Category: City Council

City Council, Drugs, Police

SPD Chief Questions Whether LEAD Diversion Program is “Meeting Expectations”
“Mark43 Recorded Diversion” refers to all completed referrals police made through arrests; LEAD also gets some referrals that don’t come from SPD.

Barnes allowed that LEAD was better than “no diversion at all,” while Councilmember Rivera said the city has already “thrown a lot” of money at the program.

By Erica C. Barnett

Police Chief Shon Barnes questioned the value of LEAD, the city’s main criminal justice diversion program, at a city council committee on Monday—saying the program could not, on its own, “deliver the level of order, safety and visible presence that residents, businesses and visitors believe should be indicative of a major US city.” For 15 years, LEAD has provided services as an alternative to arrest and incarceration; the model, which includes long-term case management, harm reduction, and connections to housing and treatment, has been replicated around the country and is considered a best practice for minimizing people’s involvement in the criminal legal system.

Since 2023, police have had the power to arrest and charge people with a gross misdemeanor for possessing or drugs or using them in public. That year, a new state law made drug use or possession a gross misdemeanor, rather than a felony, in response to a 2021 state supreme court decision called State v. Blake that overturned existing laws that classified possession and public use as felony crimes.

Between 2024 and 2025, according to a staff presentation during the council’s public safety committee on Tuesday,  LEAD diversions for people arrested for possession or public use declined almost 37 percent—from 173 to 109—while charges filed by police officers more than doubled and attempted jail bookings increased by 191 percent. (This number includes both jail bookings and people the jail declined to book because of medical and other issues). Misdemeanor drug use and possession cases made up just under half of all drug arrests.

This is not the outcome local leaders said they hoped for when they adopted the law in 2023. In an executive order that accompanied the new law, then-mayor Bruce Harrell directed SPD to adopt a policy that directed officers to divert drug users into LEAD or other programs whenever possible, rather than arresting them. That policy says, “When an arrest is warranted, sworn employees should prioritize diversion in lieu of booking.”

In general, the numbers show, police have continued to routinely arrest and book people using drugs in public rather than sending them to LEAD.

Both the new law and the executive order gave individual police officers the ultimate authority to decide whether to arrest someone or refer them to LEAD, based partly on whether they decide a person is posing a “threat of harm” to anyone in the public. (LEAD can also take referrals after an arrest).

The way SPD’s policy defines a threat of harm gives police a lot of discretion to decide whether they think someone is causing harm. But it specifies that any time a person is using drugs near a bus or rail stop, school, or park, a threat of “harm will be presumed.”

Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes said the list was almost too expansive. “A very important policy decision will have to be made whether or not officers can [arrest] people using drugs” when they witness it, “and whether or not we can make that arrest without having to go through the checklist,” Barnes said.

Barnes and acting Assistant Chief Rob Brown told the committee that they respected LEAD and planned to continue diverting people to the program. In “many cases,” Barnes said, LEAD “is better than having what we’ve always done, which is no intervention at all. But it’s also important to be clear-eyed about what the program can and cannot accomplish and whether it’s meeting the expectations of the people who live, work and visit the city.”

 

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LEAD was started in Belltown in 2011 and has expanded in size and scope many times since, so it’s inaccurate to say that the city has “always” done “no intervention at all.” Barnes, previously police chief in Madison, Wisconsin, was appointed chief by Harrell last year.

Brown, who was previously the commander of SPD’s South Precinct, said he was particularly interested in holding people accountable who engage in what he called “defiant” drug use—that is, drug use in highly visible places that make residents and customers “very uncomfortable.” These “defiant” users, Brown said, “feel like they’re entitled to consume. … I understand that [for] somebody who is an addict, that jail alone, by itself, is not necessarily going to help them get to moving beyond their addiction. But what I do want to see is behavior change for this type of defiant, open consumption.”

In a separate presentation, Purpose Dignity Action’s Lisa Daugaard, who launched LEAD in Belltown 15 years ago, said funding for the PDA-run program hit “a high-water mark” in 2022 and has been declining ever since, reducing LEAD’s capacity to take on new clients.

