Mayor Wilson, Media, Police

Messages Show SPD Primarily Responsible for Information Gap After Bite of Seattle Shooting

 

The messages also reveal that Mayor Wilson was indecisive about going to the scene of the shooting while advisors gave conflicting recommendations and TV reporters speculated about why she wasn’t there.

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson’s office released hundreds of pages of internal Teams messages and texts between her staffers, herself, and Seattle Police Department officials from the night of the July 26 mass shooting at the Bite of Seattle and in the days following the shooting.

The messages, which do not include communications between SPD officials except where the mayor’s office was included, show two things. First, that the mayor’s office dithered and debated whether Wilson herself should go to the scene of the shooting for three hours before she finally went to Seattle Center, partly in response to TV reporters criticizing her for not being there.

And second, that the primary reason for the delay in information, as well as almost all of the delay in holding a press conference that night, was that SPD delayed the release of information repeatedly, withholding any new information information from the public and press until the press conference finally took place around 11pm.

SPD, the messages show, knew critical details about the shooting, including the fact that it was not a random mass shooting or terrorist event within an hour of the shooting—that is, before 7:30pm—but did not put any of that information out broadly until after 1:00 in the morning on July 27.

The messages include texts from mayoral communications staffer Jonah Spangenthal-Lee to SPD Chief Operating Officer Sarah Smith asking her why SPD had not provided any information since a tweet warning the public of a shooting with “multiple shooting victims” at Seattle Center at 6:29pm. “Sarah, where is SPD”s statement?” Spangenthal-Lee wrote at 8:36. “It’s been two hours since you guys have posted anything? Even some tweets at this point…”

A few minutes later, Spangenthal-Lee told other mayoral staffers in an internal Teams chat, “It’s fucking embarrassing that SPD has waited HOURS to put anything out. … I’m just saying this is a massive fucking disaster and hit to public trust.”

Responding to the text, Smith wrote,”The team is actively handling the situation on the ground and with the media on scene. Still very chaotic right now. We will have more information out soon. A few minutes later, Wilson’s interim communications director, Dawn Schellenberg, wrote that another SPD staffer was “working on getting something on Twitter”—the only social media site SPD uses. Moments later, Smith corrected her, saying SPD would have no further updates until “after 9.”

Wilson’s own statement on the shooting went out at 8:46. It did not include information SPD was still withholding, including the critical information that the shooting appeared to be between groups of people who knew each other and that there was no need for he general public to be afraid.

At 9:26, Smith sent an update: Assistant Chief Tyrone Davis, who was filling in because Barnes and both his deputy chiefs were out of town, would be doing media interviews at 10pm; SPD would put up a Blotter post “right afterwards.” Ultimately, the press conference was delayed until almost 11pm, with both Senator Pramila Jayapal and Governor Bob Ferguson, who had driven into town from Olympia, in attendance.

None of the messages include an order from the mayor’s office to withhold information from the public so that “dignitaries” could arrive at Seattle Center, as one of SPD’s communications staff told TV reporters who have repeatedly suggested that this was the reason SPD did not release information to the public all night.

While SPD was withholding information and failing to communicate with the press, a chaotic debate was going on within the mayor’s office about whether she should go to the scene of the shooting. The discussion began shortly before 6:30, when Wilson said she was available “as needed” and her interim communications director, Dawn Schellenberg, said Spangenthal-Lee had said she should go to Seattle Center. The mayor’s public safety advisor, Alison Holcomb, advised against this “until we know more.”

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At 7:26, Wilson texted, “It would be good to get clarity soon whether we’re planning a public conference tonight v. tomorrow morning, so we can communicate that to other elected officials. (Just talked with Ferguson and Jayapal. Ferguson is in Olympia but can head this way shortly.)”

