1. Yesterday, I broke the news that former Position 8 City Council candidate Sheley Secrest, who lost in last year’s primary election to Jon Grant and Teresa Mosqueda (Mosqueda ultimately won), is being charged with one count of theft and one count of false reporting over allegations that she illegally used her own money in an effort to qualify for up to $150,000 in public campaign dollars last year. To qualify for public campaign financing through democracy vouchers, which enabled every Seattle voter to contribute up to $100 last year to the council or city attorney candidate or candidates of their choice, a candidate had to get 400 signatures from registered Seattle voters along with 400 contributions of at least $10 each. Secrest denied the allegations to the Seattle Times earlier this year, before the charges were filed. She has not responded to my request for comment on the charges against her.

As I mentioned in my post, the former campaign staffer who first brought the allegations against Secrest to the attention of Seattle police, Patrick Burke is also saying she failed to pay him more than $3,300 for work he did as her campaign manager. (The Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission reports that the Secrest campaign paid Burke just over $1,300 and owes him $1,675, but says he was also promised 11.8 percent in bonus pay based on how many signatures and contributions he brought in.) Yesterday, Burke says, he had a hearing in a small-claims court case against Secrest, but says he and Secrest were unable to reach a deal through mediation, so the case will be heard before a judge next month.

Burke says he is now living at a Salvation Army homeless shelter. He says that by the time he left the campaign, his phone had been cut off and he couldn’t afford to pay for bus fare, so he was doing most of his work from a room he rented in Shoreline. He says Secrest told him repeatedly that if he could just hang on until she qualified for democracy vouchers, she would pay him everything she owed him. (Burke provided copies of what he says are text messages between himself and Secrest that support this.) “[Secrest] said, ‘If you can stick with this until we get the democracy vouchers, it will be worth your while,’” Burke says, “and I said, ‘If that’s what we need to do, let’s just push it and get done, but you have to understand that I can’t be at all the events that you need me to be at.” One point of contention, Burke says, involved $40 Secrest paid another person to design a flyer advertising a fundraiser at Molly Moon’s Ice Cream (Molly Moon’s owner, Molly Moon Neitzl, donated $250 to Secrest’s campaign.)

Secrest ended her campaign nearly $4,200 in the red. When a campaign ends up in debt after an election, it is generally up to the candidate to pay her vendors and employees, who have the right to pursue the former candidate in court if she fails to do so. In 2011, city council candidate Bobby Forch, who ran unsuccessfully against former council member Jean Godden, ended his campaign with $61,000 in debt, most of it—more than $48,000—to his former campaign consultant John Wyble. Wyble and Forch worked out a payment plan. If a campaign does not work out a way to pay its vendors, after 90 days, the amount they are owed turns into a contribution. For example, the $1,675 the Ethics and Elections Commission says Secrest owes Burke would become a $1,675 contribution, and since that amount is over the $250 individual contribution limit, the commission could launch an investigation into the campaign. However, the most the commission could do is fine Secrest—a solution that wouldn’t help ex-employees who are owed money like Burke. And Secrest is potentially in much more trouble now, anyway.

Secrest, for her part, says Burke “has been paid for all services performed before the date of his termination,” adding, “Washington is an at-will employment state, meaning an employer does not need cause to fire an employee.  In this matter, we repeatedly informed Patrick that we could not afford to keep him on staff. We clearly told him to stop working for pay, and we repeatedly told him that we will reach out once funds were available.” She sent her own screenshot of what she says is a text message exchange between her and Burke, in which she apologized that “we didn’t get fundraising in or qualified to pay you. You are a rockstar. As soon as I can pay staff I’ll reach out.”

3. Legislation currently moving through the state House, sponsored by Rep. Jake Fey (D-27), would broaden and extend the current sales tax exemption on electric vehicles, which was set to expire this year, until 2021 and would require all revenues that the state will lose because of the exemption come from the multimodal fund, which is supposed to fund walking, biking, and transit projects. Over three years, the bill report estimates, the tax exemption will cost the multimodal fund $17.65 million.

Electric-car proponents, including Gov. Jay Inslee and Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan (who announced a number of new electric-vehicle charging stations this week), argue that electric vehicles are a major part of the solution to climate change. “Seattle will continue to lead on climate action and green energy innovation,” Durkan said in announcing the new charging ports this week.

But all the gee-whiz enthusiasm in the world won’t erase the fact that cars, even electric ones, enable sprawl, and sprawl is what destroys forests and farmland, causes congestion, paves over habitat, contributes to sedentary and unhealthy lifestyles, and is in every conceivable way anathema to a sustainable climate future. What we need are not technological quick fixes like electric cars and carbon sequestration, but large-scale solutions like urban densification and taxes on suburban sprawl. Standing next to shiny new Teslas is easy. Standing up for long-term solutions to the root causes of climate change is harder.

3. The city council-appointed Progressive Revenue Task Force met for the third time Wednesday, seeming no closer to finding any viable alternatives to the employee hours tax rejected by the city council last year than they were a month ago. (Perhaps that’s because they are ultimately going to propose… passing the employee hours tax rejected by the city council last year.) The meeting was taken up largely by a review of potential municipal revenue sources proposed by the progressive Center for American Progress in a 2014 report, most of which, staffers noted, were either already in place or unworkable in Seattle or Washington State.

The meeting did include a lively discussion about the cost of building housing for unhoused Seattle residents, and a mini-debate over which shelter clients will be prioritized for housing, given that there simply isn’t enough housing for everyone entering the city’s shelter system. “Basic” shelter, the task force learned, costs an average of $5,597 per bed, per year; “enhanced” shelter, which tends to be open longer hours and offer more services and case management, costs $14,873 per bed. (Advocates from SHARE/WHEEL, which lost funding from the Human Services Department during last year’s competitive bidding process, were quick to point out that their bare-bones mats-on-a-floor model costs much less than the average basic shelter).

Enhanced shelter, which is aimed at people who are chronically homeless, has lower overall exits to permanent housing than basic shelter, primarily because it’s aimed at people who are among the hardest to house, including those with partners and pets and those in active addiction. Of about 20,500 households the city anticipates it will serve with enhanced shelter every year, it estimates that just 2,000 will exit to permanent housing. “What, if any, cautions or counterbalancing is going on in evaluating the performance of the providers that were awarded contracts to ensure that they don’t meet their exits to housing [goals] by prioritizing the easiest to house?” task force member Lisa Daugaard asked, somewhat rhetorically. “That’s a good question,” council staffer Alan Lee responded.

The task force has until February 26 to come up with its proposal.