This is part 2 of our 2 part series asking questions of mayoral candidates. Harrell replied, Gonzalez did not.
Wallyhood: You have a reputation as a consensus builder, but as we saw with Ed Murray that can mean offering platitudes to the public while letting downtown power brokers make all the decisions (see: HALA). As things work today, find it / fix it requests are followed through on only occasionally. Social media and email to bureaucrats in government and city council reps are replied to only during political campaigns or if you have connections to people that matter. Public comment at council meetings is a joke, with only cranks and nut jobs having the time to make themselves heard. The mayor is simply unreachable.
Recently in Wallingford we have had to fight SDOT when they tried to force bike lanes on NE 40th and closed Green Lake Way to vehicles without any public input, requiring thousands of people to organize community push back and a great deal of wasted government expenditures before both projects were reversed. Meanwhile, key cycling and pedestrian improvement projects with broad community support and that are in the bike master plan have been ignored for many years, such as regional greenways on Woodland Park Ave N and NE 47th, and improving NE 45th over I-5 for pedestrians and cyclists.
Neighborhood plans were a way to build consensus and include reasonable voices from the neighborhood, but were killed off by Nickels in the interest of concentrating power downtown. Now it seems like the government just lurches from one shiny object or source of outrage to the next. Do you have a plan to include the general public in your planning and decision making going forward? Do you have an idea for making communications between government and citizens more clear and productive? Should the government invest more in find it /fix it, so that if people make a request they actually receive a support ticket and an answer?
Harrell: Yes, the process by which the City incorporates feedback from the general public, as opposed to responding to simply those who yell the loudest, is not an effective means to yield an effective communication path for productive dialogue and in turn, City policy and action. As a former City Councilmember, I was known for my candor and accessibility. I have always made myself available to various communities. As an at-large and districted member, I sought to ensure my office had robust constituent services that could respond urgently to the needs of all our neighbors. I was for many years the only person of color in the elected City government, and as a result my office received a disproportionate share of calls, emails, and requests. My small staff did remarkable work managing the workload, and I personally responded to thousands of calls, emails and texts from constituents from all walks of life.
As Mayor, I will model accessibility and my cabinet members, department heads and City employees will embrace a spirit of accessibility and accountability. I’ll have a larger staff, thankfully, and will make sure that no matter your zip code or station in life, you have an open door to the Mayor’s office.
We’ve got to engage community members from the start of extensive projects, and ensure that we’re looking at our transportation system holistically. The City has to do a better job bringing community in and building support for projects like this from the start, rather than being caught flat footed when shovels are ready but community isn’t. As we consider policy and look for solutions, I will always seek input from a robust group of stakeholders, community members, and marginalized and underrepresented voices, whose input is critical.
Find It/Fix It is a powerful tool, and I do believe the City should increase its investment in improving it so that all neighbors can contribute to making our city better, track progress, and hold the City accountable for making change. As Mayor, I will also examine a 3-1-1 call center to completely revamp and reimagine how the City manages customer service requests and communication with residents. We need to update antiquated systems resulting in more efficient internal city processes as well as faster response times for residents who need individual support from the city.
City Responsiveness. I plan to restructure the budget to give each district council member approximately $10m from the budget to respond to neighborhood needs and leverage those dollars with the overall budget. I will work with them on localized budget needs and expect them to be eyes and ears in their district with me to improve the City’s ability to meet neighborhood needs.
Email Responsiveness. Using email as a means to reach residents and small businesses, we will have a formal structure in place to ensure accurate and timely communications and we will be able to receive feedback on critical issues that affect your community. We will make summaries available and will be transparent to the City on the high level results of those communications.
Consensus Building. The public doesn’t care if fault lies with the Council or the Mayor; they want the City to act as a whole to get the job done and meet their needs. It is critical to examine leadership styles to determine what leadership approach will effectively address the major issues of homelessness and effective public safety without bias. I am that candidate.
Bike infrastructure is something where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Our current scattered patchwork of bike lanes and greenways is better than nothing, but only slightly, because there are gaps all over the place where you need to take your life into your hands sharing space with speeding cars. There are places in this city I will not go on two wheels because I don’t know of a way to get there safely.
