Tag: Bob Kettle

City Council, Taxes

Business Tax Will Be on November Ballot, Despite Council Objections Over Spending “Buckets”

By Erica C. Barnett

Over objections from some council members that the proposal was “rushed” or that it funds the wrong things, the Seattle City Council voted to place a tax increase for the city’s highest-grossing businesses on the November ballot. If it passes, the “Seattle Shield” proposal would direct new revenues toward housing, homelessness, food security, and other spending areas that are typically vulnerable during budget deficits and at risk of losing federal funding under the Trump Administration.

The proposal, which Counclmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Mayor Bruce Harrell rolled out in June, would raise the business and occupation tax exemption from $100,000 to $2 million in gross revenues, exempting most Seattle businesses from the tax, while increasing the tax rate for revenues above $2 million, netting about $90 million a year.

Amendments passed last week, including two from Councilmember Maritza Rivera exempting Children’s Hospital and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center from the tax, reduced that total to about $81 million a year. Other amendments expanded the potential uses of the new tax to include substance use treatment, business workforce development and storefront repair, and—the broadest spending category—”transportation.”

An amendment from Bob Kettle would make the tax exemption up to $2 million a year permanent (otherwise, the exemption would revert back to $100,000) and reduce the higher tax on large businesses to make it revenue neutral, meaning it would only pay for the tax break for smaller businesses. The city estimates that in 2026, the tax breaks will cost around $61 million.

Councilmember Bob Kettle, who ultimately joined the unanimous vote to move the proposal to the November ballot, said he would much prefer that the council not stipulate how the increased tax revenues would be spent, instead sending a ballot measure to voters that asked them to approve an all-purpose tax that could be used for any need the mayor or council identifies in the future.

Comparing the ballot measure to the council-approved JumpStart payroll tax, which was originally earmarked for housing, Green New Deal priorities, and small business assistance, Kettle said the council only fixed that “problem” last year, when it formally eliminated all spending restrictions on the tax.

“I’m generally opposed to the use of categories or buckets, as some may say. I believe they were a mistake in the payroll expense tax, since over the years, conditions change, but the legislation remains the same,” Kettle said. “I also believe that categories, or buckets, in this B&O legislation was a mistake, in the sense that buckets begets buckets”—a reference to the expansion of the spending categories. “You know, our focus should be on the deficit. … And I think our focus should be for a clean bill to ensure that we are fiscally responsible, that meets the needs of our city.”

It is, of course, unknown whether voters would support a so-called “clean bill” that did not specify any purpose for a tax increase they were being asked to approve. But in general, every local ballot measure calling for a tax increase has had some purpose, whether it’s the transportation levy, the housing levy, the preschool and Seattle Promise levy, the tax we pay to fund emergency medical services, or any other voter-approved tax increase in local taxes.

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A levy “to fix the general fund deficit” would not only be a hard sell to many voters (who wouldn’t know whether new taxes would fund police hiring bonuses or food banks), it would incorporate the assumption that the city will continue going into each budget year with a deficit for the duration of the levy—not exactly “fiscally responsible” financial planning.

Rivera, too, appeared generally dissatisfied with the proposal, saying the six-week process to approve it was “rushed” and that she would also have preferred to send it to voters as a general tax increase to address the current deficit.

“Rather than single out items, this money should have just gone to the general fund and then when the mayor was putting together the budget that he sends us, he could have then considered this funding along with all the other funding,” Rivera said. “That would have been the good governance way to do this. But that is not how this moved forward.”

As I reported last month, Rivera was the first council member to publicly propose asking voters to approve a tax increase for undefined “general fund” purposes, arguing that the city can’t predict what needs will emerge in the future. Rivera has also suggested the city could take dedicated funds from the city’s housing levy and using them to backfill the general fund in the short term, paying back the loaned dollars later and foregoing some potential housing. Editor’s note: This story originally said Bob Kettle backed Rivera’s idea of using housing levy dollars to backfill the general fund; his office said this isn’t the case, so we’ve corrected the story to reflect that.

