By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
For Capitol Hill restaurateur Robert Sondheim, running for the City Council seat occupied by former P-I and Seattle Times columnist Jean Godden is a natural extension of the community-based work he has been engaged in for the last 15 years.
“I ran for City Council during that cattle-call time about a year-and-a-half ago when Jim Compton left his seat. So I threw my hat in at that time. Other than running for precinct committeeman back in the ‘70s, this is my only attempt at running for office,” he says. “However I ran several political campaigns years ago and I’m very involved in the community.”
Sondheim has been active in the Capitol Hill and Pike/Pine neighborhood business community since the early 1990s. Co-owner of the Rosebud Restaurant and Bar for close to 14 years, he worked his way up through the ranks of the neighborhood Chamber of Commerce to serve for three years as the group’s president.
“That’s not necessarily like running for office, but it’s like being in office,” says Sondheim, a distant cousin of the Broadway lyricist and composer, Stephen Sondheim. “I went out and introduced myself and tried to get a cohesive bond between the other neighborhoods — Fremont, West Seattle, Rainier Valley, downtown — I got myself involved in those chambers so we could work as a cohesive body together in different city matters because a larger group and more voices make a bigger difference. I really enjoyed that and thought I should participate more in city politics.”
Sondheim says one of his major issues for this campaign is policing. While acknowledging the recent concerns over police conduct and the way complaints have been handled, he says a bigger issue is what he describes as the understaffing of the police force in the city.
“Every time I talk to one of the officers in one of the precincts, the thing that they say the most is, ‘We are grossly understaffed.’ And the city really isn’t addressing that,” he says. “They say they hired 27 police officers — we need a lot more than that, we need 10 times that many in order to get the city back on track.
“My big platform: getting more police out on the streets, is having more police walking the beat and having them on foot, because hate crime is a big issue for me,” he adds.
“Fortunately I’ve never been a victim of a hate crime, but I don’t want to be and I don’t want other people in the LGBT community and in the various religious communities [to be]. I have an affinity for the Jewish community, obviously, and I just don’t want to see anybody have to be subjected to that.”
The second issue he brings up is housing affordability in Seattle where, he says, the middle class is being squeezed out.
“It’s all the haves and the have-nots, and we need to bring more of the middle class into Seattle. I have some ideas and some plans that I hope would work,” Sondheim told JTNews. “What we need to do is to have incentives for contractors to make it attractive for them to build more low-income housing. I’d like to see more low-income housing, especially up here on Capitol Hill, because this is such a diverse community here. The arts community and the artists are kind of being squeezed out of here, too.
“We need programs such as lower bank rates or help in that regard so these people can get into those houses,” he says.
On transportation issues, Sondheim proposed a variety of solutions to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct and deal with traffic congestion on the 520 floating bridge and elsewhere. His ideas include an increased reliance on water taxis to move people from areas like West Seattle and Ballard to lessen the need for a major new viaduct or tunnel along Elliott Bay.
“I like the water-taxi idea from West Seattle to downtown, and let’s keep that running 365 days a year, and let’s find ways to get traffic off the viaduct. Then let’s just tear the damned thing down and put a surface street where a surface street should be,” Sondheim says. “Let’s run a water taxi from Ballard to South Lake Union, so that people can take the new trolley system from South Lake Union into the heart of downtown.”
He also sees water taxis as part of the regional transit solution, obviating the need for an expanded 520 bridge.
“What the governor is proposing is a six-lane bridge and we should leave it a four-lane bridge,” he says. “We need to, again, find other means to get people across the lake and then get the traffic off the 520. If they want to replace the 520 bridge then it ought to be replaced with what’s there now — another four-lane, with a little bit wider turn-outs and wider lanes. That’s why traffic moves so slow — the lanes are so narrow and people get a little claustrophobic when they’re going across that bridge.”
He believes a water taxi service between Kirkland and Mountlake Terrace could lessen the demand for increased capacity on the bridge, adding that the current plan will leave a $2 billion shortfall for the proposed bridge replacement.
While he excuses himself for not participating even more than he does in the Jewish community by saying that “running a restaurant is a 24/7 job,” Sondheim says he attends services at Temple De Hirsch Sinai nearly every Friday, frequently bringing friends along with him.
“They’ve said, ‘When you’re there, you’re like a whole different person. You get yourself so involved with the embodiment of the Jewish faith.’ And I take that as a great compliment,” says Sondheim. “I’m very proud of my heritage.”