Last week, we had all the candidates for city council and city attorney in to the Cola offices for endorsement interviews. We’re publishing edited and condensed transcripts of those interview in the runup to our endorsements today, which we’ll start running shortly.
At a press briefing this afternoon, Deputy mayor Darryl Smith offered few details this afternoon about plans to site a semi-permanent homeless encampment to replace Nickelsville at the former Sunny Jim's peanut butter factory in SoDo. Among other details, Smith could not say how much the encampment would cost, whether it would include permanent wooden shacks ("that's the first I've heard of that," he said, despite the fact that a panel that advised the mayor on encampment sites specifically recommended more permanent structures), what kind of services would be provided on-site (the city generally requires that shelters it funds include services such as job assistance) and whether the mayor had obtained sign-off from the council. Smith also seemed unaware of safety concerns that have been expressed by residents of the Beacon Hill and Georgetown neighborhoods about the site's proximity to "The Jungle," an overgrown, often violent patch of park land where people are known to prey on the homeless. Asked whether the mayor's office had considered safety concerns around the Jungle, Smith seemed not to understand the question. "I don't think we're going to have a situation where this turns into what people remember as the Jungle. The Jungle is unsanctioned," Smith said. "What we want to do is provide a safe place for people that are experiencing homelessness." In addition to concerns about the safety of encampment residents, nearby community members have pointed out in emails to the city council that the Sunny Jim's site is not exactly pedestrian-friendly, with at least three pedestrian fatalities nearby in the past two years. And Georgetown residents say they already more than their share of city services. In recent years, the city has proposed building a strip-club district, a new trash transfer facility, and an expansion of Boeing Field in the neighborhood. Why, Georgetown residents have asked, shouldn't some North End neighborhoods be asked to share the burden? Smith's response: The encampment would be in SoDo, not Georgetown. End of story. "This site is not, as has been incorrectly reported, in Georgetown," Smith said. "I am reaching out to the SoDo community." (Footnote: Smith's breezy dismissal of Georgetown residents' concerns is somewhat ironic coming from the guy who was largely responsible for ensuring that CASA Latina, a social service organization for non-English speakers, didn't end up in his neighborhood.) Although Smith said he has had conversations with many city council members about the proposal, the council members I spoke to today said the mayor's office hasn't given them enough details about the project for them to form opinions. "I have real concerns about both the siting and the concept, but we haven't received any legislation or a request for funds or a description of exactly what the encampment would be," council president Richard Conlin said---a comment that was echoed by council member Tim Burgess, who said, "I'm open to addressing our need for more shelter but I'd need to see more details of the plan before saying I would support it." Some council members noted that the city's ten-year plan to end homelessness, whose mid-point is next year, calls for getting people into permanent housing, not creating encampments where people sleep outside. "I don't think we should accept the idea that people are doomed to be homeless and living in tents," Conlin said. "If [the agency that gets the contract to run the encampment] is going to try to provide some services to get people out of homelessness, which is what we're aiming for, that will be helpful, but our goal should be solving the problem of homelessness." Council member Sally Bagshaw was the only council member I talked to who said unequivocally that she was "on board" with McGinn's still-nascent plan. "I would love to see everyone living inside rather than in the mud and the rain, but I'd rather see temporary encampments [for] people who have no place else to go" than have them sleep alone outside, Bagshaw said. "It's not where I want people to be, but they're way better off in their community than sleeping alone under bridges or in the bushes."
PubliCola: Jessie, you’ve said repeatedly that Nick is a consistent “no” vote on the council, but we think he’s actually accomplished quite a lot in his three terms. Can you name some specific examples where Nick has been an obstructionist, and what you would have done differently?
Israel: You can go recently to the [memorandum of agreement the council signed] to move the [waterfront tunnel] forward. Nick put out a press release saying we shouldn’t move forward with signing the MOA and abstained from the vote.
