“Early 2025 seems like a good moment to pass the baton to the next leader of SDOT, an agency which now has the plans and the resources to maintain and modernize Seattle’s streets and bridges,” Spotts wrote. “I depart the Puget Sound with great enthusiasm for Seattle’s future, and profound gratitude for the opportunity to serve a dynamic, innovative and fast-growing city with unlimited potential.”

Hired from the Los Angeles Bureau of Street Services in mid-2022 due to his strong background in managing transportation projects, Spotts was tasked with landing the plane on Seattle’s $930 million “Move Seattle” transportation levy, expiring at the end of the year. A new $1.55 billion transportation levy takes its place next year following a landslide vote this November.

Since his appointment, Spotts has overseen a significant ramp-up in designing projects and getting them out the door in the final months of the Move Seattle Levy, which passed in 2015 but struggled in its initial years. Over recent months, the City saw a significant jump in the rate of awarded contracts, which include protected bike lane projects, bridge seismic upgrades, and transit improvements. When he entered the department in 2022, none of the four bike corridor projects planned to connect Southeast Seattle with the rest of the city had started construction, and the community was growing concerned that some would be abandoned. Over the past few months, all four have started construction.

“I can’t really even imagine a world where there isn’t this Levy to Move Seattle. It has to be finished. That’s the only thing I know in Seattle, is this imperative to finish and it’s really kind of remarkable that we’re here when we’re finishing it, and we’re finishing it well,” Spotts told the levy’s oversight committee earlier this month at their final meeting.

Spotts also oversaw a reset in SDOT’s traffic safety response, an effort that was not ultimately as successful as his project delivery ramp-up, given the City’s ambitious goal to eliminate traffic deaths by 2030. Traffic fatalities citywide have largely remained flat, and the department has remained focused on broad-based changes like restricting turn-on-red with all new traffic signal installations ahead of structural overhauls on the city’s most dangerous arterial corridors where fatalities most frequently occur.

In another move elevating safety, Spotts appointed Venu Nemani, the city’s traffic engineer, to the new role of chief safety officer and brought in a $25 million street safety grant from the US Department of Transportation. But so far, few of the projects from that 2023 grant award have begun rolling out.

Under Mayor Bruce Harrell, most of the projects that SDOT has been tasked with delivering have been initiatives from previous administrations, like wrapping up elements intended to compliment the revamp of the central waterfront, delivering the RapidRide G Line, and starting construction on the RapidRide J Line.

In contrast with his predecessor, Mayor Jenny Durkan, Harrell has engaged in less micromanaging of the department, but he also held back from offering much of a vision for the future of the city’s transportation system.

Durkan shelved RapidRide upgrades for four bus lines promised in Move Seattle, in part because their budgets had leaned too heavily on federal grants, which were not to be found under the first Trump Administration. The next transportation levy now faces similar federal funding headwinds under another Trump Administration, but isn’t as reliant on federal aid and made fewer specific promises that will get SDOT in trouble.

Starting this year, Spotts had to manage a brand new Seattle City Council, including a new transportation committee chair in District 1 Councilmember Rob Saka. Branding himself the “pothole king,” Saka has focused the committee on the core duties of the department, shying away from deep dives into most topic areas and, at one point, cutting off a planned presentation on transportation equity.

New councilmembers added their stamp to the levy renewal approved overwhelmingly by voters last month, but at its core it remained a Harrell Administration proposal that focuses on basic maintenance. The new levy also continues investment in bike lanes, transit upgrades, and improved public spaces — merging requests from all stakeholder sectors together into a levy that’s more focused on spot upgrades than transformative improvements.

Spotts’s legacy will be a public-facing focus on highlighting project delivery, with his social media account active on the weekends as he visited crews in the field pouring asphalt or adding bike lane barriers. But internal reforms implemented on his watch will also outlast his term, including the ways that the department has optimized the time of its internal delivery crews, which is often the most nimble and cost-effective way to deliver spot improvements.

“Crew delivery was sort of ad hoc and relationship based, and we’ve now completely systematized it,” Spotts told the oversight committee. “We created a new position in the design group who has a counterpart in the crew group, and they decide on the long-term schedule for that dry season. And we now publish internally this three-week look ahead, so that I and the other executives could see what work was done last week on crew delivery and what’s planned for the next three weeks. There was never that sort of transparency internally about what the crews were doing, and it wasn’t that centralized scheduling.”

Spotts is the latest SDOT Director to depart after less than four years. This is despite Bruce Harrell announcing his reelection campaign on Monday, with an intention to break the streak of one-term city leaders. It’s unclear at this point whether Harrell’s office will initiate another nationwide search or keep its sights closer to home. SDOT’s Senior Deputy Director, Francisca Stefan, is a likely choice to step in as an interim director, and would be a front-runner for the permanent position.

The next SDOT director will be tasked with scaling up hiring significantly to implement the Seattle Transportation Levy, with around 100 new positions set to be filled over the coming months to tackle new levy commitments, like building 250 blocks of new sidewalks in four years.

“I’m calling it the class of ’25,” Spotts said. “It’ll be like this large group who all came in at the same time, and so we’re all trying to figure out how to incorporate our culture into the onboarding of this new hundred people, and kind of imagining what does that feel like to have our community, our family, bigger, and that’s a very, very exciting place.”

Correction: An earlier version referred to Move Seattle as a $930 billion levy instead of $930 million. We regret the error.

The post Spotts to Leave SDOT Just as New Transportation Levy Gets Rolling first appeared on The Urbanist.

As 2024 winds to a close, Seattle’s current transportation levy is set to expire, wrapping up nine years of investments that made their mark on the city’s streets, sidewalks, and bridges. The Levy to Move Seattle, approved by voters in November of 2015, sustained transportation spending across three separate mayoral administrations. It was crafted under Mayor Ed Murray as a transformational set of investments intended to permanently change how the city gets around.

With voters last month resoundingly approving a renewal levy, simply named the Seattle Transportation Levy and on ballots as Proposition 1, that will ramp up spending in a number of areas, the Move Seattle era is set to recede into the background. The new levy, approximately 30% larger than Move Seattle after accounting for inflation, is set to ramp up spending on areas like sidewalk construction, roadway repaving, and bridge maintenance.

With over 66% of voters approving the renewal, Seattle residents seem largely satisfied with Move Seattle and want even more investments like the ones it enabled. But in some ways, the Seattle Transportation Levy represents a step back, prioritizing the “basics” of the city’s transportation system over investments that set Seattle up to be able to reduce emissions, create more vibrant communities, and get ahead of expected population growth.

This week, the Move Seattle levy’s official oversight committee met for the last time, after approximately 100 meetings spent reviewing project updates and analyzing levy spending. For nine years, the promises to the voters have been that committee’s north star. Next year, a new oversight body will be stood up for the renewal levy, with new members selected by Mayor Harrell and the City Council. That committee will be tasked with keeping a new set of commitments on track, but exactly how remains to be seen.

“We’re all taking that [vote] as a mandate to keep doing this work and keep transforming our street network,” Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) Director Greg Spotts told the committee. “Because it was an 83% turnout election, we got more than 260,000 votes. We think Proposition 1 got the most votes of any candidate or proposition ever in the City of Seattle.”

The $930 million Move Seattle Levy, leveraged with other city funding and outside grants, led to over 250 blocks of new sidewalks and pathways, over 3,400 added street trees, and repaving along a length of roadway that would stretch from Seattle to Spokane. SDOT added 68 miles of new bike facilities to the bike network over the past nine years, with dozens more under construction right now.

The Move Seattle Levy also enabled the construction of three brand new bridges: the reconstruction of the Fairview Avenue N bridge near South Lake Union, the last wooden bridge on an arterial street in the city, the S Lander Street railroad overpass in SoDo, and the John Lewis Memorial Pedestrian Bridge in Northgate. And it provided a local match for three new RapidRide transit upgrade projects, two of which are already open and serving riders: the RapidRide H Line, G Line, and J Line.

