Category: Business

Business, City Council, Elections, podcasts

Seattle Nice: City Council Shakeup in Southeast Seattle

And on Are You Mad At Me?: Why You Should Watch Shattered Glass!

By Erica C. Barnett

After last week’s grim assessment of how local leaders are (and mostly aren’t) preparing for the dual impact of city funding shortfalls and federal funding cuts, we turned this week to a more hopeful subject: Who will represent Southeast Seattle’s District 2 on the City Council next year?

Tammy Morales stepped down at the beginning of 2025, saying her colleagues had bullied her and made it impossible to get anything done, and the council appointed Mark Solomon, whom Morales defeated in 2019, to the seat. (Solomon was the second candidate to be vanquished by Morales and subsequently appointed to the council; the first was Tanya Woo, who went on to lose to Alexis Mercedes Rinck.) Four candidates have filed for the position so far: Assistant City Attorney Eddie Lin, SDOT staffer (and, until recently, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s transportation advisor) Adonis Ducksworth; business owner Takayo Ederer; and city building inspector and union leader Jamie Fackler.

I think the candidates for District 2 have more diverse viewpoints than the pigeonholes pundits are slotting them into—the usual “left,” “center-left,” and “moderate” (conservative by Seattle standards) “lanes.”

Lin, for example, floated the idea of a new levy to fund gun violence prevention programs—but also told me he supports beefing up the police department to crack down on “disorder” and “open-air drug markets” while the city figures out a way to address the addiction and poverty that lead to drug sales and petty thefts. Ducksworth, who is strongly associated with Harrell, said that while he may not have supported Proposition 1A, the measure that funded social housing, he’s “extremely happy it did pass” and will do everything in his power to make it a success. (Harrell campaigned against 1A, favoring an alternative that would have raised no new funds and would not have built social housing).

And Fackler, a union shop steward who said he was motivated to run by Prop. 1A’s success, went deep on the need to eliminate the red tape that’s currently hindering development in Seattle, including utility hookup requirements that can quickly make housing projects infeasible.

It’s too soon to say how many more candidates will get into these races before the May 9 filing deadline—there’s often a rush—but we will note that the biggest vote-winner in local election history, Position 8 (citywide) rep Rinck, is not facing any serious opposition so far. The same can’t be said for Position 9 (also citywide) Councilmember Sara Nelson, who faces a formidable challenger in Dionne Foster, the former director of the lefty Washington Progress Alliance, who we interviewed earlier this year.

In addition to the upcoming elections, we discussed the (potential) closure of the Virginia Inn, a Pike Place Market institution that is in an apparently intractable dispute with its landlord, the Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority. Sandeep and I hope they can work it out; David says that as anti-NIMBYs, we’re hypocrites for opposing the closure of a business we happen to like.

Also this week, it’s time for another episode of “Are You Mad At Me?,” our limited-run podcast about the great, underappreciated journalism movie Shattered Glass. The film, released on 2003, is about the downfall of serial fabulist Stephen Glass, a journalist for The New Republic who was caught fabricating stories after reporters for a digital startup started digging into his blockbuster piece about teenage hackers working as security consultants.

This month, Josh and I will tell you why you—yes, YOU—should watch this excellent film, even if you don’t think you care about the subject matter.

To quote the New York Times’ A.O. Scott, who reviewed Shattered Glass when it came out in 2003, it’s “an astute and surprisingly gripping drama not only about the ethics of magazine writing, but also, more generally, about the subtle political and psychological dynamics of modern office culture.”

 

Business, Mayor Harrell, Trump

Speaking to Downtown Business Group, Harrell Calls Musk, Thiel, and Other Trump Tech Advisors “Some of the Smartest Innovators Around”

By Erica C. Barnett

During his remarks at the Downtown Seattle Association’s State of Downtown event on Tuesday, Mayor Bruce Harrell appeared to praise President Trump for bringing “smart innovators” like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and David Sacks into his inner circle at the White House.

“We know that our current president surrounds himself by some of the smartest innovators around,” Harrell said. “When we drop names like [Marc] Andreessen or Peter Thiel or David Sacks or Elon Musk—these are smart innovators.”

Harrell, who noted a moment later that he had gone “off script,” had been talking about cybersecurity, potential threats from AI, and competition with China. He also noted that “the FCC is run by Brendan Carr, who did write the playbook for the FCC chapter in Project 25,” and said he got “emotional” about layoffs at the National Institute of Standards in Technology, which Wired describes as an “agency responsible for establishing benchmarks that ensure everything from beauty products to quantum computers are safe and reliable.”

