Addiction, City Council, Mayor Harrell

CARE Crisis Response Team Moves into South Seattle As Council Complains It’s Ineffective

 

CARE Team director Amy Barden (l) along with two members of the crisis-response team.

By Erica C. Barnett

The city’s CARE Team, a group of 24 civilian first responders who respond to 911 calls that don’t require a police presence, announced Wednesday that they’ll soon be expanding into Southwest and Southeast Seattle. The team is part of the city’s 911 department, now called the CARE (Community Assisted Response and Engagement) Department.

In a news conference outside the Delridge Community Center Wednesday morning, CARE Department chief Amy Barden compared the pilot program to the construction of the waterfront tunnel that replaced the Alaskan Way Viaduct, making the new Overlook Walk park at Pike Place Market possible.

“The vision was to recapture and acknowledge the spirit of our ancestry, the essence of our shared values, to reaffirm our connection to nature and to each other,” Barden said. “And so then my thoughts naturally turn to the past two years, to my adventures and the questions and comments and skepticism and incredulity I’ve encountered.”

The viaduct replacement may not be the most auspicious metaphor (just south of the Market, the waterfront street widens into a vast, ugly highway), but the skepticism about the CARE team’s progress is just as real as criticism of the tunnel project was a decade ago.

That skepticism, Barden noted, has sometimes come from people who think it’s unsafe to send social workers to respond to 911 calls, or asking why the city is spending money on the CARE pilot instead of police. More recently, though, it came from members of the City Council, who interrogated Barden last week about why CARE hasn’t shown more progress at improving conditions on Seattle streets.

The pilot program, which began with six staffers in 2023, is now a 24-person team (plus three staff who don’t respond directly to calls) for which the city spends a little more than $2 million a year.

In a meeting of the council’s public safety committee last week, council members interrogated Barden about what they described as a lack of results from that spending. Cathy Moore (whose district was not served by the pilot program until very recently) said she was dismayed to hear that her constituents were calling 911 for people in crisis and CARE wasn’t being dispatched.

“We have enough money in the city. We have enough services in the city to make it work. You’ve been in place now for a while. Why are we not doing a better job with the resources that we have?” she asked.

Other council members piled on, saying the city already had “an abundance of services” to help people in crisis (Rob Saka), that CARE was failing to call designated crisis responders to force people into treatment (Moore), and that the project, in general, “isn’t working” and shouldn’t be expanded until it is (Maritza Rivera).

“It’s a very broken system, and we have to fix it,” Moore said. “And just creating one more … agency, and [spending] another $100 million, is not going to fix it if we don’t come together holistically and talk about how it’s broken, be honest about where it’s not working, and the fact that we have different ideological positions about what should be happening. And we need to be evidence-based and be prepared to say sometimes, ‘Your civil liberties do you no good if you’re dead.'”

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Barden noted that the CARE team has just 24 members, spread across the city, which means that in Moore’s council district, there probably won’t be more than two to four people available to respond to calls at any time. “North is absolutely a priority for me,” she said. “We are studying those crisis hot spots, but I want to manage your expectations.”

One thing Barden didn’t bring up explicitly is that the CARE Team can only refer to services that are available, and that those services—including long-term treatment, case management, housing, and even basic detox—are not as ample and widely available as council members repeatedly suggested. Nor is it a great use of resources to send people through inadequate light-touch services again and again, Barden noted.

After Barden said 14 days in a facility isn’t long enough for someone to make major, necessarily life changes before sending them back out onto the street, Moore objected, citing the common refrain that relapse is a part of recovery and it often takes “many rounds” of treatment for people to get sober.

The other solution Moore suggested, involuntary commitment, is not a simple matter of pulling people off the street and taking them to treatment; even those who meet the standards in state law can only be confined for five days against their will, plus a potential 14 more with a judge’s order.

Speaking with PubliCola a few days after the council meeting, Barden expressed frustration at council members who say “‘Hey, Amy, can’t we round everybody up and detox them?’ … I don’t know why it’s so difficult to grasp that different levels of support work for different people. A lot of people [on the street] are demonstrably getting worse, but we’re like, ‘Sentence fulfilled, return to community!'”

