homelessness, human services, King County, Mayor Wilson, Uncategorized

Regional Homelessness Agency “Right-Sizing” Will Largely Restore Pre-KCRHA Status Quo

The announcement, which will send most homeless service contracts back to the city and county, aims to preserve federal funding at risk after a damning forensic audit and changes in funding priorities under Trump.

By Erica C. Barnett

King County Executive Girmay Zahilay and Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson announced Wednesday that they will transfer the region’s homelessness contracts back to the city and county, respectively, effectively ending the King County Regional Homelessness Authority as it has existed for the past five years.

Most of the region’s homeless service contracts, totaling around $160 million, will transition back to the city and county, where they used to live, by January 1, 2027, with some more complex contracts remaining at KCHRA on at least a temporary basis. As previously announced, the city and county will fund a team of consultants, from a company called Turning Point, to correct some of the major financial issues identified in the audit. The total cost, according to officials, will be under $1 million.

The KCRHA will continue to serve as the region’a Continuum of Care, the entity that applies for and administers federal funds, at least for this year. It will also oversee the Homeless Management Information System, a regional database of homeless people and the services they receive, administer the Point in Time Count of the region’s homeless population, and oversee the region’s severe weather shelters.

“It is not being dissolved, it is being strengthened,” Wilson said at a press conference Wednesday afternoon.

The changes will result in about 20 layoffs at KCRHA right away, officials said, with more to come in the future as the contracts move out. The decision to bring contracts back in-house will also result in some new costs for the city and county, especially while the KCRHA is still providing duplicative staffing, although officials said it’s currently unclear how much and what the impact will be on next year’s city and county budgets.

The KCRHA was recently subject to a damning forensic audit that found the agency had a large and growing deficit and lacked basic accounting standards; since then, the agency has released a “corrective action plan” that the auditors themselves said was  inadequate and failed to address many of their concerns.

The city and county are describing the new as a plan to “stabilize, right size, and reset” the KCRHA.

“This agency was given incredible responsibility without sufficient capacity or authority to really effectively create and drive an overall strategy for addressing the homelessness crisis in our region,” Wilson said at a press conference Wednesday afternoon, “and I think that the audit really reflects this reality—and also, of course, brings to light specific problems that have to be urgently addressed.”

Wilson and Zahilay both said moving all the homelessness contracts back to the city and county does not mean the KCRHA is a “failure” as an agency. “I think the assumption of city and county contracts by the KCRHA was not terribly successful,” Wilson said. “That’s not saying the agency was a failure, but I think that particular part of its function, talking to service providers, that was not a successful function of this work.”

On Wednesday, city and county officials characterized the decision to take back their contracts as a reset that will allow KCRHA to focus on its “true core function” of serving as the Continuum of Care for the region—that is, as the entity that applies for and administers federal contracts.

As PublicCola has reported, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development issued a Notice of Funding Opportunity this year—the first step in a competitive bidding process for federal dollars—that prioritizes transitional housing and high-barrier programs that include mandatory services over permanent supportive housing and harm reduction.

Because most of the region’s current federal funding (around $67 million) is for low-barrier permanent supportive housing, KCRHA was already likely to lose federal funds; the recent chaos at the agency makes that even more likely. (HUD recently froze all federal funding with LA’s homelessness agency over financial issues that are similar to those at KCRHA).

City and county officials suggested today that moving the contracts back to the city and county would make the city competitive again. “Taking our local dollars back to the county and back to the city really will relieve KCRHA of that additional responsibility of administering those dollars to really focus at this point in time on the changes in the Continuum of Care and that core function,” Wilson’s deputy director for operations, Mark Ellerbrook, said.

The KCRHA was established at the end of 2019 to replace the previous, locally atomized homelessness system with a “regional approach to homelessness.” The agency began administering homeless service contracts in 2022, but never got around to accomplishing its primary stated goal—getting every city in King County aligned behind a coordinated approach to homelessness and issuing new contracts to nonprofit providers as part of a coherent “five-year plan.”  Instead, the KCRHA got mired in a series of ideological arguments and policy missteps, including an aborted pandemic era effort called “Partnership for Zero” that was supposed to end unsheltered homelessness downtown.

