Mayor Wilson

Another Upheaval on Mayor Wilson’s Staff as Communications Director Departs
By Erica C. Barnett

In the latest upheaval at the mayor’s office, Mayor Katie Wilson’s communications director, Seferiana Day, is out. Day, who was out of the office for nearly two months due to a medical issue and has been on intermittent leave, was asked to resign after turning down an offer to take on a new role overseeing council-mayor relations, according to sources. The office will also undergo an internal reorganization, reassigning existing staffers to new positions and making Esther Handy Wilson’s permanent chief of staff (Handy is currently serving in an interim role.)

Wilson’s office announced the changes to staff  at a meeting Thursday morning. An internal announcement from Wilson said that Day is “stepping back from her day-to-day duties as Communications Director to focus on her health.”

Wilson’s office has not hired a replacement for Day, although they are currently in discussions with a person who would fill the role on an interim basis; PubliCola is not publishing that person’s name unless they decide to take the job.

Day was out on medical leave during many of the mayor’s so-called gaffes, including her flippant response to the prospect of wealthy people leaving Seattle because of the so-called millionaire’s income tax.

Prior to joining the mayor’s office, Day was the longtime spokeswoman for the city’s Office of Planning and Community Development; before that, she was a longtime communications consultant and a cofounder of Upper Left Strategies, a campaign consulting firm.

According to internal sources, Wilson and others in her inner circle have been frustrated that she has not garnered more positive press for some of her initiatives, including the announcement that the city will help fund construction of the long-delayed Graham Street light rail station.

At the same time, some members of the mayor’s staff have expressed concern that Wilson hasn’t articulated a clear vision on a number of issues, such as gun violence, public safety, and tenants’ rights; when Wilson recently considered rolling back renter protections, including a provision of the just cause eviction ordinance that allows people to add roommates, some staff members were appalled.

Others have questioned some of Wilson’s hires, noting that some are out of step with the politics that got Wilson elected or are not subject-matter experts in the areas they are overseeing.

Perhaps in an effort to address the latter issue, Wilson also announced an internal reshuffling of her staff this morning that will move four current staffers into new positions as “subject-matter Directors,” according to her announcement.

Mark Ellerbrook, currently deputy director of city operations, will oversee human services and homelessness; Nicole Vallestero Soper, currently the director of policy and innovation, will be the director of affordability, housing, and economic development; Hannah McIntosh, one of six “executive operations managers,” will oversee mobility, livability, and city infrastrucutre; and Alison Holcomb, the mayor’s chief advisor on public safety (and one of those five executive operations managers) will become the director of public safety.

Sejal Parikh, a former longtime staffer for City (and now County) Councilmember Teresa  Mosqueda, will move from her current job (deputy director of policy and innovation) to a new job as “deputy chief of staff for strategy and AI.”

The communications office is reportedly despondent about Day’s departure. PubliCola has heard that this won’t be the last shakeup; Wilson’s office is currently working on an office-wide reorg, which could result in additional staffers being asked for resignations.

In recent months, Wilson’s chief homelessness and housing advisor, Jon Grant, left after being asked to resign. Kate Kreuzer, her chief of staff and a longtime friend, was moved into a newly created special projects position.

We’ve asked the mayor’s office for more details about the reorg and will update this post if we hear back.

homelessness, King County, Mayor Wilson

Auditor: KCRHA’s Corrective Action Plan Fails to Take Audit Findings Seriously

Editor’s note: This post has been updated to include KCRHA’s responses.

By Erica C. Barnett

Clark Nuber, the firm that conducted a damning forensic evaluation of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority in April, has responded to the agency’s “corrective action plan” (or CAP) with an equally scathing assessment that lays out seven “red flags” that, according to the auditors, the homelessness agency failed to address in its plan to correct systemic financial issues.

The CAP, Clark Nuber wrote, completely ignored several directives from the city and King County, including orders to put a freeze on hiring and spending, and relies on “trust us” assurances that the KCRHA will fix other serious deficiencies. Given the KCRHA’s repeated failure to meet its prior commitments, “funders should not rely exclusively on KCRHA’s self-reported progress,” the auditors wrote. The plan includes “pervasive use of potential hedge language, like: “‘has begun,’ ‘has initiated,’ and ‘will include'” throughout, the assessment found.

“KCRHA also agrees that progress should be independently verified,” a KCRhA spokesperson said. “That is why the CAP itself recommended external stabilization support, and why we welcome the City and County’s intent to embed external financial expertise to support validation, documentation, and implementation. KCRHA is not asking funders or the public to rely on management assurances alone.”