In its first 18 months, the CARE team has responded to just under 1,800 calls. While council members like Saka expressed skepticism about expanding the pilot “unless and until” the pilot “is starting to achieve better results,” the primary constraint on the CARE Team’s size is a memorandum of understanding between the CARE department and the Seattle Police Officers Guild limiting the total number of CARE responders to 24. Any future expansion—Barden has suggested 96 responders as a near-term goal—will have to be bargained with SPOG, which has historically resisted reducing the police department’s authority in any way, including for jobs such as directing traffic at special events.

On Wednesday, PubliCola asked Harrell whether he shared the council’s concerns about CARE’s effectiveness. “I think that there was somewhat of a misunderstanding of the role and scope of these fine people,” Harrell said. “So we will take the feedback. … And hopefully, a year from now, we’ll have even more success stories on the lives we save.”

 

City Council, housing

“We’re Gonna Throw It Away.” Dan Strauss, on Losing End of Stadium Housing Vote, Predicts Disaster for Industrial Seattle

By Erica C. Barnett

On a 6-3 vote yesterday, the Seattle City Council approved legislation sponsored by Council President Sara Nelson to allow new apartments in the area immediately south of Seattle’s two stadiums, after weeks of often acrimonious debate between supporters of the bill (including affordable housing developers, community groups, small manufacturers, and the Building Trades union) and opponents (representatives from maritime industries, the Port, and housing advocates who argue it’s unhealthy to allow apartments on arterial streets near an industrial zone.)

Councilmember Rob Saka, considered the swing vote, voted “yes,” as did Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth, who voted against the bill in committee.

The new law will allow a maximum of 990 apartments, half of them affordable to people making less than 90 percent of median income (smaller units would lower income limits). Under amendments adopted yesterday, renters would have to affirm in their lease that they know they’re living in a “geologic hazard” area that’s vulnerable during earthquakes; building owners would have to post several prominent warning signs saying the same; and housing would be prohibited along the west side of First Ave. S., the main artery through the area. The amendments also prohibit building owners from seeking any public subsidy at any point, including for future environmental remediation.

Without belaboring the five-hour meeting (which I covered in real time over on Bluesky), one key dynamic jumped out: Councilmember Dan Strauss, who opposed Nelson’s legislation from the jump, dominated yesterday’s meeting, first by attempting repeatedly to delay the vote, and then by reiterating his arguments against the proposal long after it was clear that the vote wasn’t going to go his way. In about three and a half hours of deliberation, which included nine amendments by other councilmembers, Strauss spoke for well over an hour, returning to the same points again and again and suggesting repeatedly that if his colleagues had only done their homework, they would be voting with him.

It’s common for city councilmembers to speak out in vociferously when they know they’re going to lose (as Bob Kettle, who also opposed the bill from the beginning, did yesterday, even accusing his colleagues of being “aligned with the Trump administration” by voting to put housing near a polluted area). It’s unusual, with the notable exception of former councilmember Kshama Sawant, for a council member to use every opportunity for comment to make the same repetitive points long after it’s clear they’ve lost.

Strauss returned more than a dozen times to the fact that hotels are already allowed around the stadiums, suggesting at one point that his colleagues probably weren’t even aware of that. (There’s a Silver Cloud Inn right next to the stadiums, so it’s hard to imagine they aren’t). Strausswas chair of the land use committee when the city adopted an updated industrial lands policy that was changed at the last minute to allow hotels and offices in the stadium district, but not housing, a decision Strauss characterized as a maximalist and permanent compromise. (Proponents of housing in the area have argued that the deal was actually the opposite—the city would approve industrial lands without the contentious housing element, then revisit the housing question later.)

“Again, say it with me now,” Strauss intoned, some four hours in. “This proposal could be built today, if the units were hotels.” Since one of the main arguments against housing in the area is that renters’ cars would jam up traffic to and from the Port’s freight terminals, it’s hard to see how hotels would be much better—unless the idea is that tourists would use transit and renters would not, a conclusion that isn’t borne out by Seattle’s own experience with parking mandates, which have shown that renters in areas served by transit are far less likely to own cars than other Seattle residents.

