Time to celebrate: Scott Kubly has resigned from SDOT

Scott Kubly has resigned. The reign of terror has come to an end.

The generational gridlock that Kubly has ensured for many years to come will live on as a testimonial to his term as the director of the Seattle Department of Transportation.

Scott Kubly will not — I repeat — will not be able to screw up this city any longer. He won’t be able to steal money from taxpayers and funnel it to his cronies in the bike share business. He won’t be able to implement more road diets. He won’t be able to attempt to socially engineer people onto bikes and mass transit, neither of which fit the suburban family lifestyles of many who live and work in this region.

Mayor Jenny Durkan thanked Kubly for his service to Seattle and wished him luck, saying, “In a time of unprecedented growth, Scott set the stage for a significant increase in multi-modal investments in our city, which will have an impact for decades to come.”

Is that what he was doing? Was he serving us?

Let’s run through just a few of Kubly’s greatest hits:

• “I think what the incident from Tuesday highlights is that we actually do a good job of incident response,” Kubly said just two days after an overturned semi-truck full of fish halted traffic for nine hours on Highway 99 in March 2015.
• “Encourage people to telecommute … Encourage people to maybe take a day off work and run local errands, anything that we can do to minimize the amount of people that are traveling into Downtown,” Kubly said prior to a September 2015 visit from the Chinese president that snarled traffic throughout Seattle.
• “I can assure your listeners and the residents of Seattle that it’s not going to happen again. I’m hoping and happy to get closure today and refocus the public’s attention on work that the Department is doing to help Seattle residents with their transportation needs,” said Kubly in June 2016, after he was fined $5,000 for violating city ethics rules by failing to disclose a conflict of interest relating to Pronto, the bike sharing business he once worked for.

Honestly, this is a bittersweet day for me. I won’t have Scott Kubly to kick around anymore. But for the city, for the region, for residents of Seattle, this is a time to celebrate.

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