City Council

New Anti-Graffiti Bill Would Fine Violators $1,000 Per Tag

By Erica C. Barnett

City Councilmember Bob Kettle, who chairs the council’s public safety committee, is sponsoring a new anti-graffiti bill that would establish a civil penalty of $1,000 for every “graffiti violation,” defined in the proposal as “a single piece of graffiti, including but not limited to a graffiti tagger name or design, in a single location.” The new penalty would apply not just to taggers but to anyone “who assists or encourages another person or entity” to draw, write, or paint on public or private property; the city attorney would have three years to pursue penalties against anyone accused of violating the ordinance.

Graffiti is already a gross misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 and up to a year in jail, so Kettle’s proposal represents an expansion of the city’s authority to crack down on something that is already criminalized. The strategy is similar to the local drug criminalization law the council passed at the behest of City Attorney Ann Davison in 2023, which doubled down on existing state law by empowering Davison’s office to prosecute people for simple possession and outdoor drug use.

We reached out to Kettle to find out why he’s sponsoring the bill, but did not hear back.

To state the obvious, it’s unlikely that most taggers—who aren’t generally pulling six-figure salaries—will be able to pay thousands of dollars in fines. (While state law caps the potential fine for graffiti at $5,000, the potential fines under Kettle’s legislation are unlimited.) The legislation includes an option for people to work off their fines by doing graffiti abatement for the city, but also notes that any unpaid fines or restitution will go to a collection agency, meaning that people fined for graffiti in Seattle could end up in a crushing cycle of debt.

According to a staff memo on Kettle’s bill, the city attorney’s office believes it can fold graffiti enforcement into its existing work without adding more attorneys.

City Council, Development, labor, land use

Proposal to Allow Affordable Housing Near Stadiums Reignites a Familiar Debate Over Industrial Land
City Councilmember Bob Kettle yells at building trades union leader Monty Anderson. Remember when this council came into office, promising to restore “civility” and bring a new era of “collaboration” to City Hall?

By Erica C. Barnett

City Council President Sara Nelson has reintroduced a proposal, shelved in 2023 to secure the Port of Seattle’s support for an overhaul of the city’s industrial zoning, that would allow up to 990 units of “industry-supportive housing” —half of them affordable to people making 90 percent or less of Seattle’s median income—on two blocks of land just south of Lumen Field.

Although the city’s original “preferred alternative” industrial lands policy included this housing, the final version adopted in 2023 excluded housing from the area.

While the Port has argued that allowing housing near industrial areas will permanently harm Seattle’s maritime and industrial sectors, housing advocates point to an environmental impact statement done specifically for the industrial lands update that concluded housing is compatible with the kinds of businesses that are now allowed around the stadiums, like breweries, art spaces, and retail stores attached to clothing manufacturers.

In last week’s meeting of Nelson’s governance and accountability committee, representatives from the Port and maritime unions squared off against affordable housing advocates (the Housing Development Consortium), neighborhood business groups (the Alliance for Pioneer Square), and the Seattle Building and Construction Trades Council, which argued the zoning change would bring thousands of new jobs to the area.

Port Commissioner Fred Felleman said the Port had agreed to allow hotels around the stadiums, but “long-term housing in industrial zone without basic amenities is unacceptable and compromises our ability to attract new tenants. Please don’t put housing in conflict with job growth.”

Former Redmond mayor John Marchione, who now heads up the Washington State Public Stadium Authority, countered that the zoning change would create a “new, fully formed community with “jobs, housing, transportation and entertainment.” The area is less than a mile from two light rail stations, which currently have the lowest and third-lowest ridership of the 19 stations on Sound Transit’s north-south 1 Line—largely because almost no one lives near them.

Panel members told the council they agreed to put off the housing question until a later date in order to ensure that the industrial lands policy—which had been in the works for years—would pass with the backing of the Port, which had threatened to withhold support for the plan if it allowed housing near the stadiums. The new policy barred housing in a small area called the Stadium Overlay District, which includes two blocks just south of T-Mobile Field and a long, skinny strip of land next to Terminal 46, known as the WOSCA site for its former owner, WOSCA Terminals.

