City Council, Mayor Wilson

Council Majority Supports Fiscal Accountability for the Mayor, But Not for Themselves
West Seattle Councilmember Rob Saka wore a “Straight Outta Delridge” t-shirt to highlight several of his proposed budget adds, including $235,000 for an “art wall” he said would deter graffiti in the Delridge neighborhood.

By Erica C. Barnett

A five-member majority of the Seattle City Council declined to sponsor a proposal from Councilmember Dionne Foster to hold themselves to the same standard of fiscal responsibility they imposed on Mayor Katie Wilson this year, rejecting the idea that they should have to create a balanced fiscal plan while proposing new spending that would swell the mayor’s budget by more than $100 million. The new spending amendments that received at least five sponsors—a council majority—last week add up to almost $68 million on their own.

As we’ve reported, Wilson balanced the budget by making targeted reductions to mostly vacant positions, reducing or eliminating some of the new spending former mayor Bruce Harrell and the council piled on to the budget last year, and laying off 15 people, about 0.1 percent of the city’s workforce. Last week, City Council budget chair Dan Strauss called this plan “the Mayor Wilson Austerity Budget,” saying it “will put the city government at a full stop” and promising to “reverse the cuts.”

Wilson’s budget includes a financial plan that’s balanced through 2030, a new requirement (for this year only) that was part of the “Seattle Shield” business and occupation tax restructure that voters passed in 2025. Councilmember Bob Kettle, who added that requirement to the Seattle Shield package as a “fiscal responsibility” measure, proposed one of two identical amendments (the other is sponsored by Dionne Foster) that would make the requirement permanent. In budget terms, this means that all future mayors would have to present both a balanced short-term budget and a financial plan that shows no deficits for four years after the current two-year budget cycle ends.

During a discussion about potential budget amendments last week, councilmembers appeared eager to preserve this mayoral mandate. “I think that the amendment from last year had a positive effect, in terms of the budgeteering process, on the executive’s budget compared to what we’ve seen in the past,” Kettle said. Together, the identical Kettle and Foster amendments won sponsorship from eight of nine councilmembers, making the proposal a shoo-in for the’ “chair’s package” of consensus budget amendments Strauss will release later this week.

Moments later, though, council members expressed virtually no interest in a second proposal, sponsored by Foster, that would impose the same requirement on the council. Foster’s amendment, intended to complement that mayoral budget mandate, says that not only should the mayor send a balanced budget plan to the council, the council should send a balanced budget plan back to the mayor at the end of their annual budget amendment process.

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The amendment, Foster explained, “establishes parameters for the council’s adopted budget, so our decisions do not make the general fund or JumpStart future-year outlook less sustainable than the financial plans that we receive from the mayor’s proposed budget.” Taken together, she said, the two proposals would “strengthen transparency, establish consistent expectations, and help prevent future residents and current residents from service disruptions.

The council’s six centrists, who backed Kettle’s proposal to require balanced mayoral budgets, seemed to balk at the idea of following the same rules themselves; besides the original sponsors—Foster, Alexis Mercedes Rinck, and Eddie Lin—only one councilmember, Debora Juarez, signed on to cosponsor. (Juarez, an appointee filling out Cathy Moore’s aborted term, will be replaced by either Nilu Jenks or Julie Kang later this month.)

With just four supporters, the legislation won’t appear in Strauss’ consensus package. On Friday, Foster told PubliCola she didn’t consider the legislation dead, but she’ll have to convince at least one more councilmember to back it. Without it, the council will have free rein to give in to its spendthrift instincts—larding the budget with pet projects that don’t have a sustainable funding source and hiding the cost by describing ongoing programs as “one-time” budget adds.

Despite Strauss’ complaints about “austerity,” most of the budget reductions in Wilson’s budget are items former mayor Bruce Harrell and council members added last year with full awareness that they were using one-time dollars to pay for services and programs that would run out of money this year. The council’s central staff warned about this explicitly last year, noting that the budget was “inherently unsustainable” because it increased the city’s structural budget gap, with a built-in deficit of about $150 million in 2027 that was projected to balloon to more than $375 million in 2029.

