SEATTLE, Washington — Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson on Monday, November 2, vetoed the centrepiece bill of the city's Vehicle Resident Assistance Program — a new permit system that would have decided which people living in recreational vehicles may keep parking on Seattle streets, and for how long. The veto kills, for now, Council Bill 121283, the one bill in the five-bill package that carried enforcement teeth; Wilson signed the other four bills, which put money and services behind helping vehicle residents into shelter and housing.
The vetoed bill, sponsored by Councilmember Dan Strauss of District 6 and passed by the City Council in October, would have created an RV permit program: people already living in RVs could continue to do so if they followed current city laws and basic rules and stayed on a waitlist for appropriate shelter, while motorhomes and travel trailers without a permit would have been limited to two hours of parking on city streets at a time. The program rested on a one-time census to identify the people already living in vehicles; local reporting on the bill said registered owners with current tags would have received permits to park in assigned industrial areas while working with outreach workers, and that a permit could be lost after a resident turned down appropriate shelter six times.
Source: My Ballard
Why the mayor said no
In her veto letter, Wilson said the permit program did not meet her test for city policy. She pointed to difficulties in conducting and using a one-time census of RV residents, to challenges in documenting RV ownership, to the administrative costs of RV storage, to enforcement problems, and to a risk that people who failed to comply with the permit rules could end up in unsheltered homelessness instead of housing. “As mayor, it is my responsibility to ensure that City policies and programs are implementable, a cost-effective use of public resources, and have a reasonable likelihood of achieving their stated goals,” Wilson wrote. “I am vetoing this bill today because I am concerned that the permit program outlined in CB 121283 does not meet this threshold, and I want to give the Council an opportunity to consider an alternative pathway.”
Source: Mayor Katie Wilson's veto letter, reported by My Ballard
Wilson's alternative, as reported locally, pairs the four bills she signed with an executive-order work group on vehicle residency and two safe lots intended for 182 vehicle residents. She also signed the bills that direct $5 million of existing city budget funding to services, safe lots, shelter storage and outreach; create a “Shelter Storage” service so the city can store a resident's vehicle instead of the resident risking the loss of their possessions when they enter shelter; give the Finance and Administrative Services director wider authority to sign leases and open safe lots and storage faster; and update Seattle's junk-vehicle law — which has not been updated in 25 years — to deal with abandoned or improperly stored vehicles that nobody lives in.
“She promised me not to veto it”: the sponsor's answer
Strauss answered the veto within hours, in a statement issued through the City Council on Tuesday, November 3, and his complaint was as much about process as policy. “Before we passed this legislation, Mayor Katie Wilson promised me not to veto it and to work together to implement. Now, thirteen days after we passed it, the mayor gave me a call at 4 p.m. to let me know she was breaking that promise,” Strauss said. “The status quo is not working. It's not working for people living in RVs and it's not working for their neighbors. The city has few resources and no strategy for helping people living in their RVs get into safer shelter and housing. We can't continue to leave people forgotten on our streets.”
Source: Seattle City Council — Councilmember Dan Strauss statement
Strauss said he had shaped the legislation since January with frontline service providers and city departments, including months of meetings with the mayor's office. His last direct communication from Wilson before the veto call, he said, was an October 15 email — five days before the legislation passed — in which she wrote that if the council adopted it, her office would work with him through a program review work group to implement it. The email listed three open questions — funding an additional safe lot, funding the program's services and implementation, and ending no-notice towing in favour of 24 hours' notice — and Strauss said all three had been addressed in his budget proposal and in the departments' implementation plans, and that the council had also approved the work-group amendment Wilson had signalled she supported. “I am disappointed that Mayor Wilson has vetoed this legislation at the eleventh hour. I am disappointed that she broke her commitment to work together to implement this legislation. And, I am disappointed by the lack of leadership from the executive,” he concluded.
Because the permit bill is vetoed, there is no two-hour limit coming for unpermitted RVs and no permit census: street parking for vehicle residents stays under the rules that existed before the package passed. What does move ahead is the money side — $5 million for services and safe lots, vehicle storage for people entering shelter, faster leasing for new lots, and a modernised junk-vehicle law for abandoned vehicles.
Background: why RVs became a Seattle council fight
The Vehicle Resident Assistance Program, introduced by Strauss this summer, was the council's attempt to separate two problems that Seattle has argued about for years: people who live in RVs and camper vans because they have no housing, and derelict or abandoned vehicles left on public streets. The five bills tried to treat them differently — services, storage and a permit pathway for the first group; a rewritten junk-vehicle law for the second. Supporters said a permit system was the only way to give outreach workers a stable list of who is living where, and to give neighbourhoods a rule that could actually be enforced. The mayor's veto letter answers that the list itself — a one-time census of a population that moves — is the weak point, along with the cost and enforceability of the permit machinery built on top of it.
For Awaaz Punjab's readers in the Seattle area — including Punjabi families across King County and the long-haul drivers who park up along the Interstate 5 corridor on the way to and from the Canadian border — the fight is a familiar one: it decides how the city treats people whose home has wheels, at the same moment as the city spends new money trying to move those same people indoors.
What happens next
Under the City Charter, the City Council must now decide whether to override the veto, and it has a window of five to 30 days to do it. An override takes six votes — and the package originally passed 6–3, which means the same six councilmembers who passed the permit bill could, in principle, restore it over the mayor's objection if all six hold together. If the council does not override, Wilson's alternative path — the signed service bills, the executive-order work group and the two safe lots — becomes the city's vehicle-residency policy, and any permit system would have to start again as new legislation.