City Council, Elections, Mayor Durkan, Transit, Transportation

Plan to Preserve Metro Bus Service Heads for November Ballot

After a lengthy debate over the correct size and duration for the proposed renewal of the Seattle Transportation Benefit District—a Seattle-only tax originally intended to supplement King County Metro bus service—the city council voted unanimously to put a six-year, 0.15 percent sales tax proposal to fund bus service on the November ballot. The measure will provide a little over $39 million a year for bus service, compared to $56 million a year under the measure that expires this year—enough to preserve between 150,000 and 200,000 hours of existing in-city service.

The original 2014 STBD ballot measure included a $60 vehicle-license fee, which was supplemented by a $20 fee passed by the council, but the city has been unable to spend the revenues from either fee since Washington state voters passed the car-tab-killing Initiative 976 last year; the state Supreme Court is set to rule on the initiative’s constitutionality later this year.

It’s a sign of how much the funding landscape has changed that the biggest debates on Monday were about whether to preserve the sales tax approved by voters in 2014 at its existing level, as Mayor Jenny Durkan proposed, or increase it slightly, and on whether the funding package should last four years or six. Every option the council considered would, at best, offset service reductions from the county—a major difference from the original 2014 ballot measure, which expanded transit service by 350,000  hours

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Proponents of a larger tax hike—to 0.2 percent—argued that it may be possible, in theory, to reduce the tax after the county passes its own region-wide taxing measure, or when a court overturns I-976, making car tab revenue available again. Opponents expressed skepticism that voters would pass a significant tax increase during a recession that has already resulted in unprecedented unemployment. “Even though a 0.1 percent regressive tax maybe isn’t going go be the straw that but the aggregate impact is something that I’m very concerned about,” council member Andrew Lewis said.

Along somewhat similar lines, proponents of a shorter-term ballot measure—four years, as opposed to six—argued that a levy that expired earlier would light a fire under the city and county to come up with a regional ballot measure whose cost and benefits would be spread across the entire county instead of concentrated in Seattle. Opponents (those who supported a six-year renewal) argued that a six-year measure would put the city in a stronger bargaining position with the county if and when the county gets around to proposing a regional measure.

Worth noting: Although most council members seemed optimistic that a countywide transit measure would pass, very recent history suggests otherwise. The whole reason the city proposed a Seattle-only ballot measure in 2014 is that a countywide measure failed overwhelmingly earlier that same year, losing by double-digit margins in the suburbs, and by eight points overall. The fact is that the county could put together a regional bus funding measure on the city’s preferred timeline, only to see it fail—an outcome that may be more likely, not less, during an economic downturn.

The proposal that passed Monday also includes a measure limiting the portion of the new tax that can be spent on things like low-income transit passes, rather than service hours, to $10 million—the same cap as in the mayor’s original 0.1 percent proposal—and increases the amount that can be spent on “emergent needs,” such as bus service for West Seattle residents stranded by the closure of the West Seattle Bridge, to $9 million.

Council member Alex Pedersen, who sponsored the original 0.1 percent legislation and was the only council member to vote against expanding it to 0.15 percent, said the unanimous vote demonstrated that “despite the divisions and conflicts that many people might see reported in the media, the mayor and city council can pull together and row in the same pos direction when we direct our energy toward the hard responsibility of governing. … It may not be perfect for each of us, but it is necessary for everyone.” And with those less-than-rousing words, the stopgap transit funding measure headed toward the November ballot.

City Council, City Hall, Economy, human services, Mayor Durkan

Battle Over Budget Transparency Illustrates Deeper Rifts Between Seattle Mayor and Council

It’s probably another sign of the frayed relationship between most members of the Seattle City Council and Mayor Jenny Durkan that the big meta-budget dispute playing out in council chambers right now is how much the mayor and her budget office know about the details of midyear cuts the mayor is proposing and how much they’re telling the council, which has to approve a final package of midyear budget cuts based on more than a dozen pieces of legislation the mayor sent them earlier this month.

