City Council, Drugs, Police

SPD Chief Questions Whether LEAD Diversion Program is “Meeting Expectations”
“Mark43 Recorded Diversion” refers to all completed referrals police made through arrests; LEAD also gets some referrals that don’t come from SPD.

Barnes allowed that LEAD was better than “no diversion at all,” while Councilmember Rivera said the city has already “thrown a lot” of money at the program.

By Erica C. Barnett

Police Chief Shon Barnes questioned the value of LEAD, the city’s main criminal justice diversion program, at a city council committee on Monday—saying the program could not, on its own, “deliver the level of order, safety and visible presence that residents, businesses and visitors believe should be indicative of a major US city.” For 15 years, LEAD has provided services as an alternative to arrest and incarceration; the model, which includes long-term case management, harm reduction, and connections to housing and treatment, has been replicated around the country and is considered a best practice for minimizing people’s involvement in the criminal legal system.

Since 2023, police have had the power to arrest and charge people with a gross misdemeanor for possessing or drugs or using them in public. That year, a new state law made drug use or possession a gross misdemeanor, rather than a felony, in response to a 2021 state supreme court decision called State v. Blake that overturned existing laws that classified possession and public use as felony crimes.

Between 2024 and 2025, according to a staff presentation during the council’s public safety committee on Tuesday,  LEAD diversions for people arrested for possession or public use declined almost 37 percent—from 173 to 109—while charges filed by police officers more than doubled and attempted jail bookings increased by 191 percent. (This number includes both jail bookings and people the jail declined to book because of medical and other issues). Misdemeanor drug use and possession cases made up just under half of all drug arrests.

This is not the outcome local leaders said they hoped for when they adopted the law in 2023. In an executive order that accompanied the new law, then-mayor Bruce Harrell directed SPD to adopt a policy that directed officers to divert drug users into LEAD or other programs whenever possible, rather than arresting them. That policy says, “When an arrest is warranted, sworn employees should prioritize diversion in lieu of booking.”

In general, the numbers show, police have continued to routinely arrest and book people using drugs in public rather than sending them to LEAD.

Both the new law and the executive order gave individual police officers the ultimate authority to decide whether to arrest someone or refer them to LEAD, based partly on whether they decide a person is posing a “threat of harm” to anyone in the public. (LEAD can also take referrals after an arrest).

The way SPD’s policy defines a threat of harm gives police a lot of discretion to decide whether they think someone is causing harm. But it specifies that any time a person is using drugs near a bus or rail stop, school, or park, a threat of “harm will be presumed.”

Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes said the list was almost too expansive. “A very important policy decision will have to be made whether or not officers can [arrest] people using drugs” when they witness it, “and whether or not we can make that arrest without having to go through the checklist,” Barnes said.

Barnes and acting Assistant Chief Rob Brown told the committee that they respected LEAD and planned to continue diverting people to the program. In “many cases,” Barnes said, LEAD “is better than having what we’ve always done, which is no intervention at all. But it’s also important to be clear-eyed about what the program can and cannot accomplish and whether it’s meeting the expectations of the people who live, work and visit the city.”

 

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LEAD was started in Belltown in 2011 and has expanded in size and scope many times since, so it’s inaccurate to say that the city has “always” done “no intervention at all.” Barnes, previously police chief in Madison, Wisconsin, was appointed chief by Harrell last year.

Brown, who was previously the commander of SPD’s South Precinct, said he was particularly interested in holding people accountable who engage in what he called “defiant” drug use—that is, drug use in highly visible places that make residents and customers “very uncomfortable.” These “defiant” users, Brown said, “feel like they’re entitled to consume. … I understand that [for] somebody who is an addict, that jail alone, by itself, is not necessarily going to help them get to moving beyond their addiction. But what I do want to see is behavior change for this type of defiant, open consumption.”

In a separate presentation, Purpose Dignity Action’s Lisa Daugaard, who launched LEAD in Belltown 15 years ago, said funding for the PDA-run program hit “a high-water mark” in 2022 and has been declining ever since, reducing LEAD’s capacity to take on new clients.

After a LEAD staffer described an analysis that showed people do better the longer people they stick with LEAD, Councilmember Maritza Rivera said she wasn’t convinced the program was doing enough to impact visible drug use and disorder. “I appreciate that it can take up to two years to get someone to accept services and get toward a path of recovery,” Rivera said, but businesses can’t wait that long to see improvements. “It taking two years to help someone get off of 12th and Jackson is not helping that small business be able to stay in business and stay open,” she said.

