In a similar fashion, when Davison assumed office in 2022, she reported having a backlog of close to 5,000 misdemeanor cases from her predecessor, Pete Holmes. At the time, the problem was shrugged off as being mostly due to the chaos caused by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. However, the recurrence of this issue now that newly elected City Attorney Erika Evans has taken office could suggest a deeper issue. 

Among the over 5,000 cases in this new backlog, at least 1,700 are domestic violence cases, which are among the most serious cases handled by the City Attorney’s Office. There are also at least 1,210 backlog cases categorized as criminal traffic cases, which include Driving Under the Influence (DUI) cases. Davison’s challengers criticized her alleged mishandling of DUI cases as part of their campaign pitches.

In its capacity to handle criminal matters, the Seattle City Attorney’s Office only handles misdemeanor cases, while more serious felony cases go to the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. 

Evans said the oldest case in the backlog is from 2022, which was the first year of Davison’s term.

Further confusing matters is the installation of a new data management system within the City Attorney’s Office, transitioning from the previous system that had been in use since 1999, according to Jenna Robert, the criminal division chief. About 1,000 of the backlog cases don’t currently have a crime category assigned to them, meaning the numbers above represent the confirmed cases but could grow over time. 

Robert told The Urbanist that because of the new system’s migration issues, it has taken the last two months for the office to try to determine the magnitude of the backlog.

A spokesperson for the City Attorney’s Office told The Urbanist that the methods by which the Evans administration determines the size of the case backlog are different from the methods used by previous administrations. The Evans administration is counting a backlogged case as one where a prosecutor has not-yet filed or declined the case, whereas Davison’s administration removed some of these cases from the backlog, such as DUI cases waiting for a toxicology analysis. Due to this discrepancy, the Davison administration reported a much lower backlog than that discovered by the Evans administration.

The existence of this backlog creates a dilemma for the Evans administration. They must balance dealing with these old cases, including determining which are past their statutes of limitations, with handling new cases coming in the door. However, changing the method by which the backlog is counted does muddy the waters in terms of how systemic a problem the office is actually facing.

Evans and Robert believe the main reason for this backlog is insufficient resources for the office. 

“We have been an under-resourced office the whole time I’ve been here,” said Robert.

Robert began as an attorney in the City Attorney’s Office in 2009 and stayed until 2021, right before Davison’s term. She left to work at the Attorney General’s office and returned to the City Attorney’s Office this year. She referenced how technology has changed the way cases are dealt with due to the large amount of video footage that needs to be processed. A case can require video footage review from body-worn cameras, in-car cameras, footage taken inside precincts, and surveillance video from both public and private cameras.

“Our juries expect all of this evidence. It’s so much more complicated to try a case, to prepare a case, to gather all of the evidence: magnitudes more difficult than it was when I first came into this office,” Robert said. “Yet, when you look around, we have not resourced up for that. So we just are always struggling with the resources that we have to actually be able to handle 10 to 12,000 reports that were referred by the police department every year.” 

Public defenders experience similar issues. Increasing attrition rates for public defenders, who are likewise contending with mounting piles of digital evidence, have raised the possibility of a public defense crisis. In response, in September 2023 the Washington Supreme Court asked the Washington State Bar Association to analyze a landmark study on public defense and make recommendations for workload standards at the state’s criminal courts. This recommendation ultimately led to the state Supreme Court significantly reducing public defense caseloads last summer, although municipalities have up to 10 years to implement the new rules. 

The Seattle Municipal Court has also been struggling with reduced capacity due to updating its digital filing system and operating without one of its elected judges. In March 2024, Davison announced the office would file a blanket affidavit of prejudice against Judge Pooja Vaddadi, which left Vaddadi unable to hear her usual docket of cases. 

Changes being made

In one of her first acts of office, Evans banned all blanket affidavits of prejudice, meaning Judge Vaddadi is now able to resume a normal caseload. 

Another issue plaguing the City Attorney’s Office has been a growing backlog at the state toxicology lab that processes DUI blood tests, thereby slowing the office’s ability to file cases. In this legislative session, Evans has been a strong supporter of SB 5880, which would allow private labs to perform these DUI blood tests. 

“We know that justice delayed is justice denied,” Evans testified during a January public hearing. “You asked Senator Salomon about what it takes right now for the current delays. Right now, if someone has a drug and alcohol DUI, it takes 22 months for the toxicology lab to get that report back to us, which means that if someone commits a DUI today in Seattle, it won’t be until the end of the summer of 2027 that we can actually file charges in that case.” 

The bill passed out of the House on Friday with very little time to spare before the cut-off and now returns to the Senate to concur with changes. Being able to utilize private labs should speed up the office’s ability to prosecute DUI cases. 

Evans wants to see the number of case dismissals drop, saying that more than half of the cases filed under Davison were ultimately dismissed, which she says represents a waste of taxpayer dollars. She pointed to her and Robert’s experience as prosecutors, which differs from both Davison’s and Holmes’s backgrounds. She thinks that experience will allow them to better evaluate which cases to file. 

“I think because we have the experience we have as prosecutors, some of the things that happened under the last administration will not be happening under this administration,” Robert said.

The office’s priority for filing will be violent misdemeanor crimes, including domestic violence, DUI, and assault. 

Meanwhile, the office will determine certain non-violent cases, such as public drug use and drug possession, to send to diversion, which will help avoid clogging the court system. Evans previously criticized Davison’s administration for its approach to the City’s new drug ordinance, which did not appear to prioritize the diversion services the ordinance identified as the preferred course of action.

To this end, Evans still plans to collaborate with the Seattle Municipal Court and the Department of Public Defense to design a “reimagined community court.”

In contrast, Davison slowly ramped up the drug possession misdemeanor cases filed since the drug ordinance passed in 2023, with a more extreme escalation in her last months in office. PubliCola reported an increase from an average of four per week from mid-June to mid-September 2025 to 16.4 per week from mid-September to mid-December. 

Davison also disbanded the former community court a year and a half into her term.

The criminal division of the City Attorney’s Office will be converting to a vertical prosecution model from a horizontal model, starting with the domestic violence unit. A vertical model means that the same prosecutor handles a case from its initial filing all the way through to sentencing. This model can be more time efficient, and it also allows an attorney to take ownership and accountability over their cases, which Evans said could lead to fewer dismissals. 

The office will be forming a DUI team similar to their domestic violence team to give extra focus to filing those cases.

One of the strategies Davison said she’d use to deal with her inherited backlog of cases in 2022 was to shorten filing times. Robert said the existence of this new 5,000 case backlog illustrates the failure of this approach. She explained that quick filing times can lead to poor filing decisions and a higher rate of dismissal.

“A bunch of cases that should have never been filed go into the system,” Robert said. “They do harm to the people that are subjects of those–all those defendants now have a crime that should have never been on their record as charged–and then the taxpayers and the clogging the court and all of the cascade of issues that happen.”

What’s next

Even with the approach outlined above, Evans believes the office needs to hire more attorneys. 

The timing could be challenging, given the City faces a $140 million deficit next year. At the end of February, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson asked all city departments for plans of cutting 5-10% of their budgets. Wilson will also likely be searching for funds for her own mayoral priorities, which are almost certain to include standing up more emergency housing.

That being said, WIlson has been a big proponent of new progressive revenue sources and may propose one or more new revenue streams during the City’s budget process this fall. The most likely candidate remains a city-level capital gains tax. While this might assist in future budgets, most new revenue sources do take some time to implement, meaning the new funds wouldn’t be collected immediately in 2027.

Evans said being able to hire more attorneys sooner would be ideal, signalling the possibility of a mid-year supplemental budget request from the City Attorney’s Office. The office would have another chance to advocate for more funding during the regular fall budget season.

On the other hand, city councilmembers might wish to wait to see the effect of the procedural changes within the City Attorney’s Office before attempting to find more money in an already strapped budget.

As for the new data management system, right now the City Attorney’s Office’s system is unable to interface with the Seattle Municipal Court’s system, the integration of which is part of the next phase with the vendor. Robert estimates it could take up to six months to gain this functionality. 

More long-term, Robert said the administration is going to be faced with ongoing challenges adapting to the new system and getting it working smoothly, potentially for a year or more. 

The post Seattle City Attorney Says ‘Tough-on-Crime’ Predecessor Left Big Case Backlog first appeared on The Urbanist.

“I looked around and felt like Washington really could be the best place in the nation to build a good life if people can actually afford to do that,” Sabio-Howell told The Urbanist. “I think that we could be a state where housing is abundant and childcare is affordable, our education and healthcare systems are world class quality, and we tax the record-breakingly rich corporations that build their wealth here in Washington to make that happen.” 

