Also: County Assessor Again Accused of Stalking, and Council Presses Pause on Ethics Changes
By Erica C. Barnett
On this week’s Seattle Nice podcast, we had a lively debate over two events held by an anti-trans, anti-choice religious group at Cal Anderson Park on Capitol Hill and at City Hall over the span of four days last week. While Sandeep, David, and I all more or less agreed that the city would have been smart to permit the first event somewhere other than the heart of the city’s historic LGBTQ+ neighborhood (and I pointed out that the group did not have the required permit to set up a stage, speaker stacks, and diesel generator for its event at City Hall) we parted ways on what David characterized as the protesters’ tactics.
Calling on his past experience as an activist and his read of 1960s history, David said he hoped Mayor Bruce Harrell and his opponent Katie Wilson would “call out the counterprotesters who got arrested,” because their actions play right into the Trump Administration’s hands. Trans protesters and their allies, he argued, should have been thinking of the “voters in swing states” who would see the arrests on FOX news and decide to harden their views against trans rights.
I countered that the very existence of visible trans people in the world is offensive to people who want trans people to disappear, and that we won’t win the votes of bigots by focusing on whether “our” side is being sufficiently civil and demure as they fight for their right to exist.
David and I also disagreed about the implication of the fact that “all 31” of the people arrested were counterprotesters—a data point that that, to me, is just a baseline reality for protests.
I wasn’t at Cal Anderson, where police say some people were throwing plastic water bottles and other items. But I was at City Hall on Tuesday, where officers not only stood by while right-wing provocateurs screamed slurs like “tranny” and “autogynophile” in people’s faces, but provided security for the right-wing activists before, during, and after their unpermitted concert. The arrests I witnessed happened only after police on bikes swarmed to intervene in verbal arguments, escalating isolated conflicts into chaotic mini-melees.
Sandeep agreed with David that the counterprotesters were “dumb shits,” but eventually told us to take it outside because he was tired of hearing us get go around and around about protest tactics (probably fair!)
We also discussed my story about new, disturbing allegations that King County Assessor (and King County Executive candidate) John Arthur Wilson harassed and stalked his ex-partner. Officials and organizations across the county have called on Wilson to step down, but he told KUOW this week that he has no plans to do so.
And we talked about City Councilmember Cathy Moore’s decision last week to withdraw her broadly unpopular proposal to lower ethical standards for city council members, who are currently required to recuse themselves from voting on legislation that presents a financial conflict of interest. Moore, as PubliCola was first to report earlier today, is resigning her position as of July 7.
1. Takayo Ederer, who registered as a candidate for Seattle City Council District 2 in March, reportedly will not file as a candidate for the position next week. Ederer—whose personal wealth, as we reported, eclipses that of the entire current city council—has raised about $27,000, mostly in $650 contributions, the limit for candidates who opt out of the city’s democracy voucher public campaign finance program.
Candidates have to register in order to raise money, but a campaign isn’t official until filing week, when candidates must declare their candidacy. Filing week is next week, and the filing deadline is next Friday, May 9.
2. Earlier this week, we reported that we’d heard 2009 mayoral candidate Joe Mallahan was calling around to local political insiders about challenging Mayor Bruce Harrell. We have an update: Mallahan is definitely calling around, but he seems to be having trouble finding a political consultant who will rep him against the mayor—and that includes the firm that represented him back in 2009 .
Back then, Mallahan was challenging an unpopular two-term mayor, Greg Nickels, who got knocked out in a primary. He lost the general election to Mike McGinn, who became the first in a series of mayors who served one term or less (Ed Murray resigned in his fourth year after five men accused him of sexual assault). If Harrell is reelected, he’ll be the first two-term mayor in 15 years.
3. As the Seattle Times reported yesterday, City Councilmember Cathy Moore is proposing legislation that would remove the requirement that council members = recuse themselves from votes when they have a potential financial conflict of interest. Instead, council members would merely have to disclose their conflict.