Holcomb replied, saying to wait until after a conference call for elected officials that was being organized by SPD. That conference call didn’t take place until around 9pm, possibly because Barnes wanted to get briefed on the situation from Dallas before participating in a call with elected officials. (A release of similar internal Teams chats and text messages from SPD would shed light on what Barnes and other SPD officials were doing between approximately 7:30 and 9:45.)

By around 9:40, it was still unclear whether the mayor would go to Seattle Center. At almost 9:30pm, Spangenthal-Lee wrote, “I reaaaaaaally think the mayor should go down there,” but Holcomb disagreed, writing, “Harborview, where victim’s families are, makes more sense, and I’m not sure that makes sense.”

“Media aren’t looking for an in-depth conversation about gang violence, they’re. looking for sound bites,” Holcomb continued. “Good time for the Mayor to be letting first responders do their jobs and not be armchair quarterbacking.”

Around the. same time, Deputy Mayor Brian Surratt, who had been on the scene for two hours, told Wilson, “I just talked to [Assistant Police Chief] Davis. His recommendation is no.” In other words, shortly before 9:40, SPD was still saying the mayor should not come to Seattle Center.

But after KOMO reporter Chris Daniels said on a live broadcast that he would expect the mayor to be on the scene if she was in town, Wilson wrote, “We should consider whether I should come down to talk to KOMO, if that expectation has been created. I’m sure they would love to spin an ‘absent mayor’ story.” (Daniels has been among the mayor’s harshest critics, and a chief ringleader of the narrative that the mayor was solely to blame for the lack of information about the shooting.) “I’m inclined to have you come down,” Surratt responded.

Wilson was on the scene less than a half hour after that text, shortly after 10pm. The press conference happened shortly before 11.There was a brief delay for Ferguson and Jayapal to arrive from other parts of Seattle, but it was, at most, less than 30 minutes—at the end of a long night in which SPD had still put out no information beyond its initial, alarming post on X saying that multiple people had been shot.

SPD’s first post on the evening’s events went up early the following morning, at 1:08 am.

Wilson and interim Police Chief Andre Sayles announced some changes to how police and the mayor’s office will communicate with each other and with the public earlier this week. The city’s Office of the Inspector General is supposed to release a report about the communications breakdown sometime this fall.

Mayor Wilson, Police

Mayor Wilson Says City Will Improve Crisis Communications In Wake of Shooting
Mayor Katie Wilson, with interim police chief Andre Sayles on the left

Wilson rolled out the changes before a report that is supposed to explain how communications broke down after the Bite of Seattle shooting.

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson and the Seattle Police Department rolled out a new communications plan for emergencies this week that includes a few updates to the old communications plan, which broke down in still-unspecified ways during a shooting at the Bite of Seattle festival in July that left three people dead. SPD arrested a 15-year-old on the night of the shooting, but still has not found “persons of interest” who may have also been involved.

Former SPD chief Shon Barnes and both of his deputy chiefs were out of town during the shooting. Barnes’ absence was one of several factors that may have contributed to a five-hour delay before SPD and Wilson held a press conference the night of the shooting. Barnes resigned under pressure—walking away with a severance package worth at least $740,000—after his over-the-top reaction to a reporter who asked about his frequent absences turned into a national story.

The new rules, which Wilson announced earlier this week, would include clearer lines of communication between SPD and the mayor’s staff, which appear to have broken down during the chaos after the shooting. A new SPD policy, which the department says is still being drafted, would allow no more than three members of SPD’s “executive staff” to be out of town at the same time; it’s unclear if this will include all command staff or just the chief and his deputies and assistants.

In the future, Alert Seattle, an opt-in system that pings people’s phones during emergencies, will alert residents when any “significant incident” happens, although the parameters that term will include are still undefined. During major incidents like active shooter events, the city may use the system to push wireless alerts to every cell phone within a certain radius—warning them to leave the area, for instance. And there will now be an “expectation of providing information to the media within one hour of a significant incident, when it’s safe and possible to do so,” according to the announcement.

