We covered a lot of ground on this week’s Seattle Nice, from Republican City Attorney Ann Davison’s election-year decision to sign on to a lawsuit against the Trump Administration (unlike other leaders, she described Seattle’s sanctuary city status as an “issue of local control,” not immigrant rights), to Washington Progress Alliance director Dionne Foster’s bid to unseat Seattle City Council president Sara Nelson.
In addition to those hot topics, we talked about a story from KUOW about a late-night dispute over parking in which now-Mayor Bruce Harrell was arrested for flashing a gun at someone at a casino in Iowa in 1996. Harrell’s office told KUOW that he was only carrying the gun because he had gotten death threats over his proposed appointment to a housing board (public housing advocates wanted a public-housing resident, rather than an affluent attorney who had just moved to town, to fill the spot); he also claimed he was a victim of racial profiling by the casino security officer who detained him after the incident as well as the officer who arrested him.
KUOW’s latest story includes a first-person account from one of the people Harrell confronted in the parking lot—Rose Sanchez, who was eight months pregnant at the time. Sanchez told KUOW she came to the casino with her mother and husband, who had just gotten off the late shift at a nearby meatpacking plant. Sanchez said Harrell drove up alongside her family as they were walking through the parking lot, pointed his gun at them, and told them they had taken his parking space; in response, she said, the family reported the incident to casino security.
Harrell’s story appears to have changed multiple times. Initially, according to KUOW, he denied even having a gun; later, an officer who was apparently called by casino security (and whom he accused, along with the security guard, of racial profiling) found the gun in his Jeep. At the time, Harrell told reporters he thought “the Hispanic group” was going to attack him, and that he had the gun in the first place because of “unpleasant calls” about his appointment to the housing board that he later described as death threats. He also claimed that he and the people he confronted had “amicably settled the dispute, entering the establishment together,” which Sanchez said never happened.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
One thing that didn’t change about Harrell’s story, though, is that he clearly considers himself the victim, and even told KUOW, through a spokesman, that their reporting “forced him to relive his trauma” from racial profiling. According to KUOW, Harrell did not provide any specifics about how he was racially profiled; a casino employee recalled being surprised that the Sanchez family said Harrell had brandished a gun at them, because he was “dressed like an attorney,” KUOW reported.
So what can we learn from this story now? As Sandeep pointed out on the podcast, this incident is now almost 30 years old, so one could make the case that it’s no longer relevant—it’s literally old news. On the other hand, Harrell was close to 40 at the time, and most people’s early-middle-age foibles probably don’t involve flashing or pointing guns at strangers.
The more critical point, to me, is how Harrell has handled the the fact that the story has reemerged, with new details that weren’t reported at the time.
Rather than owning up, saying he made a mistake, and explaining what he learned from the incident or how he made amends, Harrell doubled down on his victim status. In a statement to KUOW, Harrell called the threats he said he received an “introduction to the hostilities the mayor would receive as a public servant, and reminiscent of the treatment and bigotry he has received throughout his life as a biracial person by people of all races and backgrounds who see him as different.”
It’s unlikely this incident alone will impact his reelection chances (although, as Sandeep noted, there could be more unflattering stories on the way), but it isn’t flattering to Harrell that his first instinct, when confronted with evidence he behaved rashly and inappropriately as a 38-year-old attorney, is to cast blame on everyone but himself.
We managed to dig in to three (!) hot topics on this week’s episode of Seattle Nice: Mayor Bruce Harrell’s comment that Trump “surrounds himself by some of the smartest innovators around”—Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and Marc Andreessen; a Seattle Times story about the ongoing closure of Victor Steinbrueck Park on the waterfront due to a dispute over two controversial totem poles; and the story I wrote about two women who sold a house that had been in their family for more than 70 years and walked into a buzzsaw of anger when activists learned the buyer planned to cut down a large tree on the property.
That tree story continues to get more comments than just about anything I’ve ever written, most of them calling me angry and biased and saying I have a vendetta against trees. If you haven’t read it, don’t get too excited—it’s a reported piece about what happened with one tree when the family that owned the property decided to sell it after their mother died at 101.
Tree Action Seattle created an action page for “Grandma Brooks’ Cedar” and led protests against the removal of the tree, claiming that the former owner, Barbara Brooks, cherished the cedar and told various people verbally that she wanted it saved after she died. Her daughters, including one who lived with her during the last years of her life, said nothing could be further from the truth: “Mom hated that tree,” they both told me independently—and no one called her “Grandma Brooks.”
