Tag: Ballard

Business, Speech, zoning

Old-Fashioned Furor Erupts Over Plans for Adult Cabaret License in Ballard
A local property owner says this “park” is too close to a Ballard bar whose owner is seeking an adult-entertainment license.

By Erica C. Barnett

Nextdoor—the social media site for lost cats, stationary bike sales, and NIMBY panic—was buzzing last week with the news that Roam, a bar on the largely industrial south end of Ballard Ave. NW, recently applied for an adult cabaret license.

Laurie Lohrer, who owns a nearby building where a Filson store has operated since 2016, warned neighbors that a new business “has applied to City for ‘Adult Entertainment’ permit to operate a strip club. … We don’t want another Aurora Avenue North scene on Ballard Avenue. It’s our responsibility to protect our community and its family-friendly & safe atmosphere from this incompatible use.”

But the owner of Roam Bar, Nicole Healy, says she isn’t opening a strip club; her plan is to turn the upstairs event space at the bar into an actual cabaret that will include “all kinds of entertainment like comedy, drag shows, and more,” including adult entertainment like burlesque. “I’ve always loved the arts, and while I’m not particularly creative myself, I have so many talented friends who inspire me,” Healy said. “Creating a space they’d feel excited to perform in has been a dream of mine for years.”

Lohrer did not respond to a request for an interview. In her December 8 Nextdoor post, she urged Ballard residents to “TAKE ACTION TODAY!” by writing Councilmember Dan Strauss, who represents Ballard, opposing the permit, and signing a petition she created on Change.org to “Stop Strip Club permit on Ballard Avenue.”

Strauss did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the cabaret kerfuffle.

Lohrer’s change.org petition, which had been removed as of Friday morning, claimed Roam’s license application is illegal, citing a 2007 ordinance that prohibits “adult cabarets” within 800 feet of schools, community centers, child care centers, and parks. The bar isn’t near any of those things, but the petition argues that a nearby street end—a strip of scrubby bushes at the far end of an industrial parking lot—constitutes the kind of “open space” the city council intended to protect when they wrote the ordinance.

The street end, Lohrer argued, “has been improved with enhanced shoreline habitat and bench for public viewing and enjoyment. It is a public park and provides a public open space use.” This is incorrect, according to the city’s Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections. Bench or no bench, “the area remains a city right-of-way use with no formal designation as a park or open space,” SDCI spokesman Bryan Stevens said.

“The submitted plans have demonstrated compliance with these standards as a part of our zoning review process,” Stevens added. “We are waiting for the applicant to address other fire-safety corrections before the permit is approved and issued.”

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In her petition, Lohrer argued that Roam Bar’s plans will “reduce foot traffic of shoppers, diners and to events. It would devalue Ballard Avenue as a safe and attractive place for local & greater Puget Sound residents and other visitors to spend the day or evening.”

“It’s well known that ‘adult entertainment’  businesses often become hubs for ongoing prostitution, disruptive conduct, and criminal activity,” the petition continued. “Few of us want to bring our children, family & friends for an afternoon of shopping, a meal out, or to Sunday Farmers Market—in the vicinity of a strip club.”

There’s no evidence that a bar holding events for adults at night will reduce property values, lead to street sex work, or make the area less “family friendly” during daytime hours.

Before it was removed, Lohrer’s petition had garnered only about 190 signatures.

Healy noted that Roam is “proudly woman-owned” business, and said her “goal is to create a space that is fun, safe, and empowering for performers.”

“If exotic dancing does become part of the mix,” Healy said “there will never be full nudity. For me, traditional burlesque and similar styles of provocative dance are about creativity, artistry, and comfort—not necessarily nudity. I’d want performers to feel completely free to choose their costumes and whether topless dancing is part of their act, without any conditions set by me as the owner.”

Roam opened in October as a neighborhood bar, and features large portraits of entertainers like Lady Gaga and Josephine Baker, created by Healy’s wife.

