Seattle Met Chooses Seattle Up and Coming Leaders
Seattle Met is one of those glossy urban magazines one finds in hotel rooms and on the coffee tables of affluent friends. The Met is also an interesting magazine because it has reached out to one the few remaining political reporters in Seattle, Josh Feit. Josh writes the very valuable blog, Publicola. Available via the Met’s website, this one man effort is the last stand of political reporting covering Washington state politics.
The Met’s list of “15 People Who Should Run Seattle>”is, to be blunt, mostly a list of political junkies, behind-the-scenes folks who make the system work. For the most part the list is of high level administrators, the people behind the policies we hear about from the politicians and from what remains of Seattle’s media (below).
While I find the list a real insight into the gears and cams of the current Seattle machine, I was also struck by the absence of certain specific names as well as the absence of representatives of power centers that should, I believe, have been included.
1. The University. There is not a single name on this list with any association with the University of Washington.
How can this be explained? Many of these people are filling jobs that one would assume also exist as academic positions on campus. Is it really possible that the UW is completely irrelevant to issues like urban planning, the arts, fair housing, and education?
This is especially bizarre given the huge impact the UW has as the city’s largest employer, the upcoming redevelopment of the Eastlake corridor, and the parlous condition of the city’s investment in biotech in South Lake Union. In regard to the last matter, is the Seattle Met unaware of the huge issues surrounding the sale of the AMGEN property along Elliott Avenue? That corridor, going all the way up to Everett along Aurora, is the last developable property in Seattle and the only accessible North-South corridor into the city. Is the glossy Met unaware of the role of real estate entrepreneurs, aka Vulcan?
2. Politicians. The only politician to make this list is Kshama Sawant. We all know Kshama as a very loud voice and as the impressive architect of Seattle’s $15 minimum wage. Unfortunately, her voice has become muted by her own socialist rhetoric and self promotion. As a citizen living in her District, I doubt she will be re-elected and doubt even more that she will be seen as the spokesman for “the people” she claims to represent.
If I had chosen this list I would have certainly included Senator-elect Pramila Jayapal. She has done an amazing job of building a collation of diverse minority groups in southeast Seattle. A good way to get an idea of the scope of her activities is to go to her Facebook page.
I am dumbfounded that the Met left Pramila off the list. That said, I would like to know more about some of the people they did list as minority representatives, especially Brian Surratt and Abdullahi Jama.
What about the loud voices of Reuven Carlyle, Dow Constantine????
3. Entrepreneurs. Errr ahhh .. given that the Met makes its income off of advertising baubles for Seattle’s mega wealthy, I was especially struck by the lack of any content about the people who increasingly own Seattle. It may be that Jeff Bezos was left off the list because he is too old? Given the number of Amazon employees living in Seattle’s podments, it is hard to understand how tens of thousand of under-40 Seattleites will not affect the future of Seattle.
All this raises the question of money spent to achieve pet agendas of the wealthy. Nick Hanauer is a good example. Mr. Hanauer made his money as an early investor in Amazon and recently was the major source of funds behind Washington state’s new gun control law. One wonders what a few of those dollars might do to change the future of Seattle?
A similar issue relates to other absurdly rich Seattleites. Presumably at some point Steve Ballmer will “invest” some of his $20 billion in a Seattle philanthropy. There are rumors that this might be the University of Washington. Is there a Ballmer School of Medicine in our future?
4. The Media.
It is odd that the Seattle Met has not chosen to address the question of the media. Sadly, the last real promise of a newspaper in Seattle was The Stranger, self designated as “Seattle’s Only Newspaper.” The Stranger’s disdain for the Seattle Times was justified when Eli Sanders won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for the Stranger article “The Bravest Woman In Seattle.” Since then, Tim Keck, the owner of The Stranger, has decided to return the weekly to its role as a voice for Seattle’s licentious community … the source of advertising.
Meantime the last remaining daily print newspaper in Seattle, the Times, has become a walking dead tribute to the decline of the Blethen family.