Foster’s amendment would force the council to keep those out-year numbers at or above zero by living within the city’s actual means. No wonder many of them don’t like it.

“Austerity,” typically used to describe budgets that drastically cut human services while adding money to big-ticket departments like SPD, is an odd word to describe Wilson’s budget. The plan includes minimal cuts to council priorities like the Unified Care Team (where Wilson has proposed eliminating six and a half vacant positions and transferring two vacant positions to a different part of the Parks Department) and police (whose budget Wilson increases to fund raises and 66 new positions).

The council’s spending proposals would restore and fund many of those vacant positions, including many the city has never been able to fill. The money they want to add back to the budget would fund the vacant UCT positions, accelerate police officer hiring, and preserve nine empty parking enforcement officer positions that SPD has never filled.

Alongside these adds, councilmembers have proposed restoring $7 million in spending on Seattle Fire Deparment overtime, which an analysis (requested by Foster) found was about $2 million more than SFD can actually use on overtime shifts, given the number of firefighters who are actually available to fill open shifts throughout the year.

They also want to restore funding for 14 vacant positions on the CARE Team, which would add $2.3 million to the two-year budget, and resurrect the “district funds,” a recent addition to the budget that gives councilmembers $1 million each to spend on new Seattle Department of Transportation projects in their districts.

And, as has been the case for years now, many of the council amendments that would increase funding for new or resuscitated programs in 2027, but not 2028, are obviously meant to be ongoing, because they pay for things like food assistance, sex worker outreach, gun violence reduction, and economic revitalization in specific neighborhoods like Lake City. These are all worthy priorities, but making them “one-time” actually deprioritizes them in the budget, making them the subject of annual scrambles for funding. Ongoing programs the city pays for with one-time dollars will inevitably just show up again as budget adds next year, setting the council up to once again complain about “austerity” if Wilson doesn’t take it upon herself to find stable funding for them to continue.

 

City Hall, Courts, Elections, homelessness, King County

This Week on PubliCola: Sara Nelson’s Disappearing $30,000, Council Proposes Budget-Busting New Spending, KCRHA Explains $17 Million Gap

And more stories—and podcasts!—you may have missed for the week of October 26.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, October 26

Greater Seattle: Wilson’s Sweeps and Nelson’s Disappearing $30,000

Josh zeroes in on a fact that City Council critics of Mayor Katie Wilson seem unwilling to acknowledge: Under Wilson, the Unified Care Team has done more encampment sweeps than when Bruce Harrell was mayor. And, he argues, former councilmember Sara Nelson got away with using anonymous funds to finance a PAC that’s promoting a council candidate—even though the PAC returned the money.

Tuesday, October 27

Council Budget Amendments Already Top $80 Million in New Spending—and That’s Before the Big Stuff

The city council majority, which larded the 2026 city budget with “one-time” spending on new programs, is livid that Mayor Wilson’s budget closed the deficit they created by getting rid of some of their unfunded programs. Now, they’re proposing to add many of those programs back while also adding new ones, at a potential cost of more than $100 million (as a meeting that took place after this post revealed).

Thursday, October 29

Ex-Burien City Manager’s Excessive Complaints

The city of Burien finally handed over the investigation report that preceded former city manager Adolfo Bailon’s departure. It reveals that in addition to repeatedly calling 911 on homeless people in the park near his office, Bailon filed a barrage of apparently frivolous complaints against city councilmembers, city staff, and regular Burien residents.

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KCHRA Elaborates on Money Troubles (and Lays off Key Staff)

At a King County Council committee meeting, the regional homelessness authority’s chief operating officer, William Towey, said the agency’s recently revealed $16.7 million in overspending happened because the agency consistently overestimated how much money it would bring in, to the tune of a quarter billion dollars. Seattle and the which are taking back control of the region’s homelessness contracts, will have to shoulder the cost of the KCRHA’s poor financial choices.

