Dori: How I would fix the city if I was Seattle mayor
Jun 7, 2018, 9:00 PM
(File)
(File)
As we’ve discussed quite a bit lately, I would never, ever, ever run for political office. However, if I ever wanted to run for office, I could win the Seattle mayor job in a heartbeat.
I’ve been receiving emails from panicked people in Magnolia because the city says that it needs to tear down the Magnolia Bridge, but doesn’t have the funds to replace it.
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Really? Seattle’s 2018 budget is $5.6 billion, about twice that of Boston (which has roughly the same population as Seattle). Seattle has 1,400 cops while Boston has 2,200. Boston also has just a couple hundred un-sheltered homeless people.
It’s all about prioritizing. If I were the Seattle mayor, I would just get rid of a third of city employees. I could save you about $500 million a year just by doing that. We have added 1,300 Seattle government workers since the accused child rapist Ed Murray became mayor. All of that would be gone.
Then we would start prioritizing — the first thing I’d do would be to hire more cops. I’d make sure we empowered our cops and enforced all our vagrancy and drug laws. Then we would be able to start cleaning up the homelessness problem. The two things the municipal government should be responsible for are public safety and taking care of infrastructure. So get rid of the bureaucrats, and start focusing on infrastructure. Build that Magnolia Bridge because you need it.
Where else could we carve out some money? A listener tip told us that the council’s education and preschool tax will bring in $637 million over seven years. What is one of the things they’re going to put in with this money? A $1.4 million health clinic exclusively for LGBTQ kids at the Nova alternative high school. Now, they already have a clinic there. But the problem of course, is, anytime anything has LGBTQ attached to it, no one is allowed to question it. So the Seattle City Council decides to spend $1.4 million on a health clinic for a small percentage of students. That’s not being a smart steward of money. Frankly, you should build a bridge for Magnolia to replace the decrepit one before you start building stuff like that.
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If a Seattle mayor with some common sense came in and slashed the size of government, funded infrastructure and public safety, and held off on the free giveaways, that would do a world of good. The only thing we are doing now is teaching kids to be freeloaders, teaching them at a very early age that government is the provider of all and everything in life is free. All of those programs would be on the back-burner until you replaced the bridges and hired more police officers.
I could get this done. I know I could. But I just don’t want the gig — because the one I have is too much fun.