Seattle has had a long, weird history with strip clubs and other kinds of adult entertainment. In 1988, the city passed a “temporary” moratorium on new strip clubs, then extended the moratorium annually for 17 years. Back in 2003, when Seattle had just four remaining strip clubs (including two that have since closed) Josh and I reported that the only study the city ever bothered doing on their impact on surrounding neighborhoods showed no correlation between strip clubs and public safety problems.

In 2005, federal judge James Robart (better known these days for overseeing the SPD consent decree) declared the then 17-year-old “moratorium” unconstitutional, and the city proposed new guidelines for adult entertainment, including a  “four-foot rule” that required a four-foot buffer zone between dancers and patrons. The four-foot rule was eventually overturned (along with a law requiring strip clubs to be lit up like operating rooms), and the state legislature finally passed a “Strippers Bill of Rights” allowing alcohol sales at adult entertainment venues this year. If Roam gets its license, it will be one of the first bars with a cabaret license in the state (Dream Girls, in SoDo, became the state’s first strip club serving alcohol earlier this year.)

The 800-foot buffer between strip clubs and places where “children congrate” was established in 2007 and has never been contested. According to a report on the legislation, which dubiously refers to “some” unspecified “evidence” that strip clubs caused crime, a key reason for keeping strip clubs away from places where children congregate is that because alcohol was banned inside clubs at the time, “it is believed that consumption of alcohol and drugs may occur in club parking lots, on adjacent public streets, or in the surrounding neighborhood. These activities are particularly problematic and incompatible with locations where children congregate.”

Now that the city can no longer use the excuse that people hang around strip clubs and drink (not that they presented any evidence for this claim in the first place), maybe it’s time to revisit not just the buffer zones, but the prudish insistence that strip clubs and cabarets—enclosed adults-only places where children are not allowed—somehow harm “the children” just by existing.

Development, housing, land use, Mayor Durkan, zoning

Seattle’s Latest Industrial Plan Will Exclude Housing, Erect New Walls Around Industrial Districts
Evolution Block in Vancouver, B.C.—the kind of multistory industrial building that could come to Seattle under a new proposal for industrial areas. Photo via PC Urban.

by Erica C. Barnett

Walk through the stretch of Ballard that runs roughly from 14th to 8th Ave. NW between NW 53rd Street and Leary Way, and you’ll find no shortage of breweries and taprooms selling hoppy IPAs and farmhouse ales to take home or drink onsite, along with an eclectic assortment of food trucks offering everything from dim sum to burgers to Polish food. What you won’t see is housing: No apartments, condos, or artists’ lofts to break up the area’s single-story industrial monoculture.

The breweries have brought some street-level excitement to this part of Ballard, but the vitality is limited: You can drink beer and buy food from a truck here, but you can’t work in an office, browse in a retail store, or dine at a restaurant—and you certainly can’t live here. Tap rooms (and marijuana shops) represent the limit of what’s allowed in an industrial area like this one in Ballard, which will eventually be a short walk away from Sound Transit’s Ballard light-rail station.

The future of Seattle’s industrial land has been a subject of debate for decades, but the idea of integrating non-industrial uses into these areas, which make up about 12 percent of Seattle’s land, has accelerated in recent years as smaller, more human-scale industrial businesses have replaced smoke-belching traditional manufacturing enterprises in Seattle and across the country. Under a new strategy created at the behest of Mayor Jenny Durkan, however, innovation in these areas would be restricted to small edge zones on the outskirts of industrial districts—and housing would continue to be banned altogether.

In addition to those new restrictions, a proposed amendment to the city’s comprehensive plan (the document that governs land use and zoning in Seattle) would make it virtually impossible to take land out of industrial use for any reason—a zoning restriction on par with laws preserving Seattle’s exclusive single-family zones.

