Business, City Council, housing, Mayor Wilson, Police

This Week on PubliCola: February 21, 2026

Mayor Wilson walks back opposition to surveillance cameras, Councilmember Lin wants to repeal stadium district housing law, state commission deals a blow to public defense, and more.

By Erica C. Barnett

Tuesday, February 17

State Ruling Represents a Blow to Public Defense

A state commission ruled that King County was not required to bargain with unionized staff for the county’s Department of Public Defense (DPD) before moving inmates from the King County jail in downtown Seattle to the South Correctional Entity (SCORE), a decision with potentially serious implications for caseloads and staffing levels at DPD and other public defense agencies.

Settlement In SPD Killing of 23-Year-Old Will Cost Taxpayers Millions

A $29,011,000 settlement in the 2023 killing of pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula, who was struck in a crosswalk by a Seattle police officer driving 74 miles an hour in a 25-mile-an-hour zone, maxed out the city’s insurance policy, which has a $10 million deductible and a maximum of $20 million. Rising insurance claims, including from settlements with SPD, are putting a strain on the city’s budget.

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Wednesday, February 18

In State of the City, Wilson Punts on Key Issues—Including Sweeps and Police Surveillance

In her first State of the City speech, Mayor Katie Wilson outlined a policy agenda that was still short on details—and punted on major issues, such as how she plans to add 1,000 new shelter beds this year and whether she will expand police surveillance cameras into more Seattle neighborhoods.

Seattle Nice Interviews Progressive Legislator-Turned-Chamber Leader Joe Nguyen

Our first guest on Seattle Nice this week was former Democratic state legislator-turned-Seattle Chamber leader Joe Nguyen, who told us he sees no contradiction between his past as an pro-tax progressive legislator and his present job as the head of the city’s anti-tax business lobby group.

Thursday, February 19

City Council Proposal Would Repeal Law That Allowed Housing Near Stadiums

Seattle City Councilmember Eddie Lin is introducing legislation to repeal a law that would have allowed apartments in the Stadium District just south of downtown, undoing a longstanding priority of housing developers and handing a significant win to the Port of Seattle and unions representing port workers.

Friday, February 20

Mayor Katie Wilson: “If We Turned Off the Cameras, It Would Become More Difficult to Solve Many Crimes”

In an exclusive interview, Mayor Katie Wilson elaborated on her plans for her first year, telling us how her position has changed on police cameras since taking office and how she plans to balance her campaign commitment to add 1,000 new shelter beds by the end of the year with a budget deficit and the need to build permanent housing.

Mayor Wilson, Seattle Nice

Mayor Katie Wilson: “If We Turned Off the Cameras, It Would Become More Difficult to Solve Many Crimes”

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Nice went in-depth with Mayor Katie Wilson this week, in a packed interview about her first six weeks in office. Supporters who have been disappointed by her lack of decisive action on police surveillance cameras will definitely want to tune in, as will those who are interested in how she plans to add 1,000 units of shelter by the end of this year.

This must-listen interview is full of newsworthy moments, including Wilson’s confirmation that the city’s approach to encampments has not changed since last year, when her pro-sweeps predecessor Bruce Harrell was in office.

Wilson recently paused an encampment removal in Ballard so that five people living there could get into housing—an achievement Wilson mentioned in her State of the City speech this week. But that outcome isn’t one the city can easily replicate—a permanent supportive housing provider, DESC, had just opened a new building nearby and had a few vacant spaces, which won’t be the situation during future sweeps. And very little of this type of housing is in the development pipeline.

Wilson acknowledged that it’s “absolutely true that this is not something that we are going to be able to repeat again and again and again, and that is really because of the lack of availability of emergency housing and shelter with services that match people’s needs.” Which, she said, “is precisely why a very, very high priority for my administration is working to open up new emergency housing and shelter, and we have aggressive goals for that this year.

In the meantime, Wilson added, “we’re not going to be able to make earth-shattering changes to the way that the Unified Care Team operates.”

Wilson also confirmed that the city is continuing to use the “encampment scoring system” Harrell implemented shortly after taking office—a fairly inflexible rubric that doesn’t account for conditions at individual encampments, such as whether the people living there are at the top of a wait list for housing.

We also pressed the mayor on her equivocal comments about police surveillance cameras, which police claim are necessary to solve crimes, including homicides. On the campaign trail, Wilson strongly suggested she opposed this kind of always-on police surveillance, and would not support installing new cameras in the two additional neighborhoods where they’ve been approved.

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During our conversation, though, Wilson repeated talking points from the Seattle Police Department about clearance rates and crime, arguing that cameras have helped police solve more crimes than before the cameras were installed.

The cameras, Wilson noted, only cover 1 percent of the city where about 20 percent of crime occurs (a talking point that may be familiar to Seattle Nice listeners, since Sandeep used it to justify the cameras during our conversation with City Councilmember Dionne Foster two weeks ago). Wilson said she still has concerns “around the potential misuse of our CCTV camera cameras and the possibility that that data could get into the wrong hands and be abused to target vulnerable populations,” but she’s weighing that against what she sees as compelling evidence that the cameras help solve crimes and may even prevent racial profiling.

“I think it is fair to say that if we turned off the cameras, it would become more difficult to solve many crimes, including some violent crimes and homicides, and some might not get solved,” Wilson told us.

We also talked about the conflict between funding shelter and funding housing at a time of federal budget cuts and local budget deficits; Wilson’s citywide renter survey; and how she plans to tackle “open-air drug markets” in neighborhoods like Little Saigon.

City Council, housing, land use

City Council Proposal Would Repeal Law That Allowed Housing Near Stadiums

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle City Councilmember Eddie Lin will introduce legislation later this week to repeal a law that would have allowed apartments in the Stadium District just south of downtown, undoing a longstanding priority of housing developers and handing a significant win to the Port of Seattle and unions representing port workers.

The legislation, sponsored by former councilmember Sara Nelson, would have allowed more than 900 new housing units in the area (half of them affordable “workforce” units), which is largely occupied by warehouses, vacant lots, and businesses like the Showbox and a Showgirls strip club. It’s also home to the current (and future second) SoDo light rail station, which gets minimal use because the area has few businesses and very little housing.

Opponents of the bill argued it would irreparably harm the city’s industrial businesses, and said the city should not build housing near busy, polluted freight corridors; proponents countered that the stadium district hasn’t been in industrial use for many years, and said the city needs more housing everywhere, including near the stadiums.

The Port sued the city, and late last year, the state’s Growth Management Hearings Board invalidated the ordinance as written on both substantive and procedural grounds. Among other “procedural” findings, the board ruled that the city had done a sloppy job of reviewing the proposal, failing to conduct a separate environmental analysis and bypassing public feedback requirements to push the zoning change through last year. The city appealed on the substantive issues but not the procedural ones.

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Lin told PubliCola the ruling effectively gives the city no choice other than repealing the ordinance; to do otherwise, he said, could put the city at risk of being found out of compliance with the Growth Management Act, threatening transportation and housing funds as well as the city’s Comprehensive Plan. “In my opinion, we have a Growth Management Hearings Board order and there were procedural and substantive issues that they invalidated our ordinance on,” Lin said.

The city, Lin conceded, could try to fix the issues the hearings board identified by a May deadline for compliance. Lin suggested the current council has little interest in taking on that battle, which was contentious enough the first time. The council could also include language in the city’s ongoing comprehensive plan update that leaves the door open to more housing in areas with “urban industrial” zoning, a kind of mixed-use zoning that underlies the stadium overlay.

Lin, who chairs the council’s land use committee, said he’s “open to having that discussion later, although I’m not sure how much anybody else wants to have that discussion,” adding, “It’s not my first priority to put housing [in the stadium district.] I think we should be focused on centers and corridors.” The council will start working to upzone those two types of areas—”neighborhood centers” where lower-density apartments will be allowed within 800 feet of existing commercial nodes or frequent transit stops, and “corridors” where apartments can be built directly on arterial roads—this year.

Business, podcasts

Seattle Nice Interviews Progressive Legislator-Turned-Chamber Leader Joe Nguyen

By Erica C. Barnett

Our guest on Seattle Nice this week isn’t a politician—he’s a former politician-turned-Seattle Chamber leader, and he says he sees no contradiction between his past as an pro-tax progressive legislator and his present job as the head of the city’s anti-tax business lobby group.

Joe Nguyen, the former state senator from West Seattle, defeated his opponent Shannon Braddock in 2019 by emphasizing his progressive bona fides, exemplified by a commitment to take no corporate contributions. Elected on that anti-corporate agenda, Nguyen went on to propose or support a payroll expense tax on big businesses, an excise fee on businesses that pay executives more than $1 million a year, and the statewide capital gains tax. “Tax the rich,” he wrote in the Stranger, which lauded him (pretty excessively, even at the time) as the “AOC of Washington state.”

 

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As head of the Chamber, Nguyen leads an institution historically opposed to business and capital gains taxes, and he talks like it, too—telling Seattle Nice that while he thinks “we need to have a more equitable tax structure in the United States, in Washington State, I worry that we’re putting all of our eggs in one basket” by taxing big tech businesses over and over. Already, Nguyen said, businesses have started to move jobs from Seattle to Bellevue because of the JumpStart tax, a payroll tax on Seattle’s biggest companies that the city now relies on to backfill its annual general fund shortfalls.

“Politically, it is very popular to say, ‘Tax the rich.’ Politically is very popular to say, ‘Go after the large companies.’ But the hard part that we’re going to put ourselves in is: If you want to tax the rich, you got to have rich people to tax,” Nguyen said.

“I was the architect and then sponsor of a lot of these policies,” Nguyen continued. “However, you’re concentrating a lot of that [taxation] into one specific area. And when you start to get some of this volatility, like you mentioned in your in your post [about social housing revenues] the other day, that’s the worry that I have.”

Listen to a preview of our conversation‚ in which David and I rant about the money pit that is the new downtown Convention Center, and subscribe to Seattle Nice to hear the full episode.

Editor’s note: During our interview, I said the Chamber has supported moving oversight of some parts of the homelessness system to the city’s Human Services Department. The Chamber has not taken a position on this issue. 

 

Mayor Wilson

In State of the City, Wilson Punts on Key Issues—Including Sweeps and Police Surveillance

By Erica C. Barnett

In her first State of the City speech at Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute on Tuesday, Mayor Katie Wilson outlined a policy agenda that was still short on details—and punted major issues, such as how she plans to add 1,000 new shelter beds this year, to the near future.

The speech, which Wilson wrote herself with assistance from staff, was characteristically nerdy. Wilson did not use a basketball as a prop or shout out invited guests who served as symbols for particular priorities. She thanked the city employees who toil in obscurity to keep the city running. And she paid tribute to the city’s diversity, noting that February simultaneously marks Black History Month, the Lunar New Year, Ramadan, and Lent.

At times, Wilson sounded like she was equivocating on campaign commitments after talking to people who opposed her agenda; for example, speaking about neighborhood surveillance cameras, Wilson said she “continue[s] to have concerns” about data security and the use of cameras to target vulnerable communities, but had been “moved by what I’ve heard from families and communities impacted by gun violence.”

Any mayor’s first State of the City speech, traditionally delivered in mid-February, will be necessarily short on policy achievements. But given Wilson’s mandate to undo some of the excesses of her predecessor—who utilized fear of violent crime and “disorder” to crack down on unsheltered people and expand police surveillance of Seattle residents—her speech was more equivocating than determined.

When we wrote about former mayor Bruce Harrell’s first State of the City speech four years ago, we emphasized the new mayor’s talking points on homelessness and the “unacceptable status quo” in the city, which was still recovering from COVID. Harrell committed in his speech to eliminate visible homelessness downtown through a public-private partnership known as Partnership for Zero, telegraphing a commitment to sweeping homeless people out of the downtown business district that continued relentlessly even as Partnership for Zero fizzled.

Harrell also telegraphed his intent to continue raiding the JumpStart tax, which had been earmarked for affordable housing and other progressive purposes, to pay for the city’s general budget—a commitment he would keep for four straight years, padding the budget with personal priorities while ignoring the reasons the city adopted the tax in the first place. Harrell also emphasized his desire to dramatically ramp up police hiring and crack down on “disorder.” Four years later, the speech looks like a preview for his entire term.

Will Katie Wilson’s first major speech as mayor prove similarly prescient about the priorities that will preoccupy her for the next four years? If so, she gave far fewer specifics. The speech was largely a reiteration of the mayor’s campaign priorities—affordable housing, child care, adding 1,000 shelter beds in her first year, and a potential public grocery store—combined with “wait and see” statements about some of the most controversial issues that came up on the campaign trail and were among the reasons voters elected her over the incumbent.

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Wilson, to be clear, never claimed on the campaign trail that she would “stop the sweeps.” But supporters who believed she would dramatically slow down the breakneck pace of encampment removals have been disappointed to see sweeps continue around the city. Wilson noted that she ordered the city’s Unified Care Team, a massive, multidepartmental team that removes encampments, to take more time removing an encampment in Ballard earlier this month, which allowed the city to find shelter for five people who might have otherwise been swept. Most of the encampment residents, however, were told to move along, replicating a familiar pattern from previous administrations.

The incident emphasized for Wilson that “we simply don’t have enough housing, shelter, and services for everyone who is living unsheltered,” she said, promising to work on those issues as part of her “affordability agenda” and separate plan to “introduce legislation to city council to fund shelter expansion and make it faster and easier to build shelter in our city.”

But, she added, it’s also important to keep “public spaces open and accessible,” by “prioritizing encampment removals based on safety issues and neighborhood impacts.” None of this exactly contradicts Wilson’s pre-election positions on homelessness. But it also echoes the rhetoric of her opponent and predecessor, who justified the pace of sweeps (and the expansion of the UCT) on the grounds that all encampments, including those that consist of one or two tents, are dangerous and diminish the quality of life for housed people who have to see them.

Wilson also seemed to walk back her previous support for removing surveillance cameras from several Seattle neighborhoods where they are either already deployed or have been installed but not turned on. Conversations with families harmed by gun violence, Wilson said, had “moved” her to reconsider and slow down any announcement on the cameras.

Police often justify expanding surveillance by promising it will help them prevent and solve the most devastating crimes, including gun violence and human trafficking, and the argument has emotional resonance. That doesn’t mean these claims are true; in fact, there are now decades of evidence that police cameras do not prevent or solve violent crimes. (Police have long relied on private cameras for footage of public spacess; they’re everywhere, owned by businesses rather than law enforcement). It’s the job of elected officials to say no if the evidence argues against a policy (as Dionne Foster, elected to a citywide council seat last year,  already has)—even when constituents directly impacted by crime believe false promises that a new form of surveillance will make their neighborhoods safer.

Wilson did not address the “SOAP” and “SODA” banishment zones for sex buyers and drug users that former city attorney Ann Davison reinstated, with the help of the city council, in 2024. (People accused of using drugs or attempting to pay for sex can be arrested and jailed for being caught inside these areas, even if they haven’t been convicted of the underlying offense). This probably signals that the zones, a 1990s relic the city had long abandoned, are now just another accepted violation of people’s right to travel freely through the city. That fact alone should serve as a reminder that increased police surveillance can turn into dystopian background noise if elected officials fail to listen to constituents who raise valid objections.

Courts, King County, Police

State Ruling Represents a Blow to Public Defense; Settlement In SPD Killing of 23-Year-Old Will Cost Taxpayers Millions

1. The state Public Employee Relations Commission ruled earlier this month that King County was not required to bargain with unionized staff for the county’s Department of Public Defense (DPD) before moving inmates from the King County jail in downtown Seattle to the South Correctional Entity (SCORE), a jail in Des Moines owned by several cities in South King County.

The decision to move people to SCORE, which the county argued was necessary to alleviate understaffing at the downtown jail, was controversial. Unionized staffers for the county’s Department of Public Defense, which represents indigent clients, argued that the move limited defendants’ access to attorneys and created logistical hurdles that made it harder for DPD to provide the best possible defense.

SEIU 925, the union that represents DPD employees, filed a demand to bargain over the proposal to move inmates to SCORE, arguing that the agreement creates changes to their members’ working conditions and was a mandatory subject of bargaining. A hearing examiner ruled in the union’s favor; PERC’s decision overturns that ruling.

The county’s contract with SCORE ended in 2023. But the PERC decision, which the union is appealing, has potentially serious implications for issues that remain ongoing, including caseloads and staffing levels at DPD and other local public defense agencies around the state attorneys and non-attorney DPD staff such as investigators, paralegals, and legal assistants.

According to public defense union president Molly Gilbert, “there has never been a decision like” the examiner’s initial ruling, which “would have required the county, and any other public defense office in that state, to negotiate with the union over caseloads and staffing.” In practice, Gilbert said, this could force the county to hire more staff, including paralegals and investigators, to lower caseloads make it easier for attorneys to handle the cases they have.

Public defender caseloads are an ongoing issue in Washington state; last year, the state Supreme Court ruled that jurisdictions like King County must reduce caseload standards dramatically over the next 10 years. According to Gilbert, a favorable outcome for the union wouldn’t necessarily result in a directive to hire dramatically more attorneys—a scenario that could set King County up for a consequential McLeary-style funding mandate to “lock in” complex caseload standards.

Instead, Gilbert said, the union has been making “proposals that are far cheaper than the bar standards that we could live with” by “having more staff support, which is cheaper than hiring all these attorneys. But they refuse to bargain with us on that.

The union is appealing PERC’s decision.

2. As PubliCola reported, the city settled with the family of Jaahnavi Kandula, a 23-year-old student killed in a crosswalk by a speeding Seattle police officer, earlier this month for a total of $29,011,000—$29 million plus $11,000, the amount a Seattle Police Officers Guild leader “joked” that the city would pay her family, given her “limited value.”  The comment, made by officer Daniel Auderer to SPOG president Mike Solan and caught on Auderer’s body camera, caused international outrage and led to Auderer’s termination.

SPD officer Kevin Dave was driving 74 miles an hour down a 25-mile-per-hour street when he struck Kandula, who was in a crosswalk; he claimed he was racing to provide medical care to an overdose victim who turned out to be a a guy concerned he had used too much cocaine.

After we published, a number of people asked PubliCola what Dave’s reckless driving would cost the city—and who would pay. We asked the Office of City Finance, and learned from a spokesperson that although the city’s insurance will cover $20 million of the settlement. The city itself is liable for the first $10 million of “any covered loss,” including lawsuit settlements. That $10 million deductible also includes the cost to defend SPD against the lawsuit filed by Kandula’s family.

That $10 million will come out of the city’s Judgment and Claims fund, which is part of the city’s general fund.

According to OCF, $20 million is the “full amount of available insurance and the insurers’ policy limits.” The city, in other words, is on the hook for its deductible plus any settlement amount above $20 million.

As we’ve reported repeatedly, the city has had to increase the judgment and claims fund routinely for several years running, thanks in large part to growing settlements in lawsuits against SPD. In addition to this ever-increasing line item, large settlements raise the amount the city pays for insurance; as of 2023, when Kandula was killed, the city was paying just under $9 million a year for insurance, the OCF spokesperson said. In short: SPD does not pay directly for any of the lawsuits it loses or settles.