SEATTLE — West Seattle residents wanted to know they weren’t being forgotten during a town hall meeting on Thursday. Several city leaders, including Mayor Jenny Durkan and Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best, answered questions for nearly an hour.
Sam Zimbabwe with the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) answered questions about the West Seattle Bridge, and in a bit of good news said they could get a longer lifespan on repairing the bridge than they thought.
“The best we could hope for was about 10 more years of life, given what we understand now, we think it could be 15 years of life that we could get out of the bridge,” said Zimbabwe.
The West Seattle high bridge, the main connector between West Seattle and other parts of the city, closed suddenly in March when cracks were found to be spreading.
The lower bridge is not open to general traffic for most of the day. That’s reserved for buses, trucks, especially those handling port traffic and emergency vehicles. In June, the city opened it to vehicles between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m.
Zimbabwe said opening the lower bridge to all is still not an option.
“If we opened it up to everyone to access all the time, nobody would be able to access it because there’d be too much demand,” he said.
The city is still working on a cost-benefit analysis to determine the path forward for the bridge. The SDOT plans to have virtual office hours for the community to ask more questions about the bridge, beginning next week.
Chief Best answered questions from residents about crime rates in the area, saying that overall it is down.
“Year to date major crime in West Seattle is down 16%, 389 fewer incidents. Person crime is down 13%, 30 fewer incidents,” Chief Best said.
Chief Best said if the much-discussed defunding of police by 50% were to happen, the southwest precinct would be directly affected.
“There would be fewer patrol officers available for citywide responses and disproportionately impact who's available towards the southwest precinct at each shift," Chief Best said. "It just didn’t make a lot of sense to staff six people at the southwest precinct on any given shift.”
Mayor Durkan added re-imagining policing would need to be a community-driven effort. She also did not commit to a 50% reduction in the police budget.
“We’re not looking at a fraction or a number, we’re really looking at what is the Seattle Police Department doing and what does it take to fund that,” she said.