This VXNews interview, Greg Spotts, Director of Seattle's Department of Transportation (SDOT), focuses on the recent passage of that City’s Proposition 1—an 8-year $1.55 billion transportation levy that received 66% voter approval. The levy will fund the modernization of City streets and bridges, as well as: active transportation, shared mobility, and the integration of new housing with transportation. Spotts specifically emphasizes the importance of “efficient public realm” management, dynamic curb space allocation, and leveraging local and federal funding to support Seattle's growth and infrastructure needs.
Greg, as director of Seattle's Department of Transportation, please begin with an update on the significance of Seattle’s Proposition 1, the measure just approved overwhelmingly by the City’s voters.
Greg Spotts: All of us at SDOT are thrilled with the passage of our renewal of a transportation levy that's bigger and better than the previous one. Transportation-specific taxes fund about 1/3 of our annual budget.
When I arrived at SDOT in September 2022, we were finishing up year 7 of the existing 9-year levy, and we'd only spent a little more than half of the money. The entire time I've been here, we've had to be laser focused on finishing strong on the existing levy, so we could demonstrate to the voters that November 2024 would be a good time ask for a renewal of that Levy. And we ended up renewing it at a larger size.
We took the existing 9-year, $930 million levy, we plussed it up for inflation, and then we added another 30%, so we ended up with a $1.55 billion transportation tax for the next 8 years. We are proud that 66% of the voters voted yes —that's 260,000 votes to invest in our streets and bridges.
How did the campaign frame the levy for voters?
We did some polling along the way. We polled what size levy people were comfortable with. We asked folks to rank all these different potential investment areas, and then we tested some different messaging. We ended up arriving on ‘Maintain and Modernize.’
There had been debates in the past in Seattle and other places about the perspective that we can't afford to make street improvements because we're not taking care of the assets that we already have. And I felt passionately that was a false choice. The best time to upgrade and modernize our streets and bridges is when we're maintaining them, when we're repaving them, and when we're digging them up. So, we came up with this message to maintain and modernize our infrastructure.
We were able to build a very large coalition around that ‘maintain and modernize’ concept. We had the Port of Seattle and the Chamber of Commerce supporting the levy, and we also had bike groups, pedestrian groups, Disability Rights Washington, transit groups. So, we put a large package together under that ‘maintain and modernize’ umbrella, with just about every stakeholder group who's interested in this topic supporting the ballot measure.
Elaborate on the inclusion in the levy of active transportation. (Note: Toronto's regional leadership just took a stab at the heart of active transportation in that city with plans to roll back bicycle infrastructure.) How does multi-modal transportation align with SDOT’s mobility plans for Seattle?
Something you always have to remember when you work in Seattle is that it's growing fast. And any policy you're considering, you have to think about how would that policy be affected when there's 100,000 additional people living here.
Seattle is a long and skinny, North-South city that's fully built out, and we're adding more density and more multifamily: active transportation is our only way to accommodate that growth. We simply can't accommodate that growth if every new household formed in Seattle brings two passenger cars along with them. So, we're leaning in on supporting transit and having a more walkable and bikeable city. And it's great. There are some really passionate advocates for those topics in Seattle. I think it's a very fun place to practice this craft.
We're also leaning into shared mobility. Lime, which has scooters and e-bikes in Seattle, says that we're now one of their top five global cities. We're not nearly as big as in population and tourism as New York or London, but I think we're going to see something like 4 million rides this year. We have an all-of-the-above strategy to support all types of active transportation.
Personally, I choose to live without a car in Seattle. I live in South Lake Union, which is just one neighborhood north of the downtown, and I rely on our excellent bus system to get around. You really can have a car-free or car-light lifestyle in Seattle if you choose to.
You’ve spoken in past with VX News about One Seattle. What’s the import of that term/ambition?
Seattle is the big city within King County, which reminds me of LA County in that there's many municipalities and unincorporated areas in a large county which controls healthcare and other social services.
In 2021, our current Mayor, Bruce Harrell, was running for the office on this “One Seattle” platform. He ran a unity campaign one year after the 2020 election, with everybody divided up into red and blue camps. When I applied for this job a few months after Mayor Harrell was inaugurated, I found it intriguing that a political would conceive of a unity brand of politics, bringing lots of different people together.