In other KCRHA news, agency CEO Kelly Kinnison laid off one of the agency’s last two HR staffers as well as its top expert on HMIS, the complex homelessness tracking system that is one of the KCRHA’s few remaining responsibilities

Friday, October 30

$18.7 Million for Office Space. Cuts for Public Health. King County Has It Backward.

In a guest post, Harborview nurse Ryan Talen argues that King County Executive Girmay Zahilay’s costly return-to-office mandate would be better spent on health and human service programs to replace the ones that are being cut, both in Zahilay’s proposed budget and through federal funding reductions that will eliminate health care for millions.

Also this week: I was on City Cast Seattle’s November Guide episode, where we talked about how we’re keeping ourselves busy and warm this fall, as well as what’s on your ballot this week.

On Seattle Nice this week we talked with with Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans and Criminal Division Chief Jenna Robert about the city’s new Connection Court, which pairs access to services with strict requirements for people who opt in. People who accumulate additional criminal charges or fail to participate in services will get kicked out to mainstream court, where they’ll face penalties including potential jail time.

 

 

Guest Contributor, Health, King County

 $18.7 Million for Office Space. Cuts for Public Health. King County Has It Backward.
Harborview Medical Centerl. Photo by Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Ryan Talen

As a nurse, I workat a hospital for long hours on weekdays and weekends. I wake up early and spend 12 hours at Harborview, the regional public trauma center for Washington, Alaska, Idaho, and Montana. It’s the area’s safety-net hospital, where we take everyone who comes through the door regardless of their ability to pay.

My patients span the socioeconomic spectrum: Some are well off, some are middle- or working-class, and some are experiencing homelessness. All of them benefit from public health investments. Whether they rely on vaccine information, restaurant health inspections, or the incredible free dental, vision, and health clinics Public Health-Seattle & King County offers, all my patients are healthier when they come to me because of these local investments.

So when I saw King County Executive Girmay Zahilay’s proposed budget cuts to the health department, I had serious questions about his priorities. Earlier this month, the Executive sent the King County Council a budget proposal that cuts approximately $2.8 million from the Department of Public Health while spending more than $18.7 million on his return-to-office proposal.

In the scheme of a county budget, $2.8 million could come across as budget dust. But as a nurse at Harborview who witnessed repeated cuts to public health care since the peak of the pandemic, and who is currently worried about the federal Medicaid cuts that will impact my patients, I want to see deeper investments in public health. Instead, for every dollar cut from public health, Executive Zahilay is proposing nearly seven dollars for office space.

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Because of Executive Zahilay’s budget proposal, I suspect the chance that I will see some rare patient types will increase. When I see cuts to the Monkeypox Vaccine Effectiveness program, I think about the individuals with monkeypox that I have cared for in the past and worry about the potential for seeing more of them. When I read about cuts to the Adult Dental Program, I worry about all the people who will attempt to live with tooth infections until they arrive at my hospital septic and in need of emergency care.

Executive Zahilay’s public health budget cuts come as the federal administration has cut funding for disease surveillance and outbreak response at the CDC, Medicaid coverage for our immigrant and refugee community members, and Affordable Care Act subsidies for millions of Americans. Many King County residents will now delay care because of cost, and when patients put off preventative care, they suffer long-term health consequences. With measles spreading and our food supply less safe, we need state and local governments to invest in public health like the necessity it is.

Because our Public Health Department is funded through the county’s general fund, which has continued to face significant funding shortfalls, it has taken deep cuts in previous budgets. After the health department carried King County through the pandemic with fewer COVID deaths and lower spread than other counties, it’s being rewarded with repeated hits to the budget. I expected a new executive with a progressive platform to take a new approach that prioritizes the health of our community. Instead, King County residents get a proposal that could jeopardize our health.

I urge Executive Zahilay and the King County Council to put people and health first. I know local governments cannot fully backfill the federal spending that’s being cut, but the county can still choose where its own scarce dollars go. The King County Council should reject this unnecessary spending on office space and redirect those dollars to fill the gaps the federal government has created, starting with the public health programs this budget proposal cuts. When hard choices have to be made, don’t invest in office space; invest in public health.

