At the city council’s first meetings on Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed budget this week, Councilmember Maritza Rivera repeatedly suggested that she has not gotten sufficient information, since joining the council last year, about several programs the city funds that are designed to help people living unsheltered or in crisis. Rivera has opposed some of the
On Thursday morning, Rivera suggested it might be premature to expand the city’s CARE Department, which responds to 911 calls, and the related CARE Team, which responds to a limited subset of emergency calls alongside police and can take over those calls once police sign off. As we’ve reported, the CARE Team is set to sign a new agreement with SPD that will allow it to respond to calls without police in tow, and expand the types of calls team members, who are social workers, are allowed to respond to.
The city expanded CARE to 24 people last year, the maximum allowed under the agreement with SPD that expires at the end of this year. A proposed 0.1 cent sales tax would increase that number to 48, on the assumption that the new agreement will allow the expansion.
“I don’t know how well that expansion is going,” Rivera said. “I know there are issues underlying all of that. Nevertheless, we are not done with this full year and the proposal in this budget is to go from 24 to 48… and I have not seen any information about the work that CARE is doing that warrants the expansion,” given that the 2025 budget year isn’t over yet.
Largely in response to council questions, CARE launched a detailed data dashboard, currently accessible only the city’s internal network (to which Rivera has access) earlier this year. CARE has also repeatedly presented data and results to the council and publicly answered their questions.
Rivera did not raise similar concerns about a lack of data when the council approved an expansion of live police cameras into several new neighborhoods earlier this month. The council started discussing that expansion in late July, just weeks after SPD turned on new surveillance cameras in three initial “pilot” neighborhoods. The pilot program added almost $6 million to the 2025-2026 budget along with 21 new positions at SPD; the new budget anticipates SPD will need to hire another nine people to staff the surveillance center, and cost around $500,000 on cameras alone. A majority of the council, including Rivera, green-lit the surveillance expansion without any data showing that the cameras helped SPD solve or stop crimes that would have gone unaddressed without the cameras.
Later in the day, Rivera said she also didn’t have enough information to know whether LEAD and CoLEAD, two programs run by the nonprofit Purpose Dignity Action, were worth the funding provided in the mayor’s budget, which includes about $15 million for LEAD pre-booking diversion and $5 million for the CoLEAD encampment resolution program. That money, Rivera observed, is enough to “fund an actual department,” like the Office of Arts and Culture.
“I just want to make sure I understand how well we’re doing with diversion services,” Rivera said. “I just don’t feel, since I got here last year, that I have that information that I can really speak to. How really are we helping people? I understand there’s a lot more people in the system. Ideally we’d be people should be going into recovery, and then we’re taking up new people. I don’t necessarily think that’s happening, but I don’t want to be unfair, so I just need more information.”
Andrew Myerberg, Harrell’s chief of staff, said the people LEAD and CoLEAD work with, who are often homeless and involved in the criminal legal system, don’t just “go into recovery” and cycle out; their complex needs can take years to address, and relapse is common. LEAD, founded in 2021, is an internationally renowned diversion model that has been implemented around the world, while CoLEAD has been widely praised as the most successful approach to addressing unsanctioned encampments by permanently housing people living in state-owned rights-of way.
Speaking more broadly, Rivera said she was not “supportive of Housing First”—programs based on the premise that housing is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for long-term stability, health, and recovery—because “I don’t think it’s fair. … They’re not going to be able to stay housed if they don’t have the treatment services.” This reflects a misunderstanding that has become a talking point among the right across the country—that “housing first” means “housing only,” and that programs like LEAD simply dump people in empty houses and leave them there to rot.
On Friday, Rivera appeared eager to reignite her efforts last year to gut the city’s Equitable Development initiative, which helps fund community-based efforts by small, often first-time, developers to help their projects get off the ground. Last year, Rivera proposed legislation that would have frozen all new funding for the program and required the community groups it funded to spend down every penny they received from EDI by the end of the year or lose all their funding—a virtual impossibility for long-term capital projects that typically take five to seven years to complete.
Rivera’s proposal resulted in an outcry from communities that were slated to benefit from EDI projects (which are concentrated in Southeast Seattle) as well as panicked EDI recipients, who begged the council not to withdraw city funding for their projects. (Eventually, Rivera withdrew her amendment and replaced it with new reporting requirements for EDI projects.) Rivera suggested Friday that she still thinks EDI is completing projects too slowly, noting that 20 of 75 EDI projects that have received funding at some point in the last 10 years, through 2025, are finished.
“You know, ideology is great, but what is really great is when we [take] action and these projects actually open to help community,” Rivera said. “Just talking about it, that’s great, but we have to do it. And so this was my concern, as you know last year, is a lot of these projects are not not moving along fast enough where they’re actually going to benefit community, and that’s a concern.”
Rob Saka backed Rivera up, saying that while he didn’t “remember all the ins and outs and twists and turns of that… [I] remember there being a fair amount of confusion around the original purpose and goals of that underlying effort. And I also remember my colleague being unfairly attacked, in some cases based off of race, which, you know, check your privilege! White saviorism in the city of Seattle is particularly real.”
