Category: Uncategorized

homelessness, human services, King County, Mayor Wilson, Uncategorized

Regional Homelessness Agency “Right-Sizing” Will Largely Restore Pre-KCRHA Status Quo

The announcement, which will send most homeless service contracts back to the city and county, aims to preserve federal funding at risk after a damning forensic audit and changes in funding priorities under Trump.

By Erica C. Barnett

King County Executive Girmay Zahilay and Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson announced Wednesday that they will transfer the region’s homelessness contracts back to the city and county, respectively, effectively ending the King County Regional Homelessness Authority as it has existed for the past five years.

Most of the region’s homeless service contracts, totaling around $160 million, will transition back to the city and county, where they used to live, by January 1, 2027, with some more complex contracts remaining at KCHRA on at least a temporary basis. As previously announced, the city and county will fund a team of consultants, from a company called Turning Point, to correct some of the major financial issues identified in the audit. The total cost, according to officials, will be under $1 million.

The KCRHA will continue to serve as the region’a Continuum of Care, the entity that applies for and administers federal funds, at least for this year. It will also oversee the Homeless Management Information System, a regional database of homeless people and the services they receive, administer the Point in Time Count of the region’s homeless population, and oversee the region’s severe weather shelters.

“It is not being dissolved, it is being strengthened,” Wilson said at a press conference Wednesday afternoon.

The changes will result in about 20 layoffs at KCRHA right away, officials said, with more to come in the future as the contracts move out. The decision to bring contracts back in-house will also result in some new costs for the city and county, especially while the KCRHA is still providing duplicative staffing, although officials said it’s currently unclear how much and what the impact will be on next year’s city and county budgets.

The KCRHA was recently subject to a damning forensic audit that found the agency had a large and growing deficit and lacked basic accounting standards; since then, the agency has released a “corrective action plan” that the auditors themselves said was  inadequate and failed to address many of their concerns.

The city and county are describing the new proposal as a plan to “stabilize, right size, and reset” the KCRHA.

“This agency was given incredible responsibility without sufficient capacity or authority to really effectively create and drive an overall strategy for addressing the homelessness crisis in our region,” Wilson said at a press conference Wednesday afternoon, “and I think that the audit really reflects this reality—and also, of course, brings to light specific problems that have to be urgently addressed.”

Wilson and Zahilay both said moving all the homelessness contracts back to the city and county does not mean the KCRHA is a “failure” as an agency. “I think the assumption of city and county contracts by the KCRHA was not terribly successful,” Wilson said. “That’s not saying the agency was a failure, but I think that particular part of its function, talking to service providers, that was not a successful function of this work.”

On Wednesday, city and county officials characterized the decision to take back their contracts as a reset that will allow KCRHA to focus on its “true core function” of serving as the Continuum of Care for the region—that is, as the entity that applies for and administers federal contracts.

As PublicCola has reported, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development issued a Notice of Funding Opportunity this year—the first step in a competitive bidding process for federal dollars—that prioritizes transitional housing and high-barrier programs that include mandatory services over permanent supportive housing and harm reduction.

Because most of the region’s current federal funding (around $67 million) is for low-barrier permanent supportive housing, KCRHA was already likely to lose federal funds; the recent chaos at the agency makes that even more likely. (HUD recently froze all federal funding with LA’s homelessness agency over financial issues that are similar to those at KCRHA).

City and county officials suggested today that moving the contracts back to the city and county would make the city competitive again. “Taking our local dollars back to the county and back to the city really will relieve KCRHA of that additional responsibility of administering those dollars to really focus at this point in time on the changes in the Continuum of Care and that core function,” Wilson’s deputy director for operations, Mark Ellerbrook, said.

The KCRHA was established at the end of 2019 to replace the previous, locally atomized homelessness system with a “regional approach to homelessness.” The agency began administering homeless service contracts in 2022, but never got around to accomplishing its primary stated goal—getting every city in King County aligned behind a coordinated approach to homelessness and issuing new contracts to nonprofit providers as part of a coherent “five-year plan.”  Instead, the KCRHA got mired in a series of ideological arguments and policy missteps, including an aborted pandemic era effort called “Partnership for Zero” that was supposed to end unsheltered homelessness downtown.

The city and county, meanwhile, were never willing to let go of control over what the homeless system looked like—whether, for example, the KCRHA should focus primarily on temporary shelter or permanent housing—and the agency ultimately turned into a pass-through entity for contracts chosen and funded by the city and county. With no taxing authority, KCRHA couldn’t direct homelessness policy in any substantive way, taking direction instead from a series of elected officials with differing political priorities.

