Category: education

Business, City Council, education, Elections, Mayor Harrell

Head of Downtown Business Group Lobbied for Digital Kiosk Company; Education Levy Will Help Backfill City’s Budget Deficit

1. Under an agreement signed earlier this month, the Downtown Seattle Association will get to keep the revenues, estimated at a little over $1 million a year, from 30 digital ad kiosks that a company called IKE Smart City will soon install on downtown sidewalks. Because the agreement itself is private (the city will get no money from the deal, unless revenues exceed expectations), it’s hard to say whether the business group got a good deal or if IKE will walk away with the lion’s share of the profits.

What is clear is that the relationship between IKE and the Downtown Seattle Association is unusually close: The DSA’s board chair, Pacific Public Affairs principal Sung Yang, is a registered lobbyist for IKE. According to Yang’s filing with the city in April, he was hired by IKE, along with former deputy mayor Hyeok Kim, to lobby the city on “legislation related to Digital Kiosks.”

James Sido, the DSA’s communications director, told PubliCola that Yang “didn’t represent IKE in negotiation on DSA’s agreement with IKE. We conferred directly with Clay Collett, senior development director at Orange Barrel Media (the creators and operators of IKE kiosks).” However, it appears that Yang lobbied the city on IKE’s behalf while serving as board chair of the DSA. That puts Yang on two sides of the three-way deal, serving as a representative for the digital billboard company and the business group that will receive a share of the revenues from the billboards.

2. The city council voted to put a $1.3 billion Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise (FEPP) levy on the ballot earlier this month. If passes, the levy will increase next year from 36.5 cents per $1,000 of assessed home value to an average of 61 cents per $1,000 over the next six years, starting at 72 cents per $1,000 in 2026. That translates to a price tag of $656 a year for the median homeowner in Seattle, up from $248 under the previous, $619 million levy.

In a press release, Mayor Bruce Harrell described the levy as  “transformative,” saying it would  “make Seattle one of the best cities in the nation to start and raise a family, supporting our children from cradle, to classroom, into college and beyond toward successful careers.”

But the levy also includes significant spending—nearly $50 million a year—on programs the city was already paying for out of its general-fund budget, placing services the city has previously treated as fundamental at the mercy of voters. Generally speaking, levies are supposed to be—and are invariably sold as—additive; while the city budget pays for essential services, like fire, police, and a functioning road system, voters decide whether to tax themselves to pay for things like library expansions, sidewalks, and preschool programs.

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This year’s levy will shift funding for almost 30 programs that are currently being funded by the general fund, the JumpStart payroll tax, and the sweetened beverage tax over to the levy, amounting to a total of nearly $300 million over six years. Here are some of the existing programs for which funding will shift to the education levy to help Harrell and the council close a funding gap that’s currently estimated at $250 million over the next two years, along with their current funding sources (all numbers are six-year totals):

  • Increased Mental Health Staffing Supports (JumpStart): $42.1 million
  • Supporting Youth for Success grants, which provide preemployment skill building and mentorship (General Fund): $26 million
  • Youth and Young Adult Behavioral Health (General Fund): $12.7 million
  • Nurse Family Partnership (General Fund): $18.8 million
  • Online therapy for people between 13 and 24 (JumpStart): $24..7 million
  • Developmental Bridge, which provides services to young children with developmental delays (Sweetened Beverage Tax): $4 million
  • In-person mental health care for middle and high school students who aren’t served by school-based health centers (JumpStart): $16.7 million

A spokeswoman for Mayor Harrell, Callie Craighead, said Harrell alluded to the need to use levy dollars to fund existing programs in his levy announcement, when he said the levy would “align existing City investments in programs serving the three initiative goals through levy investments to ensure a stable funding source for years to come, maximize program coordination, and drive positive outcomes for Seattle youth.”

“The City’s latest revenue projections show an uncertain economic outlook and a reduction in multiple funding sources … that would impact important upstream investments for Seattle youth and families. Our levy renewal proposal ensures that these priorities have dedicated, consistent funding for the next six years,” Craighead said.

Already, she added, state budget reductions have forced the city’s Department of Education and Early Learning to use the current levy to fund preschool slots for the 2025 to 2026 school year. “This shows the cascading impact of reductions that we are looking to avoid by having stable funding through the levy.” It also suggests the high-level spending plan Harrell rolled out when he proposed the levy may not be what it ends up funding, and that the city could look to the levy to solve its budget problems in the future.

City Council, education

Spending on City’s New Payroll System Tops $32 Million; Saka Spouts Off About Tech Workers, COVID School Closures

1. The city of Seattle has increased its spending on its troubled new payroll software system, Workday, from $14 million to more than $32 million.

