Category: Trump

City Council, Elections, homelessness, Police, Trump

This Week on PubliCola: April 19, 2025
No, we didn’t remove any numbers from this graph—there aren’t any! (And, yes, it only goes through last October for some reason).

The City Council grapples with bleak budget news, PubliCola interviews candidates for City Council District 2, and much more.

Monday, April 14

New Council Committee Shines a Light on Bleak Impacts of Trump Funding Cuts

The city council isn’t merely facing a major revenue shortfall—it also has to decide how to respond to major federal cuts to programs that help give Seattle its progressive, welcoming reputation. We spoke to the chair of a new committee dedicated to responding to these issues (which, we’d argue, every council committee should also be focusing on) about how the federal changes are already impacting Seattle.

Seattle Nice: Is the City Ready for Trump 2.0? (Spoiler: Nope!)

On this week’s podcast, we discussed the upcoming city budget, which is the main venue for elected officials, including the council, to prioritize and support programs and services that benefit Seattle residents. So far, though, there’s little indication that the council is treating the one-two punch of local shortfalls and federal cuts as the emergency it is.

Tuesday, April 15

PubliCola Questions: District 2 City Council Candidate Jamie Fackler

Jamie Fackler, a building inspector for the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections and steward with one of the biggest unions representing city employees, is running for the Seattle City Council seat currently held by Mark Solomon, who replaced Tammy Morales after she stepped down earlier this year. Fackler says he’d work to improve public safety by investing in the social safety net.

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Wednesday, April 16

PubliCola Questions: Seattle City Council District 2 Candidate Eddie Lin

Second in our series of interviews with District 2 council candidates is assistant city attorney Eddie Lin. Lin, who represents the Office of Housing, told us he wants to see deep investments in youth gun violence prevention.

Thursday, April 17

Councilmember Saka Looks for the Bright Side in Grim Local Revenue Forecast

During a grim presentation on the city’s latest revenue forecast, City Councilmember Rob Saka pressed city budget staffers for good news—in the form of unanticipated revenues from the Club World Cup, tourism, and cruise ship traffic—but found little.

KCRHA Holds Closed Session on “Federal Funding Impacts,” Approves Loan to Address Deficit Spending

The regional homelessness authority’s governing board, currently made up entirely of elected politicians, went into executive session to talk about unspecified “federal funding issues” with the agency, but did not fill the public in on what those issues are. At the same meeting, the board approved a cash transfer from King County—a separate government that provides some of the agency’s funding—to improve the KCRHA’s persistent operational deficit.

Former Police Chief Inadvertently IDs New Top SPD Hire

Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes plans to hire his longtime associate Alex Ricketts as his chief of staff. Former police chief Carmen Best inadvertently spilled the news on Facebook last week in a post that included a photo of Ricketts and a caption referring to welcoming Barnes’ chief of staff. SPD’s last chief of staff, Jamie Tompkins, resigned last year after an investigation concluded she lied about her alleged affair with former SPD chief Adrian Diaz.

homelessness, Trump

KCRHA Holds Closed Session on “Federal Funding Impacts,” Approves Loan to Address Deficit Spending

The top graph is from a KCRHA presentation in February, predicting positive cash flow through 2025 with the help of cash advances and loans from King County. The second is from a KCRHA presentation this morning, showing actual cash flow in 2024. Maddeningly, neither graph includes numbers to indicate how much money those gray bars represent.

By Erica C. Barnett

During a Thursday-morning meeting of the King County Regional Council’s governing board, which includes nine elected officials from around the county, the board went into an extended executive session to discuss what the board’s pro tem chair, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell, described as unspecified “federal funding impacts.” The closed session lasted about half an hour.

Before shutting down the meeting, Harrell announced, “We’re going to move into executive session to discuss federal funding impacts pursuant to RCW 42.3 0.110″—the part of the Open Public Meetings Act that includes a list of reasons a government agency can call an executive session. Anyone calling an executive session has to cite a specific exemption from that list, which Harrell did not do.

