Category: Elections

Elections, King County, Mayor Harrell, Mayor Wilson, Police

This Week on PubliCola: December 6, 2025

Overtime cuts and media training at SPD, layoffs at King County, a big grant to private club closely linked to Harrell, and more.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, December 1

After Overspending, SPD Scrambles to “Drastically Reduce” Overtime

The Seattle Police Department’s use of overtime has continued to increase year after year, rising to around 500,000 hours last year. Despite multiple midyear budget increases, SPD has run out of overtime funding, and will deprioritize property crimes and other types of investigations in an effort to get a handle on its budget for 2025.

Tuesday, December 2

“Bureaucrats” Losing Jobs in King County Shakeup Say They Were Blindsided by Zahilay’s Emailed Layoff Announcement

King County Executive Girmay Zahilay has portrayed his decision to lay off the majority of people who fall under his direct purview as a standard part of any transition process. But many employees who will lose their jobs in January told us their positions aren’t political; they’re bureaucrats who the county running, like regional planners, contract managers, and economists.

Mayor-Elect Wilson Appoints Deputy Mayor Brian Surratt, Other Top Staff

Regional economic growth leader and city of Seattle veteran Brian Surratt will be Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson’s sole deputy mayor, a pick that seems likely to assuage at least some concerns from business leaders who worried Wilson’s team would consist of socialist radicals. Former council central staffer Aly Pennucci, former Puget Sound Sage director Nicole Soper, and ex-Futurewise policy director Kate Kreuzer are also at the top of Wilson’s org chart.

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Thursday, December 4

Incoming Mayor Wilson Mulls Police Chief’s Future

Sources confirmed this week that incoming Mayor Katie Wilson is still waffling over whether to keep Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes, a Bruce Harrell appointee who has come under scrutiny for some of his external and internal decisions.

SPD Pays Consultants for Media Training, Executive Assessment

At Barnes’ direction, the department will pay a consultant from North Carolina to do a media training for SPD command staff and executive-level employees. Although command staff and executives just got media training from a different consultant last year, an SPD spokesperson said the new training is needed to make these officials more comfortable talking to the press.

The department will also pay another consultant, this one from California, to do an assessment of how the police chief’s office is organized. Barnes just hired several new high-level staffers and reorganized the office this year. The consultant is the same one who did two previous national searches that resulted in the selection of internal candidates for top roles at SPD, including former police chief Adrian Diaz.

Private Club With Deep Ties to Harrell Gets $183,000 City Grant

Three weeks before leaving office, Mayor Harrell announced the latest round of Equitable Development initiative grants. For the second time in his administration, the Royal Esquire Club, a private Black men’s club to which Harrell has longstanding ties, will receive money to pay for a renovation. Although Harrell’s office says the EDI committee funded the club based purely on its value as a cultural institution, the mayor’s work on behalf of the group—including alleged attempts to quash a wage-theft investigation and the use of city staff time to do administrative tasks for the club—calls that claim into question.

Harrell Campaign Paid Consultant $46,000 for Last-Minute “Outreach”

Newly filed election finance reports for November show that the Harrell campaign paid Eastside for Hire taxi company founder Abdisalam (Abdul) Yusuf more than $46,000, the equivalent of $5,000 a week (based on reports that connect payments to specific weeks of work) to do unspecified “outreach” in the final days of the campaign. Yusuf’s consulting firm has never reported any previous paid work on any campaign.

Friday, December 5

Seattle Nice: Shakeups at the County and City as Zahilay and Wilson Take Over

This week on the Seattle Nice podcast, we discussed the changes that are taking shape at King County and the city of Seattle, as County Executive Girmay Zahilay and Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson start filling out their staff, including Zahilay’s layoffs and internal discussions on Team Wilson about whether to retain SPD Chief Barnes.

