By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council delayed a vote on an initiative, I-137, to fund social housing, citing unspecified legal concerns, on Tuesday. The council’s last-minute maneuver prevents the measure from going onto the ballot in November, when progressive voter turnout is likely to be high. A majority of the council appears to oppose the measure, which would impose a 5% tax, paid by employers, on employee compensation above $1 million a year.

Voters approved a separate measure, Initiative 135, last February; that initiative created a new public developer to build permanently affordable, mixed-income public housing for people making between 0 and 120 percent of the Seattle median income. Initiative 137 would provide a funding source to build that housing. The campaign for I-135 and I-137, House Our Neighbors, collected about 35,000 signatures to support putting the measure on the November ballot.

The delay gives the council more time to draft and approve an alternative ballot measure that would appear alongside the social housing measure. Last week, the Seattle Chamber put out a poll testing messages on I-137 and an alternative measure, “Proposition 1-B,” that would amend the housing levy voters adopted last year to use some of its funds for social housing, defined as “housing with a mix of income levels not to exceed 80% of median income, that is developed or acquired by, and then owned in perpetuity or as long as lawfully possible by, a public developer.”

Ordinarily, when a council majority opposes an initiative, their recourse is to put a competing initiative on the ballot—something that happened with voting alternatives in 2022 and with the Families and Education Levy in 2014, to name just a couple of examples. What councils generally don’t do—what appears, in fact, to be unprecedented in recent history—is use delay tactics to keep a measure out of the election for which it qualified, in order to push the measure to a later, less favorable election cycle.

Councilmember Tammy Morales, the only council member to vote against the delay, later called the vote “one of the most undemocratic moments I’ve seen in Seattle,” noting that not only did the council vote to keep I-137 off the Presidential election-year ballot, Council President Sara Nelson also cut off public comment, refusing to hear from people who showed up and signed in to speak.

Nelson had already cut the allotted time for each comment from two minutes to one, a practice the city council once used far more judiciously, and admonished the audience repeatedly for clapping and cheering, which she said slowed down the public comment process.

Near the end of in-person public comment, Councilmember Bob Kettle—whose legislation approving a contract with the SCORE jail many members of the public had come to City Hall to oppose—could be heard on a hot mic, immediately after a person spoke against the jail contract and proposed anti-drug and prostitution laws, muttering, “This fucking drives me nuts” (listen below):

Nelson herself was responsible for most of the delay in Tuesday’s meeting, because she called two ten-minute recesses, which were both followed—unsurprisingly—by shouts from the crowd, who chanted, “You didn’t let us speak!”

In the past, council members in charge of meetings have often defused similar situations by letting people speak, or (less productively) forcing the public to leave, using security or police to move or arrest people who refuse to go. This time—perhaps hoping to avoid the spectacle of arresting members of the public—Nelson  stopped the meeting and had the entire council retreat to their offices, where they reemerged, virtually, a few minutes later. (Nelson, somewhat ironically, has insisted that in-person meetings are infinitely superior to virtual ones.)

Back in the relative solitude of their offices, the council resumed its discussion about the city’s contract with SCORE, a jail in Des Moines where the city hopes to jail people accused of committing misdemeanors, such as public drug use and (soon) prostitution and drug loitering, in all parts of the city. Councilmember Bob Kettle, the council sponsor for Mayor Bruce Harrell’s legislation, said he was assured by a visit to SCORE that their facility was high-quality and the medical care was stellar. “They’re fantastic at providing care at SCORE,” Kettle said.

Shortly after the meeting, Andrew Engelson, who’s been covering SCORE for PubliCola, reported on X that a 42-year-old man died at SCORE one week ago—the seventh death at the jail in less than 18 months.

The downtown King County jail recently began booking people on misdemeanors committed in the so-called Downtown Activation Zone, but generally only books people accused of crimes that endanger other people directly, such as domestic violence and DUI, or people who are on City Attorney Ann Davison’s “high utilizers” list.)

The contract would cost well over the $2 million annual sticker price listed in the legislation, because that estimate doesn’t include any of the new court staff, defense attorneys, and technology upgrades the municipal court has said will be necessary to implement it. The cost to transport people between Des Moines and Seattle—a 30-to-40-minute drive—is also unknown, since the city hasn’t identified which kinds of cases it plans to send to SCORE; most people booked on nonviolent misdemeanors are back out on the street in a day or two, but those with more complex cases may stay longer, necessitating more travel back and forth for court appearances.

According to a fiscal note produced by Harrell’s office, the SCORE contract will have no race and social justice implications, and the city did not perform a racial equity toolkit or any other racial equity analysis on the legislation. “The ability to utilize the jail for misdemeanor bookings is not a new process for the city and has historically been utilized as one of many tools when upstream approaches and community-based interventions have been unsuccessful,” the fiscal note explains.

The city’s Reentry Work Group, established in 2015 by a city council that included Harrell, recommended in 2018 that the city reduce its reliance on jails as a response to misdemeanor offenses, noting that “Black individuals only comprise 7% of the King County population, but account for 36% of the King County Jail population; Native Americans only comprise of 1% of the King County population, but account for 2.7% of the King County Jail population.” That same work group recommended removing drug and prostitution loitering laws from the criminal code. Although that recommendation was released in 2018, the council didn’t pass it until two years later; now, arguing that the previous council went “too far” in adopting progressive legislation, the new council is preparing to reinstate both laws.

As its last act of the day, the council approved the SCORE contract (with an amendment by Councilmember Dan Strauss requiring a report on “identified operational issues”) on an 8-1 vote, with Morales voting “no.”

Note: This story originally reported that Tammy Morales abstained from the SCORE vote, and that the vote was 7-1. This error has been corrected.