Courts, Crime

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

Seattle Municipal Courthouse

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans just announced the launch of a revamped community court for low-level misdemeanor offenders, fulfilling a key promise in her 2025 campaign against then-city attorney Ann Davison, who shut down the therapeutic court in 2023.

At the time, Davison and her allies argued that community court—an alternative to prosecution that connected defendants to services through the Seattle Municipal Court’s Community Resource Center—was ineffective.  Campaigning against Davison, Evans called the decision to end community court a “disaster” and promised to restore it.

The new Connection Court, which will be presided over for the rest of the year by retiring Municipal Court Judge Willie Gregory, is similar to the old community court in a few respects: It’s an alternative to prosecution on low-level misdemeanor charges such as theft and public drug use, and it connects defendants to services through the Community Resource Center, which Evans said will offer more direct connections and “warm hand-offs”  to service providers than it did before.

At the same time, the court now imposes new requirements on defendants, such as mandatory service participation, that make it a much different program than the community court Davison ended—one that Davison herself might have supported. Evans’ press announcement Thursday included supportive quotes from a dozen local leaders, including interim police chief Andre Sayles and Downtown Seattle Association president Jon Scholes, all but one including some reference to “accountability.” According to Sayles, that means “[we] offer a real path forward to those ready to take it, and we hold accountable those who continue to cause harm.”

For participants, the two biggest changes are a requirement that they commit no additional misdemeanors for 90 days—the length of the court’s jurisdiction over each case— and that they prove they’ve participated in two types of services, such as addiction counseling or job training. People who fail to meet either of these requirements—by not showing up at appointments, for example, or by committing another low-level crime—will be sent to mainstream court, where they’ll face criminal prosecution on the original misdemeanor charge along with any additional charges. Anyone with a serious felony conviction in the last 10 years is automatically ineligible for Connections Court, as is anyone who has committed a rape or murder.

Evans told PubliCola the requirements isn’t prescriptive; if someone commits another minor offense, for instance, the city attorney’s office can say, “‘You know what? Let’s give  this participant an opportunity to have that second case also be in community court,'” Evans said. Most people will still be eligible, at this stage, for other diversion programs, such as LEAD. “This just another layer for people to be able to get connected to what they need, one that was not there yesterday.”

Purpose Dignity Action co-director Lisa Daugaard, the architect of the original LEAD diversion program, said she’s reserving judgment about the revived community court. :e should be diverting cases prior to filing of charges whenever appropriate, but if cases need to be filed, it’s good to have a plan for addressing defendants’ needs, using whatever leverage the charge provides,” Daugaard said. “Everything depends on whether the services offered are actually matched to the person’s situation and needs.”

Critics of the new court, including the lawyers who defend indigent clients on misdemeanor charges, say Evans is reducing its potential  by setting up barriers to entry and establishing new hurdles for participants to trip over as they try to comply with the new conditions.

Katie Hurley, special counsel for criminal policy and practice at King County’s Department of Public Defense, said she’s concerned that the services available at the Court Resource Center don’t meaningfully address the conditions that lead people to commit petty crimes in the first place, particularly homelessness. About 30 percent of people fail to show up for municipal court hearings because they don’t have an address to receive court notices, Hurley said, yet “there’s no connection to housing, which is what many people who are prosecuted for low-level behaviors struggle with.”

“The whole idea behind Connection Court is that it’s supposed to be expansive and allow these lower-level offenses to receive a quicker, more effective response because we know that the current system has failed,” Hurley said. “Unfortunately, it’s going to exclude precisely the type of folks who should be benefiting from a Connection Court response, which is people who’ve been failed by the system previously.”

A second new program Evans announced today would send more people into that system. Her office is calling it the “High-Priority Repeat Offenses (HiPRO) program.

Under this program,  people who commit misdemeanors more than three times in a 90-day span, or more than six times in six months, will be ineligible not just for Connections Court but for any diversion programs, and Evans’ office will seek “aggravated jail sentences” against such repeat offenders.