Saka did not give any examples of anyone making a racist argument against Rivera’s proposal to gut the Equitable Development Initiative, which is explicitly designed to benefit underserved communities of color. The original EDI initiative was sponsored by former councilmember Tammy Morales, who, like Rivera, is Latina.
PubliCola’s own coverage at the time showed that the overwhelming majority of those who asked the council to allow EDI projects to keep moving forward were people of color who worked on or whose communities directly benefited from these grassroots community projects.
A public commenter holds up an image of the kind of housing he warns will be everywhere if density proponents get their way.
By Erica C. Barnett
On Friday, hundreds of Seattle residents took time out of their days to comment on proposed updates to the city’s Comprehensive Plan—a document that sets the parameters for growth and development across the city.
Although the plan is supposed to go through a major update every 10 years, Mayor Bruce Harrell released his initial proposal a year behind schedule, and the City Council is currently plodding through the plan in several “phases,” starting with changes to the city’s historically single-family zones, now known as “neighborhood residential” areas.
Some of these changes are designed to implement House Bill 1110, a bill that requires cities to allow up to four housing units on every residential lot, or six if two of the units are affordable. The council, facing a deadline to comply with 111o or accept housing regulations written by the state, passed a short-term bill complying with the law earlier this year, but still has to pass permanent legislation to update zoning rules associated with the new law.
They’re also taking up Harrell’s plan to add 30 new “neighborhood centers”—areas within a 3-minute walk (about 800 feet) of commercial and frequent bus stops where 3-to-6-story apartments would be newly allowed.
Following a pattern that has defined Seattle’s housing debate for decades, last week’s hearing pitted opponents of new housing—who argued that apartments (and the renters who live in them) would destroy the “quaint” character of their neighborhoods and contribute to “clear-cutting” trees on private lawns—against density proponents, who argued that relegating rental housing to polluted, busy arterial roads is inequitable, and that prohibiting apartments in most of the city leads directly to deforestation for suburban sprawl.
Because each person had only one minute to comment, many used some of their time to rattle off a list of amendment numbers—gibberish to anyone who isn’t intimately familiar with the plan. So instead of focusing on the high-level arguments (seriously, though, you NIMBYs need to stop saying housing proponents want to murder “orca babies”), I thought it would be helpful to dive into some of the amendments that came up most frequently.
This isn’t a comprehensive look at the competing changes council members are proposing (I did that here); instead, it’s an attempt to explain the amendments people were praising or complaining about last week, and how they’re hitting with both sides of Seattle’s eternal pro- and anti-housing debate.
Eliminate parking mandates
HB 1110 forced Seattle to get rid of mandatory minimum parking requirements for new housing within a half-mile of major transit stops, making it possible to build apartments with few or no parking spaces; Harrell’s proposal would retain other parking mandates across the city, regardless of demand.
Rinck’s amendment (amendment 7) is the strongest among several that would reduce parking mandates or eliminate them across the city; it would effectively allow developers to add parking based on market conditions and demand, and could result in lower housing construction costs.
Support social housing
Proponents of social housing, which voters overwhelmingly opted to fund using a targeted business tax earlier this year, applauded two amendments incorporating social housing into the comprehensive plan. The first, from Rinck (amendment 17), expresses support for social housing as one of the comprehensive plan’s affordability goals and incorporates it into several sections on affordable housing.
The second (amendment 61), from Kettle, would change existing city law to make it easier to build dense affordable housing in all neighborhood residential (former single-family) areas, and expand the definition of affordable housing to include social housing—a substantive change in law that would take place outside the comprehensive plan itself. A similar amendment, 60, from Sara Nelson would make similar changes to affordable-housing rules but would not apply them to social housing.
Restoring neighborhood centers
Rinck’s proposal would bring back eight neighborhood centers—those locations within a 3-minute walk of commercial nodes and frequent transit stops where 3- to 6-story apartments would be allowed—that were included in an earlier “Alternative 5” version of the plan and studied as part of a final environmental impact statement for the proposal. As we reported at the time, Harrell’s initial “One Seattle” proposal eliminated half of the 48 proposed neighborhood centers included in alternative, (After widespread blowback, Harrell restored six of the centers his initial plan eliminated).
Rinck’s amendment would restore eight more of the nixed neighborhood centers, bringing the comprehensive plan closer to the alternative that nearly new council member elected in 2023 said they supported.
Single-family activists were overwhelmingly opposed to these changes, saying that they come as a complete surprise, have never been vetted, and would result in—of course—”clearcutting” of trees on existing residential lawns.
“Say no to the city overreach of our community’s character that would destroy the very charm that attracted us to our respective neighborhoods,” one speaker told the council. “Say no to those who have ramrodded this blind-sighted, misguided notion that will result in our neighborhoods being significantly impacted by upzoned, high-density monstrosities.”
On the flip side, both homeowners and renters turned out to speak in favor of the changes, arguing that the city’s renter majority should be allowed to live in more parts of the city. “We spend too much time in the city driving our children around,” one speaker said. “We need more time to walk to neighborhood amenities and also welcome more neighborhood residents into the Seward Park neighborhood with mixed housing types.. … So go as far as you can. We really need it, and if we don’t do that, plenty of trees are going to get chopped down [for] urban sprawl.”
