Tag Archives: taxation

Local

2021 Seattle mayoral candidate Jessyn Farrell discusses her platform

Video

[SEATTLE] – (MTN) Malcontent News is conducting a series of interviews with 2021 Seattle mayoral candidates. We have contacted, or are in the process of contacting the most viable candidates, inviting them to answer seven prepared questions. Today we feature Jessyn Farrell.

For all candidates, the first interview will be about their platform and vision. Prior to the primary election, we will conduct a second round that will focus on differentiation, and challenging positions and visions. Once the final candidates are selected in the primary, we will invite them for one last round of interviews.

All candidates for the first round will be asked the same seven questions, and have received a copy in advance. These questions were created by our editorial board, and are aligned to topics of key interest to the residents of Seattle.

Malcontent News is committed to providing equal time for all candidates, and operating under a “fairness doctrine” for all candidates.

We are publishing a transcript of each interview. Transcripts may be lightly edited to remove, umms, ahhs, pauses, and aid in readability.

JESSYN FARRELL

JESSYN FARRELL, 2021 candidate for Seattle mayor
https://malcontentment.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Jessyn-Farrell-Audio.mp3
JESSYN FARRELL INTERVIEW

David Obelcz:
What is it that has you running for mayor in 2021 for Seattle?

Jessyn Farrell:
This is a really hard time for folks, whether it is the economic disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic, racial injustice. If you’re a parent like me, [who] struggles with remote learning and lack of childcare, I think that there’s this sense that we can be doing so much better as a city. We’re not tackling both the really basic things like basic service delivery, let alone the biggest problems like homelessness and climate change and housing affordability and public safety. I really think that there’s this hunger for a problem-solving leader. Who’s really willing to articulate a vision, wake up every day, and implement that vision. I am hoping to make that case to the city [on] why I am that person.

Question one – houselessness crisis

David Obelcz:
Seattle Is facing an ongoing crisis related to unharmed people’s Washington state experienced a 6.2 increase in homelessness in 2019 – 2020. King County spends over a billion dollars a year between public and private investment to support approximately 12,500 unhomed people, with disappointing results. If you were elected as mayor, how would you address this crisis? How do you think your plan provides aid in resolving this crisis, both in the short term and in the long term?

Jessyn Farrell:
I think there are three parts to that question. Number one, what is the plan? Number two, why I’m the person that can get it done, and number three, what we need to be doing above and beyond that. So I’m going to kind of take each of those things in turn. And the broad context is we’ve been in a homelessness crisis now for many years. Our leaders have not acted like that’s the case, waking up with a sense of purpose and determination and holding ourselves accountable to helping people get inside and get the services they need. So I, like many Seattleites and people across the region, are just really disappointed in the lack of progress that we’ve made. Now, the good news is I think there’s quite a bit of consensus around what it is that we need to do.

We need to be creating more interim housing options. We have learned that using hotels as a safe and stable place for people to come inside is really effective. We also know that we need to massively scale up access to mental and behavioral health services that people need. We have an opioid crisis in the state. We have a really strong state opioid prevention plan. We need to be partnering with the state to be delivering on that. Finally, not only are we needing to invest in the interim solutions, but we need to be scaling up our access to affordable housing. Generally, there is absolutely a crisis across the region, and that’s something we need to be solving for. My background is as an advocate on transit and transportation. I am a former state legislator, and I’ve delivered on those big regional solutions and to get in front of the homelessness crisis. We’re going to have to stop patting ourselves on the back for incrementalism and relentlessly focus on those particular solutions that are scaled to helping people get inside.

David Obelcz:
How does your plan differ, and how does this get us to the long term?

Jessyn Farrell:
If you look across the candidates’ plans, particularly on those interim solutions, there is a lot of consensus; but I’m going to make the case that there are really two core differences for me. Number one, part of my plan includes massively scaling up affordable housing. I’m calling it ST3 for housing. It takes its basis from the way we’ve been able to scale up regional transit infrastructure. We have a regional approach. We’re working together across three counties. We have a very significant public investment that is tied to a plan, and we’re using multimodal strategies to get people around. Similarly, in housing, we need to be scaling up housing at all income levels, very low income, all the way up through middle-class housing, and at a variety of lifecycle needs.

You know, if you’re a family, you have a different need than if you’re aging in place or if you’re a younger person. And finally, every single neighborhood across the region needs to be taking on its share of affordable housing. So that’s a core difference. And then the second core difference is, again, one of experience. I’m the candidate in this race that has accomplished large-scale regional and state solutions to our problems. I mentioned working on Sound Transit and advocating for transit. That also includes helping negotiate paid family leave and [delivering] the 2015 transportation package. So it’s that combination of being able to deliver both the consensus solutions, filling in the gaps, and then having the experience to do it.

Question two – infrastructure and economic recovery

David Obelcz:
As a result of the ongoing COVID pandemic, economic recovery and development and addressing Seattle’s crumbling transit infrastructure such as the West Seattle bridge and the Magnolia bridge [is] of great importance. Additionally, some are expressing concerns that the jobs that left downtown Seattle specifically are permanent and that workers are not going to return. So this is a three-part question. Part one, how do you plan on tackling the infrastructure issue of which it sounds like you’re passionate about. How will you stimulate economic recovery and development as we move beyond COVID? The third part is, what concern do you have about employers and workers not returning to Seattle?

Jessyn Farrell:
That’s a lot of great questions. I think what it recognizes is how important infrastructure is as a tool to spring economic recovery. I was the chair of the Governor’s task force on safe work and economic recovery. One of our core recommendations was that we need to be making major investments in infrastructure – both the safety fix projects like saving our bridges and fixing potholes – but also saving public transit in a big, dense city. We need to make sure that people have options to get around. And for those folks who are transit-dependent, continue to have that agency and freedom that transit brings. So that’s a really important piece. I would say that there are three core strategies that we need to be employing to continue to fund transit and move it into the next generation of really excellent service.

The great news is that the state is still considering a transportation investment package. And the city has to be advocating for including our bridges and transit infrastructure in that. Secondly, the Biden administration is also considering a significant infrastructure plan that matters. And then third, we have our own local tools, and we need to be stepping up and being a partner in funding and furthering our own infrastructure. I would say that it has to be tethered to our core values around equity [and] making sure that those parts of the city that have historically been left out, particularly those communities of color, have the first set of investments that matters. Secondly, climate change. Transportation is a significant driver of climate change. So we need to be lowering emissions from transportation. This idea of freedom and agency transportation should be a way to help you get to where you need to go. [For] our most vulnerable users, our youngest or oldest folks with disabilities, we need to be centering their needs. So that’s a little bit about my transportation agenda. There is a lot more on my website.

As to that second question, I think it was around downtown and what we’re going to do around downtown. Our city is so strong because we have a fantastic downtown and we have great neighborhoods, and we need to be investing in both. And obviously, there are a lot of concerns about the state of downtown right now. There are both short-term and long-run things that we need to be doing. We’ve done a great job bringing jobs downtown. And of course, now there’s some question around what’s going to happen in COVID after the pandemic, but we need to be aggressive about continuing to build housing downtown.

If you have a family like mine, there aren’t a lot of options for you to be able to live downtown. We need to treat downtown like the great neighborhood that it is. And so that means aligning the housing strategies with the job strategies. And that way, you’re able to have people downtown shopping and participating in commerce, et cetera. But that also then means you need that complete community aspect. You need schools, [and] you need open space. Those are all longer-term things. And the very near, near term, of course, people are worried about public safety. They’re worried about actually getting people downtown. Again, they’re worried about our jobs going to be coming back. And that is something that we need to be focusing on. I think one of the things we can be doing is, be a tourist in your own community as a way of getting people back downtown; downtown is open.

And part of it is that kind of “re-culturating” ourselves and changing our habits again. To being downtown for those of us who don’t live downtown and don’t go downtown every day again. But obviously, homelessness and public safety are real concerns, and those need to be addressed immediately as well. It is a crisis. It is a humanitarian crisis, and we just haven’t been acting like it. And that’s something that has impacted downtown in particular.

Question three – does Seattle have a crime and/or inequity problem

David Obelcz:
As a result of protests related to the murder of George Floyd, police violence, and ongoing racial inequality, Seattle has earned a reputation as crime written, dirty and unsafe. At one point, the city was labeled an anarchist jurisdiction by the previous Presidential administration. Do you agree with that view? What do you think will shift perceptions, and how do you address racial inequality that exists in Seattle?

Jessyn Farrell:
I want to just start by pushing back really hard on the Trump administration. They obviously had a strong political interest in demeaning cities for a whole host of reasons. So I want to dismiss that out of hand. I will say that there is this sense – I think across the city – that we want to be a city that we’re proud of. How do we turn anger into action and particularly around public safety? I want to talk a little bit about what I see as our city’s core values around that because that should guide our conversations, our strategies, and [our] budgets around public safety. First of all, every person in our city, especially our Black and brown community members, should feel safe as they go about their day-to-day lives.

For people like Charleena Lyles, who [was] murdered by the police in 2017, she was calling for help. She was in a crisis. So that is a situation in an instance where our public safety failed because it was not creating safety for folks. Likewise, another value that is important is that public safety has to mean so much more than just a traditional policing response. It has to mean all of those social, economic, and cultural supports that create thriving communities. Those ideas need to drive our discussions around budgets and what public safety means.

If I could give a couple of specific examples of what I mean by that, because the details matter here, our values and articulating our values matter, but the details matter too. So our crisis response system needs to be changed. There should not be a case where if you are in the midst of a mental or behavioral health issue, you could get harmed or killed by the police.

That is absolutely something that we need to change in there. A lot of strategies that are being employed on the ground in Seattle, whether it’s Health One, that is through the fire department or community-based crisis response systems, relying on caseworkers, we need to scale those up.

Another specific example where we can do better around public safety is changing the way we do transportation and enforcement. Too often, there is disparate enforcement of traffic laws. Whether you’re fare enforcement crossing the street, riding a bike, and we know that there are ways to remove an officer from the policing piece. You can build, you can do all kinds of things to slow traffic down on streets, whether it’s the use of cameras or creating roundabouts and more street trees.

There are lots of ways to promote better safety around transportation that we should be looking at. But there are things that are working that we need to also keep, for example, our regional domestic violence unit and the way they have been working to take guns away from dangerous people that matters implementing our Extreme Risk Protection Order Law. That’s important. The detective work that happens around things like theft or catalytic converters, those are things that we need to continue to invest in. So it has to be tethered to values first, and then strategies and budgets need to follow.

Question four – police reform

David Obelcz:
You’ve dovetailed on a lot of things that we’re going to dive deeper into. Compared to the west coast cities of Portland, San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento, Oakland, and San Diego, Seattle has the second-highest cost per officer tied with Oakland and the second-highest officer per capita behind San Francisco. Additionally, the average officer makes [$153,000 sic] a year before benefits, according to a study done in the Seattle Times and also Forbes. Seattle police say that they are suffering from slow response times and claim that they need additional budget. The police budget was cut approximately 18%, and staffing levels were adjusted to roughly 1,325 officers, if fully staffed – there are 1,088 today. How would you define “defund the police,” and what is your position on defund? How, as mayor, do you restore community trust in the Seattle police department?

Jessyn Farrell:
This answer has to be driven by what our values are, and I just, articulated them, which is to say that every single person should feel safe as they go about their day-to-day lives. Public safety is so much more than just a traditional police response. It’s those cultural, economic, and social supports that create thriving communities, and fundamentally our budgets. Therefore, staffing levels have to reflect those values and the strategies that actually work. I laid out a bunch of those strategies in my previous answer. So I won’t go through them again, but it is just to say that you can’t lead the conversation with staffing levels because, in a vacuum, you don’t get the results that you want around actual public safety. You have to start with values and the strategies that we know work.

David Obelcz:
What is your position on “defund the police?” One of the protester demands in 2020 was defund by 50%. Again, the budget was cut by 18%. What is your position, and how do you define defund?

Jessyn Farrell:
My position is that our public safety system fundamentally needs to be transformed, particularly in those places that are causing deep harm. Our crisis response, as an example, transportation enforcement is another example. The way we treat substance abuse is another example. Those are all things that need deep transformation. My position is that if we are able to transform based on our values, if we are able to build budgets and staffing levels based on our values, there will be things that we are scaling up. There will be things that we are absolutely scaling down. So that is how I would approach this conversation so that we get to outcomes where every single person. Particularly our black and brown neighbors feel safe in this community.

Question five – mental health crisis

David Obelcz:
One of many things that COVID has shed light on and that you have alluded to is the ongoing mental health crisis that is facing us as a nation. And Seattle is not exempt from this. Recently a man in the throes of a mental health crisis was fatally wounded by the Seattle police department near the Seattle waterfront. Some cities have implemented programs where unarmed teams and social workers respond to mental health calls. And in Seattle, we’ve rolled out Health One, and we’re adding a [third] unit currently. What would you do as mayor to further address the ongoing mental health crisis? And I’m going to add a little bit to that question. The increasing opioid deaths that we are currently seeing and headlines over the last say 60 days.