This harsher treatment will also apply to anyone steals from a store from which they were previously trespassed for shoplifting, a process that can be handled by private security and is based on policies that vary from store to store. Evans’ office will also seek stiffer penalties against anyone charged with car prowling, a misdemeanor, if they were convicted for felony car theft in the previous year.

Although HiPRO sounds awfully similar to former city attorney Davison’s “high utilizers” list, Evans and her criminal division chief, Jenna Robert, said it’s different in this key respect: Evans isn’t compiling a list of people who may commit crimes in the future, they’re putting people in the HiPRO program after they’re charged with a crime that warrants escalation into the program.

In contrast, Davison maintained a rotating list of about 150 people who had at least 12 misdemeanor charges in the past year, and at least one misdemeanor charge in the most recent eight months.

It’s a bit of a distinction without a difference. Keeping a list of repeat offenders sure seems more intrusive than imposing harsher penalties on people once they hit a criminal benchmark, but the result is the same—harsher penalties for people who have committed a certain number of misdemeanors over a certain period.

Hurley, from DPD, called the new program counterproductive. The new two-strikes rule for shoplifting, she said, was “very alarming for us” because it means that anyone who steals from the same store twice will be subject to a higher level of prosecution, regardless of what led them to commit the second theft. Many people who steal small items from stores are homeless or have other underlying conditions, Hurley said—like the woman DPD defended last year who was charged with theft for stealing $5 in candy from a CVS that had previously issued a trespass order against her.

Under the new criteria, that client would have been subject to harsher prosecution and ineligible for Connection Court. (Ultimately, she was deemed incompetent to stand trial and her case was dismissed).

Evans said Connection Court, which just started on Wednesday, isn’t set in stone; the details and eligibility could change as the court evolves. But it’s unclear what Evans believes throwing people in jail (a place with no meaningful services) a few days or weeks longer for low-level crimes will accomplish, beyond temporarily removing some familiar faces from the streets. Evans says she’s creating new opportunities for people to access meaningful services, combined with accountability if they fail to meet their commitments. But a plan that deliberately excludes and disproportionately penalizes repeat offenders may just ensure that the people who most need those services won’t be able to access them.

Elections, Mayor Wilson, Police

Former SPD Chief Lands on His Feet, Sound Transit Removes Candidate’s Photo from Station, More Moves at Wilson’s Office

1. As we reported on Bluesky Tuesday afternoon, former police chief Shon Barnes got a soft landing after Mayor Wilson asked him to resign, a belabored process that ended in Barnes getting a going-away gift worth almost $750,000. In his new gig will be heading up “public safety programs and strategy” for Mission Ready Technologies (or Mission RT), a Scottsdale, AZ-based company that appears to sell surveillance technology, computer-aided dispatch systems, AI-based 911 response software, and other tech tools to state and local police agencies.

In a long LinkedIn statement that three different LLM detectors assured me was 100% AI, Barnes said he’ll “focus on helping state and local public-safety agencies connect their operational needs with technology, strategy, and organizational readiness” in his new position. The details of the former chief’s new job—like what he’ll actually be doing on a daily basis—are pretty vague, but it sounds like they could involve a lot of travel to cities whose police departments are implementing new technology. Neither Barnes nor Mission RT’s press release said whether Barnes will be renting in Arizona or working remotely from his home outside Chicago.

2. Julie Kang, a candidate for Seattle City Council Position 5, got prominent placement at the grand opening of Sound Transit’s new Pinehurst station on September 30, courtesy of a large photo featuring Kang, her husband, and their daughter placed prominently at the station, The photo was one of a series featuring community groups that had supported the station just east of I-5 at NE 130th Street, and it identified Kang’s family as representatives of the Haller Lake Community Club. Kang posted it on her Instagram page.

 

Sound Transit did the photo shoot on June 30; Kang entered the race late last year.

