Category: City Hall

City Hall, Development, housing, Renters, Uncategorized

Council Amendments to Comprehensive Plan Reveal Competing Priorities
Maritza Rivera’s amendments would shrink neighborhood centers—areas where 3-to-6-story apartments would be newly legal—across her northeast Seattle district.

The comprehensive plan sets rules for how Seattle develops in the future, including where the city will allow its renter majority to live.

By Erica C. Barnett

After nearly a year of delays, the city council is finally getting ready to put its stamp on Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed 10-year Comprehensive Plan—a document Harrell has branded with his campaign slogan as the “One Seattle Plan.” The council has been meeting for months to discuss elements of the plan, including the creation of a few dozen new “neighborhood centers” where apartments will be allowed for the first time in decades, but this week was the council’s first opportunity to propose tweaks to the plan—107 amendments in all.

The comprehensive plan sets policies for growth and development, designating where new housing, transportation, and other infrastructure should go and placing limits on housing density in the city’s neighborhoods. It’s updated every 10 years, with periodic amendments, and inevitably reflects the political priorities of whoever is in office at the time.

We’ve reported previously on the Harrell Administration’s reluctance to allow significantly more housing in Seattle’s traditional single-family neighborhoods as part of the plan.

After killing an early draft of the plan that would have allowed significantly more density, Harrell released a plan last year that fell far short of the changes necessary to create enough housing for new and current residents—including renters—to live in Seattle affordably. After intense criticism of that proposal—the city’s Planning Commission said it upheld exclusionary policies rooted in redlining and failed to provide the housing Seattle needs—the mayor came back with a new plan that allowed slightly more housing, though still less than the proposal most members of the current city council said they supported when they ran for election in 2023.

The council’s proposed amendments are a mixed bag. Several proposals would collectively shrink the size of the proposed “neighborhood centers”—areas within 800 feet of certain frequent transit stops where 3-to-6-story apartments would be allowed—by hundreds of acres, in a blatant retreat to old single-family zoning patterns that benefit people who already own property and don’t want renters living in “their” neighborhoods.

Others would impose new restrictions on any new development that requires removing trees, including one that would give the city free rein to force builders to redo projects if even one tree, of any size, was threatened.

Still others would provide new incentives for developers to build dense housing, serving as a counterpoint to other councilmembers’ proposals to shrink the areas of the city where people who can’t afford to buy a house in Seattle are allowed to live.

Breaking the substantive amendments down into broad categories, we have:

Expanded Neighborhood Centers

On balance, the proposed amendments that make it easier to build housing—including everything from density bonuses for affordability to expanded and brand-new neighborhood centers—outweigh NIMBY proposals to restrict housing, although some of the proposals are probably nonstarters—or negotiation starters—in their current forms.

Harrell’s final comprehensive plan proposal included 3o neighborhood centers—down from 48 in an early draft, but more than the 24 included in an early version of the plan. Since then, though, there’s been intense pressure on the council to further reduce the number of neighborhood centers in the plan, coming primarily from incumbent  homeowners in neighborhoods like Wedgwood, Madrona, and Maple Leaf.

Although several council members did end up proposing amendments that would scale down the size of neighborhood centers, in some cases dramatically, the amendments to add new areas of potential density outweigh those proposals, meaning that if every proposed change to the neighborhood centers was adopted, the amount of land in designated neighborhood centers would increase significantly.

Council members who proposed new or expanded neighborhood centers included Dan Strauss (who proposed a new East Ballard neighborhood center and called for expanding the boundaries of five others, including in Magnolia), Bob Kettle (who proposed a new North Queen Anne/Nickerson Neighborhood Center) and Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who’s proposing eight new neighborhood centers, one in each council district.

“Seattle needs more housing,” Rinck said. “Seattle also needs full and thriving communities, and we’ve heard an overwhelming call from constituents to achieve these goals with more housing, especially in high-opportunity neighborhoods which haven’t seen proportional growth.”

Build This, Not That

Other proposed amendments would add density bonuses and incentives for different types of housing, such as stacked flats and affordable apartments.

Kettle, for instance, proposed getting rid of an “amenity area” requirement for new housing in neighborhood residential zones, freeing up more land for housing.

Under the current proposal, 20 percent of the space around new apartment buildings in the city’s traditional single-family areas would be reserved for open space, typically a yard, for residents to “recreate on site”—as if what apartment dwellers in cities really want is a tiny lawn where they can all hang out together.

An amendment from Sara Nelson would retain a requirement that residential buildings, including new apartments in all parts of the city, be exempt from environmental review under the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA); that exemption is otherwise set to expire next month, making housing harder to build.