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PubliCola has reported in recent weeks on the KCRHA’s oddly blithe response to the forensic audit and the mayor and county executive’s response to its corrective action plan. Both agency CEO Kelly Kinnison and William Towey, the KCRHA’s associate director for strategy, have publicly treated the audit findings as little more than a speed bump, and blamed most of the financial and accounting issues on the way the agency’s budget functions (as a reimbursement system, in which the agency pays nonprofit service providers and gets reimbursed afterward) and previous leadership.

On Wednesday, however, Kinnison said, “As it was launched, [KCRHA] is a failed experiment,” she said.

Given that Kinnison and Towey have largely blamed the agency’s problems on decisions made before Kinnison was hired in 2024, I asked if she saw any of the problems that resulted in today’s announcement as her responsibility. “Absolutely, there are always things I would do differently and prioritize differently,” she said. “Being a newcomer to the region, I think”—Kinnison moved here from D.C.—”was more challenging than maybe I even expected it to be.”

Otherwise, Kinnison said, she came in and took charge of a bad situation by hiring administrative staff and getting the agency into financial shape. If she could have done something different, Kinnison said, she would have “been louder” and “more public” about the agency’s financial issues—”I came in when we were not paying providers on time and people were doing payroll on credit cards”—and lack of finance and administrative staffing. “There’s decisions a reasonable person could have made that would have bene different, but this missing money and construction of the back end [financial system] that didn’t  work—that’s an implementation problem.”

Kinnison also reiterated her claim that she had asked the city to initiate a forensic audit into the agency after she arrived and began identifying problems that occurred under her predecessor, Marc Dones. The mayor’s office says that isn’t true, and that the city (under then-mayor Bruce Harrell) and county (under then-executive Dow Constantine) requested the audit. Simon Foster, the former KCRHA deputy CEO, reportedly also raised concerns about the agency’s finances to the city. Foster was laid off by Kinnison last October, as was KCRHA finance director James Rouse, who was not replaced.

City and county officials, as well as as Wilson and Zahilay, were reluctant to say what will happen to the KCRHA after the contracts move. “That’s what the broad stakeholdering is designed to do” over the coming year, Zahilay said. Kinnison’s future at the agency is also up in the air, and she stood at the back of the room, rather than front and center, as Zahilay and Wilson answered questions. In a joint statement after the announcement, King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski and Seattle City Councilmember Maritza Rivera—who both proposed dissolving the agency earlier this year—celebrated the news. “While this is not a complete dissolution of the Regional Homelessness Authority that we may have called for, it is a major step in the right direction,” they said. “This is a much-needed reset of how we manage our homelessness response.”

 

Drugs, human services, King County, Uncategorized

County’s Midyear Budget Sparks Controversy Over Harm Reduction, Human Service Contracts, and Lobbyists

1. After PubliCola reported on a King County Council supplemental budget amendment that would have prohibited spending county funds on safer smoking supplies for drug users, the proposal’s sponsor, Councilmember Rod Dembowski, decided to withdraw the amendment and replace it with one that simply requests more information on the program. It was a significant victory for harm reduction proponents, who pointed to data showing that the program provided access to services, including treatment, to tens of thousands of drug users last year.

The supplemental budget, usually a low-key affair, sparked a number of controversies  this time around.

During a work session before this week’s county council meeting, Dembowski said that in response to “feedback,” his amendment would “modify that language away from a strict cutoff to asking for some more information about the program. You know, how many supplies are being distributed? What is the cost? Who are they going to? What studies are out there? What assessments are out there? Give us some more information, and come back in a few months to let us know about the program.”

As we reported last week, the county spends a small amount—about $14,000 so far this year—on safe smoking supplies, plus some staff time for county employees who distribute pipes and foil at the county’s syringe exchange and to nonprofit groups that run their own syringe exchange programs.

Those programs had fallen largely into disuse as most drug users switched from injecting to smoking; the result was a sharp reduction in the number of people who accessed other county services that are a primary function of the program, such as case management, basic health care and STI testing, and referrals to treatment. Opponents of harm reduction have caricatured and demonized safer smoking programs in the Trump era, claiming that they “enable” drug users and encourage drug use.

2. The supplemental budget, adopted yesterday, also included a modified version of an amendment Dembowski proposed earlier this month that will add another layer of process to every new Best Starts for Kids contract. (Best Starts has been under fire for months after an audit and followup investigation found potential misuse of funds, and possible outright fraud, by some “high-risk” organizations that received contracts during and after the pandemic.)

