This morning, more than 30 of Seattle’s largest employers put their names on a letter to Mayor Katie Wilson and the City Council demanding the Mayor and city treat disorder as the economic problem it is.
The signers include Microsoft President Brad Smith, Costco CEO Ron Vachris, Alaska Air Group CEO Ben Minicucci, Mariners owner John Stanton, plus leaders from Starbucks, Nordstrom, T-Mobile, Zillow Group, Puget Sound Energy, Weyerhaeuser, Virginia Mason Franciscan Health, BECU, and the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce. These firms pay the payroll, fill the office towers, stock the stores, and write the checks that keep the city’s tax base from collapsing.
What the letter asks for is specific. Increase public-safety investment and protect the funding in the budget. Turn the CCTV system back on and use it. Produce a public-safety action plan with measurable goals and monthly reporting, on a 100-day clock, according to reporting of the letter. Get priority 911 response closer to a seven-minute standard. Put more officers on patrol. Crack down on open-air drug markets. Arrest people who repeatedly refuse treatment and shelter. Ban camping within 250 feet of parks and playgrounds. Clear encampments near schools.
The letter’s key line is the one City Hall should tape to the budget binder: “A credible public-safety plan and a budget that protects the investments behind it are inseparable. Seattle voters have made it clear that they expect both.”
That is not ideology. It is how a city stays employable. Retail theft, slow 911, and tents next to playgrounds are not abstract “root causes.” They are why customers stay home, why night shifts get harder to staff, and why companies look at Bellevue and start measuring square footage.
Wilson’s office spent yesterday talking about a “resilient Seattle economy” task force and a fund to keep startups from leaving, but you cannot task-force your way around a storefront that is boarded because no one feels safe walking to it. You cannot retain talent if employees spend their commute stepping around needles. Employers are offering partnership. They are also putting the city on notice that partnership without enforcement is not acceptable.
Small businesses feel this first. They do not have campus security or a government-affairs shop. They close earlier, lose inventory, and raise prices, or they leave. When the largest employers in the region say the same thing in one letter, it is because the smaller ones have been saying it for years.
Wilson can treat this as an attack from “the rich,” or she can treat it as the price of keeping the tax base that funds everything else she wants to do. The letter even notes Wilsons weak approval numbers. That is politics. The substance is simpler: turn the cameras on, answer the phone when someone calls 911, and stop pretending that a camping ban near a playground is cruelty.
Seattle does not have a shortage of plans. It has a shortage of follow-through. The companies that still write the city’s largest paychecks just offered to help, if City Hall will finally do the basic job of making the streets usable there is a way out of the mess.
