I have a small favor to ask that would mean a lot.  As many of you know, I'm running for the State House of Representatives. The state government decides a lot of big stuff—whether we build enough housing and transit, fund our public schools, or provide childcare and healthcare to families in need. 

I’m running against a longtime incumbent who has been on the wrong side of most of these issues. But we know how party politics tends to favor incumbents.

And yet, the local Democratic Party offers an opportunity for the grassroots to weigh in.

I need a small favor, that will have a big impact. 

The 46th District Democrats will vote to endorse me, both of us, or neither of us, and YOU can sway this vote! This endorsement could be pivotal. All you have to do is:

1. Join the 46th District Democrats (you/your spouse and any 12+ year old children if appropriate). Choose whichever dues level is appropriate for your personal situation. It’s quite affordable, and the money stays with the local group, not the party.

2. When you sign up, be sure to provide them with your email and cell phone number so that they can send you the information required to participate in the endorsement meeting.  (The 46th doesn't spam or sell your data! )

3. Fill out this form so our campaign can send you an invite for the meeting on the afternoon of May 17th, when to join the zoom call, and how to vote.

4. Recruit your friends and family to join as well! Each family member should sign up individually, except that youths 12+ should be included on their parents' membership.

We will need a large turnout to ensure a win and endorsements have come down to a single vote in the past. Get those teens involved!

It would mean the world to me.  

Unsure if you live in the 46th? You can use this address checker. 

Feel free to reply to this email if you have questions.

Thank you!

Ron

PS. Here is a map of the 46th District. It’s more or less 45th in the UDistrict up to the Shoreline Border, from 99/Aurora in the West to Lake Washington in the East, with a few exceptions.

Share the Cities has generated an action letter that is pre-written (you can edit it). It takes about 30 seconds to sign and send it to the entire council. I spent maybe another three minutes adding a few more personal touches, just putting things into my own words, when I sent it.

As Seattle moves to the next big stage of our 20 year growth plan, the letter focuses on how the council can expand housing options near transit, (and not just on the busy roads) around large parks, along planned bus lines, as well as some bus routes that were excluded from the Harrell version of the plan. It requests more housing near “multi-use trails, streets with protected bike lanes, Neighborhood Greenways, and Healthy Streets.”

Next up—more pocket parks and more water management/drainage options in areas with a lot of multi-family housing, and the exchange of some street parking with street trees.

Finally, it asks for amendments in support of the proposals from the Complete Communities Coalition (member orgs include House Our Neighbors, Habitat for Humanity, Futurewise (where I’m on the board), and the Housing Development Consortium) for courtyard and Passive House bonuses.

It’s spot on, high value, and easy. Please jump on and sign/send it!

Ask Seattle City Council for more housing near transit, parks, and trails!

This is our chance to build the city of our dreams. Send a letter to City Council to ask for more apartments and social/affordable housing near transit, parks, trails, and in quiet neighborhoods all over the city!

Action Network

Money in politics has been extraordinarily destructive to the health of our democracy. The debate often gets hung up on “how much” the money impacts elections. And it often misses the obvious fact that all that money influences the way politicians act. We have a coin-operated political establishment! I

Citizens United was a turning point. Beside being a stupid decision on the merits, our Supreme Court gave corporations the ability to spend infinitely in politics. And now the servile political class increasingly does their bidding.

But there is (amazing!) effort afoot that might provide a workaround. It won’t get all of money out of politics, unfortunately. But it is promising for getting corporations out, which would be a HUGE step. Here is how it works:

Some leading legal scholars have come up with an idea to use corporate law instead of speech law to fix the problem. While states are not allowed to limit the speech of corporations, states have a different right that is extremely, repeatedly, settled law. They grant corporations the ability to exist, and the states get to decide what that existence includes and does not include - as in, what these corporations can and cannot do. And when other corporations do business in these states, they have to abide by the same laws.

The idea here, then, is simply to restructure their enabling statutes to prevent them from engaging in political speech.

Here are some key sections of a writeup from the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance:

For more on this - here is the website -

Transparent Election Initiative

A bipartisan team of former Montana officials have unveiled an oddly simple yet startlingly robust legal mechanism for undoing Citizens United that ...

