Down in the basement of City Hall, at the end of a corridor most city employees have little reason to visit, is a faux-wood paneled section of wall with an unmarked door and a small ledge that looks like it once served as a customer service counter. The only indication that there’s anything behind the wall, besides a jutting door handle, is a red-lit security panel, indicating that someone has the ability to badge their way into this unmarked room, and that it isn’t you.
The space, located just past the Boards and Commissions room, was at one time a walk-up counter for the city’s credit union, but was vacant for years—until 2022, when Mayor Bruce Harrell had it converted into a workout facility. The unmarked gym is only open to the mayor and members of his security detail, who are SPD officers; in an unscientific poll of a half-dozen current and former City Hall staffers, not one was aware of the gym’s existence.
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The insider who told PubliCola about the gym said Harrell didn’t end up using it very often, preferring a private club nearby that has better facilities. According to Jamie Housen, a spokesman for Harrell’s office, the mayor used the gym “a handful of times, maybe five or six. Housen said the equipment in the gym is all the “personal equipment” of the SPD officers on Harrell’s security team, and includes “a 10+ year-old treadmill and used weight equipment”—definitely a step-down from the Washington Athletic Club, where Harrell is a member.
The basement of city hall also contains a lactation room that one staffer described as the equivalent of a “supply closet.” Seattle Channel is also down there, as is the office for the city’s janitorial division and a garage access point for city staffers.
It’s unclear how often members of Harrell’s security team use the gym. SPD officers have access to a fully equipped gym at SPD headquarters right across the street from City Hall, as well as at every police precinct, but Housen said the mayor’s detail “is unable to use those spaces because they are required to keep close proximity to the mayor at all times.” Housen said SPD pays a lease for the gym to the city’s fleets and facilities department, and let us know that Jim Brunner of the Seattle Times passed on writing about the gym last year.
We filed a records request for more details about the gym, and will file an update if we learn anything interesting, like the max incline on that decade-old treadmill or whether there’s an explicit policy against dropping weights.
Outgoing police chief Adrian Diaz speaks at a press conference Wednesday afternoon, flanked by Mayor Bruce Harrell and incoming interim police chief Sue Rahr.
By Erica C. Barnett
Mayor Bruce Harrell officially announced that Police Chief Adrian Diaz will be stepping into an unspecified new role in “special projects” this afternoon, at a crowded press conference in which Harrell also announced that former King County Sheriff Sue Rahr will serve as interim police chief while the city does a national search for Diaz’ permanent replacement.
As we reported in our initial story on Harrell’s decision to remove Diaz this morning, at least half a dozen women and one man, former assistant chief Eric Greening, have accused Diaz or other department officials of sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and creating a misogynistic culture. Two of the lawsuits, by veteran police detective Denise “Cookie” Bouldin and Captain Eric Greening, also allege racial discrimination. Bouldin and Greening are Black; Greening applied for the permanent police chief position when Diaz was interim and was demoted from assistant chief after Diaz won the permanent job.
In his remarks, Harrell did not mentioned the allegations against the chief and others in the department, instead praising Diaz as a visionary leader who had turned the department around and deserved nothing but respect. “His integrity, in my mind, is beyond reproach,” Harrell said. “He’s a human being, and a good human being at that.”
In his own brief remarks, Diaz cited his own accomplishments, including the creation of a course for police recruits that includes trainings by representatives from marginalized communities and meetings with community groups, before breaking down in tears. “I’ve accomplished so much in four years as chief, but there’s more work to be done. I passed that challenge along to [Rahr], and I’ll continue to support the city in [its] transition,” Diaz said.
Harrell would not elaborate on what Diaz’ “special projects” role would entail, or what his rank and salary will be. Diaz’ most recent rank in the department was lieutenant, but Harrell suggested it was unlikely he would be demoted back to his previous rank.
Asked to respond to the allegations against Diaz, which include sexually harassing female subordinates and putting them in situations that made them feel uncomfortable, Harrell declined, citing the fact that the lawsuits are ongoing and that the city has appointed an outside investigator to look into the allegations against Diaz and others in the department.