Wilson has deflected questions about what caused the five-hour delay, saying that information will be revealed in a review by the Office of Inspector General, which her office requested, later this fall.

In an interview, Wilson said she decided to announce new communications policies prior to the publication of the OIG review “because it’s very important that the public has confidence that we’re prepared for Bumbershoot this weekend and all the big events coming up. … What this is about is saying there were gaps. We did not measure up to the standard that we have set for ourselves in terms of communications with the public. And we are fixing that moving forward.”

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Wilson’s communications office has seen significant turnover throughout her eight-month administration, including the firing of a multimedia specialist last week. Currently, Wilson has a temporary press secretary and temporary communications director, along with multiple consultants working on communications.

Asked whether the lack of a permanent comms team was a factor in the communications issues that arose after the shooting, Wilson said, “No, I don’t think so. We have excellent interim leadership in our comms department. And I’m not just saying that because my interim comms director,” Dawn Schellenberg, “is sitting here,” she joked.

It’s unclear how much the changes will impact how quickly the public receives direct information about major incidents, and how often.  The new rules say Alert Seattle subscribers will get push notices about “significant incidents,” an SPD term of art that includes everything from robberies to reports of shots fired to assaults to “any other event a sergeant believes is significant.” Notifying the public every time one of these incidents occurs could contribute to fear—or apathy. Wilson said her office would get back to me on the new threshold for alerts. “We’re not going to spam people,” she said.

Wilson said her office will also direct people to X, SPD’s platform of choice for putting out timely information, “when appropriate,” and confirmed that her office hasn’t asked SPD to put out information on additional platforms, such as Instagram, Reddit, and Bluesky. Most people in Seattle are not on X, the controversial, Elon Musk-owned platform that has become a haven for right-wing disinformation and hate speech.

Most of the mainstream media in Seattle have focused their coverage of the communications breakdown on Wilson’s responsibility, almost to the exclusion of SPD—the organization that actually conducts media briefings after shootings and other major events.

Asked about the media’s singular focus on her role, Wilson said, “I’m not going to sit here and complain about the media.”

“What’s unfortunate,” Wilson continued, “is that so much of the media narrative has focused on communications, in a way that has gotten away from gun violence and the victims and really just what we can do moving forward as a city to make sure our public spaces are safe.”

While the mayor has declined to comment on SPD’s role in the communications breakdown or discuss how much the former chief’s absence from the city contributed to the information bottleneck, Barnes has been making the media rounds to give his own version of events.

Earlier this week, for instance, he told KOMO’s Chris Daniels that his absence from the city during the shooting wasn’t an issue, because he had access to Teams and a copy of the Active Shooter Incident Management Checklist on his phone. (As I reported, Barnes had planned to be out of the city until mid-August.)  “What I did, virtually, if you will, is what I would have done if I was here on the ground here in in Seattle,” Barnes told Daniels.

homelessness, Mayor Wilson

Pallet, Company That Built Just-Opened Interbay Shelter, Closes Abruptly


By Erica C. Barnett

Pallet Shelter, a company that manufactures freestanding, one-to-two-person shelter units that has been active in Seattle since 2022, is shutting down effective tomorrow—an abrupt closure that comes just months after the nonprofit Everyone Deserves Housing opened a 75-unit Pallet shelter in Interbay.

Pallet announced the news on its website and in social media posts on Thursday, saying that a lack of funding and a shift in “political priorities” were partly to blame for the company’s shutdown. The company will cease operations on Friday.

“The homelessness response landscape has evolved significantly since Pallet began,” the post on Pallet’s website says. “Communities understand the challenge differently. Customer needs have become more complex. Funding environments and political priorities have shifted. And through nine years of working alongside communities across North America, we have learned an extraordinary amount about what works, what doesn’t, and what is needed next.”

Pallet founder and CEO Amy King did not respond to a request for an interview, and Everyone Deserves Housing director Dan Wise declined to comment.