Over the past year in particular, the SDOT has ramped up work to deliver final levy commitments, capitalizing on a project delivery machine that really didn’t exist within the department at the beginning of the Move Seattle era. So far in 2024, the city has awarded approximately 30 different construction contracts — more than double its normal rate of around 12 per year.

But for all its accomplishments, Move Seattle will also be remembered as a levy that fell short in many areas, which likely paved the way for a renewal that is much less ambitious in its scope.

Move Seattle promised seven total RapidRide lines, not three, banking on anticipated federal funding that never materialized. It promised West Seattle residents a transformed Fauntleroy Boulevard as an entrance to the entire peninsula, with protected bike lanes and a tree-lined median — a project that was put on hold by Mayor Jenny Durkan in 2018 as Sound Transit began eyeing Fauntleroy as a potential light rail corridor. Ultimately, Sound Transit selected a tunnel option as its preferred West Seattle Link alternative, greatly reducing any conflicts with Fauntleroy Way.

Move Seattle promised a grand total of 110 miles of bike facilities: a number that proved unattainable with the funding provided in the levy and political obstacles along the way.

Without a very intentional effort in 2019 to allocate some of the proceeds from a surplus City property in South Lake Union, spearheaded by Councilmember Mike O’Brien, the Move Seattle levy would have been on track to leave Southeast Seattle without any new bike connection to the rest of the city, despite millions in spending. With that seed funding, and a clear resolution from the City Council giving direction on a path forward, one of the projects is now open along MLK Jr Way S, and another three projects are under construction.

The new Seattle Transportation Levy is much less ambitious in its vision for expanding the bike network, focusing instead on a handful of key connections and upgrading and maintaining the bike infrastructure that was built during Move Seattle. When it comes to transit investments, it rests on Move Seattle’s laurels as well — with just one new RapidRide planned on top of the Move Seattle-funded J Line, set to open in 2027. The Seattle Transportation Levy promises 160 bus projects, with few requirements about what those improvements could entail: bus stop upgrades, bus lanes, or nearby pedestrian improvements all qualify.

With Seattle’s megaprojects like the waterfront revamp wrapping up, and the light visible at the end of the tunnel on the 520 bridge replacement, the era of setting up transformative investments is over, and the era of spot improvements is here.

With Move Seattle’s ambitious and fairly narrowly tailored targets now in the past, Seattle’s leaders do now have more flexibility around how to guide transportation spending. That could come with positives and negatives, but there are early signs that the city is heading into an time of intense micromanagement. At its last meeting, the Move Seattle Levy Oversight Committee (LOC) approved a letter sounding the alarm about a proviso, approved by the City Council during November budget deliberations, that puts a hold on roughly half of the new levy’s proceeds in 2025 until the Council approves a detailed spending plan outlining how SDOT will use the funding.

“[T]he LOC sees the potential for this proviso to be used in bad faith as its wording makes it possible for Councilmembers to hold levy funds hostage until they are spent on specific projects Councilmembers may see as a priority,” the letter states. “SDOT developed the [Seattle Transportation Plan] that is used to guide their work, including annual spending plans, with significant community input, leading to strong safety, equity, and mobility filters which guide how SDOT does project development work. It is important for community transparency, accountability, and fiscal responsibility that we respect the processes that went into developing these community plans.”

The Seattle City Council unanimously approved the Seattle Transportation Plan earlier this year, but without much time actually processing what the plan actually represents, and with few substantive amendments. The STP includes a lot of transformational projects, but both the Harrell Administration and the City Council haven’t shown much interest in actually pursuing them. The Seattle Streetcar system, sitting in limbo, is emblematic but far from the only example.

There are also signs that transportation spending is set to get increasingly Balkanized. As part of the 2025-2026 budget, the City Council approved a new program setting aside $1 million for each of the seven district councilmembers to utilize within their districts, with no apparent requirements around justifying those investments with any data or desired outcomes.

So far, a majority of the council has shown extreme deference to the priorities of other district councilmembers. The $2 million earmark from transportation chair Rob Saka requiring SDOT to completely reconfigure the already-completed RapidRide H project near a preschool with personal ties to his own family an extreme example. How exactly the Council will treat any draft spending plan put in front of them will be something to watch.

As the new levy’s investments start to take shape, Move Seattle is set to become yesterday’s news even as the trees, sidewalks, and asphalt that it paid for will remain behind long after the levy expires. For all its faults and for all the stumbles that the city made over the past nine years, it did encapsulate a vision for transforming the city’s transportation system. Now that it’s gone, where the city is headed next remains up in the air.

The post The Levy to Move Seattle Era Draws to a Close first appeared on The Urbanist.

With 66.8% of voters giving the go-ahead as of election night, Prop 1’s passage is all but assured. Budget writers can now get to work preparing the City budget for an additional $371 million in transportation spending over the next two years, funded via property tax revenues. SDOT said that 71 positions that it was holding vacant can now be filled, in addition to 72 new positions in 2025 and another 44 in 2026.

Prop 1’s wide margin on election night bolsters the arguments made by transportation advocates that a larger, more ambitious levy would have also had success at the ballot box. Polling commissioned by the Northwest Progressive Institute this spring showed majority support for a $1.9 billion levy that included more projects.

However, the City Council rejected a push by Councilmember Tammy Morales to increase the levy’s amount modestly to $1.7 billion, which was in large part due to opposition from the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce.

As national election results continued to point to an overall rightward shift in the electorate, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell took a victory lap in a statement released Tuesday evening.

“Tonight’s results demonstrate that Seattle voters are committed to advancing a safer transportation system that benefits all,” Harrell’s said. “The Transportation Levy represents our steadfast dedication to a One Seattle vision, prioritizing the creation of a safer, more reliable, and better connected transportation network.”

Harrell hinted that the levy would work hand-in-hand with his comprehensive plan update. The transportation element for that update was approved earlier this year, but the housing and land use element remain in process after numerous delays and second guessing.

“We worked diligently with community members and the City Council to develop a comprehensive plan that emphasizes safer streets, dependable transit and freight movement, and improved connections across Seattle’s neighborhoods to schools and light rail,” Harrell added. “This levy will facilitate bridge upgrades, smoother roads, additional sidewalks, enhanced transit connections, and much more, all designed to support those who live, work, and play in Seattle.”

After a significant period of lag between the passage of the 2015’s transportation levy and SDOT becoming fully staffed to handle delivery of its expanded portfolio of promised projects, the department seems to be on much firmer footing now. The project delivery machine focused on finishing strong with those prior promises can now turn its attention to what comes next.

However, the same problem of multimodal federal grants evaporating under a Trump Administration, which dogged Move Seattle projects, has also emerged for its successor due to Trump’s apparent victory, though perhaps to a lesser degree. This time around, levy backers promised fewer specific deliverables (especially around transit and bike upgrades) and counted less on federal grants to meet pledges. Still, a dearth of federal grants could limit how far SDOT is able to stretch and leverage levy investments.

Initial repaving projects that SDOT has in the pipeline include East Marginal Way S in Georgetown, Roosevelt Way NE in Pinehurst, Elliott and Western Avenues in Belltown. A rebuild of Rainier Avenue between S Jackson Street and S Walden Street in Mount Baker is also on the initial project list, as is a major segment of Beacon Avenue S through Beacon Hill. Those two projects will be major undertakings, with the full scope of Vision Zero and transit improvements planned as a part of the maintenance work still unknown.

With a federal funding landscape that’s set to see seismic shifts in the coming years, bundling improvements for projects like RapidRide R along Rainier Avenue becomes even more important.

