City Council

After Telling Councilmembers To Avoid “Getting into the Depth of Topics,” Strauss Plans to Rush Entire Budget Through on Friday

The budget chair’s amendments would add millions of dollars for Ballard—including a bus route to his own neighborhood that’s likely near the bottom of Metro’s priority list.

By Erica C. Barnett

City Council budget committee chair Dan Strauss wants to wrap up the budget process this week, despite other council members’ objections that they don’t feel prepared to learn about amendments, debate them, and vote them up or down all in a single day.

The council already has very little time to consider and amend the mayor’s budget, which the mayor announces on the fourth Tuesday of every September. (Prior to 2022, when the council held its main meetings on Mondays rather than Tuesdays, the budget came out one day earlier). This year’s published budget schedule, which is the basis not just for the council but for community groups to provide feedback, includes a vote on Monday, not Friday, giving an additional weekend for councilmembers to deliberate and get feedback,

In most of the last 10 years, council records show, the council (serving as a nine-member budget committee) has had at least one, and often two, days to deliberate over the budget before meeting for a day of votes. Until Strauss took over as budget chair in 2024, the council’s budget season went through the week of Thankgiving; that year, Strauss truncated the schedule to give himself and the rest of the council that entire week off. The shortened schedule has sometimes made the budget feel rushed and underbaked. Last year’s budget, for instance, devolved into a chaotic flurry of lat-minute amendments and what I described at the time as one of the least transparent budget processes in recent memory.

This year, Strauss is trying to outdo last year’s example, condensing the usual day for discussion and deliberation and the day for further deliberation and voting  into a single day-long meeting this Friday.

At a council meeting on Tuesday, Strauss—who introduced his own “chair’s package” of more than 150 amendments the previous Thursday—said council members should plan on being in chambers until 8:00 or later to put a bow on substantive spending amendments this week, wrapping up council budget amendments earlier than at any time in the past 10 years, which is as far as the council’s online schedules go back.

After this post went up, Strauss contacted me to say he planned to “go at a comfortable cadence” on Friday, leaving plenty of time for breaks; if it seems unlikely they can finish everything in one day by 5pm, he said, he’ll hold the rest of the meeting on Monday. He also said the mayor has started delivering the budget earlier than in previous years; as noted above, I checked the last going back ten years, and this isn’t the case.

The consent package generally includes amendments that have at least five supporters—enough to pass.—although this isn’t a requirement. This year, the package includes many amendments that have just one sponsor—Strauss—as well as 44 amendments that did not have majority support when the committee voted on them the first time.

The 44 non-consensus “consent” items include:

  • An amendment to spend $100,000 a year to have two police officers stand in council chambers during full council and public safety committee meetings, in addition to the security officers who are already present at all times (three supporters);
  • A proposal to increase the budget by $2 million over two years to fund nine long-vacant parking enforcement officer positions. Each year, instead of filling the positions, SPD uses the salary savings each year for other priorities (four supporters);
  • A proposal to spend $470,000 in one-time funds on an anti-graffiti “art wall” in Delridge, money that will in reality have to be ongoing (three supporters);
  • A proposal to spend $500,000 on murals in the “Ballard Brewery District” (three supporters);
  • $100,000 for a consultant to study the possibility of creating a special taxing district, subject to regular voter approval, to fund the fire department (four supporters);
  • An amendment to prevent two layoffs and temporarily forestall 11 more, of 15 citywide layoffs total, at a cost of $1.8 million (three supporters);
  • A proposal to spend $500,000 (spending identified as one-time that would almost certainly be ongoing) on additional abstinence-based treatment slots at the private Lakeside-Milam treatment center in Kirkland (three supporters);
  • A proposal to take control of the city’s Sound Transit liaison away from the Department of Transportation, an executive department, and give it to the City Council. Strauss said last week that he proposed the change because Mayor Katie Wilson “didn’t support my priorities” for Sound Transit—an apparent reference to Strauss’ effort to convince the regional transit agency to build light rail line starting in Ballard (three supporters);
  • $200,000 to launch a “sip and stroll” outdoor drinking program around the Ballard breweries (three supporters);
  • $150,000 for “seasonal lighting” and Christmas decorations in Ballard, including an illuminated cat sculpture related to Seattle’s sister city, Reykjavík, along with an illuminated sculpture of Jimothy, the meme raccoon (four supporters);
  • An amendment restoring two maintenance positions, with no funding attached, to the Unified Care Team, which removes encampments (four supporters).

The proposed extra spending in Strauss’ district is notable. Strauss has proposed 13 geographically specific spending adds, most of them in Ballard, totaling more than $14 million; of that amount, about $8 million is non-general fund money that would pay to re-turf a playfield in West Magnolia, while the other $6 million is part of the general fund budget that makes up most of the city’s discretionary spending.

In addition to the items that did not have consensus support, Strauss added more than a dozen new amendments to the consent package on his own—proposals with no cosponsors that have never been discussed or voted on at all. Some of these are standard budget-chair stuff—changes that resulted from the October revenue forecast, for instance—but most are not.

The most contentious item on this list will probably be Strauss’ proposal directing SDOT, to spend $2.5 million from the voter-approved Seattle Transit Measure restoring bus service to the North Beach neighborhood in Ballard, where Strauss lives. This would involve asking King County Metro to either resurrect the Route 15 Express to Blue Ridge or expand service on the 17 Express to Sunset Hill.

The 15 was eliminated, and the 17 saw reduced service, after King County Metro opened the RapidRide D line, which is largely redundant with both routes. Strauss’ proposal would use a one-time budget proviso, or restriction, to direct the spending, but if Metro did agree to restore the service (any change would require.a separate King County Council vote), the spending would undoubtedly be ongoing, not one-time.

