1. Former city councilmember Sara Nelson’s effort to repeal a law that increased the way “gig” workers’ salaries are calculated, which would have reduced their pay substantially and increased profits for companies like Uber and Doordash, died that September after six months of heated debate. (The proposal would have effectively overturned the PayUp law, just adopted the previous year, whicih required companies to pay some of the expenses drivers previously had to absorb—expenses that pushed drivers’ pre-tip pay below the legal minimum wage). Although four council members voted for the bill in committee, it died quietly in late 2024.
A recent study by the city’s Office of Labor Standards now confirms what many drivers themselves said when testifying against the Nelson bill: Between January 2024 and July 2025, the average pay for drivers working for the five largest delivery companies average pay increased despite a reduction in tips, indicating that the legislation raising worker pay succeeded at its goal. The study looked at the approximately 92,000 workers who drive for companies like Doordash, most of whom work part-time and use multiple apps.
What’s more, predictions that drivers would get fewer orders did not come true—instead, the number of orders grew by 3.2 percent. The number of drivers increased by a similar amount in the same period—2.8 percent.
Pre-tip pay for “engaged time”—time spent actively completing orders—rose to an average of $30.12 during the study period, after subtracting mileage expenses (the report does not include an average prior to 2024). Pay for “online time,” which includes time drivers spent waiting for orders to come in, rose to an average of $15.98 an hour. This was despite an increase in fees by delivery companies, which add to the cost of orders.
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The PayUp law required delivery companies to report detailed information about drivers and their earnings, which is how OLS had access to such an expansive dataset.
The report did confirm that tips declined a bit (by an average of $2.37 a week) after worker wages went up, increasing the cost of deliveries, but noted that the percentage of workers’ income made up by tips was much lower, since drivers’ new base pay is now more consistent and predictable. Most drivers work part-time, with average weekly wages rising from $314.40 to $341.62, including tips.
2. Three city councilmembers—Council President Joy Hollingsworth, Debora Juarez, and Eddie Lin—will propose legislation next week that would ban data centers inside city limits, they announced yesterday. The legislation comes in response to reports that unnamed companies were planning five data centers on land owned by Seattle City Light; according to the Seattle Times, which reported the initial news, two of the companies withdrew their proposals this week.
The legislation would not directly impact City Light-owned properties outside Seattle; councilmembers are reportedly discussing a potential bill that would address data centers on these properties, such as a moratorium that specifically targets City Light. Leases of City Light-owned land still have to be approved by the City Council, so the council could choose to reject a lease for a data center even in the absence of a moratorium, although they would face financial pressure for rejecting revenue-generating opportunities.
1. Former Burien city attorney Garmon Newsom II has filed to run for the Seattle Municipal Court seat currently held by Judge Willie Gregory, who’s retiring. As PubliCola reported, Newsom was put on leave last year and returned only to be summarily fired by controversial city manager Adolfo Bailon earlier this month. The Burien City Council recently put Bailon on administrative leave.
As Burien city attorney, Newsom defended a city law that makes it illegal to sleep in public in the city, arguing that the ban created an “incentive” for people to go to shelter. (Burien does not have any year-round shelter for single adults).
He also argued for using city permitting rules to prohibit a church from hosting an encampment, and criticized the church for denying access to right-wing commentator Jonathan Choe, who was working for the Discovery Institute but whom Newsom described as a “member of the press.” During the debate over proposed shelter bans in Burien, we reported on a couple of instances in which he described existing or proposed laws inaccurately.
Newsom is represented by Northwest Passage, the Seattle consulting firm founded by Christian Sinderman. Last year, Northwest Passage was the consultant for then-mayor Bruce Harrell (who lost) as well as successful candidates Erika Evans (now Seattle City Attorney), Dionne Foster (now a Seattle councilmember) and Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck (who was reelected).
The other candidates in the race, so far, are Seattle attorney Lindsay Calkins and Snohomish County public defender Gabriel Rothstein.
2. Former Seattle Police Officers Guild director Mike Solan is running as a Republican for the Pierce County Council seat that’s currently held by Democrat Robyn Denson, who isn’t seeking reelection.
