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.
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.
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 $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.
State legislation that would have made it a first-strike felony, rather than a misdemeanor, to pay another person for sex has been amended; under a version that passed narrowly out of committee, buying sex would be a gross misdemeanor and sex workers would get access to services in lieu of jail. Proponents of the original, harsher bill said the new version fails to crack down enough on the “demand” side of sex work, and suggested that lenient prostitution laws allowed traffickers to go unpunished.
The changes to the state law we covered Monday came partly in response to a lurid presentation by local prosecutors at a city council meeting, which included photos of identifiable, brutalized women and graphic details of assaults. Advocates for sex workers, also appalled by the presentation, issued a list of demands for the city, including a separate panel on non-carceral, humane approaches to abuse and trafficking and the inclusion of people with direct experience in policy discussions about sex work.
City Attorney Erika Evans and the ACLU of Washington announced that the ACLU is dropping its lawsuit against the city over a policy instituted by Evans’ Republican predecessor, Ann Davison, that disqualified Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi from hearing criminal cases for almost two years.
City hall veteran Ben Noble, who’s currently in his second stint as director of the city council’s policy-oriented central staff, is retiring in March after more than two decades at the city. His replacement, Lish Whitson, is another city old-timer who has worked on four comprehensive plan updates, including the upzone of Seattle’s former single-family enclaves last year.
The Seattle City Attorney’s Office settled for $29,011,000 with the family of Jaahnavi Kandula, the 23-year-old student who was struck and killed in a South Lake Union crosswalk by a Seattle Police Department officer traveling 74 miles an hour in 2023. The $11,000 is a pointed reference to a comment made by Daniel Auderer, then the vice president of the police union, that the city could just “write a check” for that amount because that’s all Kandula’s short life was worth.
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Funding for Seattle’s new social housing developer, which the City Council approved in a 7-0 vote yesterday, is coming in significantly higher than anticipated: In its first year, the developer will receive an estimated $115 million to acquire existing apartment buildings and develop new ones. The revenues mirror early returns from the JumpStart payroll tax, which is also a tax on large companies that pay high wages.
The city’s Office of the Inspector General released a report today finding that the Seattle Police Department’s actions during the anti-trans “Don’t Mess With Our Kids” rally, held by an extremist group called Mayday USA, showed a bias against counter-protesters who showed up to demonstrate against the right-wing event. After chatting amiably with security for the anti-trans group, officers began referring to protesters as “transtifa.”
On this week’s episode of the Seattle Nice podcast, David, Sandeep, and I interviewed new City Councilmember Dionne Foster. Our conversation touched on encampment removals, police surveillance cameras, the upcoming library levy, and the
The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has rescinded a $3 million grant it gave the Low Income Housing Institute to build 60 new low-barrier tiny houses outside King County’s youth detention center, claiming LIHI delayed the process by failing to secure a site in time. The money, which LIHI secured in last year’s city of Seattle budget, will now go to the Salvation Army to convert 35 of its existing transitional housing units into shelter.
LIHI Director Sharon Lee speaks at the opening of Rosie’s Tiny House Village in the University District
By Erica C. Barnett
The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has rescinded a $3 million grant it gave the Low Income Housing Institute to build 60 new low-barrier tiny houses outside King County’s youth detention center, claiming LIHI delayed the process by failing to secure a site in time.
Tiny houses are small, freestanding, heated structures that provide shelter for one or two people. Unsheltered people often prefer tiny houses to other kinds of shelter because they provide privacy and a door that locks.
The money will now go to the Salvation Army, which will use it to convert some of the existing transitional housing beds at its William Booth Center in SoDo into non-congregate emergency shelter beds, according to KCRHA. While the converted rooms are technically “new” shelter beds, they aren’t really additive, since the people living in the existing transitional housing will either have to leave or see their housing downgraded to emergency shelter.
“Without this funding, we may have had to close beds,” Salvation Army spokeswoman Sara Beksinski said.
KCRHA spokeswoman Lisa Edge said the agency “chose to prioritize speed of implementation in the competition for these funds,” KCRHA spokeswoman Lisa Edge said. “Because LIHI could not perform in the period clearly outlined for the second location, we proceeded with an award to the next highest rated applicant, the Salvation Army.”
The Salvation Army’s original application was for $1.1 million; we have a call out to find out if this is how much the KCRHA awarded them and, if so, what will happen to the rest of the funds.
The $3 million more than half the funding—nearly $6 million—LIHI worked to secure for tiny house villages in the Seattle’s 2025 budget. The other half is funding a new tiny house village in North Seattle called Olympic Hills, which opened last month. The second shelter was a joint project between LIHI and Purpose Dignity Action’s CoLEAD program, which provides temporary lodging and intensive case management to people with physical and behavioral health needs; now, CoLEAD will relocate its operation to the North Seattle village.
In late January, LIHI appealed KCRHA’s decision, pointing to the agency’s own delays in approving contracts that were funded back in 2024, and says they were blindsided by the agency’s decision to take back the funds less than three months after they sent LIHI a letter signing off on the county-owned site.
“We should ask why the KCRHA’s [Request for Proposals] process took so long, given the homelessness crisis,” LIHI director Sharon Lee wrote in her appeal. Although the city council approved the funding in late 2024, the city didn’t announce the awards until the following July. “We believe it is KCRHA, not LIHI, that delayed the overall timeline in creating two new villages.”
Lee acknowledged that LIHI experienced hiccups securing a location for the second shelter, but said King County Executive Girmay Zahilay had made it clear that securing the King County site was a high priority for his new administration. As backup, Lee said, LIHI also secured an agreement with Mount Baker Housing for a second site—the old Thunderbird Treatment Center in Rainier Beach, which the housing nonprofit plans to redevelop in about three years.
