1. Prior to her State of the City remarks earlier this week, Mayor Jenny Durkan made a hot-mic comment deriding Council President (and mayoral candidate) Lorena González; the comment came during some apparent technical difficulties immediately before the livestreamed speech.

“Slow down a little bit, please,” Durkan says to someone off camera, apparently referring to her remarks on the screen in front of her. “There’s, like, all sorts of shit gone now,” she continues, laughing. “We’ll just go to the top and I’m going to, like, do the best I can.”

“If it was easy,” Durkan continues, “it’d be Lorena’s rebuttal.”

Durkan then proceeded to deliver a State of the City speech that clocked in at just over six minutes—the shortest, by far, in recent memory.

Per custom, Council President González, who announced she’s running for mayor after Durkan announced late last year that she would not seek a second term, did provide a response to Durkan’s State of the City speech. However, far from criticizing the mayor or her comments,  González actually thanked Durkan and city employees for “working hard to keep our City government running smoothly every day since the pandemic first hit our region a year ago.”

During a Town Hall Seattle forum on women in politics on Wednesday night, Durkan said she decided not to run for a second term, in large part, because if she stayed in the race her opponents would “feel like they have to be oppositional,” even if they agree with her, “because they’re running against me or supporting an opponent.”

“At the end of the day,” she added, “that was my job: Doing what was right for the city.”

Despite Durkan’s insistence that running for reelection during a crisis would elevate politics over what’s “right for the city,” campaigning for office while running the city isn’t unprecedented or irresponsible. In fact, it’s a standard part of a mayor’s job description.

2. Former city council member Tim Burgess and SoDo Business Improvement Area director Erin Goodman have formed a political action committee to support an initiative related to drug use, homelessness, and behavioral health in Seattle. The new PAC, called Seattle Cares, has received an initial $15,000 contribution from the Downtown Seattle Association. Last election cycle, Burgess formed a PAC with the similarly anodyne name People for Seattle, which worked to defeat council members Lisa Herbold and Kshama Sawant and to oppose then-candidate Tammy Morales.

Although the committee has not filed initiative language yet, clues can be found in a poll PubliCola reported on earlier this month, which asked respondents about their support for a ballot measure that would give police additional tools to remove homeless people from public spaces, apparently in combination with some kind of behavioral health and addiction treatment funding.

The poll asked respondents their opinion of a Seattle ballot initiative that would use existing government funds to support treatment for mental illness and drug addiction while giving police more authority to “intervene” if people experiencing homelessness didn’t accept the “help” they were offered. The hypothetical ballot measure, according to the poll, would also re-establish the police-led Navigation Team, which removed encampments across Seattle until the city council eliminated the team in last year’s budget.

It’s unclear where the funds for the measure would come from or what kind of “behavioral health” and addiction services would be offered to people experiencing homelessness. Supporters of encampment sweeps, quoted in media such as KOMO TV’s “Seattle Is Dying” series, often tout non-evidence-based approaches such as involuntary treatment for people with addiction. Burgess said Thursday that the official committee filing “was meant to comply with legal requirements but we are still debating and crafting what we might do, if anything.”

3. Speaking of polls, another poll in the field this month—this one funded by United Food and Commercial Workers Local 21— asked about a potential city policy that would impose a surcharge on medical marijuana, specifically, to fund training and certification for people who sell cannabis products. The poll framed the new certification program as an opportunity for professional growth and a way of promoting equity among cannabis retailers, and tested a message positioning the surcharge as a way to fund improved service and support for medical marijuana consumers.

Sarah Cherin, UFCW 21’s executive vice president, told PubliCola she couldn’t provide details yet about any potential ballot measure. “Cannabis went from being illegal to essential in a short span time. The laws haven’t kept up,” Cherin said.

UFCW has organized cannabis workers in other states, and has found itself on the other side of workers’ rights issues from large weed sellers such as Uncle Ike’s. Last month, Cherin testified in favor of legislation that would give more emphasis to labor standards such as providing health care, paying a living wage, and having a collective bargaining agreement in place on the list of standards that the state liquor and cannabis board uses to determine whether to grant a marijuana business license. Uncle Ike’s employees testified against the legislation.

Washington state currently imposes a 37 percent excise tax on both recreational and medical cannabis products, the highest in the country. A proposal being considered by the state senate, SB 5004, would exempt medical marijuana patients from this tax.

4. Former King County sheriff Sue Rahr is stepping down as the head of the state’s Criminal Justice Training Commission (CJTC), the agency that certifies, de-certifies, and coordinates training for law enforcement officers in Washington.

Rahr announced her retirement on Wednesday morning after leading the CJTC for nine years. Before joining the commission in 2012, Rahr worked for the King County Sheriff’s Office for 33 years, including six years as sheriff.

Monica Alexander, a former Washington State Patrol Captain, will take over as the CJTC’s interim executive director. Alexander began working for the state patrol in 1996, becoming the first and only Black woman to ascend to the rank of captain within the agency; she also did a six-year stint as a traffic reporter for KOMO News.

The changes to the CJTC’s leadership come as the Washington State Senate considers a bill that would significantly expand the commission’s authority to de-certify or suspend law enforcement officers for misconduct. Under current state law, the CJTC has to wait until a law enforcement agency fires an officer before considering whether to decertify that officer, which allows officers facing misconduct charges to move to new jurisdictions before they can be fired. The legislation would expand the commission’s powers, allowing it to decertify law enforcement officers at its discretion, including officers who retire or resign in lieu of termination.

The bill would also require law enforcement agencies to report any serious use-of-force incidents to the commission, as well as any preliminary misconduct allegations or criminal charges of which their officers are found guilty. The commission would use that information to identify officers whose misconduct is bad enough to merit decertification.