Ryan Talen is a nurse at Harborview, the regional trauma center for Washington state, Alaska, Idaho, and Montana.

Courts, criminal justice, homelessness

Ex-Burien City Manager’s Excessive Complaints, KCHRA Elaborates on Money Troubles (and Lays off Key Staff) and More

Despite what my Bluesky would have you believe, there is more stuff going on in and around Seattle than just the budget!

1. Three months after we requested a report on the investigation into former Burien city manager Adolfo Bailon’s performance, the city of Burien finally provided a heavily redacted copy of the 24-page document. Although the redactions (of phrases like “city manager” and “city attorney” as well as the names of, Bailon, and former Burien city attorney Garmon Newsom III) make the report a somewhat challenging read, what’s clear is that Bailon was fired not just for poor performance, but for spending much of his time filing frivolous harassment and discrimination complaints about elected officials, city staff, public commenters, and at least one person who wrote a letter to the editor of a local news site.

Bailon’s complaints included one accusing  councilmember Hugo Garcia of making a “verbal threat”  when, as Bailon told it, Garcia said they would have a problem if encampment sweeps started up in Burien. Bailon also complained that Garcia implied the city manager was racist at a council meeting at which Garcia said a council proposal to site a new tiny house village in a low-income, mostly Latino area “reeks of white supremacy.”

To back up his claim that Garcia was targeting him, Bailon complained about an email Garcia sent to Councilmember Rocco Devito (the topic was the Seahawks flag) in which Garcia misspelled Bailon’s first name as “Adolph.” This, Bailon said, “suggests a deliberate attempt to associate me and my legal work with white supremacy and with Adolf Hitler.” Bailon also filed complaints against Garcia over comments he posted on social media and threatened, in comments on a letter to the editor of the B-Town Blog, to request Garcia’s employment file and post it publicly.

On and on the complaints went. Bailon wanted the council to publicly condemn someone who criticized him on social media, then threatened to get HR involved when two councilmembers didn’t respond right away. He demanded a formal investigation into a Burien resident, claiming she made a racist comment about how he should “go back where you came from”; in fact, she had said his lack of compassion for homeless people showed he didn’t understand Burien, but he might “have better luck” in his previous home state of California. He filed a complaint against a constituent who said he had burned bridges with progressives, calling this part of a pattern of harassment. While he was filing all these complaints, Bailon also had plenty of time to call 911 on homeless people, then complain to the police chief when he got put on hold.

As we reported, the city council put Bailon on administrative leave in April, shortly after he fired Newsom, who immediately had his attorney send a letter accusing Bailon of racial discrimination. (Bailon is Mexican American and Newsom is Black). When city staff tried to put Bailon on leave to investigate the allegations, Bailon claimed they were harassing and discriminating against him; the council voted to put him on leave about a week later, prompting more complaints. The council eventually fired Bailon “without cause,” which gave him access to a severance payment of around $120,000. He still lives in Burien.

 

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2. The leader of another dysfunctional government entity, King County Regional Homelessness Authority director Kelly Kinnison, was absent during much of a King County Council committee meeting last week where she and her chief operating officer, William Towey, were scheduled to answer questions about the discovery that the agency overspent its budget by nearly $17 million, with interest on its ongoing debt to King County continuing to accrue.

Kinnison joined the meeting remotely about halfway through Towey’s in-person presentation, in which Towey revealed that the agency brought in about $250 million less, over its five-year lifespan, than it assumed it would. “Classic overspend,” as Towey described it, accounted for about $3.4 million.

Most of that overspending came from three sources: An “unplanned and unbudgeted” decision to use Salesforce to administer grants to homeless service providers; “excessive … fees” to the Robert Half temp agency, which provided financial staffers to do work that would more typically be done by employees, at a cost of $150 an hour plus fees; and interest the agency has consistently owed King County, its lender, because its bank balance has typically been negative (rather than balancing out over the course of the year as funding comes in).