Strauss has frequently complained that there is “no transit service to Ballard” in non-commute hours. That’s untrue, but direct service his neighborhood, a single-family enclave near the city’s northwestern edge, is limited. The corridor ranks low on the priority list SDOT uses to determine which new transit service to buy with Transit Measure dollars, which incorporates factors like ridership, housing density, and equity.

On Tuesday, Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck said she planned to pull the bus proposal from the package for a separate discussion. “I really think it’s important, as a part of our partnership with King County Metro, that we work closely with them … and we’re really data driven about this,” she said. Councilmember Eddie Lin echoed Rinck’s comments, saying, “I strongly would prefer to be going through [the prioritization] process than us sort of picking and choosing which routes get additional service through the budget process. I just don’t think that’s the right way for us to be adding service.”

In an unusual three-page memo to the council, SDOT itself cautioned strongly against using the budget to push specific bus routes to the front of the line for funding,, writing that earmarking money for a specific route goes against the “equity-centered, data-driven methodology” SDOT uses, as well as “policy established by City Council in the Seattle Transportation Plan (STP), the Comprehensive Plan, and the voter-approved Seattle Transit Measure (STM).”

“Directing funds to specific fixed route services through a proviso or other mechanism would require foregoing other service investments,” the memo says. “As a result, higher priority routes and community-identified needs for funding through the new STM would receive less service over the life of the measure.”

As examples, the memo includes a list of 18 high-priority transit improvements that would cost the same amount each year as Strauss’ proposal to serve Sunset Hill, including more frequent weekend service, expansion to 24-hour or later night service, and improved all-day service on crowded, heavily used routes in every council district.

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Other unilateral additions Strauss unveiled last week include an amendment that would require SDOT to prevent left turns at an intersection in his district, a project he said a group of unidentified “neighbors” asked for in a petition; the transfer of $31 million in revenues from the JumpStart payroll tax over two years to pay for new spending; a decision to reduce JumpStart’s emergency reserve fund below the legally mandated level; and a brand-new, never discussed 0.01 percent sales tax increase for human services.

Strauss has tried to limit discussion about his proposed changes to the budget.

During a committee meeting where he introduced his balancing package last week, Strauss explicitly instructed the rest of the council not to ask too many questions or engage in detailed discussions. “Debate, or really getting into the depth of topics—that should be reserved for Friday the 13th when votes are happening.” This accelerated schedule was news to some, since it means the council will have just one day to process the amendments, deliberate, ask questions, and vote on the entire budget, including the consent any package, amendments council members pull out of it for separate votes, and more than two dozen “self-balancing” amendments council members plan to introduce that day, plus several dozen other pieces of budget-related legislation.

Strauss, who has punctuated every budget meeting this year with what he calls “Google Maps” updates on how long it will take the council to get out if everyone feels the need to ask questions or talk, said council members could easily get out of chambers earlier than 8:00 as long as they don’t spend too much time discussing the budget legislation. “If we all speak to the items which are important to us, we will be able to get out by 5 p.m. If we all speak to every single item, we will not,” Strauss said.

Maritza Rivera, who has been a vocal advocate against overspending this year, said she didn’t understand why Strauss was in favor of “rushing through the process,” given that councilmembers weren’t able to have a discussion about the consent package, including all the new amendments sponsored solely by Strauss, last week. “It’s my hope that we’re able to have the conversations Friday that we were unable to have in chambers, if we need that, and then use Monday, which is already on the schedule, to continue doing those votes,” Rivera said. Councilmember Dionne Foster chimed in to agree.

Strauss responded that he has “never seen a consent package include so many of our proposals,” adding, “I have the faith in the world that we will be able to be completed by 5pm [on Friday]. I’m just simply stating that extra three hours on Friday is something that we should prepare to reserve because in our—in my conversations regarding this process, it will be less impactful than coming back on Monday.”

On Wednesday evening, Strauss echoed something he said at Tuesday’s council meeting—that this year’s consent package includes the most council-sponsored items he can remember. While the total number of amendments in the package—139—is high, it’s not precedent-setting. There were more consent amendments during five of the last 10 years, with many coming coose, including 129 items last year.

Editor’s note: This post has been updated after our conversation with budget chair Strauss. The neighborhood served by the 17X bus route is Sunset Hill, not North Beach/Blue Ridge, so we corrected that error. We also added Strauss’ comments from our conversation after this story went up, along with some additional detailed information about the council’s historical budget schedule obtained from publicly available records.

Civil Rights, Mayor Wilson, Police, Privacy

Wilson Says Expanding Police Surveillance System Will Help Make Seattle “The Safest Big City in the Country”

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson announced she’ll proceed with an expansion of police surveillance in the Central District, Capitol Hill, and SoDo (where cameras are already installed), subject to a handful of new requirements that were outlined in the NYU Policing Project’s civil-rights audit, released yesterday. The decision, Wilson said, was part of “making Seattle the safest big city in the country—safe from gun violence and serious crime, and safe from authoritarianism from the federal government.” The expansion was proposed by former mayor Bruce Harrell but put on “pause” shortly after Wilson took office. 

Like Harrell, Wilson framed her defense of mass surveillance in terms of community safety and justice. “Our city has too many grieving families, too many communities who rightfully expect crimes to be solved, but are losing hope of their day in court,” Wilson said. “Justice means protecting from harm and preventing it. It means delivering accountability afterward. My decision today strikes that balance.”

At a press conference with the mayor on Tuesday, interim police chief Andre Sayles said the cameras were a big part of the reason there were no homicides in June and that the World Cup was safe; Wilson turned on the cameras near the stadiums during the monthlong event, citing an unspecified “credible threat.”

