Rob Davis, who ran for City Council in 2023 and narrowly lost to Maritza Rivera, is hoping his North Seattle neighbors will get behind his explicitly urbanist agenda in his attempt to unseat longtime 46th District state Rep. Gerry Pollet and his slow-growth agenda.
Just south of the 46th, renter and labor activist Hannah Sabio-Howell is making the case that 20-year incumbent Sen. Jamie Pedersen is no longer serving the progressive 43rd District well. Sabio-Howell argues that Pedersen is out of touch with Seattle’s renter majority, and favors compromise too much at a time that demands urgent action on affordability.
King County Executive Girmay Zahilay announced a new plan to add 500 units of “shelter and housing” in the next 500 days, or by mid-August 2027, and will convene a work group to discuss a potential countywide housing levy. Some of the new shelter or housing could be on county-owned land, similar to the strategy Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson is using to cut down on the cost of new tiny house villages in Seattle.
The mayor announced this week she wants to accelerate the remaining phases of Seattle’s comprehensive plan update by one year, add more density within a “reasonable walk” of transit stops, and restore and expand the proposed neighborhood centers—nodes of density inside traditional single-family areas. We spoke with Wilson about her vision to update her predecessor’s anemic proposal.
City Councilmember Maritza Rivera wants the City Auditor to do an audit of all Human Services Department contracts, she announced this week, in light of a damning King County audit that found evidence of waste, misuse of funds, and potential fraud. But “audit the human services contracts” is a big request for the city’s small audit office, and Rivera doesn’t have council support lined up.
After a parade of library supporters told Rivera’s select committee on the library levy the city should go beyond Wilson’s $410 million levy proposal, she said she would not be supporting a single amendment to the plan. “It would be fiscally irresponsible to increase the proposal given the city’s other needs,” she said.
And Rob Saka turned his transportation and Seattle Center committee into a 90-minute rally for bringing an NBA team to Seattle, asking hard-quitting questions like “what color do you want the team uniforms to be” and “how excited are you for the Sonics.”
Coming next week: The city council will have a full day of meetings to discuss the latest updates to the city’s Comprehensive Plan on Monday. The pro-housing Complete Communities Coalition is having a rally at City Hall to support more apartments in Seattle (RSVP here); Tree Action Seattle is urging the anti-housing homeowner contingent to show up too, telling their supporters that “street trees are not a solution”—only private lawns are.
In an announcement that echoed Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to add 500 new shelter units by this summer, King County Executive Girmay Zahilay said Tuesday that he’s launching a new plan to add 500 units of “shelter and housing” in the next 500 days, or by mid-August 2027, and will convene a work group to discuss a potential countywide housing levy. Some of the new shelter or housing could be on county-owned land, similar to the strategy Wilson is using to cut down on the cost of new tiny house villages in Seattle.
Other elements of the “Breaking the Cycle” plan include improving performance metrics, reducing regulatory barriers, and better data collection and distribution.
“We want to know where are people falling through the cracks, where are services not connecting, and which programs are actually helping people stabilize,” Zahilay said at a press event Tuesday morning. “And then we’re going to use that information to make better decisions about how we invest public dollars by shifting resources to more programs that are delivering results.”
The overall plan, which Zahilay is calling “Breaking the Cycle,” consists largely of work groups that will report on ways to improve the responsiveness and effectiveness of existing county programs. Three months into his term, Zahilay is laying out a process, not presenting a finalized policy agenda or proposing legislation.
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But the two marquee elements of Zahilay’s announcement—the 500-bed commitment and the potential housing levy—do raise questions whose answers will determine the success of his plan. Will housing units (and shelter beds) that are already in the pipeline count toward the 500-unit goal, as the Urbanist suggested? How many will be housing, and how many will be shelter? Both these issues came up when former mayor Bruce Harrell promised to add 2,000 “units” of shelter or housing over four years, declaring victory even when the city ended up with less shelter overall, and claiming credit for projects that were begun under his predecessor’s turn. Zahilay’s proposal is, pointedly, for “net” new neds or units, so presumably he’s eager to avoid a “mission accomplished”-style Pyrrhic victory.