The closure of Pallet means that the operators of existing Pallet shelters, like the one in Interbay, will have to replace parts and perform maintenance on the units themselves, with the help of a limited warranty that covers “defective” shelter units and an online handbook that includes sources for items that might break, like heaters, locks, and windows.

The Interbay Pallet shelter is one of the first shelters in several years to open under a contract with the city’s Human Services Department rather than the King County Regional Homelessness Authority. The contract, originally for 50 Pallet units with a future expectation of 100 units on site, was amended in April.

The new contract added 25 units, for a total of 75, removed the reference to 100 eventual units, and tripled in cost, from $1.3 million to almost $4 million. A spokeswoman for HSD said the increase “reflects planned phased work that came on incrementally adding budget for scope as it was confirmed.”

Pallet’s shelter units, which are made of plastic and fiberglass panels that flatten for transport, are utilitarian—consisting of little more than a shed with narrow cots that fold down from the walls—but expensive, at almost $20,000 for each micro-modular shelter. That’s almost five times as much as one of the Low-Income Housing Institute’s “tiny houses,” which are made of wood, and almost four times as much as Pallet cited as a starting price for each unit when PubliCola covered their first Seattle shelter in 2022.

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In an interview on Thursday, Mayor Katie Wilson said she doesn’t believe the closure of Pallet will impede her administration’s ability to keep opening new shelters.

“It’s unfortunate that they’re shutting down, but we will be able to move forward,” Wilson said. “My understanding is that Pallet shutting down is really due to shifts in the availability of public funding—they just don’t have the demand, in terms of purchasing their shelters, that they need to keep them in business.”

In 2024, a fire raced through a Pallet shelter operated by Catholic Community Services on Elliott Ave. W, destroying or damaging 25 of the units and displacing 28 people. Similar fires have occurred in several other Pallet shelters in California, raising concerns about the flammability of the fiberglass-reinforced plastic used in the shelter units.

Wilson said the city will continue to partner with groups like Sound Foundations, which builds wooden “tiny house” units for the Low-Income Housing Institute’s tiny house villages. She said the city is also looking into shelter options that don’t involve micro-modular units, such as shelters inside leased buildings. The HSD spokeswoman said the city is working to “diversify” the types of shelter it provides, saying, “the City’s shelter expansion is not dependent on a single model. It includes tiny houses, leased apartment buildings, and safe lots for vehicles.” The city just put out a new request for qualifications for shelter providers last month.

That has been the case historically, but it’s a departure from the mayor’s initial commitment to focus on creating large new village-style shelters as a way of standing up lots of new shelter quickly.

Since that “shelter accelerator” announcement, the city has opened or announced a net total of 175 new Pallet and tiny house units combined, a fraction of the goal Wilson set of opening 1,000 new shelter beds in her first year.

King County

King County Assessor Wilson Misused County Resources Amid Stalking and Harassment Allegations: Report

By Erica C. Barnett

King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson, who faced charges last year for allegedly stalking and harassing his ex-fiancée, communications consultant Lee Keller, committed multiple violations of King County’s ethics code, the county ombuds office concluded in a report released today.

The ombuds was investigating a complaint made last year that Wilson used King County resources to stalk, contact, and harass Keller. Keller sought criminal charges against Wilson after he was arrested outside her house while under a restraining order that required him to stay at least 1,000 feet away from her.

The order includes newly disclosed information about Wilson’s behavior as county assessor, and concludes that he violated the county’s ethics code in at least four distinct ways, and violated a county rule about the appropriate use of county IT resources.

Negotiating a lease

In a 2024 letter of interest sent on his King County letterhead, which includes the information that the assessor determines property values, Wilson wrote, “I’m John Wilson, the King County Assessor. I’ve been elected countywide to this office three times since 2015. … As King County Assessor, I direct a team of highly professional residential and commercial appraisers who cover all of King County. I know from traveling the county how rare it is to find a residential gem like your property, for rent.”

