January 2008

Kudos to the organizers of last night's Sixth Annual Rainier Beach Town Meeting. For six years residents, business people and other advocates have gathered together to refocus and rededicate to the top priorities for their corner of Seattle. Rainier Beach can be such a conundrum. A neighborhood on the edge of Lake Washington with great homes, great parks, and a business district crying out to be remade into something serving more of the needs of the community. Unfortunately, Rainier Beach has too many people in poverty, too much crime and too many kids failing to advance. The neighborhood planners recognized these challenges when they built the Rainier Beach 2014 Neighborhood Plan 10 years ago. The plan is heavy with improvement recommendations for schools, mentoring, job training, parent support and more. It was great to see action steps from the plan distributed to attendees Thursday night as a starting point for work. Due to construction around the Rainier Beach Community Center the meeting was held in the cafeteria at Rainier Beach High School. This was a great, symbolic thing for a school that struggles for respect. Two highlights from the meeting — the food and the band! The band has several RBHS freshmen playing instruments and they were terrific.

After the Rainier Beach Town Meeting I ate dinner and went to bed for a few hours before getting up at 1:15 a.m. to do the 2008 One Night Count. Annually, volunteers fan out across parts of King County to count homeless people. You go with a group and you count who you see on the street, under awnings, in doorways, under overpasses and in wooded areas. This was my second year counting unsheltered homeless people and this time I was dispatched with a group to Lake City, a new count area for 2008. How cold was it? According to the kind voice on KUOW that morning, it was 27 degrees. In Lake City we had a "guide," Josie, who has been homeless around Lake City for a while. Josie didn't think we'd see anyone on the street (except for Maria) because the Mennonite Church opens when the mercury goes below 35 degrees. She was right. We walked and drove the area, but encountered only Maria. According to Josie, Maria steadfastly refuses to come into the shelter. She has five shopping carts full of stuff. She arranges them in a barricade around herself in a doorway on Lake City Way and sleeps on the ground. We did count some likely car-campers in Lake City and a few folks lucky enough to be provided an apartment for the time leading up to demolition and redevelopment of the property. Our total for the area was 29.

Overall volunteers counted 2,631 people Friday morning for a 15 percent increase over last year's number. There will be a lot of quiet arguing about the validity of this number. It's not scientific. It's a snapshot. Maybe more people were "easier" to count because they packed shelters due to the cold. Maybe people were harder to count because of recent camp cleanups. Maybe automatically counting two people per tent or car overcounts. Maybe it undercounts. A 15 percent increase is a disappointment to everyone. It does not mean that the 10 Year Plan to End Homelessness is failing. It does mean our health care, our foster care, our rehab, and our mental health systems have to be funded adequately if eviction prevention and supportive housing are ever going to keep up with the need. And then there's the economy. We'll talk about living wages another time.

Click here to check out the Seattle/King County Coalition for Homeless explanation of the 2008 One Night Count.

We received our regional committee assignment this past week. Those are the committees where I represent you while sitting next to King County councilmembers and mayors and councilmembers from the cities and towns around us. I lucked out and will retain my seat on the Board of Health. We had our first meeting of the year yesterday over at King County Council Chambers. The meeting was a typical run-through of the proposed work program for the year and updates on a few ongoing initiatives. One of the briefings was on the public health "indicators" we use to measure how we're doing. Public Health Seattle-King County recently revamped the indicators we use to better line up with the priorities of the Public Health Operational Master Plan, the road map for developing the public health system here. We measure rates of HIV infection, cigarette sales, the number of uninsured kids, and more. One of the larger-scale things we measure is the number of "years of healthy life." Here's some mixed news. According to the briefing paper, the average King County resident born between 2003 and 2005 could expect to live 80.7 years. That's up from 77.8 years a decade ago. Nice jump of almost three years! Unfortunately, the expected number of healthy years lived went from 71.5 years up to just 72.5 years. These numbers are different for different racial and ethnic groups (generally worse), but the picture is the same. We may be living longer thanks to modern medicine, but the quality of life lived may not be what we hope.

Hallelujah. Last week Gov. Chris Gregoire uttered the t-word in relation to replacement of the Evergreen Point (520) Bridge. In addition, the Governor recognized that I-90 must be tooled at the same time in order to prevent toll-avoiders from choking that route. We still need an answer to the same problem for Lake City Way and SR 522, but that's for another day (soon). For now I'm just happy that tolls are truly part of the discussion. King County Executive Ron Sims advanced the ball further down the field by talking variable tolls to help manage demand.

Now all we need is a design for the new 520 bridge that doesn't decimate the Union Bay, pave the arboretum or destroy neighborhoods.

Thank you to everyone who participated in yesterday's swearing in ceremony for new and returning councilmembers. In talking with someone about it this morning I was reminded that it's one of the few days we have here when we remind ourselves of how unique and valuable local representative democracy is. It's a moment to say thanks to supporters, lay out who we want to be, and look forward to a productive year. No imperfect solutions, compromises or failures — yet. Everyone is optimistic, everything seems possible.