But the Policing Project audit found that there was “thin” evidence that indiscriminate surveillance—their term for surveillance that applies to everyone in a public place, rather than people suspected of a crime—helps police solve or prevent crime. About 300 communities currently have Real Time Crime Centers like Seattle’s, which layer CCTV surveillance feeds with other data and live communications in an attempt to respond to crimes more quickly and solve them after the fact. The audit also found that while Seattle police often claim the RTCC was instrumental to solving a crime, the reality is that SPD counts any interaction with the system, such as an officer calling up a single camera, as a successful intervention.

The statistics SPD provided “reflect that in 2025, the RTCC  assisted in 17 homicide cases, with its support helping to close 10 of these cases. In SPD’s data analysis, however, it defines RTCC “support’as a case in which an RTCC analyst takes any action (such as checking a camera), regardless of whether that action yielded any useful information or meaningfully impacted the investigation,” the report found.

Asked about this at a press conference on Tuesday, Wilson seemed confident that the cameras help police address crime, despite the lack of a “controlled experiment” proving that they do. She was especially compelled, she said, by arguments that police are short-staffed and need all the help they can get, including from camera footage and the ability to view crime scenes in real time and after the fact.

“I do believe, from my conversations with our RTCC staff and officers, that the cameras are helpful both in investigations and in real time incidents,” Wilson said. “And you can argue about how helpful. But I think [the cameras are] an efficient, effective use of our resources.”

Many opponents of police surveillance have expressed concerns that camera footage could be obtained by ICE or outside law enforcement agencies to track down immigrants or target people seeking abortions or gender-affirming care.

In a statement, the privacy advocates at Community Not Cameras, said, “Mayor Wilson’s campaign platform acknowledged that ‘Seattle can’t be a true sanctuary city if ICE can access data about you.’ Yet the audit makes clear that the City’s policies cannot eliminate that possibility.”

The report itself pointed this risk out explicitly, noting that all that’s required to obtain footage is a subpoena or simple records request (which can be anonymous, and don’t require a requester to state the reason for their request). Wilson, however, said she would “not allow the data that the city collects to be used to harm immigrants, LGBTQ plus people, or others who may be targeted by federal agencies or other bad actors.”

“None of the 19 recommendations [in the audit] puts the footage beyond federal reach,” Community Not Cameras’ statement continued. “A written policy does not stop a subpoena. The Mayor conceded as much today, saying ‘even if we implement all of these recommendations, some level of risk will remain.’”

Asked how she would accomplish this, Wilson noted that the report recommended limiting the amount of time camera footage is retained in a system owned by Axon, the company that provides Seattle’s camera system, when SPD proactively retains footage for investigations. Currently, that footage is stored indefinitely.

Wilson also noted that Seattle does not use Flock cameras, which are more widely used than Axon’s, adding that she believes Axon is a more “responsible” company. “Axon will continue to be a partner in designing a system for Seattle that meets our specific needs, fits our policies, and is consistent with our values,” Wilson said. In a video posted on X, Wilson emphasized the fact that there are “no Flock cameras in Seattle.”

“Flock, no. This is a different system managed by a different company,” Wilson said in the video.

But there’s really no difference between Flock and Axon. In an interview, NYU Policing Project’s director of  technology law and policy, Max Isaacs, said that while Flock and Axon have focused on different segments of the market, “it’s not like one is good and one is bad, or either one is better than the other. They’re both trying to do a similar thing, adopting similar business models” in an attempt to become “the Apples of surveillance tech.”

On Tuesday, Wilson acknowledged that “there’s no such thing as zero risk,” adding that Seattle (like Washington state) has directed police not  to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement efforts or help other states track down people who get health care here. “If the city gets a request from law enforcement that it can’t legally refuse, “we will shut down the camera system at least for 60 days,” she said.

Wilson’s announcement did not include the most ambitious recommendation from the NYU report, which said Seattle should require police to get a warrant before they go through footage “retrospectively” to track a person’s past movements. The report said this step was important to protect people from unlawful searches, and noted that it would only apply in the relatively rare circumstances when police want to track where someone went as part of an investigation, not in situations like a real-time response or to look at a crime scene remotely.

Wilson brushed a question (from the Urbanist) about why she didn’t include a warrant requirement in her announcement, saying Seattle police don’t use the RTCC to track people after the fact. An SPD spokesman confirmed that they have not used the cameras this way, largely because it would be a cumbersome process to track someone from camera to camera, given the current limits of the RTCC technology. However, the department does not have an explicit policy preventing them from using footage in this way, which was what the proposed warrant requirement was meant to address.

Among other commitments, Wilson sad SPD had agreed to complete and publish a dashboard on its usage of the RTCC and create an “omnibus surveillance policy,” two commitments the department made in 2024 and in 2025, respectively, but has not completed. Wilson also announced that SPD “will clarify and strengthen its policies and practices around permissible uses, access criteria and logs, data retention periods, requests from outside agencies, regular internal audits, and more.”

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The city is also setting up an advisory group that will meet over the next few months to “develop additional policies around private camera integration, usage of the RTCC during large-scale events, protests and other First Amendment activity, and criteria guiding any future CCTV camera placements,” according to the announcement. Currently, 23 privately owned cameras at three locations feed directly into the Real Time Crime Center; individuals and business owners have voluntarily registered another 900 cameras at 159 locations, saying they will let SPD to use their private footage on request.

Meeting with the press immediately after Wilson’s announcement, City Council public safety committee chair Bob Kettle had measured praise for Wilson’s decision, which he said made obvious sense based on the conclusions of the study. (Previously, Kettle called Wilson’s decision to hold off on installing new cameras until the audit was complete “unconscionable.”