As part of the 2023 deal, Washington State Public Stadium Authority consultant Lizanne Lyons told the council, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office told  the housing advocates to come back in the future to seek zoning change to allow housing in the two blocks south of the stadiums. (The WSPSA owns Lumen Field.)

“It was frankly at the 11th hour that we were informed that the deal we thought we had, that we had been told we had, [to allow up to] 990 units of housing in the stadium district were taken out,” Lyons said. “We were told that the timing was sensitive … ‘Come back in a year and get the zoning change you need to enact the housing that we have repeatedly told you you could have.'”

The Port and longshore union argue that allowing apartments in the area would create traffic bottlenecks for trucks and make it impossible for Terminal 46—which currently serves as storage space for imported cars—to be used for container shipping in the future. Before the council can take up any proposal to allow housing near the stadiums, Councilmember Dan Strauss said, they must first make sure they know how that terminal will be used in the future, what kind of development will take place at the WOSCA site (a decision that won’t happen until after the World Cup games next year), and how any new housing will impact freight traffic in the future.

“There are other ports to the north and south that could just as easily take this traffic, and it would be a shame if they start taking our cargo because I- 90, that connects Seattle to the heartland of America, into Boston, can’t get through that last half-mile at the end to meet the port,” Struass said.

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The city’s final Environmental Impact Statement concluded that while housing growth can increase car traffic, it could also lead to better infrastructure for transit, pedestrians, and cyclists in “areas with histories of long-term underinvestment” like SoDo. The FEIS did also found that there would be no “significant adverse environmental impacts” from adding 990 new housing units in the area.

As Mike Merritt, a former senior executive policy advisor at the Port of Seattle, recently wrote in Post Alley, low shipping volumes—not traffic on and around I-90—have led to slowdowns and closures at several Seattle terminals, including Terminal 46, which has not had container service since 2019.

Housing opponents have also argued that the city has failed to consider the potential impacts of natural disasters or an emergency that requires the military to access Seattle by sea.

Channeling these arguments, Kettle said the city had failed to consider the possibility of several types of potential disaster on people living in the area. “There’s not been any talking about Love Canal-type considerations for this location,” Kettle said. Moreover, “SODO is between two fault lines [and sustained] great damage from earlier earthquakes, like in 2001 … These considerations have not been talked about— liquefaction zones, tsunami, in terms of the elevation, the inundation of the water. … We look at the LA fires right now, we look at the hurricanes in the Gulf, in Florida. These are major considerations.”

Instead of standing for “Final Environmental Impact Statement,” Kettle quipped, FEIS should have stood for “Flawed Environmental Impact Statement” because “it didn’t really address some of the unique circumstances” in the two-block area.

In fact, the EIS did consider geological hazards, traffic impacts, and the other potential issues Kettle and Strauss identified. In a section about geologic hazards, the EIS notes that “modern building codes” are designed to mitigate against risks associated with earthquakes in historically industrial areas across the city, including in existing residential neighborhoods like Pioneer Square, Ballard, and Georgetown.

“With mitigation, all these impacts together would not be considered significant,” the EIS concluded. If the Big One hits, of course, it won’t really matter if you live near the stadiums or elsewhere in the city; all of Seattle, but especially areas near waterfronts, will face catastrophic destruction.

Panel member Monty Anderson, head of the Seattle Building & Construction Trades Council, said he was familiar with all the arguments against housing near the stadiums—particularly the ones about future uses for the WOSCA site and Terminal 46.  “‘What if the Coast Guard comes? What if they build an arena? What if we get offshore wind?'” Anderson said. “Everybody knows that it’s just delay.”

Lyons, from the stadium authority, noted that it’s been decades since the two blocks south of Lumen Field have been used for industrial purposes. “It’s a lot of vacant buildings and deteriorating warehouses and vacant lots,” she said, plus “some good development on First Avenue South.”

