Maybe Metropolis, Mayor Wilson, Taxes

The Gaffe Faff: Wilson isn’t Misspeaking. She’s Delivering.

By Josh Feit

Desperate to make anything stick to our unflappable and breezy left-wing mayor, Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat tried to create the narrative that Mayor Katie Wilson is prone to gaffes. He didn’t mean it in the same way the damaging label once dogged klutzy president Gerald Ford in the 1970s. (Ask Claude about Ford and the Air Force One stairs.) Or the way we mean it when we talk about Trump getting his facts wrong 24-7. What Westneat means is: Wilson has said a few things about tax policy that he disagrees with. He’s evidently the keeper of common sense.

On several occasions now, Wilson has acknowledged, with gusto and millennial nonchalance, that she’s not cowed by the business class.  Specifically, when questioned about the state’s new “millionaires’ tax” during a recent appearance at Seattle University, Wilson mockingly said “bye” to rich people who choose to flee. And while promoting progressive tax policy at an earlier event, Wilson described Seattle as “filthy rich.”

She was hardly wrong. Between 2013 and 2023, the number of millionaires in Seattle grew by 72 percent, putting us in the company of other tech boom towns like Austin and the San Francisco Bay Area.

To characterize Wilson’s statements as “gaffes,” Westneat assumes Wilson has unwittingly said what she really thinks—and, more importantly, that she’s been nefariously hiding something.

But she hasn’t been hiding anything. That’s what drives Westneat bonkers. The editorial team at the Seattle Times still can’t wrap its head around the fact that Wilson openly ran as a socialist and won. They’re now rationalizing her victory by pretending she has a secret agenda.

Westneat calls Wilson’s pronouncements “revealing.”  Only to someone who’d be surprised to find books in a library.

Wilson, the first mayor in memory who seems to actually like the job, is brazen about being a Capitol Hill lefty. In March, I saw Wilson wear her politics on her thrift-store sleeve during an address to Seattle’s capitalist class in a convention center ballroom at the Downtown Seattle Association’s annual State of Downtown event. Just like the supposed gotcha fodder she hand-delivered at Seattle U, when she insouciantly defended progressive taxes, she gleefully reiterated the same pro-tax message to the business crowd at the DSA. She openly described herself to the ruling class in attendance as “a progressive and a socialist”—and then paused to say it again, in case anybody missed it.

There’s just no gotcha to get. These aren’t “gaffes.” Wilson said what she she openly believes, including her assessment that the narrative about millionaires fleeing the state is, as she told the SU crowd, “overblown.” And she’s right. As the New York Times reported this week in a story about Wilson’s co-conspirator, NYC mayor Zohran Mandami: “Research shows that past tax increases by states have not led to an exodus of wealthy residents.”

It’s also important to note that Wilson’s derisive comment was specifically about the tiny number of high-income people who may leave the state—as opposed to those who may grumble, but decide living in a thriving city like Seattle is worth paying higher taxes. She isn’t demonizing the wealthy. She’s ridiculing wealthy people who don’t prioritize their larger community.

There’s also another group of people in Wilson’s calculation. Lower-income people who don’t have the luxury of deciding whether or not to stay, but instead, are forced out by Seattle’s insuperable cost of living. Raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for affordable housing and transit is one way to help make sure working-class residents aren’t displaced. Which is a much more pressing and concrete concern for a mayor than the notion of millionaires on the lam.

“We continue to have one of the most regressive tax systems in the country in this state,” Wilson said with typical candor at a pro-social housing event in February, evidently sounding like Che Guevara or, I don’t know, centrist state Democratic Sen. Jamie Pedersen (D-43, Seattle). (Pedersen led the charge for the state’s new tax on people who make more than a million dollars a year.) “It is very gratifying to know that we’re going to be able to use a little bit of that wealth and put it to work building housing and operating housing,” Wilson concluded. 

In another recent attempt by the conservative media to catch Wilson in a supposed gaffe, talk radio seized on a press conference last month where she announced a new bus lane. They accused her of  being privileged because she said she takes her daughter to Seattle Center on Metro’s Route 8. (Yep. Taking the L8 up Denny is apparently elitist.)