The changes, drafted by the Ethics and Elections Commission last year, would remove a standard tool designed to prevent financial conflicts and corruption. Historically, however, it has been vanishingly rare for city council members to actually abstain from votes because of real or perceived conflicts of interest, according to a look at the minutes of every full council meeting over the last five years. (Anecdotally, council members often say they’re abstaining because they need more information, which can be code for not wanting to take an unpopular vote).
Recently, Tanya Woo abstained from voting in committee on a proposal to reduce the minimum wage for delivery workers because she and her husband own a restaurant that uses these services; after widespread opposition, the measure never made it to full council.
Moore will soon introduce legislation rolling back a number of landlord-tenant laws, including a prohibition on adding roommates who are not on a lease, moratoria on winter and school-year evictions, and a law that lowered the minimum fee for late rent to a nominal $10. If the recusal requirement remains in effect, it’s possible that the two council members who each own rental property—Maritza Rivera and Mark Solomon—would face pressure to recuse themselves.
However, history suggests otherwise. Rivera and Solomon each own one small rental apartment, and make less than $30,000 a year from rent (campaign finance disclosures include a range from $0 to $29,999), which makes their potential conflict much smaller than, say, a real estate developer or the owner of multiple apartment buildings.
Smaller, say, than former councilmember Mike O’Brien, who owned three properties that he used as Airbnbs but did not recuse himself from legislation (which he sponsored) limiting the number of Airbnbs a single property owner could operate.
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.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
– 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.
During a presentation on changes the city will have to make in order to comply with a new state law mandating more housing in traditional single-family areas City Councilmember Cathy Moore proposed imposing Mandatory Affordable Housing conditions on 4-unit “middle housing” developments, despite studies commissioned by the city that found the potential fees will make this type of housing infeasible.
The current council, who were mostly elected in 2023, have taken shots at their predecessors for adopting nonbinding “issue” resolutions. How the tables have turned: This week, the council adopted a purely performative resolution declaring that “defund the police”—a thing that never happened—is dead.
Two stories in today’s Afternoon Fizz: After Dow Constantine’s departure to become Sound Transit CEO, deputy King County Executive Shannon Braddock was appointed acting—but not interim—executive, leaving open for now the possibility that the county council could replace her before November. And after a public commenter said cut-through traffic on a greenway is endangering cyclists in West Seattle, City Councilmember Rob Saka defended his opposition to traffic diverters when the project was built, saying that allowing cars to use the greenway to cut through the neighborhood is a matter of “equity” in a food desert.
Late last month te City Auditor’s Office issued a set of detailed recommendations to improve the city’s response to gun violence, which has increased in Seattle even as other cities have seen dramatic reductions. Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington said the existence of the audit showed a lack of “respect,” adding that the city was already doing, or in the process of implementing, every recommendation on the auditor’s list.
I went on Crystal Nicole Fincher’s Hacks and Wonks podcast this week to discuss recent state and local news, including Governor Bob Ferguson’s refusal to consider wealth taxes on the very richest Washingtonians, the Seattle City Council’s anti-”defund” resolution, and Councilmember Cathy Moore’s recent decision to halt a competitive bidding process for organizations that help exploited sex workers leave the sex trade.
Mayor Bruce Harrell delivers his 2025 State of the City speech.
1. During his State of the City speech earlier this month (titled “Seattle On the Rise”), Mayor Bruce Harrell touted the fact that, “paired with” a dramatic reduction in visible encampments, the city’s encampment removal team made more than 1,800 “referrals to shelter” in 2024. Some people, Harrell conceded, may initially refuse the Unified Care Team’s offers, but “we will always ask and create spaces for people to recover.”
For years, the city has used shelter “referrals” as a metric for success. But, as PubliCola has documented year after year after year after year after year, only a fraction of the people the city “refers” to shelter during or before encampment sweeps actually end up showing up at shelter and staying there for even a single night.