Both women were quite upset at the way Tree Action and some neighbors have characterized their mother and her wishes after her death, and said they no longer feel comfortable in their old neighborhood. Tree Action, meanwhile, has doubled down, saying the sisters previously said that they planned to save the tree, reneged, and are now lying.
Activists from outside the neighborhood, as well as some neighbors, have argued that I should have discounted the Brooks’ story about their own experience and reported that their stories were false—or, at the very least, presented the Brooks’ version as dubious compared to the narrative on Tree Action’s “Grandma Brooks’ Cedar” page. Ultimately, reporting usually involves speaking to human beings and reporting their version of events; in this case, I found the Brooks sisters to be very credible when describing their own family’s story.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
Both sisters’ stories were remarkably consistent: They told me their mother “hated that tree” because it required so much maintenance, and recalled that neighbors did not pitch in to help when their mother was alive and taking care of the tree on her own. They laughed bitterly at the image of their mother lovingly carrying buckets of water out to the tree in the summer; she did water her flowers with a bucket when it was hot, they said, but not the tree—which, both mentioned, prevented their mother from gardening in a large portion of her yard.
Both sisters also mentioned that neighbors often pestered their mother to put a covenant on the property to save the tree, but she refused. “My neighbor across the street— for years he would tell my mom, ‘When you sell this house, put it in writing that this tree has to stay,’ and she said, ‘No—don’t tell me what to do,'” one of her daughters, Beverly, told me.
In the end, like most families who sell their houses, the Brooks sold for the best price they could get and moved on—thinking, they said, that this would be the end of the story. “Don’t homeowners, after they pay taxes for 75 years, have the right to sell the place?” daughter Barbara said.
Like, I have to imagine, most people who live in Seattle, I love trees. Seattle’s natural beauty is one of the primary reasons I decided to move here. But I also know that the only way to meaningfully protect the city’s tree canopy long-term is by planting more trees for future generations to enjoy, including trees in public spaces like parks (where a 2023 study found that more than half the tree canopy loss in the city is actually occurring). The new development on the Brooks’ property, for instance, includes six new privately owned trees and one new street tree. No, those new trees won’t immediately replace the shade of the one tree that was removed. But they will eventually.
That’s the thing about trees: They often live longer than we do, long enough for us to forget about the context in which they actually grew. An 80-year-old, or even 100-year-old, cedar is not part of some old-growth forest—it was almost certainly planted, as landscaping, by the people who built the resource-hogging single-family houses that now make up neighborhoods like Ravenna. Go way back, and you’ll find, yes, developers who clear-cut the ancient forest that used to cover this part of the Pacific Northwest, scraping the ground bare so that white colonizers could live here in the manner they preferred.
Should North Seattle homeowners have to think about that every time they look up at a tree on someone’s private lawn and awe at the sweep of its branches? I’m not saying that, but I do think some perspective is in order. Banning private land owners from removing every large but not exceptional tree, which some advocates argue should happen as part of an upcoming review of the city’s tree ordinance, will indeed protect isolated older trees in people’s yards. It will also directly prevent the development of desperately needed housing in Seattle—pushing more and more people into distant exurbs, which can only be built by destroying the healthy forests that are large trees’ natural habitat.
During his remarks at the Downtown Seattle Association’s State of Downtown event on Tuesday, Mayor Bruce Harrell appeared to praise President Trump for bringing “smart innovators” like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and David Sacks into his inner circle at the White House.
“We know that our current president surrounds himself by some of the smartest innovators around,” Harrell said. “When we drop names like [Marc] Andreessen or Peter Thiel or David Sacks or Elon Musk—these are smart innovators.”
Harrell, who noted a moment later that he had gone “off script,” had been talking about cybersecurity, potential threats from AI, and competition with China. He also noted that “the FCC is run by Brendan Carr, who did write the playbook for the FCC chapter in Project 25,” and said he got “emotional” about layoffs at the National Institute of Standards in Technology, which Wired describes as an “agency responsible for establishing benchmarks that ensure everything from beauty products to quantum computers are safe and reliable.”
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
Mayoral spokesman Jamie Housen said Harrell was actually criticizing Trump and his tech advisors.
“The mayor was not praising them, he was referencing they have an objective reputation as leaders in technology and innovation, and that it is a danger they are in the president’s orbit,” Housen said. “He certainly doesn’t agree with their politics, which is why he highlighted this through concerns around the actions coming out of DC like significant staffing cuts impacting cybersecurity and the degradation of protections and questions over access to personal data.”