As the meeting neared its 7pm conclusion, Strauss went so far as to imply that the 990 proposed apartments would actually obliterate the city’s maritime and industrial industry. Gesturing toward the “orange cranes” on the waterfront outside City Hall, he wondered aloud, “how much training does it take to get a skilled operator? How much investment does it take? And we’re gonna throw it away. We’ll keep the picture of it, though, in the conference room.”

Strauss repeatedly suggested shadowy forces were at play in some of his colleagues’ yes votes, fixating on a comment from Cathy Moore about a walking tour she and Maritza Rivera took at which, they said, a neighborhood group member suggested vacating South Occidental Street near the stadiums so it could become a pedestrian-only zone.. “The package of amendments today clearly demonstrates that council members have good intent, and that they know that housing in this area is a bad idea, but feel compelled to vote on this proposal or for this proposal,” Strauss said. “Today, for even me, new information has come to light, which further leads me to believe there were commitments or things shared in private.”

“If the next step from here as an alley vacation, this isn’t about affordable housing or union-built anything—this is back to 2016 about a whole different conversation,” Strauss said. The apparent implication was that the owner of much of the property rezoned for housing yesterday, Chris Hansen, had cut a side deal with other council members to bring back his 2016 stadium proposal without Strauss’ knowledge; that proposal died after the council narrowly rejected a proposal to vacate Occidental. Rivera and Moore denied this and said they regretted bringing it up.

Strauss said the zoning change, if approved, would “possibly be the first decision before this council that cannot be taken back.” While it’s true that once a building goes up, the council doesn’t have the power to tear it down, the city does change zoning laws all the time. It seemed like what Strauss wanted to say is that he didn’t like the way his colleagues were voting. But that’s sometimes just part of the job.

Courts, Elections

PubliCola Questions: City Attorney Candidate Nathan Rouse

By Erica C. Barnett

Nathan Rouse, a public defense attorney who works on felony cases for King County, is challenging City Attorney Ann Davison, a Republican, from the left, saying he’ll use his background in public  to refocus the city attorney’s office on victim restitution, fighting companies that bilk renters and workers out of their money, and routing misdemeanor defendants into evidence-based alternatives to jail, like the STAR Center for unhoused people with high service needs that’s opening near the King County Courthouse later this year.

Rouse grew up in a Quaker family in Philadelphia, and says that background led him to public defense—eventually. Before becoming a lawyer, Rouse spent a year juggling college and a brief career as a professional cyclist (his grades suffered, so he decided to focus on school), then worked at private law firms and as a judicial clerk before joining King County Public Defense in 2021.

Rouse is the third person running against Davison, who is in her first term. We spoke last week.

PubliCola (ECB): Tell me a little about your background as a public defender and how you believe that experience prepares you for this role.

Nathan Rouse (NR): As a public defender you see, directly and daily, the failed approaches to criminal justice in the criminal legal system. You see clients being cycled in and out of court and in and out of jail. You see the impact of that on your clients, and you see the failures of those approaches to actually provide any meaningful public safety to the community or provide any meaningful support to victims of crime.

I love being a public defender, but one of the things that’s really hard is that the deck is stacked against you, and you end up feeling pretty powerless a lot of the time. So I was really motivated to run in order to pursue meaningful reform of the system that actually accomplishes things like public safety and support for victims and sets people up for evidence-based treatment and recovery. It’s not like I have a silver bullet for any of this, but I can absolutely see clear examples of where the current approach is failing, and there’s a much better way to go about it.

ECB: What are some of the policies Ann Davison has implemented that you’ll focus on reversing or improving if you’re elected?

NR: I would not prioritize filing cases over getting results in those cases. And I think that’s what you really see right now. In the current city attorney’s office, you see a lot of filings, but if you look at their data, the results are not great. They’re not even getting good results in the most serious threats to public safety, like [domestic violence] or DUI cases, there’s a really, really high rate of dismissal of jury trial sets that are just dismissed by the city attorney’s office. They’re also declining an even higher rate of DV referrals than Pete Holmes’ administration did.

I think getting rid of community court was a disaster. Say what you will about community court, in terms of the way it was being used previously, but the problem with just getting rid of it and not replacing it with anything is then you’re just relying of jail and the diversionary programs that are available out there to solve all the problems that we all see on a daily basis.