And so, all of us who are direct mayoral appointees, we're trying to channel a One Seattle spirit in our specific domain. Regarding the levy, having a larger package with a more diverse, broad stakeholder group was consistent with the mayor's One Seattle message, and I think that's why we got 66% of the vote. I think a smaller package that might have pitted one mode against another wouldn't have gotten this high level of support.
SDOT’s 2023 theme was: Delivery, fast and flavorful. As 2024 comes to a close, has it been?
You know, there's a season for everything. In my first 4 months of the job, I did a listening tour that included 100 different community walks.
What people told me is that SDOT’s got to deliver on your promises. They said it takes too long to build projects, and even though you set these very far away deadlines, you don't meet them.
Taking that message seriously, I wanted to challenge the staff with a call to action to deliver, but I didn't want them to sand off the best parts of a project just to get something done. The idea was to deliver, in concert with our values, the holistic, multi-benefit project with the favorite parts the community really liked, rather than deliver a bare-bones version. The staff enthusiastically responded to this call to action.
We pushed a whole bunch of projects through the design process in 2023. We had been averaging 12 contracted construction starts a year in prior years. Well, in 2024 we've had 30 contracted construction starts so far through mid-November, and we're not done yet.
In ‘23 this mobilization caused a lot of designs to get completed, which caused a lot of shovels to enter the ground in ’24. I really think that delivery push was a necessary predicate to making a credible case to the voters that they should renew the transportation levy, because if we hadn't spent the money and we hadn't delivered on our promises, it was going to be a real uphill battle to ask for more money.
So, what will be the SDOT motto for 2025?
It's so simple. It's: a running start to the new levy. There is an impression—and I wasn't here in 2015/2016—but there's an impression that when the last levy passed, SDOT didn't staff up and we got off to a slow start. That slow start, along with the pandemic and a concrete strike, affected the whole spending arc of the 9-year levy.
For this new levy, we've had a team working on readiness since July, when the Council voted to put the new levy on the ballot. We have an extremely detailed plan that we're now starting to execute, which is going to include around 72 new positions in 2025. We're also going to fill a bunch of our vacancies that we had been holding open, waiting to see whether the levy passed or not. We're going to onboard more than 100 new people next year. We’ve got to hire the right people and get them started on a very focused set of tasks, so we can show the elected officials and the public that we’re immediately delivering value from the confidence that they placed in us.
You lead Seattle’s DOT, but in the past, we've often discussed the actual need for improved collaborationbetween urban planning and transportation agencies to better address City priorities: housing, mobility and congestion relief. Is such collaboration happening in Seattle?
We're really trying to bring it all together under the frame of this inevitable growth that just seems to never stop. We need to build a lot more housing, and that housing is going to end up being multifamily because there's no more land in Seattle. As we do that, we need to create vibrant urban villages where people can use active transportation to get around.
Post pandemic, there's many more trip types that we're focused on than just the backbone commute, because not everybody's commuting five days a week. It's interesting, some of our neighborhood centers are doing an excellent lunch business on weekdays, because some people are working from home on any given weekday, particularly Mondays and Fridays.
We're really trying to think about creating lower carbon transportation options and placemaking in our streets and plazas to support where the city is positioning that growth to occur.
Something I really love about Seattle that's interesting is people really love their neighborhood, but they actually also love being a Seattleite at large. I was doing this thing on Twitter, of posting pictures from different parts of Seattle, at different parks and small businesses, and I'd ask, ‘Where am I?’ And people loved to guess where I was, and people often guess well outside their neighborhood. There's a pride in being a Seattleite, and we're trying to have this city evolve in a way that maintains a lot of what people love about Seattle, but it does also need to become denser and less car-oriented in order to accommodate that growth. All of us department heads are really trying to work together on that along with the private sector who's really keen to continue investing. The investment that we have in development in Seattle is really remarkable.
Greg, you've long focused your public administration career, both in LA and now Seattle, on building a team and delegating responsibility. Is the above still a priority?
Thank you. I'm very, very blessed with the team that I have at SDOT. I've pretty much exclusively promoted from within. We have a bunch of emerging leaders who are real experts in their field. I think of myself like the conductor of an orchestra: it's not up to me to tell the bassoons how to play the bassoon. I'm trying to get all the sections to play well together. I want my subject matter experts to take ownership in what they're doing and bring forth data-driven recommendations based on industry best practices.
