Category: City Council

City Council, Mayor Wilson, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Mayor-Council Conflict and a Data Center Moratorium

By Erica C. Barnett

This week on Seattle Nice, we discussed tensions between Mayor Katie Wilson’s office and members of the City Council, whose frustration with a lack of collaboration between the second and seventh floors of city hall erupted last week when a Wilson staffer asked the council to hold off on passing a bill to implement the final part of Wilson’s shelter surge plan.

As I reported, Wilson was apparently unhappy with some of the amendments councilmembers proposed and wanted the council to change them.  The council—already irritated that Wilson sent them the shelter bills without first securing a council sponsor and trying to elicit support—was not pleased that the mayor seemed to be ordering them around, and after a reportedly heated meeting between countil members and three Wilson staffers, the council passed the legislation, which Wilson had asked to be expedited as an “emergency” bill, with the (relatively minor) amendments intact.

The tension, Sandeep pointed out, has been brewing since well before the latest conflict; when Wilson fired former City Light director Dawn Lindell, some councilmembers were sensitive to union complaints and excoriated the mayor for what they called a rash decision. Just yesterday, Councilmember Bob Kettle took up that torch again during a discussion about a proposed one-year moratorium on data centers, saying, “We had top notch leadership with Seattle City Light, and this is a failure of our city right now.”

And speaking of data centers, our second segment is all about whether saying no to companies that want to build massive data centers to power AI is a good idea.

Sandeep argued that if Seattle doesn’t embrace the AI future, we may fall behind economically and turn into a hollowed-out shell of a city, like Rust Belt cities did in the 1980s. David some economists claim AI could help solve the affordable housing crisis and doesn’t want to dismiss possibilities like that out of hand. And I, as the resident Luddite, argued that we shouldn’t hitch our entire economy (and the future of our climate) to technology most people don’t like or want.

FYI: Seattle Nice Patreon donors got an early preview of our show this week. Supporting Seattle Nice gets you access to some of our episodes a day before they go out on the regular feed, along with occasional Patreon-only exclusives and the knowledge that your contributions go directly toward making Seattle Nice for you every week, including paying our editor, Quinn Waller.

City Council, Mayor Wilson, Opinion, Transit

The News About Sound Transit Is Grim. Why Are Most Seattle Politicians Pretending It Isn’t?
Sound Transit’s four Seattle representatives: Katie Wilson, Dan Strauss, Girmay Zahilay, and Teresa Mosqueda.

By Erica C. Barnett

Sound Transit board chair Dave Somers announced a revised, “affordable” capital plan for the regional rail system at a meeting of the agency’s executive board on Thursday. The proposal attempts to close a $34.5 billion budget shortfall by focusing on the “spine” of the system, from Everett to Tacoma, while putting off major projects in Seattle that helped the Sound Transit 3 plan pass overwhelmingly here, most notably including the segment from downtown to Ballard.  The agency will fully design the Ballard extension and the Graham Street and Boeing Access Road infill station but postpone all three “until new resources or third party funding can advance them,” as ST’s deputy director Alex Krieg put it yesterday.

Ryan Packer, at the Urbanist, has been covering this story closely (probably between the top-secret closed-door meetings with Mayor Wilson that had the Seattle Times editorial board spewing smoke from their ears this morning!), so I’ll direct you to their story earlier this week for all the details about the new plan.

What I want to focus on is the insistence of most members of the Sound Transit board on living in an alternate reality—one where stopping the line at Seattle Center is completing the first part of the “Ballard” line, and where taking on debt well into the next century is a sustainable way to fund a train system.

Board members, including those from Seattle, have insisted that the regional rail agency isn’t truly “deferring” anything and that the entire ST3 package approved by voters in 2016 will get built—just as soon as Sound Transit comes up with a plan to cut costs and get new resources to build out the system voters have been funding for the past 10 years.

During a Transportation Choices Coalition-sponsored panel about the plan earlier this week, Mayor Katie Wilson said, “The fact that part of the project does not appear in the ‘affordable’ plan does not mean that it is being canceled or delayed or deferred. And so one of the things that I want to see is just a really clear plan for, as we do that work, adding [the missing stations and rail lines] back into the plan. And I’m not even talking like any more revenue for this. It’s just that we need to get further along in the planning process, and then suddenly you’re going to see more stations kind of magically come back into affordability.”