The bulk of the $16.7 million gap, as we’ve reported, resulted from false assumptions about how much administrative funding the KCRHA would receive through its contracts with homeless service providers. Although some, including a certain Seattle Times columnist, have portrayed underspending as a shocking scandal, it’s typical for providers (including nonprofits that contract with the city of Seattle) to be unable to spend all of the money they’re allocated every year; the KCRHA just decided, at some point, that they wouldn’t, and kept using this assumption year after year.

One way or another, the city and county are going to have to split up the cost of the KCRHA’s poor financial decisions. How they will divvy up that expense (and when) remains an open question. Asked about the debt last week, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson would only say that the city is “in active discussion with the county” about how to fix the KCRHA’s fiscal mess.

3. Although the city and county are taking over almost all the KCRHA’s contracts with homeless service providers, the KCRHA will continue (for now) to oversee a number of federally required functions, including the biennial Point In Time Count of the region’s homeless population (a process that now involves a lot of statistical extrapolation and data analysis rather than a direct count), the annual federal funding process, and the job overseeing the region’s Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) database.

Given these new limitations, many at KCRHA were taken aback earlier this month when Kinnison laid off the agency’s lead HMIS analyst, a person who had been with KCRHA since the beginning and was chiefly responsible for overseeing (and understanding) HMIS. This core function will now go to other staffers who have been doing other work and are less familiar with the complex system. Kinnison also let one of the two remaining HR staffers go, meaning that there will only be one HR staffer left to oversee every aspect of human resources at the agency, which has about 50 employees.

The layoffs were not announced; in fact, according to sources familiar with the discussion, Kinnison told a group of elected officials and others working on KCRHA’s transition that she was not planning additional layoffs as of that morning.

4. Don’t miss our conversation with Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans and Criminal Division Chief Jenna Robert this week. We talked about Evans’ new Connection Court, a diversionary misdemeanor court that pairs access to services with strict requirements for people who opt in. People who accumulate additional criminal charges or fail to participate in services will get kicked out to mainstream court, where they’ll face penalties including potential jail time.

Evans also announced a new program for repeat offenders that will both prohibit them from participating in any diversion program and seek harsher penalties, including “aggravated jail sentences,” for people who meet certain criteria, such as amassing more than three misdemeanor charges in three months or shoplifting at the same place twice.

A quick correction on this episode: Sandeep described San Francisco’s Reset Center, a sobering center where police remove people from the streets involuntarily for eight hours or so until they can receive a certificate of sobriety, incorrectly.

It is not true that the Reset Center offers medication-assisted treatment, such as shots of long-acting buprenorphine. The center gives referrals to outside providers but does not offer treatment.

It is also not really true that people can just get up and walk out of the Reset Center. In fact, according to the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, which runs the site, only “[once an individual able to care for themselves, they receive a certificate of release (849 (b) PC) and are free to leave.”

City Council, Mayor Durkan

Council Budget Amendments Already Top $80 Million in New Spending—and That’s Before the Big Stuff
City Councilmember Rob Saka, speaking to reporters on Monday

The council has about $26 million, over three years, in unanticipated funding “to play with.”

By Erica C. Barnett

After many on the Seattle City Council spent the past few weeks criticizing Mayor Katie Wilson’s budget for failing to fund their priorities, including police officers, fire department overtime, and discretionary transportation funds former mayor Bruce Harrell created for each councilmember using one-time money, the council is getting down to amendments this week.

So far, the council’s budget agendas, which are organized by department, include proposals that would increase general fund spending by more than $80 million over the two-year budget—and that’s before the council even gets to the big-ticket police, transportation, and human services department budgets, where councilmembers will almost certainly propose spending tens of millions more. Between them, councilmembers have proposed more than 160 amendments, most of them for new spending.

The city is required by state law to adopt a balanced budge. Every new program or project must be offset by cuts to someone else’s priorities.

A restructure of the city’s business and occupation (B&O) tax adopted by voters last year includes a section requiring the mayor to propose a balanced financial plan through 2030 this year, but not after that. A proposal from Councilmember Dionne Foster would make this long-term balanced budget mandate permanent, and would also impose it on the city council, requiring them to produce a final budget that’s also balanced in future years.

