King County, labor

Union Members, King County Employees Protest Three-Day Office Mandate

By Erica C. Barnett

Members of the PROTEC17 union, including King County employees, held a demonstration in the lobby of King County’s Chinook building on Tuesday to protest King County Executive Girmay Zahilay’s three-day-a-week return to office (RTO) mandate, which county employees have called punitive, expensive, and counterproductive.

Carrying signs with slogans such as “Communities not cubicles,” “King County is Bigger than Seattle,” and—memorably—”I don’t have a desk,” the staffers showed up with a giant “blank check representing the expense King County will incur to rent private office space so that employees, including many who were hired as fully remote workers, will have a place to sit downtown.

A staffer for Zahilay showed up in the lobby to accept the check and said she would make sure he gets it.

The county gave up much of its office space during the pandemic and agreed to allow many employees to work from home indefinitely under an agreement called “Green Where You Work.” Now, many county employees don’t have desks to “return” to as part of the “return to office” plan—a misnomer for county employees who were hired over the past six years and have never had a physical office downtown.

David Dahl, a capital projects manager for the Department of Natural Resources and Parks, was hired as a remote worker for a job that takes him to sites across King County. Living in Seattle, he said, might make it relatively easy for him to come downtown to meet the three-day mandate, but for many of his coworkers, the extra trip would add hours of unnecessary commute time to jobs they could previously do from the part of the county where they lived.

“We have a lot of people who have projects in the south end and live in Auburn or Kent or Tacoma, and they can easily get to those projects in a very short amount of time,” Dahl said, “whereas if they have to come into an office and then go back to a park site, that’s a ton of driving to do something that should be pretty simple.”

King County is much larger than the city of Seattle, where many workers also chafed at return-to-office mandates. The county covers more than 2,100 square miles, and many staffers live far away from Seattle, in areas where housing is more affordable.

Moving more than 1,000 employees into “a space with maybe 80 desks” would be impossible, Dahl said, and the new spaces the county has come up with at the King Street Center aren’t up to ergonomic standards. “It frankly should be the bare minimum that if you’re asking someone to work in an office, you should provide them an ergonomic place to sit and to do their work,” Dahl said.

Another DNRP employee, Brad Moore, said requiring county employees to travel to downtown Seattle for work would lead an “extremely high and unknown cost” for office space “that we feel could go towards much better things—for example, the public service that we’re all supposed to be providing.”

Moore, who lives in Shoreline with his extended family and was hired as a fully remote staffer, said the mandate will add a one-way transit commute of between 45 minutes and an hour to every work day. That will make it harder for Moore to help take care of kids in the family and help his wife, who has mobility issues, get to work.

But Moore added that the situation is much worse for some of his coworkers, who live in places like Everett and “are being told that they have to come into the office two or three days a week. I mean, in the morning, it could take two hours,” Moore said.

Affordability, Density, podcasts

Will Dialing Back Fees on Housing Fix Seattle’s Construction Crash?

 

Photo by Joshua T. Garcia, via Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 license.

By Erica C. Barnett

On Seattle Nice this week, Sandeep and I brought on two special guests to explain why developers want a holiyday from Mandatory Housing Affordability fees, which are added on to of the cost of every new multifamily residential building in Seattle. The fees pay for affordable housing (or a developer can skip them by building affordable units on sight), but they’re bringing in less money than ever as housing development slows.

Since MHA passed, in 2019, Seattle has undergone a political evolution on housing. Density, which neighborhood activists and most political leaders once saw as having an entirely negative impact on neighborhoods, is increasingly seen as a necessity as Seattle’s renter majority grows. Many people no longer agree that the city should segregate renters from property owners by restricting them to dirty, polluted arterials far from parks, libraries, and tree-lined streets. There’s a growing consensus that to reduce the cost of housing, you have to build more of it.

Our guests this week, land use and housing consultant Natalie Quick and former Seattle Chief Operating Officer Marco Lowe, don’t go so far as to call for a total repeal of MHA, but they do make a strong case for its eventual replacement with an incentive-based approach called funded inclusionary zoning. FIZ, which we’ve covered at PubliCola before provides tax breaks, similar to Seattle’s existing Multifamily Tax Exemption program, in exchange for a requirement that developers build affordable units on site. Instead of charging a fee for housing, which drives up rents, FIZ makes it possible for affordable and market-rate housing to coexist.

As Marco points out, housing slowdowns don’t just lead to a shortage of housing, driving up rents. They also deplete city resources, because when developers decide it’s too expensive to build, the city loses out on all other kinds of non-MHA revenues, from sales taxes on materials to taxes on real estate transactions to property taxes on the housing itself.

