City Council, homelessness, Mayor Wilson

Councilmember Saka Says He’ll Provide Crucial Vote for Mayor Wilson’s Veto of Legislation to Ban RVs From Seattle

Sponsor Dan Strauss said the mayor’s veto shows she’s “disingenuous” and can’t be trusted.

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson vetoed legislation on Monday that would ban RVs from parking on Seattle streets over time, citing the “complexity and cost” of a proposed one-time count of people living in RVs, concerns about the legality of the proposal, costs, and the potential that impounding residential RVs would increase unsheltered homelessness.

The legislation, sponsored by Dan Strauss, would establish a permitting system for a limited number of RV residents—those counted in a one-time-only census—with the goal of eventually banning RVs from Seattle streets. Residents would have to participate in mandatory services and accept offers of shelter, and any RVs without a permit could be immediately impounded and removed. It passed on a 6-3 vote.

On Tuesday, Wilson announced an accompanying executive order that directs the Human Services Department to do “intensive outreach” to people living in their vehicl s, create a citywide list of RV residents, and connect those individuals to a new RV safe lot and shelter that will open next month.  That lot, known as the Glassyard Commons, will hold up to 72 RVs and has 20 “tiny house” shelters. A second safe lot, opening in 2027, will accommodate around 90 more. The order also establishes a work group to recommend “programmatic, policy and legal changes” to the city’s approach to RVs within 60 days.

Late Tuesday morning, Wilson was joined at a press conference at City Hall by surprise supporter Rob Saka, one of six councilmembers who voted for the legislation. Saka, as PubliCola first reported Tuesday morning, had changed his mind on the legislation, and would no longer provide the necessary sixth vote to overturn Wilson’s veto. Put another way: Unless Saka changes his mind again before the council votes on Wilson’s veto, the veto will stand.

“I voted in favor of the council’s recent RV legislation because I believe the status quo is totally unacceptable,” Saka said. “I stand by that vote and the urgent need for action that motivated it. But I’ve also learned through my experience in public service that we achieve the best results when the executive branches and the legislative branches are aligned around a shared strategic approach.”

“I’m willing to give the mayor a fair shot to propose a credible alternative to that proposal.”

Shortly after Wilson issued her veto late Monday afternoon,  Strauss issued a statement on Monday decrying Wilson’s “lack of leadership” and criticizing her for “breaking her promise” not to veto the bill. Contacted Monday night, Strauss said he met with Wilson’s team on October 14, before the final vote on the bill, and “they stated the mayor was not going to veto the legislation. Today when she called me, she expressed regret for saying she wouldn’t veto the legislation and then doing so.”

On Monday night, Wilson confirmed the meeting, but said that since then, “I have spent more time with city departments understanding the challenges of implementation, and my own deeper consideration of the potential impacts of the legislation led me to believe that giving the council an opportunity to consider an alternative path was the right thing to do for the city. As I have been considering all options, my staff have also been transparent with Councilmember Strauss about that shift.”

Speaking at the press conference on Tuesday, Wilson said concerns about the logistical complexity and basic legality of Strauss’ proposal were also on her mind when she decided to veto the plan.

“I considered what it would take to stand up a costly and complex new city bureaucracy in a constrained budget environment. I considered the likelihood that this would, in practice, end up pulling capacity and personnel from other urgent public safety priorities. I learned more about the legal, operational, and safety challenges to dealing with problematic RVs and the ways that this legislation does not address those challenges.”

Seattle City Councilmember Dan Strauss

Shortly after the mayor’s press conference ended, Strauss decried the mayor’s decision, calling Wilson “disingenuous” and saying “I can’t trust her word anymore” because “there have been a number of times that she’s broken the promises that she’s made to me.” He called Wilson’s executive order “a copy and paste from my legislation.”

Strauss also accused Wilson of “sitting on” the $5 million set aside in the 2026 budget for shelter outreach last year. “She has been sitting on these funds all year, and since July and August, when I’ve been in direct conversations with the mayor’s team about deploying these funds, they have not deployed the funds for contracted outreach to help people living in their vehicles,” Strauss said.

Asked about this allegation, a spokesperson for Wilson said the mayor “has been holding funding for RV outreach until the policy deliberation at the Council was completed. Upon signing her Executive Order, the Mayor has asked HSD to immediately work to get this funding out the door to support vehicle resident outreach.” The budget set aside money for safe lots, shelter, assistance for RV residents as they move into shelter or housing, and RV storage associated with safe lots; had HSD used the money for RV outreach before the safe lot opened, they would not have had any shelter to offer RV residents.