Unsurprisingly, the ploy didn’t work. Wilson, who co-founded the Transit Riders Union and ran on improving bus lanes, simply doubled down on her new bus-only lane plan and playfully trolled the apoplectic media on Instagram.

In case the Seattle Times doesn’t follow Wilson’s Reels, they might want to watch this one, because she offers up another consistent core belief that they could spin as a “gaffe.” Wilson said: “As our city keeps growing, there just isn’t room to keep adding more cars to our roads. When we make it possible for more people to choose public transit for more trips, more people can get where they want to go and everyone wins, including those who drive.”

Trying to portray Wilson as gaffe-prone when all she’s doing is demonstrating her commitment to the progressive agenda that she openly ran on last year is just sour grapes from the Seattle Times. It also shows how flummoxed they are with her casual charisma. As they reported themselves last year, the anti-Wilson campaign couldn’t get traditional anti-left memes to stick to her. This latest iteration doesn’t track either.

City Council, homelessness, Mayor Wilson

Council Committee Approves Larger New Shelters Amid Cloud of Mayor-Council Conflict

By Erica C. Barnett

The city council’s land use committee approved the final piece of Mayor Katie Wilson’s shelter expansion proposal today, increasing the maximum size of tiny house village-style shelters throughout the city. The bill will allow villages, or “transitional encampments,” with up to 150 people (up from from 100), subject to restrictions that include minimum case management and overnight staffing, good neighbor agreements, and written public safety plans. The bill, which still has to be adopted by the full council, is the final piece of legislation the Wilson administration requested as part of a plan to add 1,000 shelter beds this year.

The shelter vote was clouded by a growing tension between the council and mayor’s office that exploded into the open over the past week.

On Tuesday, less than 24 hours before today’s scheduled vote, the mayor’s council liaison called land use committee chair Eddie Lin to ask him to pull the legislation from today’s agenda because the mayor’s office had problems with some of the changes the council has proposed. Lin said no.

This demand from the mayor’s office was a highly unusual breach of the legislative process in itself. Later in the day, Wilson’s senior advisor on housing and homelessness, Jon Grant, along with at least two other mayoral staffers—Kate Brunette Kreuzer and Nicole Vallestero-Soper—met with council members one on one and continued demanding last-minute changes to the amendments.

The meeting turned into a heated late-afternoon conflict that several sources described as a serious and significant breaking point in the relationship between the mayor and council. Several sources characterized Wilson’s staffers as “disrespectful” and expressed surprise that Wilson’s office seemed to believe they could order the council around.

Before Wednesday’s vote, council members thanked each other for their professionalism, speed, and transparency before moving the bill forward Wednesday, and Council. President Joy Hollingsworth alluded to a “lack of communication” about the amendments; only Lin thanked the mayor’s office.

Wilson herself, several people we spoke to emphasized, has always been polite and thoughtful in their interactions. But the mayor herself has rarely been around, according to council sources, sending staffers down to discuss legislation with council members and staff instead.

In response to questions, Wilson’s spokesperson, Sage Wilson, said the mayor’s office will “take our share of responsibility for that [communication] gap,” adding, “we did ask if the committee chair was open to providing more time to continue discussions so we could get to a good place together.”

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Council members have raised concerns about the increasingly fractured relationship with Wilson’s office before; in fact, just last Friday, Council President Joy Hollingsworth met with mayoral staff to express how important it is that they communicate with the council throughout the legislative process. At a council media availability on Monday, before the mayor’s office asked Lin to pull the shelter bill, Hollingsworth said, “I know it’s a big learning curve, but it would just help us … that we’re talking before legislation is being transmitted” in order to avoid “surprises.”

It’s worth a brief digression here about how the city’s legislative process works. Legislation can come from the council itself, or the mayor can “send down” legislation by identifying a sponsor who will carry their bill through the council process and having them introduce it—a step Wilson skipped with her make-or-break shelter legislation. Then the mayor typically works with council allies to shepherd a proposal to the finish line, communicating closely with the sponsor and discussing any concerns as soon as they arise. Legislation is a give-and-take process between coequal branches of government, and mayors typically accept non-fatal amendments as part of the deal.

