McGinn elected Seattle Mayor

Mike McGinn

Seattle chose a new mayor Nov. 3. When the “polls” in the all-mail election closed at 8 pm, the vote was close. Just 910 votes separated the candidates: Joe Mallahan, a former executive at T-Mobile, and Mike McGinn, former head of the local Sierra Club chapter and founder of The Great City Initiative. Neither man had ever held elected office. As the vote count progressed, McGinn’s lead initially shrank to less than 500 votes before swelling to more than 1,000, then topping 2,000 by the end of the week and reaching almost 5,000 on Nov. 9, six days after the election.

Though he’d never held or run for office before, Mayor-elect McGinn is no stranger to city politics. He ran a successful campaign against a tax measure to expand the region’s new light rail system because it also included money for new highways. After defeating that measure in 2007, he campaigned hard for one that would fund an expansion of light rail without the new highways. It passed, as did a parks levy he worked on. Following those victories, McGinn became the first serious challenger to two-term incumbent Greg Nickels who had the backing of Seattle’s business community. McGinn based his campaign on opposition to an unpopular plan to replace Seattle’s aging waterfront viaduct highway with a $4.2 billion tunnel.

After his populist, all-volunteer campaign surprised the city with a first place finish in the primary, McGinn was out-fundraised by 3 to 1 (largely thanks to a $230,000 donation Mallahan made to his own campaign) and had no support of the business community, unions, the city’s last daily newspaper, the state’s Democratic governor or virtually any other endorsement that matters in Seattle, with a few exceptions. Things looked dim for the candidate who was known to ride his bike to campaign events. But as he started talking about other issues, including mass transit, green jobs and business, voters started listening. When he pledged to respect a deal made by the City Council to move forward on the tunnel, McGinn closed in on Mallahan and ended up winning the campaign.

During the campaign, McGinn made the time to answer some e-mailed questions from Sustainable Industries about his plans for the city and its business community. We weren’t able to run it in the magazine at the time due to space constraints, but now that he’s been elected and will be running Washington’s largest city—and a city the rest of the country regularly looks to for leadership in all things sustainable—we thought it would be a good idea to share his views on sustainability, business and the role cities play in combating climate change as he gets ready to take office.

SI How satisfied are you with Seattle's climate and sustainability policies? Which need the most work and what needs to be added?

MM Satisfaction, whether personal, professional or civic, comes based upon our perception of how we are doing compared to someone else. While Seattle is often heralded as a bastion of sustainable thinking nationally, when we look globally we see that we need to be doing much more in order to have a positive effect on our environment. 

In the Northwest, the transportation sector accounts for the lion’s share of our GHG emissions. Therefore, our transportation policy is a huge component of our climate policy. The best thing that we can do is to integrate our transportation and land use policies in order to make transit, biking, and walking the modes of least resistance. 

For years, our citizens have been far ahead of our decision makers. Despite an increased demand for walkable urban neighborhoods connected by an exceptional transit system, we have left these infrastructure investments chronically under-funded. We must correct that and aggressively invest in developing the public and private resources to make this vision of a sustainable Seattle come to pass. 

However, we must remember that sustainability is not just about economic or environmental concerns. We need to make sustainability part of public health, job creation and education policies. Without this holistic approach, our successes will be fleeting and our bright green future will remain in doubt

SI If you are elected, what would be the centerpieces of your sustainability policies and how would they affect businesses?

MM Sustainability policies may include:

• Increasing transit within Seattle, including providing incentives for transit-related businesses;
• Promoting Seattle as a green jobs hub, including investing in energy audits, low impact development and sustainable construction and design;
• Increasing bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure
• Supporting transit-oriented development

These would create more sustainability-oriented jobs and would increase the types of jobs available.

SI How would you court cleantech and other "green" businesses, if at all? 

MM Washington lags behind other states establishing clean energy policies that attract new business ventures; Seattle can lead by example. An obvious place to start is by growing industries that promote greater home efficiency. The city should advocate home energy performance scoring as required information when homes go on the market. It should also expedite permitting for homeowners who choose to improve the efficiency of their homes when they remodel. These policies would open business opportunities for cutting-edge home designers and home energy professionals. Another program that should be explored is to provide a renewable energy financing program similar to the exceptional successes of Berkeley’s FIRST Solar Financing Program.

From a manufacturing perspective, Seattle has an exceptionally talented workforce and a regional, national and international transportation network that few cities on the West Coast can rival. The talent and resources can be brought to bear on any number of cleantech enterprises, and the City of Seattle can, and should, promote these businesses through tax incentives, expedited permitting and any required zoning changes.

SI What role do you see cities having in the push towards sustainability? In what areas can municipal governments have the greatest impacts?

MM As Mike Houck of the Urban Greenspace Institute in Portland is fond of saying, ”In livable cities, lies the preservation of the world.” I couldn’t agree more, and Seattle, where our mediashed is bigger than our watershed, should be leading the way.

We know that cities play a critical role in the battle against global climate change. Countless studies have shown the beneficial climate impacts of city living. However, the benefits for citizens go beyond their impact on a better ecological future. For those who chose to live in and invest in our cities, the dividends include increased health, better social connections, and more time to dedicate to civic or religious engagement.

Perhaps the best thing that cities can do is to ensure that cities are magnets of livability. That was why I founded Great City and why I helped lead the effort to pass last year’s Parks Levy in Seattle. It is only by balancing livability with our continued growth that we will be able to push for a sustainable future.

SI The main tenet of your campaign in the primary was opposition to the tunnel replacement for the viaduct. Some say that this will negatively impact businesses in Seattle and means that you care more about sustainability than business and the economy. Do you think being more sustainable should mean doing less business or just a certain kind of business?

MM Sustainability is not just about environmental concerns, it is also about economic and social concerns. We have choices about how we spend our limited public resources that are reflected by our shared community values. Most Seattle voters would rather invest in our education system, our transit network and building economic resiliency by seeding our innovation economy, rather than investing in a $4.2 billion dollar tunnel that will not have any downtown exits and will require a toll to use.

Rather than an investment in our future, the tunnel perpetuates the policy mistakes of our past. The debt on those mistakes will be borne by us, our children and grandchildren.

Given the current state of Washington's economy, what do you see as the biggest challenges to pushing your environmental agenda while also improving the city's economy?

MM Environmental and economic concerns cannot be addressed as two different problems. We need to find the places where economic and environmental policies align and aggressively pursue those policies. This requires a different way of budgeting, developing policy and governing than we have seen in the past. This will be the biggest challenge.