legislature, Urbanism

Ron Davis, Running for the State House on an Urbanist Platform, Says North Seattle Is Ready for a Change

By Erica C. Barnett

At least two Seattle candidates are betting that this is the year voters will decide to replace longstanding Democratic state legislators with progressive newcomers who want to move forward quickly with pro-housing, pro-worker agendas. If either succeeds, it will be a repudiation of the received wisdom that entrenched incumbents have an unshakeable advantage.

The first candidate, Ron Davis, will be familiar to PubliCola readers—he ran for City Council in northeast Seattle’s District 4 in the 2023 election, losing narrowly to Maritza Rivera in a year when moderates swept the council elections. Davis is running against 46th District Rep. Gerry Pollet. Pollet, appointed in 2011, leads an environmental group that advocates for cleaning up the Hanford nuclear site; as a legislator, he has worked to defeat or water down bills that would allow more housing in single-family neighborhoods.

In 2022, the state House Democratic Caucus voted to remove housing issues from Pollet’s committee—a decision that was quickly followed by several years of pro-housing legislation that forced cities dominated by suburban-style housing to allow apartments in neighborhoods, not just on busy streets.

Davis is hoping his North Seattle neighbors will get behind his explicitly urbanist agenda—and reject what he calls Pollet’s anti-growth approach.

“He’s been sort of the chief NIMBY in the Democratic caucus,” Davis said. “He does not want anything that involves changing the landscape in any way.” For instance, Davis points out Pollet’s opposite to accessory dwelling units, his support for adding additional environmental review to the long-delayed completion of the Burke-Gilman Trail through Ballard, and opposition to the low-density multifamily buildings known as “missing middle” housing.

“I think there is a set of people whose idea of being an environmentalist, like his, remains sort of stuck in the 1970s Malthusian, Thanos kind of worldview—like, ‘There should be less people in the world,'” Davis said. “I really don’t think that’s going to be most voters.'”

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(After we published this story, Pollet’s team contacted us to say that Pollet co-sponsored HB 1110, which required cities to allow up to six apartments per lot; that he co-sponsored a transit-oriented development bill we covered last year; and that he voted for a middle-housing bill, HB 1782, that included a huge number of loopholes and exemptions.

He also sponsored his own middle-housing bill,  HB 1981, which included poison-pill elements such as concurrency requirements—a common preemptive tactic for preventing new housing—and protections for historic buildings, trees, and “access to sunlight” in residential areas, among other provisions that would restrict new housing. Pollet sponsored amendments to water down both 1110 and 1782), for instance, and attempting to make it harder to build in areas at “high risk of displacement” where urbanists would argue more housing is also necessary.

Pollet has championed the inclusion of more affordable housing in new developments, backed rent stabilization bills, and supported adding back neighborhood centers that former mayor Bruce Harrell removed from Seattle’s comprehensive plan. However, he also argued the city should require private developers to ensure that up to 25 percent of all new units near transit are affordable to people making as little as 0 percent of median income (and up to 80 percent), an idea that seems designed to kill rather than encourage housing even without the bill’s language about protecting trees, historic structures, and access to sunlight.)

On the surface, there seem to be plenty of voters in North Seattle who agree, at least nominally, with Pollet’s slow-growth agenda; in 2024, running essentially unopposed (the other candidate was a Republican), Pollet got more than 83 percent of the vote.

But Davis thinks North Seattle voters will support his ambitious vision, which also includes universal child care; removing police accountability from the list of conditions police unions can negotiate as part of their contracts; replacing endless highway megaprojects with state investments in local transit; and using creative tools like revolving loan funds and state-funded Section 8-style vouchers to expand access to affordable housing and backfill federal funding cuts. All of this would probably require more funding than the state will take in from the “millionaire’s” income tax, which still has to withstand a court challenge after passing this year; Davis says that even with that tax in place, Washington’s tax system will still be more regressive than most other states.

Davis also said he wants to see stronger sanctions against ICE than Democrats in the legislature managed to muster so faåår.” I see our Democrats in Olympia saying, ‘Oh my God, there’s a fascist takeover of the federal government. It’s a threat to our basic freedoms,'” Davis said when we spoke late last month. “And then they’re like, ‘We have a mask ban that says maybe you could sue, but only if they violate your constitutional rights.’ I mean, God, are you fucking kidding?”