The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance • Tom Moore

Sadly, this kind of ambitious proposal is exactly the kind of thing the political establishment in Olympia is uninterested in actually doing. So many of them would rather campaign on “saving democracy” from Trump while tinkering around the edges and not actually saving democracy. We will likely need an initiative to make this happen unless the gaggle of left challenges this year turns into a slate of wins and scares the legislature into upgrading their behavior. I’ll certainly fight for it if I make it through!

This Montana initiative is the coolest legal innovation I’ve seen in a long time. If in Washington we paired this with ranked-choice voting, publicly funded elections, and consolidation to even years when most people vote - we might start to actually see a political class that represents what the people want!

I don’t say any of this to set aside the deep federal work that must be done. Obviously as soon as we can, we need to expand the court dramatically, depoliticize it by creating randomized rotations (including from the appeals courts) and term limits, and then rebuild constitutional law. Then we need to get all private money out of politics.

But in the meantime, this is pretty damn cool! I have added it to my own platform. I hope you will support it.

With Fred Meyer closing in Lake City and the loss of QFC in Wedgwood back in 2021, North and Northeast Seattle have felt real pain from the closing grocery store trend. Over a dozen stores have closed in Seattle since 2016, and a fistful more in the region.

There is no easy solution to this problem, as consumers buy ever more online. But that doesn’t mean we cannot fix it. It just means we need a serious, all-hands effort to fix it.

A Public Option: I’m with Zohran Mamdani on this. If we assume that groceries are a basic good that should be physically present in all communities (and we should assume that!), and it is clear the market will not provide this, we should provide a public option.

These stores can be government-run, but they don’t have to be. They could simply be government-owned locations that lease at rock bottom prices, or government-owned but operated by a third party. One way or another, the market is not doing the job. They should certainly be unionized.

MFTE for Grocery - we have a program in Washington State that provides significant property tax reductions for owners of buildings with workforce housing set aside. One really cool thing about this particular tax break is that it is a tax shift - it mostly just shifts taxes onto the rest of the property base (we’re talking pennies per parcel), so we don’t starve local governments of revenue.

A similar property tax exemption for unionized grocery stores, with a more aggressive exemption for unionized grocery stores in food deserts, would go a long way.

Vacancy Taxes:

We need to design well-calibrated commercial storefront vacancy taxes that make it less profitable to hold out for a rich renter. This should include an exemption for newer spaces (so we don’t discourage them from getting built), and have a grace period that accounts for the regular interval between leases.

If done right, this will reduce rents for retail businesses all over the region

More GOD in our lives.

You’ve heard of Transit Oriented Development? How about Grocery Oriented Development!

Grocery stores inside urban growth areas should get substantial height bonuses and parking/setback waivers that allow them to build lots of housing on top of their stores, and in adjacent parcels. In Seattle, they should allow buildings up to a total of eight stories. A portion of these should be set aside for workers (this should be offset through funded inclusionary zoning, which must be designed to make the affordable set asides revenue neutral.)

This will greatly increase the profitability of building grocery store style buildings in the city. It will also help by bringing in a ready-made nucleus for both the customer base and workforce. And it will help with the housing crunch.

This one will require careful design. The funded inclusionary part will be particularly important to get right. Also, if the developer builds with this bonus but cannot keep the store leased, there should be a grace period, but then the loss of the property tax exemptions. This will keep them highly motivated to lease at a lower rate. The threat should not be so punitive, however, that the building never gets built in the first place.

Keeping the Consumer in the Center

None of this suggests we should juice the profits of these big corporations. These incentives need to be targeted to bring them into undeserved areas. At the same time, we also need to continue to protect consumers and workers from corporate consolidations and stop algorithmic pricing/price discrimination so consumers do not get ripped off.

The industry will do its best to portray these goals as at odds with one another. But we can manage to combat broad corporate exploitation of workers and consumers while we also target incentives to ensure good geographic coverage for grocery stores.

Just know this will mean a fight ahead. Here is the Seattle Times on recent attempts to address the matter.

“Yet despite broad public concern around the loss of grocery stores, and backing by labor and anti-hunger groups, legislators had scant success. Four of five bills stalled out under industry pressure, budget realities and the constraints of a short session.”

We will need legislators who are ready for the fight.

