Courts, Mayor Wilson, Parks

King County Assessor Says He Can’t Wear Ankle Monitor In Stalking Case Due to Medical Condition, Burien Puts City Manager on Leave, and More

1. King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson failed to appear at his court hearing in Seattle Municipal Court on Tuesday, where he was scheduled to explain why “medical issues” prevent him from wearing an ankle monitor while he awaits trial on charges of stalking his ex-fiancée, Lee Keller. Wilson’s attorney said his client was confused about the date. The court will hold another hearing tomorrow so that Wilson can attend.

According to a court filing, Wilson told a staffer for the company that provides GPS monitors, Sentinel, that he can’t wear a monitor because he “must regularly soak both legs in water to help reduce swelling” from a medical condition. “Sentinel policy states that the GPS device must not be submerged in water,” the “failure to enroll” filing says. Wilson also said he has to wear compression socks and “reported the device felt tight and indicated that additional space would be necessary to allow him to properly remove and put on his compression socks. Due to these factors Sentinel did not enroll Mr. Wilson on the GPS with exclusion zones obligation.”

Wilson was arrested earlier this year after showing up repeatedly outside Keller’s home in violation of an existing no-contact order. In court filings last year, Keller detailed Wilson’s history of stalking and harassing her over a period of several years. Seattle Municipal Court pro tem judge Noah Weil issued a five-year no-contact order against Wilson last week  and ordered him to wear a GPS monitor that would alert Keller if Wilson comes within 1,000 feet of her. During that hearing, Wilson said he would have “no problem” complying; the ankle monitor was meant as an assurance that he would not violate this protection order as he has with previous orders to stay away from Keller.

2. The Burien City Council decided, in a closed-door executive session, to place city manager Adolfo Bailon on administrative leave last night, voting 4-3 to remove him and direct the city’s contract interim city attorney, Ann Marie Soto, to find an interim replacement.

The reason the city has a contract city attorney is that Bailon summarily fired former City Attorney Garmon Newsom III earlier this month, PubliCola has learned. (Newsom would have been the person providing legal advice to the council as they discussed whether and how to remove Bailon). This could be among the reasons the council’s four progressive members voted to place Bailon on leave after a lengthy executive session with Soto Tuesday night.

Officially, the council has not given a reason for removing Bailon from his position, and PubliCola was unable to get any councilmember to comment on the record about what led them to consider removing him in the first place. (Executive sessions are closed to the public and considered attorney-client privileged.)

However, it’s not hard to imagine any number of possible reasons beyond Bailon’s decision to fire the city attorney. Back in 2023, the city council (then dominated by more conservative members) stood by Bailon as he shot down efforts to stand up a homeless shelter on land owned by the city, threatened legal action against a church that hosted an encampment, turned away $1 million in shelter funding from King County, and more.

Bailon also berated council members who disagreed with his political views on homelessness, filed a complaint against Councilmember Hugo Garcia over  tweets, demanded the removal of the King County sheriff’s deputy who served as Burien’s police chief, and apparently spent much of his time calling 911 on unsheltered people in the park outside his office, among many other actions that arguably stretched the limits of his authority as a city employee.

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Under Burien’s city manager-council form of governance, every city employee technically works for the city manager, and he works for the seven-member city council. Three years ago, an outside firm resigned over what they described as the council’s refusal to take critical evaluation of Bailon’s performance seriously. With a council less sympathetic to Bailon’s actions and political opinions, he could be on his way out after four years in the role, for which he is paid around $240,000.

3. Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson announced the dates for Seattle’s annual “Bicycle Weekends” event, in which the city opens up Lake Washington Boulevard in Seward Park to cyclists and pedestrians during summer weekends. And unlike her predecessor, who killed longstanding plans to install stop signs and speed humps on the dangerous lakefront boulevard, Wilson is expanding the safe-street program to include every summer weekend and three holidays.

That means that cyclists and pedestrians, including wheelchair users, will have access to the roadway Under Harrell, who lives nearby, the car-free celebration happened only on alternate weekends, for a total of 20 days. Wilson is expanding that to 15 summer weekends and a total of 33 days, including three holidays. Details (including where drivers can park outside the car-free zone) on the city’s website.

homelessness, Mayor Wilson, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Mayor Wilson’s Shelter Plan, King County Assessor’s Stalking Charges, an Ambitious Library Levy, and More

By Erica C. Barnett

If you aren’t listening to Seattle Nice, the weekly podcast I co-host along with political consultant (and my former Stranger colleague) Sandeep Kaushik and longtime reporter and producer David Hyde, now’s a great time to tune in—in the last couple months, we’ve talked to City Councilmember Eddie Lin about plans to increase density across the city, debated Mayor Katie Wilson’s apparent plan to move forward with the police surveillance cameras she once opposed, and talked to Downtown Seattle Association director Jon Scholes about the DSA’s unusually sunny forecast for the future of downtown.