The amendment adopted Tuesday will require the county’s Department of Community and Human Services to send a “notification letter” to the county council certifying that every new contractor has met a series of requirements— guaranteeing, for instance, that each individual contractor has sound financial systems and “qualified personnel” to administer the contract. Previously, the amendment would have also required such a letter for every contract amendment, which opponents said would have turned routine changes into lengthy administrative nightmares.

The amendment, like Dembowski’s original proposal, also requires contractors to attest that neither they, nor any person in a position to administer contracts, has ever lost a county contract because of misconduct or misuse of funds. But it provides a new out that wasn’t included in the original proposal: If the contractor has taken “all reasonable steps” to recover misused funds and can show that “adequate corrective action has been implemented,” the county can still contract with them.

Dembowski characterized every element of the amendment as “not unusual” or something that “shouldn’t be a challenge.” But critics of his amendment argued in public comment that it still creates more process without providing meaningful oversight, since the council is made up of elected officials, not contracting or financial experts.

Dembowski’s amendment doesn’t include a minimum contract size or explain how small organizations that may be new to government contracting are supposed to prove they already have financial controls and systems in place that will meet the new requirements.

3. Also Tuesday, the county council voted to retain the county’s current federal lobbying firm, Washington2 Advocates, for at least a year while also paying a new lobbying firm, Manatt, Phelps, & Phillips. The contract with Washington2 will be with the legislative branch, while the contract with Manatt will be with the county executive.

Tensions flared over the contract decision after King County Executive Girmay Zahilay hired Manatt through a request for proposals process without telling the council what they were doing, effectively canceling out a one-year option to retain Washington2 Advocates, run by longtime county lobbyist (and personal friend of some councilmembers) Jeff Bjornstad.

During Dow Constantine’s time as executive, the council and executive jointly approved the lobbying contract. So it was a surprise to some on the council when they learned that Zahilay had run a new bidding process and picked a new contractor. (After we published this post, the executive’s office reached out to let us know that the council’s government relations staff was aware of the RFP. “We communicated to all Councilmembers our desire to coordinate with them on this RFP before it went live in April,” the spokesperson said.)

“The renewal came up sort of abruptly—we weren’t notified until there was already an RFP put out by the executive branch to search for another contractor,” Councilmember Claudia Balducci told PubliCola Tuesday. “For a very long time, we hired a lobbyist and worked together across the branches very closely … so this was a little jarring.” It “didn’t help,” Balducci continued, that Zahilay “deleted the council from the RFP” itself, effectively cutting them out of the lobbying contract altogether. “We were told that wasn’t the intent, but this all happened very quickly.”

Zahilay’s office disputes this, saying the council is still “a receiver of the consultant’s services” and saying the contract has always been just with the executive branch.

Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda told PubliCola that the fact that Bjornstad didn’t apply in the executive’s competitive process was “a sign that he wasn’t interested in competing.” Mosqueda argued that the executive had the right to issue a lobbying contract, arguing at a Monday council pre-briefing that the decision “should not be about individual relationships that people have had with a contractor over X number of years. …  This is about how the county can best be represented in these immense times.”

Doubling up on lobbyists for a year will cost the county about $200,000.

Asked about the dustup with the council, a spokesperson for Zahilay said, “we are rebidding and refreshing all federal and state lobbyist contracts. As a new administration, we believe this is good practice.”

Uncategorized

Top Advisor to Mayor Wilson Leaves Temporary Job After Ethics Director Reverses Course

And: Where was the police chief during last weekend’s spate of deadly shootings?

This post has been updated to note that Lisa Daugaard left her position voluntarily, rather than being asked to leave.

1. Last Friday, two teenagers were shot and killed in a double homicide near Rainier Beach High School. The following night, four people were shot during a fight in Pioneer Square; one of them, a 27-year-old, was killed. On Monday, Barnes did a presentation on Seattle’s improving crime stats, which SPD billed as the police chief’s “State of the City” address, and was apparently peppered with questions about the weekend’s violence.

PubliCola couldn’t attend Monday’s event because we’re out of town this week. If we had, we’d have asked Barnes a question SPD’s communications office refused to answer: Where was the police chief last weekend when Seattle residents were being shot? Historically, Seattle’s police chief has gone to the scene of deadly shootings, but Barnes was nowhere to be seen.