According to Sound Transit spokeswoman Rachelle Cunningham, Kang was “nominated, selected and photographed as a representative of the Haller Lake Community Club” and her photo was “randomly selected as one of the photographs to be featured at the station.”

At least one community member had a problem with the transit agency giving a candidate such prominent billing just weeks before the election, and complained to Sound Transit shortly after the station opened. The agency acted fast. By Friday night, two days after it went up, the photo of Kang and her family was gone.

Asked about the swift removal of the image, Cunningham said, “we heard concerns from community members about the photos and the perception of agency funds being used to support a campaign. Sound Transit does not endorse political candidates, and the photos were removed Friday.”

Sound Transit emailed Kang late Friday afternoon to let her know the photo was coming down . In response, Kang wrote, “When our family agreed to participate in the community photo shoot, we did so because representation matters to us. As an Asian American family, we wanted our community to be visible in the public spaces and transportation system that belong to all of us. At the time, I had no expectation that I would someday be a candidate for Seattle City Council.”

“I respect Sound Transit’s responsibility to remain neutral in elections. At the same time, I hope you will reconsider whether removing a longstanding community image simply because one of the people pictured later became a candidate is the appropriate way to maintain that neutrality.”

Kang told PubliCola she was referring to her general support for the light rail station, not the photo shoot in June.

3. Ansel Herz, the former Stranger reporter who’s spent the last decade or so doing comms for progressive candidates and causes, will take over Mayor Katie Wilson’s press office as press secretary and digital strategy director next Wednesday. Wilson has had a string of temporary press secretaries since Sage Wilson left in June, including, most recently, Alex Hudson, the former Transportation Choices Coalition director, who’ll return to her previous role as a transportation policy advisor.

Alex Gallo-Brown, a longtime who was glued to her side on the campaign, will no longer be Wilson’s director of community relations; instead, he’ll step into the newly created position of  “senior advisor on public engagement.” Matt McIntosh, another Wilson campaign staffer who’s currently a community relations manager, will be Wilson’s interim community relations director. The change means that Gallo-Brown will no longer be directly managing staff, but will have more direct control, along with Herz, over Wilson’s online communications.

As we reported, Wilson fired her digital communications manager Amy Piñon earlier this year, hiring a temporary contractor to do social media in her stead.

Wilson’s communications office has had extremely high turnover since she took office, the result of both firings (Wilson axed her original comms director, Seferiana Day, in June) and voluntary departures, like former press secretary Wilson’s. The turmoil reflects, among other issues, an ongoing tension between campaign loyalists who came into office wanting to blow up the old, institutional ways of doing things and government veterans with experience working in those institutions.

Wilson recently hired Tara Lee, a longtime comms professional who’s worked for former Gov. Jay Inslee as well as the Washington Budget and Policy Center, the nerdy left-wing think tank, as communications director.

City Council, Mayor Harrell, Mayor Wilson, Police

As Council Considers Reinstating Police Hiring Bonuses, an Unreleased Draft Report Finding They Don’t Work Is Timely Again
Seattle interim Police Chief Shon Barnes at a recent City Council committee meeting.

A city report showed one-time bonuses have no effect on police hiring. The Harrell Administration rewrote it to say the opposite.

By Erica C. Barnett

As the city council begins the process of dissecting and amending Mayor Katie Wilson’s budget, council members are already pushing back on the mayor’s police hiring plan, which funds a net increase of 66 new officers through 2028. The budget includes around $56 million in raises for existing SPD officers; it also incorporates SPD’s decision, which went into effect September 1, to eliminate hiring bonuses for new and transferring officers, saving the city a couple million dollars a year.

The bonuses, which officers receive in two payments (one when they’re hired, the second about a year later) range from $7,500 for first-time recruits to $50,000 for officers with prior police training and experience. Between July 2022 and May 2026, they’ve cost the city around $3 million, with another $1.4 million in second payments outstanding, according to SPD’s most recent data.