I had an incoming theory with this job that I could be most helpful largely being external facing. Rather than micromanaging the staff, I could be blocking and tackling for our projects, solving community concerns about the things that we wanted to do, and building strong relationships with all kinds of different stakeholders, so they felt like if they if they have a concern, I'll just show up in front of their small business and walk the block with them. They don't have to hire a lobbyist to get an appointment with me and come to the municipal tower.
Because I'm a generalist, I inherently have a sort of delegating and empowering leadership style. But for this job, I also believed that my time could be better spent strengthening SDOT’s external relationships, rather than double clicking into the minutiae of everybody's business. I'm trying to have the agency become more confident and move more quickly.
Along with your interview, we're going to be carrying an interview with the Planning Director of LA as well as the LA Deputy Mayor for Infrastructure, Randall Winston. Both address the need for Los Angeles to develop a new capital infrastructure Plan that will cut through some of the bureaucracy and better allocate assets. Is better long range capital planning & less bureaucracy also needed inSeattle?
Something that attracted me to this job was the way the administration of the public realm was structured in Seattle. It’s quite a bit more efficient and better organized than LA. I'm very excited about that directive in LA. I think it's well needed, and I think it diagnoses the problem really well.
Here, Seattle Department of Transportation pretty much controls every asset at grade level in the public realm. We've got the road surface, the sidewalks, the street trees, the striping, the signage, the signals, the parking and the bridges, and we even site the locations of street lights. We are able to deliver holistic, multi-benefit street designs.
Regarding the LA directive for a multi year capital program: in the annual Seattle budget, there's a five-year capital program, and there's a page about every capital project with a detailed project budget. Literally there are hundreds of these pages about the capital program, and it constrains what I can do compared to when I worked at the Bureau of Street Services. It is something that really helps get everybody on the same page about what is getting built where for how much money.
I learned the value of a five-year capital program that the mayor and council all vote for when they vote for the budget: I started to use it as a tool. For example, there might be somebody who opposes a bike lane or a bus lane, I can tell folks, ‘hey, it's in the capital program. The mayor and the council voted for this—there's already been a representative process to decide this, and my job is to execute the capital program.’ So, I think there's a lot more prioritization and transparency with that type of system, and I'm very interested to see how it unfolds in LA.
With SDOT’s jurisdiction over the entire street-curb nexus, elaborate on how digital tools are being employed today to better manage the City’s curb-space.
It's interesting that the Parking Group at SDOT is now called Curb Space Management, because the curb space could bevaluable for a whole range of uses like Uber and Lyft and taxi;for commercial deliveries; people dropping off their kids at daycare—it doesn't necessarily have to be just for parking
It was very exciting at CoMotion LA. There’s talk about cities digitizing all the curb space and dynamically allocating that space based on different needs at different times of day. In Seattle, we got a federal SMART grant to pilot digitizing the curb, and we're pursuing a second round of that grant with Minneapolis to see if we could enable curb reservations for deliveries using a smartphone, that, for example, UPS could use to count on a space being available for a particular 15 minute window when they need to go into an office building and deliver a hand truck full of packages.
It's really intriguing how our industry is evolving and some of these digital tools that were originally created to monitor scooter share and bike share are being expanded and reutilized to digitize the curb space and manage it in a dynamic and strategic and data driven way. It's going to be a very, very interesting time the next 10 years, as the denser parts of cities start to think really, really strategically about the use of that very valuable space.
Lastly, Greg, with the Nov 5th election results now in—what are the takeaways for SDOT and other DOTs around the country?
Well, certainly we're in a lucky place, having asked Seattle taxpayers to invest in transportation locally. We've always intended to use some of this money in the levy to be matching money for regional, state, and federal grants.
We did very, very well winning competitive grants during the Biden years with the Biden Infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act.
Going forward, we will look for the opportunities where our goals are aligned with the federal goals. And we'll have as much ingenuity and smarts as we can to compete for things where we could be competitive, and when we can't, we'll rely on local money.
Luckily, speaking of elections, there's a carbon tax—a cap and trade system—in the state of Washington. There was a repeal of that act on the ballot that was voted down, which means that there's still a significant state funding source for active transportation in cities in the state of Washington. So,that was a real bright spot for us, in addition to our own transportation levy.