public safety, Taxes

Seattle Considers Using Special Fire District Tax to Close Budget Deficit
Photo by Joe Mabel, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson and the City Council are discussing whether to close a nearly $150 million budget shortfall by moving much of the Seattle Fire Department’s budget out of the city’s general fund by creating a special fire district, which—if approved by voters—could levy additional property taxes, freeing up hundreds of millions of general budget dollars for other purposes.

Wilson’s office confirmed that they are working with the fire department on a potential fire district, saying the city can no longer rely on the usual budget tricks or cuts alone to address a $175 million deficit  next year, which amounts to about 10 percent of the city’s general fund. “The gap is far too large to address with the kinds of temporary fixes that have been used in the past, and closing this deficit with cuts alone would require reductions in critical services and substantial layoffs across departments,” a spokesperson for Wilson’s office said. “Half of the general fund goes to public safety and human services, so there are no easy solutions here.”

A fire district would also be a way to raise revenues while steering clear of a state-imposed cap on local property tax levies that limits local levies to $3.60 per $1,000 of assessed value. The city is quickly running up against that limit.

In a press release Wednesday night, the Seattle Firefighters Union said the union “is currently evaluating the mayor’s plan.” Union president Kenny Stuart did not return a call seeking comment.

The spokesperson called a fire district one “potential path forward to stabilize SFD resources while also protecting other public services. … We have been working closely with SFD Chief Scoggins as well as the leadership of Local 27 to see if we can find a path forward that balances varying needs around revenue, public safety, and good governance.”

Prior to this year, Seattle had the authority to set up its own fire district, but there was no benefit to doing so: Any taxes the district levied would have to be offset by a reduction in other property taxes. The state legislature changed the law governing fire districts this year to give Seattle the authority to levy taxes (or a fee called a “benefit charge”) outside the existing property tax cap—meaning that the city could increase taxes without bumping up against the $3.60 limit.

“It’s just additional revenue flexibility and authority,” said Candice Bock, government relations director for the Association of Washington Cities, which supported the legislation. “Cities have to fund everything within their existing property tax levy authority, and this … creates more capacity.”

Wilson has asked all city departments, including the Seattle Police Department, to come up with potential cuts ranging from 3 to 5 percent of their budgets to close a deficit created in part by “structural issues”—costs, including labor, are growing faster than city revenues—and in part by her predecessor Bruce Harrell’s decision (supported by the city council) to pile on tens of millions in new spending every year, including a $100 million spree in the 2025 budget.

The fire department’s budget is around $350 million. Moving even half that amount into a new fire district would close next year’s budget deficit. However, that would also mean that funding for some of the city’s most basic public safety services—protecting residents from fires and responding to emergency calls—would be put to a periodic public vote. Seattle already uses local levies to fund its libraries, parks, and transportation system, but putting fire services up to a public vote would put the city on a potentially risky limb.

“Cities will have to continue to figure out a way to fund it if voters don’t like this option,” Bock said.

If the city puts the fire district plan on the ballot this year and it passes, the district will be a separate government entity under the direct control of the city council, which would act as its board of directors—similar to the way the council serves as the governing board for the city’s Park District, which oversees parks levy spending.

Elections, Media

Elections Complaint Targets Conservative Podcaster Brandi Kruse and Let’s Go Washington
Screen shot from a recent “unDivided” video titled ‘TRANS DEMANDS”

By Erica C. Barnett

A group called Washingtonians For Ethical Government filed a complaint against Let’s Go Washington and right-wing influencer Brandi Kruse on Tuesday, claiming that the conservative PAC failed to disclose in-kind contributions from Kruse, who has spent hours advocating for LGW’s latest ballot initiatives on her podcast and spoken at their rallies as a supporter.

Let’s Go Washington, which is financed by hedge-fund investor Brian Heywood, has two initiatives on this year’s November ballot.

The first would ban trans girls from participating in children’s sports. The second would give parents the right to inspect all their children’s school records, including notes from mental health counseling sessions, among other new rights. Opponents say the latter initiative would make it dangerous for kids to confide in counselors about problems at home, reveal that they’re LGBTQ+, or ask about reproductive health care.

