City Council, Transit, Uncategorized

Greater Seattle: A Supermajority, a Mistake, and a Chance

By Josh Feit

66 percent = A Supermajority

I’ve gone from stunned, to angry, to eventually, “oh, Seattle” since I first learned more than a decade ago that the Seattle Department of Transportation doesn’t charge for street parking in West Seattle. So, while I wasn’t exactly breaking out the champagne, I was relieved when the city finally announced on September 30 that it has decided to expand its parking demand management program to the West Seattle Junction (and to Upper Queen Anne as well.)

The SDOT program, which exists in most business districts in the city, regularly reviews parking availability from Ballard to Roosevelt to Capitol Hill to South Lake Union to Columbia City, tweaking the dials on parking rates to ensure there’s always one to two spots open per block. The well-tested theory behind the (mostly) citywide policy, first enacted in 2010, goes like this: When people have to pay for parking, they’re likely to be more efficient with their time, which leaves more spaces open more often. Showing great forbearance, SDOT patiently explained this concept and the change—$1 an hour in the morning to  $4 an hour in the evening—to West Seattle residents in the recent report.

According to SDOT’s “intercept” surveys of West Seattle Junction visitors (conducted in-person rather than online), a 66 percent supermajority of people said they walked, biked, or took transit to the Junction as opposed to driving.

This provides a potential new rejoinder to complaints from businesses about paid street parking.

The longstanding and obvious retort is that rather than decreasing the number of people who can park and shop, paid parking adds more shoppers by making parking spots more readily available. Now SDOT can add this: The fact that a supermajority of people aren’t even driving to the commercial district in the first place means the shopping-while-driving customer isn’t the seismic constituency shopkeepers may assume they are.

The 66 percent number tracks. It’s similar to the 60+ percent number the SDOT’s survey found in Upper Queen Anne.

Admittedly, SDOT’s online surveys showed the opposite: More people in those surveys said they drive in to the Junction and (though much less so) to Upper Queen Anne. The online sample size was also bigger. But with hundreds of in-person respondents who were actually interviewed in the neighborhood, the West Seattle and Queen Anne surveys seem noteworthy enough for SDOT to call out, which they did in the Queen Anne report under the banner “Many People Visit Without Driving.” They also noted the supermajority in the West Seattle report. “While 71% of online respondents said they typically drive to the Junction, our intercept survey found 66% of respondents typically walk, bike, or take transit to the Junction.”

Slower Bus Service > Faster Bus Service

I’m all for dedicated lanes and multiple-door boarding and inline platforms. And I’m a yes to off-board payment and synchronized traffic lights and queue jumps. Give me all the smart-bus fixes that speed up service. What I’m not for is taking away stops on one of the busiest local bus lines in the city. That’s the current vision for the 7, which King County Metro plans to replace with the Rapid Ride R line—R for Rainer. The county council is scheduled to vote on the the changes—which could reduce the number of bus stops on the popular 7 by about 30 percent—before the end of the year.

Council members and Metro planners should remember that R also stands for Rely on, which is exactly what many of the 11,000 daily 7 riders do—to get to local grocery stores, services, and appointments along the Rainier corridor itself and not necessarily, as the RapidRide plan seems to imagine, travel exclusively to downtown.

To quote Anna Zivarts’ recent editorial for us: “The downtown-centric alignment of the Rapid Ride R was based on pre-pandemic destination data. Despite profound changes in commute patterns since then, there hasn’t been time or resources to examine whether Rainier Valley’s transit needs have evolved.”

Eliminating stops along one of the most heavily used local bus routes in the city seems likely to make it less popular and less reliable.

5 to 4 > 6 to 3

Seattle voters have a chance to second 2025’s election results in a few weeks. Which I hope they do to make it clear for the the Seattle-is-Dying media that bashing Mayor Wilson for the past year hasn’t prompted the backlash they’re hoping for.

Last year, in addition to electing dorky socialist Mayor Katie Wilson, Seattle also added two much-needed progressives to the council’s vote count, nudging city hall from an 8-1 conservative-bloc roll call to a less- dominant 6-3 dynamic by adding brainiac lefty Dionne Foster and urbanist attorney Eddie Lin.