The ombuds found that by using his position to help secure a lease, Wilson violated an ethics code provision against using public resources for personal gain. “Not only did Assessor Wilson make clear that he and/or his office sets property values, and that he is the Assessor, but in the letter to the Property Manager and property owner, Assessor Wilson included an embedded link that led directly to the official King County Assessor’s website while describing what a ‘residential gem’ the property is,” the report says.

“The clear implication of the letter as a whole was that Assessor Wilson should receive special consideration due to his position in County government. … There is no legitimate reason for the King County Assessor to be negotiating for personal residential property and lease terms from their official County email address.”

Violating a protection order

The ombuds found that Wilson used his county email to contact Keller at least eight times over a span of three weeks when she had a restraining order against him, asking her to go to events with him five times and repeatedly sending her information about an audit that required county employees to verify their dependents’ eligibility for King County health care. The ombuds found that these emails violated the protection order, “which is illegal.”

Wilson was ordered to wear an ankle bracelet and stay away from Keller last year while misdeamenor charges against him were pending, but successfully fought the requirement, claiming his doctor had ordered him to soak his legs every day because of a medical condition. While his case was pending, Wilson posted several mocking social media posts from his hot tub, prompting a judge to order him to wear the monitor. Soon after, though, Keller said she no longer wanted to pursue the case—a pattern that had repeated previously in their relationship, according to the extensive court documents for the case.

Sending in the sheriff

Wilson also contacted King County Sheriff Patti Cole-Tindall, asking her to go or send someone to Keller’s house to perform a “wellness check” after she refused to talk to him at an event. Wilson’s emails came one day after Keller got a domestic-violence restraining order against him in May 2024. Over several emails sent from his county address over a 12-hour period, Wilson told the sheriff Keller was “distraught and agitated” as well as in a “manic, agitated” state. and said he would call 911 and ask for a wellness check on Keller.

During the email conversation, Cole-Tindall told Wilson “Ms. Keller not wanting to talk to Assessor Wilson was not an indication of risk of self-harm,” the report says, adding that the assessor “switched to his county email address when he wasn’t getting a response.”

Knowing that Keller had a restraining order against him, the report continues, “Assessor Wilson continued using his official King County email to try to force a wellness check on Ms. Keller.” In one email, he “acknowledged the Sheriff was busy with a visit from the President of the United States, and again requested that someone do a wellness check on his former domestic partner,” saying he would otherwise call 911 and have them send someone to Keller’s home.

“As an elected government official of the 13th largest county in the country, Assessor Wilson has power and authority that Ms. Keller doesn’t. The Ombuds Office finds that Assessor Wilson attempted to wield that power under the guise of seeking help for Ms. Keller,” the report says. “We do not conclude that this was a genuine, County-related emergency worthy of an elected official, acting in their official capacity, to reach out to the head of a law enforcement agency to request action.”

Election Damage Control

The report also found that Wilson had used his county email address to set up meetings with campaign supporters, including two of his staffers, communications manager Chris Vance and deputy assessor Al Dams, to do damage control in early summer 2025. (Dams later called on Wilson to resign). Wilson sent the emails to Dams’ and Vance’s personal accounts, indicating that he knew county employees weren’t supposed to do election work using county property.

This was shortly after PubliCola and other media reported on the latest stalking and harassment allegations against Wilson, which came about six months after news broke about a previous domestic violence restraining order Keller had let lapse.

The emails included a document from May 25, 2025 titled “ElectJohnWilson Exec Team—The Options” which set a Zoom meeting “to strategize and discuss media about he and Ms. Keller and the news stories at that time,” according to the report. They also included a draft email with a Word document addressing “the allegations made by Ms. Keller and Assessor Wilson’s commitment to running for King County Executive.,” dated June 2. Wilson stayed in the King County Executive race more than a month longer as demands piled up for him to withdraw from the race and resign.

“Political campaign-related activity on King County technology assets is strictly prohibited,” the report notes.