Sabio-Howell has spent the last three years as the communications director for Working Washington, a statewide labor advocacy nonprofit that fights to raise wages and improve labor standards. Working Washington was involved in the defense of gig workers’ minimum wage policy and flexibility protections when former Seattle Council President Sara Nelson tried to roll them back in 2024, a fight that Sabio-Howell said seemed impossible to win at the time due to lobbying from multi-million dollar companies. 

“We won anyway,” Sabio-Howell said about that fight, “because we saw that working people and the vast majority of Seattle, and I would also say Washington, believes in fair pay and good workplaces and an economy that works for working people. […] I have gotten used to taking on big fights against big money, particularly fueled by big corporations, and winning alongside grassroots people power.”

Sabio-Howell’s mother’s side of the family are immigrants from the Phillipines, and her father’s side of the family has lived in eastern Washington for generations. Both of her parents were educators. As a Millennial/Gen Z edge case, Sabio-Howell would be the youngest senator serving in the Washington State Legislature, if elected, bringing a fresh perspective to a body that tends to skew older. 

Sabio-Howell also has experience at the state legislature, having served as a legislative aide for Rep. Larry Springer (D-45th, Kirkland) and later as a communications specialist for the State Senate, working for five different state senators and the Senate Members of Color Caucus. 

“I could hit the ground running and would be eager to, because I think we need fighters and we need effectiveness, and we need a commitment to our community’s values,” Sabio-Howell said.

(Disclosure: Sabio-Howell has also served on The Urbanist’s election committee from 2022 to 2025, along with our Publisher Doug Trumm and Contributing Editor Ryan Packer. She served as co-chair for her last two years. The reporter of this piece has never served on that body.)   

A tough race

The incumbent, Pedersen, who is also the Senate Majority Leader, has served in the state legislature for almost 20 years. After a stint in the state House, he ran for the Senate seat in 2014. A gay man himself, Pedersen is known for championing LGBTQ+ rights, supporting the legalization of the sale of marijuana, and instituting more gun control measures at the state level. 

Pedersen is also a Yale-educated lawyer who practiced corporate law at Preston Gates & Ellis (now K&L Gates) for 17 years. Since 2012, he has worked as general counsel and executive vice president at McKinstry, a Seattle-based construction and engineering firm.

Pedersen raised about $240,000 in donations during the last election cycle in 2022. Sabio-Howell contends that in this last legislative session, he has shown a willingness to cut deals with the largest corporations, citing the $550 million tax break buried in the “millionaires” income tax of which Pedersen is the lead sponsor. (This tax break has since been removed by the House.) 

Pedersen has also expressed support of rolling back the estate tax increase passed last session. He told The Stranger he does not support his seatmate Rep. Shaun Scott’s new tax proposal, the Well Washington Fund, which would institute a payroll expense tax similar to Seattle’s JumpStart, because it is not politically feasible. 

“I think that Senator Pedersen’s alliance with corporations is fundamentally out of step with our district,” Sabio-Howell said.

Sabio-Howell referenced the historical outcomes of elections and ballot initiatives in the 43rd district. 

“We have affirmed over and over again that we believe in taxing the rich, in a fair and safe community for all of us,” Sabio-Howell said. “That makes me really excited about what kind of visionary leadership could be coming out of the 43rd, and I want to offer that this is our first chance in 20 years to choose our fighter.”

An affordability platform

Rather than cutting, Sabio-Howell wants to expand state investments in child care, education, housing, transit, and health care, and she wants to pay for this by taxing the ultra-wealthy corporations in Washington.

“It doesn’t feel like enough to me to defend a system that isn’t working for us, or to just hold the line on already inadequately funded programs,” Sabio-Howell said. “We need to be reinvesting in those programs and building them out to make sure they actually can work for people, particularly working people.”

While Sabio-Howell supports Pedersen’s millionaires tax, she doesn’t think it is adequate, particularly because any funding from the new tax wouldn’t be available until 2029. Unlike Pedersen, she doesn’t support rolling back taxes on the wealthy, such as the aforementioned estate tax reduction, and she would like to see the legislature pass a wealth tax and Scott’s Well Washington Fund. 

She doesn’t support the sales tax rollback in the millionaires tax that would have downstream revenue hit to Sound Transit. 

Among Sabio-Howell’s priorities are making universal childcare a reality and better funding K-12 education. 

“The paramount duty of the state legislature is to fund basic education, and that needs to be a critical priority, just based on everything we know about how that then sets young people and families up for success in Washington, and saves the state money in the long run,” Sabio-Howell said. 

While Sabio-Howell supports a wide variety of means to make housing more affordable, she is particularly enthusiastic about the idea of a statewide social housing program, citing her district’s strong support for Seattle’s social housing initiatives. She said she was disappointed that last year’s rent stabilization bill was so watered down.

“I think for so many of us, having our rent go up by anything close to 10% is also totally unaffordable,” Sabio-Howell said.

In addition to her desire to see further rent stabilization, Sabio-Howell said she would support efforts to do more to incentivize upzoning and strengthen tenant protections. She’s a proponent of the failed neighborhood cafe and corner store bill, talking about the importance of community building and place making.

Sabio-Howell said she expects to be a renter herself for the foreseeable future.

“The dark joke of people who are young is that it’s almost a laughable idea that we would ever be able to buy a house here in Washington generally, but particularly in the 43rd, a place where it’s actually a big, exciting step to move out of a studio apartment into a one bedroom,” Sabio-Howell said.

When considering legislation to make housing more abundant and affordable, Sabio-Howell emphasized the importance of such laws having teeth and dedicated resources for enforcement to hold communities accountable. 

Sabio-Howell said it’s the state’s responsibility to provide resources for a robust transit system in the state. She’s interested not only in building out Sound Transit’s connections but also providing more frequent service, better pay for operators, and possibly even lowering fares. She mentioned the dearth of both renters and regular transit users in office at the state level and how that impacts policymaking. 

Health care is another area that Sabio-Howell is interested in making more affordable, citing the increasing number of people who are losing coverage or having to forego it because of rising premiums. 

“When it comes to protecting and reinvesting in health care, that’s a place where the state legislature is on the front line, is maybe both our first and our last defense against devastating federal cuts,” Sabio-Howell said. 

In addition to using funds from the Well Washington fund to cover some of these gaps, should that legislation pass, Sabio-Howell said she thinks the state could eventually accomplish universal healthcare. During her time as a communications specialist at the senate, she worked with Senator Emily Randall on passing the Universal Health Care Commission, a first step towards that goal, and she spoke about taking additional serious steps in that direction. 

Sabio-Howell expressed support for even-year elections for local offices and converting Washington’s very part-time legislature to a full-time year-round body, which she said would allow more working class people to serve in elected office. 

On public safety and immigration

Sabio-Howell would like the state legislature to revisit some of the accountability issues related to policing that the public organized around in 2020, citing the legislature’s rollback of police use of force standards and high-speed pursuit standards in subsequent legislative sessions. She also spoke about the ineffectiveness of the $100 million police hiring incentive that Governor Bob Ferguson insisted on including in the budget last year, under threat of veto. Recent reporting from The Washington Standard revealed that no new police officers have yet been hired as a result of that program.

With U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) both expanding its surveillance apparatus and tapping into local surveillance data, Sabio-Howell says it’s important to protect immigrants from surveillance, along with the entire community. She also noted the need to protect consumers from surveillance surge pricing, referencing a bill that died earlier this session. 

“In general, government, and I mean this broadly, at the federal level, the state level, has really been so many years behind the ball when it comes to regulating big tech,” Sabio-Howell said.

Sabio-Howell comes from a mixed-status family, meaning a family with different immigration statuses. In the past, she has volunteered outside of the Northwest ICE Processing Center, helping people who had just been released without any money or means of communication, who often don’t speak English. 

“It’s extremely cruel,” Sabio-Howell said. “It’s a blight on our state, and it’s the state’s responsibility to do something about that.”

In addition to adding more parameters to protect data from ICE, Sabio-Howell outlined several steps she’d like to see the state take in response to ICE’s ramp-up of immigration enforcement. She supports the ban on law enforcement covering their faces, which has now passed out of both chambers. She’d like to either ban or severely limit ICE’s ability to operate in sensitive locations like hospitals, child care centers, and courthouses. She is interested in looking into stripping incentives from companies that work with ICE, making it more expensive to do so. And she wants more pathways for people to be able to sue ICE for violating their constitutional rights.

A way forward

Rather than trying to maintain the status quo in our state, Sabio-Howell believes in dreaming bigger and revitalizing and expanding the services that could make living in Washington and the 43rd LD even better. And she’s looking forward to presenting that bold vision to voters who might be ready for a different approach in leadership after 20 years. 