Foster and Lin have been great additions so far. Former Washington Progress Alliance ED Foster, no surprise; YIMBY Lin for rookie legislator of the year (thank you for reining in hearing examiner appeals on land-use decisions)! They’ve both joined charismatic Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, the most reliable lefty of the three.

Three is still less than six, though. North Seattle voters now have a chance to add a fourth progressive to the mix, Nilu Jenks, whose strong showing in the primary bodes well for the ongoing trend away from the Harrell years. And with swing votes like Rob Saka and Dan Strauss occasionally breaking from the majority, even that 5 to 4 conservative hold could be tenuous.

All this is to say, our progressive mayor may soon have more votes to work with on the second floor.

A question would remain, though. Can she work with them?

Josh@PubliCola.com

homelessness, King County, Media

No, King County Didn’t Write a $10 Million “Blank Check” for Youth Homelessness

By Erica C. Barnett

On Seattle Nice last week, we briefly discussed a column by the Seattle Times’  Danny Westneat, titled “Another ‘blank check’ program passes at King County.” I had just read the column the morning we recorded, and—never a good idea—assumed that Westneat had his facts basically correct.

Silly me.

The program Westneat spent several hundred words deriding as a $10 million “blank check”—which, side note, is not what a “blank check” is—is a 0.01 percent sales tax, which works out to about $4 a year, to fund youth homelessness programs. Westneat, acknowledging that the tax would provide “rather tiny amount—just $10 million per year for three years”—nonetheless says the county can’t be trusted to pass a tax without a predetermined spending plan, because of  “a series of blunders and mismanagement that have focused a Klieg light on local social services funding.”

Specifically, Westneat claims, the Best Starts for Kids program was designed to let county workers decide what to fund “on the fly,” resulting in “chicanery,” improper payments, and possible fraud. Because of this, Westneat argues, all county human services programs (and only those programs) deserve special scrutiny. Targeting the unrelated Health Through Housing program, which provides permanent supportive housing in existing buildings, Westneat claims that operating costs have “soared,” and that the program will never reach its goals.

“[C]an we at least admit we have a problem?” Westneat kvetches. “Why these councils don’t just flesh out a clear spending plan with goals and oversight from the beginning is beyond me, but it’s probably because there’s no fallout with the voters when they don’t.”

“Until then, it seems the blank checks are only going to keep on coming.”

Much as I wish Westneat’s dashed-off ragebait didn’t have an impact, he’s influential—pundits and elected leaders routinely cite his columns as evidence to support their own positions, even when they’re full of half-truths and outright errors, like this one.

Wanting to know more about what the sales tax for youth homelessness will actually fund, I called the proposal’s sponsor, King County Councilmember Jorge Barón. To my surprise, given how much coverage the tax plan has received, he told me I was the first reporter to contact him about his bill.

“It’s not a blank check,” Barón said, sounding exasperated. (I get it—it’s not the first time the Seattle Times has run an error-riddled opinion piece about the tax without talking to its sponsor). To begin with, “there are already guardrails in the state legislation” that created the new taxing authority, limiting spending to “child care; perinatal support services;  before-school and after-school based youth services that address mental, social, behavioral, and physical health; workforce capacity building; shelter and rental assistance; and client transportation.”

“The state has given us clear direction on what this money can be used for, which is very limiting,” Barón said.

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Moreover, Barón said, the county is going to adopt a spending plan—the thing Westneat claims they have no plan to do—in November, once they know how much money they can actually expect from the tax. Although Westneat wrote that the tax will net the county $10.3 million, the actual amount could be significantly less, Barón explained, because other cities within King County also have the authority to pass the same tax. The county has to credit every city that passes their own sales tax increase for its portion of the total, so they’re waiting to find out how much they’ll actually have to spend over the three-year life of the tax.

“There is going to be a spending plan. The details are being finalized,” Barón told me.

Spending plans aren’t the same thing as dictating specific agencies the county will fund, which means the spending plan the county adopts will probably be less prescriptive than Westneat seems to be suggesting it should be—that is, they set general parameters around how the money should be spent but give local officials the ability to select specific projects over the life of the tax.