King County Councilmember (and former city council member) Teresa Mosqueda echoed Wilson’s comments at the board meeting Thursday, telling Somers, “I heard you say that nothing is deferred indefinitely, that we are not abandoning any lines or projects, and that we are committed to final design, getting ultimately to Ballard, Issaquah, and wanting the infill stations. … I see this as a need to present a ‘Yes, and’ proposal. Yes, we hear you that the community and this board want the full Sound Transit 3, and we recognize in order to accomplish that, you need to have additional financing tools.”

What about those additional financing tools? Sound Transit board members, and many transit advocates desperate to complete the long-promised system, have laid their hopes on the state legislature, which last year rejected a proposal to allow Sound Transit to sell unprecedented 75-year bonds to pay for costs that weren’t included in the voter-approved plan. (Really, plans—the long-“deferred” Graham Street Station was supposed to built as part of ST1).

There’s currently little public discussion, outside reflexively anti-tax conservative media, about whether it’s a good idea to put taxpayers on the hook for this rail system until the 22nd century. For rail advocates, it seems to be a settled debate. And no one is talking much right now about what ST4 will include.

The only board member who has relentlessly insisted on speaking bluntly about what Sound Transit is actually proposing is City Councilmember Dan Strauss. Strauss is no one’s idea of a firebrand, but he is extremely protective of the neighborhood at the heart of his district, Ballard, and he’s made no secret of his outrage that the plan cuts defers postpones the Ballard extension for the foreseeable future. Ballard, as Strauss points out often, has been upzoned three times since voters approved ST3 ten years ago. It’s now designated as a “regional center” in the city’s comprehensive plan, the densest possible designation, and is slated for another upzone later this year. Thanks to all those new people living in Ballard, Sound Transit has projected daily ridership as high as 147,000 people along the Ballard segment—the highest ridership in the system.

“Sound Transit did not provide an approach that maximized ridership,” Strauss said at the TCC event earlier this week. “If they had, they would be looking at the dollar per rider figure that the Ballard Lake extension provided.”

At Thursday’s ST board meeting, Strauss asked the board, semi-facetiously, to change the name of the “Ballard Link initial segment,” which ends at Seattle Center, to the “Downtown tunnel” segment, “because that is being transparent with the public about what segments we are funding.” It’s too bad the other Seattle representatives on the board aren’t equally committed to being honest with voters about what we’re getting with Sound Transit’s new “affordable” plan.

City Council, homelessness, Mayor Wilson

Council Committee Approves Larger New Shelters Amid Cloud of Mayor-Council Conflict

By Erica C. Barnett

The city council’s land use committee approved the final piece of Mayor Katie Wilson’s shelter expansion proposal today, increasing the maximum size of tiny house village-style shelters throughout the city. The bill will allow villages, or “transitional encampments,” with up to 150 people (up from from 100), subject to restrictions that include minimum case management and overnight staffing, good neighbor agreements, and written public safety plans. The bill, which still has to be adopted by the full council, is the final piece of legislation the Wilson administration requested as part of a plan to add 1,000 shelter beds this year.

The shelter vote was clouded by a growing tension between the council and mayor’s office that exploded into the open over the past week.

On Tuesday, less than 24 hours before today’s scheduled vote, the mayor’s council liaison called land use committee chair Eddie Lin to ask him to pull the legislation from today’s agenda because the mayor’s office had problems with some of the changes the council has proposed. Lin said no.

This demand from the mayor’s office was a highly unusual breach of the legislative process in itself. Later in the day, Wilson’s senior advisor on housing and homelessness, Jon Grant, along with at least two other mayoral staffers—Kate Brunette Kreuzer and Nicole Vallestero-Soper—met with council members one on one and continued demanding last-minute changes to the amendments.

The meeting turned into a heated late-afternoon conflict that several sources described as a serious and significant breaking point in the relationship between the mayor and council. Several sources characterized Wilson’s staffers as “disrespectful” and expressed surprise that Wilson’s office seemed to believe they could order the council around.

Before Wednesday’s vote, council members thanked each other for their professionalism, speed, and transparency before moving the bill forward Wednesday, and Council. President Joy Hollingsworth alluded to a “lack of communication” about the amendments; only Lin thanked the mayor’s office.

Wilson herself, several people we spoke to emphasized, has always been polite and thoughtful in their interactions. But the mayor herself has rarely been around, according to council sources, sending staffers down to discuss legislation with council members and staff instead.

