DBTrek wrote: ↑Tue May 15, 2018 10:01 pm
"How are they unaccountable?"
"The city's General Fund and voter-approved
spending has grown from $1.28 billion in 2012 to $1.78 billion in 2016,
a 39 percent increase," said the letter. "Over the same period, Seattle's
population grew by only 11 percent, and cumulative inflation was only 6.8 percent.
"One must ask,
what do we have to show for this drastic increase in spending?"[/b]. . .
. . ."Recommendations from national homelessness experts that Seattle could make serious progress in addressing homelessness have been ignored (at best) and arguably rejected by the Council (at worst)," said the letter.
"For example, the Council recently restored funding to certain homeless service providers
that failed to meet the performance requirements of the recent Request for Proposal process. This is a concrete example of the Council's politicization of the homeless services contracting system . . ."
https://www.seattlepi.com/local/politic ... 785992.php
They spend money without achieving success, then simply raise taxes for failed policies. That's being both financially unaccountable and holding oneself unaccountable for failure. I didn't say they were not elected.
The original head tax was allegedly going to build
2000 of a needed
20,000 "affordable housing units". Now they've passed a tax to fund about
900.
So the first plan was to tax businesses an intolerable amount to create
10% of the needed "affordable housing". Instead they've passed a tax that merely slows business growth to fund
less than 5% of what they claim to need. Wow. Seattle just taxed our major employers into stasis so they could fund
less than 5% of their own solution to homelessness.
A failed policy is kind of relative to the other available options. For example, your proposed policy of creating zero affordable houses for the poor and telling them to fuck off would be "successful" on its own terms, but would not solve the poor people's actual issue. Not coincidentally, that plan got passed up for the policy that creates 900 more affordable homes than there were before.
Perhaps that money could have been spent more efficiently to solve the problem.
But for the poor person being priced out of their home, an inefficient, wasteful solution is better than, "fuck you."
You can't be mad that people chose something that you think sucks, if you gave them an even worse choice.
Poor people are not going to vote themselves out of their own city. Likely the way they figure it is this: If the companies leave because of the tax, the rent becomes affordable again, if they get the affordable housing tax dollars, then at least 900 more low income workers and their families will be able to live there. For the low income Seattleites, this is a rational choice. The reason they keep voting for the liberal council is because the conservative politicians have nothing to offer them, and as you admit yourself, neither do you.
From the article:
A City Council spokesperson says the dollars are tracked by the Mayor’s Office and broken up by different departments.
When you look at the Department of Human Services, for example, you see a pie graph breaking down the dollars.
About 34% went to permanent housing support and 50% got eaten up in the emergency category -- things like hygiene centers, authorized encampments and emergency shelters.
The mayor on Monday also said she’s hearing the concerns, promising to account for every penny spent.
“The people of Seattle have my pledge as their mayor I am going to work as hard as I can to make sure that every penny is spent wisely and efficiently and makes a difference,” Mayor Jenny Durkan said.
Durkan has until December 14 to submit a final spending proposal.
She says she will also hire an independent economist and appoint an oversight committee.