“We were excited to have the county commit to finally doing something” with tiny houses, Lee said.
The KCRHA didn’t let Zahilay know they were rescinding LIHI’s funding for the planned tiny house village at the county site, his office confirmed.
“Our office was not aware that KCRHA was going to rescind funding and award it to another provider, and we expressed disappointment that they did not update or coordinate with our administration before making this decision,” Zahilay spokeswoman Callie Craighead said.
Zahilay is currently “having initial conversations with stakeholders about the potential to site a tiny home village at the juvenile justice center property,” Craighead said. “Before a tiny home village is sited, we would need to engage with staff at the facility, see robust neighborhood outreach plans and timelines, and understand how services would be prioritized for those in need in the immediate area.”
The city’s budget didn’t explicitly grant the $6 million to LIHI, because all large contracts must go through a standard bidding process. But it was LIHI that secured the funding, working with City Councilmember Bob Kettle to add the money in 2024, with the understanding that it would fund tiny house villages or some other form of new noncongregate shelter.
In a letter rescinding KCRHA’s funds, KCRHA’s deputy director, Jeff Simms, blamed LIHI for the delays, saying the homelessness authority had already granted one extension to give LIHI more time to nail down a location and that this violated the KCRHA’s “preference for applications that had a site located and prepared for operation.”
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But LIHI said the timeline was significantly more complex than the KCRHA was letting on, and pointed to another email from Simms, in October, saying that “LIHI has met the requirements of the [request for proposals] to have located a site for operation of a second non-congregate shelter” at the juvenile detention center or the former treatment center.
That letter did note that KCRHA might “take steps” to reallocate the money to another agency if LIHI didn’t secure a site by December. Lee says LIHI signed a letter of intent with Mount Baker Housing to lease their Rainier Beach site and sent a copy to KCRHA in mid-December, but never heard anything back until the agency rescinded their funding in January. “For a whole month, there was silence, until they yanked the contract,” Lee said.
KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison rejected LIHI’s appeal earlier this month, and LIHI’s efforts to get city officials to intervene have been unsuccessful so far. Kettle, who got the money into the city budget back in 2024, told PubliCola, “We understand LIHI’s frustrations but also KCHRA’s need to press forward. We will work with both to move ahead on other important projects in [Council District 7] or that have important public safety impacts.”
A spokesman for Mayor Katie Wilson’s office, Sage Wilson, told PubliCola, “We’re not going to comment on the details of a dispute between LIHI and KCRHA. However this situation does underscore the importance of accelerating the development of emergency shelter, which is why the mayor has already issued an executive order doing just that.”
LIHI and KCRHA have long had a tense relationship, going back to the time of founding CEO Marc Dones, who frequently clashed with Lee over funding for her projects. Lee said she isn’t done fighting over the rescission, and she’s talking to KCRHA’s governing board about what she considers overreach by Kinnison and Simms.
Meanwhile, she said, “We are going to continue to develop tiny house villages, because we know that the mayor is very supportive and we think there are going to be other opportunities for us.” LIHI just opened a new tiny house village in Tukwila and is working to site a new RV safe lot, with tiny houses, in West Seattle.
Our guest for this week’s episode of Seattle Nice (don’t worry, we’ll get back to our traditional bickering format soon) is new Seattle City Councilmember Dionne Foster, who beat Position 9 incumbent Sara Nelson in a blowout last year. Foster, like fellow newcomers Eddie Lin and Alexis Mercedes Rinck (who’s been there a year), is a progressive, with a resumé and policy priorities to match.
Since Foster heads up the council’s Housing, Arts, and Civil Rights committee, we started out by talking about homelessness: How’s new Mayor Katie Wilson doing so far, and does Foster want to see fewer encampment removals?
Wilson is expected to release plans for a “shelter surge” in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, the city has continued moving unsheltered people from place to place, though now—according to Wilson’s office—in a way that attempts to “minimiz[e] harm.”
We also talked about laws passed by the previous council that increase penalties for using or possessing drugs in public, which include “stay out” orders banishing people from certain “drug areas” before they’re found guilty of any crime. Foster affirmed that she doesn’t plan to propose repealing the law, but did say she expects police to limit arrests to situations where someone poses a threat of harm to themself or others—a concept that’s codified in the law, but that remains troublingly vague.
We turned next to the Seattle Police Department’s use of 24/7 surveillance cameras, which Foster unequivocally said “should be turned off and come down.” Wilson’s office hasn’t made an announcement about the cameras yet, but Foster noted that the ones installed most recently have not been turned on yet. In addition to concerns about police surveillance generally, opponents have pointed out that the federal government can easily demand access to camera footage, putting immigrants and other vulnerable people at risk.
SPD claims the cameras deter and help them solve crimes, but has not presented specific, compelling evidence that camera surveillance helped them solved a crime that could not have been solved using other methods, including private surveillance cameras and traditional police work.
Nor, Foster noted, do they seem to address violent crime, one of SPD’s most frequent justifications for putting them around the city. “When we’re thinking about the technology matching the challenge, that’s where I see sort of a misalignment,” she said. “I do want to make sure that we’re … making sure our tools match the issues that we are trying to solve.”
We also squeezed in time to talk about the upcoming library levy, the new neighborhood centers, and former mayor Harrell’s “deeply unsustainable” budget, which sets up Wilson and the council for budget cuts—and potentially new revenue options, like a local capital gains tax.
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By Erica C. Barnett
