Tag: Rob Saka

City Council, Crime, Elections, public safety, Transportation

Transportation Levy Funds Leary Bypass of Burke-Gilman Trail; Council Escalates Street Racing Rhetoric (and Fines)

1. The Seattle City Council voted Tuesday to approve a $1.55 billion, eight-year transportation levy for the November ballot, and Mayor Bruce Harrell signed the legislation Wednesday.

In a reversal from its previous position, the council decided Tuesday to earmark $20 million to “complete” the long-disputed Burke-Gilman Trail by rerouting cyclists and pedestrians off the current route and onto new path next to busy Leary Way NW. Cycling advocates and industrial businesses have spent decades locked in a legal battle over the “missing link” of the trail along Shilshole Ave. NW, with business groups opposed to a straightforward link between two sections of the trail through Ballard.

By explicitly funding the Leary detour, Strauss said his amendment will finally settle that debate, “putting this 30-year problem to rest.” But the debate is likely to continue, even assuming voters approve the transportation levy and secure the $20 million for the Leary option. The proposed route, as we’ve reported previously, would require cyclists to cross 13 active intersections, the most of any alternative the city has studied, plus 33 driveways and loading docks—each presenting its own opportunities for collisions.

Three council members—Sara Nelson, Bob Kettle, and Maritza Rivera—voted against Strauss’ proposal, with Cathy Moore and Rob Saka reversing their previous “no” votes. Rivera said she supported completing the Missing Link, but that she didn’t support earmarking so much money for a specific option when there would be more opportunities to discuss the alternatives and finalize the details later; Nelson said she was concerned about stripping all but $6 million from an arterial maintenance fund that was supposed to help leverage millions of dollars in other investments.

Model T speedster photo via ModelTPix.com.

2. Also this week, the council’s public safety committee, chaired by Kettle, approved legislation that will allow police to issue tickets to anyone engaged in illegal street racing in Seattle.

The new ordinance (much like last year’s controversial drug law, which incorporated an existing state law into a local ordinance) imposes a fine of $500 for the first infraction and, thanks to an amendment added by Councilmember Rob Saka, escalating fines that top out at $1,500 per infraction. Another Saka amendment, modeled on a law in Kent, makes it a civil infraction for people to be “spectators” at street races.

“Many of these races are occurring because they’re putting on a sideshow. They’re putting on a show for people,” Saka said, adding that spectators can number in the “hundreds—hundreds!” The “key delta” between the Kent law and Seattle’s proposal, Saka added, is that Seattle’s only imposes a civil fine, while Kent’s allows criminal penalties.

“We can’t be afraid of taking risks and taking strong action to solve this problem that has plagued our city over and over again,” Saka said.

A council spokesperson said it “will ultimately be up to SPD” how to enforce the ban on watching street races, which could include issuing tickets on site or using footage from nearby surveillance cameras to track down and ticket people after the fact.

None of these measures are likely to end street racing, which has been illegal in Washington state since the age of the Model T. State law has banned street racing since at least 1915, suggesting it has been a perennial problem. The original law banning street races allowed officers to arrest drivers for “racing on the public highways,” except when local authorities set aside time for “speed trials or speed contests.”

City Council, Elections, Equity, Transportation, Uncategorized

It’s Decision Day for the Seattle Transportation Levy
Photo by Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 4.0 license, via Wikimedia Commons

By Erica C. Barnett

The city council’s transportation levy committee will approve the final version of the 2024 levy proposal on Tuesday— one of the final steps before it heads to the November ballot.

The proposal currently on the table is a $1.55 billion levy that would cost the median Seattle homeowner $499 a year, up from about $275 a year under the levy passed in 2015, which expires this year. So far, the council has added $100 million to the plan Mayor Bruce Harrell sent down in May.

Councilmember Tammy Morales has proposed boosting that number to $1.7 billion, a level polling has suggested voters would support, to restore funding for equitable, community-created projects and add funding for sidewalks, bike lanes, and road maintenance, among other projects.

