Category: public safety

Mayor Wilson, Privacy, public safety, Taxes

Wilson Backs Down on Tenant Protection Rollbacks, Fire Department Funding Plan Fizzles, Privacy Advocates Push Back on Surveillance During World Cup

1. Mayor Katie Wilson’s office confirmed that Wilson will not be proposing changes to the city’s just cause eviction ordinance that housing developers, including the Housing Development Consortium, had been pushing for months. Tenant advocacy groups opposed the potential changes and met with Wilson the week before last to urge her not to move forward with the changes.

Some affordable housing developers have argued for years that the city’s landlord-tenant protections, which are stronger than the state’s,  have made it impossible for them to evict tenants who don’t pay rent or break the law. Specifically, they wanted Wilson to roll back the city’s roommate law, which allows renters to add roommates without asking their landlords’ permission, and and align the requirements to evict a tenant with three days’ notice with the more landlord-friendly state law.

“The Mayor is not proposing changes to the roommate law or the three‑day notice,” a Wilson spokesperson said. “Her office has received proposals and perspectives on a wide range of economic, health, safety, and operational issues.”

Former City Councilmember Cathy Moore said she would introduce legislation that would have rolled back the roommate and three-day notice provisions but resigned before she actually introduced it.

Had Wilson introduced the rollbacks, tenant advocates argued, it would have given centrist councilmembers the opportunity to reopen the entire just cause eviction law, which includes many other provisions landlords oppose. The optics of Wilson—a tenants’ rights activist before becoming mayor—proposing landlord-friendly legislation that even her predecessor, Bruce Harrell, didn’t support would also be terrible, for obvious reasons.

Wilson does plan to propose legislation, in collaboration with Councilmember Dionne Foster, to curb rental “junk fees” in July, her spokesperson said. Wilson wrote about these fees, which include “notice fees,” fees for going month-to-month, and monthly “billing fees,” for PubliCola in 2023.

2. A proposal to create a special taxing district to pay for the Seattle Fire Department is dead, at least for this year, PubliCola has confirmed.

Creating a fire district would have allowed the city to fund much of SFD’s budget through a new property tax, moving that money out of the city’s general fund and helping to close a budget deficit Wilson recently said would be close to $175 million. The district, authorized by a new state law this year, would have had the ability to levy taxes outside the existing property tax cap of $3.60 per $1,000 of assessed property value, making it an appealing way to offload a big chunk of city spending.

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The firefighters’ union, however, did not get on board, effectively killing the proposal. The plan would have made much of the fire department’s funding subject to regular voter approval; it would have also moved SFD under the direct control of the city council, acting as the fire district’s board; the union reportedly wanted SFD to have direct participation on the board, at a minimum.

PubliCola exclusively reported on the potential fire district proposal last month. At a City Club event last week, Wilson said the city is facing a budget deficit of “about $175 million next year.” Without the fire district serving as a relief valve, Wilson will likely introduce additional taxes this year, including a local capital gain tax opposed by business groups like the Seattle Metro Chamber and Downtown Seattle Association.

3. In response to Wilson’s announcement last week that she will turn on police surveillance cameras in the stadium district for the upcoming World Cup games, the anti-surveillance advocates at Community Not Cameras questioned the mayor’s claim that police and the FBI had presented evidence of a “credible threat” to public safety. Wilson previously said she would not turn the cameras on without evidence of a credible threat, but did not clearly define what she meant by that term; last week, she cited “general but credible” threats to justify activating the cameras.

“By activating an Axon-backed surveillance grid in Seattle, the City is risking this data being handed over to a weaponized federal intelligence apparatus,” the coalition said in a statement.

“[R]egardless of whatever bureaucratic policy or verbal assurances the Mayor hides behind, the City of Seattle does not have the power to stop the federal government from obtaining this data once it exists. Any local safeguards or policy limitations the City claims SPD follows are completely meaningless against the collection capabilities and legal mechanisms available to the federal government.  If you build it, and if you turn it on, they can take it.”

Our Seattle, a group of Wilson supporters who organized to hold the mayor accountable to her campaign promises, requested footage from one of the surveillance cameras, which SPD has maintained is deleted after five days and only accessible to a handful of people. They received and posted the footage on Instagram on May 28.

 

 

City Council, Mayor Wilson, Police, public safety

“There’s a Quick Fix”: Councilmembers Pressure Mayor to Activate Police Cameras for World Cup

By Erica C. Barnett

Editor’s note: This post has been updated with comments from Mayor Katie Wilson’s office.

