City Council, education, Mayor Wilson, Police, Poverty

Seattle Police Chief Out of Town During Mass Shooting

 

 

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By Erica C. Barnett

Editor’s note: This post, originally part of today’s Morning Fizz, has been updated and expanded to include new information.

Yesterday’s mass shooting at Seattle Center, in which a gunman killed three people and injured five more, was the type of violent incident that, historically, has prompted Seattle police chiefs to rush to the scene to demonstrate the seriousness of the situation and answer questions from members of the press.

But the city’s current police chief, Shon Barnes, was nowhere to be seen on Sunday. As he has been for many weekends since he took the $373,000 job in December 2024, Barnes was out of town. According to multiple sources, Barnes planned to be out of town until mid-August, taking several weeks away from Seattle during the period when shootings and other violent incidents are most likely to occur. Barnes also took two weeks off during the most recent winter holidays, including New Year’s Eve.

As we’ve reported, Barnes rents an apartment in Seattle and makes frequent trips to his family residence in Chicago, where his wife and kids live full-time. Last year at this time, PubliCola reported that Barnes’ schedule showed he spent most weekends, beginning on Friday afternoons, out of town, attending conferences, going to events related to his college fraternity, giving keynote speeches, or spending time with his family in Chicago.

PubliCola sent detailed questions about the police chief’s whereabouts to SPD on Sunday night and Monday morning and had received no response or acknowledgement by late morning. However, Barnes’ Facebook page, where he has chronicled many of his trips, indicates he was at a conference for the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives in Dallas. He was back in Seattle this morning for a press conference on the shooting at City Hall.

(After this post went up, a city spokesperson contacted us to ask for a correction, saying we had inaccurately claimed Barnes was in Chicago, which we did not; our article this morning included the paragraph above about Barnes’ attendance at the NOBLE event. Despite the apparent urgency of this call, SPD still has not responded to any of our questions sent over the past two days.)

Barnes, who received a $50,000 recruitment bonus to leave his previous job as police chief of Madison, WI, was also out of town during a major SPD incident last May, in which police pepper-sprayed and arrested dozens of counter-protesters at a rally and concert held by anti-trans right-wing activists at Cal Anderson Park on Capitol Hill, Seattle’s historic LGBTQ+ neighborhood. Barnes’ family also lived in Chicago while he was Madison’s police chief, although those two cities are only about a three hours’ drive apart.

During a press conference late Monday morning, a reporter asked Barnes if he was out of town this weekend, as I reported on Sunday. His response: “I wish I had a crystal ball and we could schedule gun violence but we can’t.”

At the end of the press conference, Barnes snapped at South Seattle Emerald reporter Connor Nash, who asked him about my reporting that he is out of town a lot. FOX 13 anchor Hana Kim posted video (above) that showed Barnes becoming “confrontational,” as Kim put it, snapping, “I have been here working as hard as I can for this city from the day I got here. Do you got that?”

As Nash continued to ask his question, Barnes cut him off. “No, no, you listen to me.”

“The reports are that you are not in town—often,” Nash persisted. “Their reports are wrong. You understand that?” Barnes said, as his chief of staff Alex Ricketts pushed himself physically between Barnes and Nash, saying, “Let’s go, man. Let’s go. Let’s go” and escorting Barnes back inside the mayor’s office.

We’ve reached out to the mayor’s office about Barnes’ outsize response to the question about his schedule and will update this post if we hear back.

City Council, education

Council’s School Meals Plan Will Require Cuts to Other Services (Reposted)
Council President Joy Hollingsworth speaking outside council chambers earlier this year.

By Erica C. Barnett

Editor’s note: This post, originally part of today’s Morning Fizz, has been reposted as a separate piece in order to expand today’s other Fizz item, about Police Chief Shon Barnes’ absences from Seattle.

