CHS examined the two candidates who are vying to be Seattle’s next mayor through the prism of what the future may hold around transit and transportation on Capitol Hill. The races for Seattle’s two citywide city council seats may feature some starker contrasts than in the mayor’s race, with similar stakes for pivotal decisions around the future of transportation in the city.
In the race for Position 9, the seat Council President M. Lorena González is vacating, the candidates offer pretty different visions of what government can and should accomplish. Nikkita Oliver, the lawyer, poet, and community organizer in the race, has built an ambitious campaign platform heavily based on the idea that the city should reform and expand its current revenue base to include new forms of progressive taxation. Sara Nelson, Fremont Brewing co-owner and former council aide to Richard Conlin, has primarily argued that the city should do a better job with current revenues.
For transportation improvements, Nelson has said she favors issuing bonds to pay for big ticket projects like the Magnolia Bridge’s pricey replacement, and is banking on a sizeable portion of a Federal infrastructure bill coming to Seattle. “We have a lot of transportation needs, lots of transit needs and finite resources,” Nelson said at a forum earlier this year hosted by Seattle Subway.
Oliver has advocated for public transportation to be fare free, a position they share with King County Executive candidate Joe Nguyen. A change in fare structure might be more likely to happen at the county level, but could be pushed from the city as well. King County Metro collected around $140 million every year in revenue from fares prior to the pandemic, close to 25% of its operating expenses. But a large percentage of that comes from employers buying bulk transit passes, which many argue could be collected more equitably from all employers. “High capacity, reliable, rapid transportation in our city is something we talk a lot about, pay lip service to, but continue to fail to provide,” Oliver said at the same Seattle Subway forum.
Nelson’s policy platform includes incentivizing charging for electric vehicles on private property, finishing the Burke Gilman missing link through Ballard, and encouraging ”human-powered water transportation”, i.e. more people kayaking to work across Lake Union.
Oliver has made the revisions that the city will make to its Comprehensive Plan in 2024 a centerpiece of their platform. Increased density, particularly in neighborhoods that haven’t been asked to increase their housing stock as areas like the South End have seen high rates of turnover. Nelson is more reluctant to propose changes to zoning, particularly in Seattle’s single-family neighborhoods. This will keep Seattle’s growth strategy focused on its busy arterial streets, where transit tends to be located but where Seattle’s fights over street space are most intense and air pollution levels are highest.
For council Position 8, Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda is running for a second term. In terms of revenue reform, Mosqueda navigated the JumpStart payroll tax through to a veto-proof majority after the repeal of the Head Tax in 2019. Revenues from that tax prevented budget cuts during 2020 in response to the pandemic from being more severe than they could have been.
Mosqueda has been an outspoken advocate of a connected bicycle network on the council since she was elected in 2017. In 2018, she used a speech from the council dais to coin a term that has become popular in the bike advocacy community: bike facilities should be accessible to people of all ages, languages, ethnicity, genders, and abilities (ALEGRA), which also means happy in Spanish. “It’s about access to bike lanes as a necessity,” she said.
Mosqueda’s challenger Kenneth Wilson is a civil engineer who has opinions on how the city is managing current infrastructure projects, most notably the West Seattle Bridge repair. In response to Wilson’s proposal to allow the bridge to carry a limited amount of traffic before a full repair is completed, the Seattle Department of Transportation’s Roadway Structures Director Matt Donahue has offered a public rebuke: “You don’t fly the plane when you’re trying to fix it.”
Wilson’s views on transportation would differ considerably from the established views inside the Seattle Department of Transportation, which he would have no direct control over if elected to the city council. “Our City must also act to address root transportation safety problems instead of reducing the value of roads by unrealistically and unilaterally dropping speed limits,” he writes on his website. SDOT’s data shows that the speed limit reduction, which passed city council unanimously in 2016, has reduced top-end speeding as well as injury collisions citywide.
Oh, and we couldn’t talk about Councilmember Mosqueda without mentioning the Capitol Hill Superblock, an idea that has languished under Mayor Durkan’s administration but which could move forward under a new mayor. A full pedestrian-friendly rethinking of Capitol Hill’s nightlife district like the one she has proposed in Pike/Pine could prove to be a model that could jump to other neighborhoods.
The two citywide councilmembers will see their seven colleague’s districts redrawn, with shakeups possible in all districts as boundaries shift due to unequal population growth. After 2023, the dynamics on the city council could completely shift. With such stark choices for both of these seats, voters will be setting the stage for many years to come.
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More people kayaking to work? Seriously? That’s really part of Nelson’s transportation plan? That’ll be good for like, 8 people (6 of which work at her brewery).