Apparently responding to public commenters who argued that having more street-level activity would improve public in the area, Kettle said that wasn’t true—just look at downtown, Belltown, and the Chinatown-International District, which have lots of people but also lots of crime. “If residence was the determining factor of public safety, those should be the three safest places in the city. But they’re not.” Legislation the council passed last year, including surveillance cameras, higher pay for police, and “stay out” zones for people who use drugs in public, create “the conditions for safety,” Kettle said; “housing itself will not.”

Later in the meeting, Kettle lost his temper at Anderson after the union leader commented that some people had been “fed lines” and  “talking points” by opponents of the housing proposal. “We all do that,” he said. Although the remark seemed to be aimed at the longshoremen who testified earlier, Kettle seemed to take  it as a personal attack.

Cutting Anderson off, Kettle said his views on industrial land policy are based on his “service as a naval officer, an international security expert [who] understands international trade,” as well as his “studies,” “academic experience,” and time on the Queen Anne Community Council. “I’m not being a mouthpiece for anybody that’s out here, and I just want to make that point clear,” Kettle said.

That prompted this dramatic exchange, which began when Anderson responded to Kettle:, “Since you’re so intelligent and smart and I’m just a stupid Mexican construction worker, I’ll bide down to what you think I should—” At that point, Kettle, visibly shaking with anger, began shouting:

After the meeting settled down, Kettle said he “respect[ed]” Anderson, but did not apologize for his outburst.

Nelson’s committee will take up the legislation again in February.

City Council, Density, housing, neighborhoods, This Week on PubliCola

This Week on PubliCola: January 11, 2025
Cathy Moore says she won’t “sacrifice” her neighborhood to three-to-five-story apartments around an intersection Maple Leaf (circled on map)

Cathy Moore Says Young People Want Yards, Bob Kettle and Rob Saka Test Blast Balls, and PubliCola Predicts the Future

Monday, January 6

Anti-Housing Activists Hope for Receptive Audience as Council Takes Up Comprehensive Plan Update

As the city considers density increases so modest that its own planning commission called them utterly inadequate, single-family preservationists are creating petitions to oppose any changes in “their” neighborhoods, especially those that allow more renters to live in more parts of Seattle.

Tuesday, January 7

SPD Fires Officer Who Struck and Killed Pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula Two Years Ago

Kevin Dave, the police officer who struck and killed 23-year-old student Jaahnavi Kandula while driving almost three times the speed limit, finally got fired after spending two years on SPD’s payroll after killing Kandula, whose family is suing the city for more than $110 million.

Wednesday, January 8

It’s Time to Appoint Another New Councilmember!

Tammy Morales’ resignation opens a spot for yet another new council appointment. The appointment process, which should wrap up before the end of this month, will result in a council with only one member, Dan Strauss, who has served for more than three years, including seven members who have served one year or less.

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“I’m Not Prepared to Sacrifice My Neighborhood”: Councilmember Cathy Moore Takes Hard Line Against Apartments

One of those recently council members, Cathy Moore, came out hard against a proposal to allow apartments along the periphery of single-family neighborhoods, saying that allowing three-to-six story apartments within 800 feet of 30 transit stops across the city would destroy neighborhood character, denude the landscape, and produce “unstable” housing occupied by renters, who, she said, aren’t “engaged socially and politically” the way property owners are. About six in ten Seattle residents rent their homes.

Thursday, January 9

Seattle Nice: Bob Kettle Talks Public Safety, Density, Why He Opposed the Capital Gains Tax, and More

The Seattle Nice podcast sat down with City Council public safety committee chair Bob Kettle to talk about his priorities for 2025, how much density the city should allow in single-family neighborhoods like Queen Anne, and at what point the new council will stop blaming their predecessors for the real and perceived public safety challenges in Seattle.