Instead of raising concerns with the bill and amendment sponsors when they proposed the amendments last week, the mayor’s office waited until the day before the vote to raise specific objections. (There would ordinarily be more time between introduction and a final vote, but the mayor’s office asked for an expedited timeline, designating the legislation as an “emergency” bill.)

Wilson, the mayor’s spokesman, said the mayor “raised concerns since amendments were initially released about the implications of putting policy related to shelter operations into the land use code. … We had good conversations with Councilmembers about how to address those concerns and thought we had come to an understanding, but there seems to have a miscommunication, because the language released Tuesday morning was not in line with what we had expected.”

The amendments Wilson’s office objected to weren’t the ones you might expect. Maritza Rivera’s proposals to create shelter-free “buffer” zones around schools, child care centers, and parks and require uniformed security outside every shelter did not move forward (she could reintroduce it at full council, but it lacks the votes to pass). Neither did language—apparently inadvertent—that would have made shelter providers responsible for unsanctioned encampments and public safety issues in the area around shelter sites.

Instead, the purportedly problematic amendments came largely from Wilson’s own progressive council allies. Alexis Mercedes Rinck, for example, added amendments that would set a nonbinding “goal” of minimum case management staffing and require staffing at night, and bill sponsor Dionne Foster added an amendment, on behalf of Debora Juarez, to require shelters to adopt public safety plans.

Another amendment, from Hollingsworth, stipulates that the new shelters must adopt good neighbor agreements, something many shelter providers already do. (Hollingsworth changed the amendment on Wednesday to remove many requirements she said shelter providers identified as problematic.) And Dan Strauss proposed a new version of an amendment that would require shelter providers to divide larger shelters into distinct, separate “neighborhoods” with controlled access, after Low Income Housing Institute director Sharon Lee emailed the council Monday with concerns about the original, more rigid proposal.

LIHI provides most of the city’s tiny house villages and will likely be one of the biggest beneficiaries of funding to provide the new micromodular shelters. Grant, Wilson’s senior advisor on housing and homelessness, was most recently a longtime staffer at LIHI and frequently testified at council meetings on their behalf.

The shelter bill, a marquee proposal meant to fulfill Wilson’s biggest campaign promise, could represent a turning point in Wilson’s relationship with the council members whose support she will need to move her ambitious agenda forward. Just not in the way she probably hoped.

 

Mayor Wilson, Media, podcasts

No Wonder the Pundit Class Can’t Stand Her: We Discuss the Mayor’s “Gaffes,” Shelter Buffer Zones, and the KCRHA’s Financial Plight
Mayor Wilson is excited about fixing transit! Or IS she??

By Erica C. Barnett

Is Mayor Katie Wilson proving herself to be a “gaffe”-prone executive, stumbling and bumbling her way into damaging missteps, as Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat argued recently? Or is she exactly who she appeared to be on the campaign trail—an authentic lifelong activist with socialist leanings who refuses to play the game pundits like Westneat want her to play? That’s our first topic on the Seattle Nice podcast this week.

Here’s my take: Westneat’s column was a confusing, first-pass confabulation of unrelated incidents, including a Starbucks rally before Wilson took office, an out-of-context remark about millionaires fleeing the state in response to taxes, and a comment Wilson made at an event in February about social housing.

In addition to these “gaffes,” Westneat was incensed that Wilson allowed a city staffer to steer her briefly away from KOMO’s Chris Daniels, who was interviewing the mayor in a one-on-one after a press conference where she took questions from all members of the media.

(Westneat, like most pundits and the Seattle Times editorial board, failed to summon similar outrage when Wilson’s centrist predecessor, Bruce Harrell, routinely deployed the phrase “how dare anyone question” him when deflecting questions he didn’t want to answer, ended press conferences abruptly, and was rude to unfavored reporters, including on Election Night 2021 when he literally pretended I was invisible. Wonder why.)

Although Daniels, Westneat and seemingly everyone who’s still on X treated this brief faux pas as an assault on journalism itself, Wilson actually did answer the question—which was about whether a recent shooting made her want to add more surveillance cameras faster. (No.)

