Tag: Seattle Chamber of Commerce

City Council, City Hall, Density, Development, gender, homelessness, housing, King County, land use, Morning Crank, neighborhoods, Politics, Renters, Transit, Transportation

Morning Crank: Democrats, Taxes, and “The Ideological Anti-Parking Agenda”
Detail from Seattle frequent transit map; click for link to full map.

1. A last-ditch email from anti-development activist Chris Leman with the subject line “Parking SOS!! E-mails and calls needed to prevent devastation of neighborhood parking” heralded next Monday’s vote on parking reform legislation that will clarify where apartments may be built without parking, require more bike parking at new buildings, and require developers of large buildings to “unbundle” the cost of parking and rent by charging separately for each.  Council member Lisa Herbold has proposed giving the city’s Office of Planning and Community Development the authority to institute parking  mandates, refuse to grant residential parking permits to new renters, or take other steps to reduce competition for on-street parking as part of the environmental mitigation process, arguing (among other things) that cars circling the block for parking produce climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions.

Leman’s email makes several misleading claims, implying that the city wants to define “frequent transit service” as three buses per hour (in reality, it allows that frequency during low-ridership midday hours if a route offers extremely frequent service at rush hour, like the RapidRide buses that arrive every 10 minutes), and claiming that “many more areas of the city will be open to developers putting in dense buildings with no parking.” In reality, while the changes will slightly increase the amount of the city served by frequent transit service (from 18.6 percent to 22.5 percent), the changes will only allow new buildings with no parking in six small portions of urban villages served by six frequent bus routes (full list on page 20 of this report.)

But the biggest misrepresentation in Leman’s letter, which describes Herbold as a lone voice of sanity against the “ideological anti-parking agenda” of North Seattle council members Rob Johnson and Mike O’Brien,  is that eliminating parking mandates contradicts “the majority wishes and interests of [council members’]  constituents.” For months, tenants, commuters, and environmental advocates have been showing up in council chambers and at public meetings to make the case that renters shouldn’t have to pay extra for  parking spaces they don’t want or need. Although the old-guard neighborhood activists may not like or want their input, those people are constituents, too, and their numbers are growing.

2. This one is still in the “credible rumor” category, but former state Senator Rodney Tom—the Republican-turned-Democrat-turned-leader of the Republican-voting Majority Coalition Caucus—may be considering a run for the 48th District state senate seat currently held by Democrat Patty Kuderer. And he’d be running as a Democrat.

Tom, who did not run for reelection for the Bellevue-Medina seat in 2014, did not return a call to his office on Tuesday. But Halei Watkins of Moxie Media, which recently merged with Kuderer’s campaign consulting firm, Winpower Strategies, says she has heard the rumor repeated frequently enough, and with enough “fervor,” that she believes it. “I think he is going to run because he thinks he needs to, [and] is probably being encouraged by the business community,” Watkins says. “Frankly, I don’t think that it matters to him if he runs as a d or an r he might as well just run as [a member of the Rodney Tom party at this point.” Tom was one of two nominally Democratic members of the so-called Majority Coalition Caucus, creating a 25-24 Republican-voting majority in a senate that had a Democratic majority on paper. Tim Sheldon, the other Democratic member of the MCC, remains in the senate, which has had a true Democratic majority since the 2017 election of Manka Dhingra in the 45th, another Eastside district that neighbors the 48th.

Kuderer, for her part, doesn’t sound worried about a challenge from the right in her Democratic-leaning district. “I really don’t know” if Tom is running or not, she says, but “it doesn’t change my campaign strategy any” if he is.

3.  As the city council gets ready to take up the recommendation of the Progressive Revenue Task Force, including a new, $75 million employee hours tax on businesses, the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce put a phone poll in the field out this week focusing on the tax proposal, homeless encampments, and Seattle City Council member Mike O’Brien. Summer Stinson, a Democratic Party activist and co-founder of Washington’s Paramount Duty, a pro-school-funding group, live-tweeted the poll. Among the questions Simpson said she was asked (linked and reproduced here with permission):

• What do you think of Mayor Jenny Durkan, Amazon, and city council member Mike O’Brien?

• Do you see “the ineffective city council as a problem?”

• Do you think  “there is too much influence from labor unions on city government?”

• Do you agree “that the Seattle City Council has raised too many taxes and fees?

• “Is homelessness getting worse because the City Council, despite spending millions a year, does not know how to reduce homelessness?”