On Tuesday, Seattle City Councilmembers Rob Saka and Bob Kettle trashed Mayor Katie Wilson’s decision, announced in March, to leave newly installed police cameras turned off in the absence of a “credible threat” to public safety during the upcoming World Cup games, suggesting that the mayor is “afraid, apparently, to use technology from the World War II era” (Saka) and deriding the “credible threat” standard as “not a professional standard” (Kettle).

“Ask the mayor of Atlanta during the ’96 Olympics, was there a credible threat notification on that bombing? There wasn’t,” Kettle said. The Atalanta Olympics bombing, infamously, was falsely blamed on an innocent security guard, Richard Jewell; the real bomber wasn’t caught until 2003, after setting off several more bombs in Georgia and Alabama.

“Reacting after the fact is not going to get us there, and so, as someone who’s worked in this field, I do have to say, I do not understand the [mayor’s] position related to credible threat,” Kettle said.

In a statement Wednesday morning, a spokesman for the mayor’s office said, “Identifying a credible threat involves multiple experts from federal, state, and local agencies monitoring and assessing various streams of information. In collaboration with one another, they weigh incoming intelligence and jointly recommend whether to elevate security operations. Mayor Wilson’s decision whether to activate the Stadium District cameras will be informed by this group’s recommendation.”

Saka, who showed up to this morning’s public safety committee meeting decked out in 2013 Boston Marathon gear (he held up his finisher’s medal, seen above, through much of his 12-minute speech), said he “didn’t know how to protect my wife” when the bombs went off that year, shortly after the two had finished the race. “I was there. … I know what chaos feels like.”

“I don’t think that our city is is as ready as it could be to host the world for such a global event of this scale,” Saka continued. “The good news is that the solution is simple. There’s a quick fix available. This council has previously authorized and funded the expansion of critical security cameras in key areas throughout the city.”

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Saka accused Wilson of wishful thinking. Waiting for a credible threat, he said, “falsely assumes and incorrectly assumes that the purported threat will always pop up on a radar every single time with no fail rate whatsoever. As someone who’s a former intelligence officer who did this work, I wish that were true. It’s just not.”

As Office of Emergency Management Director Curry Mayer reminded councilmembers this morning, the Seattle Department of Transportation already provide live camera surveillance feeds to the city’s Emergency Operations Center from hundreds of locations around the city, including more than a dozen traffic cameras around the stadiums and several around Seattle Center. The EOC, which will be heavily staffed during the World Cup, is activated during all major events in Seattle and will serve as the central hub for live monitoring and emergency response during the World Cup games.

“The cameras that we rely on in the EOC are the cameras that SDOT uses all throughout the city,” Mayer said, and are “very helpful for any kind of event.”

The EOC, notably, does not have any ability to access any of the surveillance cameras operated by SPD, which feed into a separate Real Time Crime Center at SPD headquarters.

Wilson is clearly feeling the pressure to turn the cameras on, whether or not they will actually add significant coverage to the existing web of surveillance surrounding the stadium district. Her spokesperson said the mayor “continues to consult public safety officials regarding circumstances that might warrant use of the expanded set of cameras during the FIFA World Cup. We appreciate councilmembers’ perspectives, and those will be part of ongoing discussions.”

 

public safety, Taxes

Seattle Considers Using Special Fire District Tax to Close Budget Deficit
Photo by Joe Mabel, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson and the City Council are discussing whether to close a nearly $150 million budget shortfall by moving much of the Seattle Fire Department’s budget out of the city’s general fund by creating a special fire district, which—if approved by voters—could levy additional property taxes, freeing up hundreds of millions of general budget dollars for other purposes.

Wilson’s office confirmed that they are working with the fire department on a potential fire district, saying the city can no longer rely on the usual budget tricks or cuts alone to address a $175 million deficit  next year, which amounts to about 10 percent of the city’s general fund. “The gap is far too large to address with the kinds of temporary fixes that have been used in the past, and closing this deficit with cuts alone would require reductions in critical services and substantial layoffs across departments,” a spokesperson for Wilson’s office said. “Half of the general fund goes to public safety and human services, so there are no easy solutions here.”

A fire district would also be a way to raise revenues while steering clear of a state-imposed cap on local property tax levies that limits local levies to $3.60 per $1,000 of assessed value. The city is quickly running up against that limit.

In a press release Wednesday night, the Seattle Firefighters Union said the union “is currently evaluating the mayor’s plan.” Union president Kenny Stuart did not return a call seeking comment.