I was out of town for a couple days last week, so I was a few hours late to the news that three Seattle City Council members—Joy Hollingsworth, Dionne Foster, and Dan Strauss—announced they had found a win-win solution to the problem created by a Hollingsworth-Foster amendment repurposing funds that were supposed to pay for universal school meals in the upcoming school year. The amendment, which took $3 million out of universal meals by delaying that program a year, will pay for $500,000 in annual grocery vouchers for up to 5,000 poor families each year, according to the sponsors.

The council’s big fix: Keep the vouchers, and fund universal school meals—at an annual cost of $3 million—out of the city’s general fund, starting with this year’s supplemental budget.

By the time I read about the proposal, there were already a number of stories and social media posts describing the amendment as a solution that gave everybody what they wanted—the FEPP levy could still fund food vouchers for the poorest kids, while the council would use existing money to make universal school meals happen in time for the upcoming school year. “Seattle City Council proposes plan to fund free meals for all school kids,” went a typical headline.

I found the tone of the coverage perplexing. It was as if people forgot that the term “general fund” means “entire discretionary budget for the year” and that the mayor and council are currently facing a budget hole of at least $175 million. Any time the council or mayor add a new obligation into the budget, they have to cut funding in another part of the budget to make it balance. This isn’t deep budget lore; it’s basic math.

Mayor Katie Wilson was less than impressed with the proposal, noting in a statement that she looked forward to “seeing which critical services they plan to cut from the general fund to make their numbers work.”

Proponents of the amendment delaying universal school meals by a year, which passed 6-3 last week, said they wanted to wait to see what happens with the statewide tax on income above $1 million a year, which is supposed to fund universal school meals statewide. That tax is up for a referendum vote in November and could still face challenges in court. If the tax fails, the city will still have to come up with a long-term funding plan to pay for universal school meals in future years.

Courts, legislature

Most Men Prosecuted for Sex Buying Don’t Reoffend, Report Suggests
The county prosecutor says locking up men who attempt to pay for sex would reduce demand, but the defense department says the evidence suggests otherwise.

By Erica C. Barnett

A new report from the King County Department of Public Defense about misdemeanor arrests for “commercial sexual exploitation,” or paying for sex, found that virtually none of the men prosecuted between 2022 and 2025 (typically in SPD stings) has been prosecuted again. DPD has argued that this lack of recidivism proves there’s no need to make the offense a felony. Last year, the King County Prosecutor’s Office pushed for state legislation that would do just that, using lurid stories about sex traffickers, accompanied by unredacted images of beaten women, to argue that sex buyers are complicit in abuse.

Most of the 81 cases DPD reviewed resulted in what’s called a dispositional continuance, in which a person agrees to diversion—typically, a class on the consequences of buying sex (“john school”) and community service. None of those men were caught reoffending, suggesting that misdemeanor prosecution—and perhaps the embarrassment and shame of being caught—was enough to convince them not to reoffend.

“These findings clearly suggest that a misdemeanor offense is sufficient to deter people from engaging in this behavior, even one that uses a diversionary response” like sex buyers’ classes, DPD special counsel for criminal policy and practice Katie Hurley said. “And so, there’s no showing that a higher level, a more serious level offense is needed, and the misdemeanor response appears more than sufficient to deter repeat offending.”

The prosecutor’s office disagrees with this assessment, arguing that sex buying should come with harsher penalties, including jail time, in order to end the demand for sex work. In a recent statement, prosecutor Leesa Manion said prosecuting traffickers and pimps alone “won’t fix this problem” of sex trafficking. “Children, women and others from vulnerable communities continue to be exploited because they are in high demand by buyers. We’re fighting for state legislation to protect and increase resources for trafficking survivors by holding sex buyers accountable for using their money to buy sexual access to vulnerable people.

“Until that changes, we will continue to see the wild west of human trafficking, violence, and misery taking place along Aurora,” Manion said.

There are other possible explanations for the apparent lack of recidivism by men who buy sex, including the possibility that they do offend again but haven’t been caught.

