Mayor Proposes Improvements in Sidewalk Café Permitting
Seeks changes to encourage more sidewalk cafés citywide

SEATTLE- Mayor Greg Nickels today submitted legislation to the Seattle City Council to significantly improve the city’s permitting process for sidewalk cafés.

With the goal of encouraging more sidewalk cafés throughout Seattle, the new permitting procedures will make it easier to apply to use city sidewalk space. The entire permitting process will be overhauled, with significant improvements offered on fees, processing times, design standards, enforcement and departmental oversight.

“Sidewalk cafés add life to our business districts,” said Nickels. “By simplifying permitting and reducing fees for cafes, we can take full advantage of the summer months to enjoy café life outdoors.”

The proposal recommends the following changes to the sidewalk café permitting process:

• Streamlining an outdated, bureaucratic permitting system by consolidating all actions within one agency, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT), instead of shuffling applicants among multiple city departments.
  
  
• Simplifying the permit review process to achieve a 10-day turn-around. This will save months of waiting time for each application and create a time frame comparable to leading café permitting processes nationwide.
  
  
• Reducing the permit’s cost by nearly $1,700. With lower expenses due to a simpler process and reduced departmental overhead, the city can cut costs and pass the savings along to applicants.
  
  
• Substituting stronger enforcement for a little-used public notice process. The current public notice requirement is rarely used by citizens and does not address their main sidewalk café concerns, which are noise and encroachment. The proposal would improve the city’s policing of violations through the new Department of Executive Administration noise enforcement team.
  
  
• Establishing design standards to address critical public concerns, such as disabled access, encroachments, hours of operation, egress, seating platforms, and landscaping. These standards, which will be explained in full via an updated Client Assistance Memo, will reduce permit review time and encourage consistency.
  
  
• Eliminating Seattle Municipal Code inconsistency on sidewalk cafés. This change would reduce ambiguity about acceptable café locations and allow them in all districts where eating, drinking and certain retail food establishments (i.e., grocery stores) are allowed.

There are currently 225 sidewalk cafés in the city of Seattle. The permits that allow the use of publicly owned sidewalk space, which are currently issued by the Department of Planning and Development with assistance from SDOT, must be renewed on an annual basis.

Visit the mayor’s web site at www.seattle.gov/mayor. Get the mayor’s inside view on efforts to promote transportation, public safety, economic opportunity and healthy communities by signing up for The Nickels Newsletter at www.seattle.gov/mayor/newsletter_signup.htm.

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Office of the Mayor