The Seattle City Council’s transportation committee Tuesday morning will hold a confirmation hearing for Greg Spotts, the mayor’s pick to lead the Seattle Department of Transportation.

You can view Spotts’s responses to written questions from the committee below. “I will bring to Seattle a wide variety of experiences from my fourteen years of public service in Los Angeles,” he writes. “My focus as an executive at StreetsLA has been to help Los Angeles become more walkable, bikeable, transit-friendly, safer, greener and climate resilient.”

In the document, Spotts included his first-year priorities for the Seattle role:

• Conduct an extensive listening tour to walk, bike, roll and ride transit with staff and constituents, inviting stakeholders to show me what’s working well and what needs improvement. This outreach will also extend to goods movement and the Port.
• Conduct a rigorous review of the Vision Zero program to identify which interventions in which places are most likely to save lives. This review requires both extensive quantitative analysis and deep engagement with the communities who are most at risk.
• Ensure that SDOT has the people, the systems, and the technology needed to implement best practices in asset management for the inspection, maintenance and repair of Seattle’s bridges.
• Bring to life the Transportation Equity Framework by embedding these concepts and techniques in the daily activities and functions of the department.
• Infuse the department with the values of responsiveness, innovation, transparency and accountability; these are the values that guide me as a public sector leader.

CHS reported here on Spotts and his work as chief sustainability officer in Los Angeles.

Harrell included a change at the top of SDOT as he launched his new administration earlier this year saying the department needed to take a more “balanced” approach that better recognizes “the role of cars and new electric vehicles.”

This week, Spotts has been posting updates to his @Spottnik Twitter account describing his experiences as he is staying in downtown Seattle without a motor vehicle during this visit for the confirmation process. In one update, Spotts included that he got a ride home “in a colleague’s Camry” after attending a barbecue.

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