This one’s a wonky episode, but one well worth listening to if you want to understand why so little new housing—particularly larger units—is getting built right in Seattle right now and what the city could do to reverse the trend.

Editor’s note: This story originally identified Marco Lowe as the former Office of Economic Development director. This error has been corrected.

King County

County Assessor, Charged With Stalking, Posts Taunting Pics as Council Again Demands His Resignation

By Erica C. Barnett

On Tuesday, the King County Council will take up a motion to send a letter to King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson demanding his immediate resignation. Wilson was charged late last month with stalking his ex-fiencée, Lee Keller. This will be the second such action by the council, which unanimously passed a resolution calling for Wilson’s resignation last year after Keller provided new evidence of Wilson’s harassment in a petition for a protection order and dissolution of their domestic partnership.

Wilson, who refused to step down, was arrested less than a month after that vote for showing up at Keller’s house in violation of the protection order. He’s now facing charges of stalking, a gross misdemeanor, and under a five-year no-contact order.

Last week, a judge reversed an order that would have required Wilson to wear an ankle monitor to ensure that he stays at least 1,000 feet away from Keller. The decision came after Wilson argued that he has a medical condition that requires him to soak both his legs every day, which would damage the ankle monitor.

Just hours after his hearing, Wilson appeared to brag about the ruling by posting a photo of himself, shirtless and in a tub, on Instagram and Facebook. The caption read: “What a great night to soak in the tub and let your cares float away”—an obvious reference to his victory in court hours earlier.

Three days later, Wilson did it again, posting another semi-nude photo of himself in the hot tub under the taunting caption, “Great to soak my legs after after (sic) a very productive and successful week.”

Wilson has claimed that a medical condition called lymphodema requires him to completely submerge both legs in water every day. In court, Keller said that for the four years they were together, he never had the condition in both legs. After deciding Wilson could go without the ankle monitor, Seattle Municipal Court Judge Andrew Simon advised Keller to figure out how record any calls from Wilson and to take screen shots if he contacts her by text or email.

The county council’s letter demanding Wilson’s resignation reads, in part,

You have been embroiled in a domestic violence dispute for over two years, accused of stalking and harassing a King County resident. The King County Superior Court found enough evidence to issue a temporary protection order as well as a restraining order to prevent you from contacting that same King County resident due to your repeated stalking and harassment. The petition for the restraining order also alleged that you improperly used county resources to engage in the stalking, which would be a violation of the public trust and unacceptable.

These allegations and court orders have caused irrevocable harm to the public’s trust and faith in you as a public servant and elected official. You have fully lost our confidence in your judgement and ability to perform the duties of your role. It is for this reason that the King County Council unanimously passed a motion calling for your resignation on June 10th, 2025.

When an elected official breaks the public trust like this, it’s not possible to effectively serve the public and execute the duties of their office free from distraction. Our residents rely on the Office of the Assessor to provide critical County functions and, at this point, they would be best served by your resignation.

The county council has no power to remove Wilson, an independently elected official; only the voters can do so, by holding a recall election.

Police

SPD Gives Medal to Officer Who Chased Man Into Traffic, Leaving Carful of Kids Behind

 

Body camera footage from the chase.

The department used 911 audio of a panicked domestic violence victim, without obtaining her consent, in its video promoting the officer’s courage for apprehending her abuser.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle Police Department put out a video last week congratulating police officer Albert Khandzhayan, who received the department’s Medal of Courage for apprehending a man who had kidnapped his wife’s three children by breaking the window of her car, dragging her out, and driving off with the kids inside.

The video begins with 911 audio of the woman crying and screaming unintelligibly as cinematic music swells. “It started with confusion. A woman screaming,” a narrator intones. “A dispatcher trying to make contact. Chaos pouring through the line. And then. Sudden silence.” The screen goes black. Then the audio picks up again with the woman, still crying, explaining that her husband took her children. (SPD’s blog post identifies the man as her “ex-boyfriend.”)

The 911 audio is quite upsetting, and I was surprised that SPD put it out at all, given the likelihood that publicizing it would retraumatize the victim and potentially other domestic violence victims who came across it. If they did debate whether to use the audio, I wanted to know how they they decided that using it to illustrate Khandzhayan’s achievement outweighed the potential for harm.

SPD didn’t answer those questions, but they did acknowledge that they never reached out to the woman to ask if it was okay to use the audio. “This was an oversight and is highly regrettable. It is never our intention to cause trauma to anyone, and it is our goal to always be helping those in need. We will do better in the future, and we appreciate you highlighting this,” a spokesperson said.