Marc Andreessen is a tech mogul who co-founded Netscape and is now one of Trump’s top tech advisors. Palantir founder Peter Thiel, who’s probably best known for funding the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that doomed Gawker, was one of Trump’s earliest tech supporters. David Sacks is a Paypal co-founder who is now Trump’s “crypto czar.”
Tuesday’s event was not the first time Harrell has had seemingly conciliatory words for the Trump Administration while speaking to a business group. During a Washington Technology Industry Association event after the election last year, Harrell said he was not “not going to D.C. with my fist balled,” adding, “I look for opportunities … no matter who’s in the White House.”
Harrell spent the first five minutes of his recent State of the City speech (which we discussed on Seattle Nice last week) blasting Trump’s crackdown on immigrants, funding cuts, “unconstitutional executive orders,” and anti-DEI policies.
Shon Barnes, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s pick for police chief
By Erica C. Barnett
Last week, Mayor Bruce Harrell announced that, for the first time since before the COVID pandemic, more people are entering the Seattle Police Department than leaving it—precisely one more person, but still a step in the right direction for advocates of a larger police force. However, a closer look at those numbers reveals that the latest group of applicants, as well as the smaller cohort that makes it through the hiring process, are still overwhelmingly male—a bad sign for the city’s goal of having an incoming recruit class that’s 30 percent women by 2030.
According to numbers provided by the mayor’s office, 86 percent of the 84 new officers hired in 2024 were men, and 14 percent were women. Those numbers closely mirror the larger group that applied for police jobs last year; women also represented 14 percent of that group, with 84 percent identifying as male, 0.7 percent as trans or nonbinary, and 1 percent declining to identify their gender.
SPD has signed on to the national 30X 30 initiative, committing to have a recruit class that’s 30 percent women by 2030. It’s a lofty goal for an overwhelmingly male department whose culture has been described by women who work there as misogynistic, discriminatory, and rife with sexual harassment.
SPD’s most recent permanent chief, Adrian Diaz, was removed from his job after being accused of sexual harassment and discrimination, and finally got fired last year after an investigation revealed he had an inappropriate relationship with a woman he hired and promoted and lied to investigators to cover it up.
Mayor Bruce Harrell has touted the gender-equalizing credentials of his police chief nominee, Shon Barnes, who was police chief in Madison, Wisconsin for just under four years. ” Chief Barnes brings proven experience advancing the Madison Police Department’s inclusive workforce initiative that has resulted in 28% of officers being women,” Harrell said in his announcement.
In reality, Madison’s police force has been a national anomaly for decades, and hit the 28 percent level Harrell credited to Barnes four years before Barnes joined the department in 2021. Madison’s recruit class was 35 percent female in 2023 before declining to 21 percent in 2024, according to the city. Barnes may well be the best pick for Seattle’s police chief (the mayor did not reveal who any of the other candidates were prior to choosing Barnes, and there was no public selection process), but he didn’t create a culture where women see policing as a viable career option in Madison; he joined a department that had spent decades creating and nurturing that culture.
Seattle is a larger department with a reputation as a place where women’s complaints about misogyny, sexual harassment, and discrimination are not taken seriously. Even as he demoted former police chief Diaz because multiple women accused him of sexual harassment and discrimination, Harrell kept him on at his previous salary and praised him as a man of unimpeachable integrity. For Barnes, fixing that culture—and putting SPD on track to more than double the number of women who want to work there over the next five years—will be a more significant challenge than joining a department that has already done the work.
City Council candidates Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Tanya Woo on a recent episode of “City Inside/Out.”
By Erica C. Barnett
In planning for a potential $260 million budget shortfall this year, Mayor Bruce Harrell asked most city departments to come up with potential cuts of 8 percent—a worst-case scenario the mayor’s office avoided by using about half the funds from the JumpStart payroll tax to pay for staff and services that are usually funded through the city’s general fund.
One department that did get gutted—not cut by 8 or 10 percent, but slashed in half—is the Seattle Channel, the city’s award-winning source for arts coverage, interviews with elected officials, campaign debates, and other original programming.
Harrell’s budget proposal would eliminate the jobs of three videographers who film, produce and edit programs and meetings, two half-time web positions, a senior producer, and the channel’s operations manager. The cuts would mean the end of all original Seattle Channel programming, leaving only city council meetings and mayoral events.
During a recent presentation to the City Council, City Budget Office director Dan Eder that with the decline in cable subscriptions, the cable fees that help fund Seattle Channel are no longer enough to keep it going. “At this point, we just didn’t have enough money available to us… to continue that program,” Eder said.