The idea is to impose some fiscal responsibility on the council after years of profligate spending that has relied on large deficits in future years. “Seattle cannot continue balancing its budget one year at a time while leaving significant ongoing deficits for future leaders to address,” Foster said when she announced the proposal.

Speaking to the media on Monday, Councilmember Rob Saka said he was excited to learn that the city had discovered “a lot of money” recently that “it looks like we have to play with” beyond what the mayor’s office was aware of when they submitted the budget in September.

The first chunk of “new” money, about $12 million over three years (2026-2028), comes from a combination of $7.8 million in net new revenues projected under the updated October revenue forecast and $4 million in interest income from JumpStart (payroll) tax investment revenue. On top of that, the city received an unanticipated $14 million from a JumpStart tax payment that came in late, according to for a total of $26 million across three years.

The council is already busy trying to spend several times that amount, with dozens of potential budget adds. (Saka alone has introduced 20 budget amendments so far).  On Tuesday, when the council’s budget committee moved quickly through amendments involving 16 city departments and signed on as co-sponsors to each others’ amendments, most of the proposed budget adds won sponsorship from at least a five-vote council majority.

Speaking to reporters Monday, public safety chair Bob Kettle derided what he called Wilson’s attempt to present a “Goldilocks budget,” calling it a “bowl of cold porridge” because it slows down police hiring after SPD hits 1,250 officers, which is expected to happen next year or in early 2028. (He also griped that the mayor wouldn’t have presented such a balanced budget if the council hadn’t forced her to with the B&O tax requirement)

“She’s going to own the effects of the budget, particularly as it relates to public safety,” Kettle said. “Ththis is not a budget that one should be celebrating, if you’re looking at it from strictly the public safety perspective.”

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Kettle said he plans to introduce amendments this week to add more funding to the police department, which Wilson’s budget would increase by more than $68 million, mostly because of the huge raises her predecessor Bruce Harrell negotiated, and the council approved, last year. However, he acknowledged, “the ability to really make changes is going to be problematic” because the budget is so lean, and restoring $7 million a year for Seattle Fire Department overtime, which Wilson’s budget cut, is a higher priority. “It has consensus across the floor, and so that’s going to be the first in line,” Kettle said.

Some of Kettle’s other big-ticket priorities include a proposal to add $1.9 million over two years for graffiti removal (Wilson’s budget removed this funding, which includes a contract with Uplift Northwest to remove graffiti from private property) and $562,000 next year (rising to $715,000 in 2028) to pay for four more assistant city attorneys to prosecute misdemeanors.

Saka’s 20 amendments include a two-year, $14 million plan to restore “district funds” that council members can use to pay for small transportation projects in their districts; Saka, who has called himself the city’s “pothole king” would also restore $1.3 million a year for pothole repairs that Wilson proposed cutting to help address revenue shortfalls and higher-than-expected cost inflation at the Seattle Department of Transportation.

Other proposed council budget adds include:

• An amendment from Councilmember Dionne Foster that would spend $10 million a year in Office of Housing funds to support the construction of new affordable housing and the preservation of existing affordable units. Noting that the mayor balanced her budget, in part, by moving $65 million in JumpStart tax funding out of the Office of Housing, Foster said Tuesda, ” I believe it’s our responsibility, and we have an opportunity if we have additional resources, to reinvest those [dollars] back into our affordable housing community.” Foster’s amendment didn’t get any new co-sponsors, possibly due to its size.

Alongside that proposal, Foster introduced an amendment directing the city’s budget office to come up with a plan to direct half of the money the city brings in from the big-business tax toward the Equitable Development Initiative and affordable housing. These were two of the top spending priorities in the original JumpStart spending plan, which the council fully abandoned in 2024.

• A proposal from Council President Joy Hollingsworth (whose cosponsors include everyone on the council) to spend $5 million over two years to expand and make permanent the Central District and Southeast Seattle Reinvestment Fund the council funded, like many of its 2026 priorities, with one-time funding last year.

