Tag: streetcar

City Council, Environment, Police

Midyear Budget Proposal Adds Funding for Streetcar Study, Police Overtime—and $19 Million for Unanticipated Lawsuit Payouts

By Erica C. Barnett

The city council got a first look at a proposed mid-year budget package that would fund a graffiti cleanup team that Harrell recently rolled out as part of his Downtown Activation Plan; add funding to revive the delayed downtown streetcar connector; increase SPD overtime spending to pay for downtown emphasis patrols, expanded online crime reports, and public disclosure officers; and put an additional $19 million into a fund that pays out for lawsuits and claims against the city, many of them the result of alleged police misconduct.

Every year, the city council has to adjust the budget to reflect new priorities, as well as what the city has actually spent so far that year, in a midyear supplemental budget that’s often hundreds of pages long.

The council denied Harrell’s request to nearly double what the city spends on graffiti removal last year, increasing annual graffiti cleanup spending to almost $4 million. According to council staff, Harrell’s office reversed their decision by using unspent funds from Seattle Public Utilities public hygiene budget, including pump-outs for trailers that provide showers for unsheltered people, to fully the graffiti cleanup crews. Harrell announced the new spending earlier this month as part of his Downtown Activation Plan. Because the city has already executed the contracts, a council staffer explained Wednesday, the council now has little choice but to fund the expanded graffiti program.

To fund other Downtown Activation Plan programs, a central staff memo notes, Harrell has proposed using the JumpStart fund, which includes funding earmarked for small businesses. Ironically, it was the Downtown Seattle Association, along with the Seattle Metro Chamber and other business groups, that proposed temporarily suspending the JumpStart tax—which only applies to the city’s largest businesses—earlier this year.

The memo outlines all the other proposed midyear budget adjustments, which also include $1 million “a delivery assessment of the Center City Cultural Connector”—as the proposed downtown streetcar was recently rebranded—”to determine if the design needs to be updated to reflect the intent of the project.”

“My original idea was, just lift the proviso and let them spend the salary savings on emergent needs,” Councilmember Sara Nelson said Wednesday, adding that the funding limitation “prohibit[s] the uses of salary savings on on expenses that are really important right now for the for Seattle Police Department.”

The council will also have to approve a $19 million increase to the city’s judgment and claims fund—including $14 million from the city’s planning reserves fund and $5 million from insurance—to pay for “higher than anticipated expenses” from lawsuits against the city. A spokesperson for the city’s budget office told PubliCola the city “cannot accurately predict how much money will be spent if the request is approved,” and said the city may not end up using all the money.

Still, the allocation represents a significant increase to the fund, which the city already expanded by $11 million in the 2023 budget last year, when it increased the fund from $30 million to $41 million “to pay for extraordinary settlements against the City.” Last year, lawsuits against the police department accounted for almost half of the $36 million the city spent on settlements, defense attorneys, and other litigation-related expenses, according to a report released in April.

The midyear budget also releases some funding to SPD to pay for improvements to the department’s online reporting system and unbudgeted overtime expenses the department has already made, along with position authority for four new public disclosure officers. Currently, SPD has to get council approval to spend funding allocated to vacant positions, including sworn officer positions the department is unable to fill, on unrelated purposes.

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Although the spending SPD is requesting is fairly limited—about $815,000—budget chair Teresa Mosqueda noted that whenever the city creates new SPD positions—on top of the hundreds of vacant positions that are included in the budget every year—”it compounds our increased costs year over year,” because the new positions become an additional SPD expense in future budget years.

“If there [are] positions that are vacant, that the department intends to hold vacant, that are no longer needed or are not part of the near term planning, it is okay to abrogate positions in order to put funding into other priorities,” Mosqueda said.

Councilmember Sara Nelson, who argued vehemently against restrictions on SPD’s spending authority last year, said another way to solve the annual funding problem would be to just allow SPD to spend salary savings on whatever they want. “My original idea was, just lift the proviso and let them spend the salary savings on emergent needs,” Nelson said Wednesday, adding that the funding limitation “prohibit[s] the uses of salary savings on on expenses that are really important right now for the for Seattle Police Department.” (In fact, it just requires the council to approve those expenses.)

Immediately after suggesting the council has made it too hard for the department to spend salary savings however it wants, Nelson spent 15 minutes questioning a $50,000 expenditure on a “living hotel” pilot that would create sustainable development standards for new hotels. Currently, the city has no way of endorsing or verifying that a hotel that calls itself “green” is actually adhering to green standards such as limiting water usage.