Council members, including public safety committee chair Bob Kettle, have pushed back on the decision to end hiring bonuses, which was a cost-saving move by SPD. At a budget committee meeting late last month, Kettle called the payments an effective tool for maintaining the hirng “momentum” SPD has achieved since last year.

Addressing interim Police Chief Andre Sayles, Sayles asked: “If we get lateral transfers, isn’t [paying the bonuses] a net positive for us?”

“Yes, I believe looking at a way to provide the incentive for lateral hires, specifically here in the state of Washington, will be ideal,” Sayles agreed. “Removing those incentives, particularly for lateral officers, has the potential to put us behind” neighboring jurisdictions, he added.

Since the city adopted the incentives as a way to boost hiring during a post-pandemic slump (and boosted the lateral bonuses to $50,000 in 2023), the efficacy of offering the one-time payments has gone (mostly) unquestioned,

But an unpublished 2024 analysis by the city’s Office of Performance and Innovation, based on a survey of newly hired officers and click-through rates on ads advertising various benefits of joining SPD, found that hiring bonuses weren’t a significant factor in new officers’ decision to apply for jobs at SPD. Instead, the analysis found that recruits were drawn by SPD’s competitive salary and benefits—which, at the time, were lower than the six-figure starting salaries SPD offers today.

PubliCola obtained several early drafts of the report, including comments and suggested edits, through a records request made last year.

“This evaluation found that incentive pay did not significantly impact police hiring numbers compared to other recruitment factors within the timeframe of the analysis,” one draft read. “The incentive alone is not enough to motivate people to join the Seattle Police Department,” another version concluded.

“The City should not continue the use of the hiring incentive as currently designed as an ongoing recruitment strategy,” one draft recommended..

Former mayor Harrell’s office, including then-deputy mayor Tim Burgess, public safety advisor Sarah Smith, and communications staffers, raised objections about almost every substantive element of report, from its tone, which they found too negative, to its conclusions, which they said the data didn’t support. “I don’t believe the evaluation is persuasive since the key findings are speculative,” Burgess wrote in January 2024. Every version of the report we reviewed was littered with comments from the mayor’s staff, highlighting the Harrell administration’s direct intervention in what was supposed to be an independent analysis by OPI.

By the time the mayor’s office was done with the report, it recommended keeping the hiring bonuses, rather than eliminating them.

Information that was unflattering to the program—like the fact that “100% of the employees who were hired and left since August 2022 were people of color,” as yet another draft put it—as was the fact that officers overwhelmingly mentioned salary as the main reason they applied. (Indirectly verifying this fairly intuitive survey result, SPD hiring spiked immediately after a new contract gave first-time officers a starting salary of $126,000 after a six-month training period.)

The report no longer mentioned that not one officer had mentioned hiring incentives in their self-reported reasons for working at SPD, nor that incentives ranked in the middle (above “in-person recruiting” and “personal referral” but under “salary” and “benefits”) on a five-item list that was included in the survey.

The final, public version of the report, now whittled down to just over four pages plus a chart of local police salaries, concluded, contrary to previous drafts, that it was “impossible to pinpoint the hiring incentive’s specific effect with the available data, It is clear from the survey and A/B testing that the hiring incentive is compelling to some applicants yet does not have as strong an effect as salary and benefits.”

“Given SPD’s staffing challenges, the relatively low cost, and the fact that other competing jurisdictions continue to provide the incentive, we recommend the continued use of hiring incentives,” the report now said (bold in original).

The new report also put a positive spin on the dismal finding that hiring incentives only beat out referrals and in-person recruitment in a multiple-choice question about people’s motivation for applying. “All but two hires selected incentive pay as having some level of importance in their decision to become a police officer,”  the rewritten report concluded. “Of these respondents, 23% ranked incentive pay first or second in importance, 41% ranked it as third, and 36% ranked it as fourth or fifth.”

