City Council, homelessness, human services, Mayor Wilson

Council Budget Fizz: Rinck Wants to Fund Survivor Services, Saka Wants to Defund Restrooms, and Strauss Says the Mayor Is Weak on Homelessness
City Attorney Erika Evans speaks at a press conference about Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck’s budget proposal at City Hall on Wednesday.

1. Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck announced Wednesday that she’ll propose adding $8 million to this year’s city budget to restore services for domestic violence and sex trafficking survivors that the council funded on a one-time basis last year, and expand services and shelter for victims of gender-based violence that are losing federal funds due to the passage of HR1, Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”

The money, Rinck said at a press conference on Wednesday, would help fund legal services, flexible funding for needs like apartment deposits and childcare during court dates, support groups and counseling for survivors and their children, and prevention programs like consent education and bystander intervention.

“Gender-based violence is not inevitable. It is learned, which means it can be unlearned, and it also means it can be stopped before it starts,” Rinck said.

City Attorney Erika Evans said she started her term this year with a backlog of 1,700 domestic violence cases, which has resulted in some victims, like a woman she identified as “Sarah,” waiting years for her case to go to trial. “She said waiting two years made her feel like Seattle didn’t care about what happened to her,” Evans said. Councilmember Dionne Foster said she’ll propose a one-time add to next year’s budget that will help close that backlog; we’ve reached out to her for more details about that separate funding proposal.

HR1 cuts millions of dollars for survivor services and domestic violence prevention programs, impacting groups like the  King County Sexual Assault Resource Center (KCSARC). Meanwhile, changes and cuts to grants made through the US Department of Housing and Urban Development have left local survivor housing programs with less ability to provide shelter and housing to people fleeting abuse.

“The administration has proposed cutting the Office of Violence Against Women by 29 percent. It has moved to terminate millions of dollars in federal grants to hundreds of organizations. It has cut housing assistance,” Rinck said. “Every one of those cuts has an address, and too many of those addresses are right here in Seattle.”

Rinck didn’t offer specific details about her proposal on Wednesday, saying she’ll introduce a detailed budget amendment next week.

2. The city’s Office of Economic and Revenue Forecasts, whose October revenue forecast has recently provided the city council with more (projected) money to play with in its November budget, had sobering news on Friday: The new forecast projects just $7.8 million in additional revenues between 2026 and 2028 compared to previous forecasts. In reality, the true number will be $2.8 million in the negative, city economist Jan Duras told the Economic and Revenue Forecast Council, because the city intends to continue exempting health care providers from the JumpStart payroll tax.

The city also expects revenues to dip below previous forecasts in 2028.

What this means for the council’s budget deliberations is that for all their bluster about funding more police, more surveillance cameras, more Unified Care Team staffers, and more firefighters, they’ll be facing an even tougher budget reality this year. Funding everything council members have said they hope to add to the budget would cost tens of millions of dollars, which would require equivalent cuts to other parts of the budget. So far, no one on the council has said where they plan to cut (or what budget tricks they plan to use on the budget they received from the mayor’s office, which shows a positive balance through 2023) to pay for those additions.

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3. During one of several all-day council budget meetings this week, City Councilmember Rob Saka took several minutes to rail against Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to install 12 new restrooms, including two permanent Portland Loo-style restrooms at parks in Northeast and Southeast Seattle, using both general-fund and King County and Seattle parks levy revenues. Wilson’s proposal would also add 10 new Throne restrooms, like the ones installed in Pioneer Square earlier this year, across the city.

Overall, Wilson’s budget includes about $6.5 million, roughly half of that from the King County and Seattle parks levies, to pay for the new permanent and prefabricated restrooms, along with maintenance and renovations at existing parks restrooms, including at Judkins and Cal Anderson Parks.

Saka, who has previously complained that restrooms in his West Seattle district are poorly maintained and covered with graffiti, characterized the new toilets as a waste of money given the poor condition of the permanent restrooms in other Seattle parks. (His comments came during a discussion of the city’s parks and recreation budget; the restroom spending is spread across several budget areas).