Suggesting that Mosqueda, who proposed the expenditure, was dropping the idea on the council out of the blue, Nelson said, “You make it sound like there’s a lot of talk going on between departments, but I’m the vice chair of the sustainability and renters rights committee, I’m on land use, I’m the chair of City Light, and  the first time I’ve heard about this policy is through some of those form emails coming in.”

“I appreciate that you might know a lot about it,” Nelson continued. “Again, talking about money, that transparency in budgeting ,and making sure that when we allocate money, it’s actually getting spent. So is it premature to be funding this work, given those factors?”

No one took the bait on the glaring contradiction between supporting a blank check for police and scrutinizing a tiny expense for the environment, but Councilmember Lisa Herbold did chime in on behalf of Mosqueda’s add, noting that “it’s really important to guard against greenwashing” by companies operating in the city.

As the central staff memo notes, Harrell’s Downtown Activation Plan includes a special land use change for a proposed hotel in Belltown that will not have to adhere to any green standards, and would extend master use permits for existing downtown hotels, prolonging their exemptions from current environmental rules.

Equity, homelessness, Mayor Harrell, Morning Fizz, Transportation

New SDOT Director Talks Scooters, Streetcar, and Sweeps; A Closer Look at City Grant to Social Club Harrell Headed
New SDOT director Greg Spotts
New SDOT director Greg Spotts

1. Greg Spotts, the newly confirmed director of Seattle’s transportation department, spoke with reporters Wednesday on a wide range of topics, including scooters, the proposed downtown streetcar connector, and his plan to do a “top to bottom review” of the city’s Vision Zero effort to end traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2030, which is currently far off track.

Spotts, who previously headed up StreetsLA, a division of Los Angeles’ Bureau of Street Services, said he was currently agnostic on both the appropriate number of scooters the city should permit and the debate over whether to revive work on the downtown streetcar, which former mayor Jenny Durkan paused during her term. As Spotts noted, scooter sharing proliferated in LA after the city decided to allow any qualified company to operate in the city, but didn’t really serve low-income areas or communities of color.

“What it produced was an overabundance of scooters in the obvious places where there’s a lot of density and a lot of money, and … very few scooters in communities of color,” Spotts said. Even with incentives for placing scooters in underserved areas, they continued to cluster in wealthy, tourist-heavy neighborhoods like Santa Monica, Hollywood, and downtown LA. “So it’s not obvious how to make this public private partnership to produce all the public goods that you want, but maybe we’re in the very, very early stages of figuring that out.”

Similarly, Spotts said he might support expanding the streetcar if there’s evidence it will improve the economic climate in the areas it serves. The new downtown section of streetcar would create a loop connecting two separate streetcar lines, connecting South Lake Union to Pioneer Square to Capitol Hill. All three areas are already connected by frequent transit, which—along with low ridership on the existing streetcar—raises questions about whether a new streetcar segment would justify its cost, currently estimated at almost $300 million.

“There’s operational benefits, right? Instead of running two segments, running one big one,” Spotts said. “But what would push it over the top, I think, is it analysis that it could be an important catalyst for our small businesses in downtown, for our tourist economy, for our cultural institutions.”

One issue Spotts declined to address is SDOT’s role in removing homeless encampments from sidewalks; SDOT staffers (including some currently vacant positions) make up more than half the members of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s Unified Care Team, a group of about 70 staffers who removes encampment. (The UCT also includes six members of the city’s HOPE team, which does outreach and makes shelter offers prior to sweeps).

“At this early stage, I’m really deferring to the mayor’s office to utilize the departments as they want to for the larger policies that they’re pursuing,” Spotts said. “And I’m not looking to introduce some personal opinions into that. I’m just here to here to assist in whatever way they want us to assist.”

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2. After we reported on the fact that the city awarded nearly $800,000 to a private men’s social club that Mayor Bruce Harrell chaired until late last year, we took another look at the record to see if there was any precedent for the city awarding Equitable Development Initiative dollars to any similar institution.

Over the five years the city has been making EDI awards, about three dozen organizations have received significant grants from the fund. Many of the groups that have received multiple grants are engaged in low-income housing development, create community spaces that are open to the public, or provide social or health services to particular communities.