In effect, the amendment would bar anyone who owns industrial land from even asking permission to remove it from industrial use—say, to add housing in an area right next to a light rail station. Historically (including this year), individual land owners have asked permission to change their property from industrial to another use as part of the comprehensive plan amendment process, and historically, including this year, the city has rejected such requests.

On Monday, NAIOP Washington, a lobbying organization for commercial real estate developers, wrote a letter to the city’s Office of Planning and Community Development asking for more zoning flexibility within a quarter-mile of light rail stations and requesting a more flexible definition of “industrial” to allow a wider range of uses. And they asked the city to reject the proposed comprehensive plan amendment. “[W]e do not believe all 5,000 acres of our City’s industrial lands should be treated the same,” the letter, signed by NAIOP Washington director Peggi Lewis Fu, says.

“We believe in some areas, this work could go further… ensuring that this effort fully considers the billion-dollar taxpayer investment in current and future light-rail transit stations that fall within this study area,” the letter continues.

The new recommendations introduce the concept of “high-density employment” in industrial areas near transit stops—multistory industrial buildings that, in some cases, might include office space. In practice, this type of development would encourage a one-way in-migration to jobs and a one-way out-migration to homes, much as 20th-century transit and highway planning assumed people would commute to cities’ downtown cores from distant residential neighborhoods and suburbs.

Jessica Clawson, an attorney at the firm McCullough Hill Leary in Seattle, asked the city council’s land use committee last month to delay considering the comprehensive plan amendment until next year, when the city will have a better idea of where Sound Transit’s new stations in Interbay and Ballard will go.

“Why would the council docket and study a comp plan amendment now that would make it more difficult to consider these really important transportation decisions when making land use changes [in the future]?” she asked. Clawson’s firm is headed by longtime developer attorney (and political heavy hitter) Jack McCullough, who co-chaired the committee that produced the 2017 proposal.

The Industrial Innovation Network—a group of property owners who want to remove their land from industrial use, allowing them to develop it—has filed an appeal to the city’s determination of [environmental] nonsignificance for the amendment, arguing that the proposal would make it impossible for them to develop housing, including affordable housing, in historically industrial areas near light rail stations “In addition, the Proposal’s restriction of land to only industrial uses will cause some properties to remain vacant or underutilized, with buildings in a state of disrepair, resulting in blight,” the appeal, filed by McCullough Hill Leary, says. 

In a letter to OPCD a week before the IIN filed its appeal, Clawson argued that would take away property owners’ rights to “petition their government” for a land-use change, reduce the usefulness of light rail, and contribute to the housing shortage by taking land out of residential use, potentially “in perpetuity.” 

“Locking industrial lands into non-housing use (required by the MIC) will result in significant land use and transportation impacts,” the letter, signed by Clawson, says. In addition to the future light rail station next to Ballard’s brewery district, the SODO Manufacturing and Industrial Area includes a light-rail station that will eventually serve as a bustling transfer point for riders coming to and from West Seattle.

“Locking industrial lands into non-housing use (required by the MIC) will result in significant land use and transportation impacts,” the letter says. In addition to the future light rail station next to Ballard’s brewery district, the SODO Manufacturing and Industrial Area includes a light-rail station that will eventually serve as a bustling transfer point for riders coming to and from West Seattle.

The council voted to move the amendment forward; they haven’t acted on the industrial advisory group’s recommendations, which will face environmental review. The city hearing examiner’s office has the property owners’ appeal on its docket.

Although industrial areas enjoy an enviably low vacancy rate (about 5 percent, compared to an office vacancy rate of 15 percent), the definition of “industrial” continues to shift in ways that have led other cities (notably Portland) to allow some mingling of homes, shops, and restaurants in once walled-off industrial areas. The idea of allowing housing in industrial areas has long been off-limits in Seattle, but the city’s growth—even at the height of COVID, the city grew by 8,400 people, cementing our status as one of the fastest-growing US cities—may force the issue, especially in a city that restricts new apartments to a tiny sliver of its buildable land.

