District 6

Question 1

Public Safety: The DSA’s core mission is to create a healthy, vibrant downtown for all. It is no secret that the pandemic took a heavy toll on downtowns across the country and Seattle is no exception. As we work toward recovery on all fronts, issues of public safety downtown continue to be one of the top themes we hear from stakeholders. How will you address public safety in downtown Seattle?
» next / all

Pete Hanning

Our City Council needs to rectify the damage done by the rhetoric and actions taken to defund the police and the continued efforts to cast aspersions on the work that first responders do. This signaling to our first responders that their work was not valued by leaders in the city greatly contributed to the loss of hundreds of police officers. This made it much harder to respond to crime, homelessness, drug addiction and mental health issues especially in our downtown core. I’m running to change that. This means changing the tone coming out of the city council, first and foremost. Our first responders and our downtown businesses need to be reassured that they have partners in the City Council chambers. We urgently need to expand our recruiting and hiring practices and work quickly to get to the goal of 1400 officers that has been laid out by Mayor Harrell. At the same time, our city needs to advance alternative response models that could be helpful in lowering criminal activity, vagrancy and mental health incidents downtown. We need to be supportive of a regional solution to homelessness but do a much better job at ensuring that regional approach is managed to be successful. Our city needs to continue to advance permanent supportive housing solutions, tiny homes, more shelter space and more to be able to move people out of encampments and off our streets into shelter. We need to get to a world where our homelessness population is sheltered and our streets are used for their stated purpose.

Dan Strauss (Incumbent)

Downtown is essential to our city and region’s economy. If people don’t feel safe, we will not have a vibrant downtown and that is unacceptable. I will address public safety downtown by using proven, successful models I helped to develop. We need to hire public safety coordinators to address the problematic Third Avenue corridor and downtown overall. Having one person in charge of a problem, linked to decision makers in each department, creates a team similar to an emergency operations center directing response and adjusting to real time information.

That’s what I’ve done in my district. My public safety task forces, combined with a public safety coordinator position that I created, ensures that problem areas with repeated issues have direct access to the teams that meet their needs whether it is the police or homelessness response. And it’s getting results – recently removed a firearm from an encampment and we stabilized an individual who has had an outsized impact on the community for 5+ years.

At the beginning of my first term, we were confronted with a movement to, “defund the police”. Defund was a mistake. I have since supported fully funding police staffing, hiring, and recruitment plans every year. I work with the Mayor to continue fully funding police, and on police reforms, so that policing is better and safer. We need to focus police time on crime, hire public safety coordinators citywide, and expand our existing first responders. Hiring police and expanding these teams will make a real difference in downtown safety.

Question 3

Fiscal Priorities: Given the fragile state of downtown’s revitalization, do you agree that the City should prioritize existing spending before imposing new taxes or increasing existing ones? In a detailed manner, please describe how you would propose addressing the budget issues the city is facing.
» next / « previous / all

Pete Hanning

As a former small business owner, I completely agree. I ran the Red Door in Fremont and understand the tight margins that businesses face. We should be able to run our city government more efficiently, more effectively and with transparency and accountability to taxpayers. I will never forget it’s your money. My top priority is to spend every dollar wisely.

Dan Strauss (Incumbent)

We have a projected budget shortfall in 2025, and we have time before needing to make hard budgeting choices and evaluate projections on existing revenue. The city budget has nearly doubled in recent years, which is why I remain committed to finding cost savings within the city and tightening our belts to reduce unneeded expenditures. We need to assess which projects are mission critical to providing the functions of government, and which projects are extra or nice to have projects. By utilizing standard budgeting practices, we will be able to decrease the size of the projected revenue shortfall.

Not funding my budget request to upgrade Interbay Park and Stadium is an example of tightening our belts. I proposed upgrades with new turf and [sic] improve the soccer stadium because the World Cup is coming and it is the home of our semi-professional soccer team. Ballard FC is ranked # 1 nationally and sells out every match with 1,500 spectators. Not funding this project is the right call until we solve our budget gap. Still, there are ways to accomplish the goals without the financial investment, and this is how we are approaching this project today. We do not need a Cadillac solution at a time of budget shortcomings, when a Ford will do just fine.

The focus for spending our budget must be service delivery and this must be calculated carefully. After tightening our belts and taking the time to analyze revenue projections, if additional taxes are needed, we should first look to utilize a Capital Gains Tax.ress this question would not be possible, even if adequate detail on the coming years’ budgets was available. The city’s online budget tools I have reviewed ultimately come down to a Labor-Nonlabor set of line-items after drilling down a few layers. Councilmembers with access to staff should have detailed knowledge of the budget. For me to speculate about actual efficiencies without that access is irresponsible.

That said, there are some overarching realities. We will be losing COVID subsidies. We have to rebuild the police. Homelessness, substance treatment and affordable housing are not cheap problems. Our aging infrastructure will require ongoing upgrades and expanded capacity to deal with the increased density mandated by Olympia. I’m not sure much of these realities are captured within existing spending. I will strive always to be fiscally conservative, because it is important not to overburden any particular segment of the tax base.

Question 5

Return to Office: One of the most impactful things we can do to drive downtown revitalization is to get more people here – visitors, tourists, residents and perhaps most importantly, workers. A steady and consistent flow of employees downtown who are eating, drinking, shopping and engaging in recreation brings much needed support for our small businesses and public spaces. Do you believe that city workers should work in person three or more days per week?
» next / « previous / all

Pete Hanning

Of course. As I stated earlier, this starts with City Hall. City Hall needs to set an example for the rest of our city’s businesses. I will do everything I can to incentivize businesses to bring their employees back to work in an engaging, revitalized downtown.

Dan Strauss (Incumbent)

Yes, I believe city workers should work from the office 3 days or more a week and this change must be negotiated through the current contract negotiations. I have worked in the office 5 days a week for the last year and a half, and my team works 3 to 5 days a week from the office. The importance of working from the office is more than working together at the same table, it is the 5 minutes before and after the meeting where co-workers connect informally, it is catching the bus home with a friend in a different department, and it is seeing the person you need to call in the lunch line. The informal time to connect is where so much collaboration and exchange of ideas occurs, and these types of interactions are what moves projects further faster.