Sally's Blog

It’s been a busy few days for press conferences, letters and all around jousting about how to replace the 520 floating bridge. Last week the City Council sent a carefully worded letter to the Governor and to the transportation committee chairs in the State House and Senate. In the letter eight of nine councilmembers detailed a host of concerns about the State’s most likely option for replacing the bridge, but stopped short of saying that option (the perhaps inappropriately named Option A+) should be blown up and the process begun again. Generally, most councilmembers are resigned to six lanes as long as two of the six (one in each direction) are dedicated to high-capacity transit. We’re mixed as to whether we’re OK allowing HOV in those two lanes.

Yesterday a coalition of interesting bedfellows (Montlake, Laurelhurst, the Sierra Club, Cascade Bicycle Club, the 43rd District lawmakers, the Mayor, a couple of City Councilmembers, the Arboretum Foundation, a yacht club or two) stood in front of cameras at the 520 off-ramps to declare that Option A+ fails to meet the 21st Century transportation test. Generally, all the parties are resigned to six lanes as long as two of the six (one in each direction) are dedicated to high-capacity transit (no HOV). Parties differ as to whether the current options should be scrapped and the process begun again.

Via the media today the Governor, eastside communities and eastside state lawmakers are metaphorically standing together to proclaim that enough time has passed and that this region’s economic success is predicated on moving sooner rather than later to replace the ailing 520 bridge. Generally, all parties are resigned to six lanes, although many on east of Lake Washington really would rather it be eight. They definitely don’t think the current options should be scrapped. The Governor has committed to build, on time and on budget.

Compared to some of my colleagues I’m a newcomer to the 520 replacement debate, but I do know enough to find it a tougher problem to crack than even the viaduct replacement conundrum of the past few years. I don’t like the ramps through the Arboretum. I’d like to see a better transit connection to the UW light rail station. I’d like to see fewer cars overall in this corridor over time. I’d like less impact on Seattle neighborhoods. I don’t think a tunnel under Union Bay and over to the Husky Stadium parking lot would win permits from the federal government. I don’t support the arching skyway over Union Bay either. So, what else if A+ isn’t the way to go? I’m not hearing better ideas from any corner. How long should we wait?

The problem is knowing how long you wait and who you bunk down with in order to get the best outcome for Seattle. Who has the best leverage and the best possible outcome for Seattle? Maybe the Mayor has a better plan. If so, he can be a hero. The 2007 state law that authorized the mediated sessions among stakeholders and defined the 520 replacement project as having four general purpose lanes with two more lanes to take HOV and high capacity transit? That was sponsored by State Sen. Ed Murray from the 43rd and supported by State Reps. Frank Chopp and Jamie Pedersen of the 43rd. If we want the HOV part dropped, that would seem to require a change in the state code. Option A+ came out of the stakeholder sessions and was endorsed by neighborhoods and state lawmakers to the north of the Montlake Cut. What if A+ is the best buildable option we have? We should at least push it to produce the best possible results for Seattle. Just in case it gets built.

More than 970 volunteers strode streets, scaled hillsides and shone flashlights into dark spaces this morning as part of the annual One Night Count of homeless people in King County. The project counts the number of homeless in the county including those in shelters, but this morning the search was for “unsheltered” people sleeping on sidewalks, behind dumpsters, in doorways, on utility vents, on buses, in cars, under freeways, and in the damp of parks and greenbelts. At the end of the night, the count totaled 2,759 people in 14 cities across the county.

The good news is that this number is slightly lower than last year’s total. The bad news is that it’s still 2,759.

Tonya and Dan from my office participated, as well. We compared notes this morning on what can be a physically trying and sometimes moving experience. An odd part of the experience is the tension between counting and not counting. You’re up in the middle of the night and jazzed about playing a small part in ending homelessness by helping to measure the extent of the problem. So, you want to do some counting! However, it means the system of shelters, services, and housing might just be working if you find no one to count. It’s a weird contradiction.

Many thanks to the Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness for their organizing prowess. Big thanks to the crew from the Aloha Inn that had me along as part of their team. We combed an area of the green belt on the west side of Queen Anne. Along the way they reminded me of the Aloha’s great model of self-governance and the important role living there can play in someone’s recovery and progression to greater self-sufficiency. Maybe we need more Aloha Inns.

I don’t know what exactly will come of this, but a few of us at Council are interested in allowing parking near light rail stations at least as a temporary use for a few years. The city has been following the law by issuing “notices of violation” to parking lot operators around the stations, but maybe we should allow the parking for a while. Danny Westneat also wrote about this last weekend.

Back maybe eight years ago the City passed a host of land use changes intended to lead property owners around light rail stations to build in less car-centered ways. One of the changes prohibits single-purpose long-term parking. The idea is that you don’t really want in-city neighborhoods with light rail stations to be dominated by commuter parking lots and garages. Ideally the land is used for housing and businesses that lead people to use the train as a key mode of transportation.