For example, the Friends of Little Saigon, Africatown, the Rainier Valley Midwives, Chief Seattle Club, and the Ethiopian Community in Seattle have all received multiple EDI awards over the past five years. Other grant recipients in past years include Cham Refugees Community, the Somali Health Board, United Indians of All Tribes, and the Filipino Community of Seattle.

A few of the grant recipients provide cultural space and put on events that are open to the ticket-buying public, including Black and Tan Hall and the Wing Luke Museum. None is a private social club—except the Royal Esquire Club.

It’s unclear whether the Royal Esquire Club has sought public funding from the city in the past; we’ve requested a list of all previous EDI grant applicants through a public records request. The club, which was at the center of another controversy involving Harrell while he was City Council president, has never received an EDI award in the program’s history; the $782,000 the club will receive is more than twice its annual revenues for 2019, according to the group’s most recent tax filing.

City Council, Morning Fizz, Police, Transit

Bike Board Member Asks for Encampment Ban Near Bike Lanes, Poll Tests Streetcar Popularity; Council Clarifies “Z-Disposition” for 911 Calls

1. Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board member Dr. Doug Migden wrote to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office earlier this year to complain about the homeless people he sees while riding his bike, and to suggest legislation that would ban people from sleeping within up to 200 feet of any bike facility or sidewalk.

“First, I voted for Mr. Harrell and the primary reason is that crime and encampment related filth in Seattle is now totally unacceptable,” Migden’s letter begins. “I have lived on the north end of Queen Anne, in a house I own, since 1997. Unfortunately I’ve never seen Seattle in such a mess.”

Council member Alex Pedersen installed Migden on the bike board earlier this year, rejecting a different nominee the board identified through a months-long recruitment and nomination process. The bike board advocates for and advises the city on policies to make Seattle safer and more welcoming to cyclists from all backgrounds, including low-income and homeless people.

Given that “bicycle commuters in West Seattle can’t even safely get to downtown because of encampments and illegal activity such as IV drug use on or adjacent to bicycle pathways,” Migden continued in his letter, “how about a policy whereby nobody can camp on public sidewalks, on bicycle paths, or within 100 or 200 feet of such public spaces. This is not too much to ask and it’s certainly doable. Enforcement would be needed though. Perhaps more police officers on bicycles would help with this and other crime related issues in Seattle.”

“How about a policy whereby nobody can camp on public sidewalks, on bicycle paths, or within 100 or 200 feet of such public spaces.  Enforcement would be needed though. Perhaps more police officers on bicycles would help with this and other crime related issues in Seattle.” —Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board member Doug Migden

Yes, Migden wrote, it’s important to “take care of” truly “vulnerable populations,” but a lot of the homeless people he sees around are able-bodied men who “are not mentally ill,” are “in no distress,” and are well-off enough to “indulge” in cell phones. “[S]tratification and picking apart which illegal campers truly need assistance and which ones are basically freeloading off of responsible citizens who pay taxes etc., is crucial,” Migden wrote.

The mayor’s office, in a standardized response, told Migden they would forward the information about the encampments he reported (including “disgusting RVs” in Fremont and Ballard) to the city’s encampment cleanup squad.

2. A recent poll tested voters’ opinions about completing the long-delayed downtown Seattle streetcar project, along with various local funding options, such as increasing the commercial parking tax, increasing the local vehicle licensing fee, and increasing local sales taxes, already among the highest in the country.

The poll, conducted last week, seems to favor streetcar completion—stating, for example, that federal funding could cut the $350 million estimated cost of the streetcar almost in half, but is only available for a limited time. (Federal funding for the streetcar is far from certain, although, as the Urbanist pointed out earlier this year, a potential $75 million request for federal funding still gets a “high” rating from the Federal Transit Administration.)

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“Connecting Seattle’s two existing streetcar lines just makes sense,” one of the poll’s test messages begins. (Many polls test messages that could be used for or against a proposal or person during a future campaign.) “This project will link our busiest transportation hubs serving people coming downtown by bus, light rail, ferry, Sounder, and Amtrak train creating a more seamless and convenient transportation system.”

Former mayor Jenny Durkan paused work on the downtown streetcar connection in 2018, citing cost overruns. Before and since then, streetcar skeptics have argued that the downtown line is redundant with existing bus and light rail service and would not serve enough riders to justify the ballooning cost. Last year, the city council gave the long-moribund streetcar a kickstart by providing $2.4 million in funding to resume work on the project.

