The Wallingford Community Council (WCC) is sponsoring a candidates forum on October 2, 2019, in Room 202 of The Good Shepherd Center, 4659 Sunnyside Ave. N at 7 p.m.
Candidates who are running for council positions who will represent Wallingford in Districts 4 and 6:
District 4 Candidates
Alex Pedersen: http://electalexpedersen.org.
Shaun Scott: http://scott2019.com
District 6 Candidates
Dan Strauss: http://seattlefordanstrauss.org
Heidi Wills: http://heidiwills.com
NOTE: Due to a conflicting forum hosted by the Ballard District Council, both District 6 candidates are unable to attend. However, each candidate is sending a surrogate to represent them.
Candidates will make opening and closing statements and will answer questions from the WCC board and from members of the audience. So come on out and meet the candidates, ask them your questions, and share your concerns. This election is critical because we need to elect councilpersons who will truly represent the needs and concerns of Wallingford.
There are some extremists running this year, that is for sure! I’m looking forward to hearing how they plan to address the basic needs of our community, not how they plan to “overthrow the dominant paradigm” or whatever.
Shaun Scott is out on the fringes- sort of a Sawant socialist type but for housing. Strauss was also endorsed by the Stranger and Jessyn Farrell, so he’s beholden to the same interest groups.
Meanwhile, Pederson and Wills are standard issue politicians that avoid saying much of anything.
I wish we could get better candidates out of the primaries. We always get stuck with whatever socialist screams the loudest for the Stranger, then whatever milquetoast blah can convince the old money suburbanites at the Times that they won’t rock the boat. Cathy Tuttle would have been best for district 4, and there were several better candidates for district 6 than what we are now forced to choose between.
I’ve met Shaun. He didn’t scream. Not even once.
I met him too. I don’t mean literal screaming- I mean he is an inflexible socialist ideologue with no real world experience. Sawant doesn’t literally scream either.
I quizzed him about housing issues and he really has no depth that I could suss out. He seems to be running as a social justice warrior who sees it as his moral cause to support anyone who claims they will provide more housing.
Tuttle was so much better IMHO- she would have been a progressive urbanist but not somebody who demonized business or people that own homes. More solution minded, less enemy minded like Shaun was.
I’ve also met Shaun, and, being someone heavily invested in the capitalist economy, I am 100% confident he is not a “socialist ideologue,” hence my unreserved support for him. I found him to have pragmatic and helpful policy positions that would improve things, regardless of what “-ism” he affiliates with.
Ironically, the “more housing” thing has been a Reaganesque call for industry deregulation, with the actual delivery of more housing implausibly taken on faith. It’s so successful here that anyone can use it for some votes.
I hope there’s a way for people like Scott to work towards some of their ideals, without being put into positions of responsibility that they aren’t ready for. The municipal broadband thing, for example – has some appealing qualities, but if you leave it up to city hall, it won’t happen (I think he’s right about city hall “progressives”, it’s a political disguise for corporate stooges, but that applies to his land use deregulation too.)
The answer isn’t to stock city hall with activists who will make municipal broadband happen – not if the details really don’t pencil out and it would be a big mistake. We need a council that isn’t committed to going over the cliff, and some responsible activism outside city hall. Real estate speculation tax, etc. May be some good ideas in there, what’s scary is to think they could happen just because he and Mosqueda et al. are in love with them.
For a specific example of why not, see “head tax.” A lot of people continue to wish that we could do something like that to tap the vast wealth that goes through Seattle and has created the gold rush conditions here, but the council’s amateur work at it turned into a fiasco that’s going to make it much harder for a better version. Scott wants to bring it back, but I wonder if he understands that people like him are a big part of why it’s going to be very nearly impossible.
Pedersen is good at saying nothing. I really don’t know what he’ll do when in office, although he’s been labeled a nimby incrementalist by many.