As for the 250 blocks of new sidewalks, the City is focusing on areas around transit like Mount Baker, Rainier Beach, Northgate, Bitter Lake, and around the planned Graham Street light rail station. But SDOT has planned community walks continuing through early 2025 before it will finalize full project lists.

The levy’s passage will also resurrect a long-dormant plan to create a “curbless” street along Occidental Avenue S in South Pioneer Square near Lumen Field, set to be one of the city’s signature projects around the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup. Funding will also be earmarked for upgrades to Third Avenue, a priority of the Downtown Seattle Association.

Even after a slew of amendments to Prop 1 by the Seattle City Council, the levy’s eight-year spend plan primarily reflects the priorities of the Harrell Administration. But amendments poised for adoption later this month seek to impose a level of control over spending plans that is fairly unprecedented when it comes to transportation levies in Seattle.

One amendment, jointly sponsored by transportation chair Rob Saka and budget chair Dan Strauss, would impose a proviso, or hold, on $89 million in levy dollars until a future council action releases them. “The intent of this proviso is to have SDOT proactively engage the Council in the development of detailed spending plans for Transportation Levy programs,” budget documents note.

Another amendment, also put forward by Saka and Strauss, would resurrect a program initially proposed by Mayor Harrell that allows Councilmembers to select transportation projects to fund within their own districts. During levy negotiations this summer, the Council actually voted to remove this program in favor of other spending priorities. Over a two-year period, $1 million per year would be earmarked for the seven district Councilmembers to distribute as they see fit, but how involved the SDOT would be in vetting these projects is not clear. The two at-large Councilmembers who do not represent districts would not be able to participate in this program under the proposal.

Separate from that program, Saka has also proposed to earmark $2 million in spending — diverting money away from other projects — to modify a stretch of Delridge Way SW to allow drivers to turn left across a protected bike lane into a preschool parking lot used by himself and his family.

Council is set to discuss additional amendments to the budget next week. So far, it’s clear that this Council wants to be very hands-on when it comes to shaping the spending that Prop 1’s passage will enable.

With a wide array of takeaways from other election results Tuesday, Prop 1’s passage seems to show that transportation spending in Seattle is a consensus position. Next will be the hard part of actually implementing the projects that will keep Seattle residents safe and the city moving.

The post Seattle Voters Approve $1.55 Billion Transportation Levy first appeared on The Urbanist.

In 2006, when Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels proposed a dedicated transportation levy to bolster the city’s street improvement fund, the new levy’s timeframe was initially set at a full two decades. The Nickels administration’s full funding package would have raised $1.8 billion over its lifetime, taking a sizable bite out of the city’s transportation maintenance backlog and allowing Seattle to invest in needed upgrades.

The 2006 vote came just five years after Tim Eyman’s I-747 had instituted a 1% property tax cap that was already starting to constrict city revenues — a problem that has only gotten worse over time. To overcome the cap, Nickel’s funding package augmented the property tax levy with a commercial parking tax and a $25 head tax on employers.

Nickels’ proposal met significant opposition, including from Eyman himself, who despite being a Mukilteo resident started to mount a full-throated opposition campaign. Less than a decade after voters had rejected a $90 million bond issue to repair city streets in 1997, the proposal was framed as a “forever tax.” The Seattle City Council folded and proposed a $360 million, nine-year levy instead. The council’s alternative raised 25% less per year than Nickels had proposed and covered a much shorter span.

However, that compromise measure was too aggressive for the Seattle Times Editorial Board, which recommended voters reject the ballot measure, anyway.

“The new, smaller version is better, but not by enough,” the board wrote days before the levy was on the ballot that November. “It is still laden with crosswalks, bike lanes, traffic circles, curb bulbs, stairways, road signs, tree planting, tree trimming and a renovation of King Street Station. We are in favor of most of these things, but many of them are, in the words of the Washington Policy Center’s critical report, ‘routine public work,'” they said, citing a conservative thinktank’s assessment of Seattle’s transportation funding situation.

Reading that editorial now, you’d be forgiven if you thought you were in the present day, reading the Seattle Times editorial board’s recommendation on the eight-year, $1.55 billion transportation levy before Seattle voters this November. In fact, the Times’ editorial board has never supported a transportation levy, insisting in 2006, 2015, and now in 2024 that while the city undoubtedly has immense transportation needs, this particular package isn’t the right way to make progress on them.

In contrast, The Urbanist elections committee (on which I’ve served since 2016) endorsed the Move Seattle Levy in 2015 and 2024’s Proposition 1. “[Prop 1] investments are critical, and without any transportation levy at all, the amount of funding available for new pedestrian and bike infrastructure in Seattle will plummet,” we wrote in our “yes” on Seattle Proposition 1 endorsement post earlier this month.

This year, the Seattle Times editorial board is taking a bold stance since the levy was crafted by a mayor and city council they overwhelmingly endorsed. Seven of nine councilmembers won the editorial board’s nod, most of them just last year. The Seattle City Council sent the levy proposal to voters in a unanimous vote earlier this year. But for all appearances it doesn’t seem to matter what the composition of city council is, nor who is mayor — the Times’ editorial board has never met a transportation levy it likes.

What’s the right way to fund Seattle’s titanic transportation needs? The board never comes out and says, instead dwelling on a fuzzy Goldilocks’ problem every vote. The board insists that the levy is both too big and too small to appeal to voters. This year’s Proposition 1 is no different.

This year, the board’s primary objection seems to be that the levy doesn’t go far enough in funding road and bridge maintenance, citing the fact that “only” $397 million — over 25% of the levy — would go toward arterial roadway repair. That amount is more than the entire 2006 levy, with another $221 million set to be spent on bridges. There the editorial gets its facts wrong, saying that the levy would spend just $127 million on bridge repairs, ignoring another $71 million in structural upgrades to Seattle’s movable bridges, as well as funds to advance bridge replacement projects into design so they’re eligible for federal grants.

The Times relies on the “expertise” of former transportation committee chair Alex Pedersen when it comes to bridge maintenance, who coincidentally represents the levy’s only substantive opposition and spent his four years on City Council trying to water down multimodal transportation projects.

When it comes to spending priorities, it sounds like the Times editorial board came to the same conclusion that many transportation advocates did early on — that a larger transportation levy is likely the only way to actually achieve many of the city’s goals around transportation. And yet an overall anti-tax attitude means they can’t bring themselves to support that.

At the end of the day, the main objection to Prop 1 voiced by the board is the levy’s $133 million category for protected bike lanes and bike lane upgrades, an amount that adds up to less than 10% of the levy. In 2015, the board was upset that spending on traffic signals was set at $13 million — now that Seattle is proposing to spend $100 million on traffic signals, the board is mad that bike spending is more.

Last year, in the face of record traffic fatalities on Washington’s roadways, the same editorial board called on the state legislature to take bold action. “Engineering of roadways, too, has a role to play,” they wrote last December. “Smarter street designs can help slow car speeds and increase the safety of bicyclists and pedestrians, whose death toll has tripled in the state over the last decade. Those are worthwhile improvements but they’ll take time when action is needed now.”

Now, they oppose those long-term investments in safe infrastructure, painting them as items to placate an interest group, rather than broadly popular investments that Seattleites both want and need to achieve broader city goals.

Ultimately, the board has exhausted its credibility in this area through its knee-jerk opposition in the past. In 2015, the board urged voters to reject the current $930 million Levy to Move Seattle, citing many of the same complaints.

“Move Seattle is a grab-bag of diffuse spending, buttering money around in seven-figure chunks that fit City Hall’s urbanist-at-all-costs agenda, not the lived experience of city residents,” they wrote. “The biggest investment, $250 million for maintenance and spot repair, barely puts a dent in the city’s nearly $2 billion maintenance backlog.”

Seattle voters by and large ignored that recommendation, with a 17-point margin of approval for that 2015 levy when all votes were counted, more than double the margin that Bridging the Gap received in 2006.