Yes, how much to cut the police department (and whether the mayor’s proposed “cuts,” for this year and next, are meaningful or merely cosmetic) remains the most pressing single budget issue. But the cuts the city has to make this year—and then replicat and expand in 2021—are largely in other departments that aren’t currently in the headlines, and the debate over the mayor’s proposals is also a debate about discretion and how much of the budget is actually on the table for the council to tinker with.

On Thursday morning, city council central staff director Kirsten Arestad said central staff will develop a new budget tool—essentially, a balancing worksheet—that will show exactly what is in the mayor’s midyear budget-cutting package, including “administrative cuts” the mayor has made that are not reflected in the legislation she sent to the council. The tool will also take a baseline forecast (the June revenue forecast, which added another $11.4 million deficit to the May forecast on which Durkan’s balancing packaged is based) and use it as the basis of the balancing package. The worksheet will also indicate more clearly the gap between revenues (including COVID-related federal funding) and expenditures (including unanticipated costs related to the pandemic), Arestad said.

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If you enjoy breaking news, commentary, and deep dives on issues that matter to you, please support this work by donating a few bucks a month to keep this reader-supported site going.

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One reason all this extra work is necessary, according to Arestad, is because not all of the cuts Durkan made to the budget show up in the legislation she sent the council, which only includes cuts the council has to act on, making it “difficult to clearly see the full picture” of the budget and “almost impossible for individual council members to determine, as they’re making amendments, ‘Where can I take money, is this being double counted, how does this impact other fund balances, the levy exchanges, how we dip into the emergency funds, and so forth’.”

The budget office doesn’t see it this way. They say they have provided all the information the council has asked for—including not just specific line-item cuts but a list of cuts the mayor considered and rejected (scroll down)—and that the disagreement is actually more fundamental than a simple question of transparency. “We did not and were not intending to send down an entire new budget proposal,” budget director Ben Noble says, or relitigate the entire 2020 budget. But that, he argues, is exactly what the council is trying to do.

So why is this debate ultimately more illustrative than substantive? For one thing, a council that had a healthy relationship with the mayor could have communicated their confusion and need for more information behind the scenes, instead of having the director of Central Staff read a letter for the record; and a mayor who had a healthy relationship with the council could have figured out what information the council wanted and figure out a way to provide it, instead of sending down a dozen pieces of legislation that included gaps that were sure to frustrate a council primed to look for budget trickery.

The second reason this debate is largely symbolic is that the line items the council wants to add (and make up for by cutting from other parts of the budget) are—again, setting the police budget aside—relatively minor strictly from a spending perspective, and many of them will depend on departments (which answer to the mayor) agreeing to voluntarily start the hiring process this year for positions that have been frozen since March, at the risk of having to lay them off at the beginning of next year. Continue reading “Battle Over Budget Transparency Illustrates Deeper Rifts Between Seattle Mayor and Council” →

Addiction, Women

From Medium: I Was a “Fun” Drunk. Until I Wasn’t.

This piece, which has been lightly edited for sexual content, originally appeared on Medium. It was inspired by the responses to Susan Orlean’s recent series of tweets about getting wasted, which were celebrated by thousands of people and featured the following day in a laudatory piece in the Washington Post.

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When I quit drinking, there was no one around to suggest that I didn’t have a problem.

My friends were gone. My family was distant. My world consisted of an elliptical path between the grocery store, the bus stop, and the 600 square feet of my apartment, full of dirty dishes and half-eaten pizzas and empty bottles shoved into suitcases in the closet in case anyone dropped by.

My drinking took me to that point. But it didn’t start that way. Instead, like many women in their 20s, I started drinking because I wanted to fit in — at work, where everyone seemed so much older and more sophisticated, and in my social circle, which came to consist mostly of other drinkers—women who could shut down the bar, take a guy home, and wipe away the hangover with a few Bloody Marys in the morning.

It wasn’t just that no one ever told me they thought I might have a drinking problem — my drinking, like that of many young women, was celebrated, and the more over-the-top my behavior was, the more “fun” people considered me to be. I remember one night, out at a dive bar called the Jade Pagoda, when I danced on a table while my coworkers cheered, then made out with one of those coworkers on that same table while they cheered some more. What I learned from that experience, and from countless others, was that people liked me more when I was drunk and “fun.” For years, I took the lesson to heart.

