1. At a press conference outside City Hall on Thursday morning, the union that represents thousands of City of Seattle employees, announced that they’re endorsing Katie Wilson for Seattle mayor. The endorsement is particularly monumental given that most of the city employees represented by PROTEC17 work for Mayor Bruce Harrell and are making the case to voters for firing their boss.
“This was not an easy decision for our union, but in these challenging times, PROTEC17 members are looking for a shared vision for a better city and a clear plan for how we’ll get there,” the union’s executive director Karen Estevenin, said. “”PROTEC17 members are deeply concerned with affordability in our city… [and] creating pathways that should have been created years ago for progressive revenue so that we can address the city deficit and prevent the loss of critical services right now.”
Although the largest coalition of local labor unions, the MLK Labor Council, endorsed Harrell, a number of smaller unions, along with the Working Families Party and all of the local Democratic Party groups, have endorsed Wilson—who, as the head of the Transit Riders Union, played a leading role in the passage of higher minimum wage laws around the region, renter protections in Seattle such as caps on move-in costs and late fees, and the JumpStart payroll tax that has saved the city repeatedly from devastating budget cuts.
“It’s not an easy thing to challenge an incumbent mayor who’s been in office a very long time, and I know that it is not an easy thing for people and organizations with skin in the game to support a challenger to such an incumbent, especially when that incumbent is your boss,” Wilson said Thursday. “I believe that we will win this race, and despite the enormous challenges facing our city, from a quarter-billion-dollar budget deficit to an escalating homelessness crisis to attacks from the Trump administration, I feel immensely hopeful for the future of our city.”
2. For its part, Harrell’s campaign has decided to go with the evergreen tactic of “paint our opponent as the second coming of Kshama Sawant.” In a recent campaign mailing, Harrell said Wilson was “clear in her support for an arbitrary 50% cut in the SPD budget”—linking, perhaps assuming no one would click, to a Crosscut article in which Wilson laid out a detailed plan for the city to replace police by using less expensive civilian workers for jobs like directing traffic at events and responding to mental health crises.
In the email, which echoed a recent poll testing whether voters would buy that Wilson is a “loud,” “angry,” “divisive” woman, Harrell even referred to the entire Defund the Police movement from 2020 as “Wilson’s defund movement– led on council by her longtime ally Kshama Sawant,” and blamed Wilson indirectly for “an exodus from SPD and a dramatic rise in violent crime, crime that disproportionately impacted lower income and communities of color.”<
‘Lest it be forgotten, Wilson was never strongly aligned with Sawant—in fact, Sawant blamed the “Katie Wilson-dominated liberal activist layer” for “crowding out” Socialist Alternative, her political party at the time, during the city budget debate in 2019. Sawant has not been a council member since 2023.
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3. In a separate Harrell campaign email, deputy mayor Tim Burgess (a man who very specifically owes his job to Harrell) said he was supporting the mayor because he would “strengthen the positive momentum for change”—a bold assertion, given that Harrell has been either a city council member or mayor for 16 of the last 18 years. Burgess’ email encourages voters to think back to how bad things were during the pandemic— “The police chief resigned. Tents appeared everywhere, cluttering parks and sidewalks”—and thank their lucky stars that Harrell was elected mayor.
Burgess’ email attributes the turnaround Seattle has seen since 2020, including a decline in tents on sidewalks, lower violent crime rates, and even an increase in shelter referrals (a statistic Harrell’s predecessor Jenny Durkan also loved to throw around) to Harrell’s bold actions. In reality, while Harrell has dramatically increased no-notice encampment sweeps (a contrast to 2020, when Durkan was forced to pause sweeps at the height of COVID lockdown) the number of people experiencing homelessness in Seattle has only increased, with Native, Black, and Latino people most affected.
(“Referrals” to shelter remains a meaningless metric. It’s like declaring victory when the number of 911 calls for overdoses goes up; the true measure of success is how many people enroll in shelter and move on to more permanent housing, or how many lives first responders actually save after they show up.)<
“Police arrests,” Burgess wrote, are “at their highest level since 2020″—a metric Harrell’s supporters may view as an unmitigated good, but which should cause more skeptical voters to ask, “Arrests for what?” The city has made many illegal activities extra-illegal since Harrell was elected, including drug use and possession, sex work, street racing, graffiti.