In Seattle, conversations about the future of industrial land have been slow and fitful. In 2016, then-mayor Ed Murray assembled a group of stakeholders—including industrial land owners, planners, developers, and maritime advocacy groups—to come up with a new framework for developing industrial areas in the future. The update was long overdue: Since 2007, when the city dramatically downzoned industrial land by placing strict size limits on office and retail uses, Seattle’s industrial areas have been effectively closed to non-industrial development—a status that keeps land costs lower (no competition with residential and office developers), but can produce dull streetscapes prone to potholes and blight.

“That first [set of meetings] started so contentiously that they couldn’t even have the two sides of the table in the same room for the first three meetings,” SODO Business Improvement Area director Erin Goodman recalled. The argument boiled down to “development version preservation of industrial land—this is a hot button issue down here.” Continue reading “Seattle’s Latest Industrial Plan Will Exclude Housing, Erect New Walls Around Industrial Districts” →

City Council, Maybe Metropolis, neighborhoods, Urbanism

Maybe Metropolis: Launching Seattle’s New “Neighborhood Character”

District 6 Councilmember Dan Strauss’ legislation is an acknowledgment that Seattle’s neighborhood character is changing.

by Josh Feit

City Council member Dan Strauss passed legislation this week that extends the city’s sidewalk and curbside permitting program for Seattle businesses for another year. Standing next to one of the semi-permanent “pergolas” that now line Ballard Avenue, Strauss said, “we want them here forever.” Mike Stewart, head of the Ballard Alliance, noted the “great symbiotic relationship between restaurants, retailers, and the Ballard Sunday Farmers Market. By supporting any one of those,” Stewart said, customers help support the neighborhood’s whole urban core.

It’s a good start. In fact, I inaugurated the “Maybe Metropolis” column during the tumult of the pandemic last Fall by seizing on the street seating program as a promising sign that the COVID-19 crisis was unlocking Seattle’s larger urbanist sensibility.

But…

Strauss’ legislation doesn’t fully capitalize on this pivotal moment. Public momentum is currently pushing Seattle in an urban direction. In just one year, the city has now issued 233 outdoor restaurant permits, compared to about 384 outdoor dining permits issued over the previous 12 years combined.

Obviously, part of that increase is related to that fact that the permits were free this year; ordinarily there’s a square footage charge and a $232 up-front free. Nonetheless, this year’s permits represent an increase of more than 700 percent over the previous years’ average—a tremendous spike.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the pandemic, it’s that Seattle’s “neighborhood character” has a different personality type than we thought. Long a coded excuse against everything from more mother-in-law apartments, to triplexes, to nighttime lights in parks, it turns out Seattle’s “neighborhood character” is far more malleable and exciting than Seattle’s reactionary reflex suggests.

If we miss this opportunity to transform Seattle’s non-downtown neighborhoods on a grander scale than simply allowing outdoor seating while failing to make our local communities places that actually support our lives—as opposed to supporting Stepford lives—we will have squandered 2021’s urban revelation.

Certainly, some of the pent-up energy is specific to the pandemic, but given that trends like working from home were already in play prior to 2020—teleworking in Seattle increased 113 percent between 2010 and 2019—it seems the pandemic has actually revealed, rather than invented, neighborhood needs and preferences.

For example, the jump in working from home was not a function of Seattle’s simultaneous population boom, as it dramatically outpaced other modes like driving (which actually decreased) and walking. The need for more neighborhood options to do business, shop, and go out nearby isn’t going away if people continue to work in greater numbers at home.

The pandemic has actually revealed, rather than invented, neighborhood needs and preferences..

The change in mood that has coincided with the need for more activated neighborhoods has certainly nudged the city to already relax some rigid rules this past year. In addition to making it easier for businesses to set up sidewalk and street dining, the council has also eased restrictions on small home businesses and made some streets pedestrian and bike only zones.