It’s not hard to see what Pedersen would do, and it’s also very obvious from where he got his votes from the primaries. He’s all for the rich home owners, and the reason he has to be quiet is because he’s too much to the right by Seattle standards. For that matter, so are the richer neighborhoods that supported him in the primaries.The goal for getting him into the city council is to stall any changes, effectively the recipe of how the whole West Coast is having housing crisis.
I remember some much earlier posts on this site about him, where his “studies” and “polls” were shown, and it’s not hard to see what he’s for.
It’s my impression that he will only be one person. I can’t remember what council committee he’d like to be on, but it wasn’t PLUZ. He’s going to have a pretty hard time stalling all changes, even if that’s what he wanted to do.
Define ‘rich homeowner’ —
What does Shaun Scott mean when he says on his leaflets, “Right to the city?” How does that work? Do I have a “right to the suburbs?” What about a “right to waterfront?” Or a “right to lower Manhattan?”
It’s a reference to, primarily, a paper from David Harvey by that name. Full of a lot of interesting ideas, but covers too much ground to for it to reliably mean anything as a slogan, just from Harvey’s paper. What it means in this context, I think, is that he says he’s aligned with advocacy groups who take stuff from that work, possibly cherry picking the parts that support their agenda, and even if they’re using that as cover for the industry deregulation that always seems to be the end product of city hall land use policy initiatives these days.
Toby’s really more qualified on that subject, and it would be really informative to see that sorted out in a discussion between those two.
Here is a link to city inside out interviewing the 2 candidates: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/city-inside-out-seattle/id1191895247?i=1000451384965
Alex Petersen has a masters degree in Government Administration with a focus on budgeting, accounting, finance and public sector management. His experience includes 25 years of community development, affordable housing and fiscal accountability in both public and private sectors. He has previously worked as an aide to a Seattle Council member. He is a progressive democrat.
Shaun Scott has dabbled as a film maker, he was the editor of the homeless newspaper, Real Change, and he’s been a campaign staffer where he convinced the other staffers to join a union. None of these skills make you qualified to be on the Seattle City Council.
Pedersen is a Tim Burgess clone supported by the wealthiest and most conservative citizens of Seattle (and Medina). To call him a”progressive democrat” is to completely neuter that term.
To date Shaun Scott has only 33% of his campaign funding from within district 4. In contrast 60% of Alex Petersen’s campaign funding is from within district 4. I think it’s clear who is expected to represent district 4. http://web6.seattle.gov/ethics/elections/campaigns.aspx
If someone from Capitol Hill wants to throw $50 Scott’s way, that’s fine by me. Meanwhile Pedersen has been backed by over $80,000 in independent expenditures from PACs funded by the wealthiest and most conservative citizens of Seattle (and Medina).
Also, Scott has almost twice the number of contributors as Pedersen. And the number coming from D4 is almost the same.
“Candidate who takes a strong stand on policies with crystal clear city-wide benefit like a Green New Deal and ending apartment bans everywhere draws more support from across the city than a candidate for whom its hard to puzzle out what he’d do at all” — news at 11.
The PAC you refer to says it is supporting “Progressive Pragmatic Leaders”. Burgess said there are no corporate donations, and all of the fundraising has been from private individuals. The largest donation, he says, is $5,000.
All can play this game. 70% of Shaun Scott’s funding are from vouchers and 82% lower than $200. Alex Petersen’s funding are only 40% from vouchers and only half from lower than $200. Who is the going to be the voice for common folks?
There are enough known info about the two that there is no need to talk about this kind of thing. It’s mostly a NIMBY or not line.
The point of my original post is to point out the vast discrepancy between their qualifications. There is only one qualified candidate running in district 4.
Why is what you said a qualification? If it’s a qualification, why aren’t we banning contributions from outside of the district? Having super-local governance is already a major problem in the US, allowing gated communities to be created that walls off the “less deserved”, and you just want to reinforce that mechanism?
“Having super-local governance is already a major problem in the US, allowing gated communities to be created that walls off the “less deserved”
Oh, so you want Trump to tell Seattle how to govern itself? And people live in gated communities because they want peace of mind from criminals. If they’re paying for that security, what business is it of yours?