Barnes’ family lives in Chicago while he rents an apartment in Seattle and goes home periodically. When we asked why he wasn’t on the scene of the shootings and if he was at his family home in Chicago, an SPD spokesperson replied: “The Chief was out of town meeting with law enforcement officials to discuss federal immigration response policies to ensure the safety of Seattle.”

SPD did not respond when we followed up to ask where Barnes was, specifically, and reminded their communications office that this is public information.

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2. Lisa Daugaard, the co-director of Purpose Dignity Action and founder of the LEAD diversion program, has left Mayor Katie Wilson’s office after just 10 days on the job because of a purported conflict of interest between her work at PDA and her work helping the mayor implement her own homelessness and public safety strategy.

The decision is a blow to the new mayor’s homelessness strategy and another example of Seattle Ethics and Elections Director Wayne Barnett’s unusually strict decisions when it comes to Wilson. Previously, Barnett fined Wilson for accepting financial help with childcare from her parents after Wilson—under fire from right-wing commentators—said it was a temporary arrangement while she was campaigning for office and unable to stay home with her daughter.

After approving Daugaard’s six-month posting in Wilson’s office last month, Barnett apparently changed his mind, deciding that it represented a conflict of interest. Barnett told Daugaard she could work on policies unrelated to the issues she has worked on for years at PDA, such as diversion and temporary housing for people who commit “public order” crimes because of poverty and untreated behavioral health disorders.

Barnett told PubliCola that Daugaard reached out to him on Monday, and that he told her “she would need to formally sever ties with the PDA” to officially work with the mayor’s office.

Barnett saw no issue worth addressing with former mayor Bruce Harrell’s many apparent uses of the mayor’s office to campaign for reelection. For example, Harrell’s communications office dramatically ramped up the pace of press releases praising Harrell’s work in the two months before last year’s election. Harrell also stamped his “One Seattle” campaign brand across many city initiatives and aggressively used his official social media accounts to promote himself during the campaign.

LEAD provides services in lieu of arrest and jail to people who commit crimes of poverty. Another PDA program, CoLEAD, provides intensive case management and temporary lodging to people with unmet behavioral health needs.

Last year, the PDA sought funding for an encampment resolution program in Pioneer Square modeled after a similar statewide program the group ran until it lost funding earlier in the year, but faced opposition from some advocates who argued that the city needed to pay for existing programs that stood to lose federal funds under Trump before starting new pilots.

Daugaard, an influential member of Wilson’s transition team, took a leave of absence from the PDA for the six months she planned to be at the mayor’s office advising Wilson on public safety and homelessness. Some social service providers, as well as the same right-wing commentators who criticized Wilson for accepting help from her daughter’s grandparents, questioned the decision, arguing it gave LEAD an unfair advantage.

Mayor Wilson, Uncategorized

Mayor Wilson’s Inner Circle Is the Opposite of a Boys’ Club

She’s also announcing new department heads at a rapid clip, replacing a dozen Harrell appointees in her first few weeks.

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson continues to fill out a cabinet made up almost entirely of women—a casual first for a city whose last mayor, Bruce Harrell,  was accused by his own niece (and former deputy mayor) of running the office as a toxic boys’ club.

A list circulating at the city this week, which included details about the subject areas each new staffer will be involved in overseeing, included the following names. These are in addition to several PubliCola previously reported, including City Operations Director Jen Chan, Chan’s deputy, Mark Ellerbrook, and Executive Operations Managers Alison Holcomb and Esther Handy.

Holcomb’s overseeing all the public safety departments, while Handy will oversee small departments like the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs and the Office for Civil Rights as well as Finance and Administrative Services, a catchall department that includes everything from managing city buildings to issuing pet licenses.

OCR’s former policy director, Caedmon Cahill—who left in the last year of Harrell’s term—is Wilson’s new general counsel.

Except where noted, everyone on Wilson’s office staff has the title Executive Operations Manager—another departure from Harrell’s office, which eventually had all manner of special advisors, directors, and people with corporate-sounding titles like “Chief People Officer.”

Kristina Pham, Director of the Cabinet & Sub Cabinet. Pham comes from City Light, where she was an organizational change manager in charge of a small team; in addition to heading up the cabinet, she’ll oversee the city’s IT department.

Lindsay Garrity, who’s worked on homelessness under former mayors Durkan and Harrell,  will oversee homelessness, HSD, the King County Regional Homelessness Authoirity, and the Unified Care Team. The choice of Garrity is somewhat surprising, given her extensive ties to previous administrations and their approach to homelessness, which focused largely on encampment removals and dashboard-level demonstrations of positive progress. Garrity worked under Harrell’s deputy mayor overseeing homelessness, Tiffany Washington, for years, both in the mayor’s office and when Washington was in leadership positions at the Human Services Department.

