Lack of transit funding no longer rings true. The area just funded $50 billion in one of the most ambitious public transit expansion projects in the country, with heavy expansion of the train network. This is after an expansion still completing to grow its rail network. (Granted, it should have happened earlier, but this criticism seems less valid now than 20 years ago.)

And SPD stopped enforcing marijuana laws well before the state legalized it. It was classified as "the lowest possible enforcement priority". And then, last year, Seattle vacated all misdemeanor marijuana charges from prior to legalization.

Seattle, overall, seems reasonably well-managed. I think City Council gets up to antics now and then - they nearly lost $12 million in federal funds because of some political grandstanding in December - but the staff who actually run the city seem to do a good job.

Sometimes the level of effort to communicate and involve citizens slows down needed progress, such as the upzoning efforts designed to increase density, but they would get criticized for not doing that too.

"Lack of transit funding no longer rings true."

I can only address this for the Duvall area, but I can't agree with this statement. According to the latest city council meetings I was at, we're slated for >11% YoY growth in population (mandated at a higher level of govt, to my understanding, and without commensurate increases in funding), but have consumed our road repair funding for the next 5 years. This not including regular shutdown of the only two roads across the river, for which we have to beg Redmond to fund repairs for if issues happen, not even getting INTO the boondoggle that was the novelty hill switchback being built at half bandwidth due to legal/contractor malfeasance. (I'm also frankly, as you say, still bitter that the train buildout didn't start years ago, going back home to philly and being able to easily get into center city from >hour out via train is _such a relief_)

Enforcement was actually less my issue than how they've handled licencing. There was IIRC a lottery for licensing and they didn't take into account actual grower realized capacity, which alongside some very high tax levels, puts it non-competitive with the black market, has lowered quality and availability, and makes it very difficult to create new businesses.

I'd certainly agree with "Reasonably well managed" and would hope my complaints don't paint over the successes that I also mentioned. As you say with the city council grandstanding (and I'd mention some of the corruption in the ports prior) there are some pockets of issues, and that's why I try to "stay hungry" as it were for being on my local govts to improve themselves.

I don't understand. Duvall is a separate city from Seattle. Is there some tie-in on road funding I'm not aware of?

That's the understanding they communicated to us. Basically, the inter-township roads are funded in large part by the larger funding pools (redmond+seattle) and oftentimes "Growth funding" has to trickle down from federal, state and county levels.

Apologies in advance if I'm totally off base, I'm trying to repeat near-verbatim what I heard in township/county meetings on this topic. (congestion and growth)

I called around a bit and it sounds to me like Duvall basically built half its allocated growth housing for 20 years in about a year and a half and spent a ton of money on roads along the way, and now wants the PSRC to double both growth targets and funding for roads.

Building lots of housing seems pretty reasonable to me, but I'm not sure I can blame Redmond or Seattle for not writing blank checks on this kind of thing.

To be perfectly clear, I don't necessarily _blame_ redmond or seattle. I just think the convolution around "who funds what and who deals with the pragmatic result" is both unnecessarily opaque in this situation, and not a question I've heard any good answers to. This is why I handwaved at this problem as "things we're less good at." Going to years of township meetings and getting effectively shrugs and "we know this is a problem but no plan to address it outside of waiting for more upper tier funding" doesn't really engender much faith in this category, unfortunately.

(also, I was under the impression that the allocated growth targets were "set on high by the powers that be" and handed down to the townships?)

Good to know I'm not _totally_ in left field with my remembering of those meetings though... (I'm fascinated how you "Called around a bit" though, civ-e/govt work? I wish I could get those sort of answers as a resident :P)

Honestly, I'm not super well connected so I'm not sure what to make of the comment that the process is opaque.

For example, the PSRC is just one of the groups involved in this kind of funding but it's probably the one most at loggerheads with Duvall on this issue as far as I can tell after an hour or so of looking into it. They have a website and it really is super clear as to what they're doing and where the money is going. They publish the agendas for meetings on a nice calendar with links to minutes and presentations going back several years, and for more recent years have full audio and video recordings of meetings. You literally wouldn't have to step outside of your door to know everything that happened at one of those. To me, that's unbelievable transparency.

Regarding "the powers that be", I'm sure they are. Duvall is pretty small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, and while it does vote on the PSRC it's just one vote of 80-- and that's not even thinking about the myriad other planning bodies involved with roadworks or civil planning in King County. How much say in them Duvall has I can't guess, but if I had to I wouldn't assume that it ran the show.

Regarding calling around, it wasn't very backroom-- I just called the office of my rep on the city council and they emailed me back about two hours later with a bunch of information, most of which was useless and some of which was on point. In the meantime I called a friend who does property development and got the basic lay of the land. Between the two perspectives I got the general sense I've conveyed in these messages and not much else, since I haven't had much cause to think about the roadworks in that area before. I hope that doesn't sound dismissive-- I just don't live there and so haven't thought that much about it.

No not dismissive at all, everything you've said sounds quite sane, thanks for indulging my dumb questions :)

I've just had different experiences when interacting with local govt, so this is in part the self-reflective "what am I doing wrong" question. (I've emailed reps before and gotten what amounts to form letters back, if even that.) And similarly, the transparency you mention from the PSRC site, I simply never got from our local transit meetings. Bluntly, they've never even mentioned that acronym to us, insofar as what little notes I have say. May simply be that I'm asking the wrong questions or the wrong people.

I've never gotten anything but a form letter from my rep either. I usually just call their office and say I have a general question about X, could you please help me find who to ask. The staff seem helpful and knowledgeable as long as you're sensitive to their limits and position-- they can't actually do anything themselves generally. It can take time, although in this case it didn't for whatever reason.

Forward Thrust was almost built, but was doomed due to both an overly ambitious plan requiring a 60% threshold, and misfiring targeting (convincing skeptical suburbanites who lived in the middle of farmland vs. turning out urban minorities already using transit). They had a majority but not 60%.

> "there are worse elsewhere" always struck me as vacuous [...]

There's a suggestion that when discussing design objectives with a client, it's better to provide multiple prototypes than one, as their differences then become vocabulary for the discussion.

I wonder if public dialog might be served by having a richer set of such landmarks. Instead of abstractions like "transparency is good", perhaps more concrete comparison and competition like "look at that transparency in city A - let's aspire to that". And negative exemplars like "we are sooo much better than city B - yay us", and cautionary tales "but let's not get too cocky, given how fast city C declined", and peer pressure "wait, a few years ago we were ahead of city D, but now look at them - we've got to get moving here". Policy choices are currently discussed as "that might tend to have these effects" and whistles, rather than as "that would make us more like cities E or F and less like G or H - is that what we want?"

So I wonder if one could have a nuanced, specific, and helpful use of "that is done better/worse in some other place"?

Did the city have much power over marijuana policy? It seems like that was mostly the state legislature, no?

You're entirely right. I was, laxly, overlapping county/city/state legislature, since they all have some amount of impact on your day to day. (Transportation, another of my example, at least in my county, is largely being hamstrung due to a trickle down of "lack of fed funding so lack of state funding so lack of city funding so ...")