To not have super local governance means more people will be in the same boat together, as opposed to just let things rot elsewhere. The rich people have their own paid bodyguards is what would make policing bad. If rich people have to share the same police with poor people and we have policies where police resources is assigned to ensure ALL neighborhoods have the same crime rate, rich people would be much more willing to pay more tax for better polices.
Public schools are worst in regions where most of the upper middle class and above goes to private school, because that means no resourceful families within the public school system. And systems like that will make it much harder for kids from poor family to grow out of poverty.
If “we have policies where police resources is assigned to ensure ALL neighborhoods have the same crime rate….”
Rich people are, well, rich. So why would they pay good money to live in a shitty, crime ridden neighborhood?
When I say qualifications…. I mean for the job itself; education and experience relevant to the job. Sort of like you wouldn’t hire an attorney that never went to law school.
So be specific about what’s the vast discrepancy you are talking about?
“Tim Burgess clone” — ridiculous. There is practically no similarity between the two of them. Pedersen is supported by a lot of people – 40% of a crowded primary isn’t just the upper crust. There are a lot of people in that 40% that might have voted for a conservative candidate, but there wasn’t one.
Tim Burgess clone <--- A great reason to vote for Pedersen, IMHO
Luckily, there are other reasons that are based on reality.
So, what actually happened at the D4 forum last night?
Was anything of substance discussed?
Well, sure. I’m not going to try to recap the whole thing, so just to zero in on one of the issues where Wallingford has been particularly feisty, land use zoning …
Narrowly speaking, they lined up about as you would expect, Pedersen taking the view that after all the mass upzones of the last couple years, we could slack off a little and try to figure out how to work with neighborhoods on zoning and similar issue, and Scott following the market urbanist line that our housing problems are (despite several consecutive years of record housing growth) due to single family zoning which must be abolished. He wandered away from the typical urbanist plot, though, in also deploring the influence of commercial developers, and proposing some alternative economic “bottom up” model that would produce the housing we need. Of course there wasn’t time to go into details on how that would work. He did mention the city acquiring properties for a land bank. That’s what I recall a day later.
Oh yeah, “constitutional policing” came up. Most considered this essentially compatible with effective policing, and I believe it was Pedersen who pointed out that while we can’t legally walk away from our current SPD contract, it expires in a year and we should be getting started now negotiating a new one that satisfies the consent decree. Scott however took an essentially hostile tone towards the police and the existing criminal justice system, and would turn more towards “restorative justice.”
That’s pure fabrication, without even enough background on Pedersen to even know how his name is spelled.
People know what accountability is. It’s a commitment to get results. Not a commitment to some ideological ideal, that’s supposed to get results, but to do things that will work and check to make sure they are working.
He isn’t pushing any stories about crime, he is at most acknowledging what everyone knows. Unlike the law and order crowd, you’d have heard last night that he doesn’t believe more incarceration is going to help.
Scott has some interesting ideas, but I trust Pedersen more to really produce working change. He isn’t a ideological glamor boy, he’s a dedicated, pragmatic public servant.
Does Shaun believe in property rights? I ask because the more hardcore socialists either dont seem to understand private property rights, or they want to do away with them altogether. Lately I’ve been seeing more troubling chatter from the socialists about how they think it’s not “fair” that a homeowner might have an empty room or two, and that the city should make them take in a homeless person. Does Shaun believe that as well?
And let’s say, for example, that a constituent of Shaun’s contacted him to tell him that a couple of people had just set up tents on their property, and they called the police to get rid of them, but the cops won’t come. Does Shaun believe that an apartment owner, homeowner or business owner should be able to count on the city to evict the campers immediately?