Lynda Peterson, who’s currently the managing director of Cultivate Learning at the University of Washington, will oversee the Department of Education and Early Learning as well as the Department of Neighborhoods, Office of Economic Development, and Public Health.

Hannah McIntosh, a former Seattle Department of Transportation chief of staff who went on to work at King County Metro and the Port of Seattle, will oversee three of the biggest departments—SDOT, City Light, and Seattle Public Utilities.

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Rachel Schulkin, the longtime communications director for the Parks Department, will oversee parks, libraries, Seattle Center, and the waterfront.

Sunaree Marshall, who’s currently director of housing and community development for King County’s Department of Community and Human Services, will oversee housing, the planning and construction departments, and the Office of Sustainability and the Environment.

PubliCola has also learned that Adrienne Thompson, announced internally as the city’s new Labor Relations director, will not be taking the job. In an internal email, the city’s HR director, Kimberly Loving, wrote that Thompson’s appointment “will not move forward. In the near term, the Labor Relations team will report to me. This approach best supports continuity and stability while broader alignment work is underway.” We’ve reached out to Wilson’s office and will update if we hear back.

On Wednesday, Wilson announced she’s replacing five department heads and keeping several others.

The highest-profile of these—and the subject of the most speculation among the housing advocates and developers PubliCola’s been talking to—is the Office of Housing, where Harrell appointee Maiko Winkler-Chin will be replaced on an interim basis by current deputy director Andréa Akita.

A.P. Diaz, Harrell’s parks superintendent, is also out; he’ll be replaced by deputy director Michele Finnegan, also on an interim basis.

Beto Yarce, the former CEO of a nonprofit that helps women and people of color access small business capital (and a onetime City Council candidate) will head up the Office of Economic Development, replacing Harrell appointee Markham McIntyre.

Just over a week ago, the state Department of Commerce announced that Yarce would be their new assistant director of community engagement and outreach. The announcement is no longer on the department’s website but is currently still up on their Facebook page.

Lylianna Allala, the current interim deputy director of the Office of Sustainability and the Environment, will take over as director; the interim director, Michelle Caulfield, will go back to being deputy. According to Wilson’s announcement, Allala headed up the city’s implementation of the Green New Deal and was a climate policy staffer for Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal.

Quyhn Pham, the head of Friends of Little Saigon—a community group that created the Phố Đẹp (Beautiful Neighborhood) plan for the neighborhood, which emphasizes community building and safety over police enforcement—will head up the Department of Neighborhoods, replacing Harrell appointee Jenifer Chao.

Amy Nguyen, the former public art director and interim deputy director for the Office of Arts and Culture, will replace Harrell appointee Gülgün Kayim.

The department heads Wilson’s office announced she’s retaining include Rico Quirondongo from the Office of Planning and Community Development, Office of Intergovernmental Relations director Mina Hashemi, and Office of the Ombud director Amarah Khan. That’s in addition to Police Chief Shon Barnes and Human Services Department director Tanya Kim.

Wilson is replacing Harrell’s appointees at a rapid clip. At this point in his term, Wilson’s predecessor Harrell had replaced just five of Durkan’s department directors; Wilson has replaced almost a dozen.

Advocates for one department head Wilson recently fired, City Light’s Dawn Lindell, showed up at this week’s City Council meeting to criticize Wilson’s decision to replace the utility executive with environmental attorney and former EPA administrator Dennis McLerran. “Dawn is the first CEO in more than a decade to have a clear positive impact on utility,” City Light engineer Aimee Kimball said. “She has dedicated significant time and effort to addressing long standing issues of sexism, racism and alcoholism that were ignored by the prior leadership at Seattle City Light and the city for decades.”
Another speaker, electrician Peter Miller, said he and others he works with were “shocked” by the decision. “We’re just mad and can’t believe what happened, and we don’t know why,” he said. Later, Councilmember Bob Kettle agreed Lindell had begun addressing “very grave challenges” at City Light, and suggested that her firing may represent a failure of “good governance.” Kettle closed his statement by reading an additional written comment from Miller. “Someone in the mayor’s office has absolutely lost their mind,” Kettle read. “Firing Dawn Lindell is a catastrophic mistake.”

City Council, Police, Uncategorized

Divided Council Passes New Police Contract That Raises Officer Pay 42 Percent, With Few Accountability Concessions
Councilmembers Sara Nelson, Debora Juarez, and Maritza Rivera confab before leaving council chambers Tuesday.

