By Erica C. Barnett

We had Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson on Seattle Nice this week for a wide-ranging interview about her priorities as mayor—as well as how she plans to deal with the massive budget deficits set up by Mayor Bruce Harrell and the city council and the constraints the council has placed on her administration.

As PubliCola has reported, Harrell’s budget—which the council will pass in final form tomorrow—plunges the city into nine-figure deficits starting in 2027, which will force Wilson to act quickly to address budget shortfalls her predecessor failed to address. The budget also seeks to force Wilson to preserve some of her predecessor’s pet projects, including the encampment-sweeping Unified Care Team and a squad of graffiti removal staff, through restrictions that prohibit her from spending city funds on anything other than sweeps and anti-graffiti efforts.

We discussed those issues and much more, including many questions submitted by readers, in a wide-ranging 45-minute discussion with the mayor-elect.

A few highlights:

On whether she plans to replace Harrell’s police chief, Shon Barnes:

I’m going to respectfully decline that question at the moment. It’s a very sensitive question, and I am looking forward to meeting with Shon Barnes in the near future and having conversations with a lot of people about how things are going at the police department. And this is not just about the police chief, but this is about department leadership across the city, because there’s the question, when a new mayor comes into office, of potentially appointing new department heads.

For me, this is really not a political question. I don’t care what department head supported Harrell or campaigned actively for him. For me, this is really about getting the best people in place to lead those departments, and obviously there needs to be a certain amount of kind of vision alignment for someone to want to work with me. But beyond that, the thing that I really care about is that they’re a good leader that their, you know, employees respect them and can work for them. … So I’m hoping to retain in department leadership folks who are dedicated public servants doing a great job, and then yes, I’m sure there will be some, some turnover. So that applies across the board, including our police department.

On whether she’ll be Seattle’s “urbanist mayor”

Seattle’s a big city, and I love living in a big city, and I want Seattle to become a bigger and better city, where it’s possible, for example, for someone to live like I do right now, which is raising a child in in an apartment. And that means that the city kind of becomes your your backyard or your living room. And I think that urban lifestyle is something that we need to promote, and we need to make it possible for more and more people to live in this city without owning a car. And that’s not just for the sake of the people who don’t own cars. I mean, as more people continue to move to Seattle in our region, we just have limited space, and it’s just not possible to keep adding cars to the road. …

We deserve a world-class mass transit system. I think that’s just a very, very important thing to be working towards for all kinds of reasons. And we need great public space. We need more car -free public space. We need great parks, great playgrounds, all of those urban amenities. And so I am going to be very focused on making sure that Seattle is Seattle is a great, big city that can continue to grow in that direction.

On breaking Seattle’s 16-year streak of one-term mayors:

Despite the fact that I challenged an incumbent, I think it’s not great to just have one-term mayor after one-term mayor. So I do hope to govern in a way that leads to me being able to serve another term.

One of the things that I understand about Mayor Harrell is that I do believe that he stepped into office wanting very much to be a two-term mayor. And I think that his approach, and his consultants’ approach to governing over the last four years, has been to really focus on building that coalition of interests that could get him reelected for a second term. … It’s a kind of a transactional style of politics where he was trying to kind of gather together those interests that could get him reelected. I don’t think that’s a good way to govern. Because you’re doing favors for people, you’re building those relationships, but that’s not a vision for the city, you know? That’s not a vision of delivering for the people of Seattle. And so for me, I do want a second term, but I do not want to govern to win a second term.I want to govern to do the right thing, and if I’m lucky, that means that I will get a second term.

On restoring the longstanding nude beach at Denny Blaine Park, which Harrell repeatedly tried to shut down:

Yes, I do want to do this, and I want to work closely with Friends of Denny Blaine and others. I mean, there are some legitimate issues that need to be solved to make sure that the park is good for all the folks using it. But yeah, I would like to restore the park to its historic use as a queer nude beach.