Tag: nightlife

City Council, Mayor Harrell

Council Can’t Wait to Vote “Hell Yes” on Bills Cracking Down on Graffiti and “Nuisance” Bars and Clubs
Graffiti in Belltown

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council discussed two new laws this week that will, if passed, give the city new powers to crack down on nightclubs and graffiti—although the impact of the latter is very much in question, given that the police department currently refers only a few dozen cases to the City Attorney’s Office for prosecution every year.

The graffiti proposal, which PubliCola reported on when it was introduced, would fine taggers $1,000 per “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.”

Under state law, graffiti is already a gross misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 and up to a year in jail, or (if the graffiti causes more than $750 in damage) a felony, so the new local law would add an additional penalty. The new fines would be cumulative, so the cost to prolific taggers could add up quickly.

The city already spends several million dollars a year on graffiti abatement. The money, part of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s “One Seattle Graffiti Plan,” pays for 11 full-time city staffers (including two new positions added last year), including seven “Graffiti Rangers,” and a contract with Uplift Northwest to remove graffiti.

Previewing the legislation at a meeting of the council’s public safety committee this week, City Attorney Ann Davison said fining prolific taggers would serve as a deterrent and help ensure “that our city is known as a place of order,” particularly in preparation for next year’s FIFA World Cup games, when people driving through Seattle might be endangered by graffiti along I-5, “where you maybe can’t read the exits that you’re trying to safely take.”

The taggers whose cases SPD has referred to her office, Davison continued, aren’t “lost young people” but “fully functioning, employed adults, oftentimes,” most of them white men. “Oftentimes, these are people that have strategically engaged in this activity for a long time, and again, looking to increase their social reputation and notoriety by damaging our property and costing us millions of dollars,” Davison said.

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Davison declined to say how much, if anything, the city expects to take in from fining taggers $1,000 per tag. (The legislation would also allow people to do graffiti abatement work for the city in lieu of fines). But her deputy, Scott Lindsay, said the city attorney’s office has already identified 20 or so people it plans to pursue based on their social media posts, and believes they’ll have more success imposing fines because civil cases have a lower standard of proof than criminal cases.

“The initial goal really is focused on those top 20 or so graffiti taggers … most of whom have already been identified” and bringing cases against them, Lindsay said, in order to “create the deterrence effect at the top and let that filter down.”

The proposed legislation would also allow the city attorney’s office to bring civil cases, and impose fines, on anyone who “assists or encourages” another person who violates graffiti laws. According to council staff analysis, the point of this provision is to empower Davison’s office to ”seek restitution and penalties from on-line graffiti promoters, who incentivize tagging and publish graffiti on Instagram.”

Council President Sara Nelson, who said she’s eager to vote “hell yes” on the legislation, said she expected the potential for fines to deter taggers from doing so in the future. After all, she said, “how many of us don’t speed because of the ticket we might get?”

Nelson was also enthusiastic about another bill the public safety committee discussed this week—an amendment to the city’s existing “chronic nuisance property” ordinance that would dramatically expand the city’s power to fine or shut down businesses by holding them responsible for activity that takes place “in proximity” to the business (a term that is undefined), and adding alcohol violations in or around a business to the list of activities that could enable the city to shut a business down.

Could the legislation be used, Nelson asked Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess, to target businesses like the McDonald’s at Third and Pine, where people have historically congregated to buy and sell drugs?

Yes, Burgess responded, the new law would allow police to target people using or buying drugs near any property, as long as the Seattle Police Department could demonstrate that the people were “associated with” the property (a term that the bill analysis interprets to mean customers or patrons) and that there was some “nexus” between the property and the drug activity (a term that is not defined).

Burgess—who as a city councilmember, fought fiercely for a bill that would have criminalized “aggressive panhandling” by people he characterized as “street thugs“—assured the council that the city would use their new powers judiciously. “We answered [stakeholders’] concerns about enforcement by pointing to the history of the [nuisance] ordinance being used only 17 times in 16 years,” Burgess said.