“It makes me really excited to think that we could opt into leadership that is moving in lockstep and shoulder to shoulder with our visionary values,” Sabio-Howell said. “Policy is something we build, not something that happens to us, and nowhere is that more possible or more true in our history.”

The post Labor Leader Sabio-Howell Launches Bid Challenging State Senator Jamie Pedersen first appeared on The Urbanist.

House Bill 1923, sponsored by Rep. Greg Nance (D-23rd, Bainbridge Island) and dubbed the Mosquito Fleet Act, would have allowed water-adjacent cities, counties, transit agencies and port districts from Olympia to Friday Harbor to set up their own passenger-only ferry (POF) districts. Unlocking the ability to go to the voters for funding to establish new routes, the field of potential ferry districts would be dramatically expanded beyond Kitsap Transit and King County, who currently have specific carve-outs in state law to fund and operate their ferry systems.

Despite an overwhelming 84-11 vote in the Washington House in mid-February, the version approved by the Senate last week is essentially a different bill, following a striking amendment put forward by Senate transportation committee chair Marko Liias (D-21st, Mukilteo). Striking amendments replace all of the text of the bill, causing advocates to scramble to understand the implications of the new language.

Liias’s amendment adds requirements for new passenger-ferry districts to only procure vessels made in Washington State, to only operate zero-emission vessels, and includes a ban on all state funding for passenger ferry districts starting in just two years. It restricts new POF districts from being able to utilize the sales tax funding that current districts use, instead switching them over to a potential property tax.

The new Senate version would also require passenger ferry districts to not overlap and be “mutually exclusive” — language that appears to prevent multiple jurisdictions from being able to coordinate on establishing POF districts. San Juan County Commissioner Jane Fuller told The Urbanist she’s concerned that this means they wouldn’t be able to work with the Port of Friday Harbor or nearby Whatcom or Skagit Counties on setting up potential new ferry routes between Friday Harbor and Bellingham and/or Anacortes.

“I am concerned that the changes will significantly impact the ability of local jurisdictions to move forward with setting up passenger-only ferry service,” Fuller said. “It’s so impactful as to call those amendments — from my vantage in San Juan County, and knowing the situation and other counties that have chosen to be a part of the new county ferry caucus — render the bill in that form, something of a non-starter for local jurisdictions to do passenger-only ferries.”

“We have sister counties that are quite well endowed, like Skagit, like Whatcom, that are interested in partnering with this county on some passenger-only ferry options. So that’s a difficult pill to swallow,” Fuller said.

Nance, who first put forward this bill last year after seeing his district struggle with unplanned service disruptions on the state ferry system, also blasted Liias’s changes.

“The intent of the Mosquito Fleet Act is to let local communities get boats on the water as quickly and cost-effectively as possible,” Nance wrote to The Urbanist via email just before the Senate’s floor vote. “Every single one of Marko Liias’s proposed changes makes things slower, more expensive, and less power for local communities. It makes projects impossible. Zero relief for commuters, zero help for communities, zero jobs under Liias’s proposed amendment.”

Peter Philips, a marine transit advocate and former publisher of Fishermen’s News and Pacific Maritime Magazine, told The Urbanist that he reacted the Senate’s amendments with a combination of confusion, disbelief, and extreme disappointment.

“I don’t understand why this bill did not just sail through with universal approbation. It’s this very simple, elegantly written bill that allows communities to take independent action and fund that independent action on their own,” Philips said. He noted that the requirement to build new vessels, a provision that would likely make new passenger ferry districts ineligible for federal funding, would be incredibly counterproductive.

Last year, the legislators faced pushback from labor groups over Governor Bob Ferguson’s decision to procure the first three new vehicle ferries built in decades from a Florida-based manufacturer, dollars that will now not be spent in state. But the manufacturing landscape for new passenger ferries is very different, setting aside any hypocrisy on the legislature’s part.

“Concerns by labor over Build In Washington mandates for the big ships is justified. However, with small passenger-only ferries, no other state would build these boats,” Philips said. “Gulf coast yards would not be competitive, because the cost to bring those boats around to Washington State would make it cost prohibitive for those yards to bid on the work competitively. There are no other new build yards on the West Coast of the United States that can do this. There are at least nine shipyards that I know of in Washington State that have the ability and expertise to build passenger-only ferries, so there’s no need for Build In Washington mandate.”

In remarks on the Senate floor, Liias described the changes made as being in search of a compromise, while outlining clear reservations about the idea of scaling up ferry service that would compete with Washington State Ferries (WSF) vehicle ferry service.

“My concern, not as a boat lover, but as the chair of the transportation committee, is our state ferry system has tremendous capital needs on the horizon. We need to spend at least $3.5 billion dollars over the course of the next decade to acquire new vessels to replace our aging fleet. And so my priority across time has been to make sure that our state ferry system is healthy and functional and strong,” Liias said. “I’m concerned that creating expectations to create a new system of passenger ferries will create obligations for us to help stand up and fund these activities at a time when we haven’t yet funded our own ferry system.”

If a battle between WSF and future passenger ferry systems is seen as zero-sum as he described, then the policy changes included in his striker take on a new light, and could be seen as less aimed at achieving their objectives and more about kneecapping systems that have the ability to be much more nimble.

Liias was not available for an interview with The Urbanist ahead of the publication of this story.

“This feels like tremendous overreach on what many of us, as jurisdictions impacted by WSF service, would like to be doing in terms of empowering ourselves and coming up with solutions that will offset the impacts to our local economies and our communities of very beleaguered service of WSF,” Fuller said. “It feels like the state is putting its hand in its way and inhibiting any flexibility we may have to be creative about how we do that, including finding cost-efficient ways of doing this by partnering with other other jurisdictions.”

Fuller noted that state ferry service has improved in recent months as the agency has made gains in crew availability and made strategic decisions around how to maintain service on the San Juan Islands specifically. But framed the idea of curtailing additional mobility options as short-sighted given the long timescale to potentially fix the major issues that the state ferry system faces, including a dozen aging ferry vessels set to be retired and in need of replacement by 2040.

Under current ferry construction timelines, WSF will not have all three of the new vessels it recently procured ready for service until 2032, with legislators this year turning down the idea of issuing bonds to get the next three new boats into the construction pipeline.

“We are seeing some positive change. I will be the first to say that, and others would echo that,” Fuller said. “However, we cannot do anything about the fact that vessels are beyond their lifespan, that vessels are needing to be replaced, and that they can’t possibly be replaced, at least in a reasonable timeframe, and consequently we’re going to have more and more crises facing us in times ahead.”

Nance is hopeful that the bill can be fixed after it heads back to the House. That chamber can force the Senate to vote on receding from all of its amendments, but if that vote fails, the bill would head to a conference committee. With just four working days left until the end of the session on March 12, time is of the essence.

“The future of ferries hangs in the balance,” Nance wrote.

The post Mosquito Fleet Act Runs Into Choppy Seas in the State Senate first appeared on The Urbanist.

“That will teach you a lot about how our system works and doesn’t work,” she told attendees at the University of Washington’s (UW) OpenThePaths2026 conference on February 27.

Held by the UW Taskar Center for Accessible Technology, the conference was meant to highlight the state’s first-ever nearly complete map of pedestrian infrastructure, OS-CONNECT, which maps the pedestrian infrastructure across the area where 90% of the state’s population lives.

The map

While AI created that map, humans vetted it — and in opening the second day of conference presentations, Taskar Center researcher Anat Caspi, the host and moderator of the conference, said that humans would be continuously responsible for vetting and maintaining the data shared. She said that the center had envisioned the constantly updated map as a platform to encourage buy-in from the public and center people walking, rolling, and biking. At the same time, the Taskar Center would share the vetted data with different agencies and providers.

“One of the biggest issues that we’re facing with this data, as well as other areas where low information has existed, is that it’s low-resourced,” Caspi explained. “We don’t have a single source to provide us with data just as it has been available for car travel, and so car travel becomes the only mode we know […] about, both in terms of ridership, in terms of who’s there, what are they using, what roads are being used, and how much. But we don’t have this kind of information collected and shared across all the different partners that support active transporters, and so that’s really the vision.”

Caspi acknowledged that many institutional barriers exist preventing policymakers from “really subscribing to that shared vision and open shared data that supports non-drivers.”

Legislative advocacy

Balducci joined a morning panel alongside Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Rep. Greg Nance (D-23rd, Bainbridge Island), a sponsor of the Mosquito Fleet Act, which seeks to give local jurisdictions more tools to expand foot ferries. The trio, all of whom are pushing for accessible public transit in-office and in advocacy roles, covered a variety of topics, primarily focusing on how to get legislators to perk up, listen, and act on different community needs.

