Tag: Jenny Durkan

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The Real Surprise in Durkan’s Staffing Announcement Was Who Wasn’t Mentioned

ULI-081

Last Friday, MayorJenny Durkan announced the departure of Seattle Department of Transportation director Scott Kubly, who got in trouble over his role in promoting a now-defunct bikeshare company affiliated with his former employer, and Patricia Lally, head of the city’s Office for Civil Rights. Durkan replaced both Kubly and Lally with interim directors from outside the city—former SDOT director Goran Sparrman and former Youth Violence Initiative director Mariko Lockhart. Kubly reportedly lobbied hard to keep his job, but that was probably never in the cards—his fans saw a visionary, big-picture leader, but his detractors inside and outside the city saw an outsider (from Austin by way of D.C. and Chicago) who threw elbows at too many people.

Durkan also announced a number of department heads she plans to keep, including Office of Housing director Steve Walker, Human Services Department director Catherine Lester, and Department of Education and Early Learning director Dwane Chappelle.

One name that wasn’t on either list was Department of Neighborhoods director Kathy Nyland, the onetime Georgetown neighborhood activist who emerged as one of the most transformative figures of the last four years. Nyland reorganized and attempted to remove the deadweight from DON (her email signature: “New Day, New DON!”, which had been the city department where miscellaneous programs went to languish, and to reimagine the concept of “neighborhoods” itself, to include the renters, immigrants, and newcomers who actually make up the majority of the city. Nyland’s dedication to inclusiveness riled the old-guard neighborhood movement—single-family homeowners, mostly white baby boomers, who tended to oppose changes that would add new people, particularly “transient” renters, to their” neighborhoods.

Those old-guard activists lost big during the last election—NIMBY darlings Jon Grant, Pat Murakami, and Bob Hasegawa lost decisively—but are hoping Durkan won’t realize that their time has passed.

The biggest rift between Nyland and the old guard came when Murray announced that the city would no longer fund or staff the 13 neighborhood district councils, and would dedicate the money they had spent supporting the councils to other purposes. Nyland took the brunt of the blame, as neighborhood activists accused her of failing to get their input and shutting them out of the system they have dominated for decades.  On the campaign trail, Durkan talked about “bringing back the district councils,” and said she thinks “the city has quit listening to the neighborhoods’ needs.”

They haven’t—they’ve just started listening to underrepresented people, too—and as Nyland has pointed out, when you’re used to being the only voice in the room, inclusion can feel like an affront. But neighborhoods are made up of renters, immigrants, night-shift workers, and young people, too. It would be a shame if complaints from activists who want to restore things to the “good old days” of Seattle circa 1990 were successful at pushing out an effective advocate whose work is just getting started.

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

City Hall, gender, Mayor Durkan, Seattle magazine, Transit, Urbanism

How Mayor Durkan Could Surprise Seattle

A version of this piece originally ran at Seattle Magazine.

When Jenny Durkan and Cary Moon emerged as the top two vote-getters in the August primary election, there was no longer any question that Seattle would elect a female mayor. But when Durkan emerged victorious, with a commanding 56 percent of the vote, many were wondering if the first woman mayor in nearly 100 years would merely be more of the same. (Bertha Knight Landes, the first female mayor of a major American city, ended her single two-year term in 1928, when she was beaten by a man whose primary platform plank was that he was not a woman. No woman has come close to being elected mayor of Seattle since.)

“Murray 2.0” was a tag that dogged Durkan throughout the campaign, and the new mayor has been pilloried by Seattle’s left, with some justification, for being the “establishment” candidate—the one with money, backing from big businesses like Amazon and Comcast, and insider connections (her sister Ryan is a land-use attorney with many major local clients, her brother Jamie was a prominent Seattle lobbyist, and her brother Tim works for the city.)

Durkan has flinched at the “establishment” label—pointing to her work as an early advocate for marriage equality (Durkan is gay) as well as her support for undocumented immigrants as US attorney under former President Obama—but will it stick? She has four years to answer that question; in the meantime, here are some ways we think Durkan could—not will, but could—surprise Seattle:

By actually sticking to her promise to be the mayor “of the people, not of City Hall.”

On her first day as mayor, Durkan attended ceremonial swearing-in ceremonies from Delridge to Phinney, Ridgeand was officially sworn in several miles south of city hall, at the Ethiopian Community Center in Rainier Beach. If she keeps her commitment to be out in the neighborhoods, listening to neighborhood concerns personally instead of sending emissaries to meetings that are likely to get hot (as her predecessor Murray often did), she will build valuable trust, especially in communities that feel they lack a voice at city hall, like the East African immigrants of South Seattle or renters getting priced out of neighborhoods across the city.

By cleaning Murray’s house.

Durkan may have appointed Murray’s former chief of staff, Mike Fong, as her senior deputy mayor, but don’t let that fool you: Fong’s experience as a policy wonk and City Hall dealmaker long predates his time in the Murray office, spanning all the way back to 2001, when he worked as a policy staffer for the city council. Her other deputy mayor, Shefali Ranganathan, led the pro-transit Transportation Choices Coalition. The mayor has the ability to hire and fire the heads of more than two dozen city departments. This week, she announced the (voluntary) departure of police chief Kathleen O’Toole and the (requested) departure of City Light director Larry Weis. Scott Kubly, the head of the Department of Transportation, is already looking for jobs elsewhere. (Jesus Aguirre, the parks director, left shortly before Durkan took office.)

By implementing an activist agenda that includes compromise versions of policies Seattle’s left holds dear.

Some of her detractors scoffed when Durkan made free community college tuition a centerpiece of her campaign—her opponent Moon, for example, who immediately issued a statement calling for a progressive statewide income tax and capital gains tax to pay for education instead. Less than a week into her term, Durkan has already signed an executive order directing the city to come up with a plan to pay for the two-year-college proposal, and to begin implementing it in 2018, by expanding the number of credits that people in an existing program called 13th Year Promise can take for free. Other areas where Durkan could move fast: Implementing a new business tax or taxes on large employers—a proposal that came up late in this year’s budget cycle and failed to pass; expanding the families and education levy, which is up for another vote next year, to increase access to preschool; and moving forward with a safe drug consumption site in Seattle, which Durkan identified as a priority on the campaign trail.

By not being the new Ed Murray—and being the new Greg Nickels instead.

Below the marquee positions, Durkan’s day-one staff looks like the who’s who of the Nickels years, which ran from 2001 to 2009. There’s major initiatives director Kylie Rolf, Nickels’ onetime outreach coordinator; Andres Mantilla, also on Nickels’ outreach team; legislative affairs director Anthony Auriemma, who worked for Nickels late in his term; and office administrator Lyle Canceko, a former communications staffer for Nickels. Will surrounding herself with staffers for the former mayor, a competent centrist who was ousted after his muddled handling of a major snowstorm, make Durkan more likely to govern like Nickels, too? Hard to say—but during her kickoff in Rainier Beach, she did work in one snowstorm joke.

And finally: By surprising some of the transit advocates and urbanists who didn’t support her and being an effective advocate on the Sound Transit board.