“We’re a year plus away from an audit, a damning, scathing audit, that revealed can’t get our own house in order—quite literally, bath house in order!” Saka siad. “We can’t even solve the problem of maintaining properly our existing restroom inventory fleet. And how many new bathrooms are proposed for expansion under this? And yes, my council district is the worst off. It’s no secret, in terms of inability to properly maintain because of graffiti and vandalism our existing restroom fleet!. And now we want to expand, create new shiny names, and we can’t take care and look after the things that we have properly today.”

Saka’s opposition to new public restrooms represented a dramatic reversal of his position just one year ago, when he added $1 million in funding to then-mayor Bruce Harrell’s budget for new public restrooms in his district. Citing the exact same “scathing audit,” Saka argued last year that his district should be prioritized for new Portland Loo-style restrooms.

Adding these restrooms, Saka argued, would help “to harden the parks restrooms, to make it more tamper resistant, to make it more vandalism resistant, to make it more graffiti resistant.” Funding restrooms in his district, Saka said, was a way of respecting “the gravity and severity of the underlying problem at issue” in the audit.

Saka’s total reversal on the issue of public restrooms may seem perplexing, but two things have changed. First, this year’s proposed new restrooms are not in his district. And second, the mayor is Katie Wilson, a person many on the council, including Saka, seem determined to oppose even when it means they have to completely reverse positions.

4. For another example, look no further than Dan Strauss’ dark insinuations on Thursday about Wilson’s proposal to move the city’s huge (more than 100-member) encampment sweeps team out of her direct control and into the Human Services Department, which oversees homelessness programs and, until Harrell vastly expanded the city’s encampment removal apparatus, oversaw previous iterations of the team.

Logically, taking the UCT out of Wilson’s office is a way of depoliticizing it, and that’s how a staffer characterized the change. Council central staffer Ann Gorman said, “this was undertaken in order to protect the UCT across mayoral administrations, so that it continues” no matter who is in office. “To someone who is interested in the continuation of the UCT, that’ss good news that would seem to reflect the the achievement of efficiencies.”

Strauss said he took “a little bit of issue” with Gorman’s comments, calling the claim that moving the sweeps team back to HSD would insulate it politically “the largest pile of horse pucky I’ve ever seen occur in my life.” The city needs “executive leadership”—that is, direct control by the elected mayor—for the UCT to be effective, Strauss said.

The real reason Wilson wants to move the team, Strauss continued, is that she doesn’t want to deal with homelessness—quite a thing to claim about a mayor whose budget includes $37 million for new shelter, far more than any of her predecessor’s budgets.

“I believe that that transfer happened because the mayor is likely uncomfortable addressing homelessness, because addressing homelessness requires both a lot of compassion and firm boundaries, and it can be very uncomfortable,” Strauss said. 

Strauss also assailed Wilson for using existing funds—$3.5 million—for an RV safe lot where people living in RVs could access services and shelter and move toward housing. Strauss wants to use that money on his plan to eventually ban RVs from the city, with a transitional period where people currently living in RVs would be required to register with the city and accept services and shelter offers. Strauss said he was “deeply disappointed in the lack of collaboration from the Wilson administration regarding this funding, and my door remains open.” 

 

homelessness, King County, Mayor Wilson

Regional Homelessness Authority’s Overspending Grows to $17 Million, According to New Report
KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison

By Erica C. Barnett

The city of Seattle and King County will be on the hook for at least $16.7 million in previously unreported costs accrued by the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, city and county officials said Thursday afternoon.

The additional shortfall, a combination of excessive administrative spending and growing debt, was revealed in a new report from Turning Point, the consultant hired to reconcile the agency’s finances after a damning forensic audit found widespread, longstanding accounting irregularities earlier this year.

In a joint statement, King County Executive Girmay Zahilay and Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson said, “The $17 million unrecoverable balance is unacceptable, and the County and City are working together to address repayment while protecting critical services for people experiencing homelessness.”

