Category: public disclosure

Addiction, City Council, Courts, Police, public disclosure

This Week on PubliCola: May 10, 2025

Ethics rules, a public records lawsuit, and a bar complaint against Seattle’s Republican city attorney.

Monday, May 5

Seattle Nice: New Hope for Fentanyl Users

On this week’s episode, Sandeep and I interviewed the Downtown Emergency Service Center’s medical experts about a breakthrough in treatment for opioid addiction that makes it easier for people who use fentanyl to start medication-assisted treatment, and more likely that they’ll stick with treatment once they start.

Minimum Wage Advocates Countersue Burien; Council Bill Says Conflict of Interest Recusals Are Bad for Democracy

In response to a lawsuit by the city of Burien claiming that the minimum wage ordinance recently passed by voters is confusing and unenforceable, proponents of the law countersued, alleging that Burien is ignoring the will of the voters. And, the Seattle City Council argues that recusing themselves from votes when they have financial conflicts of interest would deprive voters of representation.

Tuesday, May 6

Seattle Police Guild Sues Police Department Over Public Records Delays

We aren’t the only ones fed up with SPD’s delay tactic of “grouping” public disclosure requests filed by the same person and considering them one at a time; the Seattle Police Officers Guild also says SPD is using the policy to withhold records from requests dating back as far as 2020.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

Wednesday, May 7

The Most Common Reason for Past City Council Recusals: Owning Rental Property

As the council prepares to release themselves from longstanding ethics rules just in time for a vote on changes to landlord-tenant law (some council members are landlords and might have to abstain under the current code), we looked back at the relatively few times council members have recused themselves in the past. The most common financial conflict was—drumroll—being a landlord.

Thursday, May 8

County Council Gives Itself a Little ($315,000) Gift; Saka’s Effort to Divert Traffic Safety Funds to Sidewalks Fails

The King County Council added more than $300,000 to their district budgets to pay for unanticipated expenses at a time when the county faces a $160 million two-year shortfall. And Seattle Councilmember Rob Saka narrowly failed to convince his colleagues to use speed camera revenues on sidewalks rather than traffic safety projects.

At Ethics Meeting, Moore Says Changing Ethics Code Will Improve Representation and “Transparency”

At a meeting of the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, Councilmember Cathy Moore responded to a dozen public comments opposing her proposal to weaken ethics rules, reiterating the claim that recusal was antidemocratic and adding that verbally disclosing a conflict of interest is more transparent than recusing oneself from a vote because of that conflict.

Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi Files Bar Complaint Against City Attorney Ann Davison and Her Former Criminal Chief

PubliCola exclusive: Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi, who’s been effectively prohibited from doing her job for the last year, filed a bar complaint against the city attorney and her former criminal division chief, charging that they fabricated and misrepresented evidence against her in their letter issuing a blanked affidavit of prejudice against her, preventing Vaddadi from hearing criminal cases.

Courts, Police, public disclosure

Seattle Police Guild Sues Police Department Over Public Records Delays
Photo by Derek Simeone, via Wikimedia Commons, cc-by-2.0 license

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle Police Officers Guild has filed a lawsuit against the Seattle Police Department over its practice of “grouping” multiple public disclosure requests from a single requester and responding to them one at a time, a policy that allows SPD to sit on more recent requests for years while slowly fulfilling older ones.

The lawsuit stems from nine requests SPOG filed between 2020 and 2025; the oldest, from March 11, 2020, is more than five years old. SPOG is asking the police department to hand over the records and pay its attorney fees.

“Our biggest gripe,” SPOG president Mike Solan said, is that SPD has determined that SPOG is a “high user” of the system, “and therefore it will take too long to process [our requests.] And for us, when we see other entities granted what appear to be really quick turnoarounds, in terms of days, if not a week, when we’ve got yearslong requests that are not being granted, there’s something not right with the system in terms of being fair and balanced.”

Earlier this year, the Seattle Times sued SPD on similar grounds, alleging that SPD was failing to follow the terms of its earlier settlement over the grouping issue. In that settlement, SPD explicitly agreed not to group records requests made more than eight weeks apart—not just for the Seattle Times, but for everyone.

The records SPOG is seeking range from videos of what the lawsuit refers to as the 2020 protests, which the lawsuit refers to as “riots,” as well as records about officers’ job assignments; the city’s decision in early 2020 to reconstitute its encampment removal team, which had included police; and documents related to the city’s adoption of Workday, a new payroll system that has issued inaccurate paychecks to many city employees, including police.

“When applying the Grouping Policy, SPD processes only one grouped request at a time, placing the others on hold as if the PRA obligations are suspended,” SPOG’s lawsuit says. “This practice adds lengthy delays to an already slow process for obtaining SPD records, and signals to the requester that any additional requests will be futile.”

