Sally Bagshaw won’t take The Stranger sailing.
Oh, we ask her. We ask when she says she’s going to join the kayaktivists for the “Festival of Resistance.” Then we ask again when it’s time for this second installment of our “District Date” series. She says maybe later in the summer, closer to or after the August 4 city council primary election. How convenient.
She won’t take me on her plane, either, even though she took Frizzelle in 2009.
Instead, she wants to ride bikes around her district. See! She’s just like us!
Doesn’t she know I just did this with Council Member Mike O’Brien? The important difference is that Sally Bagshaw has an E-Bike.
I do not have an E-Bike. This means that every time Bagshaw takes our bike ride up a steep hill with ease, I’m left pedaling at a slower and slower pace with my skinny jelly legs until I finally resign myself to just walk my bike up the hill and then text Ansel later to ask how to ride up hills.
I tell you this—at my own expense—because it’s a metaphor for Bagshaw’s inevitable reelection in what has quickly become the most boring city council “race” of this otherwise batshit local election year.
Bagshaw has a lot of money for her campaign—just over $65,000 so far—and basically no competition. Her opponents have to know they’re going to lose (“I’m comfortable with that,” one tells me; more on them later) just like I know I am not going to make it up the hill. But we all have to act cool, like we can totally do the thing we so obviously cannot do. Everyone else—no one more acutely than Sally Bagshaw—can see how ridiculous we look, but we go on pretending everything is fine.
Bagshaw lives in and now wants to represent the newly created District 7, which stretches from downtown to Discovery Park, including South Lake Union, Belltown, Queen Anne, and Magnolia. It’s whiter and slightly wealthier than the city as a whole and home to more renters than homeowners. Of all the crane-dotted parts of the city, this one has seen the greatest growth in the number of one-bedroom units, according to this recent KUOW analysis. Downtown is also the very place whose influence district-election supporters wanted to weaken with this new system. With most council members now representing specific neighborhood clusters outside of downtown, District 7 (along with maybe the two citywide seats) is what remains for those interests in City Hall.
I meet Bagshaw at the nonprofit Mary’s Place, where she’s helping the organization move its emergency family shelter to a new location. Then, as we ride around Belltown and downtown, Bagshaw shows me stuff she’s really (disproportionately?) excited about: the protected bike lane on 2nd Avenue, the Bell Street Park, that giant playground next to the EMP, and the West Thomas Street overpass (OK, that one is actually pretty cool).
At one point, she calls me “kiddo.” Later—on a flat section of downtown, but headed farther away from Queen Anne, where she eventually wants us to bike—Bagshaw says, almost sounding worried, “The farther we go, the farther you have to bike back up hill.” Oh, it’s fine, I lie straight at her face. Fucking E-Bikes.
Bagshaw seems really set on polishing her bike cred here and, indeed, she talks a good game.
But like the rest of the city council and the mayor, she’s dodged spending the $20 million a year needed to fully fund the city’s bike-safety plan, as Dominic has thoroughly documented.
On affordable housing, she’s supportive of a linkage fee to make developers pay to keep Seattle livable for lower-income residents, but it’s unclear just how much of a fee she supports. She believes there’s an amount on which developers and the city could compromise to keep developers from suing the city. That is, uh, optimistic, and in sharp contrast to some candidates in other council races who’ve called for the “maximum possible linkage fee.”
Bagshaw also spends part of our ride praising the so-called “9½ Block Strategy,” a crackdown on downtown crime championed by the mayor and Seattle Police Department—the first leg of which claimed to direct those arrested for drug crimes into diversion programs, but didn’t actually.
And, of course, she’s a tunnel supporter.
Still, Bagshaw has staked out some good positions that don’t necessarily align with the wealthy downtown interests she will soon literally represent. She’s voted in support of city-sanctioned homeless encampments, both in 2013 and this year, and supported lockers for homeless people. On a proposal to ban smoking in city parks, which some worry could disproportionately affect the homeless, she opposed the first try in 2010 and, when it came back this year, argued for designated smoking areas in parks. (She lost.)
When we stop in Westlake park to see some of the tables and chairs the city has bolted down installed there, I ask Bagshaw why she thinks she didn’t attract any more serious competition—or, really, any at all until just before the filing deadline. I have to drag an answer out of her.
And all she’ll say on the record is this: “I have worked really hard to meet people, to know people and to treat them respectfully. I don’t agree with them all the time but they know they can talk to me and that goes a long way.”
