Civil Rights, homelessness, labor, Mayor Wilson

Union Urges Wilson to Act After Investigation into Civil Rights Director Concludes; KCRHA Proposes 7 New Hires

1. PROTEC17, the union that represents workers at the city’s Office for Civil Rights, is renewing its call for Mayor Wilson to remove OCR director Derrick Wheeler-Smith from his position after an internal investigation concluded that Wheeler-Smith subjected “a subordinate employee to unwelcome conduct of a sexually explicit nature during a work-related trip,” according to a letter the union sent Wilson and two city council members last week.

PROTEC17 did not provide the investigation report, which PubliCola has requested from the city. For this reason, it’s unclear which alleged incident this finding refers to; as PubliCola reported earlier this year, staff described multiple incidents in which Wheeler-Smith allegedly made inappropriate remarks about women or sex at staff events. SOCR employees also shared misogynistic images they said Wheeler-Smith sent to male staff, including a meme of Kamala Harris suggesting she got the Presidential nomination by giving oral sex.

In February, PubliCola reported on widespread staff allegations against Wheeler-Smith, which included retaliation, financial self-dealing, anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, and sexually inappropriate remarks and text messages. Staffers also accused Wheeler-Smith of dismissing civil rights issues faced by immigrants, Asian Americans, and other marginalized people.

“The same investigation found it more likely than not that Director Wheeler-Smith made repeated comments of a sexual nature to staff in the workplace, including in front of his leadership team,” the letter says. “The investigator deemed the comments not ‘objectively offensive’ despite the several employees who reported being offended, crediting instead a division director who ‘thought it was a funny story.’ Resolving whether conduct is objectively offensive by privileging those who were not bothered over those who  were is precisely the kind of judgment OCR exists to scrutinize in other workplaces.”

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The findings against Wheeler-Smith, made by an outside attorney who conducted the investigation on behalf of the city’s Human Rights Investigation Unit, were apparently narrow; in its letter, the union disputes some of the findings and notes that the investigation didn’t consider many of the concerns staff raised in calling for Wheeler-Smith’s removal earlier this year. These issues included retaliation and “conduct based on protected characteristics.”

As we reported, employees said Wheeler-Smith was dismissive about LGBTQ+ civil rights, directing staff to remove pro-LGBTQ+ imagery from internal staff publications and complained about former Mayor Harrell’s comments condemning an anti-trans event in Cal Anderson Park.

Wilson’s office did not respond to questions about Wheeler-Smith; we’ll update this post if we hear back.

Wheeler-Smith, who makes a little over $236,000 a year,  has been on paid leave since March. In his absence, OCR has headed up by an interim director, Erika Pablo, but she’s going on leave; her replacement, SOCR manager Mike Chin, will serve as an interim interim until she returns or Wilson makes a decision on the future of the department.

2. The King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s finance committee recommended hiring for seven positions earlier this week, including a senior director for emergency housing services; a senior coordinator for emergency housing; an accountant; a procurement manager; and an IT and operations staffer.

King County Executive Girmay Zahilay’s chief budget officer, Aaron Rupardt, told the finance committee that he supported the hires, some of which could be internal promotions that would not increase administrative spending. It will be up to the entire governing board, made up primarily of elected officials from around the region, to approve the new hires and any new spending they may require.

In a letter responding to a forensic audit that found serious financial issues, including a growing negative balance, at the agency, Wilson and King County Executive Girmay Zahilay both called for

The committee also recommended approving $43,000 in unspecified discretionary spending requested by KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison. KCRHA provided a memo detailing the positions the agency wants to fill on Friday afternoon.

City Council, Mayor Wilson, Police, public safety

Police Chief Says No Plan to Slow Hiring Amid Budget Crunch; City Attorney Says “SOAP Orders Don’t Work” at Aurora Ave. Safety Event
Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans

1. Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes, responding to a question from PubliCola, said the police department does not plan to slow down hiring, despite a city council presentation this week that concluded, “SPD may need to slow hiring to live within its budget” because the speed at which it’s hiring new officers is outpacing the department’s spending capacity.