Elections, Mayor Harrell

Private Club With Deep Ties to Harrell Gets $183,000 City Grant; Harrell Campaign Paid Consultant $46,000 for Last-Minute “Outreach”
Mayor Bruce Harrell on election night at the Royal Esquire Club

1. On Thursday, Mayor Bruce Harrell announced $27.8 million in new grants through the city’s Equitable Development Initiative—the city’s largest anti-displacement program. On the list, for the second time in Harrell’s term: The Royal Esquire Club, a 78-year-old private social club on Rainier Avenue South where Harrell served as board president (and where he held his election-night party this year).

This year’s $184,000 grant serves as a kind of bookend to the Harrell Administration. In 2022, shortly after Harrell became mayor, the city granted the club $800,000 for renovations to its building—one of the largest grants that year. This year’s grant will also go toward that renovation.

Back in 2022, Harrell’s office said the EDI program chose all grants based on objective, merit- and equity-based criteria and that the mayor had no influence over the process. When we asked about this year’s award, Harrell’s office referred us to the same statement they sent three years ago when the club got its first EDI grant: “Decisions on which organizations received funding were determined by the EDI Advisory Board and community panel through a competitive community-based process. The mayor had no role in deciding which organizations would receive the awards and did not receive or score the applications.”

Harrell’s longstanding connection to the Royal Esquire Club has been the source of controversy, and the subject of a formal ethics complaint, in the past. In 2018, when he was city council president, Harrell intervened in an investigation into wage theft allegations by five women who worked as servers at the club.

When the city’s Office of Labor Standards began looking into the allegations, Harrell contacted the city employee who was investigating the case to remind him that the council and mayor had the power to cut OLS’ budget. At various council meetings, Harrell called OLS’ investigators “extremely unprofessional” and their treatment of the Royal Esquire Club “horrible.” (The women eventually reached a financial settlement).

This year, KUOW reported that Harrell had directed his city council staff to do administrative work for the Royal Esquire Club, which lacked secretarial support at the time, including tasks like filling out insurance paperwork, collecting membership dues, and sending out invitations to fundraising events. (Harrell characterized this work as “constituent services.”)

The EDI program funds organizations “working on anti-displacement efforts in high displacement risk neighborhoods.” According to a spokeswoman for Harrell, the club “is a historically significant gathering space for Seattle’s Black community, which has experienced well-reported displacement from the city and the loss of culturally significant spaces.”

Other projects that received EDI funding this year included an immigrant and refugee public market (African Community Housing & Development) the Khmer Community Center (Khmer Community Seattle King County, a birth and parenting center for Indigenous parents (Hummingbird Indigenous Family Services,) and a health care center for seniors on Beacon Hill (International Community Health Services).

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2. On Sunday, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s reelection campaign filed its campaign finance reports for the week leading up to the November 4 election. The reports show that Harrell reported paid the one-person consulting firm owned by Eastside for Hire founder Abdisalam (Abdul) Yusuf more than $21,000 on election day.

Combined with the payments PubliCola reported last month, the Harrell campaign has paid Yusuf more than $46,000 for unspecified outreach work. Yusuf’s firm, FF and J Consulting, has never reported any previous paid work on any campaign.

Yusuf is a prominent member of the Seattle-area Somali community who has frequently advocated on behalf of rideshare drivers. During the final weeks of the campaign, Harrell was reportedly eager to drum up votes from Seattle’s tight-knit East African communities. The nature of Yusuf’s outreach and engagement is unclear—neither he nor the Harrell campaign responded to our questions just before the election‚‚but whatever it was, Harrell considered it extremely high-value. His consultant, Christian Sinderman, received the same amount in a month that Yusuf got from the campaign every week, and his campaign manager made around $1,200 a week, according to campaign finance reports.

Harrell lost the election to Katie Wilson by a margin of 2,011 votes.

City Council, Elections, homelessness, King County

This Week on PubliCola: November 22, 2025
Image via Wilson for Seattle.

An interview with Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson, federal cuts that could leave thousands homeless, the city council adopts a budget that pushes off hard choices, and much more.