“I will not comment on any litigation, and that’s an unwise move by any stretch of the imagination,” Harrell said. “There’s a process for that, and it’s called due process for a reason, and so we’ll let the litigation and the claims play out.”
But by praising Diaz at length while verbally waving away the allegations against him, Harrell gave tacit credence to a vocal contingent of Diaz supporters who claim he is the victim of an internal conspiracy based on fabricated allegations.
Two of these supporters, Community Police Commission member Rev. Harriet Walden and SPD African American Advisory Council member Victoria Beach, who is an employee of the department, have suggested that all of the women who’ve sued the department are liars. In a press conference last week, Walden and Beach blamed the women’s allegations on racism and an internal “mutiny” at SPD. Both women expressed support for Diaz from the audience during Harrell’s press conference when he called on them during a question and answer period.
“I know for a fact that he’s going to be proven innocent,” Beach said. “I’m not the chief, but I would say the hell with all of this, and I would be out of there, and I would have the biggest lawsuit ever. This is wrong. Nobody is safe in the Seattle Police Department.”
Prior to working as an employee at SPD, Beach had a $63,000 contract through 2023 to “assist in the coordination of the various advisory councils that the department works with.”
In 2022 and 2023, Walden held a contract with the Human Services Department to conduct around 14 in-person or virtual “Virtues Healing Circles” per year; in the circles, participants draw “virtue cards” from a deck and discuss how the virtue listed on the card resonates with their personal experience. The goal is to create healing and supportive environments for people who have experienced trauma, such as gun violence. Walden’s contract also required her “to distribute Virtues Cards at community events and encourage others to host their own circles” and “attend events at the request of the City to respond to crises whenever feasible for Rev. Walden.”
When PubliCola reached out to Walden earlier this year to ask about her contract, she said that “until you have the experience [of participating in a Virtues Circle] I don’t have anything to say to you,” adding, “I’ve never had a contract with the city before, so why shouldn’t [I] have a contract with the city?” Beach did not respond to our request for comment at the time, and approached me on Wednesday to say that she did not “owe” me an interview (which, of course, neither she nor anyone else does.)
While the lawsuits wind their way through the courts, several insiders observed that Harrell’s effusive comments about Diaz’ performance could help him find a job as police chief elsewhere, which Diaz said he would be open to doing in the future. After Diaz broke down crying during his own brief remarks, Harrell said, “You can’t make up that kind of heart,” and claimed Diaz “gets calls all the time to lead other departments.”
“The city should have ultimate faith in the police department,” Harrell said. “We don’t make panic moves, we make strategic moves… If there’s one takeaway from this press conference, it’s that I stand with this fine leader.”
Rahr is an advisor for SPD’s 30 by 30 initiative—an effort aimed at increasing the number of female police recruits to 30 percent by 2030—and a national expert on police recruitment. At the end of the press conference, PubliCola asked Rahr whether she was concerned about the allegations of misogyny, harassment, and discrimination in the department and what she would do, if anything, to address what many women have described as a misogynistic culture at SPD.
“I’ll be honest with you, I have concerns about the culture of all police department,” Rahr said. “I don’t think the Seattle Police Department is worse or better than others. I think we have work to do in every department. One of the reasons I was very anxious to jump in is, I think the Seattle Police Department is open to doing something meaningful and implementing systemic change.”
Councilmember Rob Saka, who came to the press conference along with Councilmember Tanya Woo, said he stood by Harrell’s decision and declined—in response to a reporter’s repeated questions—to say that he “stands with” Diaz. In a statement, council public safety committee chair Bob Kettle said the “gender equity issues identified by women within the department in the 30×30 Report. … are serious, they are real, and they need to be addressed. I am excited to work with Interim Chief Rahr to continue that work.”
During the public safety committee’s meeting on Tuesday, Saka raised questions about Diaz’ frequent use of security detail, asking rhetorically whether it makes sense to pay for the chief to have full security at all times, the same way the mayor does.