Solan has long lived in West Seattle, but Pierce County tax records indicate he bought a house in Gig Harbor last month. Solan is a controversial figure; in addition to (infamously) blaming the January 6, 2020, insurrection on Black Lives Matter protesters, Solan recently mocked the head of the city’s CARE Department and appeared to joke with then-SPOG vice president Daniel Auderer about the death of a young student killed in a crosswalk by a speeding cop.
Solan didn’t immediately respond to a text message asking about about his candidacy this morning.
Brenda Lykins, a former Gig Harbor City Council member, is running for the seat as a Democrat. So far, Solan has not reported any contributions.
3. During a presentation on the Law Enforcement Diversion program earlier this week, the Seattle Police Department was represented by Chief Shon Barnes as well as Acting Assistant Chief Rob Brown, a longtime captain and former South Precinct commander who now oversees operations.
Why does SPD have an acting assistant chief, rather than a permanent one? As it turns out, they have both. Todd Kibbee, the permanent acting chief, is out on paid leave while Brown does his job.
SPD Chief Operating Officer Sarah Smith would not confirm that Kibbee, who has been at SPD for 33 years, was burning his leave before retiring, a common practice that allows officers to continue receiving full pay and benefits while they use up their accrued sick and vacation time at the end of their careers. Smith said only that Kibbee was on “approved leave.”
Smith did not respond to questions about how long Kibbee would be on paid leave and whether Barnes plans to appoint Brown permanent assistant chief.
Kibbee makes around $313,000 a year, while Brown makes around $266,000, according to city salary data.
Two recent views of King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn, a return-to-office proponent who frequently calls in to council meetings from remote locations.
1. In the wake of an audit that revealed potential fraud and waste at King County’s Department of Community and Human Services, County Councilmembers are proposing an office of inspector general to provide a new layer of oversight to receive tips and conduct investigations into claims about contractor misuse of county funds. A new inspector general’s office would cost around $800,000 a year, according to a presentation by the county auditor’s office last week.
County auditor Kymber Waltmunson said last week that an independent inspector general could augment the work the auditor and ombuds are already doing by setting up a hotline for anonymous tips, investigating fraud (the auditor does analyses but does not investigate), and actively monitoring contracts.
Rod Dembowski, one of the councilmembers who’s pushing for more oversight of county contracts, told PubliCola a new inspector general would “fill in a gap that we’ve identified” between the ombuds office, which oversees complaints about county employees, and the auditor’s office, which comes up with a work plan every year and conducts audits based on that plan.
“I’m trying to cover that gap where somebody believes something is being improperly done by a contractor or recipient of county funds,” Dembowski said. The IG would be “able to look at the actions of contract and grant recipients and see if there’s malfeasance or misfeasance there.”
County Councilmember Claudia Balducci said she agreed with Dembowski’s intention to encourage more active investigations into complaints about misuse of county funds, but isn’t convinced yet that the county needs to add a whole new office for that purpose. “I do think whatever happens needs to be nested within our current oversight [system.] I want to avoid creating overlaps and confusion.
She also isn’t convinced that the damning DCHS audit, which looked at a subset of contracts, necessarily indicates there are similar issues in other county contracts.
“I was hoping after the audit uncovered real lapses in oversight in a small number of our contracts, that someone would raise their hand and say, ‘Is this a bigger problem?'” Balducci said. “It might be. Or is it contained to some areas? But nobody in the system came out and said we should look more deeply.”
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2. More than a dozen King County employees showed up to a King County Council meeting this week to testify against King County Executive Girmay Zahilay’s “return to office” mandate, which would require most county employees, including those who were hired as remote workers, to commute to offices in downtown Seattle three days a week.
The mandate will require King County to rent a substantial amount of private office space in downtown Seattle, since the county does not have enough room for all its employees. Last week, county employees delivered a giant blank check to Zahilay’s office, representing the millions of dollars they estimate it will cost to rent office space so that everyone can have a desk downtown.
One of the most vocal advocates for a strict return-to-office policy has been Republican Councilmember Reagan Dunn, who went on KIRO Radio this week to declare, “There’s a new sheriff in town bringing employees back to King County so they can hang out around the water cooler and collaborate and do the people’s work.”