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Strauss, who previously said the mayor was “uncomfortable addressing homelessness” because it would require her to set “boundaries,” credited himself with getting Wilson to take action no RVs . 

“If it took 11 months of my work for the mayor to pay attention to one of the most critical issues in our community today, then that’s a success for me, and that’s a success for the legislative branch,” Strauss said. “Right now, we need leadership, not wishy-washy work groups.”

Strauss said a previous count of RVs in Seattle found a total of 145 RVs in the city, which he said was probably an undercount. Between the two RV safe lots, Strauss said, there might be enough room to take every RV in Seattle off the streets.  “If you have two shelter safe lots that account for all of the RVs that people are living on the city streets, then we have a place for them to go,” Strauss said. “And because I am concerned that it’s an undercount, that’s why I propose the permit process to say, if you are living on the streets today, we are going to care for you today.”

But that number is almost certainly far lower than the true number of people living in RVs in Seattle. The most recent detailed Point In Time Count of people experiencing homelessness in King County, from 2024, found that about 27 percent of the unsheltered people in King County were living in their vehicles. Applying that number to the 4,858 unsheltered people the count estimated were living in Seattle that year suggests that there were more than 1,20o people living in their vehicles in 2024.

Extrapolating from the high-level Point in Time Count the King County Regional Homelessness Authority released earlier this year suggests there are around 1,500 people living in vehicles in Seattle. That’s in line with a recent study from the University of Washington, which also concluded that about 500 of those individuals are living in RVs and other large vehicles, such as “fifth wheels,” throughout the year—not 150.

ACLU-Washington Executive Director Michelle Storms, who stood beside Wilson during her press conference, declined to say afterward whether the ACLU would have sued the city if Strauss’ RV ban had gone into effect. “Because there is this veto and this possibility of a path forward that is both mindful of the human and compassionate need, as well as addressing public safety and concerns, we’re excited to see how that unfolds, and we’re grateful that the mayor has made out this particular piece of legislation,” Storms said. 

In September, the ACLU’s Smart Justice Policy Program Director Jazmyn Clark warned that Strauss’ legislation raised “significant constitutional concerns,” pointing to court cases establishing that that state’s Homestead Act provides protections for vehicles used as homes. A separate state Supreme Court case involving a person who lived in his vehicle found that the city’s towing and impound fees violated the constitutional protection against excessive fines.

The ACLU also raised legal questions about a separate Strauss bill Wilson did not veto, which vastly broadened the definition of “junk vehicles” to make it easier for the city to tow and discard unsightly or inoperative cars parked on public streets.

Under the Seattle City Charter, the City Council has until December 2 to take a vote on the veto, but Strauss said he hoped to hold a vote as soon as possible. “My proposal is to get this done with now,” he said.

City Council, Elections, legislature, neighborhoods

Greater Seattle: Bad Budget Amendment, Risky Election Strategy

By Josh Feit

Democracy > Neighborhood Community Councils

The people you’d expect to throw a fit—older, white, property owners—threw a fit when the city stopped funding the 13 neighborhood district councils back in 2016. According to the city’s own research, the neighborhood councils, which were born during the comp plan overhaul that locked single-family zoning into place in the mid-1990s for the next two-and-a-half decades, were predominately made up of homeowners. Shocker.

The City also found, yup, the councils were older and whiter than the rest of Seattle’s population. A NextCity article published at the time when the city finally broke ties with them was appropriately titled “How Seattle Is Dismantling a NIMBY Power Structure.”

This aggrieved constituency has a new champion today: City Council President Joy Hollingsworth. During a budget hearing last week where city council members began proposing amendments to Mayor Wilson’s $2.5 billion budget, Hollingsworth proposed a $100,000-a-year amendment that would fund a similar system again. Hollingsworth represents Capitol Hill, which is a supermajority renter district, by the way.