Hurley said that if harsher consequences were necessary, more misdemeanor cases would lead to jail time, rather than dismissal. “You’d expect that people would only talk about needing a higher-level response if they were really maximizing the response available within the misdemeanor system, but in fact we see the opposite,” Hurley said .”We see the vast, vast majority of these cases being dismissed with dispositional continuances or for other reasons, and we see the recidivism rate being exceedingly low, and we’re seeing no real jail time imposed for these offenses.”

Although the prosecutor’s office often argues that wealthier white men are most likely to pay for sex in general, most of the men who actually get prosecuted for the offense are men of color, and a hugely disproportionate percentage are Latino, as PubliCola has previously reported. In the cases DPD covered in its report, 44 percent of the men prosecuted for sex buying were Latino (compared to 8 percent of the King County population), and 53 percent required an interpreter because they didn’t speak English.

One possible reason for the racial imbalance is that most of the prosecutions appear to have originated with SPD stings in the Lowe’s parking lot at 125th and Aurora, a place where Latino day laborers congregate. The police department trains female officers to pose as sex workers, then swoops in, using multiple teams of officers to grab and arrest one man at a time.

PubliCola reviewed about 35 of the cases in DPD’s report, and all but one originated in stings at 125th and Aurora. This area is about 20 blocks north of the area where neighborhood residents and business owners have sought help from the city to address gun violence related to sex trafficking.

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“Increasing the penalties and collateral consequences (such as adverse effects on housing, employment, and immigration) for people prosecuted in these cases would only further entrench existing racial and ethnic disparities in Washington’s criminal legal system,” DPD’s report concludes.

“To the extent that the claim that the majority of people who buy sex are wealthy white men, the ‘tool; of prosecuting people through sting operations by SPD on Aurora Avenue North will not reach the supposed majority of potential buyers – further undermining the claim that classifying this behavior as a felony will be an effective deterrent for that population.”

Casey McNerthney, a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, said the discussion over how harshly to penalize sex buyers often ignores the perspectives of sex trafficking survivors, ” who we can say without speculation are disproportionately from marginalized communities, including people of color, kids from the foster care system, and people from the LGBTQIA+ community. The KCPAO’s support in the last session was rooted in what we have learned from extensive conversations with sex trafficking survivors and the lasting trauma that they endure.”

SPD stings, however, don’t involve actual sex workers—and do nothing to help victims of sex trafficking, for whom the city and county provide very few direct resources compared to their huge investments in policing and prosecutions.

We discussed the debate over sex work prosecutions, along with my recent reporting on another staff departure from Mayor Katie Wilson’s office, on the Seattle Nice podcast this week.

City Council, Mayor Wilson, Poverty

Universal School Meals Delayed In Favor of Grocery Vouchers for Low-Income Families

By Erica C. Barnett

After weeks of debate that revealed widespread public opposition to a plan to delay funding for universal school meals, a city council committee approved the change today. The proposal, part of the spending plan for the Families, Education, Preschool and Promise levy,  delays funding for a new universal free school breakfast and lunch program for at least a year to fund a grocery voucher for low-income families to buy meals during school breaks and weeds, using $3 million from the first year of the school meal plan to fund $3 million in food vouchers over six years.

According to a memo on the amendment, which was sponsored by Council President Joy Hollingsworth and Councilmember Dionne Foster, the $500,000 annual program will serve “up to 5,000 families annually.” At that level, the program would be able to provide $100 a year to each family.

The idea behind the substitution, according to its sponsors, was twofold. First, the city doesn’t know yet if voters will uphold the millionaires’ tax in November; that tax is supposed to fund universal school meals statewide starting in 2029, in November. Because the money for universal meals may not materialize, it’s risky to fund it locally on a short-term basis.

The second argument, and the subject of the greatest public outcry, was that the poorest students should get priority over those whose parents can afford to pay for meals at school—that is, those who qualify through an annual income verification and application process. Universal school meals might provide food for all children, but the poorest kids are going hungry at home, too, proponents argued, so that need should take priority—at least until we know whether state funding for universal school meals is secure.