Downsizing neighborhood centers
As I noted in my earlier coverage of the council’s amendments, several proposals would downsize proposed neighborhood centers, while others would increase them. If every single change to neighborhood boundaries passed, they would collectively increase the total size of neighborhood centers across the city, but there’s no guarantee of how each individual vote will go—and the new neighborhood centers would be located, lopsidedly, in the council districts of councilmembers who support expansion.
The downsizing proposals would shrink neighborhood centers in Fauntleroy and Morgan Junction (amendments 35 and 37, Rob Saka), Madrona (amendment 38, Joy Hollingsworth), and Bryant, Ravenna, and Wedgwood (amendments 39, 40, and 41, Rivera).
Dan Strauss’ amendments expanding and redrawing neighborhood centers all over his northwest Seattle district (42 through 49) are the main proposals that would offset these potential losses. If all the amendments were to pass, it would mean that most of the expanded neighborhood centers would be in District 6, which includes parts of Magnolia, Fremont, Wallingford, and Ballard, while most of the reduced neighborhood centers would be in Northeast Seattle, represented by Rivera. (Bob Kettle has also proposed restoring a neighborhood center on Nickerson).
In other words, the neighborhood center-specific amendments are a product of the city’s district council system, in which individual council members have been empowered reshape the density maps in the parts of the city they represent based on their individual opinions about whether more housing is good or bad.
Corner stores, not just for literal corners anymore
A large number of public commenters expressed their support for Rinck’s Amendment 66, which would allow “corner stores” throughout residential areas, rather than just on literal corners, as Harrell’s plan proposes. Rinck’s amendment would also remove a proposed size limit of 2,500 square feet for these businesses, allow bars (not just restaurants), and remove a requirement that new businesses close at 10pm.
“It’s time to let Seattle cook, brew, and create,” one supporter said. Nelson and Strauss have amendments that would remove the “literal corner” requirement but keep all the other restrictions in place.
More transit-oriented development
Rinck’s Amendment 76 would allow denser low-income housing and stacked flats in more parts of the city, by making a technical change to the definition of “major transit” so that it includes areas within a quarter mile of bus stops that have 15-minute service on weekdays. The upshot would be that these types of housing could get a density bonus if they’re near frequent transit; in addition, they wouldn’t be subject to mandatory parking requirements.
One commenter who spoke against this change suggested it would result in “denuding all of Seattle’s neighborhoods” of trees and “subject[ing] nearly the entire city to five- and six-story developments.” Others noted that it went beyond the requirements in HB 1110—which is true; that bill was meant to represent a floor for all cities across the state, not a maximum density level for the state’s largest city.
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Rivera has a couple of amendments that would create steep hurdles for new housing. The first, Amendment 81, would direct the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections to write rules dictating the kind of “exterior cladding” allowed on buildings in any local or national historic district, based on “objective design standards,” whatever that means.
Activists have sought and won historic district designations for neighborhoods like Wallingford with the goal of preventing demolition and redevelopment of lots developed in the 1920s and 1930s, but they might balk at HOA-style rules telling them what color they can paint their houses, or what specific type of siding they have to purchase during home renovations.
The second Rivera amendment, 102, is more insidious: It would authorize SDCI’s director, a political appointee, to require developers to come up with alternative site plans, at any point during the development process, “if the Director determines that an alternative site plan could feasibly increase the retention of existing healthy trees.”
In plain language, the amendment would give absolute power to the head of the city’s building department to kill individual housing projects on the grounds that there is some possibility a purely theoretical “alternative site plan” could protect any tree of any size or age—an absurd expansion of the city’s bureaucratic power.
As we’ve reported, neighborhood activists frequently present their own “alternative site plans” that they claim would allow developers to retain trees, usually by reducing the size and value of any future housing on the site.
Developers, who get loans to build housing projects based on future value, generally dismiss these alternative plans as unworkable (if you got a loan to build five 1,500-square-foot units with yards, you can’t pay that loan back by selling five 1,000-square-foot units with no outdoor space); under Rivera’s amendment, the city itself could use similar site plans to effectively stop housing projects from moving forward.
Lawns > housing
Other tree amendments (including 91, from Nelson; 92, from Strauss; 93, from Rivera, which would also establish new tree protection areas) would provide density incentives for developers that preserve existing trees on existing private lawns. One Strauss amendment, 100, would require developers to plant a new tree for every 2,500 square feet of lot area, in addition to other tree requirements, and another, 103, would prohibit removing large trees near the corners of any lot.
Unsurprisingly, many commenters claimed that allowing more density in Seattle’s historic single-family neighborhoods would result in “clear-cutting” the city, by eliminating the trees that homeowners and earlier developers planted in the yards of single-family houses. As one speaker argued, “We risk losing old-growth trees and wetland and bald eagle habitat ecosystems that make this area unique.” In fact, there are virtually no old-growth trees remaining on private property in Seattle, because early developers clear-cut the forest that once occupied the land now known as Seattle in order to build single-family houses.
