Category: labor

City Council, homelessness, labor, Mayor Wilson, Police

This Week on PubliCola: December 13, 2025

A 14-point plan for incoming Mayor Wilson, a new police contract that raises cops’ pay another 42 percent, a parking enforcement labor slowdown, and more.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, December 8

A 14-Point Plan for Mayor Wilson

Josh and I laid out a 14-point PubliCola manifesto for incoming mayor Katie Wilson, including everything from revamping the city’s comprehensive plan to allow more housing across the city, to building Park- and School-Oriented Transit. Also: Get rid of special rules that have enabled SPD to evade public disclosure and empowered mayor after mayor to sweep people living unsheltered without notice or assistance.

Tuesday, December 9

Feds Yank Homeless Funding Process for “Revisions,” Adding More Confusion to Changes that Could Impact Thousands in Seattle

After announcing new rules for federal homelessness funding designed to defund permanent housing and housing-first programs, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development abruptly yanked its call for funding applications without specifying why—or when the application process will open again. The upshot is that programs serving thousands of people could face funding gaps starting early next year.

Wednesday, December 10

Divided Council Passes New Police Contract That Raises Officer Pay 42 Percent, With Few Accountability Concessions

In a split vote (with Rinck, Lin, and Saka voting “no”), the city council approved yet another round of generous pay increases for cops, without the accountability measures that were promised when the city approved 23 percent retroactive pay hikes for police last year. While the new contract allows the CARE Team of unarmed first responders to expand and respond to some 911 calls without police in tow, it also imposes many new restrictions; for instance, CARE can’t respond to crisis calls if drug paraphernalia (like foil) is present or if it appears any “crime has occurred.”

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Mayor-Elect Wilson Will Retain Police Chief Shon Barnes

On the heels of the contract adoption, Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson announced that she’ll be keeping Police Chief Shon Barnes, along with the heads of Seattle’s other public safety departments, saying she expected him “to make SPD a place where professionalism, integrity, compassion, and community partnership are at the center of every action.”

Friday, December 12

Parking Enforcement Officers On Work Slowdown After Contract Negotiations Stall

After two years of negotiations with the city, the Seattle Parking Enforcement Officers Guild authorized a “realignment of enforcement priorities”—essentially, a work slowdown—to signal to city negotiators that they need a better contract. The issues at play include pay—parking officers’ pay is capped at $37 an hour, which the union argues is too low—and working conditions, like having to respond to calls on unpaid lunch breaks.

Seattle Nice: New Police Contract, Wilson Keeps Police Chief, and We Celebrate our Four-Year Anniversary!

On the fourth anniversary of the Seattle Nice podcast, we discussed some of the big stories of the week, including the new police contract, Wilson’s decision to retain SPD chief Barnes, and what HUD’s decision to yank its annual homeless program funding application might mean for people experiencing homelessness in Seattle (and the King County Regional Homelessness Authority.)

labor, Mayor Harrell

Parking Enforcement Officers On Work Slowdown After Contract Negotiations Stall
Image by Kyah117, via Wikimedia Commons. CC-by-4.0 license

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle’s parking enforcement officers have been engaged in a work slowdown since mid-November, after failing to reach an agreement on a contract that would raise their pay and allow them to take paid lunch breaks, among other union demands.

Jake Sisley, the head of the Seattle Parking Enforcement Officers Guild (SPEOG), said that on November 18, the parking enforcement officers started a “realignment of enforcement priorities” that will result in fewer tickets and more warnings for people who violate on-street parking rules.

“The city makes money off PEOs going out and doing their job, and while I maintain that’s not the primary purpose, I think the city sees it as the primary purpose,” Sisley said. “We don’t want to diminish the level of service we provide the public—like, if someone calls and says there’s a car blocking their driveway, we’ll still cite that person and tow them. But for everything else that’s kind of benign, like pay to park or if there’s a no parking zone, maybe that’s not a problem. Maybe you don’t give them a ticket, but just give them a warning.”

SPEOG represents the city’s 85 or so parking enforcement officers, who are part of the Seattle Police Department but operate under a separate contract. (Mayor Bruce Harrell just signed a new police contract giving rookie officers a starting salary of $118,000, rising to $126,000 after six months, plus bonuses for having a two- or four-year degree).

