Mayor Katie Wilson and King County Executive Girmay Zahilay both announced that they plan to “embed an independent financial analyst” in the agency, as a statement from Wilson put it yesterday.
According to Zahilay’s announcement, “This analyst will provide more transparency into financial practices, improve payment processes, and ensure corrective actions are being implemented with urgency.” Wilson’s announcement referred to the analyst (or analysts) as “a financial services team” that will “shore up financial and internal controls at KCRHA.”
The decision came after a flurry of discussions late last week about how to respond to the KCRHA’s “corrective action plan,” which laid out a series of steps to respond to a damning audit that found the agency lacked basic financial controls, overspent its administrative budget, and could not account for $8 million in spending. The audit also found that KCRHA had a consistent and growing negative budget balance—around $45 million when the audit concluded, an amount that had increased to $65 million by the time the auditors presented their results.
The announcement represented a slowdown of what had been growing momentum to “wind down” the agency quickly and send the contracts it manages back to the city and county agencies that used to oversee them. It was also a reversal of a plan set in motion last week.
As recently as last Friday, Wilson and Zahilay were planning to announce on Monday that they were taking back the homelessness contracts and distributing them to the city’s Human Services Department and King County’s Department of Community and Human Services, according to accounts from people familiar with the discussions. (Zahilay, rather than Wilson, was reportedly leading the charge to pull the plug). Homeless advocates, city council members, and some members of the business community reportedly urged caution, and cooler heads apparently prevailed.
Under the scenario the city and county were contemplating last week, the KCRHA would continue to exist—at least temporarily—as a shell of itself, serving as the region’s Continuum of Care for federal funding purposes and administering the Point In Time Count of the region’s homeless population.
This may still happen; the decision to fund an accounting team to address the problems identified in the audit does not preclude shutting down the agency. But as of now, that will no longer happen on an accelerated timeline.
As we reported last week, KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison and Associate Deputy for Strategy William Towey have asked for $500,000 to hire a fnancial consultant—as Kinnison put it, a “CFO-type role”— through the staffing firm Robert Half, which charges hefty recruitment fees on top of their temporary staffers’ salaries. The KCRHA laid off its most recent chief financial office last October and never replaced him.
A spokesperson for Zahilay’s office said the county does not know yet how much the consultant will cost or how the city and county will split the spending.
Screen shot of footage from a police camera that was looming over a Planned Parenthood clinic on Aurora Avenue N, obtained by Our Seattle through a records request.
By Phil Mocek
On Friday, Mayor Katie Wilson activated the Stadium District surveillance cameras for the duration of the FIFA World Cup, reversing the pause she announced in March. Invoking a briefing from Seattle police and the FBI, her late-afternoon public announcement identified “general but credible threats” to justify the deployment.
Two days earlier, at aSeattle CityClub event, she had defined a credible threat narrowly: Information that a specific person “has the intention to cause harm” and that “it is believable that they might be able to carry it out.” A “general” threat at a large event is not the narrow thing she defined. It is the ambient condition of hosting a mega-event, present at any gathering of this scale, identified by no one in particular, aimed at no one in particular. As a justification for recording crowds of people suspected of nothing, it has no natural limit, and will return every time the city hosts the world.
The standard Wilson set on Wednesday did not survive even until Friday.
What she conceded in the same breath as her announcement matters as much as her reversal. Even as the cameras go on, Wilson said, the city will “continue honing our policies and protections to safeguard the data these videos capture.”
Those protections have not been written. The cameras are on anyway, recording everyone who passes by, without any suspicion of wrongdoing. That is the entrance built before the exit: the sequence that quietly turns a temporary emergency measure into permanent infrastructure.
The city already has a working example of the alternative: SPD has suspended its patrol-car license-plate readers while it works out how to comply with a new state law restricting collection near schools, clinics, and courts. Rules first, then the system. For the stadium cameras, though, the city reversed that order.
The debate that produced this was flattened into a single question: On or off. But “on or off” was always the wrong question. The consequential questions are who controls the switch, under what written rules, where the footage goes, how long it is kept, and who can access it. On Friday the city answered “on” and left the rest blank.
Strip away the World Cup urgency and the case for the cameras rests on one claim: that the footage might help after something goes wrong. Wilson acknowledged as much at CityClub, where she said cameras are “less” useful for “preventing or deterring crime” than for solving it.