Two proposals that didn’t come up much, if at all, during the public hearing are also worth flagging. The first, Kettle’s amendment 32, would add an entirely new “public safety element” to the comprehensive plan—effectively adding goals like crime reduction and improved 911 response times to the city’s foundational zoning document.
The second, which spans two amendments (21, from Nelson, and 22, from Saka and Mark Solomon), would “discourage the concentration of human services facilities” for “low-income populations” in downtown Seattle. As the brief staff summaries of these amendments notes, the city frequently has no say in where services for low-income people are located; one reason a lot of services are downtown is because downtown is the city’s most central and transit-accessible neighborhood.
The comprehensive plan committee will take up all the amendments (plus, god help us, any new ones) on September 17 and 18, with a final council vote on the Phase 1 changes likely later this month.
As a state program to improve digital equity shuts down, the group that distributes state funds to dozens of small nonprofits and the State Department of Commerce are at an impasse, with millions of dollars in the balance.
By Erica C. Barnett
Terrence Morgan, the CEO of Fresh Start Professional Services, was excited to receive grant funding in 2023 through a state initiative called the Digital Navigator Program. For the first time, Fresh Start would be able to rent an office to hold digital literacy classes and provide a modest monthly subsidy for program participants—people from marginalized communities, including survivors of domestic violence and people coming out of prison or treatment, for whom computer training classes could provide a pathway to higher educat,ion or better-paying jobs.
For more than a year, the state money that paid for the program showed every month, as expected. But then, this past January, the funding stopped.
Fresh Start was able to keep its classes going for a while by spending down its reserves and canceling the stipends that made it feasible for many of its clients to participate in the program, Morgan said. By April, though, “we started really feeling the brunt of it, because our funds were depleted. Our funds are totally completely depleted now.” After six months without any reimbursement for its work, Fresh Start has taken out a line of credit and laid off staff. Morgan and two other top staffers stopped taking pay three months ago.
“We’re doing the bare minimum we can do” until the program ends this month, he said. At this point, he isn’t convinced the state Commerce Department, which funds the Digital Navigator Program, has any intention of paying the dozens of groups that signed contracts for the funding in 2023. “”My guess is—and I’ve been saying this for the last four months—we ain’t never getting paid.”
•••
To understand why Fresh Start and the other organizations have gone unpaid for months requires some background on how the state’s Digital Navigator Program works. In 2021, at the height of the pandemic, the Commerce Department began giving out grants to local organizations to distribute laptops, set up internet connections, and provide digital literacy training to people in underserved communities.
Since then, the Digital Navigator Program has expanded and evolved, granting tens of millions of dollars to dozens of organizations to pay for digital literacy classes, laptops, help lines, and internet service across the state. A dashboard on the EEC’s website documents nearly 230,000 “interactions” made possible by the Digital Navigator Program, which include classes, home visits, calls to technical support lines, and other one-on-one encounters with people who participated in the program.
In 2023, the Commerce Department selected one of those grant recipients, the Seattle-based Equity in Education Center, to distribute more than $20 million in digital equity grants to 39 smaller nonprofits run by and for people of color in marginalized communities—a departure from the department’s previous practice of distributing dozens of grants directly. The EEC headed up the largest of three such “consortiums”; the other two were run by the Community Health Network of Washington and the Nisqually Indian Tribe.
For the first year or so, EEC director Sharonne Navas said, the payments from the Commerce Department came regularly. “We’d submit [invoices] for January, get paid in February, and reimburse our subcontractors by the first week of March,” she said. Last year, the state started asking for additional proof of how the organizations were spending their money, like payroll reports, bank statements, and copies of paper receipts. Navas said the EEC provided all the requested documentation, despite chafing at what they saw as shifting, sometimes arbitrary requirements.
Then, in November, a state audit found issues with 12 of the 62 digital navigator contracts with the organizations heading up the three consortiums. The Commerce Department, according to the audit, had failed to ensure that some forms had signatures, hadn’t verified certain contract requirements, and had paid out a total of $1,510 for “food/snacks that were not approved,” including energy drinks.
Shortly after the audit came out, then-Governor Elect Bob Ferguson appointed a new Commerce Director, former state senator Joe Nguyen, who started in January. That same month, the department stopped paying the EEC, telling the group in April that it was going back over every invoice they had submitted between August and December of 2024, and would start paying them again once they were satisfied that everything was in order.
After the checks stopped coming, Navas said, she was forced to first run through the EEC’s reserves to pay her own staff and the subcontractors, and then to take out a line of credit, using her own house as collateral.
“We’ve floated nine payrolls. We’ve used up all our savings,” Navas said in early June. “I had to furlough 11 staff, and then we had to let nine of them go this week, because we just don’t have the cash anymore.” According to Navas, the state now owes the EEC more than $3 million, with no guarantee that the organization and its subcontractors will ever get paid.
