1. Former police chief Shon Barnes’ $700,000 settlement agreement with the city, which PubliCola received Thursday through a records request, includes a year of paid health care, 18 months’ full salary, the $50,000 “lateral officer” bonus Barnes took when former mayor Bruce Harrell hired him, and a $60,000 relocation allowance for Barnes to move to Seattle from Chicago. (Barnes rented a apartment downtown, listed on Trulia in December 2024 at $3,228 a month, while retaining his family home in Chicago and frequently visiting his family there).
That adds up to $700,000. But the deal also includes a payout for any time off Barnes has accrued but not used. SPD has not responded to any of PubliCola’s questions since last week (except to tell us the chief’s schedule was “locked down” when he left) and the mayor’s office did not immediately respond to our question about how much time Barnes had accrued. Barnes made $179.54 an hour and his accrued time off was paid out at that rate.
As we reported, Barnes began calling around last Wednesday to tell people he’d been fired (one of our sources was a retired officer who got the news directly from an SPD captain). In reality, Mayor Katie Wilson had asked him to resign and he refused. As a result, rumors swirled for almost a full day before the two sides signed the settlement agreement late Thursday afternoon.
In the agreement, Barnes agreed not to sue the city, and the city agreed not to say anything negative about him to potential future employers. Although Wilson critics have demanded to know exactly what Barnes did wrong (beyond the obvious), the agreement to refrain from badmouthing Barnes likely restricts Wilson’s ability to provide more details about why she fired him. But we can make some educated guesses based on issues that came up before last week, when Barnes confronted a reporter who asked him about PubliCola’s reporting on his frequent travel.
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2. Seattle and King County provided more details this week about their plans to claw back homeless service contracts from the King County Regional Homelessness Authority as part of the “right-sizing” they announced last month that will dramatically reduce the size and responsibilities of the homelessness agency.
After the contracts return to the city and county, which oversaw homeless services before setting up the KCRHA through an interlocal agreement in 2019, the KCRHA will be in charge of the county’s severe weather shelters (but not the city’s), the annual federal funding process (already at risk due to Trump Administration changes to the funding criteria), and the completion of this year’s Point In Time Count analysis of the region’s homeless population. As the region’s Continuum of Care for homeless services, it will also hang on to a number of administrative functions, like overseeing the region’s Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) database, at least for now.
The city will take back 117 contracts with 40 providers, totaling around $113 million. The county will take back 100 contracts with 40 providers totaling around $46 million.
Seattle plans to hire 23 new staffers in the Human Services Department to administer the contracts, and the county will hire 11 people.
It’s unclear how much staff duplication will occur while the contracts move from KCRHA to the two local governments. Currently, KCRHA has 73 staffers. The “right-sizing” announced more than a month ago included between 20 and 25 layoffs, but so far, none of those layoffs have occurred. The city is facing a budget deficit of at least $175 million, so it will need to cut KCRHA’s budget (and staff) by at least the equivalent of the new staff it’s hiring to avoid paying for double staffing next year.
Almost all of the KCRHA’s $203 million budget comes from Seattle and King County.
If Wilson had just fired him the day she took office this whole circus of manufactured outrage from the Seattle Times and the rest of the right wing would be months and months in the rear view mirror. Nothing she did would have ever satisfied these dudes. Might as well get it over with quickly and install a team she trusts from the start.
Mayor Wilson really hasn’t done much of anything. Of course looking back on the reign of Mayor Bruce, he didn’t get much done in 4 years! So some of it is the mayor has limited control of an increasing chaotic city. Wilson brought some of her activist buddies in to work in her administration and several of them are already gone. So much for installing a team she trusts from the start.
We’ll see what her idea is on finding a new police chief. She publicly called for defunding the police, didn’t she? Do you really believe anybody qualified to run the Seattle police department really wants to take the job, tough as it is, and try to do it with less money?
Looks like the old chief had nothing but his best interests and not Seattle.