It’s unclear who’s behind the poll; local political consultants, transit advocates, business groups, and streetcar proponents all told PubliCola it wasn’t them.

3. During an update on the city’s efforts to established an alternative response system for 911 calls that don’t require an armed response, city council public safety committee attempted to clarify an issue that recently confounded a prominent local columnist: The so-called “Z disposition” the Seattle Police Department gives to certain low-priority calls.

Previously, committee chair Lisa Herbold noted, dispatchers would routinely put the 911 system into “priority call status,” meaning that calls that didn’t rank in SPD’s top two “priority” designations (which include violent crimes and crimes in progress) would not get any response at all. Now, an officer reviews lower-priority calls before deciding whether they merit a response before dismissing them. “In my mind, that’s that’s a better approach, because at least you’re having somebody on the ground with law enforcement expertise making that decision,” Herbold said.

In April, she added, the city’s Office of Police Accountability recommended establishing a clearer system for assigning low-priority calls, in response to a high-profile complaint about two officers who ate breakfast near the Ballard library rather than responding immediately to a call about a person asleep inside their car.

Councilmember Sara Nelson said that in her view, the new system is actually worse, because under “priority call status,” police would at least tell low-priority callers to call back or give them a general estimate of when they might hear back about their call. “There is a customer service issue going on with the call with the system right now with no communication and that’s why people are getting upset,” Nelson said.

Efforts to replace police with civilian responders for some 911 calls remain largely stalled, and the Seattle Police Officers Guild has demanded to bargain any changes to the SPD-centric 911 response system.

Arts, City Council, homelessness, Mayor Durkan, Parks, Transit

Council Amendments Would Stall Downtown Streetcar, Preserve Laurelhurst Community Center, and Defund Salvation Army Shelter

Laurelhurst Community Center

By Erica C. Barnett

The battle over police funding may be the marquee issue at Thursday’s final public city council budget meeting, but the council will also be taking up dozens of other changes to Mayor Jenny Durkan’s proposed 2022 budget. Here are a few we’re tracking as the council winds up its deliberations over next year’s budget.

• A proposal by Councilmember (and perennial streetcar opponent) Lisa Herbold to cut $2.4 million that would re-start planning for the long-delayed downtown Seattle streetcar and reallocate that money to help improve Seattle Public Schools’ bus routing technology and to fund a citywide hiring incentive program.

Herbold noted earlier this month that there are currently vacancies across all city departments, not just SPD, and suggested funding incentives to fill those positions as well.

• Two amendments, both by Councilmember Tammy Morales, that would strip $5.1 million in federal funding from a Salvation Army-operated emergency shelter in SoDo and use the money to fund land acquisition for cultural space through the city’s Cultural Space Agency, to purchase a separate piece of land in SoDo for transitional housing to be run by the Chief Seattle Club, and to develop a new “City-run social housing acquisition program.” The Cultural Space Agency is a public real estate development agency established last year with a mission to create new, community-based arts and cultural venues and spaces in Seattle; an infusion of $1.1 million would allow the agency to set up a land acquisition fund.

Social housing is a somewhat loftier notion; according to Morales’ amendment, $2 million would be enough to hire a team that would “research portability of social housing acquisition program models currently operating in cities like Berlin, Paris and Vienna,” but any expansion of the program would require ongoing funds in future years.

PubliCola is seeking more information about the transitional housing project.

UPDATE: On Thursday afternoon, all three of Morales’ proposals to repurpose funding for the SoDo shelter failed; two, the transitional and social housing proposals, failed for lack of a second vote to put them up for discussion.

In her budget this year, Durkan proposed eliminating the creative industries director position altogether and demoting the city’s creative industry policy advisor to a lower-level “creative industries manager” job overseeing various special events and permitting staff.

The Salvation Army shelter receives additional funding from the city and county, but the loss of $3.1 million in annual funding would force the agency to close the shelter in 2023 or find funding elsewhere. The shelter, located in a former COVID isolation site inside a former Tesla dealership, enabled the Salvation Army to consolidate several existing shelters in one location, freeing up other spaces for use during weather-related emergencies. The building, which has a special air-filtration system, served as the city’s only smoke shelter during the 2020 summer wildfires.