Sandeep and David think there’s something deeper here—Sandeep in particular argued that it’s important to play nice with the business community—but I think what’s really going on is that people who didn’t want Wilson to win in the first place are now angry that she isn’t playing the usual political games by slapping backs and spooning up sound-bite pablum on command. Despite their outrage about this supposed assault on the free press, it’s clear that Westneat and the rest of the pundit class are perfectly happy when politicians give meaningless comments like “that’s a great question, Chris, and it’s a matter of great concern to me,” as long as the politicians treat them like they’re important.

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Case in point: Westneat praised Wilson’s counterpart at King County, County Executive Girmay Zahilay, for giving “a classic ‘I feel your pain’ answer” to the question Wilson was answering—at much greater length than the out-of-context clip—about millionaires leaving Seattle because of the new state tax. “He said he supports progressive revenue, but that every policy has trade-offs that ought to be acknowledged,” Westneat wrote. Then Wilson “did the very thing Zahilay had just suggested was bad to do.” She was honest. No wonder the pundit class hates her guts!

Later in the podcast, we talked about a couple of stories I covered last week: A proposal to create 750-foot “buffer zones” around schools, child care centers, and parks where new tiny house village shelters would be prohibited, and the ongoing fallout from a damning forensic evaluation of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s finances, which has left many of the people with the power to shut down the agency convinced it’s time to do so.

Courts

After “Cavalier” Social Media Posts, Judge Says County Assessor Accused of Stalking Must Wear GPS Monitor After All
These social media posts that made a judge question whether the King County Assessor, who’s accused of stalking his ex, is taking his situation seriously. Wilson argued that the court should ignore his posts because they appeared on PubliCola, which he called a “personal blog” consisting of the “unverified…opinions” of “someone named Erica Barnett.”

Wilson tried to blame PubliCola for turning the court and public against him, calling us a “personal blog” whose coverage the judge should ignore. She didn’t buy it, saying his own actions were to blame.

By Erica C. Barnett

King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson will have to wear a GPS ankle monitor to ensure that he stays at least 1,000 feet away from his ex-fiancée Lee Keller, who has accused him of stalking her, a Seattle Municipal Court judge ruled on Tuesday. A different judge had decided Wilson did not need to wear a previously ordered monitor, after Wilson said he had a medical condition, lymphedema, that requires him to soak both legs every day. The company that provides King County’s ankle monitors, Sentinel, confirmed that their units can’t be submerged in water.

Wilson was arrested and jailed last year when he showed up repeatedly at Keller’s house while she had a protection order against him; he’s currently facing charges related to that arrest. Previously, according to Keller, Wilson contacted the employer of a man she had dated to falsely accuse him of sexually assaulting her; took photos of her without her knowledge and sent them to her; showed up at her home uninvited and refused to leave; and harassed her with incessant calls and text messages.

The King County Council, Seattle Women’s Commission, and Seattle Times editorial board have all called for Wilson to step down. In court on Monday, John Polito, Wilson’s attorney, said the criticism was tantamount to “calling for his head on a stake” and had biased the public unfairly against him.

In fact, Wilson would have been allowed to continue without the ankle monitor if not for own actions. Hours after learning he would not have to wear an ankle monitor after all, Wilson posted a selfie on Instagram and Facebook showing sitting in a tub, grinning, with the caption,  “What a great day to just soak in the tub and let your cares float away.” Three days later, he did it again, posting, “Great to soak my legs after after (sic) a very productive and successful week” above a photo of him in the tub, mid-laugh.

PubliCola broke the story about Wilson’s defiant posts. Our article made its way to Judge Catherine MacDowell through an internal news distribution service, and she ordered Wilson to show up to court in person to address what she called “cavalier and public” posts that indicate “he does not seem to be taking this seriously.”

In a brief filed Monday, Polito argued that PubliCola is a mere “personal blog” by “someone named Erica Barnett” that should be disregarded because it is merely the “Ms. Barnett’s personal opinions unedited and unverified.”

In court, Polito argued that Wilson was being treated unfairly because of all the negative coverage and public criticism by elected officials and the press. (He also suggested that the word “stalking” was defamatory.) “If his name was John Smith, this would not be happening,” Polito said. He then claimed that Keller’s recent presence at a fundraiser for King County Executive Girmay Zahilay was a sign that her case against Wilson was politically motivated.

