Economy, Mayor Wilson, Opinion

Mayor Wilson Defies Convention at Annual Downtown Business Event
View from the cheap cheap cheap cheap seats at Wednesday’s State of Downtown Seattle event.

By Erica C. Barnett

During the Downtown Seattle Association’s event celebrating the annual State of Downtown Seattle report yesterday, I got a kick out of Mayor Katie Wilson’s speech, in which she cheerfully defied expectations for political speeches at this glad-handing event. Wilson spoke after King County Executive Girmay Zahliay, who touted his three-day-a-week return-to-office mandate to surprisingly tepid applause.

It wasn’t that Wilson didn’t kowtow a bit to her corporate audience—saying, for example, that she wants to “keep our parks and public spaces welcoming and accessible to all” by “finally … putting people inside in large numbers.” People experiencing behavioral health crises “can make  the people around them feel less safe,” Wilson said. “We have to acknowledge that, and we have to do more to make all of our streets and public spaces feel more welcoming for people of all incomes and backgrounds, whether they live downtown or tourists visiting our city for the first time.”

But Wilson also used the occasion to frame a commitment to good government as an explicitly left-wing priority. “As a progressive and as a socialist— as a progressive and as a socialist—I believe it’s very important for people to have faith in their government, and that means, among other things, being able to trust that it is a good and effective steward of our collective resources. We can’t be afraid to stop funding things that aren’t working well.” (Ahem.)

The keynote speaker, Atlantic writer Derek Thompson, was the co-author (along with New York Times columnist Ezra Klein), of Abundance—the book every pro-market urbanist in your life was urging you to read last year. Sounds like this was happening to Wilson, too, and she finally get around to reading it after the election.

It was pretty clear Wilson wasn’t as taken with the book as those who embraced it as a clever takedown of progressive dogma. If I had to guess, I’d say that’s because she saw through its paper-thin thesis—that if liberals would only become libertarians, we’d live in an age of abundant housing, transportation, consumer products, and energy.

“Some of you might know that in my prior career, in addition to being a community organizer, I was also a columnist who’s written for some of our local publications, and I’m sure that if I hadn’t been running for office last year, I would have found time to write my critical take on the abundance framework,” Wilson said. “Now I’m in a role where I have to muzzle myself a little bit, so I’m going to resist the temptation, having an audience with Derek, to give my Abundance TED Talk.”

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Instead, she said, she’d focus on some things she liked from the book, like the Urbanism 101 argument that NIMBY land-use restrictions prevent housing from being built.

“I have to say, I also really love the abundance vision of the world, in the not-far-off year of 2050, when we’ve achieved such abundance and productivity that the work week has been shortened to just a few days,” Wilson continued. “I do hope that 10 or so years from now, when AI has thoroughly disrupted the job market, and you start hearing a national rally cry for a 24-hour work week, that many of the far-sighted business leaders here today will hop on board that train.”

I haven’t reviewed Abundance, and I’ll try not to here, but the few minutes I saw of Thompson’s PowerPoint presentation before I had to leave for an event across were pretty misleading examples—tailored for a a roomful of business elites who are inclined to oppose taxes and believe in the awesome power of free markets.

Thompson extolled Lakewood, a suburb of L.A., as an example of the dense housing that can happen in the suburbs when government gets out of the way. (Lakewood, as a contrast to Petaluma in Northern California, is a central example in the book.) But Lakewood sits on an artificial oasis in what would otherwise be harsh, unwelcoming desert, and that oasis was made possible by government intervention in the early 20th century, when Los Angeles diverted water from farmland, destroying farmers’ livelihoods to build a city in an otherwise uninhabitable area. The conflict became known as the Water Wars.

Similarly, Thompson’s praise for Texas and its vast solar farms would be inspiring, except that Texas (where I’m from) has a notoriously unreliable power grid—a fact that the dominant Republicans in the state, including Gov. Greg Abbott, have falsely blamed on renewable energy. They’ve also been working steadily for the past decade to undermine wind and solar while doubling down on fossil-fuel subsidies—but never mind that, look at this slide of a solar farm!

