1. Mayor Katie Wilson is hiring two new temporary communications staffers: Crystal Nicole Fincher—the political consultant, podcast host, and co-owner of KVRU community radio—will be Wilson’s strategic communications consultant, and Dawn Schellenberg, a longtime spokesperson for the Seattle Department of Transportation, will temporarily take over the communications director position. As we were first to report, Wilson’s original comms director, Seferiana Day, was asked to step down shortly after returning from months of medical leave earlier this month.
Schellenberg started on Wednesday and Fincher will start next month, according to an internal announcement from Wilson’s chief of staff Esther Handy. Fincher will step away from her other duties while working for the mayor, and both she and Schellenberg will be in their new roles through September, Handy wrote.
Fincher will reportedly be in charge of coming up with a new communications strategy for the mayor, who has garnered a fair amount of negative press over her surveillance camera policy, failure to stand up 500 shelter beds by the World Cup as hoped, and other decisions that many have perceived as strategic blunders or policy moves that don’t align with Wilson’s campaign promises.
Wilson’s deputy mayor, Brian Surratt, has reportedly been interviewing candidates for a permanent communications director. According to internal and external sources, Surratt has communicated that the mayor’s office is looking for a Black man, specifically, to fill the position.
It seems likely that more changes in the communications office are coming. As we reported, there’s tension between the mayor’s communications and policy shops, with each blaming the other for negative press around recent Wilson decisions, like her announcement that she’d be turning surveillance cameras at the stadiums in time for the World Cup.
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2. Several members of the city council say they’re putting their foots down: No matter how much more money the Seattle Police Department needs to hire the flood of new applicants that have poured in since the passage of a new police contractlast year, they aren’t going to support any hiring slowdown. “Now is not the time to withdraw our sustained investments to boost our officer staffing levels and boost our response times,” Councilmember Rob Saka said at a meeting of the council’s public safety committee on Tuesday, adding that the police budget is “sacrosanct.”
“It’s time to lean in, not tap out,” Saka said.
Given that the city will have to close a nearly $200 million budget shortfall, that could be a problem. Earlier this month, we reported that unless SPD slows down its hiring pace this year, it will go $1.7 million over its 2026 budget, with additional overruns next year if hiring continues at its current pace.
Council central staffer Greg Doss noted that SPD’s ballooning costs are “strictly related” to the salary increases the Seattle Police Officers Guild secured last year from former mayor Bruce Harrell and the city council, which guarantees fully trained new officers a salary of $126,000 a year. And Dan Eder, the former Harrell budget office director who was recently appointed budget director at SPD, said a hiring slowdown is, in fact, “on the table” if SPD can’t find other places in its budget to pay for all the new officers the department is hiring.
“We haven’t yet exhausted all possibilities” for funding the new officers, Eder said. “We’re looking at contacts and non-sworn expenditures. It is possible that if that is not enough savings, that we will not shrink the police force, but we will slow the growth of the police force for the rest of the year. That’s just a recognition of the dire strait that the city budget finds itself in this year and for the next biennium of the budget. We just don’t feel that there is extra money.”
Saka, along with committee chair Bob Kettle, said slowing down police hiring would be tantamount to defunding the police.
Kettle said he had “indicated to SPD to continue the hiring, to maintain the momentum,” while Saka said the city “repealed the defund movement” via resolution last year. That resolution, which acknowledged people’s general “right” to “feel safe,” arguably had less substance than most nonbinding council resolutions. Among other things, it “formally reversed” the completely nonexistent “prior commitments” by the previous city council to defund and abolish the police.