Tag: Sara Nelson

City Council, Elections

City Hall Fizz: Shakeups On the Second Floor

1. The city council will face a $260 million-plus budget deficit this year without one of its key budget experts, as deputy central staff director Aly Pennucci leaves the city after 11 years—nine of those on central staff, a team of policy experts who work for the entire council—to take a new position as one of two deputy county executives in Whatcom County.

Pennucci is one of two central staffers who’ve been publicly briefing the council on the upcoming budget crunch. Most recently, in response to skeptical questions from new Councilmember Maritza Rivera, she explained the steps the new council would have to take if it wants to roll back legislation that raised the JumpStart payroll tax to raise an estimated $20 million a year for mental health services in public schools.

On Friday, Mayor Bruce Harrell announced plans to spend up $10 million of those funds on student mental health programming this year, including $2 million for youth gun violence prevention and intervention. The council will have to approve legislation allocating the funds.

Central staffers are among the few current council staffers with institutional knowledge that stretches longer than a council term, so the loss of a veteran budget expert will be acutely felt just as budget season is getting started.

Pennucci will leave at the end of this month, and start her new position in August.

Another second-floor staffer, Councilmember Dan Strauss’ district director Amy Enbysk, is leaving to take over as press secretary for King County Executive Dow Constantine.

2. Dana Robinson Slote, the longtime head of the council’s communications office, left the council after 11 years in late May for a job as media relations director at the University of Washington. This week, Council President Sara Nelson announced her replacement: former city of Bellevue communications director and consultant Brad Harwood.

Harwood, an attorney, has contributed thousands of dollars to state and local campaigns, including $1,000 to the People for Seattle campaign in 2019. Tim Burgess, a former councilmember who is now deputy mayor, established People for Seattle to campaign against progressive candidates and incumbents, including current City Councilmember Tammy Morales; the campaign was known for its inflammatory, highly misleading ads, including mailers that Photoshopped stock photos of tents and graffiti into Seattle locations like playgrounds.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

Most of the candidates People for Seattle went after in 2019 have left the council, but two, District 2 representative Tammy Morales and District 6 Councilmember Dan Strauss, remain.

Harwood’s background prior to becoming Bellevue’s communications director is significantly more political than that of a typical city staffer, particularly one hired to represent a range of political views—including Morales’ and Strauss’—on a council whose membership changes over time.

Prior to, and after, his time as communications director for Bellevue, Harwood worked as a consultant for a number of political campaigns, including No on I-522, the campaign against a state initiative that would have required labeling of genetically modified foods; a successful 2015 campaign to repeal limits Seattle imposed on the number of cars companies like Uber could operate in the city; and the campaign that legalized charter schools in Washington state.

Update: In 2006, the Northwest Progressive website quoted Harwood as a spokesman for the state Republican Party. As of 2015—the most recent date, before last year, for which his profile is archived—Harwood’s LinkedIn page touted his experience as a board member for the Roanoke Conference, an annual Republican event that describes itself as a “retreat-like atmosphere” for “up-and-coming” Republicans. The group’s website quotes the Seattle Times, which called the conference “The ‘must-attend event for … Republican leaders’ in Washington state.”

Before becoming a consultant, Harwood worked for former King County Councilmember Jane Hague, a Republican who was defeated by Democrat Claudia Balducci in 2015.

Harwood has contributed to a number of Republicans as well as Democrats (including, most recently, Balducci’s 2026 campaign.) In 2022, he gave $2,000 to campaigns associated with Federal Way Mayor Jim Ferrell, a Republican-turned-Democrat who ran law-and-order campaign for King County prosecutor. He also contributed $1,250 to campaigns affiliated with now-Mayor Bruce Harrell in 2021. He has also given smaller contributions to the Mainstream Republicans of Washington; former Republican gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna; Republican King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn; and Republican secretary of state Kim Wyman.