But by expanding the ordinance to hold businesses liable for what happens on other people’s properties, or on nearbt streets and sidewalks, the ordinance is explicitly designed to increase that number.

The expansion to offsite does represent a significant expansion of the city’s authority,” the council’s central staff director, Ben Noble, told the committee. “I think there’s there’s no question about that, and there really is a question of whether the due process measures that are in place are sufficient to balance the interest of the property owners and the interest of the public.”

Committee chair Bob Kettle said the ordinance is necessary to reduce gun violence outside nightclubs. Committee vice chairman Rob Saka said he had been working on similar legislation on his own but Mayor Bruce Harrell beat him to it, and asked to be added as a cosponsor until Kettle reminded him that he was already cosponsoring the bill.

City Council, King County, Mayor Harrell, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Assessing the Assessor, Moore Faces the Urbanists, and Seattle Hates Nightlife

 

By Sandeep Kaushik

(Note from Erica: Ordinarily, I write about what’s happening on the podcast myself, but I couldn’t beat Sandeep’s blurb this week. I recorded this podcast from the back seat of a rental car parked on a dead-end road outside New Orleans during a torrential thunderstorm, so forgive any audible raindrops.)

On this week’s Seattle Nice podcast: With David away for a second consecutive week, Erica and Sandeep seek out the inimitable Josh Feit, news editor of the Stranger back in the olden (golden) days, to buffer their conversation with convoluted references to 50-year-old Joni Mitchell records.

We start with the increasingly off-putting saga of King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson, who remains defiant in the face of a unanimous vote by the King County Council (minus the absent Reagan Dunn) urging him to resign over allegations he stalked his ex-partner during their breakup from hell. We ask: Why did the resignation calls take so long, and are we headed for a messy recall? (Hours after we taped this episode on the morning of Friday, June 13, a judge denied Wilson’s legal motion seeking the dismissal of his ex-partner’s protection order against him.)

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Next up, Josh keys off the announced resignation of Councilmember Cathy Moore to argue that what Moore and her supporters and backers decry as incivility in Council chambers is really just sour grapes about the rising voice of an emerging urbanist majority. But are the urbanists so ascendant, give the status quo nature of the comprehensive plan they’re currently debating to death?

Finally, we dig into the implications of Erica’s reporting that the mayor is seeking to expand the city’s powers to shutter “nuisance properties.” Is a crackdown on clubs warranted by recent incidents of gun violence that have occurred outside nightclubs and hookah lounges? Or is this just the latest iteration of a long, pinch-faced tradition in Seattle municipal politics of finger-wagging at—and passing laws to curtail—the city’s nightlife?

Better listen in before a Big Yellow Taxi comes to take Josh and Sandeep away!

 

Affordability, City Council, Mayor Harrell, Renters

Harrell Bill Would Make Venues Liable for Patrons’ Off-Premises Behavior; Moore Bill to Ban Algorithmic Rent-Fixing on Fast Track

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell is proposing legislation that would expand the city’s ability to shut down so-called chronic nuisance properties by holding businesses responsible for incidents that occur “in proximity” to their property, if the person who violated the law was a patron or customer of the business and “facts and circumstances establish a nexus between the property and the nuisance activity.”

The legislation would also add violations of state liquor laws to the violations that can get a property tagged as a “chronic nuisance,” allowing the city to sanction or shut down bars and nightclubs if they violate liquor laws repeatedly—or if their patrons violate liquor laws after they’ve left the premises. If a business violates the nuisance law more than three times in 60 days, or seven times in a year, the city can take actions ranging from a fine to shutting the business down.

Currently, the city’s chronic nuisance law only applies to incidents that occur on the premises of a business or property. This limited approach, according to Harrell’s proposed legislation, has allowed “Nuisance activities … including homicides and aggravated assaults, to occur near certain properties in Pioneer Square.” In May, for example, four people were shot outside the OHM Nightclub near Occidental Park, three of them fatally.