In response to questions, Wilson’s spokesperson, Sage Wilson, said the mayor’s office will “take our share of responsibility for that [communication] gap,” adding, “we did ask if the committee chair was open to providing more time to continue discussions so we could get to a good place together.”

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

Council members have raised concerns about the increasingly fractured relationship with Wilson’s office before; in fact, just last Friday, Council President Joy Hollingsworth met with mayoral staff to express how important it is that they communicate with the council throughout the legislative process. At a council media availability on Monday, before the mayor’s office asked Lin to pull the shelter bill, Hollingsworth said, “I know it’s a big learning curve, but it would just help us … that we’re talking before legislation is being transmitted” in order to avoid “surprises.”

It’s worth a brief digression here about how the city’s legislative process works. Legislation can come from the council itself, or the mayor can “send down” legislation by identifying a sponsor who will carry their bill through the council process and having them introduce it—a step Wilson skipped with her make-or-break shelter legislation. Then the mayor typically works with council allies to shepherd a proposal to the finish line, communicating closely with the sponsor and discussing any concerns as soon as they arise. Legislation is a give-and-take process between coequal branches of government, and mayors typically accept non-fatal amendments as part of the deal.

Instead of raising concerns with the bill and amendment sponsors when they proposed the amendments last week, the mayor’s office waited until the day before the vote to raise specific objections. (There would ordinarily be more time between introduction and a final vote, but the mayor’s office asked for an expedited timeline, designating the legislation as an “emergency” bill.)

Wilson, the mayor’s spokesman, said the mayor “raised concerns since amendments were initially released about the implications of putting policy related to shelter operations into the land use code. … We had good conversations with Councilmembers about how to address those concerns and thought we had come to an understanding, but there seems to have a miscommunication, because the language released Tuesday morning was not in line with what we had expected.”

The amendments Wilson’s office objected to weren’t the ones you might expect. Maritza Rivera’s proposals to create shelter-free “buffer” zones around schools, child care centers, and parks and require uniformed security outside every shelter did not move forward (she could reintroduce it at full council, but it lacks the votes to pass). Neither did language—apparently inadvertent—that would have made shelter providers responsible for unsanctioned encampments and public safety issues in the area around shelter sites.

Instead, the purportedly problematic amendments came largely from Wilson’s own progressive council allies. Alexis Mercedes Rinck, for example, added amendments that would set a nonbinding “goal” of minimum case management staffing and require staffing at night, and bill sponsor Dionne Foster added an amendment, on behalf of Debora Juarez, to require shelters to adopt public safety plans.

Another amendment, from Hollingsworth, stipulates that the new shelters must adopt good neighbor agreements, something many shelter providers already do. (Hollingsworth changed the amendment on Wednesday to remove many requirements she said shelter providers identified as problematic.) And Dan Strauss proposed a new version of an amendment that would require shelter providers to divide larger shelters into distinct, separate “neighborhoods” with controlled access, after Low Income Housing Institute director Sharon Lee emailed the council Monday with concerns about the original, more rigid proposal.

LIHI provides most of the city’s tiny house villages and will likely be one of the biggest beneficiaries of funding to provide the new micromodular shelters. Grant, Wilson’s senior advisor on housing and homelessness, was most recently a longtime staffer at LIHI and frequently testified at council meetings on their behalf.

The shelter bill, a marquee proposal meant to fulfill Wilson’s biggest campaign promise, could represent a turning point in Wilson’s relationship with the council members whose support she will need to move her ambitious agenda forward. Just not in the way she probably hoped.

 

City Council, Elections, homelessness, King County, labor, Police

This Week On PubliCola: May 2, 2026
An illustration of what shelter-free “buffer zones” around child cares and schools might look like in Council District 3

Homeless agency audit fallout, councilmembers propose no-shelter zones, delivery worker pay increases, and more

Monday, April 17

After Board Meeting on Damning Audit, Talk Turns to “Winding Down” Homelessness Authority

After a presentation on a devastating forensic audit that found widespread financial problems and a lack of internal financial controls at the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, a consensus is growing among regional decision-makers that it’s time to start “winding down” the agency. The KCRHA itself would go on to release an FAQ later in the week that took little responsibility for the ongoing issues and suggested fixing them would be a relatively straightforward matter.

Tuesday, April 28

SPD Chief Questions Whether LEAD Diversion Program is “Meeting Expectations”

Although official SPD policy calls for diversion, rather than arrest and jail, when officers encounter someone violating the city’s laws against using drugs in public and simple drug possession, Police Chief Shon Barnes appeared to criticize the city’s main diversion program, LEAD, at a recent council meeting. Afterward, Councilmember Maritza Rivera suggested the program already has plenty of money.

