Progressives notch another win as Katie Wilson tops incumbent Bruce Harrell for Seattle mayor
SEATTLE (AP) — First-term Seattle Mayo…
#NewsBeep #News #Headlines #Amazon.com #BruceHarrell #DistrictofColumbia #DonaldTrump #Elections #GeorgeFloyd #IDStateWire #Idaho #Inc. #KatieWilson #LocalNewsforApple #ORStateWire #Oregon #Politics #Racialinjustice #Seattle #U.S.DemocraticParty #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesgovernment #Us #USA #WAStateWire #Washington #ZohranMamdani
https://www.newsbeep.com/250090/
Seattle's Mayor Bruce Harrell has posted his concession speech to the Seattle Channel.
It's always great to see democracy in action... oh and gotta thank our lucky stars Bruce didn't finish defunding the public access channel to give more money to the cops otherwise we might not have been able to see it. 🥴
A local chud posted this so I am unironically stealing dis shit.
Yes, buckle up a new dawn is upon us!
Welcome Comrades!
Bruce Harrell is basically a darker complexion Biff from Back To The Future.
I fully expect him to thank us for letting him be our homecoming king by mistake tomorrow.
To restore public trust, Seattle city government needs a renewed commitment to transparency
From data.seattle.gov.A great city like Seattle should never have anything to hide from its people. That’s why one of the best things city government can do to earn the public’s trust is to act with transparency and make public information as freely accessible as possible. Doing so is also a way to support and encourage more independent journalism by providing all news outlets with equal access to public information.
Seattle has a history of being a leader on government transparency efforts, and since launching the Open Data Program in 2010 the city has hosted a huge amount of public information on its data.seattle.gov website. Many key datasets are updated regularly or even live and are open to anyone in the public to peruse. The idea was that the city had nothing to hide from the people, and it would be easier for everyone if they just made the information available rather than requiring people to file constant public disclosure requests (“PDR”). Open data is one powerful part of running a transparent government. The city also just in general needs to be more forthcoming and proactively open about program and project developments as well as political decision making.
The city has lost its way over the past decade or so as more and more public information has receded back behind the obscure and slow PDR process. This is especially true for the Seattle Police Department, as Erica C. Barnett at Publicola has been documenting, but it’s also true for other city departments. For example, it took a PDR by Ryan Packer to learn that the Seattle Parks Department and the Seattle Department of Transportation had invested staff time and public money into designs for a safer Lake Washington Boulevard before Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office told them to scrap those safety updates. Before the PDR was fulfilled, simple media questions asking why the safety upgrades were scrapped went either unanswered or only vaguely answered. There is absolutely no reason SDOT and the Parks Department should ever obfuscate some roadway design plans or refuse to provide the public with an explanation for project changes. A similar process played out over efforts to close the nude beach at Denny-Blaine Park. These are not state secrets, these are our public parks.
The reason it was so hard to get this information is that Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office was at the center of it. They have made a habit of obscuring the flow of information, which is not just bad for the public but was also bad for Mayor Harrell. It didn’t work. Instead, every time it took a PDR to reveal major details about a public project, it made them look untrustworthy. This is how he got the nickname “Backroom Bruce,” which dogged him during the campaign. Hiding public information is almost always more damning than whatever the information says.
As it appears Katie Wilson will be Seattle’s next mayor, there are going to be a lot of people like me talking about what the new administration should prioritize. I will of course have thoughts on how a new administration can make our streets safer and more accessible for biking because that’s what Seattle Bike Blog does. But being extremely transparent from day one is one of those priorities that can benefit all the city’s work. I urge the incoming administration and the whole city government leadership chain to embrace a fresh approach to public information. Doing so would also set clear expectations for all the non-government workers who interact with City Hall, whether they are paid business lobbyists, individuals or community organizations.