Especially when we have really good new treatment options that are coming online through places like King County and at the state level, there’s a real opportunity for a place like the city attorney’s office to partner with these new evidence-based programs. There’s the STAR Center that’s opening on Third Avenue, the medication-assisted treatment that’s happening, the new facility that’s right across from the King County courthouse on Third Avenue as well. The Kirkland Crisis Connections Center that just opened—there’s just a lot of really promising stuff that’s coming out and being opened. There’s an opportunity to partner with these organizations and apply for grant funding, and really use community court as something that could be a connection point for services.

It’s a total myth that people just\ want to be addicted to drugs like fentanyl and methamphetamine and don’t want any help, and they’re just taking advantage of everybody. That’s just not true. People really, really want support and they really want help. But if you don’t have meaningful support that extends beyond, say, a couple-week program at the beginning, it’s not going to work. It’s a recipe for relapse and basically continuing down the same path. So at the city attorney’s office, you can’t just think about filing cases. You have to think about, what’s the purpose of filing this case and what’s the outcome going to be? And you have to look at the data and the evidence that tells you about that.

ECB: So are you saying that you would file fewer of the types of cases the current city attorney has emphasized—like trespassing and shoplifting cases?

NR: I’m not going to say I wouldn’t file any of those cases, but I do think that I would file fewer of them and explore other opportunities to divert them to programs like LEAD. It’s a really popular, effective program that should be fully funded. Obviously, I can’t fund it as a city attorney, but I can be a liaison and advocate for it at the City Council.

Erica Barnett  Has the high utilizers initiative caused harm, and it something that you would eliminate if you’re elected?

NR: Yeah, I would eliminate it. I don’t think it’s effective, for a few reasons. Number one, I think more than half of the folks that were on that list were not competent to stand trial. That means that folks are being prosecuted and the cases are just being dismissed. And then another case comes up, and the same thing happens, and that’s a waste of resources. So that’s one issue.

Another is the idea of disqualifying them from community court. You can’t just give up on people. You need to continue offering the resources. Because the reality in a misdemeanor prosecution system, which is what the Seattle City Attorney’s Office engages in, is that everybody is going to be back in the community relatively soon. What are we doing to actually interrupt the cycle of crime and addiction and mental health issues that are that’s occurring over and over again?

Another thing that’s true about the high-utilizer initiative is that well over 50 percent of the folks on that list had housing instability issues. So I think it’s just another example of promoting rhetoric over results.

ECB: You’ve said that the city attorney’s office needs to proactively work to protect workers and tenants from things like wage theft and rent gouging. What can the city attorney’s office do on those two issues specifically?

NR: I think one good example of a place where the city attorney’s office could advocate for legislation is in the area of algorithmic rent price fixing, like the RealPage company that is using algorithms to set rent and causing rent inflation. San Francisco and Philadelphia have basically created legislation banning that type of price fixing in the rental markets. So I think that’s a good example of where you can use advocacy for legislation to protect tenants.

ECB: And wage theft?

NR: Millions and millions of dollars are stolen each year from hard-working people and the Office of Labor Standards in Seattle does a great job investigating these complaints. And when OLS refers an investigation to the city attorney’s office for prosecution, the city attorney’s office has to be ready and willing to pursue those cases. My understanding is there hasn’t been a robust appetite for prosecuting those cases as there could be, and the city attorney’s office should absolutely be messaging and broadcasting their willingness to prosecute those cases and go after folks that are stealing money from hard-working people.

ECB:  We all tend to focus on the criminal side of the city attorney’s office. But are there issues on the civil side that you’re going to want to prioritize, or other kinds of less headline-grabbing issues that the city attorney actually spends a lot of time dealing with that you would want to focus on?

NR: The city has an opportunity to file lawsuits. Pete Holmes did that with Monsanto, and Davison’s office settled it for, like, $160 million for the city. So going back to RealPage—is there an opportunity for the city to be suing a company like that to protect residents of our city and seeking a settlement or some kind of judgment in that case?

I’d also be interested in setting up a more robust victims’ compensation fund on the criminal side. And that could be something that’s explored as a legislative opportunity, if there’s a way to work with the City Council on something like that. I think that would be popular, because businesses and small business owners that are victims of crimes—they’re not getting restitution from the people that are being prosecuted, because the folks that are being prosecuted don’t have the means to pay restitution. They can’t even afford an attorney, for the most part. So why isn’t there a way to reallocate funds from excessive prosecution to setting up a more robust victims’ compensation fund?