This week, we talked about the mayor’s plan to build 500 new tiny house village-style shelter units by this summer, stalking charges against the King County Assessor (who has refused to step down despite a unanimous King County Council vote demanding his resignation), and the latest library levy, which Sandeep said was just another example of Seattle’s willingness to pay any amount of taxes for any purpose.

Sandeep said he was impressed by the mayor’s announcement last week that the city will open 75 new shelter beds in Interbay and expand tiny house villages in two other locations. The biggest unheralded news, he thought, was the announcement that T-Mobile, Starbucks, and Microsoft are all helping to fund the mayor’s initial shelter push, kicking in around $3 million so far.

As someone who’s genuinely excited by Wilson’s ambitious agenda but skeptical about her ability to upend the Seattle Process, I argued it’s too early to declare victory—noting, for instance, that the last time the city participated in a privately backed venture to address homelessness, the “Partnership for Zero” effort to eliminate visible homelessness downtown, they got burned—that initiative, spearheaded by the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, fell apart when it proved harder to house people directly from the street than the homelessness agency anticipated, and funders pulled out, forcing the partnership to shut down in 2023.

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People who’ve been around Seattle’s homelessness system for a while say they’re hopeful about the mayor’s plan, but I’ve also heard concerns that it’s too focused on a single shelter type—tiny house villages—and too optimistic about the timeline for siting nearly 1,000 more tiny house units around the city in the next nine months. Another concern is cost—Wilson’s team has said the average tiny house unit will cost $28,000, all in, but that estimate seems low, given the higher cost of existing villages with the kind of wraparound services and 24/7 security Wilson has suggested will be available at each site.

All that said, you know who didn’t really even bother trying to add shelter in Seattle? Wilson’s predecessor Bruce Harrell, who promised to add 2,000 “shelter or housing” units by the end of his term but ended up using dubious math (taking credit for shelters that were underway by the time he took office, for instance) to claim he had actually added 3,000. (In reality, by the end of Harrell’s term, there were around the same number of shelter beds in Seattle as when he took office). In other words, even if Wilson gets no further than the initial 100 or so additional tiny houses she announced last week, she’ll have increased shelter more than Harrell did in his entire four years in office.

City Council, Courts, Density, homelessness, housing, Mayor Wilson

This Week on PubliCola: April 11, 2026

Shelter expansion, anti-apartment pushback, Northeast Seattle gets dedicated cops, and a bunch of other stories you may have missed this week.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, April 6

Seattle Nice: Mayor Wilson Wants to Expand Housing Faster

On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we talked about how Mayor Katie Wilson’s personal experience renting in Seattle may have impacted her decision to go “bigger, taller, and faster” on the city’s comprehensive plan. We also talked about City Councilmember Maritza Rivera’s still-vague proposal to “audit the Human Services Department.”

Councilmember Rivera Wants to Audit Human Services

Speaking of which, here’s what we know about that proposal: Rivera believes that in light of King County’s audit, which found serious problems with some its own human services contracts, the city should audit its own human services contracts. The auditor’s office told us this would be a long, involved process; generally, their audits are more focused and happen at the direction of more than just one councilmember.

Tuesday, April 7

Seattle Council Hears from Renters Who Want Quality of Life and Homeowners Who Want to Keep Neighborhoods to Themselves

A meeting on the proposed comprehensive plan update, which could allow some apartments in parts of the city that are not directly on large, polluting arterial roads and highways, broke down along predictable lines: Renters and housing advocates asked for the right to live in Seattle’s quieter neighborhoods, and housing opponents argued that allowing apartments near them would be tantamount to clear-cutting Seattle, murdering orcas, and making birds go extinct.

Wednesday, April 8

SPD Dedicates Three Officers to Magnuson Park, Citing Success with “Disorder” and Property Crimes During Pilot

The Seattle Police Department is permanently assigning three officers to the area around Magnuson Park, a large lakefront park in an affluent part of Northeast Seattle where residents, and Councilmember Rivera, have been calling for more cops to crack down on loud summertime parties and street racing. The park is home to hundreds of low-income residents who live in apartments run by two nonprofits; it’s also where police shot and killed Charleena Lyles, a woman who called 911 during a mental-health crisis.