“I don’t mean any disrespect by this,” Rivera continued, “but everyone comes here and says, if we had more money, it would be different. … “You know, we have thrown a lot [of money at LEAD]—I mean, PDA gets $20 million from the city.”

“We’re in a budget deficit. So are there other things that we can do to address the problem? … Because I don’t know that we have more money that we can put into it.”

Last year, Rivera voted along with the rest of the council to increase the police department’s budget by $35 million, including millions for to expand SPD’s camera surveillance program into additional neighborhoods. That amount will grow this year even in he absence of new programs, as officers that received raises of 42 percent over the past five years get raises on top of their new higher salaries.

homelessness

After Board Meeting on Damning Audit, Talk Turns to “Winding Down” Homelessness Authority
KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison

By Erica C. Barnett

A consensus appears to be growing among regional decision-makers that it’s time to start “winding down” the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, which received the results of a devastating forensic audit earlier this month, according to people familiar with internal discussions about the agency’s future who spoke with PubliCola over the past few days.

But what that plan, and the path forward for homeless services, will look like, if it happens, remained murky after the weekend, which KCRHA board members, Seattle and King County elected officials, and homeless service providers and advocates spent discussing how to ensure homeless service providers keep getting funded even if the KCRHA no longer exists.

KCRHA’s board, made up primarily of elected officials from around the region, met on Friday to discuss the findings of a forensic review  that found pervasive, ongoing financial oversight and accounting problems that resulted in overspending, a persistent negative fund balance, and at least $8 million that could not be accounted for. Between the $8 million and another $4.26 million in overspending (which included $1.26 million in unfunded interest payments on loans), the audit found nearly $13 million in money that was effectively missing from the KCRHA’s accounts.

Kinnison, who made an unusual in-person appearance at Friday’s meeting, cued up a presentation by Mike Nurse, a principal with the auditing firm Clark Nuber, by reading a prepared statement full of reassuring claims. The problems the auditors identified, she said, were “serious” but not fatal, and stemmed largely from decisions made before she arrived in mid-2024—when, she suggested, things started turning in the right direction.

“This audit identifies real weaknesses in KCRHA’s financial systems, controls and reporting, particularly during our early formation period,” Kinnison said. “I want to be clear about one important point. The audit did not find evidence of fraud or misuse of funds. … There are no missing funds.” Finally, whatever problems the audit identified with the agency’s “internal tracking and reconciliation processes,” Kinnison said, all the money was “used on services for people experiencing homelessness.”

Kinnison, who did not attend most of the regular meetings with auditors, concluded by saying she was the right person to get the agency back on track. “I just want to say, I’m a career public servant. I was hired to do this work. It’s what I’ve been doing, it is a passion for me. It’s part of my identity to uphold the public trust, and I am really honored to be the person that’s helping to understand [how] KCRHA can improve to the level that meets public expectation and scrutiny.”

The rest of the meeting might as well have taken place in a different reality.

For the next hour, Nurse made the case that KCRHA’s financial oversight and accounting practices had left the door wide open for waste, financial abuse, and fraud.

“Did we find fraud at KCHRA? The answer to that remains unclear,” Nurse said. “In our testing, we did not identify any direct evidence of fraud.” However, that testing was based on a small sample of KCRHA’s financial transactions, and ” transparency issues on the accounting record between 2021 and late 2024″ made it impossible to track spending on a detailed level.

Many of those “legacy issues,” Nurse said, persisted after that period—meaning that previous leaders, including controversial founding CEO Marc Dones, were not solely to blame for the casual accounting practices and opaque record-keeping that contributed to overspending, negative balances, and opaque financial records. As recently as last year, many different people had access to the spreadsheets KCRHA used to track spending, and various people deleted, and made other changes to “thousands” of financial transactions, the audit found.

“Under current conditions and without corrective action, the challenges I’m talking about are likely to continue, including ongoing cash shortfalls and the reliance on advances in borrowing to meet funding requirements,” Nurse said. Without any formal financial controls, he continued, the KCRHA is at risk of having to pay back federal funding they’ve already spent. Several past audits, including county and state reports in 2023 and a second state audit in 2024, both unearthed many of the same issues, Nurse noted, but KCRHA did not take any apparent actions to fix the problems, and “these issues still remained” as of last July, when the audit began.