Other amendments, from Hollingsworth, Nelson, Kettle, and Rinck, would provide bonus density for developers who agree to build specific types of housing, including social housing, accessory dwelling units, and low-income or affordable housing. Several proposals would create incentives for developers to build stacked flats—apartments spread out across a single story of a building—including density bonuses for retaining trees and amendments that would allow stacked flats to be denser than other types of apartments in neighborhood residential (former single-family) zones.

Rob Saka also has an amendment that would give a density bonus for one- or two-story “cottage” apartments surrounding a large common area, a style that resembles single-family housing more than the three-to-six-story apartments that will be allowed in the new neighborhood residential zones under the current plan.

Strauss proposed an amendment that would increase the maximum height in these areas from six to seven or eight stories immediately next to a major transit stop, and Rinck proposed changing the definition of “major transit stop” to include high-frequency buses.

15-Minute City

Several amendments would reduce or remove mandatory parking requirements. The most ambitious, from Rinck, would “remove parking requirements citywide for all land uses in all zones,” a phrase that brings joy to my car-hating little heart. (Yes, I own a car. No, I don’t think the city should socially engineer car culture, as it currently does.)

Builders wouldn’t be barred from including parking in their developments, but they wouldn’t be forced to do so, as they are in many places under the city’s current code.

Another amendment from Rinck, essentially a backup if her first parking proposal fails would reduce parking mandates to comply with a statewide parking reform bill that requires cities to eliminate some of their parking mandates by 2028. Another proposal, from Strauss, would establish parking maximums in the city’s regional centers—the densest areas, including downtown, Capitol Hill, and Strauss’ home turf of Ballard. In a concession to the tree-preservation lobby, Rinck’s amendments also include one that would eliminate parking mandates for developments that preserve trees.

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A proposal to allow corner stores in neighborhoods could also see some meaningful changes.

In the past, we’ve dunked on Harrell’s proposal to allow corner stores in neighborhoods, because it would only allow new stores and restaurants  on literal corner lots, with restrictions that don’t apply to other businesses in the city, such as a mandatory 10pm closing time. Several amendments attempt to remedy those issues. The amendments range from extremely modest (a Nelson amendment that would remove the literal-corner requirement but retain restrictions on business type, size, and closing hours) to ambitious, by Seattle standards (a Rinck proposal that would remove the corner requirement, allow businesses to be open past 10pm, and add bars to the list of businesses that are legal in neighborhoods.

Three amendments, from Rinck, Strauss, and Nelson, would make it easier to open stores and restaurants in residential neighborhoods where they’re currently banned. As we’ve reported, Harrell’s comp plan proposal would allow corner stores in neighborhoods, but only on literal corners, with additional restrictions such as mandatory 10pm closures and a stipulation that they can include restaurants, but not bars.

The amendments range from modest (amendments from Strauss and Nelson to allow stores throughout residential zones, not just on corners) to ambitious (a Rinck proposal that would allow restaurants and bars throughout these areas, eliminate a requirement that businesses be closed from 10pm to 6am, and ditch a 2,500-square-foot size restriction included in the mayor’s proposal). Allowing bars in neighborhoods, a policy that works fine in big cities across the country, may be a bridge too far for censorious Seattle, but a compromise between these proposals could be a first step toward creating more 15-minute neighborhoods in Seattle.

Homeowners vs. Renters

Of course, it wouldn’t be a zoning update without some NIMBY poison pills. Although no one, including newly appointed District 5 Councilmember Debora Juarez, has proposed reviving former D5 councilmember Cathy Moore’s quixotic effort to remove an entire neighborhood center from Maple Leaf, several councilmembers have proposed reducing the amount of land in their districts where people who rent apartments can live.

Maritza Rivera, who has frequently claimed that the city did insufficient outreach to single-family neighborhoods before allowing apartments near frequent transit stops, has three amendments to shrink neighborhood centers in Bryant, Ravenna, and Wedgwood. Her proposal to scale back the Wedgwood center is the most radical of the three, in that it would reduce the size of the center by about 40 percent, limiting apartments to 35th Ave. NE, already a busy arterial, and prohibiting them in the adjacent blocks. (In contrast, one of Rinck’s amendments would expand the Wedgwood neighborhood center to the south; expect strong objections from Rivera to that one).

“Based on months of feedback from community members who live in and near the proposed neighborhood centers, my amendments modify the boundaries of the neighborhood centers in the D4, including Wedgwood, Bryant and Ravenna, to reflect resident concerns….  around the ability of local neighborhood streets to handle increased growth and the infrastructure,” Rivera said.