The spokesperson called a fire district one “potential path forward to stabilize SFD resources while also protecting other public services. … We have been working closely with SFD Chief Scoggins as well as the leadership of Local 27 to see if we can find a path forward that balances varying needs around revenue, public safety, and good governance.”

Prior to this year, Seattle had the authority to set up its own fire district, but there was no benefit to doing so: Any taxes the district levied would have to be offset by a reduction in other property taxes. The state legislature changed the law governing fire districts this year to give Seattle the authority to levy taxes (or a fee called a “benefit charge”) outside the existing property tax cap—meaning that the city could increase taxes without bumping up against the $3.60 limit.

“It’s just additional revenue flexibility and authority,” said Candice Bock, government relations director for the Association of Washington Cities, which supported the legislation. “Cities have to fund everything within their existing property tax levy authority, and this … creates more capacity.”

Wilson has asked all city departments, including the Seattle Police Department, to come up with potential cuts ranging from 3 to 5 percent of their budgets to close a deficit created in part by “structural issues”—costs, including labor, are growing faster than city revenues—and in part by her predecessor Bruce Harrell’s decision (supported by the city council) to pile on tens of millions in new spending every year, including a $100 million spree in the 2025 budget.

The fire department’s budget is around $350 million. Moving even half that amount into a new fire district would close next year’s budget deficit. However, that would also mean that funding for some of the city’s most basic public safety services—protecting residents from fires and responding to emergency calls—would be put to a periodic public vote. Seattle already uses local levies to fund its libraries, parks, and transportation system, but putting fire services up to a public vote would put the city on a potentially risky limb.

“Cities will have to continue to figure out a way to fund it if voters don’t like this option,” Bock said.

If the city puts the fire district plan on the ballot this year and it passes, the district will be a separate government entity under the direct control of the city council, which would act as its board of directors—similar to the way the council serves as the governing board for the city’s Park District, which oversees parks levy spending.

City Council, Mayor Harrell, public safety, Taxes

Council Takes Up Harrell’s “Inherently Unsustainable” Budget; New Spending Includes $800,000 in Speculative AI Spending
Mayor Bruce Harrell, speaking at AI House in September

1. Your sales taxes are going up next year, thanks to a vote by the City Council Tuesday that approved a 0.1-cent increase that can, in the future, be used for any “public safety” purpose, including programs the city is already funding through its general fund.

The new tax, authorized earlier this year by the state legislature, will add $23.7 million in new funding to the budget to pay for 24 new CARE Team first responders, keep the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program going, and fund treatment, firefighters, and other non-police public safety programs. It also includes $15 million to supplant general fund spending on CARE, giving the city $15 million more to use on any purpose.

But, as a City Council central staff memo on the budget notes, there’s nothing in the state authorizing legislation that requires the city to use the new sales tax on new programs. (The original idea behind the legislation was that cities would use the tax increase to pay for police.)

According to the central staff analysis, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed budget is unsustainable and relies heavily on fiscal sleight-of-hand to come up with a balanced budget in 2026, tumbling precipitously into massive deficits in 2027 and beyond. These tricks include relying on a one-time $141 million fund balance left over from 2025, which won’t be there to balance the budget next year; funding programs that will be necessary long-term, like food assistance for people losing federal benefits, with one-time resources, so that they don’t count toward future deficits; and assuming a $10 million “underspend” every year in the future, allowing the mayor’s budget team to chop $10 million off each year’s expenditures automatically without actually making cuts.

Referring to the fund balance, the memo notes, “The Mayor’s reliance on this $141 million one-time resource to balance his proposed spending for 2026 reflects the inherent unsustainability of the 2026 Proposed Budget, and demonstrates the basic magnitude of the mismatch between the City’s expenditures and its reliable, on-going revenues.

This damning assessment by the council’s own central staff could have implications throughout the budget, which the city council will begin discussing in detail today. What it could mean for the public safety sales tax, specifically is that, if the council passes Harrell’s unsustainable budget mostly as-is, future councils (and a potential future mayor Katie Wilson) could choose to use the money not to fund CARE and LEAD and treatment, but to pay for police, fire, and other basics that would ordinarily be paid for by the general fund.

In other words: Like the JumpStart payroll tax fund, which was supposed to pay for specific program areas (housing, small businesses, Green New Deal, and equitable development), the public safety tax could be used in the future as a slush fund to pay for programs that have historically been funded out of the city’s general budget.

The proposed budget adds about $53 million in new spending compared to the endorsed 2026 budget.