In a separate but related issue, KCRHA staffers spent more than a million dollars using agency credit cards and reimbursing staff without providing detailed justifications for their purchases, which included clothes, office furniture, and $13,000 in relocation costs for a chief program officer who lasted less than a year. Payroll records and receipts, obtained through a records request and provided to PubliCola, show that the KCRHA paid nearly three times that much—more than $38,000—to relocate Kinnison to Seattle from Washington, D.C.

Nurse also knocked down one of the KCRHA’s chief justifications for its persistent negative cash balances—the fact that the agency uses a “reimbursement” framework, paying providers first and refilling their bank account when money comes in from outside funders. (The KCHRA switched to this system after providers complained about payments that were often months late, an especially severe financial burden for small and less-established nonprofits.)

Many agencies use a reimbursement model, Nurse said, results in accounts whose balances dip into the red and back into the back on a consistent monthly basis, like a “sine wave”; in contrast, the KCHRA’s balance has been inconsistent and mostly in the red, with a negative balance that actually grew from $44.7 million in July 2025 to nearly $63 million this March. On the chart above, which is included in the report, “you can see the receivables continue to grow, grow, grow, and the cash continue to decline, so that is not what you would expect to see.”

Implementing all the recommendations from the audit, Nurse said, could cost the KCRHA “potentially in the millions of dollars” and take a year or more. It could also lead to a disruption in homeless services, since the agency would need to use existing staff and resources to work exclusively on correcting all the problems the report identified.

Currently, there seems to be little enthusiasm for that option. After Friday’s meeting, board member and King County Executive Girmay Zahilay said he wanted to work “methodically and thoughtfully” while deciding what happens next. “We have to make sure that anything that we do moving forward is going to be better than the status quo.”

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Board member and Seattle Councilmember Dionne Foster told PubliCola after the meeting that she thinks it’s important to create a “strong foundation” for the future homelessness system by not acting rashly and immediately moving to the nuclear option—a shutdown process that, under the agreement that established the KCRHA, be required to last at least one year.

“When the auditor talks about this being something that was built over time because of the poor foundation of the agency, that’s something that we have to take into account in how we respond,” Foster said. “I want to make sure that as we’re thinking about how we address these audit findings, we do not pivot so quickly that we have another poor foundation.”

During a City Council briefing on Monday, Seattle Councilmember and KCRHA board member Alexis Mercedes Rinck said she is introducing a resolution that will lay out “next steps for our contracts, staffing, Continuum of Care … and how we will ensure a continuity of services with or without KCRHA.”

On Monday, King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski—one of the first elected officials, along with Seattle Councilmember Maritza Rivera, to explicitly call for shutting down the agency—told PubliCola he’s started working with other council members on a plan to “take back, in an orderly way” some of the functions KCRHA oversees and revert to a system where the county, Seattle, and other cities run their own homelessness systems the way they did before the KCRHA existed. That option couldn’t happen overnight, because HSD no longer has a formal homelessness division or the staff to manage large, complex grants.

“I know we’ve used this phrase ‘homelessness is a regional problem that requires a regional solution,'” Dembowski said, “but I think there’s an opportunity to ask, is that really the case? It’s certainly a regional challenge, but I think this trite statement that it requires a regional response deserves some assessment and reflection, because I don’t think that’s what we’re doing.”

Most smaller cities decided not to contribute funding to the KCRHA, preferring to keep funding local homeless service providers directly, and the KCRHA eventually moved toward “subregional” planning that takes the different political and financial realities of different parts of the region into account.

Zahilay, along with Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, sent a letter to Kinnison giving the agency until May 8 to present a plan to address some of the “high-risk findings” in the audit, and until May 23 to come up with a corrective plan to address the other audit findings. Wilson, through her deputy mayor, Brian Surrat, also added amendment to a resolution creating a finance committee with the authority to approve or reject new agreements, discretionary spending, and new hires; the changes effectively put KCRHA under a hiring and spending freeze for the indefinite future.

Courts, Density, homelessness, labor, Mayor Wilson, Police, Transportation

This Week on PubliCola: April 25, 2026
KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison

A forensic audit finds widespread problems at the homelessness agency, county workers rally against in-office mandates, and a ton of other stories you may have missed this week.