The city and county, meanwhile, were never willing to let go of control over what the homeless system looked like—whether, for example, the KCRHA should focus primarily on temporary shelter or permanent housing—and the agency ultimately turned into a pass-through entity for contracts chosen and funded by the city and county. With no taxing authority, KCRHA couldn’t direct homelessness policy in any substantive way, taking direction instead from a series of elected officials with differing political priorities.

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PubliCola has reported in recent weeks on the KCRHA’s oddly blithe response to the forensic audit and the mayor and county executive’s response to its corrective action plan. Both agency CEO Kelly Kinnison and William Towey, the KCRHA’s associate director for strategy, have publicly treated the audit findings as little more than a speed bump, and blamed most of the financial and accounting issues on the way the agency’s budget functions (as a reimbursement system, in which the agency pays nonprofit service providers and gets reimbursed afterward) and previous leadership.

On Wednesday, however, Kinnison said, “As it was launched, [KCRHA] is a failed experiment,” she said.

Given that Kinnison and Towey have largely blamed the agency’s problems on decisions made before Kinnison was hired in 2024, I asked if she saw any of the problems that resulted in today’s announcement as her responsibility. “Absolutely, there are always things I would do differently and prioritize differently,” she said. “Being a newcomer to the region, I think”—Kinnison moved here from D.C.—”was more challenging than maybe I even expected it to be.”

Otherwise, Kinnison said, she came in and took charge of a bad situation by hiring administrative staff and getting the agency into financial shape. If she could have done something different, Kinnison said, she would have “been louder” and “more public” about the agency’s financial issues—”I came in when we were not paying providers on time and people were doing payroll on credit cards”—and lack of finance and administrative staffing. “There’s decisions a reasonable person could have made that would have bene different, but this missing money and construction of the back end [financial system] that didn’t  work—that’s an implementation problem.”

Kinnison also reiterated her claim that she had asked the city to initiate a forensic audit into the agency after she arrived and began identifying problems that occurred under her predecessor, Marc Dones. The mayor’s office says that isn’t true, and that the city (under then-mayor Bruce Harrell) and county (under then-executive Dow Constantine) requested the audit. Simon Foster, the former KCRHA deputy CEO, reportedly also raised concerns about the agency’s finances to the city. Foster was laid off by Kinnison last October, as was KCRHA finance director James Rouse, who was not replaced.

City and county officials, as well as as Wilson and Zahilay, were reluctant to say what will happen to the KCRHA after the contracts move. “That’s what the broad stakeholdering is designed to do” over the coming year, Zahilay said. Kinnison’s future at the agency is also up in the air, and she stood at the back of the room, rather than front and center, as Zahilay and Wilson answered questions. In a joint statement after the announcement, King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski and Seattle City Councilmember Maritza Rivera—who both proposed dissolving the agency earlier this year—celebrated the news. “While this is not a complete dissolution of the Regional Homelessness Authority that we may have called for, it is a major step in the right direction,” they said. “This is a much-needed reset of how we manage our homelessness response.”

 

Mayor Wilson, Media, Police

News Vouchers Delayed Until 2027, Stranger’s Editor Out, Ex-Cop Fired for Punching Handcuffed Woman Involved in Fracas at Pride

1. Mayor Katie Wilson, who had been planning to release her “News Notes” proposal to help fund independent media on or around Independence Day, has pushed the potential ballot measure back a year, according to her office. We’ve followed up with more questions about the reason for the delay and will update this post if we hear back.

News vouchers would work much like democracy vouchers, Seattle’s public campaign finance program. If approved, the program would use a small property tax to provide funding to local news outlets that meet certain criteria, such as providing core content for free, adhering to basic standards such as factual accuracy, and having independent ownership. (Many of the details are TBD).

As they already do with democracy vouchers, Seattle residents could spend news vouchers on the outlets they want to support—providing a boost to the local news ecosystem and allowing more established independent outlets to expand their coverage.