Kettle said he “disagree[d]” with the Policing Project’s finding that real time crime centers and surveillance do little to prevent or solve crime. In Seattle, he said, “Everybody thinks if you have 100 instances of crime, that you have 100 people doing it,” Kettle said. “That’s not the case. You may have 10 people doing 10 crimes, and then if that one person, if you’re catching them on crime two out of ten, then you’re preventing those next eight.”

Councilmember Eddie Lin said he was disappointed with the decision, and wished that the mayor had waited until the results of an additional audit by the city’s Office of Inspector General and the University of Pennsylvania come out early next year. That study will look into how the RTCC is used and whether Seattle’s surveillance system is effective at addressing crime.

“We were supposed to be getting these reports before we expanded further,” Lin said. “I think this recent report only reinforces the the need for us to have better protections and oversight in place,”

In a statement, the OIG said the NYU report and recommendations “reinforce and further inform issues that OIG identified in its first annual surveillance review; risk of improper data sharing with outside agencies, unclear criteria for expansion of RTCC technologies, and the need to enforce privacy protections on integrated cameras.”

 

Density, Elections, legislature, Trump

Greater Seattle: Two Notes on the Election, One National and One Local

By Josh Feit

A Democratic Majority > Stephen Miller’s Promotion

If you’re outraged that Trump promoted Stephen Miller to White House Chief of Staff, you—not Trump— have surely missed the point of last Tuesday’s election results.

Who cares that Trump named Miller as White House Chief of Staff on Friday. The joy of Tuesday is that I can’t be bothered with what Trump does anymore. Watching fellow Democrats react to the Miller story this week with the usual outrage strikes me as missing the point of the election. And it doesn’t help that the New York Times fell for it too (surprise, surprise) as they amplify Trump’s post-election cry for attention by playing along. Their willingly gullible headline ponders Trump’s decision to “forge ahead with an agenda that many voters rejected.” More accurate headline: Trump reverts to class-clown form by taunting Democrats with obvious troll.

Trump thrives on driving the Democratic base crazy. Appointing Miller as a response to Election Day’s thundering anti-MAGA vote was Trump, in a state of denial, attempting to get his usual round of attention as if he still had that power over us. The point Democrats need to take in is that he doesn’t. Or shouldn’t anymore. He’s a lame duck saddled with a movement that utterly collapsed on Tuesday night in the biggest popular vote backlash in fifty years.

And practically speaking, Miller has already had teacher’s-pet prominence in the White House anyway. Miller’s elevation doesn’t represent anything new. Trump and Miller have been trying to destroy America with their KKK politics for years. Miller is the policy architect behind ICE and its terrorist mission, one that has imprisoned an estimated 70,000 people in abusive detention centers to date where several have died. Feeling outrage over Miller’s new role is redundant. The only thing that’s new is that Democrats have the power stop to him. Let’s act like it. The historic blue wave means that rather than taking Trump’s bait and flipping out about his every latest kneejerk ploy, we can take the initiative instead.

The commanding Democratic majorities can block any new Miller policies and also hold Miller accountable for his reign to date, including conducting a congressional investigation into the shooting deaths of ICE victims like Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, Renée Good, and Alex Pretti.

This week’s historic rebuke is also a historic mandate. We should take the initiative by passing Democratic policies. Trump will be the one who’s now stuck reacting.

It’s fitting that the last time either party won the House popular vote by such a decisive margin (at least 13 points) was when the Democrats did so in the immediate aftermath of Watergate in 1976. This comparison isn’t potent simply because both routs involved a historically corrupt president, but because the American project to expand rights was in full bloom in 1976. It was nice to wake up in America again this week.

As this becomes the “Shove that ballroom up your fat ass!” election, it’s worth pointing out this now-famous taunt happened at a rally in Mississippi in late October, when Trump was campaigning for Republican incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. The Democratic challenger, District Attorney Scott Colom, is now poised to win and flip another red senate seat blue.

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A Long List of Pro-Housing  Bills > A Kneejerk Progressive Vote 

The blue wave hit Washington’s state legislature in last week’s election too. Democrats are set to go from a simple majority to a supermajority in the state house, and if the pickup in the 35th legislative district holds, the Democrats advantage in the senate will go from a 30-19 to a 31-18. And it wasn’t just a blue wave, it was a dark blue one, with a handful of progressive challenger ousting Democratic incumbents.

Unfortunately, the lack of nuance in that kind of wave doesn’t bode well for the urbanist, pro-housing agenda next session. Specifically, it’s disappointing that incumbent YIMBY superstar Sate Sen. Jesse Salomon (D-32) was ousted by the progressive challenge from longtime state house rep Cindy Ryu (D-32). (The 32nd LD covers Shoreline, Edmunds, Mountlake Terrace, and Lynnwood.)

In recent years, Salomon has taken a daring lead and passed some of the session’s most innovative, pro-density legislation, including bills to authorize  co-living micro housing, disarm NIMBY misuse of historic landmarking, exempt infill housing from prohibitive SEPA appeals, and hack anti-density zoning regs by creating more density in existing confines with his  single-stairway bill, and a PubliCola favorite along the same lines—his elevator reform bill. Salomon also took on AI rent fixing. Thanks to his A+ record on housing, the Urbanist endorsed him over Ryu.