Monday, April 20

SPD Gives Medal to Officer Who Chased Man Into Traffic, Leaving Carful of Kids Behind

The Seattle Police Department put out a video congratulating officer Albert Khandzhayan for apprehending a man who had kidnapped his wife’s three children by breaking the window of her car, dragging her out, and driving off with the kids inside. The video includes disturbing audio from the woman’s panicked 911 call; when we contacted SPD, they expressed “regret” for posting the audio without asking the victim’s permission.

Update: After we posted about the video, SPD removed it from Youtube and their website, replacing it with a note said in part: “Recognizing the potential harm this post may have caused, we have removed the video originally posted here.”

County Assessor, Charged With Stalking, Posts Taunting Pics as Council Again Demands His Resignation

King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson posted multiple photos of himself in a tub, shirtless, on Instagram and Facebook Stories, with captions flaunting the fact that a judge ruled he did not have to wear a previously ordered ankle monitor because of a medical condition he claimed requires him to soak both legs every day. His next hearing is May 5, when PubliCola hears he may be asked to address the flippant posts.

Tuesday, April 21

Will Dialing Back Fees on Housing Fix Seattle’s Construction Crash?

On our first of two Seattle Nice episodes this week, we interviewed land use and housing consultant Natalie Quick and the city’s former chief operating officer Marco Lowe about why developers are asking holiday from Mandatory Housing Affordability fees, which pay for affordable housing but are bringing in less money as housing development slows.

Union Members, King County Employees Protest Three-Day Office Mandate

Members of the PROTEC17 union, including King County employees, protested King County Executive Girmay Zahilay’s three-day-a-week return to office (RTO) mandate, which county employees have called punitive, expensive, and counterproductive. Many of the county’s far-flung workers have never been to physical offices, so “return to office” is a misnomer.

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Wednesday, April 22

Seattle Times Fails to Credit PubliCola for Reporting on County Assessor’s Social Media Posts

The Seattle Times failed to credit PubliCola’s original reporting on County Assessor Wilson’s disappearing social media posts, instead representing the find as their original reporting. This is not in keeping with bare-minimum standards for crediting other news sources when doing followup coverage of a story another media outlet broke.

Forensic Audit Finds Homelessness Agency Lacked Basic Accounting Standards, Lost at Least $13 Million

A devastating forensic audit found multiple serious issues with the way the regional homelessness authority ran its finances, including casual accounting practices, commingling of restricted funds, consistent negative balances, and millions of dollars in overspending and money that the agency was unable to account for. The audit led local officials to issue statements calling for accountability and, in some cases, the immediate dissolution of the agency.

Thursday, April 23

Fulfilling a Campaign Promise, Wilson Announces Denny Way Bus Lanes Coming This Year

Mayor Katie Wilson announced a two-phase plan to add a dedicated bus lane along the most congested part of Denny Way, between Lower Queen Anne and Capitol Hill, and create a new pathway to the South I-5 on-ramp. The two-phase plan will fulfill a campaign promise to address chronic delays on the bus route known derisively as the “L8.”

Alarming Audit, Missing Millions: Is the End Nigh for KCRHA?

In our second podcast this week, we discussed the implications of the KCRHA audit for the future of the long-embattled agency. The audit, I argued, is most concerning for what it reveals about the agency’s lax financial controls and casual accounting practices, which included allowing the same person to oversee expenditures from approval to validation that the expense was appropriate and calculated and logged correctly.

Friday, April 24

KCRHA Board Will Meet Today to Discuss Disastrous Forensic Audit

I previewed the KCRHA board meeting to discuss the audit, including the agency’s own preemptive efforts to suggest things were well under control.

Also this week: On Friday, I covered the KCRHA board meeting in detail, including CEO Kelly Kinnison’s insistence that the audit didn’t find fraud and that no money went “missing.” In a presentation, the auditor corrected those claims and added texture to some of the dry details in the audit, including the KCRHA’s extensive use of a private temp staffing agency that charged large commissions and the widespread use of credit cards without clear authorization or line-item receipts.

Coming up: On Monday, I’ll be on City Cast Seattle discussing the audit findings and what they mean for the future of the agency. Tune in!

homelessness

KCRHA Board Will Meet Today to Discuss Disastrous Forensic Audit

By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s governing board, made up of elected officials from around the region, will meet today for a briefing and discussion on a damning forensic evaluation into the agency’s finances. The audit found potential misuse and commingling of restricted funds, spending that could not be accounted for, casual accounting practices, and lack of oversight and internal controls to protect against waste, abuse, and fraud.