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

 

SPD’s public disclosure division allows requesters to pick a single request for a public disclosure officer to answer, in its entirety, before starting on the second request on the list. “In other words,” the lawsuit says, “the City deliberately creates a circumstance where a requestor is required to acquiesce to the City’s improper Grouping Policy in order to supposedly enable the City to process a request that is more important to the requestor.

As we’ve reported previously, PubliCola currently has nine requests stuck in the grouping process, with SPD working on just one request. At SPD’s current rate of progress, we don’t expect answers to most of our requests for many years, if ever, and have more or less stopped filing requests. By creating a policy that allows SPD’s legal department to delay records requests indefinitely SPD has effectively overturned the state Public Disclosure Act for anyone else who files multiple records requests.

Several years ago, compounding this problem for members of the press, SPD’s media relations department began responding to basic media questions by telling (certain) reporters to file a records request—knowing full well, based on experience, that filing a request was about as effective than screaming into a hole in the ground. (The media folks got better once Sue Rahr replaced Adrian Diaz as interim chief a year ago; the public disclosure response team, which is part of SPD’s legal division, did not.).

City Attorney Ann Davison’s office filed a terse response to the lawsuit that denied the allegations but did not go into detail about why they believe SPD is in the right. Davison’s office declined to comment.

“We hope that this lawsuit will illustrate our concerns with [SPD] not following the rules,” Solan said. “I think that is a fair thing to ask: Change the policy and grant us our public disclosure requests.”

 

Police, public disclosure

Police Deny Request to Produce Records in a Timely Fashion

SPD West Precinct

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle Police Department’s public disclosure office denied PubliCola’s request to consider nine outstanding records requests in four batches, as a settlement agreement between the department and the Seattle Times requires, telling us that they are following a rule put in place under former mayor Ed Murray that allowed SPD to “group” all records requests from a single media outlet or individual into a single mega-request and respond to each request one at a time.

In 2023, the city settled the Seattle Times’ lawsuit over this practice, which unreasonably delays access to public information, by agreeing to refrain from grouping requests made more than eight weeks apart. Although the agreement did not entirely stop SPD from grouping (and thereby delaying) records requests, it was supposed to rein in the police department’s liberal use of this delaying tactic.

SPD did not say why they suddenly decided to group our requests, most of which SPD has claimed to be working on for months, and in some cases well over a year. SPD had already provided disclosure dates for all but one of our nine requests (and three we closed because we’ve been waiting so long that they’re no longer timely; now, SPD has canceled all of those dates and assigned a “placeholder” disclosure date of December 31, 2025 to all but one of our requests.

SPD’s decision to group our requests means that records that we were supposed to receive, under SPD’s previous disclosure schedule, in the next couple of months have now been arbitrarily pushed out to a date more than a year in the future. Under the old schedule, we were supposed to receive records on three requests this month, one request in January, four in February, one in March, one in April, and two in May. Now, under a best-case scenario, we’ll get the first installment on a single request we made last April at the end of February, with all the others pushed out indefinitely.

This delay in providing access to public records directly contradicts the terms of the city’s settlement, and creates an obstruction to public access to public information. We filed a records request today to find out how many other media outlets and members of the public have been affected by this policy over the past year. Since our latest request has to get in line behind all the others, dating back to early 2023, it will likely be a long, long time before we have our answer.

Police, public disclosure

SPD Is Still Delaying Public Disclosure by “Grouping” Records Requests, In Defiance of 2023 Settlement

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle Police Department informed PubliCola last week that it will be “grouping” all of PubliCola’s 12 open, but unrelated, public records requests into a single request and answering each of them in chronological order, rather than working on more than one of our requests at one time, which had been standard practice. All of our other requests have been pushed out, “as a placeholder date,” until December 31, 2025.

According to the form response SPD’s public disclosure office attached to all of our outstanding requests, the office can use its “discretion to group multiple requests received from the same requester or similar requests from multiple requesters and to process the requests together as a group.”

The effect of this decision will be to slow down our requests, placing the most recent ones at the back of a very long queue—discouraging PubliCola from filing additional requests and giving SPD an incentive to hold requests open longer than necessary, further delaying access to public information. We may finally get records we asked for months or years in the past, but requests we filed this month won’t see the light of day until every other request we’ve ever filed is complete.

SPD’s decision to group all our requests into a single pile is a clear violation of an agreement reached with the Seattle Times last year, which applies to all records requests, not just the Times’. Under that agreement, SPD agreed that it would not lump requests together if they are more than eight weeks apart. Our open requests do include three sets of requests that are within eight weeks of each other, plus six that are not; the requests span more than two years, October 2022 to November 2024.

According to the settlement with the Times—which the paper covered under the headline, “SPD agrees to improve public disclosure”—the city agreed that the “Seattle Police Department (SPD) will modify its [grouping policy] to preclude administrative grouping of requests that are submitted by the same requester more than eight (8) weeks apart from each other.” Prior to the settlement, the Times reported, police would “at times delay releasing records for years, well beyond the period of time it actually took to process a given request”—precisely the problem PubliCola is facing now.