A Rivera amendment for Ravenna traces a similar line to carve single-family houses in a designated historic district (itself a way for older neighborhoods to oppose density) out of the proposed neighborhood center around Third Place Books, leaving the commercial area but ensuring that there would be no apartments in the neighborhood surrounding the commercial center.

Separately, Rivera proposed an amendment that would give the city the HOA-like authority to dictate what kind of external siding would be allowed on buildings within designated national or local historic districts, based on factors like the “historic character” of an area; this extraordinary new power would also apply to historic districts that might be designated in the future, including those proposed by house owners who oppose new development in their neighborhoods.

Joy Hollingsworth wants to cut the Madrona Neighborhood Center by about seven blocks, concentrating new housing into a smaller area that already includes parks, schools, and other areas where housing can’t be built.

Joy Hollingsworth has proposed shrinking down another controversial neighborhood center in Madrona, whose homeowning residents showed up en masse to oppose the zoning change in their neighborhood. Hollingsworth’s amendment would shrink the Madrona center by nearly 40 percent, slicing off big chunks of current single-family areas on the east and west sides of the proposed center and concentrating any new housing around an existing commercial stretch that includes an elementary school, library, and playfield where housing can’t be built.

Finally, it wouldn’t be a conversation about housing in 2025 without hand-wringing over trees—not planting or maintaining trees in public spaces, which are actions the city could take at any time, or encouraging property owners to plant new trees themselves, but preserving trees that already exist, generally at the expense of new development.

In addition to the tree preservation incentives I mentioned earlier, there’s an amendment from Strauss to “recognize the importance of the natural environment and native species, including trees, bees, salmon, orca, and herons,” plus several from Rivera to make it harder to develop housing if trees are on site.

The most extreme proposal from Rivera—and the one that made Rinck confirm with council staff that the amendment really would do what it appeared to do—would allow the city to require developers to come up with a completely new alternative plan if it turned out their housing proposal would require the removal of any tree, no matter its size, age, or viability.

It’s easy to see how this could grind development in traditional single-family areas to a halt. If someone planted a sapling on a property slated for development, or if there was already unremarkable small tree on site, the city could stop the project and require the developer to start from scratch.

Housing is already tremendously expensive to build in Seattle, and construction permits are declining as developers pull out of the city. Empowering unelected city staffers to force full project redesigns around every existing tree would exacerbate the housing crisis, adding costs to projects that are already financed while reducing the amount of housing that could be built in every project with a tree on site. And forget about expanding the city’s tree canopy—who would plant a new tree on a property they may want to sell in the future, knowing it would instantly reduce their property value?

City Hall, immigration, Media

No, the Library Did Not Tell Employees to “Capitulate to Fascism”

By Erica C. Barnett

A story posted earlier today in the Burner—an online publication started by former Stranger writer Hannah Krieg—claimed that the Seattle Public Library was “capitulating to fascism,” as Krieg put it on X, by forbidding frontline workers from recording ICE raids in library buildings on their phones and telling them that ICE does not need warrants to barge in and make arrests.

Citing a memo titled “Protocols for Immigration Enforcement: Compliance and Readiness at The Seattle Public Library” as well as an all-staff email from library director Tom Fay, the post also claimed that library staffers can’t ask ICE for a warrant to make arrests, and that SPL will not protect any employee who’s arrested for allegedly interfering in an ICE arrest.

What’s more, according to the article (written by a guest writer but posted by Krieg) the memo itself was apparently written by someone every progressive hates—Republican City Attorney Ann Davison.

Banning staffers from asking ICE agents for warrants? Prohibiting people from recording arrests on their phones? It all sounds quite alarming—and it would be, if any of it was true.

The Burner, which represents itself as independent journalism with a lefty twist, seems to have forgotten the journalism part. I got a copy of the memo, which was not linked in the post, and it took about five seconds to realize that at least one of the statements the publication represented, between quotation marks, as quotes from the memo … is not actually a quote from the memo.

These misrepresentations would just be sloppy if the memo actually did tell library staff that ICE never needs a warrant or that people can’t record ICE on their phones, as the story explicitly claims. But the memo (which is 12 pages long) basically says the opposite, so the misquotes are really misinformation.

The false quote from the memo is “Do not record interactions on a phone.” In fact, the memo (and a followup email to staff from Fay) emphasizes that it is legal to record ICE interactions, but that employees should use their personal devices to do so and understand the risk that a cop might get excited (as they do) and decide to arrest them. Describing a shitty fact about police behavior is a far cry from the saying that the “City will not defend, support or represent them in any legal case,” which is how the article describes the policy. The memo does not say any of that.

“This guidance does not intend to to strip library staff of their citizen right to film law enforcement,” Fay wrote, adding a link to  guidance on recording police officers from the Freedom Forum, a First Amendment advocacy group.