By most metrics, Move Seattle has been a success, even after facing numerous headwinds, such as a pandemic and federal grants drying up during the Trump administration. Those challenges prompted a course correction to adjust delivery targets downward when budget projections proved a bit too rosy. The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) has been able to achieve a full 27 out of the 30 delivery categories promised to voters.

The ambitious targets that Move Seattle set also led to additional investments from other funding sources to shore up performance where things were coming in short, leading to additional projects than the city would have seen otherwise.

In short, the Move Seattle Levy has been instrumental to improving mobility in Seattle, covering 30% of SDOT’s budget. Without it, the city would be much worse off.

Proposition 1, dubbed the Keep Seattle Moving measure by supporters, builds on that legacy.

If Prop 1 is approved by voters, SDOT is set to immediately get to work to implement projects, with funding secured to be able to fill 71 positions that are currently vacant and another 116 positions in the next two years. 40% of those new hires will support pedestrian safety and Vision Zero projects, according to a presentation the department shared with the city council last week. Planned 2025 projects include upgrades across the entire city, including work to hit the ambitious goal of building 250 blocks of new sidewalks in five years.

If Prop 1 is not approved, funding for arterial repaving will drop by 52%, SDOT will have to eliminate an entire shift from its traffic operations center, and funding for bike infrastructure would drop by 75%. That’s probably fine with the Times editorial board, but it will mean worse mobility for Seattleites.

If the Times succeeds in blocking the levy this year, the City’s second attempt to renew it is very likely to be slimmer and include less infrastructure that a growing city needs in the 21st Century. Failure at this year’s ballot box isn’t likely to prompt bolder thinking, especially from this current mayor and council, who will still be holding the reins next year.

When filling out their ballots, voters should keep in mind that if the Seattle Times editorial board had been listened to, Seattle would be even further behind than it is now.

The post The Seattle Times’ Credibility on Transportation Levies Has Run Out first appeared on The Urbanist.

At an event in Beacon Hill Monday night, Mayor Bruce Harrell joined the levy’s core supporters for a formal kickoff as the independent campaign staff prepare for the final eight weeks before the November 5th election.

Harrell’s levy proposal, lightly amended by the city council, focuses heavily on core transportation maintenance spending, with over a third of levy dollars earmarked for road and bridge maintenance, but it also includes funding to build 320 blocks of sidewalks, add traffic safety improvements, and expand the city’s bike network across key connections.

Praising the advocacy community for pushing to include their priorities in the levy’s spending breakdown, Harrell then extended that praise to the levy’s planned investments.

“Let me make something very clear, that our country was built on advocacy. Our labor movement was built on advocacy. Our fight against climate change is based on advocacy. You are supposed to advocate for that which you are passionate about. This investment, it is bold because we have bold leadership, community leadership in the city,” Harrell told attendees. “This levy represents everything that is good about this city, so the dollar breakdown is irrelevant when we are talking about safety, climate change, resilience, bridges, potholes, roads, bike lanes, everything we could do. It represents the best of the best.”

Many of Seattle’s transportation advocacy organizations had initially pushed for the City to go much bigger than a $1.55 billion levy, which will only outpace monetary inflation by around 30%. With a majority of respondents in a Northwest Progressive Institute poll earlier this year saying they’d support a $1.9 billion levy, there was a considerable push to include more sidewalk funding, transit upgrades, and safety improvements in the final levy. But in the end, an amendment from Councilmember Tammy Morales to increase the total to $1.7 billion only served as a counterpoint to galvanize business support around the $1.55 billion number.

But despite a clear preference to go bigger, many transportation advocacy groups have now backed the smaller compromise version, including Seattle Neighborhood Greenways, the Transit Riders Union, and Cascade Bicycle Club. These groups are likely betting that rejecting a levy in November would lead to a smaller levy in the future, not a larger one — not to mention a fiscal cliff for the Seattle Department of Transportation, which gets 30% of its funding from the Move Seattle Levy, which expires at year’s end.

“The decision to endorse the 2024 levy comes on the heels of months of advocacy to increase investments for walking, biking, and connections to transit. While the proposed levy doesn’t fully rise to meet the city’s identified needs, the $1.55 billion 2024 transportation levy headed to voters this November is a balanced compromise and deserves your vote,” the Seattle Neighborhood Greenways endorsement of the levy said.

Seattle Greenways’ endorsement noted that this levy is poised to be more flexible in its priorities than 2015’s Move Seattle Levy, offering opportunities for advocates.

“Flexibility is good, but it means there will be a critical role for ongoing advocacy to hold the city accountable to its goals around climate, equity, accessibility, and safety,” Seattle Greenways wrote. “If we are vigilant and fight for these critical outcomes, the Seattle Transportation Plan and this funding levy could make Seattle one of the best cities to walk, bike, and take transit in the United States. But we will need your continued engagement to help push our city to achieve its highest potential.”

Seattle’s business community also appears fully on board, with the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce voting to endorse in August. “We care about potholes, we care about bridges, we care about access to transit: these are all very important investments for the business community,” Lars Erickson, the Chamber’s senior vice president, said Monday. “We support strategic investments in freight. It’s important for packages to get delivered to your homes, good for businesses to get the deliveries they need on time. We support the funding to improve Third Avenue, in particular, and in other parts of downtown, before hundreds of thousands of people descend on Seattle for the 2026 FIFA World Cup.”

During Council deliberations, the Chamber pushed for the amount allocated to freight investments to be beefed up, aligning with recommendations from the Seattle Freight Advisory Board. With several high-profile freight projects including the S Lander Street overpass and E Marginal Way S street rebuild in the soon-to-expire levy, the new levy proposal initially didn’t include much freight spending, but was revised to bring the total amount of spending up to $45 million.

On Tuesday, the Port of Seattle Commission also voted to endorse the levy, in a 3-0 vote, with the freight funding undoubtedly playing a major role. Commissioners Hamdi Mohamed and Sam Cho, both City of Seattle employees, recused themselves from the discussion and vote.

“The thing that I would say about this levy that I really appreciate is it focuses on infrastructure for residents and businesses,” Commissioner Ryan Calkins said. “Oftentimes, over the last couple of generations, a lot of the improvements we made to our transportation corridors has been to accommodate long commuters, and I’m really grateful that we’re taking an opportunity to add to that kind of funding, funding that supports pedestrians and bikers, and last mile for freight that’s coming from our ports to our distribution centers.”

As for opposition to the levy, former Councilmember Alex Pedersen has so far emerged as the primary surrogate urging a no note. An opponent of 2015’s Move Seattle Levy as well, Pedersen served four years on the council as transportation committee chair but departed before work started on this renewal. In an email sent to his mailing list that railed against the proposal, Pedersen pushed for the city to instead adopt transportation impact fees, a tax on new housing construction that he lobbied for during his time on council. He also targeted bicycle safety spending — 8.5% of expected total levy spending — as an egregious earmark.

“The Prop 1 tax is inequitable and unfair because it squanders your money on expensive pet projects for interest groups like bicycling clubs,” Pedersen wrote.

The Keep Seattle Moving! campaign appears to be betting that most Seattle residents find fearmongering about scary bike lanes tiresome and dated. While many urbanists would likely support a larger levy, business groups and mobility advocates have seemed to found agreement that approving Prop 1 represents the best path forward to creating a more equitable, safe, and sustainable transportation system in Seattle.

The post ‘Keep Seattle Moving’ Levy Campaign Kicks Off first appeared on The Urbanist.

The new levy includes few signature, big-ticket projects, unlike the Move Seattle Levy, which included the John Lewis Memorial Pedestrian Bridge in Northgate, the Lander Street Bridge in SoDo, an overhaul of Madison Street via the RapidRide G Line, and other splashy items. Instead, the package focuses transportation spending toward the city’s significant infrastructure maintenance backlog, which has continued to grow during the Move Seattle era, while leaving some of the decisions around how to tackle major unfunded infrastructure projects on the city’s books for another year or another decade.

