Looking forward to the "Bellevue-Kirkland Full Employment Act". Business will leave Seattle in droves.

What are the authors proposing? That city leadership simply disregard Proclamation 20-28 and the OPMA, and hope whatever legislation they pass can somehow survive the inevitable legal challenge?

And how exactly does Kshama Sawant's nasty, patronizing denunciations of almost everyone but herself and her sympathizers promote "productive conversations"? And why exactly should Lorena Gonzalez and Lisa Herbold be added to her list of corporate tools (see her remarks at last week's press conference)? And "magnitude of the need"--yes, the need also for decent private sector jobs! And Jenny Durkan and Alex Pedersen are not ignoring the magnitude of the need. Their approach differs somewhat from that of Sawant and Morales; they, and all council members (not just Sawant and Morales) care about helping people in need (they're not all moralistic show-offs who have to scream this at everyone). The real problem is that Kshama Sawant is an ego case craving historic legend status, and anyone who disagrees with her is the way of what she perceives to be her historic career. She obsessively needs to stand out as different and exaggerates differences to make it appear she and she alone cares about the poor. She cannot tolerate conservatives, moderates, or even moderate leftists: you either hate and denounce capitalism or you somehow don't understand what's really wrong. And if you're a mainstream Democrat, you're the epitome of evil: no discussion, no exchange, no learning. Agree with her or you're a corporate tool--end of her discussion. There are countless quotations from her attesting to this kind of self-righteous, dogmatic moral condescension. Good for Alex Pedersen for voicing a different view. He knows, of course, he'll be denounced and hated for daring not to follow Sawant's lead. He's to be thanked for opening up a real discussion, not blamed for avoiding "productive conversations."

@4
the bill does not address the fallout from Covid-19. It proposes the largest tax increase in the history of Seattle and designates all of it to be used as new spending. It was changed after the Covid 19 crisis had already started to raid existing city funds to provide temporary payments. A very small portion of the overall spending is dedicated to providing relief and even then only for a very short term so claiming that is what this bill is about is just dishonest.

Setting aside the willingness of Sawant's supporters to violate the law in order to punish Amazon and the fallacy that a payroll tax is in any way progressive the most ironic part of this piece is the mention of austerity budgeting. If this bill were to pass in its present form in practically guarantees massive cuts across the city. The city is staring down a $200M-$300M budget this year (and it will likely get worse) and this bill dedicated all of its funding to new spending. Where is the money going to come from to backfill the existing services? Even if you pass additional revenue like an income tax or new property taxes those won't be able to be collected for 1-2 years much like the revenue from this bill so the city will have to borrow from other accounts to provide relief this year. If you raid those account today the only option left will be massive cuts as Seattle is obligated to balance the budget. If Sawant wants to continue her vendetta against Amazon then she will continue to be ignore by the adults in the room who are working on real solutions to the problems facing this city.

@6: Excellent statement. And what's most galling is that Sawant and her supporters paint anyone who disagrees with her as not caring enough about the poor and not understanding "the magnitude of the need." Obviously, yes, there is huge need, especially now because of the coronavirus crisis! But you articulately and precisely show why Sawant's and Morales' bill would likely worsen the situation. Again, thank you.

Fuck sawant and get Toadies.

*her

@1:

You-all keep saying that, but you know it's not going to happen. If anything, now that we've demonstrated for the past couple of months that large swaths of the tech sector can function just fine in a WFH environment, why would MSFT, AMZN, GOOGL, et al abandon Seattle now that they: A of All) have invested billions and billions of dollars in physical infrastructure inside the city limits, and; B of All) enticed tens of thousands of worker-bees to relocate to the city? You think some 20-something with a six-figure salary who just put down 20% on an $800,000 condo or hamster box house is going to want to suddenly pick up and move 12 miles across the lake, when they can continue to do their job from the comfort of their own living room - assuming they could even find a place to buy on the Eastside for the same price OR find a buyer for their current habitation in a pandemic-depressed real estate market?

If so, please send me some of what you're smoking, cuz that must be some seriously sticky dank, yo.

