SDOT Director Greg Spotts will resign February 12, he announced Tuesday morning.

“I depart the Puget Sound with great enthusiasm for Seattle’s future and profound gratitude to Mayor Harrell for the opportunity to serve a dynamic, innovative and fast growing city with unlimited potential,” he wrote in a Bluesky post. “I’m also very thankful for the community members who welcomed me so warmly.”

Spotts took over the job in September 2022 following the December 2021 departure of Sam Zimbabwe in the wake of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s election. It is common in for new mayors to bring in their own SDOT Director, though Spotts would be the first SDOT Director in a while to leave before their mayor’s term has ended. Mayor Harrell announced this week that he will seek reelection in 2025.

“On a personal level, moving to Seattle alone has been hard, particularly living so far away from my mother in CA and father in NY,” Spotts wrote. “In 2025 I will pursue professional opportunities closer to my loved ones.”

Though his time in the office was relatively short, Spotts oversaw a pivotal moment in SDOT’s history. Voters approved the largest ever transportation levy in November by a landslide (the final result was 67% in favor), giving SDOT a nod of approval that did not feel certain just a few years ago.

After a very rocky first couple years after passage of the Move Seattle levy in 2015, SDOT was in a bad place during the early years of the Jenny Durkan administration. They were failing to deliver promises, and morale was low. To make matters worse, Durkan took more than a year to select an SDOT Director after the December 2017 departure of Scott Kubly. When Zimbabwe was finally hired in January 2019, he took office in the midst of a major transportation transition. His first week was the week the Alaskan Way Viaduct closed, followed closely by a lengthy closure of the downtown transit tunnel. Zimbabwe was putting fires out left and right during his nearly three years in the position, including overseeing the emergency closure of the West Seattle Bridge one year into his term. These crises were not Zimbabwe’s fault, but he was the one who had to deal with them. As we wrote when he left in 2021, “It feels like Sam Zimbabwe never had the chance to lead the Department of Transportation without an emergency beyond his control dictating the work of the day.” Yet through it all, he was also able to get stalled projects moving and start delivering on Move Seattle promises, including major pieces of the downtown bike network.

The Harrell Administration did not wait as long as Durkan’s to pick their SDOT Director, which was a good call because SDOT still had a lot of work to do to win back the trust of voters who kept seeing delays and mishaps from their transportation department. Spotts immediately took bold stances on prioritizing safety and getting promised projects out the door. SDOT has been in project delivery overdrive ever since Spotts arrived as they raced against the clock to complete as many of the Move Seattle Levy promises they could before it expires at the end of this year. The Spotts SDOT successfully showed the city that their transportation department really can get things done.

Though early, his departure does come at a logical transition point. The Move Seattle levy is ending, and a new departmental funding regime is taking over. Hopefully Mayor Harrell does not delay in choosing a successor, because there is a lot of work to do to hire additional staff and scale up the department’s work to meet the new funding levels and workload. SDOT failed in 2016 to get a quick start, and then got pushed to the back burner in 2017 amid Mayor Ed Murray’s resignation following allegations of child abuse and sexual assault and all the turmoil from Trump’s first election. Seattle cannot afford to make the same mistake and get a slow start on its new transportation levy. There’s a lot of work to do, and only eight years to do it all.

We will update this story as we learn more.