“Black dildo boy”

Finally, in searching Wilson’s emails, county investigators found two instances where Wilson used sexually explicit language in violation of county policy.

In one instance, his county phone referred to a person on his contacts list as “black dildo boy.” In the other, a “personal, ‘diary-like’ reflection on his relationship” with Keller, titled “Open Letter to John Wilson,” included explicit sexual references to Keller. These two incidents, while not a violation of the county’s ethics code, do violate the county’s policy on acceptable uses of King County resources, the ombuds found.

Wilson did not respond to an email seeking comment. A group of his staff called for his resignation today, due to “our lost confidence in your leadership, the impact on employees, the continued degradation of the department’s credibility, and the best interests of the department.”

Wilson has rebuffed every previous effort by elected officials and his own staff to pressure him into resigning, and plans to attend the International Association of Assessing Officers conference in Calgary next month, according to his social media. Wilson’s most recent social media post, about a celebration of life for longtime Seattle journalist Joel Connelly, includes a photo of the back of Keller’s head.

Keller declined to comment on the report.

City Council, housing, Mayor Wilson

Greater Seattle: Katie Wilson is to Jimmy Carter as Zohran Mamdani is to Barack Obama

By Josh Feit

First of all, a quick followup to an item from a couple of weeks ago, when I wrote: “Trump’s Case Against US Olympian David Hearn for Vandalizing the Reflecting Pool (since abandoned by Trump’s own DOJ) > North Seattle Couple’s Case for Recalling Katie Wilson.”

Yup. Last week, King County Superior Court Judge Patrick Oishi dismissed the request for a recall. At a confusing hearing last Thursday, August 27, Oishi told the petitioners their case was “befuddling.” For starters, they missed a filing deadline and then withdrew their request. Seems like the Trump analogy was spot on. And in what seemed even more similar to Trump’s endless mishegas, the couple then claimed they had more info. Oh brother.

Barack Obama > Jimmy Carter

Speaking of Wilson and analogies to presidents, let me alert you to this one: With her econo-travel  aesthetic, earnest policy brain, lefty-populist comfort zone, socially-awkward-bookworm personality, and (from what we hear about her behind-the-scenes leadership style) prickly isolation on the 7th floor—Wilson is Seattle’s own Jimmy Carter. If this analogy isn’t tracking for Gen Zers and Millennials, ask the internet about solar panels, sweaters, and thermostats. Carter, an outsider who was a elected during America’s post-Watergate call for goodie-goodie governance, eventually started to tank in the polls during his presidency. I initially thought Wilson’s high-wattage smile and unbridled joy in civics would confound the naysayers, critics, and bitter media. But—recall effort or not—recent polling indicates this mayor is in trouble.

Thanks to Wilson’s socialist label and sudden, surprise rise, the analogy that used to come to mind was more encouraging: Wilson was Seattle’s own Zohran Mamdani. But Mamdani veers toward a presidential analogy of his own. And it’s the opposite of a one-termer like Carter who got mired in “malaise.” Mamdani’s soaring popularity, confident charm, and big-ideas agenda make him like Barack Obama, an incorrigibly popular two-term president.

As Mamdani continues to wow the public and generate hope with his own gleeful project of sweeping governance (sweltering subway stations as pools of sustainable energy being the latest Mamdani lightning bolt) a pal in New York asked me why Wilson was having so much trouble in Seattle. I don’t think this fully explains it, but the fact that he’s a he and she’s a she has evidently allowed the media to normalize an unbridled condescension, giving their anti-Wilson bias free rein.

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50 > 0

Protesting density, liberal Boomers and Xers often quote Joni Mitchell’s famous line, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” Unwittingly, their knee-jerk “Development=Bad” mantra prioritizes car-dependent lifestyles. By stalling new housing development, they are locking pervasive car culture in place, thwarting the density needed to create walkable neighborhoods and expanded transit service. I derisively call it Joni Mitchell Politics.