As a Seattle resident, I’m tired of the lack of ambition of our political leadership. While our private sector is among the most ambitious in the world, our political class is cowed by its obsession with process, insiderism, and the donor veto.

So our private sector runs roughshod over our politics, and we do not tax the rich, nor do we build the kind of affordable quality of life we all deserve.

Paris is a great example of political ambition. Anne Hidalgo is just finishing up her time as Mayor. This socialist leader took office in 2014 with a vision to clean up a dirty city, make it a haven for people on foot or on a bike, and start greening its too-concrete-filled landscape.

It has been a wild success. Tens of thousands of parking spots and many miles of car lanes have been repurposed as parks, protected biking lanes, promenades and pedestrian paths. A wildly ambitious expansion of the Paris metro is also underway - and it is being built much faster and at a fraction of the cost of Sound Transit.

And it has transformed the city.

Perhaps most stunning—look what it has done to the air quality. Infill housing is famously great for carbon emissions. But if it is managed correctly, local air quality can be pretty excellent too.

Keep in mind this city is more than 5x as dense as Seattle! Simply making alternates to cars more feasible and convenient transformed the very air they breathe.

Unsurprisingly, the socialist party that has ushered in these changes just decisively won another mayoral term.

We can transform our community too. We have the resources (we are actually even richer)—but we currently lack the courage.  

And please don’t tell me it can’t be done in a modern city, “built for cars.”

Much of our city was built before cars—Wallingford was a streetcar suburb! And anyway, even more modern style cities like Seoul (yes, an old city, but with a modern form) are transforming themselves too. Check out this freeway to stream + park conversion in Seoul, South Korea.

By the way, after they took out all those lanes, traffic got better!

As you can imagine, my frustration with our lack of progress is part of what motivates me to run for office.

I’m tired of weak-willed politicians who think thirty year time horizons for small accomplishments are good enough. I’m tired of people who are so stuck in trading small favors for gains that they have lost any imagination for what a real, better future could look like. And I’m sick, sick, sick of people who think that process is justice, rather than a potential means (or block) to justice.

By the way, this future isn’t just quieter, safer, healthier, and more fun. It’s far more affordable! 

Transportation is one of the top items in household budgets, often the second highest expense. Car ownership (depreciation, repairs, insurance, fees, gas) costs $10k to $15k a year in Seattle. Transit-only is about $100-$120 a month, and much lower for low-income “Orca Lift” cardholders. Even with $1000 set aside for a few uber rides a month, that’s less than $2500 a year for a middle class rider.

Interestingly, even a modest paring back on driving produces lots of savings. A new study suggests that in Washington State, driving 20% less results in $1800 saved per household statewide, meaning the saving is likely higher in Seattle. It would also save 170 people from car crash deaths per year, plus 1419 more lives saved from reduced emissions and improved fitness per year.

We can have an affordable city. But it means making it much, much easier to build. It means taxing the rich to fund the construction of the future. It means building up our building trades so we can actually deliver. And it means making the hard choices any city must make if it wants to make it as easy to get around without a car as it is with.

Please consider supporting my campaign.

Terrible news - Sound Transit faces drastic cuts, and it is starting to consider some ugly choices. In a recent meeting that highlighted a set of options that were meant as representations of the kinds of choices we face (not an actual menu of what we have to pick right now), none of the options reached Ballard.

This is bad news for Seattle in general, and transit riders in particular. “Ballard Link is . . . the highest ridership line planned as part of ST3, by far, with 90,000 to 147,000 daily riders expected to jump on trains between Chinatown International District and Market Street by 2046.”

Why the shortfall? Some of it, like inflation, was unavoidable. But the responsibility rests primarily in the hands of our legislature for four reasons:

1. They set up Sound Transit projects to all turn out insanely overpriced by giving local jurisdictions the power to extract huge concessions from the agency in exchange for a permit, and by empowering city politicians to run the board and meddle with projects to please their constituencies. This has caused a lot of dumb building decisions and huge, huge delays, raising costs by billions or even tens of billions.

2. Then, a few years ago, they cut back the most progressive (as in, tax the rich) source of revenue for the agency, costing it billions.

3. Then this year, they wouldn’t extend Sound Transit’s bonding capacity to meet its needs.

4. And finally, they walloped it with another multi-billion dollar funding cut when they cut future sales taxes on services. While sales tax cuts are generally a good thing, services are consumed more by wealthy people. And in any case, they didn’t replace the revenue.