This is standard practice. The six-year Seattle transit levy that’s on the November ballot, for instance, lays out nine broad spending categories, including bus service hours and transit “safety supports,” but keeps those categories general to allow the city to decide on specific projects in the future.

For this more targeted, three-year levy, though, the county already has a half-dozen specific youth and family projects in mind, including a Seattle shelter operated by Mary’s Place that is slated for closure; Friends of Youth’s Eastside shelter program; the ROOTS youth shelter in the University District; and the YMCA’s Social Impact Center in South King County.

Zooming out from the sales tax plan, Westneat also exaggerates the findings of a high-profile audit of grants made during the pandemic as part of the county’s Best Starts for Kids levy. Westneat claimed the audit found the $900 million program was “awash in improper payments and possible fraud.” (The aforementioned error-riddled op/ed claimed the county “lost untold millions of dollars” to waste and fraud, an inaccurate claim that a first-year fact checker would have flagged immediately.)

In reality, the audit looked at 19 grants, totaling about $12 million, that included funding for community groups that had never previously held county contracts. Ultimately, the audit found $320,000 in improper or questionable payments, including a little over $10,000 in potential fraud, although the county never actually paid out that money. All told, the county is working to recover about $58,000 in potentially improper payments. The county absolutely screwed up by failing to closely monitor these programs. But that hardly makes the entire levy program “awash” in fraud.

Westneat’s cheap shot at Health Through Housing is wrong, too. Citing his own previous column about problems at one of the former hotels King County tried to convert into housing, Westneat suggests the entire enterprise has failed. The program, he claims, “has never reached its goals” and “likely won’t now,” since the county has stopped buying up old motels.

In terms of the total number of units, Westneat’s correct—the program’s goal was to “create and operate” 1,600 units, and the county only reached 1,423, including nearly 1,000 units of permanent supportive housing. Rising costs have stalled building acquisition, and NIMBY opposition has also slowed down specific projects.

In terms of success at getting chronically homeless people into permanent supportive housing—housing for people with physical and mental disabilities that includes wraparound services and minimal barriers to entry—Health Through Housing is an indisputable success. Of the hundreds of formerly homeless people living in permanent supportive housing through the program (768 as of the end of 2025, a number that has grown since then with the full and partial openings of three more buildings), 93 percent remained housed, meaning they didn’t return to homelessness.

Being housed, as the name of the program suggests, resulted in dramatic reductions in emergency room visits, hospitalizations, and jail bookings. Improving people’s health and stability, and reducing involvement in the criminal legal system, are also key Health Through Housing goals, which the program has achieved year after year.

Although Westneat is scandalized that the average operating cost for these units was $3,400 last year, that number represents the cost of providing supportive services that make it possible for homeless people with long-term disabilities to stay in their housing instead of sleeping on sidewalks and in encampments. In other words, it’s not $3,400 in “rent” per month, but an all-in number that include the “wraparound services” Seattle liberals like Westneat always say we need in order to keep people from living on the streets.

We’ll be discussing the new tax again on this week’s Seattle Nice. We also got into the details on KUOW’s Week in Review last week, where a fellow guest called my work to report this story out “adorable” before dismissing everything I said.

 

homelessness, Mayor Wilson, Police, Taxes, Transportation

This Week On PubliCola: Police Hiring Bonuses Don’t Work, Scooter Usage is Up, Community Court is Back, and More

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, October 5

Greater Seattle: Bike and Scooter Share Could Soon Lap 2025’s Record-Setting Numbers

Josh is hyped about the latest stats on Lime scooter and electric bike rentals in Seattle, which show more people are using micromobility options than ever before, even when you discount the spike in usage around the World Cup. In less encouraging news, the number of people in downtown Seattle hasn’t bounced back from the pandemic as fast as other cities—something he says alley activations, and loosening the city’s puritanical rules against drinkign al fresco, could help.

