The Seattle City Council will vote today on the plan to invest $7.2 million in annual revenue from the $20 vehicle license fee (VLF) approved in November. On Wednesday, the transportation committee unanimously backed an amendment from Vice Chair Dan Strauss that reworded Committee Chair Alex Pedersen’s plan. The City Council is expected to approve the bill with the Strauss amendment today at its 2pm full council meeting (sign up for public testimony here).
Pedersen’s plan was laser-focused on bridge maintenance bonding, even if the exact bridges in question remained a moving target. Strauss’s plan keeps Council’s ask for the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) to come up with a bridge maintenance project list tallying at least $75 million. However, his framing makes it much clearer than immediately bonding on 20 years of revenue from the VLF hike is not a foregone conclusion.
“We need to have a more accurate and detailed understanding of our maintenance and investments needs, and we need to use this information to raise the correct amount of bonds at the right time to invest in our infrastructure rather than taking on unneeded debt until we’re ready to use it,” Strauss said on Wednesday. “If this non-binding language was enacted on today, we would raise bonds without shovel-ready projects. This means we would be paying bankers interest on dollars we would not be ready to spend today.”
Councilmember Strauss’s amendment was fairly last minute and wasn’t available on the City’s website for the public to preview ahead of the 5-0 vote. Public comment at the start of the meeting had come down largely against Pedersen’s amendment, with several members of the Move All Seattle Sustainably (MASS) Coalition testifying, including Ryan Packer, senior editor at The Urbanist. “Ten people have lost their lives on our streets in the last four months,” Packer said. “This should be setting off alarm bells.”
MASS also issued a statement arguing for keeping SDOT’s spend plan which had dedicated 73% of revenue to safe streets, sidewalks, and multimodal planning and 24% to bridge structure maintenance, honoring the extensive stakeholder work that SDOT did. SDOT’s plan also included an equity analysis lacking in Pedersen’s plan.