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Mayoral spokesman Jamie Housen said Harrell was actually criticizing Trump and his tech advisors.

“The mayor was not praising them, he was referencing they have an objective reputation as leaders in technology and innovation, and that it is a danger they are in the president’s orbit,” Housen said. “He certainly doesn’t agree with their politics, which is why he highlighted this through concerns around the actions coming out of DC like significant staffing cuts impacting cybersecurity and the degradation of protections and questions over access to personal data.”

Marc Andreessen is a tech mogul who co-founded Netscape and is now one of Trump’s top tech advisors. Palantir founder Peter Thiel, who’s probably best known for funding the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that doomed Gawker, was one of Trump’s earliest tech supporters. David Sacks is a Paypal co-founder who is now Trump’s “crypto czar.”

Tuesday’s event was not the first time Harrell has had seemingly conciliatory words for the Trump Administration while speaking to a business group. During a Washington Technology Industry Association event after the election last year, Harrell said he was not “not going to D.C. with my fist balled,” adding, “I look for opportunities … no matter who’s in the White House.”

Harrell spent the first five minutes of his recent State of the City speech (which we discussed on Seattle Nice last week) blasting Trump’s crackdown on immigrants, funding cuts, “unconstitutional executive orders,” and anti-DEI policies.

Business, Speech, zoning

Old-Fashioned Furor Erupts Over Plans for Adult Cabaret License in Ballard
A local property owner says this “park” is too close to a Ballard bar whose owner is seeking an adult-entertainment license.

By Erica C. Barnett

Nextdoor—the social media site for lost cats, stationary bike sales, and NIMBY panic—was buzzing last week with the news that Roam, a bar on the largely industrial south end of Ballard Ave. NW, recently applied for an adult cabaret license.

Laurie Lohrer, who owns a nearby building where a Filson store has operated since 2016, warned neighbors that a new business “has applied to City for ‘Adult Entertainment’ permit to operate a strip club. … We don’t want another Aurora Avenue North scene on Ballard Avenue. It’s our responsibility to protect our community and its family-friendly & safe atmosphere from this incompatible use.”

But the owner of Roam Bar, Nicole Healy, says she isn’t opening a strip club; her plan is to turn the upstairs event space at the bar into an actual cabaret that will include “all kinds of entertainment like comedy, drag shows, and more,” including adult entertainment like burlesque. “I’ve always loved the arts, and while I’m not particularly creative myself, I have so many talented friends who inspire me,” Healy said. “Creating a space they’d feel excited to perform in has been a dream of mine for years.”

Lohrer did not respond to a request for an interview. In her December 8 Nextdoor post, she urged Ballard residents to “TAKE ACTION TODAY!” by writing Councilmember Dan Strauss, who represents Ballard, opposing the permit, and signing a petition she created on Change.org to “Stop Strip Club permit on Ballard Avenue.”

Strauss did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the cabaret kerfuffle.

Lohrer’s change.org petition, which had been removed as of Friday morning, claimed Roam’s license application is illegal, citing a 2007 ordinance that prohibits “adult cabarets” within 800 feet of schools, community centers, child care centers, and parks. The bar isn’t near any of those things, but the petition argues that a nearby street end—a strip of scrubby bushes at the far end of an industrial parking lot—constitutes the kind of “open space” the city council intended to protect when they wrote the ordinance.

The street end, Lohrer argued, “has been improved with enhanced shoreline habitat and bench for public viewing and enjoyment. It is a public park and provides a public open space use.” This is incorrect, according to the city’s Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections. Bench or no bench, “the area remains a city right-of-way use with no formal designation as a park or open space,” SDCI spokesman Bryan Stevens said.

“The submitted plans have demonstrated compliance with these standards as a part of our zoning review process,” Stevens added. “We are waiting for the applicant to address other fire-safety corrections before the permit is approved and issued.”

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In her petition, Lohrer argued that Roam Bar’s plans will “reduce foot traffic of shoppers, diners and to events. It would devalue Ballard Avenue as a safe and attractive place for local & greater Puget Sound residents and other visitors to spend the day or evening.”