Elected officials who previously called for the KCRHA to shut down immediately, including King County Councilmembers Reagan Dunn and Rod Dembowski and Seattle Councilmember Maritza Rivera, issued statements calling the latest news “shocking” (Rivera) and “outrageous” (Dembowski) and describing the KCRHA as a “failed experiment” in a regional approach to homelessness (Dunn).

Tough talk aside, city and county taxpayers are now on the hook for the KCRHA’s overspending; according to deputy county budget director Aaron Rubardt, paying back the KCRHA’s unpaid debts will likely take several years.

According to Turning Point’s report, as of July 31, the KCRHA had a net negative balance of more than $31 million, which was offset by money it was owed by the city and county, resulting in an overall negative balance of $16.7 million as of that date. Here’s the high-level breakdown:

For context, KCRHA has long blamed its persistent negative balance on its reimbursement-based model, in which the agency pays homeless service providers for their annual contracts and gets reimbursement from its funders, chiefly the city and county, after the fact.

However, if this was the only reason for the negative balance, the homelessness agency’s bank account should end up with a positive or zero balance once all those reimbursements come in; instead, the KCRHA’s negative balance grew larger and larger over time. “This was an argument for needing large cash advances to avoid those negative cash balances,” City Budget Office director Aly Pennucci said on Thursday. “However, even after those cash advances were approved, the cash position remained negative, raising further concerns.”

The overall net deficit of $16.7 million is what will remain after every entity that owes KCRHA money has paid everything they owe.

The bulk of the shortfall resulted from KCRHA overspending the amount of administrative funding they had coming in. That excessive spending included lavish outlays on high-priced temporary staffing firms like Robert Half, which charges hefty recruitment fees to do work that would more typically be done by regular full-time employees. It also includes the salaries of KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison and recently promoted Chief Operating Officer William Towey, who make a combined total above $600,000, according to the union that represents many KCRHA employees.

The largest portion of the KCRHA’s overspending resulted from errors in calculating how much money the agency would receive as the result of grants to homeless service providers.

Every dollar of funding the KCRHA receives and sends to service providers in the form of grants comes with an “administrative allowance”—a percentage of the contract amount that enables the KCRHA to administer the contracts. But that allowance is based on how much of the money actually gets spent—if a provider can’t use all the money it receives in a certain year, the amount the KCRHA receives to administer that money also decreases.

What the KCRHA did, according to the report, was assume that 100 percent of every grant it administered would be spent each year, and spent the administrative allowance that would apply if that was true. This resulted, over time, in an administrative “overspend,” based on contractor underspending of $259 million, of $15.7 million by July 2026. On top of that, the KCRHA overspent what it was bringing in by another $3.3 million on top of the amount that resulted from that miscalculation. And the KCRHA owed an outstanding $4.4 million in interest on its debt to King County, which serves as the KCRHA’s bank.

“The general idea is because they didn’t have the [necessary] financial practices in place, it was difficult for KCRHA to see this happening,” King County’s Rubardt said. “We have asked for a followup on the timing of all the accumulation, but my sense is that’s been occurring over the entire time the KCRHA has been in existence.”

Pennucci said the total amount of outstanding administrative debt will probably “come down” by the end of the year, as grantees spend more money. Interest payments, meanwhile, will keep accruing on the KCRHA’s negative bank balance, resulting in a larger interest balance by the end of the year.

The KCRHA’s governing board, made up of elected officials from across the region, will discuss the findings of the report at its meeting on November 6. When I asked whether anyone will be held accountable for the agency’s expensive errors, Wilson’s director of city governance and human services, Mark Ellerbrook, said it will be up to the governing board “to work on and wrestle with” that question.

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City Council, City Hall, human services

Council Critics Accuse Wilson of Creating “the Unfund Budget”

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson’s centrist critics on the Seattle City Council spent most of Wednesday accusing the mayor of creating a budget that, as Councilmember Bob Kettle put it repeatedly throughout the day, “unfunds” (rather than defunds) critical services, including encampment removals, graffiti and park restroom cleanups, and transportation projects.