The second would expand the so-called “parents’ bill of rights,” a Heywood initiative the state legislature passed with some alterations last year, to give parents unfettered access to their children’s school records, including counseling and medical records that might reveal whether a student was LGBTQ+ or asked a school staffer about birth control or abortion.

The complaint centers around Kruse’s activities in favor of the initiative, which WEG says constitute contributions to the campaign that need to be reported on campaign finance reports. The group has tallied up 159 incidents in which they say Kruse engaged in “political advertising” for the initiatives, calculating their value at between $345,000 and $1.25 million based on estimated ad rates for Kruse’s podcast and the reach of her social media posts.

Pam Stuart, the spokeswoman for Washingtonians for Ethical Government, said at a press briefing Tuesday that the difference between editorial advocacy and advertising is that people get paid to advertise specific products. Kruse’s “unDivided” podcast is sponsored, in part, by Project 42, a Heywood-funded group that pays Kruse to cover certain topics.

“If I were a sign maker… [and] I were to make signs for Let’s Go Washington and give them to them, I would have to file [that as] an in-kind donation, because I’m taking the services that I normally get paid for in my daily job, and I’m donating those to influence people to vote a certain way,” Stuart said.  “As a paid online influencer, Ms. Kruse is donating her online influencing services to this particular cause.”

Unlike sign makers, some journalists do support specific issues and causes.  Stuart said Kruse is no longer a journalist, but acknowledged that deciding who counts as a journalist and who is a mere “online influencer” can be a slippery slope. PubliCola, for example, primarily produces traditional journalism, but we also have values and a point of view that’s reflected in much of our coverage; we also publish opinion pieces that are clearly labeled as such. It feels obvious that what we do is journalism, while Kruse’s activities (including her widely mocked participation in a Trump praise circle at the White House) are not. But does that make her advocacy against trans children and kids’ privacy advertising rather than editorial commentary?

Stuart said that’s for the Public Disclosure Commission to decide,. “According to the PDC, advocacy tends to become in kind donations when three things occur: The speaker or the person doing the work normally charges for that service. … the content promotes or opposes a candidate or ballot measure,” and the person doesn’t receive any payment, she said.

” I think the difference is: Is this really just her expressing an opinion, or is this really a coordinated effort with a campaign?”

Kruse has gone back and forth about whether she is a journalist or, as she put it repeatedly on X, “not a journalist.” In an email Kruse forwarded to the media on Tuesday, she accused Washingtonians for Ethical Government of attacking the First Amendment, and appeared to threaten to sue them for defamation and slander.

“I have never received any form of funds or contribution—undisclosed and unreported or otherwise—from Let’s Go Washington,” Kruse wrote. “The claim that I have violated state disclosure law is therefore false and defamatory as a factual matter, and further ignores that state law explicitly makes clear that political commentary and editorials do not constitute political advertising.”  

“Tread very carefully,” Kruse wrote.

homelessness, King County, Mayor Wilson

Mayor Says KCRHA’s Initial Response to Audit Findings “Did Not Adequately Address My Concerns”
KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson told PubliCola she is dissatisfied with the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s five-page response to an April 22 letter, sent jointly with King County Executive Girmay Zahilay, directing the agency to come up with a written plan to address five “high-risk” findings from a recent forensic audit.

KCRHA’s response, Wilson said, “did not adequately address my concerns regarding management of City funds, particularly regarding invoicing problems and negative cash balances. All options remain on the table as we await KCRHA’s full corrective action plan.”

The audit found that the KCRHA could not account for $8 million in public funds, and had overspent its administrative budget by $4 million; on top of that, the homelessness agency owes King County around $1.26 million in interest on loans that is not covered by its current budget. Wilson and Zahilay gave the agency until last Friday, May 8, to provide a written plan, including:

“A strategy with a detailed timeline outlining how the KCRHA is going to address issues related to unreconcilable and unrecoverable cash”—the entire $13 million;

“Details of immediate action” to ensure that reimbursements for KCRHA employee spending is pre-approved and documented. According to the audit, there were a number of odd-looking reimbursements, including more than $9,000 in lodging costs for an interim chief financial officer, that weren’t explained, and in general, reimbursements “did not have necessary approval and/or supporting documentation as required by governing policies”;

Immediate actions to ensure gift cards distributed to homeless people during the “point in time count,” which now consists of interviews and a data analysis, are documented and tracked, which they have not been in the past;

A plan to ensure “segregation of duties” for expenditures. Currently, the same person can approve an expenditure, make changes in the KCRHA’s accounting system, and verify that an expenditure was appropriate; and

Actions the agency is taking to control employees’ use of cash-equivalent “purchase cards,” which the audit found have been used by various employees for purchases that weren’t clearly documented, making it difficult or impossible to know if they were legitimate.

