Urbanist-endorsed Ryan Mello’s term as Pierce County Executive starts with the new year. His new role presents county residents and Tacomans in particular an opportunity to forge ahead, building on progress residents of South Puget Sound have made in recent years.
Executive-elect Mello’s public service experience can be traced to his time in AmeriCorps, time he spent advancing community service and engagement among Pierce County youth. Later he served as executive director of the Pierce Conservation District, an office that directs county-wide efforts to make the connection between people, place, and animals more sustainable.
This previous experience points to the first of three items on a wishlist for Mello’s time as County Executive following his election victory in November. That full wishlist:
- Greening Pierce County and boosting depaving efforts.
- Boosting Pierce Transit.
- Embracing housing growth.
We’ll get to the latter items soon.
Greening Pierce County
In the context of Washington’s Climate Commitment Act, an aggressive suite of policies that intend to cap and reduce greenhouse emission in Washington State by 95% by the year 2050, Pierce County has an opportunity to compete for program dollars with our neighbor city to the north in a way that it hasn’t before.
“Capacity breeds capacity,” says Lowell Wyse, Executive Director of Tacoma Tree Foundation, one of the groups at the forefront of greening and sustainability efforts in Tacoma and Pierce County, when I asked him about his hopes for a Mello administration.
When I heard this, I thought back to my only experience with the Pierce Conservation District, back in 2022. The Autumn 2022 EnviroTalk issue ran a story titled, “Breaking Old Ground: Depaving Puget Sound,” about the County’s effort’s to depave so much of the county. Planting strips with trees and shrubs would curb stormwater runoff that is polluting Puget Sound and decrease the need for expensive sewer upgrade projects. It would lessen the urban heat island effect that hits much of Pierce County hard (due to the prevalence of pavement and scarcity of tree cover), making neighborhoods more pleasant and livable — even during extreme weather.
This story prompted me to reconsider my then-new neighborhood; just a few feet from my front door was a clear example of the work we need to do across much of our city and county: section after section of planting strips that were paved over.
The story included contact information for key personnel and an invitation to contact staff to suggest areas for depaving. I wrote in. I never got a response.
Not long after this experience, I had a conversation with a City of Tacoma staff person with whom I shared this experience. That person told me that they weren’t surprised. Apparently (and at that time), the depave program was staffed by a single person. The reality was that, despite the story in EnviroTalk, there wasn’t any actual capacity to carry through any of the program’s goals.
“Capacity breeds capacity.” The first wish I have for a Ryan Mello administration is for a growth of capacity in this key county resource. The truth is we need more than a PR story; we need an actual program to reclaim what amounts to thousands of square feet across our county to be an actual asset in our efforts to grow our tree canopy and related ecosystems.
Right now, these spaces are no more than a convenient parking space for people who would flaunt the State’s prohibitions against storing their cars on “planting” strips.
Greening these spaces and adding to our tree canopy will help more people see urban growth as a win-win, making room for more residents while improving livability, sustainability, and the environment.
Boosting Pierce Transit
The second wish for a Ryan Mello administration is for greater cohesion between the City of Tacoma’s transportation planning and the County’s capacity to deliver what amounts to transformative public transit. I grew up in Southern California — in Anaheim (think Disneyland) specifically. In some ways, the County’s provision of transit reminds me of the levels of transit I experienced as a youth in Southern California, a place designed to accommodate cars, not transit riders or pedestrians.
In other ways, aspirations for what our transit could be in Tacoma and Pierce County makes me hopeful that we could one day soon have the levels of transit that doesn’t require all of us to pay a significant tax to get to work, school, the supermarket, and our mother’s house.
The hope is that our incoming County Executive will direct our nominal transit agency, Pierce Transit, to see itself as an agency that serves an urban population and which plans and operates in tandem with Tacoma’s emerging Transportation and Mobility Plan.
