Tag Archives: tim burgess

Crime, News, Politics, Transportation

City Council Blogs: the Missing Jail, “Rubble Yard” Money & $80 License Fees

The Seattle City Council is all over this newfangled blogging thing the kids are always on about. No longer to they have to beg the Seattle Times for space on the op-ed page. Some are more prolific than others: Tim Burgess I think leads the way–he even has his own blog–but Sally Bagshaw is right in there. Nick Licata writes frequently, with a monthly round-up. Sally Clark writes once or twice a month, just ahead of Bruce Harrell. Jean Godden was last heard from in March, and the sporadic Tom Rasmussen has let six months go between posting.

City Council President Richard Conlin

Here’s Council President Richard Conlin on how “the tunnel project has wound up funding Seattle street repairs,” thanks to the city pocketing some $3 million from the sale of the “Rubble Yard.” As the city is some $578 million behind in arterial maintenance, that $3 million is less impressive than it might first sound. At least, notes Conlin, it’s not all going on quick fixes:

While some of this will be used to fill the proliferation of potholes, most of it is being used for longer term repairs, such as replacing concrete panels and repaving deteriorated asphalt streets.  While pothole repairs are important short-term steps, these more substantial repairs will address a number of major problems that are more serious than potholes, and will provide fixes that will last for many years.

Conlin also provides a short crash-course in why Seattle streets look the way they do, and what’s been done the past few years to remedy that.

Tim Burgess

For a bigger number of dollars saved, turn to Tim Burgess and his post on how “Seattle avoided spending millions on a new city jail.” It’s an interesting story, turning as it does on the Council uniting to refuse to spend hundreds on millions on a huge project whose necessity arose from a flawed usage forecast:

The Council will vote in early September whether to approve a new jail services contract with King County through 2030. If approved, the new contract will save Seattle taxpayers approximately $200 million in jail construction costs and multiple millions more in operation costs.

Burgess credits King County Executive Dow Constantine for changing the conversation: Constantine agreed that “planning for jail services should be an ongoing regional task with representatives of the County’s larger cities actively participating.” That kind of bottom-up planning would be a wonderful model to export to other areas, such as transportation.

Speaking of transportation, God love Mike O’Brien for sticking his neck out for an $80 vehicle license fee, while the King County Council remains deadlocked over a $20 version to fund Metro Transit.

Mike O'Brien

O’Brien’s politically cannier colleagues have staked out lower-cost fees, recognizing that the mood is ugly; he’s aware–“some of my colleagues on the Council feel like $80 is too high and that we need to look at a lower increase, maybe $40 or even $60″–but he wants to push ahead: “additional revenue is needed to not only maintain Seattle’s transportation infrastructure, but to expand it to provide improve mobility for all residents in Seattle.”

Perhaps, O’Brien says, there is a way to make the fee less regressive, in terms of its impact on “lowest-income residents.” His main point, though, is that there’s substantial overlap between low-income residents and not owning a car. So it’s not just a question of how this will affect the minimum-wager who drives a beater to work, but how it will affect the minimum-wagers who take transit.

If you’ll permit me the observation, this isn’t going to “git ‘r’ done.” I doubt that the populace is in the right frame of mind for anything but specifics. If you’re going to ask for $80, you need to show exactly how that money is going to be spent, and how it’s going to benefit Seattle. Squishily “maintaining” and “improving” isn’t going to win you votes, and bike paths will likely lead to your summary execution. (I do believe drivers would pay to keep bicyclists out of their way–I’d like to see Sally Bagshaw run up a few low-cost bike-boulevard flags and see if anyone salutes.)

You need to demonstrate that $79 is too little, and $81 is more than necessary. If you’re suitably Machiavellian, you perhaps go public first with an outer-bound number, to set an anchor point in people’s minds, and then let yourself be talked down. But for heaven’s sake, don’t let the discussion be about $80–any reasonable person would rightly prefer to keep $80 in their pocket. The discussion has to be about a tangible, concrete accomplishment (or example of a benefit).

To read Publicola’s recap of the Council’s discussion, no one else has reached that level of clarity either. It sounds like the Council is simply taking the temperature to see what people might be willing to pay, rather than building arguments from either necessity, or civic desire. That has been the usual approach of this Council as it cowers from the effects of the recession, makes ritual budget sacrifices, and hopes for brighter days.

News, Transportation

After Carmageddon, The Buspocalypse

Service reductions considered by King County Metro

Earlier, musing about non-events like L.A.’s Carmageddon, I wondered why we don’t consistently advertise how helpful it is not to drive everywhere.

Of course, for that to work, people have got to be able to get around using alternatives to their car. In King County, we’re facing major cuts in transit unless funding can be found.

Sums up Seattlepi.com: “Without extra funds, a total of 600,000 hours of transit service would be eliminated over the next two years. This is about 17 percent of Metro’s entire system, but it would affect up to 80 percent of bus riders.”

The City Council’s Tim Burgess writes on his blog of the “Metro Transit Horrors Coming“:

Metro Transit is getting ready for massive service cuts because of falling revenue from the sales tax. This is one of the negative ripples from the stagnant economy over the past three years.  Don’t think it’s going to be that bad?  Take a look at this map.