SPD’s public disclosure officer did give us the opportunity re-order the 12 requests, but did not agree to work on more than one of them at a time.

In a statement, an SPD spokesman said SPD groups requests like PubliCola’s in order to “allocate resources efficiently and fairly, to provide fullest assistance to all requestors, and to process requests in a manner that allows the greatest number of requests from the greatest number of requestors to be processed, without prioritizing or deprioritizing any one requestor.”

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

SPD has “more than quadrupled the size of the public disclosure unit since 2016,” the spokesman said, but there is still a backlog of almost 4,000 requests. SPD has used this backlog as a reason for delays for many years, and has appended a note about the backlog to its form response to records requests since at least 2018. In any case, SPD is required to follow the law, and abide by legally binding settlement agreements, regardless of workload.

The “grouping” policy, adopted under former mayor Ed Murray, was supposedly designed to reduce delays for public records requesters by allowing public disclosure staff to work on requests from more people at once. In practice, it leads to delays so long that the information is often outdated, sometimes by years, by the time it shows up in a reporter’s inbox.

PubliCola reached Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison’s office, which signed the agreement with the Seattle Times, to ask if SPD and the City Attorney’s Office have a difference of opinion about whether SPD has to abide by the settlement, and whether the city attorney considered them to be violating it by continuing to group (and delay) records requests. A spokesman for Davison responded by telling us the city attorney does not give legal advice to media (obviously, we didn’t ask for legal advice) and said any information about their position on the settlement was subject to attorney-client privilege.

Getting information from SPD through official channels, never easy, became extraordinarily difficult in recent years. Under its former director John O’Neil, SPD’s communications office routinely responded to simple questions and requests for information by telling PubliCola to file a records request—a departure from past practice that has made it impossible, practically speaking, to get things like police reports and 911 calls in a timely fashion.

The SPD spokesman said the media relations office will do its best to answer questions in the future, and there have been noticeable improvements. But that doesn’t address the potentially years-long waits we currently face for our outstanding requests, a pile that has continued to grow because our reporting hasn’t stopped just because the department has told us, in effect, that filing records requests is pointless.

SPD’s delay tactics have had real consequences, though. Many of our requests have become significantly less timely over the months or years PubliCola has spent waiting for records. These include requests for information about former police chief Adrian Diaz’ alleged use of his security detail to run personal errands and take him to the Portland Airport so he could fly to a Huskies game in Houston; requests related to body camera analysis; requests for information about the killing of 23-year-old pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula by police officer Kevin Dave in January 2023; and requests for information about Daniel Auderer, the police union leader caught on tape laughing about Kandula’s death.

In the interest of expediting our outstanding requests, PubliCola has closed some of the requests that are no longer timely, like a request for information about parking enforcement officers we filed in June 2022. While we don’t see much point in having SPD produce records on an issue that is no longer newsworthy, our decision in itself illustrates the problem with letting the police sit on public records for months or years. The public deserves to know what the city’s police department is doing with their tax dollars in a timely fashion, not years after the fact—but SPD has designed its policies to delay providing that information for as long as possible.

public disclosure

Updated and Improved: The City of Seattle’s Employee Directory, Only On PubliCola
Photo by Mark Daynes, via Unsplash.

By Erica C. Barnett

Since 2021, when then-mayor Jenny Durkan disappeared the city’s online employee directory (and promised, falsely, to repeat it), PubliCola has been filing records requests, consolidating, editing, and converting multiple spreadsheets in various formats into a single database that anyone can search to find contact information for virtually anyone in the city. (So DON’T COMPLAIN TO ME IF YOU CAN’T USE IT. Just kidding. I love your feedback!)

The reason I publish this database, a process that routinely includes pulling my own hair out, is because this information is public, and it should be publicly available. It is standard practice for other governments, including cities like Bellevue, counties like King and Pierce, and the entire Washington State government, to make their employees’ contact information publicly available. Seattle became an outlier, under Durkan, in 2019, and has continued to withhold this information from the public under current Mayor Bruce Harrell.

City officials often talk about “access,” “transparency,” and “public-facing databases,” suggesting they value keeping themselves accountable to their constituents. But when Seattle (or any city) replaces a standard directory of public employees and their contact information with a short list of gatekeepers and links to generic internal websites, that’s a blow against transparency. And while it’s easy to throw up our hands and say that this kind of slow erosion of accessible information is inevitable, it’s important to remember that it hasn’t always been this way.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

So, as we have in the past, we’re publishing a searchable database—also available as a Google spreadsheet—of all publicly available contact information for city employees. This version, unlike one we published earlier this year, includes each listed employee’s name, contact information (email and/or phone), department, and title.