KCRHA spokeswoman Lisa Edge told PubliCola after the fact that the board had used the “litigation” exemption, which allows closed meetings to discuss current or potential lawsuits.  This exemption is fairly common for elected bodies (the Seattle City Council uses it all the time to talk about lawsuits the city is embroiled in), but it’s generally included in the written agenda and always stated out loud—not vaguely implied by a hand-waving reference to the entire list of possible reasons for closing a meeting to the public.

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It’s unclear whether the KCRHA is involved in any lawsuits related to federal funding. (The executive session was not on the agenda for the meeting). But the agency’s contracts, and KCRHA itself, will definitely be impacted by cuts to the Interagency Council on Homelessness, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Health and Human Services, among other lifeline federal agencies. Except for a brief discussion in February, KCRHA’s governing board has not talked about the impact of these potentially existential cuts during any of its regular public meetings.

By all appearances, KCRHA already operates on a razor’s edge. After the board returned from executive session, the agency’s finance director, James Rouse, explained that because the authority doesn’t receive money from its funders—primarily the city and King County— at the same time that it needs to pay homeless service providers, it operates at a deficit for most of the year, relying on “interfund” loans and cash advances from the city and King County to stay solvent.

“We start off with a zero cash balance,” Rouse said, then “we pay our providers, [and] we end up in a negative cash balance” that grows throughout the year while the KCRHA waits for reimbursement. By the end of the year, Rouse said, the authority receives enough money to bring the agency’s balance back to zero, and the cycle starts again.

That isn’t exactly what happened last year (the authority only had a positive cash balance in August and September, according to a graph presented at today’s meeting), and it isn’t the pattern the agency’s finance staff predicted just two months ago, when they presented a graph showing large deficits in January and February that transformed into positive balances starting in March 2025 and dwindling to zero by the end of this year.

Both graphs are reproduced above; neither includes specific monetary figures, and the legislation authorizing the interfund loan from King County is effectively a blank check. According to Edge, the loan kicks in when the agency’s bank account drops into the negative.

City Council, Mayor Harrell, podcasts, Trump

Seattle Nice: Is the City Ready for Trump 2.0? (Spoiler: Nope!)
Perhaps a little Brutalism will cheer you up? HHS headquarters photo by ajay_suresh on Flickr; Creative Commons 2.0 license

By Erica C. Barnett

As I noted earlier today on Bluesky, it’s past time for Seattle leaders to be running around with their hair on fire. Not only are federal policies contributing to a shortfall in local revenues, direct cuts are just starting to hit programs that serve people across the county—from nonprofits that provide shelter, housing, and health care to people experiencing or at risk of homelessness to groups that provide legal and other critical services to immigrants and refugees.

Less than three months in, the second Trump Administration has already decimated the Departments of Health and Human Services and HUD, cuts that directly reduce funding for local service providers, and has just begun the process of denying federal funds to so-called “sanctuary” jurisdictions like Seattle and the state of Washington, to which FEMA just denied funding to pay or the damage done during last year’s “bomb cyclone” weather emergency.

FEMA also just eliminated a disaster preparedness program, started during the first Trump Administration, that funds emergency preparedness programs such as HVAC upgrades for libraries to serve as emergency shelters during dangerous heat and wildfire events; flood prevention; earthquake mitigation for unreinforced masonry buildings, and “resilience hubs” designed to support residents during and after a disaster.

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More cuts are coming, and the city shows few signs of preparation. Instead of talking about cuts to the city’s biggest budget items, local taxes to help prevent thousands more people from becoming homeless, or other radical budget options (like a local New Deal), the city seems like it’s preparing to meet this moment by doing what it always does in challenging budget years—ask departments to come up with potential cuts, then find ways to make the cuts as painless as possible while also exempting the police department or increasing its budget.

We discussed all of that and more (including a false alarm about ICE vehicles that turned out to be regular Seattle police) on this week’s episode. It’s a bleak one, but at least we all agreed on the diagnosis, if not the cure.

City Council, homelessness, Trump, Uncategorized

Grim Outlook for Local Homelessness Programs Under Trump’s Slash-and-Burn Cuts
KCRHA deputy CEO Simon Foster

By Erica C. Barnett

During the second meeting of the City Council’s special committee on the impact of federal funding cuts last week, housing and homeless service providers laid out in stark terms what will happen when, not if, cuts to federal funding for housing development and services for people experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity kick in.