It’s a good look. But rather than taking a piecemeal approach, council members need to think comprehensively about making all our city neighborhoods more neighbor-friendly. This means recalibrating zoning (more density and uses), restriping existing pavement (more bus and bike lanes), and retaking the public right of way (with bioswales, bike racks, P-Patches, microparks, and closing streets to cars.)

In March, I published a list of seven neighborhood Must Dos for meeting this moment, which mostly focused on increasing housing density in non-downtown neighborhoods (end single family zoning, please!) and increasing the density of indie businesses as well. Along those lines, I wrote: “With hundreds of businesses getting street (or sidewalk) seating permits … it needs to be a permanent option.” Since the council seems to be responding to the zeitgeist, I’d like to take advantage of the momentum and offer some more necessary fixes for Seattle’s neighborhoods.

Because District 6 Councilmember Strauss is showing such leadership on this issue, I’m proposing Ballard, which makes up the bulk of District 6, as the first neighborhood to implement the following recommendations for acknowledging and activating our new neighborhood character.

We can call it the Ballard Action District, or BAD.

Ballard Ave.

First, while allowing multifamily housing in Seattle’s exclusive single-family zones must be central to any plan to reinvent our neighborhoods, let’s start by upzoning the real estate that’s adjacent to our neighborhood parks and schools, creating Parks Oriented Development (POD) and Schools Oriented Development (SOD).

Eighty-nine percent of the city’s parks and open spaces are in single family zones. Similarly, the vast majority of the city’s top-performing elementary schools are in single-family areas. Let’s give more people access. In order to redistribute these assets, let’s start undoing those single-family enclaves, which make up 65 percent of the city’s developable land, by prioritizing real estate around parks and schools for multi-family and affordable housing.

Continue reading “Maybe Metropolis: Launching Seattle’s New “Neighborhood Character”” →

homelessness, human services, Mayor Durkan, Morning Fizz, Parks, Police

Another Sweep in Ballard, JustCARE Disputes Mayor’s Cost Claims, and Former County Dems Leader Resigns

1. On Friday, the city will remove any tents that remain at Gilman Playfield in Ballard, part of a wider strategy of removing encampments that are near schools, playgrounds and sports fields. The Gilman sweep comes after similar encampment removals at Rainier Playfield and Miller Park on Capitol Hill, which the mayor’s office said were necessary to make the parks “safe and accessible” to students and children playing sports.

Mayoral spokeswoman Rachel Schulkin said the Seattle Police Department responded 61 times in the past six months to “calls including disturbances, domestic violence, and other suspicious or potentially dangerous activity at the playground,” and that the fire department had responded to another 11 calls. Additionally, “Youth sports team coaches, parents, and neighbors have been reaching out to the City over the past few months with various safety concerns and to express their frustrations over not being able to use the field for youth sports,” Schulkin said.

On the day a jury found Derek Chauvin guilty of murdering George Floyd, the account retweeted a post from the Kent Police Department that read, “If you’re celebrating 420 today, DON’T DRIVE. Pop a squat on your 70s basement couch, play some Boston in the background, binge watch Fast Times and eat Doritos.” When a reader called the tweet “tone deaf,” the Kent account responded, “Just want to encourage people to be safe if they’re celebrating today 😊.”

The encampment was quiet on Wednesday morning, as outreach workers went from tent to tent to discuss options with the people living in the park. None of the tents were on the playground or the nearby playfield; the biggest concentration was in a shaded area near the restrooms and on the sidewalk outside the playfield fence.

According to an outreach worker on site, most of the residents would be offered rooms at the Executive Pacific Hotel downtown; if the majority of the dozens of people living in the park accept placements, the hotel would be essentially full, although some people who moved into the hotel have reportedly left without receiving permanent housing placements.

Encampment removals slowed down dramatically during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic but have been ramping back up this spring, including the removal of tents and encampment residents from University Playfield near I-5 last weekend.