Thompson brushed past another example of what he considers anti-“abundance” waste—the fact that affordable housing for low-income and formerly homeless people costs more to build than market rate apartments—by saying there was no reason for this to be the case. While it’s true that rules for affordable housing can increase costs, a bigger cost driver financing, which typically comes from many public and private sources and can take months or years to secure. Eliminating unnecessary regulation is important, but it’s only part of the story—and  “abundance” advocates often simply ignore the reasons for some regulations, such as building codes and accessibility requirements.

As I said, I ducked out of Thompson’s talk after about two minutes (remember, I did read the book.*) But I hope the mayor will elaborate at some point—maybe on Seattle Nice!—about her reaction to the “libertarian, but make it pro-social” argument at the center of this bestseller.

*  Which, by the way, also lacks any substantive class or racial analysis and conveniently elides the experience of poor people in the US and the rest of the world. Somebody’s gotta mine all those rare-earth metals, pose as AI sexbots, and pilot those “autonomous” delivery robots, after all, and it ain’t gonna be the elites who write bestselling books promising us a frictionless technotopia is right around the corner.

Media

KIRO Radio Ran a Segment Attacking My Reporting. They Still Haven’t Responded to My Efforts to Correct the Record.
By Erica C. Barnett

Earlier this week, KIRO Radio’s “Gee and Ursula” show had a guest, Angela Rye, who spent most of a ten-minute segment accusing me of fabricating what she called an “unsourced” story on allegations made by city staff about Derrick Wheeler-Smith, the head of the city’s Office for Civil Rights. Rye belittled my work and this site repeatedly, making multiple false claims about my story.

One factual claim—that Mayor Katie Wilson did not put Wheeler-Smith and his deputy, Fahima Mohamed, on administrative leave—merits specific correction. As we reported, Wheeler-Smith has been on family and medical leave to care for his mother; the administrative leave is separate and unrelated.

Additionally, KIRO did not fact check or correct the false claim that Wilson had “been paid, by this gossip blog site, $30,000.” (Rye referred to me as a “gossip blogger” and PubliCola as a “gossip blog” no fewer than nine times—a standard, time-worn term used to dismiss and belittle female journalists and our work.)

As readers know, Wilson was an activist and writer for many years before she decided to run for mayor, and I solicited (and paid for) five pieces from her between 2023 and 2024. The total for those pieces, according to records from my payroll software, Gusto, was $3,900. It appears Rye looked at Wilson’s financial affairs statement and decided to interpret “less than $30,000” (the smallest category) as “$30,000.” The Stranger and the Urbanist also paid Wilson less than $30,000 for period columns in 2024, according to the report.

Here’s an edited version of the two statements I issued after KIRO aired its piece, which it then posted on social media and Youtube with various headlines belittling this website and my work. As of this morning, KIRO as well as the two radio hosts have not responded to any of the posts I have put up on social media, which tagged the hosts as well as the radio station; nor have they responded to comments I have made on the online versions of this segment.

KIRO Radio has still not reached out to me after running a ten-minute segment accusing me of fabricating my heavily reported story about allegations against a city department director by his staff, which their guest called “unsourced.”
They also referred to me as a “gossip blogger” nine times—a misogynistic term used to dismiss female writers since time immemorial. I have been working alongside KIRO Radio’s reporters for 25 years, and their decision to use their massive megaphone to run a 10-minute radio piece trashing me as a person and a journalist is outrageous and unacceptable.
The “Gee and Ursula” show never contacted me about my story before they handed the mic to someone whose apparent goal was to damage my  professional reputation as an independent journalist. They have also ignored my comments about this on social media, on which I tagged them repeatedly and offered to come on their show to explain my reporting process for this story, including the reason whistleblowers who fear retaliation routinely speak to reporters on condition of anonymity.
PubliCola, in publication since 2009, is a fraction of the size of an outlet like KIRO Radio, so my ability to defend myself is dwarfed by KIRO’s ability to defame me as a “gossip blogger” and fabulist. It is appalling that this radio show spent ten minutes of airtime trashing me and my work without bothering to contact me or fact-check any of the false claims made about me by their guest, including the bizarre lie that I paid now-Mayor Katie Wilson $30,000.
Instead, they have shown they are proud of this segment by posting it on YouTube, KIRO’s own site, and elsewhere with splashy headlines like “Angela Rye Calls PubliCola Story a ‘Gossip Blog’ Amid Seattle Civil Rights Drama.” Wilson, who was a writer and activist for many years before she was mayor, wrote for me five times over two years, with the last piece in 2024, long before she ran for mayor. I paid her $3,900 total for those five pieces ($500 for one and between $1,000 and $1,200 for the others.)
I remain eager and willing to come on the “Gee and Ursula” show or any other KIRO show to correct the record about my work and explain my reporting process to their listeners. I realize this is less exciting than a personal and professional attack, but I believe any media outlet should be interested in speaking to the people they are talking about—especially when there is an opportunity to correct false claims they, perhaps unwittingly, led their listeners to believe were accurate.
legislature, Mayor Wilson, Media, Police