King County Metro has proposed a two-year authorization of a $20 car-tab fee to raise $25 million each year, and the King County Council has the option of either approving the so-called Congestion Relief Charge themselves, letting it come to a public vote in November, or whistling blithely and walking away because the bus isn’t going to be coming for some time.

So far, support for the charge has been tepid, even among Democrats. None of the Republicans on the Council are for it–I believe the party line is that the bus system should “pay for itself” with charges at the fare box. (I don’t think this line of reasoning extend to tolls helping roads “pay for themselves.”)

In fact, Metro has raised fares consistently as a way of making up shortfalls in sales tax revenue. Currently a one-zone peak fare is $2.50 and two-zone is $3.00 (contrast that with Metro’s reported per-boarding operating cost of $3.90 for 2009).

Now, consider that the other big news out of Metro is that bus ridership increased almost six percent last year. Jim Jacobson, Deputy General Manager of Metro, puts daily ridership at over 340,000 people. The situation is similar to people who complain about cyclists who commute taking up space on the road: Put everyone back in cars, and congestion gets appreciably worse.

If the Council hasn’t felt strongly about the cuts in service, bus riders certainly have. Hundreds jammed a meeting at the King County Courthouse, and on July 20, car tab supporters handed in 10,000 signatures in support of the funding mechanism. There’s another public meeting tonight.

Crime, News, Politics

Tim Burgess Speaks Out on Seattle Weekly-Child Prostitution Link

Tim Burgess

The Seattle City Council’s Tim Burgess has distinct credibility in the fight against child prostitution–he’s no Ashton-come-lately. His concern with child prostitution in Seattle appears the first year of his Council service, in 2008, and he’s consistently used his position as chair of the Council’s Public Safety and Education Committee to press for action. So when he offers the facts on child prostitution in Seattle, it’s worth listening:

Over the past three years, 18 criminal investigations, all resulting in criminal charges being filed in King County Superior Court, have produced evidence that Village Voice Media/Backpage.com has been used as a vehicle in the prostitution of  children.

It’s his second recent post on child prostitution, and it’s difficult not to see it as a rebuke to the Seattle Weekly editors who have reached truly jesuitical heights in arguing that overstating the risk of child prostitution would be worse than their company’s unknowing complicity in any cases at all:

The “problem” the mayor is referring to is the trafficking of minors involved in the sex trade, and the “numbers” are how many minors are actually involved in it.

Since the Weekly is curious, Burgess replies:

Over the past 13 months, YouthCare has engaged with 185 children—some referred to YouthCare by police and other organizations, others identified by YouthCare staff involved in outreach efforts—who acknowledged being commercially sexually exploited through prostitution.  Of this total, 119 enrolled in a YouthCare program and 23 of these reported being prostituted through Village Voice Media/Backpage.com.

While you may reach for that handy Upton Sinclair quote–“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”–to illuminate the Weekly‘s disturbing sang-froid, Burgess wants you to know that it’s not a question of shutting down Backpage.com at all: “Village Voice Media/Backpage.com could chose to follow the very simple steps that other publishers follow that would make it almost impossible for this exploitation of children to take place.”

The Weekly and VVM have tried to spin the story several ways so far: The concern with child prostitution is a publicity stunt by “Bono-quoting philanthropic sherpas, like Kutcher and Moore’s charity consultant Trevor Neilson,” it’s a slippery First Amendment slope (raising the prospect of right-wingers making it “illegal for adults to buy pornography and for teenagers to feel each other up (a cause we will fight to the death to defend”), and it’s possibly a conspiracy orchestrated by the puppetmasters at The Stranger to weaken a competitor.

In case all this furor has you wondering where VVM/Backpage.com actually stand, know that they take child prostitution very seriously (the Weekly‘s inability to write seriously about it notwithstanding) and are already working hard to prevent it. (“Backpage takes it so seriously that it devotes nearly 100 employees to proactively reporting suspicious ads and those who breach its terms of service to local authorities and national children’s advocacy groups.”)

Editor-in-chief Mike Seely writes: “If Backpage and, in turn, Seattle Weekly were to follow Craigslist’s lead and cave to pressure from its adversaries, the behavior […] wouldn’t simply evaporate. Instead, it would be pushed back underground–into bus stations, dark alleys, and far-flung corners of the Internet which don’t give a damn about the problem and aren’t equipped to police it themselves.”

(That’s right. Back-alley child prostitution. Just like abortion. Would someone at the Weekly please stop Mike Seely before he defends you again?)

I refuse to believe that Seely and managing editor Caleb Hannan are personally so blasé when it comes to a case of child prostitution here and there. (Nor do I believe that corporate at Backpage.com is eagerly soliciting their advice for its business model.) It seems more likely that their in-the-weeds arguments arise from being too close to the issue. But whatever the motivation, their efforts in self-defense have only resulted in people producing harder numbers on Weekly-related child prostitution. They may buy ink by the barrel, but ink doesn’t wash that stain off.