The contract, which provides $126,000 paychecks to rookie cops after 6 months, also imposes restrictions on the CARE team of unarmed first responders, prohibiting them from responding without a police escort on most calls.

By Erica C. Barnett

With three council members voting “no,” the city council approved a new contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild that gives rookie cops a starting salary of $118,000—with an automatic bump to $126,000 after just six months—with few of the new accountability requirements Seattle residents were promised in 2024, when the council approved SPOG’s most recent retroactive contract.

The 2024 contract gave cops retroactive pay increases of 23 percent; the contract adopted Tuesday, which goes through 2027, gives them additional raises of 42 percent over the next two years.

The deal, which goes through the end of 2027,still falls far short of implementing accountability legislation the city passed in 2017. That legislation called for the city’s Office of Police Accountability and Office of Inspector General to have full subpoena power when investigating misconduct (to date, they’re only allowed to subpoena public records, precluding access to things like text messages on officers’ personal phones). It also called for an end to outside arbitration, a process that allows officers to appeal disciplinary decisions to private arbitrators outside Seattle, and a lower standard of proof for misconduct allegations. None of these measures are in the contract; only one, the standard of proof, will be subject to an additional arbitration process (meaning it could still happen if the city wins its case against SPOG.)

In fact, the contract includes just two changes related to accountability. First, it simplifies a 180-day “clock” for disciplinary decisions, removing some carveouts that have contributed to very long delays between the time when someone files a misconduct complaint and when it gets resolved. Second, it allows sergeants, rather than the Office of Police Accountability, to determine discipline for “less than serious” misconduct, theoretically freeing up OPA to investigate more serious claims.

It’s unclear what will happen to cases involving professionalism and conduct unbecoming an officer, which are largely subjective; we’ve asked SPD and OPA whether a case like that of Daniel Auderer, who defended his offensive jokes about the police killing of 23-year-old pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula as “gallows humor,” would be dealt with internally under the new rules and never see the light of day.

“This has been part of a two year process to get here, two years for us on the [Labor Relations Policy Committee] and the Select Labor Committee. This is not a rushed process,” public safety committee chair Bob Kettle said. “One of the things I’m constantly looking at is to create a functional criminal justice—a functional public safety system. This is what we’re doing with this agreement.”

After the contract passed, SPOG President Mike Solan posted this gloating tweet.

Three council members voted against the agreement—an unprecedented number in recent years. Councilmember Rob Saka, who announced his opposition in a press release and op/ed in the Stranger, said he couldn’t support giving such large raises to police without extracting some accountability concessions.

“I have lived through encounters where the actions of an officer cross the line, where I felt fear rather than protection. I’ve experienced police brutality firsthand,” Saka said. “These moments have shaped me, and I carry them with me every single day, not with resentment or animus, but with responsibility. No person in Seattle should ever feel powerless, unseen or vulnerable to unequal justice and an encounter with law enforcement.”

Saka also noted that the huge pay increases come at an increasing cost—by 2027, an estimated budget increase of $57 million a year— at a time when the city is facing major budget deficits and federal cuts to programs that serve vulnerable people.

The newest councilmember, Eddie Lin, described an incident in his 20s when a cop in St. Paul, Minnesota “ended up putting his hands around my throat while I was handcuffed in the back of the police car and threatening me” after he refused to give up the name of a drunk and disorderly friend who had escaped arrest. After driving him around town for half an hour and “continuing to tell me how they were going to ruin my life,” the officer threw Lin in jail, where he said he stayed “for several nights.” Later, he got pulled over by the same cop and was terrified the same thing would happen again.

“There’s one harm when misconduct occurs,” Lin said. “There’s another harm, which is just as serious, when that misconduct does not get addressed. And if we really want to move toward a more positive relationship between community and the police, toward a comprehensive approach, toward public safety, accountability has to be our priority.”

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Lin also noted that the contract includes no mention of the department’s purported goal of having a recruit class that is 30 percent women by 2030. In 2025, less than 10 percent of SPD’s new hires have been women, and the department never bothered to fill a position that was supposed to help with this goal.

Alexis Mercedes Rinck also voted against the contract, saying the agreement  fails to include meaningful accountability provisions that our community has demanding, has been demanding for years. … In short, this contract asks Seattle taxpayers to invest more in policing without requiring more accountability in return, and that’s not a deal I can support.”

