern Washington this week, hanging out at the office of the Whitman County Democrats and reportedly campaigning for Democratic state House candidate Matthew Sutherland, while three more local Democratic organizations—the 32nd, 34th, and 46th District Democrats—were adopting resolutions that, to varying degrees, call for his removal as chair.

The 34th District Democrats’ resolution turned out to be the most contentious, thanks in part to 34th District chairman David Ginsberg—a Stober ally who told the Seattle  Times he did not believe Stober had harassed the employee, Natalia Koss Vallejo,  because Koss Vallejo had socialized with Stober and seemed “chummy” with him before he fired her. (Stober told me he could not harass a female employee because he is gay.) The day before the meeting, Ginsberg sent a letter to the district’s email list asserting that “any resolution condemning the alleged behavior of Chair Stober cannot be considered tomorrow night.” This led to a watered-down resolution calling on Precinct Committee Officers from the 34th to petition the King County Democrats for a special meeting to vote on Stober’s removal.

Ultimately, that resolution passed, but not before several speakers spoke strongly against it. One, 34th District state committeeman Chris Porter, likened Stober to Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after a white woman falsely accused him of whistling at her (along with several other civil-rights martyrs). “None of us know the facts,” he added. Porter was followed by another speaker who said Stober was falling victim to “the ‘big black man’ scenario … it’s intimidation.”

Most of the speakers defending Stober were men. One said he had worked with Stober “every day for a couple of hours a day” and “I never saw in all my interactions with him acting inappropriately at all.” Another noted that Stober has said that he has a significant amount of of unspecified “evidence” that will exonerate him.**

At the 32nd, the most notable comment in favor of a more strongly worded resolution calling on Stober to step down came from former Shoreline city council candidate and recovering addict Jin-ah Kim, who said Stober had repeatedly pressured her to drink with him, despite knowing she is in recovery. Koss Vallejo has also said Stober pressured her to drink when she didn’t want to. The 46th would have passed a watered-down resolution similar to the one passed by the 34th if not for the intervention of former 46th District chair Jesse Piedfort, who also happened to be one of the only men at any of the recent district meetings to speak up strongly on behalf of harassment victims. The resolution that ultimately passed combined a call for Stober to resign with a call for a meeting of PCOs to remove him.

The King County Democrats will hold a meeting this coming Monday night to decide how to proceed with the investigation into Stober’s behavior since the group’s one remaining vice chair (the other two have resigned) was unable to find anyone willing to serve on the proposed investigating panel. Pierce County Democrats chair Tim Farrell, who recently called on another accused sexual harasser, state Rep. David Sawyer (D-29), to resign, will preside.

Earlier today, state Rep. Rebecca Saldaña (D-37), whose own district declined to pass a resolution condemning Stober (the chair of the 37th, Alec Stephens, also suggested that there was a “racial element” to the accusations), sent a letter to the King County Democrats saying that she will withhold all contributions to the group until the Stober situation is resolved.

2. Over at city hall, Mayor Jenny Durkan announced a major cabinet departure on Friday—Catherine Lester, head of the city’s Human Services Department, will be leaving her position and “returning to her family in Toronto, Canada after seven years with the department.” Deputy director Jason Johnson will replace Lester as interim HSD director starting in May.

During her tenure, Lester oversaw the adoption and implementation of Pathways Home, a new approach to homelessness that relies heavily on the private market and short-term vouchers to move people quickly from the streets to housing, a strategy known as “rapid rehousing.” Pathways Home has been criticized by some political leaders and service providers, as well as by this blog, because it makes some highly optimistic assumptions about people’s ability to transition from homelessness to relative financial independence within just a few months without the kind of wraparound services that are provided in traditional transitional housing.

Lester also oversaw the city’s first competitive bidding process for homeless service contracts in more than a decade. That process, which prioritized programs that move people into permanent housing over those providing transitional housing or traditional shelter and hygiene services, was also controversial.

3. Lester defended the city’s efforts to provide restrooms and showers for unsheltered people this week to the Seattle/King County Board of Health, which adopted a resolution calling for additional investments in handwashing facilities, showers, and toilets across King County, while also acknowledging that “there are improvements to be made.” The city recently cut, then partially restored, funding for hygiene centers that serve some of the city’s homeless population, and has appeared sensitive to the issue of whether it is doing enough to ensure that people on the streets can wash their hands or relieve themselves. In a memo that Lester echoed in her comments to the Board of Health, the city enumerated 117 restrooms “available to all members of the public,” including Port-a-Potties near five transit stops and restrooms at libraries, community centers and parks, as well as restrooms at enhanced shelters, which are currently open only to those who stay at those shelters. The resolution notes that King County is currently experiencing a strep outbreak “that is particularly affecting those experiencing homelessness and injection drug users” and that other diseases that hit homeless populations hardest, like hepatitis A, can be controlled simply by giving people places to wash their hands.

