Now he wants voters to believe he represents the working class—and that his opponent, renter Katie Wilson, is an out-of touch-elite.
By Erica C. Barnett
Mayor Bruce Harrell has attacked his opponent Katie Wilson for being insufficiently “working-class,” casting himself as a man of the people running against an out-of-touch elitist who “has never had to struggle because her parents are still paying her bills at age 43,” as a campaign spokesperson put it last month.
Harrell, 67, has been wealthy for decades, and his travel while in office reflects his access to a personal expense account most ordinary travelers would envy. While traveling on city business, the mayor has spent tens of thousands of dollars of his own money to upgrade his accommodations from the economy flights and midrange hotel paid for by the city to purchase first-class flights and luxury accommodations for himself and his wife, Joanne.
Over a two-year period, according to documents obtained through a records request, Harrell spent at least $55,000 on 16 first-class flights to attend conferences, tours, training sessions, and ceremonial events on behalf of the city, among at least 24 out-of-town trips he took during that period.
Hotels for 14 of those trips—the only ones for which the mayor’s office provided hotel expense information—cost at least another $24,000.
Only a small portion of this sum, which represents part of the mayor’s travel between February 2023 and February 2025, was reimbursed by the city; the mayor paid for upgrades, and all of the first lady’s travel, on his own dime.
Generally, the Harrells paid for their travel by credit card (often accumulating Alaska airline points), and received partial reimbursement from the city, reflecting what the same trip would cost for the mayor alone if he was traveling on the city’s middlebrow dime. Harrell was often accompanied by mayoral staff and his security detail on his travels, but the records we received do not include travel costs for the mayor’s retinue.
The records reveal the extent to which Harrell has been out of town while on the job—at least 11 weeks in 2023, seven in 2024, and four weeks in the first six months of 2025. This almost certainly underrepresents the mayor’s travel, since it does not include vacation and may not include every city-sponsored trip; for instance, the documents show almost no travel between August and December 2024, indicating either that the mayor did not leave town for five straight months or that the mayor’s office did not provide complete records for that year.
We chose to look at February 2023 through February 2025 because that was the longest period for which the mayor’s office provided a relatively complete set of records.
The pricey flights and luxe hotels reflect the dramatic wealth gap between of Seattle’s 57th mayor, who reported his family’s net worth at around $15 million in 2021, and most of his constituents, to whom lie-flat airplane beds and $1,000-a-night hotels are far out of reach.
The records, which consist mostly of emails between mayoral staff and Joanne Harrell about travel details and reimbursements, don’t include all hotel and flight expenses. For example, they exclude the cost of hotels and flights for at least seven trips, making a total tally of expenses impossible.
Still, the expense records we did receive show that the Harrells travel in style. Here are a few examples of the expenses the Harrells incurred while traveling on the city’s behalf. In most cases, the city paid only for the estimated cost of an economy class flight and the price for a mid-range hotel, typically between $250 and $300 a night, with the Harrells paying the difference. In some cases, such as the Bloomberg trip, conference organizers were the ones paying the cost of economy fares.
• $2,600 for one first-class ticket for Harrell to attend the Bloomberg City Data Alliance in Baltimore in May 2023;
• $7,800 for two first-class tickets for the Harrells to attend the Seattle Chamber’s annual International Leadership Mission in Bergen, Norway, where—according to the program—attendees discussed “Regional Promotion on the Global Stage Through Tourism,” learned about advancements maritime and airline industry sustainability, and participated in “Sister City Engagements” in Bergen and Reykjavik, Iceland.
• $13,000 for two first-class tickets to Tokyo and Seoul, South Korea in June 2023, for a nine-day trip billed as “G7 trip” in emails between Harrell’s staff and Joanne Harrell. Incomplete travel records for this trip suggest the Harrells’ hotels cost $1,000 for one night in Tokyo and $2,200 for three nights in Seoul.
• $5,500 for two first-class flights and $2,600 for three nights in a hotel in Washington, D.C. in 2024 for a trip that included a state dinner at the White House.
• $3,500 for two first-class tickets to Columbus, Ohio for a two-night trip to attend the US Conference of Mayors’ annual event. According to the mayoral staffer who calculated the city’s reimbursement, an economy-class ticket for the same trip was about $550.
The mayor is obviously free to spend his wealth however he chooses. But Harrell has repeatedly claimed the “working class” mantle in order attack his opponent, who shares a one-bedroom apartment with her husband and young child, as comparatively privileged and out of touch. It’s unclear whether voters who struggle to pay their own bills will buy into Harrell’s claim that he’s just like them.