Rinck said that she’s among the 20% of Seattleites who don’t own a car, and who get around using public transit. But when does that 20% — or any percentage — begin to matter in public legislative discourse?

Balducci said that she believes it takes some sort of “forcing function.” She pointed to accessibility requirements as an example. Before ADA regulations, people with disabilities had very limited access to transit. Unfortunately, she said, it wasn’t the result of good intentions so much as a host of lawsuits, regulations and enforcement.

“Collectively, it takes a lot of pressure. I think that we need to maintain the focus on passing good laws. And that doesn’t just mean at the state and federal level, at the local level,” Balducci said. “We need to pass good ordinances that apply to our own jurisdictions that force us to then do the right thing and send the message to the entire organization.”

Rinck pointed out that change is hard in the face of a majority of people who still benefit from the way things are. She later highlighted that while policymakers care about data from the standpoint of funding decisions, that’s not the only thing that gets them to sit up and care.

“I would love if every policymaker looked at data and cared about data, but that’s not the way to do it. I want to emphasize how important it is to understand what drives your decision-making,” Rinck said. “Not everybody cares about data. They care about the re-election. They care about looking good. They care about whether or not they’re embarrassed to leave. Those are tools, too. That’s my very spicy take.”

“Sometimes,” she continued, “the thing that gets the decision-makers to do the thing we need them to do is, for a very silly reason, a silly rationale, but if we’re about really effectuating change, that is … a realistic tool in our toolbox.”

Nance agreed, saying that it’s extra difficult to get transportation bills the proper attention they need, especially with so many spreadsheets and numbers attached. What gets these kinds of pro-transit bills passed, he said, is story — personal stories about individuals, to put faces to those spreadsheets and numbers. It’s also important to personalize that data before getting too far along in the process, to head off any cross-aisle “shouting,” as Nance put it, at public meetings.

Community action

That’s where advocacy leaders like Paulo Nunes-Ueno and Kirk Hovenkotter come into play, which made their panel following the elected leaders well-timed. At the conference, the pair of transportation advocates presented the Megaproject For Safety, a roadway safety initiative that Transportation Choices Coalition (TCC) spearheaded. Hovenkotter is the executive director of TCC, while Nunes-Ueno runs his own transportation consulting firm.

The initiative calls for dedicated state funding to prioritize making the state’s most dangerous roads, many of which are state highways doubling as main streets, safer. The coalition’s webpage states that new money — which a measure like a road usage charge could create — would fund the initiative.

“I also want to use this as a moment to talk about how you can keep and build momentum around an idea like this. We all know there’s great ideas or a dime a dozen, but it’s how you organize and how you put pressure on decision makers and bureaucracies to be able to get them done,” Hovenkotter said, before outlining the project for attendees. “That’s the conversation that I really want to have with Paulo and with you all in the room today.”

2023 was Washington’s deadliest year for traffic deaths, marking a 33-year record high. Of the more than 800 people who died, 160 were pedestrians. 2024’s numbers were nearly as grim, with more than 730 people dying in traffic crashes, 155 of whom were pedestrians.

Every municipality has its known danger roads, Hovenkotter said, and listed a few of them — Aurora Avenue in Seattle, Pacific Avenue in Tacoma, Division Street in Spokane, and U.S. 2 in Monroe. The problem is not just that they persist, but that, as cities and towns overhaul their zoning codes to allow for more middle housing as required by state law, the surrounding streets will get increasingly worse at meeting residents’ needs.

“I can promise you almost 100% of the properties along these roadways are going to be upzoned for new housing,” Hovenkotter said. “And the ask that we have is, ‘If we’re going to add new housing here, how do we make the roads that this housing is going on places we can be proud of, places that are easy to walk and get to these destinations and get to these homes? They’re not the roads that we know they need to be to be the homes for so many more people in our state. But we know that our state can do big things when it puts its mind, money, and might to a problem.”

Hovenkotter pointed out that the state has no problem committing both billions of dollars and decades of time to infrastructure like floating bridges and freight. So why not commit similar resources to pedestrian safety along Washington’s major roadways?

Hovenkotter said that in last year’s legislative session, following former Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) Secretary Roger Millar’s call on the legislature to put $150 million per year towards funding safer main street highways, the coalition asked the legislature of $1.5 billion over the course of 10 years to fund those safer roadways.

“Last year, we were lucky to win $100 million committed towards these roadways in the [2027 – 2029] biennium,” Hovenkotter said. “It was a really exciting win, and this went from an idea at the beginning of session to something that had $100 million committed to it.”

During the question and answer session, Barb Chamberlain, WSDOT’s director of active transportation, offered a slight correction. She pointed out that while Hovenkotter framed it as a win — and she appreciated that “advocates always have to say we had a win” — it was not, as she put it “new money” going towards those efforts, but repurposed funds already going to a similar purpose.

“It is within the preservation budget where we’re supposed to be doing Complete Streets work, so it’s money on specific projects, not on other projects. The real win would be new additive funding. ‘Additive’ is the key word here,” Chamberlain continued. “We want these transformational projects. We need new money to do transformative work, because you still want us to do the basic work — nobody gets across the river if the bridge is closed. No mode moves. So, ask for new money, when you are asking.”

She also highlighted that different agencies operate different roadways, and noted that there is a difference between roadway design and operation decisions and land use decisions.

“‘Wide and fast’ — those are functions of roadway design and operational decisions. … ‘Busy and complex,’ those are land use decisions. That is your city council or your county council,” Chamberlain said, indicating where residents could direct their advocacy energy. “What is the zoning? What is the anti-displacement housing policy? What are they going to do at the city level or the county level that means that the uses alongside the road and the design of the road work together? Because they don’t today. This is definitely not disputing the core premise, which is that we have a lot of car sewers [areas that are dangerous because of cars and car infrastructure]. And they need to be better. But just work all of the policy here, not only the transportation policy and not only the state. I think that’s my big takeaway.”

Another attendee, Jen Mayer, King County Metro’s equity and social justice capital implementation manager, agreed with Chamberlain about the funding, and said that she would love to see more interagency partnerships. While she acknowledged that sometimes these partnerships can mean long processes towards goals — she knows from personal experience — she also said it’s worth it, particularly dollar-wise.

“It would be way cheaper … all the different agencies are doing all sorts of stuff. Any time you dig dirt, I would like to have a model where we have a sidewalk SWAT team that says, ‘Oh, by the way, I saw you’re having a truck lay some ground here. Can you build some sidewalk along the side? Can you do ramps?’” Mayer said. “Can we be more opportunistic in our partnerships? Because it’s a lot of money to mobilize for sidewalks and ramps and crosswalks. But if somebody’s already mobilizing in that area, it’s way cheap to give them a little more money to do the work that we want to see get done. … I’d love to have more partnerships on the smaller scale as well as on the bigger scale.”

But, as conference speakers stressed throughout the morning, nothing changes without the public pushing for it.

Readers looking to get involved with transportation safety on a local level can check out organizations like the Seattle Streets Alliance, Tacoma on the Go, and the Transit Riders Union. Those looking to get involved at a state level can check out organizations like the Transportation Choices Coalition and Cascade Bicycle Club.

The post Advocates Gather at UW, Pushing for Safer, More Accessible Streets first appeared on The Urbanist.

The bill was one of Sound Transit’s biggest focuses this legislative session, one strategy to tackle the $34.5 billion financial shortfall the agency faces over the next two decades. Testifying in favor of the proposal were some of the agency’s biggest players, including CEO Dow Constantine, board chair Dave Somers, and board vice chair Ryan Mello.

But Monday’s final House transportation committee meeting came and went without a vote on SB 6148, in spite of officials intensely lobbying committee chair Jake Fey (D-27th, Tacoma) over the weekend to get the bill added to the docket and approved.

While the legislative calendar means SB 6148 is dead, the policy change is still very much alive. Wednesday morning, Liias successfully amended another bill that had been sent over from the House, HB 2711, to add the 75-year bond provisions. That omnibus bill tackles tweaks to transportation funding policies the legislature approved last year, making it a natural fit among the other provisions. Whether the gambit is able to pay off before the end of the 2026 legislative session on March 12 remains to be seen.

Allowing 75-year bonds would ultimately bring Washington law in line with a change to federal infrastructure loan programs, including the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA), included in 2021’s bipartisan infrastructure law. That change allowed bond terms for specific, long-lasting infrastructure projects to extend up to 75 years, while state law still prohibits bond terms beyond 40 years.

“By utilizing the TIFIA program that Congress recently extended, they can put more projects on the ground more quickly to help deal with the commute in the Puget Sound region, also to create jobs,” Liias said ahead of the Senate floor vote on SB 6148. “The estimate from Sound Transit’s finance staff is that the additional financing capacity they can achieve would help them put 40,000 jobs in our communities building infrastructure for us over the next decade. So we need jobs. We need this infrastructure. The sooner we build, the cheaper it is.”