The Commerce Department doesn’t dispute that they haven’t paid the EEC and its sub-grantees since January, but they say it’s the EEC’s fault—not theirs. According to Commerce Director Joe Nguyen, appointed by Governor Bob Ferguson in the EEC was always supposed to pay groups like Fresh Start out of its own funds, in advance, and then submit receipts and other documentation to the state to get reimbursement for the money, which amounts to about $1 million a month. To get paid, Nguyen said, all the EEC needs to do is show that it has paid each of the 39 organizations that are part of its consortium, then show the state exactly how each group spent the money.
In April, Nguyen told Navas in an email that “there is no freeze on the funds” and that “the delays and issues with reimbursement are not due to Commerce’s actions. We have expedited payment as soon as the proper documentation are submitted.”
“I don’t understand why they can’t produce some of these basic receipts,” Nguyen told PubliCola. “It’s all on a reimbursement basis—you submit the receipts, we pay you back.”
In a recent “listening session” with the organizations that contract with the EEC, Nguyen told the groups it was the EEC’s fault, not the state’s, that they haven’t gotten paid this year. (PubliCola received a recording of the meeting, which was not public.) The old leadership at Commerce, Nguyen said, had been paying the EEC without proper documentation, which was out of line with state policy and law. All he was asking for, Nguyen said, was receipts and invoices—and for the EEC to pay everyone in advance, which he said they should have been doing all along.
Navas said there are two flaws in the state’s position. The first, she said, is the Commerce Department keeps changing its requirements. When the program was set up under the agency’s previous director, Mike Fong, subcontractors were only required to submit invoices showing how they spent their grant funding. When Nguyen took over, the requests grew more and more specific, and rejections more common. “We’ve shown proof of payment throughout this whole entire thing,” Navas said. (PubliCola reviewed many of the documents the EEC submitted to Commerce and confirmed that they included receipts, payroll reports, and other detailed documentation.)
“The goalposts have moved so much that I don’t think they want to pay us,” Navas said. “Personally, I think that they want to show that we’re incompetent and then show that the new leadership at Commerce has saved the state $6 million.”
The second issue, Navas said, is that the EEC can’t pay people out of money it doesn’t have. “This grant was created during COVID, when nobody had any money,” she said. “The reimbursement process that we were under was, okay, let’s just be a little bit more flexible with this grant, because we have promised to give out 10,000 laptops and pay 200 digital navigators, and there is no organization that can do that and upfront all the money.”
What Commerce is asking now, Navas said, “is that I pay people before they pay us, and I can’t because I have used all my money to keep the organization open. … It is genuinely impossible” to pay out $1 million a month without having the money in hand, she said.
Nguyen said his only goal is to get the Digital Navigator Program in compliance with state standards that apply to all other contracts. “We have an obligation at the state to adhere to the State Administrative and Accounting Manual,” he said. “We want to make sure that any time people work with Commerce, we are being as supportive as possible, but we literally have [laws] and rules we have to follow.”
During the listening session, which did not include EEC representatives, Nguyen said he was trying to find a way to pay each of the 39 contractors individually, rather than through their contracts with EEC—a deal that would require each contractor to independently cut ties with the Equity In Education Center in the hope that they’d stand a better shot of getting paid by working with Commerce directly. So far, none of the groups have taken him up on his offer.
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Emails between Commerce and the EEC throughout 2025 show that the relationship between the two is strained, if not broken. The two sides seem unlikely to resolve their impasse by the time the Digital Navigator program ends on June 30. Meanwhile, the nonprofits that received funding through the program are scrambling to figure out how to make up their losses.
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Mission Africa, a Federal Way-based organization that provides case management, mentorship, job training, and other services to immigrant and refugee women and youth, used its Digital Navigator grant to provide broadband access and digital literacy skills to a wide range of participants, from kids in high school to recent immigrants who didn’t need to have computer skills in their home countries.
Since 2022, when Mission Africa first applied for a Digital Navigator grant under an earlier iteration of the program, digital navigation has grown to be the group’s biggest program, according to its CEO, Ndudi Chuku.
“You have people who are medical doctors who come here and they’re not computer literate, maybe they have a serious language barrier. These are the people who are coming her, and we say, ‘This is a mouse. This is a desktop,'” Chuku, who is from Nigeria, said. “And these people end up getting good jobs, and they get a living wage to take care of their families.” In addition to basic digital literacy, Mission Africa teaches classes to train young people in coding, SQL, robotics, and cloud computing—skills that help them access better-paying jobs in the tech sector.
Chuku never stopped paying her staff, she said—”I couldn’t tell them, ‘We can’t pay you because we haven’t been paid,’ because that’s not my agreement with them”—but the loss of regular funding from the state has been “very, very impactful.”
Mission Africa, she said, has given the state no reason to believe they’ve been dishonest about how they’ve spent the money, and they’ve submitted meticulous invoices, including bank and payroll statements that include costs that have nothing to do with the Digital Navigator Program, which Chuku considers “an invasion of our privacy.”
“We did good work, we did it well, with integrity and honesty. We did not cut corners in any way and we did not make up numbers,” Chuku said. “For the past 18 months, Commerce has paid EEC for them to pay us. It has never been the other way around. I don’t know why they won’t pay us now.”