Of 13 partisan candidates on Harwood’s lengthy contribution list, eight are Republicans (and a ninth, Chris Vance, is an independent who used to lead the state Republican Party).

The council’s communications staff reportedly had no input into Nelson’s decision, which she told them about last week.

Responding to questions about his political work and contributions, Harwood referred PubliCola to a press release announcing his hiring, and said, “The only thing I’d add is that I’m thrilled to be here. Just like my time leading communications for the City of Bellevue (the second largest city in King County), I look forward to successfully supporting all nine Seattle councilmembers and department staff.”

3. City Councilmember Tanya Woo—the candidate Morales defeated in 2023, only to have the council immediately appoint her to a citywide seat this year—has lost every Democratic legislative district endorsement in Seattle so far (except the 43rd, which will vote next week) to progressive challenger Alexis Mercedes Rinck. Local Democratic endorsements may not mean what they used to, but a sweep of the LDs is a sign of solid support across the left half of the spectrum, from the historically cranky 34th in West Seattle to the idiosyncratic 37th in South Seattle.

Woo’s campaign website, revamped to reflect her incumbent status, does not currently include an endorsement page.

City Council, Economy, labor

City Council Bill Cutting “Gig” Delivery Workers’ Pay Moves Forward
Micaela Romero from Washington Community Action Network, joined by her son, testifies against legislation that will reduce delivery driver wages.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council’s governance and economic development committee approved a bill sponsored by Council President Sara Nelson that will lower the minimum wage for so-called “gig” delivery workers on Thursday, with Joy Hollingsworth abstaining because, as she put it, “I still want this bill to be baked more.”

The 4-1 vote came after hours of testimony from delivery drivers who were overwhelmingly opposed to the legislation and have shown up at public comment periods for weeks on end to ask the council not to cut their wages. After last year’s city council, including Nelson, voted for the “PayUp” bill that required gig companies to cover more of workers’ costs, wages went up to an average of around $26 an hour. In response, the gig companies—Uber, Doordash, Instacart, and others— imposed a flat $5 fee on every order, causing demand for delivery service to plummet.

A handful of drivers, mostly representing the Uber-funded lobbying group Drive Forward, said the changes would enable the companies to drop the fees.

Several council members patted themselves on the back for listening to “all sides” of the issue before voting to approve a bill that satisfied almost all of the delivery companies’ demands.

Nelson, for example, spent several minutes reading the February testimony of bike delivery worker Heather Nielson, who said the fees had caused customers to “boycott the apps” and stop providing tips, into the record. Nielson, later featured on the conservative website The Center Square, said tips make up 90 percent or more of drivers’ wages—a claim that many other drivers contradicted in their testimony.

Nelson seemed eager to ignore those workers’ comments, referring to them dismissively as “all this noise we’ve been hearing.”

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

 

Her legislation, she said, “is an effort to reverse the bad outcomes caused by a flawed law” that resulted in a “drastic reduction in worker wages and lost revenues for restaurants and other retail establishments. That’s what happened. That was the chain of events. And all of this was anticipated but the last council did it anyway. And now we’re faced with the fallout.”

Councilmember Maritza Rivera recalled a time when, “as a young woman, I worked as a server in a fast food restaurant where I made the legal minimum wage and relied on tips to pay rent, utilities and groceries.” In most states, restaurants can pay sub-minimum wages for tipped workers on the justification that workers make plenty of money from customers’ tips, and companies like Doordash and Instacart adopted the practice in states where it’s still legal until a series of lawsuits forced them to alter their policies. Washington state does not allow a “tip credit.”

The legislation notably, does not require companies to stop paying the $5 fee; nor does it impose any new restrictions on the companies’ power over their workers, such as their ability to “deactivate” (fire) workers for any reason, including wanting to set their own work hours.