Issuing bonds with such long term lengths isn’t seen as a slam dunk by all Puget Sound transit advocates, some of whom have raised concerns about asking future generations to pay off funding decisions being made today. Others have argued that pulling this financial lever will allow the agency to get out of asking tougher questions around how to reduce costs and build its infrastructure faster.

The budget-balancing “building blocks” that the Sound Transit board is set to put together in the coming months to bring down those costs are clearly going to involve a wide array of different tools. Constantine has said that the 75-year bonds would make sense for long-lasting infrastructure projects, such as the generational investment of building a second tunnel under Downtown Seattle as part of the Ballard Link Extension project, which is a big ticket item in a project that has seen its budget balloon past $20 billion.

At last week’s Sound Transit board meeting, this issue was a hot topic, with board members discussing potential talking points to convince Rep. Fey to advance Liias’s bill. Board chair Somers spelled out the need to secure this authority now, ahead of the update to the agency’s long-range financial plan set to occur later this year. To legislators, a one-year delay in approving the change doesn’t mean much when it comes to light rail projects happening years down the line, but to Sound Transit that delay would be significant.

“The

The ‘why now’, for me, [is] I heard Representative Fey say he was so excited to be seven minutes away from light rail when we opened Federal Way,” Seattle Councilmember Dan Strauss said. “The ‘why now’ is, I don’t know that we can get much closer to his house without the bill.”

Sound Transit’s other major legislative priority, a bill streamlining permit requirements and allowing the agency to submit permit requests before officially acquiring parcels where projects will be built, was approved by the House late Wednesday, with the full Democratic caucus on the House side in support. It still needs another Senate vote but is on track to head to Governor Ferguson’s desk.

Several hurdles still remain to be surmounted in a small number of days for the 75-year bond proposal to make it to the governor’s desk. The full Senate, which approved SB 6148 on a 29-20 vote, will need to sign off on HB 2711, sending it back to the House. There House members will be forced to concur with the changes made on the Senate side or reject them. Such a move would likely put the entire bill’s future in jeopardy.

The post Sound Transit’s Bid to Unlock 75-Year Bonds Finds Second Wind first appeared on The Urbanist.

The House Transportation Committee’s decision to halt the bill to allow 75-year bonds to help Sound Transit cover the Sound Transit 3 (ST3) shortfall, without offering any alternative, shows how much work remains to be done to turn that public support into improved outcomes.

The gap between strong public support and ongoing political failure presents an important and urgent opportunity to transit advocates across the Puget Sound. Those advocates need to leverage widespread public support for more light rail to force local and state leaders to implement constructive solutions needed to build the ST3 plan that voters approved in 2016. Regional and state leaders will have to come up with more money, and they must help implement lasting reforms to bring down costs.

Sound Transit faces a deficit of nearly $35 billion in the ST3 program to build rail lines to connect our region. We have two ways to respond to this: abandon the plan to build the passenger rail our region urgently needs, or figure out how to raise the money and implement the planning reforms needed to build the system voters approved.

Scaling back the ST3 plan would be an unpopular, embarrassing admission of failure. Cities around the world are rapidly building out mass transit systems, often at a fraction of the cost of ST3. That includes big, dense European cities like Paris and Madrid, where unions are also strong and environmental laws and historic protections also make construction a challenge.

In particular, the Puget Sound region needs to learn from Europe how to build a lot more rail for a lot less money – without compromising on safety, worker pay, or the rider experience. And transit advocates can learn from other successful urbanist campaigns, particularly the Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) movement, to craft new strategies to help Seattle lead on mass transit in North America.

It’s Not the 2000s Anymore

Twenty-five years ago, Sound Transit was in a fiscal crisis. Voters had approved creation of the system in the 1990s. But by 2001, it became clear Sound Transit was about $1 billion short of the funding it needed to build from Northgate to Sea-Tac Airport.

This set off a round of political attacks at the federal, state, and local levels that nearly destroyed Sound Transit. Sound Transit solved that crisis, and a similar one in 2009 caused by the Great Recession, by delaying projects. They believed there was no public support for finding more money to prevent those delays. Perhaps that was true in the 2000s. It’s not true any more.

Light rail expansion is now one of the most popular things in Seattle, even more popular than the return of the Sonics NBA franchise. Strong public support, especially in the Puget Sound region’s urban core, is a gamechanger for advocates, and we should adjust our strategies accordingly. No longer should we accept further project delays, and we certainly should not accept cuts to the voter-approved system. Instead, it’s time to find more money, and reform how Sound Transit plans and builds the system.

Transit advocates would do well to take a page from the successes of the YIMBY movement. For many years, housing advocates ran into huge barriers thrown up by Not In My Backyard activists or NIMBYs, particularly in the form of low-density zoning and onerous review processes. Those barriers eventually choked off the supply of new housing, causing housing costs to soar. 

And that, in turn, created a political crisis. 

Suddenly, the public demanded more housing, and turned against NIMBY obstruction. YIMBY success stems from recognition of this changed reality and clever, effective, persistent advocacy knowing that the wind was now at their back.

From my experience in the YIMBY movement in the last few years, the following keys to success are applicable to transit advocacy:

• This is primarily a political problem that requires a political solution. While it’s worth debating things like whether we should use elevated or tunneled tracks along a route, or automated versus human-operated trains, these alone do not solve the funding crisis. Effective solutions require different decisions to be made by elected officials.

• Leverage public support. When the public strongly wants something to happen, the onus is on elected officials to deliver. High levels of support for mass transit should force state legislators to feel immense pressure to solve ST3’s problems – but that requires public mobilization. 

• Focus on mobilizing the broader public. Transit advocates need to focus on activating the broad base of Puget Sound residents who want ST3 projects built. That base is less interested in the technical details. They want to know who to call, which meetings to attend, and what to ask for. 

• The technical details matter, but they don’t convince everyone. Every transit advocate is a wonk at heart who cares deeply about the technical details, and rightly so. Sound Transit staff, board members, and state legislators all want to know that what we ask for is technically sound, feasible, and will work. We have to be able to defend every point we make and every ask we have. But those details usually don’t inspire the public to show up. They care about the big picture: will this help get my train line built?

• Compromises are necessary, but they shouldn’t be bad ones. At some point, we have to accept decisions that are made so we can move on to construction. The ST3 route and project list is set. I’m not wild about freeway routes, but it’s not worth the delay to go back and pursue a different alignment. Similarly, a 75-year bond is not the ideal way to finance infrastructure. But it’s better than cutting or delaying ST3 projects.

In some ways, transit advocates in the Puget Sound region have it easier than housing advocates. Public support has been on our side for 30 years. But that support has not been as strong and deep as it is today.

The political threats to Sound Transit no longer stem from voters losing faith due to financial woes. The main threat is failing to deliver the projects promised to voters. That, in turn, creates a strong incentive for elected leaders at the local and state levels to step in and provide the money and the reforms needed to deliver what voters approved.

No Way Around the Need for More Money

The $35 billion deficit facing ST3 dwarfs the $1 billion deficit Sound Transit faced in 2001 and the $4 billion deficit it faced in 2009. A deficit of that size cannot be closed without adding some amount of new money, even if other reforms are adopted – unless we agree to chop off parts of the system voters approved.

Much of these rising costs are outside Sound Transit’s control. The Covid-19 pandemic caused years of delay, which meant added cost. So, too, did the inflation that followed the pandemic. That was before Donald Trump returned to power in 2025. His inflationary policies, including his tariffs and his targeting of a significant portion of the construction workforce, all exacerbate the cost problem.

Other causes of rising costs are within the control of Sound Transit and Washington State’s leaders, and we’ll discuss those below. But no credible analysis suggests there is any way to reduce project costs and also keep ST3 whole without more long delays. 

Transit advocates should leverage strong public support for light rail expansion and push state legislators to approve some significant amount of new funding for ST3. Elected officials who oppose this would find themselves on the wrong side of public opinion, giving advocates a real opportunity.

The question is what form new funding would take. Sound Transit had been pushing legislators to allow it to float 75-year bonds. That bill failed to pass by Monday’s deadline, though it could be revived as part of the final transportation budget. Long-term bonds are controversial, and other advocates have pushed higher taxes on large vehicles, commercial parking taxes, or simply taxing wealthy individuals and large corporations.

Whatever the solution may be, elected officials need to understand that their failure to act puts them on the wrong side of strong public support for completing the ST3 project list.