Wilson’s team had reportedly been vetting the outlines of her plan with editorial board members at the Seattle Times, which had already started ramping up its opposition campaign—in the form of opinion pieces by their “save print newspapers” columnist Brier Dudley—as far back as 2023. The pro-news voucher camp was reportedly working to convince the Times editorial board to stay neutral on the measure, rather than opposing it.

2. The Stranger’s editor-in-chief, Hannah Murphy Winter, is out. Stranger publisher Tracey Cataldo told PubliCola Murphy Winter will “stay on to help see the team through the transition” but would not provide further details, such as whether the Stranger has hired a replacement. Murphy Winter took over the paper after it was bought by Noisy Creek, a media company founded by former state legislator and Grist CEO Brady Walkinshaw.

Stranger staff found out about the firing this morning. Internally, there appears to have been some shock at the timing, just before a print endorsement issue that will reportedly include at least one controversial pick. The optics of firing the paper’s top editor right as endorsements hit are also less than ideal.

Murphy Winter, previously the chief research editor at Rolling Stone, did not respond to text messages seeking comment. Walkingshaw also did not respond to messages. (Editor’s note: This post originally said Walkinshaw lives out of state; he contacted us to let us know that he lives in Seattle and owns a house in LA. We regret the error.)

3. A video from last weekend’s Pride events, taken by Turning Point USA activist Jonathan Choe., appears to show former Seattle police officer Adley Shepherd immobilizing a person’s wheelchair by standing on it as they yell “get off my chair!” Shepherd, ID’d in the video as a security guard protecting a street preacher who’s heard yelling something about the “kingdom of Satan,” then appears to shove or punch the person in the wheelchair, prompting a brief fracas in which Shepherd appears to trip and fall to the ground, where another person restrains him. When a third person briefly jumps on Shepherd, people in the crowd, including Choe, can be heard yelling “Stop!”

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If Shepherd’s name isn’t immediately familiar, here’s a refresher: He’s the former cop who was fired in 2016 for punching a woman who was handcuffed in the back of his police car after she kicked him. The woman, who suffered a fractured eye socket, had not committed any obvious crime before Shepherd handcuffed her and shoved her into his car. An arbitrator overturned the firing in a case that led a federal judge to rule SPD out of compliance with a longstanding consent decree, but the firing was upheld after a protracted court battle.

Shepherd was in the news again in 2020 after he attended the January 6 rally alongside with several SPD officers.

Choe and TPUSA, unsurprisingly, have characterized the incident as a vicious attack by activists on a Christian minister and his security guard, but even his own heavily edited video does not show anything of the sort.

Shepherd now runs a security firm, Edrei Solutions. When we called him, Shepherd said PubliCola had treated him unfairly in the past and hung up on us.

Drugs, homelessness, Mayor Wilson, neighborhoods, public safety

KCRHA Spins the News that Homelessness Is Growing
Nearly half of all homeless families are unsheltered, according to the latest count.

We discuss the latest estimate of the region’s homeless population and the latest “new approach” to drug use and crime in Little Saigon on this week’s Seattle Nice.

By Erica C. Barnett

After releasing a high-level summary of the latest “point in time count” report on King County’s homeless population last week, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority tried to put a positive spin on the results at a meeting of the agency’s governing board last week. The new numbers showed a 9 percent increase in overall homelessness—from an estimated 16,868 to 18,365—between 2024 and 2026.

On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we dug into all these numbers—and the KCRHA’s take on what they mean.

At a presentation to the governing board on Friday, the KCRHA’s associate director for strategy, William Towey, said “one of the key takeaways from the Point In Time count is that the system is doing amazing work. It’s moving a lot of people through, we’re housing a lot of people, a lot of people are coming in and successfully exiting, but the inflow just continues to grow.”

Every year, according to KCRHA, about 17,000 people stop using homeless services (a widely used proxy for no longer being homeless), while about 18,000 enter or re-enter the system. As long as the rate of people entering the system exceeds the number of people exiting, overall homelessness will continue to grow.