Davis said he’d support creating a state-funded “civilian response team” to serve as “the vanguard of resistance” if and when ICE descends on Washington state en masse. He’d also support legislation to “punish Vichy collaborators,” like a proposal last session that would have barred law enforcement agencies from hiring people who worked for ICE during the second Trump Administration.

In fact, Davis says he’d support going even further, by keeping them from taking “any state- or locally funded job, or contracting job, ever again.” Asked whether this kind of mass punishment paints every ICE employee with too broad a brush, Davis said, “I’m talking about who’s participating in this process [of targeting and abducting people perceived as immigrants] now. So you time bound it, and give people notice that they have six weeks or two weeks to quit or whatever.”

When Davis ran for council in 2023, he had a hyperlocal pitch: Elect me, and I’ll work to establish 15-minute neighborhoods and build “intermediate” housing solutions for people experiencing homelessness, including tiny house villages. Three years later, it’s clear that most of Seattle’s new urbanist policies were the result of action by the stateles  legislature, including Sens. Jessica Bateman (D-22, Olympia) and Emily Alvarado (D-34, Seattle), which forced cities to allow denser housing near transit stops and in traditional single-family neighborhoods, to widespread NIMBY chagrin.

Davis said his own experience “putting together the coalition that passed the parking reform bill”—a Bateman bill that placed limits on how much parking cities can require in new developments—made him realize “I could get more done in just a few months” in Olympia than the council, with its Seattle Process, often gets done in years. Not only that, he said, the state has the power and funding potential to pull off bigger things—like universal child care, housing, and supplementary funding for local buses.

When I mentioned the conventional wisdom that legislators don’t have much power until they’ve been around a while, Davis pointed to examples like Bateman (elected in 2020) and Alvarado (elected to the House in 2022). “It’s not as if they showed up and the skies parted,” Davis said, “but I do feel like they’ve moved much more quickly, and they haven’t listened the conventional wisdom, which is that you have to put your head down for many, many years” before getting anything done.

Next up: Progressive renter Hannah Sabio-Howell challenges Sen. Jamie Pedersen, a member of the state legislature for 20 years.

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City Council, Density, Mayor Wilson, Police

This Week on PubliCola: March 28, 2026

Surveillance cameras, high-tech toilets, an interview with pro-housing councilmember Eddie Lin, and more.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, March 23

Seattle Nice: Does Mayor Wilson Really Believe Police Surveillance Enhances Safety?

Was Mayor Katie Wilson’s decision to audit the safety and security of police surveillance cameras a classic “split-the-baby” compromise, a pro forma move with a foregone conclusion, or a thoughtful approach to ensure public safety for Seattle residents? That was our topic on Monday’s episode of Seattle Nice.

Tuesday, March 24

Councilmembers Say Wilson Must Turn On Stadium Cameras by June

Previewing a demand he would make official via press release later in the week, the City Council’s budget committee chair, Bob Kettle, said a new audit into whether police cameras are protecting people’s privacy better happen fast—an odd statement, don’t you think, from a man who drops “good governance” into every other sentence?

Rob Saka Won’t Use His Committee’s Actual Name

City councilmember Rob Saka won’t call his Transportation, Waterfront, & Seattle Center committee by its name! You can’t make him!

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What Is the NYU Policing Project, and Why Did the Police Chief Resign from their Board?

Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes was on the board of the NYU Policing Project, the group that’s doing the audit of SPD’s cameras, but resigned on Monday—three days after we asked the mayor’s office if his presence on the board represented a conflict of interest. The co-founder of the Policing Project, Barry Friedman, filled us in on the group’s history and what their audit in Seattle will involve.

Wednesday, March 25

Seattle Gives High-Tech Toilets Another Go, Starting in Pioneer Square

Seattle is a really hard place to find a restroom, especially if you don’t look like you’re coming right back to buy a latte. Throne, a D.C.-based toilet company, is coming to the Seattle area soon—including Pioneer Square and the stadium district— with its high-tech toilets, which use AI and user reviews to schedule maintenance and ban people who trash their freestanding restroom from using them again.