The KCRHA, Clark Nuber found, also continues to insist—inaccurately—that its deficit (currently around $65 million, up from $45 million last July) is the inevitable result of its funding structure, in which the agency pays homelessness nonprofits and gets reimbursed by the city and county. Many large nonprofit and quasi-governmental organizations use reimbursement-based systems, the auditors pointed out, without the kind of steadily increasing negative balance KCRHA has experienced.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

 

“[The deficit grew steadily and consistently over time, which is the signature of a management process failure rather than an external shock or an inherent feature of reimbursable funding,” the evaluation found. One of the main issues, the auditors wrote, is that KCRHA has routinely submitted invoices late—up to 16 months—which has prevented the agency from getting reimbursed on time.

The KCRHA spokesperson said the agency “accepts responsibility for internal weaknesses that contributed to the problem” of negative balances. “Those are within KCRHA’s control and are being addressed through the CAP. At the same time, resolving the interest obligation and preventing recurrence will require coordinated work with funders on reimbursement timing, advances, working-capital structure, and treatment of accrued interest.”

The “root causes” of the negative balance “included internal factors: the absence of a formal monthly close process, inconsistent invoice preparation and submission, a lack of real-time cash monitoring, inadequate budget oversight, and insufficient internal controls,” the auditors wrote. “These are organizational management weaknesses, not consequences of the funding model itself.”

Overall, Clark Nuber found that the corrective action plan had not fully met any of seven “key dimensions” laid out in the forensic audit, including “KCRHA understanding of issues,” “achievability,” “accountability,” and risk.

The KCRHA spokesperson said, “Several of the issues raised in the assessment are already being addressed. The governance items referenced by the City and County—including spending controls, hiring controls, and a pause on new agreements that increase cost or liability—have been taken up directly with the KCRHA Governing Board and are in place.”

Additionally, they said, the corrective plan says nothing about $6.4 million in  overspending on programs—”the most significant omission in the CAP”—and the growing amount of interest it owes the King County Investment Pool, from which it routinely borrows money. As we noted in our initial coverage, the $6.4 million is on top of $8 million in spending the KCRHA could not account for, $4 million in administrative overspending, and $1.26 million in interest that is “still growing.”

The KCRHA spokesperson said the agency already addressed the $6.4 million in overspending in late 2025 and early 2026.

Clark Nuber also noted that the KCRHA has put off establishing internal financial controls until the far-off Phase 3 of the plan, even though these controls are “not an aspirational best practice,” but required by federal law. “This means KCRHA will be administering significant public funds, including federal awards, without the required control structure throughout the period that is supposed to represent its most intensive corrective action effort.”

The report includes ten short-, medium-, and long-term recommendations for the city and county. It’s unclear whether either government will take the auditors’ adivce to heart; ten days after Clark Nuber published its report, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson and King County Executive Girmay Zahilay jointly announced plans to “embed” (and pay for) an outside consultant to “ensure [the] corrective actions” in the KCRHA’s plan “are being implemented with urgency.”

Wilson’s office did not respond to questions Wednesday; Zahilay’s office referred us to his statement about the decision to hire a consultant. The new finance committee of KCRHA’s governing board—one of the steps outlined in the CAP—will meet Thursday morning at 10am.

 

City Council

New Council Legislation Could Make Your Utility Bills Cheaper

By Erica C. Barnett

City Councilmember Dan Strauss, along with Council President Joy Hollingsworth, is proposing legislation this week that would expand access to the city’s Utility Discount program by expanding eligibility in two stages—one in 2027 and one in 2029—to include people making 60 percent and then 80 percent of Seattle’s Area Median Income. The discount program provides a 60 percent discount on City Light bills and a 50 percent discount on Seattle Public Utilities bills.

Currently, eligibility for the discount program is is limited to people who make 70 percent or less of the state’s median income, which is much lower than Seattle’s—around $73,000 for a single person, compared to about $102,000 in Seattle. According to an analysis from the mayor’s office, about 31,000 more households would become eligible for the program if the city bumps eligibility up to 60 percent of median income, and another 48,000 would become eligible if that’s expanded to 80 percent.

Earlier this month, Strauss said he was surprised recently to learn that someone he considered well-off had signed up for the program when they lost their job. “That just reinforced for me that is absolutely the seniors, the parents of the kids that I grew up with” who need the discount program, Strauss said. “This is an important affordability program for everyone in the city, and we have to have that safety net, if they need to use it, available and easy to sign up for.”