This Wilson dude sounds completely lost in his own world. Sure, the data and city engineers say that the lower speed limits work and the bridge needs to be repaired before reopening it, but what do they know, here’s some guy has his own unsubstantiated ideas that feel better to him.
I am PRO water commuting! I think a lot more people would do it if they had places to rack up a kayak. Tons of people both live and work on the water. It wouldn’t cost the city much either to provide such spaces….It would be SO AWESOME! People could kayak from eastlake and grab a brew at Fremont Brewing! I live not far from the water and I’d be in!
Yep. That’s how government works: Tax the many to provide for the few.
Regarding housing in Seattle:
In SDCI’s Annual RRIO Report delivered to the Seattle City Council, they announced that the number of rental properties registered in Seattle has declined 14.4 percent since 2019, that is a staggering loss of 4858 registered properties. The report posits “The decline in registered rentals may be attributed to more rental properties being sold and becoming owner-occupied…”
The report goes on to claim that while the number of registered units has declined, the total number of units remained stable. This confounding statement was unsubstantiated in the report, leaving the reader to ponder how registered units can decrease substantially but total number of units remain constant?
SDCI and the City Council both know why the number of rental units are declining. The Council continues to refuse to accept that housing providers have been, and still are, selling their rental units in Seattle. The industry has been saying this for years, and a survey of RHAWA’s membership tells us that approximately 30% of the units that leave the market do so due to increased legislative burden.
How long can the City Council continue to ignore the facts and data, while passing more onerous and devastating housing policies?
You can read the full report here: https://bit.ly/3iB3sAb
I don’t know why people buy into the myth of “progressive taxation.” All taxes are “regressive” because all costs are pushed down to the lowest economic level that can’t push them down any further.
A. If I were a landlord and my taxes were raised, I would need to raise my rents to cover it. I wouldn’t worry too much about my tenants leaving for another apartment complex, because I know the other locations will be raising their rents as well to make up for the added tax expense.
B. If I were a business owner and my taxes were raised, I would need to raise my prices to cover it. Again, my competitors would be doing the same. They aren’t going to internalize the expense – they’d lose revenue.
C. If I were an employee, and my taxes were raised, I’d try to get higher pay to make up for it – either by trying to get a raise or moving to a company that would pay me more. In either case, my current employer would incur more expenses and need to pass those added expenses on to the consumer as in B, above.
D. As an investor, whenever my taxes are about to be raised, I consult with my tax attorney and she finds the loopholes that are always written into the new tax laws to protect the rich people who fund election campaigns.
This is what happens in every political and economic system that actually exists on Earth.
This. Flat tax! Tax forms should be as simple as postcards.
DefundThem –
When I worked in Singapore, that’s exactly the way it was. “Inland Revenue” did, in fact, send me a >pre-paid< postcard to confirm my identity and family size. After I returned the card, then they sent me a bill for my tax – a whopping 3% of income – which I could pay monthly without penalty. No withholding of money before it’s due.
At least, that was my experience there in the late 90s.
@Anti-itnA: I’m curious what your explanation is for the repeatedly measured fact that economic inequality is much higher in the US than in most other highly industrialized nations.* And also why economic inequality in the US was much lower in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s than it has been since the 1980s?
*If your answer involves differences by race, note that economic inequality among White Americans alone is much higher than Western Europe.
Steve –
Good question. One of the reasons why income differences were flatter after WWII was that because the USA was the only industrial economy left standing. We lent money to the rest of the world to buy capital goods from us to redevelop their industrial bases.
With manufacturing – the main economic source for wealth for the middle class – moving overseas, that helped build up the economies of those countries while removing a very big step up on the ladder to family financial growth in the US.
Also, after the War, it was easy for the US to put very high taxes on the rich, because there was nowhere else they could invest and make the returns that were coming out of US companies. Now rich people have lots of places all over the world where their investments can make a lot of money, so, if they dislike US taxation levels, they can move their funds (and their citizenship) elsewhere.
Additionally, however they may have behaved in the past, the two parties in the US serve the rich … which includes themselves –
“Majority of lawmakers in 116th Congress are millionaires,” OpenSecrets dot org.
In serving the rich, not only do the politicians – R nd D alike – write tax laws that protect the materially wealthy, they also write laws for business and investing that help the rich concentrate more and more of that wealth into fewer and fewer hands. These laws include regulations that are purported to protect the “little guy” but really make it easier for the rich to get richer – such as rent caps.
How do I know this is true? Because I have used many of the same techniques to build my own net worth from zero to $2 million – I have rental property, investments, and small businesses and because of all of these, I am able to reduce my taxes to less than what a regular employee pays making the same amount of money.
What did you hope I was going to say?