A few notes on the data: Each employee is listed in Lastname,Firstname format in a single cell, so my name would be listed as Barnett,Erica (but searching in the “Name” column for “contains” “Erica” would pull me (and any other Ericas, Americas, etc.) up. Or, if you want to find everyone who works in a department, searching by the department’s acronym—say, SDOT, for the Seattle Department of Transportation—will pull up everyone in that department. Alternately, you can just go into the Google spreadsheet and search or sort by whatever you’re looking for.

Employees who asked the city to remove them from publicly available contact lists, such as some victims of domestic violence, have been removed from this database.

As we’ve said every time we’ve published this information since 2021: Although this database duplicates much of what was in the official city directory, representing an accurate contact list for city employees as of this summer, it does not provide a substitute for transparency from the city itself, which is ultimately responsible for providing this kind of basic information to its residents.

Police, public disclosure

Pay Records Show Diaz Still Listed as “Chief,” With $338,000 Salary; SPD Won’t Respond to Records Requests Until 2025

1. Former Seattle police chief Adrian Diaz has not been at work since the announcement, in May, that he was stepping down from his position to take on unspecified “special projects.”

However, according to internal payroll documents, as well the city’s public-facing salary database, Diaz has retained the official title “chief of police” along with his previous salary of just under $163 an hour, or $338,000 a year. Sue Rahr, the interim police chief, makes just under $168 an hour, or $349,000 a year. Between Rahr and Diaz, the city is paying a combined total of just over $687,000 for the interim police chief and her predecessor.

Diaz resigned after more than a half-dozen women came forward with accusations of sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and retaliation by Diaz, communications division director Lt. John O’Neil, and others at SPD. Earlier this week, four of the women filed a lawsuit against the city and SPD after the department failed to respond to their previous $5 million tort complaint.

SPD referred questions about Diaz to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office. Harrell spokesman Jamie Housen said Diaz remains on personal leave, and could not confirm reports that Diaz has turned in his SPD vehicle, a 2023 Chevy Tahoe. Asked about Diaz’ salary and title, Housen said, “While the former chief is on leave, we are working with Chief Rahr to determine appropriate title, responsibilities, and salary.” If Diaz was bumped down to his previous rank of lieutenant, his top possible pay would be around $95 an hour, or $197,000 a year—a more than $140,000 pay cut.

2. SPD informed PubliCola this week that it will take them until January 17, 2025 to provide camera footage showing what happened when former deputy mayor Monisha Harrell, who is the mayor’s niece, was stopped by an officer in Greenwood in June. According to Harrell, the officer, Jay Mackey, said he was checking plates for stolen vehicles and couldn’t read hers because it was under a plastic cover; a photo Harrell provided PubliCola, which we blurred for privacy in our original post, showed that the clear cover did not appear to obscure the plate number.

In 2022, then-police chief Diaz said the department would de-prioritize traffic stops for low-level offenses such as having expired tabs, part of an effort to reduce opportunities for racial profiling and avoid the kind of conflict between officers and drivers that can escalate to violence.

Harrell, who is Black, told PubliCola she believes Mackey, who is white, was profiling her. The video will help flesh out what happened and reveal exactly what Mackey said when he approached Harrell’s car.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

By making the public wait seven months or more to see it, SPD is withholding public information for what is, by any measure, an excessive amount of time.

SPD’s slow responses to records requests have long been infamous, but the time they take to fulfill records requests has become increasingly extreme. Last year, for instance, it took SPD eight months to provide PubliCola with audio of a single 911 call; in contrast, back in 2016, it took SPD  two months to hand over detailed information and audio from every 911 call made from a specific address over a period of more than two years.

PubliCola is still waiting on installments from a request I made about parking enforcement officers back in 2022, and we just got the first batch of emails from a request about body cameras from 2023, with the second installment due to arrive late next March. Those aren’t cherry-picked examples; they’re typical response times for SPD, and would be shocking from other city department.

During COVID, the police department added a lengthy “don’t blame us” explanation for slow responses to its automated records request response, which said that due to “an extreme backlog of requests, staffing shortages, the redeployment of supporting units to SPD’s frontline COVID-19 response, and, pursuant to CDC recommendations and City direction, reassignment to remote access,” it could take SPD between 6 and 12 months to respond to requests.

Starting in 2022, this emergency warning was replaced by a generic explanation for any delays: “At this time, the Seattle Police Department’s Legal Unit is operating under a backlog of over 2,000 open requests.”

In 2023, the Seattle Times signed a pre-litigation agreement with SPD that was supposed to stop excessive records request delays by amending SPD’s practice of “grouping” requests made from the same news organization and responding to them in order. The agreement was silent on the more broadly applicable problem of excessive delays for single requests, which have continued unabated since the newspaper settled with SPD.