In a city hall signing ceremony Wednesday morning, Mayor Bruce Harrell framed this levy as representing an all-of-the-above approach to transportation in Seattle.

“Some people have choices of how they get around, and some people do not,” Harrell said. “Our levy was designed to meet Seattle’s diverse community neighborhoods, and understand that we are living, fortunately, in a world where we have different modes of travel, and we want input from all communities and neighborhoods.”

Rob Saka, chair of the city council’s transportation committee who shepherded the bill toward yesterday’s vote, echoed that theme as well: “We need to move beyond those stages where we’re pitting one mode against another mode and one person’s choice against another person’s choice. This transportation package isn’t about the Balkanization of our roads, or our people, or our choices. It’s about all of us coming together, as evidenced here today.”

Notably, city leaders were joined by representatives of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, MLK Labor Council, and Cascade Bicycle Club, but not from Seattle Neighborhood Greenways, Disability Rights Washington, or most of the other groups that had pushed for the city to go big when it comes to transportation spending — and who helped campaign for Move Seattle in 2015.

Transportation Choices Coalition (TCC), which spearheaded the Move Seattle campaign, announced the start of the campaign to pass the levy renewal shortly after the signing. “The campaign to support the levy, Keep Seattle Moving, has launched,” TCC wrote. “It will mobilize a coalition of businesses, labor, advocacy organizations, and Seattle voters to get the levy passed in November.”

The group’s press release touted “$160.5 million to Vision Zero, Safe Routes to School, and neighborhood safety projects; $151 million to improve transit corridors and connections; and $133.5 million for bicycle safety” as wins for safe streets advocates.

“No matter who you are, this levy will make it safer and easier for you to get around Seattle,” said Kirk Hovenkotter, TCC’s executive director, in a statement. “Voters will soon have the opportunity to make a generational investment in our city’s transportation future.”

Final amendments

During the City Council’s long deliberative process, which began in early May, most of the attention was focused on a small group of amendments highlighted by a push to increase funding for new sidewalks, seeking to address the significant number of gaps in the pedestrian network. Additionally, amendments funded freight improvements requested by business groups and the broadly popular Safe Routes to Schools program. Revisions also added $15 million for downtown activation and upgrades along Third Avenue, $8 million for “low pollution neighborhoods,” and $3 million for structural repairs to Pioneer Square streets.

A last minute amendment by Councilmember Tammy Morales sought to increase the total levy amount by $150 million, but was rejected by her colleagues over sticker shock concerns and deference to property owners. While the council was on board with increasing the total amount proposed by Mayor Harrell by a more incremental $100 million, or $12.5 million a year, they clearly did not want to stray too far from the initial package that Harrell put forward, especially without the blessing of the chamber of commerce, which opposed Morales’s amendment.

One final amendment was approved Tuesday. Put forward by Councilmember Dan Strauss and approved 6-3, it will allocate $20 million to building a bike trail along NW Market Street and Leary Way NW, completing the Missing Link of the Burke-Gilman trail in a way that apparently appeases industrial business owners, who have been blocking a planned trail along Shilshole Avenue NW for decades. That funding was diverted from arterial road maintenance, money that had been set aside to match for outside grant opportunities. Strauss’s gambit had originally failed in committee, along with a plan to divert sidewalk funding to an overhaul of Ballard Avenue’s cafe street.

While there are fewer detailed project lists than voters saw nine years ago with Move Seattle, the guardrails around transportation spending are actually more restrictive. Move Seattle saw three big “buckets” of spending priorities — safe routes, “congestion relief,” and maintenance, and only those overarching categories had their spending levels set by the ordinance the voters ultimately approved. The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT), in coordination with the Mayor’s Office, could move funding around as long as they did not change those overarching totals by more than 10% and City leaders checked in with the levy’s oversight board.

This levy goes further and sets spending levels for each individual category of spending. For example, the measure sets aside $66.5 million to be spent on People Streets and Public Spaces, and if SDOT can’t spend that amount — outside of a 10% margin — the city council will have to approve a change by a supermajority vote of at least seven of nine councilmembers. Other stipulations include at least $32 million for electric vehicle charging infrastructure, $111 million for new sidewalks, and $34 million for repair of existing sidewalks.

The transportation levy is a huge piece of Seattle’s budget; Move Seattle funds about 30% of SDOT’s budget. As a result, the ordinance commitments approved this week are likely to be the north star for city transportation investments through 2032. Those commitments are as follows:

“Back to basics” maintenance projects

• 15 corridor-wide repaving projects
• Pavement spot repair projects at 400 locations
• Repainting of 3,600 crosswalks
• 34,000 spot repairs to sidewalks
• Contributions for at least 10,000 ADA-accessible curb ramps
• Funding for city’s first preventative bridge maintenance program
• Planning work for replacement of the north segment of the Elliott Bay seawall and five other bridge structures: the 1st Ave S and 4th Ave S rail bridges in SoDo, the W Dravus Street rail bridge, the NE 45th Street viaduct, and the Magnolia Bridge.

Safety-focused investments

• 12 corridor-wide safety redesigns
• “Responsive safety projects” at 70 high-collision locations
• Traffic calming measures implemented on 50 corridors citywide
• Contributions to at least 70 projects that “improve safety and fund safety education programs” at schools
• 10 new traffic signals
• A $30 million contribution to a full revamp of Seattle’s most dangerous state highway, Aurora Avenue N, to match a planned $50 million investment from the state legislature
• 350 blocks of new sidewalks, with at least 250 required to be completed or under construction by 2029

Transit projects

• 160 individual projects to improve bus reliability, access, equity, and safety, with a focus on “performance pinch points affecting multiple routes”
• Corridor-wide improvements to Rainier Avenue S (RapidRide R), Beacon Avenue S, Aurora Avenue N, and Denny Way/E Olive Way.
• $9 million for transit rider security programs, either city-implemented or those that have been created by King County Metro or Sound Transit
• Light rail access improvements, including along N 130th Street, S Henderson Street, and at Judkins Park Station.

Seattle officials have eschewed the broad “RapidRide+” bus rapid transit promises of the Move Seattle Levy, which didn’t pan out so well due to a number of unforeseen obstacles, including a transit-averse Trump administration and a global pandemic. While Move Seattle campaign materials promised the addition of seven RapidRide lines by 2024, only one — the H Line — has been delivered thus far, with the long-delayed G Line about to finally open on September 14. Beyond the delays, three RapidRide lines pledged in Move Seattle were fully downgraded from RapidRide status, and it’s fallen upon the new levy to deliver the earlier promises for the R Line, upgrading Route 7.

The more cautious approach may be warranted given the overpromising of the earlier levy, but the lack of well-defined signature projects could also make it harder to inspire enthusiasm among transit advocates.

Now that the ordinance is on its way to King County Elections, the work will be turned over to an independent campaign to bolster public support for the levy. If past performance is any indication, those campaigners will face a favorable environment. Most recent levies in Seattle have passed by healthy margins, and the Move Seattle levy was approved in 2015 by 17 points, despite a concerted opposition effort, which seems unlikely to materialize this year.

Multiple recent polls have shown the transportation levy to be well above water with Seattle voters, even if a larger package had been put forward.

The post Seattle Sends $1.55 Billion Transportation Levy to the November Ballot first appeared on The Urbanist.

The final size of Seattle’s next transportation levy was set Tuesday by a Seattle City Council committee, with nearly all councilmembers supporting a $1.55 billion package, but all but two rejecting the idea of going any further. Major additional amendments aren’t expected at next week’s final vote as the proposal heads toward a November vote, following two months of council deliberations to arrive at this point.