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

According to a fiscal note, increasing the threshold for the program to 60 percent of area median income would cost about $5 million for Seattle City Light and $13.9 million for SPU. The money would have to come from a rate increase of 0.5 percent for City Light and 0.1 percent for SPU, Strauss said, or an average increase of about 77 cents a month. City Light is currently considering separate increases to pay for, among other things, a maintenance backlog.

Enrolling eligible ratepayers in the discount program has always been a challenge; currently, about 36 percent of eligible residents, or around 39,000 people, are enrolled. Strauss’ and Hollingsworth’s legislation does not directly take on this problem. The program is also not available for renters without their own City Light accounts whose landlords use ratio utility billing systems, or RUBs—a type of third-party billing that allows landlords to pass the cost of a building’s overall utilities on to tenants and does not reflect how much service a tenant actually uses.

The council’s governance and utilities committee, which Hollingsworth chairs, will take up the utility discount legislation at its meeting on Thursday.

homelessness, King County, Mayor Wilson

City, County Plan to “Embed” Consultant to Address Financial Issues at Homelessness Agency

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson and King County Executive Girmay Zahilay both announced that they plan to “embed an independent financial analyst” in the agency, as a statement from Wilson put it yesterday.

According to Zahilay’s announcement, “This analyst will provide more transparency into financial practices, improve payment processes, and ensure corrective actions are being implemented with urgency.” Wilson’s announcement referred to the analyst (or analysts) as “a financial services team” that will “shore up financial and internal controls at KCRHA.”

The decision came after a flurry of discussions late last week about how to respond to the KCRHA’s “corrective action plan,” which laid out a series of steps to respond to a damning audit that found the agency lacked basic financial controls, overspent its administrative budget, and could not account for $8 million in spending. The audit also found that KCRHA had a consistent and growing negative budget balance—around $45 million when the audit concluded, an amount that had increased to $65 million by the time the auditors presented their results.

The announcement represented a slowdown of what had been growing momentum to “wind down” the agency quickly and send the contracts it manages back to the city and county agencies that used to oversee them. It was also a reversal of a plan set in motion last week.

As recently as last Friday, Wilson and Zahilay were planning to announce on Monday that they were taking back the homelessness contracts and distributing them to the city’s Human Services Department and King County’s Department of Community and Human Services,  according to accounts from people familiar with the discussions. (Zahilay, rather than Wilson, was reportedly leading the charge to pull the plug). Homeless advocates, city council members, and some members of the business and philanthropic community reportedly urged caution, and cooler heads apparently prevailed.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

 

Under the scenario the city and county were contemplating last week, the KCRHA would continue to exist—at least temporarily—as a shell of itself, serving as the region’s Continuum of Care for federal funding purposes and administering the Point In Time Count of the region’s homeless population.

This may still happen; the decision to fund an accounting team to address the problems identified in the audit does not preclude shutting down the agency. But as of now, that will no longer happen on an accelerated timeline.

As we reported last week, KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison and Associate Deputy for Strategy William Towey have asked for $500,000 to hire a fnancial consultant—as Kinnison put it, a “CFO-type role”— through the staffing firm Robert Half, which charges hefty recruitment fees on top of their temporary staffers’ salaries. The KCRHA laid off its most recent chief financial office last October and never replaced him.

A spokesperson for Zahilay’s office said the county does not know yet how much the consultant will cost or how the city and county will split the spending.

Wilson’s office did not respond to questions.

Guest Contributor, Mayor Wilson, Police, Privacy

Seattle Turned on the Surveillance Cameras Before It Wrote the Rules
Screen shot of footage from a police camera that was looming over a Planned Parenthood clinic on Aurora Avenue N, obtained by Our Seattle through a records request.

By Phil Mocek

On Friday, Mayor Katie Wilson activated the Stadium District surveillance cameras for the duration of the FIFA World Cup, reversing the pause she announced in March. Invoking a briefing from Seattle police and the FBI, her late-afternoon public announcement identified “general but credible threats” to justify the deployment.

Two days earlier, at a Seattle CityClub event, she had defined a credible threat narrowly: Information that a specific person “has the intention to cause harm” and that “it is believable that they might be able to carry it out.” A “general” threat at a large event is not the narrow thing she defined. It is the ambient condition of hosting a mega-event, present at any gathering of this scale, identified by no one in particular, aimed at no one in particular. As a justification for recording crowds of people suspected of nothing, it has no natural limit, and will return every time the city hosts the world.