That concession should end the prevention argument the camera hawks on the City Council are making. But investigative usefulness was never the test. Almost any sufficiently invasive practice is useful to investigators: Door-to-door searches would be, document checkpoints would be, unfettered access to medical records would be. We restrict those not because they don’t work but because a free society does not make its residents prove their innocence to a camera. The burden is on the government to justify watching a population suspected of nothing. “It might help” does not carry that burden.
By turning the cameras on, Wilson added to a system that already sits in constitutionally uncertain territory. Washington’s constitution forbids disturbing anyone’s “private affairs … without authority of law,” and the State Supreme Court reads that guarantee as broader than the federal Fourth Amendment—broad enough to require a warrant before police track a car’s movements (State v. Jackson), and explicit that the protection does not shrink merely because people have grown accustomed to being watched.
Federally, the U.S. Supreme Court held inCarpenter v. United States that assembling a record of a person’s movements over time can constitute a search even when each movement happens in public — while declining to decide whether ordinary security cameras cross the same line. A permanent, recorded, searchable network trained on public crowds sits squarely in the space those rulings left open. The cameras on Aurora already sat there; the stadium network enlarges it. What changed on Friday is not the constitutional question but the mayor’s posture toward it: In March, she hit “pause” precisely to avoid feeding that uncertainty, and on Friday she fed it anyway, before the safeguards she promised exist.
None of this is a complaint about cameras in general. The stadium district was never going to be unwatched: The city’s emergency operations center already takes continuous feeds from hundreds of SDOT traffic cameras, and police routinely pull footage from private businesses after an incident. What is different about the stadium cameras—20 installations, each consisting of four fixed lenses forming a 360-degree view, plus one pan-tilt-zoom camera, for 100 distinct feeds—is what becomes of the images: They feed SPD’s Real-Time Crime Center.
As City Councilmember Bob Kettleapprovingly noted in his statement commending the activation, the decision “connect[s] them to the Real-Time Crime Center.” There, the footage is recorded, retained, and searchable. What sets it apart from a live traffic feed is not the lens but the system behind it: images pulled into a police database, held, and made available for investigative use rather than passing through and vanishing.
Because this database is hosted by a private vendor, it can be retrieved by subpoena, including from out of state. The city’s own surveillance law already says as much: Data may be shared “to the extent required by court order, subpoena, or as otherwise required by law,” no matter what data protections the city has promised. And the footage need not wait for a subpoena in order to escape: Anyone can request and receive it under the Public Records Act—including, as advocates have noted, out-of-state authorities checking who drove past a reproductive health care clinic. It is a different object from a live traffic feed, and it is the object now switched on.
A spokesperson clarified to PubliCola that once the games are over, the city will turn the cameras back off until a long-term decision is made about the original pilot program. That is welcome, but it is not a sunset date or a binding protocol, and switching cameras off is not the same as deleting what they recorded. The fine print the city skipped is still missing: published activation criteria, a single named official accountable for making the call, a retention-and-deletion schedule for everything captured or derived from it, a firm decommissioning date, and a binding commitment that the data will be purged and never shared for immigration enforcement purposes. None of that requires waiting. All of it could be published before the first World Cup match on June 15.
The council’s majority spent months pressing Wilson to turn the cameras on. But it cannot compel a mayor to run a surveillance system, and no one should want it to. That power would effectively bind every future mayor to operate every funded system, no matter what later comes to light.
Wilson says she cares about privacy, and that her team is working on the rules. A published protocol, a firm deletion date, and a decommissioning plan before June 15 would prove it. Until then, turning the cameras on is not a public-safety policy. It is the absence of one.
Phil Mocek is a software engineer and civic technologist who researches government surveillance and public-records compliance in Washington.
1. Mayor Katie Wilson’s office confirmed that Wilson will not be proposing changes to the city’s just cause eviction ordinance that housing developers, including the Housing Development Consortium, had been pushing for months. Tenant advocacy groups opposed the potential changes and met with Wilson the week before last to urge her not to move forward with the changes.
Some affordable housing developers have argued for years that the city’s landlord-tenant protections, which are stronger than the state’s, have made it impossible for them to evict tenants who don’t pay rent or break the law. Specifically, they wanted Wilson to roll back the city’s roommate law, which allows renters to add roommates without asking their landlords’ permission, and and align the requirements to evict a tenant with three days’ notice with the more landlord-friendly state law.
“The Mayor is not proposing changes to the roommate law or the three‑day notice,” a Wilson spokesperson said. “Her office has received proposals and perspectives on a wide range of economic, health, safety, and operational issues.”
Former City Councilmember Cathy Moore said she would introduce legislation that would have rolled back the roommate and three-day notice provisions but resigned before she actually introduced it.
