Hey, you! Early primary ballot return rates have been less than inspiring, so I know many of you reading this right now still have your ballot sitting on your kitchen table. Hey, that’s fine. My ballot is still here, too. But you can’t get distracted today and tomorrow and forget to vote because there’s a lot riding on this primary.
First off, you get a chance to approve the King County Parks levy (Proposition 1), which includes absolutely vital funding for regional trails like the EasTrail (formerly the Eastside Rail Corridor Trail), the Lake to Sound Trail between Renton and Des Moines, and finishing the East Lake Sammamish Trail.
So even if you are experiencing decision paralysis over your district’s Council vote, voting for the Parks Levy (and the Seattle Public Library Levy!) should be reason enough to inspire you to open that ballot, mark your votes and get it in a mailbox (must be post-marked Tuesday or earlier, so not a great last-day option) or a dropbox (final collection at 8 p.m. Tuesday).
If you have lost your ballot, you can either head down to the King County Elections centers in downtown Seattle and Renton to vote in-person or download and print your ballot then mail it in. And new this year, you can now register and vote any day including election day. So even if you procrastinated, head down to the Renton or Seattle King County Election center and vote in-person.
For a refresher on the Seattle City Council district primaries, check out our posts:
Eat food, listen to music and support the work of Seattle Neighborhood Greenways Sunday, all in the middle of Beacon Hill’s Roberto Maestas Festival Street.
Feast in the Street is a fundraiser for SNG that also “lets us re-imagine our public spaces in a way that puts people first.” That’s pretty on-brand for the group, I’d say.
You can register online for a spot, and then you can even join one of five neighborhood rides to the feast (or you could just take light rail to Beacon Hill, since the party is right outside the station entrance).
Katie Wilson of the Transit Riders Union has penned a two–part op-ed for Crosscut, and of course they are both must-reads.
Seattle’s climate emissions are increasing. And transportation is our biggest offender. We need a lot more people to drive a lot less. And we don’t have a lot of time to change course. So how are we going to do this?
For regular readers of this blog, few of her suggested solutions will be a surprise. But unfortunately, not everyone is a regular reader of this blog (hard to believe, I know, but it’s true). Wilson does a good job simplifying a set of complex and intertwined issues into ideas Mayor Jenny Durkan and the city has the power to improve.
The mayor can prioritize walking, biking, transit and accessibility, even in the face of opposition.
“After a century of auto dominance, most of us don’t even notice how much of our public space has been appropriated for cars, or how deeply driving is subsidized and written into our laws,” she writes. “There’s no way to revoke this planet-destroying privilege without making some people angry. The mayor needs to stand firm in defense of projects that shift us toward a sustainable future, even when it’s hard.” (more…)
As noted in our previous posts, Seattle Bike Blog is not doing official endorsements this primary. Instead, I’ll be going district-by-district, posting videos from the MASS Coalition’s transportation forums along with a roundup of transportation-related endorsements and other notable news items and thoughts.
Now, District 7. Right off the bat, we gotta talk about the Magnolia Bridge. Every candidate supports replacing this bridge, but the most popular idea among candidates is a “one-to-one” replacement of the car-centric freeway-style viaduct, which is complete nonsense. This would cost upwards of $420 million, a price tag that is simply not justified by the relatively small number of households it would serve. Investing in car-centric freeway infrastructure is also not in line with our climate goals. Our city has massive transportation challenges in quickly-growing parts of town and in lower-income areas that have long been neglected.
In order to make a Magnolia Bridge replacement make sense, it’s going to need to be paired with some major changes in the area, including a lot more housing and transit. So while all candidates support replacing the bridge, there are some differences in how they talk about it. (more…)
As noted in our previous posts, Seattle Bike Blog is not doing official endorsements this primary. Instead, I’ll be going district-by-district, posting videos from the MASS Coalition’s transportation forums along with a roundup of transportation-related endorsements and other notable news items and thoughts.
Oh, Mike O’Brien. Please don’t leave us.
District 6 has drawn the biggest field of candidates, and the race is also among the least clear for biking and safe streets. On one hand, there are a lot of candidates who told Lester Black at the Stranger (be sure to check out the spreadsheet of responses) that they ride bikes (Terry Rice, Jon Lisbin, Dan Strauss, Heidi Wills, Jay Fathi, Joey Massa and Ed Pottharst) and think the city should invest more money to build bike lanes (Rice, Strauss, Fathi, Massa, Pottharst). So that’s good.
But no single candidate has yet emerged as the favorite among transportation-focused organizations, which is disappointing.
Melissa Hall has a good social media presence, sharing quality takes on transportation issues. For example, she supports completing the Missing Link which is somehow not a unanimous opinion among candidates this year. Her campaign got off to a late start and has been building. The question is whether she has a big enough campaign operation to get enough votes out. As we saw with the last mayoral race, being right about stuff is not enough to win an election.
Summary of public feedback on the Missing Link Environmental Impact Statement. Shilshole is the planned route.
The only candidate to get multiple endorsements from the orgs we’ve been tracking is Dan Strauss, who is currently a staffer for Sally Bagshaw. Strauss says a lot of the right things except for one big one: He is against completing the Missing Link. That’s a huge red flag. The city has already studied this section of trail far beyond the point of absurdity, and they found no evidence that the trail would harm jobs or any of the other arguments opponents have used in fighting for the past couple decades. I also worry about what opposing the trail says about who has his ear. The overwhelming majority of people (over 80 percent) who responded to the city’s multiple public outreach efforts about the trail support completing it as designed. Only 5 percent wanted Leary, Strauss’s stated preference. So who is he listening to?
UPDATE: Strauss commented below, and then he and I talked on the phone to somewhat clarify his Missing Link position. He wouldn’t budge from saying that he prefers Leary. But his position isn’t because of the business appellants, it’s because of the MLK Labor Council (I previously interviewed Nicole Grant about the council’s opposition).
“I know that a lot of people in the past have used Leary as a false alternative,” he said. “I want to get it done.” He also described himself as “very pro-bike.”
“I want a connected network of protected bike lanes,” he said. “I’m gonna go to the mat on the whole bike network.”
Work is scheduled to begin this fall, though schedule relies on a court ruling. I asked him if he would try to stop trail construction when/if work begins.
“My preference would still be Leary. But for me, we need to get it done now,” he said. So what does that mean? I dunno.