The KCRHA has focused heavily on the fact that although both sheltered and unsheltered homelessness continue to increase, the rate of increase in overall homelessness has declined—from 21 percent between 2022 and 2024 to 9 percent over the last two years. At the governing board meeting, Towey argued that the “declination in the rate of increase” represented a specific number of people who would be homeless but are not. “That translates to over 2,500 individuals or households who aren’t homeless because of that decrease in the rate of increase,” Towey said.

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson pointed to a troubling aspect of the numbers Towey didn’t mention, but which we highlighted in our coverage of the count last week—unsheltered homelessness, which is both more visible and more dangerous for people living outdoors than living in shelter, has spiked by 21 percent even as sheltered homelessness has grown more slowly. That’s more than 2,000 additional people living unsheltered compared to the count released in 2024.

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“I’m very, very concerned by the really significant increase in the rate of unsheltered homelessness,” Wilson said. “We were already a national outlier in having over 50 percent of our homeless population unsheltered, and now when it’s up to over two thirds, that’s pretty shocking.”

Towey attributed the increase to the closure of 689 shelter beds, including an unspecified number of family shelter beds, which Towey called the “primary driver” of the shelter losses. Family homelessness, according to the report, has declined slightly over the past two years, but the percentage of  families who are unsheltered increased almost 40 percent, to nearly half of all households with minor children. In the 2024 count, about 35 percent of people living in family households were unsheltered.

Also on this week’s show, we discussed the latest  “new approach” to address the crowded drug and stolen goods market around 12th and Jackson in Little Saigon, which consists of expanding the hours service providers are on site, directing existing LEAD diversion services to the area, and, as ever, flooding the zone with cops, who are supposed to send some people to LEAD instead of arresting them.

Personally, I’m tired of hearing elected officials (and certain podcast cohosts) argue that hot spot policing, plus a nominal new investment in services, will improve conditions this time despite the many previous times the same basic approach has failed. Sandeep thinks there’s something truly new this time. I’m far less optimistic.

City Council, homelessness, King County, Mayor Wilson, Police

This Week on PubliCola: June 27, 2026

Discouraging homelessness numbers, SPD hiring debate, King County budget shenanigans, and much more.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, June 22

Allegation: Civil Rights Office Director, Staff Went to Strip Club During City-Sponsored Civil Rights Trip

A recently concluded investigation into Seattle Office for Civil Rights director Derrick Wheeler-Smith, which found Wheeler-Smith subjected a subordinate to “unwelcome conduct of a sexually explicit nature,” details allegations that Wheeler-Smith and several other men went to a strip club in Alabama during an official City of Seattle-sponsored trip to civil rights history sites in the South, PubliCola exclusively reported.

Tuesday, June 23

Report: Homelessness in King County Continues to Grow, with 21 Percent Increase in Unsheltered Homelessness Since 2024

The latest biennial count of the region’s homeless population, which has been based since 2022 on interviews and statistical sampling rather than a physical count, found that homelessness overall increased 9 percent—a data point the King County Regional Homelessness Authority characterized as good news because it represents a slowed pace of increase—but that unsheltered homelessness increased 21 percent, largely because of the closure of some family shelters.

Wednesday, June 24

County’s Midyear Budget Sparks Controversy Over Harm Reduction, Human Service Contracts, and Lobbyists

Three King County budget-related items in this Morning Fizz:

• First, County Councilmember Rod Dembowski’s proposal to defund a successful harm reduction program that connects drug users to services by offering safer smoking supplies will not move forward. After PubliCola broke the story last week, Dembowski replaced the proposal with a request for information on the program.

• Second, Dembowski’s proposal to add more process to every grant or contract issued through the county’s Best Starts for Kids program—subject of a recent high-profile audit—got scaled back to a level the county’s Department of Community and Human Services said it can live with. New grants and contracts will still require a letter to the county council making a number of financial and other guarantees about each program.

• Finally, a majority of the county council voted to retain the county’s longtime federal lobbyist for another year after County Executive Girmay Zahilay put out a request for proposals and hired a new lobbyist. Councilmembers accused Zahilay of taking unilateral action, which his office says isn’t true; in fact, they say, a council representative has been present at every step of the hiring process. The council decision to hire two separate lobbyists will cost the county about $200,000 a year.