SPD Claims “300% Increase In Justice” Due to Surveillance Camera HQ; Judge Rules Against Activists in Press Pass Case

1.  The Seattle Police Department announced earlier this month that its Real Time Crime Center, which receives live feeds from dozens of police surveillance cameras trained on neighborhoods across Seattle, “Triples the Odds That a Victim Receives Justice.” That’s a bold claim for an operation that just got access to live surveillance footage late last summer, when the City Council approved the controversial cameras.

SPD, which is pushing Mayor Katie Wilson to expand police cameras into more Seattle neighborhoods, is using stats like this to convince Wilson that the benefits of surveilling Seattle residents outweigh privacy and overpolicing concerns. (And it appears to be working).

But what does a “300 percent increase in victims receiving justice” mean? SPD canceled a scheduled interview with PubliCola seven minutes before it was supposed to happen—according to Mayor Wilson’s office, SPD put out their press release before the mayor’s office had a chance to look at the report—so all we can go on is the scanty data they provided us prior to our scheduled interview.

That data shows that the 300 percent increase represents an uptick in how often a dispatch (such as a 911 call) resulted in an arrest, broken down further into arrests that included violent crimes and those that were primarily property crimes. Overall, 11.7 percent of dispatches that “involved” the RTCC in some way resulted in an arrests, while just 2 percent of dispatches where the center was not involved resulted in an arrest. The data does not show whether arrests resulted in prosecutions, the percentage of arrested people who went to jail, the demographics of arrestees, or how the RTCC was “involved” in the arrests.

Even with the lack of information beyond arrests, it’s important to note that SPD is describing arrests in themselves as a form of justice, when they could just as easily represent the kind of over-policing that often results when police concentrate their energy on specific neighborhoods and communities. As SPD’s blog post noted (in order to make the opposite point), the new cameras are not located randomly; they’re trained on “high-crime” neighborhoods, including Aurora Ave. N and downtown; if the planned expansion moves forward, SPD cameras are also coming to the Central District and Capitol Hill.

SPD’s blog post goes so far as to describe every arrested person as an “offender,” regardless of whether they were ever prosecuted or found guilty of a crime.

Unsurprisingly, the data showed that in general, SPD was more likely to arrest a person for calls that involved a violent rather than a property crime.

2. Yesterday, a US federal district judge ruled that three right-wing activists—Brandi Kruse, Jonathan Choe, and Ari Hoffman—were not entitled to press passes allowing them into the non-public press areas inside the state house and senate. The three had requested day passes from the Washington State Capitol Correspondents’ Association (CC, saying that they were journalists and should be allowed the same access as the rest of the press.

*Except when requesting special access to legislators, apparently

Kruse, a former FOX 13 reporter, has posted over and over (and over) on X, “I am not a journalist.” She frequently speaks at right-wing rallies, including a rally against trans children held at City Hall last year. Choe, a former KOMO reporter, works for Turning Point Media, the campus activism group founded by Charlie Kirk, and the Discovery Institute, the local right-wing think tank that spawned influential MAGA activist Chris Rufo. Hoffman is a onetime City Council candidate who has a talk show on KVI Radio; he also plagiarized PubliCola on at least one occasion, directly stealing quotes and reporting and representing our work as his own.