Seattle has a long history of passing legislation to restrict nightlife or expand business owners’ legal liability for their patrons’ behavior in response to tragic incidents or repeated neighborhood complaints.

In fact, Harrell’s proposal is strikingly similar to the 1999 “added activities ordinance,” which would have made bars and clubs liable for noise, litter, traffic, and crime that happened nearby, in areas they don’t directly control. At the time, proponents said expanding the law was necessary because of issues the city tied to clubs in Pioneer Square and on the downtown waterfront. The proposal, backed by then-city attorney Mark Sidran, floundered after a federal  judge ruled that a similar state law that required venues to get special licenses for dancing, live music, and other “added” activities, was unconstitutional.

On its face, Harrell’s proposal seems less restrictive than the added activities ordinance—it doesn’t apply to urban annoyances like noise and litter. But the list of activities it would hold businesses newly liable for on the sidewalks and streets around them is broad, including not only criminal offenses, ranging from assault to failure to disperse, but drug and liquor violations that might occur down the block from a business, or even further away—the bill doesn’t define what it means for a nuisance to be “in proximity” to a property.

Harrell’s legislation notes that the existing chronic nuisance ordinance has only been used 17 times since it was adopted in 2009—a tacit reassurance that if the city gives the mayor and police chief power to hold clubs liable for off-premises activities, they won’t abuse it. But the letter of the proposed law would allow the city to shut a bar or nightclub down if people are caught smoking weed or drinking alcohol in a public area outside the bar, and nothing in the proposal constrains police from keeping an extra-close eye on properties the city has identified as potential targets for abatement under the expanded nuisance law.

The legislation hasn’t shown up in the council’s legislative tracking system yet. When it does, it will go through Harrell ally Bob Kettle’s public safety committee.

2. On Wednesday, the City Council’s housing and human services committee approved legislation that would prohibit property owners and managers from using algorithmic rent-setting companies like Real Page to determine rent prices. The bill, sponsored by Councilmember Cathy Moore, took the committee just 35 minutes—35 minutes!—to discuss and approve. The fast-tracked bill now heads to the full council, which could vote on the bill before Moore departs the council on July 7.

Moore has come under fire for supporting legislation, which she was set to sponsor, that would roll back a number of anti-eviction laws passed by the previous council, including the winter and school-year eviction moratoriums and a $10 cap on late fees. Moore also proposed legislation that would have rewritten the city’s ethics code so that council members could vote in their own financial interest; that proposal faced stiff  opposition, and Moore withdrew it shortly before announcing she would step down a year and a half into her term.

Advocates who’ve opposed Moore on other policies applauded her for pushing the ban on algorithmic pricing, which uses both public and proprietary data to recommend rent prices. The state and federal governments have sued the largest algorithmic pricing company, RealPage, over the practice, which critics say amounts to illegal collusion among property management companies to keep rents high and hold units vacant until they can charge more, contributing to the housing crisis. At the time then-attorney general Bob Ferguson sued RealPage last year, his office estimated that about 800,000 leases had been priced using RealPage in the state since 2017.

“While it’s hard to measure the impact [in Seattle] precisely, it is likely that this has contributed significantly to the rapidly rising rents that we’ve seen coming out of the pandemic,” Transit Riders Union leader and mayoral candidate Katie Wilson said. “Landlords and property managers, following the instructions that they get from RealPage … end up raising rents more than they otherwise would, forcing tenants out when they can’t afford the increase.”

A ProPublica investigation found that companies using RealPage sometimes leave units vacant on purpose to help drive up the cost of other units.

The state legislature took up statewide legislation to ban algorithmic rent-fixing tools earlier this year, but advocates in Olympia opted instead to focus on passing the landmark rent stabilization bill, a legislator who worked on both bills told PubliCola.