The housing impacts alone will be broad and widespread across every kind of affordable housing, from buildings financed privately through federal tax credits to permanent supportive housing that relies heavily on federal support.

Services that help keep people housed, such as health care, will also become harder to access, as the Trump administration targets Medicaid recipients—cutting funds and imposing work requirements on the state’s poorest residents, including many with disabilities that make it impossible to work.

Meanwhile, the region’s homelessness agency stands to lose the federal funding that is the agency’s third-largest funding source, and is now facing a choice about whether to comply with the administration’s new mandate to verify their clients’ immigration status and provide that information to ICE.

“We know that immigration verification requirements have a chilling effect that extends throughout the community, and that even documented individuals are less likely to seek help,” King County Regional Homelessness Authority deputy CEO Simon Foster said, because “they are afraid of the repercussions to themselves, their friends and their families.”

The meeting offered a first look at the impacts federal cuts will have on the housing and homelessness system locally. The speakers—who, in addition to Foster, included Naomi See from Hunt Capital Partners, Jess Blanch from Enterprise Community Partners, interim Chief Seattle Club director James Lovell, and Downtown Emergency Service Center director Daniel Malone—described a bleak cascade of consequences.

– KCRHA, which received $66 million directly and indirectly, through King County, from HUD’s Continuum of Care program last year, is bracing for cuts that could impact ongoing contracts with housing providers and direct subsidies to help people stay in their housing. Overall, nearly 2,200 formerly homeless people could be at risk of losing their housing from federal cuts, along with another 2,300 in transitional housing and other programs. More than 240 people in programs funded through KCRHA could lose their jobs if the programs they operate are eliminated.

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– The federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit program, which helps fund most affordable housing projects, could drop in value dramatically, limiting its effectiveness. LIHTC is complicated to explain, but basically, states award federal tax credits to developers who sell them to investors at a discounted rate—say, 90 cents on the dollar. If that rate gets too low for the developers to build their projects, they have to seek funding from “gap funders,” like the city and county, or forego building.

The reasons this is happening, See said, are at least twofold: Corporate tax rates are likely to increase soon, which makes investors place a lower value on housing tax credits, and tariffs on Canada and Mexico are likely to increase the cost of materials used in construction, including drywall and lumber, making it harder for new housing to pencil out.

– The state’s Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps low-income people pay their utility bills and weatherize their homes, could be cut. Earlier this month, the Trump administration eliminated the entire federal LIHEAP program as part of the mass firings at the Department of Health and Human Services, throwing the future of state-level programs in question.

According to Jess Blanch, from the affordable housing funder Enterprise Community Partners, Washington received $66 million from the federal government for LIHEAP last year, providing utility assistance to households with an average income of 150 percent of the federal poverty rate— $22,590 for a one-person household or $46,800 for a household of four.

– Cuts to two federal programs that help house people and keep them housed, Section 8 and the less-known Section 4, which helps community-based housing providers build capacity to increase their effectiveness, could dramatically increase homelessness, Blanch said. Enterprise and one of its partners recently received notice from DOGE that “due to our supposed non compliance with the DEI executive order,” HUD is freezing their funds, impacting providers like DESC that were set to receive grants.

– Individual organizations that rely on federal funding, including DESC, stand to lose huge chunks of their operating budgets thanks to slash-and-burn cuts at HUD, HHD, and Medicaid. Malone noted that DESC gets about a quarter of its funding from federal sources. In late March, DESC learned that a federal grant that funds outreach and engagement with opioid users had been eliminated (along with the entire federal agency that oversees substance use and mental health treatment across the country), forcing DESC to “scramble to figure out what to do about how to manage the loss of those funds,” Malone said.

– Funding for opioid addiction treatment through Medicaid could also be at risk, since Trump seems determined to go after states that expanded Medicaid. “Reductions in federal cost share of Medicaid expansion would result in a huge hit to the state, and the state would have to figure out how they were going to continue people on health insurance if that were to happen,” Malone said.