Here is the printed version of my comments after being sworn in by my dad and my partner. I'm not great at reading comments, so this is close to what I said, but probably not exactly what came out of my mouth:

Thank you, Council President Licata, council colleagues friends and family being here for this, my Third Annual Swearing In.

This is the third time in three years that I’ve asked friends and family to take time out in the middle of a Monday afternoon to come downtown for my swearing in. I’m very happy to share the ceremony this time with new and returning colleagues.

I want to acknowledge a few people.

* My dad, Dr. Stephen Clark, is here. This is a repeat performance for him. My dad is also an elected official. He is serving his third term on the board of the Valley View Water District.

* My mom is again holding down the fort in Portland. She is not a fan of traveling, but she’ll get a full report when we call her later this evening.

* My partner Liz Ford is also here, back in town not quite a full day. We had a different holiday break than planned. Liz’s father passed away December 29. Paul Ford was a former town councilmember in Amherst, Mass., also a Republican Party leader in Western, Mass, what I imagine must be a lonely position. He was loved by his family, especially by his six children. He will be greatly missed. He was a bit of a character.

Over the several plane rides and days of the holiday break, such as it was, I had the opportunity to think about what it means for someone to be a character, to have character. Even before yesterday’s Seattle Times feature on what being wealthy means in our region, I had been mulling over Thoreau’s assertion that the mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation. Thoreau in the same essay mentions the “desperate city.”

All cities are a little bit desperate, I think. In Seattle, we’re desperate to care for the vulnerable and provide for families, prove we can beat the odds and remain affordable, crush the skeptics by actually solving transportation problems, create more parks, and preserve our character and environment as a place at the water’s edge between mountain ranges, a place where character, innovation and community matter.

During my time in the air and in airports over the past couple of weeks I also was reminded how lucky I am to live in Seattle. I was so happy to come home to the shades of gray and green. I am excited and eager to get going this year despite the fact that in this job, the most frequent comments from people I hear are:

“I don’t know how you do it.”

“I would never be able to put up with it.”

“How do you listen to all those people?”

“Thank you for being willing to do this.”

And:

“What is it you do, anyhow?”

It makes you wonder if you’re OK or if you’re as weird as the comments imply.

I think I’m OK. I just happen to believe that City government is where we make decisions that can most directly affect, improve quality of life. The themes of my campaign this past year were safety, affordability and sustainability.

These will be the over-arching values I keep in mind as we work through this year. 2008 looks to be a challenging year.

* We must work harder to make progress in the 10-Year Plan to end Homelessness.

* We must secure the transportation investments necessary to keep freight and people moving when the viaduct comes down.

* We must continue to attract the businesses and the jobs that ensure opportunity for people in our city.

* We must invest in the icons like Pike Place Market that make us Seattle.

In my first swearing-in I pledged to do a few things that really haven’t warranted changing much:

* Be a responsive, ardent, and effective advocate for our neighborhoods.

* Push proposals that improve the city’s performance with women and minority-owned businesses

* Promote the health and well-being for Seattle’s ill, disadvantaged, and vulnerable.

* In my new term to use the Planning, Land Use and Neighborhoods Committee to forge the best decisions for the development of our city while preserving the history and character we value.

* Be honest and true to my word.

Like before, I ask for you all to participate. Yes, civic discourse and process are difficult, but we are so much stronger for them. That’s how we counter the desperation of cities and in Seattle turn it into hope, opportunity, and progress.

Borrowing from and slightly adapting a far more famous inauguration speech:

“Finally, whether you are citizens of Seattle or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth and lead this city we love….”

Thank you. Thank you to Seattle voters for their confidence. Let’s get to work.

Firefighters really are great cooks

I'm not a big red meat eater. I haven't been since college. So, I was more than a little nervous when dinner was served at Fire Station 28 on a Tuesday night in December in Hillman City and it was three crockpots full of pot roast.

I invite myself out for dinner to fire stations a few times a year so I can talk directly with firefighters about their job, what they need and how we make decisions about their needs here at City Hall. It's really nice to sit down with the group and talk about whatever is important to them and quiz them a little. That Tuesday night we talked about the need for more aid cars, the way paramedics are at risk of bouncing around like a pinball in the back of a medic truck if there's an accident on a run, and about kettle bell training, but mostly about efforts underway to institute a health and fitness program in the Fire Department. The City is working with firefighters in designing the program. If things go forward as hoped, firefighters would sign up for an initial screening, after which they would be able to receive occupational therapy, fitness and wellness counseling. The idea is to help prevent injuries and support injured firefighters in getting well.

Two things I learned at dinner were 1) firefighters don't like to go to the doctor, and 2) the firefighters I spoke with are concerned, as all of us are, about the privacy of their health information in whatever program gets set up. There are many details of the program still to be worked out between the firefighters and the city, but this was a great discussion and gave me good questions to ask about the health and fitness program's design.

And, the pot roast was fantastic.