The theme of the day was insinuation: Council members complained about things that have supposedly fallen apart that Bruce Harrell is no longer in office, like the state of parks restrooms or the swiftness of encampment sweeps, then blamed them on Wilson and her budget priorities. Dan Strauss, for instance, said a business owner’s complaint about an encampment that stayed in the same spot for three months shows that there’s been “a complete change in how effectively the city is addressing homelessness,” while Rob Saka assailed the mayor for proposing 10 new portable public restrooms when “we can’t even get our own bathhouse in order!”

“How many new bathrooms are proposed for expansion?” Rob Saka asked rhetorically, projecting to the rafters. “Now we want to expand, create new shiny things, when we can’t even properly take care of the things we have today? Hmm!”

In general, the day’s two budget meetings (which I covered in detail on Bluesky, starting here) were an opportunity for councilmembers who opposed Wilson’s election to overstate the likely impact of her proposed budget cuts and suggest that she should have made different, unspecified decisions to address a $175 million budget deficit.

Take, for example, the “unfunding” of the city’s Unified Care Team, which would lose two and a half administrative positions—desk jobs—that have never been filled.

This cut, Kettle said, represented a larger “deprioritization” of encampment removals—one that has deprived the Parks Department of the “heavy equipment” it needs to haul tents, trash, and people’s possessions away after encampment sweeps. Piling on, Maritza Rivera claimed Wilson’s “budget renders us incapable” of addressing homeless encampments. And Saka railed against the mayor’s decision to move the city’s Unified Care Team back to the Human Services Department rather than having its duties spread across four separate city departments.

Addressing the mayor (who, quite possibly, could hear him from her office five floors above), Saka said, “Now, this might be a good thing to deprioritize [the UCT] t and bury that work down in a department somewhere. It might be a political bone to throw at your democratic socialist base, but it does our communities harm!”

Last year, Saka sponsored a budget proviso, or spending restriction, that required Wilson to maintain the $30 million, 116-member Unified Care Team and keep spending money on specific priorities, such as $2.2 million for police to be present at sweeps.  “Some people on the far, ultra-left lost their national minds!” when he sponsored the proviso, Saka bellowed. “Calls to employee wellness programs skyrocketed, apparently, in some circles after I did that! But it was a wise and responsible thing to do.”

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Later in the day, during a discussion about how to resolve a growing deficit in the Seattle Department of Transportation’s transportation fund ($41 million on average each month this year), council members suggested this was the first they were hearing about the seriousness of SDOT’s financial problems. (SDOT has said the shortfalls stem from higher-than-anticipated costs and lower-than expected revenues.) “I did not know up until a couple weeks ago, right during the budget, as part of the budget process, that SDOT was operating basically in the red in this way,” Rivera said. “This is a new development for council.”

In fact, a staffer reminded her, the budget the council adopted last year showed a growing negative transportation fund balance starting in 2027. That same budget noted that SDOT had finished paying off a previous interfund loan, unanimously approved by the council in 2020, last year. “I think there was some awareness that the transportation fund was having challenges,” the staffer said. “Now it may not have had awareness that starting in 2026, after the interfund loan was paid off, that we continue to have those challenges, but … I looked at last year’s financial plan, and it was a negative balance, and projected for it to be negative balance for this year and the coming years.” 

The council has the authority to revise the budget to reflect their own priorities. But there’s a difference between expressing genuine concern about cuts and deficits and continually rehashing the last election.

Instead of responding like the business community has to Wilson’s budget (with a tone of surprised approval, since the budget funds centrist priorities, like police, with minimal cuts and no new taxes), the council is spending a huge amount of rhetorical energy this year grandstanding over relatively insignificant cuts (rarely have so many budget speeches centered on the elimination of two vacant administrative positions) without acknowledging that for every program they restore, they’ll have to find commensurate cuts elsewhere in the budget. It’s as if Wilson’s opponents on the council think the mayor made up a mean budget just to spite them, and that their job is to righteously restore funding for all their pet projects without balancing the ledger.