Tuesday, October 6

As Council Considers Reinstating Police Hiring Bonuses, an Unreleased Draft Report Finding They Don’t Work Is Timely Again

When a council-mandated report found that hiring bonuses don’t have a meaningful impact on whether people apply for jobs at the Seattle Police Department (and recommended ditching them), then-mayor Bruce Harrell’s team just changed the report, whittling it down to a few bullet points and recommending that the city keep them. The City Council is currently talking about reinstating the bonuses, which SPD ended in September.

Wednesday, October 7

Former SPD Chief Lands on His Feet

Former Seattle police chief Shon Barnes, who received a departure package worth well over $700,000 when he resigned under pressure earlier this year, has landed a new job at a company that sells surveillance and other technology to law enforcement agencies. No word on whether Barnes, who spent much of his time as police chief out of town at networking conferences or at his family home in Chicago, will be working remotely.

Sound Transit Removes Candidate’s Photo from Station

For two days, riders who passed through Sound Transit’s new Pinehurst station in North Seattle saw a giant photo of District 5 City Council candidate Julie Kang and emitcomplained, Sound Transit took the image down—a move Kang calls unfair.

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More Moves at Wilson’s Office

After months without a press secretary,, Mayor Katie Wilson has hired former Stranger writer and longtime progressive comms person Ansel Herz for the role (a fact I teased on Bluesky a couple months ago, before it was official) Alex Gallo-Brown, who’s been Wilson’s director of community engagement, is moving into a senior advisor role where he will no longer be managing a staff, but will be advising on external relations and digital strategy; Wilson fired her digital strategist in August.

Thursday, October 8

Revived Community Court Will be Paired With Punitive New “High-Priority” Track for Repeat Offenders

City Attorney Erika Evans is reviving the old community court her predecessor, Ann Davison, shut down in 2023, but with new “accountability” requirements and stricter eligibility—for instance, anyone who commits additional misdemeanors within 90 days will get bounced back to mainstream court for prosecution. Services will now be mandatory and failing to comply with service commitments will also be disqualifying.

At the same, Evans announced a new “high-priority offenses” program, in which she’ll seek longer jail sentences for people who commit more than a threshold number of misdemeanors over a certain period—three in 90 days, for example, or two if the second offense is stealing from a store that has issued a trespass order. Public defenders called the punitive elements of Evans’ plan counterproductive because, they argue, they’ll exclude people who would most benefit from services like treatment.

Also this week: On Seattle Nice, we spoke with Transportation Choices Coalition Director Kirk Hovenkotter about Proposition 1, which would double a sales tax that pays for extra bus service in Seattle. If you live in Seattle, it’s on your ballot this month.

On the same show, we talked briefly about a column by Danny Westneat in the Seattle Times, in which he complained about the King County Council writing what he called a “blank check” to. pay for vaguely defined youth and family services. I had only read the column that morning, and said it would be better if there was some kind of spending plan attached to the proposal. Silly me, responding to a Westneat column without doing my own reporting! After a morning of phone calls (including with sponsor Jorge Barón, who said I was the only reporter who called him about his proposal) have a very different take, which I’ll share on a future episode. TL;DR, though: Westneat broadly misrepresented both the tax proposal and the audit of the county’s Best Starts for Kids program his criticisms were based on, while unfairly maligning an unrelated county program that has successfully kept people housed as a failure.

I also went on KUOW’s Week in Review this week, where host Bill Radke, commentator Joni Balter, KUOW’s Scott Greenstone and I talked about the shelter sales tax, whether Democrats plan to broaden the “millionaires’ tax” to apply to slightly less-rich people, whether Mayor Wilson is betraying her socialist roots, and much more.

Save the date: Seattle Nice is hosting a live debate for Seattle City Council District 5 between Julie Kang and Nilu Jenks. Join us at the National Nordic Museum on October 21 at 6 p.m. See you there!

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Courts, Crime

Revived Community Court Will be Paired With Punitive New “High-Priority” Track for Repeat Offenders

Seattle Municipal Courthouse

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans just announced the launch of a revamped community court for low-level misdemeanor offenders, fulfilling a key promise in her 2025 campaign against then-city attorney Ann Davison, who shut down the therapeutic court in 2023.