Instead, the bill reduces workers’ pay and takes away some of the rights they currently have. First, the bill lowers the amount companies must pay their drivers for expenses, such as self-employment (employer) taxes and workers’ compensation, that the drivers wouldn’t have to pay if they were classified as employees. Continue reading “City Council Bill Cutting “Gig” Delivery Workers’ Pay Moves Forward” →

City Council, labor

Nelson Bill Would Eliminate Minimum Wage for “Gig” Drivers—and Slash Workers’ Rights

By Erica C. Barnett

Gig delivery workers and their allies were bracing for legislation by City Council President Sara Nelson to repeal minimum wage legislation passed last year, known as the PayUp law. What they may not have expected was how far Nelson’s proposal would go to roll back reforms unrelated to wages, including protections against deactivation, transparency requirements, and legal rights for delivery workers to sue if their employer violates the law.

The new minimum wage, which works out to around $26 an hour, was intended to offset many of the employer-side costs drivers must bear because they’re classified as “independent contractors,” including workers’ comp insurance, employer payroll taxes, unemployment insurance, family and medical leave insurance, and gas, maintenance, and other costs associated with driving for a living.

The PayUp legislation also ensured that drivers would be paid for rest breaks and time spent doing work other than actively driving—costs that an employer would have to pay if the workers were traditional employees. And it made it harder for the companies to deactivate or otherwise penalize workers for doing things the companies don’t like, like going offline during periods of high demand.

Delivery companies, including Uber and Doordash, claimed that paying for these expenses would make it impossible for them to turn a profit, and imposed a $5 fee on every delivery order, instantly driving down demand for drivers’ services and leaving many in desperate straits. Nelson and other allies of the delivery companies now argue that rolling back the minimum wage is the only way to eliminate the fees and get Seattle residents ordering again—a claim workers dispute, noting that the apps haven’t provided financial data to back up their pleas of poverty.

But Nelson—whose company, Fremont Brewing, just sold a majority share to a firm that also owns dozens of restaurants that deliver through DoorDash—has proposed legislation that would far beyond repealing the new minimum wage. The bill Nelson introduced this week would put far more power in the hands of delivery companies, and strip authority from the city to enforce its own labor laws.

And, notably, it wouldn’t require the app companies to stop charging the $5 fee or prohibit similar fees in the future, leaving open the possibility that every time the city attempts to regulate them, the apps could just impose fees large enough to grind their own business to a halt.

At the city council’s regular meeting on Monday, most of the people who testified about the legislation were against it. One, a former driver for Uber and Lyft named Sandra, said she drove 10 to 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for years until she was deactivated without explanation last September. “There is no consistency in pay, and the apps treat workers as disposable,” she said. “These apps like to pretend they’re doing things that are in their workers’ interests. …  They are not. They just want to get out of paying a minimum wage.”

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

 

In addition to eliminating the minimum wage for drivers, which worked out to about $26 an hour before expenses, Nelson’s proposal would:

• Cut drivers’ base per-mile payment from 64 to 35 cents a mile, less than half the federal rate for tax deductions;

• Eliminate a $5 minimum payment for each delivery offer;

• Eliminate penalties (currently double pay plus $5,755) imposed on companies that fail to pay drivers;

• Deny workers the right to file a civil suit against delivery companies that withhold their wages or violate other rights guaranteed by the law;

• Remove transparency requirements that help workers decide whether to accept a delivery offer, including whether the delivery requires climbing stairs, what’s in the delivery, and the amount of any tips provided in advance;

• Reduce the amount of time workers have to decide whether to accept an order or lose it from two minutes to 45 seconds;

• Extend the amount of time companies have to inform workers how much they made on a delivery from 24 hours to 48;

• Prohibit the city’s Office of Labor Standards—the only city agency that enforces local labor laws—from asking delivery companies for “the production of any record,” including information that would help workers make informed decisions about which apps to work for, unless it’s part of an enforcement action against a company;

• Bar OLS from adopting rules that “impose additional requirements” of any kind on delivery companies, in perpetuity;

• Require OLS to give the app companies 30 days (with an option for extensions) to correct most “non-willful” violations before taking any enforcement action;

• Remove a section prohibiting “adverse actions” by delivery companies that was intended to stop the companies from deactivating, threatening, penalizing, reducing or garnishing pay, or discriminating against workers because they won’t take certain jobs or aren’t available when the companies want them to be on the clock;

• Allow delivery companies to charge workers a $5 fee (adjusted by the rate of inflation every year) every time they take out their earnings before the end of the company’s “pay period”—an ironic twist, given that the rest of the law insists drivers aren’t employees.