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The KCRHA’s response, signed by strategic director William Towey, continues to blame many of the agency’s financial shortcomings, including its ongoing negative balances and the “missing” $8 million, on the fact that it operates on a reimbursement model, meaning that the agencies pays nonprofit homeless service providers before its funders—the city and the county—reimburse them, resulting in periodic negative balances. The audit found that this model doesn’t account for the KCHRA’s financial problems; since it came out, the KCRHA went tens of millions more into the red.

In the letter, Towey also said the KCRHA is working to address other issues flagged by the city and county, by tightening expense reporting rules, working to segregate staff duties to the extent possible, requiring better documentation of purchase and gift cards, and reconciling the budget to address the outstanding $8 million balance, which the auditors said may have to be “written off” if KCRHA can’t account for it.

After a representative from the auditing firm, Clark Nuber, presented their findings to the KCRHA’s governing board late last month, many board members and other elected officials began talking about “winding down” the embattled agency rather than working through all the issues the auditor identified, a process that could cost a million dollars or more and take as long as a year to complete.
“My highest priority as mayor is to bring people inside by rapidly expanding shelter and emergency housing with wraparound services,” Wilson said. “All options remain on the table as we await KCRHA’s full corrective action plan.” That plan, which is supposed to address the remaining audit findings, is due on May 23.
Contacted on Friday, Zahilay’s office said his office and the county’s Department of Community and Human Services “are closely reviewing the letter to ensure the corrective actions meet our expectations. We continue to engage with the King County Council, City of Seattle, KCRHA Governing Board, partner cities, and service providers to gather all the facts and work together on a planned and deliberate path forward without disrupting critical services for people living unsheltered.”

City Council, Mayor Wilson, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Mayor-Council Conflict and a Data Center Moratorium

By Erica C. Barnett

This week on Seattle Nice, we discussed tensions between Mayor Katie Wilson’s office and members of the City Council, whose frustration with a lack of collaboration between the second and seventh floors of city hall erupted last week when a Wilson staffer asked the council to hold off on passing a bill to implement the final part of Wilson’s shelter surge plan.

As I reported, Wilson was apparently unhappy with some of the amendments councilmembers proposed and wanted the council to change them.  The council—already irritated that Wilson sent them the shelter bills without first securing a council sponsor and trying to elicit support—was not pleased that the mayor seemed to be ordering them around, and after a reportedly heated meeting between countil members and three Wilson staffers, the council passed the legislation, which Wilson had asked to be expedited as an “emergency” bill, with the (relatively minor) amendments intact.

The tension, Sandeep pointed out, has been brewing since well before the latest conflict; when Wilson fired former City Light director Dawn Lindell, some councilmembers were sensitive to union complaints and excoriated the mayor for what they called a rash decision. Just yesterday, Councilmember Bob Kettle took up that torch again during a discussion about a proposed one-year moratorium on data centers, saying, “We had top notch leadership with Seattle City Light, and this is a failure of our city right now.”

And speaking of data centers, our second segment is all about whether saying no to companies that want to build massive data centers to power AI is a good idea.

Sandeep argued that if Seattle doesn’t embrace the AI future, we may fall behind economically and turn into a hollowed-out shell of a city, like Rust Belt cities did in the 1980s. David some economists claim AI could help solve the affordable housing crisis and doesn’t want to dismiss possibilities like that out of hand. And I, as the resident Luddite, argued that we shouldn’t hitch our entire economy (and the future of our climate) to technology most people don’t like or want.