At the time, Davison and her allies argued that community court—an alternative to prosecution that connected defendants to services through the Seattle Municipal Court’s Community Resource Center—was ineffective.  Campaigning against Davison, Evans called the decision to end community court a “disaster” and promised to restore it.

The new Connection Court, which will be presided over for the rest of the year by retiring Municipal Court Judge Willie Gregory, is similar to the old community court in a few respects: It’s an alternative to prosecution on low-level misdemeanor charges such as theft and public drug use, and it connects defendants to services through the Community Resource Center, which Evans said will offer more direct connections and “warm hand-offs”  to service providers than it did before.

At the same time, the court now imposes new requirements on defendants, such as mandatory service participation, that make it a much different program than the community court Davison ended—one that Davison herself might have supported. Evans’ press announcement Thursday included supportive quotes from a dozen local leaders, including interim police chief Andre Sayles and Downtown Seattle Association president Jon Scholes, all but one including some reference to “accountability.” According to Sayles, that means “[we] offer a real path forward to those ready to take it, and we hold accountable those who continue to cause harm.”

For participants, the two biggest changes are a requirement that they commit no additional misdemeanors for 90 days—the length of the court’s jurisdiction over each case— and that they prove they’ve participated in two types of services, such as addiction counseling or job training. People who fail to meet either of these requirements—by not showing up at appointments, for example, or by committing another low-level crime—will be sent to mainstream court, where they’ll face criminal prosecution on the original misdemeanor charge along with any additional charges. Anyone with a serious felony conviction in the last 10 years is automatically ineligible for Connections Court, as is anyone who has committed a rape or murder.

Evans told PubliCola the requirements isn’t prescriptive; if someone commits another minor offense, for instance, the city attorney’s office can say, “‘You know what? Let’s give  this participant an opportunity to have that second case also be in community court,'” Evans said. Most people will still be eligible, at this stage, for other diversion programs, such as LEAD. “This just another layer for people to be able to get connected to what they need, one that was not there yesterday.”

Purpose Dignity Action co-director Lisa Daugaard, the architect of the original LEAD diversion program, said she’s reserving judgment about the revived community court. :e should be diverting cases prior to filing of charges whenever appropriate, but if cases need to be filed, it’s good to have a plan for addressing defendants’ needs, using whatever leverage the charge provides,” Daugaard said. “Everything depends on whether the services offered are actually matched to the person’s situation and needs.”

Critics of the new court, including the lawyers who defend indigent clients on misdemeanor charges, say Evans is reducing its potential  by setting up barriers to entry and establishing new hurdles for participants to trip over as they try to comply with the new conditions.

Katie Hurley, special counsel for criminal policy and practice at King County’s Department of Public Defense, said she’s concerned that the services available at the Court Resource Center don’t meaningfully address the conditions that lead people to commit petty crimes in the first place, particularly homelessness. About 30 percent of people fail to show up for municipal court hearings because they don’t have an address to receive court notices, Hurley said, yet “there’s no connection to housing, which is what many people who are prosecuted for low-level behaviors struggle with.”

“The whole idea behind Connection Court is that it’s supposed to be expansive and allow these lower-level offenses to receive a quicker, more effective response because we know that the current system has failed,” Hurley said. “Unfortunately, it’s going to exclude precisely the type of folks who should be benefiting from a Connection Court response, which is people who’ve been failed by the system previously.”

A second new program Evans announced today would send more people into that system. Her office is calling it the “High-Priority Repeat Offenses (HiPRO) program.

Under this program,  people who commit misdemeanors more than three times in a 90-day span, or more than six times in six months, will be ineligible not just for Connections Court but for any diversion programs, and Evans’ office will seek “aggravated jail sentences” against such repeat offenders.

This harsher treatment will also apply to anyone steals from a store from which they were previously trespassed for shoplifting, a process that can be handled by private security and is based on policies that vary from store to store. Evans’ office will also seek stiffer penalties against anyone charged with car prowling, a misdemeanor, if they were convicted for felony car theft in the previous year.