“It’s well known that ‘adult entertainment’  businesses often become hubs for ongoing prostitution, disruptive conduct, and criminal activity,” the petition continued. “Few of us want to bring our children, family & friends for an afternoon of shopping, a meal out, or to Sunday Farmers Market—in the vicinity of a strip club.”

There’s no evidence that a bar holding events for adults at night will reduce property values, lead to street sex work, or make the area less “family friendly” during daytime hours.

Before it was removed, Lohrer’s petition had garnered only about 190 signatures.

Healy noted that Roam is “proudly woman-owned” business, and said her “goal is to create a space that is fun, safe, and empowering for performers.”

“If exotic dancing does become part of the mix,” Healy said “there will never be full nudity. For me, traditional burlesque and similar styles of provocative dance are about creativity, artistry, and comfort—not necessarily nudity. I’d want performers to feel completely free to choose their costumes and whether topless dancing is part of their act, without any conditions set by me as the owner.”

Roam opened in October as a neighborhood bar, and features large portraits of entertainers like Lady Gaga and Josephine Baker, created by Healy’s wife.

Seattle has had a long, weird history with strip clubs and other kinds of adult entertainment. In 1988, the city passed a “temporary” moratorium on new strip clubs, then extended the moratorium annually for 17 years. Back in 2003, when Seattle had just four remaining strip clubs (including two that have since closed) Josh and I reported that the only study the city ever bothered doing on their impact on surrounding neighborhoods showed no correlation between strip clubs and public safety problems.

In 2005, federal judge James Robart (better known these days for overseeing the SPD consent decree) declared the then 17-year-old “moratorium” unconstitutional, and the city proposed new guidelines for adult entertainment, including a  “four-foot rule” that required a four-foot buffer zone between dancers and patrons. The four-foot rule was eventually overturned (along with a law requiring strip clubs to be lit up like operating rooms), and the state legislature finally passed a “Strippers Bill of Rights” allowing alcohol sales at adult entertainment venues this year. If Roam gets its license, it will be one of the first bars with a cabaret license in the state (Dream Girls, in SoDo, became the state’s first strip club serving alcohol earlier this year.)

The 800-foot buffer between strip clubs and places where “children congrate” was established in 2007 and has never been contested. According to a report on the legislation, which dubiously refers to “some” unspecified “evidence” that strip clubs caused crime, a key reason for keeping strip clubs away from places where children congregate is that because alcohol was banned inside clubs at the time, “it is believed that consumption of alcohol and drugs may occur in club parking lots, on adjacent public streets, or in the surrounding neighborhood. These activities are particularly problematic and incompatible with locations where children congregate.”

Now that the city can no longer use the excuse that people hang around strip clubs and drink (not that they presented any evidence for this claim in the first place), maybe it’s time to revisit not just the buffer zones, but the prudish insistence that strip clubs and cabarets—enclosed adults-only places where children are not allowed—somehow harm “the children” just by existing.

Business, Mayor Harrell

Seattle Nice: Is Downtown “Revitalized and Transformed” Yet?
Source: City of Seattle Downtown Activation Plan

By Erica C. Barnett

On Seattle Nice this week, we discussed Mayor Bruce Harrell’s “Downtown Activation Plan,” which proponents called a “roaring success” at a press event last week. Even by the metrics the city is using to gauge progress, though, the report card is mixed. Although Mayor Bruce Harrell credited the year-old plan for visible changes downtown over the past year, including new businesses filling storefronts, new residents, and more office workers and visitors in the area, the direct link between downtown recovery and the 46-point DAP is unclear.

Much of the plan consisted of low-hanging fruit (more murals and art in vacant storefronts in Pioneer Square; ) or projects that were already underway, such as the renewal of the Downtown Seattle Association’s longstanding Metropolitan Improvement District, or the continuation of police crackdowns on drug dealers and efforts to address gun violence citywide. Other action items are vague, like “support community-driven activations and cultural celebrations Downtown.” This makes it hard to tell what it means, if anything, to say that “93 percent of DAP initiatives are completed or in progress,” as the city boasted last week.

Additionally, Harrell’s list of “real, positive changes” include items that weren’t even part of the DAP plan, like the expansion of the CARE Team of non-police first responders, encampment removals by the (unrelated) Unified Care Team, and the number of major events at the stadiums.

Ultimately, Sandeep and I both agreed, the “state of downtown Seattle” comes down to vibes—regardless of the numbers, does downtown feel (to lightly paraphrase the mayor) “revitalized and transformed”? Obviously, the answer depends on which part of town; when; and what you mean by revitalization and transformation—but we agreed that downtown, in general, is feeling livelier than a year ago.

