So, here we go again; Seattle has elected another new mayor following a series of single-term mayors who did not have enough time to achieve all they promised. Will Katie Wilson be different, or will she be one more city chief executive taking only a brief ride on the civic merry-go-round?
Like her predecessor, Bruce Harrell, Wilson seems like a sincere, decent person who wants to do the right thing. Unlike her predecessor, she has scant experience in city government. That experience worked against Harrell in the mayoral election because he was branded — fairly or not — as the establishment bum who needed tossing out. In four years, will Wilson look like the starry-eyed novice whose socialist-lite schemes were too dreamy and impractical to work?
Wilson is not the first mayor to come from outside the usual political paths. Back in the late 1970s, Seattle picked a television news reporter, Charles Royer, to run the city and he turned out to be a great success — but that success came in Royer’s second and third terms after hits and misses and a lot of learning on the job during his initial four years. In the last decade-and-a-half, no mayor has won a second term.
Harrell, the son of a Japanese mother and a Black father who pushed his way up from humble beginnings in Seattle’s Central Area, narrowly missed winning another shot in an election that was nearly a tie. Wilson, an East Coast child of privilege who arrived in Seattle after dropping out of Oxford, should be smart enough to know her victory was no mandate. Wilson needs to grow beyond her life as a progressive activist; she needs to be what she has promised she would be: a mayor for everyone in this city.
Wilson will try to find a more effective way to serve the many unhoused people in our city, but, as she attempts this, she must not ignore the concerns of residents and shop owners who feel the negative impacts of encampments, drug use and criminal activity.
Wilson will support novel alternatives to jailing and prosecuting petty criminals, those who are addicted to drugs and people with threatening mental disabilities, but she will be seen as a failure if she forgets the victims — largely people in already disadvantaged communities — who suffer at the hands of anti-social and violent perpetrators.
Wilson will act on her biggest issue, the high cost of living in this rich city, particularly for renters, but she would be wise not to forget that vibrant neighborhoods are what make Seattle an unusually livable metropolis, and that all the good works she hopes to achieve rely on tax revenue from a strong business sector that cannot be merely vilified as an enemy camp.
As mayor, there are plenty of sharp needles Katie Wilson will have to thread and I wish her luck. Oh, and on the way to doing big things, I hope she’ll fix a few potholes.
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