Although HiPRO sounds awfully similar to former city attorney Davison’s “high utilizers” list, Evans and her criminal division chief, Jenna Robert, said it’s different in this key respect: Evans isn’t compiling a list of people who may commit crimes in the future, they’re putting people in the HiPRO program after they’re charged with a crime that warrants escalation into the program.

In contrast, Davison maintained a rotating list of about 150 people who had at least 12 misdemeanor charges in the past year, and at least one misdemeanor charge in the most recent eight months.

It’s a bit of a distinction without a difference. Keeping a list of repeat offenders sure seems more intrusive than imposing harsher penalties on people once they hit a criminal benchmark, but the result is the same—harsher penalties for people who have committed a certain number of misdemeanors over a certain period.

Hurley, from DPD, called the new program counterproductive. The new two-strikes rule for shoplifting, she said, was “very alarming for us” because it means that anyone who steals from the same store twice will be subject to a higher level of prosecution, regardless of what led them to commit the second theft. Many people who steal small items from stores are homeless or have other underlying conditions, Hurley said—like the woman DPD defended last year who was charged with theft for stealing $5 in candy from a CVS that had previously issued a trespass order against her.

Under the new criteria, that client would have been subject to harsher prosecution and ineligible for Connection Court. (Ultimately, she was deemed incompetent to stand trial and her case was dismissed).

Evans said Connection Court, which just started on Wednesday, isn’t set in stone; the details and eligibility could change as the court evolves. But it’s unclear what Evans believes throwing people in jail (a place with no meaningful services) a few days or weeks longer for low-level crimes will accomplish, beyond temporarily removing some familiar faces from the streets. Evans says she’s creating new opportunities for people to access meaningful services, combined with accountability if they fail to meet their commitments. But a plan that deliberately excludes and disproportionately penalizes repeat offenders may just ensure that the people who most need those services won’t be able to access them.

Elections, Mayor Wilson, Police

Former SPD Chief Lands on His Feet, Sound Transit Removes Candidate’s Photo from Station, More Moves at Wilson’s Office

1. As we reported on Bluesky Tuesday afternoon, former police chief Shon Barnes got a soft landing after Mayor Wilson asked him to resign, a belabored process that ended in Barnes getting a going-away gift worth almost $750,000. In his new gig will be heading up “public safety programs and strategy” for Mission Ready Technologies (or Mission RT), a Scottsdale, AZ-based company that appears to sell surveillance technology, computer-aided dispatch systems, AI-based 911 response software, and other tech tools to state and local police agencies.

In a long LinkedIn statement that three different LLM detectors assured me was 100% AI, Barnes said he’ll “focus on helping state and local public-safety agencies connect their operational needs with technology, strategy, and organizational readiness” in his new position. The details of the former chief’s new job—like what he’ll actually be doing on a daily basis—are pretty vague, but it sounds like they could involve a lot of travel to cities whose police departments are implementing new technology. Neither Barnes nor Mission RT’s press release said whether Barnes will be renting in Arizona or working remotely from his home outside Chicago.

2. Julie Kang, a candidate for Seattle City Council Position 5, got prominent placement at the grand opening of Sound Transit’s new Pinehurst station on September 30, courtesy of a large photo featuring Kang, her husband, and their daughter placed prominently at the station, The photo was one of a series featuring community groups that had supported the station just east of I-5 at NE 130th Street, and it identified Kang’s family as representatives of the Haller Lake Community Club. Kang posted it on her Instagram page.

 

Sound Transit did the photo shoot on June 30; Kang entered the race late last year.

According to Sound Transit spokeswoman Rachelle Cunningham, Kang was “nominated, selected and photographed as a representative of the Haller Lake Community Club” and her photo was “randomly selected as one of the photographs to be featured at the station.”

At least one community member had a problem with the transit agency giving a candidate such prominent billing just weeks before the election, and complained to Sound Transit shortly after the station opened. The agency acted fast. By Friday night, two days after it went up, the photo of Kang and her family was gone.

Asked about the swift removal of the image, Cunningham said, “we heard concerns from community members about the photos and the perception of agency funds being used to support a campaign. Sound Transit does not endorse political candidates, and the photos were removed Friday.”