The cost increases have been catalogued in a series of 18 change orders to the city’s contract with Deloitte, the consulting firm that’s been implementing and troubleshooting the new system since last year. Each change order includes a catalog of outstanding issues with Workday, which launched last year after numerous delays.

As soon as the new system was in place, city employees began reporting missing or inaccurate pay, deferred compensation that came out of their paychecks but never showed up in their bank accounts, and disappearing vacation days, among many other problems that have ranged from annoying (managers not being able to hand off payroll approval duties when they take time off) to nerve-wracking (paychecks that showed up hundreds or thousands of dollars short) to harmless but potentially costly (some workers got vacation time they didn’t qualify for—and took it.)

A spokesman for the city’s HR department, Antorris Williams, said change orders are common for large projects, and that all the changes “were approved by the Mayor’s Office and did not require” approval from the city council through a formal budget action. Last year’s city budget estimated that implementing Workday would cost up to $50 million over the life of the contract, which is ongoing.

PubliCola has reached out to the city numerous times about issues with Workday. Every time, we’ve been told that whatever specific crisis we were calling about had been resolved or would be fixed soon. We don’t envy the city HR employees who have to put out fires caused by complex new software that may not have been ready for prime time. But the kind of problems Deloitte was reporting as recently as late February—when the most recent $2.1 million change order was signed—suggest that worrying problems persist.

The tables in Deloitte’s most recent contract update, for example, show dozens of issues that have arisen recently or remain unaddressed. These include employees getting shorted on vacation time; people being improperly told they’re ineligible for family leave; incorrect deductions for union dues and social security; and all manner of big and small nuisances that appear to require one-off changes to the complex system.

Last year, the city converted five “emergency” positions that were created to implement Workday from temporary to permanent. The new positions added $1.5 million in annual city spending. According to the most recent city budget, the permanent employees will provide ” ongoing operations and maintenance support post-implementation.”

2. During a meeting of the city’s Families, Education, Preschool and Promise Levy committee on Thursday, Councilmember Rob Saka, a former Big Tech attorney, was talking about the need to for more opportunities for local Black and brown kids when he made this comment about Seattle’s tech industry:

“Many of those workers aren’t from the city of Seattle. Many of them don’t look like me, to be more blunt. … And you know, there’s a lot of reliance on H1B visas and everything. We need to empower more people with the opportunity to have these jobs, more people locally. So that’s why we need more people from the Central District, more people from the South End, more people from High Point, and we do that by investing in digital skilling initiatives.” Saka’s comment, which suggested that Asian immigrants are taking jobs that should go to people from Seattle, was an extraordinarily poor choice of words, at best, in the current anti-immigrant national climate.

Earlier in the meeting, Saka criticized Seattle for keeping schools and preschools closed during COVID for longer than other parts of the state. After opining that kids who don’t attend preschool are too often watched or babysit at home by Mom or Grandma—nd half the time being babysit by a TV, the soap operas,” Saka said his own kids’ preschool “stayed open the whole time,” allowing him and his wife to “work remotely without [the] distraction of two year olds and three year olds primarily having meltdowns everywhere.”

Seattle, Saka continued, had erred by keeping schools closed too long, and had to be forced by then-Gov. Jay Inslee to reopen at least part-time in April 2021. In 2021, when “schools across the state were opening up left and right, it took an order of the the governor the state of Washington to order schools to open up in Seattle,” Saka said. “So COVID, apparently, was worse in the city of Seattle than other parts of the state, other parts of the country. Not true, by the way. And what kind of impact does it have on people’s mental health? Not good!”

The committee’s other members did not remark on Saka’s comments about immigration and school closures during COVID.

City Council, education, Equity, Transportation

Spending Money Earmarked for Student Mental Health Will Require Action from Skeptical Council; Saka Abruptly Cuts Off Presentation on Transportation Equity

1. Seattle City Councilmembers, many of them still focused on undoing the legacy of the previous, more progressive council, turned their attention this week to an increase in the JumpStart payroll tax passed in the final days of budget deliberations last year.

The 0.1 percent increase, sponsored by former councilmember Kshama Sawant (with current council members Sara Nelson and Dan Strauss voting “no”), is supposed to flow into the city’s Department of Education and Early Learning to “expand educational supports at Seattle Public Schools, prioritizing mental health services including, but not limited to, school-based mental health counselors and culturally specific and responsive programming from community-based organizations.”

That won’t happen, however, without followup legislation expanding the possible uses of the JumpStart tax to include mental health supports for students—and until then, money will keep accruing, unspent.

