Common Cause Seattle is at a crossroads. We have fundamental choices to make about the future of our city. We can remain a city divided into opposing camps locked in civic strife, or choose to be a city united by our commitment to the public good. We can remain a city where the enforcement of law is subordinate to the political aims of the day, or choose to be a city where the law is fairly and equally applied. We can remain a city that perpetuates inequality, injustice, and marginalization, or choose to be city that affords everyone the opportunity to succeed, live well, and put down roots. It is up to us to choose the better way, to make common cause between us, and work towards a Seattle that works for us all. We have good reason to be optimistic about our future. Seattle is an educated city full of curious, creative, and passionately civic-minded people. Our economy is healthy and growing. We are at the forefront of scientific, medical, and technological innovation. We are home to the University of Washington, an internationally renowned research university, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest philanthropic foundation in the world. Amazon and Microsoft have their headquarters in our region and Apple, Google, and Facebook are all planning major expansions of their Seattle offices. These are the five most valuable public companies in the United States. Seattle has resources sufficient to meet the challenges it faces, but lacks the vision necessary to use them. We need leaders that can inspire us to put our differences aside, to trust and compromise, and to find common ground on which to build. There is more common ground than there may seem.
Common Ground Good Governance As Seattle residents, we are ultimately responsible for ensuring that our city is run well. We have the right to demand, and the civic obligation to maintain, a local government that is fiscally responsible, transparent, accessible, and accountable to the public will. We have good reason to be concerned about City Hall. Our local representatives are dedicated public servants with the best of intentions, yet Seattle seems unable to make significant progress on its most pressing challenges. Part of the problem, no doubt, is that these challenges are also among the most difficult to overcome. Another part of the problem, however, is that our efforts have too often been reactive, uninformed, and divisive. Nowhere is the clearer than in our haphazard response to the homelessness crisis, which has sown fear and distrust in our neighborhoods, alienation from the business community, and exasperation among law-enforcement and service providers. This is a high price to pay for our small and infrequent successes. Tragically, we continue to shuffle the homeless from one unsanctioned encampment to the next, without being able to provide them the services and shelter they need. We can do better. We can elect a City Council that builds consensus, seeks reasonable compromise, and refuses to make perfection the enemy of progress. We can elect a City Council that works for us all.
Public Safety First among the primary responsibilities of local government is to ensure that people are safe. Every person in Seattle has the right to be secure in their person and property, to be free from violence or intimidation, and to be protected from public hazards. As Seattle residents, we should expect our local representatives to advocate, legislate, and adequately fund improvements to public safety, and to make sure that those tasked with keeping us safe are excellently trained, equipped, and compensated for their service. The Seattle Police Department has achieved remarkable reforms over the past six years. Our implementation of mandatory de-escalation, crisis-intervention, and anti-bias training has become a national model for constitutional community policing. Newly ratified contracts between the City and the police unions have cemented important oversight and accountability measures and provided our officers with a long overdue raise in pay. All of this is very good news. But Seattle has struggled to recruit and retain police officers. Across Seattle, residents complain of the lack of police presence in their neighborhoods and slow response times to non-emergency calls. Seattle does not have enough police officers to meet demand. To handle the public calls for service, the Seattle Police Department relies heavily on patrol officers working overtime. This makes us all less safe. We have far fewer police officers than cities comparable in population and geographic area. We should remedy this fact and to substantially increase the number of officers available to serve our growing city.
Livability We are in the midst of an unprecedented period of growth. This is understandable. We have a strong and growing economy. We are a center of technological innovation, educational excellence, and cultural and artistic expression. We are surrounded by stunning natural beauty. Our population is diverse, highly educated, and deeply progressive. Seattle is a city where people want to work, have a home, raise a family, and build a life. It may seem that our region has grown too much and too rapidly. It is harder than it used to be to find an apartment in Seattle and much harder still to own a home. Traffic is awful and getting worse while access to fast, reliable public transportation is, for most of us, years away. Seattle Public Schools are struggling with significant capacity management issues, much to the consternation of students and their parents. Despite the strain, growth is a good problem to have and preferable to the alternative. But we need to much better manage how we grow, where and how quickly, and to mitigate the impact of growth on our ability to provide critical public services and on our infrastructure, institutions, and communities. In Seattle, each neighborhood is different but every neighborhood should be livable. Every neighborhood should be safe. Every neighborhood should have ample housing and great schools. Every neighborhood should be served by public transportation. This should be our goal. These are the basics.
Economic Opportunity We all want Seattle to be a city where people have a real opportunity to start a career, own a home, and raise a family. We all want Seattle to prosper and to see our neighbors thrive and children flourish. We may passionately disagree on how best to secure the future of our city, but we cannot afford to lose sight of the fact that ours is a common project and we are all in it together. Seattle will succeed only if it continues to produce a good number and healthy variety of jobs that are secure and pay well. We have to make sure that Seattle remains a decent place to take a risk, start a business, try to grow and create jobs. This is fundamental to the future of our city. Our representatives makes things worse when they create an unstable regulatory environment for business. They do us a disservice when they treat business as a captive and somewhat hostile source of potential revenue, as they did in the recent Head Tax debacle. Local government should approach the business community as a partner mutually interested in the wellbeing of Seattle and its residents. The business community, in turn, should look for opportunities to advise local government, support its work, and help fund solutions to shared problems. We need to ensure that Seattle employers can reasonably predict the laws and costs of doing business here. We need to support and sustain programs that provide Seattle residents with the education and training Seattle businesses require. We need to work together for each other.
Equality The Black and Native American infant mortality rate in King County is double the regional average. Students of color in Seattle Public Schools test on average forty percent less proficient in English and math than White students. There are over four thousand homeless students in Seattle Public Schools and about ninety percent of them are students of color. White households in Seattle have double the annual median income and ten times the median net wealth of Black households. They are more than twice as likely to be homeowners. In Seattle, our bastion of progressive values, children of color have been geographically resegregated into worse schools. People of color are arrested, charged, and convicted more frequently, and more harshly sentenced, for minor offenses. Communities of color suffer disproportionately from poverty, housing instability, preventable illness and chronic disease. They die younger. Our conception of ourselves and of our city simply cannot be reconciled with this litany of uncomfortable fact. Are we committed to equality of opportunity? The annual median wage of women working full time in Seattle is twenty percent less than that of men. Are we committed to protecting the most vulnerable? Nine out of ten Native American women in Seattle have been victims of rape or sexual violence and over half of them are homeless. Are we committed to tolerance? The number of hate crimes in Seattle doubled last year. It is the fourth year running that number has sharply increased.
These are tense political times. Our ideological divisions are sharper, our rhetoric meaner, and our patience with each other worn thin. This is true even here in Seattle, where our political spectrum entirely consists of various shades of blue. But we need to be able to have open and uncomfortable conversations about systems of oppression and privilege. We do not have the luxury to misconstrue criticisms of these systems as attacks on our character, to disengage and nurse hurt feelings. How ought we to respond when confronted with such a litany of uncomfortable facts about inequality of opportunity and inequity of outcomes in Seattle? What measures should we take?