Watch for more on this. I’ve asked staff to look into what it would take to allow special, temporary permission to operate a parking lot near a light rail station.

The New York Times Sunday edition carried this wake-up piece about the record high number of people using food stamps. The piece notes that the surge has happened under the radar which seems hard given the numbers cited in the article:

The public development authority model for coordination of action is interesting and works well for Pike Place Market and the International District. Each of the other PDA's owns property, though, and that's the bedrock of their reason for being. We need a central coordinating committee for Pioneer Square.

“About 6 million Americans receiving food stamps report they have no other income, according to an analysis of state data. In declarations that states verify and the federal government audits, these people described themselves as unemployed and receiving no cash aid: no welfare, no unemployment insurance, and no pensions, child support or disability pay. Their numbers were rising before the recession as tougher welfare laws made it harder for poor people to get cash aid, but they have soared by about 50 percent in the past two years. About one in 50 Americans lives in a household with a reported income that consists of nothing but a food-stamp card.”

One in 50 is an incredible statistic. The article states later that the number rises to 1 in 17 in Yakima County. Some of the rise in numbers is due to states like Washington getting smarter and more aggressive in signing people up for food stamp help. The numbers are over-whelming, though, and further drive home the difficulty of speedily “correcting” the economy. We need jobs so people can ditch food stamps, right? Seattle wants new, green jobs. Professional jobs, construction jobs, research jobs, manufacturing jobs. In order to create jobs, companies need to see demand for consumption of their product. Or do companies just need tax breaks?

“ ‘This is craziness,’ said Rep. John Linder, R-Ga., the ranking minority member of a House panel on welfare policy. ‘We're at risk of creating an entire class of people, a subset of people, just comfortable getting by living off the government.’

He added: ‘You don't improve the economy by paying people to sit around and not work. You improve the economy by lowering taxes’ so small businesses will create more jobs.”

Part of me believes Linder is correct in that national and state tax policy could use an overhaul, but lowering taxes has become an easy thing for national-level figures to espouse. Maybe we should lower local and state business taxes “so small businesses will create more jobs.” The problem is small businesses also need adequate garbage service, a dependable power supply, clean water, good sewers, buses and trains shuttling around their workers, responsive police and fire services, high quality schools producing skilled, smart workers, and a safety net that strives to take care of the people who can’t yet or never will be successfully employed or fully independent.

Even without lowering taxes we’ll be cutting city services further this year. Mayor McGinn’s announcement today of mayoral review of all new hires (essentially a hiring freeze), mayoral review of every amended or new contract, and trimming higher level staff numbers by 200 won’t get us to the point of needing less tax revenue, just a little closer to the balance point for current income.

So exactly what is the right mix of tax breaks and consumer confidence that will get more people jobs and fewer people needing food stamps?

This piece on Pioneer Square from Knute Berger last week in Crosscut may not have received many hits because we're in the twilight of the year when many people are tuning out for a while, but it's worth revisiting. I'll be working a bit in 2010 on how to raise Pioneer Square's stock as a great neighborhood. The City's hired consultant, the esteemed historic business district expert Donovan Rypkema, has looked at Pioneer Square's opportunities and disadvantages twice over the past decade and each time the message has been essentially the same -- stop whining, things aren't as bad as the hand-wringing would have you believe (his retail numbers are pleasantly shocking); we need to improve safety and the sense of safety; we need more workforce and market-rate housing in the square; and the square needs better coordination and decision-making by the players involved.

The public development authority model for coordination of action is interesting and works well for Pike Place Market and the International District. Each of the other PDA's owns property, though, and that's the bedrock of their reason for being. We need a central coordinating committee for Pioneer Square.

Berger jumps ahead slightly when he says I have a task force working on better incentives to make historic properties and their users successful. We'll be launching the task force in the first part of 2010.

Things are hectic as the year winds down, so I've not been good about posting to the blog. There's plenty going on -- 520 bridge details, text amendments in South Lake Union, wrapping up mid-rise and high-rise zoning code changes -- and I'll try to do better.

In that vein, I wanted to share yesterday's surprising factoid. I'm the alternate Seattle member on the Regional Water Quality Committee. This is the group that meets over in King County Council Chambers and includes representatives from King County Council, suburban cities, local sewer districts and Seattle City Council. Usually Councilmembers Richard Conlin and Tim Burgess attend. Richard is off this week (hiking in some beautiful place, I'm sure) so I attended in his place yesterday for a vote requesting financial policies be developed before the County proceeds with any reclaimed water program.