The good news is that the city probably doesn’t need to invest heavily to build new transparency tools from scratch because many of the tools are already available through data.seattle.gov, Seattle Channel, Legistar, various department-specific data portals, or from project webpages on city websites. Mostly, we just need everyone to use them more often. Every project over a certain size needs to have a webpage that houses all relevant documents, and city staff should be more broadly empowered to share information without requiring too much executive oversight (some oversight is needed since department heads and the mayor need to be aware of what’s going on within the departments they oversee). If it’s a hassle or time-consuming to update a city webpage (a complaint I’ve heard from various city staffers), then the city needs to figure out how to make it easier. Essentially, if a document would be available to a PDR, then it should probably be on the project website. Project updates should always be transparent about what has been changed since the previous update. Reporters should never need to use the Wayback Machine to uncover project cuts. We will still find out the information, and the city will look untrustworthy in the process.
Oh, and please bring back the Seattle City Directory? It should never be difficult to figure out who works for who and who holds what public job. Relying on Publicola for a public directory is absurd.
All city news is not good news, so the public may discover problems through the city’s increased transparency efforts. However, this is a feature, not a bug. If there’s a problem, then we need to deal with it, and Seattle should do so in an open and honest manor. It’s much better to have problems come to light in the open than to discover later that city officials knew about the issues and didn’t let the public know.
Finally, transparency can only truly work if city employees are given clear expectations and can trust the mayor to support them. If staffers are afraid of retribution from above for sharing public information, then they will of course be less likely to do so. Then again, if city employees are living in fear of retribution from above then that’s a sign of a much larger leadership problem.
We live in a time when the Republican leaders of the U.S. House of Representatives will stop meeting entirely to prevent the release of public information that could tie the President and many other powerful people to a pedophile ring. Operating with real transparency is just one of the many ways Seattle can and should conduct itself in stark opposition to the Republicans in DC. Seattle has nothing to hide.
#SEAbikes #Seattle
The state of our divided Seattle bike movement
I am writing this post before King County Elections releases the November 11 ballot count, so the result of the Seattle mayoral election is still unknown. It has been torture waiting for the result, but perhaps it is also a unique opportunity for some honest reflection on the current state of the Seattle bike movement as a political force. Voting is over, so there are no more voters to win over, yet without a result the finger-pointing and arguing stage hasn’t yet fully begun.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but the recent Shifter video and the unstated subtext bubbling below the Life After Cars event last week has had me thinking a lot about this odd moment in which the local bike movement is split on the most important political position in the city: Mayor. Seattle Bike Blog and the Urbanist enthusiastically endorsed Katie Wilson while Washington Bikes endorsed Bruce Harrell. It’s the first time since writing this blog we have been fully in opposition about a major election (in 2021 WA Bikes dual-endorsed Harrell and Lorena González while Seattle Bike Blog sole-endorsed González).
When you look back through Seattle’s modern bike history (about 1968-present), it’s amazing what bike folks can accomplish when people are united and pulling in the same direction. But when bike folks are divided, things can get bad. We saw this play out in Seattle but especially across the U.S. during the “vehicular cycling” era in which many “avid cyclists” organized against the creation of bike lanes and even sometimes trails because they were convinced that cycling is safest when people learn to bike on roadways like they are driving a car. The result was that any momentum from the 60s and 70s to invest in bike lanes and develop safe bike infrastructure standards was set back by decades. Why would a politician, even a good one, use any of their political capital to build a bike lane that a bunch of bike riders would protest alongside any upset drivers? Maintaining the status quo is politically easy, and making change is difficult. Political leaders need to know that bike supporters will have their back when the “bikelash” comes.
Seattle’s current split is far less significant than in the vehicular cycling days (documented at length in a recent Not Just Bikes video and touched on in my book). The difference, I’d argue, is more about competing theories of change than it is about competing philosophies about cycling itself. Washington Bikes and Seattle Bike Blog both support investments in safer cycling infrastructure and expanding bicycle education and using bikes for direct action through efforts like the Pedaling Relief Project. The big difference is about whether to seek influence through an existing problematic power structure that has been pretty good for bike lanes or to support a bike-riding candidate seeking to create a whole new path to power filled with potential and unknowns. Should the Seattle bike movement be part of the establishment or part of the change? Does power come from the people or from corporate sponsors? Is this a growing pain for a movement that is getting more mainstream and therefore has a wider range of political affinities, or is it a sign of trouble? Can all of these be a little bit true at the same time?