There’s an ordinance that requires the property owner to clean up graffiti within 10 days, or something like that, or else they get penalized by the city. Why are we shifting those costs to private businesses? I mean, I don’t really think that graffiti prosecution is worthwhile in any sense. But I think that we need to look at the ways that the city shifts costs to private business owners, and are there ways to make people whole when they’re victims of property crimes.

ECB: Ann Davison is a Republican, which is not a great place to be politically in Seattle right now. In what ways do you think her party affiliation should alarm Seattle residents voting in this nonpartisan race?

NR: I’ll start with the premise of leaving the Democratic Party in 2020 to become a Republican, when Trump was in his first term. That choice right there is pretty concerning to me, because the Republican Party is the is the party of Project 2025, and all of the various attacks on individual liberties that have occurred since.

Now we have Trump back again, is this the right leader to defend the city of Seattle against attacks from the Trump administration? You know, Pete Holmes was one of the first to file a sanctuary cities lawsuit against the Trump administration. And Davison, some time after it was actually filed, joined the lawsuit that was filed by King County and San Francisco and Portland and some other cities. But there was hesitation there. The hesitation, plus the explanation for doing it, was concerning to me, because it wasn’t phrased in terms of, we need to protect the residents of Seattle. It was phrased in terms of, we need to protect our local police resources so they can be used to solve local crimes, [rather than] we need to fight back against racism and racist attacks on immigrants and refugees and asylum seekers. So that concerns me.

I also think that the decision to join that lawsuit was motivated by the fact that it’s an election year, and I think the same is true of the announcement the other day that they’re ramping up efforts to hire more people to join the city attorney’s office to work against the Trump administration, or whatever those positions were characterized as. So I don’t think that she’s the right person to be in charge of that office at this time.

Elections, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Sound Transit’s New Leader, Katie Wilson’s Run for Mayor, and Ann Davison’s Challengers

By Erica C. Barnett

On our latest episode of Seattle Nice, we discuss King County Executive Dow Constantine’s likely appointment to a $675,000-a-year job as head of Sound Transit; mayor Bruce Harrell’s first potentially viable challenger, Katie Wilson; and a new candidate, Erika Evans, who’s joining the race against Republican City Attorney Ann Davison. We also poured one out for the short-lived candidacy of Tanya Woo, who briefly filed to run for City Council District 2 (the seat she lost to Tammy Morales before getting appointed to the council and losing to Alexis Mercedes Rinck last year).

It’s somewhat unusual for an incumbent city attorney to have so many challengers this early in the race (in addition to Evans, Rory O’Sullivan and Nathan Rouse are running). But in the case of Davison, it’s hardly surprising.

In her first unsuccessful campaign, in 2019, Davison ran against Debora Juarez from the right. As part of her appeal to voters, Davison proposed warehousing unsheltered people in former big-box stores, called climate change a pointless “luxury” issue compared to removing encampments and making Seattle “clean”; and claimed the city’s streets were covered in human feces.

In her second campaign, for lieutenant governor in 2020, Davison ran as a Republican, announcing that she had left the Democratic Party as part of the Walk Away movement headed up by (later-convicted) January 6 rioter Bradon Straka. (State elections are partisan, but Washington state does not require voters to register as a party member, so there’s no way to confirm Davison’s previous Democratic affiliation).

After losing that race in the primary, Davison defeated police abolitionist Nicole Thomas Kennedy in 2021, running on a law and order platform. She has spent her term advocating for the right to prosecute people who use drugs in public, crack down on sex workers, and banish people who commit drug and sex work misdemeanors from parts of the city.

Under Davison, the city shut down community court, which provided an alternative to jail for people accused of certain misdemeanors; created a new “high utilizers” program in which people arrested over and over are subject to a higher level of punishment; and began pursuing charges aggressively under a new drug law that makes simple drug possession or using drugs in public a misdemeanor. She also supports limiting the number of times people are allowed to overdose before they’re thrown in jail.

We debated whether Davison is really a Republican (she is, ) or if she’s maybe some kind of moderate Democrat (as Sandeep seems to believe).

