District 4

Question 2

Investing in Downtown’s Recovery: Given the importance of downtown to the overall health and vitality of our city and region, what actions will you propose to support downtown’s recovery?
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Maritza Rivera

A healthy downtown is critical to the vibrancy and livability of Seattle and to its overall economy. The overall health of Seattle depends on rebuilding our downtown core and doing everything possible to help downtown business, both small and large, succeed. Working as the Vice President of the Hispanic National Chamber of Commerce exposed me to just how difficult it is to run a business, especially for business owners of color. In addition to the usual challenges of razor thin margins, high costs, and disproportionate taxes, Seattle is also experiencing record levels of property crime. Part of why I wanted to run for office in the first place was because of the stories I heard from both small and large businesses that have had items stolen from their shelves, their windows broken into and smashed, hateful graffiti sprawled on their walls and drug use on the sidewalks in front of their doors. All of this after our entire economy shut down for nearly two years.

The City must do more to support businesses both by addressing the systemic issues they are facing like homelessness, crime and substance abuse, but also through direct service, aid, and collaboration. I would be a strong advocate in getting our spending under control and ensure that our investments are targeted towards solving our biggest challenges and not on pet projects from various council members.

Ron Davis

Downtown rests on three mutually-reinforcing pillars: jobs, tourism, and housing.

With downtown’s population at historic highs, we should double down by making it easier to build housing (single track permitting with a builder’s remedy, significant code changes, no design review, expanded zoning envelope). To ensure a complete community, we need a K-8 school (despite enrollment declines elsewhere), better parks, a lidded I-5, public safety (see above), attractive local transit like the Streetcar, light rail stations where people actually are and want to be, grocery stores, childcare, and calm, safe streets. Like lower Manhattan after 2001, this will activate a 24-hour city.

Second, we need to ensure that downtown is a world-class destination. The above investments will help, especially the streetcar, parks, the I-5 lid, and 24-hour activation. But we need to ensure that our events infrastructure remains top-notch, our waterfront is a destination, not a passthrough, and our museums get a level-up. All need great transit connections to the region.

Last, downtown needs to be attractive to workers and businesses. The above will help, especially activation, public safety, and readily available daycare (many parents would give up working from home tomorrow for childcare). Also, the quicker, safer, and more convenient it is to get downtown, the more likely people are to come (which means delivering ST3 with a great UX/station access, passing a Move Seattle levy that speeds up buses and increases frequency, and planning for ST4).

Question 4

Top Voter Concerns: What do you believe are the top three issues on voters’ minds right now, and how would you propose addressing them?
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Maritza Rivera

First, crime and public safety. I believe we must fully staff our police department and won’t rest until we get to five minute response times for priority one calls, invest in alternatives to law enforcement that can help to lessen the burden placed on our offices to solve every problem and every call for service, get guns off our streets and support community violence intervention, empower neighborhoods and BIDs to address public safety issues, and bring urgency to ending open air drug markets and accountability for repeat offenders, high utilizers, and dealers.

Second, government accountability. Over 50% of Seattle residents believe that they are taxed too much for what our city delivers and 70% no longer trust us to spend money wisely. We need leaders that will look first for inefficiencies in our bloated budget and ending restricted funding for pet projects with dubious real world outcomes before adding yet another new tax.

Third, childcare costs. After the birth of my two daughters, we did the math as a family– and it simply was not possible for us to afford high-quality child care for our kids in Seattle. First, I’ll work with regional, state, and local partners to identify funding and bonding authority to create additional childcare facilities throughout the city. Second, We need to work with our labor, business, and education partners to make early learning a livable industry that people want and are able to work in. Third, we need to reduce the cost of child care. It is simply far too expensive to build a new child care facility in the City of Seattle.

But absent attempting to address those external factors, we have a supply problem as well. When I talk to builders and realtors they complain about the high cost and uncertainty related to construction permitting in Seattle. If the city is going to address supply, it can’t ‘go it alone’ through an unfunded social housing developer. We need to address the permitting process so that junior level people on the side of the developer and the housing department can get together and agree on whether a particular design would be approved. To do this we can create a catalog of pre-approved designs to cut through red-tape and bureaucracy.

Ron Davis

Homelessness and housing costs. Experts have shown these largely overlap (see, e.g., “Homelessness is a Housing Problem, Page and Colburn, or the more comprehensive “In the Midst of Plenty,” Shinn and Khadurri). I’d work to bring supply in line with demand (we are way behind), expand investment in affordable and social housing for those the market cannot serve, and use displacement prevention policies. For homelessness in particular, I’d scale more temporary solutions like tiny homes and vouchers while building permanent supportive housing for the folks experts call “chronically homeless.”

Public Safety. I’ve outlined in detail above; in short, I’d invest in community violence intervention programming, get guns off the street, scale a fourth (behavioral health-focused) 911 crisis response, and use this to ensure less than five-minute wait times for an emergency response, fully fund behavioral health services, and build trust through de-escalation, good governance, and accountable law enforcement.

Although climate doesn’t have the same immediacy or salience to many voters, many express concern about climate-connected issues like housing, transportation, vision zero, the tree canopy, and climate justice. To address these, we must make it as quick, easy, safe, convenient, and comfortable to get around the city without a car as it is with, electrify everything that isn’t human-propelled, rebuild our tree canopy, legalize complete neighborhoods and reform building rules to make low-carbon mass timber construction feasible, and move toward climate-friendly building standards.

Question 6

If there were any important details about your candidacy that you were unable to provide in response to the previous questions, please take this opportunity to share that information here:
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Maritza Rivera

My life experiences have shaped me into being the ideal candidate for Downtown Seattle Association members and the residents of District 4. My parents moved from Puerto Rico to New York in search of a better life. I grew up in a tough neighborhood in the Bronx, on the 5th floor of a five story no elevator building. My dad was a welder and my mom worked at a factory. I was tapped to work in the White House as President Clinton’s Hispanic liaison and later served as a Vice-President of the National Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, where I worked closely with Hispanic small businesses from across the country.

In Seattle, I have had the privilege of working at the ACLU post 9/11 to protect Muslim communities from xenophobia, at City Hall working for Former City Council Member Tom Rasmussen, for Mayor Durkan, and now in the Harrell Administration as Deputy Director of the Department of Arts & Culture. This combination of non-profit, civil-society, city council and mayoral administration experience makes me uniquely qualified to help our city solve its most pressing challenges.

Ron Davis

I’m running because, as an entrepreneur, CEO, and dealmaker, and as a nerd steeped in the science of housing, homelessness, transportation, crime, drug addiction, and climate- I’m tired of watching City Hall drown good policy in an ocean of hand-wringing.

We face serious crises–homelessness, mental health, drug addiction and overdoses, the crime spike, and looming climate change. Our business community has brought plenty of ambition to their industries–but too often, our city government has faced big problems with disheartening provincialism.

I grew up in a wage-earning family and launched a journey that landed me at Harvard Law School and in the comfortable, professional world–a journey that would have been impossible in Seattle today. I’ve seen firsthand the enormous gap between merit and outcomes, the ways that those who have gotten lucky often hijack local rules to lock in their privileges, and the ruinous economic, social, and climate consequences.

We can have a green, clean, safe, inclusive city with shared prosperity. All it requires is political will, capacity building, and investment.

Amazon is famous for taking the long view. Other candidates may offer you short-term financial opiates, like a JumpStart tax cut – but the evidence is clear that this will not net out favorably for Seattle’s competitiveness. And taxes like that are the only realistic way we are going to fund our biggest priorities –including yours.

I hope you’ll join me and take the long view.