So, as summer comes to a close, let’s applaud the Seattle Office of Housing and City Councilmember Dionne Foster’s pro-housing politics. Thanks to legislation they passed earlier this summer, OH used $6 million to acquire the site of a former gas station, mini-mart, and parking lot on East Montlake Place E. in the upscale Montlake neighborhood to build 50 below-market-rate condos. There’s currently zero affordable housing in the pricey area.

Under Seattle’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda, adopted in 2015, high-income communities like Montlake that lack affordable housing are known as “high opportunity” neighborhoods.

In her summer wrap-up newsletter, Foster noted the housing win: “Through acquiring property in a high opportunity neighborhood in Montlake we are locking in a future for affordable homeownership in a neighborhood that currently does not have affordable homeownership.”

Josh@publicola.com

Density, Elections, LGBTQ+, Mayor Wilson, Media, Police, Uncategorized

Poll Tests Anti-Density Messages, Mayor Wilson Does Damage Control, and Ron Davis Has Another Anti-Stranger Manifesto
Source: Fulcrum Strategy Group poll

1. A recent messaging poll by a group calling itself the “Green Neighborhoods Coalition” tested talking points against Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to finally get moving on the the Seattle Comprehensive Plan, which has been mired in appeals for more than a year. Activists who oppose the plan claim that allowing modest new apartment buildings in and around Seattle’s suburban-style single-family enclaves will “deforest” Seattle, result in the deaths of orcas and salmon, and lead to untold environmental devastation.

The comprehensive plan, which has been pushed back repeatedly since early 2023, epitomizes the concept of “endless delay”—or the “Seattle Process,” if you prefer.

The poll, conducted by Fulcrum Strategy Group (the same pollster behind recent Chamber and Challenge Seattle polls), describes Mayor Katie Wilson’s “taller, denser, faster” approach to the comprehensive plan neutrally, as a series of zoning changes designed “to more quickly address Seattle’s affordable housing crisis by supporting faster development of apartments and condos across Seattle with a particular focus on greater density transit corridors.”

Then, it tests detailed negative messages among people who say they support “a more deliberate approach” to development, including the argument that building more housing will destroy “parks, trees, and greenways”; that the approach “shortchanges climate resiliency” by “ignoring” climate change and “long-term environmental resiliency”; and that (finally) moving forward on the comp plan is a way of “cutting corners, taking shortcuts, excluding community voices, and trying to rush a decision.”

Andrew Thibault, the co-founder of Fulcrum, said the Green Neighborhoods Coalition’s messaging was not “NIMBY/anti-density.”

Editor’s note: This post originally said that the Seattle Parks Foundation was “the group behind” the Green Neighborhoods Coalition. They are the Green Neighborhoods Coalition’s fiscal sponsor, not a direct funder. We regret the error.

2. Less than a day before we published our story about interim Police Chief Andre Sayles’ complaint against a detective who spoke at a pro-LGBTQ event, Mayor Katie Wilson was at a meeting of the city’s LGBTQ Commission, doing a bit of preemptive damage control. At the time of the Thursday night meeting, Wilson’s office still had not responded to our questions for the story we published the following morning.

According to three commission members, and as reported by Seattle Gay News, Wilson and a staffer told the commission our story was basically toothless—specifically, that Sayles had only asserted that the detective, Beth Wareing, represented herself as an SPD detective in violation of orders not to do so. Wilson explained the issue as a “procedural” problem rather than a serious overstep by Sayles, one commissioner said, and let the commission know the case had been dismissed.

Not only did Wareing not mention her affiliation with SPD at the No Hate in WA State press conference, this was not the most incendiary allegation Sayles made against her. He also alleged that she lied about what two anti-LGBTQ initiatives would do, which would be a violation of SPD’s policy against dishonesty and a fireable offense that could have ended Wareing’s career. (She retired rather than continuing at SPD after a sabbatical as the direct result of Sayles’ unfounded complaint). According to OPA, Sayles’ claims against Wareing risked violating her right to free speech.

