The Sunday Times had what I thought was a reasonably fair portrait of the McGinn administration’s first year. In my view, an ideal mayor is both right on the substantive policy merits, and able to cajole the Council and State, through love or fear, into supporting his agenda.
On the first point, I think anyone that thinks Seattle’s transit, pedestrian, and bicycle agenda should be a higher priority than the free flow of cars has to be happy with policy coming out of the Mayor’s office.
On the other hand, just about everyone would agree that it’s the latter point where he needs to improve. Still, I have to object to one aspect of media analysis of this problem, well illustrated by this Times blurb about the seawall:
[The Mayor made a seawall] announcement that clumsily excluded Council members. The perceived slight hurt the new mayor-council relationship. The council struck back by punting a sea-wall ballot measure all the way into 2011.
Bad on the Mayor for not optimizing his council relations, but the Seattle City Council is not a collection of inanimate objects; they are actual humans with moral agency. If they postpone an important safety measure mostly because the Mayor failed to show them proper deference, that’s a damning indictment of the Council.
Many differences between Council and Mayor have legitimate policy and interest group roots, and that’s entirely proper. To the extent that this is about who’s showing enough respect, both sides should grow up.
And that goes for Olympia too.
The thing about the seawall replacement is that if it’s done first, there is a far less likelihood of the viaduct failing from an earthquake. If you watch the WDOT video of the viaduct failure, you can see that the seawall fails first, the soil sloughs away from the support pillars, then the upper deck tips.
Also the seawall is Seattle’s responsibility. The whole cut and cover tunnel was designed to make it the state’s problem by making the outer wall of the tunnel also the seawall. Pretty tricky, but stupid.
The cut and cover tunnel put in that light sounds like it would have been a total disaster, 40 years down the road when the concrete eating sea-creatures ate through the tunnel wall, as they have done with the current seawall.
That would be wood eating creatures, not concrete. Even with a new seawall the wet soils would still be a problem under the viaducts supports. If it dried out the current viaduct would sink more.
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/Viaduct/viaductSeawall.htm
Gotta love a Mayor that focuses on making sure we can all booze through the night and hike parking rates vs. making the city actually attractive to business and families with kids.
Waiting for that 2011 vote on west-side light-rail/streetcar/rickshaw
Increasing turnover rates at parking spots IS attractive to business. More people means more business, no?
Ending reactionary liquor laws, ensuring parking is available in front of small businesses, continuing to make the city attractive to productive mid-20s to mid-30s residents who are in demand by local employers, rather than families who cost the city more money than they bring in… McGinn might be a brat, but the reasons that you gave for disliking him are precisely why his intentions are in the right place.
Of course, Mayor McGinn can only focus on two things at any time and currently those are all-night drinking and market-based parking rates. It is all part of his well known anti-business/anti-family agenda…
As someone with a family, I love his support for biking, pedestrians, and transit. My kids won’t be driving for a long time, so those sound like great priorities to me and my family.
McGinn can’t focus on more than one thing at at time.
BTW where is the 2011 vote on West-side Light Rail?
Or do the apologists simply sweep that under the rug while the Mayor attempts to reform STATE liquor laws…
Maybe he should dole another $50K consulting gig to a buddy…
As for his support for biking, pedestrians, and transit, more power to him, wake me when he actually gets something done
As for his support for biking, pedestrians, and transit, more power to him, wake me when he actually gets something done
If McGinn makes good policy proposals and the Council rejects them, that’s the Council’s fault, not the Mayor’s.
If McGinn makes good policy proposals and the Council rejects them, that’s the Council’s fault, not the Mayor’s.
Or a weak Mayor
Actually I would say the council is much more engrossed with parking than the Mayor.
We seem to be ignoring the biggest issue the Mayor has had to face, cutting the budget in the face of huge revenue drops. He was basically thrown in the deep end this year and since we are not even discussing that issue, I would say he has handled it very well.
I don’t usually write comments at blogs, but I’m compelled to clarify concerns that the Council dithered on the Mayor’s seawall levy proposal because we were tweaked over not being consulted or some such thing. Actually, we did not move forward on the proposal last year because (1) neither the Mayor nor the Council had established a strategic capital needs plan that put the seawall proposal in context with other pressing public safety capital needs and (2) because with the current seawall schedule funds needed for design and engineering work now can be adequately covered with existing resources. In other words, we concluded last year that we didn’t need to rush forward with a levy measure. Instead, the Mayor and Council are working very closely to craft the right proposal for our voters to consider and we will complete that work this year. It’s likely a ballot measure will be scheduled this year.
On the larger issue of relationships between the Mayor and Council, I would just remind us all that journalists thrive on conflict, even when it doesn’t exist. There is actually a very healthy and appropriate amount of dialog, collaboration, debate and effective work being done between the Mayor and his staff and my the Council and our staff.
Councilman Burgess,
I don’t always agree with you, but I thank you for taking the time to listen to and respond to your constituents. Just like I think everyone needs to wait tables for a bit, I think everyone in Seattle and even Washington State needs to move out and experience other local and state governments just to realize how good we’ve got it.
Matthew Johnson
Indeed – I spent a decade in MA – what a difference.
Agree completely. I live in South Carolina now. Dear God….
Well, it’s easy to spoof identity on this blog and it’s been done before but I tend to believe this post is legit (better “security” would probably rank ahead of an edit feature in my list of new year’s wishes… and that’s saying something). Councilman Burgess, if you (or staff) do indeed follow this blog, let alone it’s comment thread then I’m sure the principles would love to have a guess post (or series, free publicity… what’s not to love for a politician?). I’m not a Seattle resident but FWIW I think the mayor is doing a good job and it would be nice to believe he and the council are on a working relationship.
Those familiar with my posts won’t be surprised to read here that I think that Mayor McGinn has had a terrible year, managing to frequently alienate 8/9 City Council members on a range of issues – most notably the tunnel and the 520 bridge replacement – and surely to have broken any chance of getting on well with Governor Gregoire by – in essence – accusing her of being a liar on the tunnel. Not exactly the most diplomatic response to the state’s senior executive.
He has a style of governing that I am not comfortable with as it is too dismissive and confrontational towards opinions and ideas outside of a narrow focus on goals of relatively little wider interest.
Where his predecessor, Greg Nickels, did so much better was in being able to focus on the concentrated ntelligent mass transit goals most of us believe in here whilst at the same time being able to get things done at a wider integrated level inclusive of road interests, thereby building up political capital for achieving both the core and wider goals. It was a good legacy to hand on to his successor – solid and competent and successful. Yet McGinn has largely squandered all of this and set us back to a weaker time of divisive and confrontational politics.
As Joni Balter said in last Thursday’s Seattle Times, the result has meant that the last year has felt for some of us like three.
“As Joni Balter said in last Thursday’s Seattle Times, the result has meant that the last year has felt for some of us like three.”
Alas, two years of the McGinn administration will not yield a quick opening of U-Link.
Nor can we vote Joni Balter off the island.
Well it wasn’t ever going to.
I have only ever agreed with Joni Balter on McGinn. On other matters, she is too right wing for my liberal/socialist perspectives on the role of effective local and state government in our society.
I wouldn’t vote her off the island – that honor should go to Tim Eyman!