This proposed property tax levy represents the first major piece of legislation that this city council, made up of six brand new members, has accomplished to date. By and large, the bulk of the levy looks like it did in May when Mayor Bruce Harrell transmitted a $1.45 billion levy to the council for consideration.

Following the mayor’s blueprint, $423 million would be spent on repaving projects across the city, and another $221 million to maintain and upgrade the city’s bridges $100 million would go to signal upgrades, and $66 million to “people streets and public spaces,” a new category of spending that includes both pedestrian lighting and wayfinding but also placemaking. $70 million will go toward Vision Zero funding, an amount that was left untouched by council despite rising traffic fatalities and serious injuries across the city.

The biggest area where the council collectively made its mark is around sidewalk funding. A combined $145 million will go toward new sidewalks and the repair of existing ones, an increase of over 75% compared to the amount initially proposed by the Mayor. The baseline commitment to expand Seattle’s sidewalk network — which is missing over 18,000 blocks or 27% of the city’s total — now stands at 350 blocks through 2032, though this does represent a walk back of an earlier commitment to build 500 blocks within five years, a number that the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) contended was impossible to achieve given the amount allocated and existing constraints in project delivery.

Freight and industrial business advocates also saw a victory with an addition of $20 million in funding, nearly doubling the amount to be spent on projects that better enable the movement of trucks and improve access to the city’s industrial zones. That was a primary public request from the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, along with asking for the size of the levy to stay modest.

For months, transportation safety advocacy groups have been urging the city to go bigger, pointing to both internal and independent polling that showed strong support for a levy that makes more investments in areas. But the council rejected an amendment Tuesday, proposed by Councilmember Tammy Morales, that would have added an additional $150 million, or just under $20 million per year, to specifically fund projects the entire council had identified as priorities without having to subtract funding from somewhere else. But in the end, only Cathy Moore joined Morales in supporting that amendment, with Dan Strauss abstaining from the vote.

Morales started remarks on her amendment by reading the names of people who have been killed in traffic violence so far this year, a list that did not yet include the name of a motorcycle rider who did not survive a crash on Aurora Avenue late Monday night.

“We can’t afford to wait to be bold in our vision of what Seattle streets could look like. Lives are quite literally depending on it every day,” Morales said. “I know this is a big ask. I think we’ve all demonstrated our commitment to keeping our neighbors safe, and I ask for your support on this amendment.”

But in arguing against the increase, many councilmembers said that going any further would push the tax burden into the realm of the unaffordable, even as Morales’s amendment would have only increased the amount due yearly for the owner of a median-value home in Seattle by $48. Overall, the owner of a median-valued Seattle home assessed at $804,000 would pay an estimated $520 a year under the $1.55 billion levy.

Opponents also argued that a $1.7 billion levy would face stronger headwinds in November, despite the favorable polling. The levy will be sharing the ballot with high profile elections including U.S. President, when turnout is traditionally at its highest. In 2015, the last transportation levy, dubbed Move Seattle, faced an off-year ballot and a concerted opposition campaign and prevailed by more than 17 points.

Council President Sara Nelson argued that public polling that showed strong support did not take into account the cumulative impact of increased property tax levies and other cost increases, suggesting Seattleites are not aware of their own tax burden. Seattle voters have not rejected a citywide tax levy in decades.

“These polls, whenever they’re put before the voters, or likely voters, no matter what the ballot measure, be it housing or parks or transportation, never really tells never really tells the voters how much they’re already paying in an aggregate based on the cumulative increase of each of our levies,” Nelson said. “My vote is not a vote against Vision Zero, against safety, clearly that is important.”

The proposal heading to next week’s final vote does include a number of amendments suggested by councilmembers, most of which were approved with one single vote in which there was little discussion about individual elements. One amendment diverted $500,000 from the Mayor’s proposed budget for protected bike lanes to fund a study on potential lids over I-5 in the U District and around N 130th Street Station. Councilmember priorities like a neighborhood greenway on 6th Avenue NW (Strauss), an intersection upgrade at Roosevelt Way N and N 137th Street (Moore), protected bike lanes on 12th Avenue S (Hollingsworth), and a Vision Zero project on Rainier Avenue S (Morales) were all included. However, with a few exceptions, the amendments mostly just earmarked existing funds for specific projects.

Saka even went so far as to amend the levy to include a new protected bike lane in his West Seattle district to be named after Steve Hulsman, a cyclist who was killed by a driver last December on Marine View Drive SW. However, without adding any additional funding for bike lanes, it’s unclear if other projects will now have to be cut from the levy given that new unfunded mandate. The Mayor’s proposal only funded 10 miles of additional protected bike lanes after Move Seattle promised 50 miles and has delivered around 40.

The council ultimately rejected a suite of amendments from Councilmember Dan Strauss to fund several major priorities in his Northwest Seattle district, including one that would have diverted $20 million in repaving funds to connect the Missing Link of the Burke Gilman on Leary Way and Market Street, and another that would have diverted $5 million in sidewalk funding to pay for a “curbless” revamp of the Ballard Avenue cafe street.

The biggest standalone amendment that was approved was a proposal from Councilmember Morales to eliminate a fund designated for district councilmembers to select their own transportation priorities. Instead $14 million will be directed to a new Neighborhood-Initiated Safety Partnership Program, intended to empower communities that might not normally have a seat at the table when it comes to transportation projects. The amendment only passed after both Council President Nelson and Councilmember Maritza Rivera abstained from voting, with chair Rob Saka voicing extreme skepticism of the idea of diverting the funding to a new program. Saka was joined by Bob Kettle and Dan Strauss in opposing the amendment.

“We can’t just slap the word equity or community on something and just expect that it’s going to yield, immediately, equitable or community-driven results,” Saka said, after calling the proposed program a “slush fund,” an assertion that brought pushback from SDOT Director Greg Spotts. Under the now-eliminated funding for District Projects, it would have been elected councilmembers and not the transportation experts at SDOT who would have been tasked with making decisions around which projects to fund, a task which has not previously been under their control, making it much more like a slush fund.

Overall, Saka touted the proposal ultimately voted out of the committee by an 8-0 vote, with Dan Strauss abstaining. Strauss appeared upset his amendments were rejected, but did not make comments before the final vote.

“I’m delighted by the final package, because it reflects a citywide view and all of us can claim credit, and it does center safety investments, for the whole city. And this is something to be excited about, and rally around, and unite, because 30% of SDOT’s budget is the levy, and if it doesn’t pass…let’s just say it’d be catastrophic,” Saka said. “Jobs are on the line, the city’s ability to perform essential services, on the line. I don’t want to talk about that because I think where we’re landing directionally is putting together a package that we can all be excited about, we can all rally around, but ultimately voters are going to decide on.”

The post Seattle City Council Rejects Bid for Larger Transportation Levy first appeared on The Urbanist.

Since it was released in early April, the draft levy has seen two $100 million increases, the first by Mayor Bruce Harrell and the second by Councilmember Rob Saka, who chairs the transportation committee chair. However, prior to Morales’ announcement, the city council had seemed content to leave the property tax levy at $1.55 billion. Last week, when a laundry list of proposed amendments were discussed by the council’s select committee on the transportation levy, all amendments — including one from Morales — proposed swapping around funds instead of adding them on.

At that meeting, Morales suggested that she would come back with a new amendment that increased funding, she said, to avoid having to pit different council priorities against one another. But it’s unclear whether Morales will be able to find another four votes to approve this latest increase, even as the amendment drafted by her office makes clear overtures to specific councilmembers to try and get them on board.

Only Councilmember Cathy Moore expressed a potential openness to go bigger last week, while not committing. Almost all of the programs that would see increases under Morales’s amendment had been included in amendments initially offered by other councilmembers, but this would increase the total size of the pie to accomplish more of them.

