DORI MONSON

City leaders focusing on bike lanes, $15 an hour as Seattle goes down toilet

Jun 11, 2014, 12:02 PM | Updated: 1:32 pm

Seattle has a lot of wonderful things to show visitors, but KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson says cit...

Seattle has a lot of wonderful things to show visitors, but KIRO Radio's Dori Monson says city leaders aren't focusing on keeping the city a great place to be. (AP Photo/NOAA Fisheries Service, Candice Emmons)

(AP Photo/NOAA Fisheries Service, Candice Emmons)

The summer brings tourists to Seattle, but a local resident and Dori Monson Show listener who tried to put herself in the place of a tourist witnessed what sounds like an awful picture.

Listener Molly wrote us an email describing what she ran into on just a simple visit to downtown Seattle. Her experience involved a disturbing encounter with an apparently pregnant drug abuser, loud fights, visible criminal acts on the street and the odor of marijuana throughout the city.

On Tuesday’s Show, Dori said he thinks this example is a damning indictment of our city leaders who he says continue to focus on things like bike lanes and $15 an hour while letting the city go down the toilet.

From Tuesday’s edition of The Dori Monson Show

I would say my experience when I go down there is identical to Molly’s.

Father’s Day is coming up on Sunday. I used to, for Father’s Day, ask for the same thing every single year. I wanted all our girls, and my wife together, and I wanted to go down to Pike Place Market.

There’s a little Mexican restaurant at Pike Place Market that we all just love. So we’d go there. We’d walk down by the harbor steps, walk down by the waterfront. To me, that was the ideal Father’s Day, being with my family, with all my kids, hanging out in downtown Seattle.

I haven’t requested that for probably three or four years now, for the exact reason Molly described. Not because I’m scared to go down there, but because it’s disgusting.
We have city leaders who have decided the priorities are bike lanes and the socialist agenda. They do not mind that the streets have been turned over to the bums and the criminals.

I grew up spending so much time in downtown Seattle. I love this city. I really do. But I don’t love the politics in this city. I don’t love the lack of attention to what is going on in the streets. I don’t like the fact that the things that our leaders care about the most have done zero to improve the quality of life in the city and have done everything to contribute to the conditions of misery on the streets.

So what happened to downtown Seattle?

What happened was an absolute lack of prioritization by our city leaders because the criminals, the homeless are not a voting block. So there is no point in them paying attention to these problems. It doesn’t get the reelected, it doesn’t help them climb up the political ladder. The bicycle community and the socialists are powerful voting blocks, so they will continue to focus on those issues and they will continue to let the streets of downtown Seattle deteriorate.

It’s like what is going on in San Francisco. There is no middle class at all in San Francisco. It’s six-figure people and homeless people. That’s it. And San Francisco, a city that used to smell like the waterfront and sourdough bread when you walked around Fisherman’s Wharf, that used to smell like garlic when you walked up the North Beach, that smell of San Francisco that used to be so evocative and glorious – now the whole city smells like urine. Everywhere you go in the city smells like urine.

I have zero doubt that is the path we’re on here in Seattle. So what happened to downtown? Local politics happened to downtown.

Taken from Tuesday’s edition of The Dori Monson Show.

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City leaders focusing on bike lanes, $15 an hour as Seattle goes down toilet