Numbers provided by the mayor’s office confirm that this continued to be the case in 2024, when only 48 percent of 1,884 “referrals” actually resulted in someone staying in a shelter. That’s 903 instances in which a person slept in a shelter as the result of a Unified Care Team referral last year—down from 970 in 2023. This “enrollments” number fluctuates from season to season and year to year; people tend to be more willing to spend a night or two in a shelter bed when it’s cold out, for example.
A spokesperson for the mayor’s office noted that the enrollment numbers are likely an undercount, since some people don’t confirm their identities when they enroll in shelter; others, the spokesperson noted, may end up going to a different shelter or take more than 48 hours to enroll.
Alison Eisinger, director of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, said the “referrals to shelter” metric is about as meaningful as telling someone about a lunch place that has a good tofu banh mi and counting that as business for the restaurant. “No contracted outreach provider reports [referrals] because it is such a lousy indicator of the work,” she said.
Instead of focusing on “crappy data,” Eisinger said, she’d like to see the city working with the state to address the looming $250 million shortfall in revenue from the document recording fees that fund homeless services, or preparing for the likelihood that the Trump Administration will soon decimate the Department of Housing and Urban Development by slashing its workforce and cutting federal grants for housing.
None of the recent numbers Harrell touted in his speech are available on the city’s “One Seattle Homelessness Action Plan” dashboard, which does not appear to have been updated since last June. The mayor’s spokesperson called this an “oversight” and said the site would be updated with December figures later this week.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
2. The city of Burien is suing to roll back a voter-approved measure that increased Burien’s minimum wage to the same minimum as Tukwila—currently $21.10 an hour. The lawsuit, first reported by the B-Town Blog, targets the Transit Riders Union, which ran last year’s initiative campaign, and its general secretary (and sometime PubliCola contributor) Katie Wilson.
In its lawsuit, Burien claims that the initiative is too vague and “confusing” for voters to understand; additionally, the city argues that the initiative didn’t explicitly overturn the old minimum wage, leaving two “competing” minimum wages in place. The lawsuit also claims the campaign “went to exceptional lengths to suggest and imply that Burien had no minimum wage at all.”
The city is using the same Seattle law firm to sue Wilson and TRU that it’s using to defend against three homeless people seeking to overturn the city’s ban on sleeping outdoors, Keller Rohrback.
It’s hard to square Burien’s outrage with the details of the law its city council passed last year, which includes so many exemptions and carveouts that it could exempt many or most employers from paying more than the state minimum, currently $16.66 an hour.
The biggest carveout is that the law doesn’t set a minimum wage, but a minimum “total compensation” that varies by employer size. Total compensation, according to the law, includes not just wages but tips and medical benefits like health insurance. Other cities with minimum wage laws, such as Seattle, phased in their minimum wages over time, allowing smaller employers to count medical benefits and tips toward the minimum, but that initial grace period ended this year. Burien’s law permanently exempts any employer that provides benefits, or whose employees rely on customer tips, from paying more than the state minimum.
There are additional exemptions, too. Companies with fewer than 20 employees (which the law itself estimates at about 26 percent of Burien’s businesses) are completely exempt from the law. In addition, the highest possible wage—set at $4.50 an hour above whatever the state minimum happens to be—only applies to employers with more than 500 employees in King County. According to 2022 Census data, there are 269 businesses who meet that standard in all of King County, most of them outside Burien.
In the lawsuit, the city of Burien argues that by pegging the Burien minimum wage to Tukwila’s (which, in turn, is indexed on the city of SeaTac’s), the initiative is “uniquely problematic.” Voters in Renton passed a similar law last year, also pinned to Tukwila’s minimum; so far, it has not been challenged.
Port Commissioner Toshiko Hasegawa speaks at a meeting on potential changes to allow housing in the stadium district.
By Erica C. Barnett
Back in January, Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson convened a panel to discuss legislation that would allow affordable “workforce” housing in an industrially zoned area just south of downtown.