@10 Yes, they have shown that they all can work from home. In the era of the cloud, infrastructure is easy to move, and so are corporate headquarters. Most corporate buildings in Seattle will close, the workers will work from home, the headquarters will move, the infrastructure will move to the cloud (servers in Yakima and Nevada, and so on). Workers in Seattle who live in apartments will move if they are taxed by the city. Houses will be sold by many. Not all. But enough to make it hurt.

@6 "...the adults in the room who are working on real solutions to the problems facing this city." We've been waiting for over 5 years for these "real solutions."

Seattle is better positioned than almost any other city in the world to come out of this crisis stronger than ever. We have so many advantages, with the correct investments we could truly be America's first 21st century city. The complete lack of imagination by the Mayor's office, and the reflexive turn to austerity economics by the entrenched interests is our biggest impediment. I don't agree with everything Sawant says, but at least she has a vision; can anyone tell me what Jenny Durkan's vision for our city is. It has been clear she looks at this office as just a temporary stepping stone.

@10 Also, when that happens, Seattle gains an even greater reputation as a "place not to do new business." Like California and New York.

@12...You're right, both the mayor and the council lack any imagination to fix the long term problems facing Seattle but those problems existed before them and will exist long after they are gone. Quite honestly I don't know that they can even be solved. The problem I'm thinking about specifically is the massive hole in the budget for this year and next that will either require additional revenue to fill or cuts, most likely a combination of both. The first step to fixing that problem is not to make it worse and by that measure the bills proposed by Sawant and Morales completely fail.

@10...I agree, Amazon won't be leaving Seattle anytime soon but they are only 1 of 800 companies impacted by this tax. I would be looking at the other 799 who are most likely made up of service related industries with highly compensated employees (law firms, accounting offices, smaller tech companies who are leasing). Is it really a stretch to say many of them could simply pick up and move when their leases come due? As for those 20 somethings I seriously doubt a large percentage of them own anything. Didn't it just come out that the majority of Seattle are renters now? I would wager a large percent of those renters would welcome a move to a lower cost locale where they could actually afford to buy and even if they don't when did any company ever give a shit what their employee's think.

@11 As long as we don't have an income tax, Amazon is contributing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to the local tax base. Why is that so hard to understand? It's not rocket science--it's arithmetic a six grader could understand (0 x 0% = 0)

I've never been a fan of Sawant. I think she's been playing politics for far too long at the expense of actually getting things done, but I also think she's one of the few people on our council, at the moment, who is speaking for the people being affected most by this unprecedented crisis. I wish we had better voices, but I'd rather have a kooky progressive than a bunch of schlubs who think it's still 1995 and we're in the peak era of mindless Reagan/Thatcher neoliberalism.

All Amazon has done is drive up the cost of living, taken over large parts of our city that could have been used for other purposes, destroyed local businesses, attacking unionization at every step, and somehow convinced so-called "progressive" Seattleites that they're the most important business in this city. Sure, they "created jobs"--by shipping people into the city for the majority of those jobs. They didn't create jobs for existing Seattleites, they lured in a bunch of overpaid tech heads from other cities. Did we need them? I mean, as far as I can remember, Seattle was a better place to live at any point between 2004-2014 than it is now. When did the homeless crisis start again? When did gentrification of old neighborhoods really pick up?

Was Amazon the only reason this happened? No. The bigger issue is a bunch of Seattleites who were happy buying their over-priced houses while their fellow citizens struggled making ends-meet working multiple jobs, as our infrastructure began to collapse just as all of the huge sky rises went up. If you want to live in the new San Francisco--by all means, move to San Francisco.

Quit drinking their crappy kool-aid that's made by exploited workers in terrible working environments with no benefits who get fired when they so much as say "we should be cared about."

(I graduated from UW in 2009, and spent a number of years in the service industry, before having an opportunity to work in the non-profit sector. I have spent the last seven years working for various non-profits in Seattle, barely able to get by as rent prices skyrocket and the cost of living continues to grow, as our Seattle City Council ignores the average people who made this city such a great place to live, and kowtows to major corporations and know-nothing fiscal conservatives who don't understand simple mathematics.)

@16 You, a college graduate, voluntarily took a low-paying non-profit job, and you think conservatives are the ones who can't do math?

@16- you're an idiot.

@16 smits, excellent points.

@19 I am no fan of Sawant, but you can't blame her for those problems. Those are everywhere. It's a national crisis.

The SCC propaganda board with more how not to run a city.