For those of us who rely on/love these trains, it feels a little like the legislature has left us like this.

Perhaps you can understand why I don’t have faith in the folks that created these problems to be the ones to fix them.

To me, the fight for universal, high-quality healthcare is deeply personal.

When I was 13, my great-aunt Jeanie, who was only in her forties, died of melanoma. It was an awful death, and it genuinely traumatized me at the time.

It was also fully preventable.

She and her husband did not have healthcare. So when they saw the early signs—they were reluctant to see a doctor. They waited a long time. And once melanoma has advanced, it is lethal.

My Aunt Jeanie—who always called me “Ronnie Paul”—was one of the kindest people I have ever met. She laughed and hugged easily, and filled a room like a song. Despite feeling larger than life—she was just as physically fragile as the rest of us.

I remember when my aunt Rhonda spoke at her graveside, she said Jeanie had been her godmother, and she had always thought of her as a fairy godmother. That seemed right.

Sadly, my aunt Rhonda also died young—in her fifties, from complications related to an autoimmune disorder. She too went years without healthcare, and her lack of access to good treatment destroyed her body’s basic functions.

I was in my late twenties by then—less traumatized, but no less filled with grief.

When I think about the fact that both could still be with us, I can only feel grief and rage. Their deaths have long animated my belief that healthcare should be a universal, basic, public good.

So i just signed the Whole Washington Pledge. Washington State is easily rich enough to fund universal healthcare—we just choose not to do so. Almost every middle income to wealthy country in the world has some form of universal healthcare.

It’s time we step into modernity, and embrace this basic form of morality.

Whole Washington has a representative bill, and a funding plan.

I plan to fight for it, and I hope you will join me.

Friends—I am running to represent North & Northeast Seattle in the State Legislature!

Here my launch video on Tiktok: Please watch it to the end, bookmark it, share it, and comment (or comment on comments!). Likes are helpful, but the other stuff makes it much more likely people will see it!

@voterondavis

I’m running to represent N & NE Seattle in the state legislature, to stop saying no and and start building our affordable future. Join us,... See more

Also, here is my launch video on Instagram.

Same story - please watch it to the end, save it, share it, and comment or comment on comments. This convinces Instagram to show it to far more people!

—

For fifteen years, we’ve been represented by a legislator whose answer to housing, clean energy, transit funding and so much more is ”NO.”

It’s time to say YES - to freezing the rent in public housing, to building over a million homes, to affordable childcare for every family, to doubling the buses on the road, finally fully funding our schools, and to stopping Trump.

It’s time to say YES to funding all of this by taxing the rich and corporations like we mean it.

Big money has opposed me before, and they will so again. Please help us in the fight and support our campaign!

Onward!

Ron

(This is a personal announcement from my longstanding personal newsletter and no piece of it, including the video, utilized any campaign resources).

Washington State Democrats headed to Olympia on the promise of taxing the rich this year. 

The earliest evidence looked good—they put forth a genuinely bold plan to tax million-dollar+ incomes, raising $3 to $4 billion a year. That’s enough to fund universal affordable childcare in the state while giving caregivers a 20% raise; cover the deficit so we don’t have to cancel the climate investments voters overwhelmingly supported in 2024; and spend $500 million more on public health, transit, and housing—as well as defending civil rights. 

That’s the kind of taxing the rich I can get behind!

But it’s starting to feel like they don’t really mean it. 

Tax the rich . . . later?

First, the tax won’t gather revenue for several years. That’s not their fault—they are rightly anticipating court challenges and a likely ballot referendum. So what are they doing to fill the gap in the meantime? America is under attack from the Feds, and people are desperate. Is the establishment treating this crisis as a crisis?

State Dems don’t bother taxing the rich now.

Nope. In fact, their best option for doing so, which was the Well Washington Fund, which doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere. It was a modest payroll tax on high earnings, like JumpStart in Seattle. It even gave a break to businesses already paying JumpStart! Well Washington would have raised $2.5 billion a year.