Under the new contract, the CARE Team, a group of social workers who respond to calls that don’t require an armed police response,,will be allowed to dispatch without police officers present, a change Mayor Bruce Harrell and many council members have touted as a significant win. (The CARE Department, which includes the 911 call center, is a part of the SPOG contract because, according to SPOG, their work impacts police officers’ working conditions and therefore must be approved by the guild.)

But as PubliCola reported in October, the deal with CARE effectively prohibits them from responding to most crisis calls, forcing them to call police instead of responding if they see any drugs or drug paraphernalia, such as foil; if the person in crisis is anywhere besides a public sidewalk or public building, such as a library; or if the person is in a homeless encampment, among a long list of restrictions.

CARE Department Chief Amy Barden told PubliCola she’s “happy that the process has concluded” and hopeful that police sergeants will voluntarily refer calls to CARE, as she said they did in 2023 and 2024. “If we return to the level of collaboration that we had for so long, then the contract will not be nearly as restrictive to the work,” Barden said.

But relying on police to voluntarily work with CARE is different than allowing CARE team members to use their judgment and discretion, Barden added. “The neighbors that I’m most interested in helping are people who are struggling with substance use and people who are unsheltered, and those two populations are named specifically in the exclusionary criteria, so that’s a problem.”

She also criticized the prohibition on responding to crises in non-public spaces, such as businesses, comparing it to a medical response. “If somebody’s having a stroke in the lobby of a business, versus a public space, it doesn’t make it not a stroke. If it’s happening in the city of Seattle, there should be a team who goes to that event regardless of location.”

The agreement resolves some grievances between the city and SPOG by cutting additional checks to cops who worked at various special events, such as Seahawks games, in the past; officers who worked at a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day event in 2022, for example, will receive double their hourly pay plus a full day of vacation, while those who worked at the Seahawks game on October 7, 2021 will get extra pay equal to 10 hours of work. The agreement also provides free parking to 19 additional civilian SPD employees, including the HR unit and a front desk staffer, who work desk jobs at police headquarters downtown—a perk most city employees do not receive.

After the three councilmembers who opposed the contract spoke, Councilmember Dan Strauss began to justify voting yes on the contract, saying it was the only way to “move accountability forward” and allow CARE to assist more people. As a group of people who had testified against the contract earlier began to boo and shout, calling Strauss “complicit in the murders” of people like Christian Nelson, who was shot and killed by SPD officers near the Othello light rail station last week, the council moved quickly to vote, curtailing further speeches. While most of the council left to meet from their offices, Lin, Strauss, and Rinck remained at the dais, their expressions ranging from pained (Rinck) to detached (Strauss) as the crowd chanted “knees off our necks,” “jail killer cops,” and “shame!”

The contract now heads to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s desk.

LGBTQ+, Police, Uncategorized

SPD Chief Puts Cop Who Called 2020 Protesters “Cockroaches” In Charge of East Precinct
SPD’s East Precinct in 2020

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct, located at 12th Ave. and East Pine St. in the heart of Capitol Hill, came under new leadership in September, when SPD Chief Shon Barnes quietly removed the precinct’s gay acting commander, Doug Raguso, and placed a newly promoted captain, Mike Tietjen, in charge.

If Tietjen’s name sounds familiar, that’s because he was at the center of two high-profile incidents during protests against police violence in 2020.  In the first, then-sergeant Tietjen was suspended without pay for shoving a man forcefully into a bus stop, causing him to hit his head. In the second, he was moved to a different precinct after driving an unmarked vehicle onto a sidewalk full of protesters, later comparing them to “cockroaches” because of the way they scattered in the path of his SUV.

In 2007, Tietjen and his partner were accused of choking a man in a wheelchair and planting drugs in his hoodie; although then-SPD chief Gil Kerlikowske exonerated both officers in a press release, they were subsequently reassigned to Harbor Patrol. Two years earlier, according to KUOW, Tietjen was accused of ” punching and choking a man” he was arresting “to the point of unconsciousness.”

In an internal email announcing eight promotions, including Tietjen, Barnes wrote that everyone he was promoting had shown “the ability to rise to challenges, embrace innovation, and guide others with clarity and purpose. … The leaders we celebrate today represent our commitment to building an organization that is resilient, forward-thinking, and deeply connected to the community we serve.”

Raguso, a 22-year SPD veteran, was a fixture at the East Precinct who previously served as SPD’s LGBTQ liaison. SPD declined to say why he did was not promoted to captain. A department spokesperson said, “We promote our captains based on input from Command leadership, their Civil Service test scores, and other feedback.”