The report covered a period ending in July 2025, when the agency’s cash balance was negative by $44.7 million. A few months after the audit began, agency CEO Kelly Kinnison laid off 13 staff, including the general counsel and chief financial officer. Neither position has been filled. At the same time, Kinnison hired five new staff, including three top executives, offsetting some of the savings from axing the agency’s attorney and the executive overseeing its finances.

Elected officials issued a flurry of statements ranging from alarm to calls for the KCRHA’s dissolution on Wednesday. Four Seattle-area leaders who expressed grave concerns—King County Executive Girmay Zahilay, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, and Seattle City Councilmembers Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Dionne Foster—are on the governing board.

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In advance of today’s meeting, KCRHA’s Associate Director of Strategy, William Towey—who was among the new executives Kinnison hired last October—sent an email to KCRHA staff assuring them that the agency has “made meaningful progress [to] bring transparency to where we needed to improve and to help guide the work ahead.”

“Core operations are stronger, invoicing is now completed on time with significantly improved accuracy, we have implemented regular monthly financial close processes, and we have strengthened oversight of spending, including purchase cards”—spending by individual staffers that was done with little accountability or oversight, the audit found. “At the same time, the audit makes clear that more work is required, and we are already taking action to address those areas.”

Towey’s letter to staff emphasized that, “[i]mportantly, the audit did not find evidence of fraud or misuse of funds.” However, the audit explicitly says that the failure to find “large-scale fraud in the samples reviewed” does not mean a clear bill of health; “due to limitations in internal controls, the risk of fraud, waste, and abuse remains,” the audit notes.

Towey told KCRHA staff Kinnison herself requested the audit, a claim that sources inside the city as well as former KCRHA staff have disputed, saying that Kinnison’s former deputy, Simon Foster, requested it after discussions with the Seattle Human Services Department. (Foster was among the 13 laid-off staff.)

In a formal complaint last August, then-CFO James Rouse (one of the 13 staff let go last October) said Kinnison had not initiated the review and seemed unaccountably dismissive about the implications of a forensic audit, which is typically done when there’s a suspicion of wrongdoing, such as fraud.

Ordinarily, an agency under audit would have the opportunity to respond in writing to the audit and have the response released as part of the audit itself, but that didn’t happen in this case. Kinnison is expected to respond to the audit findings verbally at the KCRHA’s board meeting this afternoon.

One question that’s unlikely to come up at the meeting is what responsibility the elected officials on the board, as well as the KCRHA’s two main funders, the city and King County, had for ensuring its spending was in order and its accounting practices met basic standards. In 2024, the city and county gave the governing board more authority, but the officials on the board never took a particularly active role in questioning or overseeing the agency or its budget. Instead, the board generally rubber-stamped the budget after viewing a PowerPoint presentation, effectively ceding authority to the CEO and staff to hold themselves accountable.

homelessness, podcasts

Alarming Audit, Missing Millions: Is the End Nigh for KCRHA?

By Erica C. Barnett

On this week’s 🚨emergency episode🚨 of Seattle Nice, we discussed a damning new forensic report into the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s finances, which revealed that the agency could not account for millions of dollars in public funds.

As I reported earlier today, the audit revealed that the KCRHA couldn’t account for $8 million; it also revealed an “administrative overspend” of more than $4 million, on top of a previously reported programmatic overspend of more than $6 million. Beyond the missing money, the repord raises serious concerns about the KCRHA’s accounting practices and use of restricted funds, some of which may have been used for unauthorized purposes.

We discussed what Sandeep described as the “overlapping failures” early in the agency’s history, when the founding CEO, Marc Dones, established a culture in which lived experience of homelessness took primacy over traditional government qualifications, a practice that pushed many of the people who had been managing homelessness contracts at the city of Seattle out and set the agency on a path of lackadaisical record-keeping, few formal financial controls, and accounting practices that included reconciling funds over chat, email, and constant revisions to Excel spreadsheets, rather than traditional government accounting practices.

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A number of elected officials at the city and county have already called for the dissolution of the KCRHA, expressing outrage at the audit findings. That process, if it happens, will be long and arduous, and could spell the end of the much-touted “regional approach to homelessness,” which was the ostensible reason the KCRHA was created in the first place.