“Equity does not mean providing the exact same investment for every student regardless of need,” Hollingsworth, said. “It means directing resources where barriers remain the greatest, and that was my goal with this amendment.”

Both Hollingsworth and Foster complained from the dais about the way their proposal has been portrayed by opponents and members of the media, zeroing in on the term “means testing.”

“‘Means testing—I don’t know where that came from,” Hollingsworth said. “That was not something we ever put out.”

Foster echoed Hollingsworth’s criticism, saying, “It has been very difficult to have these conversations and to listen to some of the narrative out there.” Fresh Bucks, an unrelated voucher program that helps low-income people buy produce at farmers’ markets, is also targeted at low-income people, but no one describes that program as means-tested, Foster said. “And I wonder why that is.”

Means-testing is a term that means, simply, requiring people to prove their income is lower than a specified threshold in order to qualify for benefits. Put another way, it is what happens when the government sets income thresholds that define “need,” and makes people prove that they lack the means, or income, to fulfill that need themselves.

To qualify for reduced-price or free school meals in Seattle, a single parent with one kid has to make less than $39,000 in gross (not take-home) income a year, or $757 a week—approximately Seattle’s minimum wage. For a two-parent family with two kids, that goes up to $59,000, or a total gross income of $1,114 a week. About 50 Seattle schools offer free lunches to all kids because more than 40 percent of parents have qualified for the program. But anyone who makes more than the cutoff is ineligible for help—and to as many public commenters pointed out, there are plenty of people who make more than the bare minimum who struggle to pay their monthly bills in Seattle.

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Although Hollingsworth suggested there would be little to no administrative burden for low-income parents to apply for and get accepted into the new low-income food voucher program, Rob Saka disagreed. Saka spent years in and out of foster care and was raised by a single dad who worked hourly warehouse jobs. From age 9 to 18, Saka said, he only went to the doctor a handful of times and never went to the dentist, because his dad’s hourly warehouse jobs didn’t provide health insurance.

“We qualified for free and reduced lunch, which means we would have also likely qualified for Medicaid,” Saka said. “But I never went to the dentist, and only went to the doctor a handful of times in nine years, because of the severe, significant, nontrivial, and substantial administrative paperwork burden imposed on people that need these valuable resources.”

In a statement, Wilson said, “While I am disappointed with the decision to delay universal meals for a full school year, I respect the Council’s process and know we share a commitment to addressing food insecurity. I am proud that the amendment passed by Council commits the City to universal school meals in 2027. That means up to 6,800 students who currently fall through the cracks will have access to free breakfast and lunch, families will save roughly $1,200 a year, and there is a path to end the stigma around food insecurity in our schools.”

The Hollingsworth-Foster amendment pushes universal school lunches off until 2027. But it also, importantly, still assumes that the millionaires’ tax will be implemented in the future and will start paying for the program in 2029. If voters reject the millionaires’ tax, or a court overturns it, it’s unclear what will happen next year, which would have been Year 2 of Wilson’s universal school lunch program. If the statewide tax tax fails, the current plan would fund universal school meals for just one year, unless the city decided to make universal meals a local funding priority in the future.

Had the universal meals program passed, kids would have been able to get breakfast and lunch at school every day without having to demonstrate that they truly “need” it, at a cost of a few million dollars a year. That’s real money, but it also pales in comparison to what the city spends on other priorities, including $80 million in salary increases for police this year alone.

 

City Council, Mayor Wilson, Police

Mayor’s Press Secretary Departs, Budget for Police Salary Hikes Tops $80 Million

1. Sage Wilson, Mayor Katie Wilson’s press secretary, is leaving the mayor’s office after less than seven months on the job, after deciding he’d be more effective as an advocate for progressive causes outside the mayor’s office than inside it. Wilson, who previously worked in media relations for the labor advocacy group Working Washington and the progressive policy group Civic Ventures, doesn’t have a job lined up yet; his last day will be in early August.