The money would evidently go to support the Seattle Neighborhood Alliance, the umbrella group for the dozens of neighborhood councils (which very much still exist on their own) including the Fremont Neighborhood Council, Greenwood Neighborhood Council, Roosevelt Neighborhood Association, Rainier Beach Community Council, and others. Hollingsworth didn’t say the city thinks the makeup of the councils has changed since their heyday. But to be honest, even if some neighborhood councils are more representative than they were a decade ago, that still wouldn’t make this a good idea. Giving the city’s imprimatur to the councils would bolster a type of neo-ward politics and affirm a cozy relationship between city hall and self-appointed local leaders and gatekeepers.

When faced with a “neighborhood” uproar after the city pulled the plug on the councils a decade ago, the Department of Neighborhoods director at the time, Kathy Nyland, responded with a message that’s worth reiterating today: “We have heard from residents active in the system that ‘District Councils work for us.’ … However, they don’t work for everyone.”

Democrats Beating Republicans > Democrats Beating Democrats

In what’s supposed to be a Blue Wave Tuesday, the Democrats in Washington state seem like they might be missing an opportunity to increase their majorities in Olympia. Competing Democratic IE groups are pouring money into Democratic intramurals in Southeast Seattle’s safe 37th Legislative District and the blue 32nd Legislative District north of Seattle, for example. The fundraising could be drawing money away from campaigns for potential Democratic pickups, like in the 35th district, which includes parts of Mason, Kitsap, and Thurston Counties. And in much-needed defense in Bellingham’s 42nd LD.

In the 37th District race between incumbent Democratic State Sen. Sharon Tomiko Santos and progressive challenger Kelabe Tewolde, rival independent expenditure groups have spent about $260,000 on Tewolde’s behalf and just over $110,000 for Tomiko Santos

Similarly, in the 32nd District race between incumbent State Sen. Jesse Salomon and progressive challenger Democratic State Rep. Cindy Ryu, rival Democratic groups have spent about $516,000 on Salomon’s behalf and around $100,000 for Ryu, 

By comparison, even though Democrats have a chance for a pickup in the 35th LD, where Democratic Thurston County commissioner Carolina Mejia is running against Republican incumbent State Sen. Drew MacEwen, Democratic groups have spent around $495,000 supporting Meija—a large amount that’s nonetheless dwarfed by the nearly $1 million Republican groups have poured into supporting MacEwen.

The Democrats also have to defend seats. In the formerly Republican-controlled 42nd Legislative District, first-term Democratic incumbent State Sen. Sharon Shewmake decided not to seek reelection. And Republicans are spending big to retake the seat in the race between Republican Erika Creydt and Democratic Port of Bellingham Commissioner Michael Shepard. Pro-Shepard PACs have spent around $385,000, while pro-Creydt groups have spent $600,000. Democratic IEs shouldn’t have taken their eyes off the ball like that.

With a commanding 30-19 majority already in place, progressives might feel this is a safe year to nudge the Democratic Party to the left by running challengers. However, safe is not a word I’d use to describe Trump’s America. The Democrats’ paramount mission in 2026 needs to be a thundering, top to bottom rebuke of the GOP.

Josh@PubliCola.com

City Council, Mayor Wilson

Council Majority Supports Fiscal Accountability for the Mayor, But Not for Themselves
West Seattle Councilmember Rob Saka wore a “Straight Outta Delridge” t-shirt to highlight several of his proposed budget adds, including $235,000 for an “art wall” he said would deter graffiti in the Delridge neighborhood.

By Erica C. Barnett

A five-member majority of the Seattle City Council declined to sponsor a proposal from Councilmember Dionne Foster to hold themselves to the same standard of fiscal responsibility they imposed on Mayor Katie Wilson this year, rejecting the idea that they should have to create a balanced fiscal plan while proposing new spending that would swell the mayor’s budget by more than $100 million. The new spending amendments that received at least five sponsors—a council majority—last week add up to almost $68 million on their own.

As we’ve reported, Wilson balanced the budget by making targeted reductions to mostly vacant positions, reducing or eliminating some of the new spending former mayor Bruce Harrell and the council piled on to the budget last year, and laying off 15 people, about 0.1 percent of the city’s workforce. Last week, City Council budget chair Dan Strauss called this plan “the Mayor Wilson Austerity Budget,” saying it “will put the city government at a full stop” and promising to “reverse the cuts.”

Wilson’s budget includes a financial plan that’s balanced through 2030, a new requirement (for this year only) that was part of the “Seattle Shield” business and occupation tax restructure that voters passed in 2025. Councilmember Bob Kettle, who added that requirement to the Seattle Shield package as a “fiscal responsibility” measure, proposed one of two identical amendments (the other is sponsored by Dionne Foster) that would make the requirement permanent. In budget terms, this means that all future mayors would have to present both a balanced short-term budget and a financial plan that shows no deficits for four years after the current two-year budget cycle ends.

