1. A council committee meeting about midyear changes to the city budget went briefly off the rails on Tuesday, after Joy Hollingsworth proposed using $250,000 in unused funding for police surveillance cameras to pay for community violence interruptors from the group We D eliver Care for the rest of the year. The money is a one-time expenditure; starting next year, the city expects King County to pick up the tab as part of its”mitigation” for a mental health crisis center the county is opening in Hollingsworth’s district.
Council budget hawk Maritza Rivera, who had already questioned some of the other midyear adds, seemed satisfied with that explanation. But public safety chair (and camera fanatic) Bob Kettle was not, taking the mic to bellow that he found it “unconscionable” that Wilson would not simply expand the camera system without finishing the study.
“I am confident how the NYU report is going to come out, and then the mayor should push forward on the CCTV cameras, and SPD can obligate those funds here in this calendar year,” Kettle said. “And I would note that is unconscionable in terms of what the mayor has been doing with this program, because we vetted this program, we built in so many protections in this program, we built in so many safeguards, protocols from top to bottom. So the fact that she hasn’t done anything on those nine positions is unconscionable.”
In fact, the city council rushed a second round of cameras through last year before any study could be done, asserting at the time that there was no way they could be used to violate people’s privacy. The Policing Project is doing the review the council declined to do in its haste to get cameras up before Bruce Harrell left office.
After he finished criticizing Wilson for doing basic due diligence before unleashing police surveillance citywide, Kettle said that even though he supported violence interruption programs “110 percent,” he would vote against funding this violence prevention program—and oppose the whole supplemental budget—if it used a penny of 2026 camera funding for anything other than cameras.
The midyear budget also includes funding to pay for universal school lunches during the upcoming school year, announced last week in a joint statement by Mayor Katie Wilson and city councilmembers. The money will come from $5 million the city no longer plans to spend on Northgate Commons, a mixed-use Seattle Housing Authority project near the Northgate light rail station (the city’s contribution will go from $20 million to $15 million).
2. Last Monday, several days before Mayor Katie Wilson asked then-police chief Shon Barnes to resign, I (and other reporters) requested Barnes’ calendar. The version I received begins abruptly on March 29, and has been color-coded and altered to remove Barnes’ original plans for the last week of July and first week of August, when he returned to Seattle from planned time off to respond to a shooting at Seattle Center.
Each time I followed up to request Barnes’ full calendar last week, SPD assured me they were “working on it” and would have the missing months’ schedule to me shortly.
But this Monday, a week after I originally requested Barnes’ calendar, an SPD spokesman told me that because Barnes resigned, his schedule is now “locked down” and can only be accessed through a public disclosure request. As I’ve reported, getting records out of SPD often takes months or years, meaning that a document SPD could have simply handed over last week won’t be public until their public disclosure office gets around to providing it.
Despite this newly imposed delay, we do know a little about Barnes’ calendar for the first few months of the year. Between information SPD provided reporters last week, PubliCola’s previous reporting, and Barnes’ social media, it’s clear that between late last December and the end of March, Barnes took a 15-day vacation, was in Chicago with his family for at least nine additional days, and spent five days doing recruitment at a basketball tournament held by a conference of small HBCUs that includes Barnes’ 2,300-student alma mater.
As with his calendar we reviewed in 2025, Barnes’ weekends were mostly empty, with several Fridays preceding unscheduled weekends marked as “unavailable,” “out of office,” or “focus time,” with nothing specific on the calendar.