Sound Transit emailed Kang late Friday afternoon to let her know the photo was coming down . In response, Kang wrote, “When our family agreed to participate in the community photo shoot, we did so because representation matters to us. As an Asian American family, we wanted our community to be visible in the public spaces and transportation system that belong to all of us. At the time, I had no expectation that I would someday be a candidate for Seattle City Council.”

“I respect Sound Transit’s responsibility to remain neutral in elections. At the same time, I hope you will reconsider whether removing a longstanding community image simply because one of the people pictured later became a candidate is the appropriate way to maintain that neutrality.”

Kang told PubliCola she was referring to her general support for the light rail station, not the photo shoot in June.

3. Ansel Herz, the former Stranger reporter who’s spent the last decade or so doing comms for progressive candidates and causes, will take over Mayor Katie Wilson’s press office as press secretary and digital strategy director next Wednesday. Wilson has had a string of temporary press secretaries since Sage Wilson left in June, including, most recently, Alex Hudson, the former Transportation Choices Coalition director, who’ll return to her previous role as a transportation policy advisor.

Alex Gallo-Brown, a longtime who was glued to her side on the campaign, will no longer be Wilson’s director of community relations; instead, he’ll step into the newly created position of  “senior advisor on public engagement.” Matt McIntosh, another Wilson campaign staffer who’s currently a community relations manager, will be Wilson’s interim community relations director. The change means that Gallo-Brown will no longer be directly managing staff, but will have more direct control, along with Herz, over Wilson’s online communications.

As we reported, Wilson fired her digital communications manager Amy Piñon earlier this year, hiring a temporary contractor to do social media in her stead.

Wilson’s communications office has had extremely high turnover since she took office, the result of both firings (Wilson axed her original comms director, Seferiana Day, in June) and voluntary departures, like former press secretary Wilson’s. The turmoil reflects, among other issues, an ongoing tension between campaign loyalists who came into office wanting to blow up the old, institutional ways of doing things and government veterans with experience working in those institutions.

Wilson recently hired Tara Lee, a longtime comms professional who’s worked for former Gov. Jay Inslee as well as the Washington Budget and Policy Center, the nerdy left-wing think tank, as communications director.

City Council, Mayor Harrell, Mayor Wilson, Police

As Council Considers Reinstating Police Hiring Bonuses, an Unreleased Draft Report Finding They Don’t Work Is Timely Again
Seattle interim Police Chief Shon Barnes at a recent City Council committee meeting.

A city report showed one-time bonuses have no effect on police hiring. The Harrell Administration rewrote it to say the opposite.

By Erica C. Barnett

As the city council begins the process of dissecting and amending Mayor Katie Wilson’s budget, council members are already pushing back on the mayor’s police hiring plan, which funds a net increase of 66 new officers through 2028. The budget includes around $56 million in raises for existing SPD officers; it also incorporates SPD’s decision, which went into effect September 1, to eliminate hiring bonuses for new and transferring officers, saving the city a couple million dollars a year.

The bonuses, which officers receive in two payments (one when they’re hired, the second about a year later) range from $7,500 for first-time recruits to $50,000 for officers with prior police training and experience. Between July 2022 and May 2026, they’ve cost the city around $3 million, with another $1.4 million in second payments outstanding, according to SPD’s most recent data.

Council members, including public safety committee chair Bob Kettle, have pushed back on the decision to end hiring bonuses, which was a cost-saving move by SPD. At a budget committee meeting late last month, Kettle called the payments an effective tool for maintaining the hirng “momentum” SPD has achieved since last year.

Addressing interim Police Chief Andre Sayles, Sayles asked: “If we get lateral transfers, isn’t [paying the bonuses] a net positive for us?”

“Yes, I believe looking at a way to provide the incentive for lateral hires, specifically here in the state of Washington, will be ideal,” Sayles agreed. “Removing those incentives, particularly for lateral officers, has the potential to put us behind” neighboring jurisdictions, he added.