Thursday, June 25

Mayor Hires Temporary New Comms Team; Councilmembers Tell SPD: Keep Hiring, We’ll Pay for It!

Thursday’s Fizz featured an exclusive about Mayor Katie Wilson’s decision to hire political consultant, podcaster, and KVRU Radio co-owner Crystal Nicole Fincher as well as longtime SDOT spokesperson Dawn Schellenberg to help craft a new communications strategy and fill in while the mayor finds a permanent new communications director, respectively.

And several members of the city council, including Rob Saka and Bob Kettle, rejected the idea of slowing down Seattle Police Department hiring, as suggested by SPD budget staff, in order to above going above budget this year and in next year’s budget. Saka suggested that slowing the pace of hiring would be tantamount to defunding the police.

Friday, June 26 How Do We Get Transit Champions on Transit Boards?

In a fascinating guest editorial, nondriver movement leader Anna Zivarts explores what it would take to get actual transit riders on the Sound Transit board, looking at how other cities have tackled the problem of transit agencies whose decision makers don’t represent or understand the challenges faced by people who rely on transit every day.

Also this week: Check out the latest episode of Seattle Nice, where we discussed the dramatic increase in unsheltered homelessness and the latest plan to address drug use and criminal activity around 12th and Jackson.

 

Transit

How Do We Get Transit Champions on Transit Boards?
Sound Transit Special Selection, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Anna Zivarts

Watching the Sound Transit board vote at the end of May, I think I felt like a lot of transit riders. Who in this room is going to the mat for us?

It is a familiar feeling. In 2022, I was organizing disabled nondrivers who were trying to fight proposed transit service cuts in Washington’s  Tri-Cities area. Their transit board, working to burnish their anti-tax bonafides, had proposed cutting the sales tax that funded transit, which would have eliminated Sunday service. Calling into the meetings, I was heartbroken that such a proposal was being considered, and that none of the elected leaders voting on it themselves relied on, or even rode, public transit. 

In organizing disabled transit riders throughout the state, I had heard similar stories about other transit boards. From Vancouver to Bremerton, Skagit Valley to Walla Walla, as I wrote in this PubliCola op-ed from 2023, transit riders shared how they’d show up at their local transit board meeting to advocate for improvements only to hear that none of the elected leaders on the board rode transit, often refusing to do so because it took “too long” and they were “too busy.”

Inspired by the success of Intercity Transit in Thurston County, whose members lobbied hard in the 1980s to be allowed to have community representatives serve as voting members, we started working to pass legislation that would allow the other 20 transit agencies in Washington governed under this state law to add two additional voting seats to their boards. We believed that by including transit riders and organizations that serve transit-dependent communities, these agencies would provide better service and improve communication with the communities they serve. 

Our greatest allies on this bill were local elected leaders who sat on transit boards and saw how thin they were stretched. For elected officials, a transit board appointment is often just one of multiple duties of a part-time, sometimes volunteer elected position. Having the time to deeply engage with the issues facing the transit agency can be a stretch, even for those elected leaders who want to be transit champions. (We heard this same critique from King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci in her recent comments in PubliCola on the need for Sound Transit governance reform). 

Our bill was killed before being introduced in 2023 and failed to pass in 2024, but we were finally able to get it passed last year. As of January 2026, all 20  transit agencies can update their charters to add these seats. But so far, none have done so. Worse, some agencies appear to be actively campaigning against adding transit riders to the boards. 

I wanted to share the history because I hope the research on best practices and the conversations we are having with local transit agencies can inform the Sound Transit governance restructuring debate, and vice versa. Granted, the scale of Sound Transit’s budget and its ambitious light rail plans will require some different considerations, but I think there are useful parallels, especially as we look at how different transit governance structures function in other communities outside of Washington. 

Last fall, as Nondrivers Alliance we started meeting with elected leaders who sat on transit boards across our state, one of the most common concerns was whether it is feasible to have appointed members, in addition to elected officials, serve on transit boards. 