UPDATE: On Wednesday, in an email to staff that also advised staff about the Burner’s inaccurate reporting, Fay said the library’s guidance not to record on city-owned phones was “the result of a misunderstanding that occurred at a citywide training in February.” That was the only part of the guidance that was specific to SPL’s protocols; now, the rules at the library are identical to those for all other city of Seattle staff.

This change won’t actually impact any frontline library staff, because none of those staffers have city-issued phones. In fact, just 76 of the library’s more than 650 employees have phones, including regional managers, supervisors, gardeners, and maintenance workers.

The story also says the memo directs staff that “warrants [are] not required” for ICE to make arrests. “[A]rrest warrants definitely are required except in limited cases (the memo does not acknowledged this),” the piece claims, contrasting the library’s policy unfavorably with a Seattle Public Schools policy that requires ICE to present a warrant before entering school buildings.

In fact, the memo dedicates several pages to the library’s protocol for barring ICE officers from all non-public spaces unless they can present a judicial warrant; explains the difference from a judicial and administrative warrant and notes that the latter isn’t sufficient; and gives staffers a script to use if an ICE officer tries to get into areas where they aren’t allowed without a warrant.

“Officers need a judicial warrant to enter and search non-public areas,” the memo says. (Emphasis in original.) “DO NOT consent/grant access to non-public areas. Please tell them the following: ‘You may not enter this non-public area, and I am not authorized to let you enter. I will notify Library administration, and someone will be coming to verify.” At that point, staffers are supposed to call their manager and document everything that happens.

Legally, ICE can make arrests in most public places, including libraries; schools were exempt under a federal policy that designated them as “sensitive” areas ICE needs a judicial warrant to enter. Although Trump rescinded that Biden-era policy in January, his executive order—which also covers churches, where the sanctuary movement began—is being challenged in court.

The library’s guidance comes directly from a citywide training on February 27 about how city employees should respond to ICE raids, among other topics related to immigration. The training was created by the city’s Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs, which has a ton of other know-your-rights resources on its website.

More than 1,000 employees across the city took part in the training, which explained existing city policies for dealing with ICE (which have not changed, but have obviously become more urgent) and included resources from Northwest Immigrant Rights Project and the National Immigrant Law Center.

I posted obliquely about this on Bluesky earlier, and I see that since then, the Burner has posted a whole separate post that now includes a completely different two-page memo, and has changed the headline on the original post, which was “Seattle Public Libraries Tells Workers Not To Interfere With ICE Raids.” Once you tell people they should be outraged at the local library for violating the First Amendment and forcing staff to roll over for ICE arrests, and shout on social media that they’re basically fascists, it’s pretty hard to walk that back.

“Library memo describes citywide ICE policy for public buildings, developed by Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs” isn’t much of a headline, though. That’s because it isn’t much of a story.

Update Wednesday: The original story has been removed, replaced by a new piece by Krieg asserting essentially the same facts and with a misleading headline that still suggests the library has ordered staff to stand by passively and not ask for warrants when they are required, which is false. The story was purportedly taken down because it did not include “copies of the memos” laying out the city’s policy, but the new piece still doesn’t include the the 12-page memo laying out the policy, which includes a script for demanding warrants and barring ICE from entering areas of public buildings where they are not allowed to be. The new piece also argues that SPL should order its frontline workers to be confrontational toward armed ICE agents. By doubling down on the false narrative and failing to correct or acknowledge any errors, the new post does not address any of the the issues outlined below.

City Hall, Mayor Harrell

Harrell Installed Gym in Basement of City Hall for Himself and His Security Detail

By Erica C. Barnett

Down in the basement of City Hall, at the end of a corridor most city employees have little reason to visit, is a faux-wood paneled section of wall with an unmarked door and a small ledge that looks like it once served as a customer service counter. The only indication that there’s anything behind the wall, besides a jutting door handle, is a red-lit security panel, indicating that someone has the ability to badge their way into this unmarked room, and that it isn’t you.

The space, located just past the Boards and Commissions room, was at one time a walk-up counter for the city’s credit union, but was vacant for years—until 2022, when Mayor Bruce Harrell had it converted into a workout facility. The unmarked gym is only open to the mayor and members of his security detail, who are SPD officers; in an unscientific poll of a half-dozen current and former City Hall staffers, not one was aware of the gym’s existence.

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The insider who told PubliCola about the gym said Harrell didn’t end up using it very often, preferring a private club nearby that has better facilities. According to Jamie Housen, a spokesman for Harrell’s office, the mayor used the gym “a handful of times, maybe five or six. Housen said the equipment in the gym is all the “personal equipment” of the SPD officers on Harrell’s security team, and includes “a 10+ year-old treadmill and used weight equipment”—definitely a step-down from the Washington Athletic Club, where Harrell is a member.