Friday, March 27

Seattle Councilmember Eddie Lin: “Go As Big As We Can” On Growth in Comp Plan

On our second episode of Seattle Nice this week, we talked to new City Councilmember and Land Use committee chair Eddie Lin, who’s overseeing the ongoing adoption of Seattle’s (ahem, the “One Seattle”) comprehensive plan. We talked with Lin about density, the fees Seattle charges developers to fund affordable housing (which could come down soon, at least temporarily), and his take on surveillance cameras.

Also this week: I appeared on KUOW’s Week In Review, hosted by Bill Radke, along with former KIRO host Dave Ross and KUOW’s Libby Denkman. We talked about surveillance cameras, the potential return of the Sonics, why light rail across Lake Washington took so long, and more.

And if you missed Mayor Wilson’s Town Hall meeting on surveillance cameras Friday night, I live-posted minute-by-minute updates and analysis on Bluesky.

City Council, Density, homelessness, podcasts, Police

Seattle Councilmember Eddie Lin: “Go As Big As We Can” On Growth in Comp Plan
Image via Seattle.gov

By Erica C. Barnett

This week on Seattle Nice, we talked to City Councilmember Eddie Lin, who’s serving his first term representing Southeast Seattle’s District 2. He’s the third council member to represent this district since 2025, when Tammy Morales resigned just one year into her second term; she was replaced by Mark Solomon, a crime prevention coordinator for SPD who served until Lin was elected in November.

As head of the council’s land use and comprehensive plan committees, Lin will oversee the work of updating the plan that guides the city’s growth and density for the next 10 years, as well as zoning and land use decisions like whether to grant developers a temporary break from the Mandatory Housing Affordability program that allowed taller, denser housing in some areas in exchange for fees that fund affordable housing.

We talked to Lin about those fees and whether they’re working as designed. While MHA has brought in tens of millions a year for affordable housing, developers argue it has increasingly squelched development, by adding significant costs at a time when market-rate housing developments barely pencil out. Lin talked (favorably but cautiously) about a different concept called Planned Inclusionary Zoning, which requires developers to build affordable housing but offers them tax breaks, rather than charging a fee, to make it more feasible for them to build.

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“We absolutely want to go as big as we can” in the remaining parts of the comp plan, Lin said, by expanding the areas where housing is allowed (as The Urbanist pointed out recently, the city’s planning department actually reduced density along several arterials in wealthy neighborhoods). Lin said “we need to be going deeper into the neighborhoods” with density, as well as restoring the neighborhood centers former mayor Bruce Harrell removed from the plan, nodes of density where modest apartment buildings will be allowed.

We also asked Lin about the new dynamics on the council, Mayor Wilson’s new plan to build tiny house villages all over the city, and police surveillance cameras, a program Wilson once opposed and now seems likely to expand.

After pointing out that many people want cameras in their neighborhoods, including people who live in the Chinatown-International District, Lin said he’s still not happy that the cameras were expanded without any analysis of whether the “pilot” program launched last year (and immediately expanded) was effective and protected people’s privacy. His outstanding concerns, Lin added, have to do with the potential for the footage to end up in the hands of the Trump Administration, which could use it for immigration enforcement or to target people seeking gender-affirming or reproductive care. That’s the focus of an audit Wilson has commissioned, but hardly the only reason to question mass surveillance by local police.

homelessness

Seattle Gives High-Tech Toilets Another Go, Starting in Pioneer Square

 

One rendering of what the freestanding toilets might look like in Pioneer Square.

By Erica C. Barnett

Anyone who has walked through Seattle’s densest neighborhoods—First Hill, downtown, Capitol Hill—knows that it’s damn near impossible to find a public restroom outside libraries, parks, and tourist-heavy areas like Seattle Center and Pike Place Market. Past efforts to add public restrooms have ended poorly; in 2008, after spending around $5 million on installation, cleaning, and maintenance, the city tore down five freestandimg restrooms installed just four years earlier downtown and on Broadway in Capitol Hill.

During the pandemic, Seattle actually locked existing public restrooms and replaced them with port-a-potties, euphemistically referred to as “comfort stations.” Plans to install something as minimal as freestanding sinks for handwashing got ground up in the gears of concern-trolling masquerading as public process: How will the city maintain them? How can we keep homeless people from ruining them? Won’t people be at risk of tripping if there’s a hose on the sidewalk?