 

City Council, Police

Changing Seattle’s Police Hiring Test Won’t Fix SPD’s Recruitment Issues, City’s Test Administrator Tells Council President
A demographic chart shows SPD is losing out on a huge potential hiring pool: Women.

By Erica C. Barnett

The head of the city commission that administers tests for new Seattle Police Department recruits, the Public Safety Civil Service Commission, pushed back against several of City Council President Sara Nelson’s claims about police hiring and recruitment at a meeting of the Community Police Commission this week.

Nelson has proposed legislation that would push the PSCSC to switch to a test called the Public Safety Test (PST), which has a 90 percent passing rate and is used by smaller jurisdictions around the region.

In contrast, about 75 percent of applicants pass the test Seattle uses, which was developed by a company called the National Testing Network in response to a federal consent decree that required SPD to implement policies to reduce biased policing and excessive force. The test, which the city has used since 2012, is designed to eliminate applicants who are biased, dishonest, or unable to react appropriately in various scenarios, including crises.

Switching to the PST test, Nelson argued, would mean that applicants would no longer have to take a different test to apply in Seattle—an extra step Nelson said is preventing “highly qualified [people] that we think would be great candidates for our force” from applying. “We are competing against” other cities like Bellevue that use the PST, Nelson said. “That is why there is an interest [in using the same] exam so that you can just order the scores to be sent to the several jurisdictions at the same time.”

PSCSC director Andrea Scheele, who addressed the CPC after Nelson wrapped up, said the NTN test has never been a deterrent for applicants in the past, suggesting that the test is not the problem. Just a few years ago, she said, thousands of people took the test during each testing cycle, and the test has only become more accessible since then—for example, applicants can now take it online. “Personally, I don’t believe that the problem is that people can’t find us or people don’t want to take our test, or that people don’t know that Seattle Police Department is hiring,” Scheele said.

Scheele and police reform advocates have noted that the NTN test was specifically designed for Seattle in response to the consent decree, and tests for specific qualities that may not be captured by the more generic PST.

Addressing those concerns, Nelson argued that it would be a straightforward and relatively speedy process to add new questions to the PST that would effectively make it as rigorous as the NTN test. This would occur, she said, through a “validation study,” which Nelson described as “about eight weeks in which the people that design the test meet with stakeholders, the accountability partners, the chief, and … anybody [else who] wants to be involved in the formation of this exam, and they figure out what do we want to test for, and then then design the test around that.”

But Scheele told PubliCola that “customizing” the PST exam, which Public Safety Testing licenses from another company called Industrial/Organizational Solutions, would probably take much longer than eight weeks. “My estimate is that to do a full validation study would take six to 12 months,” she said—and that’s if the company cooperates by providing information about the test itself. Scheele said she’s already  “due diligence” to determine if there are other tests that would work in Seattle, but that process has been hampered by the fact that the president of Public Safety Testing, Jon Walters, has refused to participate or respond to any of the PSCSC’s questions.

“I sent a list of 44 questions to each of the two companies, and NTN got back really quickly with what appeared to be complete and thorough responses,” Scheele said. In contrast, Walters “said ‘I’m not going to answer your questions.”

“I don’t think I’m going to persuade them to participate,” Scheele told the CPC, “but I’m still going to complete my due diligence process.”

