1. City council members Rob Saka, Joy Hollingsworth, Maritza Rivera, and Bob Kettle have all proposed amendments to legislation proposed by City Attorney Ann Davison and sponsored by Kettle that would create zones from which people accused of drug-related crimes, including public drug use or possession, can be prohibited.

The legislation, which Davison proposed in June, expands on the old “Stay Out of Drug Area” zones established and expanded under former city attorney Mark Sidran, who is primarily remembered for instituting a number of punitive laws and policies, among them the “teen dance ordinance,” the poster ban, and many laws targeting homeless people, including a notorious prohibition on sitting down on public sidewalks.

As we’ve noted, banishment areas (whether for drug users or sex workers, who would be banned from Aurora under a different law proposed by Councilmember Cathy Moore) have an expansionary logic: When people are banned from existing in one area, they move just outside the banishment zone, until enough people complain that they are banned from that area as well. The result the last time these zones were widespread in Seattle  was that people eventually give up even trying to stay out of the expanded no-go zone, as Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert discussed in their 2010 book Banished.

In each amendment, the sponsoring council member justifies the SODA zone in their council district with the phrase, “Due to high levels of significant drug activity.” The zones will not stop this significant drug activity, but they will push it outside the zones, which will then require expanding, until most of the city is once again off-limits to people who have no choice but to display the symptoms of their addiction in public. The bill, which expresses concerns about “reducing overdose deaths,” does not address drug use and overdoses inside people’s homes.

Also Friday, Moore proposed a promised amendment to her legislation that would bring back the old prostitution loitering law and Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP) banishment zones, clarifying that only people accused of being sex buyers to pimps would be subject to SOAP bans and prohibited from going anywhere near North Aurora Ave. As we reported last month, Seattle has attempted to focus on sex buyers in the very recent past, and it did not result in a decrease in the sex trade on Aurora and in other SOAP areas.

Moore’s amendment would also slightly expand the proposed Aurora SOAP zone and add a few more nonbinding recital clauses about diversion and the need for an “emergency receiving center” for women leaving the sex trade, which the legislation does not fund.

2. The Office of Police Accountability declined to interview Seattle Police Department general counsel Becca Boatright when it investigated a complaint about a Facebook post that appeared to dismiss female officers’ concerns about harassment and discrimination in the department as “clickbait.”

“Negative headlines may be the clickbait but for the honest brokers interested in an honest discussion, we’re here to have it. I’m so proud to be a member of the SPD and of the incredible work my teams do. Real change comes from within. Follow the data, lean into the science,” the post said.

Boatright’s post went up shortly after the release of a report in which a dozen women in the department described their experiences, which included sexual harassment, casual misogyny, and story after story of women getting passed over for promotions in favor of less-qualified men.

The person who filed the OPA complaint said the post constituted “harassment, unprofessionalism, and retaliation against female SPD employees who alleged mistreatment by SPD.”

A spokesperson for the OPA said the case was “certified for an expedited investigation. That means OPA and [the city’s Office of the Inspector General] agreed that OPA could issue recommended findings based solely on its intake investigation without interviewing the named employee.” Generally, an expedited investigation means that OPA decided an officer didn’t violate SPD policy—in this case, the policy prohibiting SPD employees from ridiculing or maligning protected classes.

3. Former City Councilmember Alex Pedersen co-authored an opinion piece for the Neighborhoods for Smart Streets lobby group, which formed during the heated debate over a bike lane in Wedgwood, urging a “no” vote on the Seattle Transportation Levy, which would provide $1.55 million for new sidewalks, road maintenance, spot improvements to help buses operate more smoothly, and protected bike lanes, among many other projects. The ballot measure includes the biggest investment in new sidewalks in the levy’s history.

Pedersen, along with former councilmember Margaret Pageler and Latino Civil Alliance board chair Nina Martinez, argues that the proposal is a “$1.5 BILLION boondoggle” (the word “billion” is capitalized like that throughout the piece) that “uses Seattle’s middle class like an ATM machine” to fund projects that only “bicycling clubs”—apparently a reference to the Cascade Bicycle Club, a perennial bugbear for the Seattle Times—will ever use.

“Lobbyists larded the levy with unnecessary projects – including costly bike lanes that are rarely used and impede access to brick-and-mortar small businesses,” Pedersen and his co-authors write. “It’s inequitable because it shoves 100% of the cost onto Seattle residents.”

During his single term on the council, Pedersen was a big fan of “impact fees” that would divert the cost of public street improvements onto housing developers. Based on the premise that new apartments have a negative impact on cities, transportation impact fees drive up the cost of new housing (and thus directly increase rents), but don’t impact incumbent single-family homeowners because they aren’t taxes.

Pedersen and his co-authors go so far as to claim the levy is inequitable to people of color, based on a January 2024 survey that they claim shows “most people of color oppose this levy.” While a majority of people the survey lumped into an undifferentiated “BIPOC” category did say they’d oppose a hypothetical $1.2 billion or $1.7 billion levy back in January, the city didn’t release even preliminary details of the actual levy until almost four months later. The high-level conclusion of that poll Pedersen cited? A strong majority of voters supported a $1.7 billion levy even without knowing the exact details of what it would fund.