Both Choe and Kruse recently took part in a cringe-inducing praise circle at the White House, at which Kruse told Trump that supporting him had made her “more attractive.”

The CCA guidelines for press access say, “It is important that a line be established between professional journalism and political or policy work. This is the spirit in which the Legislature has offered access: The press should act as an independent observer and monitor of the proceedings, not an involved party. This means that we cannot endorse offering credentials to one who is part of, or may become involved with, a party, campaign or lobbying organization,” even if that person worked as a journalist in the past.

The judge in the case, David Estudillo, wrote in his ruling that the CCA rules require media to work for an organization “whose principal business is news dissemination” rather than political activities. Although the three activists accused the organization that issues press passes of being biased against them because of their political views, Judge Castillo noted that the legislature has issued badges to media across the political spectrum; the difference in this case, he wrote, was that all three activists’ main job is advocating and speaking on behalf of political campaigns and causes.

As an example, Estudillo noted that Kruse was a listed speaker at a recent rally outside the state Capitol advocating for two anti-trans initiatives targeting children. The first would overturn state legislation designed to protect LGBTQ+ kids from being outed to their parents if they confide in a trusted adult at school; the second would bar trans girls from participating in school sports. Kruse and the other activists were arguing, in essence, that they should be allowed to headline a rally calling for the repeal of state legislation on the Capitol Steps, walk inside, and demand special access to the state legislators they were just rallying against by claiming to be “media.”

homelessness, Mayor Wilson, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Mayor Wilson Wants to Go Big on Shelter. Will She Succeed—and If She Does, What Then?

By Erica C. Barnett

This week’s episode of Seattle Nice was all about shelter—specifically, Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to allow larger tiny house villages, spend $5 million up front funding them, and—boring but potentially most significant—put the city itself in charge of leasing land for new tiny house villages, RV safe lots, and sanctioned encampments. Currently, any organization that gets city approval to set up a village or sanctioned encampment still has to get permits and approvals from a long list of city departments, which can add as much as a year of delay.

With the city itself in charge of stuff like approving and connecting utilities, signing leases with property owners, and making sure tiny house village locations are up to code, Wilson is betting the city can dramatically cut the timeline from a shelter proposal to opeming day.

Wilson, as we discussed this week, vowed during her campaign to add at least 1,000 new shelter beds in her first year, with a goal of 4,000 new beds by the end of her term. This ambitious goal marks a philosophical shift away from strict housing-first principles (the idea that people need permanent housing before they can tackle their behavioral health issues) toward a shelter-first approach that emphasizes mandatory case management and individualized services to stabilize people after they leave the streets.

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Listening back to our conversation, I was struck by how familiar much of the conversation sounded—not to our usual Seattle Nice bickering over whether Seattle NIMBYs treat homelessness as an aesthetic problem (but—last word—they totally do), but to the last 15 years of debate over how to fix homelessness. Over time, the political pendulum has swung back and forth between a focus on new housing for almost everyone (which costs millions and often takes years), housing vouchers for almost everyone (the concept behind the short-lived Partnership for Zero) and shelter for almost everyone (as a “front door” to housing). The pendulum currently rests on shelter, this time with mandatory case management and bespoke services that will, the Wilson administration hopes, be a more successful approach than past shelter efforts.

Wilson will probably propose a local capital gains tax, or some other kind of progressive revenue, to supplement $5 million her team found in two underutilized city funds. (Note/clarification: This post, and my comments on the podcast, were both a bit flip about the funding source. Around $3.3 million comes from two funds in the Office of Housing that were being underutilized. Both are revolving loan funds paid for by Community Development Block Grants.) And she seems likely to propose using unspent Office of Housing funds to pay for shelter, a prospect that could mean less money for permanent housing in the future, money being fungible. But actually solving homelessness—no one talks anymore about ending it, but making it “brief, one-time, and rare”—has eluded every mayor since Ed Murray declared an official state of emergency on homelessness in 2015.