Ryu, who got her start opposing pedestrian-friendly fixes to Aurora, represents the political sphere where progressives and NIMBYs align in a provincial wariness of development. This potent wing of the Democratic party could pose a real threat this coming legislative session to state senate housing committee chair Sen. Jessica Bateman (even more of a YIMBY standout than Salomon). Bateman (D-22, Olympia) is the housing hero whose monumental 2023 fourplex legislation, HB 1110, forced reluctant Seattle (and former mayor Harrell) to allow more density in neighborhood residential zones. As Sen. Bateman cues up her 2027 pro-housing agenda, it’s bad news for urbanists that she no longer has Salomon as a legislative ally. And, worse that Bateman’s intraparty foes will have a new ally in Ryu.

Josh@Publicola.com

Mayor Wilson, Police, Privacy

Long-Awaited Report Recommends Limits on Real Time Crime Center, Including Warrants for Investigators to Search Surveillance Footage

 

By Erica C. Barnett

The NYU Policing Project released its long-awaited privacy and civil-liberties audit of the Seattle Police Department’s Real Time Crime Center on Monday, one day before Mayor Katie Wilson plans to announce whether she will expand the city’s use of the surveillance cameras that feed into the center. The RTCC incorporates hundreds of city-operated and private surveillance cameras into a system that allows officers to surveil much of the city in real time, pulling in data from other sources to direct police in the field or investigate crimes after the fact.

The report did not make recommendations about whether the city should expand the center. Instead, the auditors made 19 recommendations to help address “shortcomings” in the program, including the potential for footage to wind up in the hands of federal agents and the lack of formal written policies governing things like data retention and when police can use the RTCC. These recommendations ranged from changes that would be fairly easy to implement—like ending SPD’s policy of retaining some camera footage indefinitely—to bigger lifts, like requiring a warrant any time police want to review someone’s movements retrospectively, which the auditors said constitutes a type of search.

“We think that there is a solid foundation for governance of the RTCC in Seattle… but that there are also significant gaps in policy that the city and SPD can fill,”  NYU Policing Project chief of staff Katie Kinsey said on Monday. “If the RTCC is going to continue to operate, it should do so subject to implementing these additional policy recommendations.”

Earlier this year, Mayor Katie Wilson “paused” the installation of new cameras on Capitol Hill and in the Central District; the city did install and turn cameras on near the stadiums just south of downtown, but only during the World Cup. Critics on both sides have assailed the mayor for her approach to cameras. Law-and-order officials like Councilmember Bob Kettle have harrumphed that she’s putting public safety at risk, while privacy advocates like Community Not Cameras have said police surveillance puts Seattle residents and visitors at risk.

Seattle’s RTCC, which began operations in 2025, provides police with real-time and after-the-fact access to footage from a network of  more than 500 individual cameras, many of them housed in single-location “units” with three to five cameras each, operated by SPD, the Seattle Department of Transportation, and private business owners who’ve volunteered to make their footage accessible to SPD. About 900 more private cameras, at 159 locations, are owned by people who’ve volunteered to make their footage accessible on request.

SPD officers at the RTCC access all these camera feeds using an Axon system called Fusus, which allows officers to call up camera footage and pull in other information to respond to ongoing incidents, overlaying that footage with law-enforcement databases, object-detection software, and other tools to give the police department a far more comprehensive picture of what’s happening in view of the cameras than old-fashioned CCTV cameras alone.

“When you’re connecting a bunch of cameras, when you’re having analysts that are able to look into them, when you’re running AI over them, we’re talking about really a different kind of technology,” Kinsey said.

SPD is barred from using facial recognition. But it does use a system called “object identification” that is supposed to be able to identify a list of object types, including vehicles, purses, and clothing colors. In practice, this system often fails to identify objects and people properly. In one high-profile case last year, police swarmed a 16-year-old student and handcuffed him after his school’s camera surveillance system mistook the bag of Doritos he was holding for a gun. (Speaking to the auditors about problems with the object identification system, Seattle police described a more innocuous example, in which a test search for a person wearing gray pants and a gray shirt turned up footage of a pigeon).

Most of the RTCC’s work involves supporting officers responding to 911 calls,  the report found, but officers working at the RTCC also use the system to investigate crimes by tracking people’s movements, going back through footage to surveil suspects “retrospectively.” The report recommends requiring police to obtain a warrant any time they want to use camera footage to investigate a crime after the fact, allowing “warrantless tracking” of individuals only when officers are responding to a situation in real time, to “prevent physical harm to the officers or other persons, the destruction of relevant evidence, or the escape of the suspect.”

The Policing Project is aware that this will be the most controversial recommendation, and took pains to point out that it would only apply to investigations that take place after a crime is over and the scene is cleared.

“We are not recommending a warrant in what are called exigent circumstances—when there is a public safety hazard, there’s a shooter, there’s someone who  represents a threat to public safety. Nor are we saying that SPD is powerless to check the cameras at the crime scene to see who may have been there,” said Max Isaacs, the Policing Project’s director of  technology law and policy.

Of all the recommendations, he said, the warrant requirement was “a hard pill for [SPD] to swallow. But “it is not the case that [a warrant requirement] would impede investigations. If the investigation is warranted, then they can always go to a judge and get signoff.”

The report also notes that many of SPD’s existing policies, like a commitment from Axon that it will disable new surveillance features by default, are “informal” and not a part of SPD’s policy manual or law, meaning that they can be changed at any time.

In one unwritten policy, SPD says it retains surveillance footage no longer than five days unless it’s needed for an investigation—but because there’s no formal policy, the department could increase that period to as long as 30 days without  any policy change. This casual approach is at odds with the seriousness of “‘indiscriminate’ surveillance,” the report found, and recommended that SPD adopt five-day retention as a formal policy. “We think [the lack of a written retention policy] is a mistake, and it should be made a matter of binding policy,” Isaacs said.