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After the 911 audio concludes, the video’s narration shifts to Khandzhayan. “[He] heard the call. He thought about the roads. The on-ramps. The choices someone might when fear takes over,” the narrator says. As swelling orchestral music plays, the video shows Khandzhayan pulling into a gas station, walking up to a car, then chasing a man out of the station and across a crowded highway. Through a series of rapid cuts, the video shows Khandzhayan eventually catching up with the man and tasing him to the ground.

The video then cuts to a scene back at the gas station, where a different officer opens the car door and a child can be heard crying, “Mommy! Mommy!” “Reuinted with their mother,” the narrator says. On the video, an infant in a baby carrier is visible in the back seat.

“This is courage under pressure, bravery anchored in discipline, a superior performace of duty in service of three children and their safety,” the narrator concludes.

But is it? I asked SPD whether officers are supposed to chase people on foot out into traffic, a situation that could result in crashes and injuries not just to an officer or suspect, but anyone who slams on the brakes or swerves to avoid them. I also asked if they could point me to any training or official protocol about chasing suspects onto roadways. “Foot pursuits are inherently dangerous, and the domestic violence kidnapping suspect crossing the active highway demonstrates this,” the spokesperson responded.

Finally, I asked whether SPD encourages officers to leave young children and infants alone, as Khandzhayan appeared to do in the video, to pursue a suspect. The spokesperson responded that “in the case of runaway children and children in dangerous circumstances, a sworn employee is immune from liability if, acting in good faith, they fail to take a child into custody.”

As of publication, the video remains available on SPD’s Blotter blog and on the department’s Youtube page.

Courts, homelessness, King County, Mayor Wilson, Transportation

This Week on PubliCola: April 18, 2026

Homelessness Authority Undergoes Forensic Audit, County Assessor Won’t Have to Wear Ankle Monitor in Stalking Case, and More News from this Week

Monday, April 13

Seattle Nice: Mayor Wilson’s Shelter Plan, King County Assessor’s Stalking Charges, an Ambitious Library Levy, and More

On the podcast this week, we talked about Mayor Wilson’s plan to build 500 new tiny house village-style shelter units by this summer; stalking charges against King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson; and the latest library levy, which will dwarf the most recent such levy at nearly half a billion dollars.

Tuesday, April 14

King County Assessor Says He Can’t Wear Ankle Monitor In Stalking Case

County assessor Wilson, whose term ends this year, failed to show up to a court hearing where he planned to argue that he couldn’t wear a court-ordered ankle monitor because of a medical condition. His lawyer cited scheduling confusion as the reason for his absence from the virtual hearing.

Burien Puts City Manager on Leave

The Burien City Council, which has a new progressive majority, placed controversial city manager Adolfo Bailon on administrative leave this week. Bailon recently fired Burien’s city attorney, who was reportedly helping the city council figure out the process for ushering Bailon out the door.

Bicycle Weekends Will Be (Almost) Every Weekend This Year

Mayor Wilson announced the dates for Seattle’s annual “Bicycle Weekends” event, in which the city opens up Lake Washington Boulevard in Seward Park to cyclists and pedestrians during summer weekends. Unlike her predecessor, who killed longstanding plans to install stop signs and speed humps on the dangerous lakefront boulevard, Wilson is expanding the safe-street program to include every summer weekend (except Seafair) and three holidays.

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Wednesday, April 15

King County Assessor Won’t Have to Wear Ankle Monitor in Stalking Case

King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson, who was arrested and charged with stalking after he showed up repeatedly at his former fiancée’s house in violation of a no-contact order, will not have to wear an ankle monitor, a Seattle Municipal Court judge ruled, due to a medical condition that Wilson said requires him to soak his legs nightly. The monitor would have alerted Keller if Wilson violated the order by coming within 1,000 feet of her.

Thursday, April 16

Mayor Wilson’s “Shelter Acceleration” Plan Moves Forward, With Some Questions Unanswered

The City Council approved two pieces of legislation to advance Mayor Wilson’s proposed shelter expansion this week and moved a third bill forward, clearing a legal path for the city to build larger tiny house villages on a shorter timeline and providing $5 million to help pay for the first of 1,000 new shelter units Wilson has said her administration will add this year. But the council had questions about how the mayor plans to make her shelter plans sustainable, given ongoing budget deficits.

Friday, April 17

As Seattle Goes It Alone on Shelter, Homelessness Authority Faces Forensic Financial Audit

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority will not oversee any of the new shelter contracts, the Wilson administration confirmed to PubliCola. KCRHA is currently undergoing a forensic audit into its accounting and budgeting practices, a sign of strong concern from both the city and King County, its two primary funders.

