Restore trees, please
The mayor plans to send back a hefty check he got last week from Richard Sikora. All the same, Sikora has made his point.
On Dec. 26, Sikora, owner of the Pioneer Building in Seattle’s Pioneer Square district, mailed Mayor Greg Nickels a personal check for $10,000 with a letter asking Nickels to replant the 17 trees cut down last March in nearby Occidental Park.
The trees were cut down as part of a $1.8 million Pro Parks Levy project that left 43 full-grown sycamores standing, but replaced the benches and rustic cobblestone design of landscape architects Jones & Jones with a plaza that a group of Pioneer Square residents and business owners had sued to stop.
“I’m sure that you didn’t realize how detrimental the removal of those trees would be asthetically, or how disturbing it would be to people who have loved the park for many years,” Sikora, a retired professor, wrote to the mayor.
“We appreciate the gesture,” Nickels spokesperson Marty McOmber said of the $10,000 check, but “we’ve replaced those trees two for one in the area.” Judging from thank-yous the mayor has received about the improvements, he added that the changes “have been been really well received.”
Housing for whom?
After getting out to community meetings and talking with constituents, Seattle City Councilmember Tom Rasmussen came to a conclusion: The mayor’s proposal to expand a tax break for residential developers is just a tad rich for Seattle.
In August, the mayor proposed expanding Seattle’s Multifamily Tax Exemption, a 10-year property tax break that developers get for making up to a third of their units “affordable” in new buildings. Under the mayor’s plan, the exemption could be used in 22 more areas of the city (up from 17) and serve renters who make more money (up to 100 percent of the area’s median income, or $75,600 for a family of four, an increase from today’s cap of 70 percent).
On Dec. 4, Rasmussen responded with a more moderate proposal, one that distinguishes between areas such as Rainier Valley, where development is sluggish, and Ballard, where condos are shooting up daily. In low-growth areas, developers would have to make up to a third of their units affordable to people at 70 to 80 percent of median income (topping out at $59,600 for a family of four). In high-growth areas, a renter’s income could be 90 percent of median.
The good news, says John Fox of the Seattle Displacement Coalition, is that the next time the City Council’s Housing Committee meets in January — that is, after Rasmussen is no longer the committee’s chair — they’ll be working with his proposal, not the mayor’s.
The bad news is that “it still sucks,” he says. “It’s still a giveaway to developers.”
—Cydney Gillis