Pierce County counts on a modest 0.6% sales tax to operate local transit, while its neighboring counties to the north have dedicated greater resources to bus service. To offer the types of levels of transit that would represent an actual mobility choice for most residents of Pierce County this level has to increase — to at least 0.9%, according to Pierce County Transit staff
Raising the agency’s funding to at least these levels is a good way for Mello’s administration to ensure that the agency’s recently released long-range plan can achieve the levels of service we need in Tacoma and the county overall. Making transit a viable mobility option for residents of Pierce County’s “priority populations” is key to making Tacoma’s transportation planning — and Home in Tacoma zoning reforms — a reality.
Tacoma needs 15-minute headways on certain Pierce County routes to make long-range planning a reality — at least.
“Frequency is freedom” is a known maxim among transportation planners and transit enthusiasts. Tacoma has a “Frequent Transit Network Vision” aspect to its Transportation and Mobility Plan. While aspirational, it is entirely tenable. It will require greater levels of service from Pierce Transit and more prioritization from Sound Transit. Ryan Mello’s leadership (he also leads the Pierce County delegation on the Sound Transit Board as county executive) can work towards ensuring that we get both.
One specific action Mello’s administration can take is to prioritize alignment among Tacoma’s, Pierce Transit’s, and Sound Transit’s plans for bus rapid transit (take two), the arrival of Link light rail, and high-speed rail. Currently, it is not clear that the City, the County, and our regional partners have a unified vision of transit for South Puget Sound, especially in terms of how to connect all modes of transit (and people to them) that currently arrive — and will be arriving — in Tacoma. Mello’s leadership can bring that clarity and unity of vision to fruition.
But it will take more than alignment: Pierce County will need to allot more funds to Pierce Transit, and Pierce Transit will need to rethink its identify and role as a transit agency; its model should be less the Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA) I knew as a youth in the 1990s and more like an agency that operates in a region of four million people who are aspiring to move without needing a car.
To do this, a Mello administration should boost Pierce Transit funding by at least 50%.
Embracing housing growth
The third wish for a Mello administration is to align the County’s growth strategy to Tacoma’s Home in Tacoma zoning overhaul, which replaces single family zoning citywide. Even after some dilution in the last phase of the policymaking process, Home in Tacoma stands to remake the city in ways that makes it — and region — the type of place where more people can live and live sustainably. And when I write “sustainably,” I mean it comprehensively: encompassing people and place.
The City of Tacoma Council is poised to take up a much needed tree preservation ordinance in the new year (after these protections were stripped from Home in Tacoma at the last-minute). Truly, we need a plan for increasing density and livability that makes trees and their ecosystems central to the process, and we need it to also extend beyond the city limits of Tacoma.
Returning to Mello’s first engagements with our region — when he led efforts to recognize high schoolers who dedicated significant time to knowing and improving their communities — my wish third and last wish for a Mello administration is for a County that supports and coheres with its largest and most significant city, where people from around the region come to work, study, and play. Tacoma has long been a place of pride, and it stands to be that place into a future that is uncertain for many if its leaders at the city and county level prioritize the type of city that has become uncommon in the U.S.
Home in Tacoma seeks to revise Pierce County’s largest population center in the image of the city we were promised: a place where people connect, where people don’t have to sit (and contribute to traffic) to do basic things — shop, work, study, play — where people come to enjoy robust public life in our many excellent parks and public amenities, and where people choose to live and can afford to do so.
To deliver this, Home in Tacoma will deliver on design and development. More room and more housing options are going to be presented via this zoning reform. The role of the executive is to make sure that these reformations of place don’t stop at Tacoma’s borders (or are undone by competing policies beyond its borders).
That the population of Pierce County will increase in the coming year is true, as is that much of this growth will happen in Tacoma. Still, we require executive leadership that brings forth a comprehensive and cohesive strategy for growth that offers people attainable housing in desirable, connected, and sustainable communities that offer true mobility freedom via transit, and freedom from car-related violence and traffic death via safer design.
The time has come for Ryan Mello. The time has come for Pierce County.
Rubén Casas
Rubén joined The Urbanist's board in 2022. He is a scholar and teacher of rhetoric and writing at the University of Washington Tacoma. He is also the faculty lead of the Urban Environmental Justice Initiative at Urban@UW. In his work and advocacy, Rubén examines how cities and the institutions that comprise them imagine, plan, and build in ways that promote and/or discourage community and a sense of place.