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Leaving aside the second goal (which, broadly speaking, Sandeep and I share), there’s still a live debate about whether forcing people who currently work from home to return to their cubicles in downtown Seattle should be the primary basis for downtown “recovery.” For Harrell, a “revitalized” downtown is one where the number of office workers during the day is roughly the same as it was before the pandemic, among other measures. I think a thriving downtown needs to have a diverse economy that doesn’t roll up the carpets at 5pm, and where businesses aren’t a monoculture of lunch spots for office workers.

Not to get too existential, but one of the key lessons of the pandemic, for workers, was that life is much more than work. For many, working from home instead of commuting provided hours of extra time to spend however they want, and offered an environment with fewer distractions where they could be more productive.

This isn’t true for everyone—Sandeep says he’s one of those people who couldn’t wait to get back to his office—but forcing everyone into a single mode of work feels untenable, if not cruel, to those who benefited from working from home. (Additionally, many workers now perceive that the hours they spend driving or taking the bus to work each day are actually unpaid labor.) In my view, this self-sortingis actually good for both workers and daytime businesses in neighborhoods outside downtown—which isn’t the only neighborhood in Seattle that matters, after all.

Listen to our surprisingly civilized (!) debate on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.

 

Business, legislature

Lowering the Amount People Can Drink and Drive Would Save Lives. So Why Has the Legislature Failed to Do It?

By Erica C. Barnett

Next year, for the third time in three sessions, state Sen. John Lovick (D-44, Mill Creek) will introduce legislation that would lower the maximum blood-alcohol concentration (BAC) for drunk driving to 0.05 percent, making  Washington the second state, after Utah, to adopt a limit lower than 0.08 percent.

“I think this is the year we’re going to get it done,” Lovick said.

As a state trooper for 31 years, Lovick said, “I arrested as many or more drunk drivers than probably anybody. I just saw the devastation it caused on our streets”—statewide last year, more than one person died in a drunk-driving collision, on average, every day— “and it’s all alcohol-related. … We’re just tolerating too much. I think we need to do better to keep our communities safe.”

Representatives from the restaurant, beer, and wine industries argue that lowering the limit—a BAC of 0.05 percent roughly represents between three and four drinks in two hours—will unfairly penalize them while doing little to address deaths from drunk driving, which they say come largely from people driving to and from home and from people who are significantly above the current limit.

“We wholeheartedly want to work toward getting the number of DUI deaths down to zero on our roadways,” said Daniel Olson, executive director of the Washington Brewers Guild, which represents craft breweries. But, he said, “This proposal is not backed up by data.”

Specifically, Olson argued that Utah has not seen a decline in DUI fatalities since lowering its own BAC limit in 2019.  “It’s our opinion that lowering the BAC to 0.05 for DUIs will not result in a reduction in DUI deaths on our roadways, based on Utah data,” Olson said.

Washington Traffic Safety Commission (WTSC) external relations director Mark McKechnie counters that drunk-driving crashes rose everywhere during the pandemic, but that Utah’s plateaued and then dipped last year, while other states have seen steady increases.

But even if you don’t find Utah’s data compelling, he said, there is plenty of evidence out there—from the 75 percent of countries in the world that have a drunk-driving limit of 0.05 or lower—showing that places with lower limits, from Japan to France to Australia, have lower drunk-driving fatalities, because the lower limits serve as a deterrent. It isn’t that people drink less; it’s that many of them no longer drink and drive.

Overall, McKechnie said, decreasing the maximum BAC from 0.1 percent to 0.08 percent results in a 9 percent reduction in drunk-driving deaths, and cutting it to 0.05 leads to another 11 percent reduction in lives lost because people got behind the wheel impaired.

“Most of the world has adopted this, it’s working, and it doesn’t produce the kind of unintended consequences that we hear about” in Washington state, McKechnie said.

The hospitality industry, particularly wineries, argue that Washington state is different because unlike Europe, we don’t have reliable public transit outside major cities.

“Something that … is frustrating for us [is to be told that] somebody can just get an Uber, or get a bus, or stop at a friend’s house or whatever,” Washington Wine Institute director Josh McDonald said during a WTSC-led webinar on the proposal this week.