Which is to say: Get ready for tomorrow’s meetings, which will focus on the human services, police, and fire departments, three areas where many on the council have, if anything, even bigger feelings about the mayor’s budget proposal.

City Council, Transit, Uncategorized

Greater Seattle: A Supermajority, a Mistake, and a Chance

 

By Josh Feit

66 percent = A Supermajority

I’ve gone from stunned, to angry, to eventually, “oh, Seattle” since I first learned more than a decade ago that the Seattle Department of Transportation doesn’t charge for street parking in West Seattle. So, while I wasn’t exactly breaking out the champagne, I was relieved when the city finally announced on September 30 that it has decided to expand its parking demand management program to the West Seattle Junction (and to Upper Queen Anne as well.)

The SDOT program, which exists in most business districts in the city, regularly reviews parking availability from Ballard to Roosevelt to Capitol Hill to South Lake Union to Columbia City, tweaking the dials on parking rates to ensure there’s always one to two spots open per block. The well-tested theory behind the (mostly) citywide policy, first enacted in 2010, goes like this: When people have to pay for parking, they’re likely to be more efficient with their time, which leaves more spaces open more often. Showing great forbearance, SDOT patiently explained this concept and the change—$1 an hour in the morning to  $4 an hour in the evening—to West Seattle residents in the recent report.

According to SDOT’s “intercept” surveys of West Seattle Junction visitors (conducted in-person rather than online), a 66 percent supermajority of people said they walked, biked, or took transit to the Junction as opposed to driving.

This provides a potential new rejoinder to complaints from businesses about paid street parking.

The longstanding and obvious retort is that rather than decreasing the number of people who can park and shop, paid parking adds more shoppers by making parking spots more readily available. Now SDOT can add this: The fact that a supermajority of people aren’t even driving to the commercial district in the first place means the shopping-while-driving customer isn’t the seismic constituency shopkeepers may assume they are.

The 66 percent number tracks. It’s similar to the 60+ percent number the SDOT’s survey found in Upper Queen Anne.

Admittedly, SDOT’s online surveys showed the opposite: More people in those surveys said they drive in to the Junction and (though much less so) to Upper Queen Anne. The online sample size was also bigger. But with hundreds of in-person respondents who were actually interviewed in the neighborhood, the West Seattle and Queen Anne surveys seem noteworthy enough for SDOT to call out, which they did in the Queen Anne report under the banner “Many People Visit Without Driving.” They also noted the supermajority in the West Seattle report. “While 71% of online respondents said they typically drive to the Junction, our intercept survey found 66% of respondents typically walk, bike, or take transit to the Junction.”

Slower Bus Service > Faster Bus Service

I’m all for dedicated lanes and multiple-door boarding and inline platforms. And I’m a yes to off-board payment and synchronized traffic lights and queue jumps. Give me all the smart-bus fixes that speed up service. What I’m not for is taking away stops on one of the busiest local bus lines in the city. That’s the current vision for the 7, which King County Metro plans to replace with the Rapid Ride R line—R for Rainer. The county council is scheduled to vote on the the changes—which could reduce the number of bus stops on the popular 7 by about 30 percent—before the end of the year.

Council members and Metro planners should remember that R also stands for Rely on, which is exactly what many of the 11,000 daily 7 riders do—to get to local grocery stores, services, and appointments along the Rainier corridor itself and not necessarily, as the RapidRide plan seems to imagine, travel exclusively to downtown.

To quote Anna Zivarts’ recent editorial for us: “The downtown-centric alignment of the Rapid Ride R was based on pre-pandemic destination data. Despite profound changes in commute patterns since then, there hasn’t been time or resources to examine whether Rainier Valley’s transit needs have evolved.”

Eliminating stops along one of the most heavily used local bus routes in the city seems likely to make it less popular and less reliable.

5 to 4 > 6 to 3

Seattle voters have a chance to second 2025’s election results in a few weeks. Which I hope they do to make it clear for the the Seattle-is-Dying media that bashing Mayor Wilson for the past year hasn’t prompted the backlash they’re hoping for.