After a LEAD staffer described an analysis that showed people do better the longer people they stick with LEAD, Councilmember Maritza Rivera said she wasn’t convinced the program was doing enough to impact visible drug use and disorder. “I appreciate that it can take up to two years to get someone to accept services and get toward a path of recovery,” Rivera said, but businesses can’t wait that long to see improvements. “It taking two years to help someone get off of 12th and Jackson is not helping that small business be able to stay in business and stay open,” she said.

“I don’t mean any disrespect by this,” Rivera continued, “but everyone comes here and says, if we had more money, it would be different. … “You know, we have thrown a lot [of money at LEAD]—I mean, PDA gets $20 million from the city.”

“We’re in a budget deficit. So are there other things that we can do to address the problem? … Because I don’t know that we have more money that we can put into it.”

Last year, Rivera voted along with the rest of the council to increase the police department’s budget by $35 million, including millions for to expand SPD’s camera surveillance program into additional neighborhoods. That amount will grow this year even in he absence of new programs, as officers that received raises of 42 percent over the past five years get raises on top of their new higher salaries.

City Council, homelessness, Mayor Wilson

As Seattle Goes It Alone on Shelter, Homelessness Authority Faces Forensic Financial Audit

By Erica C. Barnett

One group that was notably missing from a public discussion of Mayor Katie Wilson’s shelter expansion plan was the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, which is supposed to manage every publicly funded homeless shelter contract in the region. Instead, the city is going it alone in Wilson’s top campaign priority—building 1,000 new units of shelter, such as tiny house villages, in 2026, and a total of 4,000 by the end of her term.

Wilson’s team has said they can move faster if the city does the work. But they’re also waiting on the outcome of a major forensic audit that could shed unfavorable light on the KCRHA’s finance and budgeting practices. That audit, which the city is paying an outside consultant more than $600,000 to conduct, has been going on since August and is supposed to wrap up this month. (King County is also helping to pay for the audit.)

So far, Wilson’s team has not suggested that they’re concerned about KCRHA’s ability to administer homelessness contracts; instead, they’ve said it’s just easier and more logical for the city to do it.

Near the end of a city council committee meeting on Wednesday, for instance, Council President Joy Hollingsworth asked whether the KCRHA would “have a role” in the city’s big shelter expansion plans. Or, Hollingsworth asked, “are we transitioning that a little bit now to what we’re doing at the city, because those outcomes have not been—I’ll just be frank—what the public has anticipated for the money that we have been spending or giving to the King County Regional Homelessness Authority?”

Jon Grant, Wilson’s homelessness advisor, hemmed and hawed. “You know, we have, I think, a very important partnership and relationship with the King County Regional Homelessness Authority. …. And I think that collaboration will continue.” But, Grant said, it just makes more sense for the city itself to oversee the new shelters and administer contracts through the city’s Human Services Department—”in parallel to the work that we are also still doing with KCRHA and the work that they’re doing to operate the existing base of shelters,” of course.

Former mayor Bruce Harrell also worked to bring some of the work KCRHA was overseeing back in direct city control—focusing specifically on outreach and homelessness prevention, two areas the Harrell Administration said KCRHA “did not have the capacity” to oversee, given that they busy trying to implement Partnership for Zero—a plan, later abandoned, to end unsheltered homelessness in downtown Seattle.

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The forensic audit is taking a close look at the KCRHA’s finances—including the agency’s ongoing negative budget balance, which I wrote about last year. (KCRHA essentially starts every year with a fund balance of zero and borrows money, with interest to pay contractors throughout the year, paying back the loans when they receive money from funders.)

According to the city’s contract with consultant Clark Nuber, issued last July, the audit will “assess and document King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s (“KCRHA”) use and allocation of contributed funds; analyze the underlying drivers of its recurring negative cash position; assess the adequacy of the accounting infrastructure, information flow, and reporting; evaluate and reconcile cash advance activity to understand and identify issues related to reporting and reimbursement; and provide best practice recommendations to improve systems and processes.”