“I have not been notified that the police department will slow down on our current hiring plan for this year. We’re moving forward,” Barnes said. “I think we all share [the belief] that we need more police officers, but we also understand the constraints of a budget, and until I hear anything differently, we’re going to continue moving forward.”

A planned briefing of the council’s public safety committee, which was postponed due to time constraints earlier this week, found that SPD hiring will outpace the department’s budget by a projected $1.7 million this year. Recruitment has been up ever since a new police contract raised starting salaries, after training, to $126,000 last year, and the number of highly paid late-career officers leaving the department has declined. SPD is on pace to have just under 1,200 officers by the end of the year.

Mayor Katie Wilson has asked all city departments to come up with cuts of 5 to 10 percent to help close a budget gap of at least $175 million. The police department, whose nearly-$500 million budget is by far the city’s biggest general-fund obligation, was reportedly asked to come up with $20 million in potential cuts.

2. Barnes made his comments during an announcement about the city’s latest efforts to address gun violence and sex trafficking on Aurora Ave. N. City Attorney Erika Evans announced she would use Extreme Risk Protection Orders, a tool typically used to take guns away from domestic violence offenders, to remove guns from people accused of committing gun-related crimes, whether or not they have been convicted. (Violent gun-related offenses are typically prosecuted by the King County Prosecutor.) Evans also said she would seek funding for a full-time prosecutor to pursue the orders.

 

At the same press conference, Mayor Katie Wilson announced the Seattle Department of Transportation will install barriers on four streets that intersect with Aurora Ave. N to block traffic from getting through; residents who have demanded the city do something about increasing gun violence in the area have installed makeshift barricades in recent weeks.

City Attorney Evans broke with council members on one key issue, saying that she did not believe banishing men who pay for sex from the area around Aurora, which is designated as the city’s Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP) zone, are an effective way to protect women and girls from pimps and traffickers. (Former Councilmember Cathy Moore, who sponsored the SOAP legislation, then skedaddled off the council, was in the audience for yesterday’s event.)

Noting that the city has had SOAP orders off and on for 30 years, Evans said, “If they were effective, Aurora and other areas of Seattle, including Little Saigon, would be safe, and they’re not. … SOAP orders don’t work. ERPO orders work.”

3. The press conference, which took place on the same day Wilson announced internally that she was reorganizing her office and that her communications director, Seferiana Day, was leaving, featured some internal drama of its own. According to sources, councilmembers frustrated with what they viewed as inaction on Aurora planned to hold their own press conference without Wilson at which they would criticize her lack of action on gun violence and sex trafficking in the area.

After a flurry of discussions, the mayor and council agreed to hold the press conference in the awkward, narrow space outside council chambers, rather than outside Wilson’s office. Councilmembers have repeatedly refused to participate in the mayor’s press conferences, despite being invited—an indication that council-mayor relations still have a long way to go after some dramatic early missteps by the Wilson administration.

Mayor Wilson

Another Upheaval on Mayor Wilson’s Staff as Communications Director Departs
By Erica C. Barnett

In the latest upheaval at the mayor’s office, Mayor Katie Wilson’s communications director, Seferiana Day, is out. Day, who was out of the office for nearly two months due to a medical issue and has been on intermittent leave, was asked to resign after turning down an offer to take on a new role overseeing council-mayor relations, according to sources. The office will also undergo an internal reorganization, reassigning existing staffers to new positions and making Esther Handy Wilson’s permanent chief of staff (Handy is currently serving in an interim role.)

Wilson’s office announced the changes to staff  at a meeting Thursday morning. An internal announcement from Wilson said that Day is “stepping back from her day-to-day duties as Communications Director to focus on her health.”