Money Isn’t Enough – Reforms Are Needed Too

New funding, or even a scaled back ST3, does not solve the underlying problem of soaring costs. Even if Seattle voters somehow allowed Sound Transit to cancel their city’s new rail lines, the “spine” to Everett and Tacoma would still be many billions of dollars over budget. It would still face the same ongoing cost pressures, absent reforms.

It costs more to build mass transit in North America than in Europe. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Let’s take Madrid as an example. The Puget Sound region has a higher GDP than Madrid, yet Madrid tripled the size of its subway system for a fraction of the cost of ST3. One researcher estimated that the $185 billion total cost for ST3 could build nearly a thousand miles of subway if Seattle’s construction costs were the same as in Madrid.

One cause of higher costs is endless delay. Voters approved ST3 in 2016. Nine years later, the core elements of that system, including rail to West Seattle and Ballard, still have not yet begun construction. Environmental reviews are incomplete and so is permitting work. Former Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell caused nearly a year of delay on the Ballard line when he pushed Sound Transit to investigate a consolidated station in South Lake Union, at the behest of Amazon.

Recent cost estimates show that in 2025 dollars, rail to Ballard will cost between $20 billion and $22 billion, up from $12 billion. But construction isn’t slated to begin until the 2030s, when costs will be even higher. In “year of expenditure” dollars, when Sound Transit actually has to pay contractors to build the line, the cost estimate soars even higher, to $30 billion. In other words, every year of delay means higher and higher costs.

International experts have made a series of recommendations to Sound Transit to reduce its construction costs without scaling back projects, harming the environment, or compromising worker pay and safety. Sound Transit has adopted several of these proposals. But there is more it can do.

A revealing moment came earlier this year when, as The Urbanist’s Ryan Packer reported, Sound Transit staff revealed that changing the design of the proposed Seattle Center station (on the Ballard Line) would shave nearly $500 million off of the construction cost. That’s about the same amount of money saved by deleting the Avalon station on the West Seattle line.

Sound Transit should do more of this kind of sensible redesign work. It’s time to standardize station designs, design shallower stations and tunnels, and preserve right of way well in advance of construction. 

Sound Transit should have the ability to conduct its own permitting, rather than have to go through the permitting process of every city it serves.

These and other reforms can help bring down construction costs without giving up on the system voters approved. Without these reforms, costs will continue to soar, no matter how much we scale back or abandon parts of the ST3 plan.

Some transit advocates are calling for more substantial changes to ST3. Last year, Scott Kubly and Claudia Balducci each called for a study of deferring or eliminating the second downtown tunnel. The Sound Transit board threw cold water on that idea. But others persist. 

Some advocates are exploring automated trains, or elevating the proposed routes rather than use tunnels. Those ideas are worth considering, as long they can be proven to work – and can be shown to achieve the core goal of delivering the voter-approved ST3 plan with a minimum of delay. That should be our guiding north star as transit advocates.

Abandoning pieces of ST3, or accepting years more of delay, would be an admission of failure. It would be giving up on our region’s ability to move people, address traffic, and reduce climate pollution. Instead, the Puget Sound region should step up and lead by obtaining more funding, as well as showing the country how to build excellent mass transit at European prices. 

Robert Cruickshank is a Seattle resident who regularly rides Link light rail with his family.

The post Op-Ed: Finding Smart Solutions to Sound Transit Budget Woes first appeared on The Urbanist.

Pollet has earned a reputation of siding with the existing homeowners in his district over the new residents trying to move there, and became infamous for watering down housing reforms during his time as chair of the House’s Local Government Committee. In 2022, a striking amendment Pollet put forward significantly weakened a bill legalizing middle housing across Washington’s major cities, blunting its momentum and demoralizing housing advocates from Bellingham to Spokane.

In 2023, Pollet railed against HB 1110, that bill’s successor that was ultimately able to make it across the finish line. He did ultimately vote for it after securing an amendment allowing cities to hold off on zoning changes in specific areas, but has often been a “no” on the idea of reducing red tape for housing construction more broadly.

“Those years were low interest-rate years. We could have tens of thousands, maybe 50,000 or 100,000 more modestly-priced homes in the region right now, and they would be bidding over us, instead of us bidding over what’s left. And that’s a really huge and ugly, frustrating dynamic,” Davis told The Urbanist in an interview near his Roosevelt home.

A tech entrepreneur who has worked in enterprise sales after getting a doctorate degree from Harvard Law, Davis diverted his career after losing his city council race three years ago. He started a newsletter, which he dubbed Rondezvous, and got involved in some of the city’s biggest civic fights.

In 2025, Davis had a very busy year. He stepped up against a wave of cash that rolled in to promote the corporate-backed alternative to Prop 1A, the dedicated fund for Seattle’s Social Housing Developer. At a press conference in front of the Amazon spheres last February, he called out the city’s biggest corporations for trying to railroad a new source of progressive revenue.

As a consultant, he spent weeks bartering with legislators in Olympia in support of statewide parking reform, a bill that many seasoned housing advocates saw as a quixotic attempt. A slog that likely would have made Davis tear his hair out — if he had any — that work ultimately helped to get SB 5184 across the finish line, reducing housing costs and making redevelopment projects more feasible in every corner of the state. Then Davis turned his attention back to Seattle, setting up a progressive political action committee (PAC) to counter big-business spending in support of Katie Wilson’s successful mayoral bid.

Now Olympia is calling to Davis once again in a bigger way.

“I don’t think we can really move the needle on our core issues unless we take a regional and statewide and broader approach,” Davis said. “There’s so much more opportunity there.”

Davis has already lined up the endorsements of a number of prominent urbanists and housing advocates, including Transit Riders Union, Tech4Housing, Bothell Mayor Mason Thompson, former Seattle mayoral candidate Cary Moon, Patience Malaba, former Seattle City Councilmember Mike O’Brien, Seattle Social Housing Developer executive director Tiffani McCoy, House Our Neighbors executive director Naishin Fu, 43rd District Democrats Chair Ryan Driscoll, and safe streets leaders Gordon Padelford and Kelli Refer.

The affordability agenda

When Davis lists his priorities, the idea of making life more affordable for Washingtonians of all stripes comes through most clearly — though a sales tax holiday doesn’t make it onto the list. Davis wants to finally get the legislature to fully fund education, its paramount duty under the state constitution. And to make a major investment in child care, touting the goal of capping child care costs at 7% a household’s income that was a central plan in Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. He celebrated expected increased investments in summer camp programs in Seattle under Mayor Wilson, but was clear that the legislature is going to need to step up to provide more funding.

“The year-round problem is something that we need really serious taxing power to address,” Davis said, pivoting the discussion to tax reform. As Davis announces his campaign, the Senate-advanced tax on incomes over $1 million has stalled out in the House. While some holdout Democrats undoubtedly would be happy to see no changes to the state’s tax code move forward, others are frustrated with the way the millionaires tax has advanced without explicit commitments to fund education or reduce the tax burden in other areas.

“I’m a big fan of the millionaires tax, per se. I’m all in for a 10% tax on incomes over a million bucks,” Davis said. “At the same time, it feels a little bit like a head fake. Cool, let’s do that. But in the meantime, we have an existing budget gap. We’re talking about cutting funding for toddlers with disabilities and 14,000 families who are supposed to get childcare, and sweeping hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of climate investments out of the Climate Commitment Act.”

Davis wants to see broader tax reforms put on the table.

“If we if our tax rate was about like Minnesota, we would literally have enough money to fully fund education, have universal childcare, cover the deficit, end homelessness, and probably put another $500 million a year into transportation — sustainable transportation — with some leftover funds,” Davis said. “It’s stupid. We are choosing this scarcity and we’ve got a set of leaders that appear just completely beholden to a class of folks who have a big stake in keeping that scarcity in place.”

And then there’s housing. Davis wants to see the legislature fully fund housing choice vouchers to subsidize rents for existing tenants, keeping them from falling into homelessness. But housing supply will be a clear priority for him as well. He supports the elevator reform bill advancing through the House right now, and would focus on additional issues where the legislature could get out of the way of the construction of badly needed units.

“There’s just such a thick package of things that need to be done to really get us to a standard where stuff moves quickly. I don’t think we need to compromise on core safety or climate constraints around housing, just a lot of the stupid rules. There’s still so many stupid rules to fix,” Davis said.

Bus lanes over new highways

When it comes to transportation, Davis wants to help steer the ship away from the highway megaprojects that the legislature continues to be focused on, as the state’s existing infrastructure continues to fall into disrepair. He also wants the state to get off the sidelines when it comes to public transit.

“I don’t think we should be expanding highways,” Davis said. “We should paint one thousand miles of bus lanes in the busiest corridors in the region, and we should add 50% frequency to the top 100 bus routes. And then you take hundreds of thousands of people a day, and you make their lives easier and more convenient, and they get places fast, and you also end up attracting a lot more people to those routes, and you’re solving a transportation cost and convenience problem for hundreds of thousands of people.”