Nelson also said she hoped her bill would encourage applicants to stick with the process by funding a new PSCSC staffer to do outreach and engagement to applicants, something she claimed the PSCSC doesn’t do. “Think about if you’ve ever applied for a job and you hear nothing from the from the prospective employer,” Nelson said.  “Most jurisdictions acknowledge that application within 48 hours and invite the candidate to be able to ask some questions and be guided through the next steps. We don’t do that.”

Scheele said Nelson is misinformed. “Of course their application is acknowledged,” Scheele told PubliCola. “They receive an email almost immediately from us, they get at least six messages throughout the application process, and they can call us at any point if they have a problem with the actual test,” an opportunity Scheele said many candidates take full advantage of.

One recruitment opportunity Nelson and the CPC did not discuss was hiring more women, by addressing SPD’s culture of misogyny; recent articles in PubliCola and on KUOW have shone light on the issues faced by female officers, from overt sexual harassment to getting passed over for promotions and opportunities because of their gender.

Last year, according to a slide Scheele used in her presentation, just 7.4 percent of the candidates who passed the test were women, while to 90.1 percent were men (another 1.8 percent declined to identify their gender, and a handful were trans or nonbinary)—a fraction of the percentage of women SPD has pledged to hire by 2030 as part of the “30 by 30” initiative.

City Council, labor, Mayor Harrell

City Council Staff Ordered Back to Office Four Days a Week; Workers Hold Out Hope for Earlier Retroactive Pay

1. City Council President Sara Nelson told legislative staffers this week that they will be required to work in the office four days a week, rather than the two-day citywide minimum, starting on June 24.

“Councilmembers have reported to me that they are most productive when the staff who support them are available for in-person meetings and impromptu consultations,” Nelson wrote in a memo to staff. “Moreover, professional relationships, which are essential for a legislative body to thrive, are best developed and maintained in an atmosphere where key staff are available onsite for direct person-to-person contact, whether scheduled or serendipitous.”

“Given the significant advantages associated with being in the office, and after lengthy consultation with my fellow Councilmembers and Legislative Department division heads, I am writing today to announce that the Legislative Department will be transitioning to an increased in-office presence of four days a week to more effectively meet internal and external business needs,” Nelson wrote. “This new policy will acknowledge the specific circumstances of individual employees and their roles in the Department, and each supervisor will have the flexibility to address such circumstances, on a case-by-case basis.”

PubliCola asked Nelson whether there was data to back up the statement that working from an office has “significant advantages” for legislative staff, but has not heard back yet. A number of legislative employees, including the city clerk’s office, have unionized over the past few years; one issue clerk’s office raised in their union drive was a new requirement that they commute to downtown Seattle two days a week regardless of their job duties, how far away they live, or whether they could do their jobs more effectively from home.

Although Nelson and Mayor Bruce Harrell have suggested that downtown recovery depends on city employees coming back to their offices and spending money in the area, the cost to city employees isn’t just the price of lunch. The pandemic made many workers aware of how much unpaid time they lose to daily commutes, and many discovered they were more productive when they worked from home. Adding cars to the roads also counteracts the city’s climate efforts, and works against efforts to achieve Vision Zero—the city’s goal of zero traffic deaths or serious injuries by 2030.

It’s unclear whether the return-to-office mandate is a working condition that will require additional bargaining for unionized legislative employees. Nelson’s memo says “a policy change of this nature should not be implemented without the Department’s leadership engaging in discussions with PROTEC-17, which represents staff across the Department”—though not individual council members’ staff.

PubliCola reached out to PROTEC17 and Nelson and will update this post if we hear back.