Wilson’s office has not hired a replacement for Day, although they are currently in discussions with a person who would fill the role on an interim basis; PubliCola is not publishing that person’s name unless they decide to take the job.

Day was out on medical leave during many of the mayor’s so-called gaffes, including her flippant response to the prospect of wealthy people leaving Seattle because of the so-called millionaire’s income tax.

Prior to joining the mayor’s office, Day was the longtime spokeswoman for the city’s Office of Planning and Community Development; before that, she was a longtime communications consultant and a cofounder of Upper Left Strategies, a campaign consulting firm.

According to internal sources, Wilson and others in her inner circle have been frustrated that she has not garnered more positive press for some of her initiatives, including the announcement that the city will help fund construction of the long-delayed Graham Street light rail station.

At the same time, some members of the mayor’s staff have expressed concern that Wilson hasn’t articulated a clear vision on a number of issues, such as gun violence, public safety, and tenants’ rights; when Wilson recently considered rolling back renter protections, including a provision of the just cause eviction ordinance that allows people to add roommates, some staff members were appalled.

Others have questioned some of Wilson’s hires, noting that some are out of step with the politics that got Wilson elected or are not subject-matter experts in the areas they are overseeing.

Perhaps in an effort to address the latter issue, Wilson also announced an internal reshuffling of her staff this morning that will move four current staffers into new positions as “subject-matter Directors,” according to her announcement.

Mark Ellerbrook, currently deputy director of city operations, will oversee human services and homelessness; Nicole Vallestero Soper, currently the director of policy and innovation, will be the director of affordability, housing, and economic development; Hannah McIntosh, one of six “executive operations managers,” will oversee mobility, livability, and city infrastrucutre; and Alison Holcomb, the mayor’s chief advisor on public safety (and one of those five executive operations managers) will become the director of public safety.

Sejal Parikh, a former longtime staffer for City (and now County) Councilmember Teresa  Mosqueda, will move from her current job (deputy director of policy and innovation) to a new job as “deputy chief of staff for strategy and AI.”

The communications office is reportedly despondent about Day’s departure. PubliCola has heard that this won’t be the last shakeup; Wilson’s office is currently working on an office-wide reorg, which could result in additional staffers being asked for resignations.

In recent months, Wilson’s chief homelessness and housing advisor, Jon Grant, left after being asked to resign. Kate Kreuzer, her chief of staff and a longtime friend, was moved into a newly created special projects position.

We’ve asked the mayor’s office for more details about the reorg and will update this post if we hear back.

homelessness, King County, Mayor Wilson

Auditor: KCRHA’s Corrective Action Plan Fails to Take Audit Findings Seriously

Editor’s note: This post has been updated to include KCRHA’s responses.

By Erica C. Barnett

Clark Nuber, the firm that conducted a damning forensic evaluation of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority in April, has responded to the agency’s “corrective action plan” (or CAP) with an equally scathing assessment that lays out seven “red flags” that, according to the auditors, the homelessness agency failed to address in its plan to correct systemic financial issues.

The CAP, Clark Nuber wrote, completely ignored several directives from the city and King County, including orders to put a freeze on hiring and spending, and relies on “trust us” assurances that the KCRHA will fix other serious deficiencies. Given the KCRHA’s repeated failure to meet its prior commitments, “funders should not rely exclusively on KCRHA’s self-reported progress,” the auditors wrote. The plan includes “pervasive use of potential hedge language, like: “‘has begun,’ ‘has initiated,’ and ‘will include'” throughout, the assessment found.

“KCRHA also agrees that progress should be independently verified,” a KCRhA spokesperson said. “That is why the CAP itself recommended external stabilization support, and why we welcome the City and County’s intent to embed external financial expertise to support validation, documentation, and implementation. KCRHA is not asking funders or the public to rely on management assurances alone.”