During an onstage conversation with Wilson and Housing Development Consortium director Patience Malaba at the HDC’s annual fundraising luncheon on Tuesday, Zahilay noted that the county has to rely on two main revenue sources: Sales and property taxes. (In 2024, Zahilay—then a King County Councilmember—proposed spending $1 billion of the county’s debt capacity on bonds to pay for workforce housing; that plan has not come to fruition).
“We do have to take a hard look at weighing those tradeoffs” between higher taxes and more housing, Zahilay said. “Of course, we need more revenue to fund critical services, especially to our most vulnerable neighbors—and we need to be careful about what kind of impact that has on cost of living.”
King County’s beautiful Brutalist Administration Building, closed since the pandemic. Photo by Another Believer, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
1. The city of Seattle finalized a settlement last week with Seattle police officer Denise “Cookie” Bouldin, a longtime officer who sued the department in 2023, alleging gender and racial discrimination. Bouldin will receive $750,000 in an agreement that also requires her not to sue the city again over the same claims.
SPD has settled a number of discrimination lawsuits in recent years, for amounts ranging from around $200,000 (paid to SPD sergeant John O’Neil, who was himself the subject of multiple discrimination complaints) to $3 million (paid to police captain Deanna Nollette, who claimed former chief Adrian Diaz discriminated and retaliated against her by demoting her and moving her to overnight duty after she alleged discrimination.
Bouldin, best known for her chess club for students in Rainier Beach, claimed in her lawsuit that her fellow officers and SPD officials subjected her to “race and gender discrimination on a daily basis that had “been ongoing and continuous throughout her entire career.” Among other allegations, Bouldin said SPD staff refused to give her a parking pass, mishandled her personal property, and retaliated against her when she complained about officers who allowed their dogs to “roam around” SPD’s south precinct.
The size of the settlement is unclear. Bouldin’s attorneys did not respond to a request for comment.
The City Attorney’s office would not say how much the settlement was for. In the initial tort claim that preceded the lawsuit, Bouldin sought $10 million from the city, according to media reports.
In a statement, City Attorney Erika Evans said Bouldin “is a pioneer at the Seattle Police Department who has been a beloved and deeply trusted presence in our community for decades. The City is thankful this case was able to resolve.”
2. The city council is poised to consider legislation that would make it easier for the city to site and build tiny house villages, but the three bills—sent down by Mayor Katie Wilson without prior conversation with council members or staff—will likely face scrutiny.
Two of the proposals—one that would provide about $5 million in funding for future tiny house villages, and another that would allow the city itself to lease and prepare land for shelters—do not have committee assignments yet. The other, which would increase the maximum size of tiny house villages from 100 people to as many as 250, is sponsored by Councilmember Dionne Foster and will be heard in Councilmember Eddie Lin’s land use committee.
It isn’t the cost of the proposal itself that’s currently raising eyebrows on the council: Most of the funding would come out of this year’s budget, which already includes money for shelter that can be used to build out the first set of 500 beds Wilson wants to add before the World Cup games in June.
Instead, councilmembers are raising questions about the size of the potential shelters (there’s a big difference between 25 to 50 tiny house units and hundreds), the fact that Wilson seems committed to tiny houses, specifically (Jon Grant, her chief homelessness advisor, worked at the city’s main tiny house village provider, the Low Income Housing Institute, immediately before joining Wilson’s office), and the level of services the new shelters will be able to provide for an average cost of $28,000, which is less than existing shelters that provide 24/7 on-site staff and wraparound support for chronically homeless people.
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Behind the scenes, councilmembers have grumbled that Wilson didn’t work with them before dropping her legislation in an announcement that only Rob Saka, whose district includes SoDo and other areas with a large number of unsanctioned encampments and RVs, attended.
3. By June, most King County employees will be required to work from physical offices three days a week, and many employees are pushing back. (Seattle also has varyingin-office mandates that we’ve coveredextensively.) Editor’s note: This sentence has been corrected to reflect that June, not March 30, is the general deadline for Return To Office. According to the county executive’s office, different departments are implementing the new mandate on different timelines.
In a recent internal newsletter, King County Executive Girmay Zahilay expressed his “commitment to building a Better Government includes listening to staff and empowering you to identify challenges and bring forward solutions” [emphasis in original]. Some county employees, taking him at his word, used the newsletter as a forum to express their frustration with the mandate.