Ana Perera, the CEO of Adonai Counseling and Employment Services, said the Digital Navigator Program has funded four staffers, including one who works one-on-one with migrant workers and other Spanish speakers in Eastern Washington. The group has also provided broadband service to people who are “getting out of prison and going out to places like Omak or Clallam Bay,” Perera said, teaching them how to access their medical records, look for job or entrepreneurship opportunities, and access digital services.
“The heart of our agency is reentry,” Perera said, with a focus on employment, training, and behavioral health. The digital navigator funding has allowed Adonai to expand their work into 31 of the state’s 39 counties, “with a huge focus on rural areas” where broadband access is sparse and where participants lack access to digital literacy and training programs.
Perera, who had to start paying staff out of her own salary, said she thinks Nguyen is trying to drive a wedge between the small community organizations like hers and the EEC, which was previously just one of many organizations receiving direct grants from the state.
“I felt like the listening session was there to make sure to create division among our group so it would break down—’This is all EEC’s fault, they haven’t done thism they haven’t done that,'” Perera said.
Morgan, from Fresh Start, offered a similar assessment. “All they’re doing is stall tactics to get to the end of the grant and say, ‘You didn’t comply, you lost funding.’ At the listening session, they said, ‘We can’t pay you because Sharonne was supposed to pay you all up front.’ But she was paying us up front until you stopped paying her.”
Navas said her organization “absolutely made mistakes,” especially in the early days, when the EEC was a $300,000 organization that rapidly expanded to a budget of $13 million. But none of those errors, she said, justifies cutting off funding to so many small community organizations, including some whose staff have had to go on food assistance, couch surf, or take out personal loans in the months they haven’t been paid.
“When it’s a good day, [I think] it might just be new leadership, under a new governor, trying to come in and trying to enforce internal ways of doing things that should have always been in place,” she said. “On a bad day, it’s hard to give people grace who have so much power, and flippantly say that they’re not going to move any faster.”
The state and the EEC have until July 7 to resolve their impasse. Although the state legislature included an extension of the Digital Navigator Program in its 2025-2027 budget, the governor eliminated the program through a line-item veto, citing “the state’s significant fiscal challenges and funding cuts from the federal government.”
Records also show that Rivera, who blamed the city’s planning director for delaying a meeting “for months,” was chiefly responsible for the delays.
By Erica C. Barnett
In late May, City Councilmember Maritza Rivera proposed freezing 2024 funds intended for the Office of Planning and Community Development’s Equitable Development Initiative, the city’s largest anti-displacement program, prompting outrage from community-based organizations and residents across the city.
She backed down after thousands of people flooded council members’ inboxes with objections to her proposal, which would have frozen about $24 million in 2024 funding for EDI projects unless OPCD spent all the funds that were currently available for the program, around $53.5 million, by September. Because it can take many years to spend capital funds, the measure would have effectively halted all projects planned for 2024 as well as future projects, putting a halt to the program.
EDI provides partial funding, such as startup capital costs, to community groups and nonprofits doing projects that benefit low-income people and communities of color, largely in Southeast Seattle. Freezing the 2024 funds would have opened up a path for the council to spend these targeted dollars closing the general-fund budget, at the expense of dozens of projects lined up to get EDI funds this year.
Rivera insisted at the time that she wasn’t trying to kill the initiative, and said she never intended to vote against the budget “carryforward” ordinance that would have preserved funding for projects that are already under contract.
But documents obtained through a records request show that Rivera was scoffing at EDI well before she began raising questions publicly, and that as late as May 15, she was suggesting that she might vote to kill the $53.5 million in projects as well, telling OPCD director Rico Quirindongo in an email, “At $50.5 million dollars and given the $250 million budget deficit, I need to have information that will give me confidence in voting for the proposed carryforward and in general, by which to show my constituents the accountability we are giving to OPCD’s programs.”
Even earlier, in March—shortly after OPCD did a lengthy presentation on EDI— Rivera texted Councilmember Cathy Moore, saying, “I could not disagree more that EDI has addressed housing displacement across the city and for low income families.”
In May, Rivera defended her proposal after three hours of public comment against it, accusing her colleague Tammy Morales of spreading “disinformation” and confusing people into believing that her bill would cut funding for projects that were already funded.
A review of thousands of emails that poured in opposing Rivera’s proposal, however, suggests the opposite—community groups, including many that have received EDI funds, understood exactly what her bill would do.
For instance, Wa Na Wari, the Black arts and culture organization, noted in their email that their plans to purchase a permanent home include future EDI funding that would be at risk under Rivera’s proposal. The director of the Church Council of Greater Seattle wrote, “It is imperative to the flourishing of our city that you do not pass any amendment which would freeze funding for the Equitable Development Initiative.” And even a mass email, which referred to the more than 50 organizations whose EDI funding was secured prior to 2024, noted that the proposal would harm ongoing and upcoming projects by halting the program.
Rivera also mischaracterized her attempts to get information from OPCD about the program. During a May council meeting, for example, Rivera complained that she had repeatedly sought meetings with OPCD, but the department had “consistently rescheduled and delayed.”