Chamber spokeswoman Alicia Teel confirmed that the organization is funding the poll. Asked about its purpose—and, specifically, why the poll zeroed in on O’Brien—Teel said, “Understanding public opinion is part of our overall advocacy strategy; we poll on a fairly regular basis to get a sense of how much people are tuned into developments at City Hall, including how Council is stewarding taxpayer dollars. The tax on jobs”—the Chamber’s preferred term for the employee hours tax—”is a proposal that would affect all of our members in Seattle, so it’s definitely top of mind for us. As for asking about specific Councilmembers, we are curious about how well people feel that they are being represented by their district Councilmembers.”

4. After publishing a nearly 9,000-word defense of his behavior as chair of the King County Democrats (a defense that included four sentences that could be generously construed as apologetic), Bailey Stober temporarily ceded his duties as chair last night but did not step down, saying that he wanted the chance to defend himself in an trial that will take place on April 8, followed by a vote by the county’s precinct committee officers on whether to remove him from office on April 15.

For all the details on last night’s meeting of the King County Democrats, and Stober’s non-apology apology, I’ve posted a few highlights from Twitter below, and collected all my tweets here.

Stober remains on paid leave from his job as communications director for King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson while the office, with the help of an outside attorney, investigates the charges against him and determines whether they impact his ability to do his job as chief spokesman for the assessor. Chief deputy assessor Al Dams says the investigation will be limited to the allegations of harassment and other inappropriate workplace behavior; the county will not look into allegations that Stober misused Party funds because he does not have the authority to spend county funds. Dams did not immediately respond to a request for Stober’s salary; last year, when his job was listed as “administrative assistant II,” the 26-year-old made $90,445, according to the Tacoma News Tribune’s public employee salary database.

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site or making a one-time contribution! 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 time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as reporting-related and office expenses. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

Bikes, Business, campaign finance, Elections, labor, Morning Crank, State of Washington, Transportation

Morning Crank: “Unprecedented” Bipartisan Testimony

1. The state Public Disclosure Commission, which enforces campaign finance rules, keeps tabs on lobbyists, and provides a library’s worth of public information about every campaign in the state, has been inundated over the past year by citizen complaints. One very particular citizen, actually: Glen Morgan, the former Freedom Foundation fellow and director of the Citizens Alliance for Property Rights, who has filed nearly 300 complaints with the agency against Democrats and progressive groups in the past three years. (He has filed a smaller number of complaints with the attorney general’s office, which has 45 days to respond before a citizen filing a complaint can indicate their intent to file a lawsuit; if another 10 days go by with no action from the state, the citizen complainant can sue the person or campaign he feels is violating campaign-finance law.)

Some Democratic organizations have spent down their treasuries and dissolved their political arms in response to the onslaught; others are facing fines of tens of thousands of dollars for violations ranging from  late reports to reports they failed to file at all. This is less of an issue for large, well-funded organizations like the state Democrats or unions like SEIU 775 than it is for small, volunteer-run district party organizations, which often have only a few hundred dollars in the bank and can scarce afford to pay attorneys, much less cough up $10,000-plus fines. The complaints Morgan files are often about violations most observers would find trivial—failing to report the number of copies that were made when paying a printer, for example, or filing a required report one day late.

Morgan, who started filing complaints after local Democrats alleged he violated campaign finance law in a series of misleading robocalls against Democrats running for Thurston County Commissioner in 2016, has only filed complaints against Democratic groups, but he contends his point isn’t that Democrats are uniquely bad at following the law—it’s that the whole system is broken. “Nobody cares about a conservative activist saying all this. It’s irrelevant,” Morgan says. “So you have to demonstrate it by proving that there’s a problem with the widest variety of people possible.”

But Dmitri Iglitzin, a Seattle attorney who has represented several of the Democratic Party groups Morgan is pursuing, says that while Morgan “says he wants to create a crisis and show how screwed up the system is—which he’s done—the fact that he’s only gone after progressive groups and is a former Freedom Foundation Fellow and head of a right-wing organization (the Citizens Alliance for Property Rights) shows that his agenda is to wipe out Democratic party organizations and progressive organizations from the political sphere.”

Whether or not that’s the case, reforming the original law that led to the current, rather byzantine system of campaign-finance reporting—and that turned the Attorney General’s office into a useful bludgeon for activists like Morgan—is a bipartisan issue. Yesterday, the heads of the King County Democrats, Bailey Stober, and the King County Republicans, Lori Sotelo, testified together before the House State Government, Elections, and Information Technology Committee about a bill proposed by Rep. Zach Hudgins that would force complainants like Morgan to file their complaints at the PDC first instead of filing simultaneous complaints with the attorney general’s office. The PDC would have 60 days to take action on a complaint before a citizen could escalate it up to the AG, and the AG would have a longer time—60 days, not 45—to decide whether to take action. The bill would also bar citizens from filing complaints with the AG’s office for violations that amount to less than $25,000.