It’s undeniably good that both candidates courted voters who care about cycling. We did not have a mayoral candidate who was out there campaigning on the promise that they would tear out the bike lanes, and that alone is a sign of the bike movement’s power and the popularity of cycling and safe streets among Seattle voters. It has been obviously beneficial to the cause of increased cycling infrastructure that WA Bikes has had a friend in Mayor Harrell these past four years. If Harrell manages to pull out a close victory as the last ballots are counted (and perhaps recounted), he will absolutely owe some of it to the tens of thousands of dollars WA Bikes spent on mailers supporting him as well as their messages of support to their very large email list. WA Bikes reached significantly into a demographic that you would expect to be strong for Wilson: Bike riders.
But this is also the exact scenario I fear most because I think infighting within the Seattle bike movement would be intense and could leave lasting scars. If the margin for defeating Wilson ends up within the feasible WA Bikes influence range, things could get ugly. People calling out WA Bikes for failing to even dual endorse a bike-riding candidate and longtime transportation advocate has already been a constant buzz in recent months. If it ends up being decisive, well, grievances will be uncorked.
Maybe this is a fight that needs to happen. Hashing out disagreements is an important part of any social movement. In some ways, this is how Seattle Neighborhood Greenways initially came to be. It wasn’t an opposition group to Cascade Bicycle Club (back then Cascade was a political org, but a merger and major reorganization in 2015 turned Cascade into a non-partisan 501c3 org and WA Bikes into a politically-active 501c4 org). But as I wrote in my book, Cascade was in crisis in 2011 over the organization’s political actions. Cascade initially backed Greg Nickels in the 2009 primary, but then backed the anti-establishment candidate for mayor Mike McGinn during the general election (CORRECTION: I initially wrote that Cascade had backed McGinn over Nickels in the primary, but this was not accurate. I regret the error.). This is around the time I started Seattle Bike Blog (July 2010), so one of my first big tasks was to report on the chaos within Cascade and in some ways play the mediator. Several people at the time described it to me as a “civil war.” At one point, the Board of Directors fired the Executive Director because he refused to fire the club’s Advocacy Director, then a bunch of members organized against the Board and all but forced them to resign en masse. To outside observers they looked like the dog that caught the car. Cascade had been building their influence over decades and finally got a bike-riding champion elected mayor, then promptly imploded under the pressure of their own success.
Amid all that infighting, neighbors worried that the bike movement was going to blow its chance to take advantage of a rare opportunity for change started creating their own small neighborhood groups focused on supporting safe streets. They sidestepped the Cascade chaos and focused on the real goal: Safe streets. They were enormously successful, and the groups eventually formed into Seattle Neighborhood Greenways, a bottom-up organization in which the main org exists largely to support the advocacy work of the neighborhood groups. Greenways groups along with Cascade (once it got its shit together) were able to set in motion the foundations for today’s bike network such as the creation of the 2014 Bicycle Master Plan (at the time probably the best such plan in the nation), a pilot protected bike lane on 2nd Ave downtown, and the inclusion of unprecedented funding for bike improvements in the 2015 Move Seattle levy. It’s remarkable in retrospect that the Seattle bike movement was able to so deftly navigate such an awful implosion at Cascade and come of it stronger than before.
Now we have almost the opposite dynamic at play. WA Bikes supported the establishment candidate this time, and many of the people in their base are angry about it. My read is that it’s probably better for WA Bikes (and its sister organization Cascade) if Wilson pulls off the win. WA Bikes is significantly out of step with a large portion of its own base on this one, and I’m sure folks will organize some kind of response. Harrell supporters can get mad at Seattle Bike Blog and no critical bike movement infrastructure will be seriously damaged (this is the power of independent media). But we need WA Bikes and Cascade.
As I mentioned in the Shifter video, it’s a small miracle that Cascade (and WA Bikes) exists the way it does. It has so many more resources to dedicate to advocacy than most other bicycling organizations in the country because its early organizers made the decision to direct the revenue from the club’s hit rides back into the club and its advocacy efforts. It was a volunteer-run organization for a long time, and it kept pumping out hit after hit with its rides. A huge number of people have participated in Cascade events, and Cascade is often a person’s first contact with cycling. It is a powerful presence culturally and politically, and it’s not something that could be created today if we were starting from scratch. It’s a special institution that belongs in part to everyone who rides a bike here, which is why I think people are feeling so angry, hurt and sold out. In a town where corporate profits are constantly prioritized above the people, it’s painful to see that even the bike club is acting on the same side as the ultrawealthy megadonors behind the Harrell campaign and his not-so-independent PAC. If in 2011 they were the dog that caught the car, in 2025 they are the car.