Turning to one of the oldest tropes in the victim-blaming book, Polito argued that Keller can’t really be afraid of Wilson, because she got back together with him in the past. (The brief Polito filed Monday includes many photos of the two together, complete with editorial comments from Polito like “the joy on their faces speaks volumes far more than words.”)

“This [court] is the place free all of that nonsense, all of the ‘hashtag, I Believe Her.’ But just because women weren’t believed doesn’t mean we automatically believe them,” Polito said. “It’s not, ‘hashtag, I Believe Her,’ it’s ‘hashtag, He Didn’t Do This.'”

MacDowell said all those arguments were irrelevant to the question before her—should Wilson have to wear an ankle monitor to ensure he stays away from Keller, or should she take him at his word that he’ll never contact her again?

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“Yes, in a case where he wasn’t an elected official, if a defendant had posted something on social media, it’s likely it wouldn’t have come to the court’s attention on its own,” she said. But since Wilson is fully aware that he’s an elected official and public figure, and posted the images anyway,  “it calls into question the seriousness of the issues that he represented to the court”—that is, whether Wilson’s medical condition really requires him to soak both his legs every single night.

MacDowell gave Wilson until next month to sort out the ankle monitor issue, which will also give him and his lawyer an opportunity to determine if a wrist monitor would work instead. If he ends up with an ankle monitor and still needs to soak his legs regularly, MacDowell suggested, he’s free to come to Sentinel’s office as often as he wants to have them switch the monitor from one leg to the other.

In a statement, Keller said, “I am grateful the court agreed that John Wilson must wear a GPS device to ensure he does not come near me and has no contact with me. He has shown he will not obey court orders and I am concerned for my safety without court assurances. The GPS monitoring device will provide me with that confidence that he must stay away.”

homelessness, King County

County Council Launches Action to Address Homelessness Authority’s Financial Issues

By Erica C. Barnett

The King County will take up legislation from Councilmember Jorge Barón this afternoon that directs the King County Executive’s office to take two concrete steps toward addressing the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s financial issues, which have led local elected officials to start discussing a plan for “winding down” the agency. Shutting the KCRHA down would require either the Seattle City Council or the King County Council to adopt a motion to terminate an interlocal agreement between the city and county, triggering a dissolution process that must last at least one year.

Barón’s motion, co-sponsored by Rod Dembowski and Steffanie Fain, asks King County Executive Girmay Zahilay to conduct an assessment of the KCRHA’s forthcoming “corrective action” plan responding the issues identified in a recent forensic audit, and produce a report on “whether the county should continue, amend, or terminate its participation” in the interlocal agreement that created KCRHA.

The legislation sets a June 15 deadline for the briefing, which will cover the corrective plan (due May 23) and options for covering the KCRHA’s shortfall. The longer report, which the legislation says should include an outline for how to “transition contracts and activities currently managed or carried out by the authority,” is due August 1, a few weeks before the council is set to take up a separate proposal, sponsored by Dembowski and Reagan Dunn, to start the process of dissolving the homelessness agency.

“We need to be very thoughtful about this,” Barón said. “We don’t want to make the situation worse by trying to do something quickly and without a lot of thought for the people on the street and those who are getting services right now.”

Talking to PubliCola last week, Dembowski said he considers the KCRHA “a failed agency, by design and also in its implementation. … I don’t see the necessity or value of having the KCRHA continue.” But, Dembowski added, he wants to dismantle the agency “in an orderly way.”

Barón’s proposal comes in response to a forensic financial review that found the KCRHA had a growing negative balance, could not account for at least $8 million of its budget, and has few internal controls over its own budget and finances. A little over a week ago, the KCRHA’s governing board (on which Barón sits) learned from the auditors that just getting KCRHA’s finances to a baseline standard could cost millions of dollars and take years.

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There appears to be little enthusiasm for that option. While Dembowski (along with Seattle City Councilmember Maritza Rivera) has been the most vocal proponent for shutting down KCRHA as quickly as possible, his isn’t the only voice of resignation. County Councilmember Claudia Balducci, a former member of the KCRHA’s governing board, told PubliCola last week, “I think it’s really time to figure out a different path forward. It’s time to admit this isn’t working.”