The standard Wilson set on Wednesday did not survive even until Friday.

What she conceded in the same breath as her announcement matters as much as her reversal. Even as the cameras go on, Wilson said, the city will “continue honing our policies and protections to safeguard the data these videos capture.”

Those protections have not been written. The cameras are on anyway, recording everyone who passes by, without any suspicion of wrongdoing. That is the entrance built before the exit: the sequence that quietly turns a temporary emergency measure into permanent infrastructure. 

The city already has a working example of the alternative: SPD has suspended its patrol-car license-plate readers while it works out how to comply with a new state law restricting collection near schools, clinics, and courts. Rules first, then the system. For the stadium cameras, though, the city reversed that order.

The debate that produced this was flattened into a single question: On or off. But “on or off” was always the wrong question. The consequential questions are who controls the switch, under what written rules, where the footage goes, how long it is kept, and who can access it. On Friday the city answered “on” and left the rest blank.

Strip away the World Cup  urgency and the case for the cameras rests on one claim: that the footage might help after something goes wrong. Wilson acknowledged  as much at CityClub, where she said cameras are “less” useful for “preventing or deterring crime” than for solving it.

That concession should end the prevention argument the camera hawks on the City Council are making. But investigative usefulness was never the test. Almost any sufficiently invasive practice is useful to investigators: Door-to-door searches would be, document checkpoints would be, unfettered access to medical records would be. We restrict those not because they don’t  work but because a free society does not make its residents prove their innocence to a camera. The burden is on the government to justify watching a population suspected of nothing. “It might help” does not carry that burden.

By turning the cameras on, Wilson added to a system that already sits in constitutionally uncertain territory. Washington’s constitution forbids disturbing anyone’s “private affairs … without authority of law,” and the State Supreme Court reads that guarantee as broader than the federal Fourth Amendment—broad enough to require a warrant before police track a car’s movements (State v. Jackson), and explicit that the protection does not shrink merely because people have grown accustomed to being watched. 

Federally, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Carpenter v. United States that assembling a record of a person’s movements over time can constitute a search even when each movement happens in public — while declining to decide whether ordinary security cameras cross the same line. A permanent, recorded, searchable network trained on public crowds sits squarely in the space those rulings left open. The cameras on Aurora already sat there; the stadium network enlarges it. What changed on Friday is not the constitutional question but the mayor’s posture toward it: In March, she hit “pause” precisely to avoid feeding that uncertainty, and on Friday she fed it anyway, before the safeguards she promised exist.

None of this is a complaint about cameras in general. The stadium district was never going to be unwatched: The city’s emergency operations center already takes continuous feeds from hundreds of SDOT traffic cameras, and police routinely pull footage from private businesses after an incident. What is different about the stadium cameras—20 installations, each consisting of four fixed lenses forming a 360-degree view, plus one pan-tilt-zoom camera, for 100 distinct feeds—is what becomes of the images: They feed SPD’s Real-Time Crime Center. 

As City Councilmember Bob Kettle approvingly noted in his statement commending the activation, the decision “connect[s] them to the Real-Time Crime Center.” There, the footage is recorded, retained, and searchable. What sets it apart from a live traffic feed is not the lens but the system behind it: images pulled into a police database, held, and made available for investigative use rather than passing through and vanishing.

Because this database is hosted by a private vendor, it can be retrieved by subpoena, including from out of state. The city’s own surveillance law already says as much: Data may be shared “to the extent required by court order, subpoena, or as otherwise required by law,” no matter what data protections the city has promised. And the footage need not wait for a subpoena in order to escape: Anyone can request and receive it under the Public Records Act—including, as advocates have noted, out-of-state authorities checking who drove past a reproductive health care clinic. It is a different object from a live traffic feed, and it is the object now switched on.

A spokesperson clarified to PubliCola that once the games are over, the city will turn the cameras back off until a long-term decision is made about the original pilot program. That is welcome, but it is not a sunset date or a binding protocol, and switching cameras off is not the same as deleting what they recorded. The fine print the city skipped is still missing: published activation criteria, a single named official accountable for making  the call, a retention-and-deletion schedule for everything captured or derived from it, a firm decommissioning date, and a binding commitment that the data will be purged and never shared for immigration enforcement purposes. None of that requires waiting. All of it could be published before the first World Cup match on June 15.

The council’s majority spent months pressing Wilson to turn the cameras on. But it cannot compel a mayor to run a surveillance system, and no one should want it to. That power would effectively bind every future mayor to operate every funded system, no matter what later comes to light.

