Category: Blog

Washington State Senators will be holding a work session today on their latest transportation proposal.  The legislature was called back into a special legislative session by Governor Jay Inslee .  The proposal, from the GOP-led majority coalition, could be voted on by the legislature by the end of the week.

The Senate package will disproportionately impact people with lower incomes, immigrants, refugees and people of color.  It would do this in two ways: 1. It will result in cuts to transit services that people with lower incomes rely on, and 2. It will take funds away from toxic clean-up projects that affect the public health.

Despite raising revenue for transportation, the package would still lead to cuts to King County Metro that threaten transit access for low income communities. Service cuts are detrimental to those for whom public transit is their primary source of transportation to get to jobs, schools, day cares, and grocery stores. These residents are most likely to be people of color and low wage workers.

The proposal will also weaken environmental laws necessary to address public health concerns in communities near toxic waste sites. The Senate proposal diverts $280 million away from a toxic waste clean-up fund to the direct benefit of oil and gas corporations.

The diversion of funds comes at the direct expense of waterways like the Duwamish River. Residents of the Duwamish Valley are predominately low wage workers and people of color. A recent study has already demonstrated that Duwamish Valley residents face disproportionate diesel exhaust pollution. Failing to clean up toxic sites will compound and prolong the environmental hazards which place the health of lower income households at risk.

The package is essentially a doubling down on a failed transportation system that doesn’t adequately provide for transportation alternatives. The $12 billion package will spend less than 2% on alternatives to cars. For more information about their proposal view the proposal’s bills and balance sheet.

The Senate work session will take place on Thursday at 1:30pm in Olympia, Senate Hearing Rm 4 in the J.A. Cherberg Building; Olympia, WA. They will be taking public comments between 1:30-5:30pm.

SeaTac’s Proposition 1 established an early lead on election night, which is very likely to hold as the last ballots are counted. Although a recount is likely and a legal challenge from opponents is already in the works, the initiative has succeeded and will ultimately prevail because of a campaign that was able to demonstrate living wage jobs are not only good for workers, but good for the local/regional economy.

The initiative is poised to win having faced opposition from a campaign of politically powerful corporate interests. The opposition campaign was funded by Alaska Airlines, the National Restaurant Association, the American Car Rental Association and the Koch brothers-backed Freedom Foundation. These national corporate interests threw both their money and their weight into this local election.

Three things were core to the campaign to win the SeaTac Good Jobs Initiative:

Sound Research that Showed the Initiative Would Lead to Economic Growth. Economic impact analysis showed how worker spending will multiply under the initaitve, resulting in up to $54 million of increased income for the region and more than 400 new local jobs. It also showed how an increase in earnings and spending will mean more revenue for local governments to pay for improved infrastructure such as schools, parks and public safety.

The analysis authored by Howard Greenwich and Nicole Vallestero Keenan was front page news in the Seattle Times and shifted the debate over the economic impacts of the policy.

Support from Small Businesses. Despite a powerful corporate campaign that attempted to paint the initiative has harmful to small business (the policy included an exemption for small businesses) local businesses publicly backed the initiative. Don Liberty, owner of the Bull Pen Bar and Grill was a key spokesperson in favor of the initiative. Puget Sound Sage engaged local small business owners, including Don, to demonstrate why they supported workforce requirements and paid fair wages to their employees.

Support from Faith Communities. SeaTac is a small city where personal relationships matter, and support from a trusted friend, teacher, minister or neighbor, business owner will sway votes. Even before the initiative campaign began local ministers, imams and community groups convened by Sage organizers were coming together to support living wage jobs at SeaTac Airport.

Rev. Jan Bolerjack of Riverton Park United Methodist Church, became a critical voice for the campaign and a media star. Her story about how airport workers come to her church’s food bank wearing their airport uniforms became the moral story of Proposition 1 for SeaTac voters.

“Economic opportunity should be the promise of Seattle. Good jobs, equity, fair wages, worker protections, affordable housing and a livable city for the diversity of people who should be able to call Seattle home – these are values I have fought for all my career.”

 – Candidate Ed Murray

The mayor’s race has ended and Mayor-Elect Murray is planning his transition to move into Hizzoner’s chair.  What will a Murray administration mean for issues like equitable development, access to affordable housing, quality jobs for Seattle’s service sector workers, and dependable access to transit?

