Mayor Katie Wilson Responds to Her Critics

Today we welcomed Mayor Katie Wilson to the show. We have been a podcast just slightly longer than Katie Wilson has been the mayor, so it feels a little bit like we’ve grown up together. Here’s a little preview of what Jane and Katie talked about:

• 🏙️ How has it been going from organizer to mayor?  ”From business to labor to community organizations… there's more of a need to have some kind of relationship where you're able to work together even if you don't always agree on things, and that is kind of the baseline that I've been trying to establish with everyone.”
• 🚌 On transit being a core issue:  ”The sense that I have is that the response from Seattle residents is really overwhelmingly positive. I think there's a wide recognition in Seattle that we need to make our transit system work, right? Seattle voters have consistently, overwhelmingly supported funding transit, and I think we all know that when we're putting our public funding into something, we wanna make sure that it works well.”
• ⏸️ Hitting pause on surveillance expansion: “Moving forward I want to get a much clearer sense of the legitimate place of surveillance technology in our larger public safety system. What are the limits of that? How can we make sure that we have as good as possible protections in place?... Surveillance should be a very small, modest part of public safety.”
• That’s just a little bit of what they cover. But there’s also AI-policy, Ballard encampments, car-free park weekends, and a lot more. Listen here or watch here.