Afternoon Fizz, SPD Edition: Councilmembers Test-Drive Blast Balls, SPD Sued Over Records Violations, and More

Four stories in this week’s afternoon Fizz: Bob Kettle and Rob Saka take a field trip to SPD’s firing range to test blast balls for themselves; the Community Police Commission proposes changes to SPD’s proposed policy allowing the use of “less lethal” weapons, which is moving forward at breakneck speed; the Seattle Times sues SPD for violating an agreement over public records requests; and former police chief Adrian Diaz loses his longtime attorney.

Friday, January 10

PubliCola’s Seattle Predictions for 2025

PubliCola’s founders give you our predictions for 2025. Sandeep thinks Seattle will fail to break out of its political inertia; Josh says you’ll start to hear more open MAGA rhetoric in public places in Seattle (which, he also predicts, will still be riddled with dogs), and I predict that new, even more stringent tree protections will be used to prevent housing for renters in the name of the environment (despite the fact that car-oriented sprawl, which results from insufficient housing in cities, is an existential environmental risk.)

Also, despite a $2 million budget setaside, I predict that SDOT will find reasons not to remove an 8-inch traffic safety curb that prevents dangerous left turns into the parking lot of the preschool Rob Saka’s kids attended, which Saka claimed his constituents found “triggering” and “extremely traumatizing” because it reminds them of Trump’s border wall.

City Council, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Bob Kettle Talks Public Safety, Density, Why He Opposed the Capital Gains Tax, and More

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle Nice team sat down with City Council Public Safety Committee chair Bob Kettle this week to talk about his plans for 2025. Our wide-ranging conversation touched on the new “stay out” zones for people accused of using drugs or engaging in sex work, how he thinks the city should respond to anti-Trump protests, and whether he and other new council members deserve any blame for the resignation of Tammy Morales, a progressive councilmember who left after what she described as a year of mistreatment by her colleagues.

After a year of explicitly blaming the previous council for increases in misdemeanor crime since 2020, Kettle was reluctant to say when the current council, which is made up almost entirely of recently elected members, will begin to bear responsibility for the success or failure of its policies. “We’re in a transition,” he told us.

The council spent the latter half of 2024 reversing many of the progressive policies adopted by the previous council (reinstating the old “prostitution loitering” law); resurrecting policies the city abandoned because of their negative and racially disproportionate impacts (reviving banishment zones for drug users and people involved in sex work); and expanding police powers to surveill and book people for misdemeanors (installing live CCTV cameras in neighborhoods across the city and signing an agreement to jail misdemeanor offenders at SCORE jail in Kent.)

So when will the current council start to share some of the blame if its own policies fail to reduce misdemeanor crime in Seattle? According to Kettle, the “permissive environment” he talked about in his campaign is already “shrinking” thanks to laws the council adopted and the presence of more police officers on the streets. (Yesterday, Mayor Bruce Harrell announced that the police department grew by one officer last year, the first year-over-year gain since the pandemic). Police, Kettle said, are “booking the drug dealers, not those that are suffering from addiction, unless there’s some additional [crime], because we do believe in the diversion piece.”

We didn’t have time to get into this, but the new drug law does not address drug dealing, which was already a felony under state law. Instead, it criminalized simple drug possession and using drugs in public places, which empowered police to arrest and potentially book people for those crimes. The city did not increase funding for the city’s primary diversion program, LEAD; instead, LEAD has shifted away from community referrals, which don’t require an arrest, to arrest diversions—a more inefficient process for serving the same cohort of public drug users.

We also asked Kettle why the city council has been so quiet about the potential that Seattle will lose federal funds because of its “sanctuary city” status for immigrants and refugees as Trump carries out the mass deportations that are his number one priority. Federal dollars pay for transportation, housing, and emergency response during natural disasters and public health crises like pandemics, yet city officials have been mostly silent about what happens if disaster strikes and federal funds don’t come through.

And we pressed Kettle for his position on Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed comprehensive plan update, which calls for more housing in traditional single-family areas like Queen Anne, which he represents.