Last month, Davison belatedly joined a lawsuit filed by other cities against a Trump executive order threatening to withhold federal funds from cities that won’t help the federal government conduct immigration raids—a Seattle policy for many years. Unlike other city attorneys, however, Davison’s justification for joining was that the order violates “local control,” a tepid reason at best.

Notably, Davison has declined to denounce Trump generally or say whether she voted for Trump or Harris in the last election (we asked), and the policies she supports are, very generously, on the far right end of Seattle’s political spectrum. (Although, again, she denounced the Democrats and joined a national Republican movement in 2020, as Trump was running for reelection, and ran on a Republican ticket that was headed by a far-right MAGA extremist who went on to deny the election results.)

Check out our discussion on this week’s episode:

 

This Week on PubliCola

This Week on PubliCola: March 15, 2025

Candidates jump in (and out), police get a $40,000 PowerPoint, and a guest columnist argues that transit riders should get a say in how transit works.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, March 10

Tanya Woo Tries Again (UPDATED: Nope); Advocates Tell Council How they Can Help Limit “Existential” Threats from Trump

Two-time candidate and one-time council appointee Tanya Woo filed to run for council again, then apparently decided against it. Also, advocates for people whose rights are threatened by the Trump administration’s actions on health care, immigration, and LGBTQ+ rights told a new council committee what’s at risk over the next four years and how they can help

“This New Republic Story? It’s a F*cking Sieve.” Adam Penenberg Joins Us on Episode 2 of “Are You Mad at Me?,” a Shattered Glass Podcast

On the second episode of our new limited series podcast on the 2003 movie about the unraveling of a journalistic fraud, Shattered Glass, Josh and I interviewed the reporter who broke the story that led to New Republic reporter Stephen Glass’ undoing. For those who weren’t around or don’t remember, Glass’ fabrications (followed, not long after, by the Jayson Blair scandal at the New York Times) were a huge deal at a time when print outlets considered themselves far superior to online journalism.

Tuesday, March 11

PubliCola Questions: City Attorney Candidate Erika Evans

Erika Evans, until recently an assistant US Attorney at the Department of Justice, told PubliCola that if she’s elected she’ll actively fight against the Trump Administration and prioritize dangerous misdemeanor crimes, like domestic violence and driving under the influence, over prosecuting and jailing people for drug use, sex work, and crimes of poverty.

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Wednesday, March 12

PubliCola Questions: Mayoral Candidate Katie Wilson

Transit Riders Union leader Katie Wilson is challenging Mayor Bruce Harrell on a progressive platform that includes promoting social housing, increasing shelter capacity instead of just pushing unhoused people from place to place, and passing “progressive revenue to make sure we do not go into a financial death spiral.”

Thursday, March 13

SPD Paid $40,000 for Two-Day Media Training Requested by Adrian Diaz Chief of Staff

At the request of Jamie Tompkins, former police chief Adrian Diaz’ former chief of staff, SPD flew two trainers in from out of town to teach them how to get good press and avoid bad press. The paint-by-numbers trainings included advice like “social media has changed how people communicate,” “use the media as a tool,” and “engage in likable behavior.”

Friday, March 14

To End Car Dependency, We Must Change Who Has A Seat At the Table

In a guest post, nondriver Anna Zivarts argues that people who don’t drive deserve a seat on the boards that make decisions about our transportation and land use policies, rather than people who don’t even use the transit systems they’re in charge of.

Guest Contributor, Transit

To End Car Dependency, We Must Change Who Has A Seat At the Table
Transit board leaders who don’t ride transit can’t fully understand what’s working—and what isn’t. Photo via Wikimedia Commons; CC-by-2.0 license

By Anna Zivarts

“If you could change one thing to make our communities less car-dependent, what would it be?”

That’s a question I get asked a lot in rooms full of climate and family-bike advocates, transit agency staff, and elected leaders working to build more affordable, dense housing. They are eager for checklists of steps they can take to make our communities more accessible for people who can’t, can’t afford to, or choose not to drive. They want to know what the solution is. 