I was fun. Until I wasn’t.

The parameters of acceptable femininity are wide enough to accommodate women who have “funny” meltdowns or who take their tops off or who sleep through Sundays. They don’t have room for women who lash out when they’re drunk, or who wonder whether they really gave their consent, or who say, in so many words: “This isn’t fun. Stop clapping. I need help.”

In all that time, no one ever suggested that I might consider taking a break from drinking. Why would they? Women who act out in a certain way — by being a certain acceptable type of “messy,” the type that isn’t too picky about men’s behavior and cracks jokes about her drinking (“Drinking problem” always worked when I spilled my cocktail) and laughs uproariously — are celebrated. Everyone loves a “fun” girl, a “cool” mom, a “wacky” older lady with a martini in hand. (Note that these parameters are not just gendered but aged — a 60-year-old throwing herself at young men is seen as pathetic, while a “wine mommy” who heads out to the bar while her husband takes care of the kid is irresponsible; why isn’t she celebrating “wine o’clock” at home?).

The parameters of acceptable femininity are wide enough to accommodate women who have “funny” meltdowns or who take their tops off or who sleep through Sundays. They don’t have room for women who lash out when they’re drunk, or who wonder whether they really gave their consent, or who say, in so many words: “This isn’t fun. Stop clapping. I need help.”

Women who fall into addiction — a neurological, psychological, and physical brain disorder that many people still consider the result of personal failings — are not celebrated. Strangers don’t show up to cheer when you pass out on the sidewalk, or check yourself into treatment, or say “I need help,” although addictions that lead to these behaviors tend to start benignly, with the kind of drinking women are socially permitted to do.

I thought about all this when celebrated writer Susan Orlean posted a series of increasingly incoherent tweets on Friday night, in which she acknowledged being “falling-down drunk,” embarrassing her husband in front of their neighbors, and apparently infuriating her family. “I am@being shunned by my family because I am drunk. Yes ok I am fine with that FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCKERS,” she wrote. As I write this, the most recent responses — of thousands in this vein — are “Cheers to you!! This is definitely not the right time to be sober(within reason)I’m having a few with you!!,” “How wasn’t I following you until now? Best 2020 Friday night entertainment” and “Hey Family, leave her alone! Let the girl drink and tweet! 😜. Got your back”

These people piling praise onto a celebrity’s timeline are ostensibly “celebrating” Orlean for “living her best life,” as many of them put it. But in reality, they’re projecting a narrative that’s as American as Lucille Ball.

We celebrate women — particularly famous women — when they embarrass themselves, or get falling-down-drunk, or go on harmless-seeming tirades against their families. “No one on my house is talking to me right now ok!! YeH whatever I hzte you too.” We stop celebrating them when their behavior tips over into problematic territory — when Britney shaves her head, or Lindsay passes out in her Mercedes. Being a “fun” drunk is a trap, but you won’t know that until you get down off the bar, or stop live-tweeting your life like it’s a sitcom, or say something publicly that’s just a no-two-ways-about-it bummer, like expressing shame, helplessness, or regret. Watch how fast the crowds dissipate then.

Read the rest of this essay on Medium.

Mayor Durkan, Police

Seattle Mayor’s Proposal To Move Police Investigations Out of SPD Could Have Unintended Consequences

As calls to defund the Seattle Police Department continue, Mayor Jenny Durkan has proposed moving about $56 million out of the Seattle Police Department’s budget into other parts of the city budget—a ledger swap that could actually cost the city more money than the current system and could, advocates say, actually weaken the accountability system.

When announcing the transfers, Durkan’s office described the changes as “actions to transform the Seattle Police Department and reimagine community safety” by responding to requests from community stakeholders. However, it’s unclear where the impetus for the specific changes the mayor proposed—moving 911 dispatch, the Office of Police Accountability, and the Office of Emergency Management out of SPD—came from.