These are state and federal issues, not merely local ones, but the city could make funding decisions that help offset the current and future cuts. Revenue is one option, although the council has not shown much appetite for new taxes—a modest capital gains tax, proposed by Rinck and her colleague Cathy Moore during last year’s budget, could provide some funding, but the council majority rejected this option, arguing that there wasn’t enough data about the need for funding rent and food assistance.

Lovell, from the Chief Seattle Club, noted that “no matter what we do, that level of federal funding that’s at risk cannot simply just be absorbed without something having to go away. And the only way to prevent that, I think, is with a different revenue source” from the state, King County, or the city. Lovell said the council would “probably have to have a special budget session just to kind of brush up on what the federal impacts have been and how they’ve passed through to the city.”

So far, the committee has focused on surfacing problems, rather than identifying solutions that the council can advocate and implement. That has value in itself—but only if the rest of the council chooses to listen and take action based on the flood of, yes, data they’re receiving about people who will be directly impacted by the cuts.

City Council, Elections, gender, immigration, Trump

Tanya Woo Tries Again (UPDATE: Nope); Advocates Tell Council How they Can Help Limit “Existential” Threats from Trump
Her again: Tanya Woo has filed for the city’s public financing program after losing elections in 2023 and 2024.

1. UPDATE As of Monday night, Woo’s name no longer appeared on the city’s campaign website, where it appeared briefly on Monday afternoon, or or on the city’s democracy voucher page.

Tanya Woo is apparently trying a fourth time to get on the city council, after voters rejected her in 2023 (when she lost to Tammy Morales in District 2) and 2024 (when she lost to Alexis Mercedes Rinck for a citywide council seat.) In between those campaigns, the newly elected centrist council appointed her to citywide Position 9, in a direct rebuke to the voters who had just chosen Morales over her.

Woo has not filed for office yet, according to campaign records, but she is listed as a candidate for the position on the city’s Democracy Vouchers website, where she has indicated she will be seeking public funds for her campaign. Candidates for district council seats must collect 150 signatures and campaign donations of at least $10 to qualify.

After winning appointment from her fellow centrists in a pantomime of public process that wasted city time and resources vetting seven candidates who never stood a chance, Woo had an unremarkable 10 months on the council, casting votes in favor of the council’s new law-and-order agenda but proposing no significant legislation of her own, beyond a dead-on-arrival proposal to create special “no-protest zones” around councilmembers’ homes.

Woo also claimed to be the victim of a “xenophobic” hate crime when someone wrote “Tanya Woo hates black people!” and “Fuck Tanya Woo” on the outside of the apartment building her family owns in the Chinatown-International District. During the budget process, Woo opposed Morales’ proposal to study anti-displacement measures for at-risk homeowners as part of the city’s comprehensive plan—saying the proposed environmental impact study (EIS) would “help inform, but not do what we think it’s going to do, based on what I’ve been hearing recently” before asking what an EIS was.

The other candidates who have also filed for Position 2, currently filled by “caretaker” appointee Mark Solomon, are Bruce Harrell transportation advisor Adonis Ducksworth, assistant city attorney Eddie Lin, and real-estate investor Takayo Ederer; all three previously sought appointment to the open seat.

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2. Rinck convened the first meeting of the council’s new Select Committee on Federal Administration and Policy Changes last week, bringing advocates for reproductive rights, the LGBTQ+ community, and immigrants together to discuss the thrriskeats the Trump administration poses to vulnerable people in Seattle.

The threats are well known. Trans people risk losing access to gender-affirming care across the country, and even in Washington state, there are laws on the books that allow forced outing of LGBTQ+ kids and students seeking gender-affirming care.

Health care, similarly, is the line, as Trump threatens to pull  federal Medicaid funding from any provider that offers abortions or gender-affirming care. As Courtney Normand, director of Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates Washington, noted at least week’s meeting. “About 40 percent of all Planned Parenthood patients are Medicaid patients, so [the loss of Medicaid funding] is an existential threat to our ability to be safety-net health care providers at all in Washington and across the country.”

For undocumented immigrants in Seattle, the threat is similarly existential. Although Seattle is a “welcoming city” for immigrants—meaning, primarily, that city employees, including cops, aren’t allowed to inquire about anyone’s immigration status—ICE raids have already hit the city, according to the immigrants’ rights advocates on last week’s panel.