Last week, transportation committee chair Rob Saka (D1, West Seattle) released a version of the plan that includes both changes he announced two weeks ago as well as amendments that the council will discuss publicly for the first time on Tuesday. They include:

• A proposal from Dan Strauss (District 6, Northwest Seattle) to reduce bike safety funding by $500,000 to fund a feasibility study for using private funds to build a lid over I-5 through the Roosevelt neighborhood and near the North 130th Street light rail station;

• An amendment from Saka to create a new $7 million fund for “neighborhood scale traffic safety programs.” This new category would be separate and distinct from both the new “district funds” council members could direct to projects in their district and the new, grassroots “neighborhood-initiated  safety partnership” program proposed by Mayor Bruce Harrell and slashed under Saka’s plan.

Councilmember Cathy Moore  (D5, North Seattle) proposed eliminating the entire program, developed by a transportation equity work group charged with recommending ways to make city transportation funds more accessible to marginalized groups. The latest version of the plan would still cut $15.5 million, or 38 percent, from Harrell’s $41 million proposal.

• An amendment from Tammy Morales (District 2, Southeast Seattle) to stipulate that the city will spend the $6 million previously added for transit security “in coordination with” transit agencies, rather than unilaterally putting more officers on buses and trains.

• A formal guarantee that at least 36 percent of new sidewalks funded by the plan will be in North Seattle’s District 5; 22 percent will be in West Seattle’s District 1; and 17 percent will be in Southeast Seattle’s District 2. Districts 3, 4, 6, and 7 would split up the remaining 25 percent.

• $20 million in new spending, proposed by Strauss (D6, Northwest Seattle and Magnolia), on improvements to freight mobility in Interbay, SoDo, and elsewhere.

• An amendment from Saka increasing the minimum number of sidewalks the levy would build from 280 to 320, on top of 30 new blocks of sidewalks onAurora Ave. N.

• Amendments from Moore that would fund “auditing and professional services” for the Move Seattle Levy Oversight Committee, which would also expand to include the transportation committee chair, currently Saka. The committee provides oversight and is supposed to hold the city accountable to spend levy funds according to the language of the levy; the amendment would also expand the volunteer group’s responsibilities to include auditing and performance evaluations of levy programs under a new “Good Governance and Equitable Implementation Initiative.”

• Another amendment from Moore adding $5 million to “investigate and propose a comprehensive strategy” to dramatically improve the state of the city’s bridges and arterial streets, and consider transportation impact fees—fees on new multifamily housing, based on the idea that apartments have a negative impact that requires mitigation—as a strategy for funding sidewalks.

• Amendments to the nonbinding “recitals” section of the legislation—in theory, the place to establish whatever problem a new law attempts to solve—have swelled the number of “whereas” clauses from 15 to 41, increasing the length of the proposal by several pages; additions include new clauses supporting electric vehicles, asserting that traffic safety measures shouldn’t unduly slow down emergency responders, and establishing that Seattle wants to “create and maintain a safe, efficient and reliable transportation system.”

• Amendments from Strauss to spend $5 million turning Ballard Ave. into a “curbless street” by reducing funding for sidewalk spot repairs and sidewalk construction and to spend $20 million completing the Burke-Gilman trail through Ballard by cutting funds for arterial street maintenance.

The transportation levy committee meets on Tuesday at 9:30.

 

City Council, education, Equity, Transportation

Spending Money Earmarked for Student Mental Health Will Require Action from Skeptical Council; Saka Abruptly Cuts Off Presentation on Transportation Equity

1. Seattle City Councilmembers, many of them still focused on undoing the legacy of the previous, more progressive council, turned their attention this week to an increase in the JumpStart payroll tax passed in the final days of budget deliberations last year.

The 0.1 percent increase, sponsored by former councilmember Kshama Sawant (with current council members Sara Nelson and Dan Strauss voting “no”), is supposed to flow into the city’s Department of Education and Early Learning to “expand educational supports at Seattle Public Schools, prioritizing mental health services including, but not limited to, school-based mental health counselors and culturally specific and responsive programming from community-based organizations.”

That won’t happen, however, without followup legislation expanding the possible uses of the JumpStart tax to include mental health supports for students—and until then, money will keep accruing, unspent.

The council and Mayor Bruce Harrell have already signaled that they plan to amend JumpStart, which is supposed to pay for affordable housing, Equitable Development Initiative projects, and Green New Deal investments, to free up money to solve a general-fund deficit of around $260 million. (The deficit has grown, among other reasons, because of a recently adopted contract with the city’s police guild giving officers retroactive raises of 24 percent).