City Council, homelessness, Mayor Wilson

As Seattle Goes It Alone on Shelter, Homelessness Authority Faces Forensic Financial Audit

By Erica C. Barnett

One group that was notably missing from a public discussion of Mayor Katie Wilson’s shelter expansion plan was the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, which is supposed to manage every publicly funded homeless shelter contract in the region. Instead, the city is going it alone in Wilson’s top campaign priority—building 1,000 new units of shelter, such as tiny house villages, in 2026, and a total of 4,000 by the end of her term.

Wilson’s team has said they can move faster if the city does the work. But they’re also waiting on the outcome of a major forensic audit that could shed unfavorable light on the KCRHA’s finance and budgeting practices. That audit, which the city is paying an outside consultant more than $600,000 to conduct, has been going on since August and is supposed to wrap up this month. (King County is also helping to pay for the audit.)

So far, Wilson’s team has not suggested that they’re concerned about KCRHA’s ability to administer homelessness contracts; instead, they’ve said it’s just easier and more logical for the city to do it.

Near the end of a city council committee meeting on Wednesday, for instance, Council President Joy Hollingsworth asked whether the KCRHA would “have a role” in the city’s big shelter expansion plans. Or, Hollingsworth asked, “are we transitioning that a little bit now to what we’re doing at the city, because those outcomes have not been—I’ll just be frank—what the public has anticipated for the money that we have been spending or giving to the King County Regional Homelessness Authority?”

Jon Grant, Wilson’s homelessness advisor, hemmed and hawed. “You know, we have, I think, a very important partnership and relationship with the King County Regional Homelessness Authority. …. And I think that collaboration will continue.” But, Grant said, it just makes more sense for the city itself to oversee the new shelters and administer contracts through the city’s Human Services Department—”in parallel to the work that we are also still doing with KCRHA and the work that they’re doing to operate the existing base of shelters,” of course.

Former mayor Bruce Harrell also worked to bring some of the work KCRHA was overseeing back in direct city control—focusing specifically on outreach and homelessness prevention, two areas the Harrell Administration said KCRHA “did not have the capacity” to oversee, given that they busy trying to implement Partnership for Zero—a plan, later abandoned, to end unsheltered homelessness in downtown Seattle.

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The forensic audit is taking a close look at the KCRHA’s finances—including the agency’s ongoing negative budget balance, which I wrote about last year. (KCRHA essentially starts every year with a fund balance of zero and borrows money, with interest to pay contractors throughout the year, paying back the loans when they receive money from funders.)

According to the city’s contract with consultant Clark Nuber, issued last July, the audit will “assess and document King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s (“KCRHA”) use and allocation of contributed funds; analyze the underlying drivers of its recurring negative cash position; assess the adequacy of the accounting infrastructure, information flow, and reporting; evaluate and reconcile cash advance activity to understand and identify issues related to reporting and reimbursement; and provide best practice recommendations to improve systems and processes.”

The audit was supposed to wrap up in December but the city extended the contract until the end of April late last year.

The homelessness agency has been audited before, by the state auditor and the King County Department of Human and Community Services, which raised serious concerns about the KCRHA’s accounting and monitoring practices—finding, for instance, that the agency had spent grant funding on ineligible projects, failed to executive projects on time, and had accounting errors that led to a negative balance at the end of the year.

The audit covers the period between 2021, when KCRHA started operations and July 2025. According to the contract, “If issues or suspected malfeasance are identified, the Consultant will propose additional targeted procedures to further investigate, which may include considerations such as expansion of the time range under scope, performing data analytics, staff and management interviews, and other related procedures.”

It’s unclear whether this audit, like the earlier ones, will find concerning issues with KCRHA’s internal accounting and budget practices, although early reports from people familiar with the process say it’s unlikely to be flattering. What is clear is that the city and county, which provide nearly 80 percent of the KCRHA’s budget, are following the outcome closely.

A spokesperson for Wilson told PubliCola the mayor’s office is “certainly aware of the audit, which was jointly commissioned by the previous administrations at the County and City. The mayor is concerned about KCRHA’s stewardship of public funds and will be asking hard questions about their financial controls & effectiveness.”

A spokesperson for DCHS said the department “supports the audit to gain a more clear and accurate understanding of KCHRA’s cashflow and to confirm that the organization has strong internal controls in place to sustain long-term cash management, including invoicing processes.

And a spokesperson for King County Executive Girmay Zahilay said, “Strong financial stewardship, transparency and accountability, and achieving tangible progress in addressing the homelessness crisis that impacts every part of our region are top priorities for Executive Zahilay. Once the full audit report is received, the County will work with the City and other partners to determine next steps.”