King County covers more than 2,100 square miles, and many King County staffers do not live in or near Seattle, where the county’s central office space is located. Several noted that their jobs require them to go to far-flung locations; forcing them to commute to an office downtown will mean sitting in a cubicle and attending meetings remotely instead, they argued.
A number of staffers said the return-to-office mandate takes away valuable family and leisure time, contributes to stress and demoralization, and costs real money. “As a blanket and rigid policy, it disproportionately harms parents and caregivers who must secure new, costly childcare to cover mandated office days,” one staffer wrote. “It places the greatest strain on lower-wage workers and especially single working parents. The mandate forces parents to spend less time with their children, so they can sit in a cubicle alone with a headset, taking the same Teams calls they would at home. It forces employees to budget for new expenses (childcare, gas, parking, etc.) in a burgeoning recession when gas, groceries, and utility prices are on the rise.”
“Many staff moved to more affordable housing when positions were fully remote. That is how many of us are surviving,” another staffer wrote. “The long-term effects of this lowered productivity will negatively impact the work we do and the providers we support.”
Several staffers raised concerns about crowding in the county’s downtown office spaces, including King Street Center and the Chinook Building. The county scaled back on office space during the pandemic, and is now scrambling to find places for workers to sit. One staffer from the Department of Public Defense said staffers will now be forced to conduct client interviews from offices where three desks have been crammed into spaces built for one, compromising confidentiality in the name of “boots on the ground” and office camaraderie.
Asked about the employees’ concerns, Zahilay spokeswoman Callie Craighead said the executive wasn’t taking a “one-size-fits-all approach” and has, for example, allowed employees to meet their return-to-office requirements by working from county offices outside downtown Seattle. “Departments are currently developing plans to meet the three-day in-office expectation while continuing to preserve telework flexibility where possible,” Craighead said. “This includes coordinating in-office schedules and using existing space creatively.”
Responding to concerns about new expenses and the need for work-life balance, Craighead said, “The Executive recognizes that employees are balancing many considerations, including commute times and family responsibilities. As the father of a newborn and a toddler, he understands firsthand how important flexibility is for working families. His goal is to strike a thoughtful balance between maintaining the flexibility we value and strengthening in-person collaboration so the County can continue delivering strong results for residents.”
City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck’s proposed legislation to bar new detention centers in Seattle, originally introduced in February, has been delayed and amended to accommodate other council members’ concerns about prohibiting new local jails even temporarily, as the original legislation would have done. The new version of the bill, which would explicitly exempt jails from the moratorium, went up online yesterday.
A brief recap: On February 13, Rinck announced legislation that would ban new detention centers, as well as jails, in the city of Seattle for one year. The bill, announced in tandem with King County Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda’s similar legislation prohibiting detention centers in unincorporated King County for a year. Both proposals contains an emergency clause to illustrate the urgency of passing the ban; in December, ICE quietly posted a solicitation for contractors to build a new 1,635-bed detention facility in the Seattle area.
Legally, because of the Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution, federal law trumps state law—meaning that ICE, putatively operating in compliance with federal law, can violate any or all of the local and state laws blue cities and states put in their way. But laws like regional bans on detention facilities—and other anti-ICE legislation, including an executive order from Mayor Katie Wilson barring ICE from using city property and a proposal from Mosqueda that will have the same effect for county land—can create friction, Rinck said.
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“We still will have a law on the books, and if they try to challenge our decision, we will see them in court over this,” Rinck said. “It does force a conversation.”
Both bills are based on local land use regulations. They argue that any new detention center could have major impacts on “water, sewage and wastewater, transportation and parking, public safety, and public health” and that a moratorium would provide time to create permanent legislation on detention centers.
“Here at the county, we have explicit authority in our statute to ensure that land is being used in the public’s interest,” Mosqueda said. “Any detention center in King County is going to not only disrupt the local community, but it goes counter to King County’s interests in making sure that we’re promoting safety and well-being.”
