Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn met with a packed house at Youngstown Cultural Arts Center in Delridge on March 13 to answer questions from the community and discuss the future of jobs and education in the city.
Before he took the stage, the Vicious Puppies Dance Crew – part of the non-profit educator Arts Corps at Youngstown – upped the tempo of the evening with a vibrant dance set.
Possibly pre-planned, possibly off-the-cuff response, McGinn opened his statements with a promise to find funding for Arts Corps - an educational program serving 800 kids that does not qualify for funding from the Families and Education Levy due to a lack of measurable academic outcomes defined in the guidelines.
“We are just coming out of the longest, deepest depression since the Great Depression,” McGinn said, adding 35,000 jobs were lost in the city. With signs of improvement now showing, he said 18,000 jobs have been added since the big hit and Seattle has a slightly lower unemployment rate than the rest of the state and nation.
In the push to continue improvement, McGinn talked jobs and education.
“One of the key pieces is education,” he said, detailing a number of programs funded by the Families and Education Levy including early learning, attendance incentive programs (for example, less than ten absences in a school year equals a free ticket to Bumbershoot), and the statewide College Bound scholarship program where low income students who sign up by the eighth grade and graduate high school with a 2.0 GPA or better get their college paid for.
“The jobs that we lost are not the same jobs we are going to get,” McGinn said, stating the healthcare, maritime and software industries are showing strong growth, but immigrant populations and high school dropouts may not have the skills to enter those fields. As remedy, he said, the city is working with local community colleges on a Pathways to Careers initiative that will train those populations for entry-level positions in areas of growth.
Onto the Q&A
Arts Corps
Several Arts Corps students studying the arts at Youngstown took the podium first to express the value of the program and asked McGinn to acknowledge the failures of the Families and Education Levy in providing funding for this program and others like it without the clear, measurable academic results of traditional educational.
As mentioned earlier, McGinn preempted the call for funding with news that he would find funding for Arts Corps.
His response included the general: “The achievement gap in our schools is real and its longlasting. What we know is that African American, Latino, some Pacific Islander groups … there test grades are much, much lower and dropout rates are higher. And then there is the pathway (from school to dropping out to incarceration).”
To the specific: “We are going to try to hold that bar over the long term (funding for academic programs) because we really want to change the odds that say we can’t change outcomes for our kids … Now in the case of the 800 kids being served by Arts Corps, I don’t want to see them lose services … I want to see them continue to receive services,” but the funding will likely come from “other pots of money.”
Viaduct questions
One man asked the Mayor whether the city plans to connect 509 to the Viaduct for a north/south alternative to I-5, and if so, he asked that the city be more transparent in their plans.
“It has been a long time priority for the Port (of Seattle), WashDOT, a fair number of elected (officials) to take (509) and continue it to the freeway on I-5,” McGinn responded. The idea is called the “509 extension.” Currently, 509 terminates south of Burien and the plan would call for a continuation to I-5.
“I personally have concerns for it because it gets you out to I-5 faster but it also does the reverse: it would make it really easy for people to jump off of I-5 and take 509 into the city and what we then would be talking about is maybe 30 or 40 thousand more cars a day to come over the 1st Ave S. bridge,” McGinn said. “(The bridge) is already close to capacity … and then coming down the viaduct and people are concerned about the capacity of 99 from West Seattle to downtown.”
McGinn said the Port is pushing for the extension to make it easier for their trucks to get to I-5, but “I don’t think they are really thinking it through, I actually think that 509 extension would be really bad for traffic congestion… but that remains on the wishlist for WashDOT.”
Another man said his commute from West Seattle to Belltown used to be seven minutes, but with the Viaduct construction it can now take up to 40 minutes. McGinn said the reality is the tunnel is happening and construction disruption will be a part of the commute for years to come, but the city will work to be flexible, adaptive and better in communicating with commuters throughout the process.
Communication between neighborhood groups and the city
A Delridge resident said, “There seems to have been a breakdown in communication between city departments and neighborhood groups and for those of us who have been active for a long time it seems like it is worse now than it was five years or ten years ago … some decision gets made and folks in the neighborhoods who are active, who participate, who are on email lists and Facebook groups and things do not know what’s going on and they feel blindsided. Or we have communications that we want to express … and we tell people and then it seems it disappears … something seems to be broken.”
McGinn acknowledged cuts to Dept. of Neighborhood service centers and representatives have hurt the communication process, adding, “You all know: our economy was bad, we had less money in city government and we made a lot of reductions and that was one set of reductions.”
“One of the things I care very deeply about is that people should get a high level of interaction and service from every department (not just the Dept. of Neighborhoods),” he said, adding the city will be looking at improving communication with the public.
Traffic lights in West Seattle
Karl de Jong, Admiral Neighborhood Association vice president, asked the mayor about his groups request for the Seattle Dept. of Transportation to review the intersection at 47th Ave SW and SW Admiral Way because of a death there in 2006.
“When can we expect a new traffic signal there? SDOT said they are doing 33 new traffic signals but they don’t have the budget to do it.” de Jong said, adding signals are also needed at S.W. Yancy St. and S.W. Genesee St. intersections along S.W. Avalon Way.
McGinn acknowledged the vehicle license fee increase bill that failed in 2011 would have paid for those improvements, but there are no plans for a new bill anytime soon.
He said the City’s main priority this year is rebuilding the seawall, and as a result new traffic lights and other roadway improvements will be pushed back.
“(The current seawall) is made of wood, it was never designed for an earthquake, it is rotting and if we get a big earthquake it is going down and it is taking the elevated Viaduct down with it,” McGinn said.
“This isn’t to say I wouldn’t like to fund more local street improvements from signals to crosswalks to street repaving … (but) we are short. You all know how many potholes we have out there,” he said. “I’m going to keep pushing, I’m a neighborhood guy … but I can’t say we are going to do it this year.”
Speaking of potholes, McGinn said prior administrations policy of ignoring regular road maintenance is currently coming to a head with roads in the city deteriorating at a rapid rate.
DESC Supportive Housing in Delridge
Delridge residents dealing with the impending homeless housing project across the street from the library on Delridge Way S.W. (which just passed another review board meeting towards a master use permit to build) asked the Mayor how the city is dealing with the fair dispersion of low income housing throughout the city and how it was possible the Office of Housing used year 2000 census data in determining the number of allowed rooms for the DESC project.
McGinn deferred the questions to Rick Hooper, director of the Office of Housing, but said the DESC project falls in line with his hopes to eradicate homelessness in ten years, although striking a balance in finding the right ratio of low-income housing for neighborhoods is a tricky process.
Hooper said the city puts a “very high priority” on dispersing low-income housing as much as possible and said the majority of current projects similar to DESC’s in Delridge are being built in North Seattle.
DESC’s Delridge Housing was originally designed with 75 rooms, but a Delridge resident discovered the Office of Housing used out of date census data to come up with that number. After it was brought to their attention, the city forced DESC to drop their number of units down to 66.
Hooper acknowledged a mistake was made, adding, “All I can say is we moved quickly (once it was brought to their attention).”
Wrapping it up
“I just want to say that I think we have a lot of good going for us,” McGinn said as he closed the town hall. “It is my commitment – it is why I come out to these things– that we are going to confront our problems squarely, we are going to acknowledge there are difficult issues and argue over them with dignity and appreciation for each others motivations … so we can see what we are really good at and where we can make it better, because there is no better city in the world.”