Although the Murray and McGinn campaigns focused on different areas, progressives in Seattle will have plentiful opportunities to work with the new Mayor’s office.

During his four years in office, Mayor Mike McGinn provided leadership on developing good jobs in the green economy for young workers, promoted a city-wide local hiring policy to help neighborhoods with high unemployment, supported living wages, and opposed selling city property (the legal term is a ‘street vacation’) to developers for use by retailers like Whole Foods that don’t provide living wages and good benefits.

How will Ed Murray be different?  Not much, but a few distinctions remain.

Overall, Murray says he’s committed to “strengthening and protecting the working and middle class,” and “ensuring that Seattle does not become a city where only the very wealthy and the very poor live.” Murray has pledged support for $15 minimum wage for Seattle, phased in first for city employees, fast food and retail workers, and then for most workers “by the end of his first term.” Murray, like McGinn, is also committed to enforcing Seattle’s wage theft and paid sick leave laws.

When it comes to ensuring that communities receive real benefits from development projects, a Murray administration will likely be hesitant to employ some policy tools community groups deem important. In statements this summer, Murray opposed McGinn’s decision to deny a request from Whole Foods for a street vacation for their proposed West Seattle store. Sage, along with many community groups and unions, has found street vacation permits a useful way to get developers to agree to better environmental and labor policies.

Like McGinn, Murray says he supports inclusionary housing policies in growing neighborhoods like South Lake Union. His Economic Opportunity Agenda states that future development should include maximum benefits…including increasing the number of public housing units that developers must provide.”

Under McGinn, the City embraced policies to prevent displacement of immigrant and communities of color from southeast Seattle near light rail development. The City’s Community Cornerstones Project is focusing on supporting immigrant businesses and cultural institutions, along with affordable housing near light rail.  Murray proposes “building a small-business incubator service for assisting new immigrant-led small businesses,” and more affordable housing in general.

All of this means progressives can continue look forward to opportunities to work with the new Mayor’s office on policies that build thriving communities for the next four years.

Voters in the City of SeaTac this week appear to have approved a precedent-setting Living Wage ballot initiative, although ballots are still being counted.  The pending victory comes after a nearly year-long campaign by a strong community-labor partnership.

Even if Prop 1 wins, the campaign is not over, as Alaska Airlines and many of the funders backing the opposition campaign are likely pursuing legal measures to prevent the implementation of the voter approved law.

SeaTac’s Proposition 1 is not the first living wage at airports, but it has become the bellwether in the movement for a living wage.  The true benefit of Prop 1 lies not only in the living wage, but the comprehensive benefits and protections included in the language:

• $15 dollar minimum wage indexed to inflation – for covered hotel, car rental, parking and airport service workers.
• Paid Sick Days – workers accruing an hour of paid sick time for every 40 hours worked. For a full time employee, this is 6.5 days per year.
• Worker Retention – replacement sub-contracting companies retaining the current workforce for 60 days.
• Tips Theft Protection – ensuring that hotel service charges (tips) are paid entirely to workers, not kept by management.
• Full Time Work – offering part-time employees the ability to work more hours before hiring new part-time employees.

The initiative covers large hotels, car rental firms, and airport parking in a zone surrounding the airport, and airport service workers, including retail and food service, plane cleaning and fueling, baggage loading, and wheelchair service. These interlocking, comprehensive benefits mean that not only will thousands of workers be lifted out of poverty, but they will also have more job security and better working conditions.

These policies will mean a win-win-win scenario for workers, businesses and the local economy.   Workers will see better standards, employers will see reduced turnover and improved performance, local businesses will have more customers, and the local economy will see a $54 million dollar wage boost.

Ed Murray appears poised for victory in Seattle’s mayoral election. As KPLU reporter Ashley Gross asserted in a recent story, Seattle’s new mayor will be challenged to address an affordable housing crisis in the city.

The challenge is a big one: Seattle is one of the top ten metro areas in the nation with the most dramatic increases in rental costs in 2012, and homelessness in the city is also on the rise.

At the same time Seattle is a city segregated by both race and income. In order to effectively address the segregation of opportunity that lies within Seattle’s housing crisis, inclusionary zoning is an important tool that must be on the table.

Inclusionary zoning arose out of the civil rights movement. Civil rights leaders advocated for inclusionary zoning as a housing policy to fight racial segregation and the economic attack on communities of color in the United States. But they weren’t just concerned about housing. They sought to ensure that people of color had the opportunity to share in the benefits of living in high opportunity neighborhoods, like strong schools, access to good jobs and safe streets and sidewalks.