No, Durkan isn’t likely to revisit the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda—an Ed Murray initiative that irks many urbanists because it doesn’t increase density at all in single-family neighborhoods, which make up the vast majority of Seattle’s residential land. But during the campaign, when her opponent was promising to speed up light rail with a loan that Sound Transit said wouldn’t actually help them, Durkan offered her own plan to get the trains running to Ballard and West Seattle faster by expediting the permit and construction process and paying for better bus service in the meantime.

 

City Hall, Crime, Mayor Durkan, Morning Crank, Police

Evening Crank: Week 2 Shakeups at SPD, Seattle City Light

The big news out of city hall today was the surprise announcement, dropped in the middle of a press conference to announce the less-surprising news that Seattle police chief Kathleen O’Toole was stepping down, that Seattle City Light director Larry Weis had resigned over the weekend. “It was clear to me that City Light … was somewhere we needed to make a change,” Durkan said this morning. “I talked to the director in terms of what my expectations were, we made a mutual decision that he would resign and so we will be having a nationwide search to make sure that we get the right person in place.”

The news of Weis’ departure came after allegations of widespread sexual harassment and sexism in the department, and after the department’s new consolidated utility billing system launched months late and at least $34 million over budget. “We’ve had challenges at City Light… everything from billing to the workplace environment,” Durkan acknowledged.

Weis is the highest-paid city employee, with a base salary of $340,000, and the only department head eligible for a performance bonus; earlier this year, while seeking a $30,000 bonus, he gave himself perfect marks on a self-evaluation of his performance. I asked Durkan whether she planned to compensate the next director as generously as Weis, whose high salary former mayor Ed Murray justified by saying a lower salary would not be competitive with similar positions in the private utility market. “I’m not going to comment on what the range of compensation is, but I can tell you that if we pay at a certain range, we expect a certain performance,” Durkan responded. The city will do a national search for Weis’ replacement; during the last national search, which resulted in Weis’ hiring, the city paid $50,000 to an executive recruiting firm.

SPD chief O’Toole will be replaced, on an interim basis, by deputy SPD Chief Carmen Best, who will the the first African-American woman, and only the second woman, to head the department. The search committee will be headed up by ACLU deputy legal director Jeff Robinson, former mayor Tim Burgess, Chief Seattle Club director (and Community Police Commission member) Colleen Echohawk, and ex-King County sheriff Sue Rahr. Durkan said she would announce the other members of the search committee in the next two weeks, and that they will begin a national search at the beginning of 2018. O’Toole’s last day will be December 31. Best said she plans to apply for the permanent position. Best’s status as a department veteran—she’s could give her the inside track on the job.

Durkan announced she had asked several other department heads, including fire chief Harold Scoggins, Office of Emergency Management director Barb Graff, and Seattle Public Utilities director Mami Hara, to stay. Last year, Hara was given a significant pay increase, to around $300,000, after the city’s human resources department argued that her pay was not competitive with similar department heads in other cities.

Durkan said to expect more big HR announcements in the coming weeks. Don’t take this as gospel, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s taking a close look at who’s running the Office of Housing and the Human Services Department, two departments whose profiles are only going to get higher as the city—and Durkan—tackle the growing homelessness crisis in the coming year. And I would be shocked if she isn’t planning to announce a new director for the Seattle Department of Transportation (whose current director, Scott Kubly, is already applying for jobs out of town) very soon. Although many urbanists may long to see Durkan appoint Jessyn Farrell, the former mayoral candidate, state legislator, and director of the Transportation Choices Coalition, the better money’s on SDOT chief of staff Genesee Adkins, the former chief lobbyist for King County and, as it happens, a former Transportation Choices policy director herself.

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

City Council, City Hall, Election 2017, Elections, Mayor Durkan, Morning Crank, Morning Fizz

Morning Crank: “If There Were Easy Solutions, Seattle Would Not Have Elected a Woman Mayor.”

This post has been updated to reflect the fact that Moxie Media worked on an independent expenditure campaign on behalf of then-mayoral candidate Ed Murray in 2013; it did not work directly for the Murray campaign.

1. Jenny Durkan was sworn in as the first female mayor of Seattle since the 1920s yesterday, and although much of the local press coverage has downplayed that aspect of her victory (in part, perhaps, because her general-election opponent, Cary Moon, was also a woman), I saw quite a few women wiping tears from their eyes and doing little victory dances when Durkan noted that it had been “Almost 92 years since we had a woman mayor,” adding, “if there were any easy solutions, Seattle would not have elected a woman mayor—again.” After Durkan’s speech—delivered with more dynamism than her predecessor Ed Murray, but otherwise pretty standard “let’s-get-to-work” fare—a woman I didn’t know grabbed me by the hand and said “Isn’t this great??” while another woman I do know wiped away tears and told me, “We’ve waited a long time for this.”

After her official swearing-in, by US District Court Judge Richard Jones, Durkan headed out to continue a series of swearing-in ceremonies around the city, where she signed two new executive orders. The first, aimed at helping low-income renters find housing or keep their existing housing, directs city departments to identify people eligible for utility discounts and other benefits and sign them up; create a proposal for a rent assistance program for people who are “severely cost-burdened” (meaning they pay more than half their income on rent and utilities); speed up housing placements from the lengthy Seattle Housing Authority waitlist; and streamline the process of signing up for multiple benefits by creating an “affordability portal.” The second executive order commits the city to evaluating the Race and Social Justice Initiative and making changes if necessary, and requires all department heads and mayoral staff to go through implicit bias training within Durkan’s first 100 days in office.

2. Yesterday, Moxie Media—the consulting firm that charged self-financed mayoral candidate Cary Moon more than $257,000 for its services—and Winpower Strategies, most recently the consultant for city council candidate Jon Grant and mayoral candidate Mike McGinn’s unsuccessful campaigns, announced that they were merging. “We’re excited to blend our teams into a bigger, stronger Moxie Media, providing our clients with all the strategic acumen and creative innovation we can leverage toward ensuring everyone has a voice in our democracy,” Moxie founder Lisa MacLean said in a statement. Winpower is run by John Wyble, a longtime local consultant who was part of Moxie from 2001 to 2009; in 2003, I described the firm’s client base as “moderate, Prius-driving Seattle environmentalists.” Since striking out on his own, Wyble’s client base has included people further out on the left of whatever the current Seattle spectrum happens to be, from firebrand former council member Nick Licata to Seattle Displacement Coalition co-founder David Bloom to Grant.

Vintage cutline and photo via the Stranger.

A look at Winpower’s local electoral record suggests this is not a merger of two equal partners—as does the fact that the firm will retain the Moxie name.  Wyble’s biggest win locally happened in 2009, when Mike McGinn beat Joe Mallahan in the mayor’s race, but since then, his Seattle clients have mostly failed to catch fire. Think Bobby Forch (2009 and 2011), Brian Carver (2013), Morgan Beach, Halei Watkins, and Tammy Morales (2015), and Jo(h)ns Grant, Creighton, and Persak this year. You don’t even have to look at his client list to know that Wyble’s political analysis has been off-base locally; just check out his blog, where he predicted in August that Durkan would not be the mayor, because all the “progressive” votes, combined, would hand the win to Moon. “The electorate has changed in Seattle and change is what the electorate wants. … When you add [up all the Moon, Farrell, Oliver, Hasegawa, and McGinn] votes and a more progressive electorate, it’s not hard to believe that the candidate who came in second in the primary has the best shot at winning the general,” Wyble wrote.

