Proposals are due to Amazon tomorrow from cities interested in recruiting the company – and its 50,000 new jobs – to the community.  You can take a look at the 8-page guidance memo from Amazon here to see specifically the things they are looking for.

In one of his only official acts during his short time as Mayor, Bruce Harrell committed Seattle to putting forth a proposal to keep those jobs here.

Last week, a number of Seattle area elected officials signed a letter asking to hit the “refresh” button with Amazon in the hopes of building a better working relationship between the company and area governments.

As a first step, let’s create a joint task force that will use data to drive results on topics such as transportation, freight mobility, safety, public health investments, educational opportunities and more.

In addition to these areas, the letter also specifies interest in addressing “The Gig Economy.”

This letter is a great first step because it highlights a secret that Amazon knows, a number of companies know, and residents of Puget Sound know if we’re honest with ourselves:  we can barely handle the growth from Amazon’s first 40,000 employees.  They have already announced plans for an additional 6,000.

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Being the kind of city that can handle another 50,000 employees in HQ2 would mean we’d need to be a different kind of metropolitan area.

The mossbacks that killed monorail in the 1970s and that prefer Seattle as a provincial town out west may want to go backwards.  But, economies are like bicycles: you either keep pedaling (growing) or soon, you lose momentum and stall out (recession).

Seattle needs to keep pedaling.

To keep the kinds of companies like Amazon locating to Seattle, growing in Puget Sound, and staying in Washington State, we need to “refresh” our thinking about growing and managing our economy.  Unless we purposely want to stall out our regional economy, here are three things policy makers should be thinking about in order to keep the momentum growing.

It’s time to modernize Sound Transit financing 

Let’s be honest:  getting voter approval for more than $50 billion in funds only to be delivering on improved light rail and transit options decades in the future is not a way to attract and retain job growth.  We’ve grown too quickly – and will likely continue to grow into the future – to have transit solutions delivered in the 2020s and 2030s.

The current financing model at Sound Transit is a result of political compromise and administrative mismanagement in the 1990s.  When the agency was first funded, the legislature didn’t want to provide major capital funding to Sound Transit that would allow for rapid build-out of transit, or to allow Sound Transit to have authority for raising capital on its own in such a way that could leave the state on the hook.

There were good reasons for this.

1. Sound Transit wasn’t demonstrating operational efficiency, and there was a legitimate possibility (though likely small) that a well capitalized agency would mismanage projects, not delivery the goods, and leave the state ultimately holding the bags.  That happened with WPPSS and the memory was not too distant in the 1990s.
2. There is only so much bonding capacity available to the state for capital projects.  The legislature didn’t want to allocate all of that to Sound Transit.
3. Politically, transit was a hot potato with Republicans in eastern Washington, east King County, and other parts of the state against it.  A number of Democrats were still car-centric, too.  And, traffic, while not great in the 1990s, was nothing like it is today.  There wasn’t enough pain in the system to force an open mind.

Today, Sound Transit has two decades of operational performance.  It has demonstrated trust among voters, and importantly has shown the resiliency needed to work through administrative challenges over the years (like the late 1990s).

If we want to be a world class city, we simply need better transit.  We can’t get there with the current funding mechanisms that value risk mitigation over effective service delivery.

Renew up-zoning of urban centers outside of the downtown core

The idea of up-zoning will continue to be a politically charged one given the primary role of single family neighborhoods in Seattle.  But, given how difficult it is to move into the urban center (downtown) and how unlikely that is to change in the near term (see the first point), we should review the idea of up-zoning commercial areas and offer increased incentives for companies to locate there.

Northgate is a prime example of that opportunity.  Significant progress has been made there already over the last decade.  But if the option is a 100-story building downtown or two 50 story buildings in Northgate, it may be time to explore a significant up-zone there.  (I know both are fraught with challenges, but you understand my point.)

If we can’t fit in the employees we currently have in downtown, if it clogs our roadways, if transit isn’t coming in a timely way, if demand for housing in the core is driving up costs, and if residential zoning is a political challenge, let’s build on the urban centers that already exist in the Seattle area and make them stronger.

Northgate, Broadway, Ballard, Rainier, maybe even West Seattle…  They all could be featured for building upon the work that’s already underway.  In other words, this is not an assault on urbanism. It is building on the urban areas that exist, and responding to economic and political reality to address the goal of recruiting and retaining jobs.

Renew the discussion about a tri-county Metro government

Our county and local governments have had a hard time keeping up with the demands of a modern regional economy.  The kind of collaboration that could exist across multiple communities with a more unified structure of government would better position the region to be responsive to the needs of a changing economic structure.  King County and Snohomish County are demonstrating that, in part, by choosing to submit a unified proposal to Amazon rather than do something themselves. The awareness that they are stronger together than apart is exactly the kind of collaboration I’m talking about.

It turns out there are a number of models for this sort of collaboration. In Portland, city and county governments have ceded responsibility for growth management, solid waste, parks and other uses to a “Metro” government.  It’s the only directly elected regional government in the US – and it’s working well by many standards.

It turns out we have a similar tool on the books in Washington State: a metropolitan municipal corporation.  This is a government formed by existing jurisdictions to address a regional problem. While not directly elected, it is a government comprised of the directly elected officials from participating jurisdictions.

This is exactly the sort of thing that works in Washington State. Many folks won’t recall that King County Metro is the merged government between King County and the Metro government (itself named as a result of the ‘metropolitan municipal corporation’ statute, for which it was created).  Metro started in 1958 as a result of a lack of coordination on sewer treatment, and the consequent pollution of raw sewage flowing into Lake Washington.

In other words, we don’t have to look to Oregon to find a model of regional government.  We started it here, in Washington State!  We can do it 60 years after it started here as well.

Bottom line

As a region, it would be very difficult to accommodate Amazon’s HQ2 even if they wanted to stay.

But, there will be other opportunities for recruiting, growing and retaining great employers in our region.  To be ready, we have to start planning now and carefully thinking through the financing, zoning and governance questions that will be required of us moving forward.

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