Monday, November 17

Federal Funding Changes Could Make Thousands of People in Seattle Homeless

Changes to the type of homelessness programs the Department of Housing and Urban Development will fund could slash most federal funding for permanent housing in Seattle—a shift that will force the city and King County to come up with new funding sources or allow thousands of people to fall into homelessness starting next year. We took a deep dive into the local implications of the changes.

Seattle Nice: Did Katie Wilson Win or Did Bruce Harrell Lose?

On this week’s show, we debated how Katie Wilson won the mayor’s race, why she won it, and how incumbent mayor Bruce Harrell tried to keep her from winning it. We also discussed Harrell’s claims, during and after his concession speech, that there had been “anomalies” in King County Elections’ vote count and his insistence to the end that it’s “offensive” to ask whether he understands the affordability challenges Seattle residents face in 2025.

Tuesday, November 18

County Executive-Elect Zahilay’s Layoff Proposal Shocks Some Longtime Staff

Incoming King County Executive Girmay Zahilay is the first new executive in 16 years, and he’s shaking up the executive’s office and county departments, announcing around 100 layoffs last week. Some staff reported feeling shocked and demoralized by the changes, which Zahilay’s transition team says are a normal part of every election.

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Wednesday, November 19

The Post-Election Budget: Council Protects Sweeps Team, Raises Permit Fees, and Bans Spending on Harm Reduction

The city council made a number of last-minute changes after mayor-elect Wilson was elected, including provisions designed to force the new mayor to preserve the encampment-sweeping Unified Care Team, which has swelled to 116 members. The budget also bans the city from spending money on harm reduction supplies for drug users (except needle exchange, which has reached a degree of cultural acceptance even among centrists), and requires incoming city attorney Erika Evans to preserve her predecessor Ann Davison’s approach to misdemeanor drug crimes.

Thursday, November 20

Seattle Nice Interviews Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson!

We had Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson on Seattle Nice this week for a wide-ranging interview about her priorities as mayor—as well as how she plans to deal with the massive budget deficits set up by Mayor Bruce Harrell and the city council and the constraints the council has placed on her administration.

Friday, November 21

Council Adopts Harrell’s Budget With Minor Changes, Setting Up Huge Deficits for Incoming Mayor Wilson

The “audit the budget” cohort of councilmembers elected in 2023 haven’t cut spending as they promised during their campaigns. Instead, they’ve approved most of the new programs Mayor Harrell has proposed while adding their own. The result is a budget that plunges into nine-figure deficits starting in 2027, when incoming mayor Katie Wilson will have to figure out how to address the budget cliff her predecessor, and the council, kept pushing off.

Homeless Authority Praises Religious Program, Katie Wilson Plans to Jerk-Proof the Mayor’s Office, and Who Will Be the City Council’s Next President?

In a packed Friday Afternoon Fizz, we reported on King County Regional Homelessness Authority CEO Kelly Kinnison’s visit, with The More We Love director Kristine Moreland, to learn about a Christian recovery program for homeless people in Baltimore; Mayor-Elect Wilson’s plans to simplify and reorgnize the mayor’s office; who will be the next City Council president; and my appearance on a recent episode of City Cast, the new podcast about Seattle.

 

 

Elections, podcasts

Seattle Nice Interviews Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson!

By Erica C. Barnett

We had Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson on Seattle Nice this week for a wide-ranging interview about her priorities as mayor—as well as how she plans to deal with the massive budget deficits set up by Mayor Bruce Harrell and the city council and the constraints the council has placed on her administration.

As PubliCola has reported, Harrell’s budget—which the council will pass in final form tomorrow—plunges the city into nine-figure deficits starting in 2027, which will force Wilson to act quickly to address budget shortfalls her predecessor failed to address. The budget also seeks to force Wilson to preserve some of her predecessor’s pet projects, including the encampment-sweeping Unified Care Team and a squad of graffiti removal staff, through restrictions that prohibit her from spending city funds on anything other than sweeps and anti-graffiti efforts.