Communities fought a long and uphill battle to win inclusionary zoning. One suburb Mt. Laurel in New Jersey fought particularly long and in the face of racism and marginalization by local government. But today, the fruits of their organizing have resulted in measurable outcomes for the families that eventually were able to live in this high opportunity suburb. A recent NY Times article profiled their experience and the work of Princeton sociologist Douglas S. Massey to compare the outcomes of families that were able to live in Mt. Laurel versus families that were constricted to low-income redlined neighborhoods.

Their recent book found that Mt. Laurel families have more economic success and their kids are doing better in school than families not able to afford the neighborhood. “Two-thirds are working, compared with just over half of the nonresidents, and a third as many, 4 percent, are on welfare. The sizable earnings gap, $19,687 versus $12,912 from wages, helps push the tenants living in the new housing out of poverty. The longer they stay in Mount Laurel, the better jobs they get and the more economically independent they become.”

The children of families living in Mt. Laurel, “study twice as many hours and spend more time reading.”

Inclusionary zoning creates these types of outcomes because it begins to dismantle barriers to affordable housing and then shares the benefits of high investment neighborhoods with families and households that have been historically shut out from opportunity. “I would go as far as to argue that what is truly American is not so much the individual but neighborhood inequality,” concludes the Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson in his landmark 2012 book, “Great American City.”

It is time for Seattle to address the segregation of opportunity in our city and our elected leaders will need this valuable policy tool.

Earlier this fall, we released a report showing how SeaTac’s Proposition 1 will inject $54 million into the local economy and create over 400 new jobs.  We also showed how local businesses, particularly in SeaTac, will benefit.  Before the elections close on November 5^th,  we wanted to show how this new economic activity will affect government budgets.  We found that local government (city, county, transportation, etc) and school district budgets will increase by nearly $1.2 million from Proposition 1.   SeaTac itself could receive up to $50,000 a year directly to its general fund.

It’s pretty intuitive how local budgets will benefit.  More money in the pockets of thousands of workers will result in spending at local businesses for goods and services.  Increased spending at local businesses means more sales and use tax revenues for local government.

The bottom line for both state and local government? Nearly $2.8  million in total sales tax collected.

How?  For every dollar that a worker spends of his or her new earnings, we estimate that 59.5 cents will be spent in the regional economy – or about 60%.  (The estimate is based on figures from the Federal Bureau of Economic Analysis.  See Martin Associates, 2007 Economic Impact of the Port of Seattle, page 62.)  This represents spending after taxes, purchase of goods from outside the region and savings.

Applying 60% to the $54 million additional earnings generated by Proposition 1, we arrive at a $32 million increase in purchase of local goods and services.  Because groceries are largely exempt from sales tax, we remove another 9% (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, households earning between $20,000 and $29,999 spend 9% of their budget on food at home), leaving a total of $29 million.

Now, we apply tax rates. Assuming the remaining income is spent on items that are taxed, local governments will receive an additional $877,000 and State government an additional $1.9 million.

How will this money be spent?  The three percent of the every dollar spent that goes to local government typically includes:

• .85% for cities
• .15% for general county purposes
• .2%  for county mental health and criminal justice
• .9%  for Metro
• .9%  for Sound Transit.

SeaTac and other nearby communities benefit from all of these governments.  In particular, SeaTac benefits from Sound Transit’s new light rail stations.  In addition, a portion of the state sales tax comes back to local schools. (Here’s the math – about half of the state’s general fund comes from sales tax and 44% of the state’s general fund goes back to school districts.  So, of the $1.9 million, about $400,000 will support schools around the state.)

The City of SeaTac’s budget will see direct benefit as well.  In our report, we estimate that between 15% and 20% of covered jobs are held by workers who live in the SeaTac and are even more likely to spend locally as well.  Although many SeaTac residents do not spend all of their money in the city, we also point out that dozens of small businesses in and around Sea-Tac Airport cater directly to people who work at the airport.  Workers commuting to their jobs in SeaTac also spend money there, making up for loss in sales by residents shopping in other cities.  Hence, we estimate that 15-20% of those new expenditures will be at SeaTac businesses.  Applying the rate for the city’s proportion of the sales tax (0.85%), we estimate that the city will see an increase of $37,000 to $50,000 a year in revenues.