Katie Wilson is a bus-riding mama who gets shit done. She seeks out and fosters genuine community relationships, works with folks to identify problems within city government that are holding people back, and then she creates unstoppable public momentum to get solutions passed into law. I have watched her do it over and over for the 15 years I have been writing Seattle Bike Blog. Often, people don’t even know that some of these hugely successful initiatives were due in large part to her organizing because she has rarely been the face of those efforts. Instead, she has been out there gluing together the coalition that gets the wins. Wilson’s fearless and collaborative leadership philosophy is in sharp contrast to both the vile narcissism we see every day on the national news and the Nerf dart resistance to it from many Democratic Party leaders.
I remember very clearly when the ORCA Lift program began because I was an early user. Making rent every month as an independent journalist was so tight that I would avoid taking transit to save on fares. But ORCA Lift made each ride a flat $1.50, giving me and thousands of others peace of mind to use our public transit system as needed. Katie Wilson was on the committee at King County that pushed for the creation of that low-income transit fares program. She was also a key player years later in the creation of Seattle’s free youth transit program, which was so successful that legislators ended up adopting a similar program for kids across the whole state.
Renters today must be given advance notice of rent increases, and shady money grabs like high move-in fees and predatory late fees have been restricted thanks in large part to her organizing. She also worked on successful minimum wage increases throughout King County. Again, these are policies that have made many people’s lives significantly better in our ever-more-expensive corner of the world…