- Kelly O
You could argue that Peter Steinbrueck, who is filing paperwork this week to run for mayor, has defined the city’s vision over the last five years more than anyone else. During his tenure on the Seattle City Council, he wrote the preamble to the city charter—essentially the city’s mission statement—after discovering “there was no preamble, there was no vision statement for the City of Seattle,” he says.
“Can you believe that?”
“So I crafted a single paragraph,” Steinbrueck continues, and he put that text on the ballot in 2007. “It was a small thing, but there’s a principle there. The city should have a vision, and the leadership should have a mission that is longer serving than the here and now, the day to day, and the latest building boom. Former mayor Greg Nickels rebelled against it. He said it was silly. But I got support and got the damn thing passed.”
Now the city’s first directive, among other populist goals, is to act in the “general welfare of the people.”
Five years later—after leaving a council seat he’d held for a decade to go back to his roots in architecture, urban planning, and consulting—Steinbrueck is ready to return to city hall, this time as mayor, because, he says, “I don’t feel the city has strong leadership right now.” If you want an example of the current mayor being “reactionary,” Steinbrueck says, look at the police department, which is undergoing serious reforms only after the US Department of Justice demanded a federal court settlement to correct patterns of excessive force. To take charge, Steinbrueck says the police chief should be “put up for confirmation” periodically by the mayor and the council.
Steinbrueck also envisions preserving industrial lands for industrial uses, moving the proposed Sonics arena out of Sodo and into Rainier Valley or to the Eastside, developing dedicated rights-of-way for buses, and returning more decisions about density and construction rules to neighborhood groups.
“He’s a unique candidate who has supported and defended the maritime and industrial businesses,” says one of his early boosters, Vince O’Halloran, local branch agent for the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific and prominent figure among Seattle’s labor bloc. “The maritime industry has the same impact in Washington as the airplane industry, but we are never recognized. This is a maritime city: We’ve got the Sounders, the Seahawks, the Mariners—good grief. Seattle has so much to lose in our industrial base, and it should be protected far more aggressively, and Peter seems to be taking that position.”
Steinbrueck’s platform may appeal to a broad coalition that is increasingly disaffected by recent decisions in city hall (such as siting an arena in Sodo and allowing larger buildings to develop throughout Seattle). By uniting these industrial and neighborhood groups, he could carve out a coalition that hands him both money and foot soldiers in the mayor’s race.
But Steinbrueck, who once represented the council’s more progressive wing, is quick to point out that he isn’t an anti-density freak. He sponsored legislation for one of the greatest height increases in downtown when he was on the council, while also using his leverage to extract more affordable housing from the deal (despite resistance from developers). And as for 65-foot-tall buildings—the type that some neighborhood groups have resisted? “I like 65-foot buildings,” he says. “I live in one.”