The auditors also recommended getting rid of footage used as evidence once it’s no longer needed. The current policy of keeping that footage indefinitely makes it more likely that bad actors, such as ICE or outside law enforcement, can file a public records request or issue a subpoena for SPD footage. “We think that creates unnecessary risk, and SPD should change it,” Isaacs said.

Other policies are vague to the point of meaninglessness—like an official policy that says the RTCC can be used to assist with “serious and violent” crimes. In practice, the report found, “SPD currently interprets” this phrase to include “misdemeanors of all kinds.” When there are no clear guardrails around how a police department can use surveillance, Kinsey said, “there is this tendency to have mission creep. So a tool that starts to be deployed or procured for one reason ends up being used for lots of other reasons because you have it on hand.” 

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The report recommends setting clear standards for when police can access the RTCC, and says that in any future “review of the RTCC’s authorization, the City Council should consider whether to further limit the circumstances in which the RTCC [can] be activated.”

Police surveillance is a relatively new project in Seattle, unlike other cities where Flock-branded cameras have become a ubiquitous, often controversial feature of everyday life. (SPD’s cameras are from a different company, Axon, which also manufactures Tasers.) Proponents argue that the RTCC and its cameras deter crime and help solve crimes; in Seattle, they’ve been sold as solutions to sex trafficking, gun violence, drug sales, and more. But, as the NYU report notes, the evidence that they actually do any of these things is “thin.”

“SPD has published some data on RTCC impact, including that officers and detectives are three times more likely to arrest a suspect when they receive support from RTCC analysts.,” the report notes. “SPD statistics also reflect that in 2025, the RTCC assisted in 17 homicide cases, with its support helping to close 10 of these cases.”

“In SPD’s data analysis, however, it defines RTCC ‘support’ as a case in which an RTCC analyst takes any action (such as checking a camera), regardless of whether that action yielded any useful information or meaningfully impacted the investigation.” In other words, SPD is mixing up correlation and causation—they could just as easily claim that driving an SUV instead of a patrol car improved investigation outcomes, or that better in-car computers make it more likely that an officer will solve a crimde.

Wilson will make an announcement Tuesday morning about her plans for the RTCC. (On Monday, the mayor’s office declined to respond to written questions). For months, she’s been telegraphing that the report’s release is a final step before she announces plans to keep the RTCC and preserve or expand its surveillance footprint in Seattle. What’s unclear is which recommendations from the report she will try to put in place and whether she’ll make the RTCC’s ongoing existence and future expansion conditional on meeting them.

Speaking to PubliCola late Monday afternoon, Kinsey said she was “relatively optimistic about the adoption implementation of a lot of these recommendations, and for a few reasons. One is that we were asked to do this audit by the mayor’s office.  I think it always makes a really big difference when you’re doing something because leadership is actually asking you to do it, and not because some less empowered entity is asking you to do it.”

The other reason is that the Policing Project worked with stakeholders inside and outside the city for eight monts to come up with these recommendations. “Having a certain amount of buy-in, a certain amount of understanding through the process that these things are actually doable, helps me feel a little optimistic,” she said.

This is a developing story. We’ll have an update tomorrow after Wilson’s press conference, which will also feature interim police chief Andre Sayles.

City Council, Elections, homelessness, Mayor Wilson

KCRHA CEO’s Departure Leaves Right-Hand Man in Charge, City Budget Leader Warns Council About Profligate Spending, No Concession Yet in Lopsided Council Race
KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison reads her resignation letter on Friday.

1. King County Regional Homelessness Authority CEO Kelly Kinnison likely forestalled her own firing by resigning abruptly on Friday, November 6. In a brief, 153-word resignation letter, Kinnsion wrote that given the KCRHA governing board’s recent decision to “right size” the agency and move the administration of the region’s homelessness contracts back to Seattle and King County, “I believe it is in the best interest of the agency for me to make room for those changes.”

The KCRHA began to unravel earlier this year, when a forensic audit found that sloppy accounting and fiscal practices had resulted in the apparent disappearance of $13 million, which was not fully accounted for until late September. Last month, a followup report found that because of miscalculations that lasted for the duration of the agency, the KCRHA had overspent its budget by almost $17 million, which the city and King County (the KCRHA’s two primary funders) will now have to pay.

Kinnison’s announcement took place at the beginning of a KCHRA governing board meeting that was  scheduled to include a closed executive session, called under a subsection of the Open Public Meetings Act that allows closed meetings to review the performance of a public employee, a typical step before a governing body fires an executive. During the meeting itself, that item was apparently removed from the agenda and the board held a brief executive session to discuss litigation, but not the performance evaluation, which would have become unnecessary once Kinnison resigned on her own.

It’s unclear what litigation the board was discussing. Former KCRHA employee Xochitl Maykovitch filed a lawsuit against the agency in June, alleging that Kinnison had illegally withheld records related to an investigation into staff complaints against Kinnison. That investigation, by an outside lawyer, found that Kinnison retaliated against Maykovitch and the KCRHA’s general counsel, Edmund Witter.

In July, PubliCola reported that it appeared Kinnison did attempt to conceal her correspondence from public disclosure law, cutting off the public disclosure officer’s access to her emails and asking an IT staffer to label all her communications “deliberative” to categorically exempt them from records requests.

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The KCRHA’s governing board, made up of elected officials, had seemed stubbornly dedicated to keeping both Kinnison and her recently promoted chief operating officer, William Towey, on board. For more than a year, the board more or less ignored staff complaints about Kinnison (including allegations of racial bias) and demands that the board fire executive staff, including Towey and Kinnison, before getting rid of critical workers.