This is classic Sally Bagshaw. She acts so damn nice. And this is why her recent behavior has been so fun to watch. In April, Bagshaw filed an ethics complaint against and publicly went after her council colleague, Kshama Sawant, over a housing affordability town hall Sawant hosted in council chambers that Bagshaw claims was really more of a Sawant campaign rally. As the mayor has introduced legislation trying to shut down that kind of thing, which the city’s Ethics and Elections Commission and the ACLU of Washington have expressed concerns about, Bagshaw has held to her position. (Although, while doing so, she rarely actually looks at or makes eye contact with Sawant, even during testy exchanges at the council committee table. Other members do this too and I just need to say, it’s really fucking weird, you guys. Cut it out.)
Bagshaw suggests we grab coffee at that fishbowl-like Starbucks at Westlake, where she orders an Arnold Palmer with two Splendas. (She’s totally of the people, you guys.) There, I ask her about the recent dustup. Has Sawant changed Bagshaw’s job as a council member?
Definitely, Bagshaw says. These days, “everything becomes a fight.” Then she launches into a divorce law metaphor about “position-based and interest-based bargaining,” in which interest-based bargaining focuses on how to get to a compromise and position-based bargaining involves, basically, being selfish dicks to each other. Sawant has made the council’s arguing more position-based than interest-based, Bagshaw says.
That’s the divide playing out on the council now: Are Sawant’s strong positions forcing them to make more progress or just bogging them down in ugly ideological fights? In a way, the results of this election cycle will determine which way the narrative about Sawant heads. Eight seats on the council are vulnerable to change this year, and could very well be taken by challengers more in synch with Sawant, but without real competition in the District 7 race, Bagshaw’s seat is one that’s almost certain to still be occupied by a deep Sawant skeptic.
Even when we’re talking about Seattle-nice Bagshaw, watching an incumbent go unchallenged—especially in this new district system, which promised more access for grassroots candidates and a shift away from downtown having the loudest voice in City Hall—feels kind of gross.
That’s what drove Hanna Brooks Olsen, one third of the blog Seattlish, to float the idea of challenging Bagshaw. (She eventually decided against it.) And it’s a big part of what’s driving Bagshaw challenger Gus Hartmann, who announced his candidacy on filing day and has raised about $4,200 so far. Hartmann, a 39-year-old Google engineer, suggested we hang out at the 5 Point but was in Dublin this week for work. So he agreed to Google Hangout with me instead. Video chatting always ends up feeling like an overly intimate thing that should be reserved for long-distance relationships and camming, but this is my job, so I did it.
Aside from forcing an incumbent to face a little competition, Hartmann’s candidacy basically boils down to this: He believes Belltown, where he lives, and some of the nearby areas in the district should be the focus of much of the city’s new development and better incorporated as neighborhoods.
“Seattle is growing and it’s going to continue to grow,” he says. “That’s going to require density and putting it in a place doesn’t displace people or price people out. The 7th [District] is ripe for that…I don’t know that the incumbent has any particular interest in the denser parts of the district and integrating them better into Seattle.”
Hartmann—who gave $150 to Sawant in 2013—says he doesn’t support linkage fees, but isn’t specific about how he would otherwise encourage affordable housing development.
He’s already written off getting any support in neighborhoods like Magnolia and Queen Anne and is mostly focused on getting young transplants and tech workers more engaged and maybe even voting in this off-year election. He acknowledges that transplants and well-paid tech workers are driving some change in the city, but says “if it wasn’t tech workers, it could have been finance” or some other industry.
“There is a great deal of hostility toward tech people,” he says. “They’re catching a disproportionate amount of blame because tech workers don’t engage or say anything… Because they don’t say anything, they’re very easy to blame.”
Bagshaw’s other, even-longer-shot challenger, is Queen Anne/Magnolia resident Deborah Zech-Artis—who says she’s running because she wants to “make a difference and help more people realize their dreams and open doors instead of strangling dreams and closing doors.” When I ask what we would do on a theoretical district hang-out, she e-mails me a Word document that reads like a tourist’s itinerary: Dinner at Palisades or Maggie’s Bluff, Kerry Park, a steak house in South Lake Union, walking through Belltown and Pike Place Market, the waterfront, Myrtle Edwards park, the Seattle Art Museum, Pioneer Square, and the Underground Tour.
I do not actually do any of this. Instead, I spend a half-hour pricing E-Bikes online.