Durkan won with 56 percent of the vote.

Winpower’s client list does include a number of well-funded campaigns for incumbent state legislators (Steve Hobbs, Jeannie Darnielle, Nathan Schlicher) as well as Democratic challengers (Michelle Rylands, who lost to incumbent Phil Fortunato in her race for 31st District state senate; Lisa Wellman, who defeated incumbent Sen. Steve Litzow in the 41st). But state elections are only in even years, which means most consultants also have a local client base. For obvious reasons, serious candidates want consultants who can demonstrate that they win election, which is why the fortunes of Seattle consultants tend to rise and fall with their win-lose ratios. On this score, Moxie’s recent record is also mixed; their local clients in recent years have included Ahmed Abdi, who lost to Stephanie Bowman for Seattle Port Commission this year; Debora Juarez, elected to the Seattle City Council in 2015; Fred Felleman, who defeated Marion Yoshino for an open Port seat in 2015; and an independent expenditure campaign for Ed Murray, who beat Winpower’s client McGinn in 2013. (The IE paid for this controversial ad accusing McGinn of being soft on domestic violence.) They also worked on 2015’s Honest Elections campaign, which led to public financing of elections, better known as “democracy vouchers.”

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

Election 2017, Elections, King County, labor, Media, Urbanism, Women

Election 2017: Vindications and Repudiations

Y’all, I’ve been traipsing all over Europe on my trust fund for the last few weeks (note: A JOKE) and I came back just in time to see Seattle elect our first female mayor in nearly a century, Jenny Durkan, and the first 6-3 female majority on the city council since the 1990s. Meanwhile, King County  voters may have elected their second-ever female sheriff, if early returns hold and Mitzi Johanknecht defeats incumbent John Urquhart for that position. Pundits elsewhere were dubbing last night a “great night for women,” and it was, but let’s get a few more female mayors, sheriffs, council members, and state legislators (not to mention pay equity, affordable day care, and hiring parity) before we declare the glass ceiling shattered to dust.

On to the celebrations!

I arrived at council member-elect Teresa Mosqueda’s party at Optimism Brewing Company at around 7 last night and the mood was already ebullient, although some supporters I talked to were still gritting their teeth as they waited for the 8:15 results. They shouldn’t have worried: The first vote drop showed Mosqueda winning decisively with 61.51 percent of the vote (to Grant’s 38.49 percent)—a rout that turned the cavernous room into a veritable nerd mosh pit.

Council member Lorena Gonzalez, who also won decisively over neighborhood activist Pat Murakami last night, introduced Mosqueda to the stage, shouting no fewer than three times that Mosqueda won because “she gets shit done!” In response to the results, the Grant campaign sent out a tepid non-concession, holding out hope that the remaining ballots would somehow reverse a yawning 23-point gap. (I was told that the statement he made at his own election-night party, down in Hillman City, was more decisively a concession speech.) At any rate, Grant’s defeat showed that not only is an endorsement from the Democratic Socialists of America not a slam-dunk in Seattle (and that, in fact, it may be a liability), neither is an endorsement from the Seattle Times or the Stranger, both of which effusively supported Grant. (Although the two papers have decidedly different politics, they both backed Grant in large part because of his position on zoning and development—he opposed the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda, which chips away at exclusionary Seattle zoning rules that restrict new housing to a small fraction of the city’s residential land, and supported punitive developer fees that would have contributed to Seattle’s housing shortage.)

Grant’s campaign was also hampered by charges that he had created a hostile work environment for women and people of color as head of the Tenants Union, and by persistent questions about why, if his campaign was truly about “giving a voice to the most marginalized,” he was running at all. Grant, who grew up on Bainbridge Island, is white; Mosqueda, who grew up in Olympia, is Mexican-American. Mosqueda, who was lambasted by Grant and his supporters for her support from labor unions, kept her job lobbying  for the rights of women, children, and workers in Olympia right through the end of the campaign, noting that she had to do so to pay her rent. (In addition to bein the third Latina on the council, Mosqueda will be the only renter.) Grant, in contrast, has been campaigning full-time since January, and lives in a house in South Seattle that was initially purchased for him by his parents after the previous owners lost their home to foreclosure. That class divide between the two candidates might not have been immediately apparent to the casual voter, but Grant’s insistence on portraying Mosqueda as an “establishment” candidate beholden to business and nefarious unions spurred Mosqueda to make Grant’s own more rarefied background an issue, and may have turned off voters initially inclined to support Grant because he purported to be the candidate of the people.

Speaking of which: Density was also a big winner last night, with HALA fan Jenny Durkan winning big (Moon, who touted urbanist values in front of urbanist audiences, was wishy-washy in front of neighborhood groups and on the citywide stage, proposing to start the HALA process over and let neighborhood groups have a larger say in the “character” and “culture” of their neighborhoods when deciding whether to let density in—as they did under “the great Jim Diers.”

Other takeaways from last night:

• Democracy vouchers and the Honest Elections initiative, once touted as a way to get money out of politics, have done nothing of the sort. Early on, both Grant and Mosqueda began filing requests to exceed the mandatory limits on contribution size and overall spending imposed by the 2015 initiative, and the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission promptly granted all their requests. Closer to Election Day, both candidates for city attorney—incumbent Pete Holmes and challenger Scott Lindsay—were also released from the initiative’s strictures. Mayoral candidates Jenny Durkan and Cary Moon didn’t have access to democracy vouchers (they’ll kick in for the mayor’s race in 2021), but it probably wouldn’t much matter—as of today, Durkan has raised a record-breaking $937,410 and is well on track to burst through the $1 million ceiling by the time late contributions come through, and Moon’s contributions, currently $347,734, will top $500,000 once she pays off her debts, which total $182,682. Unless the ethics commission has a dramatic change of heart, it’s unlikely that they’ll force mayoral candidates to abide by limits that they haven’t enforced on candidates for city council or city attorney.

Moreover: The Honest Elections initiative limits contributions to $500. Neither Moon nor Durkan had an average contribution close to that. Moon’s average contribution was $174, and Durkan’s was $234. Finally, both campaigns were heavily supported by funding that was outside the scope of the initiative: Durkan was backed by $727,139 in independent expenditures by a business-backed political action committee, People for Jenny Durkan, and Moon has spent $176,521 of her own money (so far) to self-fund her campaign, nearly as much as the $181,766 she received from 1,043 supporters. Until PAC spending is dealt with (unlikely, given the ruling in Citizens United that money is speech) or self-financing is banned (ditto), big money—whether from wealthy candidates or deep-pocketed donors—will continue to be a major factor in Seattle politics.