“Those don’t exist out in in most of our wine regions. …We’re in a worldwide competition wines across the entire world. We need [customers] to come find us, experience us and and and believe in us as as their wine of choice.”

But McKechnie said there are plenty of countries that have lower drunk-driving limits than Washington’s and minimal access to transit. “I wanted to ask, have you been to Ireland? Outside of Dublin, most of Ireland is very rural and has very limited public transportation in most of the country,” McKechnie said. “It’s really easy to get a drink, and it’s really hard to get around, and yet they have a fraction of the [DUI] fatalities that we do.”

Lovick said he doesn’t “buy the ‘rural communities’ argument” because people can choose a designated driver or wait to drive until they’re no longer impaired. “We’re trying to hold the person’s who’s drinking accountable. There are so many ways of getting around—[we’re saying] you can drink all you want, but just don’t drive,” he said.

One thing the industry representatives and advocates for lowering the limit agree on is that if there aren’t enough people to enforce drunk-driving laws, they won’t have an impact at any level. “Having additional troopers, having additional police patrols, is something that would significantly lower traffic fatalities,” Washington Hospitality Association external relations director Julia Gorton said during another recent WTSC webinar on the proposal, held earlier this month.

As a former state trooper himself, Lovick said when he would pull someone over for impaired driving, he thought of the kids who lived and played in the street in front of his own home. “When I stopped someone driving and I gave them a physical sobriety test I would ask a simple question: Did I want this person driving in a cul-de-sac where my kids were playing, or a street where fifth-grade kids were out there serving as crossing guards? Ask anyone: Would you want someone out there is a .06, .07, .08 out there driving where your kids are playing?”

McKechnie believes it’s only a matter of time before Washington, and other states, follow Utah’s lead by lowering their drunk-driving limits. It’s a familiar story, he said: “We’re hearing the same arguments today that we heard about the change from 0.1 to .08 I think we’re here now, considering this, because that clearly did not fix the problem. We Don’t think 0.05 is going to be a panacea, but it’s going to be an important piece of the puzzle to significantly reduce fatalities of the type that’s most common.”

Business, homelessness, Mayor Harrell

Put Homelessness Agency CEO Search on Pause, Former Governor and Seattle Chamber Leader Say

By Erica C. Barnett

Former governor Christine Gregoire and Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce director Rachel Smith sent an email asking the committee charged with hiring a new CEO for the King County Homelessness Authority to pause the search process, citing “many unanswered questions” and “challenges the agency has faced and/or been unable to respond to.”

Another issue, Gregoire and Smith wrote, is that the city is in the middle of “ongoing conversations about making potentially significant changes to the organization, including the structure of the Authority’s governance. And finally, based on our conversations with various leaders, we have not heard confirmation of how and when the Authority will be reauthorized.”

Gregoire and Smith serve on the committee, which was scheduled to get an initial list of about a dozen candidates from a search firm today.

As PubliCola reported earlier this week, the search for a new CEO has been rocky, and the list of applicants has reportedly inspired little excitement on the search committee. The agency’s last permanent director, Marc Dones, left in May 2023, and the position has since been filled by two interim directors—former deputy CEO Helen Howell and, since January, former United Way chief financial officer Darrell Powell. Powell, an ally of Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell (and Harrell’s pick for the interim position), reportedly put his name in the running for the permanent position.

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Gregoire and Smith carry weight on the committee. Gregoire leads Challenge Seattle, a business coalition that helped marshal millions of dollars for the failed Partnership for Zero public-private partnership, and Smith controls the most influential business group in the region at a time when the mayor and most of the city council are strongly aligned with business interests.

Seattle elected officials have expressed dissatisfaction with the KCRHA’s current governance structure, which includes an “implementation board” of subject-matter experts and a “governing board” of elected officials, and will likely propose a single board made up of, or at least dominated by, elected officials. Changing the KCRHA’s governing structure would require changes to the interlocal agreement that created the authority, which is up for reauthorization at the end of the year. Seattle and King County are the major parties to that agreement; if either pulled out, it would effectively mean the end of the authority.

“We–along with all of you–are committed to securing the most experienced and qualified individual to lead the Authority,” Gregoire and Smith’s letter concludes. “Under the circumstances, nothing short of that can meet the needs of the organization and the community it serves. Thus, we strongly recommend a pause in the search until we, as a Committee, can ensure we are attracting the highest caliber candidates and also clearly represent the organization’s status to the candidates.”