But Barón told PubliCola the process can’t move forward until after the county know exactly what’s involved in fixing the agency’s financial issues, determine how much it will cost the city and county to pay down the agency’s overspending and debt, and he figure out how to handle the $200 million or so in homeless service contracts the KCRHA administers, most of them funded by the city and county.

If the KCRHA loses its authority to administer contracts, some have suggested that it could serve as a regional body that brings Seattle, King County, and suburban cities together to coordinate regional homelessness policy, while Seattle and King County resume control of homelessness contracts (something Seattle has already started doing with Mayor Katie Wilson’s shelter push).

Barón was cautious when asked what the future of the KCRHA might look like. I don’t want to say this is the end or that it definitely is headed in that direction, because KCRHA hasn’t had a chance to respond to the evaluation yet” or present its corective action plan, Barón said. “For me, the question is, is that where we want to spend resources, or do we want to put those resources in a transition? I am not prepared to make that decision now.”

Whatever the county and city decide about the future of the regional homelessness agency, Barón said they’re going to have to figure out how to pay for any funds the KCRHA can’t account for, including overspending and the interest on loans it took out with the county. “Both of us were funders and I think there should be equitable and fair distribution of responsibility for those issues,” Barón said.

 

Police

Audit: Retiring SPD Officers Routinely Burn Through Months of Sick Time, Costing City Millions Each Year

SPD West Precinct

By Erica C. Barnett

As PubliCola reported last week, SPD Assistant Chief Todd Kibbee is on extended leave before his expected retirement, leaving taxpayers on the hook for his position as well as that of his replacement, Acting Assistant Chief Rob Brown. Like many SPD veterans before him, Kibbee appears to be “burning” his sick time prior to retiring, a common practice at SPD despite city policy that requires employees to provide verification that they have a valid reason for taking sick leave.

The practice allows retiring officers to earn full pay for every day of sick leave they’ve accumulated, even when they aren’t actually sick.

Earlier this year, the city’s Office of Inspector General released an audit into this practice, finding that the city spends about $3 million a year in so-called sick leave “for officers who are functionally retired,” plus another $900,000 a year for benefits such as retirement contributions that continue to accrue while these “functionally retired” officers are on leave.

According to the audit, nearly two-thirds of the SPD officers who retired between January 2018 and May 2024 did so after going on leave for more than two weeks, a status that puts them on a list of employees that are “unavailable” for assignments. “Among this group, the median employee was assigned to the ‘unavailable’ unit for 226 days,” according to the audit. After 2020, the percentage of retiring officers who took extended sick leave before separating from the department increased to 72 percent.

“Of the 276 sworn employees retiring from extended leave status, 219 (79%) used every full day of sick leave they had accrued,” the audit found.

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Notably, retiring SPD officers generally hang on to large amounts of vacation time, which “cashes out” at 100 percent—meaning that officers receive full pay for accrued vacation time they don’t use. In contrast, sick time only cashes out at 25 percent, so it’s more lucrative for officers to use up all their sick time and cash out their vacation time before retiring.

Not surprisingly, SPD officers generally hoarded their remaining vacation time and cashed it out after burning up their sick leave. By the time they retired, the median SPD retiree cashed out 251 hours of vacation time—nearly two months’ worth—and less than four hours of sick time.

Because retirement and other benefits keep accruing while employees are on sick leave, simply “paying sworn employees 100% of their sick leave to retire instead of going on extended leave, the City would have saved an average of at least $1.7 million per year,” the OIG found.

In theory, officers are supposed to provide a doctor’s note justifying their sick time when they return to duty, but since retiring officers never come back, they never have to show they were actually sick.

As part of the latest police contract, the Seattle Police Officers Guild agreed to come up with a policy that will require officers to provide verification from a health care provider that they have a legitimate reason to take extended sick leave. According to the department’s response to the audit, this policy will be implemented this year.

Asked about the timeline for implementing this new policy, SPD Chief Operating Officer Sarah Smith said “SPD is still in discussions with our labor partners regarding this matter. Once a final policy is finalized, we will provide more details.”