I know that the bike movement in Seattle is strong enough and cares enough to navigate whatever is ahead. I hope this post can help provide a basis of understanding about what happened last time there was a big disagreement over local politics within the club as well as some of the dynamics at play. No matter what happens (if anything happens at all), we will come out stronger so long as everyone keeps their eyes on the end goal: More people bicycling safely.
#SEAbikes #Seattle
Awoke much earlier than i hoped, struggling with insomnia this week. This is good news though from #TheSeattleTimes - #KatieWilson is catching up to #BruceHarrell and might actually win! :)
Bruce Harrell - 116435 - 50.7%
Katie Wilson - 112135 - 48.9%
Activist Katie Wilson continues to gain on incumbent Bruce Harrell in the closely watched race for Seattle mayor. As of Friday’s ballot count, Wilson was just 4,300 votes behind Harrell, narrowing his early lead. With about 45,000 ballots left to tally, independent analysts weren’t ready to call the race.
Ahh this old routine.
Haven't seen this smear campaign since the last time a young person took on a sitting Amazon Basics corporate ass Seattle mayor.
#Vote #KatieWilson #BruceHarrell #Seattle #PNW #ElectionDay2025
Get your ballot to a drop box + How to print a replacement ballot or register in-person
See the interactive map via King County Elections.It may be too late to rely on the post office to mail your ballot ahead of the November 4 election, so anyone with a ballot still lying around should fill it out and get it to a ballot drop box (King, Pierce, Snohomish) by 8 p.m. Tuesday. Also send this info to your friends and family who are less engaged than you are.
Any registered voter who has lost their ballot can complete and print a replacement ballot online (King, Pierce, Snohomish). You can also register and/or vote in-person now until the polls close by going to a voting center, though check the open hours before going (King, Pierce has unlisted extended hours until 6 p.m. Monday and 8 p.m. Tuesday, Snohomish).
Check out our endorsement of Katie Wilson for Seattle Mayor as well a compilation of endorsements around the region from Washington Bikes, Transportation for Washington, the Urbanist and the Transit Riders Union. If you’re having trouble deciding who to vote for, seeing where these four very different orgs landed can give you a good idea. One surprise to me, for example, was that all four orgs endorsed Claudia Balducci for King County Executive while only the Transit Riders Union dual endorsed Girmay Zahilay. That race may end up being the closest major race on the ballot, and many people (including yours truly) are having a hard time deciding because they’re both great. So if you care a lot about transportation policy, maybe these endorsement results are your tie-breaker.
This is a moment in Seattle history. We have not elected a mayor like Katie Wilson in modern memory. She is a genuine bike and bus riding grassroots community organizer and an effective coalition builder. Perhaps most remarkably, she is not overly egotistical, a problematic trait that nearly all successful politicians share. She doesn’t always make everything about Katie, she centers the work and the partners who make it happen. She is also not afraid to take a chance on a new idea (like ORCA Lift and the JumpStart tax and social housing), and she has a remarkable success rate gathering the community and stakeholder buy-in to make them happen. She is the kind of politician people say they want but rarely get a chance to elect. A mayor who leads from within rather than on high. Electing Katie Wilson could be a chance to redefine the path to power at City Hall, a once-in-a-generation kind of event.
Don’t sit this one out or rely on some promising polling to get Katie to the Mayor’s Office. A handful of ultrawealthy people and companies are spending huge amounts of money to attack her and shift the race back in Harrell’s favor. But we can defeat them with people power by volunteering for the Wilson campaign to get out the vote (for example, you can phonebank from your own home). If nothing else, contact all your friends and family to urge them to vote and offer to answer their questions.
#SEAbikes #Seattle
News Beep
nullagent
Tom Fucoloro
🦄 🅃🅁🄰🄽🅂🄸🄲🄾🅁🄽 🏳️⚧️
Jason Weill