Board members were tepid about Kinnison’s tenure on Friday; only Mayor Katie Wilson and King County Executive Girmay Zahilay spoke. “We appreciate your work and also acknowledge the tremendously challenging job that you had with the federal landscape, with the structures in this entity, that are very challenging to navigate and the complexity of the homelessness crisis in general,” Zahilay said.

Ironically, it will be Towey, who Kinnison hired over widespread objections, who will now take over as effective leader of the agency until the board can appoint an acting CEO. Since last year, Towey has served as Kinnison’s right-hand man, speaking on the agency’s behalf at meetings from which she has been absent or at which she sat next to him in silence.

Kinnison has not signed a separation agreement, according to a KCRHA spokesperson, suggesting that she will not receive severance.

2. Seattle Budget Director Aly Pennucci, a former longtime City Council staffer, didn’t mince words in her assessment of the council’s plan to pile tens of millions in new spending—including ongoing projects that the council plans to pay for with “one-time” funds—on to Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposed budget. Had the budget “accurately reflected” many of thse “one-time” items “as ongoing investment,” Pennucci wrote in a letter to the council on Friday, the budget deficit in 2029 would be $41 million. Which—go math!—is what we reported as the council’s unsustainable long-term commitment last week.

“I heard clearly from many of you over the last two months that you consider ending one-time funding as a ‘budget cut,’” Penucci wrote. “So, I want to be clear with you, City employees, and community partners, that items labeled as “one-time” in the budget for 2027, 2028, or both, will be removed from the 2028 and/or 2029 baseline budget. That is your direction to CBO when you adopt spending as one-time.”

“In addition, given the continued economic uncertainty, and the use of fund balances and reserves, we will need to proceed very carefully with authorizing some of this new spending in 2027 so councilmembers should expect that some of the proposals may be frozen, at least until we see the April revenue forecast.” (Emphasis in original).

Pennucci also expressed concern about council budget committee chair Dan Strauss’ decision to dip into financial reserves meant to shore up the JumpStart tax in case of an unexpected revenue shortfall, bringing it below the level required by law. The JumpStart payroll expense tax falls most heavily on a small number of huge companies with highly compensated workers, so it’s inherently volatile, which is why the council previously established a reserve amounting to no less than 10 percent of projected tax revenues.

Finally, Pennucci cautioned against all the “earmarks” in the budget—spending that the budget says will go to an organization “such as” a specific, named group—warning that the council may want funds to go to their preferred organization, but the city is still required to follow state and federal contracting law. This is a perennial losing battle—the mayor and council often specify which groups they want to receive city funding in the budget, using weasel words to avoid explicit earmarks. This year, however, Wilson’s budget included almost no earmarks; the exceptions included adds for Throne and Portland Loo-style public restrooms.

The council’s budget amendments would add at least 21 new earmarks to the budget, including seven for neighborhood associations and business groups in West Seattle, Magnolia, the University District, and SoDo as well as the Seattle Sports Commission, Red Barn Ranch, Lakeside Milam treatment center, and many others.

“If a contracting process results in an award to Council’s desired recipient, the ‘such as’ language can call into question the validity of the process,” Pennucci wrote. “If the contract is awarded to an entity other than Council’s preference, the language results in a disgruntled organization that expected to receive the contract

3. District 5 City Council candidate Julie Kang has still not conceded to her winning opponent, Nilu Jenks, who was leading Kang 59 to 41 on Friday. Concessions, while not legally required, are customary once it’s clear who has won an election. On Friday, Kang posted on Facebook and Instagram that she was still waiting for King County Elections “to finalize the results.” By next year’s election (when Jenks will have to run again for a full four-year term) Kang wrote, she hopes “we will see a safer Aurora, better access to essential services in Lake City, and measurable progress on the commitments made to #seattle residents.”

In an interview with PubliCola in October, Kang said that whether she won or lost, she would run for the North Seattle seat again next year.

 

City Council, Mayor Wilson, Uncategorized

Council Budget Proposal Uses One-Time Funding, Dips Into Reserves to Pile On New Spending and Reverse Mayor’s Cuts
City Council budget chair Dan Strauss

Budget chair Strauss balked at requiring the council to pass a budget that’s balanced long-term. “I’m concerned with how much power we’re giving the executive.”

By Erica C. Barnett

City Council budget committee chair Dan Strauss released his “chair’s package” of amendments to Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposed budget on Tuesday. The proposal, which represents a starting point for the next few weeks of council budget deliberations, includes more than $40 million in proposed spending that relies on one-time funds for either one or both years of the two-year 2027-2028 budget to continue existing spending or fund new programs that will almost certainly be ongoing. If the spending the plan proposes funding just in 2027 is continued in 2028, that number balloons to around $60 million.

Each of these added priorities, from $5 million for programs that help survivors of gender-based violence (sponsored by Alexis Mercedes Rinck) to $14 million for firefighter overtime (sponsored by Maritza Rivera), will require the council to find new money to sustain it in either 2027 or 2028; otherwise, ongoing programs will lose their support from the city.

This number excludes all capital projects (things that will be built, as opposed to new city employees or services for people) as well as projects that are, or appear to be, time-limited, such as a contract with the National Network for Safe Communities to come up with a “focused deterrence” crime prevention plan (sponsored by Maritza Rivera).

Unsustainable spending, including the practice of funding ongoing needs with purportedly “one-time” funds, is one of the primary reasons the city has experienced growing budget deficits over the past several years. Last year, then-mayor Bruce Harrell and the council adopted a budget that fell immediately into a $150 million deficit in 2027, ballooning to more than $375 million by 2029. That budget, too, included tens of millions of dollars in one-time funding, but Strauss’ package would rely even more heavily on one-time funds for ongoing programs than the final 2026 budget did.