Speaking to PubliCola after the meeting, Saka said, “I do think it makes a lot of sense for the mayor to have executive protection at all times. And I think as a policy matter, we should question whether it makes sense, as a standard practice, to have the chief of police have equal executive services protection rather than protection in response to a specific threat. We are grossly understaffed and under-resourced today… We’re in a $260 million and growing budget deficit. So always thinking about how we can best help drive efficiencies and streamline things and optimize our investments,
Harrell said he anticipates the search for a new permanent police chief will take between four and six months; Rahr does not plan to apply for the job.
Mayor Bruce Harrell’s budget director, Julie Dingley, resigned this week and is out of next Friday, when she’ll be replaced on an interim basis by Harrell’s policy director Dan Eder. PubliCola first reported the news about Dingley and Eder on X this morning, and Harrell announced it as part of a larger staffing update this afternoon.
Dingley’s departure comes as the mayor’s office and city council prepare to contend with a budget deficit of more than $240 million.
This week, the city council’s central staff released a report revealing that the cost of a new 2021-2023 contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild, which provides retroactive raises totaling 24 percent over the past three years, will cost the city more than $96 million in 2024 alone, and $39 million in 2025 and 2026, not counting additional raises that the Seattle Police Officers Guild will negotiate as part a contract that will eventually apply retroactively to those years.
Overall, central staff estimates, the 2023 contract will cost about $9.2 million more, over the next three years, than the city has set aside to increase officer pay.
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Harrell also announced his appointment of Natalie Walton-Anderson, City Attorney Ann Davison’s former criminal division chief, as his public safety director. When she left Davison’s office earlier this year, Walton-Anderson said she needed to “take a break and reset after 27 years working in the criminal legal system.”
Walton-Anderson was known for aggressively filing charges in drug-related cases that would ordinarily get channeled into the city’s pre-booking diversion program, LEAD, and Davison credited her with instituting the “high-utilizer initiative,” which targets people accused of multiple misdemeanor offenses for more punitive approaches than other defendants.
Walton-Anderson’s appointment also comes at a time when Harrell is preparing to roll out a new “public safety plan” reportedly focused on drug use downtown, and as the city considers inking a new contract for jail beds with the South Correctional Entity (SCORE), which would allow the city to book people on charges King County generally excludes from booking, such as drug possession and other low-level misdemeanors.
King County ended its own brief contract with the regional jail, which is owned by six South King County cities, last year, citing logistical challenges. Four people died at SCORE last year, including a woman who died of malnutrition and dehydration after spending three nights curled on the floor of a temporary holding cell.
Advocates for safer streets gather outside City Hall this week. Speaking: Cecelia Black, Disability Rights Washington
By Erica C. Barnett
Last week, the city released a 22-page transportation levy renewal proposal that would bring in $1.3 billion to fund roads, bridges, and sidewalks over the next eight years, with $218 million for bridge maintenance, $109 million for sidewalks and pedestrian improvements, and $107 million on Vision Zero and school safety projects.
Adjusted for inflation and timeline (the new levy is eight years instead of nine), that’s about $33 more million a year than the Move Seattle levy that’s about to expire—hardly enough to maintain the status quo, much less invest in new initiatives, especially once construction cost inflation is factored in.
After Mayor Bruce Harrell announced the levy last week, advocates for safer streets began pointing out inconsistencies between the city’s rhetoric about the proposal—which Harrell said “will make trips safer, more reliable, and better connected” no matter how people get around—and what the levy would actually fund.
Although the graphics-heavy proposal is noticeably light on specifics, the balance of spending categories skews heavily toward car-oriented projects, including road repairs, new pavement “on our busiest streets,” and bridge maintenance, including upgrades and planning for the replacement of the Ballard and Magnolia Bridges.
Compared to the Move Seattle Levy, the new levy plan cuts spending on transit connections by 30 percent; cuts pedestrian projects, including new sidewalks, by 23 percent; and cuts spending on freight mobility by 45 percent, according to an analysis by Whose Streets? Our Streets! organizer Ethan Campbell. Spending on “climate and resiliency” projects is up 111 percent from the previous levy, but that category—as described in the levy proposal—focuses mostly on planting trees, expanding access to EV chargers, and increasing “low-emissions goods delivery in areas most impacted by climate change and pollution,” rather than shifting people away from cars. Vehicles account for almost two-thirds of all greenhouse-gas emissions in Seattle.
