There's a Help Wanted ad that needs to be posted in every newspaper in Seattle. That ad would read something like this:
Help Wanted: Someone with name familiarity, lots of dollars or ability to raise them, and proven leadership experience, willing to take on Greg Nickels for Mayor in 2005.
A large coalition of community leaders seeks strong leader who will give first priority to our neighborhoods and small businesses, with the goal of ensuring equity, jobs, and affordable housing for low income people, communities of color, and others now marginalized by the policies of our current Mayor.
The successful candidate will in the past have distinguished herself or himself as a strong advocate for these values central to the well-being and soul of our city.
During the four-year tenure of Greg Nickels, these core city values have been pushed aside in favor of an agenda that overtly favors downtown and large corporate interests like no other time in this city's history. Mayor Nickels has slashed programs for the poor and failed to even begin to address the nearly $1 billion backlog of transportation and other basic infrastructure needs in our neighborhoods.
Nor has he chosen in any way to stem the gentrification and displacement that is driving housing prices up and many longtime residents out of Seattle. In fact, Nickels' policies aimed at promoting runaway growth have only served to accelerate these trends, driving a deeper wedge between rich and poor, and white and non-white in our city.
While many of our neighborhoods go without economic development, or even sidewalks, crosswalks or critical bridge repairs, Mayor Nickels has already made tens of millions of dollars available for his pro-downtown and South Lake Union biotech agenda. If he is re-elected, he plans to spend nearly $1 billion more just in these two concentrated areas of the city. By contrast, directing only a fraction of those dollars into our neighborhoods would do far more to generate tax revenues and jobs. And the jobs we would generate would assist low-income people, communities of color, the unemployed and underemployed - those who really need them.
Our current mayor has also tread heavily on public involvement processes established over a 30-year period that used to precede all critical land-use and other policy decisions affecting neighborhoods and small businesses across the city. Despite the fact that Mayor Nickels repeatedly expressed his devotion to the "Seattle Way" four years ago when he campaigned for the job, his staff now speaks derisively of those processes.
Upzone
Nearly every community group in the city has a horror story to tell about how city planners defied the goals and policies in their neighborhood plans painstakingly developed under previous mayors after countless hours of community participation. To Mayor Nickels and his staff, the neighborhoods and their planning efforts are simply obstacles in the way of his plan to substantially upzone large tracts of our city. Virtually every Seattle community is affected by his pro-density agenda.
Insider polls of the electorate indicate that Mayor Nickels is not invincible. There is still a great deal of anti-incumbency fervor out there, sentiment that two years ago led voters to un-elect three incumbent councilmembers. Those feelings have only been reinforced by the shameless way the mayor and his departmental staff cater to downtown and special interests.
Mayor Nickels cannot pursue his superfluous tunnel alternative for the Viaduct, Paul Allen's streetcar, a Mercer reconfiguration (that only makes traffic worse in that area) on top of the monorail and light rail - not without indefinitely postponing long overdue work on our city's neighborhood infrastructure.
Fund drain
Nickels' solution to this dilemma is to drain away our limited existing city, state and federal dollars for these mega-glamour projects, and then, for the basics, go to Olympia for authority to impose more regressive taxes like tolls, higher gas and utility taxes and float more voter-approved bonds. This is exactly the kind of recipe that produces a Tim Eyman-like anti-tax backlash, something so far we've avoided in Seattle. A candidate running on a platform of fiscal prudence, putting neighborhoods first, combined with social justice could offer a real alternative to voters.
Key decisions fundamentally affecting the distribution of wealth and the future of this city will be made this coming year and before the 2005 fall elections. Without any opponent, the Nickels team will interpret that as a mandate to impose their agenda with no consideration for how it will affect the city budget, affordability, historic structures, neighborhood quality/livability and the displacement of low-income people from Seattle.
As it is, most of our current councilmembers have little backbone and often cave in to the Mayor's steamrolling tactics. And, if Greg Nickels is elected and serves out a second four-year term, it could be too late for any future elected official - or any of us - to restore justice and fairness to the governance of our community.
John Fox and Carolee Colter are members of the Seattle Displacement Coalition. They can be reached at editor@capitolhilltimes.com.
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