Sage Wilson is just the latest in a string of mayoral staffers to leave Wilson’s office, and the second top communications staffer. In June, as we reported, Wilson asked her communications director (and Sage Wilson’s boss), Seferiana Day, to resign after a string of bad press for the mayor, much of which occurred while Day was on medical leave. After Day’s departure, the mayor’s office hired Crystal Nicole Fincher, the political consultant, podcaster, and co-owner of KVRU Radio, to join her team temporarily as a big-picture communications consultant, and brought on longtime SDOT spokeswoman Dawn Schellenberg as a temporary media relations staffer.

Day’s old position has been posted publicly, but the mayor’s office has reportedly been talking to Gregory Joseph, until recently the communications director for the Alliance for Gun Responsibility. (Editor’s note: This story originally said Joseph was the Alliance’s current communications director. A representative from the group reached out to let us know his “role ended in June.” We regret the error). Several sources have told PubliCola the mayor’s office has interviewed Joseph “informally,” although the official line is that they haven’t done any interviews yet and are considering any and all candidates for the job. (The mayor’s office did not immediately respond to questions about the communications director position Wednesday morning).

Prior to joining the Alliance, Joseph was in the news in New Orleans for allegedly misusing $51,00o in city funds to create campaign mailers for his boss, then-mayor LaToya Cantrell, during the final stretch of an ultimately unsuccessful recall campaign against her.  Joseph was later accused of violating procurement policies with a no-bid contract as well. According to local media reports, the council found Joseph guilty of violating city policies, gross misconduct, incompetence and neglect of official duty and unanimously voted to suspend his pay, effectively firing him.

Another Wilson staffer, city council liaison Tracey Whitten, just went on an extended medical leave, telling the City Council in an email that she plans to return in November.  In her absence, Karem Levitas, a senior policy advisor to the mayor who spent a decade as a policy staffer for the city’s Office of Labor Relations, will take over.

The relationship between the council and mayor, as we’ve reported, has been rocky, thanks in part to early friction between councilmembers and two Wilson staffers, Jonathan Grant (who resigned in May) and Kate Kreuzer (reassigned to a different job two weeks before Grant was asked to step down).

Asked about mayor-council relations during a media availability earlier this week, City Council President Joy Hollingsworth gave an equivocal answer, saying the relationship was new, still  “building,” and getting better over time. But she also said Wilson’s team didn’t talk with the council before introducing their Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise levy spending plan, which led to a heated debate over whether to use levy funds to pay for universal free lunches or targeted spending on take-home food for low-income kids.

” I do not like a food fight,” Hollingsworth said. “Number one, if I were to have a conversation with the mayor about this plan before they announced it in April, I would have said let’s lower the [eligibility] threshold to 30 percent”—making schools eligible for free meals when 30 percent of their kids qualify for free and reduced lunches—”instead of 40 percent. … let’s get those schools that are on the bubble for the first year, and then the next year we can expand it.”

2. The city’s midyear supplemental budget is usually as boring as its name. This year is largely no exception—the proposal, before any council amendments, keeps the city’s 2026 budget mostly in balance, with just $500,000 in additional spending that does not have an identified funding source. (The council adopts supplemental budgets every year to keep spending in line with expectations and make any changes that the original budget, adopted every November, didn’t anticipate.)

But the staid supplemental does include a potential warning sign: The budget update assumes the city will spend just over $80 million this year paying retroactive (2024-2025) and current (2026) wage increases for SPD officers (represented by the Seattle Police Officers Guild) and officers with a rank of lieutenant or captain (represented by the Seattle Police Management Association), combined.

This total is about $12 million less than the city estimated back in 2025, when the fiscal notes, or cost estimates, for the new contracts totaled a little more than $90 million. And that was back when SPD estimated it would hire 100 new officers this year; more recently, the department said they were on track to hire 167 new cops, a pace that could require them to slow down hiring unless the city gives them even more money.