The county staffers, represented by PROTEC17, had a minute each to explain why commuting to a desk downtown would not make them more effective or efficient. Dunn, who lives 35 miles away from downtown Seattle, wasn’t around to listen, though. Instead, as he often does, he had called in to the meeting from a remote location.
City Councilmembers Maritza Rivera and Joy Hollingsworth proposed amendments to Mayor Katie Wilson’s ambitious shelter proposal that would mandate 24-hour security and buffer zones around parks, schools, and child care centers where large new “transitional encampments,” a term that primarily refers to tiny house villages, won’t be allowed. (Seattle has had a few actual temporary encampments, but Wilson’s plan centers around tiny house villages rather than tents).
Last month, Wilson introduced a legislative package that would make it easier to site and build larger tiny house villages. The council’s land use committee is considering the part of her proposal that increases the maximum “shelter census” from 100 to 150 people in most areas, plus a potential 250-person shelter somewhere in the city.
Hollingsworth sponsored the amendments that would impose security mandates and no-shelter zones because Rivera isn’t on the land use committee.
The first of the two Rivera-Hollingsworth amendments, which would both apply to shelters that serve more than 100 people would require the presence of “identifiable security personnel” on site 24 hours a day. The second would prohibit new tiny house villages within 750 feet of all child care centers, schools, and playgrounds, and within 500 feet of most city parks. (Small “pocket parks” under 2 acres would be exempt).
It’s unclear how much of the city would be automatically off-limits under this expansive prohibition. Using an online GIS map creator, I drew a 750-foot radius around every public school in the city as well as a couple dozen child care facilities in a large swath of Hollingsworth’s district. (Child care facilities in private homes don’t count as child care facilities under city code, according to a council staffer.)
Not indicated on the map are the park buffer zones, which would extend 500 feet in each direction from midsize or larger park, and park playgrounds, which would be subject to the 750-foot buffer zone.
Under the amendment, sober shelters and those “that are exclusively for families with children” would be allowed inside the buffer zones. The council expressed its “intent,” in legislation that released funds for Wilson’s initial shelter push, for two of the new shelters to be limited to families with children and one to people in recovery from addiction.
The proposed changes were just two of seven proposed amendments to the original bill, sponsored by Councilmember Dionne Foster. Another amendment, from Councilmember Dan Strauss, would require tiny house providers to separate the new, larger villages into fenced-off “neighborhoods” whose residents would be physically restricted from entering each other’s area.
A fourth, from Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, would require the new, larger villages to have at least two shelter staff on site 24 hours a day. Other amendments would require good neighbor agreements and public safety plans and request a 1-to-15 staff-to-resident ratios for shelters serving people with high-acuity behavioral health conditions..
Rivera, speaking in favor of her proposal to establish no-shelter zones, said she was trying to protect children from dangerous people who might live at the new tiny house villages. “We know that for shelters that are not sober … there might be drug dealing and other public safety issues, and we don’t want near that near children,” Rivera said. Then, conflating unmanaged encampments with managed shelter, she continued, “I know we’ve had issues with encampments at our major parks.”
Rivera also attempted to link tiny house villages to a recent gunfire incident near a press conference Mayor Wilson held to announce new education and child care investments. “Everybody knows by now that there was a shooting and shots were fired … right into the Yesler Community Center,” Rivera said. “So I’m not saying shots are going to be fired outside of these sanctioned shelters. But again, we cannot say that there won’t be drug dealing outside of these shelters or attempting to be done outside of these shelters, and so we need to make sure that we’re keeping our kids safe.”
Hollingsworth and Rivera introduced their security and buffer zone amendments at the last minute, so the only copies consisted of physical printouts in council chambers. The committee didn’t vote on Tuesday; they’ll meet at least one more time next week before pushing the bill forward to a full council vote.
“Mark43 Recorded Diversion” refers to all completed referrals police made through arrests; LEAD also gets some referrals that don’t come from SPD.
Barnes allowed that LEAD was better than “no diversion at all,” while Councilmember Rivera said the city has already “thrown a lot” of money at the program.
