Dori: You’re paying for SDOT runner-up’s brand-new $195K job

Does everyone remember what the city did with the new police chief position? They interviewed three finalists, gave the job to Carmen Best, and then created a six-figure job for one of the losers. Now the City of Seattle and Mayor Jenny Durkan are doing the exact same thing with a brand-new transportation-centric position.

There were three finalists to be the new SDOT director. United States Air Force Major General Mike Worden was one of the candidates, but was not hired because he did not have enough transportation experience. So the city hired Sam Zimbabwe instead.

But, we have just found out that Mayor Durkan has once again created a job for one of the losing candidates, the director of citywide mobility operations coordination. And through this job, the retired major general will be paid $195,000 a year.

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According to a press release sent out by the mayor’s office, Worden’s job is to coordinate the city’s response to the “Seattle Squeeze,” which is “a four-year period when public and private megaprojects in the region will create new challenges to getting in and around Seattle.”

This is the job description from the mayor’s office:

Worden will be the single point of contact for ensuring the City’s 29 departments have a coordinated response to new mobility challenges and impacts to department operations, including managing the right of way, conducting incident response, and ensuring the continued delivery of emergency services. He will also help ensure the City is working closely with partner agencies on operations and planning.

I have a small query here: What is the guy they hired above him, the SDOT director, doing every day? Can’t he coordinate between agencies? Can’t he track whether things are being done efficiently? Isn’t that what a boss is supposed to do? And yet they create, out of thin air, another $195,000-a-year bureaucrat job.

It just makes me wonder, who does this retired major general know? Who promised him that even if he didn’t get the SDOT director position, he would still receive a nearly $200,000-per-year consolation prize job that never existed before?

That’s what we do in Seattle. We just keep making things worse, and then spending more money on them, whether it’s traffic, homelessness, or drug addiction. All we do is hire six-figure bureaucrats who make things worse and worse and worse, and Jenny Durkan is at the top of that list.

Everybody else in politics and the media keeps watching out for the criminals. You keep giving cover to Jenny Durkan as she creates jobs out of thin air. And so, my motto for 2019 is this:

You keep protecting the criminals, and I will keep protecting the taxpayers.

I will make sure everybody knows that the more we spend, the worse things get around here.

Let’s see if traffic gets better now that they have two guys making $200,000 a year running SDOT, instead of just one. It’s not their money, it’s your money. And they throw it around like Monopoly money.

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