Last week, the Seattle City Council couldn’t muster the votes to pass an emergency ordinance to keep design review moving during the pandemic era, coming up a vote shy. Yesterday that vote flipped and it passed. Councilmember Tammy Morales provided the decisive seventh vote needed to pass the emergency ordinance–as Councilmembers Alex Pedersen and Lisa Herbold continued to hold out against the measure.
The emergency ordinance will alleviate a logjam caused by the cancellation of design review meetings over the past two months. In the short-term, those projects will move into administrative design review carried out by staff at the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections (SDCI). In the medium-term, design approval will revert to the volunteer design review boards once a system is set up for holding online meetings and taking public input remotely. That must happen within six months or else the special administrative path will disappear.
The exception is affordable housing projects, which will remain under SDCI’s purview and on an expedited track. Supporters pointed how the COVID-19 triggered recession makes the need for affordable housing more dire and delaying delivery of that housing would worsen the suffering from the recession.
Councilmembers unanimously passed a Morales amendment that treated differently the International Special Review District (ISRD) in the Chinatown-International District–where Morales said planned projects are overwhelmingly hotels and market-rate condos rather than affordable housing. Under revised language, the ISRD can meet electronically, although approvals are postponed until robust public input can resume.
Though she supported the final bill with her amendment included, Councilmember Morales said she remained conflicted on the ordinance, reiterating her belief that it conflated issues of participation and affordable housing. She portrayed development as at odds with communities facing displacement pressure in her district, which stretches from the Chinatown to Rainier Beach
“I was elected to stop displacement,” Morales said. “Making the development process easier is rarely a benefit to the communities I represent. The trade-off is that what is seen as efficient for government or for developers often means inequity in my community.”
Morales added her vote would be the “first and last concession in the name of easing process or relieving administrative burdens, especially if it means accelerating disaster gentrification.” Slowing down the process can ensure her community is heard, she argued, but “don’t mistake that for naivete or confusion. It’s about ensuring those voices have access to power.”
Councilmember Andrew Lewis’s vote also seemed to come with some reservations after he offered a last-minute amendment to block projects participating in the Living Building pilot program from availing themselves of administrative design review.
“The buildings that going forward under the pilot program are of a particular size and bulk that design review is more important than for similarly situated projects that are not part of the Living Building pilot program,” Lewis said. “Given the status of the three projects this would address, all of which are midstream through the established in-person design review process, that it would be warranted for these projects to continue on in that path and go back to the design review boards, be they in person or virtual, to get the final go ahead to proceed to the Master Use Permit.”