Currently, PEO salaries max out at just over $37 an hour—an amount SPEOG President Jake Sisley says is far too low, especially compared to civilian Community Service Officers and License and Standards Inspectors, who make up to $52 an hour. “Parking enforcement officers do a lot,” Sisley said—from ticketing and towing cars that are blocking driveways and roads to directing traffic at special events to knocking on the doors of RVs where people are living as part of the abandoned vehicles team.

The PEOs have been working without a contract since the end of 2023, the same year that six new people joined the city council, shaking up the Labor Relations Policy Committee, which votes on labor contracts. (A five-member council majority serves on the LRPC.)  SPEOG agreed to put the contract, which would go through the end of this year, off until the fall of 2024, Sisley said, when the union asked for a “robust” 32 percent pay increase that would to put parking enforcement officers’ pay in line with CSOs and licensing inspectors. The city countered with an offer of 2 percent.

“Our response was essentially, ‘Get real,’ because there were so many other things that were on the table,” Sisley said. “The fact that they came back with essentially [just] 2 percent— it was like, you aren’t even trying. You’re trying to delay.”

Since then, Sisley said “they’ve slowly clawed back up to a real proposal”—one that would increase PEO pay by at least 11.5 percent—but a number of issues are still outstanding and the contract is currently in mediation, with no clear path to consensus.

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The PEOs are asking for a half-hour paid lunch, rather than their current unpaid lunch breaks, because they often get calls during lunch and have to leave. Sisley said the city’s labor negotiators said they could just turn their radios and phones off during their breaks, but SPEOG argued that would create a safety issue.

They’re also opposing the city’s effort to make service on specialty teams, like the abandoned vehicles squad, a mandatory part of the routine “bid” for shifts, instead of something people sign up for on a voluntary basis; they argue that if not enough people are signing up to work these shifts, the city should pay a premium to those who volunteer. SPEOG has filed a grievance over this issue, Sisley said.

For years, the parking enforcement division has had high turnover and about 20 vacant positions. Moving the PEOs back to SPD from SDOT, where they were moved in 2021 (the only sense in which SPD was meaningfully “defunded”) was supposed to improve hiring and reduce turnover, but it didn’t, leaving about 18 perennially vacant positions.

This year, Mayor Bruce Harrell tried to defund these positions and move their funding, almost $3 million, to pay for his other priorities. After learning that PEOs actually bring in more money than they cost, in the form of fines, the council rejected that proposal. SPEOG argues the hiring and turnover issues will persist, however, as long as parking enforcement officer wages and working conditions remain worse than similar jobs, like CSOs.

“It’s not so much about the money—it’s about the principles,” Sisley said. “But the money does matter.”

The city’s lead negotiator on the contract and Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office declined to comment for this story, citing the ongoing negotiations.

labor, Transit

Staffers Say Sound Transit Refused to Bargain on Return-to-Office Policy, Use of Consultants

 

Photo of Union Station by Steve Morgan, CC BY-SA 4.0 license, via Wikimedia Commons

But Sound Transit says they’re bargaining “in good faith,” and that staffers should have known they couldn’t work from home indefinitely.

By Erica C. Barnett

For months, Sound Transit staffers have been trying to negotiate with their bosses over what they describe as return-to-office mandate and an increasing reliance on consultants rather than staff. But, they say, the regional bus and light-rail agency has refused to bargain, ignoring or rebuffing their primary demands over months of negotiations that reached an impasse

Earlier this month, Sound Transit staff who recently joined the PROTEC17 union, including internal specialists who help oversee projects and keep track of costs, packed a Sound Transit board meeting to express their disappointment in the lack of progress. One staffer who testified accused Sound Transit of “stonewalling at the negotiating table”; another said the agency was pushing an “agenda of overspending, risky contract procurement and major sweeping changes without our input.”

This past March, after more than a year of interim leadership, the Sound Transit board appointed former King County Executive Dow Constantine as its CEO.

A Sound Transit spokeswoman, Rachelle Cunningham, said the agency “is committed to respecting employees’ rights to organize and to maintaining strong, collaborative relationships with our labor partners, grounded in inclusion, respect, and shared purpose.”

One major point of contention is Sound Transit’s return-to-office policy, which requires most staffers to come in to the agency’s office in the Chinatown-International District three days a week. (Staffers say they got just 30 days’ notice of the change). Because Sound Transit told employees they could work from anywhere in Washington state during the pandemic, some moved out of the Seattle area and are now expected to commute hours to the office after working remotely for the past five years.