Jessyn Farrell:
People [are] experiencing mental health crises, particularly on the street or in their homes, and calling for help. We need to be doing those things that we know work. I mentioned Charleena Lyles. She had called for help 17 times prior to her being shot and killed by the police. So that is a system that is not working. And we do know that there are programs, and you mentioned them. There are caseworkers. There are social workers who are building relationships with people over time. They’re able to meet their medical and healthcare needs as well as help them get to services. That is something we should be doing. And we know that works. For example, Health One is an example, but there are other programs [such as] Just Cares. [We] need to be scaling those programs up because they get people connected to the services and the housing they need.

And they are typically a safer response, a less fatal or harmful response. So that’s important in the opioid crisis. We have a comprehensive state opioid response plan. The city needs to be a much more proactive partner in implementing that plan. And there are a lot of components. There are upstream components working with doctors around prescriptions, [such as] using nonmedical pain management approaches, working to make sure that people have safe storage. Training physicians to assess whether there is an early-stage opioid addiction happening so that help can be provided. There are a bunch of upstream things that we need to be partnering with our medical and care community that are part of our state’s plan. What happens when people are in the throes of addiction? We need to be creating pathways so that people can get the kinds of supports they need, particularly medical opioid use disruptors.

There are treatments like Suboxone that require daily administration. We need to be scaling up our public health infrastructure so that people have access to that so that they can get to a place where they’re able to have reduced cravings. They’re able to have that interruption of the addiction cycle that we know is necessary for people to get to a better place. The public health infrastructure matters. And then, of course, the final piece is stable housing because you can’t get in front of an addiction if you don’t have a stable place to go every night.

Question six – zoning and Seattle housing crunch

David Obelcz:
On this subject of stable housing, housing affordability is a significant problem in Seattle. 88% of Seattle’s land for housing is zoned for single-family units. Over the last five years, most of the new construction has been centered on the 12% that supports high-density housing. Developers and builders focused on small footprint properties with minimal parking and luxury [features]. Do you support changing zoning rules for ADUs and more dense construction? That was part one. What changes to Seattle regulations for the construction of residential property would you support?

Jessyn Farrell:
The affordability crisis is a real consequence of many decades and, in part, centuries of systemic racism that have left out, [in] particular, our Black neighbors, of wealth accumulation that comes from housing. Trickle-down economics – we have not adequately regulated and taken away regulations that created housing stability in the last couple of decades, so we need to take a comprehensive approach. Zoning is one piece of that.

I support changing and reforming our zoning, so every neighborhood has access to a diversity of housing types that meet people at different income levels and meet people at various stages of their life cycle. If you want to age in place and live in the neighborhood you’ve lived in for a long time, you may not have opportunities. Changing the kinds of housing diversity within a neighborhood matter. There are a lot of things that we need to be doing beyond zoning. Zoning changes in and of itself [don’t] create stable communities necessarily or affordable housing in the way we want it to.

We need to be looking at those financing mechanisms that run behind or through a building. You may be familiar with a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. That’s a great housing product if you’re lucky enough to have it. And it creates a lot of stability for a homeowner; we need to be thinking about the next generation of stability supports for both owners, people getting into homeowning and current renters. Those things all matter and that’s a conversation that’s beyond zoning.

Finally, obviously, the way we do permitting has to be streamlined. It takes way too long in this city. We know that we can reform permitting to achieve our ability to deliver more housing [and] our environmental goals. You don’t need to put those two things against each other, such as tree canopy and more affordable housing. Those are things that absolutely can be sorted out. I helped negotiate a permit streamlining bill at the state level that had broad support in both the environmental community and the development community. These are things that we can do, and we just need to be focused. That’s why I’m proposing ST3 for housing because what gets planned for has a chance of getting done.

Question seven – taxation

David Obelcz:
Seattle has a reputation for having high taxes compared to other Washington cities. A number of initiatives have added incremental taxes to fund transit, homeless programs, education, and the general fund. These taxes are small on paper. For instance, STB Prop One added one-half of one cent to the city sales tax. However, most of these taxes are regressive due to Washington state’s existing tax structure. Will you pledge no new taxes for the residents of Seattle? And what programs would you cut?

Jessyn Farrell:
No new tax pledges are the language of trickle-down proponents, which I do not believe in, in any way. But I will say this is how I approach a tax conversation. First of all, it should be driven by what services do we want to fund. This is a city that cares about high-quality services, and this is a city that wants to fund those things. When we are talking about taxes, we are merely talking about the mechanism that allows us to, through government, provide the things that we want. Whether it’s transit or childcare or environmental programs or parks. Those are things that people want, and we have to start the conversation so that it’s tied to what is it that we’re trying to do.

Secondly, we do have, now it may be the number two most regressive tax system, thanks to action that the state took. [Editors note – Ms. Farrell statement is Washington state had the most regressive system prior to most recent legislative session]. So the city now needs to be working as a partner to have access to more tools that are fundamentally progressive and focused on expecting the very wealthiest to be paying their fair share. As you mentioned, the very wealthiest pay only 3% of their overall income into taxes, and for the very lowest income [it’s]17%. So the city needs to be a partner in really aggressively changing that. That is something that is a value of mine that also animates my opinion around taxes.

David Obelcz:

What programs would you cut if you were mayor?

Jessyn Farrell:
That is a question that you have to be looking at in that broad sense of what is it that we are trying to do. And, if you are talking about transit, if you are talking about parks programming, if you are talking about funding for homelessness services, I think the broad point is that we are not doing enough. Now, there are things that we need to be looking at. And I named a few, particularly in the public safety conversation. We can be looking at a lot of different ways to do better traffic outcomes, safer traffic outcomes without the use of officers. So that’s a place where we need to be looking at as a place to cut. Also, the idea around crisis response and who we’re asking to go at a time of crisis, that’s something that we can look at changing.

So there are things that we can be doing to change how we’re spending money in the city. But it has to be tied with what are our objectives, what makes a great livable city. As mayor, I will say, I have been a legislator. I have worked at the executive level in government before, and every single expenditure matters. And you have to go through every single line item with a fine-tooth comb because that is really about delivering services for the city. So I will go through, I will commit to delivering budgets that have that attention to detail and are focused on delivering the things that we want in this city.

David Obelcz:
Jessyn, thank you so much for joining us today. I appreciate it. I know our viewers have appreciated hearing about your platform and your vision for Seattle for 2021 and beyond.

BIPOC, Local

Interview with Seattle mayoral candidate and Seattle City Council President Lorena Gonzalez

Video

[SEATTLE] – (MTN) Malcontent News is conducting a series of interviews with 2021 Seattle mayoral candidates. We have contacted, or are in the process of contacting the most viable candidates, inviting them to answer seven prepared questions. Today we feature Seattle City Council President, Lorena Gonzalez.

For all candidates, the first interview will be about their platform and vision. Prior to the primary election, we will conduct a second round that will focus on differentiation, and challenging positions and visions. Once the final candidates are selected in the primary, we will invite them for one last round of interviews.

All candidates for the first round will be asked the same seven questions, and have received a copy in advance. These questions were created by our editorial board, and are aligned to topics of key interest to the residents of Seattle.

Malcontent News is committed to providing equal time for all candidates, and operating under a “fairness doctrine” for all candidates.

We are publishing a transcript of each interview. Transcripts may be lightly edited to remove, umms, ahhs, pauses, and aid in readability.

LORENA GONZALEZ

lorena Gonzalez, 2021 candidate for Seattle mayor
https://malcontentment.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Audio-Track-for-Website-and-Transcription.mp3
LORENA GONZALEZ INTERVIEW

Jennifer Smith:
Hi malcontents. This is Jennifer and I’m here today with Lorena Gonzalez. She is running for Seattle mayor Hello, Lorena, how are you doing today?

Lorena Gonzalez:
I’m doing great, Jennifer. Thanks for having me.

Jennifer Smith:
Well, thank you so much for being here with us and being willing to share your platform with our audience. Can I ask you what inspired you to run for mayor?

Lorena Gonzalez:
You know, I get that question a lot. It’s an important question. Listen, I’m running for mayor of Seattle because I really believe in this city. I love the city of Seattle and I know many people, including many of your listeners and Watchers do as well. I have spent most of my life working through many challenges. I first started as a migrant farmworker out in central Washington, where at the young age of eight years old, I earned my first paycheck picking cherries in orchards in central Washington state and living in migrant farm labor camps. And I worked my way through that to eventually becoming a civil rights attorney here in the city of Seattle, representing women, families, children, and people and all sorts of civil rights cases, including in police brutality and racial discrimination cases across the state.

I want to be able to build on that work on the work that I’ve been doing on the city council for the last seven years to really deliver on this civil rights moment to make sure that we’re producing equitable community safety. And I also want to address issues of deep poverty and inequity in our city that are largely along racial lines. We live in a tale of two cities in many ways. And I think my unique lived experience and the fact that I’m still not benefiting from incredible wealth will serve the people well. Particularly those working families and workers in our city who continue to be left out of our economy and who unfortunately end up entering into a cycle of poverty and homelessness. I believe my record and my experience on the city council to deliver on big, bold, progressive ideas is exactly what the city needs in the next mayor as we come out of COVID. And as we look at an equitable economic recovery.

Question one – houselessness crisis

Jennifer Smith:
I think that’s an excellent segue into our first question. Seattle is facing an ongoing crisis related to unhomed peoples Washington state experienced a 6.2% increase in homelessness during 2019-2020 and King County spends over $1 billion per year in public and private investment in support of approximately 12,500 houseless people with very disappointing results. If you are elected mayor of Seattle, how would you address this crisis and how do you think your plan would provide aid in resolving this crisis? Both in the short and in the long term.

Lorena Gonzalez:
Because this issue is so controversial. I think it’s important to really start from a place of acknowledging where we have common ground. I think that we actually agree on a lot in this space. I think in general, we all agree that we want to create a system and a community in which people aren’t required to live outside because of a lack of housing. We want to be able to use our parks as parks. We want to be able to use our sidewalks and we want to be able to use other public spaces for their intended use. And we don’t want people suffering needlessly in our streets. So I think the reality is there a lot of interventions, a lot of solutions, a lot of ideas that work permanent supportive housing, transitional housing, rapid rehousing, increasing non congregate shelter options for people that’ll meet their needs, and providing people with mental, behavioral, and substance use disorder, treatment and services and healthcare that is linguistically culturally appropriate is what we know works and it is what we need to keep doing.

The issue has been that we are in a little bit of a log jam because of a lot of different personalities who can’t come together to set aside egos and to just get to work on those solutions. What is different about me is I have significant deep relationships with our city council, with our regional elected leaders, with our state elected leaders, and with our federal elected leaders, to really make a difference in this space and to shepherd forward all of the solutions I just listed in a way that is going to produce more meaningful results. I’m looking forward to being able to lead in that fashion and to walk into that challenge with eyes wide open, but also take advantage of all the opportunities I believe exist about the areas that we agree upon as it relates to addressing the needs of people experiencing homelessness.

Question two – infrastructure and economic recovery

Jennifer Smith:
COVID of course has exacerbated the homeless crisis, but it’s also really something we need to discuss in the context of economic recovery and development, as well as addressing Seattle’s crumbling, transit infrastructure, such as the West Seattle bridge. It’s a great importance to many people. Some are also expressing concern about large corporations and many in the workforce, actually leaving Seattle. The question that is threefold, how do you plan on tackling infrastructure, aiding an economic recovery and what concerns do you have about the loss of corporations and workers.

Lorena Gonzalez:
COVID is really, especially for communities of color, really highlighted some of the pre-existing inequities and made them worse. I think that COVID has left no households, untouched assuming you don’t live in the one percent in our city. Most households have been impacted in some way. My household is no exception to being touched in a negative way by COVID my own husband who is in the restaurant industry found himself unemployed for the better half of last year and most of this year – and just recently returned to work because of his restaurant finally reopened. So I understand how important it is to support our local economy and to make sure that folks are going to be able to not just make it through the next few months but to actually be able to thrive. So I think it’s important to make sure that we are continuing to provide things like rental assistance and eviction relief and other supports to our local economy to make sure that they can continue to weather the storm and eventually get to a place where we are thriving.

Reopening downtown is critically important. It’s important because there are thousands of workers in the region that rely on those jobs, hotel workers retail workers, other restaurant service, industry workers, arts, and culture workers. They all rely on a bustling moving downtown and that’s why it’s so important for us to continue to ramp up our vaccination efforts and to continue following public health guidelines to make sure we’re not rolling back our economic restrictions. I think this is a really complex issue. We have a little bit more of a storm to weather here before we are going to start seeing some uptick, but we are seeing that people, including corporations in our city, are committed to being here. And I really appreciate those corporations who acknowledge that taking care of their workers is part of a good business strategy. It means that they are going to continue to, in my mind, being good partners to us at the city to help us get workers back to work safely, but also to continue to be good neighbors and help us build the vibrant city that attracts their workers to come here in the first place.