But last year, Amazon, Microsoft and much of the Trump-enabling set spent $2.6M last year trying to bully Dems into backing down on corporate taxes. Apparently it worked. (Why are they worried? Do they really think a corporate branded-campaign against taxes on big corporations will persuade anyone right now? They are being cowards).  

In fact, they are cutting taxes for the rich

Not only that, but it looks like they plan to cut inheritance taxes for billionaires and other very wealthy people, from 35% to 20%. 

The millionaire tax bill itself even includes cuts for large corporations. Hanna Krieg at the Burner reports that the establishment quietly slipped in a $500 million tax break for big businesses.

So at the moment, when we’re already facing dire cuts, it looks like we plan to raise taxes several years from now (if the mechanism turns out to be legal and passes a referendum), but cut taxes on inheritance and corporations sooner so we can–what? Cut even more?

What are they doing down there?

I am a Democrat, AND I can see why people accuse us of being weak-willed, beholden to the donor class, and afraid to fight for the little guy.

Because too often we are weak-willed, beholden to the donor class, and afraid to fight for the little guy. 

We need better.

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I deeply enjoyed a recent listen on “reactionary centrism.” It was a podcast collaboration between the Volts Podcast and Newsletter’s David Roberts, one of the nation’s premier climate -related science, technology, business and policy reporters, and Michael Hobbes, whose “If Books Could Kill” debunking podcast is a must-have for anyone interested in a snarky, evidence-based take on how to avoid the herd mentality around the latest fad books. He has another popular podcast called “Maintenance Phase” that picks apart health fads too. 

Together they tackled the topic of “reactionary centrism,” the overwhelming instinct to turn to both-sidesism (“yes, Trump is cutting hundreds of millions from universities to force them to teach how he wants, but some random lefties no one has ever heard of were mean to someone on Twitter”) to the constant “the left made them do it” crap that comes from so many ostensibly “liberal” pundits. Their ability to capture vapidity masquerading as sophistication was, to put it mildly, refreshing. 

It’s a must-listen or, if you prefer, read. You can do both at the Volts website. I listened to it on my favorite podcast app (Overcast), but you can find it wherever you get your podcasts.

Seattle quietly just ushered in one of the biggest transit upgrades in the country. Trains on the main line through Seattle just doubled—which means twice the trains and half the wait! More specifically, there will be four minutes between trains at peak hours, and five minutes all day, with only late-night trains spreading further out. 

65,000 passengers per weekday use the stations that will see the change. It will be a fantastic upgrade for the Davis household, that’s for sure. It will save all of us tons of time, make it much easier to avoid worrying about a late train, reduce crowding, and just generally make the train a more convenient and reliable option. 

The reason for this game-changing increase is that in about a month, Sound Transit will start carrying people across Lake Washington back and forth between Seattle and the new Eastside line. 

But ahead of that, Sound Transit has started running “simulated service”—running empty trains back and forth across the bridge. Simulated service sounds like no big deal, except it turns out that riders can use those trains running each way on the Seattle side of the lake. This doubles the number of trains on the main line in most of Seattle and all of the northern suburbs that the line reaches. Riders between the International District on the far southern end of downtown all the way up through the nose-bleeding northern stop of Lynwood will find that commuting life just got a little bit easier.

Sometimes people complain about Sound Transit. The agency has certainly been beset by delays, cost overruns (as with all infrastructure around the country), silly meddling by some of the politicians on the board, and cities using permits as a way to force bad and expensive choices by the agency. It’s easy to get frustrated, but we should also remember that our legislature could put reforms in place to fix some of the most glaring problems. Just as important, Sound Transit’s thousands of employees are hard-working public servants and their decades of work has done an immense amount to make it easier to get around our beautiful city.

Bravo! See you on the train!

You may recall that last February, Seattle passed an “excess compensation” tax to fund the city’s “social housing developer.” It was a payroll tax of 5% on compensation in excess of $1M, estimated to raise $50 million a year. Remember that this developer is a publicly owned agency that builds mixed-income, climate-friendly housing and keeps the rent stabilized. 

The council refused to put a funding option on the ballot after the agency was created by initiative, so House Our Neighbors rallied the people and got the excess compensation tax on the ballot. The council’s conservative Dems like Sara Nelson, Maritza Rivera and Bob Kettle were adamantly opposed. So they added an “option 1B,” deliberately designed to confuse the voters. It was “pro” social housing, but eliminated the mixed income elements, funded it with only $10 million, and took that $10 million away from housing for much poorer people. 