• Morales has also proposed restoring a position at the Office of Economic Development to support and promote film, music, and other creative industries in Seattle. Over her term, Durkan has steadily chipped away at this longstanding city function, first by neutering the Office of Film and Music (whose director, Kate Becker, left for a job as King County’s first-ever Creative Economy Strategist in 2019 and was never replaced), then by attempting to eliminate the city’s nightlife advocate, and, finally, by bumping OED’s Creative Industries director position further and further down the OED org chart.

Currently, the Inclusive Creative Industry Director job is vacant; the city’s website describes the job of the office as helping creative workers “transition into middle and higher earning jobs,” promote economic recovery, and “Better connect businesses and workers with the creative skills that will be in high demand in the Network Economy,” whatever that means.

Laurelhurst is a wealthy area that ranks among the least diverse in Seattle. In his pitch to trade the parks workers’ pay increases for the community center, Pedersen argues that the center serves an important race and social justice purpose because it is “connected by a bridge to the adjacent [Laurelhurst] elementary school, where 45 percent of students are Black, Indigenous, or people of color (BIPOC) and 31 percent of students’ families are low income.”

In her budget this year, Durkan proposed eliminating the creative industries director position altogether and demoting the city’s creative industry policy advisor to a lower-level “creative industries manager” job overseeing various special events and permitting staff. Morales’ resolution wouldn’t reverse the demotion, but it would place a hold on the money to fund the manager position until OED provides the council with a “Creative Sector Action Plan” and a description of how the office will “reorganize so that this position can focus solely on policy development and implementation related to the creative industries and not be responsible for staff management.”

• Councilmember Alex Pedersen, who frequently talks about the need to treat “mom and pop landlords” differently than big property management companies, wants to set up a special “small landlord and tenant stakeholder group” at the city’s Department of Construction and Inspections. According to Pedersen’s proposal, “The group should propose a definition of ‘small landlord,’ estimate the population of small landlords with units in Seattle, make findings about how current regulations and market trends impact small landlords and their tenants, and identify whether those impacts are disparate.”

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The plight of smaller landlords came up frequently during the COVID pandemic, when many tenants who lost their jobs were unable to pay rent. Landlord advocates argued that the eviction moratorium and other tenant-friendly laws and policies put smaller-scale property owners at risk of defaulting on their mortgages.

• Pedersen is also behind a proposal that would eliminate pay increases for some salaried parks employees to fund the reopening of the Laurelhurst Community Center, which Durkan’s budget proposes closing and turning into a “premier rental facility” like those at Pritchard Beach and Golden Gardens. Durkan’s budget uses the money saved by shuttering the center to pay for a mobile recreation and playground program called Rec’N the Streets. The city’s parks department shut down all 26 of the city’s community centers last year because of the pandemic, and has reopened only nine.

Laurelhurst, a waterfront neighborhood in Northeast Seattle, is a wealthy area that ranks among the least diverse in Seattle. In his pitch to trade the parks workers’ pay increases for the community center, Pedersen argues that the center serves an important race and social justice purpose because it is “connected by a bridge to the adjacent [Laurelhurst] elementary school, where 45 percent of students are Black, Indigenous, or people of color (BIPOC) and 31 percent of students’ families are low income.”

However, the community center is one of the smallest in the city, lacks a gym, and does not offer child care, limiting its usefulness to families with school-age children. Across Seattle, community centers serve the entire surrounding community, not just nearby elementary school students, and are especially critical in lower-income areas where residents may lack the ability to pay for private sports lessons, child care, after-school activities, homework help, fitness classes, and other types of programming that community centers provide.

The Laurelhurst Community Club, a private organization that runs a beach club that’s open only to property owners in the neighborhood, has been a vocal advocate for reopening the community center, where the group has historically held its meetings.

City Council, City Hall, Elections, homelessness, human services, Mayor Durkan, Transportation

Council Whittles Budget Wish List Under Shadow of Eyman’s Anti-Transportation Funding Measure

Although an analysis by the city council’s central staff shows that Tim Eyman’s Initiative 976, which appears to be passing, could reduce the Seattle Department of Transportation’s current funding for buses and road maintenance by as much as $33 million next year (when Seattle’s local $60 car tab measure is set to expire), the council moved ahead with next year’s budget on Wednesday without resolving the question of whether and how to fund the shortfall. Mayor Jenny Durkan and city attorney Pete Holmes are holding a press conference on Thursday to announce a lawsuit challenging the initiative, which overturned the vehicle license fees that fund roads, bridges, maintenance, and transit projects throughout Washington state.