Jennifer Smith:
Back to the question of infrastructure for say lives in West Seattle. The other day it is an absolute nightmare up there with construction, and there’s so much being done. How do you plan on addressing issues of infrastructure, especially if we’re looking as an example, the West Seattle bridge

Lorena Gonzalez:
Well, I live in West Seattle, so you don’t have to tell me more than once about the impact of the West Seattle bridge. It is the number one issue that people approach me about as I move about in my own community here in West Seattle. It is a regional asset. It was the right thing to close it down because of the significant public safety issues that it posed. But it is proven to all of us how important it is to maintain our infrastructure. Of course, the federal government is looking at funding infrastructure projects. It’s a little unclear to us what bridges will be prioritized. But in the interim at the city, we are looking at strategies to make sure that we’re taking care of our bridge infrastructure, including currently looking at a bonding proposal of up to $100 million to take care of the much-needed infrastructure need of bridges across the city.

So that’s going to be something that the next mayor is going to have to implement and execute on. As a sitting city council member, who’s being asked to vote and consider this strategy, I’ll be ready on day one to implement that as a priority to make sure that no other neighborhood in the city of Seattle is left effectively on an Island and isolated and having to deal with the immense amount of traffic that’s caused by rerouting. It has been really difficult for the entire region to deal with our failed bridge, and we can’t allow it to happen again.

Question three – does Seattle have a crime and/or inequity problem

Jennifer Smith:
As a result of protest-related to the murder of George Floyd, for which Derek Chauvin was just convicted on all three counts, police violence and ongoing racial inequality is a major topic. Seattle has a national reputation as crime-ridden, dirty and unsafe. At one point it was labeled by the previous presidential administration as an anarchic jurisdiction. How do you plan on addressing the continuing racial inequality that exists within Seattle, how do you plan to mitigate those and make people see Seattle more favorably?

Lorena Gonzalez:
I just want to sort of start by acknowledging how important it is to not only say the words ‘Black Lives Matter,’ but to effectuate those words in our policy and local jurisdictions are the ones who hold the most amount of power to truly transform policy, to produce equitable community safety. And by that, I mean, we have control of our police departments. We have control of their budgets, and we have control of how we leverage our dollars to invest or not in community-based safety initiatives that will help to reduce the need to engage in criminal behavior because of a lack of opportunities. SoI want to acknowledge that this is really important work. It is not going to happen overnight. It’s not going to happen in one mayoral term. It is long and steady work that is really important for the next mayor to fulfill and continue.

I think that the reality is Seattle continues to be a vibrant city. That doesn’t mean that we are crime-free. It does mean that we have an obligation to make sure that we are meeting current public safety needs with the tools that we currently have while also working on continued investment and scaling up of human service-based programs that are really going to produce more equitable community safety. That means that we’re not flipping a switch, right? We’re not flipping a switch overnight on 911 or pulling away from public safety services, but we are doing the slow and steady work of making sure that we are meeting the 911 response needs of the city while also investing in communities who have been starved of investment for far too long. I think that’s just really important work for the next mayor to understand, and to be committed to, and to make difficult decisions about what our police department should and should not be doing in terms of their bodies of work. It is going to be a significant challenge for the next mayoral administration.

Question four – police reform

Jennifer Smith:
Speaking about SPD when compared to the West Coast cities of Portland, San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento, Oakland, and San Diego, Seattle has the second-highest cost for police officers tied with Oakland and the second-highest officer per capita behind San Francisco. Additionally, the average officer makes $153,000 a year before benefits, according to the Seattle Times. Despite the large force and supporting budget, Seattle police report, slow response times and claim the issue is a lack of staffing. The budget was cut by approximately 18% and staffing levels were adjusted to support roughly 1,325 officers. How would you define defund the police and what is your position? How do you restore community trust, especially within BIPOC communities with SPD?

Lorena Gonzalez:
I started kind of answering that a little bit on that last question, but I think the concept of defund SPD is for a lack of a better description, it’s an oversimplification of the issue that we’re talking about. I think it’s really important for us to stay focused on a concept of what it looks like to scrutinize police budgets, which historically have not received scrutiny. I know this, I can speak from a place of knowledge because I have served on the city council and it has been incredibly difficult to scrutinize the police budget in large part because there isn’t a lot of transparency. I think it’s important to start there, right? We have a responsibility to take a closer look at every city department’s budget. And just because you’re a police department, [it] doesn’t make you exempt or give you the privilege to not have that level of scrutiny.

The second thing is we’re talking about an allocation and relocation of city dollars to programs that will produce truly equitable communities. Things like gun violence prevention, things like youth engagement. Jobs for youth. Particularly black men between the ages of 18 and 24. These are all programs that we know if we invest in them as the need that exists, they will make a difference. They will interrupt cycles of violence and they will interrupt the cycle of poverty that oftentimes allows our children to be victimized by criminal elements. I think it’s really important for us to have a conversation about, what does it look like to scale up programs that do not require a gun and badge to respond and how do we get our police department back to core law enforcement functions that are appropriate for them to respond to. They are not equipped and don’t have the tools nor I believe, should they be responding to people in a mental health crisis with guns. We should be looking at how do we get to people who are experiencing mental health crises with better systems in place. And once we identify what those systems are, and once we’ve developed those systems, we can start pulling back a law enforcement first approach.

Question five – mental health crisis

Jennifer Smith:
Mental health crisis has been one of the things that COVID has shed so much light on. And we recently had a man in the throes of a mental health crisis get shot by SPD on the waterfront. Would you be open to implementing something similar to the STAR program in Colorado, which replaces traditional law enforcement responders with a medic and mental health professional, on some emergency calls as a way to deescalate situations when there is a clear mental health element?

Lorena Gonzalez:
I have great news. We have our own version of STAR in the city of Seattle. It’s the Health One Mobile Unit. We have just announced that we have deployed our second unit. But that brings us to a total of two and the need is much greater obviously than a total of two. But that model is exactly what you’ve described. It is designed to respond to people who are in crisis, who don’t need to have necessarily a law enforcement intervention but needs somebody who’s going to help them deescalate and to approach them with the behavioral health needs that they need in order to calm down, take a moment and survive at the end of that experience. I think we need to do more of that kind of work. We need to take that to scale so that we are actually seeing good outcomes for the people who are experiencing a mental health crisis. Obviously, somebody ultimately dying, being killed as a result of being in a mental health crisis. I think we can all agree that that is not the outcome we want to see.I don’t think police officers want that outcome, and I don’t think anyone else in the city wants that outcome as a result of that interaction.

Question six – zoning and Seattle housing crunch

Jennifer Smith:
So shifting directions a little bit, I want to talk about land use in Seattle. Eight-Eighty percent of Seattle’s land that is zoned for housing is zoned for single-family housing. Over the last five years, most of the new construction has been centered in the 12% that supports high density. Housing developers and builders focused on small footprint properties with minimal parking and luxury appointments. Housing affordability is a major problem for Seattle, which you already referenced earlier. Do you support changing zoning rules for ADUs and more dense construction to alleviate the housing crisis? And what changes do you support?

Lorena Gonzalez:
Let’s start with the fact that Seattle is progressive as we are, is not immune from the vestiges of racial discrimination in our land use policies. In fact we still have defacto redlining across our city and it shows up in the fact that we have effectively banned multifamily housing in a vast majority of the city. Exclusionary zoning laws, like those laws that exist in the city of Seattle, have a direct connection to redlining laws. I think it’s really important for the next mayor, and I’d be committed to doing this to finally reforming our exclusionary zoning laws to allow for increased development capacity in every neighborhood across the city.

We need more housing choices, and we as people of color in this city, deserve an opportunity to be able to live in a neighborhood of our choice. I shouldn’t be excluded from living in a neighborhood by virtue of the fact that I have historically lacked access to wealth and capital and financing to be able to get into a home. Currently, right now, I think we can all agree it is way too expensive for anyone. In my neighborhood, it costs $850,000 to get a small three-bedroom house. That is just not okay. And we have to allow for affordable housing development to occur in areas that aren’t just restricted to urban villages. Everybody has a responsibility to do their part. We all should be absorbing development capacity, and we are way far behind the nation as it relates to this kind of reform. Even President Joe Biden has put as part of his platform, the need to radically reform and abolish exclusionary zoning laws, and I couldn’t agree with him more.

Question seven – taxation

Jennifer Smith:
Seattle has a reputation of having high taxes compared to other Washington cities. A number of initiatives have added incremental taxes to fund transit, homeless programs, education, and the general fund. These taxes are small on paper, one 10th of 1%, for example, but most of these taxes are regressive due to Washington state’s tax structure.Will you pledge no new taxes on the citizens of Seattle?

Lorena Gonzalez:
I cannot make that pledge. I can make a pledge that I do believe in progressive revenue taxation. I have been a long-time supporter of progressive revenue taxation and do believe that there are people and corporations in the city who can afford to pay more in taxes in the city of Seattle. I think that it’s important for us to acknowledge that not all residents of the city are created equal and we have to be able to craft any future progressive revenue to acknowledge that fact and to try to the greatest extent possible hold harmless our lowest-income residents in the city so that we are not exacerbating the realities of our regressive tax system in the city of Seattle. Our tax code is upside down in the state. We have made some progress in the state legislature this year, which I’m really excited to see the capital gains tax in particular. But I think that we need a lot of help and relief from the state to be able to truly meaningfully provide tax relief for those people in our city who are [at] lowest income and who are being taxed at a disproportionate rate in comparison to our wealthy residents and corporations.

Additional Questions

Jennifer Smith:
And we know that Seattle has been home to native peoples long before settlements.Sovereignty is always an issue for both tribes that are nations that are federally recognized and those who are not like the Duwamish. So as mayor of Seattle, how would you continue to support indigenous sovereignty for native peoples living with and around the Seattle area.

Lorena Gonzalez:
Tribal relations and representation within a mayoral administration are very important given where we are seated. I think that we through our office of intergovernmental relations used to have a representative who represented the interest of tribes and made sure that we were honoring those really important principles of conferring and consulting with tribes. I also think it’s important for us to remind our colleagues at the state level and at the county level that they have an obligation to do that. We have a native council member now, councilwoman Debra Juarez, and she has done a really tremendous job of making sure that policies are centering the needs of indigenous people in our city and also leveraging her position to influence how other agencies that we work with elate to and interact with and do business with our indigenous community. The last thing I’ll say is that we have an office of economic development. We have many public works projects, and I think it’s really important for all of our public works projects to acknowledge hose land we are on. But I also think it’s really important for us, as part of our community benefits and community workforce agreements, to make a commitment to hiring and creating economic opportunities, whether it’s jobs or business opportunities for indigenous people whose land we,e are benefiting from.

David Obelcz contributed to this story.

Local

Nikkita Oliver sees infrastructure improvement and expansion as vital for Seattle

Video

[SEATTLE] – (MTN) Malcontent News is conducting a series of interviews with 2021 Seattle city council candidates. We have contacted, or are in the process of contacting the most viable candidates, inviting them to answer seven prepared questions. Today we feature Nikkita Oliver (they/them).

For all candidates, the first interview will be about their platform and vision. Prior to the primary election, we will conduct a second round that will focus on differentiation, and challenging positions and visions. Once the final candidates are selected in the primary, we will invite them for one last round of interviews.

All candidates for the first round will be asked the same seven questions, and have received a copy in advance. These questions were created by our editorial board, and are aligned to topics of key interest to the residents of Seattle.

Malcontent News is committed to providing equal time for all candidates, and operating under a “fairness doctrine” of equal time and treatment.

We will be publishing a transcript of each interview. Transcripts may be lightly edited to remove, umms, ahhs, pauses, and aid in readability.

NIKKITA OLIVER

nikkita oliver, 2021 candidate for Seattle city council, seat 9 [at large]
https://malcontentment.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Audio-Track-for-Nikitta-Oliver.mp3
Audio of nikitta oliver interview

Question one – houselessness crisis

Renee Raketty:
As you know, Seattle is facing an ongoing crisis related to unhomed peoples. Washington State experience to 6.2% increase in homelessness during the 2019-2020 year. King County spends over $1 billion per year in public and private investment in support of approximately 12,500 homeless people with disappointing results. If elected to the city council, what would you advocate and support to address this crisis?

Nikiita Oliver:
 You have a lot of work to do. We’ve been in a state of emergency around the housing crisis and supporting our loved ones who don’t have homes since 2015. A major part of the crisis is we just simply have not built enough housing. We have not actually invested ourselves in that. While we might be spending, within our region, lots of money on services; if we provide services but have nowhere for people to come inside who want to, then what we’re doing is basically saying, ‘We’ll give you some services to survive but we’re not going to support you getting into housing where you’ll have opportunities to thrive.”

A huge priority is looking at Seattle’s comprehensive plan for 2024 and addressing issues around exclusionary zoning. The fact that we’ve only been developing density on 12 percent of the land and we need to address the fact that single family zoning — as the way our city is set up now — is not going to allow us to develop enough housing in order to ensure that our loved ones who want to come inside can and to be able to provide enough housing for the missing middle. Displacement and gentrification is also a part of the crisis that we’re facing.