During a budget committee meeting this week, Strauss said the council did no outreach to the school district before passing the increase for mental health programming, and new Councilmember Maritza Rivera expressed skepticism about the city taking on “a newer line of business” that they had no expertise in. The council previously added $4 million, over two years, for mental health services in schools, with $250,000 of that earmarked for Ingraham High School, the site of a 2022 shooting.

Rivera, whose kids go to Ingraham, said she had “no idea how the money was implemented, how well it’s working. It’s a new line of business, [and] there are no mental health experts at the department or at the city. There’s [Seattle-King County] Public Health, but I’m not sure how plugged-in Public Health was to that [decision], so definitely a lot of questions here.”

Yesterday’s shooting at Garfield High School will make it harder, politically, for council members obsessed with undoing Sawant’s legacy to allow the school mental-health funding (which was prompted by the Ingraham shootingl) to lapse, but anything’s possible; if the city doesn’t allocate the money this year, via the regular midyear budget process, it would go back into the JumpStart fund and be allocated among the current spending categories.

Employers have been paying the increased tax—which is based on the pay of the highest-paid employees at the city’s largest companies—since the beginning of the year.

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2. During a meeting of the council’s special transportation levy committee this week, committee chair Rob Saka abruptly cut off a presentation from the Seattle Department of Transportation about a proposed task force that will, if the levy passes in November, be charged with creating policies to guide levy spending on sidewalks, bridges, and street paving, with a focus on equity and financial sustainability.

SDOT director Greg Spotts had just given a brief overview of the levy and was handing the mic off to SDOT’s transportation equity program manager, Annya Pintak, to talk about efforts to integrate the city’s race and social justice goals into the levy.

That’s when Saka jumped in, telling Spotts, “I’m gonna cut you off here for just a moment. I feel like we have a good baseline on that. And so, you know, you were invited here today with the specific purpose and intent [of] talking about the task force. So I encourage you to direct your comments and narrow them to the task force, and I believe slide 14 is… where that starts.”

A third presenter, levy program manager Megan Shepherd, jumped past Pintak’s presentation to her own slides, leaving Pintak—the only person of color at the presenters’ table—sitting silently (and awkwardly) at the table for the rest of the presentation.

Whatever Saka’s reason for rushing SDOT along, nixing the equity section of the department’s presentation didn’t save much time; the whole agenda item took up roughly 15 minutes of an almost two-and-a-half-hour meeting that began and ended with lengthy remarks by Saka.

City Council, Mayor Harrell, Morning Fizz, Police

Rahr Pledges No Personnel Changes at SPD, Reinstates Assistant Chief Put on Leave By Diaz; Saka Proposes Expanding Transportation Levy
Interim Seattle Police Chief Sue Rahr, speaking at a press conference at City Hall this week

Is it even a Friday without a bunch of late-breaking local news? We think not!

1.  John O’Neil, a Seattle police captain who has been accused of sexual harassment and retaliation by his female subordinates, will continue to direct SPD’s public affairs office, that office confirmed on Friday—contradicting claims from inside the department that O’Neil was seen clearing out his desk on Wednesday, when Mayor Bruce Harrell announced former police chief Adrian Diaz will be reassigned to “special projects.” 

O’Neil, like Diaz, is facing multiple lawsuits and internal complaints from women alleging sexual harassment and retaliation. Three of the women who have filed lawsuits left the public affairs office, including two—Valerie Carson and Judinna Gulpan—who took demotions in order to be reassigned. The decision to retain him in light of allegations similar to the ones against Diaz reads as a vote of confidence in O’Neil and his leadership.

In an internal email on Thursday, Rahr wrote that her number one goal was to “bring stability and continuity” to the department. “I have no plans to make personnel moves, especially at the command level.”

At Wednesday’s press conference, Rahr declined to condemn SPD’s current culture, saying she’s concerned about the culture in all police departments across the country. “I don’t think [SPD is] worse or better than others; I think we have work to do in every department,” Rahr said. “One of the reasons I was very anxious to jump in is, I think the Seattle Police Department is open to doing something meaningful, and implementing systemic change.”

2. Despite her pledge, Rahr did make one top-level personnel decision this week—she reinstated Assistant Chief Tyrone Davis to full duties, just eight days after Diaz put him on administrative leave while the Office of Police Accountability completes an investigation into allegations against him. PubliCola first reported the news on Twitter at 1:30 this afternoon.

