Media personality Tracy Taylor running for Auburn City Council

Former KIRO Newsradio traffic reporter and popular Seattle media personality Tracy Taylor is running for Auburn City Council.

“Our police departments are stretched very thin, and we just don’t have enough manpower,” Taylor told The Jason Rantz Show on AM 770 KTTH. “So first and foremost, we need to rebuild what we’ve lost over the years, including our police department, and start from the ground up there and then start kind of implementing and if not allocating some of those departments into certain areas, such as street racing, and obviously homelessness and whatnot.”

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Taylor is running in the 3rd Position against incumbent James Jeyeraj. She spent 25 years in local TV and radio, including Bonneville Seattle’s KIRO Newsradio.

“I know the Economic Development Division out in Auburn, I just happen to see a blog post about how they’re putting up new murals, and they’re trying to beautify, in particular, the downtown core,” Rantz said. “From an economic perspective, what needs to happen in order to encourage more businesses to come into the city or to support the ones that are already there?”

Taylor said she is part of the Arts Commission that brought in the murals.

“Our arts team in the city really just tried to change the look and the vibe, so to speak, in Auburn,” Taylor said. “But we lost something really, really important in downtown Auburn. Something that was a very big staple to a lot of the community and a lot of families.”

Taylor was talking about the Sunbreak Cafe.

“And Jason, if you’re a fan of banana bread, then you know the loss because their banana bread is famous,” Taylor continued. “And when that restaurant closed down, essentially, we lost a lot of the downtown vibe, we lost a lot of the activity, we have a lot of small businesses right now that are struggling to stay afloat because we are just not getting the foot traffic.”

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Taylor said the city of Auburn needs to come up with an incentive for businesses to return downtown.

“I have lived here in Auburn for several years now. And I just would love to see some change here in our community, I am just kind of tired of seeing everything just remain stagnant and stale. And it’s time to just revitalize our community, our city, and make it better.”

Listen to the Jason Rantz Show weekday afternoons from 3 – 7 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (or HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3). Subscribe to the podcast here.