To help address this, I encouraged UW sustainable transportation grad student Naomi Rubin to create a report on transit agency governance structures last fall. She found that many agencies have appointed boards, and sometimes there are specific seats designed for transit riders. For example, on the MBTA (Boston’s board) the governor makes appointments, and one appointee must be a transit rider; another must be from an environmental justice population. In Oregon, the boards of larger transit agencies (Salem and Portland, for instance), are appointed by their governor as well, and one appointee must be a regular transit rider.

Transit governance and restructuring is a hot topic in many jurisdictions struggling to rebuild from pandemic ridership declines and over budget transit expansions. Chicago is going through a process to restructure their regional transit agency. The new board will include two appointed representatives (one voting, one non-voting) from the disability community. In Denver, a proposed restructure of the RTA board would eliminate two-thirds of elected members and replace them with a mix of elected and appointed representatives. 

In Los Angeles, as their County Board of Supervisors expands from 5 to 9 members, LA Metro’s board is being restructured to accommodate this new representation. 

Like Sound Transit, LA Metro is also expanding their system, and fights over alignments and the appeasement of NIMBY concerns have delayed and added costs to projects. With the current governance structure, “no one prioritizes what makes the best transit network, or what is best for riders,” reflected transit advocate Nick Andert.

The decision on how LA Metro’s board will be reconstituted ultimately lies with the state legislature, although the current board wants to present the legislature with a preferred alternative, which they’ll  vote on in July. The LA transit advocates I spoke with aren’t sure yet what board configuration they’ll support. Even the simple prospect of adding four county supervisors to the board has been highly controversial because no one wants to dilute their own power. 

The LA advocates looked at San Francisco Bay Area’s BART, where board members are directly elected to the transit board. But because of the politics of some LA county communities, such a system in LA could result in anti-transit transit board members who would stonewall any efforts to expand transit, the advocates worried. This was a problem with the BART system in the past before the current pro-transit slate of board members won election. 

For context, I reached out to Dr. Rosalie Ray, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography & Environmental Studies at Texas State University. Dr. Ray published a typology of transit governance in 2020 and continues to research how representation, experiences and identities impact transit board decision-making. (I got to know Dr. Ray because we co-authored a chapter in Edward Elgar’s Handbook of Transportation and Public Policy about how disabled nondrivers are excluded from transit governance and what could be gained through reforming board structures for our inclusion.)

Dr. Ray studied the power-sharing efforts in the formation of King County Metro’s Equity cabinet, and so I asked, from her perspective, if she thinks a transit board that includes some appointed members with specific qualifications would better serve Sound Transit. She thought it would, especially if there was an intentional effort to prevent knowledge loss as members cycled on and off the board. But she also pointed out there were tradeoffs: When elected officials in charge of land use decisions sit on the transit board they (theoretically) have a stake in creating land use policies that make transit work. Without this direct connection, transit and land use decisions risk being decoupled. 

I also spoke to Chrisof Spieler, author of Trains, Buses, People, who currently serves as the transportation director of the city of Madison, Wisconsin. Previously he served on Houston’s appointed transit board.Spieler noted that many appointees to transit boards are there not because they wanted to be transit champions, but because they (and the people who appointed them) saw their board appointment as a resume builder in the context of larger political ambition. 

Because of his experience in Houston, and what he’s seen in other agencies, Spieler is skeptical that governance structures matter. “Every structure has success stories and failures,” he shared. “Dysfunctional structures with the right people can accomplish extraordinary things.” And the reverse is also true. 

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In the context of Sound Transit, LA Metro, and other agencies that are seeking to build rail extensions, Spieler noted that decisions about alignment and which lines get built in what order (or at all) will always be highly political, and even if a transit board consists of appointees, the big decisions will get negotiated between the people with the appointing power. 

For Spieler, the key question is whether transit riders have the political power to hold the key decision makers, these elected leaders, accountable. In the context of Sound Transit, this would mean asking why, with the ability to appoint 10 of the 18 board members, the King County Executive wasn’t able to negotiate more for King County access in the recent re-alignment. 

A partially appointed or directly elected board that includes representation for different geographies will face the same tensions between regions. In Europe, many of these tensions are resolved by the transit agency being managed by a single government entity: the city, county, or state that the transit serves. In Washington, this could translate into Sound Transit being managed by WSDOT, which could look at what the Puget Sound region needs overall. But how would a system that primarily serves the Puget Sound region fare in the context of competing interests from other parts of the state?