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Thursday, April 9

Larger Library Levy Moves Forward

The city council added nearly $70 million to a $410 million library levy renewal that will be on the ballot this year, including new funds for repairs and maintenance at the downtown library, air conditioning for libraries that don’t have it, and more electronic copies of popular books. Rivera voted against every amendment, citing the need for fiscal responsibility as the city approaches a state-imposed cap on property tax levies.

Founder of AI Worker Surveillance Startup Appointed to Ethics Commission

Evan Smith, formerly of Starbucks, created a system for companies to spy on retail workers by recording all their conversations and using AI to analyze their speech for compliance with company policy. Councilmembers Rivera and Joy Hollingsworth nominated him to serve on the city’s Ethics and Elections Commission.

County Assessor Pleads Not Guilty to Stalking, Must Wear Ankle Monitor in Five-Year No Contact Order

John Arthur Wilson, who has refused to step down from his elected role as King County Assessor despite being arrested for stalking and harassing his ex-fiancée, was slapped with a five-year no-contact order while awaiting trial on stalking charges. He’ll have to wear an ankle monitor to ensure he doesn’t come within 1,000 feet of his ex; his term expires at the end of this year.

Friday, April 10

Developers Ask for Mandatory Affordable Housing Fee Holiday as Permits for New Apartments Dry Up

Seven years ago, the city approved Mandatory Housing Affordability fees on new development; the fees fund affordable housing projects, or developers can build affordable units on site. Since then, development has slackened and the cost of building has gone up, and developers say the fees are a major reason. Now, they’re asking the city to lower the fees temporarily. But the request raises larger questions about how Seattle funds affordable housing, and whether it’s smart to treat apartments like a negative thing by charging special fees on new development.

Also this week: I covered two stories exclusively on Bluesky.

First, the mayor met with opponents of police surveillance cameras in a Zoom town hall that was clearly frustrating for both sides. (I attended a watch party at Stoup on Capitol Hill.) Wilson seems committed to turning on the cameras proposed by her predecessor, Bruce Harrell, and approved by the previous city council, and opponents of police surveillance feel betrayed by the mayor they supported, in part, because they thought she shared their commitment to getting rid of the cameras.

Second, Wilson announced that the city has secured a site for the first 75 units of new shelter of her term—a small step toward the 1,000 new shelter units she promised during her first year. The announcement came at a public meeting where the mayor moderated a panel and took questions from the public, a dramatic departure from the way most previous mayors have rolled out big announcements.

I also talked about these stories and more on Hacks and Wonks with Crystal Fincher on Friday; we also discussed the lawsuit that was filed this week to stop the state’s new high-earners’ income tax, some sheriff’s opposition to a new law saying they can’t serve if their law enforcement certification has been revoked, and more.

 

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City Council, Development, housing

Developers Ask for Mandatory Affordable Housing Fee Holiday as Permits for New Apartments Dry Up

By Erica C. Barnett

A group of apartment builders is asking Mayor Katie Wilson and the City Council to consider rolling back the fees they pay every time they build new housing. The developers, calling themselves the Seattle Housing Roundtable, are asking the city to reduce Mandatory Housing Affordability fees by 90 percent this year, followed by an 80 percent reduction next year and a 75 percent reduction in 2028, with a goal of permanent MHA reforms by the following year.

According to Ian Morrison, an attorney with the land use firm McCullough Hill, MHA “was a good idea when it was originally envisioned, at a time when interest rates were much lower and the economic climate was a lot more positive and predictable.” But, he added, “What we’re seeing now, using the city’s own data, is MHA as a part of a project that was viable in the late 2010s no longer work.   That means housing will not be built in Seattle today.”

The Seattle City Council approved MHA in 2019 as the final component of former mayor Ed Murray’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA). The program made developers build affordable housing or pay a fee every time they built new apartments in Seattle’s multifamily areas (at the time, Seattle still had single-family zoning). In exchange, they were allowed to build more densely.  The framework took for granted that new market-rate apartments have a negative impact on neighborhoods that developers must mitigate by funding affordable housing.

This consensus has shifted just in the seven years MHA has been in effect, as scarcity has made apartments increasingly unaffordable and more people understand that density is an environmental necessity and an answer to growing demand for housing. At the same time, the funding MHA produces for affordable housing has plunged from a high of $74 million in 2021 to just $22 million last year as development has slowed. Last year, developers filed applications to build fewer than 2,000 new apartment buildings, a drop of almost 90 percent from a peak of 17,400 units in 2020.

