Council calls for more review of Seattle's snowstorm response

Members of the Seattle City Council are pushing to hire an outside consultant following a Seattle Times report Thursday that the city bungled its response to a series of December snowstorms.

Council members also said they will put off discussion about accepting Mayor Greg Nickels' "after-action report" about the city's snowstorm response.

"We are continuing to get conflicting information from the executive as well as from the news reports about what happened, and that is not a good sign," said Councilmember Tom Rasmussen.

Rasmussen pressed for an independent review of the city's response last month, but couldn't get support for it from a majority of the council. That changed Thursday, and Rasmussen said he had already discussed a review with the city's auditor.

Councilmember Sally Clark said the story made it clear that the council had received incomplete information from city department heads, who gave reports at a series of meetings following the storms. The story spurred "renewed interest," she said, "in an independent review of how SDOT performed."

The Seattle Times investigation found that the two Seattle Department of Transportation managers in charge during the storms had no experience directing a major snow response. They adopted a top-down management style that ultimately ended in major streets going unplowed for days, according to interviews and an analysis of about 2,000 records.

The investigation also showed that the department rarely used all 27 of its plows to clear streets, even after heavy snowfall, and that plows were pulled off priority streets to attend to special requests and help less experienced drivers, most of them deployed in the south end of the city.

"I was shocked when I read the story and wondered why we had not been told that same information," said Councilmember Tim Burgess. "It was disheartening to read the story, because I guess I naively thought we were getting the full story, but obviously we were not."

Councilmember Bruce Harrell agreed that the council should probe further, but questioned whether hiring a consultant was the way to go.

"I have a hard time spending money to force people to be honest," Harrell said. "My job is not to manage and interrogate executives. My job is to get accurate information. I want to get at the truth and come up a with a plan to get at the truth and make sure we have a competent snowstorm response."

Councilmember Nick Licata, who renewed his support for an independent inquiry on Thursday, said the council had limited power to force change short of cutting off pay. Still, he said the council should dig further.

"There is not a culture of wanting to find out," Licata said. "We have been far too polite. At some point, you have to stop being polite. It's not just that we're not getting good information — we're not getting information at all, or we're getting the wrong information."

Some council members were out of town and couldn't be reached for this story. Conlin was in a meeting. Councilmember Jean Godden is out of the country, and member Jan Drago was out of the office and unavailable.