And if they refuse to leave peacefully right away, who would do the evicting? Shaun certainly has indicated he’d like to see even less patrol cops than we have now. He, like his comrade Kshama Sawant, routinely refers to cops as “murderers,” despite them being attacked with butcher knives and having been exonerated. And his party (the DSA) is agitating to abolish both police and prisons. Does Shaun Scott subscribe to that extreme ideology as well?
I haven’t seen the media ask any these questions of Mr. Scott, and I think we deserve to know.
a meaningful discussion of “property rights” would be interesting, but ultimately meaningless. The reality will continue to be what it is, that land is essentially controlled by private owners, within constraints imposed by local jurisdictions. You can keep people off, to some extent, but not everyone, you can’t have more than N unrelated people, you can’t have a septic system, etc. I’m sure a case could be made that it isn’t a good way to handle such a prime resource of our society, but there’s no way to get around it without massive upheaval. What I guess people usually mean, instead, is whether those constraints may be added to, or whether we have a “right” to the currently existing level of constraint.
Even in that light, your example isn’t super illuminating, because it’s so hypothetical. Campers generally know better than to set up tents in your yard, and while I don’t doubt there’s an occasional drunk who holes up in a garage, there’s no societal interest I know of to legitimize that. That’s about freeway margins etc., where there is any degree of controversy … and no individual property rights.
It’s actually not just hypothetical, this has already happened in the city. In fact, one such victim was a friend of a friend of mine. She discovered a couple of vagrants had set up tents in her backyard. One of them repeatedly broke into her house and claimed it was “his,” and menaced her. And the cops didn’t do anything about it until pressure was put on the city with media coverage.
I think we need to know Mr. Scott’s thinking on this, just like we should know if a local candidate has extreme pro life views or opposes any restrictions on guns, regardless of whether they can actually enact that into policy in the city. After all, it wasn’t all that many years ago where none of us would have dreamed tents and trash would have been allowed to fester in some of our most popular city parks, and yet we had city councilmembers pushing to legalize that.
OK, but here, note that publicity resulted in enforcement (apparently, I’m unfamiliar with the story.) Had the publicity instead brought O’Brien, Mosqueda, Gonzalez et al. in to rescue the campers, that would better illustrate your point. There’s no real controversy over whether anyone’s entitled to camp in your yard.
LOL. any meaningful discussion of “property rights” would surface the fact that “Alex Pedersen is a staunch opponent of property rights:”
Split your lot to give half to your kids to put a house on? Nope
Build a ‘plex on land you own? Nope
Rent out a house with ADUs without living there? Nope
Indeed, there’s a whole raft of things you may not do.
In the ideal society, we let you do as you think best, except when we can’t afford to. Some things we can’t afford to have happen at all, because of say risk to life and limb. Others, we can’t afford to allow because they’re easier or more lucrative, and while they might be individually not much to worry about, the cumulative effect would be harmful. Land use regulations are typically in the latter category. Having made a major commitment to a home in a neighborhood, one might even feel that one has a right to not have that neighborhood undermined by a city hall that has become captive to development interests.
Or, Having made a major commitment to a home in a neighborhood, one might feel that abridging one’s property rights over it ought to be subject to very strict scrutiny, and the personal preferences, political ideology, or self interest of “people who don’t own my property” doesn’t pass muster by a long shot.
Libertarianism always struck me as a fantasy that would appeal mostly to teenagers.
Me too!
Ah you’re for property rights? You mean like how your fellow YIMBYs pushed Mike O’Brien to ban McMansions?
Oh, but that’s different.
My preferred plan was to set a maximum square footage and allow people to pay money to buy more – that’s essentially a tax on huge homes. We tax what we want less of, and if we want fewer of them, easy way to raise money through a progressive tax.
In some ways I give O’Brien credit: by requiring an “ADU inside” instead you actually make the big house more affordable to a future buyer with less money who needs to trade space for rent, without having to go through the delay, hassle and risk of building it themselves.
It’s not as consistent with my beliefs as a straight up progressive tax, but not a bad idea. (Our house would have had to been built with the back half of the ground floor “ADU ready” – not really a big hassle, easier to do while the house is being built, and it would cut the income required to own by a decent chunk.)