This is the reason why we spend money but it continues to be ineffective. Some answers to this is Seattle getting into housing — actually building social housing that is affordable; that is also nice. People want to live in nice homes and meet the needs of our community members. So [we need to] continuing making more investments in social housing. We can’t continue to rely upon the private market to be our answer to the housing crisis. There’s just not a real incentive for the private market to actually respond to the need. So we need to be willing to actually drive some of the development if we’re going to build $400 million a year for 10 years of affordable housing. We need to figure out, how does our regional plan really work? I think for a lot of folks, they felt Seattle saying, “we are part of a regional plan,” has been a little bit of a cop-out and putting the majority of the work on the county or other cities to respond.

I think the city needs to level up. We have a $6.2 billion budget. We have over 800,000 residents. It is time that we really take accountability and responsibility for the ways in which development and our city and growth have actually been a part of exacerbating the housing crisis. We also need to deal with the fact that our tax structure, the way in which we generate revenue very regressively. It ends up putting the burden of the cost of this new development and the services that we absolutely need to be providing on the backs of those who already pay the most in taxes. Those who pay the least and honestly have benefited the most from the development and growth, continue to not really have to be invested in seeing our city become the healthiest city that it can be.

We are also, probably, going to face a massive eviction crisis. So in addition to the crisis we were already in — COVID-19, the recession, and many people not being able to pay rent or mortgages — means that we also need to figure out how do we stabilize folks who are still in their homes but maybe facing eviction. Continuing to find ways to either cancel rent or do rental support or mortgage support to keep people in their homes; there is going to have to be a combination of responses that come from the city. This is going to require us to really think about our priorities as a city. Are we willing to prioritize people being able to stay home and stay healthy? The way that we do that is going to be investing in things that keep people from losing their homes and investing and building housing rapidly. I know that it’s been a challenge for our city to prioritize this in the past but I think that — with the right folks committed to seeing the interest of our city as a whole be served — we can actually move in that direction.

Nikkita Oliver

Question two – infrastructure and economic recovery

Renee Raketty:
As a result of the ongoing COVID pandemic, economic recovery, and development, as well as addressing Seattle’s crumbling transit infrastructure such as the West Seattle Bridge, is of great importance. Moreover, some are expressing concern businesses are leaving Seattle and workers will not return post-COVID. The question then is threefold. How does the council address crumbling infrastructure, aid in economic recovery and development as we move beyond COVID, and what concerns do you have about the loss of business, both large and small, and a loss of jobs within Seattle?

Nikkita Oliver:
I think what we really have to grapple with as a city is that we cannot recover back to normal. We actually need to grapple with the fact that our social and economic safety net for most people is one that is ineffective. As a result, that’s why we are seeing such a huge economic crisis because we have not ensured that all people have access to healthcare. We have not ensured that all people have access to affordable housing and we have really failed to ensure that workers are protected. So really thinking about how do we ensure that any employment that the city is involved in are union, prevailing wage jobs. Thinking about the contracts we have, not just in terms of development and construction, but also expanding the conversation about prevailing wages and unionization to other industries that touch the city. There are tons of industries that we do contract work that we could be pushing to actually treat workers right; to have the right working conditions, hazard pay, and to ensure that people have high wage jobs.

This is a really important part of knowing that disasters are going to come. This is not the last time that we see this. As a result, if we’re going to build a social and economic safety net that works for everyone, anything that the city is invested in needs to push contractors or industries that we work with to make sure that people have high-wage jobs that pay healthcare and benefits. That’s just thinking forward in terms of protecting us, protecting people, protecting workers, when an additional crisis does come. The West Seattle Bridge and other bridges, other infrastructure in our city are of huge concern.

The Move Seattle levy expires in 2024. This was a 2015 levy and, in many ways, it’s actually fell short of the promises that taxpayers voted for. So the first thing that I think the city actually has to do when it comes to our crumbling infrastructure is explaining why that levy did not fulfill the promise that we made to voters. That explanation, being a pathway towards saying, “Is it possible to continue this levy? Will you all vote for it again? Here’s the explanation of why it fell short. Here’s how we will address those shortcomings in the future?”

Getting our infrastructure up to par is important for a number of reasons. It’s not just about safety — but it’s also understanding that if we want to be able to keep our maritime and port industries healthy — which are significant jobs in our region and also an important part of moving goods. Not just through Seattle but to other regions in Washington State, including thinking about the eastern part of the state, the fruit basket — then we need to ensure that the infrastructure around the port is solid so that freights can move in and out without issue.

This is also about our environment. When freights are backed up and not able to move through the port in a timely manner; we’re seeing way more pollution, both in terms of exhausts but also noise pollution happening in the neighborhoods that already facing some of the highest levels of pollution. So this is also a health concern.

Addressing our crumbling infrastructure touches a myriad of areas of life from the environment to industry and economic well-being, to also the health of communities that many of these industries are moving through. In 2024, providing that clear explanation on what some of the challenges were: it’s not just the West Seattle Bridge. It’s also thinking about North Seattle and east-west buses; sidewalks for safety. It’s looking at the bridges in other areas of our city that are also deteriorating. We don’t want to see them in the same situation that the West Seattle Bridge is; where it’s been closed down for almost a year.

Then we need to consider thinking about how does this impacts our transit infrastructure. The transit infrastructure also plays a major role in thinking about the well-being of workers; the ability to move through the city or in and out of the city in a way that doesn’t require you to spend two hours of your day doing that. Most of our families can not afford to do that. We have to understand that transit and the accessibility of our city are also tied to the economic well-being of folks.

My concerns are about many of our small businesses. Small businesses that are owned by Black, Indigenous, and people of color who really have suffered through the pandemic without having access to all of the things that allow their businesses to sustain. I’m also thinking about folks who are freelancers, some of whom have been able to get access to unemployment, but for many of whom, it took a very long time to get that access to unemployment. So maybe they’ve become backed up on rent or other types of bills that they’re later going to have to find ways to pay. This is where canceling rent or having rental support programs; finding ways that maybe mortgages can be canceled or mortgage support programs; having a rent stabilization on commercial properties is going to be huge. The city has taken emergency measures that have been really significant in allowing small businesses to continue to function. One of these is folks being able to run their small businesses out of their homes if they have particular detached units. This is a creative option that has not been allowed to exist prior to the pandemic.

One thing the pandemic has shown us is that there are things that we could have done long before that we didn’t do because we said we couldn’t. Then we found out that in a state of emergency that we could. Sustaining some of those measures are going to be key to ensuring that small businesses, freelancers, are able to thrive. Then, moving forward, how are we ensuring that our folks that work in tech: I’m thinking about our Uber drivers or folks that are delivering food, who are a part of our gig economy, what are we doing to ensure that those folks are able to get access to health care and benefits?

We’ve seen through the pandemic that has not been possible for a lot of folks. We need to keep talking about what does it look like to have a gig workers package that ensures those safety measures: hazard pay healthcare benefits. So that again, when disaster does come again — because this is not going to be the last thing we face, the climate catastrophe is really upon us — we need to make sure that people are prepared and they have access to the social and economic safety nets that work.

Question three – does Seattle have a crime and/or inequity problem

Renee Raketty:
As a result of the protests related to the murder of George Floyd, police violence and ongoing racial inequality, Seattle has earned a reputation as being a crime-ridden, dirty and unsafe city. At one point the city was even labeled, by the past presidential administration as an anarchist jurisdiction. Do you agree with this view?

Nikkita Oliver:
I do not agree with this view. I think in many ways this view is created by mainstream media outlets not telling the whole story. I think it’s really important that we tell whole stories, acknowledge what’s really been happening in our city — which is actually drastically different than that. I’m not sure if you want more detail but I certainly have lots of thoughts in that area.

Renee Raketty:
Absolutely. We want to know how are we going to shift perceptions?

Nikkita Oliver:
We shift perceptions by building the city we want to see. We don’t control mainstream media but what we do control is the way in which our city continues to move and develop. Some of our elected officials need to actually take accountability for statements that they made during the protest that was then leveraged by media outlets, both locally and nationally, to paint a picture of a city in crisis. That’s not what was happening in our city.

I understand that there were things that happened in CHOP that caused a lot of pain for people. In fact, those things were happening in other areas of our city — in terms of folks being shot and killed. When we make that issue about just one area of our city, we actually miss the underlying issues that are the reasons why certain types of gun violence are happening. These are economic reasons. These are social reasons. We have areas in Seattle that have been redlined historically; that have experienced exclusionary zoning, are over-policed, and lacked social services. Many of them are also food deserts. They’re not what we would call — in the urban development sphere — communities of opportunity. These neighborhoods are lacking economic opportunity, educational opportunity, and the services that ensure people can thrive.

Nikkita Oliver, candidate for Seat 9 of the Seattle City Council holds their first rally

So while some areas of our city are growing into these urban villages that have grocery stores that have great produce, or have access to medical facilities, and have access to social services; there are other areas of our cities that are being inequitably developed and are not receiving that same attention and growth to ensure that we do the things that actually prevent violence. This is not conjecture, and it’s not me just making up a story. We know that through social science, when people have their basic needs met and they have access to economic and educational opportunities, then violence decreases substantially.

We have communities though who have been historically and presently disenfranchised from the access to that opportunity while the wealth of white folks and our region has continued to grow. Those communities continue to have access to higher earner jobs. The wealth of Black communities has actually continued to decrease.

I think that we absolutely want to change this weird narrative that’s happened around Seattle and show who we really are. I’ve also talked to people in the suburbs of Seattle and they say things like, “Oh, Seattle, traffic’s too bad.” This kind of complaining about Seattle. I want to change that narrative too.

Question four – police reform

Renee Raketty:
Renee Raketty: (15:03)
Compared to the West Coast cities, such as San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento, Oakland, and San Diego. Seattle has the second-highest cost per police officer tied with Oakland and the second-highest officer per capita behind San Francisco. Additionally, the average officer makes $153,000 a year before benefits, according to the Seattle Times. Despite this large force and supporting budget, Seattle police reports, low response times and they claim the issue to be a lack of staff. The budget was cut by approximately 18% and staffing levels were adjusted to support roughly 1,325 officers. How would you define defund the police? What is your position on that and how, as a member of the city council, do you restore community trust and SPD?

Nikkita Oliver:
“Defund the police” is also ‘invest in the community.’ I think it’s really important not to separate those two from each other. I think it’s also important to acknowledge that our current system of public safety does not create safety for everyone. In fact, there are many communities that are actually less safe when they call the police. There are communities that are actually afraid to call the police when they’re actually in need of support. I think we also have to acknowledge that we do not have the myriad of services that we need to ensure that people are safer. Police are not typically doing what we think. I think a lot of folks have it in their minds, maybe from movies or TV, that police are all day responding to violent crime and violent calls. The reality is a lot of what police officers are doing are responding to things involving property or maybe parking issues or even noise complaints. That is the majority.

In Seattle, I think 1.3% of the calls that come through 911 are quote/unquote, “violent crime.” So that’s actually a very small percentage. I think we’ve also seen and I know you’ve seen this, having been out at the protest. There will be an obscene amount of police officers at the protest and then later we’ll find out that something else was happening in the city but the Seattle Police Department will say that they had very slow response times. I would wonder how are they prioritizing what’s important for their presence to be at.

That being said, I do have to go back to the underpinning thing here. Our system of public safety is not one that works for everyone. We’ve heard this time and time again, it’s not new information. It’s not new as of 2020. In fact, these are conversations that people have been having for a long time about public safety and what really makes the community safe. An 18 percent defund of a police department that has one of the highest budgets in the entire United States really is not that much. SPD’s budget prior to this last budget cycle was $410 million. They often actually spent over that budget and would be asking the council for additional dollars in addition to receiving money from groups like the Seattle Foundation giving dollars to the Police Foundation that then gave money to the department to buy more equipment. There are also additional dollars, including federal dollars, that come into the SPD on a regular basis. So I don’t believe that they’re actually hurting for money.

What is hurting for financial resources are community-based responses to intervening with harm and responding to harm when it happens. I’m thinking about what do people do when they’re in domestic violence situations and they do not believe that calling the police is going to make it safer. This was my own life at one point in time with a partner of mine. I did not feel like I could call the police for support because — at the time — I was dating a six-foot-seven Black man and did not think that calling the police was going to make our situation any better. In fact, it worried me that something might happen to him and his life if I did that, and is that a burden I wanted to carry?

I am not the only Black person who has ever been in that situation and thought about that. I’m certainly not the only person. There are families who also are afraid to call the cops when their loved ones are having mental health crises. We know that this is happening. We also know that the police are ill-equipped to respond to these types of situations. Why aren’t we not investing more of our public safety budget in ensuring that we have the resources that can meet a multiplicity of needs, knowing that most of the things that people call 911 who actually do not need an armed officer to come to the door?

