It makes no tactical sense to withhold valuable information from designated neighborhood emergency response teams. We risk valuable time in trained neighbors helping each other during a crisis, by failing to coordinate and communicate with them. In an emergency, the city’s response teams will be overwhelmed with digging themselves out and then responding to the most critical incidents. Neighborhoods may be on their own for 72 hours or more. Let’s support the "first responders" in our neighborhoods!
Parks & Seattle Center
40. Create 'whitewall' spaces in city parks and other public spaces to allow youth a venue for artistic expression
Graffiti is often an attempt by our youth to express themselves in a creative fashion. We can curb this negative expression by providing positive outlets such as designated space to allow for artistic expression. Once a month we will paint wall space in our parks and community centers to be free and open for spray painting and at the end of the month we will white-wash it and allow for new artistic expression.
43. Commission the Parks department to assume responsibility for the upkeep of school playgrounds and school grounds to allow schools to focus more resources on education.
Our public school system is suffering right now from shortages in funding and overburdened class sizes. We as a city should take upon ourselves the responsibility of up keeping the playgrounds and outside grounds of the school. We have an amazing Parks and Recreation department that would be able to do this while allowing for our School Board to keep its focus on the inside of the buildings rather than the outside.
Finance & Budget
28. Reorganize the "square footage" tax.
The present state of the square footage tax is extremely confusing and is burying many of our small businesses in difficult paperwork. We must refine the way we structure our business taxes to allow for small business owners to run their businesses smoothly.
30. Create comprehensive plan for public financing of local elections.
Far too often our modern politics become contests between who can raise the most money – not who can best represent the people. It is in the interest of good government to provide everyone the same opportunity to step forward and serve in public office. Seattle could return to Public Campaign Financing similar to the setup in the 1970's, and the voters take back their politics.
It is possible to not overly burden the taxpayers and still prevent the elections from being dominated by special interest groups with deep pockets, as demonstrated by other state and local governments. Its well past time for us to make public campaigns a priority here in our own city.
32. Reduce the salaries of the Mayor and City Council.
During this time of economic crisis we have laid off city employees and asked librarians to take off a week furlough (unpaid). Yet despite freezing their salaries our Mayor and City Council are still making over $100,000! As a leader it is essential to put the people you serve first and as such I am calling for a reduction in the Mayor and City Council’s salaries until a time where we are not asking for the people or our programs to suffer budget cuts.
Planning, Land Use & Neighborhoods
45. Reallocate some funding for low-income housing into transitional housing programs.
Last year 34 human beings died because they had nowhere to get out of the elements. The city has continued down the set path of the 10-year Plan to End Homelessness without regard to changes in the economy or the problem. This has pulled critical funding from necessary emergency and transitional shelters in the city. We must restore this funding and properly set people up for the move into permanent housing. We must not set these men and women up for failure before they even have a chance to succeed.
46. Hold an open design contest to solicit creative, environmentally friendly architectural designs for townhomes to be built in the city.
Several cities, such as Portland, do programs such as this already. By providing free designs we enable new architects to make themselves known, and prevent the continual use of the same design from being used repeatedly. It also will encourage designs that will stimulate and preserve a neighborhood’s specific character.
49. Ensure that the ongoing review of neighborhood plans contain some measure of legal authority to prevent unwanted and unnecessary changes to the character of our neighborhoods.
Neighborhood Planning is an essential part of the health and vitality of the city. Each individual neighborhood plan serves to protect the character and uniqueness of every corner of Seattle. If steps are not taken to preserve these plans, Seattle runs the risk of becoming a 'sub-divided' city where the rich diversity of the area is lost and density is our only priority. To help prevent this we must not only review the neighborhood plans in place, but take steps to insure they are valid and contain some measure of legal authority so they can be used in the fight against unwanted and unnecessary changes to the character of our neighborhoods.
Public Safety, Human Services & Education
86. Work to end the illegalization of homelessness and expand the successful Drug Court program in order to significantly lower the number of people we are incarcerating.
It is senseless to charge a human being with the crime of sleeping outside when she has no alternative. Often times it does nothing more than to create a criminal background that would result in her inability to apply for permanent housing. It also creates a system that encourages being arrested because at least then there is a roof and food provided. We would save the City more money by investing in more shelter beds and spaces, and actually take steps to further people along rather than bury them. We must decriminalize homelessness in order to truly go about solving the problem.
88. Expand Youth Violence Prevention Initiative to include Central District and Lake City; and provide for planned expansion as the program attains key objectives.
While it might on the surface seem to make sense to focus all of the YVI’s funding on the south-end of Seattle with its present gang issues, it is easier to stop a problem before it starts rather than wait for it to begin. That is why we must expand the YVI further to help prevent gang problems from developing into more serious concerns in the Central District and Lake City.
Transportation
94. Allocate more money from transportation budget for mandatory sidewalk and bike lanes in areas where they are currently lacking.
We talk often in this city about the need for us to move out of our cars and start using more sustainable means of travel. This will not be accomplished as long as our neighbors can’t hold their heads up when they walk because the sidewalks are in such disrepair, and our bicyclists are knocked off the roads by cars. It is time to fulfill the city’s sixty-year-old promise and change our transportation funding priorities to encourage alternative means of transportation. It is time we get sidewalks in north end neighborhoods. We need to continue to encourage "safe paths to schools" and pedestrian connections to bus stops and the new light rail stations.
100. Ensure that the waterfront tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct proceeds only if all funding has been secured, and city residents are not liable for cost overruns.
See 87 more ideas:
100 Ideas for Seattle by Dorsol Plants (opens a PDF)