Tag Archives: city hall

Seattle City Council ready to set new rules for street cafes and food trucks

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A Seattle City Council committee will take up debate Tuesday over how best to continue the pandemic success of street cafes while also reshaping the city’s rules around food trucks and sidewalk merchandise displays.

On the table are new sets of proposed rules for the Seattle Department of Transportation’s management of the programs that resulted in a proliferation of street dining tents and sidewalk patios across Capitol Hill during the COVID-19 crisis. Advocates showed that the features were extremely popular with customers despite issues around accessibility and concerns over street access and lost parking spots. Continue reading →

Latest city neighborhood grants: Polish Home HVAC upgrade, new fence for Howell Street P-Patch

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Capitol Hill community center the Polish Home and a neighborhood p-patch have been selected for $75,000 in support from the city’s Neighborhood Matching Fund.

The grants are part of $818,698 supporting 21 different community-initiated projects in neighborhoods across the city part of the latest matching fund awards.

The Polish Cultural Center was awarded $48,875 to upgrade 18th Ave’s Dom Polski with a new HVAC system “to enable the community to continue to use this special space for Polish cultural events and community gatherings like National Night Out, Neighborhood Block Parties, and other programs.” Continue reading →

This year, Sawant has company in annual Seattle budget ‘no’ votes

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Seattle Channel: 11/28/22 Budget Committee

Kshama Sawant is not alone in 2022 in her yearly dissent against Seattle City Hall’s annual budget compromises.

Monday, the socialist city council member and longest serving member of the body cast a vote against the compromise 2023 budget package in a procedural committee vote ahead of Tuesday afternoon’s final vote on the proposed spending plan by the full council. She was joined by unlikely collaborators —  citywide representative Sara Nelson and U District, View Ridge, Wallingford, and Wedgwood rep Alex Pedersen — in voting no on the package.

The budget proposal still moved forward on the 6-3 vote.

When it comes to these final votes, the District 3 representative for Capitol Hill and the Central District has made a tradition over the years of standing up against the compromise packages she has helped forge. Continue reading →

Despite Capitol Hill and Central District smash and grabs, East Precinct burglary reports have plunged

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Aftermath of a recent break-in at the Hillcrest Market

With reporting by Hannah Saunders

Despite a rise in concern over property crime in the city to end the year, Seattle Police statistics show that either people aren’t reporting the crimes, or a return to more normal patterns and increased emphasis on organized retail theft have put a dent in surging shoplifting and burglary totals in the city and across Capitol Hill and the Central District.

Still, around 100 break-ins are reported every month in the East Precinct, most targeting commercial buildings. And the individual anecdotes are frustrating. A week before Thanksgiving, the manager of Capitol Hill’s Hillcrest Market posted pictures to the CHS Facebook Group showing the aftermath of a break-in that targeted the Summit Ave grocery for thousands of dollars worth of cigarettes. It was the third time in a month the shop had either been ripped off or broken into. Continue reading →

Here’s what made it into the Seattle City Council’s final 2023 budget changes — and what did not

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The Seattle City Council finalized its changes to the 2023 budget Monday including ending a short-lived experiment by returning the city’s parking enforcement officers to the Seattle Police Department.

CHS reported here on the spending constricted package from council budget chair Teresa Mosqueda who called the spending plan an “anti-austerity” approach to “keeping our community cared for and housed, connected and resilient, and healthy and safe” despite a predicted downturn in city tax revenues.

Mayor Bruce Harrell also saw his plan for a new Unified Care Team that will help maintain “clean and accessible Seattle neighborhoods, parks, and open spaces” including sweeping encampments and clearing tents from public spaces like parks make it through the budget process intact. Continue reading →

Seattle City Council seeks Community Police Commission volunteers

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The Seattle City Council is seeking volunteers to be part of the city’s Community Police Commission.

Council public safety committee chair Lisa Herbold announced the search earlier this month. “In accordance with the 2017 Accountability Ordinance, to be eligible, commissioners must be respected members of Seattle’s many diverse communities and reside or work in Seattle at the time of their appointment,” the announcement reads. Continue reading →

City Council’s ‘anti-austerity’ budget package: Aiming JumpStart back where it belongs, preserving parking enforcement’s move out of SPD, nuking ShotSpotter, and giving mayor his ‘Unified Care Team’

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Teresa Mosqueda with Patty Murray (Image: @TeresaCMosqueda)

With ambitions curtailed by a predicted downturn in city tax revenue and with the impact of a wave of tech layoffs looming, the Seattle City Council’s “rebalancing package” of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s a $1.6 billion 2023 budget proposal is on the table this week with what council budget chair Teresa Mosqueda says is an “anti-austerity” approach “keeping our community cared for and housed, connected and resilient, and healthy and safe.”