By Erica C. Barnett
Police Chief Shon Barnes questioned the value of LEAD, the city’s main criminal justice diversion program, at a city council committee on Monday—saying the program could not, on its own, “deliver the level of order, safety and visible presence that residents, businesses and visitors believe should be indicative of a major US city.” For 15 years, LEAD has provided services as an alternative to arrest and incarceration; the model, which includes long-term case management, harm reduction, and connections to housing and treatment, has been replicated around the country and is considered a best practice for minimizing people’s involvement in the criminal legal system.
Since 2023, police have had the power to arrest and charge people with a gross misdemeanor for possessing or drugs or using them in public. That year, a new state law made drug use or possession a gross misdemeanor, rather than a felony, in response to a 2021 state supreme court decision called State v. Blake that overturned existing laws that classified possession and public use as felony crimes.
Between 2024 and 2025, according to a staff presentation during the council’s public safety committee on Tuesday, LEAD diversions for people arrested for possession or public use declined almost 37 percent—from 173 to 109—while charges filed by police officers more than doubled and attempted jail bookings increased by 191 percent. (This number includes both jail bookings and people the jail declined to book because of medical and other issues). Misdemeanor drug use and possession cases made up just under half of all drug arrests.
This is not the outcome local leaders said they hoped for when they adopted the law in 2023. In an executive order that accompanied the new law, then-mayor Bruce Harrell directed SPD to adopt a policy that directed officers to divert drug users into LEAD or other programs whenever possible, rather than arresting them. That policy says, “When an arrest is warranted, sworn employees should prioritize diversion in lieu of booking.”
In general, the numbers show, police have continued to routinely arrest and book people using drugs in public rather than sending them to LEAD.
Both the new law and the executive order gave individual police officers the ultimate authority to decide whether to arrest someone or refer them to LEAD, based partly on whether they decide a person is posing a “threat of harm” to anyone in the public. (LEAD can also take referrals after an arrest).
The way SPD’s policy defines a threat of harm gives police a lot of discretion to decide whether they think someone is causing harm. But it specifies that any time a person is using drugs near a bus or rail stop, school, or park, a threat of “harm will be presumed.”
Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes said the list was almost too expansive. “A very important policy decision will have to be made whether or not officers can [arrest] people using drugs” when they witness it, “and whether or not we can make that arrest without having to go through the checklist,” Barnes said.
Barnes and acting Assistant Chief Rob Brown told the committee that they respected LEAD and planned to continue diverting people to the program. In “many cases,” Barnes said, LEAD “is better than having what we’ve always done, which is no intervention at all. But it’s also important to be clear-eyed about what the program can and cannot accomplish and whether it’s meeting the expectations of the people who live, work and visit the city.”
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LEAD was started in Belltown in 2011 and has expanded in size and scope many times since, so it’s inaccurate to say that the city has “always” done “no intervention at all.” Barnes, previously police chief in Madison, Wisconsin, was appointed chief by Harrell last year.
Brown, who was previously the commander of SPD’s South Precinct, said he was particularly interested in holding people accountable who engage in what he called “defiant” drug use—that is, drug use in highly visible places that make residents and customers “very uncomfortable.” These “defiant” users, Brown said, “feel like they’re entitled to consume. … I understand that [for] somebody who is an addict, that jail alone, by itself, is not necessarily going to help them get to moving beyond their addiction. But what I do want to see is behavior change for this type of defiant, open consumption.”
In a separate presentation, Purpose Dignity Action’s Lisa Daugaard, who launched LEAD in Belltown 15 years ago, said funding for the PDA-run program hit “a high-water mark” in 2022 and has been declining ever since, reducing LEAD’s capacity to take on new clients.
After a LEAD staffer described an analysis that showed people do better the longer people they stick with LEAD, Councilmember Maritza Rivera said she wasn’t convinced the program was doing enough to impact visible drug use and disorder. “I appreciate that it can take up to two years to get someone to accept services and get toward a path of recovery,” Rivera said, but businesses can’t wait that long to see improvements. “It taking two years to help someone get off of 12th and Jackson is not helping that small business be able to stay in business and stay open,” she said.
