This post has been corrected, as noted in the text.

Tom Byers, a former deputy mayor to Paul Schell, proponent of bus-rapid transit, and founder of the Cedar River Group, sparked speculation at city hall that he was considering a run for mayor when he sent an email to city council members grousing about Seattle City Light’s poor response during the December snowstorm. Byers, who lives in Madrona, was unable to report an outage in his area through City Light’s reporting system because he was on a cell phone (!!) “I wound up in the Orwellian loop in which City Light’s automated system refuses to let you in if you are calling from a cell and refers you to human operators who are not working on a Sunday,” he wrote.

But what piqued the interest of some at city hall was the penultimate line of Byers’ email: “I am beginning to wonder if maybe the only solution is to run for Mayor on a simple platform that says Seattle cannot be a world class city with third world infrastructure, and those who respectfully suggest improvements should get a meaningful response from their government!” Byers wrote.

Byers says that part of the email was a “joke.” However, he adds, “I hope somebody does come forward. … I think a good opponent would be a very good thing. If you get somebody good in [the running] who has a different kind of approach and tone and they give him a good run for his money, maybe we’ll see some of the Greg Nickels I used to know when he was working for Norm Rice and when he was on the [King] County Council.” Byers says the mayor’s “top-down” approach was evident during last year’s snowstorm, when city workers told him the Seattle Times that they weren’t empowered to decide where and how to clear snow and which neighborhoods to get to first. Byers says he was without power for five days. 24 hours. [Byers’s power was out for five days during the 2007 windstorm, not the December 2008 snowstorm].

In related news, the mayor’s office just asked the city’s ethics and elections department to review the Seattle Department of Transportation’s (SDOT) response during the snowstorm. Yesterday, the Seattle Times reported that street-clearing crews gave preferential treatment to the Admiral District in West Seattle, where the mayor, SDOT chief Grace Crunican, and other top city officials live, while ignoring arterials in other parts of town. (Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis lives near Alki, not in the Admiral District). “We will demand answers to these management questions because the public must have confidence in the people charged with improving and carrying out our city’s snow response plan,” Nickels said in a statement.

14 replies on “Mayoral Update”

  1. Very glad to see that the old “print media breaks story, spurring government response” model still has a drop left in the tank.

    OMG — Did I just top out an ECB post with a relevant comment?

  2. ECB on 12/23:

    In fairness to the city’s transportation department, they have exactly 27 trucks equipped to sand and de-ice Seattle’s approximately 4,000 lane miles of streets. Of those, they’re focusing on primary arterials like Aurora—roads that are used most frequently by the most people, including folks on transit—and bridges. Seattle has about 1,200 arterial lane miles. Given that challenge (combined with the fact that investing in a huge snow fleet for a once-in-a-decade event like this would never happen even in good budget times), I’d say they’re doing a pretty good job.

    http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archive…

  3. I and many other in my neighborhood had the same experience that Tom Byers had with City Light. Apparently, their phone system just does not work on weekends and at night. They have known this for some time (months to a few years), but do not yet have a solution.

  4. That’s not Orwellian. It’s Kafkaesque. Seattle cannot be a world class city with an illiterate mayor, and a semi-literate mayor won’t do either.

  5. Hey! Our phone doesn’t work in the daytime either! 😉

    The trouble is that people (reasonably) call the call center, when they should be calling the outage hotline. You can easily get that number from the SCL website the next time your power goes out and…. oh….wait…

    Well, you should go to the website right now, and write it down for future reference. I’d tell you what it was, but I can never remember. For some reason our power never goes out.

  7. Catalina – I should have been more specific: The after hours hotline where you report downed power lines and power outages does not work. The phone system is broken. City Light and apparently the Mayor’s Office know this. They just don’t know how to fix it. We had no power and we had a downed line. We dialed correctly all night long. So did many of our neighbors.

  10. Well by Golly, Cold&Dark, you are right. The 684-7400 number is the one I call when I am curious to see if there are outages (they have a recorded message that works well), but I’ve never used it to report an outage. Sure enough, it transfers you to a number that is not staffed. Not even a voicemail box .

    The last time I had to report an outage, you could call the call center and it would transfer you to a person who answered an after-hours number. But that was several years ago.

    There are technologies available that will automatically alert the utility when a meter goes off-line. City Light was going to implement this, but with the current budget crisis, all bets are off.

  11. Sorry, wrong number. Schell’s, flat “whosingcharge” style didn’t get anything done either.

    Agree with @4 as well. Getchyer allusions right please.

    We need top down, brass knuckles but with the right to do list.

    That’s the problem.

  13. Johnny Rhodes—Paul Schell managed to bring about a total renovation of the City’s libraries, hundreds of major park improvements, construction of several new community centers, a new city hall and opera house and literally hundreds of neighborhood matching fund projects. Greg Nickels has been cutting Schell’s ribbons for seven years. So don’t badmouth Paul. He got an enormous amount done in four years.

    And with regard to Orwell v. Kafka, the City light problem qualifies under both. Check out the absurd government policies referenced by Orwell in “Down and Out in London and Paris!”

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