• The King County Veterans, Seniors, and Human Services levy, which King County Executive Dow Constantine and advocates for homeless residents argued should be even larger, passed so overwhelmingly that it’s tempting to second-guess the county council’s decision to play it safe with the ballot measure. As I’ve reported, Constantine initially proposed renewing the levy at 12 cents per $1,000, which would have added $9 to the typical property owner’s annual tax bill and funded an additional  $67 million in services over six years, but the county council rejected his proposal, arguing (among other things) that voters might be suffering from tax fatigue. Advocates for homeless services argued for an even higher rate, 15 cents, to extend services to the hardest to house. Last night’s results suggest that that council underplayed its hand in going with the lower, “compromise” rate.

• Outside Seattle: Manka Dhingra’s election to the (traditionally Republican) 45th District state senate seat solidifies the Democrats’ hold on both houses of the state legislature and is part of a wave of Democratic victories across the country, including in Virginia, Minnesota, and New Jersey. (Vox has a roundup of all of last night’s barrier-busting wins here.) In Bellevue, the results were a mixed bag: Supporters and opponents of a proposed men’s homeless shelter—which turned out to be a key issue in this year’s divisive council races—each one two council seats. Newcomer Jared Nieuwenhuis and incumbent Conrad Lee oppose the shelter, and newcomer Janice Zahn and incumbent Lynne Robinson support it. Down in Burien, where a slate of city council candidates calling themselves “Burien Proud Burien First” focused on Burien’s status as a sanctuary city for undocumented immigrants, to races were still too close to call; in the other two, a conservative and progressive candidate have strong leads, according to KUOW, which reports that “Nearly a quarter of Burien’s population is Latino but none have ever been elected to City Council.”

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

City Council, Election 2017, Elections, endorsements

The C Is for Crank General Election Endorsements

Mayor: Cary Moon

The 2017 election season began in earnest when former mayor Ed Murray, once considered a shoo-in for reelection, was felled by charges of sexual assault. Twenty-one people put their names in the running, and things have only gotten more interesting since then. For the first time in Seattle’s history, women came in first, second, third, and fourth, and you had to go all the way down to sixth place to find a white guy (former mayor Mike McGinn, for the record, at 6.5 percent). That’s amazing, but of course, it shouldn’t be—the fact that Seattle hasn’t elected a female mayor in nearly a century (and has never elected a woman to a full four-year term) is a sign of how far this “progressive” city has to go.

Perhaps predictably, there have been complaints from certain quarters that neither of the two women who made it onto the general election ballot—Cary Moon and Jenny Durkan—has the requisite “experience” or “gravitas” to be mayor. While it’s true that neither Moon nor Durkan has experience directly relevant to the job of mayor—neither has ever served in elective office, nor run an organization with thousands of employees—I think concerns about “experience” are overblown. Durkan has experience managing a US Attorney’s office with dozens of staffers and a complex portfolio, and is familiar with the way the city works from her time working on the historic consent decree between the US Department of Justice and the city; Moon has a long record as a civic activist working on land use and transportation issues in Seattle, most notably on the waterfront, where she fought against the downtown tunnel (and, for the record, was right). Either candidate will face a learning curve; both bring skills and knowledge that will serve them well as mayor of Seattle.

I’m endorsing Moon because her vision of Seattle is the Seattle I want to see—a Seattle where people of modest means can afford to live in city limits, where all parts of the city are accessible to all people via high-quality, high-frequency transit, and where solutions to homelessness don’t begin and end with market-based vouchers and punitive encampment sweeps. Homelessness is a go-home, bottom-line issue for the future of Seattle; the next mayor can choose to pursue half-measure solutions that only help a few people on the margins while pushing the rest from place to place while dozens more join their ranks every day; or she can go big, tackling Seattle’s homelessness problem like the crisis that it is.

Moon is best known for her work to stop the construction of the downtown waterfront tunnel, which she argued would do little to improve traffic flow through downtown while decimating the waterfront with a massive highway-like “boulevard” that cuts off the waterfront from the rest of downtown as surely as the elevated viaduct does today. Moon was right about that (and about the inevitability of cost overruns) and her vision for a car-lite waterfront remains the single most forward-thinking proposal for the future of downtown in the last 20 years. Although her idea for the waterfront was ahead of its time, the vision Moon showed back in 2004 demonstrates her capacity to think about the city at a 20,000-foot level, and—importantly—to prioritize people over automobiles. Her opponent has expressed general support for transit, sidewalks, and electric cars, but Moon’s record demonstrates a real commitment to, and understanding of, the fact that thriving 21st century cities cannot put cars—any kind of cars—first.

As the city grows at an astounding pace, we don’t have time for leaders who cater to narrow constituencies (like the aging minority of Seattle residents who own single-family homes) or spend their days rushing from crisis to crisis (sweeping homeless people from place to place to placate housed residents who would prefer that humanitarian crises happen somewhere else). When asked whether she would revisit the portions of the city’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda that preserve 1950s-style single-family zoning indefinitely, Durkan has been noncommittal, suggesting that HALA is the best we’re going to get; Moon has said she supports reopening single-family areas to row houses, townhomes, duplexes, and stacked flats, which is the bold plan that Murray abandoned as soon as he came under pressure. Both candidates are clearly committed to increasing density to accommodate population growth, but Moon will make pro-housing policies a priority.

More than any other issue, Seattle’s response to the homelessness crisis (and the separate but related addiction epidemic) will determine what kind of city we will be in the coming decades. Under Murray (and on the basis of two reports by out-of-town consultants), the city has pushed homelessness policy in the direction of “market-based,” “results-oriented” solutions that look good on paper but won’t pencil out in an expensive city where homelessness is directly tied to a lack of affordable housing. The city’s Pathways Home plan, which Durkan supports, assumes that a majority of homeless people will be able to go from living on the street to making a living wage within just a few months—an unrealistic plan that privileges the easiest-to-house while leaving people suffering from addiction, mental health issues, or simply long-term joblessness behind. Moon is the only candidate in any race who has zeroed in on this plan, criticizing its unrealistic promise to “permanently” house thousands with short-term housing vouchers.

At a time when Seattle is deciding what kind of 21st century city it wants to be, it needs a leader who can think in broad strokes, not one who promises more incremental changes. Moon has shown the capacity to be that kind of leader. More than Durkan, she has expressed broad support for big-picture solutions, and a healthy skepticism that the “free market” will solve problems like the lack of affordable housing for low-income and homeless individuals and families. She has also demonstrated a willingness to listen to people and perspectives that have historically had trouble getting a foot in the door at city hall, and—importantly—to reconsider her views when challenged with new information. Mike McGinn, the former mayor to whom Moon is often compared, had a fatal flaw—he didn’t listen. Moon listens, even to people with whom she disagrees. She’s collaborative, not combative, and driven not by ego but by a genuine desire to build a more inclusive city, even if that means listening to people with whom she disagrees.

Moon’s platform isn’t perfect, by any stretch. Her plan to expedite Sound Transit expansion by offering to extend loans to the agency is almost certainly unworkable and unaffordable. Her commitment to city-funded broadband, after study after study (and mayor after mayor) has failed to justify its expense, feels like pandering. She has continued to insist that Vancouver-style property speculation is a major driver of housing prices here despite evidence that this is not the case. And her commitment to “inclusiveness” and “collaboration” in city government could tip too far in the wrong direction—listening to stakeholders is important, but excessive stakeholder input is a major reason Seattle is stuck with a 1990s zoning code in 2017.