The audit was supposed to wrap up in December but the city extended the contract until the end of April late last year.

The homelessness agency has been audited before, by the state auditor and the King County Department of Human and Community Services, which raised serious concerns about the KCRHA’s accounting and monitoring practices—finding, for instance, that the agency had spent grant funding on ineligible projects, failed to executive projects on time, and had accounting errors that led to a negative balance at the end of the year.

The audit covers the period between 2021, when KCRHA started operations and July 2025. According to the contract, “If issues or suspected malfeasance are identified, the Consultant will propose additional targeted procedures to further investigate, which may include considerations such as expansion of the time range under scope, performing data analytics, staff and management interviews, and other related procedures.”

It’s unclear whether this audit, like the earlier ones, will find concerning issues with KCRHA’s internal accounting and budget practices, although early reports from people familiar with the process say it’s unlikely to be flattering. What is clear is that the city and county, which provide nearly 80 percent of the KCRHA’s budget, are following the outcome closely.

A spokesperson for Wilson told PubliCola the mayor’s office is “certainly aware of the audit, which was jointly commissioned by the previous administrations at the County and City. The mayor is concerned about KCRHA’s stewardship of public funds and will be asking hard questions about their financial controls & effectiveness.”

A spokesperson for DCHS said the department “supports the audit to gain a more clear and accurate understanding of KCHRA’s cashflow and to confirm that the organization has strong internal controls in place to sustain long-term cash management, including invoicing processes.

And a spokesperson for King County Executive Girmay Zahilay said, “Strong financial stewardship, transparency and accountability, and achieving tangible progress in addressing the homelessness crisis that impacts every part of our region are top priorities for Executive Zahilay. Once the full audit report is received, the County will work with the City and other partners to determine next steps.”

City Council, homelessness, Mayor Wilson

Mayor Wilson’s “Shelter Acceleration” Plan Moves Forward, With Some Questions Unanswered

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council approved two pieces of legislation to advance Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposed shelter expansion this week and moved a third bill forward, clearing a legal path for the city to build larger tiny house villages on a shorter timeline and providing $5 million to help pay for the first of 1,000 new shelter units Wilson has said her administration will add this year. (Earlier this month, Wilson announced the first new shelter that will open as part of her “shelter acceleration” plan—a 75-unit Pallet shelter on 15th Ave. W in Interbay).

But council members raised questions about the timeline and long-term funding for the new shelters, which are supposed to serve people with various needs, ranging from people priced out of market-rate housing to those with profound substance use disorder and other behavioral health needs. The legislation allocated existing funds for the shelters, but they’ll need ongoing funding through the city budget, which is facing a deficit of more than $140 million.

“I will say that in these few months of a new mayor, we have yet to understand exactly what the plan is for the rest of the year, and in most circumstances, the council would not pass a budget bill without an exact plan nailed down,” Councilmember and budget committee chair Dan Strauss said. ” [A] higher level of care means that there’s a higher financial cost, and I think that we have to just really reckon with that, because without spending those additional dollars, we’re not going to see the outcomes that we are setting out to achieve today.”

The first bill adopted Tuesday gives the city’s Department of Finance and Administrative Services the authority to sign leases and make property improvements on behalf of nonprofit agencies that operate tiny house villages or other types of “transitional encampments,” a change aimed at reducing the time it takes to open new shelters. The legislation also allows the city to negotiate leases at “market rate,” rather than capping the price for land.

The second bill allocates $8.2 million to new shelters by using up the balance of two city funds—a revolving loan fund for affordable housing that was “underutilized,” according to a council staff analysis, and a human services fund that’s restricted to projects in downtown Seattle.

Councilmember Eddie Lin’s land use committee took up the third and final bill for the first time on Wednesday. It would increase the maximum size of tiny house villages from 100 occupants to 15o and allow one “pilot” village with up to 250 residents—a reduction from Wilson’s original proposal, which would have allowed one such village in every council district.