The council and Mayor Bruce Harrell have already signaled that they plan to amend JumpStart, which is supposed to pay for affordable housing, Equitable Development Initiative projects, and Green New Deal investments, to free up money to solve a general-fund deficit of around $260 million. (The deficit has grown, among other reasons, because of a recently adopted contract with the city’s police guild giving officers retroactive raises of 24 percent).

During a budget committee meeting this week, Strauss said the council did no outreach to the school district before passing the increase for mental health programming, and new Councilmember Maritza Rivera expressed skepticism about the city taking on “a newer line of business” that they had no expertise in. The council previously added $4 million, over two years, for mental health services in schools, with $250,000 of that earmarked for Ingraham High School, the site of a 2022 shooting.

Rivera, whose kids go to Ingraham, said she had “no idea how the money was implemented, how well it’s working. It’s a new line of business, [and] there are no mental health experts at the department or at the city. There’s [Seattle-King County] Public Health, but I’m not sure how plugged-in Public Health was to that [decision], so definitely a lot of questions here.”

Yesterday’s shooting at Garfield High School will make it harder, politically, for council members obsessed with undoing Sawant’s legacy to allow the school mental-health funding (which was prompted by the Ingraham shootingl) to lapse, but anything’s possible; if the city doesn’t allocate the money this year, via the regular midyear budget process, it would go back into the JumpStart fund and be allocated among the current spending categories.

Employers have been paying the increased tax—which is based on the pay of the highest-paid employees at the city’s largest companies—since the beginning of the year.

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2. During a meeting of the council’s special transportation levy committee this week, committee chair Rob Saka abruptly cut off a presentation from the Seattle Department of Transportation about a proposed task force that will, if the levy passes in November, be charged with creating policies to guide levy spending on sidewalks, bridges, and street paving, with a focus on equity and financial sustainability.

SDOT director Greg Spotts had just given a brief overview of the levy and was handing the mic off to SDOT’s transportation equity program manager, Annya Pintak, to talk about efforts to integrate the city’s race and social justice goals into the levy.

That’s when Saka jumped in, telling Spotts, “I’m gonna cut you off here for just a moment. I feel like we have a good baseline on that. And so, you know, you were invited here today with the specific purpose and intent [of] talking about the task force. So I encourage you to direct your comments and narrow them to the task force, and I believe slide 14 is… where that starts.”

A third presenter, levy program manager Megan Shepherd, jumped past Pintak’s presentation to her own slides, leaving Pintak—the only person of color at the presenters’ table—sitting silently (and awkwardly) at the table for the rest of the presentation.

Whatever Saka’s reason for rushing SDOT along, nixing the equity section of the department’s presentation didn’t save much time; the whole agenda item took up roughly 15 minutes of an almost two-and-a-half-hour meeting that began and ended with lengthy remarks by Saka.

education, Elections, Mayor Harrell, Morning Crank, neighborhoods

Magnolia Considers Suing Over New District Boundaries, Mayor Donates Auction Item to Exclusive Private School

1. Update on November 22, 2022: According to an email distributed by the Magnolia Community Council, the group “has made the difficult decision to no longer pursue an appeal” because the cost of doing so would be “prohibitive.” The group “will start planning for how we will come together to work effectively and efficiently for one community made up of two Council Districts,” the email said.

Rumors were flying this week that the Magnolia Community Council planned to file a legal challenge to a new Seattle City Council district map that divides the peninsula into two council districts. Representatives of businesses and homeowners in Magnolia argued that the map the Seattle Redistricting Commission ultimately adopted was inequitable because it “split” the neighborhood, moving the wealthier, whiter western half of Magnolia into District 6, currently represented by Dan Strauss.

An email that went out on the community council’s mailing list this week sought donations for a “legal defense fund” to request a review of the new map from a King County Superior Court judge, on the grounds that the redistricting commission did not follow rules laid out in the city charter for the 10-year redistricting process. “Our goal is to request a judge to order the Commission to follow the Charter and vote for a map that keeps Magnolia whole,” the email says.

The community council’s website praises comments made by former mayor Greg Nickels, the only redistricting commission member to vote against the map. In his statement, as PubliCola reported, Nickels called the map “retribution  [against] Magnolia because it is an older, wealthier and whiter community.”

Demographically, the neighborhood consists of two distinct, and very different areas. The west side, with its expansive views of Puget Sound, fits the stereotype of Magnolia as a suburban enclave: almost exclusively single-family and owner-occupied, with median home values as high as $1.7 million.

