‘Pick a lane and do it’: Seattle Times columnist calls out city’s inability to solve problems

A columnist for The Seattle Times, Danny Westneat, recently wrote an article labeling Seattle as a fickle city, oftentimes being outspoken on key issues that drag the city down, yet nobody jumps at the chance to enact any changes.

Westneat joined “The John Curley Show” on KIRO Newsradio to further explain his thinking behind the article and provided real-time examples for why he believes Seattle is a fickle city.

“We keep sort of metronoming back and forth from one to the other, and as a result, there’s no real progress made on anything,” Westneat said. “With homelessness, crime, or public drug use, in particular, the competing visions are there, but nobody ever really marshals enough support long enough to actually effectuate and try out their vision.

“For example, we have a public drug use ordinance where basically you can’t smoke fentanyl in front of Nordstrom. Yet, we do have a pretty big faction in the city that doesn’t really want the cops involved in drug use; they see it as a public health problem. Their vision is: let’s focus on treatment, not punishment, and so we can’t decide whether to go soft or hard on that issue,” Westneat continued. “I think they’re conflicted on what is the best way to solve the problem. I just want them to pick a lane and do it. When they say, ‘Hey, we need more treatment,’ I’m like, ‘Yes, we need more treatment, so let’s do it,’ like, how come we haven’t built the treatment? ‘”

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

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