This week on the Seattle Nice podcast, we discussed the changes that are taking shape at King County and the city of Seattle, as County Executive Girmay Zahilay and Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson start filling out their staff.
As I reported earlier this week, Zahilay put more than 100 executive branch staffers on notice on a Friday that unless they heard from HR by the end of the day the following Mondday, they should not expect to have jobs after the end of the year.
Employees I spoke to said they expected the executive’s staff, which includes dozen of political appointees, to turn over. But they were dismayed to learn that many other staffers doing technical or bureaucratic work, including land use planners and data analysts, will also lose their jobs in this “restructuring” process. They also said Zahilay’s team handled the delivery of this bad news poorly, damaging morale on teams that worked on reducing the county’s climate impact, promoting racial equity, developing the comprehensive plan, and working to improve the quality of government services.
While I argued (based on what I heard from a half-dozen staffers impacted by the changes) that Team Zahilay could have taken more time and care when deciding the fate of apolitical staff, Sandeep said county employees without civil service protections shouldn’t expect to keep their jobs when a new executive comes in.
We also discussed how the mayor-elect is building her own executive team and speculated about which city department heads she plans to replace or retain. As I reported, Wilson is reportedly still on the fence about Police Chief Shon Barnes, who has fans and detractors inside and outside the city. During his brief time as chief, Barnes has come under scrutiny for the department’s crackdown on nudity at Seattle’s historic LGBTQ nude beach, Denny Blaine, for firing SPD’s top two civilian staffers, and for appointing as East Precinct commander a captain infamous for driving his SUV onto a sidewalk filled with protesters in 2020.
To reiterate something I said on the show (and caught a lot of flak from my co-hosts for saying): Barnes, who has talked openly about how God sent him to Seattle (and, before that, Madison), is a weird cultural fit for a deeply irreligious city with a large LGBTQ+ population and a history of anti-police protests. (And, though I didn’t mention it, an appropriately adversarial press.) Having grown up in the Southern Baptist church myself, I personally have zero patience for the mingling of religion and government, and I’m always surprised when otherwise lowercase-l liberal people argue that it’s intolerant to expect government officials to keep their faith separate from their jobs.