“We received reports of ice appearing in people’s workplaces, including a restaurant in downtown Seattle,” Vanessa Reyes, policy manager for the Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network, said. “We’ve gotten reports of people getting deported very quickly after detention, being sent to detentions in other states, and those who have sent to the detention center in Tacoma reporting unsafe and unsanitary conditions.”

In many cases, the solutions, where they exist, are at the state level—through lawsuits by the state Attorney General’s Office, expanded shield laws for people who help others get health care they can’t access in their own states, and laws protecting students at school, including needed revisions to the so-called parental rights bill, a right-wing initiative the state senate passed unanimously last year.

At the city level, though, the advocates who spoke last week proposed changing laws and policies the current city council just put in place, like new live camera surveillance, expansion of automated license plate readers, and the use of police to crack down on people with addiction, men who pay for sex, and people who commit crimes that are often linked to poverty, like shoplifting.

“One thing that’s really going to have a negative impact on our community members are the ways in which people can be subject to mandatory detention without bond, just for having been arrested for a crime such as shoplifting—not even convicted, but just potentially being accused and arrested, Jenny Mashek, directing attorney with the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, said.

Sami Alloy, the interim executive director of Pro-Choice Washington, added that she wanted to see the city “curtailing the surveillance of Seattle residents” by limiting the use of technologies like automatic license plate readers,” which could potentially be used to undermine the state’s shield law.

And Taylor Farley, the executive director of Queer Power Alliance, said, “We need to maintain and strengthen our local tenant protections, not to roll back what we’ve already put in [place].  We’ve put those protections in because they were needed at the time, and they’re still needed and they’re going to be needed for the future.”

The council has called for more policing, more surveillance, and more emphasis on arrests for low-level crimes, including banishment orders that restrict people from going into certain areas of the city even if they haven’t been convicted of a crime. The council is also considering rollbacks to existing tenant protections, including the winter eviction moratorium, maximum late fees, and the “first in time” rule that requires landlords to rent to the first qualified candidate.

Councilmember Cathy Moore, who supported all the policies advocates identified as areas of concern, disputed some of the advocates’ characterizations before asking them about concrete actions the council could take to help fund or advocate for things like gender-affirming care. “We don’t always agree, and I would certainly heartily disagree with some of the representations that have been made, but I’m not going to take this opportunity to go into that,” Moore said.

City Council, Parks, Transportation, Trump

SoDo Housing Plan Advances, Republican City Attorney Says Trump Immigration Order Violates “Local Control,” Saka Says No to Restrooms, Yes to Cars
The city’s most deadly areas for people walking, biking, and rolling are in South Seattle, including Rob Saka’s West Seattle district.

1. A proposal from Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson to allow up to 990 units of housing near the city’s two stadiums as part of a new “makers’ district” passed out of Nelson’s committee last week, but it faces an uncertain future at the full council, where two staunch opponents—Bob Kettle and Dan Strauss—will make their case that allowing apartments in a historically industrial area will decimate the city’s maritime industry.

The Port of Seattle and maritime industry unions have argued that allowing people to live near the stadiums—primarily on First Avenue South—would add so many cars to the area that trucks moving to and from the industrial waterfront would get stuck in traffic, making Seattle less competitive with other port cities. They also argue that the proposal reneges on the city’s promise to preserve existing industrial zoning in perpetuity, and that it’s a dangerous and environmentally unhealthy place for people to live.

In a 13-minute speech, Kettle hit all the highlights of this argument, saying the area is vulnerable to a Love Canal-style environmental disaster, that the Port itself is vulnerable “in a cutthroat shipping industry,” and that the geology of the area, which was built on unstable “fill,” would leave residents vulnerable to liquefaction in an earthquake, even if the new buildings were built according to modern earthquake standards.

“How about if you’re walking your dog in this little area, in this little neighborhood, you know, what happens?” Kettle said. “You’re trying to play catch with your kid, or you’re trying to bring in your groceries—a code-enforced building is not going to help you when you’re out there walking the dogs.”