We discussed those issues and much more, including many questions submitted by readers, in a wide-ranging 45-minute discussion with the mayor-elect.

A few highlights:

On whether she plans to replace Harrell’s police chief, Shon Barnes:

I’m going to respectfully decline that question at the moment. It’s a very sensitive question, and I am looking forward to meeting with Shon Barnes in the near future and having conversations with a lot of people about how things are going at the police department. And this is not just about the police chief, but this is about department leadership across the city, because there’s the question, when a new mayor comes into office, of potentially appointing new department heads.

For me, this is really not a political question. I don’t care what department head supported Harrell or campaigned actively for him. For me, this is really about getting the best people in place to lead those departments, and obviously there needs to be a certain amount of kind of vision alignment for someone to want to work with me. But beyond that, the thing that I really care about is that they’re a good leader that their, you know, employees respect them and can work for them. … So I’m hoping to retain in department leadership folks who are dedicated public servants doing a great job, and then yes, I’m sure there will be some, some turnover. So that applies across the board, including our police department.

On whether she’ll be Seattle’s “urbanist mayor”

Seattle’s a big city, and I love living in a big city, and I want Seattle to become a bigger and better city, where it’s possible, for example, for someone to live like I do right now, which is raising a child in in an apartment. And that means that the city kind of becomes your your backyard or your living room. And I think that urban lifestyle is something that we need to promote, and we need to make it possible for more and more people to live in this city without owning a car. And that’s not just for the sake of the people who don’t own cars. I mean, as more people continue to move to Seattle in our region, we just have limited space, and it’s just not possible to keep adding cars to the road. …

We deserve a world-class mass transit system. I think that’s just a very, very important thing to be working towards for all kinds of reasons. And we need great public space. We need more car -free public space. We need great parks, great playgrounds, all of those urban amenities. And so I am going to be very focused on making sure that Seattle is Seattle is a great, big city that can continue to grow in that direction.

On breaking Seattle’s 16-year streak of one-term mayors:

Despite the fact that I challenged an incumbent, I think it’s not great to just have one-term mayor after one-term mayor. So I do hope to govern in a way that leads to me being able to serve another term.

One of the things that I understand about Mayor Harrell is that I do believe that he stepped into office wanting very much to be a two-term mayor. And I think that his approach, and his consultants’ approach to governing over the last four years, has been to really focus on building that coalition of interests that could get him reelected for a second term. … It’s a kind of a transactional style of politics where he was trying to kind of gather together those interests that could get him reelected. I don’t think that’s a good way to govern. Because you’re doing favors for people, you’re building those relationships, but that’s not a vision for the city, you know? That’s not a vision of delivering for the people of Seattle. And so for me, I do want a second term, but I do not want to govern to win a second term.I want to govern to do the right thing, and if I’m lucky, that means that I will get a second term.

On restoring the longstanding nude beach at Denny Blaine Park, which Harrell repeatedly tried to shut down:

Yes, I do want to do this, and I want to work closely with Friends of Denny Blaine and others. I mean, there are some legitimate issues that need to be solved to make sure that the park is good for all the folks using it. But yeah, I would like to restore the park to its historic use as a queer nude beach.

Elections, King County

County Executive-Elect Zahilay’s Layoff Proposal Shocks Some Longtime Staff

The layoffs aren’t unusual for a new executive, Zahilay’s team says—it’s just that the county hasn’t had a new leader in 16 years.

By Erica C. Barnett

King County Executive-Elect Girmay Zahilay, the first new county executive since Dow Constantine was elected in 2008, reportedly plans to lay off his predecessor’s entire executive staff, along with at least some department heads and deputy directors, as part of a major restructuring of the executive branch of county government.

According to Zahilay’s transition team, the restructure will impact around 100 out of 133 people currently serving in appointed positions.