Developers and land use attorneys we spoke to seemed reluctant to say outright that the city should get rid of MHA altogether, although it negatively impacts their bottom line. Holly Golden, a land use attorney at HCMP Law Offices, said that with lower fees, “you’d still see millions of dollars of MHA fees, plus new construction jobs and permit fees to keep [the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections running during the building downturn. … Getting projects started provides a huge financial benefit to the city budget at a time when they really need it.”

Taxes on construction are inherently volatile, and there’s a real question about whether MHA aligns with the reality of Seattle as a majority-renter city with an acute housing shortage. If the city agrees to an MHA “holiday” and development rebounds, a surge in other funding sources like the Real Estate Excise Tax could help offset the loss of MHA dollars.

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Not every jurisdiction funds affordable housing by charging a fee on development. PubliCola has reported on a concept called funded inclusionary zoning, in which developers get tax breaks for including affordable housing in their projects. The concept flips the script on development, treating density (i.e. apartments, i.e. renters) as a good thing while also ensuring that affordable housing gets built. Developers aren’t charitable organizations—if a project doesn’t make sense to them, they won’t build it—so instead of penalizing new housing with fees, cities like Portland are trying incentives to build new housing at all income levels.

“There are ways to ensure that inclusionary zoning programs work for the long term and are well calibrated to ensure they don’t impede housing,” Morrison said. “But getting those details right takes time.”

Eddie Lin, the head of the city council’s land use committee, told us on a recent episode of Seattle Nice that he’s “open to a temporary reduction in MHA fees. It needs to be tailored to the right size to get construction going, but not more than we need.”

Eliminating MHA completely, Lin continued, is a nonstarter; the fee, he said, remains “incredibly important for developing additional affordable housing. … We want to be mindful of not giving away too much more than we need to.” MHA reform, he said, might include addressing the fact that developers currently have to pay a fee for building in low-rise zones but not in neighborhood residential—the former single-family zones that now allow essentially the same density as low-rise areas.

Ray Connell, managing director at the developer Holland Partner Group, said it’s possible the impact of MHA and other taxes and regulations in real time by looking east across Lake Washington. “All the cranes are in Redmond,” where fees are lower, “so projects get started,” Connell said. “It’s amazing to go over there and see a bunch of new projects and cranes in the sky. Why is it happening over there? It’s not a hard cost issue, and it’s not an interest rate issue. Yes, it’s the jobs… but it’s also the additional fees that we have to face on this side of the lake.”

Redmond recently adopted an aggressive inclusionary zoning package that says 10 percent of all new units in housing with 10 or more units must be affordable. In four years, Connell said, “there won’t be cranes in certain areas of Redmond. … We can’t get those areas of Redmond to work anymore.”

Courts, King County

County Assessor Pleads Not Guilty to Stalking, Must Wear Ankle Monitor in Five-Year No Contact Order

By Erica C. Barnett

King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson will have to wear an ankle monitor and stay 1,000 feet away from his ex-fiancée, Seattle PR consultant Lee Keller, while he awaits trial on the two charges of violating a no-contact order Keller obtained against him last year. Wilson pled not guilty to both charges; his next pretrial hearing is scheduled for May 5. The no-contact order is for five years, expiring in 2031.

Wilson was arrested last July for showing up repeatedly at Keller’s home while a no-contact order was in effect. Keller accused Wilson of stalking and coercive control; the two reconciled briefly while the restraining order was in effect. Before his arrest, Wilson used a photo taken during that period in which Keller was smiling to argue in court that he posed no danger to her and that the order should be lifted.

According to a Seattle Municipal Court spokesperson, the company that provides GPS monitoring to the city, Sentinel, has to inform the court if a defendant violates a no-contact order. In domestic violence cases, the victim can opt in to an app that alerts them if the person under the order comes within 1,000 feet of wherever they are. Keller said she plans to use the app.

Keller told PubliCola by email that she’s “deeply grateful to the Judge, the Seattle Police, the City of Seattle and the prosecuting attorney’s office for their careful work around this. I feel better knowing there are people keeping track of his whereabouts. I just hope this is not prolonged and that my protection order stays in place for the longest period possible. And that he now understands the seriousness of breaking the law.”