The council’s planned changes range from shifting JumpStart tax revenue back to its initial purpose of addressing the city’s resiliency and homelessness crisis including an important cost of living adjustments planned for salaries for workers at human service providers that will nearly double the $15.5 million the mayor was aiming to spend, to a key reorganization decision that will keep parking enforcement resources at the Seattle Department of Transportation, to accounting maneuverings that will slice 200 unfilled positions out of Seattle Police so $29 million of the department’s other priorities can be funded.

Some smaller pet projects, meanwhile, will be cut including an amendment from District 3 Kshama Sawant that targets $2 million for gun detection technology championed by the Harrell administration.

The council’s public hearing on the proposed spending package — and the final opportunity in the weeks-long 2023 budget process — is Tuesday night:

Final Public Hearing — Tuesday, November 15 at 5 PM at City Hall — People wishing to testify can participate online and are encouraged to do so given the ongoing nature of COVID. In-person testimony will be accepted as well.

“There weren’t easy answers in this year’s budget, but there were core values to start from: transparency and accountability, investing in key and core city services for our working families and small businesses, and preventing cliffs in services and avoiding austerity to ensure a resilient economy,” budget chair Mosqueda said in a statement. Continue reading →

A ‘strong mayor’ — Harrell’s Capitol Hill tour includes public safety, kombucha, and pumping iron

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The mayor’s Sunday tour included a stop at a kombucha vendor at the farmers market. The mayor has reportedly become quite fond of the beverage. (Image: CHS)

Harrell hitting the bench press at Rival Fitness (Image: City of Seattle)

Seattle’s mayor sampled some farmers market kombucha, pumped iron, and got an earful from local businesses about public safety, homelessness and mental illness resources, worries about the loss of car access and street parking to neighborhood street changes, concerns about sidewalk vendors, and worries about gun violence.

Mayor Bruce Harrell came to Capitol Hill for a tour Sunday to hear from neighborhood business owners in what his office says is the start of visits around the city part of new “One Seattle Community Connections” efforts with stops in more neighborhoods to come.

The tour with media in tow included the Sunday Capitol Hill Farmers Market, a stop at T’Juana Tacos inside the Nacho Borracho bar on Broadway, a visit to E Pine’s Rival Fitness, and a closed-door lunch with neighborhood business representatives atop Mercado Luna to discuss nightlife and public safety concerns including multiple incidents of gun violence near lower Pike/Pine club the Mint Lounge.

Before the closed-door session with the nightlife and business reps, Harrell told CHS his visit to the neighborhood wasn’t about cracking down on any specific business. Continue reading →

Capitol Hill Business Alliance to host Councilmember Nelson and East Precinct reps for public safety ‘community conversation’

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Citywide Seattle City Councilmember Sara Nelson and representatives from the East Precinct will take part in a community discussion Thursday on public safety.

The daytime online meetings is hosted by the Capitol Hill-based GSBA business advocacy group and its Capitol Hill Business Alliance and takes place Thursday, November 10th from 11 AM to 12 PM: Continue reading →

At African American Advisory Council, gunfire detection tech backers make case for deployment in Seattle

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(Image: Shotspotter)

Wednesday’s meeting of the African American Advisory Council (Image: CHS)

In the scheme of things, $1 million among $1.6 billion in spending line items is a drop in the bucket. But the debate over Seattle’s possible implementation of gunfire detection technology has become a flashpoint in the city’s attempts to address a surge in gun violence.

The African American Advisory Council, which advises the Seattle Police Department about crime prevention and public safety concerns, held a meeting this week to discuss the benefits of the ShotSpotter technology.

ShotSpotter uses acoustic sensors to detect and locate gunshots through triangulation. The goal of the tech, which has been around for 25 years and a subject in debate in Seattle for over a decade, is to, ostensibly, improve police response times to incidents of gun violence.

“We have put out so much money to all of these different organizations–millions of dollars for gun violence prevention,” said Victoria Beach, chair of the council, who also said that nothing is being done while Black children are dying. “I’m tired of sitting and talking to mothers who weep.”

But critics have questioned opening a beachhead to such surveillance technology on city streets. And cities like San Antonio and Charlotte illustrate a more direct problem — the technology doesn’t seem to work.

Wednesday’s meeting of the SPD-backed community group usually dedicated to neighborhood crimes and public safety around the Central District and South Seattle comes as the Seattle City Council is weighing some 100 amendments to finalize Mayor Bruce Harrell’s 2023 budget proposal with its steps back on Seattle reforms including spending to create a larger SPD and a controversial new plan for how to redirecting funding from the city’s big business tax from COVID-19 recovery, housing, and the Green New Deal to patching up the city’s general fund. Harrell’s plans also call for nearly $40 million for “clean city, trash mitigation, encampment resolution, and RV remediation initiatives.” The City Council must pull off the balancing act in the face of a newly predicted greater downturn in tax revenue that will make additions a battle and cuts more likely.

In the middle of this, the debate over ShotSpotter has reemerged. Continue reading →