During a discussion about potential budget amendments last week, councilmembers appeared eager to preserve this mayoral mandate. “I think that the amendment from last year had a positive effect, in terms of the budgeteering process, on the executive’s budget compared to what we’ve seen in the past,” Kettle said. Together, the identical Kettle and Foster amendments won sponsorship from eight of nine councilmembers, making the proposal a shoo-in for the’ “chair’s package” of consensus budget amendments Strauss will release later this week.

Moments later, though, council members expressed virtually no interest in a second proposal, sponsored by Foster, that would impose the same requirement on the council. Foster’s amendment, intended to complement that mayoral budget mandate, says that not only should the mayor send a balanced budget plan to the council, the council should send a balanced budget plan back to the mayor at the end of their annual budget amendment process.

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The amendment, Foster explained, “establishes parameters for the council’s adopted budget, so our decisions do not make the general fund or JumpStart future-year outlook less sustainable than the financial plans that we receive from the mayor’s proposed budget.” Taken together, she said, the two proposals would “strengthen transparency, establish consistent expectations, and help prevent future residents and current residents from service disruptions.

The council’s six centrists, who backed Kettle’s proposal to require balanced mayoral budgets, seemed to balk at the idea of following the same rules themselves; besides the original sponsors—Foster, Alexis Mercedes Rinck, and Eddie Lin—only one councilmember, Debora Juarez, signed on to cosponsor. (Juarez, an appointee filling out Cathy Moore’s aborted term, will be replaced by either Nilu Jenks or Julie Kang later this month.)

With just four supporters, the legislation won’t appear in Strauss’ consensus package. On Friday, Foster told PubliCola she didn’t consider the legislation dead, but she’ll have to convince at least one more councilmember to back it. Without it, the council will have free rein to give in to its spendthrift instincts—larding the budget with pet projects that don’t have a sustainable funding source and hiding the cost by describing ongoing programs as “one-time” budget adds.

Despite Strauss’ complaints about “austerity,” most of the budget reductions in Wilson’s budget are items former mayor Bruce Harrell and council members added last year with full awareness that they were using one-time dollars to pay for services and programs that would run out of money this year. The council’s central staff warned about this explicitly last year, noting that the budget was “inherently unsustainable” because it increased the city’s structural budget gap, with a built-in deficit of about $150 million in 2027 that was projected to balloon to more than $375 million in 2029.

Foster’s amendment would force the council to keep those out-year numbers at or above zero by living within the city’s actual means. No wonder many of them don’t like it.

“Austerity,” typically used to describe budgets that drastically cut human services while adding money to big-ticket departments like SPD, is an odd word to describe Wilson’s budget. The plan includes minimal cuts to council priorities like the Unified Care Team (where Wilson has proposed eliminating six and a half vacant positions and transferring two vacant positions to a different part of the Parks Department) and police (whose budget Wilson increases to fund raises and 66 new positions).

The council’s spending proposals would restore and fund many of those vacant positions, including many the city has never been able to fill. The money they want to add back to the budget would fund the vacant UCT positions, accelerate police officer hiring, and preserve nine empty parking enforcement officer positions that SPD has never filled.

Alongside these adds, councilmembers have proposed restoring $7 million in spending on Seattle Fire Deparment overtime, which an analysis (requested by Foster) found was about $2 million more than SFD can actually use on overtime shifts, given the number of firefighters who are actually available to fill open shifts throughout the year.

They also want to restore funding for 14 vacant positions on the CARE Team, which would add $2.3 million to the two-year budget, and resurrect the “district funds,” a recent addition to the budget that gives councilmembers $1 million each to spend on new Seattle Department of Transportation projects in their districts.

And, as has been the case for years now, many of the council amendments that would increase funding for new or resuscitated programs in 2027, but not 2028, are obviously meant to be ongoing, because they pay for things like food assistance, sex worker outreach, gun violence reduction, and economic revitalization in specific neighborhoods like Lake City. These are all worthy priorities, but making them “one-time” actually deprioritizes them in the budget, making them the subject of annual scrambles for funding. Ongoing programs the city pays for with one-time dollars will inevitably just show up again as budget adds next year, setting the council up to once again complain about “austerity” if Wilson doesn’t take it upon herself to find stable funding for them to continue.