City budget director Aly Penucci told PubliCola the city already set aside enough in reserves for just this kind of budget uncertainty, and noted that $90 million represented the “estimate of what the potential maximum exposure would be that is refined as more information is known.”

Even so, the big numbers are ominous news for next year’s budget, for which Wilson has asked every department (including SPD) to come up with cuts of 5 to 10 percent. (The city is facing a deficit of about $175 million next year). Some on the council have reportedly signaled intent to hold the line on police spending, aka business as usual, giving SPD whatever it needs to hire as many new recruits as can walk through the door and meet the minimum standards.

With various public safety departments, including fire and police, taking up almost half a billion dollars,  holding police harmless this year will require bigger cuts to other city departments. Boring though supplemental budgets may be, the debate over whether to slow down police spending is shaping up to be the major battle of the upcoming budget season.

City Council, housing, Mayor Wilson

With Major Reforms Years Away, City Could Make Temporary Changes to Housing Fees Next Year
Downward trend: Permits to build new housing have continued to plummet, exacerbating Seattle’s housing shortage.

By Erica C. Barnett

Although a proposal to temporarily slash the Mandatory Housing Affordability fees paid by developers in most residential zones appears dead for this year, the City Council’s land use chair, Eddie Lin, said to expect legislation early next year that will address what housing developers have identified as a critical problem:  The fees, which pay for affordable housing, have become make-or-break for new housing projects thanks to the skyrocketing price of construction since MHA passed seven years ago.

As we’ve reported, developers sought a two-year, 80 percent reduction in MHA fees earlier this year, arguing that the development “pipeline” in Seattle is drying up; without the temporary cut, they argue, they won’t be paying any MHA fees because new housing simply won’t get built.

Mayor Katie Wilson had planned to propose a bill backed by the Housing Development Consortium, a large coalition of affordable housing developers and advocates, when the deal fell apart. Groups like the Seattle Renters Commission argued that cutting MHA fees would eliminate a key source of funds for affordable apartments, and council support for the bill also seemed on the verge of evaporating when Wilson pulled the bill.

Lin, who supported Wilson’s proposal in principle, said he supports both short-term MHA. fee relief and long-term reform. “MHA was never supposed to be a completely static thing. … It should be more responsive to updates in our zoning, updates into the housing ecosystem.” But, Lin added, “that’s going to take years, and we need to do something in the short term. And I think the pressure for that is only going to continue to build as permits continue to plummet.”

So far this year, according to the city’s housing dashboard, developers have filed permits have been filed to build just 1,137 new housing units citywide, down from 8,600 during the same period in 2020, when new permits were at their peak.

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“Hopefully we’ll be able to do something in early 2027” to provide a short-term solution to MHA fee pressure, Lin said.

In a bit of positive news, the latest report on MHA, from the city’s Office of Housing, shows that fees brought in about $47 million last year, reversing what appeared to be a long-term decline. But the gains are likely short-term, for a couple of reasons. First, more than half of last year’s MHA fees, around $24 million, came from just four large apartment buildings, according to the report—and nearly half of that amount, $10.6 million, came from a bond-financed senior housing project for the nonprofit Horizon House, a large windfall from an unusual type of project.

The second reason next year’s MHA fees are likely to drop off is that most of the remaining 2025 money, more than $20 million, comes from new housing (generally townhouses) in areas zoned for low-density developments. These low-rise (or LR) zones are almost certain to see a major drop-off in new housing permits thanks to legislation, passed last December. that allows up to eight apartments per lot in former single-family areas, which are not subject to MHA fees.

The Office of Housing report acknowledges this new reality, noting that “MHA-applicable townhome development could fall off going forward,” as developers start building in neighborhood residential areas to spare themselves the expense of MHA fees.

“Until we update MHA, especially in the LR zone, we’re going to see development in neighborhood residential, for better or worse,” Lin said. “Because why would you build an LR if you can build the same thing in neighborhood residential?”