All mayors learn on the job. My hope is that, if elected, Moon will learn which of her campaign ideas are realistic and worth pursuing and which should be abandoned. If she achieves a fraction of the vision she has outlined, the city will be visibly changed for the better. I’m voting for that vision.

The C Is for Crank endorses Cary Moon.

City attorney: Pete Holmes

City attorney Pete Holmes has a long record of fighting for progressive causes. He defended protections for hotel workers against a lawsuit by their employers; ended the widespread practice of prosecuting drivers who lost their licenses (and often their cars and livelihoods) because they couldn’t pay their traffic fines; and reduced sentencing for minor crimes to protect undocumented immigrants from unjust deportation. He has also been deeply involved in the city’s efforts to counteract the Trump Administration’s efforts to crack down on progressive cities, defending Seattle’s status as a sanctuary city.

Holmes was active in the creation of the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program, which connects drug users with health care, human services, housing, and treatment instead of throwing them in jail for minor crimes, and has worked to reform laws against drugs and prostitution—most notably, by directing police to target sex buyers, not sex workers, in prostitution stings. He was an early, vocal leader on drug reform, working to pass I-502, which legalized recreational pot, while leading a crackdown on shady (and illegal) “medical” dispensaries and home-delivery services that gave the legal weed industry a bad name. And he has led on police reform, navigating a tricky process in a way that has, at times, angered both the police union (which has opposed efforts to impose additional oversight on its members) and some police reformers (who want the power to reject or approve contracts and to hire and fire the chief of police.)

Holmes’ opponent Scott Lindsay, a former public-safety advisor ex-mayor Ed Murray, has shown a troubling affinity for law-and-order approaches to the problem of homelessness and downtown “disorder” (a Rudy Giuliani-style dog whistle if ever there was one). Earlier this year, Lindsay leaked legislation sponsored by council member Mike O’Brien that would have provided additional protections for homeless people living in their vehicles, in a transparent effort to torpedo the proposal. Lindsay’s willingness to violate city officials’ trust for political ends speaks to a lack of judgment that’s concerning in a candidate for a job that requires strict attorney-client privilege. Lindsay raises concerns about declining prosecutions for domestic violence that appear to be legitimate, but it’s hard to know whether to believe him when, for example, he also claimed recently that Seattle has the highest property crime in the country, an alarmist assertion that turned out to be misleading. (Holmes disputes Lindsay’s interpretation of the domestic-violence numbers). Lindsay has also exaggerated the impact of the Navigation Teams (groups of police and social-service workers who do outreach to homeless people living in unauthorized encampments) and suggested that homeless people are far more likely to commit crimes than data suggests—a disturbing tendency toward alarmism for someone seeking an office where measured realism is a far more important quality than the ability to rally a reactionary base.

Holmes could be more active on certain issues, like expanding LEAD to the rest of the city and promoting restorative justice for people accused of low-level crimes. However,  sometimes a steady hand is better than an itchy trigger finger. The C Is for Crank endorses Pete Holmes. 

City Council Position 8: Teresa Mosqueda

The C Is for Crank stands by its endorsement of Teresa Mosqueda, a longtime labor leader who has spent her entire career fighting for workers, women, children, and other marginalized people. Back in July, I wrote,

As the campaign chairwoman for Raise Up Washington, Mosqueda helped draft and lead the successful campaign last year for Initiative 1433, which increases the statewide minimum wage to $13.50 an hour and requires employers to provide paid sick leave. As legislative director for the Children’s Alliance, she fought for implementation of Apple Health for Kids, the state’s Medicaid program. And as campaign director for the Washington State Labor Council, she was deeply involved in this year’s paid family leave negotiations, which resulted in a bill that will provide up to 12 weeks of paid leave for workers who take time off to care for a new or newly adopted child, to recover from a serious illness, or to take care of a sick family member. Mosqueda continued to work on family leave even after she declared her candidacy—a reflection both of her strong commitment to women and families and the fact that she, unlike some of her opponents, can’t afford to quit her job to run for office full-time. If she wins, she’ll also be the only renter on the city council. (No wonder the Seattle Times didn’t endorse her.)

Much of Mosqueda’s work has been behind the scenes—the kind of efforts that tend to go unnoticed but have lasting and important consequences. As the head of the state’s largest health care advocacy coalition, the Healthy Washington Coalition, Mosqueda served on the state’s health insurance exchange board, where she fought to require insurance companies to disclose what services they provide, including reproductive health care. She also insisted that the state of Washington provide information about voter registration to people buying plans on the exchange, an ACA requirement the state tried to circumvent. These issues aren’t flashy. They don’t make headlines. But they matter.

The C Is for Crank endorses Teresa Mosqueda.

Seattle City Council Position 9: Lorena Gonzalez

Image result for lorena gonzalez seattle

Lorena Gonzalez, the capable head of the city’s public safety committee, a leader on gender equity issues on the council, and the first council member to publicly call on former mayor Ed Murray to step down, is being challenged by Pat Murakami, a Mount Baker neighborhood activist who has spent decades fighting against density and light rail in the South End. The choice in this race is obvious. If you’d like to learn more about  Gonzalez’s record and plans for her first full four-year term on the council, I encourage you to read my interview with her from earlier this year, where we discussed a wide range of issues, including displacement, homelessness, and police accountability. And then vote for Lorena Gonzalez.

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

Addiction, Drugs, Election 2017, Morning Crank, Transit, Transportation

Morning Crank: Just the Highlights

1. The HIGHLIGHT of last night’s mayoral debate at Seattle University, which I live-tweeted (Storify here): When “establishment” candidate Jenny Durkan, an activist for LGBT rights before she became a US Attorney under Obama, turned to her opponent Cary Moon and said, “Part of me wants to say, when did you get woke, because I’ve been working on these issues for 20 to 30 years in this city.” Durkan was responding to Moon’s sound bite about sharing power with all races and genders to create an racially and socially equitable city government.

2. The HIGHLIGHT of King County Superior Court judge Veronica Alicea Galván’s ruling against proponents of Initiative 27, which would have barred safe consumption sites throughout King County: The section explaining exactly why restricting the county’s spending power by banning safe consumption sites “impinges on the legislative authority of the county,” goes beyond the authority of local initiatives by attempting “usurp state law,” and conflicts with a state supreme court ruling that upheld the right of local public health authorities to respond to public health crises like the opiate epidemic. “Accordingly, I-27 in its entirety extends beyond the scope of local initiative power,” the ruling concludes.

3. The HIGHLIGHT of my conversation about the proposed First Avenue Streetcar with former Transportation Choices Coalition director-turned council land use chair Rob Johnson yesterday was his exasperated response to streetcar critics who say the city should return $50 million in federal money because it’s unclear where ongoing funding for streetcar operations will come from:

“All these capital projects come with a level of risk. … How come we’re not having those same discussions about Lander Street [a $123 million overpass project that was planned long before it received full funding]? We always pick on transit projects to ask these fundamental structural questions, but we never do that for road projects. We didn’t spend 25  minutes talking about Lander today. Instead, we spent 25 minutes talking about the streetcar. … It feels like this project is being singled out unfairly. So if my colleagues are going to continue down that path, we need to do it for all these other major capital projects.”