Speaking to PubliCola last year, staff who were involved in the creation of the report expressed intense frustration at being asked to turn their office into one called a “propaganda arm of the city” by the Harrell Administration. “We tried to soften the language to appease them,” that staffer said, but the report ended up making claims that just weren’t supported by the data. “I’m not going to spend my waking outs doing that,” the staffer said; that staffer, and another staffer who worked on the report, quit their jobs and left the city over what they saw as interference in their work that compromised its integrity.

The report that found hiring incentives have no effect is based on the only available data, which is old. The city council only required a single report on hiring incentives, eliminating the reporting requirement when they increased the lateral bonus to $50,000 in 2024. But given that new recruits now earn six-figure salaries on Day 1, and pay for lateral officers has increased commensurately, it seems likely that salary is more of a motivating factor now, not less. Ending the bonuses now will help show whether Kettle and the police chief are right. If hiring craters, even at the newly inflated salaries, the council could look for money in next year’s  budget to reinstate them. That would be a “data-driven” approach—the kind this council routinely says they support.

 

 

Business, Transportation, Urbanism

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

by Josh Feit

10.5 million by October > 10.5 million by December

Seattle scooter- and bike-share is about to break last year’s record of 10.5 million total rides—maybe as soon as this week, nearly three months before the year is over. The program hit 10 million rides as of late September, and with usage trending up—it increased 68 percent between 2024 and 2025, for example—we’re on pace to hit 13 million by the end of this year.

It costs $1 to access a bike or scooter and 47 cents a minute after that, or about $8 for a 15-minute ride. It gets much cheaper if you get a monthly membership for $5.99 to lock in lower fixed rates: $1.50 for five minutes, $2.85 for 20 minutes. SDOT also requires the main contractor Lime to have a low-cost program for low-income riders.

The scooters are more popular than the bikes, by the way—and there are far more of them in circulation too (more than 10,000 versus 3,500) when you combine the standing and seated models.

There are plenty of reasonable guesses to explain why rented bikes and scooters are growing in popularity. A seemingly obvious answer, the spike in ridership during FIFA, doesn’t seem to account for most of this year’s boon, though. Ridership during June and July, while the World Cup was in play, was higher than the comparable months for last year, but overall ridership was consistently higher in every other month this year as well, highlighting a trend that’s larger than FIFA tourism.

So what’s going on, besides $5.67 per gallon gas prices? One possibility: Four new protected bike lanes came online this year, including a few that go to popular tourist spots, including to the downtown waterfront and one along the waterfront itself, which connects to the existing Elliott Bay Trail.

You can also make the case that the program has been around for nearly nine years now and more people are simply familiar and comfortable with tapping on and bombing down Yesler or climbing up Denny, particularly for that first-mile-last-mile trip to get to or from the bus; the average trip in 2026 is 1.3 miles. And the average ride clocks in at 11.3 minutes.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

 

Normalizing bike and scooter trips points to my favorite possible explanation, or at least my favorite micromobility trend. Even though, as I reported in an earlier Greater Seattle, non-rush hour bike and scooter share is growing at a faster clip than traditional peak commute time use, more employers may be taking advantage of Lime’s business program that allows companies to offer a commute benefit for short-term bike and scooter rentals.

Those two facts aren’t contradictory. In fact, they’re likely complementary. As bike and scooter rides become more popular, companies are realizing they need to accommodate their employees. Institutionalizing alternatives to cars is the best way to wage the war, and I’m all for it, especially when it signals that companies realize it’s in their best interest to do so.

21% > 38%

The Downtown Seattle Association released some new data last week showing that downtown foot traffic (as measured by workers who work downtown, but don’t live there) has remained stuck since stabilizing in 2024 at around 60 percent of pre-pandemic levels. “Incoming Commuter Foot Traffic” was about 62 million annually in 2019, while it’s around 38 million today, a 38 percent drop.

This puts us on par with other cities such as Denver and Portland, but it’s triggering for the DSA. Bellevue’s recovery is about 17 percentage points better than downtown Seattle’s; their commuter foot traffic is just 21 percent lower than their pre-pandemic levels.

