JC Harris For Des Moines, Washington
City Council, Position #2
Homes are seen along the east side of Beacon Hill in Seattle. King Co. needs 17K new homes every year to address housing shortage. (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times, 2022) By Heidi Groover Seattle Times business reporter Just how much new construction is necessary to meet our region’s housing shortage? King County would need … Continue reading “King County needs 17K new homes every year to address housing shortage”
Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood with the Magnolia neighborhood in the distance as seen from the Space Needle. (Amanda Snyder / The Seattle Times, 2021) By Jon Talton Columnist This may be the year of aggressive efforts to increase the housing supply in Washington and Seattle. A total of 13 bills are moving through the Legislature … Continue reading “The battle is on to increase housing supply; we’ll see if it works”
By Mike Lindblom Seattle Times staff reporter Outside experts warn that Sound Transit light-rail extensions, already years late, will careen into endless delays unless the board and executives adopt a big-time mindset to match the 116-mile network they promised the voters. That means a harder line dealing with 53 local governments, which sometimes view transit … Continue reading “Be bolder to get light rail done, expert panel tells Sound Transit”
A parable on “the hard fork”, an engineering term for making a clean break with a system that has outlived its usefulness. Microsoft took the hard fork about a decade ago and the results speak for themselves. There are some real lessons to be learned here.
An essay about why dock repairs, are really about Equity–doing what is right for the entire City for a change. The way we are approaching Marina Redevelopment is not only fiscally irresponsible it is unfair to the full community–particularly the younger and more diverse parts of the city.
I testified today at the Senate Ways and Means Committee hearing on SB5199, a bill to provide funding for Local Journalism co-sponsored by our own Senator Karen Keiser. You can read more on the issue here… https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/promising-proposals-in-wa-legislature-aim-to-help-journalism-crisis/
These are the two statements I made during the 2 Feb City Council Meeting on ‘censure’. I wrote them like this to conform to our current ‘four minutes at a time’ format.
The first makes clear that there is no merit to the accusation and discusses the complete overreaction by the Council and government as a tool of bullying and intimidation.
The second discusses how tricky it is to push back against such an allegation and how this form of attack is just one instance of a pattern of deceptive government that must be changed.