Some of these appointed staffers will have the opportunity to apply for new positions (Zahilay’s transition website has an open application page), while others, whose jobs are being eliminated, will be encouraged to apply for other county positions. Zahilay reportedly plans to announce a new organizational structure for his office this week and start hiring for new positions in December.

“All current appointees are eligible and encouraged to reapply for new job postings when they come up,” Zahilay transition team spokesman Erik Houser said. “If current appointees are not a fit for the new job postings, the transition is supporting them to find other opportunities in county government.”

The changes, which come after 16 years of relative stability under Constantine, came as a seismic shock to many longtime executive branch staffers when Zahilay’s team announced them at a meeting last Friday. Staff reported feeling disrespected and caught off-guard by the sudden, disruptive change.

Houser said it’s “normal” for a new administration to come in with their own team and priorities. “Appointed staff working in the Executive Department are advised at the time of hire that they serve at the pleasure of the Executive,” Houser said.

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The move, Houser added, “is a structural one based on the strategic shift in direction that a new Executive brings, and not a reflection of how current staff are performing.”

While the mass layoffs have come as a surprise to many county employees, a similar process has become routine in Seattle, where voters have elected a new mayor every four years starting in 2009. Seattle mayor-elect Katie Wilson is announcing more details about her own transition team tomorrow, and is expected to bring in her own executive staff and announce new directors for many city departments.

Because Constantine stepped down early to take over as Sound Transit director, Zahilay’s term will start on November 25, but he plans to continue paying appointed staff who will lose their jobs next year through January 2, which will also keep them on county health insurance through the end of January.

erica@publicola.com

Elections

Seattle Nice: Did Katie Wilson Win or Did Bruce Harrell Lose?

By Erica C. Barnett

Our latest podcast episode (subscribe and get a new one every week!) focuses on the mayor’s race—how Katie Wilson won it, why she won it, and how incumbent mayor Bruce Harrell tried very hard to keep her from winning it.

I kicked things off by talking about Harrell’s not-so-gracious concession speech and Q&A with reporters, in which he suggested baselessly that there were “anomalies” in King County Elections’ vote count and grumped at a reporter who asked, reasonably enough, if he understood what it was it was like to struggle with affordability in Seattle in 2025.

Harrell, who worked as a corporate attorney before being elected to the city council in 2007, told a reporter it was “offensive” to even ask that question, given that he spent his whole life suffering from “scars” such as having to share one bathroom in the Central District house his parents owned. (The fact that Harrell frequently brought up this fairly common annoyance with living in an older house as proof he relates to the present-day challenges of working people in Seattle says a lot about why he lost).

History probably won’t care about the fact that Harrell and his allies used tired misogynistic tropes to attack Wilson, painting her as a privileged, Oxford-educated princess who never worked a day in her life, but I do—especially since Harrell’s gendered attacks created the playbook for national right-wing media like Fox and the New York Post, which will probably never tire of calling her a hypocritical socialist who “lives off her parents’ money.” (If you’re not familiar with this trumped-up issue, Wilson’s parents helped her pay for day care temporarily so she could campaign).

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Sandeep suggested it’s a bit hypocritical for left-leaning white people who “got on the identity train” a few years ago to “throw over the Black, Asian mayor” in favor of a white woman now; Harrell banged this drum at length during his campaign, suggesting that “Seattle’s Black community” monolithically supported him and his policies. And David asked whether I’m not a bit hypocritical for

defending Wilson, who has never worked in government, after criticizing the new city council voters elected in 2023, most of whom had little or no government experience. (This one didn’t feel correct to me—in general, council members don’t have much or any government experience—so I looked it up. Turns out: Nope! I criticized the incoming council cohort for their policy positions and the things they said about how local government works, which were often simplistic.)

Also, for some goddamn reason, we’re still debating whether Wilson promised to lower the price of pizza (she didn’t!)

Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in later this week for a special bonus episode.