Back Alleys = Main Streets

Speaking of foot traffic and (speaking earlier) of the World Cup, the state temporarily eased some booze regulations in advance of FIFA to help businesses capitalize on the soccer crowds. House Bill 1515, “Modernizing the regulation of alcohol service in public spaces,” allowed restaurants and bars to expand the boundaries of outdoor-table liquor service, including into public space. It also allowed neighboring businesses to combine those spaces.

And while the World Cup has been over for months, the legislation will remain in effect until the end of 2027 as a pilot project so the bill’s sponsors, including prime sponsor Seattle Rep. Julia Reed (D-36, Seattle), can get feedback from the more than 70 licensed liquor businesses who got the temp permits to expand their alcohol service. Of course, it also means we’ll hear from neighbors and others about how the pilot is going.

That extra input could help. “World Cup and Pioneer Square Art Walk are great examples of how vibrant public spaces can be,” says Henry Watson, Director of Development with Urban Villages and the RailSpur project, a Pioneer Square art space that’s been working with SDOT and the state to increase alley activation. “The question I keep getting asked is how we can make that level of activation a regular thing,” he says. “SDOT and the state have a great vision of how to do that with HB 1515.”

“Activate the Alleys” is a longstanding urbanist agenda item; it’s been bandied about Seattle for decades. Here’s hoping the World Cup gave us the kick we needed to actually make it happen.

Josh@PubliCola.com

City Council, homelessness, LGBTQ+, Mayor Wilson, Police

This Week on PubliCola: Wilson’s Budget Lands with Thud at Council, KCRHA Finds “Missing” $8 Million, RV Ban Advances, and More
Still from a promotional reel for Rokid glasses created by an SPD officer who used the glasses to film himself on the job, including while driving his car.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, September 28

On Wilson’s Budget, the Council Parts Ways With Reality

The council has started picking apart Mayor Katie Wilson’s budget, which they’ll amend before sending it back to her later this year. Some of their criticisms, however, went beyond differences in spending priorities; Wilson’s council adversaries accused her of trying to defund police surveillance, accused her of slowing down encampment sweeps (sadly, no), and even invented a 2020 council meeting at which Wilson supposedly shrieked “abolish the police!” at the council (which wasn’t even meeting in person at the time).

Greater Seattle: Inclusionary Zoning, Part 2; Amazon as a Percentage of the Budget; Permitted, but Struggling

In this week’s column, Josh takes a second look at inclusionary zoning (our version is called Mandatory Housing Affordability) via a study that found developers passed the cost of affordable housing on to other renters. Also this week, a cautionary consideration of how much the Seattle budget’s backstop depends on a handful of companies, and the necessity of thriving third places.

Tuesday, September 29

KCRHA Consultant Finds the “Missing” $8 Million

As I reported briefly on Bluesky last week, a consultant combing through the regional homelessness authority’s disheveled finances “found” $8 million the KCRHA had previously said the city and county “owed” the KCRHA but had failed to pay. In fact, according to the consultant, the money never went anywhere; it only appeared to vanish because of an accounting error.

Strauss’ RV Ban Moves Forward (But Won’t Ban Sprinters, to Saka’s Dismay)

After a flurry of mostly minor amendments, a City Council committee passed Councilmember’ Dan Strauss’ proposal to prohibit RVs without a special, one-time-only city license from parking for more than two hours anywhere in the city. Rob Saka tried to prohibit Mercedes Sprinters and similar vans from parking overnight as well, but his colleagues said that kind of sweeping ban would have unintended consequences on housed people who own this type of luxury van.

Seattle Cop Used Chinese AI Smart Glasses to Film Inside SPD Facilities, Creating Video for Company

An SPD officer is on administrative leave after using AI smart glasses to film first-person video inside a police precinct, at a crime scene, and in his car while driving. The video was used as a promotional reel by the company that makes the glasses, Rokid.