Thursday, April 30

Proposed Changes to Wilson’s Shelter Plan Include Shelter-Free “Buffer” Zones, Mandatory Security

City Councilmembers Maritza Rivera and Joy Hollingsworth proposed amendments to Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to allow larger tiny house village-style shelters around Seattle. Their walk-on amendments would mandate 24-hour security and buffer zones around parks, schools, and child care centers for new micromodular shelters with more than 100 residents.

County Considers New Contract Oversight Office

After an audit revealed potential fraud and waste at King County’s Department of Community and Human Services, County Councilmembers are proposing an office of inspector general to provide a new layer of oversight to receive tips and conduct investigations into claims about contractor misuse of county funds.

Return-to-Office Booster Calls In Remotely as County Employees Criticize Three-Day Mandate

More than a dozen King County employees showed up to a King County Council meeting this week to testify against King County Executive Girmay Zahilay’s “return to office” mandate. One person who wasn’t there to hear their testimony in person: The council’s biggest RTO booster, Councilmember Reagan Dunn, who attended the meeting—as he often does—remotely.

Friday, May 1

Former Burien City Attorney and Ex-SPOG Leader Both Run for Office

Garmon Newsom II, until recently the Burien City Attorney, is running for an open Seattle Municipal Court seat; he defended many of the city’s anti-homeless policies, including a ban on sleeping in public and an attempt to shut down a private encampment at a church. And Mike Solan, the bombastic former Seattle Police Officers Guild president, just bought a house in Gig Harbor and plans to run for Pierce County Council as a Republican.

Seattle Is Paying Two Salaries for One SPD Position

Why does SPD have an acting assistant chief, rather than a permanent one? As it turns out, they have both. Todd Kibbee, the permanent acting chief, is burning his leave, with full pay, before he retires while Brown does his job.

Despite Dire Warnings, Delivery Worker Wages Increased Under PayUp Law

A recent analysis by the city’s Office of Labor Standards found that despite dire warnings from council members who wanted to overturn the law, a 2023 law guaranteeing higher hourly pay for delivery drivers resulted in higher pay overall, along with less reliance on tips.

Council Plans Data Center Moratorium

Three city councilmembers—Council President Joy Hollingsworth, Debora Juarez, and Eddie Lin—will propose legislation next week that would ban data centers inside city limits. The proposal comes in response to reports that companies were planning five data centers on land owned by Seattle City Light.

City Council, labor, Tech

Despite Dire Warnings, Delivery Worker Wages Increased Under PayUp Law; Council Plans Data Center Moratorium

By Erica C. Barnett

1. Former city councilmember Sara Nelson’s effort to repeal a law that increased the way “gig” workers’ salaries are calculated, which would have reduced their pay substantially and increased profits for companies like Uber and Doordash, died that September after six months of heated debate. (The proposal would have effectively overturned the PayUp law, just adopted the previous year, whicih required companies to pay some of the expenses drivers previously had to absorb—expenses that pushed drivers’ pre-tip pay below the legal minimum wage). Although four council members voted for the bill in committee, it died quietly in late 2024.

A recent study by the city’s Office of Labor Standards now confirms what many drivers themselves said when testifying against the Nelson bill: Between January 2024 and July 2025, the average pay for drivers working for the five largest delivery companies average pay increased despite a reduction in tips, indicating that the legislation raising worker pay succeeded at its goal. The study looked at the approximately 92,000 workers who drive for companies like Doordash, most of whom work part-time and use multiple apps.

What’s more, predictions that drivers would get fewer orders did not come true—instead, the number of orders grew by 3.2 percent. The number of drivers increased by a similar amount in the same period—2.8 percent.

Pre-tip pay for “engaged time”—time spent actively completing orders—rose to an average of $30.12 during the study period, after subtracting mileage expenses (the report does not include an average prior to 2024). Pay for “online time,” which includes time drivers spent waiting for orders to come in, rose to an average of $15.98 an hour. This was despite an increase in fees by delivery companies, which add to the cost of orders.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

The PayUp law required delivery companies to report detailed information about drivers and their earnings, which is how OLS had access to such an expansive dataset.