Saying that you’re for pushing it forward and then abstaining when it actually comes time to push it forward, to me, is an obstructionist tactic, especially in light of the fact that [not passing the MOA] would push it to a new mayor’s decision. We do have a mayoral candidate that opposes the tunnel [Mike McGinn].
Back in 2003, when we were talking about Mercer and trying to bring jobs into that area, mercer I think Nick went on record saying that we were bringing too many jobs into South Lake Union and we should slow down.
Being a member of Sane Transit at the time of the lawsuit when they were suing Sound Transit to kill light rail was an obstructionist move. Rather than figure out how to make it better, to move the project forward, he said we should stop the project in its tracks.
I think that being the naysayer, being the obstructionist, is a fairly well-earned title. And it’s a title that in many ways I think Nick is proud of—he points out flaws in projects.
Licata: That’s true.
It’s really interesting—she points to three examples, one of which [Sane Transit] you have to go back to my first term. The other [Mercer] was six years ago, and the third one [the tunnel MOA] happened last week. She’s digging way back to find examples, and they’re examples where she’s not necessarily willing to say where she would vote differently.
The Sane Transit thing was not a vote. I was a member of Sane—I have never denied that. There was this obscure thing that was signed [by me]. They came to me and asked if I was a Sane member and I said I was. The lawsuit asked for a revote on [light rail]. But be that as it may, that was still over 12 years ago.
The second example that she brings up, on South Lake Union, I don’t know what she’s talking about. There were a number of pieces of legislation on South Lake Union. I voted in favor of some of them, and some I voted against.
I basically think I was a realist. I was saying that when they were using numbers for what the job growth would be, I was pointing out that was capacity. There is a difference. There’s no guarantee that you’re going to get that growth. And that’s the difference between myself and Jessie—I actually read the material. I actually understand the differences. I don’t just go along because it makes everyone feel good.
What I have done in South Lake Union was act, I think, as a rational voice that says as we go forward, let’s not prime the pump more than we need to. Let’s work to promote this, but not throw all of our resources into just one area. I mean, Lake City and Northgate and West Seattle—you can identify other major areas that need support. So that’s why I say my record on South Lake Union has been one of moderation. You have to evaluate each project based on, as I’ve always said, who’s paying, who’s benefiting, and what’s the return.
Let’s go into the [memorandum of agreement]. It’s really an interesting document. On the one hand it’s really a policy statement more than anything. It’s not a legal document. It’s not likely to be enforceable. The reason I objected at first was because it seemed like we were trying to play politics with this issue because you had candidates in the mayor’s race who were talking about it.
It was rushed through to us. Literally, the mayor and the finance director signed off on it the same day. That almost never happens. And the law department had one day to look at it.
I think it’s a question of ,do we want the council to weigh in as a whole on the mayor’s election?
Israel: You could also look at it as, do you want the council to weigh in on the body of work that they were trying to put together for the last eight years that we finally to a consensus ?
Licata: We haven’t gotten to a consensus. Consensus means we all agree and I don’t think the city of Seattle all agrees on the deep-bore tunnel, that’s for sure.
PubliCola: Do you think the tunnel will go forward even if Mike McGinn gets elected? And if he does get elected, will you fight him on the tunnel?
Licata: Even if McGinn gets in, the tunnel has too much momentum behind it. I think that McGinn would end up hurting Seattle’s position with the state if he becomes really adamant. I think state legislators are tired of Seattle going back and forth on the solution.
At some point we are not going to be able to reverse Mercer, just like with the tunnel, and we’re quickly approaching that point. Probably the tipping point is when we receive the [transportation funding] grant from the federal government. When get the $50 million, that’s it. We’re going to be stuck with a very large project that’s going to cost a lot of money.
Israel: If we’re going to meet our growth needs, we need to make sure we’re developing smartly in our urban centers. I think it’s also disingenuous to say that I only support feel-good projects and that I don’t read documents. I actually have a very good track record of reading things and looking at details, which is how we’ve been able to transform King County Parks into an organization that was efficient and that actually generates revenue. That’s very complicated stuff.