The KCRHA, Clark Nuber found, also continues to insist—inaccurately—that its deficit (currently around $65 million, up from $45 million last July) is the inevitable result of its funding structure, in which the agency pays homelessness nonprofits and gets reimbursed by the city and county. Many large nonprofit and quasi-governmental organizations use reimbursement-based systems, the auditors pointed out, without the kind of steadily increasing negative balance KCRHA has experienced.

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“[The deficit grew steadily and consistently over time, which is the signature of a management process failure rather than an external shock or an inherent feature of reimbursable funding,” the evaluation found. One of the main issues, the auditors wrote, is that KCRHA has routinely submitted invoices late—up to 16 months—which has prevented the agency from getting reimbursed on time.

The KCRHA spokesperson said the agency “accepts responsibility for internal weaknesses that contributed to the problem” of negative balances. “Those are within KCRHA’s control and are being addressed through the CAP. At the same time, resolving the interest obligation and preventing recurrence will require coordinated work with funders on reimbursement timing, advances, working-capital structure, and treatment of accrued interest.”

The “root causes” of the negative balance “included internal factors: the absence of a formal monthly close process, inconsistent invoice preparation and submission, a lack of real-time cash monitoring, inadequate budget oversight, and insufficient internal controls,” the auditors wrote. “These are organizational management weaknesses, not consequences of the funding model itself.”

Overall, Clark Nuber found that the corrective action plan had not fully met any of seven “key dimensions” laid out in the forensic audit, including “KCRHA understanding of issues,” “achievability,” “accountability,” and risk.

The KCRHA spokesperson said, “Several of the issues raised in the assessment are already being addressed. The governance items referenced by the City and County—including spending controls, hiring controls, and a pause on new agreements that increase cost or liability—have been taken up directly with the KCRHA Governing Board and are in place.”

Additionally, they said, the corrective plan says nothing about $6.4 million in  overspending on programs—”the most significant omission in the CAP”—and the growing amount of interest it owes the King County Investment Pool, from which it routinely borrows money. As we noted in our initial coverage, the $6.4 million is on top of $8 million in spending the KCRHA could not account for, $4 million in administrative overspending, and $1.26 million in interest that is “still growing.”

The KCRHA spokesperson said the agency already addressed the $6.4 million in overspending in late 2025 and early 2026.

Clark Nuber also noted that the KCRHA has put off establishing internal financial controls until the far-off Phase 3 of the plan, even though these controls are “not an aspirational best practice,” but required by federal law. “This means KCRHA will be administering significant public funds, including federal awards, without the required control structure throughout the period that is supposed to represent its most intensive corrective action effort.”

The report includes ten short-, medium-, and long-term recommendations for the city and county. It’s unclear whether either government will take the auditors’ adivce to heart; ten days after Clark Nuber published its report, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson and King County Executive Girmay Zahilay jointly announced plans to “embed” (and pay for) an outside consultant to “ensure [the] corrective actions” in the KCRHA’s plan “are being implemented with urgency.”

Wilson’s office did not respond to questions Wednesday; Zahilay’s office referred us to his statement about the decision to hire a consultant. The new finance committee of KCRHA’s governing board—one of the steps outlined in the CAP—will meet Thursday morning at 10am.

 

City Council

New Council Legislation Could Make Your Utility Bills Cheaper

By Erica C. Barnett

City Councilmember Dan Strauss, along with Council President Joy Hollingsworth, is proposing legislation this week that would expand access to the city’s Utility Discount program by expanding eligibility in two stages—one in 2027 and one in 2029—to include people making 60 percent and then 80 percent of Seattle’s Area Median Income. The discount program provides a 60 percent discount on City Light bills and a 50 percent discount on Seattle Public Utilities bills.

Currently, eligibility for the discount program is is limited to people who make 70 percent or less of the state’s median income, which is much lower than Seattle’s—around $73,000 for a single person, compared to about $102,000 in Seattle. According to an analysis from the mayor’s office, about 31,000 more households would become eligible for the program if the city bumps eligibility up to 60 percent of median income, and another 48,000 would become eligible if that’s expanded to 80 percent.