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

Affordability, Density, Development, Drugs, Election 2017, homelessness, housing, human services, Morning Crank, neighborhoods

Morning Crank: Why They Didn’t Apply the Racial Equity Toolkit

1. King County Council member Joe McDermott and Jeanne Kohl-Welles have proposed legislation, sponsored by five of the council’s Democrats (Dave Upthegrove’s name is not on the legislation), that would remove Initiative 27—the ballot measure that ban supervised drug consumption sites throughout King County—from the ballot. In its place would be a two-part question that would give voters the ability to say “yes” to safe consumption sites, along with the other seven recommendations that were unanimously adopted by the county’s Heroin and Prescription Opiate Addiction Task Force a little over a year ago. The task force included public health experts, elected officials, cops, and representatives from the King County Sheriff’s Department and Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.

The legislation essentially asks voters to decide whether either  measure—I-27 or the task force recommendations—should be adopted; then, if a voter says “yes” to the first question, which option they prefer.

“If the people are going to have a chance to vote on safe injection sites, I want them to have all the alternatives,” McDermott says. “This is an effort to have a positive alternative on the ballot to address the public health crisis on our streets.”

A group of advocates is suing to prevent I-27 from going on the February 2018 ballot, arguing that state law does not allow voters to veto adopted public health policies. The case will be heard in King County Superior Court on Friday.

2. The committee charged with reviewing the city’s policies around encampment sweeps met last night for the first time in a month to hear from the city’s Office for Civil Rights (which monitors the sweeps to see if rules like a 72-hour notice requirement are being followed), the Department of Finance and Administrative Services, and the Navigation Team itself about how things are going.

Questions that came up during the meandering meeting: Whether SOCR should be in the position of monitoring encampment removals at all, given that they are themselves a city department (the committee is far from the first to raise this issue); whether the committee should have its own encampment removal monitor that answers only to the committee; and why the city did not initially apply its racial equity toolkit to its sweeps policies (Finance and Administrative Services Department director Chris Potter said it was because the city declared homelessness an “emergency.”)

One question I hoped the city might answer (they didn’t) is why FAS, SOCR, the city’s Human Services Department, and the navigation teams don’t share data in a way that enables them to know exactly what happened to each individual person who received “outreach” during an encampment sweep. HSD and the mayor’s office often tout high numbers of “contacts” and “referrals” to services and safer alternative sleeping arrangements as proof that the Navigation Teams are working, but it’s virtually impossible to find out what happened to the people who received these referrals over the long- or even medium term. No single agency or organization tracks people’s progress after the initial contact by the navigation teams, and people count as success stories for the city’s purposes even if they stay in a shelter for one night and move on.

Navigation Team coordinator Jackie St. Louis did provide some information about where the teams were providing referrals to (not everyone who received a referral followed through by showing up at the shelter or other location to which they were referred). The most common locations for referrals were: The new low-barrier shelter run by Compass Housing on First Hill (capacity: 100); the sanctioned encampment in Georgetown (capacity: 70), which does not allow drugs or alcohol; the sanctioned low-barrier encampment at Licton Springs (capacity: 70), which does not require sobriety; and the Navigation Center (capacity: 75), a city-run low-barrier shelter.

That means that most people the Navigation Teams encounter are being referred to either other encampments or low-barrier shelters, not traditional shelters, transitional housing, or behavioral health or addiction treatment centers. The large influx of referrals from encampments could be one reason the Navigation Center is taking longer than that to move people along to the next thing; last month, HSD reported that the city-run center was “finding that mapping out a strategy to get [clients] housed could take more than 60 days.”

3. At an AARP-KOMO TV-sponsored debate last night, mayoral candidates Cary Moon and Jenny Durkan offered their responses to a question about whether the two-thirds of Seattle’s land zoned exclusively for detached single-family houses should be opened up to allow other types of housing. (Former mayor Ed Murray initially proposed allowing duplexes, row houses, and other types of low-density housing in single-family areas as part of the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda but backed off after homeowners complained that other types of housing would drive down their property values, make it impossible to park their cars, and destroy their neighborhood character). Moon said she wanted to restart the process so that neighborhoods could be involved in determining how to accommodate density while preserving neighborhood “character”; Durkan seemed to suggest that if the city simply made it easier to add mother-in-law and backyard apartments to existing single-family houses, there would be enough density to provide all the “missing middle” housing Seattle needs.

Moon: “I would restart that conversation with communities to say, ‘This is how many folks are moving here. Here are all the tools we could be using, including backyard cottages, mother-in-law apartments, clustered housing, row housing, stacked flats,’ and show folks all the different models for how do we add infill development in neighborhoods, and invite them to be a part of picking what works for their neighborhood. Because if you impose it from on high in Seattle, that doesn’t work. We all feel this right to shape our city, the right to be at the table and help determine what’s the right way to grow with grace. … We’ve got to involve neighborhoods in doing it together in a way that works for their character that they’re trying to protect, for how they live their high quality of life in their neighborhood.”

Durkan: “I’ve got some friends who, for 18 months, have been trying to get a permit for a mother-in-law apartment. If we made it easier for folks to get mother-in-law apartments and real backyard cottages—not these monstrosity[ies] that everyone’s afraid of—we could make almost every single-family lot into a triplex overnight. But we are having impediments, so we need to make it a priority, and the mayor needs to say to the housing and zoning people, ‘We’re going to speed up affordable housing. We’re going to give people the ability to have density,’ and then we’ll move forward.”

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

Addiction, Affordability, criminal justice, Density, Development, Election 2017, homelessness, land use, neighborhoods, Transit, Transportation

The C Is for Crank Interviews: Jenny Durkan

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue doing projects like this interview series, which included conversations with all the candidates for city council, city attorney, and mayor. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers like you. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

Former US attorney Jenny Durkan has been pigeonholed—unfairly, she says—as the “conservative” candidate in the race for mayor, where “conservative” is a term broad enough to include a longtime activist for LGBT causes, former Obama appointee, and advocate for supervised drug consumption sites. She’s caught flak for her style (too stiff and inauthentic, some say), her views on homelessness (more conservative than ex-mayor Ed Murray’s, by some measures) and her tendency to respond to questions in elliptical, lawyerly soundbites (many of which have been edited out of this interview, because nobody wants to read those.) As the candidate with the support of Seattle’s business establishment (as well as most of the local labor groups), she’s also widely considered the frontrunner in the race, and has enjoyed a large spending advantage over her opponent Cary Moon—in addition to outraising Moon in absolute dollars ($727,689 to Moon’s $231,331, of which $111,521 is Moon’s own money), a business backed political action committee, People for Jenny Durkan, has raised $124,600 so far for an independent-expenditure campaign on Durkan’s behalf.

I sat down with Durkan in September.

The C Is for Crank [ECB]: There has been a lot of talk by candidates this year about revisiting the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda, particularly the amount of affordable housing developers should have to provide and whether single-family areas should be opened up to other types of development, like duplexes and row houses. Would you revisit any part of the HALA agreement?