My goal is, my hope as a city council member, is that we can actually continue building upon the things that we know work; mental health supports, people who can respond to mental health crises. I’m thinking right now about Tommy Le, whose family just received a big settlement but will never receive Tommy back, who was in the midst of a mental health crisis. Charleena Lyles was in the midst of a mental health crisis. Charleena could still be here with us if we had the right support. How are we doing the work of learning from these tragedies to actually be doing the things that we know work for community members?

That’s my goal — prioritizing our public safety budget to actually do the things that make the community safe in terms of our ability to respond to a mental health crisis, domestic violence, to intervene, and stop violence before it occurs — because that would be the ideal.

This is the last part of this. Police are often called after harm has already occurred. So it is already a reactionary measure to public safety. What would it look like if we built a city where we built the priorities of our public safety system around preventing and intervening harm, rather than responding once it’s already happened. We could actually keep a lot of people out of the criminal punishment system, which is a broader system that needs to be addressed in relationship to policing. We could prevent a lot of harm to families and people in our city if we approach public safety from that place instead.

Question five – mental health crisis

Renee Raketty:
I’m glad you brought up mental health. Let’s talk about that for a second because I do think it’s an important issue. One of many things that COVID has shed light on is the ongoing mental health crisis in this country. Seattle is not exempt from this of course. Recently, a man in the throes of a mental health crisis was fatally wounded by the SPD near the Seattle waterfront. Washington State has consistently ranked towards the bottom for public health services for the mentally ill. What would you do as a member of the city council to address this mental health crisis?

Nikkita Oliver:
The incident you mentioned hits close to home because he was a student at Seattle University where I teach. I think people read these stories and they forget that folks are actually in our communities that are having crisises and then have deadly encounters with police. What can we do?

So as we continue the work around defunding and investing — divesting and investing into structures that work — we can actually invest in mental health professionals and intervention services that actually work. I’ve had to call for a county Mental Health Professional (MHP), a county MHP before and it’s taken 24 hours before that MHP has been able to respond to the crisis that I’ve been in with a client. Often what this means is myself or family members of this person ended up having to stay with them 24/7. In some instances, following them around the city to try to keep them safe or avoid an interaction with police. Sometimes it still ends up in an interaction with police.

The fact that we invest so much money in a system that is not able to actually respond to the needs we know are most emergent is not only fiscally irresponsible but it’s also socially irresponsible. So I think finding ways financially to beef up our mental health professional options — whether that’s looking at programs like Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets. I’m not saying specifically CAHOOTS because that model was developed in a particular context and all models that develop one place can not just be transferred to another place. We need to be thoughtful about how we develop more mental health supports in the city. That’s what defunding is actually about. It is about finding the thing to invest in that actually will do the work that we need. We know that mental health has always been something that people need response to but the recession and the pandemic have certainly exacerbated the mental health crisis that we’re facing.

We do have organizations that are able to support folks in crisis but we certainly don’t have enough of them. When you have to wait 24 hours or more before someone is able to meet you, what that likely means is that your loved one has probably spun out much farther than they were 24 hours prior. It’s even harder to do the work of mitigating harm and ensuring that that person gets the supports. The other thing is I think we need to work better with our hospitals. I’ve gone to the hospital with folks wanting to admit theirselves for support. The process of doing that comes with a lot of stigma. It’s a very cumbersome process. You often have to prove that you are suicidal or other things that will make them want to bring you into the hospital. So we need to change that process. If someone comes to you saying they need help, we should just get them help.

Nikkita Oliver

The third issue that is attached to that though is we just simply do not have enough beds, mental health professionals, or mental health supports in our region. So when people do go to the hospital saying they would like to get support, they’re often told there isn’t a bed for them. How can we be providing more of those spaces within the city using the budget we have to do that and actually investing in the things that work. The last thing I would say, I keep coming back to healthcare, but we don’t have full spectrum healthcare for some folks. As a result, when they seek out mental health supports they’re not able to pay for it. Is there a way for the city and, I would put the county in there to partner [with us], because the county does do a lot of public health work, can we be developing ways that people can access mental health supports prior to being in crisis that doesn’t require them to have health insurance — knowing that ultimately when we can get people mental health supports early on, we actually make everyone, including that person, much safer

Question six – zoning and Seattle housing crunch

Renee Raketty:
Affordability is a major problem for Seattle. 88% of Seattle’s land that is zoned for housing is zoned for single family units. Over the last five years, most of the new construction has been centered in the 12% that supports high density, housing developers and builders focused on small footprint, footprint properties with the minimum parking and luxury appointments.

Nikkita Oliver:
I know most people don’t probably whouldn’t believe this but this is actually one of the issues I’m most excited to work on. I think a lot of folks see me as just the police person. To be honest, our legacy of exclusionary zoning is contributing to so many of the problems that we’re facing in the city. There’s a book called The Color of Law that really digs into how housing is a determinant of how people thrive. It’s a determinant of whether or not communities experience high rates of violence. It’s a determinant of whether or not communities are over-policed. Housing plays a big role in that.

We have really, chosen not to turn and face our legacy of exclusionary zoning. Our current zoning pattern has created a bifurcated city. Two-thirds of our residential land is not accessible to all but those who have the highest incomes, which is a serious issue. So we need to be changing our zoning as we approach this 2024 comprehensive plan to be building a mix of housing and residential patterns that allows more people to live in more places throughout the city.

There are a number of reports that have come out that have actually recommended us addressing our zoning issues. I think it’s very important that we do it. There are examples of cities like Portland, which has a residential infill project where they have basically re-legalized the missing middle or missing middle housing citywide. This allows for a diversity of housing structures to exist in the city. Seattle has committed itself, in a lot of ways, to building urban villages. So we need to both expand our current urban villages but also be strategic about the places where we build new ones.

There is transit infrastructure being built throughout the city and there are areas that need more transit infrastructure and those would be areas that would be right for urban villages but it cannot continue to happen on the same 12% of land. We have 85%of the developing happening on 12 % of the land, which is really unacceptable.

We also cannot do it in our industrial lands [and] there’s been some talk about building affordable housing in our industrial lands. There are place-based industries that happen in those spaces that cannot happen anywhere else. So it doesn’t make sense to build there, not to mention our industrial land areas are also very much food deserts. We don’t know about the toxicity of the area and the long-term impacts that would have on folks. I’m really excited to work on our comprehensive plan for 2024. It is a huge chance to do zoning reform; to make significant strides on housing affordability.

It is also an opportunity to address our climate crisis. With all the new housing that we would build, we can build it green. We can be thinking about our sustainable infrastructure. We can be building transit in a way that helps us reach our climate goals. Having more people, being able to travel within the area that they live by foot or by bike or by bus or by light rail will make a significant decrease on the things that we’re facing with the climate crisis. So I’m really excited to work on this particular issue and also believe that housing, fundamentally, is a major determinant of the things that we’re seeing and housing in our area. This is something, again, we have to grapple with.

[It] has been highly racialized based on who is getting the wealth and income games in our city. Who’s getting access to high earner jobs. The last part of this is also anti-displacement and anti-gentrification strategies that ensure that people can stay in place. I’m thinking about our seniors who as property taxes increase cannot afford to keep their homes. I’m thinking about young people who have grown up here who may not be getting into those pipelines in the higher end of jobs and, as a result, will either spend the rest of their life as renters — though many of them cannot afford that — or they’ll never get to have any type of home ownership.

So we also need to think about co-op models, community land trust, as ways of ensuring that people can also build equity. Equity is how a lot of white folks have been able to build their legacies; send their children to college. Many Black, native, Latinx folks have been excluded from building equity through home ownership. So thinking about co-ops and community land trust is also a huge opportunity to be able to open up that opportunity for equity and wealth building that many communities based on race have been excluded from.

Renee Raketty:
Do you support changing zoning rules for [Additional Dwelling Units] ADUs and more dense construction to alleviate the housing crisis? How dense and where would you support ADU development?

Nikkita Oliver:
I support changing zoning rules for 80 years and more dense construction to alleviate the housing crisis. ADU’s are an opportunity to build another diversity of housing and build housing for the missing middle but that cannot be our only answer. There has to be much [more] diversity of housing options that we’re doing the work of presenting. So, you know, thinking of quadplexes and other things that can be built. I know that a lot of folks then will push back and say, “What about the character of our communities?” I understand that and also we’re in the midst of a huge affordability and housing crisis. If we continue to allow things to go the rate we’re going, then we’re going to be building a city just for a few and exlude the many. Accepting that density is going to be something that equitably needs to be taken on by all neighborhoods is just a really important factor of building our city in a just an equitable way that is accessible to everyone. Having areas of land that are just fully excluded for some people is not acceptable. That’s not an inclusive city. That is not a city that has a race and social justice initiative.

We need to be reckoning with the fact that our very first comprehensive plan that was put in place in the 1920’s was done so in collaboration with someone by the name of Harland Bartholomew. Harlan Bartholomew was a known segregationist and basically helped us develop our first version of these exclusionary zones that went in place. And then in the 1980’s, we did a huge down-zone that then prevented even more families moving into certain places. So if we’re going to have a city that makes it so everyone who works here can live here, then, we’re going to have to take density on equitably.

Renee Raketty:
How do you combat gentrification while also meeting housing needs?

Nikkita Oliver:
I think it’s about how you build and it is about acknowledging who doesn’t have access to the housing. There are anti-displacement strategies we can put in place. This is where co-op models and community land trusts are important. This is also where the city getting into housing is key. We have many reports, the Seattle Growth Strategy white paper, the Neighborhoods for All executive summary actually all outlined for us that we know which neighborhoods are most at risk of gentrification and displacement. Yet, [when] we have started our building, the places that we build density; we have built their first. So our strategy is off.

We need to be starting in spaces where we know we will have the least amount of impact while simultaneously doing those things that help keep people in place. This is where thinking about our seniors and the rising cost of property taxes is really important. What are we doing to help folks on fixed incomes be able to maintain their homes? How are we doing one-to-one, replacement of housing? So if we tear down a building that is affordable, are we putting up that one-to-one ratio of affordable units and ensuring that people can come back. Now, that is also really challenging.

I know they’ve said at Yesler Terrace there’s a 100 percent rate of people returning back but that’s of those who wanted to return back. Many people when they left Yesler Terrace, when we literally sold off public land — which I don’t think we should have done — had [to] move. You know that they’d already moved somewhere else, started living in that place, and then chose not to move back because it wasn’t necessarily the best decision for them at that time. So really thinking about when we do tear down buildings that are affordable, are we doing our best job to ensure that folks have a real ability to move back into that space?

Are we preserving our public lands so that we, as a city, can continue to get involved in that? Are we doing the anti-displacement work of addressing rising property taxes and supporting people in staying in their homes? Again, this is where the development needs to be taken on more equitably. We know where folks are living that are most at risk of being displaced. Why do we as a city continue to build density in those areas first rather than prioritizing other areas of the city where, when development is received, people likely won’t be displaced?

Question seven – taxation

Renee Raketty:
Seattle has a reputation for having high taxes compared to other Washington cities. A number of initiatives through the years have added incremental taxes to fund transit, homeless programs, education, and the general fund. These taxes are small on paper. A number of one-tenth of one percent taxes have been passed by voters and supported by the Council as an example. Most of these taxes are regressive due to Washington state’s tax structure. Will you pledge no new taxes on the citizens on Seattle? What programs would you want to see cut if you are on the Council?

Nikitta Oliver:
I don’t think I can 100% pledge no new taxes on all of the citizens of Seattle or all of the residents, I should say. There are wealthy folks in our communities that don’t pay their fair share in taxes. There are corporations that don’t pay their fair share in taxes. I think that there are taxes to be put in place. I think it’s important for those folks to be paying.

What I can commit to is doing the work of not putting more taxes on those who already pay more and finding ways to eliminate our regressive tax structure which requires that as the city of Seattle to actually be a part of pushing our state Legislature to make those change. [To] do it in a way that doesn’t remove the ability of cities or localities to continue to put in place their own taxes on big business or the wealthy. Our tax structure is very regressive and the wealthiest amongst us pay anywhere from zero to two percent in taxes. Those who have the least pay somewhere from zero to 17 percent. I just don’t think that is acceptable.

We need to do the work of addressing our regressive tax system. There are taxes that we can continue to address around big business that could be augmented or grown. I think we should grow those taxes because our city does need to generate more revenue to meet the immense amount of social needs that exist. We know that when we meet those social needs our city as a whole will be safer.

Renee Raketty:
Nikkita, I want to thank you so much. I’m glad that our [readers] will have a chance to hear your positions, understand them more fully, and be able to make a decision in this election.

Nikkita Oliver:
Thank you. I appreciate sharing space with you. Thank you so much.

David Obelcz contributed to this story.

Local

Seattle mayoral candidate Colleen Echohawk discusses her platform and vision for the city

Video

[SEATTLE] – (MTN) Malcontent News is conducting a series of interviews with 2021 Seattle mayoral candidates. We have contacted, or are in the process of contacting the most viable candidates, inviting them to answer seven prepared questions. Today we feature Colleen Echohawk.

For all candidates, the first interview will be about their platform and vision. Prior to the primary election, we will conduct a second round that will focus on differentiation, and challenging positions and visions. Once the final candidates are selected in the primary, we will invite them for one last round of interviews.