Given that history, it’s tempting to assume that the latest proposal for public restrooms, from a D.C.-based company called Throne Labs, will also run headlong into the Seattle process. But so far, the company’s proposal—a total of 11 freestanding restrooms across the region, each at cost of around $100,000 a year—is moving forward without too much friction. (Really straining—sorry!!—to avoid toilet analogies here). The Pioneer Square Preservation Board recently approved Throne’s proposal to add two of its restrooms in the historic district—a surprising turn from a board whose members recently debated allowing bike parking because it would require ahistorical flex posts and paint on the ground. The vinyl-clad loos have to be wrapped in images of trees, but won’t have to mimic historic bricks, an idea that was proposed and rejected.

The toilets—smaller than a trailer, but bigger than a Port-a-Potty—use a pump system called a vacuum macerator that pulls waste upward and allows water to flow down into toilets and sinks, allowing them to have running water without expensive plumbing. A bigger innovation (or downside, if you prefer your toilets low-tech and accessible right this second) is that the new restrooms only be accessible via an app, a QR code, text message, or an entry card. The first three options allow Throne to keep track of user ratings and to pinpoint which users are causing damage or overstaying the restrooms’ ten-minute limit, while the fourth is intended to make the restrooms accessible to anyone who doesn’t have a working phone.

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The proposed toilets, which will be installed through a contract with the Seattle Department of Transportation, are “not a perfect solution, but right now, if you have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the day, there’s nothing for anyone unless you go to spend money in a business,” said Lisa Howard, executive director of the Alliance for Pioneer Square. “The other advantage of the pilot is that they’re looking at things that didn’t work out for X, Y, or Z reasons” in the past, Howard said.

Throne is working on several other contracts with local transportation agencies, including King County Metro, whose spokesman confirmed that it will be replacing two existing portable restrooms at the Burien Transit Center and the Aurora Village Transit Center in Shoreline at an estimated cost of $270,000 a year.

Jessica Heinzelman, who co-founded Throne Labs along with Fletcher Wilson and Ben Clark, said Throne toilets have succeeded in places where other types of mobile restrooms have failed because they “create accountability”—if someone trashes a restroom or smokes in it, for instance, the company can generally pinpoint their identity using sensors in the unit or from negative user reviews immediately after that person left.

“What we learned as we started talking to folks in the public space is, even when there are restrooms, if it’s getting vandalized, or if there’s shit smeared all over the wall, they just shut it down, and they don’t necessarily have the operational capacity to deal with that, and so people kind of stop counting on them,” Heinzelman said. “So [the question was], How do you offer publicly available private space and keep it nice and mitigate against misuse [by] the 1 percent of users that fuck up bathrooms for the other 99 percent?”

SDOT public space manager Joel Miller acknowledged that this kind of “accountability” could deprive some users of restroom access. “If somebody is repeatedly damaging the unit so it is going offline and other people can’t use it, that user would eventually lose access,” Miller said. “It’s not the perfect solution, that we have someone that might need access lose access, but it’s better than everybody losing access because the unit repeatedly goes offline.”

Heinzelman said that even in “high-risk” locations like MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, where lots of homeless people hang out and live, fewer than 1 percent of users end up getting banned.

“I think partially it’s because if you give people the dignity and respect of having a nice space where they have enough room to change clothes, they have running water, and they can wash their their face, they want to keep it.” Heinzelman said. She confirmed that Throne hasn’t had any discussions about card distribution with local homeless service providers, but said they plan to do so once they’ve finalized their contracts. (PubliCola contacted several local service providers and only one had heard about the restrooms).

SDOT’s Miller says the city hopes to get the restrooms up and running in Pioneer Square before the World Cup games in June. One of the two restrooms will be located outside the stadiums at First Ave S and S. Charles Street; the other will be at Second Ave. S and S. Washington St.—about a block away from PubliCola’s office.

Both Heinzelman and Miller said the restrooms have to appeal to the general public, not just unsheltered people with fewer options. “We’re talking about it as a homeless issue, and we felt like the homeless absolutely need it, but you have a sustainability problem” if the restrooms are seen as a homeless service, Henzelman said. “When budgets are slashed, what gets cut? It’s the services for the people that don’t vote or can’t advocate for themselves. [We want to] create a service that everyone wants to use and everyone wants to fund because they are personally benefiting from it, but that also enables all members of society to use it.”