(UPDATE: In a press conference Thursday morning, Seattle Department of Transportation director Sam Zimbabwe said the council and SDOT were still figuring out how to fund the 2020 transportation if a court does not grant the injunction against implementation of I-976 when the city files its lawsuit challenging the initiative as unconstitutional next week.)

Here’s a first look at some of what’s in and out in council budget chair Sally Bagshaw’s initial “balancing package,” which—unlike the wish lists council members have been presenting until now—has to be balanced.

What’s In: 

• Funding to expand the successful Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program, which provides outreach and services to people committing low-level street crimes, often because of mental illness and addiction. Although the group that runs LEAD, the Public Defender Association, had asked for $4.7 million to keep up with growing caseloads, the council settled on $3.5 million. (Mayor Jenny Durkan’s initial budget provided essentially no new funding for the program, which the city has expanded geographically several times.) PDA director Lisa Daugaard told me the group has secured private funding for the remaining $1.2 million but declined to name the funder yet.

• About $1.3 million for mobile restrooms like the ones that have been successfully operating in San Francisco for severa6l years; the restrooms would include toilets, a drop box for needles, and a place to dispose pet waste.

• $1.8 million in funding for two new tiny house village encampments, which would bring the total number of tiny house villages to ten. One of the new villages would be designed for people referred from LEAD (which serves some homeless clients but is not primarily a homeless services organization) and the city’s Navigation Team, which removes unauthorized encampments from public spaces.

• A small amount of funding—$158,000—for the use of the University Heights Center parking lot in the University District as overnight parking for five to 10 people or families living in their cars. The most recent point-in-time count of people experiencing homelessness found more than 2,000 people living in their vehicles across King County, a number that was lower in the latest count, in part, because All Home King County adopted different (lower) assumptions about how many people are sleeping in a single vehicle.

Earlier this year, Mayor Durkan scuttled plans to open several larger “safe lots” for people living in their cars around the city. In lieu of larger lots where people living in their cars can access services and showers, Durkan has proposed spending $375,000 to open up to 40 spaces citywide by persuading religious institutions to host a few cars at a time. The budget action, from District 4 council member Abel Pacheco, redirects $125,000 of that money to the U District community center.

Once downloaded, the app pings when a homeless person wearing one of the company’s bluetooth-equipped “beacons” is nearby, providing information to about their story and what they need. If the smartphone owner decides to donate, the homeless person can receive vouchers for goods and food (though not alcohol) at participating retailers, but only if he or she has agreed to go to counseling with a nonprofit case manager once a month.

• $75,000—down from the $175,000 proposed by council president Bruce Harrell—to fund a company called Samaritan that has developed an app-based homeless donation system. Once downloaded, the app pings when a homeless person wearing one of the company’s bluetooth-equipped “beacons” is nearby, providing information to about their story and what they need. If the smartphone owner decides to donate, the homeless person can receive vouchers for goods and food (though not alcohol) at participating retailers, but only if he or she has agreed to go to counseling with a nonprofit case manager once a month. (Specific details about clients’ case management visits is provided to anyone who downloads the app, including medical information that they choose to mention in their summaries.) Case management is free, but “career counseling” costs $20 an hour, according to media reports.

The proposal is controversial. The Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness says it’s “flat out unacceptable to put public [money] into [a] for profit private enterprise,” especially one that charges for “career counseling.” They’re pushing for the council to remove the spending—which, council member Lisa Herbold pointed out, does not include funding for the mandatory case management obligations the program creates for its clients—in the next budget round.

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• Reflecting the fact that the regional homelessness agency likely will not be in place by the beginning of next year as originally planned, the balancing package eliminates $345,000 earmarked to fund staff for the new agency. The document describing the budget cut mentions an April 1, 2020 start date for one of the positions, but it’s unclear whether the new authority will be in place by then; members of the Sound Cities Association, which represents King County’s suburban cities, plan to discuss the proposal at their November 20 Public Issues Committee Meeting, which is one day after the November meeting of the King County Regional Policy Committee, which must approve any plan before it goes to the full King County Council. Suburban cities have expressed concern that the proposed governance structure is too Seattle-centric, that the governing board is unaccountable, and that the proposed public development authority isn’t the appropriate structure for merging the city and county’s homelessness agencies.