“I don’t mean any disrespect by this,” Rivera continued, “but everyone comes here and says, if we had more money, it would be different. … “You know, we have thrown a lot [of money at LEAD]—I mean, PDA gets $20 million from the city.”
“We’re in a budget deficit. So are there other things that we can do to address the problem? … Because I don’t know that we have more money that we can put into it.”
Last year, Rivera voted along with the rest of the council to increase the police department’s budget by $35 million, including millions for to expand SPD’s camera surveillance program into additional neighborhoods. That amount will grow this year even in he absence of new programs, as officers that received raises of 42 percent over the past five years get raises on top of their new higher salaries.
A consensus appears to be growing among regional decision-makers that it’s time to start “winding down” the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, which received the results of a devastating forensic audit earlier this month, according to people familiar with internal discussions about the agency’s future who spoke with PubliCola over the past few days.
But what that plan, and the path forward for homeless services, will look like, if it happens, remained murky after the weekend, which KCRHA board members, Seattle and King County elected officials, and homeless service providers and advocates spent discussing how to ensure homeless service providers keep getting funded even if the KCRHA no longer exists.
KCRHA’s board, made up primarily of elected officials from around the region, met on Friday to discuss the findings of a forensic review that found pervasive, ongoing financial oversight and accounting problems that resulted in overspending, a persistent negative fund balance, and at least $8 million that could not be accounted for. Between the $8 million and another $4.26 million in overspending (which included $1.26 million in unfunded interest payments on loans), the audit found nearly $13 million in money that was effectively missing from the KCRHA’s accounts.
Kinnison, who made an unusual in-person appearance at Friday’s meeting, cued up a presentation by Mike Nurse, a principal with the auditing firm Clark Nuber, by reading a prepared statement full of reassuring claims. The problems the auditors identified, she said, were “serious” but not fatal, and stemmed largely from decisions made before she arrived in mid-2024—when, she suggested, things started turning in the right direction.
“This audit identifies real weaknesses in KCRHA’s financial systems, controls and reporting, particularly during our early formation period,” Kinnison said. “I want to be clear about one important point. The audit did not find evidence of fraud or misuse of funds. … There are no missing funds.” Finally, whatever problems the audit identified with the agency’s “internal tracking and reconciliation processes,” Kinnison said, all the money was “used on services for people experiencing homelessness.”
Kinnison, who did not attend most of the regular meetings with auditors, concluded by saying she was the right person to get the agency back on track. “I just want to say, I’m a career public servant. I was hired to do this work. It’s what I’ve been doing, it is a passion for me. It’s part of my identity to uphold the public trust, and I am really honored to be the person that’s helping to understand [how] KCRHA can improve to the level that meets public expectation and scrutiny.”
The rest of the meeting might as well have taken place in a different reality.
For the next hour, Nurse made the case that KCRHA’s financial oversight and accounting practices had left the door wide open for waste, financial abuse, and fraud.
“Did we find fraud at KCHRA? The answer to that remains unclear,” Nurse said. “In our testing, we did not identify any direct evidence of fraud.” However, that testing was based on a small sample of KCRHA’s financial transactions, and ” transparency issues on the accounting record between 2021 and late 2024″ made it impossible to track spending on a detailed level.
Many of those “legacy issues,” Nurse said, persisted after that period—meaning that previous leaders, including controversial founding CEO Marc Dones, were not solely to blame for the casual accounting practices and opaque record-keeping that contributed to overspending, negative balances, and opaque financial records. As recently as last year, many different people had access to the spreadsheets KCRHA used to track spending, and various people deleted, and made other changes to “thousands” of financial transactions, the audit found.
“Under current conditions and without corrective action, the challenges I’m talking about are likely to continue, including ongoing cash shortfalls and the reliance on advances in borrowing to meet funding requirements,” Nurse said. Without any formal financial controls, he continued, the KCRHA is at risk of having to pay back federal funding they’ve already spent. Several past audits, including county and state reports in 2023 and a second state audit in 2024, both unearthed many of the same issues, Nurse noted, but KCRHA did not take any apparent actions to fix the problems, and “these issues still remained” as of last July, when the audit began.
