Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan’s final state of the city speech was just six minutes long. Typically, the annual speech is about four times longer, but, as Durkan’s agenda has gotten shorter, so too has her speech. Durkan is not running for reelection so she has just ten months of work to outline. The most ambitious and perhaps only tangible goal she set for her remaining term is leading the nation in the Covid vaccination rate.
“I want us to be the first city in the country to vaccinate 70% of our adults as we prioritize the most disproportionately impacted,” Durkan said.
So far, Seattle and Washington state have not been standouts on Covid vaccine delivery, with states like Alaska and West Virginia surprisingly leading the way. Washington’s vaccination rate of 15.32% is slightly below the national average of 16.11%. Seattle may be outperforming the state average, but needless to say, Seattle has some ground to make up to meet the Mayor’s goal.
“Our most crucial shared goal over the upcoming months is getting through this pandemic and defeating this virus, and vaccinations are the path to healing, recovery and reopening. That’s how we beat this virus, and how we can fully reopen our schools and businesses and bring workers back downtown,” Durkan added in her prepared statement. “It’s why our Seattle Fire Department (SFD) mobile teams are working around the clock in critical locations across our city to vaccinate our most vulnerable and impacted neighbors, even when we got a foot of snow. SFD has provided more than 4,400 vaccinations for residents and workers at adult family homes, home health care workers, grocery workers, and elders in our hard hit BIPOC communities.”
Durkan taped her speech at the Filipino Community Center, which she said has tripled the meals it served and also stepped up as a vaccination site during the pandemic. True to form, Durkan also highlighted the new Climate Pledge Arena where the city will “watch our championship Storm and release the Kraken” (Seattle’s new National Hockey League franchise).
While vaccination is a crucial tool to recover from a public health crisis and reopen the economy, Mayor Durkan’s speech was short on policy details to address the wider-spread havoc the virus has wrought or exposed as underlying in our society. Viral immunity will only help so much for a worker who has lost a year’s worth of income, is far behind on rent payments, and at risk of displacement when the eviction moratorium is finally lifted.
Durkan alluded to racism and disparate impact–Black and Latino folks are much more likely to suffer severe health impacts from the virus and women of color in particular are more likely to lose their jobs and livelihoods. However, a roadmap, even a brief one, to correct an inequitable economy composed of layers of racist institutions wasn’t really in the cards for a six-minute speech.
“The pandemic has been the challenge of our lifetimes, and has further amplified the challenges of homelessness, public safety, the climate crisis, and racial disparities in every system: health care, education, housing, and policing,” Mayor Durkan said. “In the coming weeks, I’ll discuss and implement specific plans to continue addressing these critical issues. This includes the concrete steps we’ll take together to reopen and recover, especially in our downtown, opening hundreds of new shelter spaces and affordable homes to bring more unhoused neighbors inside from our streets and parks so they can get stability and services, addressing public safety, expanding alternatives to police responses, and investing nearly 100 million dollars in the health and resiliency of Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color to address generational disparities.”
A state of the city speech seems like the ideal time to roll out consequential policies grappling with the city’s biggest problems. Instead, we’ll watch in coming weeks for the drip drop of details.