The basement of city hall also contains a lactation room that one staffer described as the equivalent of a “supply closet.” Seattle Channel is also down there, as is the office for the city’s janitorial division and a garage access point for city staffers.

It’s unclear how often members of Harrell’s security team use the gym. SPD officers have access to a fully equipped gym at SPD headquarters right across the street from City Hall, as well as at every police precinct, but Housen said the mayor’s detail “is unable to use those spaces because they are required to keep close proximity to the mayor at all times.” Housen said SPD pays a lease for the gym to the city’s fleets and facilities department, and let us know that Jim Brunner of the Seattle Times passed on writing about the gym last year.

We filed a records request for more details about the gym, and will file an update if we learn anything interesting, like the max incline on that decade-old treadmill or whether there’s an explicit policy against dropping weights.

City Hall, labor, Mayor Harrell, Police

A Handful of Supporters Rally for Ousted Police Chief Diaz, Expected to Return to SPD at Former Rank

By Erica C. Barnett

Former police chief Adrian Diaz appeared to accept his fate when Mayor Bruce Harrell removed him as chief last week, but some of his most ardent supporters are still fighting for his reinstatement, claiming he is the victim of disgruntled employees who fabricated stories to take him down.

Six women and one man have sued or filed intent to sue the Seattle Police Department over allegations that include gender and racial discrimination, retaliation, and sexual harassment. Some of the allegations are against Diaz himself, along with his public relations director, John O’Neil.

Some of Diaz’ supporters, including nd Seattle Community Police Commission co-chair Harriett Walden, said Diaz’ accusers were disgruntled employees engaged in a racist campaign against Diaz, who is Latino.

On Wednesday, two of Diaz’ most vocal supporters, SPD employee and police advocate Victoria Beach and SPD Latino community liaison Carmen Martinez, organized a pro-Diaz demonstration in front of City Hall. As protests go, it was a small one: Around a dozen people, counting children, marched around the downtown block that includes both City Hall and SPD headquarters, holding with slogans like “Due Process for Chief Diaz” and “Honk 4 Diaz ❤️”. Over the course of an hour, a handful of drivers honked their support, prompting cheers from the group, which included Pacific Merchant Shipping Association vice president Jordan Royer and Burien City Councilmember Jimmy Matta.

Some of the demonstrators told PubliCola they supported Diaz because he had been present and available in their communities when other police were not. “I’m here to support the chief because he’s always been there to support the [Chinatown/International District] ever since he came on board,” said Gary Lee, cochair of the CID Public Safety Council. “And he would come to our events.”

Matta said he respected Diaz for reaching out to the South Park community as a patrol officer in the area and providing a positive model to kids at a time when “we were losing a lot of our children to gang violence, to drugs, the same things that we’re having now going on in our streets. … I just believe that it’s important to make sure that we support an individual that’s done the hard work.”

Royer and Lee both said they just didn’t think Diaz is the kind of person who would sexually harass women or engage in gender or racial discrimination.

“We go back a long way,” Royer said said. “I know his character. I know who he is, and that’s why I’m supporting him. … What happens if the investigation comes back, and he’s cleared? How does he clear his name? It just seems like a really good man is getting trashed.”

None of the people PubliCola spoke to said they were 100 percent certain Diaz was innocent, as Beach and Martinez have suggested. “If the process played out he was found factually [guilty] of wrongdoing, then you let the chips fall where they may,” Royer said. “I’d be very disappointed. I’d be upset. But I wouldn’t be out here.”

“I’m glad that the mayor has given [Diaz] the benefit of doubt in this deal” by keeping him on at the police department, Matta said. “Now, when the investigation comes through, we’ll see what happens. There may be a different conversation, because no woman, no personal of color, nobody should be put in a situation where it’s not a healthy work environment.”

Instead of firing Diaz outright, Harrell assigned him to an unspecified “special projects” role. When he returns to the department (from an indeterminate personal leave), Diaz will almost certainly have to return as a lieutenant—the rank he held before Harrell appointed him police chief.

Civil service rules for police stipulate that anyone assigned to the rank of captain or higher, then removed, has the right to return to their previous highest rank—for Diaz, who never took a test to become a captain, that rank is lieutenant. New interim chief Sue Rahr could get around this requirement by appointing Diaz assistant or deputy chief, but that appears unlikely, given the still-unresolved allegations that led to his removal last week.

A lower rank would come with a significant reduction in pay and perks for the former chief, who makes a base salary just shy of $340,000. Currently, the top pay for a lieutenant, before overtime, is just over $199,000, although long-serving lieutenants also receive “longevity premiums”; Diaz, who has been with the department for 27 years, would presumably be eligible for a 12 percent salary bump, which would put his base pay in the low $200,000s.