4. Harrell’s fundraising email also blasted his opponent Joe Mallahan, saying “How dare a candidate say anyone overreacted to the murder of George Floyd. Harrell was mischaracterizing Mallahan’s comments about “the overreaction” to the murder of George Floyd . In fact, Mallahan’s views about the 2020 protests are right in line with Harrell’s own message in the same email—that city officials were out of line for even considering cuts to police spending in 2020.
Mallahan doesn’t need Harrell’s help to put his foot in his mouth. At a campaign forum in Columbia City on Wednesday night, Mallahan talked about how he and “my immigrant wife” “stumbled into” the Royal Esquire Club a few years ago and were welcomed with open arms by the people there.
The Royal Esquire Club is a private social club for Black men where Harrell served in leadership roles and to which he has steered city funding. Harrell came under scrutiny in 2018 and 2019 for allegedly pressuring the city’s Office of Labor Standards to drop a investigation into wage theft based on the allegations of five women who worked at the club.
Mallahan later compared the Royal Esquire to the Greenlake bar and venue the Little Red Hen, which he called “basically the Royal Esquire Club for the white folks on the north side” in response to a question about how the candidates would work to “save the Hen” and other “creative third spaces” in Seattle.
During his closing statement, Mallahan did an “I have Black friends” routine, saying, “I have a Black man who’s 39 or 40 years old, who calls me his father” as well as a Black nephew. He also worked on the campaigns for Obama and Kamala Harris, he added.
Defund! Somebody said defund once! While calling that out might have had some salience during the pandemic when crime was on the rise, that’s now history and people can reflect on the fact a statement on a sign at a protest didn’t actually lead to any losses in the police budget. But that doesn’t keep Harrell and the conservative ilk from thinking they have discovered some magic spell to drive off their competition. Defuuuund!
What we really got from this crowd was the reverse: a massive increase in the police budget and related costs. What was in, $100 million? And they had to cover the ensuing budget hole by raiding JumpStart? Whacking another part of the budget to pay for their drunken sailor-like spending spree? And funds for affordable housing no less, even though they rode the homelessness hype train right into office, but ensuring the homeless will remain with us for as long as possible (my guess is keeping the homeless population large is a lubricant for a larger police budget).
No, these sailors are committed to staying on the bottle. Just the other day I read on this site they want to put in more cameras, keep spending on security measures and expand the police budget like there’s no tomorrow. And the budget is still in trouble, so where will they cut next? They act exactly like Michael Gordon below would have it (though he goes on to denounce them as “insane progressive,” ha!) Conservative boilerplate is a state should be a night watchman state whose only valid function is to defend property rights.
So if Howell and the rest of the clown show at city hall want to scream about Defund! then let’s all take a look at what is actually being defunded, and the consequences of that.
Well, if you think defunding the police is the right thing to do, then vote for Katie. I’d demand a mock budget from her campaign before the election however. She’s had a lot big ideas over the years at the Transit Rider’s Union…. and I sincerely doubt there’s any realistic way to pay for any of them.
Cutting the police budget is a good way to fix the deficit in the current city budget, but it won’t actually buy any of the socialist programs Katie’s supporters want. Every dollar of tax money is pretty much been promised to pay some existing expense no matter who’s mayor. The police get close to half a billion in 2025? Cutting that in half is $250,000,00 right? That’s enough money for 500 units of low income housing. I doubt Ms. Wilson could honestly build 1,000 new units of low income housing in 4 years. Doesn’t matter who’s mayor, nothing is going to really change in Seattle.
Yes I don’t think there is a politician alive who could not be accused of over-promising results on the campaign. I’m not too interested in speculative policy proposals after listening to thousands of them over a lifetime of active political life. But I do expect a change in terms of priorities at the top of the administration. Because I’m not a downtown property or business owner (or investor in either), the current administration is more like a wet blanket, so a person with broader interests strikes me as a relief.
I’m struggling to endorse Harrell or Wilson. Rather than more insane progressive bs, we need a conservative mayor. That is unlikely in heavily democratic Seattle. The liberal/progressive bs has and continues to destroy Seattle.
No, actually we don’t need a conservative mayor. Simply put that would be the worst outcome for Seattle and the region overall. The rich are already coddled enough by city government, a conservative mayor would knock down any barrier to their every whim. Talk about destruction!