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The council attached several amendments to the funding and leasing legislation before passing the two bills on Tuesday, including:

  • A requirement that each new shelter sign a “good neighbor agreement” committing to “address community concerns” as they arise, along with a written plan “to keep the area surrounding the shelter safe, clean, and free of unsanctioned encampments” (Rob Saka);
  • A list of reporting requirements, including monthly reports on “public safety indicators” around each new shelter (Debora Juarez) and a detailed report, due in September, showing how the mayor’s office plans to add 4,000 shelter units by the end of 2029 (Bob Kettle);
  • A new work group that will set the “acuity level” for future shelters (low, medium, or high—terms that are not currently defined or used in limiting clientele at Seattle’s existing shelters) and lay out the exact service types each level of shelter will provide (Strauss); and
  • A requirement that at least one of the new shelters established this year be an abstinence-only “recovery” shelter (Maritza Rivera).

Staffers with Wilson’s office repeatedly emphasized that they plan to work closely with both the Seattle Police Department and the city’s encampment-removing Unified Care Team to enforce public safety requirements around new tiny house villages, including the provision that makes shelter operators responsible for whether people pitch tents anywhere in the vicinity of the new shelters.

“The Seattle Police Department already enjoys a strong collaborative relationship with the Human Services Department via the Unified Care Team, which visits many of the existing encampments on a regular basis, and through the Find it Fix It app and criteria for resolving encampments that become dangerous or obstructions to public access to public spaces,” Wilson’s public safety advisor Alison Holcomb told the council on Wednesday.

The UCT’s criteria for encampment sweeps were established under the previous two mayors and codified by the Harrell administration in a matrix that focuses on where a tent is located rather than the individual circumstances of the people being swept.

During her campaign, Wilson opposed indiscriminate encampment sweeps, but has since told PubliCola that she doesn’t plan to make “earth-shattering changes” to the way the Unified Care Team operates. The 116-member team, which has exclusive access to hundreds of shelter beds, managed to get someone into a shelter bed for at least one night just 903 times in 2024.

Jon Grant, Wilson’s chief advisor on homelessness, said the mayor’s office hasn’t identified a site for the initial 250-person tiny house village because it would be premature to announce a location before the council adopts legislation allowing it.

Grant said the first 500 tiny homes will be aimed at “high-acuity,” chronically homeless people who need more intensive case management and wraparound services. (The cost of these services has been a bit of a question mark, as the mayor’s office has only announced an average cost, $28,000, for the first 1,000 shelter units she has said the city will open this year.) However, he said, there is “nuance” in that designation

“Within that range, folks can be chronically homeless for lots of different reasons,” including a disability that prevents them from having a full-time job who just needs “somebody to help them get their their ID and get connected to a rental subsidy program to move them into housing,” Grant said.

 

 

City Council, Courts, Density, homelessness, housing, Mayor Wilson

This Week on PubliCola: April 11, 2026

Shelter expansion, anti-apartment pushback, Northeast Seattle gets dedicated cops, and a bunch of other stories you may have missed this week.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, April 6

Seattle Nice: Mayor Wilson Wants to Expand Housing Faster

On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we talked about how Mayor Katie Wilson’s personal experience renting in Seattle may have impacted her decision to go “bigger, taller, and faster” on the city’s comprehensive plan. We also talked about City Councilmember Maritza Rivera’s still-vague proposal to “audit the Human Services Department.”

Councilmember Rivera Wants to Audit Human Services

Speaking of which, here’s what we know about that proposal: Rivera believes that in light of King County’s audit, which found serious problems with some its own human services contracts, the city should audit its own human services contracts. The auditor’s office told us this would be a long, involved process; generally, their audits are more focused and happen at the direction of more than just one councilmember.