 

City Hall, Courts, Elections, homelessness, King County

This Week on PubliCola: Sara Nelson’s Disappearing $30,000, Council Proposes Budget-Busting New Spending, KCRHA Explains $17 Million Gap

And more stories—and podcasts!—you may have missed for the week of October 26.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, October 26

Greater Seattle: Wilson’s Sweeps and Nelson’s Disappearing $30,000

Josh zeroes in on a fact that City Council critics of Mayor Katie Wilson seem unwilling to acknowledge: Under Wilson, the Unified Care Team has done more encampment sweeps than when Bruce Harrell was mayor. And, he argues, former councilmember Sara Nelson got away with using anonymous funds to finance a PAC that’s promoting a council candidate—even though the PAC returned the money.

Tuesday, October 27

Council Budget Amendments Already Top $80 Million in New Spending—and That’s Before the Big Stuff

The city council majority, which larded the 2026 city budget with “one-time” spending on new programs, is livid that Mayor Wilson’s budget closed the deficit they created by getting rid of some of their unfunded programs. Now, they’re proposing to add many of those programs back while also adding new ones, at a potential cost of more than $100 million (as a meeting that took place after this post revealed).

Thursday, October 29

Ex-Burien City Manager’s Excessive Complaints

The city of Burien finally handed over the investigation report that preceded former city manager Adolfo Bailon’s departure. It reveals that in addition to repeatedly calling 911 on homeless people in the park near his office, Bailon filed a barrage of apparently frivolous complaints against city councilmembers, city staff, and regular Burien residents.

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KCHRA Elaborates on Money Troubles (and Lays off Key Staff)

At a King County Council committee meeting, the regional homelessness authority’s chief operating officer, William Towey, said the agency’s recently revealed $16.7 million in overspending happened because the agency consistently overestimated how much money it would bring in, to the tune of a quarter billion dollars. Seattle and the which are taking back control of the region’s homelessness contracts, will have to shoulder the cost of the KCRHA’s poor financial choices.

In other KCRHA news, agency CEO Kelly Kinnison laid off one of the agency’s last two HR staffers as well as its top expert on HMIS, the complex homelessness tracking system that is one of the KCRHA’s few remaining responsibilities

Friday, October 30

$18.7 Million for Office Space. Cuts for Public Health. King County Has It Backward.

In a guest post, Harborview nurse Ryan Talen argues that King County Executive Girmay Zahilay’s costly return-to-office mandate would be better spent on health and human service programs to replace the ones that are being cut, both in Zahilay’s proposed budget and through federal funding reductions that will eliminate health care for millions.

Also this week: I was on City Cast Seattle’s November Guide episode, where we talked about how we’re keeping ourselves busy and warm this fall, as well as what’s on your ballot this week.

On Seattle Nice this week we talked with with Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans and Criminal Division Chief Jenna Robert about the city’s new Connection Court, which pairs access to services with strict requirements for people who opt in. People who accumulate additional criminal charges or fail to participate in services will get kicked out to mainstream court, where they’ll face penalties including potential jail time.

 

 

Guest Contributor, Health, King County

 $18.7 Million for Office Space. Cuts for Public Health. King County Has It Backward.
Harborview Medical Centerl. Photo by Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Ryan Talen

As a nurse, I workat a hospital for long hours on weekdays and weekends. I wake up early and spend 12 hours at Harborview, the regional public trauma center for Washington, Alaska, Idaho, and Montana. It’s the area’s safety-net hospital, where we take everyone who comes through the door regardless of their ability to pay.

My patients span the socioeconomic spectrum: Some are well off, some are middle- or working-class, and some are experiencing homelessness. All of them benefit from public health investments. Whether they rely on vaccine information, restaurant health inspections, or the incredible free dental, vision, and health clinics Public Health-Seattle & King County offers, all my patients are healthier when they come to me because of these local investments.

So when I saw King County Executive Girmay Zahilay’s proposed budget cuts to the health department, I had serious questions about his priorities. Earlier this month, the Executive sent the King County Council a budget proposal that cuts approximately $2.8 million from the Department of Public Health while spending more than $18.7 million on his return-to-office proposal.