Had Wilson introduced the rollbacks, tenant advocates argued, it would have given centrist councilmembers the opportunity to reopen the entire just cause eviction law, which includes many other provisions landlords oppose. The optics of Wilson—a tenants’ rights activist before becoming mayor—proposing landlord-friendly legislation that even her predecessor, Bruce Harrell, didn’t support would also be terrible, for obvious reasons.
Wilson does plan to propose legislation, in collaboration with Councilmember Dionne Foster, to curb rental “junk fees” in July, her spokesperson said. Wilson wrote about these fees, which include “notice fees,” fees for going month-to-month, and monthly “billing fees,” in 2023.
2. A proposal to create a special taxing district to pay for the Seattle Fire Department is dead, at least for this year, PubliCola has confirmed.
Creating a fire district would have allowed the city to fund much of SFD’s budget through a new property tax, moving that money out of the city’s general fund and helping to close a budget deficit Wilson recently said would be close to $175 million. The district, authorized by a new state law this year, would have had the ability to levy taxes outside the existing property tax cap of $3.60 per $1,000 of assessed property value, making it an appealing way to offload a big chunk of city spending.
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The firefighters’ union, however, did not get on board, effectively killing the proposal. The plan would have made much of the fire department’s funding subject to regular voter approval; it would have also moved SFD under the direct control of the city council, acting as the fire district’s board; the union reportedly wanted SFD to have direct participation on the board, at a minimum.
PubliCola exclusively reported on the potential fire district proposal last month. At a City Club event last week, Wilson said the city is facing a budget deficit of “about $175 million next year.” Without the fire district serving as a relief valve, Wilson will likely introduce additional taxes this year, including a local capital gain tax opposed by business groups like the Seattle Metro Chamber and Downtown Seattle Association.
3. In response to Wilson’s announcement last week that she will turn on police surveillance cameras in the stadium district for the upcoming World Cup games, the anti-surveillance advocates at Community Not Cameras questioned the mayor’s claim that police and the FBI had presented evidence of a “credible threat” to public safety. Wilson previously said she would not turn the cameras on without evidence of a credible threat, but did not clearly define what she meant by that term; last week, she cited “general but credible” threats to justify activating the cameras.
“By activating an Axon-backed surveillance grid in Seattle, the City is risking this data being handed over to a weaponized federal intelligence apparatus,” the coalition said in a statement.
“[R]egardless of whatever bureaucratic policy or verbal assurances the Mayor hides behind, the City of Seattle does not have the power to stop the federal government from obtaining this data once it exists. Any local safeguards or policy limitations the City claims SPD follows are completely meaningless against the collection capabilities and legal mechanisms available to the federal government. If you build it, and if you turn it on, they can take it.”
Our Seattle, a group of Wilson supporters who organized to hold the mayor accountable to her campaign promises, requested footage from one of the surveillance cameras, which SPD has maintained is deleted after five days and only accessible to a handful of people. They received and posted the footage on Instagram on May 28.
On the first of three (three!) Seattle Nice podcasts this week, we disdid a deep dive on the Sound Transit board’s decision last week to indefinitely defer the voter-approved light rail extension to Ballard, a stretch that boasts by far the highest projected ridership of any line in the Sound Transit 3 package voters approved ten years ago. Is Ballard light rail doomed? Tune in to get our takes.
Elaine Ko, the longtime—and now retired—chief of staff to City Councilmember Rob Saka, got so fed up with a rude and persistent District 1 constituent that she sought a restraining order that would prevent him from contacting her about city business. A judge said the man’s behavior didn’t constitute harassment, but not all our readers agreed.
Mayor Wilson rolled out a propsal to double the amount of sales tax Seattle residents pay to get extra transit service in the city. In announcing her plan to increase the regressive sales tax, Wilson said she decided not to impose a vehicle license fee on car owners, in part, because she thought it would prove too “controversial.”
After a delay that resulted from a legal battle over an earlier proposal, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed new funding guidelines for housing and services for people experiencing homelessness. Local providers and advocates are still discussing the implications of the guidelines, which could restrict funds for permanent supportive housing but appear less restrictive than the earlier, deeply problematic proposal.
On this week’s second episode of the podcast, we talked to Redfin’s chief economist, Daryl Fairweather, about the recent slowdown of Seattle’s housing market and whether it means renters and home buyers might see some relief on housing costs.
FOX 13 anchor Han Kim interviewed the mayor at an event sponsored by City Club Seattle, hitting Wilson repeatedly with bad-faith questions and insisting that she respond to delusional claims about homeless people by D-list former reality star, crystal aficionado, and LA mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt.