Hotels, retail stores, bars and restaurants, and offices are already allowed in this area, but housing is not; although a 2022 Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) found that a plan allowing up to 990 “industry-supportive housing” units would be compatible with the surrounding industrial area, the housing was omitted in a last-minute compromise to get the proposal past the finish line.
During the January meeting, Councilmember Dan Strauss accused Nelson of convening a panel that wasn’t “balanced,” because it only included proponents of her proposal to allow housing. Strauss has also made it clear he’s sore because Nelson is hearing the the legislation in her governance committee instead of sending it to the land use committee, chaired by Mark Solomon, where it might not get a hearing.
Echoing Strauss, Councilmember Bob Kettle said he hoped Nelson would give the other side a formal opportunity to speak against her legislation.
On Monday, Kettle and Strauss got their wish, when Nelson invited representatives from the maritime sector to explain why they see the housing proposal as a non-starter. The basic debate is about whether land with industrial zoning should be kept strictly industrial in perpetuity, as the Port and longshore union argue, or if some of that land should be repurposed for other uses, such as housing to support smaller, public-facing manufacturing businesses, as the building trades union has argued.
Currently, the two blocks just south of the stadiums are a mishmash of entertainment businesses (including a strip club) and bars, small manufacturers, underutilized retail spaces, and parking lots.
The first panelist, Port Commissioner Toshiko Hasegawa, came in hot, blasting Nelson’s plan as “a Humpty Dumpty approach to break apart our industrial lands piece by piece, year after year, to the point where we can’t put them back together again.” If the city wanted to open up the debate over the land around the stadiums, she continued, they would have to first satisfy the Port’s “core tenet—no net loss to industrial lands—and [provide] certainty that this isn’t going to come up year after year after year, because a trail of bread crumbs does not exactly exude transparency or confidence.”
The panelists (who also included Dan Kelly from the Freight Advisory Board, longshore union rep Dan McKisson, and Northwest Seaport Alliance deputy CEO Don Esterbrook) argued that housing in an industrial area would harm residents and lead to pedestrian deaths, and potentially drive port traffic to Canada or California as increased car traffic slowed down trucks trying to get out of Seattle.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
Nelson and Councilmember Maritza Rivera pressed the panelists to explain why they believed 990 new apartments would create enough traffic to cripple the Port, given that the maritime industry signed off on hotels, offices, and bars and restaurants in the area around the stadiums, which also create significant traffic.
“I don’t know why allowing for limited workforce housing is really going to have much of an extra impact than [what’s] already there, with the commercial use that includes hotels, entertainment and office space, and the sports complex,” Rivera said.
Hasegawa responded that new housing would bring “additional foot traffic” in an area that’s unsafe for pedestrians, then resumed talking about the potential impact of pollution on residents living near an industrial area. OK, Rivera said, but “we have residents in Pioneer Square, which is right there too”—why is it okay for people to live there but not on the other side of the stadiums? When no one answered that question, both Nelson and Rivera pressed: If allowing housing around the stadiums is such an obviously bad idea, why didn’t the Port or other maritime groups appeal the environmental impact statement that said a limited amount of housing was okay?
When the panelists didn’t really answer that question either, Strauss and Kettle stepped in. First, Kettle reiterated his comment from the previous meeting that the “F” in “FEIS” actually stands for “flawed,” and predicted lawsuits from residents harmed by “noise and air” issues in the area, along the lines of the lawsuits filed by residents of Whidbey Island over noise at a naval air station near their homes. Then Strauss said that in his recollection maritime and industrial unions didn’t like the final agreement to begin with, and only agreed to hotels as a compromise.
“We were furious,” McKisson confirmed, and said they still don’t know “how the non-industrial uses [have] impacted that area.”
After the meeting, Nelson said she hopes to hold a final vote on the legislation by March 18.
For years, the city has used shelter “referrals” as a metric for success. But, as PubliCola has documented 