In his testimony, Stober said the PDC had been “weaponized” against political parties. Sotelo added that the two party leaders had taken the “unprecedented action” of appearing together to demonstrate how important it was to reform the state public disclosure law. They were less sanguine about a separate provision in the bill that would increase the maximum the PDC can fine a candidate or committee from  $10,000 to $50,000.

Morgan testified too, calling the bill an inadequate response to the problems with the public disclosure law. He did not say whether he was on board with the provision quintupling the fine for violating the law.

2. The last major hurdle preventing the city from completing the “Missing Link” of the Burke-Gilman trail in Ballard fell yesterday, when Seattle deputy hearing examiner Ryan Vancil decided that the city’s environmental impact statement is adequate and rejected opponents’ arguments against building the trail. “The weight of the evidence presented supports the determination of the [final environmental impact statement] that the Preferred Alternative will improve safety for non-motorized users over existing conditions,” Vancil wrote in a 20-point, 21-page opinion dismantling every argument the opponents made.

It has been a long road for trail proponents, who have been battling to complete the 1.4-mile gap in the trail for nearly three decades. Currently, cyclists heading through Ballard on the Burke-Gilman must detour through a path that is poorly maintained and crisscrossed by multiple railroad tracks; accidents and injuries are common. Missing Link opponents, including Salmon Bay Sand and Gravel and the King County Labor Council, argued that the presence of cyclists in an industrial area would threaten businesses’ viability and endanger jobs.

In a tweet posted right after the decision came down, council member Mike O’Brien—a daily cyclist and Missing Link proponent since before his election to the council, in 2009—said, “At last! We can move forward to complete the missing link of the Burke-Gilman Trail. I look forward to [Mayor Jenny Durkan] and [the Seattle Department of Transportation[ taking quick action to complete the Burke-Gilman, providing a safer and sound alignment for pedestrians, bicyclists, cars and trucks.”

3. The Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce picked a new leader to replace outgoing CEO (and former deputy mayor) Maud Daudon yesterday: Former Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland, who will be the first black woman (and the second woman ever) to lead the business group. As Sound Transit board vice-chair, Strickland was a vocal advocate for light rail and a cautionary voice against legislation, just passed by the state  House, that could cut funding for ST3 by more than $2 billion.

By business-establishment standards, Seattle’s business community is unusually progressive, often endorsing measures (like the recent Sound Transit 3 ballot measure and the recent housing levy) supported by the left. The choice of Strickland over other potential leaders (former deputy mayor and Downtown Seattle Association head Kate Joncas was rumored to be in the running) may help assuage fears that the Chamber would respond to recent tax talk in Seattle (including discussion of the employee hours/”head” tax, which they oppose) by choosing a more conventional or conservative leader to take the chamber in a more conservative direction.

 

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site or making a one-time contribution! 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 time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as reporting-related and office expenses. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

Business, City Hall, labor

SEIU Initiative Would Tax Businesses to Fund Labor Law Enforcement

The Service Employees International Union filed an initiative petition Tuesday to tax Seattle businesses to provide additional funding for the city’s Office of Labor Standards to enforce Seattle labor laws, including mandatory sick and safe leave, the $15 minimum wage, and a law banning employers from asking about criminal records on job applications.

The initiative would impose a 1-cent-per-employee-hour tax on business licenses (in business parlance, a “head tax”); OLS would use the money, according to the initiative, “to contract with community-based employee advocate organizations, or coalitions of advocate organizations, to perform outreach, education, and compliance assistance” to employees and employers in Seattle.”

Essentially, the initiative would require the city to grant funds raised by a tax on businesses to nonprofit organizations (CASA Latina is reportedly a likely contender) to educate workers about their rights under the city’s new labor laws. The money would also pay for direct investigations into alleged violations of the minimum wage, paid sick and save leave, and criminal-history laws.

Under the initiative, 40 percent of the $0.01-per-hour business-license surcharge would fund the OLS directly; 50 percent would pay for contracts with community organizations; and 10 percent would pay for outreach and education to businesses.

I have a call out to SEIU 775 secretary-treasurer Adam Glickman, who signed the letter submitting the initiative proposal to the city clerk. Once the initiative is approved, the group will start collecting signatures for the proposal.

Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Maud Daudon, who is on a Chamber trip in Miami, said she couldn’t comment on the initiative until she’d had a chance to read it. However, Daudon says that in general, “We don’t think the head tax is a good idea,” and that labor law enforcement is “a core city function that should be paid out of the general fund,” not by a tax on employers.

The full letter submitting the initiative to the city clerk is here ;I’ll update when I hear back from Glickman, to whom labor attorney Dmitri Iglitzen, whose office drafted the measure, referred my questions.