The proposed $150 million add breaks down as follows:

• $30 million for repaving, with specific funding for projects requested by Councilmembers Saka (35th Ave SW and Fauntleroy Way SW) and Strauss (14th Avenue NW)
• $20 million for protected bike lanes, specifically earmarked to fill in gaps in the bike network on the South End.
• $20 million to connect the Burke Gilman trail via Leary Way NW and NW Market Street, a longtime priority of Dan Strauss.
• $15.5 million for the new Neighborhood Initiated Safety Program, restoring funding that had been cut in Saka’s chair’s amendment.
• $15 million for street trees and street tree maintenance, which no prior amendment had proposed to grow despite significant attention on the issue of Seattle’s tree canopy.
• $14.5 million for new sidewalks.
• $10 million for sidewalk repair.
• $10 million to convert Ballard Avenue’s cafe street into a curbless street, another Strauss priority. Strauss has touted the idea of realigning the popular streateries so that they’re immediately adjacent to restaurants, with pedestrians further out in the street, but has specifically said that the street will remain open to through car traffic.
• $5 million for intersection improvements.
• $5 million for neighborhood greenways. An amendment from Cathy Moore would have eliminated greenway funding from the levy entirely, instead putting that funding into protected bike lanes and upgrades bike lane barriers.
• $5 million for community-based planning around the future Graham Street and Chinatown-International District light rail stations, a priority of community groups like Puget Sound Sage.

At a press conference Thursday morning, Morales was joined by representatives from Seattle Neighborhood Greenways, Disability Rights Washington, and the MLK County Labor Council who have been advocating for a bigger levy, pointing to both independent and internal polling that shows voter support greater transportation investments. In fact, SDOT’s poll specifically asked about a $1.7 billion levy and found 56% support. Before Mayor Harrell even released a draft levy, MLK Labor passed a resolution supporting a $1.7 billion levy, noting “critical and ever-worsening funding gaps for basic maintenance and preservation.”

“I’ve heard loud and clear from constituents across the city, from people in every council district, during our public hearing, and during our public comment period in committee, that voters want a bolder transportation levy. They want a package that prioritizes safety investments for everyone, especially those who are walking or rolling or biking to navigate the city,” Morales said. “This council has the power to do something. Relatively modest investment in our community’s health and safety today will improve our city for decades to come. On the other hand, inaction and underinvestment puts people at risk.”

Seattle Neighborhood Greenways has lobbied for safety investments and reiterated that a larger levy could achieve them without forcing cuts elsewhere.

“Council amendments have been proposed to pit vital programs against each another, and we shouldn’t have to choose between safe routes for kids walking and biking to school and equity-focused safety programs, we shouldn’t have to choose between building and repairing our sidewalks, we shouldn’t have to choose between public open space and protected bike lanes. We need all of those things,” said Clara Cantor, an organizer with Seattle Neighborhood Greenways. “According to the city’s own polling, done by EMC research, the only argument against renewing the levy that cost it significant support, was that it didn’t go far enough and invest enough.”

Within hours, the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce came out against Morales’s amendment.

“It is disappointing to see an eleventh-hour attempt to turn a thoughtfully crafted proposal – one that was the result of months of technical work and robust stakeholder engagement – into a proposal that is about quantity, not outcomes that can be delivered,” Rachel Smith, the Chamber’s president and CEO said in a statement. “The Chamber has strongly supported the development of a balanced proposal and we urge the Seattle City Council to approve a levy renewal based on a sound project delivery plan that makes progress in maintenance and mobility, and balances needed investments with affordability concerns.”

Unlike some other amendments, Morales’ proposal responds to the realities of project delivery, scaling back a likely unrealistic goal set by Saka’s proposed chair’s amendment to add 500 blocks of new sidewalks within five years, an unprecedented rate of construction. Instead, the baseline would be reset to 250 blocks within the same amount of time, a number that SDOT said is more doable.

Morales told The Urbanist that she didn’t want to set expectations around new sidewalks too high.

“I am a little concerned about not trying to accomplish so much in an eight-year period, because I don’t know if we have the current staffing, if it requires contracting — what’s the pace of repairs versus the pace of production? — there’s just a lot of variables that I am not an expert on,” she said. “There are a lot of councilmembers who are really focused on that as their win for their district, which I totally understand. And I don’t want to set them up for failure, either.”

Morales said Thursday that she’s meeting with other councilmembers one-on-one about getting them on board with this new proposal but wasn’t joined by any of her colleagues Thursday and didn’t cite any who were specifically on board yet. Morales has often found herself marginalized on the new council, epitomized by the failure of her recent equitable development pilot program after most of her colleagues came up with their own justifications to not support it.

Next Tuesday’s committee meeting will contrast Morales’ competing vision for the next decade of transportation spending in Seattle against the consensus that had already formed, putting the entire council on the record.

The post Morales Makes Last Minute Push for $1.7 Billion Transportation Levy first appeared on The Urbanist.

The Seattle City Council is heading toward a final vote on the city’s next transportation levy, sending a package that will fund nearly a decade’s worth of transportation investments to voters in November. Over the past few weeks, no topic has been highlighted more by councilmembers more than the issue of filling in Seattle’s missing sidewalk network. With around 13,500 blocks citywide missing sidewalks — 27% of all city blocks — most of the city council, including its six brand new members, have touted this levy as an opportunity to make a significant dent in that number.

Next week’s committee vote on amendments will likely be pivotal in determining what those investments actually look like. So far, much of the conversation has been detached from the reality of sidewalk construction on the ground. As with other construction projects, sidewalk costs have been climbing and competition for contractors and labor is stiff.

When transportation committee chair Rob Saka introduced his proposed “chair’s amendment” in late May, increasing the total amount to be collected over eight years to $1.55 billion, a full $63 million of an additional $100 million was earmarked to go toward new sidewalks, and their lower-cost “alternative walkways” — a doubling of the amount proposed by the Harrell Administration. It was initially unclear how many blocks that would enable the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) to build, but when the text of the amendment was fully drafted, it included the expectation that 530 blocks would be the new baseline to complete by 2032, with at least 500 of those blocks “complete or in construction” by the end of 2029.

That pace of 500 blocks of new sidewalks within five years would represent the fastest rate of new sidewalk construction in Seattle in decades, and it would require the city to more than double the fastest rate of completion that it saw during the current Move Seattle Levy, approved in 2015. In 2019, 48 blocks of new sidewalks were completed, but the average over the entire levy so far has been less than 30 blocks annually. The city is on track to meet its original commitment to voters of 250 blocks over nine years, but will not significantly exceed that.

The final levy proposal that the Harrell Administration transmitted to the city council included a commitment to build 250 blocks within the first four years of the levy, still a big increase in the pace of sidewalk construction, but one that SDOT is apparently ready to handle, given the improvements that the department has been making around project delivery in recent years.

Another issue with the 500-block promise is the funding itself — Saka’s proposed funding level may not even be enough to actually pay for all of those blocks. With $126 million in levy funding, the average cost per block would be just over $230,000, well below the current average per-block cost. But levy dollars are not the city’s only source of sidewalk dollars. Over the past nine years, levy funding has only accounted for just over half of new sidewalk funding, with dollars from the city’s school traffic zone cameras (31%), real-estate excise taxes (7%) and grants (10.5%) making up the difference.

The fact that other funding sources do not automatically scale up as levy funding increases is why simply doubling the amount allocated to sidewalks doesn’t necessarily result in a doubling of the number of sidewalks that could be built. A 500-block pledge could push council to boost sidewalk funding from other sources at a later date. However, the Move Seattle Levy also provides several examples of overly ambitious pledges fizzling out without intervention, such as the pledge of seven RapidRide bus lines by 2024 being cut in half and delayed.

New sidewalks can vary wildly in terms of costs per block: a new asphalt path separated by precast concrete barriers can cost as low as $200,000 per block, but a new block of permanent concrete sidewalk can come in anywhere from $500,000 to $800,000, and potentially more. Despite getting a briefing on the realities of sidewalk construction in March, councilmembers have drafted amendments that seem somewhat pie-in-the-sky.