Rahr will make a base salary of nearly $350,000 a year, setting up the next chief, whoever they are, to make even more. Earlier this year, the city signed a contract with Seattle’s largest police union that gave rank and file officers a retroactive pay increase of 24 percent, making Seattle police officers the highest-paid in the region, with six-figure starting salaries.

Neither SPD’s communications office nor Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office responded to PubliCola’s inquiries about Diaz’s status at the department.

Note: This story has been corrected. Due to a brain freeze, I incorrectly identified Jimmy Matta as the mayor of Burien. Kevin Schilling is, of course, the current mayor of Burien. Here’s a story about him.

City Hall, labor, Mayor Harrell

Months Into Contract Negotiations, City Unions Say Harrell Has Barely Budged On Pay
City union members roll out a petition supporting better wages and working conditions in the lobby of City Hall earlier this year.

By Erica C. Barnett

Months into contract negotiations with Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office, the Coalition of City Unions—an umbrella group of 11 unions that represent about 6,000 city employees—says the two sides are no closer to agreement than they were when negotiations began 11 months ago. The biggest sticking point remains a proposed cost of living adjustment for 2024 that union members say represents a “minimal” increase over Harrell’s initial offer of 1 percent.

In the Seattle area, the consumer price index—a measure of the cost of living—increased 6.5 percent in the first half of 2023, so any pay increase below that level represents a cut to real wages.

City workers aren’t just feeling the pinch—they’re taking on second jobs, moving out of town, and considering jobs in the private sector, where wages have increased much faster. Dominique Ingram, an administrative specialist at Seattle Municipal Court, said she now works seven days a week—five at her job answering calls for the court, and two at a secondary weekend gig—to make ends meet.

“I like the work that I do.  I’m passionate about it. So that’s the type of type of sacrifice that I’m making to still be an employee of the city,” Ingram said. But the reality can be grinding. With two jobs, “there’s no work-life balance,” Ingram said. “I work, work, work. I hardly see my kids. When I started at the city, [I thought], finally, I was at a place where I had financial stability. The city is a great place to work. But now it’s it doesn’t even seem like a competitor in the game.”

As a point of comparison, Seattle police officers received a 17 percent pay increase after their last contract negotiation, with retroactive pay increases between 3 and 4 percent a year for the years they worked without a contract. The city council approved hiring bonuses of up to $30,000 for police last year. More recently, city attorney Ann Davison applauded the council and mayor for voting to increase city prosecutors’ pay by 20 percent.

“It‘s a negotiation, so you’re prepared for some give and take. But with this proposal, there was nothing to talk about. Nobody said anything. Everyone just quietly grabbed their things and left.” —Steven Pray, PROTEC17

The way contract negotiations with local governments typically work, union negotiators say, is that the union takes the most recent annual increase in the consumer price index, then comes up with a floor and a ceiling based on that amount; during the last negotiation, during the Durkan administration, the unions asked for the CPI plus one percent and ended up with 10.2 percent over three years. In contrast, they say, Harrell has spent the last 11 months insisting the city can’t afford more than 1 percent—a hardline position that prompted the union to walk out of negotiations earlier this month.

“It‘s a negotiation, so you’re prepared for some give and take,” said Steven Pray, a union representative for the Professional and Technical Employees Local 17 (PROTEC17), which represents workers in local governments around the region. “But with this proposal, there was nothing to talk about. Nobody said anything. Everyone just quietly grabbed their things and left.” 

On Wednesday, when the two sides came back to the table, Harrell himself showed up—an “extraordinarily rare” gesture, according to Pray. “He said, ‘I think there’s no trust in these negotiations,’ and that really stood out. Him showing up is a step in the right direction, but … the proof is in the actions that follow.”

Harrell’s office said they were unable to comment on ongoing negotiations.

Anne Cisney, a librarian at the Central Library downtown, said she talked with Harrell, whose mother worked as a finance manager for the library, about how the job has changed in recent years.

“We have people overdosing in the bathroom, we have people who are in a mental health crisis, and are getting into conflicts … and we have to be able to de-escalate that,” Cisney said. “We need to know that if you’re assaulted at work, you’re not going to have to use your own sick leave [to recover]. We need to know that we have [adequate] staffing levels, so that I’m not simultaneously running a storytime and responsible for checking for overdoses in the bathroom.”

In addition to a true cost of living adjustment, the unions have asked, so far unsuccessfully, for a citywide safety committee and incident recovery leave for workers who experience or witness traumatic incidents at work. 