OPA is the city agency that conducts police misconduct investigations. Under the mayor’s proposal, it would move out of SPD and become its own department, most likely reporting “directly to the Executive and Council,” a spokeswoman for Durkan, Kelsey Nyland, says. “Our hope is that by making them a separate office from SPD, there will be an increase in community confidence in their independence from SPD.”

When asked where the mayor got the idea to move OPA of SPD, specifically, Nyland pointed to the “Blueprint for Divestment” produced by King County Equity Now and Decriminalize Seattle, which includes these three items at the end of a long list that includes a hiring freeze, the elimination of the Navigation Team, the elimination of community outreach implicit bias training, and communications, and the elimination of overtime pay.

The agencies that deal with police accountability, including the Community Police Commission—an independent oversight body—and the OPA itself, were apparently not consulted about the change or asked whether they had concerns. (The CPC only received notice about the changes the mayor was proposing a few minutes before her public announcement). But three years ago, when police accountability advocates like the CPC, the ACLU, and the Public Defender Association were crafting a sweeping police accountability bill, they explicitly kept OPA under SPD’s aegis because doing so allowed them direct access to unredacted SPD files and to SPD personnel.

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The C Is for Crank is supported entirely by generous contributions from readers like you.

If you enjoy breaking news, commentary, and deep dives on issues that matter to you, please support this work by donating a few bucks a month to keep this reader-supported site going.

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Retired judge Anne Levinson, the former OPA auditor whose recommendations for improvements to the accountability system were endorsed by the CPC in 2014 and incorporated into the 2017 accountability legislation, says the point of that ordinance was to create a firewall between the accountability agencies and SPD while preserving their direct access to data and records, case management systems, 911 calls, and other records.

“The usual progressive position is that in order to accomplish that, they also need to be totally outside of the department,” Levinson says—”not under the department’s organizational umbrella. But when we looked at others across the country, we frequently saw not only were they not well-resourced, but they did not have full, , immediate, and unfettered access to all the information they needed to do thorough investigations. Some have to issue subpoenas or public records requests just to get basic evidence. So we said that until the City can ensure no loss in full, direct, and unfettered access to systems and evidence, OPA should not be moved to a stand-alone City agency. It makes a very significant difference.”

Nyland says that maintaining “unfettered access to SPD data and case files” is the “north star” for Durkan, one that could potentially be achieved by by creating a new “data-sharing system between SPD and OPA” and amending the accountability ordinance.

Public Defender Association director Lisa Daugaard, who served on the CPC and worked on the 2017 law, says that “similar civilian-led oversight bodies in other cities have had extreme difficulty getting access” to records in a timely fashion and have had to resort to subpoenas. “Subpoena power still leaves the agency at arm’s length and taking a shot in the dark about what to ask for,” she says. “It’s extremely helpful that OPA can access the records and data it needs from within the organizational structure.”

OPA director Andrew Myerberg, who at the city attorney’s office in 2017 and worked on the bill, recalls that “the decision was made unanimously [in 2017] to keep OPA in SPD” in order “to preserve access to data and people.”

Myerberg says that not only would the changes likely be subject to collective bargaining (something Durkan acknowledged in her announcement), they would also require approval under a federal consent decree and amendments to the 2017 ordinance. For example, although moving OPA out of SPD could increase community confidence in its independence, Myerberg says, the legitimacy of OPA decisions might be called into question if no one from SPD is in the room when OPA is reviewing investigations. Continue reading “Seattle Mayor’s Proposal To Move Police Investigations Out of SPD Could Have Unintended Consequences” →

Police

Police Accountability Reporting Fund Drive Update: You Did It!

Great news: I asked readers to contribute to a new fund to help me pay for a part-time reporter covering the police accountability and community safety beat, and you delivered! Since that first post on Monday, readers have given more than $5,200 to fund this position, beating my initial goal of $5,000 in five days flat. (This tally doesn’t include physical checks.)