SDOT spokesperson Ethan Bergerson confirmed that the department wouldn’t be able to commit to meeting the expectation that Saka laid out, because the city still assumes that only $40 million in local dollars, along with some other project funding like dollars for Aurora Avenue safety upgrades and a repaving projects, will be available for new sidewalks. “The increase of levy funding by $63 million would not fully fund 500 new blocks of sidewalks because of these other funding sources staying constant. SDOT is working on an estimate of the new sidewalk blocks that could be built with the additional funds without knowing the specific locations and their design conditions,” Bergerson said.

Acknowledging this reality somewhat, several amendments have been put forward by other councilmembers that would slightly walk back the expectation around new sidewalks, instead shifting millions of dollars to sidewalk repair instead. A proposal by District 3 Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth would shift $15 million, and a proposal by Council President Sara Nelson would shift $20 million. But during a levy committee meeting last week, no councilmembers asked the SDOT staffers present in council chambers to weigh in on what funding levels would actually be achievable.

Spending funds that had been intended for new sidewalks on sidewalk repair is going to be more feasible for SDOT because sidewalk spot repair is more likely to be accomplished by in-house crews, whereas state law requires the City to contract out most new-build projects, even if they have relatively modest price tags. Sidewalk repair can also be bundled onto repaving projects along roadways that already have sidewalks, something that SDOT is doing with a project along 15th Avenue NW in Ballard. But the amendments may not go far enough. Hollingsworth’s amendment would reduce the goal to 440 new blocks by 2029, and Nelson’s to 400, but even those goals may be too ambitious for planned funding levels.

Bergerson told The Urbanist that going beyond 250 blocks within four years wasn’t something that the department is ready to sign onto, noting that 250 blocks in four years already represents a major accomplishment compared to recent history. “SDOT is committed to achieving this ambitious goal. Increasing the four-year goal beyond 250 blocks would require more changes and considerations as to how we select and construct sidewalks including staffing levels, contracting processes, and any effects increasing sidewalk delivery would have on other projects,” he said.

This may be hashed out by the time a final committee vote takes place on July 2, but if not, the city council may be making promises it cannot keep to city residents, who rightfully have been clamoring for more pedestrian infrastructure.

The post Seattle Council’s 500-Block Sidewalk Expansion Proposal May Be Infeasible first appeared on The Urbanist.

Saka’s amended proposal also includes another $20 million for freight programs, as requested by the city’s freight advisory board and the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, and an added $10 million for additional electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure in the city’s public right-of-way.

The only program to see a reduction in Saka’s proposal is the new “Neighborhood-Initiated Safety Partnership Program,” which he proposes to cut from $41 million to $25.5 million. The program is set to take the place of the existing Neighborhood Street Fund and similarly allow community members anywhere in the city to suggest transportation improvements, with Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) officials ultimately selecting which projects to fund.

Saka takes $7 million cut from the safety partnership program and transfers it to the District Project Fund, which is set aside for each of the seven district councilmembers, empowering them to dictate which infrastructure to fund within their districts. Harrell had already intended to fund this program to the tune of $14 million. Saka’s increase would bring each district-based councilmember’s share of the slush fund to $3 million over the life of the levy.

The updated proposal also doubles, from $7 million to $14 million, the amount to be spent on Safe Routes to School projects, just as Seattle Public Schools announces plans to close approximately 20 of its elementary schools by the start of the 2025-2026 school year. Saka also increases the amount to be spent on public transit security from $3 to $9 million, while at the same time adding language making it clear the money can be spent on personnel — not just environmental improvements like increased lighting at transit stops. In fact, Saka told the Seattle Times that the added personnel could be armed officers — as opposed to Metro’s unarmed transit ambassador program.

Finally, the proposal would spend an additional $1 million on auditing services for planned levy spending, and $1.5 million for outreach efforts allowing Seattle residents to take advantage of existing property tax exemptions.

Saka’s proposal wouldn’t increase spending on either road or bridge maintenance, even after his office conducted an open survey suggesting those are top priorities for respondents, which numbered more than 1,800 who mostly said they live in West Seattle. Harrell’s initial proposal already proposed major investments in both categories, and would for the first time set up a levy-funded preventative bridge maintenance program. EV charging and freight were identified as the lowest priorities for funding by respondents of Saka’s survey.

If the $1.55 billion levy is ultimately approved, Seattle would be set to see an increase of over 120% in annual levy-funded spending on new sidewalks, putting to the test the SDOT’s ability to deliver new sidewalks as quickly as possible. Between April and May, the Harrell Administration already announced a plan to double new sidewalk construction, accomplishing the goal of building 250 blocks of new sidewalks and pathways in the first four years of the levy. In contrast, the current levy took nine years to reach that goal. Levy dollars only account for around half of the city’s overall funding for new sidewalks, but this $126 million should be enough to get to 250 blocks all on its own, based on the average cost of around $500,000 per block that has been seen in recent years.

Saka also proposes setting minimum spending levels, adding guardrails around a transportation levy that has fewer direct commitments than the 2015 Move Seattle Levy. Arterial maintenance spending can’t fall below $350 million between 2025 and 2032, nor can bridge spending go below $221 million. Sidewalk spending would have to clear $126 million in that time, and at least $27 million would need to be spent on electric vehicle chargers.

Overall, the focus on completing the sidewalk network has overshadowed the city’s traffic safety issues, with some members, including Saka, seeming to conflate the two important issues. “City-wide, approximately 27% of our roads in Seattle do not currently have sidewalks. Sadly, in District 1, more people are killed or seriously injured on our roads than in any other Council district,” Saka wrote in his constituent newsletter last month. “We need to more urgently address our Vision Zero goals, close the missing sidewalk gap, and protect our most vulnerable users by adequately investing in new sidewalks and proven Vision Zero strategies.”

Most of Seattle’s fatal traffic crashes happen on wide, high-speed arterial streets where sidewalks already exist, but people walking, rolling, and biking must contend with dangerous crossings, with the epidemic of motorist speeding exacerbating the problem. Saka’s District 1 sees the highest rate of fatal crashes due to the prevalence of dangerous roads in SoDo and Georgetown, a feature that district shares with neighboring District 2 and streets like Rainier Avenue and MLK Jr Way S. Just 20% of the locations where pedestrians were killed on Seattle’s roadways between 2015 and 2022 were streets that had just one travel lane in each direction.

In the wake of a Memorial Day week with six separate fatal traffic crashes in different corners of the city, including three pedestrians killed by drivers, the transportation advocacy group Seattle Neighborhood Greenways issued a call for the levy to focus more on safety, pointing to an independent scientific poll that showed strong support for a $1.9 billion levy when respondents were told what the dollars would be spent on.

“While investigations into each case are ongoing, what can be said now is that we are not making sufficient progress on Seattle’s Vision Zero goal, to eliminate fatal and serious injury collisions,” Seattle Greenway’s Josh Holland wrote last week. “At Seattle Neighborhood Greenways, we believe the next transportation levy, which will be on the Seattle November 2024 general election ballot, must take bold steps to invest in safe streets improvements to get this safety crisis under control.”

The council is holding its final official public hearing on the levy proposal on Tuesday at 4:30pm. However, the council will be accepting public comment at both the June 18 committee meeting, where they’ll review amendments submitted by councilmembers, and at the July 2 meeting, where they’ll take final votes on amendments and the overall proposal.

Correction: The original version of this article incorrectly said Saka’s funding increase for transit security obligated the spending toward personnel rather than infrastructure upgrades like enhanced lighting. Saka’s amendment opens the door to more transit security officers, but doesn’t foreclose on the possibility of infrastructure upgrades. We regret the error.

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