My biggest concern is that Team Wilson will address unsheltered homelessness by getting thousands of people in shelter, and people for whom homelessness is primary an aesthetic problem—we have to clear those tents near my house, it isn’t compassionate to let them live that way!—will oppose efforts to fund housing for all those people in shelter because they consider the problem solved. My modest hope is that she’ll find a way to build all the shelter she wants and create more pathways to permanent housing, because no matter how warm or colorful, a 100-square-foot shelter is not a home.

Courts, Crime

Facing Thousands of Backlogged Cases, New City Attorney Says She’ll Reorg Her Office for Faster Results

By Erica C. Barnett

When former city attorney Ann Davison started her term in 2024, she pledged to swiftly eliminate a “backlog” of some 5,000 cases she said her predecessor, Pete Holmes, had carelessly allowed to pile up during his final term. And while she did clear out much of that backlog, largely by dropping thousands of older cases, her strategy for eliminating future case pileups—a “close-in-time” policy that required attorneys to decide whether to file cases within five days of receiving police reports—was largely unsuccessful.

When she left office at the end of last year, Davison left behind a backlog of thousands of unresolved cases—between about 4,700 and 5,100, depending on which DUI cases are included in the backlog. The larger number, from City Attorney Erika Evans’ office, includes nearly 400 DUI cases that have been reviewed, but not filed, because of testing delays at the state toxicology lab, while Davison’s office did not count that type of case as part of the backlog.

“My predecessor, former city attorney Davison, also inherited a backlog from former city attorney Pete Holmes,” Evans said. “It seems like it’s common to have [a backlog], and it shouldn’t be at all.”

Scott Lindsay, the former deputy city attorney, told PubliCola his own team had identified about 1,000 cases they believe shouldn’t count toward the backlog, including the DUI “tox hold” cases as well as around 200 cases where attorneys made filing decisions before December 31 but the filings didn’t go through until this year.

“We have some real questions about how they’re doing the math,” Lindsay said. But, he added, “It’s absolutely true that there was a backlog at the end of the Davison administration, and it was growing.”

In addition to the DUI cases that are sitting in tox-lab limbo, the backlog includes around 800 criminal traffic cases, 1,700 domestic violence cases, and more than 1,000 other misdemeanor cases, such as shoplifting, trespassing, and public drug use.

The total also include around 1,000 cases that are unclassified—meaning they could be anything. This problem apparently emerged last year during a long-overdue migration from a case management database, called DAMION, to a modern replacement called JusticeNexus. The new system is designed to handle more complex case files than DAMION, but the transfer has been rough. Apparently, whenever a case category didn’t fit the new system’s parameters, JusticeNexus gave it a blank, or unclassified, status; for example, incoming cases that were previously classified under “review”—as in, ready for the filing unit to review—got categorized as blank in the new system, which didn’t have a corresponding “review” category, according to Lindsay.

“I think it’s much better, as you can imagine, to be using a system that’s not from 1999,” criminal division director Jenna Robert said during a joint interview with Evans on Friday, “but there are definitely growing pains that are going to take  while for us to resolve.”

Evans is a former federal prosecutor; Robert worked in the domestic violence division under former city attorney Pete Holmes before joining the state attorney general’s office in 2021. Evans said this experience gives them an important perspective that her predecessors lacked. “I think that perspective matters, when we’re talking about … understanding that not every case that comes in should be filed, and we really need to be looking at cases that affect public safety,” she said.

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Davison, a Republican, supported new laws cracking down on sex work and drug use and believed in treating “prolific offenders” more harshly than other misdemeanor defendants. But Evans acknowledged that despite her “weird fixations” on certain types of crimes, Davison “did have a lot of cases in diversion, including quality of life crimes” like shoplifting and trespassing.

Evans says there are a few key changes that could help her office address the backlog. First, legislation that just passed the state House, after sailing through the Senate, will allow cities to use private labs to analyze blood samples in suspected DUI cases. Evans testified in favor of the legislation in Olympia last month.

