This past Friday, Erica C. Barnett of PubliCola filed a report on Great City’s contributions meant to call into question, in part, the motives of the organization. As the new Executive Director for Great City, I was not concerned that the contributions were “revealed” (a cursory review of our website will take you right to them), but there were some issues raised in the article that I would like to respond to. While I don’t always agree with Erica’s reporting, I have usually been impressed by the quality of her work for The Stranger and, more recently, PubliCola. Also, as a regular reader of PubliCola, I appreciate what Erica and Josh are trying to do with the site by pioneering a new model for locally based online political journalism. And so I was surprised, and disappointed, by the tone of Erica’s piece.

Erica reports in her article that I was unwilling to divulge how much Vulcan has given Great City. In point of fact, Erica never asked me. I received a call from her while on a short vacation last week. She requested our donor information, and I gladly pointed her in the right direction. That was the end of our conversation. If she had asked me, this is what I would have said. Vulcan has given Great City $37,500 over the past 4 years. That’s approximately $10,000 per year if you average it out (some years have been more, some less). Our annual budget last year was $150,000. This is a modest budget for a non-profit (as I’m reminded every time I pay my mortgage), but even at that rate their generosity accounts for about 7% of our annual budget. Great City has also received grants from the Bullitt Foundation amounting to $35,000; financial support from the Cascade Land Conservancy of $30,000 (even more if you count the non-financial support they provided us when we were an initiative of their organization); and we have over 75 other donors, both large and small (among them are local environmental leaders, smaller grants, developers and land owners, and neighborhood leaders) that makes up for the additional revenue. To wit: we are a nonprofit, and nonprofits survive on the generosity of the community.

In the framing of Erica’s article and in the subsequent public debate, I’ve been noticing a few themes emerging about Great City that I’d like to take the opportunity to address.

I’ll start with Great City’s relationship with Mike McGinn. Since May, Michael has not been involved in the organization. He stayed on as Executive Director for a few months after announcing his candidacy in order to make for a smooth transition to new leadership, but the organization has move on without him.

Some have accused Great City as some sort of “mouthpiece” for his campaign; this is simply not true.  While we are tremendously grateful for Michael’s founding vision, Great City is legally prohibited from engaging in political campaigns. The departure of any group’s founding Executive Director is always a big step, but it is also an essential transition for long-term organizational viability. While there is some natural overlap in our messages, we have been careful to maintain a bright line between his campaign and our activities. As perhaps the clearest distinction, Great City has not, nor do we plan to, taken a position on the downtown tunnel.

But there is a more fundamental reason that I was concerned about the framing of Erica’s piece. It is indicative of a point of view that I occasionally hear in conversations and read in blog commentary. To be overly simplistic (but not, I think, unfair), this view point proceeds as follows: Since developers financially benefit from constructing buildings, their motives are therefore anti-neighborhood. While we all recognize that there are builders that do not, in fact, have the community’s best interests at heart, developers, both public, non-profit and private, are also powerful change agents in our communities. We only need to look at Seattle Housing Authority’s redevelopments, the new transit-oriented development of Thornton Place at Northgate or the proposed North Lot redevelopment north of Qwest Field to see that development can be a tremendous asset in achieving broader community goals.

By defining a group by the poor actions of a few overly simplifies the public dialogue. There are many legitimate issues to be critical of and much work to be done, but casting our conversation as an “us vs. them” dialogue is not helpful for anyone and only draws a wedge between the groups that should be sitting together to formulate common solutions.

So who are we? (I’m glad you asked). Great City is, at heart, an organization that believes responsible urban growth is an essential part of the solution to the daunting environmental, economic and social justice challenges we face as a culture. The decisions we make over where and how we build the urban landscape have significant impacts on the natural systems we depend on and value--be it the health of Puget Sound; the impacts of sprawl on the regional landscape or the region’s carbon footprint.

To achieve “responsible urban growth,” Great City holds to the principle that the best solutions can only be arrived at by giving all stakeholders a voice. This means neighborhood activists, environmentalists, designers, business leaders, and, yes, developers. The challenges we face are so complex, intertwined, and immediate that any solution developed in a vacuum is worth just that: nothing.

Great City strives to find solutions that work, not demagoguery that divides. This means that at times we will take stands that are not viewed kindly by the business community (like our recent opposition to the repeal of the Employee Hours Tax), and at other times we’ll take stands that are seen as being “pro-developer” (such as our attempt to influence the incentive zoning discussion last year). These stands may not always be popular, but in the end I believe strongly that our process of including neighborhood activists, environmentalists and business interests allows us to transcend politicization to achieve solutions.

But I think our actions speak louder than our words. We have 3 campaigns and 2 programs that we are currently running. Our campaigns strive to: make streets more walk-able, bike-able, and accessible to mass transit (Streets for People), encourage low impact development in our city and neighborhoods (Green Infrastructure), and push for regulatory reform that encourages, rather than impedes, innovative development (Leadership for Great Neighborhoods).

Our Neighborhood Assistance Program gives neighborhood groups access to technical expertise to help improve their neighborhoods. Our Green Infrastructure group recently led “green infrastructure walking audits” through the station areas in Southeast Seattle to identify existing assets and opportunities to improve open space, connections to mass transit, and natural drainage. Our Issues Committee takes a critical look at current issues related to Seattle’s built environment (policy proposals, planning activities or important development projects and the like) to help us figure out how we can best lobby elected officials and other decision makers on how to improve them. We also try to foster dialogue about many of Seattle’s pressing issues through a brown bag series which is open to all comers at GGLO.

These brownbags are a great way to get up to speed on many of the pressing issues facing the city. We invite anyone who cares about the future of our city, and who wants to take action to change it, to join us. We welcome your expertise and hope that you will work with us to make Seattle a model of economic, environmental and social sustainability.

Joshua Curtis

Great City Executive Director