Sound Transit announced a “pilot” project that will add fare gates to as many as 14 light rail stations, citing high rates of fare “evasion” by riders who board trains without paying at ORCA card readers . The proposal would cost between etween $79 million and $88 million, according to staff, and bring in an additional $30 million a year.
An investigation last year found that a “preponderance of the evidence” supports the conclusion that King County Regional Homelessness Authority director retaliated against two former stffers, Edmund Witter and Xochitl Maykovich, after the two voiced concerns about Kinnison’s leadership at a contentious staff meeting last year.
The Seattle Police Department communications director, Barbara DeLollis, used unapproved AI chatbots to produce a number of SPD-related documents, including a “Comprehensive Communications Toolkit for a Police Department Exiting a Consent Decree. The prompts included “a request to rewrite a published blog post to “ake this a better story for the public of a city that doenst liek crime or disorder” (sic).
Two stories in this week’s late-Friday Fizz. First, Mayor Wilson decided at the last minute to turn on police surveillance cameras around teh stadiums for the upcoming World Cup games, citing unspecified “general but serious” security threats. She has been under intense pressure from conservatives and police to activate the cameras but had pledged she would not do so unless a credible threat emerged.
Second, four female police officers who sued the city over gender discrimination settled with the city for $2.6 million—right around the time that two different officers, a woman and a gay man, filed a tort claim against the department, alleging they were denied promotions due to anti-woman and anti-gay discrimination by Police Chief Shon Barnes.
On the third episode of Seattle Nice this week, we discuss the mayor’s proposal to double the local sales tax that pays for extra bus service in Seattle. The sales tax is regressive, but it’s one of only two options the city has for increasing local transit service. Wilson rejected the other option, a flat vehicle license fee, as risky; her transportation advisor, Alex Hudson, said this week that the fee would cost car drivers too much for what transit riders would get in return.
On this week’s third (!) edition of Seattle Nice, we have a short but (I think) informative show about Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to double a sales tax that funds extra Metro bus service and other transit improvements in Seattle. The tax, current 0.15 percent (or 15 cents on every $100 purchase) would double under Wilson’s plan to 0.3 percent, bringing Seattle’s sales tax one step closer to 11 percent (we’re already the highest in the nation).
Sales taxes are among the most regressive types of tax, because they gobble up a much larger percentage of your income if you’re poor than if you’re rich. Nonetheless, Wilson is pitching the increase as a matter of affordability, since lower-income people are more likely to need reliable, frequent transit service. The increase will add about $29 a year to a typical Seattle resident’s sales tax burden.
(As an aside, I would really love it if transit advocates would stop explaining why transit is a good thing like people aren’t familiar with the concept of “bus.” Every pitch for new spending on transit, for some reason, has to involve a long explanation of the noble people who rely on buses and why they use them—e.g. “the nurse who just wants to get home after 12 hours on the night shift, the single mother who needs to pick up her kids from school, the teacher who needs to be there on time for her kids…” People know what buses are and what they do!)
As we discussed, the city does have another option for funding local transit: A vehicle license fee of up to $60. License fees, too, are regressive, and I made a misstatement on the podcast by conflating flat license fees with more progressive motor vehicle excise taxes, which cost more for more expensive cars.
At a council committee meeting to discuss the proposal this week, Wilson’s senior transportation advisor, former Transportation Choices Coalition director Alex Hudson, said a a $50 license fee would “only bring in an additional 15% more revenue each year and “nearly double that amount of the annual cost for households with only one vehicle, and triple or double the cost to households with two or more vehicles.”
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Given that the sales tax is supposed to bring in $138 million a year, another $20 million for transit actually seems worth considering, especially since license fees and vehicle taxes represent some of the only revenue sources in which drivers subsidize people who don’t own cars. (Usually, it’s the other way around.)
Last week, Wilson said she decided not to propose the license fee because it was “controversial,” which is more of a (questionable) political call than a policy one. Hearing Wilson’s office argue against a license fee because it would over-burden car owners (especially those with two, three, or seven cars!) was a bit jarring, especially coming at the very beginning of negotiations with the council over what the final ballot measure will look like.
The council will have the opportunity to amend the measure over the coming weeks. At Thursday’s meeting, Councilmember Debora Juarez said she was “offended” by references to “underserved communities” and people of color, who she accused the mayor’s office of using as “props.” She also said she was “not happy with the legislation and I think it needs a lot of work,” then said the mayor’s office was “not living in the real world” because “some people have to drive a car.” Helpful feedback, I’m sure!
1. Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson used unspecified “general but credible threats to safety and security” during the upcoming World Cup games to justify her last-minute decision to turn on more than 20 police surveillance cameras around the stadiums where the games will take place. In a late-afternoon announcement on Friday, Wilson said this information “has persuaded our law enforcement, emergency management, and FIFA security partners that we should be operating at a heightened risk level.”
SPD has staunchly defended the cameras, arguing the footage has already helped police solve crimes. Opponents have argued that the footage is vulnerable to abuse by federal agencies like ICE, vigilantes targeting people who travel to Seattle for reproductive or gender-affirming health care, and police officers themselves.
Wilson’s office told PubliCola won’t keep the cameras on after the World Cup. “Once the games are over and we return to normal safety and security operations, we will turn the cameras off until we make decisions about the original pilot,” a Wilson spokesperson said.
Wilson previously announced that the city would install the cameras, which connect to SPD’s Real Time Crime Center, but not turn them on until her office has had time to evaluate the “pilot” that placed cameras downtown, on Aurora Ave. N., and around 12th and Jackson. The NYU Policing Project just started work on a data and security audit of the police surveillance program.
Earlier this week, Wilson said in an onstage interview that the city already has access to many cameras around the stadium district, including live feeds operated by the Seattle Department of Transportation as well as private cameras operated by businesses, which have historically provided SPD with footage to help them investigate crimes.
2. The city settled a lawsuit filed by four female Seattle police officers who accused former police chief Adrian Diaz of sexual harassment and gender discrimination. The officers—Lauren Truscott, Valarie Carson, Kame Spencer, and Jean Gulpan—will receive a total of $2.6 million, according to a press release from their attorney, Sumeer Singh. Singh now works for Frey Buck, the same firm that once represented Diaz. Last year, PubliCola reported that Buck had ditched Diaz as a client.
“We are happy to see the City of Seattle take accountability for what was a clear lapse in leadership by the previous administration. We hope new leadership will improve working conditions for everyone within the Seattle Police Department, Singh said in a statement.
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3. News of the settlement comes shortly after two LGBTQ+ officers, Anna Fishel and Doug Raguso, filed tort claims against the city, alleging the department discriminated against them and denied them promotions based on their sexual orientation and, in Fishel’s case, her gender.
Fishel, a detective in SPD’s policy unit, said in her complaint that she passed the sergeant’s exam in 2024, rising to number one on the promotion list in 2025, but has been passed over for promotion by five other people since then. During a meeting with Barnes to make the case that she should be promoted as sergeant over her division, Fishel wrote, “I laid out my credentials and experience and my work on the 30×30 initiative,” which established the goal that 30 percent of SPD’s recruit class will be women by 2030.
“I also told him that I am the sole caregiver to my daughter and the only gay female up for Sergeant,” Fishel wrote in her claim. “Despite this, my ranking, and the support of my chain of command, Chief Barnes refused to promote me in place. Instead, he offered me the position of Third Watch Patrol Sergeant,” a position that would have required her to find an overnight caregiver for her child. The position Fishel was seeking went to a straight man, she wrote.
Raguso, a lieutenant, also said he was repeatedly passed over for promotion—including last year, when Barnes removed him as acting captain of Capitol Hill’s East Precinct and reassigned him to the Real Time Crime Center without a promotion. Instead of Raguso, who had worked in the East Precinct for years and was well-liked by many in the city’s historic LGBTQ-friendly neighborhood, Barnes promoted Mike Tietjen and assigned him to head up the precinct.
Barnes’ promotion of Tietjen, which the chief touted on social media, proved controversial: As a lieutenant patrolling the 2020 protest zone around Cal Anderson Park, Tietjen drove onto a sidewalk full of protesters in 2020 and compared them to “cockroaches” as they scattered to avoid his SUV. He was also involved in an incident in which a trans woman accused officers of heckling her and demanding to know what was under her skirt. Barnes eventually removed Tietjen and replaced him with Captain Jim Britt, another straight white man.
An earlier tort claim, by two former command staff members Barnes fired last year, also accused Barnes and members of his team of gender and anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination. Barnes oversaw a dramatic crackdown on nudity at the nude beach at Denny Blaine Park last year. His chief of staff, Alan Ricketts, reportedly blew off concerns about the optics of arresting people sunbathing at the LGBTQ+-friendly beach, telling one of the former command staff members, “we’re not here for the gays.”
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