Tuesday, April 7

Seattle Council Hears from Renters Who Want Quality of Life and Homeowners Who Want to Keep Neighborhoods to Themselves

A meeting on the proposed comprehensive plan update, which could allow some apartments in parts of the city that are not directly on large, polluting arterial roads and highways, broke down along predictable lines: Renters and housing advocates asked for the right to live in Seattle’s quieter neighborhoods, and housing opponents argued that allowing apartments near them would be tantamount to clear-cutting Seattle, murdering orcas, and making birds go extinct.

Wednesday, April 8

SPD Dedicates Three Officers to Magnuson Park, Citing Success with “Disorder” and Property Crimes During Pilot

The Seattle Police Department is permanently assigning three officers to the area around Magnuson Park, a large lakefront park in an affluent part of Northeast Seattle where residents, and Councilmember Rivera, have been calling for more cops to crack down on loud summertime parties and street racing. The park is home to hundreds of low-income residents who live in apartments run by two nonprofits; it’s also where police shot and killed Charleena Lyles, a woman who called 911 during a mental-health crisis.

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Thursday, April 9

Larger Library Levy Moves Forward

The city council added nearly $70 million to a $410 million library levy renewal that will be on the ballot this year, including new funds for repairs and maintenance at the downtown library, air conditioning for libraries that don’t have it, and more electronic copies of popular books. Rivera voted against every amendment, citing the need for fiscal responsibility as the city approaches a state-imposed cap on property tax levies.

Founder of AI Worker Surveillance Startup Appointed to Ethics Commission

Evan Smith, formerly of Starbucks, created a system for companies to spy on retail workers by recording all their conversations and using AI to analyze their speech for compliance with company policy. Councilmembers Rivera and Joy Hollingsworth nominated him to serve on the city’s Ethics and Elections Commission.

County Assessor Pleads Not Guilty to Stalking, Must Wear Ankle Monitor in Five-Year No Contact Order

John Arthur Wilson, who has refused to step down from his elected role as King County Assessor despite being arrested for stalking and harassing his ex-fiancée, was slapped with a five-year no-contact order while awaiting trial on stalking charges. He’ll have to wear an ankle monitor to ensure he doesn’t come within 1,000 feet of his ex; his term expires at the end of this year.

Friday, April 10

Developers Ask for Mandatory Affordable Housing Fee Holiday as Permits for New Apartments Dry Up

Seven years ago, the city approved Mandatory Housing Affordability fees on new development; the fees fund affordable housing projects, or developers can build affordable units on site. Since then, development has slackened and the cost of building has gone up, and developers say the fees are a major reason. Now, they’re asking the city to lower the fees temporarily. But the request raises larger questions about how Seattle funds affordable housing, and whether it’s smart to treat apartments like a negative thing by charging special fees on new development.

Also this week: I covered two stories exclusively on Bluesky.

First, the mayor met with opponents of police surveillance cameras in a Zoom town hall that was clearly frustrating for both sides. (I attended a watch party at Stoup on Capitol Hill.) Wilson seems committed to turning on the cameras proposed by her predecessor, Bruce Harrell, and approved by the previous city council, and opponents of police surveillance feel betrayed by the mayor they supported, in part, because they thought she shared their commitment to getting rid of the cameras.

Second, Wilson announced that the city has secured a site for the first 75 units of new shelter of her term—a small step toward the 1,000 new shelter units she promised during her first year. The announcement came at a public meeting where the mayor moderated a panel and took questions from the public, a dramatic departure from the way most previous mayors have rolled out big announcements.

I also talked about these stories and more on Hacks and Wonks with Crystal Fincher on Friday; we also discussed the lawsuit that was filed this week to stop the state’s new high-earners’ income tax, some sheriff’s opposition to a new law saying they can’t serve if their law enforcement certification has been revoked, and more.

 

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City Council, Development, housing

Developers Ask for Mandatory Affordable Housing Fee Holiday as Permits for New Apartments Dry Up

By Erica C. Barnett

A group of apartment builders is asking Mayor Katie Wilson and the City Council to consider rolling back the fees they pay every time they build new housing. The developers, calling themselves the Seattle Housing Roundtable, are asking the city to reduce Mandatory Housing Affordability fees by 90 percent this year, followed by an 80 percent reduction next year and a 75 percent reduction in 2028, with a goal of permanent MHA reforms by the following year.

