Director of the Seattle Department of Transportation Director Greg Spotts tendered his resignation to Mayor Bruce Harrell early Tuesday morning, and is set to leave the City in early February of 2025. In his resignation letter, Spotts cited a desire to spend more time with family and friends.
“Early 2025 seems like a good moment to pass the baton to the next leader of SDOT, an agency which now has the plans and the resources to maintain and modernize Seattle’s streets and bridges,” Spotts wrote. “I depart the Puget Sound with great enthusiasm for Seattle’s future, and profound gratitude for the opportunity to serve a dynamic, innovative and fast-growing city with unlimited potential.”
Hired from the Los Angeles Bureau of Street Services in mid-2022 due to his strong background in managing transportation projects, Spotts was tasked with landing the plane on Seattle’s $930 billion “Move Seattle” transportation levy, expiring at the end of the year. A new $1.55 billion transportation levy takes its place next year following a landslide vote this November.
Since his appointment, Spotts has overseen a significant ramp-up in designing projects and getting them out the door in the final months of the Move Seattle Levy, which passed in 2015 but struggled in its initial years. Over recent months, the City saw a significant jump in the rate of awarded contracts, which include protected bike lane projects, bridge seismic upgrades, and transit improvements. When he entered the department in 2022, none of the four bike corridor projects planned to connect Southeast Seattle with the rest of the city had started construction, and the community was growing concerned that some would be abandoned. Over the past few months, all four have started construction.
“I can’t really even imagine a world where there isn’t this Levy to Move Seattle. It has to be finished. That’s the only thing I know in Seattle, is this imperative to finish and it’s really kind of remarkable that we’re here when we’re finishing it, and we’re finishing it well,” Spotts told the levy’s oversight committee earlier this month at their final meeting.
Spotts also oversaw a reset in SDOT’s traffic safety response, an effort that was not ultimately as successful as his project delivery ramp-up, given the City’s ambitious goal to eliminate traffic deaths by 2030. Traffic fatalities citywide have largely remained flat, and the department has remained focused on broad-based changes like restricting turn-on-red with all new traffic signal installations ahead of structural overhauls on the city’s most dangerous arterial corridors where fatalities most frequently occur.
In another move elevating safety, Spotts appointed Venu Nemani, the city’s traffic engineer, to the new role of chief safety officer and brought in a $25 million street safety grant from the US Department of Transportation. But so far, few of the projects from that 2023 grant award have begun rolling out.
Under Mayor Bruce Harrell, most of the projects that SDOT has been tasked with delivering have been initiatives from previous administrations, like wrapping up elements intended to compliment the revamp of the central waterfront, delivering the RapidRide G Line, and starting construction on the RapidRide J Line.
In contrast with his predecessor, Mayor Jenny Durkan, Harrell has engaged in less micromanaging of the department, but he also held back from offering much of a vision for the future of the city’s transportation system.
Durkan shelved RapidRide upgrades for four bus lines promised in Move Seattle, in part because their budgets had leaned too heavily on federal grants, which were not to be found under the first Trump Administration. The next transportation levy now faces similar federal funding headwinds under another Trump Administration, but isn’t as reliant on federal aid and made fewer specific promises that will get SDOT in trouble.
Starting this year, Spotts had to manage a brand new Seattle City Council, including a new transportation committee chair in District 1 Councilmember Rob Saka. Branding himself the “pothole king,” Saka has focused the committee on the core duties of the department, shying away from deep dives into most topic areas and, at one point, cutting off a planned presentation on transportation equity.
New councilmembers added their stamp to the levy renewal approved overwhelmingly by voters last month, but at its core it remained a Harrell Administration proposal that focuses on basic maintenance. The new levy also continues investment in bike lanes, transit upgrades, and improved public spaces — merging requests from all stakeholder sectors together into a levy that’s more focused on spot upgrades than transformative improvements.
Spotts’s legacy will be a public-facing focus on highlighting project delivery, with his social media account active on the weekends as he visited crews in the field pouring asphalt or adding bike lane barriers. But internal reforms implemented on his watch will also outlast his term, including the ways that the department has optimized the time of its internal delivery crews, which is often the most nimble and cost-effective way to deliver spot improvements.
“Crew delivery was sort of ad hoc and relationship based, and we’ve now completely systematized it,” Spotts told the oversight committee. “We created a new position in the design group who has a counterpart in the crew group, and they decide on the long-term schedule for that dry season. And we now publish internally this three-week look ahead, so that I and the other executives could see what work was done last week on crew delivery and what’s planned for the next three weeks. There was never that sort of transparency internally about what the crews were doing, and it wasn’t that centralized scheduling.”
Spotts is the latest SDOT Director to depart after less than four years. This is despite Bruce Harrell announcing his reelection campaign on Monday, with an intention to break the streak of one-term city leaders. It’s unclear at this point whether Harrell’s office will initiate another nationwide search or keep its sights closer to home. SDOT’s Senior Deputy Director, Francisca Stefan, is a likely choice to step in as an interim director, and would be a front-runner for the permanent position.
The next SDOT director will be tasked with scaling up hiring significantly to implement the Seattle Transportation Levy, with around 100 new positions set to be filled over the coming months to tackle new levy commitments, like building 250 blocks of new sidewalks in four years.
“I’m calling it the class of ’25,” Spotts said. “It’ll be like this large group who all came in at the same time, and so we’re all trying to figure out how to incorporate our culture into the onboarding of this new hundred people, and kind of imagining what does that feel like to have our community, our family, bigger, and that’s a very, very exciting place.”
Ryan Packer lives in the Summit Slope neighborhood of Capitol Hill and has been writing for the The Urbanist since 2015. They report on multimodal transportation issues, #VisionZero, preservation, and local politics. They believe in using Seattle's history to help attain the vibrant, diverse city that we all wish to inhabit. Ryan's writing has appeared in Capitol Hill Seattle Blog, Bike Portland, and Seattle Bike Blog, where they also did a four-month stint as temporary editor.