But emails and scheduling records only show one instance in which OPCD rescheduled a meeting, moving a one-hour sit-down with Rivera from Friday, May 17 to Monday, May 20 so that Mayor Bruce Harrell’s chief operating officer, Marco Lowe, could be there. (OPCD met with Rivera a second time later that week.) “As a consequence” of this schedule change, Rivera told a council central staffer on May 15, she was pulling EDI program out of “carryforward” legislation for a separate vote, setting up her proposal to freeze funding for the program.
Ironically, the May meeting would have happened a month earlier if Rivera herself had not rescheduled it, after Quirindongo said he had COVID and would need to meet virtually instead of at Rivera’s office. “I think we should reschedule and give you time to recover,” Rivera wrote. “Feel better soon.”
Quirindongo did meet briefly with Rivera on May 8, but only after Rivera moved the meeting at least twice, according to scheduling records, prompting his assistant to ask Rivera’s legislative aide, “Are you able to clarify about the delay in this meeting getting scheduled? You had said she would be available today, then Monday morning, but now not until midday Wednesday, and I’d like to better understand if there are special steps we need to take in the future to get on her calendar if we have time-sensitive requests.”
Despite being chiefly responsible for putting off the meeting with OPCD, Rivera sent multiple emails to Quirindongo excoriating him for delaying their meeting “for over two months.” Quirindongo responded that, in the case of the May meeting that OPCD bumped from Friday to the following Monday, Lowe was invited to help answer some of Rivera’s questions—including a list she sent Thursday night, just hours before the meeting was scheduled.
Rivera responded, “I have always been clear on the request. Not sure where the disconnect is on OPCD’s end. Looking forward to the set of briefings occurring before next Tuesday,” which was the deadline for council members to amend the budget legislation. Rivera didn’t introduce her amendment to freeze EDI funding until three days after the deadline, filing it late in the afternoon on May 24, the Friday before the long Memorial Day weekend.
Little Brook Street Mural in Lake City, a Lake City Collective project funded by SDOT’s Neighborhood Street Fund
The council also decided not to fund a controversial Burke-Gilman Trail alternative and to hold off on studying impact fees on new apartments.
By Erica C. Barnett
The Seattle City Council’s transportation levy committee, which includes all nine council members, approved a $1.55 billion transportation levy package on Tuesday, one of the final steps before the levy heads to the November ballot.
Progressive Councilmember Tammy Morales didn’t manage to pass her proposal to add $150 million to the levy for sidewalks, arterial paving, and other projects, but she did score a significant victory: Her amendment to restore funding for the neighborhood-initiated safety partnership program, a revamp of the Neighborhood Street Fund designed to increase access to city funding for marginalized communities, passed 4-3 after two of the nine council members, Sara Nelson and Maritza Rivera, abstained.
Morales’ amendment also zeroed out a proposed $14 million “district fund” that would have empowered council members to direct the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) to build specific projects in their districts. The proposed levy still funds Councilmember Rob Saka’s new “neighborhood scale traffic safety programs,” which Saka said could be used to fund various types of “smaller scale safety improvements in neighborhoods and communities” that emerge in the future.
Councilmember Cathy Moore expressed confusion about this late addition, wondering aloud how it was different from the neighborhood-initiated projects, which came out of the work of a task force focused on creating more equitable access to small-scale transportation funding. Saka responded by saying the new fund would be a kind of catch-all for many types of projects. “The idea is that it could be for neighborhood-initiated safety [or] it could be for the district projects fund,” Saka said. “You can call whatever you want, whatever bucket or subcategory you so choose, but broadly what it is, it’s all the same thing. It’s smaller scale safety improvements in neighborhoods and communities.”
The neighborhood-initiated projects initiative, an equity-focused revamp of the popular Neighborhood Street Fund, has proved surprisingly controversial. (On Tuesday, several council members groused that most of the money would probably just end up in Morales’ Southeast Seattle district, the most diverse in the city.) The basic idea is that SDOT, with the help of its equity work group, would reach out to historically marginalized communities without a history of applying for or receiving transportation grants and work with them to develop small-scale projects.
Saka, who previously refused to hear a presentation on SDOT’s strategy for incorporating equity into the levy, derisively called the entire program a “slush fund” while cross-examining SDOT director Greg Spotts about whether the program would really do anything new.
“In the absence of this slush fund, does SDOT not undertake any of that work, currently, now?” Saka asked.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t see it as a slush fund whatsoever,” Spotts responded.
“Does SDOT engage—so, characterize it however you want—does SDOT not engage in this underlying work you’re talking about now?” Saka said.
“This program is proposed by the executive to supplement previous waves of investment and make investment in a new way, to bring people into the circle of power who previously have not felt included.,” Spotts said.
Morales’ amendment restores all but $1.5 million of the $41 million Harrell initially proposed for the program.
An amendment from Councilmember Dan Strauss that would take $20 million away from a proposed arterial road maintenance program and spend it building the controversial Leary Way alternative for completing the Burke-Gilman Trail through Ballard failed on a 5-4 vote. S
trauss has been a vocal advocate for the Leary option, a dog-leg detour preferred by industrial businesses who have spent decades fighting against a direct route connecting the two long-finished segments of the trail through Ballard. In hyping his amendment, Strauss derided the option long preferred by cyclists—a direct connection between the two incomplete segments of the existing path—as “a narrow strip of asphalt through an industrial area without a sidewalk.”
