March 20

Councilwoman Debora Juarez’s top three tasks

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Debora Juarez,  the Seattle city councilwoman representing virtually all of Maple Leaf, has posted this guest column over at CityLiving.com: A lot accomplished in first 100 days.

Specifically three things:

In our first 100 days in office, we set out with three goals to deliver on the promise of district representation. First, we aspired to create momentum around the three major capital projects planned for our district. Second, we planned district tours of major enterprises in North Seattle. Third, we opened a district office, where our constituents could speak with my staff and myself without the need to travel downtown to City Hall.

The district office is at North Seattle College, College Center Building, Room 1451, though I can’t seem to find a link to it on her web site.

The capital projects are:

1) The new north police substation at Northeast 130th Street and Aurora Avenue North.

2) The oft-discussed pedestrian bridge between North Seattle College and the Northgate Transit Center. From the city’s web site:

With the passage of the Move Seattle Levy, the Northgate Pedestrian and Bicycle Bridge project has acquired full funding for the construction of the bridge. The project team will continue to refine the design of the bridge.

3) “Finally, I have been advocating for our district’s second light rail stop, slated for Northeast 130th Street and Interstate-5. This station would serve the Lake City, Bitter Lake and Haller Lake communities.”

There is no mention of Pronto, which surprisingly, continues to be a flash point over the city budget (see comments at link).

Her guest column is here. Juarez’s own blog features “Happy International Women’s Day.”

About the author 

Sara W

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  1. A very disappointing opening act from our new Councilmember. I had a sliver of hope that the Council rep from District 5 would show a little more common sense than the rest of the City Council, but it appears that hope will go unfulfilled.

    Councilmember Juarez is already hip to the game of logrolling and horse-trading that is now going to be standard procedure with the new council structure. Voting to continue funding Pronto when (a) the cited membership figures were blatantly inflated and (b) the head of SDOT, Mr. Kubly, has a major conflict of interest, is a shortsighted and frankly disrespectful vote by Councilmember Juarez.

    Perhaps we can chalk this up to “getting off to a rough start”, and in the future she will more accurately represent her constituents here in District 5. But, I realize that is probably asking too much.

  2. I believe Ms. Juarez changed her vote after the fact under pressure from other members of the council. The story that she was miscounted is not to be believed, if our council is so incompetent it can’t count they need to be replaced. Kubly is being investigated for using fradulent numbers to persuade the City, and should be jailed for theft of public funds for the $300,000 that he diverted to Pronto last fall.

  3. Not surprisingly, Seattle City Councilwoman Deborah Juarez has gone “deaf, dumb, and blind” to Maple Leaf residents and her other District 5 constituents on her vote to spend $1.4 million dollars to bailout Pronto. If she truly believed she made the right decision, Juarez would be front and center defending her vote on her blog and her council webpage. The fact that she has gone quiet means Juarez is hoping her constituents will forget about her vote, but the local news media won’t let her off so easy.

    http://www.king5.com/news/local/seattle/city-launches-investigation-into-sdot-director-over-pronto-ties/97249954

    “Seattle City Councilman Mike O’Brien repeated that Monday, March 14: ‘We have over 3,000 members to the system today.’ It was a statistic cited by his colleague Debora Juarez in an email a day later, when she told supporters, ‘Three thousand yearly members of our bike share system would be left without service had the council voted against Pronto, and the city would have been obligated to repay $1 million in federal grant monies’.  Juarez and O’Brien both argued, successfully, membership was part of the overall equation in the bailout.

    King 5 has been told by the general manager of Pronto that the 3,000 members of Pronto was a bogus number. The current number of Pronto members is “closer to 1,900” (and what does “closer” mean? Closer to 1,500 members?).

    The Seattle City Council has known since the bailout was proposed that Pronto management has been giving them misleading information, but they still accepted the misleading information “hook, line, and sinker” without question. How hard would it have been to ask for hard data proof? Apparently it wasn’t that hard because King 5 was able to get the correct membership numbers.

    I really don’t fault Pronto management for giving misleading information since they were trying to unload a failing business to the City. It’s like buying a used car. If the buyer doesn’t take it on a test drive; if the buyer doesn’t count the tires; if they buyer doesn’t open the hood; if the buyer doesn’t have a mechanic check it . . . the blame is on the buyer for being so gullible. Sadly, Seattle taxpayers are now on the hook for $1.4 million dollars because the City Council was so gullible.

    Councilwoman Juarez based her support of the Pronto bailout because she wanted to protect the interest of the 3,000 (phantom) Pronto members (and not the interest of her District 5 constituents). Now that we know the 3,000 members was an over inflated, bogus number; perhaps Councilwoman Juarez will tell her constituents if “closer to 1,900” is still an acceptable membership number to warrant spending $1.4 million dollars. I suspect there isn’t an unacceptable low membership number. She and her other city council members would have voted for the bailout if there was only 6 Pronto members; but I guarantee Juarez is going to stay “deaf, dumb, and blind” when it comes to her bailout vote for Pronto.

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