We need a deeply interconnected network of bike infrastructure. Giving neighborhoods a say in whether they want that sort of thing runs contrary to that goal. A Wallingford bike lane doesn’t only exist for the benefit of those in Wallingford, it’s there for anyone for whom Wallingford is on the way from Point A to Point B. The network aspect is why this should absolutely be a city-level decision and not a neighborhood-level one.
The exact opposite is true in Wallingford. The city has not been following the bicycle master plan, which was a neighborhood led design and creates an interconnected network. Instead, they seem to have taken the approach that whenever they pave, they try to force in some cycling infrastructure whether it makes sense or not.
One big cycling effort led from downtown was adding bike lanes to 40th, which is not in the bike master plan and required removing parking for residents and businesses, plus only allowed for sharrows in one direction, plus connected to nothing at all. There was a reason 40th was not in the bike master plan. SDOT spent a lot of money developing plans to near completion and then abandoned them due to push back from residents.
Similarly, SDOT decided to close greenlake way to vehicles without any process at all, just on the whim of some downtown special interests. Now they have to deal with a huge, nasty fight, and are planning on doing a bunch of work on the roadway that was not necessary because they made a problem for themselves.
Meanwhile, safe crossing of the 45th street bridge remains stalled, despite explicitly being called out in the levy to move seattle and having a literal march of residents across the bridge demanding it go in. The only apparent issue is SDOT being intransigent because they don’t like working with WSDOT. Similarly, 47th was ignored in plans for Stoneway even though it is a regional greenway in the bike master plan.
Things were much better under McGinn- that’s when we got real cycling infrastructure added by working with the city. Ever since he left, SDOT has been a rudderless mess.
I happen to believe that bike infrastructure is appropriate on every arterial street. As much as I think 45th and 50th should also have bike lanes, there’s no good reason why there shouldn’t be one on 40th as well. If there’s not room for a bike lane and parking to coexist, people can park around the corner. Repaving is an opportune time to add bike lanes, and I’m disappointed this opportunity was missed.
Not all arterials are the same. 40th doesn’t have room for 2 way bike lanes and connects to nothing and parking is heavily used there. The meetings with SDOT had retired people that could barely walk lining up to say they would have to leave their family home if a one way bike lane was put in. Meanwhile, very few cycling supporters turned out because really nobody wanted to bike on 40th even if the bike lane was put in. It was a shit show.
40th St intersects Stone Way and Latona, both of which have bike lanes. It could potentially provide a good connection from Wallingford to the Burke-Gilman, which doesn’t really exist today.
I’m a strong believer in the idea that if you absolutely require a parking space right next to your home, you need to make sure you have your own garage or driveway for that. Nothing guarantees “your” street parking spot as is. Anyone can park there whenever they like. If you can’t walk from a parking spot around the corner you shouldn’t be depending on street parking in the first place. That’s their mistake. It should not be sufficient justification to delay useful infrastructure upgrades.
You need to consider priorities though. There is literally no way to get between Wallingford and U-District light rail / North UW campus other than NE 45th. 2 of the 10 most dangerous intersections in the city are on that stretch. SDOT has been making zero progress there despite strong cyclist / pedestrian support for changes and zero neighborhood opposition. SDOT spending money and effort on bike infrastructure on 40th that could have been used towards the 45th crossing was criminally stupid.
Under McGinn, the city worked with residents on cycling infrastructure and we got a lot done, including cycling lanes all up Stoneway and to Greenlake. Ever since McGinn left, SDOT has been rudderless, serving up half baked plans to the neighborhood and then pulling them back, and ignoring the bike master plan and key connection points needed for a safe, interconnected cycling and pedestrian network.
Yeah. I knew when I saw your comment about bike lanes on 40th, here they come: all two dozen people in the city who thought that was a good idea, full of woe over the tyranny of car centric dinosaurs.
There’s a point in here about that community engagement issue. I bicycle some myself and certainly have my opinions about bicycle infrastructure, as anyone would. But how do you find out what makes sense to the larger community, while taking into account the non-homogeneous unit value of public opinion? to coin a phrase.
Back in the Rob Johnson days, I think it’s fair to say that the highly factional political action clubs were the principle source of public input that counted for anything. They hypothetically represent a large membership, but that membership will kind of go along with whatever – you can’t really say for sure there weren’t lots and lots of members who would have rather just seen the pavement fixed and skip the “protected” lanes. There’s a party line, and that’s what you’ll hear from the activist members, while the other members are more interested in getting in on the group rides. The same thing happens with any advocacy group. A handful of save the trees groups – policy advocacy determined by the same one person, and lots of members who are really motivated to save the trees but not well versed on the exact policy direction they’re advocating. It would be interesting to hear how McGinn did with inputs like that – if he just had enough inside connections with the bicycle advocates that he could cut through to the more productive stuff, or maybe the world was just less factional then.