2. City employees and their unions have expressed dismay over the slow timeline for their retroactive pay increases, which represent back pay for 2023 and 2024. As PubliCola reported earlier this week, thousands of workers finally got a contract earlier this month, but won’t see their retroactive wages until October. According to emails HR managers sent to employees in various city departments Monday morning, the delay is purportedly related to the implementation of Workday, the city’s new payroll and finance system. City employees will receive the regular pay increases included in the contract, which amount to a total of 9.5 percent, next month. Continue reading “City Council Staff Ordered Back to Office Four Days a Week; Workers Hold Out Hope for Earlier Retroactive Pay” →

City Council, Police

Nelson Backs Off Proposal to Force Independent Commission To Use Easier Police Hiring Test

By Erica C. Barnett

Last month, we reported that City Council President Sara Nelson planned to introduce legislation requiring the Public Safety Civil Service Commission, which oversees the initial stages of police hiring, to adopt a police hiring test called the Public Safety Test that around 90 percent of applicants in other cities pass.

Instead, after what she described as a consultation over “technical details” with Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office, Nelson has proposed a bill that softens the prescriptive measures she previously said she would seek to impose on the PSCSC. The new ordinance says the PSCSC should merely “seek to use” the Public Safety Test, “provided that any such exam is consistent with the goals of the Consent Decree or the City’s Accountability Ordinance.” That ordinance, adopted by the council in 2017, was superseded (and undermined) by the police contract the city signed with the Seattle Police Officers Guild the following year.

Currently, the city uses a test developed in collaboration with SPD in response to the federal consent decree; that test, created by the National testing Network, is designed to eliminate candidates with obvious issues such as racial bias, lack of integrity, and poor judgment.

In March, Nelson also said she planned to require the PSCSC to process tests more quickly by sending lists of passing candidates to SPD every two weeks instead of every six. Because the PSCSC is an independent, state-created body, commission director Andrea Scheele told PubliCola the city council probably lacks the authority to force it to do anything, noting that the last time the council tried to undermine its independent authority—by removing its authority to conduct police hiring tests—it led to a protracted lawsuit that the city lost.

Nelson’s bill also says the PSCSC “is encouraged to keep entry level police officer position registers current by endeavoring to provide an updated register every two weeks,” rather than requiring the commission to do so.

In the council’s weekly briefing on Monday, Nelson said switching to the more widely used Public Safety Test “would potentially shorten the application period time significantly, and also attract more applicants, knowing that they can just direct their scores to be sent to SPD as well as other law enforcement agencies” that use the PST test.

Nelson’s bill would also add a new position to the PSCSC, at a cost of $146,000 a year, “so that contact with applicants can be made within ideally 48 hours of that application landing at the city … so people feel like they’ve got a personal connection and also that their application is appreciated,” she said on Monday. The legislation says the commission should “endeavor to” contact applicants within two days both after they apply and after they pass the hiring test.

PSCSC director Scheele was unavailable for comment this week, but told us recently that the commission would do what it could to process police tests faster. As we reported, it’s unclear how much sending a list of names to SPD more frequently would speed up the hiring process; most of the logjams occur much further along, including at the state police academy, which only has five slots for SPD applicants every month.

In response to a question from Councilmember Cathy Moore about what SPD is doing to recruit more women, Nelson said that “the mayor, in his wisdom,” added four new positions (two police recruiters, a recruiting manager, and an admin) “for innovations such as the one that you’re talking about.” Nelson’s proposal would move three of those positions, in addition to the one that is already in SPD, from the city’s human resources department into SPD itself, “where they can interact with their colleagues and find out what is working.”

The legislation directs SPD to present a report on recruitment and hiring to the council twice a year, which will include “information and metrics on new and innovative programs that are designed to increase diversity within the department, to include an increase in female candidates, consistent with SPD’s ’30 by 30′ campaign”—an effort to increase the number of female officers to 30 percent by 2030.

Councilmember Rob Saka praised Nelson’s proposal, saying it “may or may not be true” that other US cities are having trouble hiring cops. (It is true. They are. There’s really just absolutely no doubt about this.) Saka said the solution to the problem was “twofold: addressing the really clunky [hiring] process and then also really notable officer morale issues.”

Nelson’s office responded to questions on Monday by pointing us to the legislation.