• Taking $12.75 million from several programs Durkan had planned to fund with the sale of the Mercer Megablock and reallocating it to low-income housing projects that are shovel-ready but unfunded under the city’s annual Notice of Funding Availability, which always gets far more appilcations for housing projects than it has money to fund. The budget edit would cut funding from Durkan’s proposed Strategic Acquisition Fund (intended to buy land for future projects near transit) and homeownership and accessory dwelling unit loan programs that are aimed at helping moderate-income home buyers and existing homeowners get loans to buy houses or build affordable rental units on their property.

• Fully funding at least one safe bike connection between Southeast Seattle and downtown, as proposed in the 2014 Bicycle Master Plan and endorsed this year by the city’s Bicycle Advisory Board. Durkan’s Department of Transportation dramatically scaled back the BMP Implementation Plan in response to soaring costs earlier this year, but her proposed cuts seemed to center disproportionately on Southeast Seattle, the poorest and most diverse part of the city. A $2 million 2020 add from council member Mike O’Brien would enable SDOT to complete a bike lane on Beacon Ave. S. or one on Martin Luther King, Jr. Way S. before the levy expires in 2024.

What’s out: 

• In conjunction with the new funding for tiny house villages, the balancing package eliminates $1 million Durkan had proposed spending to relocate a tiny house village in Georgetown, which has the support of neighbors but has been on its current site longer than the two-year limit imposed by the city. The council could choose to change the law to allow the village to stay in Georgetown, help residents relocate to a property owned by a faith institution (which would not be subject to the limit) or close the village, which is operated by the Low Income Housing Institute.

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housing, labor, Mayor Durkan, Transit, Transportation

Durkan’s “Fare Share” Proposal Hinges on Future Success of Uber and Lyft
Kerem Levitas, Office of Labor Standards, Deputy Mayor Shefali Ranganathan, Mayor Jenny Durkan

Mayor Jenny Durkan announced Wednesday that she’s proposing a 51-cent fee on all Uber and Lyft rides, along with new minimum wage and benefit standards for drivers and a dispute resolution center for drivers who have been unfairly kicked off the platforms or underpaid.

The city estimates that by 2025, the fee will generate enough funding, $56 million, to fully fund the construction of the downtown streetcar, plus $52 million for affordable housing near transit stops and about $18 million for a new dispute resolution center for drivers challenging unwarranted removal from the ride-hailing platforms or unpaid wages.

The streetcar, which Durkan halted last year after the price to build and operate the project ballooned, faced a capital-funding shortfall of about $65 million. Earlier this year, the city council approved a $9 million interfund loan to restart work on the streetcar; that loan will be paid back with the proceeds from the Mercer Megablock sale.

“By creating a high-capacity alternative in the center city, [the streetcar] will provide an alternative for folks who are taking those short trips in and out of downtown.” – Seattle deputy mayor Shefali Ranganathan

Durkan’s proposal would also mandate that drivers be paid at least minimum wage, plus compensation for benefits and expenses, for all portions of every trip that begins or ends inside the city of Seattle, and increase the current 24-cent fee that pays for wheelchair-accessible vehicles and regulation of the ride-hailing industry.

After 2025, according to deputy mayor Shefali Ranganathan, the fee will “revert to funding transit, bike, and pedestrian projects across the city.”

In a press briefing yesterday, Ranganathan said the city expects that many people taking short trips in Uber and Lyft cars will switch to the streetcar for short trips once the Center City Streetcar is complete, citing a University of Washington survey that found that Amazon employees who use the car services would take transit “if there was quality transit available.”

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Ridership on the existing South Lake Union streetcar has been lackluster, falling 4 percent last year to just over half a million rides in 2018. On the First Hill segment of the line, ridership was up 31 percent last year, to nearly 1.2 million rides.

Ranganathan noted that about half of Uber and Lyft trips in Seattle originate or end inside the center city, which includes South Lake Union, Capitol Hill, and downtown. In a University of Washington survey of Amazon employees who take Uber and Lyft, “many of these folks …said that if there was quality transit available, they would take transit.”

“By creating a high-capacity alternative in the center city, [the streetcar] will provide an alternative for folks who are taking those short trips in and out of downtown,” Ranganathan said.

Continue reading “Durkan’s “Fare Share” Proposal Hinges on Future Success of Uber and Lyft” →