Staffers told PubliCola Sound Transit never gave a clear reason for the policy change. “There really isn’t a good argument, as far as our work is concerned, to force everybody into one location,” one staffer, who requested anonymity to protect their job, said. “The only argument that’s been giving is the ‘revitalization of Seattle.'” Another staffer added that Sound Transit opened two new light rail extensions successfully during the pandemic, suggesting that employees could work effectively without coming in to a physical office.

For staffers who relocated outside Seattle on the belief that Sound Transit’s remote work policy would be ongoing, the sudden return-to-office mandate could mean factoring an hours-long unpaid commute into every workday spent at Sound Transit headquarters. “For me, it means being less productive—actually getting less work done, because so much of my time is going to be spent commuting,” the first staffer said.

Cunningham said the agency started implementing it return-to-office policy at the beginning of 2025, and that “there was never a policy that stated employees could live anywhere in Washington and work remotely on a permanent basis.” The union disagrees, arguing that return-to-office is a work condition that Sound Transit needs to negotiate with represented employees.

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The second Sound Transit staffer said parts of their job are now being done by contractors who were supposed to augment, but not replace, Sound Transit staff. “I had to kick, scream and claw myself into meetings” where they were previously part of decision-making, the staffer said. “These consultants don’t know what they don’t know in terms of Sound Transit processes.”

In addition to hiring more contractors to do agency work, Sound Transit is moving toward a new contract procurement method in which multiple contractors are awarded a single contract to compete for individual jobs. They fear that this, too, could be a way of boxing out Sound Transit staff in favor of  private contractors. “Leadership is hollowing out [and moving] our public agency towards a privatization framework, replacing us with consultants,” the first staffer said.

“There weren’t a lot of answers about the need for this big change,” the second staffer added. “It’s all up in the air, it’s all new, and there has been very little communication about our place in all this. …  There’s a lack of trust in internal staff and a feeling that we’re not important to the vision for the agency.”

Cunningham said there’s been “no change” in how Sound Transit uses contractors. “The need for consultant services changes to reflect the needs of project delivery and operations, but nothing is being done differently than in the past,” she said.

After the action at the board meeting November 6, PROTEC17 director Karen Estevenin said, “we have received proposals on some of our top issues, and had a decent negotiation session. We plan to keep up the solidarity and actions until we have an agreement we can all be proud of.”

labor, Mayor Harrell, Police, Renters

Tietjen Still at East Precinct, Harrell Overheard Discussing Tip Credit Rollback, Mayor’s Budget Preserves Cut to Tenant Services

1. Two weeks ago after PubliCola reported that Police Chief Shon Barnes had picked controversial police captain Mike Tietjen to head up Capitol Hill’s East Precinct, Barnes announced internally that he was removing Tietjen, blaming our “recent article that has raised unease within the East Precinct, leading to a crisis of confidence among our LGBTQIA+ community members.”

As of Thursday, though, Tietjen was still in charge of the precinct, with no clear timeline for replacing him. An SPD spokesperson responded to a list of questions from PubliCola by saying, that “no movement has been made of yet. I do not have a timeline for completion at this time.”

Tietjen has been a high-profile, controversial figure at SPD since at least 2007, when he and his bike patrol partner were accused of planting drugs on a man and arresting him. City investigators later concluded that Tietjen and his partner lied about the arrest (and likely pocketed weed belonging to the suspect). The allegations raised questions about the two men’s credibility in 17 other drug and firearms cases.

More recently, Tietjen became notorious for his actions during the 2020 protests against police brutality after driving onto a sidewalk toward a group of protesters, calling them “cockroaches” when they fled the path of his unmarked SUV. (Tietjen was suspended for that incident and another in which he shoved a protester into a bus stop, slamming their head). During the same period, Tietjen failed to report an incident in which a group of officers, including one who was his direct report, allegedly harassed a trans woman in Capitol Hill, asking her if she “had a dick under” her skirt.

SPD did not respond to PubliCola’s questions about why Tietjen is still at the East Precinct and the process for replacing him.

2. During a recent meeting with restaurant owners at a West Seattle cafe, Mayor Bruce Harrell appeared to commit to considering the reinstatement of the “tip credit” for restaurants or other “exemptions” that could make it less expensive to run their businesses.