The ability to work from home is another persistent sticking point. Earlier this year, Harrell issued a back-to-office mandate that requires most city employees to commute into downtown Seattle at least two days a week, even if they can do their jobs remotely. For some workers, the new requirement has meant a return to long commutes from the outlying areas where they can afford to live.

And there have been other challenges.

Rachael Brooks, a dam safety engineer for Seattle City Light, moved 50 miles north of Seattle during the pandemic when the cost of living in the city got so high that renting became unaffordable. Her job takes her all to hydroelectric dams across the region and is “really variable—we can’t just say, ‘this is what my day to day looks like,'” Brooks said. But she and her coworkers are still required to show up to an office in downtown Seattle on a regular “hybrid” schedule—a requirement Brooks has managed to navigate by crashing with friends in Seattle two nights a week.

Ingram, who is Black, said it’s ironic to hear Harrell talk about the need for racial equity in compensation and hiring when many public-facing and administrative jobs like hers, which are held mostly by women of color, are “significantly under market.” By lowering the real wages of workers like her, “He’s actually doing the opposite of what he says he wants to do,” Ingram said.

According to Pray, the mayor’s office has not budged on the unions’ request for more flexibility for jobs that don’t require an in-office presence.

Another issue, city employees say, is that their overall compensation—dictated by pay ranges, or “bands,” and “steps” within those bands—is far below market rate in Seattle, which means people are constantly leaving tl he city for other jobs. Pray said the coalition of unions asked for market adjustments for a “small percent” of the workers they represent, but “we’re seeing very, very little movement on that front.”

Engineers like Brooks make some of the least competitive wages in the city—about 17 percent less than their private market equivalents, a recent city-commissioned market analysis found. As a result, Brooks said, “engineers are leaving left and right,” and “we can’t hire quality new engineers, whether experienced or just out of school,” because they can make much more in the private sector. “We are not a competitive employer at this point.”

Employees with Ingram’s job classification start at around $58,000 a year and max out at $65,000; increasing their wages one percent would add just $22 to $25 to their twice-monthly paychecks. Ingram, who is Black, said it’s ironic to hear Harrell talk about the need for racial equity in compensation and hiring when many public-facing and administrative jobs like hers, which are held mostly by women of color, are “significantly under market.” By lowering the real wages of workers like her, “He’s actually doing the opposite of what he says he wants to do,” Ingram said.

Starting in 2025, the city is facing a “structural” budget shortfall—that is, a gap between revenues and projected spending—of more than $200 million a year, as temporary federal funding for programs begun during the COVID pandemic goes away. “The mayor is saying ‘I’ve got a $200 million shortfall that I need to fix,” Pray said. “But every other municipality and county in this region also went through COVID and has those same issues,” and only the city of Seattle is refusing to meaningfully raise workers’ wages.

Since he started at PROTEC17 in 2017, Pray added, “we have seen the roller coaster of the economy being really great and really bad, and I have never not heard that the city is broke.” The city council is currently considering a list of revenue options that could help close the gap, including expansion of the JumpStart payroll tax on the city’s largest high-paying companies, a capital gains tax, and a tax on companies with outsized CEO pay.

Meanwhile, weekly negotiating sessions continue—as do plans for a rally of city workers on the steps of City Hall at 3:30pm on September 19. Employees are being asked to take leave to attend the rally, but a future strike isn’t out of the question.

Even a one-day citywide strike would be unprecedented.  State law does not explicitly grant the right to strike, and former attorney general Rob McKenna issued an opinion in 2006 saying public employees “do not have a legally protected right to strike.” Nonetheless, teachers’ strikes happen regularly, often with significant public support. In LA, thousands of workers went on a one-day strike earlier this month to protest what they called unfair labor practices during contract negotiations, although the impact of the action on the contract itself remains to be seen.

Here in Seattle, “in terms of a strike,we’re just not there right now,” Pray said. “We are putting all of our energy into this rally and seeing what kind of movement we can get” from the city.

“Nobody wants to be on strike,” Pray continued. “And we think we can get a fair contract without having to do that. But with that being said, you can’t just [accept] something that is super subpar.”

City Hall, Courts, Equity, Morning Fizz, race

Former City Employee Sues for “Reverse Racism,” Rufo Tells Tall Tales to Bellevue Audience

1. A former Seattle Human Services Department employee is suing the city for alleged discrimination based on his race (white) and his gender (male).

The lawsuit, filed by a California-based libertarian group called the Pacific Legal Foundation on behalf of ex-city employee Joshua Diemert, claims that HSD failed to promote Diemert and provide him with the significant raises he was “promised” while promoting less-qualified women of color. The suit also alleges that Diemert’s immediate supervisor, a woman of color, engaged in “unrelenting coercion and racial harassment,” forcing him to quit his job instead of accommodating an unspecified medical condition that Diemert claims was exacerbated by people constantly talking about white privilege around him.

