About our 2019 endorsements

Endorsements for city council races are starting to trickle in, and we are hard at work on ours as well.

With regards to the City Council, we have many, many candidates who are seeking their first office. This new council will see many important issues over the next few years. Some that are top of mind for us include:

• Lifting the apartment ban on the majority of Seattle's residential land
• Keeping large housing projects from getting bogged down in NIMBY complaints
• Staying strong on bike and bus priority in the face of parochial (or mayoral) pressure
• Increasing funding for buses, either through a renewed Seattle TBD or another measure, hopefully in a way that helps get buses out of traffic

Unlike previous cycles, rather than select a single candidate we will rate candidates as "Excellent", "Good", "Fair," or "Poor" based on their estimated policy impact, positive or negative, on transit and land use progress in Seattle. As most candidates in city council races don't have any legislative or political experience, we'll rely what's in their platform and what they've said at various debates.

Here's how we define those terms. This is evolving so we reserve the right to be inconsistent, but we'll do our best to explain our thinking.

• Excellent candidates are ones who have a passion for transit-related issues and the desire to spend political capital making our issues their issues. It's one thing to call for the elimination of single-family zoning in a debate, it's quite another to craft the policy and push it over the finish line.
• Good candidates are ones we mostly agree with on issues but we either have some reservations or we don't think that transit is a particular focus or passion.
• Fair candidates we may disagree with on one or two major things and are at best a continuation of the status quo on the council.
• Poor candidates are unqualified or hold many positions we actively disagree with.

The first round will come shortly. For city council, we'll be offering ratings in Districts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. Lisa Herbold in D1 hasn't drawn any pro-transit/pro-density opposition, so we'll save our ink.

In the meantime, let us know in the comments if there are any suburban races we should be thinking about.

The editorial board consists of Martin Duke, Brent White, and Frank Chiachiere