Amazon, Microsoft and the Chamber dumped nearly a half million dollars into a campaign of misinformation to get people to pick 1B, and our Mayor put his face all over that campaign. But House Our Neighbors had done the work, inoculating voters. I was lucky enough to get to host their press conference in front of Amazon, alongside leaders from House our Neighbors, the Labor Council and the Democratic party. 

Look, ma, I’ve got a microphone!

In the end, the vote wasn’t even close: almost 2 to 1 in favor.

We were assured this would usher in the collapse of Seattle. (Just like we were assured JumpStart—our only other progressive tax—would kill the golden goose. And the minimum wage. And various other labor protections).

Alas, Seattle is still here! We won the Superbowl, in fact. Here I am with my favorite hardcore fan at the parade. He’s obsessed with Cooper Kupp and Jackson Smith-Njigba if you are curious. 

Sam Darnold giving off camp counselor vibes. The parade was fantastic fun for fans and the team.

The tax raised $115M. That means compensation packages in the City of Seattle for people making over $1M a year totaled $2.3 billion, not counting the first million dollars for each person! That is $1.3 billion more in earnings than was even expected.

Interestingly, my post about this on Instagram/Tiktok is my most-watched post by a massive margin. People want this sort of tax all over the country. And they should get it!

Feel free to share it on Instagram (video won’t load here, but the link should work).

Tiktok:

@rondezvousseattle

Seattle’s millionaire tax is a wild success. #taxtherich @House Our Neighbors: Yes on 1A @Tech 4 Housing

Or youtube:

Please spread the good word (via this article or the videos) with others. We need to tax the rich and spend that money to make life affordable for everyday working people. As my friends in the labor movement taught me to say, “When we fight, we win!”

Once again, the Seattle Times editorial board is pretending that one of our state’s only tax-the-rich taxes (the JumpStart payroll tax) has hurt jobs. They are using this as a reason to oppose HB 1220, a statewide 5% payroll tax on most bigger companies.

For once, they tried to bring receipts, but they clearly didn’t try very hard.

In the article, they claimed that—since Seattle’s total employment is down slightly relative to Bellevue after the tax was created—the tax must be hurting us.

Had they put in more effort than a middle schooler playing with ChatGPT, they might have noticed that the small difference was due to a collapse in retail jobs during Covid (like every big city), from 82,000 to 32,000 jobs.

The Seattle tax only applies to incomes of $189,000 a year or more. How many people in retail do you know that earn $189k?

In fact, it turns out that the high paying services sector, which is where all those tech jobs are - have boomed since JumpStart. They have boomed much, much faster than Bellevue’s, both as a percentage and in absolute numbers.

If you have friends that are the newsletter reading type, please share this with them. If, like most folks, they are more into videos, here are the links to my short video addressing the same issue on YouTube, Instagram and Titkok.

Here it is if you want to see it.

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I was honored to return as a panelist on Bill Radke’s Week in Review yesterday, with Tim Keck (cofounder of the Onion, and the Stranger), and columnist Joni Balter. We discussed negotiating with ICE, government shutdowns & DHS funding, state legislation, Amazon’s big layoffs, the CHOP verdict, and more.

The YouTube didn’t have sound this week, so you’ll want to listen to it as a podcast, wherever you get you podcasts, or at KUOW/NPR’s online site. Please give it a listen!

I’ve also been commenting on ICE activity over on Instgram, Tiktok and YouTube. Please subscribe on any of these platforms you use, and stop and drop a like and comment on any videos you can. It’s a pain, but it helps boost the channels.

A Seattle police officer was caught on bodycam saying he wanted to “fuck up” some protestors. 

Last summer, when a far right group showed up to agitate against LGBTQ+ people in Capitol Hill, Seattle showed up to counter-demonstrate. The Seattle Police managing the event were mad that the counter-protestors weren’t willing to nicely stand behind a fence, separate from the hate rally. The police proceeded to use excessive force.

The officer was practically squealing with glee when he said:

Sound familiar? That sounds like the crap the ICE-militia would say. 

We are not safe when we are policed by people who think we are the enemy. 