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2. One of the new initiatives Harrell’s proposed 2026 budget would fund is Permitting Accountability and Customer Trust (PACT) program—an $800,000 proposal that will purportedly “streamline the permitting application process and improve customer services using Artificial Intelligence and data integration.”

Callie Craighead, a spokeswoman for the mayor, told PubliCola the city hasn’t picked a vendor for the PACT funding yet. “The integration of AI tools is part of the City’s most concerted effort to date to reduce permitting time, making it faster and easier to build housing across Seattle,” she said.

Harrell is all-in on AI; at an event at the startup incubator AI House last month, he told the crowd, “If you’re thinking, ‘Maybe there’s an opportunity to monetize these things the city’s working on, that’s fair game, by the way. Faster permits—we know that AI can play an incredible role there. …  Time is money, and to the extent we can reduce permit processing times, this would be an added benefit for everyone involved in that process.”

Craighead said the new “AI tools” will help permit applicants catch errors before they submit applications; help “staff apply City code more consistently and efficiently, [and help] the City find opportunities to simplify and streamline policies.”

There are some companies that claim to reduce permitting times using AI chatbots and near-instant plan reviews, but it’s unclear to what extent these tools can actually supplant the human workers who currently work with developers and homeowners on permits and ensure compliance with the city’s complex codes by, for instance, talking to people and answering questions directly and inspecting conditions on the ground.

Moving away from actual employees to tools created by AI startups—a change the city’s new AI plan refers to delicately as “workforce transition”—will face strong opposition from the city’s unions (the largest of which, PROTEC17, has thrown its weight behind Harrell’s opponent Wilson), and potential opposition from the public as well. Replacing public workers with software could also have implications for the local economy, which is increasingly tilted in favor of wealthy tech-sector workers. And, of course, the current frenzy of AI hype could turn out to be just that—hype.

The city’s new AI plan says the “City’s AI Proof of Value framework ensures pilots are judged on clear objectives, business value, responsible use, and long-term supportability, not hype-fueled adoption we hear from sales staff.” Which seems, I don’t know… a little doth-protest-too much?

City Council, Density, Mayor Harrell, public safety, Taxes

Seattle Nice: CARE Team Expansion and a Missed Opportunity for Neighborhood Businesses

By Erica C. Barnett

Gearing up for Seattle’s 2025 budget season on the latest episode of Seattle Nice, we discussed Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposal to increase the local sales tax rate by 0.1 cent to pay for an expansion of the city’s CARE Team and 911 department, backfill $20 million in spending that currently comes from other sources, and add funding for firefighters, addiction treatment, and the fire department’s Health 99 overdose response team.

Governor Bob Ferguson gave cities and counties the authority to hike sales taxes to pay for public safety programs in his budget last year, effectively punting his promise to spend $100 million on police to local jurisdictions and forcing cities and counties to use a regressive sales tax increase if they wanted more public safety funding. King County already passed its 0.1-cent tax in June; assuming Harrell’s proposal passes, the total sales tax in Seattle will rise to nearly 10.6 percent.

We dug into what the new tax will pay for, as well as why CARE Team expansion is happening now, after a lengthy stalemate between the Seattle Police Officers Guild and CARE over what responsibilities SPD is willing to hand over to unarmed social workers.

Since 2023, a memorandum of understanding between CARE and the police department requires cops to go out with CARE on every call, limits the kind of calls CARE’s first responders are allowed to respond to, and restricts the size of the team to 24 people. That MOU expires at the end of the year.

Although new SPOG contracts typically drag on for years (the most recent contract, covering the years 2021 through 2023, passed in April 2024), that may not be the case this time, as we discussed, thanks to the recent primary election results, which had Katie Wilson leading incumbent Harrell outright.

In short, SPOG appears to be racing (relatively speaking) to wrap up their latest contract this year, betting that Katie Wilson might win the mayor’s race and be less willing than Harrell to provide concessions to the union without corresponding improvements to police accountability.

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This goes far beyond CARE, of course, but the new urgency around the contract seems to have produced a new willingness to give the team some of what it’s been asking for almost since its inception, including expansion from 24 to 48 tea members, the ability to go out on calls without a police escort and to respond to more types of calls where a social worker can do more good than officers with guns.

Harrell’s sales tax proposal, part of the 2025 budget he announced today, includes funding for CARE expansion, which suggests the MOU language may already be settled. As Sandeep put it, “The specter of Katie Wilson has scared SPOG into actually making the deal to allow alternative dispatch.”