Seattle’s minimum wage law, passed in 2015, included a “tip credit” that allowed employers to pay sub-minimum wages as long as their workers made enough in tips to bring their overall “minimum compensation” to the city minimum.

The conversation was overheard by a bystander who provided a brief recording of the conversation to PubliCola. In the recording, Harrell can be heard saying that if reelected, “I fully commit, in January, to convene just restaurants” to discuss “what the city can do, from a policy perspective,” to help them deal with Seattle’s high minimum wage—”whether it’s exemptions, or re-discussion of the tip credit, I’ll have that discussion.”

Contacted by PubliCola, a spokesman for the mayor said, “Rolling back the minimum wage and reinstating the tip credit is not a policy we’re considering now or in the future. The mayor will always meet with small businesses to hear their ideas[.]”

The 2015 minimum wage law, passed unanimously by a city council that included Harrell, gave restaurants and other businesses that rely on customers to pay their workers’ wages through tips 10 years to adjust to the fact that they would have to pay the full minimum wage in 2025. Last year, Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth tried unsuccessfully to preserve the tip credit indefinitely.

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3. Harrell’s proposed budget preserves cuts made last year to the Department of Construction and Inspections’ tenant assistance program, which the city reduced from about $2.4 million to $1.6 million between 2024 and 2025. The tenant services program pays for counseling, legal aid,  education, and other assistance to tenants facing eviction or navigating landlord-tenant conflicts. Some of organizations whose city funding was cut or remained flat this year include the Tenants Union, United Indians of All Tribes Foundation, Solid Ground, and the Housing Justice Project, along with half a dozen others.

Harrell’s 2026 budget proposal includes no inflation adjustments, meaning that in real terms, nonprofits whose funding stayed flat will continue to experience reductions in their ability to pay staff salaries and other costs that are funded through SDCI.

In a letter to the city council earlier this month, seven groups that depend on city funding to operate their programs asked the council to reverse the cuts made last year and add more funding to address inflation and augment programs at a time when evictions and homelessness are approaching record highs.  The most cost-effective way to address homelessness is prevention, by helping people stay housed,” the organizations wrote. “When rental assistance is paired with tenant services it becomes far more effective, ensuring resources are used efficiently to keep people stably housed.”

Progressive Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck reportedly plans to introduce a budget amendment that would add $1 million to the budget for tenant services, restoring last year’s cut and addressing some of the inflationary cost increases over the past two years.

Last year, then-councilmember Tammy Morales did manage to get $355,000 in the budget to reduce the mayor’s proposed cuts to tenant services, but failed to get support for restoring another $456,000 in cuts. The council is similarly constituted this year, with Rinck, rather than Morales, as the lone consistent progressive on a centrist council focused on boosting the police budget, not helping tenants access legal aid.

We’ve reached out to Rinck about her amendment and will update this post if we hear back.

 

labor, Mayor Harrell, Police, Uncategorized

New Police Chief Shon Barnes Accepted $50,000 Hiring Bonus Created for Rank and File Officers

SPD says the city offered Barnes the bonus, first approved in 2022 to boost police officer hiring, “as part of his compensation.” 

By Erica C. Barnett

Editor’s note: This post is an update to yesterday’s story revealing that the Seattle Police Department paid $50,000 bonuses intended for new rank and-file-officers to new Deputy Police Chief Andre Sayles and new Assistant Chief Nicole Powell. Sayles and Powell’s positions, along with other positions added by Barnes, are new, and add ongoing costs to the Seattle Police Department’s budget.

The Seattle Police Department confirmed that Police Chief Shon Barnes, appointed by Mayor Bruce Harrell in December and confirmed by the Seattle City Council last month, received a $50,000 recruitment bonus under legislation first passed in 2022 to promote the “recruitment of new police officers” during what proponents called a crisis-level officer shortage. (In 2024, the council increased the bonus from $30,000 to $50,000).

“While recruiting Shon Barnes, a respected law enforcement leader, the City of Seattle offered as part of his compensation a ‘hiring incentive’ of $50,000 under the City’s 2024 legislation, which is related to the recruitment and retention of police officers at the understaffed Seattle Police Department,” an SPD spokesperson told PubliCola.

As we reported yesterday, the legislation that created lateral hiring bonuses was explicitly about police officers, not executives. According to the 2022 legislation, the bonuses are meant to entice trained officers who “require minimal training and can immediately bolster the department’s 9-1-1 response ability or provision of investigative services.”

