MLK Day on Monday 2015 City Hall, City of Seattle Employees Monday is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and City Council offices along with many other government offices will be closed.  The week’s City Council Briefing and Meeting will occur on Tuesday, January 21 instead.   Here are a couple of ideas for ways to celebrate […]

New Office Phone Number With the new Council taking office, telephone numbers for City Councilmembers are being changed to align with the district they represent. Councilmember phone numbers all begin with 206-684-880; the final digit will be for their district. Since I represent District 1, the new number will be 206-684-8801. For the two Citywide […]

Legacy Business Nominations Open through February 14th In 2016, my first week as a Councilmember, a District 1 resident brought me the idea of a Seattle Legacy Business Program, modeled after a successful San Francisco effort: to “recognize that longstanding, community-serving businesses can be valuable cultural assets to the City.  In addition, the City intends […]

Giving My Thanks to You I look forward this time of year to the opportunity to reflect on all that I have for which to be thankful. On this Thanksgiving Day eve, there are individual people to be thankful for their contribution to making Seattle a better city.  If you are working for your community, […]

This Week in the Budget This week, Seattle City Council Budget Committee Chair Bagshaw proposed a Chair’s Revised 2020 Budget. This revised proposal incorporated additional requests by Councilmembers that were submitted the previous week. The Budget Committee met on Tuesday, November 19th to vote on budget actions proposed by Councilmembers. The baseline for discussion was […]

SEATTLE – The Washington State Supreme Court unanimously upheld the City’s “first-in-time” ordinance today. The First-in-Time (“FIT”) Rule requires a landlord to notify prospective tenants of the landlord’s screening criteria and offer tenancy to the first applicant meeting them. The Rule does not dictate the criteria, require quantifiable or objective criteria, prevent a landlord from conducting […]

This Week in the Budget On November 6th, Budget Committee Chair Bagshaw proposed an Initial Budget Proposal, which incorporated some of the Councilmember proposals presented between October 29 and November 1. The three overarching priorities Bagshaw announced are homelessness, housing and hygiene. The proposal includes funding for each, including $3.5 million in additional funding for […]

This Week in Council Budget Deliberations Last week the Council’s Budget Committee considered Council Budget Actions proposed by individual Councilmembers. The next step in the Council’s budget deliberations will be for Budget Committee Chair Sally Bagshaw to propose an initial Council Budget Proposal, adjusted from the Mayor’s proposed budget to include Councilmember priorities, at the […]

This Week in the Budget This week the Council’s Budget Committee met on Monday and Tuesday for Budget Deliberations and Issue Identification. On Tuesday evening, the Council held the second public hearing on the 2020 budget.   We had some great public testimony from residents with the D1 Community Network in support of funding for priority […]

This Week in the Budget Last week the Budget Committee did not meet.  Councilmembers had a deadline on Thursday, October 10 to identify issues to be included in staff memos for the Budget Deliberations and Issue Identification. These meetings began on October 16 and they continue through October 22nd. At these meetings Council Central Staff […]