Last year, in addition to electing dorky socialist Mayor Katie Wilson, Seattle also added two much-needed progressives to the council’s vote count, nudging city hall from an 8-1 conservative-bloc roll call to a less- dominant 6-3 dynamic by adding brainiac lefty Dionne Foster and urbanist attorney Eddie Lin.

Foster and Lin have been great additions so far. Former Washington Progress Alliance ED Foster, no surprise; YIMBY Lin for rookie legislator of the year (thank you for reining in hearing examiner appeals on land-use decisions)! They’ve both joined charismatic Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, the most reliable lefty of the three.

Three is still less than six, though. North Seattle voters now have a chance to add a fourth progressive to the mix, Nilu Jenks, whose strong showing in the primary bodes well for the ongoing trend away from the Harrell years. And with swing votes like Rob Saka and Dan Strauss occasionally breaking from the majority, even that 5 to 4 conservative hold could be tenuous.

All this is to say, our progressive mayor may soon have more votes to work with on the second floor.

A question would remain, though. Can she work with them?

Josh@PubliCola.com

homelessness, King County, Media

No, King County Didn’t Write a $10 Million “Blank Check” for Youth Homelessness

By Erica C. Barnett

On Seattle Nice last week, we briefly discussed a column by the Seattle Times’  Danny Westneat, titled “Another ‘blank check’ program passes at King County.” I had just read the column the morning we recorded, and—never a good idea—assumed that Westneat had his facts basically correct.

Silly me.

The program Westneat spent several hundred words deriding as a $10 million “blank check”—which, side note, is not what a “blank check” is—is a 0.01 percent sales tax, which works out to about $4 a year, to fund youth homelessness programs. Westneat, acknowledging that the tax would provide “rather tiny amount—just $10 million per year for three years”—nonetheless says the county can’t be trusted to pass a tax without a predetermined spending plan, because of  “a series of blunders and mismanagement that have focused a Klieg light on local social services funding.”

Specifically, Westneat claims, the Best Starts for Kids program was designed to let county workers decide what to fund “on the fly,” resulting in “chicanery,” improper payments, and possible fraud. Because of this, Westneat argues, all county human services programs (and only those programs) deserve special scrutiny. Targeting the unrelated Health Through Housing program, which provides permanent supportive housing in existing buildings, Westneat claims that operating costs have “soared,” and that the program will never reach its goals.

“[C]an we at least admit we have a problem?” Westneat kvetches. “Why these councils don’t just flesh out a clear spending plan with goals and oversight from the beginning is beyond me, but it’s probably because there’s no fallout with the voters when they don’t.”

“Until then, it seems the blank checks are only going to keep on coming.”

Much as I wish Westneat’s dashed-off ragebait didn’t have an impact, he’s influential—pundits and elected leaders routinely cite his columns as evidence to support their own positions, even when they’re full of half-truths and outright errors, like this one.

Wanting to know more about what the sales tax for youth homelessness will actually fund, I called the proposal’s sponsor, King County Councilmember Jorge Barón. To my surprise, given how much coverage the tax plan has received, he told me I was the first reporter to contact him about his bill.

“It’s not a blank check,” Barón said, sounding exasperated. (I get it—it’s not the first time the Seattle Times has run an error-riddled opinion piece about the tax without talking to its sponsor). To begin with, “there are already guardrails in the state legislation” that created the new taxing authority, limiting spending to “child care; perinatal support services;  before-school and after-school based youth services that address mental, social, behavioral, and physical health; workforce capacity building; shelter and rental assistance; and client transportation.”

“The state has given us clear direction on what this money can be used for, which is very limiting,” Barón said.

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Moreover, Barón said, the county is going to adopt a spending plan—the thing Westneat claims they have no plan to do—in November, once they know how much money they can actually expect from the tax. Although Westneat wrote that the tax will net the county $10.3 million, the actual amount could be significantly less, Barón explained, because other cities within King County also have the authority to pass the same tax. The county has to credit every city that passes their own sales tax increase for its portion of the total, so they’re waiting to find out how much they’ll actually have to spend over the three-year life of the tax.