In a separate but related issue, KCRHA staffers spent more than a million dollars using agency credit cards and reimbursing staff without providing detailed justifications for their purchases, which included clothes, office furniture, and $13,000 in relocation costs for a chief program officer who lasted less than a year. Payroll records and receipts, obtained through a records request and provided to PubliCola, show that the KCRHA paid nearly three times that much—more than $38,000—to relocate Kinnison to Seattle from Washington, D.C.
Nurse also knocked down one of the KCRHA’s chief justifications for its persistent negative cash balances—the fact that the agency uses a “reimbursement” framework, paying providers first and refilling their bank account when money comes in from outside funders. (The KCHRA switched to this system after providers complained about payments that were often months late, an especially severe financial burden for small and less-established nonprofits.)
Many agencies use a reimbursement model, Nurse said, results in accounts whose balances dip into the red and back into the back on a consistent monthly basis, like a “sine wave”; in contrast, the KCHRA’s balance has been inconsistent and mostly in the red, with a negative balance that actually grew from $44.7 million in July 2025 to nearly $63 million this March. On the chart above, which is included in the report, “you can see the receivables continue to grow, grow, grow, and the cash continue to decline, so that is not what you would expect to see.”
Implementing all the recommendations from the audit, Nurse said, could cost the KCRHA “potentially in the millions of dollars” and take a year or more. It could also lead to a disruption in homeless services, since the agency would need to use existing staff and resources to work exclusively on correcting all the problems the report identified.
Currently, there seems to be little enthusiasm for that option. After Friday’s meeting, board member and King County Executive Girmay Zahilay said he wanted to work “methodically and thoughtfully” while deciding what happens next. “We have to make sure that anything that we do moving forward is going to be better than the status quo.”
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Board member and Seattle Councilmember Dionne Foster told PubliCola after the meeting that she thinks it’s important to create a “strong foundation” for the future homelessness system by not acting rashly and immediately moving to the nuclear option—a shutdown process that, under the agreement that established the KCRHA, be required to last at least one year.
“When the auditor talks about this being something that was built over time because of the poor foundation of the agency, that’s something that we have to take into account in how we respond,” Foster said. “I want to make sure that as we’re thinking about how we address these audit findings, we do not pivot so quickly that we have another poor foundation.”
During a City Council briefing on Monday, Seattle Councilmember and KCRHA board member Alexis Mercedes Rinck said she is introducing a resolution that will lay out “nextstepsforourcontracts,staffing,Continuumof Care … andhowwewillensureacontinuityofserviceswithorwithout KCRHA.”
On Monday, King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski—one of the first elected officials, along with Seattle Councilmember Maritza Rivera, to explicitly call for shutting down the agency—told PubliCola he’s started working with other council members on a plan to “take back, in an orderly way” some of the functions KCRHA oversees and revert to a system where the county, Seattle, and other cities run their own homelessness systems the way they did before the KCRHA existed. That option couldn’t happen overnight, because HSD no longer has a formal homelessness division or the staff to manage large, complex grants.
“I know we’ve used this phrase ‘homelessness is a regional problem that requires a regional solution,'” Dembowski said, “but I think there’s an opportunity to ask, is that really the case? It’s certainly a regional challenge, but I think this trite statement that it requires a regional response deserves some assessment and reflection, because I don’t think that’s what we’re doing.”
Most smaller cities decided not to contribute funding to the KCRHA, preferring to keep funding local homeless service providers directly, and the KCRHA eventually moved toward “subregional” planning that takes the different political and financial realities of different parts of the region into account.
Zahilay, along with Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, sent a letter to Kinnison giving the agency until May 8 to present a plan to address some of the “high-risk findings” in the audit, and until May 23 to come up with a corrective plan to address the other audit findings. Wilson, through her deputy mayor, Brian Surrat, also added amendment to a resolution creating a finance committee with the authority to approve or reject new agreements, discretionary spending, and new hires; the changes effectively put KCRHA under a hiring and spending freeze for the indefinite future.
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By Erica C. Barnett
PayUp law, just adopted the previous year, whicih required companies to pay some of the expenses drivers previously had to absorb—expenses that pushed drivers’ pre-tip pay below the legal minimum wage). Although four council members voted for the bill in committee, it died quietly in late 2024.