Mayor Wilson, Police

What Is the NYU Policing Project, and Why Did the Police Chief Resign from their Board?

Until Monday, Police Chief Shon Barnes was on the board of the Policing Project, which Mayor Wilson has tapped to do a security audit of police surveillance cameras here.

By Erica C. Barnett

On Monday, PubliCola exclusively confirmed, Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes abruptly stepped down from the advisory board of New York University’s Policing Project— the organization that Mayor Katie Wilson tapped to perform a data and security audit of Seattle’s police surveillance cameras. Barnes joined the board in late 2025.

We reached out to the mayor’s office about the potential conflict of interest first thing Monday morning. Initially, a spokesman for Wilson told PubliCola that the “mayor is aware of the chief serving on that board” but did not indicate she had any concerns.

Late this morning, the spokesman, Sage Wilson (no relation), said Barnes “was not consulted in the selection of the NYU Policing Project. He chose to resign from the advisory board after the decision on the audit was made to ensure the audit process instills the highest degree of confidence.” The mayor’s office did not say whether they asked Barnes to step down.

In a statement, Barnes said he stepped down to “avoid any potential conflict of interest or appearance of impropriety. … I do not want my service to cast any doubt on the auditors’ work, which I am confident would meet the highest ethical and professional standards regardless of my service on the advisory board.”

Barnes noted that he hasn’t actually met yet with the board, which holds meetings infrequently, adding that “advisory board members do not influence or have insight into the research conducted by The Policing Project.”

Wilson (the spokesman, not the mayor) said Barnes was on the board “because he is nationally recognized as a leader on police accountability issues.”

The NYU Policing Project has done many surveillance evaluations, including a 2020 analysis of a Baltimore aerial and ground surveillance program that captured footage from an airplane and retained it indefinitely. That audit concluded that the program, which allowed police to track individual people both in real time and after the fact, had the strong potential for violating people’s civil rights and was subject to likely “mission creep.” After it came out, the Fourth Circuit found the program violated the Fourth Amendment.

According to the Policing Project’s founder and faculty advisor, NYU Law professor Barry Friedman, the Policing Project’s audit team generally looks at things like “retention limits, who has access [to footage], what kind of training they need to have, [and] what kind of logging is there about the reason databases were reviewed,” along with questions about a department’s use of AI analysis and algorithms to make decisions that result in arrests. “And at the end, we write a report.” Often, Friedman said, that report will include an analysis of potential harms and recommended “guard rails”—policies that can prevent a technology from being misused by the people operating it.

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For instance, the Policing Project has raised questions about how long a department is retaining footage or other personal information and for what purpose. In Baltimore, which had a 45-day retention period for aerial footage, their audit revealed that the department was actually holding on to footage more or less indefinitely. SPD’s current policy allows the department to retain license reader footage that’s “flagged” by a license reader for 90 days, although a new state law will reduce that to 21 days.

The project receives funding from across the political spectrum; its current funders include the right-wing Koch Foundation and Cato Institute as well as racial equity groups like Justice Catalyst.

Axon, the company that provides Seattle’s surveillance cameras and automated license readers as well as Tasers, funded the Policing Project’s work on the company’s AI Ethics Board between 2019 and 2022. After Axon announced plans to build Taser drones and use them to respond to school shootings, the Policing Project resigned from its role staffing the board, and Friedman stepped down from the board, along with eight other board members. Mark 43, the computer-aided dispatch program, provided funding in the past but isn’t currently a funder, according to Friedman.

One thing the Policing Project’s audit won’t cover is whether SPD’s surveillance system is accomplishing its stated goals, which, at various times, have included deterrence and crime prevention as well as solving crimes that couldn’t be solved without police surveillance. “You really need social scientists to do that work,” Friedman said. “I’m super interested in that question, and it turns out how to be really hard social science, because you have to figure out [things like ‘What’s a control group?’ and ‘How do you know they couldn’t have solved it in other way?'”