Listen to our full interview below, and subscribe to Seattle Nice to get a new episode in your podcast app every week.

Also, on last week’s episode, we discussed the increase in Seattle’s minimum wage (which tipped workers will finally receive, after a 10-year transition period for restaurant and cafe owners) and return-to-office mandates, which managers love because it makes their jobs seem necessary.

 

City Council, Mayor Harrell, Mental Health

Council Rejects Full 2024 Funding for Youth Mental Health, Calls Previous Council Lazy and Irresponsible
A young man testified in front of the City Council on Tuesday.

Bob Kettle accused Tammy Morales of failing to do due diligence before proposing legislation to release funds collected from a payroll tax increase this year.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council narrowly rejected a proposal from Councilmember Tammy Morales to release the full $20 million that’s supposed to be collected this year to fund youth mental health services. The previous council voted 6-3 to approve an increase in the JumpStart payroll tax for this purpose.

Dan Strauss, who voted with Sara Nelson, Maritza Rivera, Cathy Moore, and Bob Kettle against Morales’ proposal, then introduced an amendment that added $2.25 million for gun violence prevention to the $10 million the council has agreed to spend this year; the remaining funds will go back into the city’s JumpStart fund and can be used to address the city’s $260 million budget deficit.

The vote was virtually identical to the one the council, convened as the nine-member budget committee, took last week. What was different was the level of vitriol council members directed at both the original tax increase, adopted by a previous council that the new council has turned into a synecdoche for government waste.

Rivera kicked things off by asking Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington a series of leading questions about the actions of the previous council in order to establish that that council, unlike this one, “didn’t do the research,” chose $20 million as “an arbitrary figure that was not actually needed,” and “did not get guidance from mental health professionals.”

Saka (who ultimately voted for the proposal) piled on, saying there had been “no rational basis” for increasing the JumpStart tax to fund programs to improve student mental health, a comment that prompted astonished looks from some of the kids who had just testified about how such programs had benefited them.

Then Kettle jumped in, saying the previous council (which also included Lisa Herbold, Alex Pedersen, Debora Juarez, and Teresa Mosqueda, now on the King County Council) had shown an “absolute lack of good governance… lack of coordination, lack of anything, really.” Kettle then launched into a little interrogative exercise with Washington and Human Services Department director Tanya Kim, who were both on hand to answer questions.

Speaking about Morales as if she was not sitting right there, Kettle asked both executive staffers to confirm that Morales had not coordinated with the mayor or HSD when drafting her legislation to release the $10 million to the Department of Education and Early Learning. (Council members are part of the legislative branch, and are not required to seek approval from the executive branch before proposing legislation). Then, he turned to Council Central Staff director Ben Noble, who contradicted him—saying that “yes,” Morales did work with Central Staff on the legislation.

Kettle didn’t appear to like that answer, and corrected Noble, saying he clearly only meant yes “in the sense of getting the amendment into the system, calendaring, you know, into the system.” Noble responded that in fact, central staff put the same work into Morales’ amendment that they would put into any amendment, including an analysis of the underlying policy. Kettle switched tacks again, summarizing for Noble: “So, clearly, not with the executive, the people who have to carry out what needs to be done.”

It was a weird moment, made weirder by all the leading questions that gave the mayor’s office an opening to talk about how personally insulted and hurt Harrell and his staff were by the suggestion that the mayor would use mental health funding to close the budget gap.

“The mayor cares about this issue very greatly,” Washington said, “and so to just hear it put out there like he’s just going to take this money for mental health and [use it to] close the deficit gap was hard for me to hear, and very untrue, because he doesn’t have the power to do that.”

As the central staff analysis of the underlying legislation notes, in the absence of explicit action by the council to spend the full $20 million, “the remaining $10 million in appropriation authority will go unused, and the funds will either remain in the JumpStart Payroll Expense Tax Fund balance and be available for spending in 2025 or future years, or the appropriation could be abandoned, and the monies diverted to other eligible purposes in 2024.”