Wednesday, September 30

Council Learns What “One-Time Funding” Means

City councilmembers, including many who are up for reelection next year, expressed frustration that Mayor Wilson’s budget didn’t find ongoing funds for some $78 million in new programs they paid for with one-time funds last year. Budget director Aly Pennucci repeatedly explained that if they want to find money for things they added last year with one-time dollars, they’ll have to make cuts elsewhere in the budget.

Podcaster’s Advocacy for Anti-Trans Campaign Didn’t Violate Election Law

A statewide campaign to prevent trans girls from playing sports didn’t violate election law when it failed to report campaign speeches and fundraising by right-wing podcaster Brandi Kruse as in-kind donations, the state Public Disclosure Commission found last week.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

Thursday, October 1

Interim Police Chief Based Complaint Against Detective on Right-Wing Characterization of Anti-Trans Initiative

Interim police chief Andre Sayles based his complaint against a detective who spoke at a pro-LGBTQ rally on Kruse’s characterization of the anti-trans initiative, telling an investigator the detective was being dishonest when she described the potential consequences of forcing some students to submit to genital inspections. Sayles told the investigator he had not read the initiative.

SPD Overpaid Officers By $13 Million. Now the City Wants It Back.

The city discovered in July that police officers were mistakenly paid $13 million as part of their retroactive pay increases under the most recent police union contract; the payments, which ran as high as $32,000 more than officers should have been expecting, went through in June. The city can only recover its money if the police union agrees that officers should have to pay it back.

Saturday, October 3

Two Seattle Nice Interviews This Week: Mayor Katie Wilson and Budget Director Aly Pennucci, and Councilmember Dionne Foster

On Friday, we sat down with Mayor Katie Wilson and her budget director, Aly Pennucci, to talk about Wilson’s deficit-busting budget proposal.

And in case you missed it, we talked to City Councilmember Dionne Foster earlier this week about her proposal to cut MHA fees for some housing projects, including a resolution that calls for subjecting new development in neighborhood residential areas to some kind of MHA fee.

Share

 

City Council, Development, Mayor Wilson

Two Seattle Nice Interviews This Week: Mayor Katie Wilson and Budget Director Aly Pennucci, and Councilmember Dionne Foster

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Nice has two interviews for you this week!

On Friday’s show, we sat down with Mayor Katie Wilson and her budget director, Aly Pennucci, to talk about Wilson’s deficit-busting budget proposal, which is already facing stiff pushback from councilmembers who have grown accustomed to writing budgets that are balanced in the short term but assume huge deficits in future years. As I’ve reported, a cohort of centrist councilmembers elected in 2023 (plus Debora Juarez, appointed to replace Cathy Moore, who quit a year and a half into her term) are upset that Wilson failed to fund projects they paid for with one-time dollars last year.

Council members have also said they want a commitment to hire 1,400 officers (rather than the 1,250 the budget funds) and add police surveillance cameras to Seattle Center, where seven people were shot, three fatally, at the Bite of Seattle earlier this year.

We asked Wilson and Pennucci about the council’s initial reaction to the budget and how they’re doing things differently this year.

On CCTV cameras at Seattle Center:

Wilson: “There were not cameras right at the scene of the Bite of Seattle shooting, but there are cameras at Seattle Center, and camera footage from surrounding businesses has been used extensively in in the investigation.

“Seattle Center is not, in general, a high crime area of the city, and has never been talked about, to my knowledge, prior to the shooting as a potential location for CCTV cameras hooked up to the Real-Time Crime Center. … My budget does include $500,000 for security and safety at Seattle Center, and I believe that there’s been some conversation at Seattle Center about a potential use of some of that funding …[for]  mobile cameras that could be used during big events. So there might be some solution there that’s not, you know, permanent 24/7 CCTV cameras.”