JD: I never use the word ‘revisit.’ I think it is absolutely clear that we cannot bring on board the number of affordable housing units we need without the private sector participating strongly, and the only way you’re to do that is through a series of incentives. So I think we have to keep the part of HALA that is going to give us the ability to bring on more affordable housing, and as we roll it out, we have to make sure that there aren’t unintended consequences—that we aren’t impacting neighborhoods, communities, or families in ways that we didn’t think about.

I think we just have to make sure that we are looking at it how we implement it and make sure it makes sense. We’re getting two, three, four, five years away from when the deal was made and the marketplace is growing. So have we gotten that ratio of required housing and public benefit for housing right, or is there more room there? Should we have transportation impact fees? Should we have park impact fees? We  don’t want to kill the development, because there’s no question that we’re going to get more dense, but as we do that, can we squeeze out of that growth the benefits we need [such as] affordable housing [and] transit-oriented development?

ECB: Do you think Murray made the wrong decision by taking a proposal to allow duplexes and other modest density in single-family areas off the table, and would you revisit that decision?

JD: I think it was the smart thing politically to pull that off the table, because I think the whole thing would have collapsed if the mandatory [affordable housing] fees collapsed. We would not have the resources to bring on anywhere near the affordable housing we need. To pull the rug out from under the deal and be left with nothing—it would have crushed us as city.

ECB: Murray also cut ties with the neighborhood district councils, which prompted quite a backlash from single-family homeowners who say their views are no longer being heard at City Hall. Would you restore city funding and support for those groups?

JD: I would have neighborhood councils. They’d be configured differently, but I think we suffer way too much from top-down right now, and part of the reason there is so much anxiety in neighborhoods and communities is the city has quit listening to the neighborhoods’ needs. I’ll give you an example. I was down in Rainier Beach the other day and I spent several hours with the community and youth down there, because when I was US Attorney, I’d helped them get a grant for youth violence prevention, and I wanted to get updated on what’s working and  what’s not working. And they’ve done amazing things. Even with the huge amount of displacement, the increased violence, the deaths they’d seen, the community is fighting to maintain its place.

“What I hear from West Seattle, Ballard, Greenwood, Capitol Hill—everyone feels like they’re not being listened to, and I think you have to do that. Government exists to serve the people.”

 

But they’re not getting the help they need from the city, because the city has quit listening to them. From the activists to the kids, you will hear, ‘We think we’ve figured out a path out for youth violence prevention, for activating our corners, for having corner greeters, for empowering businesses, for helping bring business back here. I think that the support the city had historically given them has eroded. You can’t do neighborhood work from city hall. While you have to have a vision and policy that works for the whole city and move people beyond some of their own vested interests, you also have to listen to what they think the solutions are for their own communities and neighborhoods.

ECB: So did Murray’s decision to take some power away from the neighborhood councils make that harder?

JD: No, again, I really want to make clear that I don’t want to talk in terms of, ‘Do you agree with what Ed did?’ I’m telling you what I would do. I think you have to have a very vibrant Department of Neighborhoods that works with people in communities and listens to people and talks to people. As I understand it, in some neighborhoods, it became the same people showing up all the time, so it was a very limited spectrum of voices. My view is, the answer is not to shut down those voices—the answer is to bring more people in. Maybe not at the same room at the same time, but you can have more meetings at different times. You can have virtual meetings. You reach out in all the ways you can to get more voices in. What I hear from West Seattle, Ballard, Greenwood, Capitol Hill—everyone feels like they’re not being listened to, and I think you have to do that. Government exists to serve the people.

ECB: Opponents of supervised drug consumption sites have filed an initiative to ban the sites throughout King County. What’s your take on that lawsuit, and do you think Seattle will ever actually get a supervised-consumption site?

JD: I think the city of Seattle should consider joining that suit and challenge it in their own right. [Ed: Since our conversation, the city has expressed its intent to join the lawsuit.] [Beyond that,] I don’t think they have the ability to stop the city from doing what it wants. If I’m mayor, we’re going to go ahead [with a supervised consumption site] and we’ll take the legal challenge, because the city of Seattle does not depend on King County for its rights. It has its own statutory rights, and one of those is to decide what it needs to do for the public health and safety of its people.

There’s no question in my mind that consumption sites are something we need to have as part of the health care response to a health crisis on our streets. Right now, we’re in a place where we give clean needles to people and tell them, ‘Go use it in the car, in the doorways, in the parks.’ It makes no sense. And for me, what’s most important is, if you read the task force recommendations, it’s not just a place where people can go and use drugs. It is a place where there will be health care workers, where they may get hooked up with addiction services and counseling and treatment. It may not ‘take’ the first time, the third time, the fifth time, the tenth time, but for somebody, it might eventually work, and that’s what we have to provide them, is that option. And they will never get it if they’re in the doorway or on the street corner.

 

“I think it was the smart thing politically to pull [allowing duplexes and row houses in single-family areas] off the table, because I think [HALA] would have collapsed.”

 

Right now, it’s being portrayed in such an unfair way. People might be surprised that a former federal prosecutor would say we should do this, but what is the alternative? I live downtown right now. My partner and I went out to dinner the night before last. In a three-block walk, we saw three different homeless people shooting up heroin, three who probably just had, and a couple of people looking to score. That’s in three blocks! What we’re doing right now is not working, and what we did in the ’90s didn’t work. I was in the front row. I was a criminal defense lawyer and saw that the war on drugs was really a war on addicts, and that’s who we locked up. And if we don’t have public health response to this crisis, we will end up in the same bad place. So we have to try things that are different. Will it work perfectly? Absolutely not. Is one site enough? Of course it’s not. But we have to show that there can be a different response that might work for some people some of the time.

ECB: Do you think the city has been moving in the right direction on homelessness, in terms of both encampment sweeps and the way the city spends its service dollars?

JD: I think what we’ve been doing on homelessness isn’t working. I think we have not done some of the really hard things we have to do to really move the dial. Number one is, we have to get real and we have to get forward-leaning on addiction services and mental health services.

I think the Navigation Teams are a mechanism for trying something different, and I think that from all the reports I’ve heard, from people who’ve been working with them, they’ve had some good successes. In my view, we have to get people out of tents and into treatment. When I talk to the various providers and the people working with the homeless, their estimates are that a significant majority of the hard-core chronic homeless are suffering either from mental illness, drug problems, or a combination of the two.

 

ECB: You’ve opposed opening up the police union contracts to observation and participation by the public. Given that the police department is still under a federal consent decree and the police union has been reluctant to institute reforms, why do you oppose opening up the contracts, and what would you do to increase transparency at SPD?

 

JD: There is no question, with Trump as president and the Janus decision coming down, that the right-to-work forces are going to be emboldened and they’re going to be coming after workers’ rights. In that context, I think it is irresponsible for anyone to say, ‘Let’s do their work for them and open up collective bargaining.’

Second, I’ve tried to talk to [reform advocates] and say, ‘Okay, what parts of police reform are they not doing because it’s against their contract?’ And the answer I’ve gotten back is, ‘Nothing.’ So the question of whether we can see what they’re bargaining is separate from the question of whether they’re doing it and if it’s effective. Going into police reform, we had a list of things we had to do, and so it wasn’t a question about, were they going to do them? A judge was ordering them to do it. So then the only part we aren’t seeing is what are we going to pay them to do it. And that all comes out when the city council has to vote on it, so there is more transparency than people think there is. My question would be, what things do people feel they don’t know?