• Several million dollars for various projects in council budget chair Dan Strauss’ district, including $350,000 in one-time funds for “activation” and “street activation” in Ballard, $500,000 for murals in the Ballard “brewery district,” $80,000 over two years to lease land for a community garden in Ballard, and $300,000 for a new skate dot at the West Magnolia Playfield (technically in Bob Kettle’s district).

• A Hollingsworth proposal that would add dedicated city funding within the Department of Neighborhoods for the city’s volunteer neighborhood councils, at a cost of $100,000 a year. Kettle and Councilmember Maritza Rivera praised the proposal (which also got support from Saka and Juarez), with Kettle saying “everything went sideways at that point” when former Mayor Ed Murray eliminated city funding for the groups.

Then as now, neighborhood councils tended to be dominated by older white homeowners with plenty of time to advocate for traditional NIMBY causes, like preserving single-family neighborhoods in amber. The city stopped funding these insular groups as part of a broader effort to get a more diverse group of people, including renters, younger people, and people of color, to weigh in on decisions that affect the city. 

• Councilmember Maritza Rivera’s proposal to commit the city to a two-year, $418,000 no-bid contract with the  National Network for Safe Communities, whose founder, David Kennedy, came up with the idea of “focused deterrence as a strategy for preventing gun violence. The idea is that in every city, a relative handful of people are responsible for most of the shootings, so cities should target those people with a carrot-stick approach—services for those who want to stop committing crimes, and aggressive prosecution and sentencing for those who reoffend. With focused deterrence, police and service providers that specialize in reducing gun violence work together to identify and target these frequent offenders.

Wilson has repeatedly expressed her support for focused deterrence, but Rivera says NNSC is different than the kind of program Wilson supports because the city would put police “at the table” instead of just “consulting” them.

Asked to elaborate on Monday, Rivera said, “When I’ve spoken to the mayor’s office about this, they have a different understanding of how to work with police. They say they want to work with police, but this particular model involves working with police at the table, with the community service providers, and with the community members working with that individual all at the same time at the same table.”

During a press briefing on Tuesday, Wilson told PubliCola “it is entirely untrue that I do not want police at the table. SPD is firmly at the table in the gun violence plan that I rolled out last month. SPD is collaborating day to day with CARE as CARE is standing up their part in in this gun violence plan. And the definition of focused deterrence is a strategy which includes law enforcement. I think I’ve made that very clear. And NNSC is not the only provider of those services.”

The council has been generally receptive to Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposed shelter plan, which would add nearly 1,000 shelter beds, including tiny house villages and RV safe lots, at a cost of around $37 million over two years.

On Tuesday, Wilson said she welcomed the idea of using the “new” $26 million from JumpStart and the improved revenue forecast to restore funding for the fire department overtime, food access funding that was cut because of an ongoing decline in revenues from the sugary beverage tax, and other programs her budget proposed cutting.

“Obviously, there’s a lot of competing priorities for that money, and I trust the council to make some good decisions there,” Wilson said. “Hopefully, they’re not putting it toward things that people are going to expect to be ongoing programs, but are funded with one-time money, because that is what got us into this problem in the first place. So I hope that they’re able to use that money on truly one-time expenditures.”

Earlier this month, the consultant working to reconcile the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s finances released a report concluding that the KCRHA overspent its budget by a cumulative total of almost $17 million. That shortfall, which the report calls “unrecoverable” by the agency, will have to be made up by the city and county. On Tuesday, Wilson declined to say how much the city could owe for the eventual bailout, saying the city, county, and KCRHA are in active discussions about that question.

Elections, homelessness, Mayor Wilson

Greater Seattle: Wilson’s Sweeps and Nelson’s Disappearing $30,000

By Josh Feit

108 < 112 < 151

In her press conference last Wednesday, Mayor Wilson debuted a new homelessness approach that focuses on identifying homeless people by name and then prioritizes getting them into shelter and formulating individualized plans. Prompted by successful examples, like a joint Downtown Seattle Association/Purpose Dignity Action encampment resolution in Pioneer Square during the World Cup this summer, social service workers will hit the streets neighborhood by neighborhood and connect people to services and shelter that work for them. Erica has a full report.