They don’t always like it when I respond that the most durable and profound change comes from changing who gets to have a seat at the tables where the decisions that shape our communities are being made. If I could change anything, what I would change first is making sure that people who don’t have the option of driving get to redesign our land use and transportation systems. 

This is a radical proposition. It’s hard for most people to disagree that we need to “include” nondrivers in these decisions. But by insisting that nondrivers are treated as equal partners, we are asking for a revision to existing decision-making structures, and this kind of restructuring always meets resistance. 

The organization I work for, Disability Rights Washington, has been advocating for the past three years to allow transit riders to hold voting seats on public transit boards (This year, the bill is HB 1418). We’ve witnessed how the elected leaders and representatives who hold those seats are rarely, if ever, transit riders themselves, and so have little understanding of what makes these systems work, or not work, for riders. In fact, we keep seeing examples of transit boards voting to cut taxes and gut service. In the Tri Cities, Ben Franklin Transit’s board attempted cuts in 2022 and 2024. This year, Island Transit’s board is floating tax cuts.

While making sure transit riders are represented on transit boards seems like a commonsense proposition, we struggle against a slew of objections grounded in paternalism, and sometimes unacknowledged ableism or racism, toward those of us who rely on transit.

“But X doesn’t have the background, the education, the expertise to make that decision.” 

“Transit riders won’t think about the larger system and will only advocate for their own specific preferences.”

“People who rely on transit won’t understand fiscal responsibility.”

“If they want to make decisions about transit, they should run for office and win elections like the other leaders on these boards.” 

Of course, we would love to see more nondrivers—in particular disabled, immigrant and non-white nondrivers—win elected office and serve on transit boards in that capacity. But in most parts of our country, outside the cores of large, dense cities, a candidate needs a car (or the financial resources to hire a personal driver) to be taken seriously. That’s because candidates are expected to be in a lot of different places in a very short amount of time, in a way that is only possible with driving. 

It’s unacceptable that the people governing transit have zero experience with the system because they “don’t have the time” to utilize it. If car-dependent communities make it infeasible for nondrivers to win elected office, we need to make sure that these voices are still present on transit boards.

And this discussion of who gets to govern extends beyond transit boards, to any space where decisions are getting made or information is being shared about our transportation system or built environment. 

We also need people who rely on transit working at, and running, transit agencies. We wouldn’t accept the head of an agency or company who doesn’t believe enough in the service or product to use it—so why do we accept it from transit agency leaders? Our paternalism toward people who rely on transit shapes who we envision as capable or qualified. (This is why Disability Rights Washington is championing another bill this session to prevent employers from requiring driver’s licenses when driving isn’t an essential function of the job.

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Almost no one would say they aspire to spend hours driving to and from a job, getting in fights over parking spaces at Costco, or waiting half an hour in the car queue to pick our kids up from school. Yet when we design our communities to prioritize car access over all other ways of connecting, these outcomes are inevitable. Additionally, the financial burden of car ownership is significant. If we build our communities to require car access for independent travel, we are locking households into a system of car dependence that can be a tremendous financial stressor. 

But it’s difficult to untangle this dependence, because once you’ve purchased a car, you’re bought in. If it’s going to be faster and safer to get somewhere by driving, why wouldn’t you drive, when the cost per mile once the car is purchased is minimal? Even though many people would prefer a life where they didn’t have to drive so much, driving–for those who can drive and who can afford to drive–is the rational choice in pretty much every community in the US. That’s why we need the voices of nondrivers to disrupt this paradox. Because driving isn’t an option for us, we are willing to push for changes that would make it possible for everyone to live without car dependence, even if (and when) those changes require tradeoffs. 

If those of us who can’t or don’t drive are in the room, sharing our passion and deep knowledge of getting around relying on transit, we’ll get better policies and more successful transportation systems for our communities. 

Anna Zivarts is a visually impaired parent and author of When Driving Is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency (Island Press, 2024). Joining the team at Disability Rights Washington in 2018, Zivarts led the Rooted in Rights storytelling project and launched the Week Without Driving challenge to address the needs of nondrivers in planning accessible communities. Previously, Zivarts spent fifteen years as a communications strategist for labor and political campaigns, working as a storyfinder for the LGBT & HIV/AIDS Project at the ACLU and co-founding the NYC-based communications and storytelling firm, Time of Day Media.