Proponents argue that the area hasn’t been industrial for years (besides entertainment businesses like the Showbox SoDo and a strip club, it’s mostly abandoned and underutilized warehouses), and note that hotels and offices are already allowed in the area under the industrial lands update the council passed in 2023. (And, of course, the maritime workers who oppose housing also work every day in the same liquefaction zone).

“If thought this would this was going to damage irreparably the port, or put it into a position within 100 years where it would not be a strong, viable entity, I would not be doing this,” Nelson said.

The proposal, which passed 3 to 2 (with Mark Solomon and Maritza Rivera supporting Nelson and Joy Hollingsworth joining Kettle in opposition), will go to the full council on March 18.

 

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2. City Attorney Ann Davison put out a statement last week denouncing efforts by the Trump administration “to coerce local authorities and to commandeer local jurisdictions into carrying out the duties of the federal executive branch, while punishing those who dissent.”

Davison is a Republican who was active in the “Walk Away” movement headed up by “Stop the Steal” conspiracy theorist Bradon Straka, one of the January 6 rioters who was later pardoned by Trump. She ran for City Council against Debora Juarez, lost, ran for lieutenant governor as a Republican, lost againagain, and became city attorney after defeating a police abolitionist in the backlash election of 2021.

Davison issued the statement after joining a lawsuit that accuses Trump of violating the Constitutional separation of powers by unilaterally directing the government to withhold federal funds and take legal action against “sanctuary” jurisdictions, like Seattle, that bar police and other officials from assisting with federal immigration enforcement.

Davison’s statement stuck mostly to the strict legal questions raised by the federal order (although it did take a moment to praise “our diverse, vibrant, and invaluable immigrant communities.”) “This is an issue of federal overreach into areas of local control,” the statement said.

The statement marked a departure for Davison, who has not previously weighed in on partisan politics. Whether Davison voted for Trump, Harris, or another candidate in 2024 is unclear; her office did not respond to a question about whether she supported Trump. Her past campaign donations include small contributions to former Republican secretary of state Kim Wyman and Joshua Freed, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for governor who went on to head the King County Republican Party and condemned Republicans who voted for Trump’s impeachment after the January 6 riots.

3. City Councilmember Rob Saka took a couple of strong stands in the past week.

First, during a presentation about an audit that found deficiencies in the Seattle Parks Department’s cleaning and maintenance of park restrooms, Saka argued against expanding public restrooms.

“[M]embers of the public always want to expand the number of restrooms, not just in Seattle, but in LA and across the country … and I don’t—I’m not sure that’s the best approach here in Seattle at this point, at this juncture, unless and until we’re in a better position to make better progress on addressing the cleanliness and accessibility [and] properly maintaining our existing restrooms,” he said.

Had Saka been around five years ago, he might have been aware of a different audit from the same office—this one recommending that the city open more 24/7 restrooms, specifically to help people living unsheltered who have “extremely limited options to avoid open urination and defecation, especially during the night.” Had he been on the council the following year, he might have taken part in a debate over  whether homeless people deserved access to restrooms and running water during the pandemic (the city decided they didn’t, and homeless Seattle residents experienced repeated outbreaks of hepatitis A and shigella.)

Then, during a presentation on traffic violence earlier this week, Saka apparently felt compelled to respond to a comment made by Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck about her decision to live car-free. “I appreciate Councilmember Rinck’s point of view,” Saka said, but noted that even in dense San Francisco, where he vacationed recently with his family, people still have cars.

“As vibrant as their transit system is, I was struck by the fact that nearly every street, arterials and non-arterials alike, on both sides of the road, there was there was parking!,” Saka said. “Parking! Available on both sides of the street! [Which] again, highlights the importance of choice! These modes are a choice. And even in San Francisco, the second most dense city in our in our country, people still choose to drive.”

One thing Saka may not have noticed, especially if he wasn’t driving, is that it’s incredibly hard to find a parking space in most of San Francisco. There are simply too many cars for the limited number of spaces, and most neighborhoods have residential parking zones, restricting visitors to no more than a couple of hours. Except in areas with heavy car traffic (like downtown, where some parking lanes convert to driving lanes at rush hour), Seattle also generally has parking on both sides of the street.