All candidates for the first round will be asked the same seven questions, and have received a copy in advance. These questions were created by our editorial board, and are aligned to topics of key interest to the residents of Seattle.

Malcontent News is committed to providing equal time for all candidates, and operating under a “fairness doctrine” of equal time and treatment for all candidates.

We will be publishing a transcript of each interview. Transcripts may be lightly edited to remove, umms, ahhs, pauses, and aid in readability.

COLLEEN ECHOHAWK

COLLEEN ECHOHAWK, 2021 candidate for Seattle mayor

Jennifer Smith:
Hello, Malcontents! This is Jennifer and I’m here today with Seattle mayoral candidate, Colleen Echohawk. How are you doing today, Colleen?

Colleen Echohawk:
I’m doing great. Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be with you.

Jennifer Smith:
We’re really excited to have you here. So just to kind of start off, what inspired you to run for mayor?

Colleen Echohawk:
Well, thank you so much for asking. This is a beautiful, wonderful city. I have lived here now for over 20 years and I care deeply about our community. And I have seen, along with all of us who live here, the tremendous frustration around some policies that are just not working for our city, specifically, homelessness. I have been working in homelessness now for over seven years. I believe deeply in our homeless community. I believe that they can get to wellness and stability and housing, but we have not set up the structures that will help them get to that place of wellness. As the pandemic came crashing down on us, I saw our homeless community really suffering. And then I also saw that our city was not responding in a way that serves them well and serves the rest of our community.

I think those of us who live in the city, it’s so frustrating for us because we, we cared deeply about, our community, including our homeless community. But when we see that we’re not getting anywhere, it is incredibly frustrating. So, that was one of the big reasons. The other thing is COVID-19. I [have] served our homeless community and our native community for a very long time now. I know very, very well that we have some incredible disparity, some health outcomes around COVID-19 that were really hard to hear and see, in the native community, we were, 1.8 times more likely to die of COVID, more likely to be hospitalized because of COVID. And those kinds of numbers were already there before the pandemic. And then as I thought about what would happen after I realized we need leadership that understands equity, that understands racial justice so that we can come out of this pandemic stronger, that we can address these inequities and be the kind of city that we say we are. We are a progressive, compassionate, generous city. And I look forward to the opportunity to lead with a lens of equity and justice.

Question one – houselessness crisis

Jennifer Smith:
Well, thank you very much for that. And I think this is an excellent segue into our first question. So Seattle is facing an ongoing crisis related to unhomed peoples. Washington state experience to 6.2% increase in homelessness during 2019/2020. King County spends over $1 billion per year in public and private investment in support of approximately 12,500 houseless people with disappointing results. If you are elected mayor of Seattle, how would you address this crisis? And also as co-founder of the Coalition to End Urban Indigenous Homelessness, which aids unhomed urban indigenous people, can you speak to the unique challenges indigenous people living in urban spaces like Seattle face.

Colleen Echohawk:
Thank you so much for the question. And one thing we know about our homeless community here in Seattle and around the country actually is that people of color are way overrepresented in the community and the homeless community. So for instance, native people make up less than 1% of the population, but in our homeless population, we make up 15%. So an incredible disparity, that’s about a thousand to 1100 people, who are of native people who are experiencing homelessness on the streets of Seattle. And then you think about, the city we are named after a chief, we are a Coast Salish city at the heart of who we are, who we are as a community. And so, it truly is unbelievable that we have such high rates of native people experiencing homelessness and even more unbelievable than that in a city like Seattle, that’s very prosperous, innovative, and entrepreneurial.

We have so many of our community experiencing homelessness around 12,000 folks are experiencing homelessness. And about [3,000] to 4,000 of those are people who been asleep outside at night, every, every single night, it’s, it’s truly horrific. In my opinion, it is a humanitarian crisis and we have to do more. And as mayor of the city, I have a unique lens of actually being a homelessness provider and also a builder of affordable housing. So I know, that we’re going to have to take many approaches. There’s no one solution to solving homelessness in our city. It’ll take many approaches, excuse me, the moment I am elected, I will be jumping into finding solutions that are going to be kind of the all of the above approach. We need more tiny houses. We’re going to need more hoteling. We’re going to need safe, lots for RVs and other vehicles.

There will be a variety of different things for people to choose. We also need culturally appropriate case management and services. When we think about the native community, many of our native folks, because of the fear of government institutions, which we get, we come to legally, we have not found many solutions in the mainstream organizations. So I would be thinking about and supporting and innovating around Black-led services and native-led services so that we find cultural approaches that would serve our homeless community. And I believe that’s one of the reasons we have such high rates of native homelessness is that we haven’t had those culturally specific programs, the same for the black community and the refugee community who are experiencing homelessness. I think that this is an exciting opportunity for our city.

We have the American relief program coming in. We have FEMA dollars that we can use. We have other federal, we have a friend in the White House who believes so much in taking care of this issue, that’s not just here in Seattle, but around the country. I have worked on the national level. I founded the National Coalition on Urban Indigenous Homelessness. I am a new board member at the National Low Income Housing Coalition. So I understand what it will take because that’s the final part is we have to build enough. I would say to anyone who lives in Seattle, like let’s put our frustrations behind this and let’s join a campaign together to serve our homeless community and get them out of our parks and out of our, right-of-ways. Our homeless community is not a place that they can thrive there. They need to thrive in housing. And then we all can use our parks and use our greenways. And, it’s gotten really out of control and we have to have leadership that will, understands the issue and knows how to solve it. And I’m that leader.

Question two – infrastructure and economic recovery

Jennifer Smith:
As a result of the ongoing COVID pandemic, economic recovery development, as well as addressing Seattle’s crumbling transit infrastructures, such as the West Seattle bridge is of great importance to me, moreover, some are expressing concern about large corporations and many in the workforce meeting in Seattle. The question is threefold, how do you plan on tackling the infrastructure issue, aiding and economic recovery and development as we move beyond COVID. And what concerns do you have about the loss of corporations and workers?

Colleen Echohawk:
We know that in our city, we have some pretty severe issues around infrastructure. We have the West Seattle bridge, the Magnolia bridge that needs to be replaced. We have streets that need to be supported. We have garbage on our streets that, I think it’s unacceptable. I think we should not have that in our city. And as, an executive director of a pretty large nonprofit, I understand the role of the mayor as being the executive to care for our city to care for our whole city. I have a lot of experience in homelessness, but I also have experience in management and taking care of our community. And I look forward to putting those skills into place because we need to have shovel-ready projects.

Like I mentioned earlier, we now have a friend in the White House. We have President [Joe] Biden. When he comes out with infrastructure packages, which is, happening right now, we need to be ready. We need to go. I would work really closely with Patty Murray. She’s the number two Democrat on the Senate Appropriation Committee. I would work very closely with her and let her know what our needs are in Seattle. Also, Senator Cantwell, she chairs the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. We are so lucky to have their leadership, and I would just be excited to talk with them and, and share with them about what the opportunities are here in Seattle and what we absolutely need. I have a lot of experience in going after the dollars that we need to be able to take care of our community. We also know that Governor Inslee has an infrastructure plan and I would be active in reaching out to him and ensuring that we get our needs met here.

Jennifer Smith:
The second part of the question deals with aiding and economic recovery and development as we move forward.

Colleen Echohawk:
We have a real reality ahead of us that it’s going to take some time to recover from COVID. And we nailed that. Our economy needs to recover and our community needs to recover in many ways. We need an opportunity to heal, and we also need people who are going to jump in and get to work immediately. About nine months ago, I started to really understand that, we can’t just be focused on economic recovery. We have to be thinking about an equitable recovery because when our economy is equitable, then we are truly going to be able to support the whole community. So I co-founded the Equitable Recovery and Reconciliation Alliance. The idea behind ERA is that the BIPOC community, the Black indigenous, and people of color community, we have a policy-driven solution that needs to be implemented.

But we often don’t have the voice that we need to have. And then, my co-founder, his name is Ben Franz-Knight, and he is the previous executive director at Pike Place Market. His role is to help our community who is really working to understand what it means to be equitable in our recovery. His role is to help them come together. So we’re looking and working with things like the downtown Seattle Association, Greater Seattle Business Partners, and the Chamber of Commerce to think about what it means to support BIPOC led solutions. And so this is, again an opportunity. This is a once-in-a-generation chance to do the right thing. so I look forward to doing this in partnership with [the] community. And I do also hope that our corporations come back into downtown Seattle and see this place as an opportunity to continue our legacy of innovation, to continue our legacy of entrepreneurship in this region. And I will be there to support them and to ensure that when we see corporations and businesses coming back into our city, that we see it with a lens of equity and racial justice. It’s really an excellent and exciting opportunity.

Question three – does Seattle have a crime and/or inequity problem

Jennifer Smith:
Moving on to the topic of equity and racial justice. Protests related to the murder and George Floyd, police violence, and ongoing racial inequality. Seattle has earned a national reputation as crime-ridden, dirty and unsafe. At one point the previous Presidential administration labeled Seattle an anarchist jurisdiction. Are you concerned about this narrow view of Seattle? If so, what will you do to shift this perception and how will you address the ongoing racial inequality that exists?

Colleen Echohawk:
I don’t know about [you], but I had people calling me from around the country, friends, and relatives saying, “What’s going on in Seattle? It’s like an anarchist takeover is happening. and everything is burning,” and as you know, that is not true.

I think that we really do need to be thinking about changing the narrative around Seattle. If I was elected mayor, I would see myself as an ambassador to the rest of the state and the country and the world to say, this is what Seattle is about. This is a community of amazing, progressive, generous, compassionate, entrepreneurial community. And we warmly welcome you to our city. I think that there is [an] amazing opportunity around tourism. I hope that our Black and indigenous and people of color-led organizations see this opportunity to think about ways that we can support the tourism industry and incubate business that maybe hasn’t happened before.

I think that we absolutely want to change this weird narrative that’s happened around Seattle and show who we really are. I’ve also talked to people in the suburbs of Seattle and they say things like, “Oh, Seattle, traffic’s too bad.” This kind of complaining about Seattle. I want to change that narrative too.

I want people to remember that we have the Kracken and we have the Mariners and the Seahawks. We have a thriving nightlife and restaurants that people want to come to. And let’s make this a great place for people to celebrate big celebrations. They come to sporting events and to be coming to our wonderful arenas. I just think it’s a really cool opportunity that I look forward to jumping into. No one loves the city more than I do. My sister, when I was thinking about running for mayor, and I also had an opportunity out in Washington, DC, she [said], “Colleen, you love Seattle. Why would you go to Washington DC?”

You’re totally right. I love this place. I’m just going to do the best I can to lift it up and celebrate the city and let the world know what a great community we truly are.

Question four – police reform

Jennifer Smith:
In addressing the racial inequality piece. How would you work to kind of move beyond that and think more critically about, solutions for the ongoing racial inequality that exists within Seattle?

Colleen Echohawk:
We have some significant issues in our city around this. We are a progressive city, but we don’t always live out our progressive values. And I hope to really inspire, encourage, and envision with everyone about what that could really look like. I can give you an example. We struggle right now with housing for our Black community. Our Black community has been pushed out of the Central District and we also know that essential workers can’t afford to live here. And a lot of them are people of color. If we believe that Black lives matter, we believe in our progressive values that means we believe in housing for them. That means we believe in the incubation of small businesses that are owned by Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities. And so I hope to truly help our communities, our neighbors understand that value and understand that when, when we do practice equity and racial justice, that it’s good for our whole community. It’s not just good for the Black and indigenous people of color communities. It’s good for everyone. And that’s going to be exciting for us as a community.

Jennifer Smith:
So when we look to the West coast cities of Portland, San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento, and San Diego. Seattle has the second-highest cost per police officer tied with Oakland and the second-highest officer per capita behind San Francisco. Additionally, the average officer makes $153,000 a year before benefits, according to the Seattle Times. Despite this large force and supporting budget, Seattle police report slow response times and claim the issue is a lack of staffing. The budget was cut by approximately 18% and staffing levels were adjusted to support roughly 1,325 officers. How would you define defund, the police? What is your position and how would you go about restoring community, particularly BIPOC community trust in the Seattle police department?

Colleen Echohawk:
This is something that is of grave concern for me. I got my start in working in the police reform arena. After the murder of John T. Williams, it’s still jarring. It’s still kind of just unbelievable native people have the highest rates of being shot by police around the country. And we’re a very small part of the population we have to do better. And, as I look at our whole city, we need to make sure that our police department is accountable and transparent. We need a reset of the police department from top to bottom, and I’m always open to looking at our pay structure – absolutely, I also believe that part of the mayor’s job is to find an excellent chief of police and hold that chief of police accountable for our police officers that are out there.