Your contributions, along with a generous grant I’ve received to fund this position, will allow me to hire an entry-level reporter to cover the ongoing discussions about police defunding and community reinvestment, the Seattle Police Officers Guild contract, protests against police brutality, the future of Seattle’s police accountability  bodies, and the Seattle Police Department budget, among many other current and emerging topics

Any additional contributions to this fund will also be set aside to fund this position and will help make this coverage sustainable for a longer period; just make sure you include a note with your Paypal or Venmo contribution indicating what it’s for. (If you have trouble, email me at erica@thecisforcrank.com and I’ll make sure your donation ends up in the right account).

And I’m still taking applications! This is an entry-level position—you don’t need any specific prior experience, but critical thinking, fearlessness, and a willingness to push past official talking points are important. BIPOC candidates are especially encouraged to apply; email a resumé along with any published clips or a writing sample, along with a brief email telling me why you’re seeking the position, to erica@thecisforcrank.com.

homelessness, Mayor Durkan, Police

Seattle Police Chief to Mayor: Take Cops Out of the Process for Diversion Referrals
LEAD has identified a number of potential clients for its COVID-era hotel-based program living in tents along 2nd Ave. Ext. S.

For months, the Public Defender Association’s Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program, which has pivoted during the COVID pandemic to a hotel-based model (called Co-LEAD) that connects unsheltered people to resources, have been unable to enroll living in encampments in Seattle, although they have had success in Burien and with people leaving the King County Jail. The reason for the lengthy delay is that the Seattle Police Department, which serves a gatekeeper role for most LEAD functions, has not signed off on the list of people LEAD wants to enroll. As a result, dozens of hotel rooms that could shelter new LEAD clients have been sitting empty for months while LEAD has waited for SPD’s approval.

SPD isn’t happy with their role in this process, either. Last week, Police Chief Carmen Best joined the chorus of advocates asking Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan to remove police from LEAD referrals and let LEAD enroll clients directly. In an email to Durkan’s homelessness advisor, Tess Colby, Best wrote:

“I’m interested in reconsidering the requirement that police OK every referral to LEAD and Co-LEAD services. These services are needed throughout our community, and it doesn’t seem sensible to require us to approve it before people get the help they need.

“In any event, due to staffing pressures and COVID-19 health constraints, we aren’t likely to be able to prioritize this for the indefinite future. But beyond that, this is the type of work most people in Seattle think the police don’t need to take the lead on. I’d appreciate seeing this change.

“Currently, we do not have the capacity to keep the level of response that we would like toward the LEAD program based on the current environment.

“I’m sure you understand the complexity and gravity without further explanation, but call me if there is a question.”

During last week’s budget committee meeting, council public safety chair (and longtime LEAD ally) Lisa Herbold said she was drafting a budget proviso to withhold funding for LEAD if police approval continues to be required for enrollment in the program.

LEAD began as a pre-arrest diversion program for people involved in low-level drug and prostitution crimes—to “interrupt the flow of people at  mass scale into jails and prisons and courts, and instead connect them to really high-quality care,” PDA director Lisa Daugaard says. Over time, though, the program evolved to the point that police are no longer needed to “intercept” potential clients, and in fact can be an impediment to enrolling people in a low-barrier, trauma-informed social service program.

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In the COVID era, Daugaard says, police “just don’t have the bandwidth to play that [gatekeeping] role at the volume that would be required, and to create that bandwidth, they would have to move in the exact opposite direction as the community conversation [about defunding the police] would suggest, which is to have more police involvement for no other reason than the system’s own needs.”

Mayor Durkan has consistently opposed LEAD’s requests for additional funding and authority. During the most recent budget cycle, Durkan declined to provide LEAD with the funding the program needed to fulfill an expansion mandate from the city, then, after losing that budget battle withheld the additional funding for months, leaving LEAD without a contract well into the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, the mayor has continued to quietly stymie the program, declining to approve a list of people living unsheltered in Pioneer Square for the program. Instead, the city provided a months-old old list of so-called “prolific offenders,” whose current locations are unknown, and gave LEAD permission to enroll those people in the new COVID-specific program.

The mayor’s office did not respond to emails sent Wednesday and this afternoon. I’ll update this post if I hear back.