Wilson says she cares about privacy, and that her team is working on the rules. A published protocol, a firm deletion date, and a decommissioning plan before June 15 would prove it. Until then, turning the cameras on is not a public-safety policy. It is the absence of one.

Phil Mocek is a software engineer and civic technologist who researches government surveillance and public-records compliance in Washington.

Mayor Wilson, Privacy, public safety, Taxes

Wilson Backs Down on Tenant Protection Rollbacks, Fire Department Funding Plan Fizzles, Privacy Advocates Push Back on Surveillance During World Cup

1. Mayor Katie Wilson’s office confirmed that Wilson will not be proposing changes to the city’s just cause eviction ordinance that housing developers, including the Housing Development Consortium, had been pushing for months. Tenant advocacy groups opposed the potential changes and met with Wilson the week before last to urge her not to move forward with the changes.

Some affordable housing developers have argued for years that the city’s landlord-tenant protections, which are stronger than the state’s,  have made it impossible for them to evict tenants who don’t pay rent or break the law. Specifically, they wanted Wilson to roll back the city’s roommate law, which allows renters to add roommates without asking their landlords’ permission, and and align the requirements to evict a tenant with three days’ notice with the more landlord-friendly state law.

“The Mayor is not proposing changes to the roommate law or the three‑day notice,” a Wilson spokesperson said. “Her office has received proposals and perspectives on a wide range of economic, health, safety, and operational issues.”

Former City Councilmember Cathy Moore said she would introduce legislation that would have rolled back the roommate and three-day notice provisions but resigned before she actually introduced it.

Had Wilson introduced the rollbacks, tenant advocates argued, it would have given centrist councilmembers the opportunity to reopen the entire just cause eviction law, which includes many other provisions landlords oppose. The optics of Wilson—a tenants’ rights activist before becoming mayor—proposing landlord-friendly legislation that even her predecessor, Bruce Harrell, didn’t support would also be terrible, for obvious reasons.

Wilson does plan to propose legislation, in collaboration with Councilmember Dionne Foster, to curb rental “junk fees” in July, her spokesperson said. Wilson wrote about these fees, which include “notice fees,” fees for going month-to-month, and monthly “billing fees,” in 2023.

2. A proposal to create a special taxing district to pay for the Seattle Fire Department is dead, at least for this year, PubliCola has confirmed.

Creating a fire district would have allowed the city to fund much of SFD’s budget through a new property tax, moving that money out of the city’s general fund and helping to close a budget deficit Wilson recently said would be close to $175 million. The district, authorized by a new state law this year, would have had the ability to levy taxes outside the existing property tax cap of $3.60 per $1,000 of assessed property value, making it an appealing way to offload a big chunk of city spending.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

The firefighters’ union, however, did not get on board, effectively killing the proposal. The plan would have made much of the fire department’s funding subject to regular voter approval; it would have also moved SFD under the direct control of the city council, acting as the fire district’s board; the union reportedly wanted SFD to have direct participation on the board, at a minimum.

PubliCola exclusively reported on the potential fire district proposal last month. At a City Club event last week, Wilson said the city is facing a budget deficit of “about $175 million next year.” Without the fire district serving as a relief valve, Wilson will likely introduce additional taxes this year, including a local capital gain tax opposed by business groups like the Seattle Metro Chamber and Downtown Seattle Association.

3. In response to Wilson’s announcement last week that she will turn on police surveillance cameras in the stadium district for the upcoming World Cup games, the anti-surveillance advocates at Community Not Cameras questioned the mayor’s claim that police and the FBI had presented evidence of a “credible threat” to public safety. Wilson previously said she would not turn the cameras on without evidence of a credible threat, but did not clearly define what she meant by that term; last week, she cited “general but credible” threats to justify activating the cameras.

“By activating an Axon-backed surveillance grid in Seattle, the City is risking this data being handed over to a weaponized federal intelligence apparatus,” the coalition said in a statement.

“[R]egardless of whatever bureaucratic policy or verbal assurances the Mayor hides behind, the City of Seattle does not have the power to stop the federal government from obtaining this data once it exists. Any local safeguards or policy limitations the City claims SPD follows are completely meaningless against the collection capabilities and legal mechanisms available to the federal government.  If you build it, and if you turn it on, they can take it.”

Our Seattle, a group of Wilson supporters who organized to hold the mayor accountable to her campaign promises, requested footage from one of the surveillance cameras, which SPD has maintained is deleted after five days and only accessible to a handful of people. They received and posted the footage on Instagram on May 28.