According to Ian Morrison, an attorney with the land use firm McCullough Hill, MHA “was a good idea when it was originally envisioned, at a time when interest rates were much lower and the economic climate was a lot more positive and predictable.” But, he added, “What we’re seeing now, using the city’s own data, is MHA as a part of a project that was viable in the late 2010s no longer work.   That means housing will not be built in Seattle today.”

The Seattle City Council approved MHA in 2019 as the final component of former mayor Ed Murray’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA). The program made developers build affordable housing or pay a fee every time they built new apartments in Seattle’s multifamily areas (at the time, Seattle still had single-family zoning). In exchange, they were allowed to build more densely.  The framework took for granted that new market-rate apartments have a negative impact on neighborhoods that developers must mitigate by funding affordable housing.

This consensus has shifted just in the seven years MHA has been in effect, as scarcity has made apartments increasingly unaffordable and more people understand that density is an environmental necessity and an answer to growing demand for housing. At the same time, the funding MHA produces for affordable housing has plunged from a high of $74 million in 2021 to just $22 million last year as development has slowed. Last year, developers filed applications to build fewer than 2,000 new apartment buildings, a drop of almost 90 percent from a peak of 17,400 units in 2020.

Developers and land use attorneys we spoke to seemed reluctant to say outright that the city should get rid of MHA altogether, although it negatively impacts their bottom line. Holly Golden, a land use attorney at HCMP Law Offices, said that with lower fees, “you’d still see millions of dollars of MHA fees, plus new construction jobs and permit fees to keep [the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections running during the building downturn. … Getting projects started provides a huge financial benefit to the city budget at a time when they really need it.”

Taxes on construction are inherently volatile, and there’s a real question about whether MHA aligns with the reality of Seattle as a majority-renter city with an acute housing shortage. If the city agrees to an MHA “holiday” and development rebounds, a surge in other funding sources like the Real Estate Excise Tax could help offset the loss of MHA dollars.

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Not every jurisdiction funds affordable housing by charging a fee on development. PubliCola has reported on a concept called funded inclusionary zoning, in which developers get tax breaks for including affordable housing in their projects. The concept flips the script on development, treating density (i.e. apartments, i.e. renters) as a good thing while also ensuring that affordable housing gets built. Developers aren’t charitable organizations—if a project doesn’t make sense to them, they won’t build it—so instead of penalizing new housing with fees, cities like Portland are trying incentives to build new housing at all income levels.

“There are ways to ensure that inclusionary zoning programs work for the long term and are well calibrated to ensure they don’t impede housing,” Morrison said. “But getting those details right takes time.”

Eddie Lin, the head of the city council’s land use committee, told us on a recent episode of Seattle Nice that he’s “open to a temporary reduction in MHA fees. It needs to be tailored to the right size to get construction going, but not more than we need.”

Eliminating MHA completely, Lin continued, is a nonstarter; the fee, he said, remains “incredibly important for developing additional affordable housing. … We want to be mindful of not giving away too much more than we need to.” MHA reform, he said, might include addressing the fact that developers currently have to pay a fee for building in low-rise zones but not in neighborhood residential—the former single-family zones that now allow essentially the same density as low-rise areas.

Ray Connell, managing director at the developer Holland Partner Group, said it’s possible the impact of MHA and other taxes and regulations in real time by looking east across Lake Washington. “All the cranes are in Redmond,” where fees are lower, “so projects get started,” Connell said. “It’s amazing to go over there and see a bunch of new projects and cranes in the sky. Why is it happening over there? It’s not a hard cost issue, and it’s not an interest rate issue. Yes, it’s the jobs… but it’s also the additional fees that we have to face on this side of the lake.”

Redmond recently adopted an aggressive inclusionary zoning package that says 10 percent of all new units in housing with 10 or more units must be affordable. In four years, Connell said, “there won’t be cranes in certain areas of Redmond. … We can’t get those areas of Redmond to work anymore.”