Also this week, the guys gave me a lot of time to geek out over the council’s amendments to legislation implementing “phase 1” of the city’s comprehensive plan, which just passed last week.

Did they go into a boredom-induced fugue state? Who knows, but I did get an opportunity to talk about why I’d be thrilled to have bars, restaurants, and late-night corner stores in my own residential neighborhood. Unfortunately, the council foreclosed that possibility when they voted to restrict new businesses in neighborhoods to stores and to make them close no later than 10pm—a missed opportunity to give more people access to the kinds of things that make a city a city.

Health, public safety

Investigation Suggests Seattle Firefighters Forged Vaccine Cards to Get Out of Citywide Vaccine Mandate
Image by Steve Morgan via Wikimedia Commons

By Erica C. Barnett

An independent investigation found it probable that Seattle Fire Department officials obtained blank vaccine cards and used them to falsely claim they were compliant with the city’s COVID vaccine requirement, PubliCola has learned.

The city launched the investigation after a fire lieutenant, Lance Fisher, told Seattle Fire Chief Harold Scoggins that people in the department were buying and selling fake vaccine cards. Fisher relayed this information during his own disciplinary hearing; he was one of many SFD employees who refused to get vaccinated during the pandemic.

According to the investigation—provided by Rose Terse, who frequently posts documents obtained through records requests on Muckrock—”a now former (retired) SFD employee contacted Lieutenant Fisher and offered him a CDC-issued COVID-19 vaccination record card that Lieutenant Fisher ‘could fill out’ and submit to the City as fraudulent proof that he had complied with the vaccination mandate.” Fisher told investigators the cards came from a former COVID vaccination site that SFD shut down without safeguarding the blank vaccine cards, allowing a firefighter to grab the blank cards and sell them.

Later, Fisher said, he learned that there were blank vaccination cards at many fire stations, and “people could just take them.”

Fisher told investigators he “declined that offer” to get a fake vaccine card and told Scoggins, “It’s known that people are submitting fake vax cards. What are you doing to verify the authenticity?”

“According to Lieutenant Fisher, Chief Scoggins’ response was that ‘it wasn’t his problem,'” the investigator concluded.

Much of the investigator’s evidence consisted of Signal messages sent to and from Deputy Chief Tom Walsh on his city-issued phone, “suggest[ing] that a system and/or network existed through which SFD employees obtained COVID-19 vaccination cards, which they submitted to the City.”

“Facts found throughout the course of my investigation suggest that one or more SFD employees may have obtained CDC-issued COVID-19 vaccination record cards; filled the cards out with false information to reflect that they had been vaccinated for COVID-19; submitted the cards to the City as proof of their compliance with the COVID-19 vaccination mandate; and were deemed to have satisfied the City’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate based on their submission of the CDC-issued COVID-19 vaccination record cards containing falsified information,” the independent investigator, Jennifer Parda-Aldrich, wrote.

“My investigation, however, did not reveal sufficient evidence from which I was able to make any conclusive findings, based on preponderance of the evidence, of the existence of any such practice or of the identity of any SFD employee(s) who submitted a COVID- 19 vaccination record card containing false information to reflect that they had been vaccinated for COVID-19 in satisfaction of the City’s vaccination mandate.”

PubliCola readers may recognize Walsh’s name. He was the deputy fire chief who, along with longtime firefighter Paul Patterson, sent emails to Scoggins in which he pretended to be a “proud Latino” South Park resident who was deeply offended by the term “brownout.”  The goal of the prank emails was to get the fire department to stop using the term to describe power outages in order to prove that the department was excessively “woke.”

Walsh and Patterson worked closely with right-wing talk show host Jason Rantz, who wrote about the hoax repeatedly and seemed to find it hilarious; they later collaborated with local right-wing activist Ari Hoffman to accuse Scoggins of breaking the law when he loaned stretchers to volunteer medics trying to get injured people out of the so-called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in 2020.

Although the Seattle Police Department got the lion’s share of attention, positive and negative, for fighting against the city’s vaccine requirements, the Seattle Fire Department was also a hotbed of anti-vax sentiment.

Messages between Walsh and other fire department employees, including Patterson, along with a city IT staffer named Dan Whipple, include multiple references to people buying “art,” using Patterson as the go-between, for themselves and other fire department officials, including Walsh’s son, firefighter Devon Walsh.