* Ginsberg’s letter went on to denounce “some pretty bad reporting on the situation by local bloggers which has only made the entre [sic] situation worse” (ahem). It continued: “Bloggers have made a big deal out of the fact that the Chair got to select 2 of the 5 committee members, but failed to mention that the Vice Chair, operating on behalf of the accuser, also got to choose 2 of the 5. Bloggers have an understandable need to drive people to read their writing with salacious narratives to gain the ad revenue they depend on. But that doesn’t always serve the truth, and in this case it has not.” In fact, this blog—the one that has been reporting on the Stober situation—has mentioned consistently that the vice chairs were asked to appoint two of the four investigating panel members. They are not acting “on behalf of the accused,” and are meant to be a neutral party. The fact that Stober was allowed to choose two of the people who were going to investigate him for a workplace misconduct allegation is highly unusual, to put it very mildly. Finally, as anyone who has ever visited my site can see, I do not have any ads, and therefore have no ad revenues. I look forward to Ginsberg’s explanation of why he feels my ongoing reporting on city hall, land use, transportation, and local elections is “salacious.”

** I have seen at least one piece of this “evidence”—a message from Koss Vallejo making a fat joke about an unspecified person. Stober sent me a screen shot of the message when I asked about this text exchange, between him and King County Committeeman Jon Culver. The two men are expressing frustration about an event planned by the organizers of the Women’s March that apparently conflicted with a King County Democrats event:

Asked about this and similar exchanges, Stober told me, “I’m not going to have this trial occur in the media-it doesn’t respect my board, the process or due process. But I will say this-my close circle of friends and advisors  have engaged in internal jokes and conversations that could have and should have been avoided and we will address that and improve. But for Natalia to pretend that is one sided is a far stretch. Here is one of MANY screenshots I’ll be turning over to investigators to show Natalia engaging in the same behavior she’s now accusing others of. This should at least ensure fair reporting. The rest I’ll give to investigators and will provide to you as appropriate.” The screen shot followed. As I’ve mentioned many times, women who play along with men who make inappropriate “jokes” in workplace situations, particularly when those men are their bosses, often do so as a coping mechanism. In any case, “But so-and-so did it too!” is not a generally recognized excuse for workplace misconduct.

City Council, City Hall, Diversity, Equity, gender, homelessness, King County, labor, Mayor Durkan, Morning Crank, race, Women

Morning Crank: “Sound Transit Is Not Felt To Be a Safe Workplace”

1. Sound Transit CEO Peter Rogoff escaped serious reprimand on Wednesday for alleged behavior toward agency employees that included looking women up and down and giving them “elevator eyes,” using racially insensitive language, swearing at employees, and using an abrasive style that both the public memo on the investigation into his behavior and King County Executive Dow Constantine described as “East Coast” (whatever that’s supposed to mean). With only Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan and Seattle City Council member Rob Johnson dissenting (because they believed Rogoff’s punishment was insufficient), the board voted to require Rogoff to create a “leadership development plan” to improve his listening, self-awareness, and relationship building” skills and to  assign a three-member panel, made up of Sound Transit board members, to monitor his progress on the plan for six months.

Durkan skipped the launch of an NHL season ticket drive and the raising of the NHL flag over the Space Needle to be at today’s board meeting, an indication of how seriously she took the charges. Before voting, Durkan read the following statement:

“The issues raised and on which we were briefed led me to believe the conclusion that these [performance] factors cannot be met, and so I will be voting against this motion. I think the facts that we have been briefed on and the conclusions reached by our Counsel demonstrate that Sound Transit is not felt to be a safe workplace for all employees, that they do not feel that they can act without repercussions, and that there are many who feel that their work is not valued. I am also concerned that the statements that were alleged to have been made by the CEO, and the actions that were raised – raised the issue of racial bias and insensitivity, as well as other workplace harassment issues. I do not believe that these issues have been resolved as completely as indicated by Counsel, and that having three Board Members oversee the daily work of this CEO is not the resolution, and so I will be voting against this motion.”

Neither Durkan nor Johnson had any further comment after the meeting.

The memo on the investigation lays out a few specific examples of behaviors that the investigation deemed inappropriate, including a Black History Month event in 2016 at which Rogoff “reportedly made comments condescending toward persons of color” and a 2017 incident in which he dismissively told a female employee, “Honey, that ain’t ever going to happen” in response to a question. But the memo, and most of the Sound Transit board, is also quick to chalk much of Rogoff’s reported behavior up to difficulty navigating the politeness of Pacific Northwest culture and the fact that the previous CEO, Joni Earl, was so beloved that Rogoff faced built-in challenges from the time he was hired, in late 2015. To wit:

In the meeting, King County Executive Dow Constantine, who was chair of the Sound Transit board when Rogoff was hired, said he talked to Rogoff when he applied for the position and “cautioned him that his directness was going to run up against a very different way of interacting  to which we are accustomed here in the Pacific Northwest, and that he was going to have to modify his manner and understand the local culture if we were going to be successful.” Constantine also described Rogoff as “bracingly direct” before praising his effectiveness.