Jessa Davis, the co-chair of the LGBTQ Commission, said she was most concerned that Sayles seems to have taken right-wing podcaster Brandi Kruse at her word that Wareing lied about what the initiatives would do. Kruse, Davis said, is a “political activist who has publicly advocated in support of these ballot initiatives that the detective was speaking against.” In fact, she’s being investigated by the state Public Disclosure Commission for her advocacy work on behalf of the initiative sponsor Let’s Go Washington, which the PDC calls an in-kind contribution.

“We’ve seen SPD officers engage in political expression before, including statements that many people in Seattle and in the 2SLGBTQIA+ community find deeply troubling,” Davis said, pointing to the double standard that allows SPD officers to express right-wing viewpoints freely. “If we’re going to protect the officers’ rights to political expression, then the rules have to be applied consistently.”

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Wilson’s office said they didn’t have complete information about Sayles’ allegations when they spoke to the LGBTQ+ Commission, and that they were trying to be “transparent and provide them with information” before PubliCola’s story went up. “It was meant to be a high-level heads up, not an attempt to minimize the story or explain it away,” a spokesperson said. “In part, the briefing was for Mayor Wilson to express her expectation that Chief Sayles would be an inclusive leader.”

According to the spokesperson, Wilson had only read the closed case summary about the complaint, which did not include most of the information we reported, when she addressed our story at the meeting.

“The Mayor had only received very high-level information about the case,” and was “actively working with OPA to obtain additional documentation. We believed it was important for us to share with the community the limited information we had received.”

Some commission members, however, left the meeting feeling reassured that Sayles had done nothing serious, and that PubliCola’s story was about a minor incident that fizzled—rather than a serious complaint that led a 30-year detective to leave the department in frustration and disgust.

3. Ron Davis, the former 46th District legislative candidate who ran as an urbanist alternative to state Rep. Gerry Pollet, sent out yet another 3,300-word manifesto to his supporters last week, this one all about the Stranger and its failure to endorse him. In Davis’ mind, this decision was not based on the paper’s actual assessment of him and his candidacy, because that process would have obviously led them to endorse Davis over Will Dreher, the other candidate in the race.

Instead, Davis’ theory is that the “oligarchs” who bought the Stranger (and got rid of three staffers Davis preferred to the current staff) 1) forced the editorial board to endorse Dreher after voting for Davis and 2) maybe (?) told the union that represents Stranger workers to write a statement saying that the board really did prefer Dreher, not Davis, which Davis argues is impossible without interference by publisher Brady Walkinshaw, who knows Dreher. (He also knows Davis, by the way, and endorsed him personally for city council in 2023.)

Assuring readers that he “consulted heavily with two STEM PhDs” in his analysis, Davis spins out a theory in which the Stranger’s endorsement is “always decisive” for lefty candidates, across “hundreds” of past elections, and that there is a knowable, specific “Stranger bump” that applies to all of those candidates, and which Davis should have rightly received.

The whole tendentious essay is almost a textbook definition of correlation-causation confusion, all leading up to Davis’ argument that the new, crowdsourced “Lefty Cheat Sheet” can be a viable alternative to the Stranger’s endorsements, whose “buyout and behavior” have “dismayed and betrayed” its readers.

Candidates are often pissed that they don’t get endorsements. Davis is the first one I can recall who has turnsd a grudge against the Stranger into a proto-crusade against the paper’s endorsements in general. The truth, as Josh argued last week, is almost certainly much more banal—the Stranger met Davis, and they weren’t impressed by him. That should lead to self-reflection, not a multi-volume conspiracy theory.

4. We discussed a counter-complaint against Sayles, KCRHA’s handling of recent layoffs, and Davis’ post-election meltdown on last week’s episode of Seattle Nice—give it a listen if you haven’t already!