Both bills are classified as “emergency” legislation, allowing them to move forward without the usual committee process. On both councils, emergency legislation requires seven of nine votes to pass—which gets us back to why Rinck’s proposal exempts jails from the one-year moratorium while Mosqueda’s does not.
According to multiple city council sources, at least two council members indicated that they would vote against Rinck’s proposal if jails were included in the ban, even though King County has no current plans to build a new jail in Seattle, or anywhere, in the near future. Banning new jails for a year could create an impression that centrist council members who will be up for election next year, including Maritza Rivera and Bob Kettle, are soft on crime.
Rinck can afford to lose two votes, but not three, and several other council members’ votes can be unpredictable when it comes to legislation perceived as “progressive,” as any legislation proposed by Rinck, one of the council’s most progressive members, inevitably is.
Kettle, the chair of the council’s public safety committee, did not respond to questions PubliCola sent on Monday.
Mosqueda said on Tuesday morning that no one on the council had raised an issue about the inclusion of new jails in the ban, noting that her legislation does explicitly allow renovations at Echo Glen, a youth detention center in unincorporated eastern King County.
Rinck’s legislation will be up for a full council vote on March 10. She said the bill will “buy some time” for the city if ICE does propose building a detention facility here. “I think this is worth fighting over,” she said.
1. The state Public Employee Relations Commission ruled earlier this month that King County was not required to bargain with unionized staff for the county’s Department of Public Defense (DPD) before moving inmates from the King County jail in downtown Seattle to the South Correctional Entity (SCORE), a jail in Des Moines owned by several cities in South King County.
The decision to move people to SCORE, which the county argued was necessary to alleviate understaffing at the downtown jail, was controversial. Unionized staffers for the county’s Department of Public Defense, which represents indigent clients, argued that the move limited defendants’ access to attorneys and created logistical hurdles that made it harder for DPD to provide the best possible defense.
SEIU 925, the union that represents DPD employees, filed a demand to bargain over the proposal to move inmates to SCORE, arguing that the agreement creates changes to their members’ working conditions and was a mandatory subject of bargaining. A hearing examiner ruled in the union’s favor; PERC’s decision overturns that ruling.
The county’s contract with SCORE ended in 2023. But the PERC decision, which the union is appealing, has potentially serious implications for issues that remain ongoing, including caseloads and staffing levels at DPD and other local public defense agencies around the state attorneys and non-attorney DPD staff such as investigators, paralegals, and legal assistants.
According to public defense union president Molly Gilbert, “there has never been a decision like” the examiner’s initial ruling, which “would have required the county, and any other public defense office in that state, to negotiate with the union over caseloads and staffing.” In practice, Gilbert said, this could force the county to hire more staff, including paralegals and investigators, to lower caseloads make it easier for attorneys to handle the cases they have.
Public defender caseloads are an ongoing issue in Washington state; last year, the state Supreme Court ruled that jurisdictions like King County must reduce caseload standards dramatically over the next 10 years. According to Gilbert, a favorable outcome for the union wouldn’t necessarily result in a directive to hire dramatically more attorneys—a scenario that could set King County up for a consequential McLeary-style funding mandate to “lock in” complex caseload standards.
Instead, Gilbert said, the union has been making “proposals that are far cheaper than the bar standards that we could live with” by “having more staff support, which is cheaper than hiring all these attorneys. But they refuse to bargain with us on that.
The union is appealing PERC’s decision.
2. As PubliCola reported, the city settled with the family of Jaahnavi Kandula, a 23-year-old student killed in a crosswalk by a speeding Seattle police officer, earlier this month for a total of $29,011,000—$29 million plus $11,000, the amount a Seattle Police Officers Guild leader “joked” that the city would pay her family, given her “limited value.” The comment, made by officer Daniel Auderer to SPOG president Mike Solan and caught on Auderer’s body camera, caused international outrage and led to Auderer’s termination.
SPD officer Kevin Dave was driving 74 miles an hour down a 25-mile-per-hour street when he struck Kandula, who was in a crosswalk; he claimed he was racing to provide medical care to an overdose victim who turned out to be a a guy concerned he had used too much cocaine.