FYI: Seattle Nice Patreon donors got an early preview of our show this week. Supporting Seattle Nice gets you access to some of our episodes a day before they go out on the regular feed, along with occasional Patreon-only exclusives and the knowledge that your contributions go directly toward making Seattle Nice for you every week, including paying our editor, Quinn Waller.

Courts, homelessness, Mayor Wilson, Media, Transit

This Week on PubliCola: May 9, 2026
Sound Transit’s four Seattle representatives: Katie Wilson, Dan Strauss, Girmay Zahilay, and Teresa Mosqueda.

Cops burn through sick time, county official accused of stalking must wear GPS monitor, Sound Transit announces “affordable” ST3 alternative, and much more.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, May 4

Audit: Retiring SPD Officers Routinely Burn Through Months of Sick Time, Costing City Millions Each Year

An audit by the city’s Office of Inspector General shows that retiring Seattle police officers routinely hoard sick leave and use it all at the end of their careers, allowing them to accumulate full pay for those days (which would otherwise “pay out” at 25 percent of an officer’s salary) without providing evidence that they’re actually sick. The pervasive practice costs the city millions of dollars a year.

Tuesday, May 5

County Council Launches Action to Address Homelessness Authority’s Financial Issues

The King County Council is asking King County Executive Girmay Zahilay to conduct an assessment of the the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s forthcoming “corrective action” plan responding the issues identified in a recent forensic audit, and produce a report on “whether the county should continue, amend, or terminate its participation” in the interlocal agreement that created KCRHA.

After “Cavalier” Social Media Posts, Judge Says County Assessor Accused of Stalking Must Wear GPS Monitor After All

King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson tried to convince a judge that PubliCola’s coverage of stalking allegations against him, which he characterized as unfounded opinions on a “personal blog,” was to blame for the negative reaction to his social media posts gloating that he had convinced a judge that he couldn’t wear an ankle monitor. The judge didn’t buy it, and said he’d have to wear a GPS monitor after all.

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No Wonder the Pundit Class Can’t Stand Her: We Discuss the Mayor’s “Gaffes,” Shelter Buffer Zones, and the KCRHA’s Financial Plight

On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we debated whether Mayor Katie Wilson is, as many pundits have recently argued, a “gaffe”-prone buffoon, or if she’s just saying things they don’t agree with. We also discussed a proposal (later withdrawn) to require shelter-free “buffer zones” around parks, child cares, and schools, and we talked about the fallout last week from a forensic audit of the regional homelessness authority.

Wednesday, May 6

Council Committee Approves Larger New Shelters Amid Cloud of Mayor-Council Conflict

A growing rift between the City Council and Mayor Wilson exploded (almost) into the open this week, after Wilson staffers made what many councilmembers and staff described as an inappropriate request to pull the mayor’s legislation to allow larger shelters because she was unhappy with some council amendments. At a meeting the afternoon before the vote, Wilson’s staff reportedly seemed to think they could tell the council, a separate branch of government, what to do.

Thursday, May 7

The Gaffe Faff: Wilson isn’t Misspeaking. She’s Delivering.

In his latest Maybe Metropolis column, Josh Feit takes a swing at pundits who are aghast that Mayor Wilson is openly supporting lefty priorities like taxing the rich and painting bus lanes. These things only seem like “gaffes,” Josh writes, to people in denial that Seattle willingly elected a socialist who ran on the exact progressive agenda she’s now espousing.

Friday, May 8

The C Is for Crank: The News About Sound Transit Is Grim. Why Are Most Seattle Politicians Pretending It Isn’t?

In my column, I wonder why elected officials from Seattle are playing nice about the latest Sound Transit 3 plan, which defers stations in Seattle (including Graham Street in the Rainier Valley, first promised in 1999) and cuts the entire Ballard line, at least until savings and “new revenue” (i.e. bonds regional taxpayers will still be paying back in the 22nd century) can be found.

City Council, Mayor Wilson, Opinion, Transit

The News About Sound Transit Is Grim. Why Are Most Seattle Politicians Pretending It Isn’t?
Sound Transit’s four Seattle representatives: Katie Wilson, Dan Strauss, Girmay Zahilay, and Teresa Mosqueda.