But as we also discussed, the city and county—the KCRHA’s two primary funders—also bear some responsibility for letting the agency’s finances and accounting get so out of hand and allowing their bank accounts to fall so far into the red. The KCRHA has long served as a bit of a punching bag for its primary funders, but it was it set up to struggle from the very start, when the city and county signed an agreement creating the agency that did not give KCRHA its own funding source, making it basically a pass-through agency that was occasionally allowed to do side missions—like the ill-fated “Partnership for Zero,” which was supposedly going to end unsheltered homelessness downtown.

The KCRHA’s board will meet at 3:00 on Friday, when it will hear from both agency CEO Kelly Kinnison and Clark Nuber, the agency hired by the city and county to do the forensic report. The public can tune in to the meeting on Zoom.

Mayor Wilson, Transit

Fulfilling a Campaign Promise, Wilson Announces Denny Way Bus Lanes Coming This Year
Advocates and city and Metro staff surround Mayor Katie Wilson at Wednesday’s Denny Way bus lane announcement.

By Erica C. Barnett

It took electing a mayor who knows what it’s like to be on a bus that’s crawling through gridlock traffic to finally address a choke point on Metro’s Route 8 between downtown and Capitol Hill. The bus, which runs from Seattle Center to Mount Baker via Capitol Hill and Judkins Park, gets stuck in traffic as it heads east from Seattle Center toward I-5, where cars stack up for blocks waiting to enter the freeway.

On Wednesday, Mayor Katie Wilson announced a two-phase plan to add a dedicated bus lane along the most congested part of Denny Way and create a new pathway to the South I-5 on-ramp that will divert cars off Denny at Boren, closing down the perpetually clogged pathway at Yale. The first phase, which will conclude later this month, will include a new south- and eastbound bus lane starting on Queen Anne Ave. and ending at 2nd Avenue, where the Seattle Department of Transportation will also add a bus “queue jump” lane to give buses priority.

Work will shut down for the World Cup in June and July and resume in August, when crews will paint nine new blocks of eastbound bus lanes on Dennybetween 5th Ave. downtown and Fairview Ave. N just before the freeway, where they’ll join up with an existing bus lane that will be shifted from its current location in the middle of the street over to the south curb. Yale Street, a notorious choke point, will no longer provide access to I-5; instead, southbound I-5 traffic will be funneled along Boren Ave.

The new bus lanes will be funded with $4 million from the Seattle Transportation Levy. The Seattle Transit Measure, which funds additional Metro service (and will be up for renewal this year), will fund additional service hours on the 8.

Source: SDOT

About 8,000 people ride the 8 every day, and about 26,000 ride the routes that travel along Queen Anne Ave. and Denny way just north of downtown, which include the 1, 2, 8, 13, 24, 33, and the RapidRide D Line.

On Wednesday, Wilson was surrounded by members of the Transit Riders Union, which she co-founded and directed before becoming mayor, and the Fix the L8 coalition, which held a “race the L8” event last year in which people—including then-candidate Wilson— easily outpaced the snail-like bus while walking, dancing, unicycling, and hopscotching along the route.

Speaking at Wednesday’s announcement, Fix the L8 organizer Jason Li said he grew tired of hearing people say that Seattle can’t convert general-purpose lanes to bus lanes because we aren’t a big city with a thriving transit network like New York. “The thing is, the city has done this before, and it was a wild success,” Li Said. Just a couple of miles away, Madison Street used to be just like Denny—an arterial with two lanes in each direction that was chronically clogged with both local and I-5 traffic, and it had a slow and unreliable bus, just like route eight.” Think about what happens when you replace 5,000 cars with a fleet of 13 buses.”

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Wilson, the first mayor in recent memory who does not own a car, recalled joining up with other transit advocacy groups to form the Move All Seattle Sustainably (MASS) Coalition to advocate for better mass transit in 2018. “I have to say, being stood up by your bus is honestly one of the most dispiriting experiences that you can have,” Wilson said.

“And I know every transit rider out there, here today and around the city, knows exactly what I mean. There’s just nothing that makes you feel [more] like you’re not valuable, like your time is not valuable. And it’s serious, right? You can lose a job because you’re half an hour late because your bus didn’t come. … This is our opportunity to start fixing this problem.”

As part of the Denny Way improvement exercise, SDOT came up with a list of nine additional congested corridors “where transit investment can deliver high impact benefits for riders and the city overall.” These routes, detailed in an SDOT memo, could be priorities for future investments in transit.