Since the city adopted the incentives as a way to boost hiring during a post-pandemic slump (and boosted the lateral bonuses to $50,000 in 2023), the efficacy of offering the one-time payments has gone (mostly) unquestioned,

But an unpublished 2024 analysis by the city’s Office of Performance and Innovation, based on a survey of newly hired officers and click-through rates on ads advertising various benefits of joining SPD, found that hiring bonuses weren’t a significant factor in new officers’ decision to apply for jobs at SPD. Instead, the analysis found that recruits were drawn by SPD’s competitive salary and benefits—which, at the time, were lower than the six-figure starting salaries SPD offers today.

PubliCola obtained several early drafts of the report, including comments and suggested edits, through a records request made last year.

“This evaluation found that incentive pay did not significantly impact police hiring numbers compared to other recruitment factors within the timeframe of the analysis,” one draft read. “The incentive alone is not enough to motivate people to join the Seattle Police Department,” another version concluded.

“The City should not continue the use of the hiring incentive as currently designed as an ongoing recruitment strategy,” one draft recommended..

Former mayor Harrell’s office, including then-deputy mayor Tim Burgess, public safety advisor Sarah Smith, and communications staffers, raised objections about almost every substantive element of report, from its tone, which they found too negative, to its conclusions, which they said the data didn’t support. “I don’t believe the evaluation is persuasive since the key findings are speculative,” Burgess wrote in January 2024. Every version of the report we reviewed was littered with comments from the mayor’s staff, highlighting the Harrell administration’s direct intervention in what was supposed to be an independent analysis by OPI.

By the time the mayor’s office was done with the report, it recommended keeping the hiring bonuses, rather than eliminating them.

Information that was unflattering to the program—like the fact that “100% of the employees who were hired and left since August 2022 were people of color,” as yet another draft put it—as was the fact that officers overwhelmingly mentioned salary as the main reason they applied. (Indirectly verifying this fairly intuitive survey result, SPD hiring spiked immediately after a new contract gave first-time officers a starting salary of $126,000 after a six-month training period.)

The report no longer mentioned that not one officer had mentioned hiring incentives in their self-reported reasons for working at SPD, nor that incentives ranked in the middle (above “in-person recruiting” and “personal referral” but under “salary” and “benefits”) on a five-item list that was included in the survey.

The final, public version of the report, now whittled down to just over four pages plus a chart of local police salaries, concluded, contrary to previous drafts, that it was “impossible to pinpoint the hiring incentive’s specific effect with the available data, It is clear from the survey and A/B testing that the hiring incentive is compelling to some applicants yet does not have as strong an effect as salary and benefits.”

“Given SPD’s staffing challenges, the relatively low cost, and the fact that other competing jurisdictions continue to provide the incentive, we recommend the continued use of hiring incentives,” the report now said (bold in original).

The new report also put a positive spin on the dismal finding that hiring incentives only beat out referrals and in-person recruitment in a multiple-choice question about people’s motivation for applying. “All but two hires selected incentive pay as having some level of importance in their decision to become a police officer,”  the rewritten report concluded. “Of these respondents, 23% ranked incentive pay first or second in importance, 41% ranked it as third, and 36% ranked it as fourth or fifth.”

Speaking to PubliCola last year, staff who were involved in the creation of the report expressed intense frustration at being asked to turn their office into one called a “propaganda arm of the city” by the Harrell Administration. “We tried to soften the language to appease them,” that staffer said, but the report ended up making claims that just weren’t supported by the data. “I’m not going to spend my waking outs doing that,” the staffer said; that staffer, and another staffer who worked on the report, quit their jobs and left the city over what they saw as interference in their work that compromised its integrity.

The report that found hiring incentives have no effect is based on the only available data, which is old. The city council only required a single report on hiring incentives, eliminating the reporting requirement when they increased the lateral bonus to $50,000 in 2024. But given that new recruits now earn six-figure salaries on Day 1, and pay for lateral officers has increased commensurately, it seems likely that salary is more of a motivating factor now, not less. Ending the bonuses now will help show whether Kettle and the police chief are right. If hiring craters, even at the newly inflated salaries, the council could look for money in next year’s  budget to reinstate them. That would be a “data-driven” approach—the kind this council routinely says they support.