Also Wednesday, the JustCARE program moved a number of people living in Pioneer Square near the historic First Avenue pergola to its own hotel-based shelters, the Navigation Center, and the Executive Pacific Hotel, most likely making a planned sweep of that encampment unnecessary; the city is reportedly planning additional encampment removals in Pioneer Square and the International District in the coming weeks.

2. Mayor Jenny Durkan has repeatedly claimed that JustCARE costs more than $100,000 a person, a claim that has so frustrated the organizations supporting the program that they produced a flyer outlining what they say the program costs “at scale”: Just under $50,000 a client, half of which is the cost of hotel rooms themselves.

Durkan’s office has shown little interest in expanding JustCARE, which is a joint project of the Public Defender Association, Asian Counseling and Referral Service, REACH, and other groups, arguing that there are cheaper options that do the same thing.

A spokeswoman for the mayor’s office provided a chart outlining the budget for King County’s extension of JustCARE, which comes in at an average of $104,000 a month per room. The mayor’s office says that they have always calculated and compared costs on a “per room” basis than a “per person” basis, a claim the PDA disputes. The PDA says that its cost estimate of around $49,000 per client is based on a longer-term model that would bring the program to “scale,” renting “more than twice as many rooms in the same hotels, and [serving] more than twice as many participants,” according to PDA director Lisa Daugaard.

In February, the city rejected a proposal that would have effectively expanded JustCARE by moving clients into the Executive Pacific Hotel downtown, insisting that they could not spend a penny more than $17,000 per client plus the cost of the rooms themselves.

Ultimately, the city signed two contracts for hotel-based shelters, with the Low-Income Housing Institute and Chief Seattle Club, that came in significantly above the $17,000 cap.

Mayoral spokeswoman Kamaria Hightower told PubliCola, “We absolutely agree that a provider contract should be a longer-term commitment both for clients and efficiency and understand the county is seeking that approach. That’s why we created our hotel programs that are a year long and include rapid rehousing resources (and some [permanent supportive housing] resources).

3. Bailey Stober, the former director of the King County Democrats who lost his job after an investigation found him guilty of sexual harassment and workplace misconduct, is leaving his latest job as communications manager for Kent Mayor Dana Ralph under circumstances that remain unclear. Ralph would not provide details about why Stober is leaving, but confirmed that he has “resigned his position effective June 1.”

Contacted by email, Stober said, “When I took the job, I came to Kent from Texas and told the Mayor I would give her 18 months to two years and then my plan was to return to Texas. I took a great job offer in Texas and as I enter my 18/19th month with the city I’ve finished the projects I wanted to finish and am happily going back to Texas.”

Stober is the anonymous voice behind the city of Kent’s Twitter account, which gained thousands of followers for its puerile tweets mocking other cities and making jokes about “nuggs.” (Here are some lyrics the account  posted at 9:00 on a Friday night.)

On the day a jury found Derek Chauvin guilty of murdering George Floyd, the city of Kent account retweeted a post from the Kent Police Department that read, “If you’re celebrating 420 today, DON’T DRIVE. Pop a squat on your 70s basement couch, play some Boston in the background, binge watch Fast Times and eat Doritos. Be chill and stay off the roads.” When a reader called the tweet “tone deaf,” the Kent account responded, “Just want to encourage people to be safe if they’re celebrating today 😊.” Unlike many other local jurisdictions, the city did not acknowledge the Chauvin verdict on its Twitter account.

Earlier this year, Ralph stood by Stober when he got kicked out of a local bar after allegedly inciting a massive brawl and calling both Ralph and the chief of police and threatening to have the bar’s liquor license revoked.

Transit, Transportation

Spike In Cost Estimates Raises Questions About Future of West Seattle-Ballard Light Rail

By Erica C. Barnett

The estimated cost of extending Seattle’s light rail system to Ballard and West Seattle, as well as several other components of the Sound Transit 3 plan adopted by voters in 2015, has risen dramatically since last year, Sound Transit staffers told the agency’s executive committee Wednesday. The main factors driving the increase, according to the agency, are higher than anticipated property acquisition costs, higher costs for labor and materials, and unanticipated “soft costs,” including additional funding for contingencies.