Drawing from my conversations with Dr. Ray, Christof Spieler and Los Angeles advocates, as well as our experience with how hard it has been to implement our local transit agency governance reform, I have come to recognize that there may be no magic bullet for transit governance reform. 

But there is one point of concurrence among everyone I spoke with: Our transit agencies would work better if transit boards, transit staff and transit contractors actually relied on transit themselves. 

“Require transit agency staff to rely on transit themselves,” Dr. Ray summed it up. 

Because elected officials, transit agency leadership and contractors rarely, if ever, ride transit, they do not feel the urgency that those of us who rely on transit do in creating transit systems that are truly excellent. This lack of transit familiarity has real costs, not just in what we imagine is possible but also in our expectations for transit service and construction. I would argue this is the root of why US transit agencies and transit construction projects can’t keep up with transit in other parts of the world: the people in charge don’t actually believe transit will replace car dependency. 

I kept wondering as I watched, biking my kid across the bridge to swim lessons over the years, the amount of construction worker time that was spent pouring and repouring concrete on I-90. Had more of the contractors working on the Sound Transit plinths been transit-dependent themselves, would there have been a whistleblower calling out the shoddy fabrication standards much sooner? Would things have been different if the project was managed by an international consulting firm with decades of transit construction experience rather than an American company that is trying to diversify from highways into transit construction? 

Spieler concurred that this could be contributing to the challenges and cost overruns. “Look where consulting firms have their offices,” he said. A firm is unlikely to attract staff that ride transit and want to ride transit if their office is in a suburban office park that can’t be reached on the bus or train. 

“At every level people don’t ride transit enough,” Spieler reflected. “We don’t force it. And we could.” He mentioned that during his tenure in Houston, the transit agency had an internal policy that required staff to ride transit. But many staff members were still reluctant to replace car trips, riding light rail to lunch instead of incorporating transit into other daily trips. And eventually the policy was abandoned. 

Inspired by advocates from Houston, Atlanta, Portland and Minneapolis, this spring my organization, Nondrivers Alliance, conducted a survey of all 219 board members of transit agencies in Washington to ask when the last time they rode transit and how often they ride transit in the system they’re in charge of. We received responses from about a third of the board members, and even among the responses we received (a self-selecting bunch), ten percent of respondents reported never having ridden transit in their jurisdiction. 

It’s not unreasonable to expect transit board members and transit agency leadership to ride the system they manage. We can set up this expectation through organizing challenges like the Week Without Driving, and we can also look at other ways to force transit agencies to institute policies and incentives to encourage this change. 

Other transit agencies have also instituted transit incentives or requirements for board members. In Manila, for example, leaders of the transit agency announced in 2025 they will require staff to ride transit at a minimum once a week. In the US, a 1993 San Francisco ballot measure  made it official city policy to require the mayor, Board of Supervisors, and other top city officials to ride public transit to work at least twice a week. But without an accountability mechanism, they didn’t follow the policy. More recently, in 2025, a bill was introduced in the California state legislature that, among other things, would have prevented transit board members from receiving their $150 daily stipend for participating in board activities if they failed to use the transit system for at least one hour or four trips per month. (The bill also would have added two non-voting members to transit boards representing riders and transit employees). Unfortunately, the parts of the bill regarding transit governance were struck. 

Perhaps it’s time to consider legislation like this in Washington. Or perhaps we just need, as present and future transit riders, to concentrate our political power. With the recent Sound Transit realignment, we saw the anger from all corners of our region. Our communities are demanding reliable, comfortable, and frequent transit. Let’s use this anger to hold accountable our elected leaders who have failed to find solutions that meet this need, starting with insisting they ride transit with us. If it’s too slow, too inconvenient, too unreliable for them, that’s an indictment of their failures and it’s time to find leaders who feel the same urgency we do to build the system we need. 

City Council, Mayor Wilson, Police

Mayor Hires Temporary New Comms Team; Councilmembers Tell SPD: Keep Hiring, We’ll Pay for It!