The eastern half of the peninsula, which includes thousands of renters in dense apartment blocks, will remain part of District 7, which includes other renter-heavy neighborhoods like Lower Queen Anne, Belltown, and downtown. According to Census data, the eastern part of Magnolia encompasses some of the city’s densest Census tracts, including several where more than 80 percent of residents are renters; overall, the part of Magnolia that will stay in District 7 includes almost 5,000 rental units.

The Magnolia Community Council did not respond to a request for comment on its plans to mount a legal challenge, nor on its fundraising efforts.

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2. Mayor Bruce Harrell offered “lunch with the Mayor” for five students, complete with a photo opp and a tour of City Hall by mayoral staff, as an auction item to benefit the exclusive Lakeside School’s parents’ association earlier this month. Proceeds from the annual ROAR (Raising Our Allocation Resources) auction pay for “classroom enrichment, faculty and staff development, and financial aid,” according to Lakeside’s website.

Annual tuition at Lakeside School is more than $40,000 a year, although families that receive financial assistance pay, on average, just over $9,800 a year, according to the school’s website. The average income for families that receive financial aid is $163,730 a year.

In response to questions about the auction, mayoral spokesman Jamie Housen said Harrell has “regularly volunteered his time for these kinds of charity auctions, including to support students at Garfield and Cleveland High Schools, the Wing Luke Museum, and the Rainier Chamber. … In this case, he was asked to support a charity auction to raise money in support of students, including financial aid for underrepresented students. One of Mayor Harrell’s children is a Lakeside alumnus and his daughter-in-law currently works at the school.”

Other items available at the auction, which has now closed, included a Lake Washington Boat Adventure with “El Capitan Jefe,” an inside look at the filming of KING TV’s long-running Evening show, and weekends at several vacation houses. Lunch with the mayor sold for $225.

City Council, criminal justice, education, King County, Mayor Harrell

Inmates Say Jail Water Still Coming Out Brown; Morales Opposes Expansion of “Inequitable” Seattle Promise Program

1. Last week, King County’s Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention (DAJD) announced that it had resumed the use of tap water for drinking and cooking “after new tests, like all other tests performed recently, confirmed that tap water in the jail meets EPA and Washington Department of Health drinking water standards.” The jail began distributing bottled water after complaints that the tap water in cells, ordinarily the only water source for drinking, hygiene, and heating packaged foods, was cloudy or brown.

According to DAJD spokesman Noah Haglund, the county’s facilities division “has worked diligently with water quality experts to assess the quality of the water and attempt to determine the cause of any discoloration or turbidity in the water.” (PubliCola reported exclusively on the water shutdown last month). Inmates at the jail lacked tap water for more than a month while the county was doing tests, and two current inmates told us they did not have access to adequate bottled water.

Haglund provided copies of testing results that indicated the water is safe to drink. However, multiple reports from inside the jail continue to indicate that the water is brown and cloudy. According to one defense attorney, a client at the jail reported that running the faucet in his cell “causes it to turn brown/black with visible film on top and particles in it.” The mother of another inmate said her son reported that “the water is still brown” and that guards are no longer handing out water.

Haglund confirmed that the jail is no longer handing out bottled water, and said that after following up on a complaint about water quality, a jail captain “did not observe any discoloration, abnormalities, or any other inconsistencies in the water” in the south wing of the jail. “We will continue to follow up if we receive additional reports about water issues,” Haglund said.

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2. As part of the city budget deliberations that are still ongoing, City Councilmember Tammy Morales, who represents Southeast Seattle, has proposed several amendments that would claw back most of $5.7 million in unspent dollars from the Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise (FEPP) levy, which funds preschool, college assistance, and other programs. Mayor Bruce Harrell has proposed investing this underspend in Seattle Promise, whose scholarships have turned out to disproportionately benefit white students, rather than the preschool programs for which the funding was originally intended.

Morales’ amendments would reduce Harrell’s proposed new spending on Seattle Promise by $1 million in 2023 and $3.7 million in 2024 and require the city’s Department of Education and Early Learning to come up with a new plan to prioritize low-income kids, first-generation immigrants, and students of color for Seattle Promise enrollment. The amendments would not reduce overall funding for the program, and it wouldn’t eliminate funding Harrell’s office has already allocated for Seattle Promise purposes in advance of this year’s budget process.

“White students get more access to more [Seattle Promise] dollars. They also have better retention rates and better outcomes than scholars of color. Until the structural problem is fixed, we shouldn’t be expanding it.”—City Councilmember Tammy Morales

The Seattle Promise program, which provides scholarships (“Tuition”) and financial assistance (“Equity Scholarships”) to Seattle high school students who attend a local college in Seattle. Most of the funding for Seattle Promise goes toward tuition, with a smaller portion paying for grants to help kids of color and low-income kids, who often don’t qualify for scholarships because they receive tuition assistance through state and federal programs, to pay for other college necessities like food and transportation.