The state only directly controls a limited number of transit corridors around the state, but he would pair bus lanes on those streets with incentives to create dedicated space for transit. That would mirror the Free Youth Fare program, where the state offered operational grants to transit agencies that made travel fare-free for kids, and every agency in the state took the deal.

“The busiest corridors often do end up converging on the state roads,” Davis said. “If it’s a city’s arterial [road], you’d have to pair it with some sort of funding mechanism for the busses. It would just be a matching fund: if it’s a top 100 route, you get an extra four busses per hour in each direction, or something.”

Standing up to Trump

Davis also wants to see the state legislature significantly ramp up its work countering a rogue federal administration.

“I think the legislature is not doing a great job. So, here we have leaders saying we have an emergency, ‘fascism is coming out of the federal government’ — which it is. I’m like: Okay, what do we have this year, a mask bill where you could maybe sue somebody if they violate,” Davis said.

He wants to see a real mask ban for law enforcement with criminal penalties, and praised Senator Manka Dhingra’s bill that would sequester state funds that had been set to go to the feds if any of Washington’s federal funding is withheld. He also thinks the state should explore standing up a civilian response team focused on logistics and potential interruption of federal activities.

“We want the federal government to look at us and think like, not worth it,” David said. “I believe the rhetoric that we are in real, serious danger, and I do not see my representatives, many of them anyway, acting like it, and it’s pretty damn frustrating.”

Visit Ron Davis’s campaign website for more information.

The post Former Seattle Council Candidate Ron Davis Challenges Longtime Legislator Gerry Pollet first appeared on The Urbanist.

Wilson’s office framed the “Neighbor by Neighbor Initiative” as a “citywide, all-hands-on-deck effort to rapidly expand shelter across Seattle and start bringing people inside.” Wilson has set a goal of standing up 4,000 additional units of emergency housing or shelter in her first term, with 1,000 of those in her first year.

The first piece of legislation empowers the Director of Finance & Administrative Services to directly sign lease agreements with property owners for new emergency housing, such as tiny house villages or RV safe lots. This would eliminate a significant bureaucratic hurdle in standing up such facilities.

“We’re moving faster than ever before, but I want to see the ground start breaking, the hammers start swinging, and fewer people left to sleep in doorways and tents,” Wilson said. “That’s why I have transmitted legislation to city council that will help us deliver on the goal of opening 1,000 new units of shelter with supportive services across the city this year. Now I need your help to get sites ready, to support our front-line service provides, and to be good neighbors with the shelters we need to open around the city.” 

Sites for potential RV encampments and tiny home villages were identified within weeks of Wilson’s inauguration, with a state-owned parcel on W Marginal Way SW in West Seattle selected as the first to move forward. Glassyard Commons will be operated by the Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI) and will include space for 72 RVs and 20 tiny homes.

Wilson’s second bill would increase the limit on shelter size, allowing tiny house villages to grow as large as 250 people in a few select cases. That’s more that twice as large as today’s cap. Only one tiny home village that large would be allowed in each council district, with villages capped at 150 after that one gets stood up.

“The second piece of legislation will allow successful shelters to serve more people,” Wilson said. “Even the most successful shelters that do the best work and have the best relationships in their communities are currently limited to serve just 100 people. This is a very low limit, which is out of step with national best practices and what cities like LA, Tampa, and Austin are doing now, and it just doesn’t make sense when we have so many people sleeping outside with nowhere to go. My proposal would increase this limit to 150 people per site on an interim basis, provide support to address any potential public safety impacts, and additionally allow one location in each city district to serve up to 250 people in cases where it makes sense.”

It’s unclear how many village operators would take the City up on this new ability, should it be granted. Some operators, such as Chief Seattle Club executive director Derrick Belgarde, have expressed a preference for lower capacity sites so that they are more manageable and less prone to issues. The largest tiny house village site that the Low Income Housing Institute currently operates has 73 units, but most are in the 40-to-50 unit range.

The third piece of legislation reallocates $4.8 million in funding to get emergency housing creation started sooner.

“My team has identified $4.8 million from existing, underutilized City fund sources, which can be used to fund shelter and wraparound services,” Wilson said. “$3.3 million was derived from an underutilized revolving loan program that was difficult to deploy and not previously appropriated. An additional $1.5 million will be appropriated from the Downtown Health and Human Service Fund, which is a program from the 1990s that has not been used for a decade.”

Mayoral spokesperson Sage Wilson indicated that, while the one-time funds would be a boost, it would be hard to find such large sums lying around in future budgets. Former Mayor Bruce Harrell and the Seattle City Council left Wilson with a bleak budget outlook for 2027, with many one-time programs sucking up scarce city dollars as the city’s revenue forecasts look stagnant at best.

As in other public appearances, Wilson underscored that addressing the homelessness crisis was her highest priority.

“Seattle’s homelessness crisis is an emergency, and in fact, our city declared a civil state of emergency on homelessness more than 10 years ago in November of 2015,” Wilson said. “But for many years and through multiple federal administrations, we have not treated this crisis with the urgency that it demands. That pattern ends here with all of us.”

She admitted that many obstacles remained to meeting that goal, but she contended the city was increasingly aligned at putting in the work to get there.

“Let’s be clear about the challenges: Our rates of unsheltered homelessness are off the charts, even in comparison with our peer cities,” Wilson said. “We have a big hill to climb, and if the solutions were easy, it would have happened already. To address this crisis at scale, we are going to need to do hard things. But I’m also confident that we can do this, because homelessness is not only the number one priority for me and my administration, I know that it’s also the number one priority for the residents of this city, for businesses and many other stakeholders across the city.”

Wilson had not identified which councilmembers will carry each piece of legislation. That said, District 1 Councilmember Rob Saka did speak at the event and broadly offer his support.

“Seattle urgently needs more shelter capacity to meet the scale of our homelessness crisis, which has gone on for too long without meaningful progress,” Saka said. “After touring Sound Foundations’ Hope Factory in my district, I saw firsthand how tiny homes can be built efficiently at scale. Expanding tiny home villages and RV safe lots is an effective, compassionate way to move people indoors and connect them to services. I commend Mayor Wilson for addressing this crisis with the urgency it demands and partnering so closely with my office to get it done.”

Additionally, District 7 Councilmember Bob Kettle did offer a supportive statement for the mayor’s press release.

“Today’s announcement of creating potentially 1,000 new units of shelter is welcome news for it builds capacity,” Kettle said. “I appreciate Mayor Wilson’s focus on this issue. My office will continue to support ways in which the city can assist our most vulnerable populations and create that safe base for all.”

Housing committee chair Dionne Foster and land use committee chair Eddie Lin are also both broadly aligned with Wilson’s agenda around making progress on homelessness, but did not release statements following Wednesday’s announcement.

Although Wilson herself did not stick around for the second half of the speaking program or to take questions from reporters afterward, a long list of providers spoke, including those focused on substance use disorder treatment and wraparound services. Beyond Wilson and Saka, the program included:

• Steve Roberts, Hope Factory / Sound Foundations NW
• Sharon Lee, Executive Director of Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI) 
• Fé LopezGaetke, Co-Executive Director, Purpose. Dignity. Action 
• Grace Stiller, West Seattle resident and neighbor of Camp Second Chance 
• Ann Haruki-Pinedo, Central District resident and neighbor of True Hope Village 
• Chloe Gale, REACH Program, Evergreen Treatment Services 
• Jilma Meneses, President and CEO, Catholic Community Services 
• Derrick Belgarde, Executive Director, Chief Seattle Club 
• Brandon Ashford-Whitfield, frontline service provider and OPEIU 8 member 

Wilson is far from the first mayor to pledge bold action on homelessness. In fact, her predecessor Bruce Harrell pledged 1,000 units of emergency housing in first six months and 2,000 units in his first year, and came up well short on both fronts, which Wilson noted on the campaign trail.

Actions by the Trump administration shredding the social safety net and risking an economic crash are likely to exacerbate the homelessness crisis. That puts even more pressure on local leaders to queue up effective programs and try innovative solutions.

As an organizer at heart, Wilson also appears to be taking the strategy that a broader coalition is needed to tackle the problem, from big institutional players to everyday residents. The mayor launched a citywide call to volunteer to show support and be part of the solution. More information on options to get involved in support is available on the mayor’s blog. 

“We need to choose to come together as a city, because we can’t keep looking away from this problem,” Wilson said. “We can’t keep pushing people from place to place without bringing more people inside. And we can’t keep forcing our busses, our parks, our libraries, to function as social service providers. Neighbor by neighbor, we can do this together.”