The city is contracting with the University of Pennsylvania’s Crime and Justice Policy Lab to do an analysis of the cameras’ effectiveness. According to SPD’s website, “Successful implementation of CCTV will  be “indicated by a decrease in violent crime, priority one response times, no increase or a decline in measures of police over-presence, measure of disparate impact, and an increase in perceptions of trust and safety.”

City Council, discrimination, Mayor Wilson, Police

Councilmembers Say Wilson Must Turn On Stadium Cameras by June, Rob Saka Won’t Use His Committee’s Actual Name
And more details about the city’s settlement with an officer who sued over alleged racial and gender discrimination.

1. Highlighting a Monday update to last week’s story about the settlement between the city and SPD officer Denise “Cookie” Bouldin, who filed a lawsuit in 2023 alleging racial and gender discrimination: The city will pay Bouldin $750,000, according to the settlement agreement. 

SPD has settled a number of discrimination lawsuits in recent years, for amounts ranging from around $200,000 (paid to SPD sergeant John O’Neil, who was himself the subject of multiple discrimination complaints) to $3 million (paid to police captain Deanna Nollette, who claimed former chief Adrian Diaz discriminated and retaliated against her by demoting her and moving her to overnight duty after she alleged discrimination.

Bouldin, best known for her chess club for students in Rainier Beach, claimed in her lawsuit that her fellow officers and SPD officials subjected her to “race and gender discrimination on a daily basis that had “been ongoing and continuous throughout her entire career.”

2.  Citing concerns about potential attempts by ICE and other federal agencies to access camera footage and data, Mayor Katie Wilson said last week that she’ll hold off on expanding the Seattle Police Department’s camera surveillance program until an audit into the privacy and security of SPD’s camera operations is complete.

Some council members, including Maritza Rivera and Bob Kettle, expressed concern on Tuesday that the audit will take too long, arguing that Wilson needs to turn on the cameras that will be installed around the stadiums in advance of the World Cup games in June. Wilson said the city will not turn the cameras on unless there’s a “credible threat.”

Committee chair Kettle, a former Navy intelligence officer, said this was inadequate, given how often major terrorist attacks have not involved a credible threat.

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“As somebody who worked in the intelligence security world, I think about 9/11. I think about being in European Command and Germany during the East Africa bombings, we were well aware of al Qaeda and bin Laden. … I was one of those people that read the chatter in the leadup to 9/11 and on 911 was there a credible threat, warning that al Qaeda was going to use planes as weapons to go into buildings? No. No, there wasn’t.”

“And it should be noted too,” Kettle continued, “that we’re in a heightened threat environment especially because of the Iran war. And it’s important to note that Iran was scheduled to play here on Pride weekend. And I think it’s important, among different other reasons, to also look out for LGBTQ+ community.” (Iran’s participation in World Cup games in the US remains up in the air.)

Kettle also chided camera opponents who “think they know the program” but, according to him, don’t. “They think they know all the decisions that went into the program, to include incorporating Seattle values, incorporating the idea that we’re not going to include facial recognition.”

Later in the meeting, the committee approved a “pause” on SPD’s use of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) on patrol cars and parking enforcement vehicles, which will put Seattle in compliance with a new state law banning the use of ALPRs near places of worship, food banks, immigration facilities, schools, and health care facilities that provide reproductive or gender-affirming health care.

Long before Trump was reelected, the city’s own Surveillance Working Group strongly recommended against installing the cameras at all, based on concerns about privacy and the risk of “disparate impacts … on minority communities.”

3. One of the oddest things that routinely happens at Seattle City Council meetings these days is that Councilmember Rob Saka refuses to refer to his committee by its actual name. For three years running, Saka has headed up the transportation committee, which was expanded this year to include arts and the Seattle Center, giving it the acronym TASC.

But Saka doesn’t use that acronym. Instead, he insists on referring to his committee as “STEPS,” short for “Safety, Transportation, Engineering Projects, Sports and Experiences.” He uses this not-quite-acronym consistently across all platforms—from the City Council dais to his Instagram, where he recently shortened the name to “Sports and Experiences, otherwise known as STEPS.”

Saka’s committee does not deal directly with public safety, engineering (beyond transportation projects), sports, or general “experiences.”

Saka has reportedly been asked more than once to refer to his committee by its actual name. Nevertheless, he persists. He even announced the “informal name” in a formal press release earlier this year.