City Council

Larger Library Levy Moves Forward; Founder of AI Worker Surveillance Startup Appointed to Ethics Commission
Seattle librarian Betsy Kluck-Keil holds up a “visual aid” at the library levy committee meeting Wednesday—a t-shirt that reads, “library > Google”

1. The Seattle City Council’s library levy committee, which includes all nine councilmembers, approved amendments to this year’s library levy proposal that will add almost $70 million to Mayor Katie Wilson’s initial $410 million proposal. Maritza Rivera, who chairs the committee, voted against every one of her colleagues’ amendments, saying that while “I love libraries,” increasing the levy further was fiscally irresponsible.

“With the proposed package, we would have $310 million left for future levies, including the housing and transportation levies. If all the amendments pass today, then we will only have $230 million left. The additions from the amendments today, while worthy, are increasing items that are already in the mayor’s package at a time when we can’t afford more. We know there are other needs that are coming. Let’s face it, we’re only in year two of this madman in the President’s president’s seat. Who knows? Who knows what else we will have to deal with. And of course, everyone keeps talking about affordability in Seattle these days, that seems more real than ever.

The city faces a state-mandated property tax cap of $3.60 per $1,000 in home value; the new levy, which is virtually certain to pass, will leave Seattle with just $310 million in capacity for future levies, such as the housing and transportation levies, Rivera said.

“If I felt that we could add this levy without jeopardizing future levies or adding to our affordability crisis, I too would add more,” Rivera said. “We don’t have a crystal ball to predict what will happen in the future. We’re operating with the knowledge that we have today. There is no judgment here. There is this is not about who loves the libraries more. This is about fiscal responsibility and our ability to pay for all our needs.”

The levy cap is a real, looming issue, and one the council should arguably be taking on more directly—for instance, by advocating for broad changes to property tax law in Olympia. If it isn’t the library levy, it will be the Seattle Transit Measure, or the next transportation levy, or election funding, or Seattle Center—whatever unlucky levy happens to fall in a year that Seattle’s property taxes finally touch the cap.

The amendments the committee passed include funding for repairs and maintenance at the Central Library downtown, seismic upgrades at the Columbia Branch library, multilingual children’s programming, and elevator and escalator maintenance, and air conditioning in libraries that current lack it. In an apparent response to Rivera’s comment, last month, that the city has federal FEMA dollars coming in to pay for cooling systems in five libraries, Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck said, “I would note that trusting our library’s future to Donald Trump’s FEMA is irresponsible.”

Deferring maintenance always leads to higher costs down the line, Rinck added. “Any pennies we pinch now will will cost us dollars seven years from now.”

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2. On Thursday, the city council’s governance committee voted unanimously (with three councilmembers present) to appoint Evan Smith, the founder of a company called Ethosphere, to serve on the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission. Ethosphere sells AI software to retail companies so that they can spy on their sales associates—or, as a boosterish Geekwire profile put it, “help associates improve their performance while giving managers better visibility into what drives sales.”

Retail companies that use Ethosphere’s system—and it’s unclear at this point which, if any, retailers have signed up—will require floor staff to wear microphones that record every conversation they have on their shift; these recordings get transcribed and analyzed by AI large language models “to assess how well employees followed the brand’s selling approach,” according to Geekwire. Sales associates the AI finds out of compliance could be penalized, retrained, or fired.

For anyone who’s worked retail, the dystopian nature of this kind of “productivity” software is obvious; selling khakis for minimum wage could soon mean submitting to intense surveillance by companies that consider workers interchangeable sales pitch dissemination machines.

None of that is directly related to the work of the ethics commission, which decides whether elected officials have violated ethics and elections law, among other responsibilities. But it does indicate on which side of the management-worker divide Smith’s sympathies fall. Smith didn’t show up for his nomination hearing on Thursday; according to Ethics and Elections director Wayne Barnett, he was “in San Francisco.”