“There is going to be a spending plan. The details are being finalized,” Barón told me.

Spending plans aren’t the same thing as dictating specific agencies the county will fund, which means the spending plan the county adopts will probably be less prescriptive than Westneat seems to be suggesting it should be—that is, they set general parameters around how the money should be spent but give local officials the ability to select specific projects over the life of the tax.

This is standard practice. The six-year Seattle transit levy that’s on the November ballot, for instance, lays out nine broad spending categories, including bus service hours and transit “safety supports,” but keeps those categories general to allow the city to decide on specific projects in the future.

For this more targeted, three-year levy, though, the county already has a half-dozen specific youth and family projects in mind, including a Seattle shelter operated by Mary’s Place that is slated for closure; Friends of Youth’s Eastside shelter program; the ROOTS youth shelter in the University District; and the YMCA’s Social Impact Center in South King County.

Zooming out from the sales tax plan, Westneat also exaggerates the findings of a high-profile audit of grants made during the pandemic as part of the county’s Best Starts for Kids levy. Westneat claimed the audit found the $900 million program was “awash in improper payments and possible fraud.” (The aforementioned error-riddled op/ed claimed the county “lost untold millions of dollars” to waste and fraud, an inaccurate claim that a first-year fact checker would have flagged immediately.)

In reality, the audit looked at 19 grants, totaling about $12 million, that included funding for community groups that had never previously held county contracts. Ultimately, the audit found $320,000 in improper or questionable payments, including a little over $10,000 in potential fraud, although the county never actually paid out that money. All told, the county is working to recover about $58,000 in potentially improper payments. The county absolutely screwed up by failing to closely monitor these programs. But that hardly makes the entire levy program “awash” in fraud.

Westneat’s cheap shot at Health Through Housing is wrong, too. Citing his own previous column about problems at one of the former hotels King County tried to convert into housing, Westneat suggests the entire enterprise has failed. The program, he claims, “has never reached its goals” and “likely won’t now,” since the county has stopped buying up old motels.

In terms of the total number of units, Westneat’s correct—the program’s goal was to “create and operate” 1,600 units, and the county only reached 1,423, including nearly 1,000 units of permanent supportive housing. Rising costs have stalled building acquisition, and NIMBY opposition has also slowed down specific projects.

In terms of success at getting chronically homeless people into permanent supportive housing—housing for people with physical and mental disabilities that includes wraparound services and minimal barriers to entry—Health Through Housing is an indisputable success. Of the hundreds of formerly homeless people living in permanent supportive housing through the program (768 as of the end of 2025, a number that has grown since then with the full and partial openings of three more buildings), 93 percent remained housed, meaning they didn’t return to homelessness.

Being housed, as the name of the program suggests, resulted in dramatic reductions in emergency room visits, hospitalizations, and jail bookings. Improving people’s health and stability, and reducing involvement in the criminal legal system, are also key Health Through Housing goals, which the program has achieved year after year.

Although Westneat is scandalized that the average operating cost for these units was $3,400 last year, that number represents the cost of providing supportive services that make it possible for homeless people with long-term disabilities to stay in their housing instead of sleeping on sidewalks and in encampments. In other words, it’s not $3,400 in “rent” per month, but an all-in number that include the “wraparound services” Seattle liberals like Westneat always say we need in order to keep people from living on the streets.

We’ll be discussing the new tax again on this week’s Seattle Nice. We also got into the details on KUOW’s Week in Review last week, where a fellow guest called my work to report this story out “adorable” before dismissing everything I said.

 

homelessness, Mayor Wilson, Police, Taxes, Transportation

This Week On PubliCola: Police Hiring Bonuses Don’t Work, Scooter Usage is Up, Community Court is Back, and More

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, October 5

Greater Seattle: Bike and Scooter Share Could Soon Lap 2025’s Record-Setting Numbers

Josh is hyped about the latest stats on Lime scooter and electric bike rentals in Seattle, which show more people are using micromobility options than ever before, even when you discount the spike in usage around the World Cup. In less encouraging news, the number of people in downtown Seattle hasn’t bounced back from the pandemic as fast as other cities—something he says alley activations, and loosening the city’s puritanical rules against drinkign al fresco, could help.