Overall, according to the staff presentation, the estimated cost to build the West Seattle-Ballard line and other aspects of the planned expansion, including a planned Tacoma Dome extension and a new operations and maintenance facility in South King County has increased by $7.9 billion, with the bulk of that—around $4.4 billion at the midrange of Sound Transit’s new estimates—coming from increased costs to build light rail between West Seattle and Ballard.

Sound Transit provided PubliCola a more detailed breakdown of the West Seattle-to-Ballard cost increases. The chart below represents the best-case (lowest-cost) scenario from the range Sound Transit released yesterday. The most dramatic percentage increase is in the elevated West Seattle to downtown segment, which Sound Transit attributed to the higher cost of property in quickly densifying West Seattle.

The main reason for the cost increases in general, Sound Transit deputy CEO Kimberly Farley said, was the cost of buying up property along the line. Property values have continued to skyrocket in Seattle and across the region despite the recession. Exacerbating that problem, Sound Transit will have to buy back an undisclosed number of buildings that are either currently under development or that have been developed since the ballot measure passed in 2015.

One of these is the Legacy at Fauntleroy mixed-use building, which will include more than 300 apartments and ground-floor commercial space. That building, and likely others, is on land that was upzoned in 2019 under Seattle’s Mandatory Housing Affordability program. The upzone, to 95 feet, went into effect in April 2019, making the seven-story project possible, and construction began three months later. The building is still under construction. PubliCola has a call out to the owner of the property.

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During Wednesday’s meeting, board members and Sound Transit CEO Peter Rogoff hastened to emphasize that these huge unanticipated costs should be viewed as a challenge, not a disaster. “While these numbers are sobering, they’re not catastrophic,” Rogoff said. King County executive Dow Constantine added that the one certainty is that light rail will only get more, not less, expensive to build in the future. “This system would have been a lot easier to build 50 years ago,” he said—an allusion to the frequently referenced Forward Thrust plan that Puget Sound region voters rejected in 1968 and again in 1970.

Staffers noted Wednesday that it was possible to make some “protective acquisitions” of property to prevent huge spikes in property values along the line, but agency spokesman Geoff Patrick told PubliCola their power to do so is limited. “While public agencies can secure federal approval for protective acquisitions in some cases, most property acquisition must occur after environmental review processes are completed and the Board has adopted the final project to be built,” he said. “This occurs after completion of the draft and final environmental impact statements that are required for most major projects.” Continue reading “Spike In Cost Estimates Raises Questions About Future of West Seattle-Ballard Light Rail” →

Business, City Council, Density, Elections, homelessness, housing, King County, Transportation

The 2019 City Council Candidates: District 6 Candidate Heidi Wills
Image via Heidi Wills campaign

This year’s council races include an unusually high number of open seats, an unprecedented amount of outside spending, and eight first-time candidates. To help voters keep track, I’m sitting down with this year’s city council contenders to talk about their records, their priorities, and what they hope to accomplish on the council.

Today: District 6 candidate Heidi Wills. Wills, a former city council member, lost her reelection bid in 2003 and spent the next 13 years as the executive director of The First Tee of Greater Seattle, an organization that teaches kids “to play golf along with life lessons and leadership skills.” We jumped right in on the issue that led to her 2003 loss to David Della.

ECB: Let’s talk about Strippergate [the scandal in which Wills was reprimanded and fined for failing to report a meeting related to a zoning request from strip-club owner Frank Colacurcio, who contributed thousands of dollars in illegally bundled donations to Wills and two other council members.] What have you learned from that experience, and how has it changed your approach to campaign financing as a candidate?