Unfortunately, he’s unlikely to be fired, because reactionary people like Martiza Rivera and Bob Kettle on the Seattle City Council have championed the conservative crusade to prevent Seattle Police Officers from ever having any sort of meaningful accountability when they violate people’s civil rights. (To be fair, the conservatives aren’t aiming for violations of our rights. They are just choosing those violations because they think the lack of accountability will make the police union happy).

That is despite the history of repeated, notorious violations in Seattle, alongside scandals like the “laugh heard round the world” - where the second in charge of the police guild laughed about a police officer running over and killing a pedestrian in a crosswalk. 

Through the two labor contracts, our most conservative council members have made it so the police are practically untouchable. After the first contract, Seattle police became the highest paid in the state without getting any meaningful accountability in return. And even though we are not having trouble with recruiting anymore, they came back and gave SPD another HUGE raise, without any real tradeoffs in terms of accountability. 

This means all the city’s bargaining leverage is gone (which was clearly the point) and will remain absent for many years. So there is almost nothing that can be done at the city level to protect civilians from officers like the guy in the video.

In other words, politicians like Rivera and Kettle, as well as the now turfed-out Sara Nelson, have worked tirelessly to make sure a badge and a gun is a permission slip to violate civil rights with impunity. 

But the state legislature can thwart their reactionary efforts. 

The legislature needs to remove the ability of reactionary city leaders to pull this crap. All city power is granted from the legislature. Cities like Seattle have failed to use it wisely. So it needs to be taken back. 

City officials should not be able to bargain away the safety of our community members and any such bargaining to date should be null and void. Labor unions absolutely deserve the right to bargain over a broad array of matters pertaining to their own safety, compensation, and job experience. But at no point should our civil rights be on the table. 

The state needs to also form an independent oversight body, with full subpoena power over departments and the power to pursue serious remedies in the case of violations. It should be staffed by civil rights experts and when a case comes up, should include a panel of citizens from the impacted communities. 

Not only will this create more accountability, but once it is off the table, perhaps unions like SPOG can start behaving like some of their far more reasonable brethren around the state and stop acting like they are at war with our populace. 

Rep. Scott has proposed something similar to the JumpStart high-earners payroll tax we have here in Seattle, to raise $2.2B per year and shield us from ugly Trump cuts.

However, this one would be statewide and come with a rebate for Seattle companies already paying the local tax. There are a few differences, but the basic gist is similar.

Unfortunately, the Senate Majority leader seemed uninterested in the idea based on some comments he made on KUOW, because he thinks it would put Washington Jobs at risk..

I beg to differ. Here is a two minute video on why.

Please watch it to the end, share it with your friends, comment, and like it. (I know, irritating to ask, but these algorithms are still getting to know me). We need to get the word out.

On Tiktok (yes, I know -I’m like the least Tiktok-watching person ever)

@rondezvousseattle

Tax Washington corporations to protect us from Trump cuts.

And Instagram

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Thank you!

It’s a New Year in Seattle, with a New Mayor, and we are about to progress to the next stage of putting our twenty-year housing plan in place.

The Director of the Office of Planning and Community Development, Rico Quirindongo, announced that his office is aimed at getting the next stages of the plan in the hands of the city council. This includes the “centers” and “corridors” parts of the plan, now that the “neighborhood” phase is over.

Quirindongo noted that there are parts of these plans that could be better if tweaked in the future instead of now. Corridors, in particular, have come in for criticism, since they stuff all the housing on busy roads. However, it should be noted that in their original memo to the public, this office did suggest much more housing farther from busy roads. The Harrell administration simply squelched the idea.

Quirindongo’s suggestion, then, is to not significantly amend these plans (yet), which would require more environmental review and add lots more delay. The goal is to get them out the door as fast as we can, in order to increase housing construction and get compliant with state law. Then, he said, let’s come back, implement the state’s new Transit-Oriented Development law (hopefully earlier than the state deadline?!), and address corridors (include housing off the busy roads but still close to buses!), and make other adjustments as needed.

I think this is very much the right choice. We cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the fast + good, especially when there will be an opportunity to come back and tweak to get closer to the ideal form. 

Corridors alone are bad policy in the long run. But combined with the other off-the-shelf stuff like stacked flats and big neighborhood centers, and the aim to eventually increase housing a short walk from transit, they become part of better whole. And if we work to transform these roads into active transportation and green corridors — well then, they become amazing. And in the meantime they allow more housing to be built. 