Advocates for safer streets say the levy also represents a capitulation on the city’s Vision Zero goal of reducing traffic deaths and serious injuries to zero by 2030, which is within the timeline of the eight-year levy. In Seattle, as in many cities, traffic deaths—particularly pedestrian deaths—have been trending upward over the past several years, as the Seattle Department of Transportation acknowledged in its “Vision Zero Top-To-Bottom Review” last year.
“Seattle adopted Vision Zero … in 2015, and yet over 1,500 people have been seriously injured and over 200 have been killed since then,” Erica Bush, director of Duwamish Valley Safe Streets, said on Monday, at a press conference held by a coalition of advocates outside City Hall. “We will not see this trend change until we commit to completely reimagining the way we use our roadways.”
At the Monday press conference, safety advocates pushed for a levy of at least $1.7 billion, with at least half of the funding dedicated to street safety and mobility for pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders. Cecelia Black, an organizer with Disability Rights Washington, noted that broken and missing sidewalks often force people who use wheelchairs, scooters, and walkers to “navigate the streets alongside cars,” putting their lives at risk.
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The levy proposes adding just 250 blocks of sidewalks and sidewalk alternatives, like curbless paved “walkways,” over eight years—about 2 percent of the 11,000 blocks that currently lack sidewalks. At that rate, advocates said, it will take the city at least 400 years to complete its sidewalk network. “In the same proposal that cuts pedestrian infrastructure, it also set an ambitious goal of filling every pothole in 72 hours,” Black said. “[The] transportation system that the mayor is proposing [is] one where we measure our response times to infrastructure for cars in hours, and our response to infrastructure for pedestrians in centuries.” Continue reading “Advocates Urge City to Adopt More Ambitious, Less Car-Centric Transportation Levy”→
The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has decided to continue its search for a new CEO, PubliCola has confirmed, after two high-level meetings in the past week at which agency officials and search committee members discussed whether to continue the hiring process or begin “winding down” the agency.
Last week, as PubliCola exclusively reported, former governor Christine Gregoire and Seattle Metropolitan Chamber director Rachel Smith wrote a letter to other members of the CEO search committee urging the committee to pause the hiring process until the agency’s future is clear; in their letter, Smith and Gregoire cited “challenges the agency has faced and/or been unable to respond to” along with ongoing questions about the agency’s governing structure. The KCRHA is headed up by an implementation board of subject-matter experts who make policy and budget decisions, and a governing committee made up mostly of elected officials board that is supposed to approve the implementation board’s decision.
The CEO search committee met on Friday. The original plan for that meeting was to whittle down a list of a dozen candidates for the permanent CEO position, currently filled by interim CEO Darrell Powell, who has reportedly applied for the permanent job. The agency has been without a permanent leader since its first CEO, Marc Dones, resigned last May.
There’s an existential issue at play here: Can the KCRHA can be successful if it’s directly controlled by political actors at King County and the city of Seattle, which together provide most of the authority’s funding?
Instead of talking about the candidates, the search committee discussed the broader future of the agency. Some committee members, reportedly including Seattle City Councilmember Cathy Moore, argued that the KCRHA needs to come up with a new governance structure before appointing a CEO in order to create a sense of stability at the agency. This, the theory goes, could lead to a deeper pool of more qualified applicants.
Moore declined to comment for this story, citing an NDA, and others involved in the internal conversations about KCRHA’s future did not respond to questions or declined to speak on the record. (The NDA, as described to PubliCola, pertains to the appointment itself, including the list of applicants. It does not restrict people from talking about the process in general or about other questions we had for Moore, such as how she would like to see the KCRHA’s governance change.)
