1. Seattle City Councilmember Bob Kettle recently contracted COVID after coming in to his City Hall office while a family member was home sick with the highly infectious disease. During the period when he was not yet testing positive, he and his staff continued to work at City Hall without wearing masks, according to sources on the floor.

Although Kettle told PubliCola that he personally stayed home for a week after his first positive COVID test (including five days after his symptoms receded), his presence on the second floor during the time when his family member was sick unnerved at least one council member, Tammy Morales, who wrote in an email to the city clerk and council HR, “I just learned that a couple folks on the floor are home with Covid. Can I ask you to send around our policies to remind folks WHEN TO STAY HOME.”

According to a staffer for his office, Kettle “took multiple tests and the moment he received a positive result, he immediately began to work from home, and followed the five-day protocol once he received a negative test(s).” The city asks employees to isolate for five days after a positive test and stay home if they still have symptoms; however, even asymptomatic people can be contagious. Kettle and a staffer confirmed that no one else in his office contracted COVID from him.

Council president Sara Nelson and other council members have frequently touted the benefits of in-person work to council members and their staff as well as the recovery of downtown businesses. The council now holds all its meetings in person; previously, some council members attended remotely, including one council member with a young child and one who is immunocompromised.

2. Facing the largest budget shortfall in recent history, many city council members have latched on to the idea that city departments are inefficient and full of costly redundancies—a problem council budget committee chair Dan Strauss has recently taken to illustrating with the example of city arborists. “We have multiple different departments that have arborists,” Strauss said at a committee meeting last month, and “I think it makes more sense to have them all in one department.”

Earlier this week, Councilmember Rob Saka took up the mantle, calling the city’s many arborists the “canonical example” of the need for “consolidation” at the city on an episode of the Seattle Channel’s “City Inside/Out,” which features panel discussions with city council members.

“Do we need 17 different departments with arborists, or can they sit under one [department]—parks, for example, or whatever it is. But we need to better consolidate our functions, services, our lines of business, avoid duplication of efforts, [and] I think we’ll achieve some some great savings through that,” Saka said.

Curious, we looked to see how many arborists the city has and in how many different departments. As it turns out, Saka and Strauss are correct that the city has arborists in multiple departments. It has a total of two: One in the Parks Department, and one in SDOT. It’s unclear how moving both positions into one department or the other would save the city money.

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3. As PubliCola reported late last year, Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon failed to inform the city council about a letter from Deputy King County Executive Shannon Braddock telling him the city needed to come up with a plan to spend $1 million the county was offering to build a shelter or lose the money.

Bailon sat on the letter for a week before telling the full council about it, claiming he was too busy responding to to emails opposing a temporary encampment at a local church that was run by a nonprofit started by then-council member Cydney Moore.

Although Bailon later changed his story, documents obtained through a records request show that he did spend a great deal of time responding to opponents of the encampment and raising questions about its legality. Those emails included:

• A note to the Burien fire chief asking him if the city could ensure that all the tents at the encampment would be “flame retardant”;

• An email to Burien Police Chief Ted Boe asking him to send an officer to a meeting to refute “potentially false claims” by the encampment’s sponsor that sex offenders would be barred from the encampment (which they were);

• An email warning the superintendent of the Highline Public School District about the church encampment’s “proximity to Highline High School” and claiming that the encampment violated city law;

• At least seven emails to people who wrote him to oppose the encampment, saying he was “very sorry to hear” about the problems the encampment would cause them and encouraging them to attend an upcoming meeting where they could express their opposition.

The encampment closed in February.