Second, she says the city needs to fund more prosecutors to review and handle increasingly complex cases, which often involve hours of video evidence. Evans is well aware that any request for additional funding will probably fall on deaf ears this year, when the city is facing a $148 million budget deficit. Although Davison managed to squeeze around $300,000 out of the city for two additional domestic violence prosecutors in 2022, Mayor Katie Wilson has asked each department to propose cuts between 5 and 10 percent, and Evans acknowledged that this year’s budget fight will be about preserving her office, not expanding it.

Third, Evans and Robert are restructuring the department so that a single attorney will handle each case from filing to resolution, a “vertical” structure Evans said would give prosecutors a greater sense of “ownership and responsibility” over their cases and prevent a situation where the city attorney’s filing unit is simply “filing for numbers.” Evans said that in her experience as a federal prosecutor, “there’s a different mentality when you’re like, ‘Okay, yeah. This is mine all the way through.”

For crime victims, “just getting the quality they need up front is really important, and I think that that naturally happens when you get a case, it’s yours and it’s not going to just be handed off to someone else to go and try,” Evans said.

These proposals don’t address other factors that could be contributing to chronic case backlogs, such as slow filings or the difficulty of hiring highly qualified lawyers to relatively low-paying government positions. By this time next year, we should have some sense of whether the changes Evans is implementing have started to make a dent in the city prosecutor’s workload, or if this recurring problem is due to other, more intractable forces.

City Council, Civil Rights, homelessness, Mayor Wilson, Police

This Week on PubliCola: March 7, 2026

Expanding tiny house villages, inside-out density, city council staff unionization, and more news you may have missed this week.

By Erica C. Barnett

Tuesday, March 3

As City and County Consider Banning New ICE Facilities, Local Jails Are Exempted from Seattle’s Ban

The city and King County are both passing temporary bans on new ICE detention facilities in areas under their jurisdiction, but only one’s—Seattle’s—does not apply to local jails. As emergency legislation, the Seattle moratorium needs seven of nine votes to pass, and some councilmembers reportedly balked at language temporarily prohibiting new jails, even though no new jail is planned in Seattle.

Wednesday, March 4

An Alternative Approach to Creating Affordable Housing: Inside-Out Urbanism

In his latest Maybe Metropolis column, Josh Feit argues that urbanists should look inward to create new density in neighborhoods, by focusing on changes to buildings themselves (rather than zoning) that could allow more apartments. “Like rearranging how you pack your suitcase rather than buying a bigger suitcase, affordable housing advocates should change the construction equation inside apartment buildings themselves.”

Wilson Announces First Steps Toward 1,000 Shelter Beds: Simpler Leases, Larger Tiny House Villages, More Money for Shelter

Mayor Katie Wilson announced the first part of her big push to add thousands of new shelter beds in her first term. Under the proposal, the city would lease land for new tiny house villages directly, reducing red tape for nonprofit shelter providers, and the city would allow much bigger villages—up to 250 units. The city council still has to approve (and potentially amend) Wilson’s plan, which she rolled out without securing a council sponsor or feedback from council members.

Thursday, March 5

Civil Rights Office Director Put On Leave Over Employee Complaints, Union Alleges Interference in Investigation

The head of the city’s Office for Civil Rights, Derrick Wheeler-Smith, and his deputy are both on paid leave after the city launched an investigation into allegations of discrimination, harassment, and bias by his staff. PubliCola detailed the employees’ claims in a story last week. The union that represents SOCR employees has filed an EEOC complaint challenging the neutrality of the investigation, after Wheeler-Smith notified a city HR investigator about PubliCola’s forthcoming story in February, saying his employees’ claims were specious and part of an effort by the deputy mayor to oust him by planting false stories in the press.

Friday, March 5

City Council’s Legislative Aides Vote to Unionize

Legislative assistants for City Councilmembers have voted to unionize. While previous unionization efforts went nowhere, this one has strong support, thanks to reportedly poor working conditions in some council offices and growing dissatisfaction with the pay disparity between council aides and people doing similar jobs in other departments.

Police Chief Says “We Don’t Take Sides” in Protests

During a presentation on the Seattle Police Department’s plans for responding if federal troops or ICE descend on Seattle, Police Chief Shon Barnes said SPD is neutral during protests, arguing that social media videos and the press use sound bites or misleading photos to misrepresent SPD’s actions.