But that's not the riveting part. The second to last item on the agenda was an update on construction of the new Brightwater Treatment Plant. (I still want to meet the person who came up with the name "brightwater" for a sewage treatment plant.) Brightwater is big, complicated, contentious, and expensive. It's the kind of project where once you make it past all the political and legal hurdles, you really need for absolutely nothing to go wrong. The price tag to all of us is in the billions.

There are four tunnel segments being bored deep underground to move treated water west to "outfall" into Puget Sound. The machines are like long canisters with turning, munching blades on the lead end. The blades turn, the machines munches and the canister inches forward through silt, clay, and rock. All the debris gets pushed out behind the machine and taken out back at the main tunnel access point to be loaded into trucks. The machines are big enough in diameter so that some of the resulting piping can be as much as five feet in diameter.

This summer and fall two boring machines failed. Both have had more wear and tear on the rims of the cutting end of the machine than anticipated and both need repairs before boring can continue. So, how do you repair a busted tunnel boring machine that's 300 feet under a school parking lot (in the case of one machine) or people's houses (in the case of the other)? Well, you move the second one further forward until it's under an intersection. At both locations you drill and pump out the water that's in the ground around the lead end of the machine so you reduce the pressure on the machine. (I hadn't thought about this previously, but the machines are down far enough that pressure is an issue.) Then real live people work their way through the tunnel length the machine already made, they move through the machine and pop out the front of it to repair the rims. Depending upon the pressure they could work as many as five hours at a time down there and then spend an hour decompressing.

Wow. For a point of comparison that may be helpful to some people, the Beacon Hill Light Rail Station is approximately 160 feet down. The Brightwater tunnel boring machine repair people go down almost twice as far and then through the tunnel to get to their target.

Thanks, TBM repair people!

Is there a worse blow to your karma than robbing a food bank the week before Thanksgiving? I guess it could be worse if you rob a food bank in the part of Seattle with the lowest incomes. I guess that would be a worse blow to your karma.

The Rainier Valley Food Bank had their external storage container cleaned out by thieves Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. They had enough food inside the warehouse (and I use that term loosely as it's a tiny space) to serve the regular Wednesday morning crowd of seniors and disabled people, but Saturday -- the day after tomorrow -- low- income individuals and families will line-up for help making it through Thanksgiving week, the week of giving thanks for bounty and cooperation. The food bank is accepting donations 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, 4205 Rainier Ave. S., Seattle, WA 98118. If you aren't able to help Rainier Valley Food Bank make up the loss, maybe consider helping out the food bank in your part of town. Overall Seattle's food banks report 50 percent to 100 percent increases in the numbers of people lining up for help. The Mayor and Council made sure next year's City budget maintains City support for food banks, but no one’s budgets anticipate grand-scale thievery from food banks.

I and my staff volunteered at the Rainier Valley Food Bank earlier this year on a Wednesday. They run a great operation. No food bank deserves to be ripped off. It's hard to imagine the thinking behind the crime. Taking the entire contents of the storage container isn't about an individual who is hungry. Will they re-sell the bags of rice, the boxes of pasta, the cans of tuna? I'm clearly missing the master- mind strategy of it all.

Last week ended with the memorial service at Key Arena for Seattle Police Officer Timothy Brenton. It was a moving, sometimes funny, sometimes jarring display of ceremony, ritual, testimony and a few tears. The entire floor of Key Arena was a sea of blue SPD uniformed officers. Brenton’s wife and two children were in the front row. During the opening and closing ceremonies the floor aisles filled with uniformed officers from all over the Northwest. The keening bagpipes were offset by the crack report of the 21-gun salute by the Washington State Patrol’s ceremony rifle team.

An hour later the news broke that a man had been shot by police in Tukwila as officers staked out a car matching the vehicle SPD suspected was involved in the Halloween night killing of Officer Brenton. Since then investigators have found explosives, assault rifles and printed material about abuses by police officers.

I have done a few ride-alongs with SPD officers since coming onto the Council. More often than not at some point in the night my assigned officer for the evening calls home on his cellphone while we’re out to say hello and good night to someone. Usually I hear a few questions about how someone’s day was or what the kids are doing. The calls are short. Pretty much the same type most of us make during our work day. I wonder if Officer Brenton made a call like that Halloween night.

It is incredibly disappointing to finally get the call we’ve been expecting: that Boeing has chosen to open the second 787 line in South Carolina. I know there must be appreciable technical reasons to open the second line in the Palmetto State, but it’s hard to not assume that $14 an hour and no union sealed the decision against opening the second line in Everett . The promised $170 million in grants in return for 3,800 jobs over seven years probably helped.

Puget Sound’s Boeing workers earn more (and, yes, deal with a higher cost of living) and bargain collectively with the company for wages and benefits. They’ve produced planes for decades and done it better than anywhere else. It’s been and will continue to be a great partnership, but I wish “the market” recognized good compensation. Instead, it seems like the South Carolina decision is yet another reflection that cheap labor trumps.