In the scheme of a county budget, $2.8 million could come across as budget dust. But as a nurse at Harborview who witnessed repeated cuts to public health care since the peak of the pandemic, and who is currently worried about the federal Medicaid cuts that will impact my patients, I want to see deeper investments in public health. Instead, for every dollar cut from public health, Executive Zahilay is proposing nearly seven dollars for office space.

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Because of Executive Zahilay’s budget proposal, I suspect the chance that I will see some rare patient types will increase. When I see cuts to the Monkeypox Vaccine Effectiveness program, I think about the individuals with monkeypox that I have cared for in the past and worry about the potential for seeing more of them. When I read about cuts to the Adult Dental Program, I worry about all the people who will attempt to live with tooth infections until they arrive at my hospital septic and in need of emergency care.

Executive Zahilay’s public health budget cuts come as the federal administration has cut funding for disease surveillance and outbreak response at the CDC, Medicaid coverage for our immigrant and refugee community members, and Affordable Care Act subsidies for millions of Americans. Many King County residents will now delay care because of cost, and when patients put off preventative care, they suffer long-term health consequences. With measles spreading and our food supply less safe, we need state and local governments to invest in public health like the necessity it is.

Because our Public Health Department is funded through the county’s general fund, which has continued to face significant funding shortfalls, it has taken deep cuts in previous budgets. After the health department carried King County through the pandemic with fewer COVID deaths and lower spread than other counties, it’s being rewarded with repeated hits to the budget. I expected a new executive with a progressive platform to take a new approach that prioritizes the health of our community. Instead, King County residents get a proposal that could jeopardize our health.

I urge Executive Zahilay and the King County Council to put people and health first. I know local governments cannot fully backfill the federal spending that’s being cut, but the county can still choose where its own scarce dollars go. The King County Council should reject this unnecessary spending on office space and redirect those dollars to fill the gaps the federal government has created, starting with the public health programs this budget proposal cuts. When hard choices have to be made, don’t invest in office space; invest in public health.

Ryan Talen is a nurse at Harborview, the regional trauma center for Washington state, Alaska, Idaho, and Montana.

Courts, criminal justice, homelessness

Ex-Burien City Manager’s Excessive Complaints, KCHRA Elaborates on Money Troubles (and Lays off Key Staff) and More

Despite what my Bluesky would have you believe, there is more stuff going on in and around Seattle than just the budget!

1. Three months after we requested a report on the investigation into former Burien city manager Adolfo Bailon’s performance, the city of Burien finally provided a heavily redacted copy of the 24-page document. Although the redactions (of phrases like “city manager” and “city attorney” as well as the names of, Bailon, and former Burien city attorney Garmon Newsom III) make the report a somewhat challenging read, what’s clear is that Bailon was fired not just for poor performance, but for spending much of his time filing frivolous harassment and discrimination complaints about elected officials, city staff, public commenters, and at least one person who wrote a letter to the editor of a local news site.

Bailon’s complaints included one accusing  councilmember Hugo Garcia of making a “verbal threat”  when, as Bailon told it, Garcia said they would have a problem if encampment sweeps started up in Burien. Bailon also complained that Garcia implied the city manager was racist at a council meeting at which Garcia said a council proposal to site a new tiny house village in a low-income, mostly Latino area “reeks of white supremacy.”

To back up his claim that Garcia was targeting him, Bailon complained about an email Garcia sent to Councilmember Rocco Devito (the topic was the Seahawks flag) in which Garcia misspelled Bailon’s first name as “Adolph.” This, Bailon said, “suggests a deliberate attempt to associate me and my legal work with white supremacy and with Adolf Hitler.” Bailon also filed complaints against Garcia over comments he posted on social media and threatened, in comments on a letter to the editor of the B-Town Blog, to request Garcia’s employment file and post it publicly.

On and on the complaints went. Bailon wanted the council to publicly condemn someone who criticized him on social media, then threatened to get HR involved when two councilmembers didn’t respond right away. He demanded a formal investigation into a Burien resident, claiming she made a racist comment about how he should “go back where you came from”; in fact, she had said his lack of compassion for homeless people showed he didn’t understand Burien, but he might “have better luck” in his previous home state of California. He filed a complaint against a constituent who said he had burned bridges with progressives, calling this part of a pattern of harassment. While he was filing all these complaints, Bailon also had plenty of time to call 911 on homeless people, then complain to the police chief when he got put on hold.