I’ve also been on the Community Police Commission and I know the issues really well. I mean our reform, since again, the murder of John T. Williams and the consent decree, it’s, it’s been, a decent start, but it’s also failed us as we saw over the summer. We have a real problem when we see officers hiding their badges during protests, we still see incredible racial disparity in arrest. And this is one of my top priorities if I’m elected. We will find a chief of police to hold our Seattle police department accountable. The issues of racial disparity in our police department. We do absolutely have to think of a cultural shift in that department and that starts straight from the chief all the way down to every single police, to someone out there on the beat. There is an accountability that absolutely has to happen from the community. And I look forward to continuing to evaluate our reform system as is.

I think that there is a lot of room for us to strengthen it. And I would look forward to hearing from the community about community-led solutions that will ensure that we have a police department that is not just, they’re not warriors, but they are guardians. So they are there to support the community in times of incredible significant need. Until we get there, we have to have a mayor that will hold them accountable. I can tell you that that is a passion of mine, something I look forward to doing, and if elected, that would be one of my top priorities

Question five – mental health crisis

Jennifer Smith:
On the topic of police, accountability, and reform. One of the many things COVID has shed light on is the ongoing mental health crisis in the country. Seattle is not exempt from this. Recently a man in the throes of a mental health crisis was fatally wounded by [Seattle police] near the Seattle waterfront. Would you consider implementing something similar to the STAR program in Colorado, which replaces traditional law enforcement responders with a medic and mental health professional for some emergency calls as a way to deescalate situations where there’s a clear mental health component?

Colleen Echohawk:
Absolutely. I support finding new ways to support folks who are experiencing mental health crises. I can tell you from personal experience, working with someone in our homelessness community that pulled a knife, in the day center of the Seattle Club, and I saw a social worker deescalate the situation in less than a minute. So it was heartbreaking, cause I’ve seen this with my own eyes, it was incredibly heartbreaking for me. When I saw [a] son, uncle nephew down there on Alaska Way with a knife who was many feet away from these officers, and then he was shot and killed. That was heartbreaking for me. And those are the kinds of things that should be taken out of the hands of our Seattle police department. I absolutely support community innovation around new ways to support mental health in our system. And I’ll also say that we have to get to the Washington state legislature as well.

We know that Washington state is vastly behind in supporting mental health in our system. I think that as we work so hard to support our homeless community, it hit me [as] absolutely heartbreaking when you see someone who needs that support and we have nowhere to send him, we have to fix that and that. It’s going to take courageous leadership, it’s going to take decisive leadership and it’s going to take innovation. And I believe I’m the right leader for those kinds of issues going on in our communities.

Question six – zoning and Seattle housing crunch

Jennifer Smith:
You talked a little bit earlier about the necessity of affordable housing. Eighty-eight percent of Seattle’s land that is zoned for housing is zoned for single-family housing. Over the five years, most of the new construction centered on the 12% that supports highly dense housing, Developers focused on small footprint properties with minimal parking and luxury appointments. Housing affordability is a major problem for Seattle as you’ve noted already. Do you support changing zoning rules for ADUs and more dense construction to alleviate the housing crisis, and what changes would you support?

Colleen Echohawk:
Absolutely. We have a lot of competing challenges before us like we haven’t really talked yet about the climate crisis, but there are intersections there. A housing affordability emergency is upon us right now. And we need to be thoughtful and creative about creating more density in our city, creating opportunities, for more housing that really truly works for our community. I absolutely believe in transit-oriented development. I think that our backyard cottages are amazing. And then I think we need to think about how we build affordable housing, that that truly does not encourage gentrification, but encourages, our Black, indigenous, and people of color communities to come back into Seattle. I have worked on the community preference policy. I think that that is a really excellent way to get started. And I think that there is just tremendous opportunity around affirmative marketing for some of our affordable housing that’s being built. We have to change our zoning laws if we’re going to truly address our climate crisis and our housing affordability.

Question seven – taxation

Jennifer Smith:
Seattle has a reputation for having high taxes compared to other Washington cities. A number of initiatives have added incremental taxes to fund transit, homeless programs, education, and the general fund. These taxes are small on paper, one 10th of a percent, for example, but most of these taxes are regressive due to Washington state’s tax structure. Will you pledge no new taxes for Seattle?

Colleen Echohawk:
I take a people-first approach on this, and I think that we absolutely need to understand the impact of a sales tax on our community. And it is not fair. It is not just, and we need to do better. Now, we have certain legal issues around an income tax, and we need to find new ways to generate revenue. So I would not say no, I will not incur any new taxes, but I think I want to incur the right kind of taxes, the taxes that are fair. I think a capital gains tax is really interesting and something that I would absolutely explore, but I believe that we in this city understand our responsibility to our homeless community, to [a] community that is hurting and suffering. In a city like Seattle, we should not have the amounts of poverty that we have in some of our communities. We should not have health inequities that we have, and that’s going to take some money and we need to that. And I look forward to working with [the] community about the kind of investments that we want to make.

Additional Questions

Jennifer Smith:
Indigenous peoples are leading the efforts to bring about many meaningful changes globally, nationally, and locally. If elected, you would be the first indigenous mayor of Seattle since the office’s inception in 1869, something that is long overdue. Can you speak to the significance of what being elected mayor of Seattle will mean both to you personally and what it potentially signifies for native nations and communities more broadly?

Colleen Echohawk:
I started thinking about running for mayor because I care about the city and I care about our homeless community, and I know I have the right kind of solutions. Being an indigenous mayor kind of just was part of like, who I am. And as I started thinking about it and understanding it more, it’s become more important. I have two amazing, beautiful children, and I want them to understand and know that it’s normal for a native woman to be the mayor of a city, because I didn’t have that growing up. when Sharice Davids and Deb Haaland were elected into Congress, I have goosebumps thinking about it now. Like it just was so unbelievable to me, people who I know understand where I come from, to have that kind of representation? It matters.

Before I announced, I talked to, leaders of the Coast Salish communities because I’m in their land right now. I am not Coast Salish, I’m Pawnee. Then I also talked to some of my elders, and one elder said to me, “Colleen, you need to remember that in our language leader means servant. And you need to remember that as you are trying out this new thing, that you are a servant to this community.” I take [it] seriously, I take that soberly, that if elected mayor that I would be a servant to this community. I would lead from a place of humility and, a place of understanding the issues that are in this community. That I have the right kind of solutions and [these] are different solutions. I think it’s time for new ideas and new people. To be in elected office, it’s exciting, and I take it seriously. I hope I win! I [hope] I’m that first person.

David Obelcz contributed to this story.

Local

Seattle mayoral candidate Andrew Grant Houston discusses his platform and vision for the city

Video

[SEATTLE] – (MTN) Malcontent News is conducting a series of interviews with 2021 Seattle mayoral candidates. We have contacted, or are in the process of contacting the most viable candidates, inviting them to answer seven prepared questions. Our first interview was with Andrew Grant Houston.

For all candidates, the first interview will be about their platform and vision. Prior to the primary election, we will conduct a second round that will focus on differentiation, and challenging positions and visions. Once the final candidates are selected in the primary, we will invite them for one last round of interviews.

All candidates for the first round will be asked the same seven questions, and have received a copy in advance. These questions were created by our editorial board, and are aligned to topics of key interest to the residents of Seattle.

Malcontent News is committed to providing equal time for all candidates, and operating under a “fairness doctrine” of equal time and treatment for all candidates.

We will be publishing a transcript of each interview. Transcripts may be lightly edited to remove, umms, ahhs, pauses, and aid in readability.

ANDREW GRANT HOUSTON

andrew grant houston, 2021 candidate for Seattle mayor

Jennifer Smith:
Thank you so much for being here with us today and, you know, coming to share your vision with our viewers. We really appreciate that.

Andrew Grant Houston:
Yeah. I really appreciate being offered this platform and I really appreciate the work that y’all have done throughout the past year.

Jennifer Smith:
Thank you. Can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and what inspired to run inspired you to run for?

Andrew Grant Houston:
I am a queer Black and Hispanic architect originally from Texas and moved to Seattle at the end of 2016 to common design housing to get my license as an architect. And what I really realized is that over time, the progressive and more sustainable city that we always say that we are isn’t quite true once you kind of get into the weeds. And so after having a lot of frustration, trying to support and organize around land use reform climate issues after the last round of wildfires and seeing the city response, which did not feel appropriate, especially given that we have been in a housing emergency and a homelessness crisis since 2015, I finally said, okay, this has got to stop. We have got to stop talking about the city that we say that we are and actually become that city. And so that’s what I’m focused on.

Question one – houselessness crisis

Jennifer Smith:
Seattle is facing [an] ongoing housing crisis related to unhomed peoples Washington state experienced a 6.2% increase in homelessness during 2019 and 2020 King County spends over $1 billion per year in public and private investment in support of approximately 12,500 houseless people with disappointing results. If elected mayor of Seattle, how would you address this crisis? And how do you think your plan would provide aid in resolving the crisis both in [the] short and the long term?

Andrew Grant Houston:
Well, I really glad that you asked the question specifically looking at a short term solution and a long-term solution because that long-term solution is driving down the cost of housing, which is really tied to allowing for more housing to happen across the entire city and not just in Black and brown neighborhoods like we currently have with the urban village strategy, but in allowing for more duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, and even larger, permanent supportive housing to happen in every single neighborhood in Seattle. And so that is how we really focus on that long-term solution. But I know firsthand as an architect, that even if we were to cut every single piece of red tape tomorrow, that it would still take about three years to build all of that housing. And so what that short-term solution really needs to be is tiny homes. If we allow for tiny homes, I know I’m proposing 2,500 tiny homes, that that is our short-term solution, how we truly address the crisis as the crisis that it is because we currently have 5,500 unsheltered people still in King County. That is really how we stem the bleeding.

But at the end of the day, something I really want to point out is just that we had some recent numbers come out from the last point in time count. So that’s where they go in one night and look over everything and see who is unsheltered and who is currently unhoused. It seems like the numbers in King County specifically are fairly stable. And so what that means to me is that as much as we are being successful in taking people out of being unhoused in a houselessness, that people are falling in at the same rate. And so we really need to focus on those preventative measures in order to ensure that less people fall into houselessness. And then that way we’re actually going to start to see some change.

Question two – infrastructure and economic recovery

Jennifer Smith:
It’s actually gotten worse as a result of the COVID pandemic. So as a result of the ongoing COVID pandemic, economic recovery, and development, as well as addressing Seattle’s crumbling transit infrastructure, such as the West Seattle bridge is of great importance. Moreover, some are expressing concern about the large corporations and many in the workforce, leaving Seattle. The question then is threefold. How do you plan on tackling the infrastructure issue, aiding economic recovery and development as we actually start to move beyond COVID? And what concerns do you have about the loss of corporations and workers in the city?

Andrew Grant Houston:
What I really have seen is not necessarily that we’re losing corporations. It’s more that people are recognizing that during the pandemic, they’re not able to enjoy the things that really make them want to live in a city in the first place. And so if you look at some of the numbers, especially in some of the movements happening in some of the other high-cost cities, like Los Angeles and New York and San Francisco, they’re actually people from those more expensive cities, particularly San Francisco that are moving here. And so we have actually seen a slight increase in our population during this time, even though it doesn’t quite make sense, like in our minds, like it does not quite compute, but it’s because they are having similar issues where they’re saying, look, San Francisco is just way too expensive. We need to go somewhere less expensive. And that’s here.

What we are seeing is that people from Seattle are actually moving to the suburbs in the area of moving to Kent and Renton and Auburn. And one of the reasons for that is because they’re looking to purchase homes. And so in that way, like I said before, we really need land-use reform so that we can allow for more people to purchase condos or townhomes or row houses. So in that way, they start to enter homeownership because that’s the thing that many people want to do. And as much as we know about the history of the United States, that that is how you build generational wealth for yourself and for your family. And so in that way, hopefully, we can bring people back to the city. Once we start to open up. My solution for a long-term strategy is really related to building more housing. And so in that way, investing more funds into not just housing, but also streets improving sidewalks and actually building sidewalks where we currently don’t have sidewalks. And all of those things that we have to do, all of those construction-related jobs are great living wage, union jobs. And so in that way, we are taking people from our communities and telling them, you can be a part of the positive change within your own community and build wealth that way as well.

Jennifer Smith:
One of the things too that happens is when people start to migrate to these places like Kent, and Auburn, and Renton is it drives up the rent. It drives up the price of housing and it exacerbates the homeless crisis. It makes it really difficult for people who were living in those areas because it was reasonable to continue to do so.

Andrew Grant Houston:
And in that way, that’s kind of why Seattle, as much as we are dealing with a regional homelessness crisis, that a lot of that crisis came from us because what ends up happening is that people move to those cities and they don’t have the same kind of protections that they have here as renters in Seattle. And so in that way, we do need a regional response, but a lot of the origin of our current crisis in the region is directly tied to the exclusionary policies that we have had here in Seattle for decades.

Question three – does Seattle have a crime and/or inequity problem

Jennifer Smith:
Police violence and ongoing racial…inequality. Seattle has earned a national reputation as a crime-ridden, dirty, and unsafe space. At one point, the city was labeled by the previous presidential administration as an anarchist jurisdiction. Do you agree with this view, what will you do to shift perceptions? And do you feel racial inequality exists within Seattle? And how do you plan to address it?