I was out for a couple of days late last week. Before cutting out Wednesday afternoon I was in a hurry to get all the “going out of town” tasks done. Clean up the desk a little. Double-check the calendar. Activate the email responder. Pack up the “to read” material for the flight. I grabbed everything and headed out to grab the dog and take him to the doggy hotel in the short time I had before getting to the Council’s budget public hearing at the Northwest African-American Museum.

I stopped being in a rush as I came off I-5 to get onto I-90 on my way to Rainier Ave. S. In front of me blocking the right lane at the end of the connecting ramp was a car, perpendicular across my lane and smashed into the concrete barrier to the right. I was the third person there. Airbags had popped, clear fluid was running out the front of the car and we were awash in traffic noise. A young guy had pulled over ahead of the wreck and was talking to the driver, a woman leaning back and not moving, but talking. As I walked toward them he motioned for me to call 9-1-1, so I dashed the few steps back to my car and called. It was then that I realized I had no idea how to turn up the volume on my phone. I did the best I could to describe where we were on the ramp and to hear the operator’s questions. I got off the phone, but started to worry whether I’d told the operator the right ramp direction. Was it really south-bound i_5 to east-bound I-90? Did I get that right?

In the meantime, more vehicles pulled over and the young guy kept talking to the driver. Turns out he’s an emergency medical technician in training. The only thing better if you’re in a wreck, I suppose, is if a doctor pulls over immediately – and that’s what happened next. Two of them! The second one pulled over and helped with what looked like a full emergency medical response bag. It was good timing for the woman in the wreck because before the doctor pulled over, the EMT in training, who was holding the woman’s head, told me to get her name, age, any medications she was taking, and to take her pulse. Weirdly, her husband had pulled up a moment before (apparently caravanning), so the name, age and medications weren’t too much of a challenge for me. I did then find out that I might not be the best person to take your pulse in an emergency.

I placed my fingers on her throat and found her pulse. Then I counted the beats over ten seconds. And then I multiplied.

“120,” I told the EMT in training. And then a few moments passed.

“No, 72. Yeah, 72. I did the math wrong.”

OK, standing between I-5 and I-90, math is not my strong suit. Looking at a person in a crunched car in pain, thinking and acting may not be my strong suits. Cripes. I’m thankful that the Seattle Fire Department pulled up soon after. I told the medic what I knew and then got out of the way, but I realized after driving on that I never told the EMT in training or the doctor how grateful I was that they stopped to help. I’d love to know who they were. I’d also like to know how the driver is. All I could find out later was that SFD didn’t handle the transport and instead called for a private ambulance. That can be an indication that the woman’s injuries weren’t life-threatening.

It’s comforting to know people will pull over and help each other. It’s even more comforting if they know how to multiply.

Last night's public hearing at Whitman Middle School (Crown Hill) on the proposed 2010 city budget was, for a budget hearing, sparsely attended. Maybe our outreach wasn't what it could have been. Maybe people just know there's no extra money to claim for their cause. In fact, among the pleas last night to restore cuts to library hours and human services advocacy groups, there was one speaker who asked the looming, critical question, "Are we cutting enough this year?" Specifically the speaker wondered how we're going to fare in 2011 if we deplete the "rainy day fund" this year.

It's the multi-multi-million dollar question and the basic answer is that we may not fare well. No one knows how quick the recession will come to an end in Seattle. Under the mayor's proposal we're taking $30 million of the $35 million reserve account to help plug the $72 million gap in the 2009 and 2010 General Fund budgets (the utilities and big bricks-and-mortar projects are separate from General Fund and usually happen with other, restricted money from ratepayers, the feds, the state or other funders). That means less of a piggy bank to hit next year when the gap could be $35 million.

Instead of looking to restore library hours or add to community center programming, should I instead be looking to lay off more than the approximately 150 people currently slated for layoffs? Some readers will say, "Hey, just cut that Mercer project or quit with the street cars." Neither of those projects if cut would yield General Fund dollars.

If you come up with great ideas about where to cut from the budget bring them to one of the two upcoming public hearings on the proposed 2010 budget:

Wednesday, Oct. 14, 5:30 p.m.
NW African-American Museum
2300 S. Massachusetts
(Judkins neighborhood)

Monday, October 26, 5:30 p.m. (4:30 p.m. for call-in comments)
City Hall, City Council Chambers
600 Fourth Ave.
(Downtown)

A recent paper from the Pew Charitable Trusts examines how a few cities, including Seattle, are dealing with budget shortfalls through furloughs and drastic layoffs. The paper provides good context for how we're doing relative to other cities. I'm always happy to be in Seattle. Even more so when I look at the budget numbers others are facing.