Another Strauss proposal to spend $5 million turning Ballard Ave. NW into a more pedestrian-friendly “curbless street” failed 8-1.
A proposal from Councilmember Cathy Moore to study transportation impact fees on new housing to pay for sidewalks also failed. Last year, the council considered, and ultimately rejected, legislation that would have amended the city’s comprehensive plan to allow the city to charge the fees, which are based on the premise that dense, urban living causes negative impacts on the city’s transportation system.
Sara Nelson, who joined last year’s narrow majority in defeating the impact fee proposal, said that because transportation fees would still require amending the comp plan, the council should consider them as part of the “big, long discussion and legislation on the comp plan update this coming year.” Mayor Bruce Harrell released his proposed update to the comprehensive plan earlier this year. “We’ve had developers, yes, weigh in on this. We’ve also had affordable housing providers weigh in in opposition to transportation impact fees, and so it’s clearly a discussion that merits a lot of sort of complex thinking,” Nelson said.
The final version of the levy proposal, which would cost the median Seattle homeowner around $45 a month, heads to the full council for approval next week.
The city council’s transportation levy committee will approve the final version of the 2024 levy proposal on Tuesday— one of the final steps before it heads to the November ballot.
The proposal currently on the table is a $1.55 billion levy that would cost the median Seattle homeowner $499 a year, up from about $275 a year under the levy passed in 2015, which expires this year. So far, the council has added $100 million to the plan Mayor Bruce Harrell sent down in May.
Councilmember Tammy Morales has proposed boosting that number to $1.7 billion, a level polling has suggested voters would support, to restore funding for equitable, community-created projects and add funding for sidewalks, bike lanes, and road maintenance, among other projects.
Last week, transportation committee chair Rob Saka (D1, West Seattle) released a version of the plan that includes both changes he announced two weeks ago as well as amendments that the council will discuss publicly for the first time on Tuesday. They include:
• A proposal from Dan Strauss (District 6, Northwest Seattle) to reduce bike safety funding by $500,000 to fund a feasibility study for using private funds to build a lid over I-5 through the Roosevelt neighborhood and near the North 130th Street light rail station;
• An amendment from Saka to create a new $7 million fund for “neighborhood scale traffic safety programs.” This new category would be separate and distinct from both the new “district funds” council members could direct to projects in their district and the new, grassroots “neighborhood-initiated safety partnership” program proposed by Mayor Bruce Harrell and slashed under Saka’s plan.
Councilmember Cathy Moore (D5, North Seattle) proposed eliminating the entire program, developed by a transportation equity work group charged with recommending ways to make city transportation funds more accessible to marginalized groups. The latest version of the plan would still cut $15.5 million, or 38 percent, from Harrell’s $41 million proposal.
• An amendment from Tammy Morales (District 2, Southeast Seattle) to stipulate that the city will spend the $6 million previously added for transit security “in coordination with” transit agencies, rather than unilaterally putting more officers on buses and trains.
• A formal guarantee that at least 36 percent of new sidewalks funded by the plan will be in North Seattle’s District 5; 22 percent will be in West Seattle’s District 1; and 17 percent will be in Southeast Seattle’s District 2. Districts 3, 4, 6, and 7 would split up the remaining 25 percent.
• $20 million in new spending, proposed by Strauss (D6, Northwest Seattle and Magnolia), on improvements to freight mobility in Interbay, SoDo, and elsewhere.
• An amendment from Saka increasing the minimum number of sidewalks the levy would build from 280 to 320, on top of 30 new blocks of sidewalks onAurora Ave. N.
• Amendments from Moore that would fund “auditing and professional services” for the Move Seattle Levy Oversight Committee, which would also expand to include the transportation committee chair, currently Saka. The committee provides oversight and is supposed to hold the city accountable to spend levy funds according to the language of the levy; the amendment would also expand the volunteer group’s responsibilities to include auditing and performance evaluations of levy programs under a new “Good Governance and Equitable Implementation Initiative.”
• Another amendment from Moore adding $5 million to “investigate and propose a comprehensive strategy” to dramatically improve the state of the city’s bridges and arterial streets, and consider transportation impact fees—fees on new multifamily housing, based on the idea that apartments have a negative impact that requires mitigation—as a strategy for funding sidewalks.
• Amendments to the nonbinding “recitals” section of the legislation—in theory, the place to establish whatever problem a new law attempts to solve—have swelled the number of “whereas” clauses from 15 to 41, increasing the length of the proposal by several pages; additions include new clauses supporting electric vehicles, asserting that traffic safety measures shouldn’t unduly slow down emergency responders, and establishing that Seattle wants to “create and maintain a safe, efficient and reliable transportation system.”
• Amendments from Strauss to spend $5 million turning Ballard Ave. into a “curbless street” by reducing funding for sidewalk spot repairs and sidewalk construction and to spend $20 million completing the Burke-Gilman trail through Ballard by cutting funds for arterial street maintenance.