1. Mayor Katie Wilson is hiring two new temporary communications staffers: Crystal Nicole Fincher—the political consultant, podcast host, and co-owner of KVRU community radio—will be Wilson’s strategic communications consultant, and Dawn Schellenberg, a longtime spokesperson for the Seattle Department of Transportation, will temporarily take over the communications director position. As we were first to report, Wilson’s original comms director, Seferiana Day, was asked to step down shortly after returning from months of medical leave earlier this month.

Schellenberg started on Wednesday and Fincher will start next month, according to an internal announcement from Wilson’s chief of staff Esther Handy. Fincher will step away from her other duties while working for the mayor, and both she and Schellenberg will be in their new roles through September, Handy wrote.

Fincher will reportedly be in charge of coming up with a new communications strategy for the mayor, who has garnered a fair amount of negative press over her surveillance camera policy, failure to stand up 500 shelter beds by the World Cup as hoped, and other decisions that many have perceived as strategic blunders or policy moves that don’t align with Wilson’s campaign promises.

Wilson is preparing to hire a permanent communications director. (A member of her communications staff reached out after this article was published to clarify that they are not interviewing yet, but seeking candidates). According to internal and external sources, Deputy Mayor Brian Surratt has communicated that the mayor’s office is looking for a Black man, specifically, to fill the position.

After this piece was published, the mayor’s office reached out to say that they are looking for a diverse candidate pool. In an all-staff email, chief of staff Esther Handy wrote that Wilson’s office “values having a diverse pool of candidates to draw from for our hiring processes,” that the office hopes “to attract candidates from a diverse range of backgrounds and perspectives, including leaders of color within the relevant industry, and that “we hope to draw from a diverse and inclusive applicant pool.”

It seems likely that more changes in the communications office are coming. As we reported, there’s tension between the mayor’s communications and policy shops, with each blaming the other for negative press around recent Wilson decisions, like her announcement that she’d be turning surveillance cameras at the stadiums in time for the World Cup.

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2. Several members of the city council say they’re putting their foots down: No matter how much more money the Seattle Police Department needs to hire the flood of new applicants that have poured in since the passage of a new police contractlast year, they aren’t going to support any hiring slowdown. “Now is not the time to withdraw our sustained investments to boost our officer staffing levels and boost our response times,” Councilmember Rob Saka said at a meeting of the council’s public safety committee on Tuesday, adding that the police budget is “sacrosanct.”

“It’s time to lean in, not tap out,” Saka said.

Given that the city will have to close a nearly $200 million budget shortfall, that could be a problem. Earlier this month, we reported that unless SPD slows down its hiring pace this year, it will go $1.7 million over its 2026 budget, with additional overruns next year if hiring continues at its current pace.

Council central staffer Greg Doss noted that SPD’s ballooning costs are “strictly related” to the salary increases the Seattle Police Officers Guild secured last year from former mayor Bruce Harrell and the city council, which guarantees fully trained new officers a salary of $126,000 a year. And Dan Eder, the former Harrell budget office director who was recently appointed budget director at SPD, said a hiring slowdown is, in fact, “on the table” if SPD can’t find other places in its budget to pay for all the new officers the department is hiring.

“We haven’t yet exhausted all possibilities” for funding the new officers, Eder said. “We’re looking at contacts and non-sworn expenditures. It is possible that if that is not enough savings, that we will not shrink the police force, but we will slow the growth of the police force  for the rest of the year. That’s just a recognition of the dire strait that the city budget finds itself in this year and for the next biennium of the budget. We just don’t feel that there is extra money.”

Saka, along with committee chair Bob Kettle, said slowing down police hiring would be tantamount to defunding the police.

Kettle said he had “indicated to SPD to continue the hiring, to maintain the momentum,” while Saka said the city “repealed the defund movement” via resolution last year. That resolution, which acknowledged people’s general “right” to “feel safe,” arguably had less substance than most nonbinding council resolutions. Among other things, it “formally reversed” the completely nonexistent “prior commitments” by the previous city council to defund and abolish the police.