Rantz: Out of touch Mayor Durkan dismisses her boss

Though I wasn’t holding my breath, I had hoped that Mayor Jenny Durkan would end the city’s obsession with pushing a transit-at-all-costs message, but alas, she’s out of touch with drivers. And with her anti-car messaging, she possibly made the most out-of-touch statement yet.

The mayor woke up from a slumber to realize Lake City is actually a neighborhood in Seattle that’s in need of attention; it turns out, Capitol Hill, Downtown and South Lake Union are not, in fact, the only neighborhoods in the city. Lake City residents deal with the same issue many of us deal with all the time: used needles strewn about, petty crime, homelessness, and lack of parking.

Consequently, Durkan decided to pretend to care about the issues of Lake City with a weekend town hall-style meeting with constituents to hear their concerns.

Speaking to KOMO 4, Durkan pretended that she understands who she works for.

“The city government works for the people, and more and more these days there’s more disconnect between people and their government,” Mayor Durkan said. “I think it’s really important to get into communities and listen to what’s working, what’s not working, how we can get better.”

She’s right, she works for us and we’re her collective boss. But when a resident asked what the city was doing to get developers to include parking in their projects, since parking is as scarce there as it is everywhere in Seattle, Durkan forgot who she works for.

Rather than “get into communities and listen” to the people she supposedly works for, she dismissed the concern and pivoted to a transit talking point.

“I know it’s an answer that not everyone will like, but the first thing we have to do is build better transit everywhere we can,” she said.

So, a resident echoes the concerns of thousands, and rather than hearing him and talking about the issue, she tells you to take the bus. Tell that to the single mom in Lake City who works two jobs and can’t afford the hour it’ll take to get from job one to job two. She doesn’t live the privileged life of a mayor. Does she think the bus is magically fast and happens to go directly to the spot you need to be dropped off? Perhaps she thinks an Uber is the same as a bus. Well, Mayor Durkan, it’s not. At least you took a bus to get the meeting in Lake City, right?

And, as I detailed last week, the parking problems impacting most of us won’t help the current problem plaguing her departments: countless hours wasted searching for parking in order to complete city business.

How out of touch can one mayor be about the problems plaguing the people she pretends to work for? Eh. It doesn’t matter. She knows there’s no consequences to her inaction on our issues.

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