Earlier this month, Strauss said he was surprised recently to learn that someone he considered well-off had signed up for the program when they lost their job. “That just reinforced for me that is absolutely the seniors, the parents of the kids that I grew up with” who need the discount program, Strauss said. “This is an important affordability program for everyone in the city, and we have to have that safety net, if they need to use it, available and easy to sign up for.”

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According to a fiscal note, increasing the threshold for the program to 60 percent of area median income would cost about $5 million for Seattle City Light and $13.9 million for SPU. The money would have to come from a rate increase of 0.5 percent for City Light and 0.1 percent for SPU, Strauss said, or an average increase of about 77 cents a month. City Light is currently considering separate increases to pay for, among other things, a maintenance backlog.

Enrolling eligible ratepayers in the discount program has always been a challenge; currently, about 36 percent of eligible residents, or around 39,000 people, are enrolled. Strauss’ and Hollingsworth’s legislation does not directly take on this problem. The program is also not available for renters without their own City Light accounts whose landlords use ratio utility billing systems, or RUBs—a type of third-party billing that allows landlords to pass the cost of a building’s overall utilities on to tenants and does not reflect how much service a tenant actually uses.

The council’s governance and utilities committee, which Hollingsworth chairs, will take up the utility discount legislation at its meeting on Thursday.

homelessness, King County, Mayor Wilson

City, County Plan to “Embed” Consultant to Address Financial Issues at Homelessness Agency

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson and King County Executive Girmay Zahilay both announced that they plan to “embed an independent financial analyst” in the agency, as a statement from Wilson put it yesterday.

According to Zahilay’s announcement, “This analyst will provide more transparency into financial practices, improve payment processes, and ensure corrective actions are being implemented with urgency.” Wilson’s announcement referred to the analyst (or analysts) as “a financial services team” that will “shore up financial and internal controls at KCRHA.”

The decision came after a flurry of discussions late last week about how to respond to the KCRHA’s “corrective action plan,” which laid out a series of steps to respond to a damning audit that found the agency lacked basic financial controls, overspent its administrative budget, and could not account for $8 million in spending. The audit also found that KCRHA had a consistent and growing negative budget balance—around $45 million when the audit concluded, an amount that had increased to $65 million by the time the auditors presented their results.

The announcement represented a slowdown of what had been growing momentum to “wind down” the agency quickly and send the contracts it manages back to the city and county agencies that used to oversee them. It was also a reversal of a plan set in motion last week.

As recently as last Friday, Wilson and Zahilay were planning to announce on Monday that they were taking back the homelessness contracts and distributing them to the city’s Human Services Department and King County’s Department of Community and Human Services,  according to accounts from people familiar with the discussions. (Zahilay, rather than Wilson, was reportedly leading the charge to pull the plug). Homeless advocates, city council members, and some members of the business and philanthropic community reportedly urged caution, and cooler heads apparently prevailed.

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Under the scenario the city and county were contemplating last week, the KCRHA would continue to exist—at least temporarily—as a shell of itself, serving as the region’s Continuum of Care for federal funding purposes and administering the Point In Time Count of the region’s homeless population.

This may still happen; the decision to fund an accounting team to address the problems identified in the audit does not preclude shutting down the agency. But as of now, that will no longer happen on an accelerated timeline.

As we reported last week, KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison and Associate Deputy for Strategy William Towey have asked for $500,000 to hire a fnancial consultant—as Kinnison put it, a “CFO-type role”— through the staffing firm Robert Half, which charges hefty recruitment fees on top of their temporary staffers’ salaries. The KCRHA laid off its most recent chief financial office last October and never replaced him.

A spokesperson for Zahilay’s office said the county does not know yet how much the consultant will cost or how the city and county will split the spending.

Wilson’s office did not respond to questions.