For example, in this Signal exchange from December 2021, Patterson and Walsh discussed whether it would be better for Walsh and his son to wait a few days after his daughters and wife got their “art” so it won’t look “ridiculous”:

Patterson: No reason to think you guys wouldn’t shop together 🤔

I will see what the artist thinks

Just cause you get the piece sooner then later doesn’t mean you have to put it on display until you are ready

Walsh: Fair point. If I did return to the art show circuit, it would save me some sick time as well.

Paul Patterson. The Harriet Tubman of the SFD.

* * *

Walsh: Did a guy from 2’s named Seto or Setu or something like that get a piece of art from you?

Patterson: One thing about my art dealings is that it is totally Anonymous

Walsh: Well I am asking out of curiosity. What you should wonder is why I’m asking. I couldn’t pick this guy out of the police lineup, but I know that somebody’s done some artwork for him. If it’s you, you should tell him to keep his fucking mouth shut.

If you weren’t the artiest, just let me know that and I’ll tell him to keep his mouth shut. All we need is an audit.

Patterson: Wasn’t me, and I appreciate you looking out Yes I would have a sit down with him. It’s important for people to know it can be down but in a very discreet way.

Walsh:  My 20-year-old daughter came in the house and told me he had some art done. Now, the exact mechanism by which she found out is unimportant—He just needs to know that what happens in a fight club stays and fight club.

Had it been Hasting’s daughter, this is a different story.

Walsh referred to himself as Harriett Tubman in a Signal exchange with Whipple that same month, saying he had found “a path to get that one piece of paper that I need” in order to fulfill “my missing requirements to work at SFD.”

“If you had a friend who is counterfeiting $20 bills, that would be good,” Walsh wrote. “But if it was actually counterfeiting them at the US mint,…Well that would just be money at that point. Those bills would have real life serial numbers, and probably be appropriately placed in whatever database they put $20 bills in.”

Whipple later told investigators he thought he and Walsh were talking about a “joke” that “we were going to have to pay people to get us out of the state or country” because of the vaccine mandate. “I didn’t understand him to be referring to fake vax cards.”

Parda-Aldrich also looked into the possibility that Walsh and Deputy Chief Chris Lombard, who was then heading up the Community Safety and Communications Center had conspired with Walsh to produce evidence that the city was refusing to grant religious exemptions to the vaccine mandate, which could help bolster the claims of a group of former firefighters who sued the department over the requirement. The CSCC was the predecessor to today’s CARE Department, a civilian department that dispatches 911 calls.

In October 2021, after a meeting in which he told then-mayor Jenny Durkan’s policy advisor, Adrienne Thompson, that the CSCC was going to lose 10 percent of its staff if they had to comply with the vaccine mandate, Lombard wrote an email to himself and his own human-resources manager to establish for the record that the mayor’s office refused to provide accommodations for CSCC staff who refused to get the vaccine on religious grounds.

Signal messages between Walsh and Patterson, along with Signal messages between Walsh and fire lieutenant Chris Carter, show that the men believed Lombard was getting the mayor’s position in writing to help the plaintiffs in two lawsuits filed by firefighters who were fired for refusing to comply with the vaccine mandate. (In one exchange, Walsh referred to Lombard as “the kind of person who hides Jews under [the] floorboard.”)

Parda-Aldrich wrote that she was unable to substantiate the claim that Lombard wrote the email with the intent of establishing a written record that would help the suing firefighters. However, she did conclude he had improperly disclosed confidential personnel information—the identities of firefighters who asked for exemptions from the vaccination requirement—to Walsh.

Neither Walsh nor Patterson responded to requests for an interview; both have retired from the department. Lombard did not respond to a request for an interview.

A spokesperson for the fire department, Kim Schmanke, said no one at SFD has faced disciplinary action for falsifying vaccine cards, and said she does not know how firefighters might have gotten the cards, if they did so.

“SFD has no conclusive facts showing that employees falsified their vaccine cards and cannot take personnel actions without factual findings,” Schmanke said. “Although the April 2025 investigative report facts that ‘suggest’ SFD employees submitted authentic COVID-19 vaccination cards with falsified information to comply with the City’s vaccine mandate, the investigation was ‘unable to make any conclusive findings, based on a preponderance of the evidence, as to the existence of any such practice or the specific identity of any employee(s) who submitted a COVID-19 vaccination record card with falsified information.'”

Devon Walsh, Dan Whipple, Chris Lombard, and Lance Fisher all remain employed at the city.

The fire department considers the matter closed, Schmanke said. “However, if any new information comes to light, the department will take appropriate follow-up action.”