The implementation plan for the levy says that if demand for tuition exceeds available funds, “tuition funds will be prioritized for low-income, first-generation” students and students of color. It also says that any levy funds that go unspent at the end of the year, including tuition and scholarship funds, will supplement the preschool programs that make up the bulk of FEPP levy spending. However, this language has never been adopted into law, which is why Harrell was able to propose rolling $5.7 million in unspent Seattle Promise dollars back into the tuition side of the program, rather than spending it on preschool.

Seattle Promise was explicitly designed to close race-based opportunity gaps that keep kids of color from attending college. In reality, according to Morales, almost half the program’s tuition funding has gone to white students. “The way that it is currently structured is inequitable,” Morales said at a committee meeting late last month. “White students get more access to more dollars. They also have better retention rates and better outcomes than scholars of color. … Until the structural problem is fixed, we shouldn’t be expanding it.”

education, homelessness, human services, Mayor Durkan, Morning Fizz

Durkan Says Schools Should Use “Reserves” for Encampment Response; Homelessness Authority May Hire Ex-HSD Director as Consultant

1. On an appearance on KUOW’s “The Record” Thursday, Mayor Jenny Durkan doubled down on her assertion that it’s up to the school district, not the city, to shelter and house people living in an encampment next to Broadview Thompson K-8 school in north Seattle. The encampment is on district-owned land on the south shore of Bitter Lake, directly adjacent to property owned by the city.

As we’ve reported, the school district has asked the city not to sweep the encampment without providing outreach and access to shelter to the dozens of people living there. Durkan has responded that the since the school district has made it clear they don’t want the city to remove the camp, it’s up to the district to “stand up their own process” for providing outreach and shelter to the people living there, using their “billion-dollar budget” to do so. 

Responding to a question posed by PubliCola’s Erica C. Barnett on KUOW, Durkan said the school district would “have to address [the encampment] the same way we do—you have to do outreach and really try to find places for people to go. You can’t just push them onto the city property [next door] and expect the city to deal with it.” Other than a rough line in the grass, there is no clear demarcation at the site between school district and city property.

Durkan disputed the idea that the school district doesn’t have the funds to stand up its own human services system. For example, she said, if the school district “want[s] to contract with an entity like JustCARE, they do have the reserves, plus money in their transportation budget that they didn’t use this year.”

The school district actually has an ongoing shortfall in its transportation budget, and can never have a surplus in that funding source because the state reimburses school districts for transportation costs after the fact.

JustCARE is a program that provides hotel rooms and intensive case management to people living in encampments in Pioneer Square and other areas. In a memo to the school board and other district officials in April, then-deputy mayor Casey Sixkiller estimated that the district could shelter 30 people through JustCARE for one year for around $1.5 million, or “set up a new tiny home village and provide services to 30 individuals, not including site selection and completing the SEPA process which adds both time and additional costs,” for $1.1 million.

“Our billion-dollar budget is intended for the education of children. We don’t have funding in excess to divert to rehousing adults living in Seattle.” — Seattle school board director Liza Rankin

“The school district so far has declined to act” to provide shelter, housing, and services to residents,” Durkan said on KUOW. “We’re hoping the school district makes a different decision, but they as a board have to decide what their priorities are.”

2. At a school board meeting on Wednesday, board director Liza Rankin, who represents the district where the encampment is located, responded directly to Durkan’s previous comments suggesting the district should set up a system parallel to the city’s to fund shelter, outreach, and encampment removals. “Our billion-dollar budget is intended for the education of children,” Rankin said. “It runs 104 schools, it employs about 8,000 staff, it serves 54,000 students, and it is still not enough to cover counseling, nursing, full-time librarians and more at each and every school.”

“So we don’t have funding in excess to divert to rehousing adults living in Seattle,” Rankin continued. “That being said, we continue to be open and wiling to partner with any and everyone who wants to support the district in the compassionate rehousing of people in our community who deserve much better.”

3. The King County Regional Homelessness Authority is in conversations with former interim Seattle Human Services Department director Jason Johnson about consulting on “sub-regional planning” in South King County, PubliCola has learned. Specifically, Johnson would work to map out the existing resources in South King County for the homelessness authority.

KCRHA spokeswoman Anne Martens said the agency is “still talking through potential scope,” adding, “we don’t actually have a contract in place, so there’s nothing official” yet. Johnson was Durkan’s pick to lead HSD, but he failed to win confirmation from the city council and served in an interim capacity throughout his two years in the position, which ended in December 2020.