The second meeting, held earlier this week, was called to discuss those governance concerns. It’s unclear whether the group reached any consensus about how the agency will be governed in the future. However, sources familiar with the discussions say representatives for Mayor Bruce Harrell and King County Executive Dow Constantine expressed their strong support for the KCRHA and its “regional approach” to homelessness. Last month, Harrell’s office announced the city was stripping KCRHA of its authority over encampment outreach and homelessness prevention, but Harrell’s office suggested it it might consider handing these responsibilities back to the authority at some point in the future.
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Many Seattle officials have argued that the KCRHA’s two-board structure (three if you count the federally mandated Continuum of Care board) is confusing and grants too much power to unelected experts who aren’t directly accountable to voters. Those with long memories will recall that this was also a heated debate back in 2019, when the KCRHA was created; at that time, the non-elected implementation board was seen as a bulwark against political influence.
One possibility, according to sources close to the discussions, is that the KCRHA will eliminate the implementation board and incorporate a handful of homelessness experts into the governing board, which would become the agency’s main decision-making body. There’s an existential issue at play here: Can the KCRHA can be successful if it’s directly controlled by political actors at King County and the city of Seattle, which together provide most of the authority’s funding?
Last year, the KCRHA was supposed to re-bid the entire homelessness system—a huge undertaking that could mean ending longstanding contracts and opening new ones with first-time providers—but that was put on hold to give the agency time to address immediate problems, including late payments to service providers.
Powell, who was Harrell’s pick to lead the agency, has been on the job for just over two months; earlier this week, the authority hired King County Department of Community and Human Services’ emergency response director, Hedda McClendon, as Powell’s interim deputy, after the mayor’s office proposed her name to Powell by email in January.
Mayor Bruce Harrell has reportedly asked the King County Regional Homelessness Authority to come up with budget cuts of between 2 and 5 percent; the city has the authority to do this because the KCRHA receives more than half its funding from the city. The request is a sign that the city’s budget crunch will directly impact the homelessness authority’s ability to expand or maintain the work its contractors do to address homelessness in the region.
It’s also more evidence, for those who are looking for it, of Harrell’s disillusionment with the agency, which has gone through tremendous upheaval (and a number of unsuccessful, very high-profile initiatives) in its first two years. Harrell has repeatedly expressed skepticism about the KCRHA’s approach, ranging from the agency’s efforts, under former CEO Marc Dones, to invest in new approaches like medical facilities for people with significant needs and single-family group homes for people exiting homelessness, to the size of the KCRHA’s budget itself, which Harrell has declined, even in good budget years, to significantly increase.
Harrell’s office would not specifically confirm the request for KCRHA to come up with cuts, but spokesman Jamie Housen said that “[g]iven the 2025 forecasted budget deficit facing the City, we are evaluating all options to drive efficiencies, optimize investments, and prioritize the needs of residents.”
According to multiple accounts, Harrell chose the KCRHA’s new interim director, L. Darrell Powell, without much direct input from the KCRHA or King County, which provides nearly half the agency’s budget. Powell—a former financial director at the YMCA of Greater Seattle, United Way of King County, and the College Success Foundation—was Harrell’s teammate on the Garfield High School football team and more recently served on his mayoral transition team and fentanyl task force.
At a recent press conference announcing the new CARE Team, Harrell jokingly praised the “proud pop,” who was among the assembled supporters, for being the father of starting Husky cornerback Mishael Powell, who “won the Husky game singlehandedly” the previous week.
Housen said Powell’s “name came out of a meeting with the mayor and several members of the Mayor’s Office where multiple names were discussed and considered. I do not know if it was the mayor who first originated his name, but he certainly agreed with the suggestion.”
King County Executive Dow Constantine said he learned about the selection of Powell from Deputy County Executive Shannon Braddock, who “brought this name to me and told me about his qualifications and background. … I did not talk directly with the city, but others did, and understood that … the mayor knows him, and he sounded like a person who would be able to bring some good qualities to this still interim role, and hopefully gaining the confidence of the various parties [involved in] KCRHA, including the city of Seattle.”
The KCRHA has hired a search firm that ordinarily does executive searches for regional nonprofits to identify candidates for the permanent CEO position. As we reported, the search has been going slowly; the search firm, Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group, just finalized a job description for the position last month.