The post Wilson Rolls Out Bills Expediting Emergency Housing for Homeless Residents first appeared on The Urbanist.

Seattle is a city full of bright possibilities — and in recent years, voters have made clear they want a transportation system that reflects that. In 2024, Seattleites overwhelmingly approved the Keep Seattle Moving Transportation Levy, with more than 250,000 votes (67%) in favor! The renewal of Seattle’s transportation levy marked a historic level of investment in building a safe, sustainable, and accessible transportation system for everyone.

That mandate felt far-fetched 15 years ago when Seattle Neighborhood Greenways (SNG) was founded on the simple idea that people of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds should be able to walk, bike, and roll to where they need to go. Our earliest campaign was to bring our namesake street design, “neighborhood greenways” — traffic-calmed residential streets designed for walking and biking — to Seattle.

That early work succeeded. Neighborhood greenways are now an official city program, with 55+ miles having been built in neighborhoods across the city. But our mission didn’t stop there.

In the years that followed, we heard from community members across the city that we needed to focus on all types of projects to make neighborhoods great places to walk, bike, roll, and live. From those conversations, our focus expanded beyond “greenways,” into a holistic vision of a safe and accessible city with crosswalks, sidewalks, protected bike lanes, pedestrian plazas, and safer streets that create a world where kids can safely walk and bike to schools and parks, elders and people with disabilities can get around to their daily needs, and where people have safe, comfortable, and convenient options for getting to where they need to go.

Over the past 15 years, SNG has helped deliver real, on-the-ground change across the city:

• Improving safety by winning safer speed limits citywide, giving pedestrians a head start at crosswalks as the default policy, and holding the city accountable for transforming our most dangerous streets. 
• Making more walkable communities by securing record investments in sidewalks and crosswalks through two transportation levies — including the largest sidewalk expansion in Seattle’s history, starting in 2024.
• Creating a bikeable downtown by envisioning and successfully advocating for protected bike lanes that encompass the city center and connect to surrounding neighborhoods. 

• Partnering with community leaders in South Seattle to bring safe streets for walking and biking to historically underserved communities, like the Beacon Ave safety project on Beacon Hill, the Georgetown to South Park Trail, and the MLK Jr Way S safety project connecting the Central District and the Rainier Valley.
• Laying the groundwork for future projects, the new People Streets program at the Seattle Department of Transportation is tasked with transforming our streets into community places for people, like pedestrianizing Pike Place Market.
  

That’s why, in our 15th year, we are proud to step into a new chapter as Seattle Streets Alliance.

As a city-wide nonprofit with full-time staff supporting an alliance of neighborhood groups, this rebrand reflects who we are now and where we are going. 

“Streets” signals that our mission is not limited to one type of improvement, but encompasses all the aspects that make for great streets — accessible sidewalks, protected bike lanes, pedestrian plazas, and more. 

“Alliance” captures our grassroots model: a collaborative community of neighborhood groups, partners, and advocates working together for systemic change.

This is more than a new name or logo. It’s a clearer expression of our belief that mobility — the ability to get to where you need to go safely, comfortably, and conveniently — is a fundamental human right. It affirms our values to create a city with equitable access to safe, sustainable streets for all. 

Seattle Streets Alliance has always been a people-powered movement, and there has never been a more exciting time to get involved! If you care about creating more walkable neighborhoods, closing the gaps in our bike routes, and making safer streets for everyone, join us or stay in the loop by visiting streetsalliance.org

The post Op-Ed: Why Seattle Neighborhood Greenways Is Rebranding as Seattle Streets Alliance first appeared on The Urbanist.

Since 2023, WSDOT has been looking at ways that the ramps around Judkins Park Station can be modified to improve safety and start to repair some of the damage from the construction of I-90 in the 1970s and 1980s. Thanks to the pairing of a state and federal grant, the department is looking at station access and will advance a concept to early level of design that can be fully funded by the legislature.

Last week, the department announced that it had selected that preferred concept after more than a year of working with a community advisory group on different alternatives.

The preferred option WSDOT is now advancing would fully eliminate the northbound ramp from westbound I-90, an interchange that flies directly over a corner of Judkins Park itself. Northbound drivers would instead utilize the same ramp used by southbound drivers on the other side of Rainier, with that intersection either being modified into a full traffic signal or a roundabout. The eastbound ramp onto I-90 from the south would be squared up like a normal city intersection.

Other options looked at included squaring up all four ramps to improve visibility and reduce speeds, and removing some of the other ramps, including the one between the light rail station entrance and S Massachusetts Street. But removing other ramps, according to WSDOT’s modelling, would have caused traffic to back up I-90, and those alternatives were taken off the table.

In trying to weigh the four different options, WSDOT used three different sets of criteria to balance tradeoffs, including not just parameters set by the state project team, but also parameters set by the community advisory group — one prioritizing active transportation in the area, and one “balancing” the needs of different modes travelling through the corridor.

“Alternative 2, by far, had the best value, and it wasn’t even close, in any of the three weighting [criteria], it really was head and shoulders above it,” WSDOT’s April Delchamps told The Urbanist.

Rainier Avenue presents its own issues. A key input into how much traffic ends up on the I-90 ramps is the number of traffic lanes on Rainier, something that is ultimately controlled by the City of Seattle. To model the future needs of the I-90 ramps, the state needed to make assumptions around how much traffic volumes would change into the future as the city grows, but multimodal travel options increase.

Different sensitivity tests were run on those assumptions, but ultimately WSDOT was able to affirm that Rainier Avenue functioned well with just one general purpose lane continuing through the interchange in each direction, along with a dedicated bus lane. That represents a 50% decrease compared to the current configuration.

“This interchange is really uniquely placed in our system. I can’t really point to another interchange in the Puget Sound that is this unique [or] that is comparable. Seattle is growing, and that population is increasing, and there are a lot of assumptions around people making more trips than ever. But there really is a key difference, as you look to the future and look at the modeling and the traffic volumes that were that were given by the [Seattle] Comprehensive Plan, is that not everyone is going to be driving a car,” Delchamps said.

She noted that even though the range of assumptions about traffic growth were broad, they all ultimately pointed in the same direction.

“The interesting thing in this case is the roadway looks pretty much similar on the channelization. That sensitivity test shows that both, it’s not overbuilding, but it would still function in the opening year. So, the solution is the same,” Delchamps said.

While the removal of the northbound ramp and reducing the number of lanes on Rainier would be a big win, transportation advocates aren’t necessarily ready to stop there. Anna Zivarts, a member of the I-90 Judkins Park advisory group and the founder of the Nondrivers Alliance, has pushed WSDOT and SDOT to dream bigger and take bigger steps to improve safety and curb pollution, including in a recent pair of Urbanist op-eds.

“I really wish, and continue to want to push for us to model what would it be like to actually fully close the ramps there,” Zivarts told The Urbanist. “I think as a city, we need to be reducing car capacity on our highways and all of our urban highways — both state and federal and the ones that are operated by the city. And the only way to do that is to really reduce the amount of space for vehicles and that’s the big picture.”

“It is a step in the right direction. We’re looking at this intersection redesign from a crash prevention perspective, and also trying to maintain vehicle throughput,” Zivarts said. “They’re not looking at any of the other public health implications of having all the vehicle throughput through this area. We’re not looking at noise, we’re not looking at air [and] particle pollution, and those just aren’t being factored into any of the analysis and that that feels like a huge gap to me.”

Even just achieving the slimdown that WSDOT wants to see will remain a heavy lift, with a construction timeline still up-in-the-air. Much will depend on the state legislature’s willingness to fund restorative infrastructure like this. The federal Reconnecting Communities Pilot (RCP) Grant Program, funded by the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, would have provided a clear pathway to funding these changes, but those dollars were pulled back in 2025 by a Republican-led Congress.

“Now that we’re at the place where we have a preferred alternative, we can start digging into what the stormwater needs to ensure the ramps are not contributing to something like that. And once we can get through a little bit of that design — and we’re funded for that piece — we can start having a better sense of exactly how much we need for construction, and we can seek funding for that,” Delchamps said. “I wish I had a year that I could give, because I think there’s just so much swirl around funding, both at the state and the federal level, that’s hard to assume.”

Given that uncertainty, Zivarts wants the state to take an opportunity to think about being even more bold.

“We’re not talking about this getting fixed next year or the next two years,” Zivarts said. “This is really looking at the future of this area and what we want for it. I think we should be thinking a little bigger and dreaming. We’re having this incredible transit investment right there, it should be a wonderful place to live and work and go to school.”

The post WSDOT Advances Plan to Tame I-90 Ramps at Judkins Park Station first appeared on The Urbanist.