Rahr did not say why she decided to restore Davis to his position.

In a brief email to SPD staff, Rahr wrote, “I want to let you know that based on newly available information and a review of the OPA investigation”—which has not been completed—”I have restored A/C Davis to full duty, effective immediately. I am looking forward to having the full team, working together.”

3. Finally—and file this under “more next week”—the city council’s transportation committee chair, Rob Saka, will propose an amended, $1.55 billion Seattle Transportation Levy next week that would increase funding for sidewalks, electric vehicle charging infrastructure, Safe Routes to School projects, transit security officers, and bridges, among other spending areas. The plan would add $100 million to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposal, which Harrell himself boosted by $100 million earlier this month.

Saka’s plan would provide an additional $63 million for new sidewalks; $6 million for transit security, including additional security guards; and $10 million for additional EV charging stations, among other changes.

To make up for some of the new expenditures, Saka’s proposal would cut funding for a new “Neighborhood-Initiated Safety Partnership Program”—a plan to build 16 street-safety projects initiated by neighborhoods based on local conditions and safety concerns—from $41 million to $25.5 million. Harrell’s original plan, released in April, included $48 million for neighborhood-initiated projects.

Saka’s proposal would also set minimum spending requirements for new sidewalk construction, bridge maintenance, arterial street maintenance, and electric vehicle charging facilities, and adds new references to auditing, good governance, and accountability. The council’s special committee on the transportation levy, which Saka chairs, will meet on Tuesday, June 4, at 9:30 am.

Correction: This article originally misstated the details of Saka’s plan, using the numbers from Mayor Harrell’s May proposal instead of those from Saka’s amendment.

City Council, Economy, labor

City Council Bill Cutting “Gig” Delivery Workers’ Pay Moves Forward
Micaela Romero from Washington Community Action Network, joined by her son, testifies against legislation that will reduce delivery driver wages.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council’s governance and economic development committee approved a bill sponsored by Council President Sara Nelson that will lower the minimum wage for so-called “gig” delivery workers on Thursday, with Joy Hollingsworth abstaining because, as she put it, “I still want this bill to be baked more.”

The 4-1 vote came after hours of testimony from delivery drivers who were overwhelmingly opposed to the legislation and have shown up at public comment periods for weeks on end to ask the council not to cut their wages. After last year’s city council, including Nelson, voted for the “PayUp” bill that required gig companies to cover more of workers’ costs, wages went up to an average of around $26 an hour. In response, the gig companies—Uber, Doordash, Instacart, and others— imposed a flat $5 fee on every order, causing demand for delivery service to plummet.

A handful of drivers, mostly representing the Uber-funded lobbying group Drive Forward, said the changes would enable the companies to drop the fees.

Several council members patted themselves on the back for listening to “all sides” of the issue before voting to approve a bill that satisfied almost all of the delivery companies’ demands.

Nelson, for example, spent several minutes reading the February testimony of bike delivery worker Heather Nielson, who said the fees had caused customers to “boycott the apps” and stop providing tips, into the record. Nielson, later featured on the conservative website The Center Square, said tips make up 90 percent or more of drivers’ wages—a claim that many other drivers contradicted in their testimony.

Nelson seemed eager to ignore those workers’ comments, referring to them dismissively as “all this noise we’ve been hearing.”

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Her legislation, she said, “is an effort to reverse the bad outcomes caused by a flawed law” that resulted in a “drastic reduction in worker wages and lost revenues for restaurants and other retail establishments. That’s what happened. That was the chain of events. And all of this was anticipated but the last council did it anyway. And now we’re faced with the fallout.”

Councilmember Maritza Rivera recalled a time when, “as a young woman, I worked as a server in a fast food restaurant where I made the legal minimum wage and relied on tips to pay rent, utilities and groceries.” In most states, restaurants can pay sub-minimum wages for tipped workers on the justification that workers make plenty of money from customers’ tips, and companies like Doordash and Instacart adopted the practice in states where it’s still legal until a series of lawsuits forced them to alter their policies. Washington state does not allow a “tip credit.”

The legislation notably, does not require companies to stop paying the $5 fee; nor does it impose any new restrictions on the companies’ power over their workers, such as their ability to “deactivate” (fire) workers for any reason, including wanting to set their own work hours.