With the Complete Communities Coalition having wrangled so much improvement out of the neighborhoods plan, and the council moving significantly left at the same time as we elected Mayor Wilson, the future for these matters is bright.

A correction upon reflection.

Which leaves me to correct myself from a previous piece. There I said the neighborhood stacked-flat legislation isn’t finished and should be revisited right away. I want to amend my timeline on that. I got new information and decided I was wrong.

Like corridors, neighborhoods should be improved after the other off-the-shelf stuff is done. Thanks to the work of the Complete Communities Coalition, the stacked-flat bonuses currently in place are perhaps the best in the country. That is something to celebrate! 

On certain pieces of property, stacked flats that qualify for bonuses may even outperform townhomes for builders, and so we’ll start to see more of this best-in-class building around our great city. 

That said, even though the legislation is best-in-class in the nation, I do believe that for wide-scale adoption, we will eventually need to do more. This stuff is hard!

But some of that “more” will come from the state. For instance, this year I’m working on a bill to reduce elevator costs, and I’ll be advocating (in my own name, not for any organization) along with others to change condo liability to make more buildings like stacked flat condos viable for homeownership. With some other code changes increasingly likely in the coming years, stacked flats will become much more viable. 

And by the time we’ve finished the other items on our to-do list in Seattle, we can boost the bonuses and remove the setbacks and we’ll be in stacked-flat nirvana!

Katie Wilson, the new Mayor of Seattle, is known for being a strong supporter of reformed policing. While critics have tried to paint her with the “defund” brush, her pre-campaign rhetoric, her campaign, and her early governing suggest nothing of the sort. In fact, her choice to retain the increasingly controversial Police Chief, Shaun Barnes, was a clear signal that she isn’t fixing for a fight with SPD. Mayor Mamdani of New York seems to be taking a similar approach.

However, a (totally predictable) rumor had already started–that Wilson had made it so cops are no longer allowed to arrest someone for doing drugs in public, ever. Soon KOMO was doing its Republican duty (remember the Jimmy Kimmel incident?) and “reporting” it as the truth. But it was not true. In fact, it appears from Publicola and Capitol Hill Seattle blog’s reporting, the KOMO report was just an amplification of loudmouth MAGA influencer Mike Solan, the head of the police union. 

Wilson released the following statement, which the publisher of the Capitol Hill Seattle blog delightfully referred to as a “spanking.”

She said “enforcement of the possession and public use ordinance in priority situations” will continue while “the LEAD framework and other effective responses to neighborhood hot spots are implemented with an appropriate level of urgency, sufficient resources, and a commitment to results.”

“You’ll know when I announce a policy change, because I’ll announce a policy change,” Wilson said.

A characteristically polite spanking, but a spanking nonetheless. 

The lie started with Chief Barnes (accidentally or purposely) misreading a memo from the prosecutor’s office and sending out his own confused memo. Then Solan whipped up the glee-filled media frenzy of fake claims. 

The Chief was already on shaky ground. Between this ridiculous episode and the recent lawsuit accusing him of ugly discrimination, I’d be minding my Ps and Qs if I were him. 

Fortunately, we don’t have to think about Mike Solan for much longer. He’s stepping down. Good frickin’ riddance! He’s been a cancer on Seattle politics and public safety. Now that he got Mayor Harrell to sign a contract that locks in tens of millions of wasted dollars per year and gets nothing in return, he can ride off into the MAGA influencer sunset with Brandi Kruse, Jonathan Choe and all the other right-wing grifters whose local public-safety agenda and claims are often indistinguishable from those of Bob Kettle, Maritza Rivera and (former!) Council President Sara Nelson. 

Dear reader,

Happy New Year to you and yours!

I want to invite you to a party I’m cohosting. It’s not a fundraiser (phew!).

To support the progressive agenda in Seattle, a group of the organizations that came together in this last election are throwing a party in North Seattle on January 12th.

We just want to say thanks, enjoy one another, and give you a view into the upcoming tipping-point races that will make or break the progressive agenda in Seattle. 

Please join me and please RSVP as soon as you can.

I really hope to see you and celebrate!