Andrew Grant Houston:
I would say that we’re not necessarily an anarchic jurisdiction as much as we are an anti-fascist jurisdiction. And I really say that with a lot of heart because I am a huge Seattle Sounders supporter. And I just remember whenever we were having a lot of the protests, especially within June and July of last year. And the president was complaining about Antifa and you would see Sounders supporters and the Emerald city supporters come out and say, no, yeah, we are Antifa – like three arrows down. Like we are going to be a part of this and support and really recognize that a lot of this police brutality is in essence state-sponsored violence. We need to provide methods of public safety that ensure people who look like myself are actually able to go out in public and feel safe themselves.

In that way, really thinking about how we redefine public safety, how we address our current methods of policing and say, this currently is not working. And I recognize that someone who is not just an architect, but an urban designer, that part of the safety is actually redesigning how our streets work and function. And so that is why I’m making not just policing, but also transforming our pedestrian infrastructure, transforming our bike infrastructure because there are a lot of deaths currently happening on our streets that are completely preventable. And then that way we’re really focusing on a true vision zero, that anyone can be outside in public space and feel safe at any time, day or night

Question four – police reform

Jennifer Smith:
When compared to the west coast cities of Portland, San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento, Oakland, and San Diego, Seattle has the second-highest cost per police officer tied with Oakland and the second-highest officer per capita behind San Francisco. Additionally, the average officer makes $153,000 per year before benefits, according to the Seattle Times. Despite this large force and supporting budgets, Seattle police report slowed response times and claim the issue is a lack of staffing. The budget was cut [by] approximately 18% and staffing levels were adjusted to support roughly 1,325 officers. How would you define defund the police? And what is your position? How do you restore community trust in SPD?

Andrew Grant Houston:
Well, what you’re really talking about are two things you’re talking about reforming, and then also defunding. And so in essence, these two decisions that people are kind of going between when I say it’s more of a yes, and. I pride myself on wanting to become a mayor that is the “yes and” mayor that we both need to reform our current police department so that we can restore trust. But also during that process, we have to start redefining what public safety means. And that means 100% public safety, but less than 50% of that is the police. The number that really draws my attention that comes from the work that has been done for many, many years here in Seattle, since the start of the Consent Decree are from groups like Decriminalize Seattle, as well as the no new youth jail movement. So in that way, coupled with the King County Equity Now Coalition of which I am a member, as part of Share the City, looking at the nearly 70% increase since 2010, in terms of the budget.

I don’t know about you, but if I look at numbers and response times, I don’t feel like there has been a 70% increase in the effectiveness of the Seattle police department. And so in that way, we really need to focus on more of a model that looks at preventative care that looks at harm reduction that looks at really addressing the issues that a lot of people are facing before they enter into an event of a crisis. Because it’s not just about not responding to a crisis with a healthcare or someone or mental assistance, someone that is not a person with a gun. It’s also about addressing the instability that has created these crises. So in that way, that is why housing is such a big part of my platform is that if we reduce our number of unhoused individuals, we reduce the number of times that those people are facing the police or engaging with the police. If we reduce the number of people who are just getting by just struggling to survive, that commit crimes of poverty. Then again, we reduce the reliance on our current policing systems. And so in that way, it makes a clear message that we are working in ways that are.

Truly creating public safety has nothing to do with [the] police. And so it makes it that much more possible to be able to do the deep work, which has been asked for by [the] community for many, many years. But I’m really saying to people, especially as the only mayoral candidate who has committed to continue the work of defunding the police is I am listening to the community, especially those who are most impacted. People who look like me, fear for their lives every single day, they go outside that we are going to address this issue, head-on. We are not going to walk back any promise. I am committed to defunding the police and establishing a new method of public safety.

Question five – public mental health crisis

Jennifer Smith:
So one of the many things that COVID has shed light on is the ongoing mental health crisis in the country. Seattle’s not exempt from this. And recently a man in the throes of a mental health crisis was fatally wounded by SPD near the Seattle waterfront. Would you consider implementing something similar to the STAR program in Colorado, which replaces traditional law enforcement responders with a medic and mental health professional for some emergency calls as a way to deescalate situations where there is a clear mental health component?

Andrew Grant Houston:
Yes, 100%. And I feel like that model in particular is an excellent example of how we can provide public safety and maintain our public safety levels while also shifting resources from the police department into our new emergency center that has been established by the Seattle city council. And so just in that way, we are providing different types of public safety, different types of care that can address crises when they happen. Because at the end of the day, as someone who watched that video, someone was in crisis and was really, truly suicidal. But if you’re not addressing those issues head-on and directly engaging with that person, even though he did have a weapon, then we are never going to get to a point where we will truly address a lot of the trauma that we know is coming from COVID, like you were talking about specifically.

I know even for myself, there have been many days, especially as a high-risk individual, someone who just got my first dose of vaccine, so really excited, but I have spent as long as six weeks indoors without going outside, even once, clearly that is going to have a mental impact on myself that I don’t even fully recognize, but I know for myself and I have the privilege to have healthcare, to have mental health services so that I can go and get help. And so in many ways, when we talk about true public safety, we need to be investing in mental health services for those who can not afford it currently. And then that way we can avoid issues and incidents like the one that occurred on the waterfront.

Question six – Zoning and Seattle housing crunch

Jennifer Smith:
I know this is another thing that’s in your platform – land use. Eighty-eight percent of Seattle’s land that is zoned for housing is zoned for single-family. Over the last five years, most of the new construction has been centered in the 12% that supports high density, housing. Developers and builders focused on small footprint properties with minimal parking and luxury appointments. Housing affordability is a major problem for Seattle. Do you support changing zoning rules for ADUs (Additional Dwelling Unit) and more dense construction to alleviate the housing crisis? And what changes would you support?

Andrew Grant Houston:
This is something very near and dear to my heart as someone who is a lifelong renter. Since I was born and raised by my mother, a single parent, but also something that I have direct professional experience on. Before I moved here to Seattle, I was a land-use consultant. And so in that way, I was actually working with cities and aiding them in rewriting the rules that really define how their cities would develop. And so truly understanding the system that in many ways was established solely as a way to keep people of color out of neighborhoods in cities. Zoning in general has a very long history, but it does not have a history that has existed the entirety of the lifespan of even Seattle. Zoning that has become restricted and restrictive land-use codes in general in Seattle did not start until the twenties. And so what you see in a lot of neighborhoods that are currently zoned for only having one house per plot of land is that there are actually a lot of duplexes, triplexes, small apartment buildings that exist in these neighborhoods.

And so what we are saying is that this current system is not only a continuation of the white supremacy of the past, because that’s exactly what it is. We are saying that this is not sustainable environmentally, economically, or culturally. The thing that you really touched on is the urban village strategy, which focuses a lot of the density into areas, which are effectively either industrial land, downtown, or communities of color and the “gayborhood,” which I know firsthand because I live on Capitol Hill. I cannot tell you how many bars we’ve heard of during the pandemic have essentially shut their doors. Not because they could not afford to continue paying their rent, but because their landlord said, sorry, your lease is up and we actually want to redevelop a piece of property. When we allow for development to occur across the entire city, we are not going to see the displacement, and why I don’t call [it] gentrification. I call it “communacide.”

The cultural destruction of our Black and brown neighborhoods of Capitol Hill. That when we spread out that development across the entire city, not only will people then get to choose where they want to live, because I know a lot of people who want to live in Wallingford. And I know a lot of people who want to live in Laurelhurst and other places in the North End. There just is nowhere for them to be able to afford [it]. We will also be able to have a more sustainable city for everyone else that we will relieve the pressure that we currently have on our Black and brown communities, especially. So that they can also continue to enjoy their lives in the communities that they have developed there over time.

Question seven – Taxation

Jennifer Smith:
So moving on Seattle has a reputation for having high taxes compared to other Washington cities. A number of initiatives have added incremental taxes to fund transit, homeless programs, education, and the general fund. These taxes are small on paper, 1/10 of 1% per example, but most of these taxes are regressive due to Washington state’s tax structure. Will you pledge no new taxes on the citizens of Seattle?

Andrew Grant Houston:
No. Because we are going to shift to progressive taxes. We are going to establish an income tax and I am specifically establishing an income tax because legally we’re allowed to. A flat tax of 1% that I am calling the Just Transition Tax. In establishing this tax, I want it to fund specifically four things. One of them being apprenticeships. So we talked earlier about jobs and infrastructure and construction in order to build the housing that we need because we have a lot of housing to kind of backfill. We need to be able to train people to do that kind of work. And so I want to specifically dedicate some funds there.

You talked about earlier, how are we going to support small businesses coming out of the pandemic? The second thing that I want to do is reduce our business occupation tax, that they can be able to have that kind of recovery.

The third thing that I want to do is establish a new public development authority and what that is really going to be focused on is that research and development, the thing that private dollars really can’t do in order to focus on net-zero buildings. So in that way, all the new housing that we need does not additionally contribute to our carbon emissions because we know we just simply need to reduce those certificate money.

And the last thing that I want to do is invest more money into our equitable development initiative because that money is specifically going back to our Black and Brown communities, our BIPOC communities so that they can self determine the types of housing, the types of communities that they are able to develop for themselves.

Jennifer Smith:
So you referenced creating an income tax. Could you talk more specifically about what you mean by that?

Andrew Grant Houston:
So there was a recent decision, and I want to say it was [it was] summer of last year where the Washington Court of Appeals essentially said that Seattle itself actually has the right to tax income as property. Because that’s really what we’re getting at when it comes to the Washington State Constitution is that income is seen as property. And so in essence, this is being treated like a flat property tax. And so they have given us the legal go-ahead to tax up to 1%. Now I know that there definitely needs to be a way to make that flat tax more progressive. And so when I am in office, I definitely am focused on looking at how are we actually going to implement this? How are we going to get credits if people who are below a certain income. But, at the same token, what this really shows for myself and I believe is that when it comes to proposing policy, I’m not just spitting out words. I really am planning on doing the diligence and my team is already doing that due diligence in order to ensure on day one, I’m able to start an app and improve the city or all Seattlites.

Additional Questions

Jennifer Smith:
Thank you for clarifying that for me. I really appreciate it. Now. I kind of have a selfish question because I am a historian. My primary field is American Indian and indigenous history. Now I noticed on your website that you referenced that you advocate for indigenous sovereignty. You know, Seattle is home to the Duwamish peoples, who were federally recognized for a short period of time and then had that federal recognition revoked. But Seattle in itself has a very rich indigenous history and contemporary presence that is often overlooked and ignored, or sometimes, celebrated as a relic of the ancient past. So what do you mean when you say you advocate for indigenous sovereignty?

Andrew Grant Houston:
What that really means is recognizing the past and present of native indigenous people in Seattle and the larger Puget sound region. One of the things that I really love about Seattle is not just our land acknowledgment, but also that in our office of intergovernmental relations, that they specifically speak between the city and local tribes in the area. And so in that way, upping that engagement and really recognizing one, that should happen and continue to happen, especially as we address a lot of these regional problems and crises. Which for example, the homelessness crisis disproportionately falls on our native and indigenous people, as well as really recognized that one of our biggest responsibilities, especially as a holder of land, is to be good stewards of that land and do that in concert with our local indigenous people.

Jennifer Smith:
Thank you so much for answering that question. I saw it on your website when I was reading up earlier and I really want to ask this question.

Andrew Grant Houston:
Absolutely. And I think at the end of the day, for me, when it comes to especially any group of color, whether it be Black, indigenous, Asian-American that people are allowed the ability to self-determine and that when it comes to a lot of the solutions that I want to provide, that I want to provide them in a way that picks up those with the least first. And so that is why my campaign is even called The Rising Tide in the first place. A rising tide lifts all boats, but that it starts at the bottom and works its way up.

Jennifer Smith:
And I think that’s such an important thing because so much of settler colonization in the United States was justified through this brown people can’t self-govern. Brown, black people can’t self-govern. And so self-determination is such a huge thing for people to recognize. Is there anything else that you would like our viewers to know

Andrew Grant Houston:
Currently, I have a clear vision for the city should look like in 2100, but I recognize that myself as the potential incoming mayor will have a significant role to play in the next eight years, ideally in the next few terms, because ideally, the next mayor is actually going to start out two full terms and not decide to not run again. That policy and those policy points, and those plans will be coming out beginning next week. So we are going to be releasing our full slate of names and then get into more details and so I’m really excited to share that with people because a lot of the work from that came directly from the community when they looked at the vision and we asked them, we recognize that we share this vision together, that we all want to see the city improve in a number of these ways, but we have to also agree on the steps to get there. And so in doing that work already and having those conversations, we don’t have to repeat the Seattle process over again. We can say with certainty that I will be a mayor of action and on day one, start to implement the things that people are asking for.

Jennifer Smith:
Thank you so much for being here and speaking with us and sharing your vision. Look forward to seeing what you put out next week.

Andrew Grant Houston:
Absolutely.

David Obelcz contributed to this story.