On demands to commit to hirng 1,400 officers:

Wilson: “It’s simply not responsible budgeting to promise that we’re going to keep hiring police officers indefinitely without any projected way to pay for them. And in fact, even the near-term hiring plan of 1,250 was established without a way to pay for it, which is why we had to come up with extra money in order to fund these 66 additional police officer positions in order to get up to that 1,250 goal. Let alone 1,400 or whatever numbers people like to throw out there. So, you know, really, this is about what can we afford, and to get to any number higher than 1250, first we have to get to 1250. So let’s get to 1250.

“There’s a lot of different factors which influence how many officers we actually need to do the work. And so I don’t really think it’s that helpful to to try to put a specific number on it.”

On ongoing homeless encampment sweeps by the city’s Unified Care Team:

Wilson: “So the Unified Care Team, for the most part, has been continuing to operate the way that they were before I took office. We’ve been doing work with them to figure out how they can adjust some of their operations to get better outcomes for people experiencing homelessness, and that was a directive that I gave earlier this year. And so they’ve come back with recommendations, and we’re in conversation now about ways that they can change how they do their work to be more effective in matching people with with services, and and also more effective in responding to some of the felt needs in in neighborhoods. …

“My values have not changed, and I don’t think that I ever said during the campaign that I was going to stop the operation of the Unified Care Team. I said that we needed to shift to a model where we were moving people from encampments into shelter, and that is what we’re trying to do. And I’m as impatient as everyone else to have that happen faster.

“When you look at how the Unified Care Team does their work, they prioritize encampment sites based on safety considerations, both safety for the people living there and safety considerations for people in in the surrounding neighborhood. There often legitimate hazards. Obviously, when an encampment is is obstructing a sidewalk or an entrance to a light rail station a space in a park, the method of prioritization is really about safety and also about other high priority uses of that of that public space. And so I think there are good reasons often for needing to remove an encampment, even if we don’t have appropriate shelter to offer to people. And I don’t love it, right? I hate it actually. And also, that is the world that we’re living in until we actually have shelter that’s appropriate to people’s needs, and so that is why that is such a high priority for me.”

Listen to our entire interview—including Pennucci’s succinct explanation of the two budget refrains she’s had to repeat ad nauseam in response to council questions—here:

Earlier this week, we spoke with City Councilmember Dionne Foster about her legislation to give developers with stalled housing projects a deep temporary discount on Mandatory Housing Affordability fees. We asked Foster about her proposal to add some form of MHA fee in former single-family areas, where townhouses and small apartment buildings are now allowed, bringing their potential density in line with the city’s low-rise zones, where MHA applies. (Former councilmember Moore proposed imposing existing MHA fees in these areas.) We also asked why her legislation, which includes a window for new (rather than in-the-works) development to get a smaller discount on fees, excludes much of Southeast Seattle, the Central District and the CID.

On expanding MHA to neighborhood residential: “It is not a proposal to take MHA as is and put it in neighborhood residential. So what it does do is say, I want our our central staff, our team here on the second floor at City Hall, to work on a proposal that includes inclusionary zoning in neighborhood residential.

“There’s also some things that we put in there around approaches to make sure it’s a flat fee, or ways to think about it so it’s not constantly escalating, to make it more predictable for folks who are building in neighborhood residential. So there’s more work to do to figure out this concept. It is specifically not the proposal that former council member Cathy Moore put forward last year. Although I think because it’s talking about a form of inclusionary zoning in neighborhood residential, that is sort of the easiest thing for people to reach for. I understand that response, but it’s where I’m actually asking for something different and to work on a process to identify that and get that right.”

On excluding new projects in areas of “high displacement risk” from the proposal: “It’s not exclusion of housing in those areas, but it was really [designed] to take into account the fact that we want to make sure we’re not accelerating, necessarily, the pace of housing in certain geographic areas that have maybe seen a lot of development or where there’s a high risk of displacement concern. The basis for this is using some of the city’s data around high risk of displacement, so that we’re not over-incentivizing production in those areas during this short period of time.”

Listen to our conversation with Foster here: