Drugs, human services, King County, Uncategorized

County’s Midyear Budget Sparks Controversy Over Harm Reduction, Human Service Contracts, and Lobbyists

1. After PubliCola reported on a King County Council supplemental budget amendment that would have prohibited spending county funds on safer smoking supplies for drug users, the proposal’s sponsor, Councilmember Rod Dembowski, decided to withdraw the amendment and replace it with one that simply requests more information on the program. It was a significant victory for harm reduction proponents, who pointed to data showing that the program provided access to services, including treatment, to tens of thousands of drug users last year.

The supplemental budget, usually a low-key affair, sparked a number of controversies  this time around.

During a work session before this week’s county council meeting, Dembowski said that in response to “feedback,” his amendment would “modify that language away from a strict cutoff to asking for some more information about the program. You know, how many supplies are being distributed? What is the cost? Who are they going to? What studies are out there? What assessments are out there? Give us some more information, and come back in a few months to let us know about the program.”

As we reported last week, the county spends a small amount—about $14,000 so far this year—on safe smoking supplies, plus some staff time for county employees who distribute pipes and foil at the county’s syringe exchange and to nonprofit groups that run their own syringe exchange programs.

Those programs had fallen largely into disuse as most drug users switched from injecting to smoking; the result was a sharp reduction in the number of people who accessed other county services that are a primary function of the program, such as case management, basic health care and STI testing, and referrals to treatment. Opponents of harm reduction have caricatured and demonized safer smoking programs in the Trump era, claiming that they “enable” drug users and encourage drug use.

2. The supplemental budget, adopted yesterday, also included a modified version of an amendment Dembowski proposed earlier this month that will add another layer of process to every new Best Starts for Kids contract. (Best Starts has been under fire for months after an audit and followup investigation found potential misuse of funds, and possible outright fraud, by some “high-risk” organizations that received contracts during and after the pandemic.)

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The amendment adopted Tuesday will require the county’s Department of Community and Human Services to send a “notification letter” to the county council certifying that every new contractor has met a series of requirements— guaranteeing, for instance, that each individual contractor has sound financial systems and “qualified personnel” to administer the contract. Previously, the amendment would have also required such a letter for every contract amendment, which opponents said would have turned routine changes into lengthy administrative nightmares.

The amendment, like Dembowski’s original proposal, also requires contractors to attest that neither they, nor any person in a position to administer contracts, has ever lost a county contract because of misconduct or misuse of funds. But it provides a new out that wasn’t included in the original proposal: If the contractor has taken “all reasonable steps” to recover misused funds and can show that “adequate corrective action has been implemented,” the county can still contract with them.

Dembowski characterized every element of the amendment as “not unusual” or something that “shouldn’t be a challenge.” But critics of his amendment argued in public comment that it still creates more process without providing meaningful oversight, since the council is made up of elected officials, not contracting or financial experts.

Dembowski’s amendment doesn’t include a minimum contract size or explain how small organizations that may be new to government contracting are supposed to prove they already have financial controls and systems in place that will meet the new requirements.

3. Also Tuesday, the county council voted to retain the county’s current federal lobbying firm, Washington2 Advocates, for at least a year while also paying a new lobbying firm, Manatt, Phelps, & Phillips. The contract with Washington2 will be with the legislative branch, while the contract with Manatt will be with the county executive.

Tensions flared over the contract decision after King County Executive Girmay Zahilay hired Manatt through a request for proposals process without telling the council what they were doing, effectively canceling out a one-year option to retain Washington2 Advocates, run by longtime county lobbyist (and personal friend of some councilmembers) Jeff Bjornstad.

During Dow Constantine’s time as executive, the council and executive jointly approved the lobbying contract. So it was a surprise to the council when they learned that Zahilay had run a new bidding process unilaterally and picked a new contractor.

“The renewal came up sort of abruptly—we weren’t notified until there was already an RFP put out by the executive branch to search for another contractor,” Councilmember Claudia Balducci told PubliCola Tuesday. “For a very long time, we hired a lobbyist and worked together across the branches very closely … so this was a little jarring.” It “didn’t help,” Balducci continued, that the council was deleted from the RFP itself, effectively cutting them out of the lobbying contract altogether. “We were told that wasn’t the intent, but this all happened very quickly.”

Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda told PubliCola that the fact that Bjornstad didn’t apply in the executive’s competitive process was “a sign that he wasn’t interested in competing.” Mosqueda argued that the executive had the right to issue a lobbying contract, arguing at a Monday council pre-briefing that the decision “should not be about individual relationships that people have had with a contractor over X number of years. …  This is about how the county can best be represented in these immense times.”

Doubling up on lobbyists for a year will cost the county about $200,000.

Asked about the dustup with the council, a spokesperson for Zahilay said, “we are rebidding and refreshing all federal and state lobbyist contracts. As a new administration, we believe this is good practice.”

homelessness, King County

Report: Homelessness in King County Continues to Grow, with 21 Percent Increase in Unsheltered Homelessness Since 2024
Source: Point-In-Time Count executive summary, KCRHA

By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority released a high-level summary  of its biennial “point in time count” of the county’s homeless population Tuesday, after a delay of several weeks that gave the KCRHA time to add more context to the numbers in response to concerns from homeless advocates that the news looked too much like doom and gloom.

The KCRHA applies statistical sampling methods to interviews rather than doing a true “one-night count.” The report includes a housing and shelter inventory, which uses on data from the county’s Homeless Management Information System to determine the number of shelter beds and housing units in the system. Unlike most other jurisdictions, the KCRHA does its estimate every two years, rather than annually.

This year, the KCRHA estimated that there are 18,365 people experiencing homelessness in King County, of whom 11,829 were unsheltered. That’s up from 16,868 and 9,810 in 2024, respectively—a nine percent increase in overall homelessness, but a 21 percent increase in the number of people living unsheltered. Additionally, the report found that “the inflow into homelessness continues to outpace exits.” In other words: More people are becoming newly homeless or returning to homelessness than are getting (and staying) housed.

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Specifically, according to the report, around 17,000 people exit the county’s homelessness system, meaning that they stop using homeless services, while around 18,000 enter it.

The KCRHA changed the way it counts the Hispanic/Latino population this. year, which appears to have resulted in a spike in the Latino number and a reduction in the number of “white” people experiencing homelessness. (We’ve asked what accounts for the change). Twenty-four percent of people living homeless in King County identify as Latino (the same percentage as identify as Black), compared to less than 16 percent in 2024.  Every non-white racial group was overrepresented among the homeless population, including Native and Indigenous people, who make up 0.4 percent of the county population but 4.2 percent of all unhoused people in the county.

Overall, the number of shelter beds in the county declined by nearly 12 percent over the past year, going from 5,958 in 2025 to 5,269 in 2026, in part because of a disproportionate reduction in family shelter beds. At the same time, the number of permanent supportive housing units—permanently affordable apartments for people with disabilities, which currently includes severe addiction—increased by 155 last year and 561 in 2025.

A press release from the KCRHA characterized the growth in homelessness as a slowdown in the rate of increase, from 26 percent between 2022 and 2024 to 9 percent between 2024 and 2026. However, as noted above, the increase in people living unsheltered on the streets increased more dramatically than the overall number of people experiencing homelessness, suggesting that the increase in visible homelessness is directly tied to the declining availability of even basic shelter.

Civil Rights, discrimination, Mayor Wilson

Allegation: Civil Rights Office Director, Staff Went to Strip Club During City-Sponsored Civil Rights Trip

By Erica C. Barnett

A recently concluded investigation into Seattle Office for Civil Rights director that Derrick Wheeler-Smith details allegations that Wheeler-Smith went to a strip club in Alabama during an official City of Seattle-sponsored trip to civil rights history sites in the South, along with other men who were on the trip, according to sources familiar with the incident.

A report on the investigation concluded that Wheeler-Smith subjected “a subordinate employee to unwelcome conduct of a sexually explicit nature during a work-related trip” but did not specify that the conduct that made the employee uncomfortable involved going to the strip club with his boss.

The report, for which PubliCola has filed a records request, also found it more likely than not that Wheeler-Smith made “repeated comments of a sexual nature” to employees.

Mayor Katie Wilson’s office has not responded to multiple requests for comment about the future of the office. Wheeler-Smith, along with his deputy, Fahima Mohamed, has been on administrative leave since March.

The January 2023 trip, organized by a group called the Empower Initiative, included visits to important sites related to the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, including the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, and the Alabama State Capitol. Staff from then-mayor Bruce Harrell’s office, SOCR, the city’s Office of Arts and Culture, and the diversion group Community Passageways, a city contractor, also reportedly went on the trip.

The Empower Initiative, run by consultant Ben McBride, offers these trips, or “learning labs,” as a “team building experience [that] translates the concept of belonging from inspiring theory to real-life practice,” according to the organization’s website.

On the final night of the trip, several of the men, including Wheeler-Smith, left their hotel in Birmingham and went to a  strip club to celebrate a staffer’s birthday, according to accounts of the incident.

Others who participated in the civil rights tour included city staffers who did not accompany the men to the strip club. It’s unclear how many of these staffers were aware of their colleagues’ nighttime jaunt.

Not only was the secretive all-male side quest arguably inappropriate for a city-sponsored trip, the Office for Civil Rights’ mission includes promoting gender equality and empowerment, a commitment staffers would later accuse Wheeler-Smith of flouting on numerous occasions.

As we reported earlier this year, employees accused Wheeler-Smith of making inappropriate sexual comments, belittling Black women, and dismissing staff concerns about the civil rights of LGBTQ+ people, Asian Americans, and Latinos targeted by ICE, among other marginalized groups.

A spokesperson for SOCR responded to PubliCola’s questions about the investigation and alleged strip club visit by saying, “I don’t have that information, and the Department is otherwise not allowed to comment on an open HR investigation.”

The head of the Empower Initiative, Ben McBride, recently wrote a Subatackpraising Wheeler-Smith; the post, titled “A Leadership Journey of Becoming” called the SOCR director “one of those rare leaders who understands that structural work and inner work belong together.”

The Empower Initiative was one of the partners for SOCR’s planned “Bridges of Belonging Community Storytelling Showcase,” along with We Deliver Care, Community Passageways, and Beautifulle LLC. Wheeler-Smith’s half-brother Davis founded Community Passageways and another diversion group that contracts with the city, Choose 180. He is also aco-founder of We Deliver Care, which is run by Wheeler-Smith’s wife Stephanie. Beautifulle was founded by Wheeler-Smith’s former boss at the religious nonprofit World Vision, Leonetta Elaiho. The Bridges of Belonging event was postponed indefinitely in March.

Editor’s note: This story originally mis-identified Davis’ current role with the three group he co-founded. We apologize for the error.

 

Drugs, education, homelessness, human services, King County, LGBTQ+

This Week on PubliCola: June 20, 2026
KCRHA associate director William Towey

KCRHA says the county and city owe it $8 million, county councilmember plans to eliminate successful harm reduction program, and much more.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, June 15

Regional Homelessness Agency Says King County and Seattle Owe It $8 Million

In a comment that came as a surprise to many on the county council, King County Regional Homelessness Authority associate director William Towey said the city and county owe the KCRHA $8 million—the same $8 million an audit found the agency couldn’t account for and that may need to be “written off.” KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison couldn’t be at the meeting because she was on vacation.

Tuesday, June 16

County Human Services Director Calls Councilmember’s Contract Approval Proposal an “Overstep”

King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski has proposed a budget amendment that would require the county’s Department of Community and Human Services (DCHS) to submit a letter for county council review every time they execute or make any amendment to a contract in the Best Starts for Kids program, which was subject to an audit that found potential fraud and abuse in a subset of “high-risk” contracts. DCHS director Susan McLaughlin said the idea was a vast “overreach” that would not improve oversight.

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Wednesday, June 17

County Councilmember Dembowski Wants to Defund Successful Harm Reduction Program

In a separate amendment, Dembowski has proposed eliminating all funding for a county program that distributes safer smoking supplies to drug users. Opponents of harm reduction have targeted the program, which the county credits with more than quadrupling the number of people who come in to clinics where they can (and do) access other services, including case management, STI testing, and treatment.

Thursday, June 18

Right-Wing Activist Accused of Assaulting Security Guard While Trying to Force His Way Into Pro-LGBTQ Event

Jonathan Choe, a former KOMO reporter who now works for the Discovery Institute and Turning Point USA, showed up to the campaign kickoff for No Hate in WA State and tried to force his way inside, allegedly hitting a security guard in the back of the head, according to a police report. The campaign is working to combat two anti-LGBTQ+ statewide initiatives, including one that would ban trans kids from playing sports.

Friday, June 19

Here’s What Being a “Child Care Candidate” Actually Means

In an op-ed directed at all the candidates who say they support universal child care, SEIU 925 political and legislative director Erin Haick lays out a road map for what that means in practice—standing firm against additional cuts, paying child care workers like the professional educators they are, and right-sizing subsidies so they actually make it possible for people to pay for child care.

Also this week:

  • On Seattle Nice, we interviewed DCHS director Susan McLaughlin about how DCHS is addressing the findings of a damning audit that found potential waste and abuse in programs aimed at helping youth, among other topics—like the future of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority.
  • I went on KUOW’s Week In Review this week, where KUOW reporter Scott Greenstone, Republican former city attorney Ann Davison, host Bill Radke and I discussed the news of the week, including a report from a downtown business group that says downtown is struggling and it’s all the fault of taxes on big business (spoiler: It isn’t.)
  • ICYMI, I was also on Crystal Fincher’s Hacks and Wonks podcast last week, where we talked about the city’s data center moratorium, the latest light rail ridership numbers, ongoing challenges the CARE Team of unarmed first responders face, mostly from the Seattle Police Department, and more.

 

education, Guest Contributor, legislature

Here’s What Being a “Child Care Candidate” Actually Means
Photo by BBC Creative on Unsplash

By Erin Haick

Everyone loves child care, especially in an election year.  Candidates for the Legislature, City Council, and County Council are promising universal child care, because it’s a real problem that child care is so expensive for parents while providers make poverty wages. Child care is easy to love, but policy and funding fixes are much harder.

So the first question: Why is it so expensive? First, child care isn’t babysitting. High-quality early learning means credentialed educators, and enough of them to give a toddler a lot of one-on-one attention. It means warm, safe, nurturing environments filled with bright colors and toys. Early learning professionals take continuing education classes just like other educators, and use a quality curriculum that teaches infants, toddlers, and pre-k at each age, from numbers and letters to how to play well with others.  

And unlike public schools, child care businesses pay for labor, rent, supplies, insurance, and more from the individual tuitions of individual families. The math just isn’t mathing anymore.  

In 2021, the Legislature passed SB 5237, the Fair Start for Kids Act—a road map for making child care more affordable for parents and more sustainable for providers. Gone was the cap of 33,000 households (in a state of 3.5 million) who could get help paying for care, imposed a decade prior during the Great Recession. Under Fair Start, a family of three earning an extravagant $4,317 a month (about $52,000 a year) was newly able to access assistance. Subsidy rates increased for providers, helping to stabilize these small, typically women- and immigrant-owned businesses. And family income eligibility was scheduled to go up 10 percent in 2025 and again in 2027.  

If the Legislature had kept the promise of Fair Start for Kids, a family of three in 2025 making (again, an extravagant) $83,000 a year would have qualified for state help, and their child care costs could have dropped from $2,000 or more a month to $215. When affordability is the issue of the day, this is functionally a serious pay raise. Fair Start laid out a road map to helping not both low-income and middle-income families, and thousands of working families were signing up for this program that helped their kids get a Fair Start while they went to work.

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Today, those promises are gone, eliminated by multiple years of state budget shortfalls and child care, which lacks the constitutional protections of public education, being treated as discretionary spending.  

The first test for leaders who want universal child care is simple: Will they say no to further cuts?  Will they protect provider sustainability and family access, in a world where more than a billion dollars was already cut out of early learning in 2025?

So first, stop the bleeding. Next, remember that help paying for child care is only valuable if the care exists to be paid for. In 2025, New Mexico got headlines for being the first state to offer no-cost child care to all families, but they forgot about the workforce. The state’s own estimates identified a shortfall of nearly 16,000 physical slots and at least 5,000 new professionals needed to staff them. Today, many families have access to a subsidy they cannot use because the care provider is not there.

The warning for Washington: Expanded eligibility will fall short if the state continues to cut or lets the workforce shrink. Families need open doors, staffed classrooms, and providers who can afford to stay.

So what should elected officials do?

  1. Commit to no more cuts to child care.  Governor Ferguson’s most recent budget proposed that child care account for 40 percent of budget cuts. This month, he told agencies like the Department of Children, Youth, and Families to prepare for “significant cuts” this winter. Washington should not balance the budget by making child care more expensive for families or harder for providers to deliver.
  2. Treat child care workers like the professionals they are with wages, benefits, real career pathways, and retirement security. Today, unionized child care providers —the largely Black, brown, and immigrant women who uphold our economy—are prohibited by law from bargaining over retirement. Washington cannot keep asking workers to carry the system while denying them the tools to stay in the field.
  3. Pay for the actual cost of care. Washington requires high quality care from providers, but the subsidy rates don’t cover those same costs. A bill to reform how these rates are set has languished for two sessions. When rates are uncompetitive, providers make rational economic choices, like reducing their enrollment of low income families or raising rates on middle income families to make up the difference.  

This election season, it’s easy to say you want universal child care.  The real test is how leaders support the workforce that make access to care for families possible in the first place.  

Erin Haick is the Political & Legislative Director at SEIU 925, which represents more than 19,000 workers in early learning, K-12, higher education, and public service across Washington State.

LGBTQ+, Media

Right-Wing Activist Accused of Assaulting Security Guard While Trying to Force His Way Into Pro-LGBTQ Event


The Turning Point USA activist was trying to force his way into the “No Hate in WA State” campaign kickoff at Neumos when he allegedly struck a security guard in the back of the head.

By Erica C. Barnett

Security at Neumos on Capitol Hill called police on Turning Point USA activist Jonathan Choe last night after Choe allegedly hit a security guard in the back of the head while trying to force his way inside the private No Hate in WA State campaign kickoff.

A Seattle Police Department spokesman said Choe left the scene after Neumos security called the police to report the assault.

According to a police report on the incident, Choe attempted to push and shove his way into the event, which kicked off the campaign against two far-right statewide initiatives on the ballot in November. The first would prevent trans girls from participating in school sports; the second would eliminate privacy protections for kids who reveal confidential information to school officials, including mental health counselors.

The latter proposal would force school districts to out LGBTQ kids to their parents and reveal private health information, such as whether student has asked about reproductive health care, if they have revealed that information to a trusted adult at school.

Choe, who is Korean American, was filmed outside Neumos yesterday, screaming nonsense like “I identify as a Black man!” “you’re wearing a wig!” and “you’re all white supremacists!” before attempting to force his way inside.

The police report notes that Choe also called the security guard a “white supremacist” for denying him access to the private campaign kickoff.

This is not the first time Choe has allegedly assaulted someone and then fled the scene. In 2024, he punched a trans woman and dragged her down the street by her hair, later claiming without evidence that she had “bumped” him; he fled that scene after throwing a metal baton he was carrying into the street.  Earlier this year, he filmed himself clubbing a protester outside a far-right rally and concert at City Hall; the protester he attacked was arrested, while Choe was not.

Choe even harassed supporters of Mayor Katie Wilson at her inauguration, shouting “he’s trantifa, he’s trantifa” while filming random people at City Hall.

Choe films constantly on his phone, but has never posted video that shows anyone actually assaulting him—despite frequently claiming to be the victim of left-wing violence. His typical MO, documented yesterday in videos that show him trying to provoke people into physical fights outside Neumos, is to claim that someone he is harassing has attacked or touched him in order to claim “self-defense” when he attacks them physically.

At yesterday’s event, Choe predictably yelled “don’t touch me!” at people who were not touching him, posting the video on X and claiming “the transgender mafia targeted me with death threats and also challenged me to a fight.” (Watch Choe’s own edited video to see what a snowflake this man is—in reality, people were pointing out that Asian Americans are also targets of white supremacists.)

Choe describes himself as a journalist. He was fired from his last journalism job, as a reporter the right-leaning KOMO TV station, after promoting the Proud Boys hate group with a promotional video scored with a far-right anthem known as the “Männerbund” In a Twitter post accompanying the video, Choe invited people to attend a Proud Boys rally in Olympia and listen to what they had to say.

We’ve reached out to Neumos management and will update this post if we hear back.