Anyway, we’ll have to see – I don’t see Harrell saying anything here that really proves he has figured out how to do better than Murray, which was catastrophically bad. It’s a hard problem. Workshops. Workshops for MHA were compromised by predetermined outcome, of course, but how do you develop a proposed change to the point where the average citizen can comment intelligently on it, without kind of narrowing down on what you want to accomplish? Workshops for light rail siting had the opposite problem – we’re paying far more to get it done, because we spun our wheels looking for site approvals from everyone. Could they have held a workshop on the West Green Lake Way closure and expeditiously extracted a better plan? I don’t know.
Yeah, I don’t know that there was any process at all with the West Green Lake Way closure. They were doing construction and figured it was easier to close it during Covid, then got railroaded by special interests into trying to keep it closed once construction finished, then got stuck in a mode war of their own making. That’s what happens when you have no plans and just lazily drift along.
McGinn in my experience would take an idea from the community that he liked, have contentious public meetings, then move forward. He was super good at managing public meetings and resolutely did not like top down decision making. That’s why he opposed HALA, possibly dooming his last mayoral run.
I think Murray is the worst mayor we’ve ever had, but most “reasonable” people seemed to like him until the scandal. He stayed on message and was able to cut deals between special interest groups downtown. If you’re not paying attention, he came across as the adult in the room. Similarly, the WCC played into the stereotype of being NIMBYs. They would probably have been more successful if they endorsed certain parts of HALA, like O’Brien’s ADU / DADU ordinances, instead of just digging their heels in.
I like the Harrell idea of handing each council person 10 million to play with. Beyond that, I agree that there are risks he follows the Murray playbook, which is my main fear with him. Gonzalez is doing a terrible job representing herself though.
WCC mainly just opposed the sucky parts of the ADU/DADU, like everyone else with any sense.
We’ll be a long time recovering from the damage Murray did to city hall, and getting away the Murray “public engagement” model would be one good place to start the recovery. Maybe the model you describe with McGinn is the answer – it really is “top down” in the sense that he doesn’t pretend to have squeezed this out of the public engagement, he just found something in there he could work with, and if it’s a loser it’s clearly on him. If nothing else, it’s more expedient in that there’s no need to pretend it’s some kind of enfranchisement. I will never forget the HALA “workshop” in Wallingford, where we generated a boatload of really thoughtful commentary, at both the city staff managed tables and even more so at the overflow do-it-yourself tables, and then some city staffer wrote up a “summary” that flat out invented some things and misrepresented others. Big waste of everyone’s time.
Yeah, HALA outreach was clearly designed to contain and muffle negative feedback. Guide everyone with complaints into a room, have low level staff write stuff down and listen, then do absolutely nothing with the feedback. The fact that nobody involved with HALA policy was there, most notably including Rob Johnson, really told you all you needed to know.
So for HALA proponents it wasn’t a waste of time at all- it was a tremendous success. What would have been a public protest and accusations of trampling neighborhoods turned into a listening session where they could shape the narrative as they wished. The WCC would have been more effective if they had organized a public protest outside the workshop rather than participating in it.
It was about as effective as it could have been. The select groups that signed up for a couple months of weekly indoctrination sessions had it much worse, from what we heard. (I applied, but oddly wasn’t selected.)
There was arguably a sound idea behind it – you get more value out of your public engagement when the public in question has a more or less comprehensive understanding of the issues. But of course you don’t want to just particularly listen to people who already have that comprehensive understanding, because they might not be diverse. So you round up your diverse group and get them up to speed so they can comment intelligently.
But as implemented by Murray’s people, naturally it was a farce. Presenting just their side, in their rigorously elaborated scheme where social justice clearly calls for more townhomes for techies, etc. People knew they were getting snowed, stopped coming. If there’s a real basis for controversy, you have to recognize it and let that get into the room, and that isn’t going to be an easy thing to manage.
Yep, the HALA workshop should have been called the HALA reeducation camp.
Struggle sessions with Comrade Murray.