Tuesday, October 6

As Council Considers Reinstating Police Hiring Bonuses, an Unreleased Draft Report Finding They Don’t Work Is Timely Again

When a council-mandated report found that hiring bonuses don’t have a meaningful impact on whether people apply for jobs at the Seattle Police Department (and recommended ditching them), then-mayor Bruce Harrell’s team just changed the report, whittling it down to a few bullet points and recommending that the city keep them. The City Council is currently talking about reinstating the bonuses, which SPD ended in September.

Wednesday, October 7

Former SPD Chief Lands on His Feet

Former Seattle police chief Shon Barnes, who received a departure package worth well over $700,000 when he resigned under pressure earlier this year, has landed a new job at a company that sells surveillance and other technology to law enforcement agencies. No word on whether Barnes, who spent much of his time as police chief out of town at networking conferences or at his family home in Chicago, will be working remotely.

Sound Transit Removes Candidate’s Photo from Station

For two days, riders who passed through Sound Transit’s new Pinehurst station in North Seattle saw a giant photo of District 5 City Council candidate Julie Kang and emitcomplained, Sound Transit took the image down—a move Kang calls unfair.

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More Moves at Wilson’s Office

After months without a press secretary,, Mayor Katie Wilson has hired former Stranger writer and longtime progressive comms person Ansel Herz for the role (a fact I teased on Bluesky a couple months ago, before it was official) Alex Gallo-Brown, who’s been Wilson’s director of community engagement, is moving into a senior advisor role where he will no longer be managing a staff, but will be advising on external relations and digital strategy; Wilson fired her digital strategist in August.

Thursday, October 8

Revived Community Court Will be Paired With Punitive New “High-Priority” Track for Repeat Offenders

City Attorney Erika Evans is reviving the old community court her predecessor, Ann Davison, shut down in 2023, but with new “accountability” requirements and stricter eligibility—for instance, anyone who commits additional misdemeanors within 90 days will get bounced back to mainstream court for prosecution. Services will now be mandatory and failing to comply with service commitments will also be disqualifying.

At the same, Evans announced a new “high-priority offenses” program, in which she’ll seek longer jail sentences for people who commit more than a threshold number of misdemeanors over a certain period—three in 90 days, for example, or two if the second offense is stealing from a store that has issued a trespass order. Public defenders called the punitive elements of Evans’ plan counterproductive because, they argue, they’ll exclude people who would most benefit from services like treatment.

Also this week: On Seattle Nice, we spoke with Transportation Choices Coalition Director Kirk Hovenkotter about Proposition 1, which would double a sales tax that pays for extra bus service in Seattle. If you live in Seattle, it’s on your ballot this month.

On the same show, we talked briefly about a column by Danny Westneat in the Seattle Times, in which he complained about the King County Council writing what he called a “blank check” to. pay for vaguely defined youth and family services. I had only read the column that morning, and said it would be better if there was some kind of spending plan attached to the proposal. Silly me, responding to a Westneat column without doing my own reporting! After a morning of phone calls (including with sponsor Jorge Barón, who said I was the only reporter who called him about his proposal) have a very different take, which I’ll share on a future episode. TL;DR, though: Westneat broadly misrepresented both the tax proposal and the audit of the county’s Best Starts for Kids program his criticisms were based on, while unfairly maligning an unrelated county program that has successfully kept people housed as a failure.

I also went on KUOW’s Week in Review this week, where host Bill Radke, commentator Joni Balter, KUOW’s Scott Greenstone and I talked about the shelter sales tax, whether Democrats plan to broaden the “millionaires’ tax” to apply to slightly less-rich people, whether Mayor Wilson is betraying her socialist roots, and much more.

Save the date: Seattle Nice is hosting a live debate for Seattle City Council District 5 between Julie Kang and Nilu Jenks. Join us at the National Nordic Museum on October 21 at 6 p.m. See you there!

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