PubliCola: Where are both of you on the number of cops we need? Should we be adding more than 25 a year? And if so, what would you cut to pay for that?
Licata: Ideally, it would be nice to ad more cops, but we have a plan in place right now that was accepted by the police department and the police guild. We met their concerns by making them most well0paid police force in Washington State. It looks like by the end of next year we’ll have enough police to move forward with the community policing plan. The key to policing is not just having more police; it’s also making them more visible.
Israel: I know first-hand, not just from looking at statistics, that the crime rate, particularly the property crime rate, is going up.
PubliCola: But Jessie, Nick does have a track record of fighting not just for police accountability, but for more officers.
Israel: We have increased police officers incrementally. But there was also a time that Peter Steinbrueck said we should add 50 cops and nick reduced to 37
PubliCola: Isn’t that the reality of budgeting? You have to make sacrifices?
Israel: It’s certainly the reality of budgeting. What I’m saying, though, is that we have some very large issues in our city when it comes to public safety. We’ve seen increasing burglary rates, we’ve seen increasing youth violence rates, we’ve dismantled our gang unit and the programs that were working to keep kids in school and to keep youth violence rates down. We have fewer police offs in neighs than we have in a very, very long time. That shows that small, incremental steps aren’t going to cut it to fix this problem
My style of leadership is to say, this is my target, this is where I want to go, and let’s figure it out. If our training facilities don’t have enough capacity, find a bigger room! There are solvable problems and there are unsolvable problems in the world and my experience in government is that we knee-jerk say something is an unsolvable problem when it’s absolutely solvable.
Licata: Police officers cost about $110,000 [each] a year. So the cost of hiring 200 new police officers [as Israel has suggested] is phenomenal. Just do the math. And you have the functional problems. You’d have to interview 5,000 people to get to 200. It’s not just a question of a larger training room. It’s really a question of systems and you don’t change the system overnight. The state is the one that actually does the training, so we have to have cooperation with the state. we also have a police force that is really high quality. One of the concerns the police force has is that they don’t want to see a degradation of quality.
So her numbers aren’t right, the execution of the sources aren’t right, and the execution of how you get there isn’t feasible. And all this is what she would face if she got on the council.
Israel: Developing legislation to fix our problems is going to be an iterative process.
At some point along the way, Seattle has decided it does not like an iterative process. It wants perfection out of the gate and that has led us to not make decisions and held us back. It has led to us taking 40 years to get light rail. It has led to us taking 10 years to fix a falling-down viaduct. It has led to a Mercer project that has taken far too long It has led to us not making decisions.
Licata: Just stepping back for a moment, what I hear Jessie saying, and it’s a little inconsistent, is something like: process is bad, and we should do something right away, but we also want perfection. So I’m not quite sure how that works out. But there are two examples of where we didn’t move ahead with something that wasn’t perfect, where I think she would agree that it’s good that we didn’t. One is the elevated viaduct. The state government said, look we’ll just replace [the viaduct] with a new one, and a good proportion of the people said no, we want to revisit it. That’s a good example where if we had followed through with Jessie’s approach, we would have had a rebuild.
The other ex is Fire Station 20. The city wanted to rebuild it, the neighbors didn’t want it, we had a process and held off and we chose a new site where the fire department and the neighbors are satisfied and happy. That’s process. In a real, practical, political world, that’s how things work.
PubliCola: Jessie, the police guild endorsed you over Nick. Why do you think they’re supporting you?
Israel: I can’t speak for the guild but the reason why I think the police are looking forward to working me is that accountability and oversight cannot be 100 percent of your work program. Between 2004 and 2007 that was 100 percent of the work program of Nick’s [public safety] committee. In those years, crime was going up, youth violence was going up, property crimes were going up, and we weren’t dealing with it. We were entirely focused on one issue and the concentration on that issue was very divisive.
Licata: That’s not true. During those years, my biggest focus was on public safety. I got more police officers in those years. At the same time, people had real problems with police behavior and they wanted to make sure [the Office of Professional Accountability Review Board] was responsive.
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