 

“I’ve tried to talk to [reform advocates] and say, ‘Okay, what parts of police reform are they not doing because it’s against their contract?’ And the answer I’ve gotten back is, ‘Nothing.’ So the question of whether we can see what they’re bargaining is separate from the question of whether they’re doing it and if it’s effective.”

 

ECB: One thing we don’t know might be whether the city is going to pay cops a huge bonus just for wearing body cameras, for example.

JD: But we will know that when the contract gets presented and has to be voted on. We’re not in the room, but we set out the guiding principles—which I think the public has a right to do—and we see things that are going to be in the contract. Once we have the inspector general stood up, once we have the [Community Police Commission] more fully staffed, part of their function is going to be setting what those goals and policies are going to be. There will be transparency into that, because their job is to bring in the voices of the community and to report back. So we have built in already, I think, the ability to have more transparency, and I think some people just aren’t aware of it.

ECB: If the issue isn’t the police contract, then why do you think we’re stalled on police reform?

JD: I actually don’t think we’re stalled on police reform. I think we’re stalled on implementing some of the ordinances that I think will give greater civilian accountability. [Ed: The city can’t implement police-reform legislation until Judge James Robart signs off on the proposed reforms.] In terms of what’s actually happening on the ground—de-escalation policies, crisis intervention training, body cams—it’s all moving forward.

ECB: If that’s true, then how do you explain incidents where de-escalation training clearly didn’t work, like the shooting of Charleena Lyles?

JD: The Charleena Lyles thing shows us that reform is never done. Since the changes [requiring SPD officers to go through crisis intervention training], significant uses of force are down 60 percent in three years. That’s amazing. Charleena Lyles was a horrible, horrible crisis. I think we failed her as a society in so many ways even before the police got to the door. She had been living on the street, and she got into housing, but clearly still had issues with domestic violence, mental health issues, a single mom, and from what I can tell from the public record, about the only time she got provided services was when she was arrested and in jail. That’s the only time we as a society did anything for her. And so we have to change that equation where, if we are going to get people off the street and into housing, we also have to provide them the social services, the network, the support that they need day to day.

 

ECB: Your opponent has said she’ll expedite Sound Transit delivery to Ballard and West Seattle by loaning Sound Transit funds to build those segments more quickly. What would you do to help Seattle get its final two segments of light rail faster?

JD: The way we can best speed up ST3 is through accelerating the siting process. That’s the longest lead time that you have in these megaprojects, and we unfortunately tend to do those things very sequentially—environmental impact statement, community input, three different site alternatives, then SDOT weighs in… We can’t afford to do that. If I’m mayor, we’re going to try to do things, instead of sequentially, in collaboration. We know where the lines are going and there’s only so many locations that the transit stations can go. Let’s start doing the process now. Let’s not wait for all the alternatives. Let’s start engaging the noisy neighborhoods and the community voices now, and start having that robust dialogue. If you wait for two years, three years to engage, then you getting those intractable fights that seem to delay things forever. With these big projects, if you let them get away from you, they will get away from you. If you deal them at the beginning, you can impact how long they take.

 

 

Development, Election 2017, Elections, housing, Morning Crank, Transit, Transportation, Urbanism

Morning Crank: “Debt Is Still Debt.”
Cary Moon and Jenny Durkan at last night’s League of Women Voters forum, which I livetweeted at twitter.com/ericacbarnett.

Editor’s note/correction: I’ve been informed that the Mike O’Brien who commented on Sightline’s website about impact fees is not city council member Mike O’Brien but a different Mike O’Brien. I regret the error and have removed the item referring to the comment, which made an analogy between development and guns.

1. The conventional narrative in the mayor’s race is that former US Attorney Jenny Durkan is the “big money candidate,” backed by big corporate contributions, and that urban planner Cary Moon is running a people-powered, grassroots campaign backed primarily by small contributions from individual donors.

It’s undeniable that Durkan has the support of business (the Chamber) and much of labor (SEIU 775, the King County Labor Council). However, a look at contributions to the two candidates calls the rest of the conventional narrative into question.

According to the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, Durkan has received $727,689 in contributions from 3,120 contributors, for an average donation of $234.50. (Contributions are capped at $500). Moon, in contrast, has received just 599 contributions—2,503 fewer than Durkan—for a total of $119,810. Her average contribution is only slightly smaller than Durkan’s, at $200.02. What this means is that not only has Durkan raised about six times as much as Moon, it has been largely in modest (non-maxed-out) contributions, although Moon does have a slightly higher percentage of small (under $99) contributions (about 6.8 percent of donor contributions, compared to Durkan’s 4.5 percent).

Yesterday, Moon’s campaign sent out a fundraising email with the subject line “3 to 1,” indicating that that’s how much Durkan has outspent the underdog candidate by. terms of supporter contributions, though, it’s more like 6 to 1, because Moon has self-financed with $111,521 of her own money. So far, Durkan has contributed $400 to her own campaign.

Durkan’s contributions.
And Moon’s.

2. Moon has proposed speeding up delivery of Sound Transit light rail to Ballard and West Seattle—approved by voters last year as part of the Sound Transit 3 tax package—by using the city’s excess bonding capacity to “help fund Sound Transit 3 (ST3) construction sooner (in other words we will loan Sound Transit the money to move this forward and Sound Transit will pay us back).” That commitment, along with a commitment to find  the money to bury light rail in a tunnel under the Ship Canal and add a (King County Metro) bus rapid transit line linking Ballard and the University of Washington, helped win Moon the support of folks like the Stranger and Seattle Subway, which gushed, “she had us at ‘Speed up design and planning of ST3 to maximize available construction funding,’ accelerate ‘delivery of Seattle projects with City money’ and/or combine that funding with bonding measures” in their endorsement statement.

But Sound Transit has rejected the kind of Seattle-backed bonding proposal Moon is proposing, noting that even if Sound Transit were to borrow money from the city, they would still have to pay that money back, and the revenue package voters just approved does not include the funds to finance the kind of additional debt the agency would need to speed up service in Seattle. In a statement, Sound Transit director Peter Rogoff said that “while Sound Transit can accept funding from third parties, debt that we have to repay is still debt and would count against our agency debt limits.”

“If there is to be any possibility of speeding up light rail to Ballard, two things must happen.  The city must work with Sound Transit and effected communities to identify a preferred alternative alignment no later than early 2019, and the city must eliminate the multiple layers of bureaucratic red tape that slows the delivery of new transit services to Seattle citizens. Sound Transit wrote to the Seattle City Council back in May of 2016  detailing 27 concrete steps the City could take to eliminate unnecessary and duplicative processes to save taxpayer money and deliver projects more quickly. Adopting these reforms is how we can create the potential to expedite the project.”

Most of the steps Sound Transit has proposed involve expedited permitting processes—using the existing environmental impact statement instead of requiring additional environmental reviews, fast-tracking master use permits, and exempting light rail stations from design review during the permitting process, for example.

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