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Lisa Herbold, the former councilmember who sponsored the 2022 legislation, confirmed that the bonuses were intended for police officers, not command staff. Council President Sara Nelson, who sponsored a 2024 bill  that increased the lateral hiring bonus from $30,000 to $50,000, said her intent was to provide an extra incentive to help SPD recruit more “lower-level officers.”

SPD’s statement suggests that Mayor Bruce Harrell proactively offered Barnes the $50,000 bonus on top of an annual salary of more than $360,000 a year. We’ve reached out to Harrell’s office to find out whether and, if so, why he initiated this offer.

SPD said they’re splitting Barnes’ payment into two parts in accordance with the hiring-bonus legislation. “To date, $25,000 has been paid to Barnes according to the City’s agreed-upon compensation structure,” the SPD spokesperson said.

The section of the about splitting the hiring bonuses actually highlights the fact that the bonuses were never intended for the top SPD brass. According to the legislation, “Half of the hiring incentive will be paid in the first paycheck and the second half upon completion of any probationary period required by the Public Safety Civil Service Rules.” The probationary period isn’t there just to require cops to prove they can do the job—once they’re off probation, they get job protections as part of the civil service.

Chiefs (including deputy and assistant chiefs) aren’t part of the civil service—they can be fired at will. As such, they don’t have any probationary period. Put another way, Barnes’ position falls outside the parameters of the legislation, so he isn’t subject to the two-payment structure mandated in that law.

We’ve asked SPD to clarify this explanation.

Elections, labor, Mayor Harrell

Election Fizz: City Employees Back Wilson for Mayor, Harrell Slams “Wilson’s Defund Movement,” and More

An image of Seattle deputy mayor Tim Burgess with the text, "We face two big decisions about Seattle's future. First, how can we sustain the positive changes we have all witnessed over the past three and a half years? Second, who is best able to lead this city forward, building on the remarkable turnaround we have all seen since 2022? For me, the answer is clear: Re-elect Bruce Harrell as mayor. Please join me in voting for Mayor Harrell and strengthen the positive momentum for change. Here’s some context." Remember 2020 and 2021. The COVID pandemic was in full swing. We stayed home and wore masks. Businesses closed, and storefronts were boarded up. Police officers in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd in plain view of all of us. Protests quickly spread across the country, some turning violent, including here. Our City Council was conflicted, confused, and unsure how to respond. They foolishly declared that the city should defund the police department by 50 percent. Police officers quit in droves, dangerously weakening our police service. The police chief resigned. Tents appeared everywhere, cluttering parks and sidewalks. Dilapidated RVs were parked throughout the city, many used for narcotics trafficking and prostitution. City government was paralyzed, to say the least. (One of the mayor’s opponents, Katie Wilson, was an advocate for defunding the police and is aligned with former Councilmember Kshama Sawant.)1. At a press conference outside City Hall on Thursday morning, the union that represents thousands of City of Seattle employees, announced that they’re endorsing Katie Wilson for Seattle mayor. The endorsement is particularly monumental given that most of the city employees represented by PROTEC17 work for Mayor Bruce Harrell and are making the case to voters for firing their boss.

“This was not an easy decision for our union, but in these challenging times, PROTEC17 members are looking for a shared vision for a better city and a clear plan for how we’ll get there,” the union’s executive director Karen Estevenin, said. “”PROTEC17 members are deeply concerned with affordability in our city… [and] creating pathways that should have been created years ago for progressive revenue so that we can address the city deficit and prevent the loss of critical services right now.”

Although the largest coalition of local labor unions, the MLK Labor Council, endorsed Harrell, a number of smaller unions, along with the Working Families Party and all of the local Democratic Party groups, have endorsed Wilson—who, as the head of the Transit Riders Union, played a leading role in the passage of higher minimum wage laws around the region, renter protections in Seattle such as caps on move-in costs and late fees, and the JumpStart payroll tax that has saved the city repeatedly from devastating budget cuts.

“It’s not an easy thing to challenge an incumbent mayor who’s been in office a very long time, and I know that it is not an easy thing for people and organizations with skin in the game to support a challenger to such an incumbent, especially when that incumbent is your boss,” Wilson said Thursday. “I believe that we will win this race, and despite the enormous challenges facing our city, from a quarter-billion-dollar budget deficit to an escalating homelessness crisis to attacks from the Trump administration, I feel immensely hopeful for the future of our city.”