In 2021, Tietjen was disciplined for a 2020 incident in which four officers, including him, pulled up on a trans woman who was walking along the sidewalk and allegedly harassed her by asking her if she “had a dick under” her skirt.

Tietjen has an adult child who belongs to the LGBTQ+ community, from whom he is estranged. PubliCola is not providing any further details about Tietjen’s child in order to protect their privacy.

Raguso is now overseeing operations at SPD’s Real Time Crime Center—a recently expanded downtown facility where officers and civilian SPD staff monitor live surveillance footage from around the city. PubliCola was unable to interview him.

The SPD spokesperson acknowledged that Tietjen “had been the subject of complaints five years ago,” but said he had completed “an opportunity for training and growth” and “has successfully delivered results to the community” since then. “In his current role, he is building positive relationships in the community, in line with Chief Barnes’ promise to police forward and continuously improve our organization,” the spokesperson said.

Andrew Ashiofu, a member of the city’s LGBTQ commission who spoke to PubliCola on his own behalf, said Tietjen’s appointment “sends a deeply troubling message” to people living in “one of Seattle’s most LGBTQIA+-dense neighborhoods. His presence in this role is not just inappropriate, it’s dangerous. It sets a precedent that undermines trust and signals to marginalized communities that their safety and dignity are negotiable.”

“As a Black gay man living within this precinct, I do not feel safe,” Ashiofu continued. “How can we trust the police to protect us when those in charge are the very people we need protection from?”

Joel Merkel, the co-chair of the Community Police Commission, said that “promoting someone who’s had these type of disciplinary actions” against them raised concerns about the new police chief’s  “knowledge and insight into SPD’s history history and dynamics … particularly as we’re trying to change the culture of SPD. With the consent decree going away, it sends a concerning message.” SPD had been under a federal consent decree since 2012, and was seeking to have it lifted when President Trump announced he was unilaterally dismissing all Justice Department consent decrees over local police departments, including Seattle’s.

City Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth, who represents Capitol Hill and the rest of District 3, did not respond to a request for comment.

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The complaints against Tietjen in 2020 were serious and highly publicized. All occurred on Capitol Hill within a short distance of the East Precinct headquarters.

In the first incident, for which he was suspended without pay, Tietjen violently shoved a man who had been trying to help another demonstrator who was blinded by pepper spray, pushing him and slamming his head into a bus stop.

Although Tietjen claimed he had simply tried to get the man to “spin around” and rejoin the crowd of people SPD was pushing out of the area,  video from his body-worn camera later revealed that he had “forcefully pushed” the man “down and towards the bus stop” as he was trying to assist a demonstrator who had taken shelter there, according to the Office of Police Accountability’s investigation into the July 25, 2020 incident.

“Moreover, but for the fact that the Complainant was wearing a helmet, he could have suffered very serious injuries based on the manner in which [Tietjen] pushed him, his momentum in falling to the ground, and his striking the bus stop with his head,” the report said.

In the second incident, on August 12, 2020, Tietjen was driving an unmarked SUV when he  accelerated suddenly and drove onto a crowded sidewalk at 11th and Pine, forcing people to scatter to avoid being hit. When someone confronted him, according to the OPA report, he compared the people he almost hit to scattering “cockroaches.” A widely posted video shows him saying he still works for SPD “because they pay me like 200 grand a year to babysit you people.” Tietjen was suspended without pay and received a “disciplinary transfer” to the North Precinct for that incident.

In the third incident, Tietjen was in an SUV with three other officers that pulled up to talk to a trans woman who was walking on the sidewalk during a protest. According to the OPA investigation, one of the officers took her picture with his phone and asked if she “had a dick under” her skirt. “She said that she told the officer to ‘come take a look’ and he replied that he would ‘need a microscope’ to do so,” the report says..

Later, the woman told OPA investigators, “the unmarked SUV again drove by her and an officer again yelled out to the Complainant to ‘show them what’s under my skirt.’ She started yelling at them, but they drove off while still saying things to her.” The OPA report says Tietjen acknowledged taking the woman’s picture and hearing someone in the car say something about a microscope, but denied most of the other details. The officers said they stopped the woman because they suspected her of “throwing rocks at” the East Precinct building.

Tietjen got a written reprimand for failing to document or report the interaction with the woman, and for failing to “counsel” another officer who shouted transphobic comments about why that was unacceptable behavior.

Five years later, Barnes promoted Tietjen to captain and put him in charge of public safety in city’s historic LGBTQ+ neighborhood.