As we reported, the city council put Bailon on administrative leave in April, shortly after he fired Newsom, who immediately had his attorney send a letter accusing Bailon of racial discrimination. (Bailon is Mexican American and Newsom is Black). When city staff tried to put Bailon on leave to investigate the allegations, Bailon claimed they were harassing and discriminating against him; the council voted to put him on leave about a week later, prompting more complaints. The council eventually fired Bailon “without cause,” which gave him access to a severance payment of around $120,000. He still lives in Burien.

 

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2. The leader of another dysfunctional government entity, King County Regional Homelessness Authority director Kelly Kinnison, was absent during much of a King County Council committee meeting last week where she and her chief operating officer, William Towey, were scheduled to answer questions about the discovery that the agency overspent its budget by nearly $17 million, with interest on its ongoing debt to King County continuing to accrue.

Kinnison joined the meeting remotely about halfway through Towey’s in-person presentation, in which Towey revealed that the agency brought in about $250 million less, over its five-year lifespan, than it assumed it would. “Classic overspend,” as Towey described it, accounted for about $3.4 million.

Most of that overspending came from three sources: An “unplanned and unbudgeted” decision to use Salesforce to administer grants to homeless service providers; “excessive … fees” to the Robert Half temp agency, which provided financial staffers to do work that would more typically be done by employees, at a cost of $150 an hour plus fees; and interest the agency has consistently owed King County, its lender, because its bank balance has typically been negative (rather than balancing out over the course of the year as funding comes in).

The bulk of the $16.7 million gap, as we’ve reported, resulted from false assumptions about how much administrative funding the KCRHA would receive through its contracts with homeless service providers. Although some, including a certain Seattle Times columnist, have portrayed underspending as a shocking scandal, it’s typical for providers (including nonprofits that contract with the city of Seattle) to be unable to spend all of the money they’re allocated every year; the KCRHA just decided, at some point, that they wouldn’t, and kept using this assumption year after year.

One way or another, the city and county are going to have to split up the cost of the KCRHA’s poor financial decisions. How they will divvy up that expense (and when) remains an open question. Asked about the debt last week, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson would only say that the city is “in active discussion with the county” about how to fix the KCRHA’s fiscal mess.

3. Although the city and county are taking over almost all the KCRHA’s contracts with homeless service providers, the KCRHA will continue (for now) to oversee a number of federally required functions, including the biennial Point In Time Count of the region’s homeless population (a process that now involves a lot of statistical extrapolation and data analysis rather than a direct count), the annual federal funding process, and the job overseeing the region’s Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) database.

Given these new limitations, many at KCRHA were taken aback earlier this month when Kinnison laid off the agency’s lead HMIS analyst, a person who had been with KCRHA since the beginning and was chiefly responsible for overseeing (and understanding) HMIS. This core function will now go to other staffers who have been doing other work and are less familiar with the complex system. Kinnison also let one of the two remaining HR staffers go, meaning that there will only be one HR staffer left to oversee every aspect of human resources at the agency, which has about 50 employees.

The layoffs were not announced; in fact, according to sources familiar with the discussion, Kinnison told a group of elected officials and others working on KCRHA’s transition that she was not planning additional layoffs as of that morning.

4. Don’t miss our conversation with Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans and Criminal Division Chief Jenna Robert this week. We talked about Evans’ new Connection Court, a diversionary misdemeanor court that pairs access to services with strict requirements for people who opt in. People who accumulate additional criminal charges or fail to participate in services will get kicked out to mainstream court, where they’ll face penalties including potential jail time.

Evans also announced a new program for repeat offenders that will both prohibit them from participating in any diversion program and seek harsher penalties, including “aggravated jail sentences,” for people who meet certain criteria, such as amassing more than three misdemeanor charges in three months or shoplifting at the same place twice.

A quick correction on this episode: Sandeep described San Francisco’s Reset Center, a sobering center where police remove people from the streets involuntarily for eight hours or so until they can receive a certificate of sobriety, incorrectly.

It is not true that the Reset Center offers medication-assisted treatment, such as shots of long-acting buprenorphine. The center gives referrals to outside providers but does not offer treatment.

It is also not really true that people can just get up and walk out of the Reset Center. In fact, according to the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, which runs the site, only “[once an individual able to care for themselves, they receive a certificate of release (849 (b) PC) and are free to leave.”