The report did confirm that tips declined a bit (by an average of $2.37 a week) after worker wages went up, increasing the cost of deliveries, but noted that the percentage of workers’ income made up by tips was much lower, since drivers’ new base pay is now more consistent and predictable. Most drivers work part-time, with average weekly wages rising from $314.40 to $341.62, including tips.

2. Three city councilmembers—Council President Joy Hollingsworth, Debora Juarez, and Eddie Lin—will propose legislation next week that would ban large new data centers inside city limits, they announced yesterday. The legislation comes in response to reports that unnamed companies were planning five data centers; according to the Seattle Times, which reported the initial news, two of the companies withdrew their proposals this week.

Editor’s note: This item initially said that the data centers were proposed on City Light-owned property. City Light told PubliCola that none of the centers were planned for City Light property. We regret the error.

 

City Council, homelessness, Mayor Wilson

Proposed Changes to Wilson’s Shelter Plan Include Shelter-Free “Buffer” Zones, Mandatory Security

By Erica C. Barnett

City Councilmembers Maritza Rivera and Joy Hollingsworth proposed amendments to Mayor Katie Wilson’s ambitious shelter proposal that would mandate 24-hour security and buffer zones around parks, schools, and child care centers where large new “transitional encampments,” a term that primarily refers to tiny house villages, won’t be allowed. (Seattle has had a few actual temporary encampments, but Wilson’s plan centers around tiny house villages rather than tents).

Last month, Wilson introduced a legislative package that would make it easier to site and build larger tiny house villages. The council’s land use committee is considering the part of her proposal that increases the maximum “shelter census” from 100 to 150 people in most areas, plus a potential 250-person shelter somewhere in the city.

Hollingsworth sponsored the amendments that would impose security mandates and no-shelter zones because Rivera isn’t on the land use committee.

The first of the two Rivera-Hollingsworth amendments, which would both apply to shelters that serve more than 100 people would require the presence of “identifiable security personnel” on site 24 hours a day. The second would prohibit new tiny house villages within  750 feet of all child care centers, schools, and playgrounds, and within 500 feet of most city parks. (Small “pocket parks” under 2 acres would be exempt).

It’s unclear how much of the city would be automatically off-limits under this expansive prohibition. Using an online GIS map creator, I drew a 750-foot radius around every public school in the city as well as a couple dozen child care facilities in a large swath of Hollingsworth’s district. (Child care facilities in private homes don’t count as child care facilities under city code, according to a council staffer.)

Not indicated on the map are the park buffer zones, which would extend 500 feet in each direction from midsize or larger park, and park playgrounds, which would be subject to the 750-foot buffer zone.

Under the amendment, sober shelters and those “that are exclusively for families with children” would be allowed inside the buffer zones. The council expressed its “intent,” in legislation that released funds for Wilson’s initial shelter push, for two of the new shelters to be limited to families with children and one to people in recovery from addiction.

The proposed changes were just two of seven proposed amendments to the original bill, sponsored by Councilmember Dionne Foster.  Another amendment, from Councilmember Dan Strauss, would require tiny house providers to separate the new, larger villages into fenced-off “neighborhoods” whose residents would be physically restricted from entering each other’s area.

A fourth, from Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, would require the new, larger villages to have at least two shelter staff on site 24 hours a day. Other amendments would require good neighbor agreements and public safety plans and request a 1-to-15 staff-to-resident ratios for shelters serving people with high-acuity behavioral health conditions..

Rivera, speaking in favor of her proposal to establish no-shelter zones, said she was trying to protect children from dangerous people who might live at the new tiny house villages. “We know that for shelters that are not sober … there might be drug dealing and other public safety issues, and we don’t want near that near children,” Rivera said. Then, conflating unmanaged encampments with managed shelter, she continued, “I know we’ve had issues with encampments at our major parks.”

Rivera also attempted to link tiny house villages to a recent gunfire incident near a press conference Mayor Wilson held to announce new education and child care investments. “Everybody knows by now that there was a shooting and shots were fired … right into the Yesler Community Center,” Rivera said. “So I’m not saying shots are going to be fired outside of these sanctioned shelters. But again, we cannot say that there won’t be drug dealing outside of these shelters or attempting to be done outside of these shelters, and so we need to make sure that we’re keeping our kids safe.”

Hollingsworth and Rivera introduced their security and buffer zone amendments at the last minute, so the only copies consisted of physical printouts in council chambers. The committee didn’t vote on Tuesday; they’ll meet at least one more time next week before pushing the bill forward to a full council vote.