1. City attorney Ann Davison has hired a former Pierce County deputy prosecutor, Fred Wist II, as her new criminal division chief; he’ll replace Natalie Walton-Anderson, who resigned last year.
According to Davis’ announcement, Wist “oversaw the elimination of a backlog of thousands of cases and worked with stakeholders to more efficiently move cases through the criminal justice system” in Pierce County. There’s scant information about Wist online, and several people who routeinly deal with the city attorney’s office said they had never heard of him; his Facebook page—where he uses a sheriff’s badge with a “thin blue line” mourning band as his avatar—is mostly inactive.
Wist was in the news a few years ago, though, when his office investigated the actions of a special drug investigation unit led by Lt. (and 2021 Pierce County Sheriff candidate) Cyndie Fajardo, finding they had committed potentially dozens of policies and procedures, including falsifying a police report to protect an informant. Fajardo and eight deputies later sued Wist, another deputy prosecutor, and several sheriff’s department officials, accusing Wist and the other defendants of harming their reputation for “political” reasons; the prosecutors put some of the officers on a “Brady” list of dishonest cops, preventing them from testifying in court.
One of the council’s resolutions seeks to “reverse” the following trends “to pre-pandemic” status: “disruptions to transportation patterns and behaviors, which have resulted in sustained trends including increased remote work, intra-neighborhood trips, and use of public right-of-way for people uses, alongside reduced downtown commute trips and an associated decline in transportation revenues.”
2. On Thursday morning, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s governing committee, made up of elected officials, could discuss plans to reorganize the embattled agency’s governance structure to give more power to elected officials and less to the experts and people with direct experience of homelessness who make up the agency’s implementation board. (Representatives from actual homeless service providers are explicitly barred from serving on this board.)
This would be the long-awaited showdown over who is in “charge” of the agency, and could result in a singular new board made up mostly of elected officials with a handful of homelessness experts in the mix—a change that would effectively hand power to the elected officials who ceded authority to experts when the KCRHA was created in 2019.
While that discussion has been going on, the homelessness authority has decided to forge ahead with its search for a permanent CEO—a process that two powerful members of the CEO search committee, Seattle Chamber CEO Rachel Smith and former governor Christine Gregoire, told committee members and Mayor Bruce Harrell they wanted to halt. Interim CEO Darrell Powell, Harrell’s pick for the temporary position, is reportedly one of the top contenders for the permanent job.
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3. Earlier this week, the City Council’s transportation committee approved several amendments to Mayor Harrell’s Seattle Transportation Plan, including one intended to “identify the Council’s priorities for future renewal of the Move Seattle Levy.” As we’ve reported, advocates for active transportation and safer streets have asked the city to increase levy spending on transit, sidewalks, and safety improvements, which Harrell’s proposal cuts in favor of huge new investments in roads and bridges that primarily serve cars.
So what are some of the council’s top priorities? In addition to sidewalks and street calming to “deter… drive-by shootings” near schools and in areas with high levels of “vehicle-involved [gun] violence,” one of the council’s resolutions seeks to “reverse” the following trends “to pre-pandemic” status: “disruptions to transportation patterns and behaviors, which have resulted in sustained trends including increased remote work, intra-neighborhood trips, and use of public right-of-way for people uses, alongside reduced downtown commute trips and an associated decline in transportation revenues.”
In other words: People need to re-commit themselves to hated commutes, stop working from home, stop patronizing businesses inside their own neighborhoods (so much for the 15-minute city?) and make room for cars in streets that transformed during the pandemic into safe places for kids to play. It’s a weird juxtaposition: Full-throated support for sidewalks in neighborhoods (and, thanks to an amendment from Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth, traffic calming improvements on Lake Washington Boulevard) combined with a hellbent insistence on getting everyone back on the road to their downtown cubicles.
Other council goals for the plan: “Improving on-time performance of transit in the Denny Way corridor,” home to the perpetually delayed Route 8; including funding for traffic calming on Lake Washington Boulevard (courtesy Joy Hollingsworth) and, as we’ve reported, Bob Kettle’s amendment to “exclude funding for the Pike Place Event Street”—a concept-level plan to periodically kick cars out of Pike Place Market and allow people to enjoy the space—from the transportation levy.
Stop working from home, the City Council commands.
These people are awful. Can’t think of anything but downtown and the asset owners who want their equity realized, pronto. They paid top dollar, after all, to have a “democracy” of exactly their choosing — and exactly so thanks to Tim Ceis.
I’d be so glad if homeless people would only have advisory role in KCRHA. We need people with management, contracting and business running skills and the homeless don’t have these.
Strictly speaking, you don’t know that “the homeless” don’t have those. There’s nothing in the homeless service infrastructure to identify homeless people’s skills, or at least there wasn’t when I was interacting with that infrastructure 2012-2021, and I haven’t *heard* of that changing since. Movies, at least, claim that business owners whose businesses fail often become homeless. While you could argue that failure disqualifies someone’s skills, I think you’d be on shaky ground there.
Wha? Opening up more streets to cars won’t get butts in seats downtown, but better public transit will. Traffic is back to being pre-pandemic insufferable, but buses are struggling. Council will have to make a great case for how this policy shift jibes with climate change mitigation and the (hopefully) shared goal of being a livable city?
This group has an agenda to pass, and none of the above are included.