The no-contact order prohibits Wilson from messaging, emailing, or calling Keller or from speaking to or going near her even if she “invites or allows you to violate the order’s prohibitions.” It does not prohibit Wilson from creating social media posts that subtly allude to Keller, which she has accused him of doing in the past.

Wilson appeared virtually at Wednesday’s hearing, and said little more than “I’m more than happy to comply with the no contact [order].”

The King County Council voted unanimously last year to demand Wilson’s resignation. Assuming he remains defiant—last month, he stood up and waved when a speaker at a Downtown Seattle Association event invited elected officials to stand for applause—he’ll be in office for the rest of 2026. He is not running for reelection.

City Council

Larger Library Levy Moves Forward; Founder of AI Worker Surveillance Startup Appointed to Ethics Commission
Seattle librarian Betsy Kluck-Keil holds up a “visual aid” at the library levy committee meeting Wednesday—a t-shirt that reads, “library > Google”

1. The Seattle City Council’s library levy committee, which includes all nine councilmembers, approved amendments to this year’s library levy proposal that will add almost $70 million to Mayor Katie Wilson’s initial $410 million proposal. Maritza Rivera, who chairs the committee, voted against every one of her colleagues’ amendments, saying that while “I love libraries,” increasing the levy further was fiscally irresponsible.

“With the proposed package, we would have $310 million left for future levies, including the housing theft and transportation levies. If all the amendments pass today, then we will only have $230 million left. The additions from the amendments today, while worthy, are increasing items that are already in the mayor’s package at a time when we can’t afford more. We know there are other needs that are coming. Let’s face it, we’re only in year two of this madman in the President’s president’s seat. Who knows? Who knows what else we will have to deal with. And of course, everyone keeps talking about affordability in Seattle these days, that seems more real than ever.

The city faces a state-mandated property tax cap of $3.60 per $1,000 in home value; the new levy, which is virtually certain to pass, will leave Seattle with just $310 million in capacity for future levies, such as the housing and transportation levies, Rivera said.

“If I felt that we could add this levy without jeopardizing future levies or adding to our affordability crisis, I too would add more,” Rivera said. “We don’t have a crystal ball to predict what will happen in the future. We’re operating with the knowledge that we have today. There is no judgment here. There is this is not about who loves the libraries more. This is about fiscal responsibility and our ability to pay for all our needs.”

The levy cap is a real, looming issue, and one the council should arguably be taking on more directly—for instance, by advocating for broad changes to property tax law in Olympia. If it isn’t the library levy, it will be the Seattle Transit Measure, or the next transportation levy, or election funding, or Seattle Center—whatever unlucky levy happens to fall in a year that Seattle’s property taxes finally touch the cap.

The amendments the committee passed include funding for repairs and maintenance at the Central Library downtown, seismic upgrades at the Columbia Branch library, multilingual children’s programming, and elevator and escalator maintenance, and air conditioning in libraries that current lack it. In an apparent response to Rivera’s comment, last month, that the city has federal FEMA dollars coming in to pay for cooling systems in five libraries, Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck said, “I would note that trusting our library’s future to Donald Trump’s FEMA is irresponsible.”

Deferring maintenance always leads to higher costs down the line, Rinck added. “Any pennies we pinch now will will cost us dollars seven years from now.”

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2. On Thursday, the city council’s governance committee voted unanimously (with three councilmembers present) to appoint Evan Smith, the founder of a company called Ethosphere, to serve on the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission. Ethosphere sells AI software to retail companies so that they can spy on their sales associates—or, as a boosterish Geekwire profile put it, “help associates improve their performance while giving managers better visibility into what drives sales.”

Retail companies that use Ethosphere’s system—and it’s unclear at this point which, if any, retailers have signed up—will require floor staff to wear microphones that record every conversation they have on their shift; these recordings get transcribed and analyzed by AI large language models “to assess how well employees followed the brand’s selling approach,” according to Geekwire. Sales associates the AI finds out of compliance could be penalized, retrained, or fired.

For anyone who’s worked retail, the dystopian nature of this kind of “productivity” software is obvious; selling khakis for minimum wage could soon mean submitting to intense surveillance by companies that consider workers interchangeable sales pitch dissemination machines.

None of that is directly related to the work of the ethics commission, which decides whether elected officials have violated ethics and elections law, among other responsibilities. But it does indicate on which side of the management-worker divide Smith’s sympathies fall. Smith didn’t show up for his nomination hearing on Thursday; according to Ethics and Elections director Wayne Barnett, he was “in San Francisco.”