By Erica C. Barnett

Sound Transit board chair Dave Somers announced a revised, “affordable” capital plan for the regional rail system at a meeting of the agency’s executive board on Thursday. The proposal attempts to close a $34.5 billion budget shortfall by focusing on the “spine” of the system, from Everett to Tacoma, while putting off major projects in Seattle that helped the Sound Transit 3 plan pass overwhelmingly here, most notably including the segment from downtown to Ballard.  The agency will fully design the Ballard extension and the Graham Street and Boeing Access Road infill station but postpone all three “until new resources or third party funding can advance them,” as ST’s deputy director Alex Krieg put it yesterday.

Ryan Packer, at the Urbanist, has been covering this story closely (probably between the top-secret closed-door meetings with Mayor Wilson that had the Seattle Times editorial board spewing smoke from their ears this morning!), so I’ll direct you to their story earlier this week for all the details about the new plan.

What I want to focus on is the insistence of most members of the Sound Transit board on living in an alternate reality—one where stopping the line at Seattle Center is completing the first part of the “Ballard” line, and where taking on debt well into the next century is a sustainable way to fund a train system.

Board members, including those from Seattle, have insisted that the regional rail agency isn’t truly “deferring” anything and that the entire ST3 package approved by voters in 2016 will get built—just as soon as Sound Transit comes up with a plan to cut costs and get new resources to build out the system voters have been funding for the past 10 years.

During a Transportation Choices Coalition-sponsored panel about the plan earlier this week, Mayor Katie Wilson said, “The fact that part of the project does not appear in the ‘affordable’ plan does not mean that it is being canceled or delayed or deferred. And so one of the things that I want to see is just a really clear plan for, as we do that work, adding [the missing stations and rail lines] back into the plan. And I’m not even talking like any more revenue for this. It’s just that we need to get further along in the planning process, and then suddenly you’re going to see more stations kind of magically come back into affordability.”

King County Councilmember (and former city council member) Teresa Mosqueda echoed Wilson’s comments at the board meeting Thursday, telling Somers, “I heard you say that nothing is deferred indefinitely, that we are not abandoning any lines or projects, and that we are committed to final design, getting ultimately to Ballard, Issaquah, and wanting the infill stations. … I see this as a need to present a ‘Yes, and’ proposal. Yes, we hear you that the community and this board want the full Sound Transit 3, and we recognize in order to accomplish that, you need to have additional financing tools.”

What about those additional financing tools? Sound Transit board members, and many transit advocates desperate to complete the long-promised system, have laid their hopes on the state legislature, which last year rejected a proposal to allow Sound Transit to sell unprecedented 75-year bonds to pay for costs that weren’t included in the voter-approved plan. (Really, plans—the long-“deferred” Graham Street Station was supposed to built as part of ST1).

There’s currently little public discussion, outside reflexively anti-tax conservative media, about whether it’s a good idea to put taxpayers on the hook for this rail system until the 22nd century. For rail advocates, it seems to be a settled debate. And no one is talking much right now about what ST4 will include.

The only board member who has relentlessly insisted on speaking bluntly about what Sound Transit is actually proposing is City Councilmember Dan Strauss. Strauss is no one’s idea of a firebrand, but he is extremely protective of the neighborhood at the heart of his district, Ballard, and he’s made no secret of his outrage that the plan cuts defers postpones the Ballard extension for the foreseeable future. Ballard, as Strauss points out often, has been upzoned three times since voters approved ST3 ten years ago. It’s now designated as a “regional center” in the city’s comprehensive plan, the densest possible designation, and is slated for another upzone later this year. Thanks to all those new people living in Ballard, Sound Transit has projected daily ridership as high as 147,000 people along the Ballard segment—the highest ridership in the system.

“Sound Transit did not provide an approach that maximized ridership,” Strauss said at the TCC event earlier this week. “If they had, they would be looking at the dollar per rider figure that the Ballard Lake extension provided.”

At Thursday’s ST board meeting, Strauss asked the board, semi-facetiously, to change the name of the “Ballard Link initial segment,” which ends at Seattle Center, to the “Downtown tunnel” segment, “because that is being transparent with the public about what segments we are funding.” It’s too bad the other Seattle representatives on the board aren’t equally committed to being honest with voters about what we’re getting with Sound Transit’s new “affordable” plan.