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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

City Council, Mayor Wilson, Police

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

.SPD West Precinct

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle Police Department overpaid police officers, management, and civilian staff a total of more than $13 million as  part of a police contract, signed in 2025, that gave officers retroactive pay increases for two years when they were operating under a previous, expired contract.

Overall, about 900 SPD employees, most of them represented by the Seattle Police Officers Guild, received more retroactive pay—a payment that represents how much an officer would have made under a new contract during a period when no contract applied—than they were supposed to, thanks to an error by SPD’s budget or HR office. Basically, someone at SPD used 2020 rather than 2024 as a baseline to calculate what officers were owed. Because pay was much lower in 2020 than in 2024, this miscalculation produced a much larger differential between officers’ pre-contract pay and their pay under the new contract. Hence the overpayments, according to the city.

Some of the payments were in the thousands, but a large number were in the five figures. One officer received $32,000 in excess pay, while hundreds more received $10,000 or more on top of their regular “retro” payments. Around 100 SPD employees received at least $20,000 more than they were supposed to, while another 225 received between $15,000 and $20,000, according to the mayor’s office.

It’s unclear whether any officer who received a bloated retroactive paycheck reported the discrepancy to SPD. SPD referred all questions to the mayor’s office, which said they’d get back to us tomorrow.

The Seattle Police Management Association and Teamsters 117, the two unions that represent a small number of the SPD employees who were overpaid, have policies in their contracts for resolving overpayment. Employees who aren’t represented by unions will have to pay the money back, in accordance with state law on overpayments.

That leaves SPOG, whose contract is silent on what happens if SPD inadvertently pays them too much. (Officers themselves have apparently kept silent, too, since the city budget office just found out some of them got checks in June that were higher than they were supposed to be by five-figure amounts).

SPOG’s 2026-2027 contract, adopted last year, boosted starting salaries well above six figures, so the difference between an officer’s 2024 pay and their pay starting in 2026 could be significant—perhaps $20,000, based on a typical raise for an officer now making around $75 an hour. But it’s hard to imagine that none of the hundreds of officers expecting a check in that ranged noticed when their payment was $10,000, $15,000, or $25,000 higher than expected. Come on. No one?

In a statement, the mayor’s office revealed who holds the cards in this situation, and it isn’t the city. “As required by law, the City will engage in bargaining with SPOG over the method by which SPOG members will repay the overpayments,” the mayor’s office said. In other words, the city can’t just take the money back—it has to get SPOG to agree on whether and how and how much money officers will have to repay, and they could choose not to bargain at all.

Of course, “overpayments” are just money that belongs to the city and its taxpayers that the city misspent. What’s the difference between a police officer who knowingly keeps money he didn’t earn and one who grabs $10,000 he found lying around at a crime scene? That will be a question to keep in mind if SPOG argues officers should just get to keep the money.

I hoped to ask SPOG president Kent Loux about this, but he did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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SPD’s error raises questions about the department’s oversight of its budget, which is around half a billion dollars. Wilson’s office said they learned about the discrepancy in mid-July, which is shortly before Wilson asked then-chief Shon Barnes to resign.

SPOG announced a class-action lawsuit over alleged underpayments and nonpayments after the city implemented its dramatically faulty new payroll system, Workday, in 2025. According to the mayor’s office, the overpayments involved officers who were were working at the department between January 1 and August 27, 2024. Although Wilson’s office said the payment errors at SPD had nothing to do with Workday, August 27 was exactly one week before the city transitioned to the new system. I’ve asked the mayor’s office for more information about how those dates were chosen.

The mayor’s office did not identify the person or people directly responsible for SPD’s error.

The mistake, whoever made it, occurred under the watch of former police chief Shon Barnes and current Chief Operating Officer Sarah Smith, who oversees both human resources and SPD’s budget office. According to an FAQ provided by the mayor’s office, the city budget office (CBO) “learned of this error when SPD contacted CBO regarding a budget-to-actuals discrepancy in SPD’s 2026 budget related to retroactive payments.” In plain English, SPD discovered it was paying out more than it had budgeted, and asked the city budget office to take a look.

According to the mayor’s office, the city council first learned about the overpayments in early August. The mayor’s office said they don’t know when they might recover the overpayments, since they have to negotiate with SPOG for that to happen. In the meantime, the overpayments will become a new problem for this year’s budget, as the city looks an extra $13 million to avoid throwing the budget out of balance.

In the future, Wilson’s office said, the city budget office and the Office of City Finance will have to sign off on all retroactive payments before they go forward. “The Office of City Finance is also updating the payroll manual to provide guidance to department staff on this new approval requirement,” according to the FAQ.

The city council has known about SPD’s overpayment problem since late August, according to Wilson’s office. It won’t impact next year’s budget, which the council is currently hashing out. We reached out to public safety committee chair Bob Kettle, who wants to find money to hire more officers next year, but have not heard back.