In an email, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office, Callie Craighead, made a distinction between “primary programming of government affairs” and “supplementary” or “additional” programming like the original work that has been the Seattle Channel’s mainstay for the past two decades. “Should the revenue forecast improve or if the City can arrange for other funding solutions, we would be supportive of restoring this additional programming,” Craighead said.
The cuts would save about $1.6 million—about 0.085 percent (0.008) of a $1.9 billion general-fund budget that includes tens of millions of dollars in new spending on police overtime, planning for the 2026 FIFA World Cup (which will include six matches in Seattle), and downtown beautification projects such as removing the fountain in Westlake Park.
The city has known about the decline in cable revenues for many years; last year, Harrell’s budget suggested using new tax revenues, based on the recommendations of the city’s Revenue Stabilization Work Group, to sustain the Seattle Channel and other programs with dwindling or unstable revenues. After voters elected a new, anti-tax city council last. year, Harrell changed his tune, issuing what amounted to a no-new-taxes pledge.
Shows that Harrell’s budget would eliminate immediately include “City Inside/Out,” a public affairs hosted by broadcasting veteran Brian Callanan; Art Zone, a “weekly love letter” to local arts and culture hosted by Nancy Guppy; and BookLust, a popular interview show hosted by Nancy Pearl, along with 20 other shows. Callanan, along with longtime producer Susan Han, has a year-to-year contract with the channel; both will lose their jobs if the cuts go through.
Gary Gibson, who managed the Seattle Channel from 2002 to 2007, recalled that the city set up a commission in 2001 to help revitalize the city’s cable-access channel, then called TV SEA, which only aired city council meetings and mayoral press conferences.
“It was a vehicle for putting out council meetings and the mayor’s press conferences—that’s all they did. There was no original programming and there was no enterprise reporting or any kind of content creation.” The commission said the channel should create engaging shows that would have an audience beyond meeting watchers, and put those shows online so people could watch them any time. “They had this idea to create a democracy portal—a two-way communication between government and the citizens,” Gibson said.
Now retired from broadcasting, Gibson led the channel through its transition in the early 2000s, from a standard public-access cable channel (called TV-SEA) that aired mayoral press conferences and council meetings, into a unique online resource offering original shows like “City Inside/Out,” “Ask the Mayor,” and election debates.
Under Harrell’s plan, the Seattle Channel would once again be little more than a portal for council meetings and press events.
Han, who has been with Seattle Channel for 17 years, said she “did expect some belt-tightening” this year, but was surprised that Harrell proposed eliminating all of the channel’s award-winning programs. “We’re just going to have to really fight to try and save the show,” she said, referring to “City Inside/Out.” “I don’t know if we have the ability to save the station.”
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
Harrell’s cuts would eliminate coverage that no one else in the city is providing—coverage that’s made possible, in part, because Seattle Channel is part of the city itself and has spent decades building trust with city leaders. The tone of its coverage is genuinely fair and balanced, and producers go out of their way to give both sides of an issue or campaign an opportunity to make their best case.
For example, during the heated debate over a proposal to recall then-council member Kshama Sawant in 2021, Han was able to convince Sawant to appear on a panel, moderated by Callanan, with representatives from the “Recall Sawant” campaign. It was the only time Sawant and her opponents sat down for a debate.
“I tried to get her own the show from April until November, and she finally said yes,” Han recalled. “That’s the thing with producing our show—you make a lot of phone calls before you hone into the right balance. And it’s not like we’re being paid hourly. We just really care that we have the best version of that show.”
Later this week, Callanan said, the Seattle Channel will hold another debate between proponents and opponents of the $1.55 billion transportation levy—a measure that has received little recent coverage from the shrinking local press corps or campaign reporters, who are largely focused on national and state races.
“It’s going to be half hour, we’re going to have opposing sides, and we’re going to present some pretty comprehensive coverage on an issues that’s huge” to the city, Callanan said. “Here are the pros, here are the cons, here is what both sides say. It’s that type of reporting” that will be lost if Harrell’s cuts go through, he said.
“Art Zone with Nancy Guppy” is another longtime staple of the Seattle Channel’s coverage.
Beyond election debates, the Seattle Channel provides ongoing coverage about the details of what the city council, mayor, and city departments are up to—everything from profiles of department leaders to half-hour sit-down interviews with council members. “I think this is something city should be really proud of,” Callanan said. “For me, it’s the idea of the city standing behind this ethic of preserving quality journalism that provides transparency into what they’re doing.”
While the Seattle Channel serves as a forum for elected officials, it isn’t a mouthpiece—which is one reason many mayors and council members have complained about the channel’s coverage over the years. Common complaints include charges that the channel gives too much time to opposing views; that its reporters should be producing promo pieces for elected officials, not journalism; and that it’s unreasonable to expect officials to sit down and answer questions.
Callanan said his goal has always been “talking to local officials in the best way possible. I want to make sure we’re doing everything we can to provide those avenues for local officials to be in front of people, have people ask questions, and have the officials respond.” However, he added, “It has been more and more challenging to get public officials to commit to interviews.”
Sometimes, this pushback has led to involuntary programming changes; for example, former mayor Ed Murray ended “Ask the Mayor,” a show where the mayor responded to viewer questions, by refusing to appear on it, and no subsequent mayor has revived the show.
Harrell has also reportedly groused about the channel’s coverage, along with the fact that its camera operators can’t always drop what they’re doing to cover his events; however, he’s the first mayor to propose eliminating 100 percent of its original programming and its two-person web team.
The mayor’s office insists that its decision to eliminate the Seattle Channel’s programming is a matter of simple budget math, not a response to its coverage. “We looked at other comparable cities with an active government-access television channel and the proposed 2025 Seattle Channel budget of $1.7 M is more in line with those cities.” Craighead said.
Harrell’s budget assumes that council meetings and his own press events will go up online without the two people who currently make that happen, which Han calls unrealistic. “Our web team is fantastic, and they’re also the ones that do the live stream and put the show on all these different platforms,” Han said. “When the mayor says we’re still going to be able to put all this stuff out and do livestreams and all that, I think he’s mistaken.”
Gibson, the former Seattle Channel general manager, said he doesn’t “really get the calculus” that led Harrell to propose eliminating everything that makes Seattle Channel unique among municipal TV stations. “It just doesn’t seem like that much to pay for that kind of transparency into government activities.”
City council members Sara Nelson and Dan Strauss have both publicly expressed their support for Seattle Channel since the mayor released his budget, and Nelson told a constituent she plans to introduce a budget amendment that would restore at least some funding this week. Neither Nelson nor council spokesperson Brad Harwood responded to PubliCola’s questions about the Seattle Channel or Nelson’s amendment.
Editor’s note: After we posted this story, Nelson put out a press release saying she was “working to preserve funding for the city’s Seattle Channel.” The announcement did not include any other details.
Mayor Bruce Harrell and King County Executive Dow Constantine will submit legislation soon to disband the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s Implementation Board, PubliCola has learned. The Implementation Board is made up of people who represent different communities impacted by homelessness, including businesses, affordable housing providers, advocates, and people with direct experience of homelessness. Both councils have to approve the changes, which require amending the interlocal agreement that established the agency in 2019.
The board includes no elected officials or service providers with KCRHA contracts. A second board, the Governing Committee, is made up almost entirely of elected officials; under the proposed changes, the Governing Committee would take over the responsibilities of the Implementation Board.
Under the interlocal agreement, the implementation board is supposed to oversee the operations of the KCRHA and approve all budget and policy decisions (like the agency’s contentiousFive-Year Plan), and make recommendations to the elected officials on the governing committee, which can ultimately approve, alter, or vote down those recommendations.
Critics, including many elected officials on the governing committee, have called this process unwieldy, and have pointed to the two-board structure as a primary reason the KCRHA has struggled to reduce homelessness in the region. Ceattle City Councilmember Rob Saka, for example, called the structure “clunky and confusing” earlier this year. “As I understand it, there’s three boards oversight with oversight authority over KCRHA, and in my mind, that’s two too many,” Saka said—including in his calculation a federally mandated Continuum of Care oversight committee, which is unrelated to the KCRHA’s governance structure.
But Alison Eisinger, director of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, says eliminating the implementation board will only ensure that the region’s homelessness agency is governed by a body that includes no one with direct expertise or experience with research, analysis, and on-the-ground work to address homelessness.
And, she added, making tweaks to the KCRHA’s governance structure doesn’t address the underlying issues that have made it challenging for the KCRHA to make a meaningful impact on homelessness—a lack of “deep, sustained, additional funding for housing, rent assistance, crisis response, and support. … The regional commitment to site, open, and operate quality housing, shelter and services that match people’s needs has to be made real by actions, not just words.”
Seattle and King County provide the vast majority of the KCRHA’s funding. As we’ve reported, the agency’s 2025 budget will require the closure of at least 300 shelter beds.
Eliminating the board will require significant amendments to the interlocal agreement, which would have to be approved by the King County Council and Seattle City Council. Constantine and Harrell’s offices did not respond to PubliCola’s requests for comment.
By Erica C. Barnett