Greg Hamilton (Washington)

Greg Hamilton

Military

Service / branch

U.S. Army

Personal

Profession

Business owner

Contact

Personal website

Greg Hamilton was a candidate for mayor of Seattle in Washington. Hamilton was defeated in the primary election on August 1, 2017.

Click here to read Hamilton's campaign themes for 2017.

Biography

Hamilton is the owner of InSights Training Center and Freyr Farms. He is a veteran of the U.S. Army.

Elections

2017

See also: Municipal elections in Seattle, Washington (2017)

The following candidates ran in the primary election for mayor of Seattle.

Mayor of Seattle, Primary Election, 2017
Candidate	Vote %	Votes
Jenny Durkan	27.90%	51,529
Cary Moon	17.62%	32,536
Nikkita Oliver	16.99%	31,366
Jessyn Farrell	12.54%	23,160
Bob Hasegawa	8.39%	15,500
Mike McGinn	6.50%	12,001
Gary Brose	2.16%	3,987
Harley Lever	1.81%	3,340
Larry Oberto	1.67%	3,089
Greg Hamilton	0.92%	1,706
Michael Harris	0.76%	1,401
Casey Carlisle	0.71%	1,309
James Norton Jr.	0.54%	988
Thom Gunn	0.25%	455
Mary Martin	0.23%	422
Jason Roberts	0.22%	405
Lewis Jones	0.19%	344
Alex Tsimerman	0.14%	253
Keith Whiteman	0.09%	174
Tiniell Cato	0.09%	170
Dave Kane	0.06%	114
Write-in votes	0.23%	418
Total Votes		184,667
Source: King County, "2017 election results," accessed August 15, 2017

Campaign themes

Hamilton's campaign website listed the following themes for 2017:

2017

“	Public Safety A city’s first job is to provide safety for its residents and employees. The citizens of Seattle have a right to be safe, and it is the city’s duty to provide that safety. The criminally permissive environment created for us by recent mayoral policy (in which the police have been instructed NOT to enforce law), is the opposite of a city’s duty to its citizens. Laws exist for a reason, and the failure to enforce basic laws has consequences. Homelessness and criminal vagrancy must be seen as acute symptoms of the larger problem. We will save money by stopping the perpetuation and growth of homelessness and criminal vagrancy. The last 30 million dollars the city spent to combat homelessness and addiction resulted in an approximate doubling of those problems. Under my leadership, we will enforce the law, and mandate that people use the excellent systems we already have in place to help people get off of our streets for good. We will provide every opportunity for their recovery. We will defund programs that aren’t working, and redirect resources toward programs that have proven results. What we will not allow is continued self-destructive behavior, nor continued danger to our citizens. Cost of Living Until we provide significant housing at reasonable prices, minimum wage increases will only be window-dressing for the problem. Until lower and middle-income people can afford to live in the city where they work, transportation changes will not fix our traffic problems. No amount of street level interventions will fix our homelessness problem, when there is nowhere for people to live. Cost of living in Seattle is perhaps the largest, most complicated, and most important issue that the mayor’s office should address. And yet, the mayor’s office has produced little in the way of results. The current city policies amount to demanding that landowners and developers build affordable and rent-controlled properties if they want to build at all. This, in turn, has created predictable results: developers have opted not to develop new properties, and our problem remains unsolved. Backyard micro-homes and mother-in-law apartments are small vision answers to a very large problem. Small solutions will have little impact on the greater housing crisis, and will create additional strain on parking and transportation in the mean time. We have proven programs that result in affordable living, such as MFTE, and programs that have given us no appreciable results, such as HALA. Through tax incentives and zoning, we can engage the major landowners and developers to help us solve our housing problems. We can do it in the areas least likely to impact local neighborhoods. We need to revisit plans that may be better options now, like high-density developments in SODO and along major thoroughfares. I will support and enhance proven answers. We must incentivize building of high-density housing in the right areas, and do so in a manner that we get significant housing built quickly. Until we do, the market will never catch up to the problem and reduce the cost of living for all citizens. Transportation The tech boom in Seattle has created a gold rush economy. We have added jobs at a dizzying rate, while failing to add the necessary infrastructure for these additional workers. The end result is a city with a massive traffic problem fueled by inaction, poor planning, and contradictory policies. Recent mayors have prioritized bicycles over motor vehicles, pitting them against each other and making us enemies on the road. Existing parking places have been eliminated, and significant new construction has been permitted with little or no planning for parking. This, and our generational failure to build a truly effective public transportation system, has left us with a disastrous traffic problem in Seattle. This problem will not be easy, cheap, or quick to fix; it’s a problem 50 years in the making. We can’t undo what has been done, or rather, what has not been done. We can only move forward from here. Technology may one day provide the answer. We can’t predict what answers technology will provide, but we do know that technology will need routes. Be it driverless, ownerless smart cars, or electric “train” cars that intelligently link and unlink as required, any future innovation will need pathways on which to operate. With that in mind, we need to serve today’s citizens while preparing for the future. We need to create a public transportation system so efficient that the majority of the people in the future would prefer to use it. We need adequate parking, and driving routes on improved streets to serve those who choose to drive. We need roads that work for our port city’s commerce to thrive. Education The current public school system is not serving the majority of students and preparing them for life. The bottom 20% of graduating classes are dropping out rather than finishing. Our high schools are pushing kids down the college degree path as though it is the only path. We are saddling our kids with a lifetime of debt in exchange for degrees that they will scarcely use after graduation. Adults are struggling to stay ahead in a constantly changing employment environment, as industries are being revolutionized by technology. Long-standing employees and hard-working Seattleites are being left behind, with little opportunity to rejoin the fast paced work force. We must provide a quality education for all students of all backgrounds and abilities. Charter schools, private schools, online schools, home schools, and other non-traditional education needs to be encouraged. Our city should welcome people so passionate about our children’s future that they are willing to start schools, not be threatened by them. We need to eliminate bureaucracy and ensure our resources are getting to the teachers and students where they belong, rather than to the bloated staffs that only paralyze the system. Schools like the Raisbeck Aviation High School and programs like the After School STEM Academy should to be greatly expanded to include all local industries and trades. Their capacity must be increased, so no child is denied a pathway to success based on admissions lotteries. Seattle residents should have job retraining available at little or no cost. The cost of providing our own citizens retraining is far less than the personal and societal costs of losing them to endless unemployment, and all the trickle-down negative effects that go along with it. The high-paying tech jobs that our city has become known for should be going to Seattle citizens first, rather than people imported from other states and countries. We have the smartest people in the world, and our innovation is why people from around the globe are clamoring for the opportunities our city provides. It is a sign of something wrong in the system when the creators of this innovation are being passed over for the jobs which utilize it.	”
—Greg Hamilton (2017)

See also

Seattle, Washington	Washington	Municipal government	Other local coverage

External links

Suggest a link

• Office of the Mayor of Seattle
• Campaign website