2. For its part, Harrell’s campaign has decided to go with the evergreen tactic of “paint our opponent as the second coming of Kshama Sawant.” In a recent campaign mailing, Harrell said Wilson was “clear in her support for an arbitrary 50% cut in the SPD budget”—linking, perhaps assuming no one would click, to a Crosscut article in which Wilson laid out a detailed plan for the city to replace police by using less expensive civilian workers for jobs like directing traffic at events and responding to mental health crises.

In the email, which echoed a recent poll testing whether voters would buy that Wilson is a “loud,” “angry,” “divisive” woman, Harrell even referred to the entire Defund the Police movement from 2020 as “Wilson’s defund movement– led on council by her longtime ally Kshama Sawant,” and blamed Wilson indirectly for “an exodus from SPD and a dramatic rise in violent crime, crime that disproportionately impacted lower income and communities of color.”<

‘Lest it be forgotten, Wilson was never strongly aligned with Sawant—in fact, Sawant blamed the “Katie Wilson-dominated liberal activist layer” for “crowding out” Socialist Alternative, her political party at the time, during the city budget debate in 2019. Sawant has not been a council member since 2023.

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3. In a separate Harrell campaign email, deputy mayor Tim Burgess (a man who very specifically owes his job to Harrell) said he was supporting the mayor because he would “strengthen the positive momentum for change”—a bold assertion, given that Harrell has been either a city council member or mayor for 16 of the last 18 years. Burgess’ email encourages voters to think back to how bad things were during the pandemic— “The police chief resigned. Tents appeared everywhere, cluttering parks and sidewalks”—and thank their lucky stars that Harrell was elected mayor.

Burgess’ email attributes the turnaround Seattle has seen since 2020, including a decline in tents on sidewalks, lower violent crime rates, and even an increase in shelter referrals (a statistic Harrell’s predecessor Jenny Durkan also loved to throw around) to Harrell’s bold actions. In reality, while Harrell has dramatically increased no-notice encampment sweeps (a contrast to 2020, when Durkan was forced to pause sweeps at the height of COVID lockdown) the number of people experiencing homelessness in Seattle has only increased, with Native, Black, and Latino people most affected.

(“Referrals” to shelter remains a meaningless metric. It’s like declaring victory when the number of 911 calls for overdoses goes up; the true measure of success is how many people enroll in shelter and move on to more permanent housing, or how many lives first responders actually save after they show up.)<

“Police arrests,” Burgess wrote, are “at their highest level since 2020″—a metric Harrell’s supporters may view as an unmitigated good, but which should cause more skeptical voters to ask, “Arrests for what?” The city has made many illegal activities extra-illegal since Harrell was elected, including drug use and possession, sex work, street racing, graffiti.

4. Harrell’s fundraising email also blasted his opponent Joe Mallahan, saying “How dare a candidate say anyone overreacted to the murder of George Floyd. Harrell was mischaracterizing Mallahan’s comments about “the overreaction” to the murder of George Floyd . In fact, Mallahan’s views about the 2020 protests are right in line with Harrell’s own message in the same email—that city officials were out of line for even considering cuts to police spending in 2020.

Mallahan doesn’t need Harrell’s help to put his foot in his mouth. At a campaign forum in Columbia City on Wednesday night, Mallahan talked about how he and “my immigrant wife” “stumbled into” the Royal Esquire Club a few years ago and were welcomed with open arms by the people there.

The Royal Esquire Club is a private social club for Black men where Harrell served in leadership roles and to which he has steered city funding. Harrell came under scrutiny in 2018 and 2019 for allegedly pressuring the city’s Office of Labor Standards to drop a investigation into wage theft based on the allegations of five women who worked at the club.

Mallahan later compared the Royal Esquire to the Greenlake bar and venue the Little Red Hen, which he called “basically the Royal Esquire Club for the white folks on the north side” in response to a question about how the candidates would work to “save the Hen” and other “creative third spaces” in Seattle.

During his closing statement, Mallahan did an “I have Black friends” routine, saying, “I have a Black man who’s 39 or 40 years old, who calls me his father” as well as a Black nephew. He also worked on the campaigns for Obama and Kamala Harris, he added.