After we published, a number of people asked PubliCola what Dave’s reckless driving would cost the city—and who would pay. We asked the Office of City Finance, and learned from a spokesperson that although the city’s insurance will cover $20 million of the settlement. The city itself is liable for the first $10 million of “any covered loss,” including lawsuit settlements. That $10 million deductible also includes the cost to defend SPD against the lawsuit filed by Kandula’s family.
That $10 million will come out of the city’s Judgment and Claims fund, which is part of the city’s general fund.
According to OCF, $20 million is the “full amount of available insurance and the insurers’ policy limits.” The city, in other words, is on the hook for its deductible plus any settlement amount above $20 million.
As we’ve reported repeatedly, the city has had to increase the judgment and claims fund routinely for several years running, thanks in large part to growing settlements in lawsuits against SPD. In addition to this ever-increasing line item, large settlements raise the amount the city pays for insurance; as of 2023, when Kandula was killed, the city was paying just under $9 million a year for insurance, the OCF spokesperson said. In short: SPD does not pay directly for any of the lawsuits it loses or settles.
Amber, from Green Light Project, and Emi Koyoma, from the Coalition for Rights & Safety for People in the Sex Trade, testify at City Council Tuesday.
By Erica C. Barnett
Advocates for sex workers, activated by a brutal, dehumanizing presentation the King County Prosecutor’s Office delivered to the city council’s public safety committee about sex trafficking, are demanding action from the city and county to rectify the harm done by past actions and statements about sex work and trafficking.
As PubliCola reported, the prosecutors, who were trying to drum up support for a proposed state law that would make it a felony to pay another person for sex. The presentation included identifiable photos of tortured, brutalized women; a lurid recitation of the objects an anonymous victim said had been inserted into her by force; misogynistic quotes about sex workers from an unidentified online forum; and graphic descriptions of rape and violence against women.
The prosecutors also claimed that every sex worker who opposed further criminalizing sex work had been a victim of childhood abuse, and was therefore speaking against their own true interests because of trauma.
In a letter to the council, which three advocates read aloud at Tuesday’s council meeting, a group of advocates for sex workers, survivors, and people in the sex trade made five demands:
• An acknowledgement from the city of the “selective and exploitative uses of survivor stories, voices, and images” by the committee and the prosecutor’s office.
• An examination of the city and county’s policies and trainings, if any, on “trauma-informed, and non-exploitative uses of survivor voices and stories.”
• An analysis by the city’s Office of Civil Rights on “existing and potential policy approaches to reducing violence and exploitation in the sex trade as well as a review of best practices for incorporating diverse voices of survivors, sex workers, and people in the sex trade while minimizing re-traumatization.”
• Strategies to include more perspectives from people with lived experience of sex work in future policy conversations, and to fund peer-led groups that provide services to survivors and sex workers without requiring that they collaborate with law enforcement
• A public safety committee meeting “dedicated to a presentation about human rights-based, noncarceral, pro-sex worker approach to empower survivors, sex workers, and people in the sex trade and combat violence, abuse, and exploitation within the sex trade.”
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The organization also provide a list of several quotes from council members during the presentation along with the derogatory messages they communicated. One was a comment from committee chair Bob Kettle aimed at people who criticize the city’s purely punitive response to the sex trade.
Kettle said that “so many women in our city,” as well as “the chattering classes,” are hypocrites because they criticize Jeffrey Epstein but don’t support carceral strategies like sending sex buyers to prison. “These people, the people come in here and yell at us because when we’re trying to go in after the men, but we’re the target. We as a city need to stop, take a deep breath, and think about that,” Kettle said.
On Monday, the Seattle Women’s Commission sent a letter to the city’s Office of Civil Rights with a list of their own requests, including a public statement from OCR Director Derrick Wheeler-Smith calling on the city to “honor and include diverse perspectives in all Civil Rights Work,” including work on behalf of sex workers, survivors, and people in the sex trade.
As we reported on Monday, the prosecutors’ presentation contributed to efforts in the state legislature to roll back the legislation the two county prosecutors were advocating for, removing the first-strike felony provision and incorporating more humanizing language into the proposal. The changes led supporters of the original bill to mutiny, calling the new version—which still increases paying for sex to a gross misdemeanor for the first two offenses, and a felony for the third—inadequate to deter people from paying for sex.