Rogoff echoed Constantine’s complimentary assessment of his style in his own memo responding to the allegations. In the memo, Rogoff acknowledges (using language that reads a bit like a job applicant saying that his worst flaw is his “relentless attention to detail”) that his “directness and unvarnished clarity did not sit well with some staff” and that he was, at times, “overly intense in articulating my expectations for performance.” Rogoff goes on to explicitly deny some of the allegations,” calling some of the claims made during the investigation “misquoted, misunderstood, mischaracterized or false. I don’t yell at people.  I don’t disparage small city mayors and I don’t shove chairs to make a point,” two incidents that were detailed in the documents released today. “I was shocked to read some of the characterizations on this list.”

A document labeled “Peter Rogoff, CEO ST: Note to file” describes some of those alleged incidents. They include: Directing a staffer to tell Seattle Times reporter Mike Lindblom to “go fuck himself”; yelling over the phone at a staffer in a conversation that lasted from 11pm to 1am; standing up at a meeting and saying “When I give direction, it’s for action, not rumination” and shoving a chair; saying that he “couldn’t give a flying fuck about how things were when Joni [Earl] was here, because she’s not here anymore”; using the term “flying fuck” constantly “to everyone”; and the aforementioned incidents in which he allegedly looked women up and down and gave them “elevator eyes.”

King County Council member and Sound Transit board member Claudia Balducci said after the meeting that she has “seen a lot of improvement” in Rogoff’s behavior. “I think that at least shows that it’s possible, and therefore that we could have a successful CEO. If he can manage people with respect and dignity then I felt he deserves the opportunity.” Balducci disagreed that Rogoff’s management style could be explained away by “regional” differences. “I’m from New York,” she said, and “I think everybody, no matter where they’re from, knows how to be respectful. The things that we were talking about were more than just style.”

Although Rogoff did not receive a bonus this year, he did receive a five percent cost of living adjustment, which puts his salary at just over $328,000.

2. The city’s progressive revenue task force held its final meeting on Wednesday morning, adopting a report (final version to come) that recommends new taxes that could bring in as much as $150 million a year for housing and services for homeless and low-income people in Seattle. Half of that total, $75 million, would come from some version of an employee hours tax; the variables include what size business will pay the tax ($8 million vs. $10 million in gross revenues), the tax rate and whether it will be a flat per-employee fee or a percentage of revenues; and whether businesses that don’t hit the threshold for the tax will have to pay a so-called “skin in the game” fee for doing business in the city. The task force also talked about making the tax graduated based on employer size, but noted that such a tax may not be legal and would almost certainly be subject to immediate legal challenges.

The original memo on the head tax proposals suggests that the “skin in the game” fee should be $200 and that the fee would kick in once a business makes gross revenues—not net profits—of $500,000. During the conversation Wednesday morning, some task force members floated the idea of lowering that threshold to just $100,000, a level that would require many small businesses, such as street-level retailers, to pay the fee, regardless of what their actual profit margins are. However, after council member and task force chair Lorena Gonzalez pointed out that the city has not done a racial equity analysis to see how any of the head tax proposals would impact minority business owners, the group decided to keep the trigger at $500,000 in gross revenues. Additionally, they decided to raise the recommended fee to $395—a number that was thrown out, seemingly at random, by a task force member who called it “psychological pricing” (on the theory that $395 feels like significantly less than $400).

The other $75 million would come, in theory, from a combination of other taxes, some of them untested in Seattle and likely to face legal challenges, including a local excise tax, an excess compensation tax, a tax on “speculative real estate investment activity,” and an increase in the real estate excise tax. Legal challenges could delay implementation of new taxes months or years, and—although no one brought it up at yesterday’s meeting—REET revenues always take a nosedive during economic downturns, making them a fairly volatile revenue source.

3. The Teamsters Local 174 confirmed yesterday that they will no longer allow the King County Democrats to hold meetings at their building in Tukwila, after a contentious meeting Tuesday night that lasted until nearly midnight. My report on that meeting, at which the group decided to extend and expand the investigation into sexual harassment and financial misconduct claims against the group’s chairman, Bailey Stober, is here.

According to Teamsters senior business agent Tim Allen, the decision wasn’t directly related to the allegations against Stober, but had to do with the behavior of some of the group’s members and their treatment of a custodial worker who had to clean up after the group, who may have been drinking alcohol on the premises. “We have standards of conduct that people are supposed to live up to” around how guests treat the building and whether they “treat our [staffers] properly,” Allen said. “They had the whole building to clean, and usually we expect [groups that use the building] to clean up after themselves. Stober, contacted by email, said “I’ve heard varying degrees of that story” (that people were drinking, continued to do so after they were asked to stop, and left a mess), “but I can’t confirm that because I was sitting in the front of the room and have no knowledge of what was happening outside of the room.” Many other local progressive groups, including some legislative Democratic groups, have alcohol at their meetings (many provide beer or wine for a suggested donation), but some venues do not allow alcohol without a banquet license.

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