Notably, Strauss’  balancing proposal does not include some big-ticket items proposed by other council members, like $3 million proposed by Bob Kettle to remove graffiti from private property, or $11.4 million, also from Kettle, to hire additional police officers beyond the 66 new hires in Wilson’s budget. That doesn’t mean all those proposals are dead—the council is still at the beginning of the amendment process—but it does reflect that much of the council’s bellyaching over what Kettle calls the “unfund budget” (and Strauss calls “Mayor Wilson’s austerity budget”) has been more show than substance.

The programs and staff that will be paid for using one-time funds include additions from every council member. In addition to the gender-based violence programs and firefighter overtime mentioned above, here are a few of the dozens of additions for which money will run out either next year or in 2028:

  • $470,000 over two years to “establish limited permissions, time, and space for artists to freely create graffiti/mural artworks on a structure” in the Delridge neighborhood (Rob Saka)
  • $6.4 million over two years to “provide ongoing and dedicated support to the organizations that aim to preserve and revitalize Seattle’s Central District and Southeast Seattle Community” (Joy Hollingsworth)
  • $1.5 million over two years to expand services at Seattle’s 14 senior centers (Saka)
  • $500,000 for one year to continue and expand access to abstinence-based addiction treatment at Lakeside Milam, a private treatment center in Kirkland (Rivera)
  • $200,000 for one year to fund programs that improve maternal health outcomes for women of color at Byrd Barr Place (Hollingsworth)
  • $1 million for one year to expand the Back to Business program, which provides funds for businesses damaged by vandalism (Rivera)
  • $200,000 for one year to “uplift semi-professional sports” (Saka)
  • $600,000 over two years to continue a program, first funded this year, that helps refugee women artisans achieve economic stability (Debora Juarez)
  • $7 million for one year to support the council’s district transportation funds, which pay for small projects every year (Saka)

And while this isn’t one-time spending, it would preclude the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) from using these funds for any other purpose: Strauss included an amendment that would require SDOT to spend $2.5 million from the just-reapproved Seattle Transit Measure to increase service on Route 17 to Ballard and reviving the 15 bus route to Ballard, which was replaced by the RapidRide D. The 17 serves Strauss’ neighborhood but currently has limited hours.

Many of the council’s new spending proposals are arguably essential, particularly those that fund health care and human services as a new federal law cutting off benefits for millions nationwide takes effect. Others, like the very recently adopted council district funds, could be cut without much impact. But all will lack ongoing funding if they make it into the final budget, which creates problems for the mayor and future councils, who will have to decide what to cut, what to continue funding, and how to pay for all of it starting next year.

For this year, at least, Strauss is proposing to move funds around, dig deeper into the JumpStart fund (a business tax originally earmarked for housing and other progressive priorities) and use up some reserves to fund the new spending. Strauss’ proposal would transfer an additional $31 million in JumpStart revenue into the general fund over two years—money that’s partly offset by higher-than-expected revenue projections—with a built-in assumption of another $11 million transfer in 2029. The city would also grab around $13 million from JumpStart’s revenue stabilization fund in 2028, lowering it to $20 million, the minimum requirement.

 

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Strauss’ plan would also reduce contributions to the firefighters’ pension fund by $22 million over two years and use that money to backfill the general fund; that’s on top of the $10 million transfer that’s already in the mayor’s budget.

The budget also assumes a new 0.01 percent sales tax for family shelter; that money will offset the King County tax that had Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat hot and bothered, so the total hit for Seattle residents will still be only around $4 a year.

In addition to all the added spending, Strauss’ proposal also adds back funding for nine parking enforcement positions that the Seattle Police Department has never filled, plus $1 million as an “incentive” for SPD to actually try to hire for those positions instead of just using the money to pay for overtime and other police priorities. The PEOs would cost around $2 million over two years, but the budget treats them as a no-cost addition by assuming that each officer will bring in more revenue, in the form of fines, than it costs to hire them.

Standing outside council chambers after a press conference on Tuesday, Strauss took issue with my characterization of the council’s budget practices, including the use of one-time funds and transfers from funds intended for other purposes, as “tricks” and asked me for an example. I mentioned the district funds, which the council gave themselves last year. Strauss said those funds are “a really great example of what one-time funding should be used for,” because the small projects it pays for are one-time capital expenses. The flaw in that argument is that the district funds themselves are designed to just go to each council member year after year—they’re an ongoing expense, even if the projects they fund are not. 

Strauss also inadvertently made the case for why these funds—which allow the council to direct spending by SDOT, an executive department—may not go to the best purpose but the one that has the most organized neighborhood support. Typically, the most organized neighborhood residents are older homeowners, while most Seattle residents are renters. Strauss gave an example of a project just north of Green Lake, a primarily single-family area, where residents got a petition together and asked for a speed hump. There are a number of reasons the city doesn’t usually budget based on citizen petitions, including the fact that letting the most organized residents with the most free time dictate spending priorities often leads to inequitable spending.

I asked Strauss whether, in the interest of fiscal discipline, he would be supporting a proposal from Dionne Foster that would require the council to balance the city budget over six years, as the mayor is now required to do with her initial budget proposal. He said he was “happy to keep talking about it,” but that the way the budget process is set up, the council doesn’t really get enough time to come up with a balanced long-term plan.

“I think the thing that concerns me about that proposal is that the mayor has five months of actual budget work, ahead of the five weeks the [budget] chair has to balance it,” Strauss said. “And with having a strong mayor system, the mayor has the ability to implement or not implement anything that we pass in the budget or by law. And so, further tying the hands of council is a dangerous proposition. … I’m just concerned with how much power we’re giving the executive.”