Here is Shaun Scott’s response when pressed by Brandi Kruse at last night’s SPOG’s Pubic Safety Forum about how he’d handle violence in our community if he abolished the police (She asks him about “police abolition” at about 1:25:00, and then the relevant part of his answer comes at about 1:27:00):
https://www.facebook.com/seattlepoliceofficers/videos/404420726912001/UzpfSTU5OTU5NTQ4NzpWSzoxMTgzNjM0NTE4NTA5NzE4/
Dude’s crazy.
I don’t know about crazy, but he’s certainly misguided.
Very charitable of you.
Thanks for the link. I found Shaun’s response very thoughtful. Nowhere has he ever said he wants SPD abolished. I should also point out that Alex Pedersen was a no-show at this forum, which has been a pattern for him throughout this campaign.
Shaun Scott has not only tweeted about police abolition, he’s said on video that he’s considering it if elected. This is from the Civil Rights Commission Forum on 9/30. Watch at 1:55:55
And from the video I posted previously, did you watch starting at about 1:25:00? Brandi Kruse specifically asked him about police abolition and he didn’t try to deny it at all. She asks him if he doesn’t want police “at all” and about justice for crime victims. and he refused to directly answer that, except to say “We have to re imagine what it looks like to have so-called public safety,” and, “it’s hard for me to answer.”
Oh, and that wasn’t the only slap in the face he offered to SPD.
At 1:11:00, Brandi Kruse asks him, “Do you believe that every Seattle police officer engages in biased policing?”
Shaun Scott’s response?
“I would say yes.” Sorry, hard pass. Shaun seems like a nice enough guy, but he has no business running our city.
You might have noticed our department was placed under a DOJ consent decree, and still hasn’t gotten fully out from under it. Whatever you me or the guy behind a tree thinks, our department has been faulted by the people who get to decide (Federal judges) for failure to deliver Constitutional policing.
(This is not necessarily the fault of individual officers – if they aren’t given training, policy, and protocols to follow, it’s unfair to leave them on their own to figure things out on the fly. I’ve gotten unconscious bias training repeatedly at different tech companies, and it’s some powerful stuff even if one thinks one’s not biased. I’ve also been part of anti-bias training in police departments, and there’s stuff you just don’t know like which cultures avoid eye contact as a gesture of respect…)
Shaun is saying they’re all racist, not just the few bad apples we’re trying to weed out. And you do know there are black cops on the force, right?
“Biased policing” does not mean “Joe / Jane /whoever I think you are a racist.”
The simplest and clearest dimension would be if the department provide no anti-bias training (I assume it must provide at least some, if it didn’t that would be alarming. An African-American cop, for example, is no more likely than anybody else to be culturally competent policing Somali or Bangladeshi immigrants.)
Phil…If you don’t understand Shaun’s stance on policing (which you apparently don’t), read this.
Also, please don’t perpetuate Alex Pedersen’s lie that Scott is “tweeting about police abolition.”
Doug Nellis, you mean this “lie?”
And Shaun literally described himself as a “police abolitionist” in his introduction in his opening statement.
Come on dude, you have to do better than this.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b60da77ebab452021f39607de040ce7bd5901efbde18c2344e158927dbae77a4.jpg
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/59f2396acf1898afbe0c5f516157273b5ad472478fe61a91a8a6c7be4cc6978b.jpg
I guess I understand the difference between saying, “I consider
myself a police abolitionist” and “I want to abolish SPD.”
Pedersen’s lie is in implying Scott is Tweeting about abolishing SPD, which (again) I don’t think he’s ever stated.
SPD is a whacked organization. It needs to be reformed. Pedersen just wants to throw more money at it.
Anyone with, say, access to the Internet could look up, say, some of the most notable self-identified police abolitionists, and see what they are doing, like those below. Which is not disbanding the police or prisons next Tuesday, but rather working toward progressive change. Some people won’t, but for those who care to learn, we can bear witness to what’s actually what versus FUD.
