Every December, Mayor Jenny Durkan releases a list of accomplishments from the year, putting a positive spin on another year of her administration. This year’s report came out the same week as her announcement of not seeking a second term. The second announcement betrayed the truth of the first: Durkan has led a failed administration. Spin-filled year-end reports can’t hide the fact the last three years have been tumultuous and rudderless, nor the fact that hugely successful mayors don’t leave their post in the midst of one of the biggest crises in city history. This is when leaders lead, which explains Durkan’s departure.
The Mayor tried to paint her exit from the mayoral race as a win for the city, saying she won’t be distracted by running for reelection and can focus on governing. Unfortunately, the Mayor didn’t have the distraction of an election-year the past three years, and it didn’t seem to help. One exception to the Mayor’s general rule of delay and vacillating has been her relentless homeless sweeps; this morning Durkan is sweeping people from Cal Anderson Park homeless encampments one week before Christmas at the height of the pandemic. Advocates with Cancel Rent Washington and Democratic Socialists of America are mobilizing to protect people in the encampments and stop the sweep.
The last three years haven’t been easy. The last year alone has seen a pandemic, recession, out-of-control violent police departments, and a racial reckoning unseen since the Civil Rights Era. Colleen Echohawk, director of native-led human service nonprofit Chief Seattle Club, said it well: “She’s been handed a huge mess that no one knew was coming.” But Echohawk added the historic moment “required a response that maybe she wasn’t prepared for… we need a new way.”
While some challenges have been beyond her control, many are of her own making. Frequent, unrelenting homeless sweeps instead of meeting her campaign promise to build 1,000 tiny homes in her first year inflamed the problem. Rather than aiding efforts to add revenue for homelessness services and affordable housing–first with the 2018 head tax and then with the 2020 JumpStart corporate payroll tax–Durkan stood in the way out of deference to Amazon and the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce. Those actions hang like a cloud over her record on homelessness, despite efforts to gussy up the narrative.
Transportation projects faced budget crunches in her term as they often do, but instead of swooping in to save the day, Mayor Durkan paused and canceled projects, throwing her predecessor under the delayed bus–and Mayor Ed Murray did run fast and loose with transit promises, planning, and accountability. While talking a big game about moving away from car dependency, the biggest projects to open in her tenure were car projects.
The failure to rein in SPD
When the murder of George Floyd happened and protests against police erupted, Mayor Durkan sided with police and property over the wellbeing of her residents. For weeks, she refused to say unequivocally that officers must display their identification after many obscured them with tape, and she resisted calls to ban tear gas, escalating the violence and mistrust between protesters and police. That was a choice. And the whole neighborhood of Capitol Hill suffered from it, whether they were protesting or not, as clouds of tear gas seeped into apartment buildings. This month we learned the U.S. District Court ruled that the City violated a restraining order by continuing to tear gas this summer. What a sad legacy.
As her police department became increasingly belligerent and violent in crowd control settings, she largely covered for them or ignored it as they assaulted journalists and targeted medics, nurses, and legal observers during protests. When the City Council requested she begin out-of-order layoffs to target police officers with the worst records of misconduct, Mayor Durkan sided with the police guild to claim this was impossible and too much paperwork, and then vetoed the City Council’s rebalancing budget over the layoff issue to further insulate the Seattle Police Department (SPD).
As Mayor Durkan pointed to the police contract as to why she couldn’t do out-of-order layoffs or require more accountability out of cops that were running wild brutalizing protesters, she hinted at another failing. She had negotiated the latest police contract in 2018 with these cop-friendly protections in them. That contract weakened recently passed accountability measures required by the Consent Decree process, and it handed out generous back pay and raises while punting on the issue of runaway overtime spending, helping the police budget swell to $409 million–nearly 30% of the City’s general fund budget.
Mayor Durkan joked that she and Police Chief Carmen Best, facing mounting pressure and stress, had contemplated a Thelma and Louise moment where they would flee out into the desert in a convertible. That ended up being prescient, as Best resigned a few weeks later and Durkan announced her exit a few months later. Neither really grappled with the actions that were necessary to guide SPD and the city out of the sinkhole it’s in, favoring a soft exit to a tough reckoning.
Rather than rein in increasingly belligerent police and their bloated department budget, Mayor Durkan pledged $100 million to communities of color–hoping to change the conversation from police violence. The problem is that money was raided from existing equity-minded programs like JumpStart spending plan and an investment fund from the previous budget that used Mercer Megablock proceeds intended to make auctioning off public land more palatable. Furthermore, she handpicked the “Equitable Communities Task Force” to divvy out the money and faced serious criticism from Black leaders for this top-down approach that crowded out grassroots efforts from King County Equity Now’s Black Brilliance Project for participatory budgeting, which was already in progress.
Killing bike projects and delaying transit
Durkan took over at a sensitive time for transportation, as the city prepared to open a number of major projects, including the SR-99 tunnel, that necessitated a temporary highway closure bringing many to predict “Viadoom” and the City to warn of a “Seattle Squeeze.” Instead of taking the Alaskan Way Viaduct closure as an opportunity to emphasize transit in a lasting way, the Durkan administration did the bare minimum and unabashedly celebrated the massive car tunnel despite the climate implications. Instead of swift action to roll out bus lanes and bike lanes, we got a former general defense contractor hired as traffic czar to do God knows what for a cushy salary.