Many of the examples of “racial harassment” listed in the lawsuit appear to involve Diemert inserting himself into other people’s conversations to make comments his colleagues perceived as racist, such as an incident where he claims he was chastised for “joining” his coworkers’ lunchroom conversations about white privilege, which occurred while he was “trying to cook his food.” In another example, Diemert claims a supervisor “berated” him for “attempting to correct [a coworker’s] discriminatory behavior toward a white applicant.” In a third, he accuses the city of forcing employees to participate in “critical race theory” during a training at El Centro De La Raza, where his comments led a coworker to call him an “asshole” in an email to another person.

In addition to $300,000 in damages, the lawsuit asks the court to find that the city’s anti-racist policies violate the 14th Amendment (equal protection) and the 1964 Civil Rights Act (protection from discrimination on the basis of race or sex). The suit also claims that the city’s Race and Social Justice Initiative “aims to end American culture because it was created by ‘white, wealthy, Christian, cis-gender, straight, non-disabled men coming from Europe who wanted to protect their place within hierarchy and empire.'” That quote comes from a city document called “Building a Relational Culture,” which says nothing about “ending American culture,” but does provide a broad framework for undoing structural racism at the city—the actual project of RSJI.

Diemert’s lawsuit, which has gotten some coverage on FOX and various right-wing websites, is one of many recent lawsuits attempting to reframe racism as something that primarily happens to white people. The Pacific Legal Foundation is responsible for many of these anti-affirmative action claims, including a lawsuit challenging Women and Minority-Owned Business (WMBE) contracting goals in California; a case accusing the University of Minnesota of discriminating against men when it cut the men’s gymnastics program; and a case alleging that elite public schools in Boston discriminate against white and Asian kids.

The city’s Human Services Department did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday, and a spokesman for the City Attorney’s Office said the city has not been served with the lawsuit yet and could not comment.

2. “Critical race theory,” unsurprisingly, was also among the topics professional troll Chris Rufo brought up at a talk last month to support the Washington Policy Center. (PubliCola reviewed a recording of the event). If you aren’t familiar with WPC, it’s the libertarian think tank that was responsible for all those confusing pro-capitalism billboards you saw around town a couple years ago. (“Free markets destroy climate change,” one read, with a Tesla logo as the “T” in “climate.”) The event, which was emceed by conservative podcaster and Project 42 “brand ambassador” Brandi Kruse, also featured former secretary of state Mike Pompeo.

Rufo, a onetime Seattle City Council candidate who spun off a job at the right-wing Discovery Institute into a career as the nation’s leading purveyor of disinformation about CRT, has since turned his attention to vilifying trans women, drag queens, and LGBTQ+ people in general. Rufo’s work is part of nationwide efforts to drive LGBTQ+ people out of public life through both legal methods—such as Florida’s notorious “Don’t Say Gay” law—and violence, including increasingly violent protests against LGBTQ+ events, including drag shows).

Kids are not being taught “fisting” in schools—but, as Rufo noted, it’s the kind of “salacious” story that gets attention from people like Tucker Carlson.

Speaking to a group of “young professionals,” Rufo bragged about his efforts to spur people to act by speaking to their emotions, even when that means ignoring “data” and facts. “I had been doing this campaign on critical race theory, doing the reports, working with the Trump White House,” Rufo said. “And all of a sudden I see something really incredible happen. I started seeing all these videos of parents at school board meetings going nuts. And that’s what you want to see.”

As an example, Rufo continued, he was pushing out stories about “the teachers union—they’re the villains, right?”—he paused for boos—”which was promoting a guide book, a kind of recipe book that was in cartoon format designed for kids, that had a guide to BDSM, sadomasochism, [and] fisting.” In reality, the “cartoon guide” is a document aimed at teenagers seeking information about queer sex, produced by a Toronto Planned Parenthood affiliate and the United Way of Greater Toronto that was linked, among many other documents, on the website of an internal NEA LGBTA+ caucus. Kids are not being taught “fisting” in schools—but, as Rufo noted, it’s the kind of “salacious” story that gets attention from people like Tucker Carlson.

Rufo also claimed a victory closer to home: The reversal of calls to “defund the police” by members of the Seattle City Council. In taking credit for this change, he claimed that Nordstrom’s flagship store in downtown Seattle, he said was “burned down” to “ashes.”  Nordstrom, which is located just a few miles from the Bellevue hotel where Rufo was speaking, remains fully intact and was bustling with holiday shoppers earlier this week.