In addition to this empathetic effort, Wilson also went on record at a press briefing last week to say the city has not—counter to Councilmember Dan Strauss’ claims—backed off on sweeps, telling two different reporters that she has no plans to change the city’s encampment removal policy. “Our Unified Care Tam has continued doing encampment removals at basically the same rate that they were doing removals before I entered office,” Wilson said. 

Wilson’s buy-in on sweeps was not news to us!

The subject of sweeps and how they beget more sweeps was actually the very first item in last Monday’s installment of this column, which also noted that lefty mayor Wilson had done more sweeps in her first year so far than her predecessor, Mayor Harrell had done by the same point in his first year.  Wilson’s 151 > Harrell’s 112. This, despite Harrell’s tough-love, football-coach reputation that endeared him to the pro-sweeps establishment.

It turns out Wilson’s 151 sweeps tally so far also bests Harrell’s tally for the same period (January through September) throughout his entire term, including in 2025, when the number of sweeps under Harrell was 108. In 2024, there were 112 sweeps under Harrell during the same period. In 2023, there were 95. And as I noted, during his first year in 2022, there were 112 sweeps.

These persistent numbers reiterate the main point I was making all along: Sweeps obviously aren’t a solution to homelessness.

Good on Mayor Wilson for at least adding a proven, humanist policy to the otherwise vicious circular logic of sweeps.

$30,000 > $15,000

We could soon find out who contributed to SeaFor, the shadowy entity former Seattle city council president Sara Nelson set up to raise money for local candidates while concealing donor’s names in order to “protect the privacy of businesses and individuals” (as its own website boasted.) That’s the possible silver lining, anyway, after the lefty Progressive People Power PAC  filed two complaints about a $30,000 donation Nelson’s fund made to a local PAC, North Seattle Neighbors. NSN is supporting the establishment-backed choice in this fall’s council race, Julie Kang, against progressive favorite Nilu Jenks.  The complaints convinced NSN to return the mystery money, which accounted for about two-thirds of the money NSN had raised to date.

How would returning the check reveal whose money SeaFor collected and passed through to NSN? Well, NSN effectively already spent the $30,000 by sending out an initial round of anti-Jenks mailers. As a result, in order to pay off the debt they incurred on those mailers, which they originally planned to cover in part with Seafor’s check, they’ll now have to go out and raise more money themselves. And it’s likely NSN will simply turn to the same conservative donor base that Nelson did. The public should keep an eye on NSN’s upcoming disclosure reports to see who their donors are in the next few weeks. NSN has until election day to cover the mailers; they’ve only reported $15,000 raised to date beyond the elusive $30,000.

I say “silver lining,” because on balance, this is an ethically-challenged turn of events for Seattle. Nelson got exactly what she wanted without having to spend any of her PAC’s money. Sure, NSN was going to buy the mailers before they had the money in hand, as political campaigns often do, operating on the assumption that they’d be able to raise the money in time to pay the eventual bill. But the bad actor in all of this, Nelson, hasn’t faced any consequences for her cynical chicanery. Her group’s ephemeral check, which as of last week accounted for two-thirds of NSN’s money “raised” to date, was on NSN’s books—and now it’s not.

By Monday, NSN had reported raising another $15,000 or so from individual donors, including former deputy mayor Tim Burgess, Vulcan chief real estate officer Ada Healey, Fremont industrial landowner Suzie Burke, and real estate investor Judith Runstad. By that time, though, NSN had already sent out another mailer accusing Jenks of being “clueless” on crime.

And as we were going to press, Jenks’ campaign announced they’d filed a complaint with the state Public Disclosure Commission and the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission calling on NSN to halt any more mailings until the names of their donors are released. They note in their complaint that the NSN’s mailers themselves list Nelson’s group as their top donor.

Josh@PubliCola.com