HW: I think the democracy vouchers has that really lessened the influence of donors and special interests in fundraising and in fueling campaigns and it’s really given voice to average people who otherwise aren’t getting involved. Everyone has $100 to spend. When I ran 20 years ago and I felt like to get my name out there, and it was a citywide race, I needed to fundraise. And remember, this was pre-Google. [Editor’s note: Google was founded in 1998 and was pretty big by 2003. Yahoo had slightly more users, and MSN had slightly fewer.] I didn’t have Google as my friend. It was $650 per person maximum.

Remember, I was trying to solve a small business issue for Governor [Al] Rosellini [who was also involved… you know what? Just read this summary], who had been a mentor to me, and I did not question his motives or sincerity or his agenda. And in retrospect, I would have asked more questions. I would have wanted to know his relationship to the Colacurcio family. I didn’t ask that question. I didn’t know the history of the Colacurcio family. 

I was the youngest person who’d ever been elected to the city council and I did not know the headlines about all their corruption and criminal activity. It raised red flags at the [Public Disclosure Commission] when those checks came in, but I wasn’t aware.

“In retrospect, I would have asked more questions. I would have wanted to know his relationship to the Colacurcio family. I didn’t ask that question. I didn’t know the history of the Colacurcio family.”

ECB: You and Judy Nicastro were booted from the council and Jim Compton, who took just as much money from the Colacurcios as you did, was reelected. Did you think there was any sexism involved in that?

HW: Yes. But I don’t want to get into it.

ECB: Density is a major point of contention in District 6, particularly in Ballard, which has changed so dramatically. What do you think of the changes that have happened around 15th and Market, where the new density has been most dramatic?

HW: I’m a supporter of density. I supported it when I was on the council, and I support it now, especially where we have transportation to support it. What’s concerning to people [about the six-story buildings at 15th and Market], and it’s a reasonable concern, is that it’s not human in scale. If we had courtyards. If we had setbacks, if it felt human in scope, not like a canyon, I think that people would welcome more density. So I think that’s really too bad that that was built in a way to maximize footprint.

The thing about [Mandatory Housing Affordability, which upzoned the city’s urban villages], which I think is a great way to include more density in  urban villages, is that it feels as though it was one-size-fits-all. And there are parts of our community that would welcome more density. In talking with folks from Lake City, they want more density. I feel like neighborhood planning, which was disbanded, is the way to go. 

I talked to [former Department of Neighborhoods director] Jim Diers recently and asked him, you know, what about this? And of course he agrees we need more housing in our community. He said that we can bring people with us, and I think that’s true. There’s been a lot of hostility within District 6 about the city’s engagement with community, that it’s been lacking, that community voices are not being heard or welcomed in these conversations. And I think that that’s led to a lot of unrest that we’re feeling now, probably leading to more incumbents not wanting to run for to reelection. I think if the city actually empowered community that would look a lot different.

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ECB: When you say ‘community,’ what do you mean? Sometimes people use the word ‘community’ when they really mean ‘homeowners.’

HW: I bring that up. People talk about owner-occupancy requirements [for accessory dwelling units] and I ask what their objections are. They say they’re concerned about developer speculation and they’re concerned about homeowners not being on site, as if that leads to the degradation of a neighborhood. And I take issue with that, because I moved 13 times before I graduated from high school. I went to 10 different schools. Housing instability was hard on my childhood, and I know how disruptive that is. It’s hard on families, it’s hard on children. If we do care about community, we need to ensure that people have housing security.

ECB: If you’re getting that kind of reaction to the idea of backyard cottages in District 6, what are you hearing about  homelessness?

HW: I feel like people want solutions. District 6 is very progressive and people care about ensuring that people have the services that they need. I think they recognize that we need permanent supportive housing, and that a housing-first approach is the only means by which we’re going to gain traction on that issue. At the same time, they’re frustrated by the city’s lack of communication and innovation around how to address homelessness. I think the integration [of the homelessness system], has broad support in District 6. Continue reading “The 2019 City Council Candidates: District 6 Candidate Heidi Wills” →