“Rachel Herzing will launch a project to reduce the demand for police emergency responses in Oakland, CA, by increasing residents’ capacity to resolve conflict without having to call the police.”
https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/grants/soros-justice-fellowships?fellow=rachel-herzing
When I speak of abolition, I don’t demand the immediate closing of all correctional facilities (though we can certainly accelerate the process through, for example, abolishing cash bail). The abolitionists I know understand that as a society we will always need to ensure accountability for people who repeatedly cause harm. Part of our work, then, must be to create the conditions necessary to ensure the possibility of a world without prisons.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vdxpp4/mending-our-ways-0000775-v22n10
Abolitionist thinking is central to contemporary debates over how to interpret the meaning of the criminal law and our criminal processes and enforcement mechanisms: it is literally part of the subject of “criminal law” today. We should teach it that way. More broadly law scholars teaching any course touching on criminal law and procedure, police and prisons, borders and border enforcement, should teach abolition. I have written before, including with Jocelyn Simonson, about how to teach criminal law differently, in this movement moment, and attune to the centrality of racialized and anti-black violence to our criminal legal system. Here, I share some notes and resources on teaching abolition. In my experience, teaching abolition requires study, but the study and teaching are more fruitful than I can say in this brief post. Teaching and learning abolition has deepened my study of the history of the United States and the unfinished social movements that define its shape, expanded my imagination of the future, and profoundly reshaped my sense of the work ahead.
https://lpeblog.org/2019/07/15/teaching-abolition/#more-2640
Your repeated use of his first name makes me uncomfortable. It’s a passive-aggressive (though much more the latter) attempt at doxing.
Why do people post under phony names? I don’t really understand that. It’s a neighborhood blog.
Whether or not you “understand” it, you deploy his name in a threatening manner. It’s weird and it debases any point you may be trying to make.
I feel the same way about people posting anonymously. Have a nice day, “Pickles.”
“”We have to re imagine what it looks like to have so-called public safety,” and, “it’s hard for me to answer.””
We should re-imagine public safety. Within the police profession we were doing so in the 90s, but after 9/11 policing doubled down on militarism. Seattle flirted with community policing in the 90s but it never got anywhere. Scott is on the right track to push for Seattle to adopt a progressive stance and figure a better post-militarism way forward.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/127643dd8718b5028ff86d5dfcc0bb46a2d33238f02995f637149424eee786b8.jpg
And so next time some tweaker decides to stab some random people downtown, or some gangbanger shoots up a nightclub, we’ll do what?Send some unarmed CSOs to go deal with the situation?
There’s not reason not to have armed response teams – in the UK most police officers don’t carry firearms, but tactical teams have all the firepower and more you’d see in the US.
The point isn’t that we don’t have the capacity to administer lethal force where necessary; the point is that the organization shouldn’t be structured around the premise that this is it’s primary purpose (which it isn’t, empirically; most police officers never discharge their weapon in the line of duty during their entire careers).
Yes, but Shaun’s talking about police abolishment.
No, he is using the phrase. There’s a whole spectrum about – to use Shaun’s phrase– “re-imagining” that leans on the phrase (kinda like “abolish ICE”). Approximately no one assumes “police disbanded tomorrow with nothing in the place of what was there.” Google it.
So when you say he is just “using the phrase,” are you suggesting that “police abolishment” doesn’t actually mean he wants to abolish the police?
If so, Google the word “abolition” and what’s the 1st thing that comes up? Here it is:
“ab·o·li·tion
/ˌabəˈliSH(ə)n/
Learn to pronounce
noun
the action or an act of abolishing a system, practice, or institution.
“the abolition of child labor”
Sigh…
“abolish the police”
good source here –
https://www.themarshallproject.org/records/3382-police-abolition
full results –
https://www.google.com/search?q=abolish+the+police&oq=abolish+the+police&aqs=chrome.0.0l6.2492j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8