It’s been more than two years since former Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan’s administration removed the directory of city employees from the city’s publici website, and current Mayor Bruce Harrell has not restored it. The impact of this decision to make public information inaccessible to the public is that, more than ever, gatekeepers stand between ordinary Seattle residents and the information they’re seeking; unless you have special access to an insider, you’ll have to go through official channels to contact the person you’re looking for.
Seattle is virtually alone among major city governments in Washington State,in concealing employee contact information. In our region alone, the cities of Shoreline, Redmond, Issaquah, Bellevue, and many others—not to mention King County, which has more than 14,000 employees—offer public-facing employee directories. The state of Washington has its own public directory, with contact information for tens of thousands of state employees, from Accountancy to Workforce Training and Education.
By deleting, then failing to restore, its own directory, Washington’s biggest city has chosen to be an outlier—a decision made all the more glaring by city leaders’ frequent talk about “accessibility” and “transparency.”
When the city disappeared the directory, Durkan’s interim IT director (who still holds that position) suggested the deletion was the result of a software glitch that would be fixed soon, most likely by the end of 2021. Obviously, that never happened. A person seeking the city’s directory at its former location will find generic links to the websites for all city departments, plus separate, redundant links for two customer service offices that are on that first website. The page also includes a link to the city’s official media contacts and the city’s open data portal, which includes a database of 466 contacts in a single department—the Department of Construction and Inspections.
As we did last year, in the interest of actual transparency and accessibility, PubliCola is publishing a searchable database with contact information for all city employees, using records we received in response to our disclosure requests. (Apologies for the the weird url; Glitch, whose tools we used to create this database, currently isn’t allowing custom domains.) We’ll update this database later in the year.
Although this database duplicates much of what was in the official city directory, representing an accurate contact list for city employees as of late 2023, it does not provide a substitute for transparency from the city itself, which is ultimately responsible for providing this kind of basic information to its residents. the latest city directory in the interest of actual transparency and accessibility.