Instead, the bill reduces workers’ pay and takes away some of the rights they currently have. First, the bill lowers the amount companies must pay their drivers for expenses, such as self-employment (employer) taxes and workers’ compensation, that the drivers wouldn’t have to pay if they were classified as employees. Continue reading “City Council Bill Cutting “Gig” Delivery Workers’ Pay Moves Forward” →

City Council, homelessness, King County, Morning Fizz

Morning Fizz: COVID at City Hall, Why “Consolidation” Won’t Fix the City Budget, and More on Burien’s Efforts to Kill a Church Encampment

1. Seattle City Councilmember Bob Kettle recently contracted COVID after coming in to his City Hall office while a family member was home sick with the highly infectious disease. During the period when he was not yet testing positive, he and his staff continued to work at City Hall without wearing masks, according to sources on the floor.

Although Kettle told PubliCola that he personally stayed home for a week after his first positive COVID test (including five days after his symptoms receded), his presence on the second floor during the time when his family member was sick unnerved at least one council member, Tammy Morales, who wrote in an email to the city clerk and council HR, “I just learned that a couple folks on the floor are home with Covid. Can I ask you to send around our policies to remind folks WHEN TO STAY HOME.”

According to a staffer for his office, Kettle “took multiple tests and the moment he received a positive result, he immediately began to work from home, and followed the five-day protocol once he received a negative test(s).” The city asks employees to isolate for five days after a positive test and stay home if they still have symptoms; however, even asymptomatic people can be contagious. Kettle and a staffer confirmed that no one else in his office contracted COVID from him.

Council president Sara Nelson and other council members have frequently touted the benefits of in-person work to council members and their staff as well as the recovery of downtown businesses. The council now holds all its meetings in person; previously, some council members attended remotely, including one council member with a young child and one who is immunocompromised.

Saka and Strauss are correct that the city has arborists in multiple departments. It has a total of two: One in the Parks Department, and one in SDOT. It’s unclear how moving both positions into one department or the other would save the city money.

2. Facing the largest budget shortfall in recent history, many city council members have latched on to the idea that city departments are inefficient and full of costly redundancies—a problem council budget committee chair Dan Strauss has recently taken to illustrating with the example of city arborists. “We have multiple different departments that have arborists,” Strauss said at a committee meeting last month, and “I think it makes more sense to have them all in one department.”

Earlier this week, Councilmember Rob Saka took up the mantle, calling the city’s many arborists the “canonical example” of the need for “consolidation” at the city on an episode of the Seattle Channel’s “City Inside/Out,” which features panel discussions with city council members.

“Do we need 17 different departments with arborists, or can they sit under one [department]—parks, for example, or whatever it is. But we need to better consolidate our functions, services, our lines of business, avoid duplication of efforts, [and] I think we’ll achieve some some great savings through that,” Saka said.

Curious, we looked to see how many arborists the city has and in how many different departments. As it turns out, Saka and Strauss are correct that the city has arborists in multiple departments. It has a total of two: One in the Parks Department, and one in SDOT. It’s unclear how moving both positions into one department or the other would save the city money.

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3. As PubliCola reported late last year, Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon failed to inform the city council about a letter from Deputy King County Executive Shannon Braddock telling him the city needed to come up with a plan to spend $1 million the county was offering to build a shelter or lose the money.

Bailon sat on the letter for a week before telling the full council about it, claiming he was too busy responding to to emails opposing a temporary encampment at a local church that was run by a nonprofit started by then-council member Cydney Moore.

Although Bailon later changed his story, documents obtained through a records request show that he did spend a great deal of time responding to opponents of the encampment and raising questions about its legality. Those emails included:

• A note to the Burien fire chief asking him if the city could ensure that all the tents at the encampment would be “flame retardant”;

• An email to Burien Police Chief Ted Boe asking him to send an officer to a meeting to refute “potentially false claims” by the encampment’s sponsor that sex offenders would be barred from the encampment (which they were);

• An email warning the superintendent of the Highline Public School District about the church encampment’s “proximity to Highline High School” and claiming that the encampment violated city law;

• At least seven emails to people who wrote him to oppose the encampment, saying he was “very sorry to hear” about the problems the encampment would cause them and encouraging them to attend an upcoming meeting where they could express their opposition.

The encampment closed in February.