Category: legislature

City Hall, Density, Elections, legislature, Police

New Column! Introducing Greater Seattle
Mayor Katie Wilson, with new interim chief Andre Sayles at far left

By Josh Feit

PubliCola isn’t making endorsements this year, but election season (see item 3 below)  gives me the perfect opportunity to debut this new opinion column with its simple premise:  X > (is greater than) Y.

1) The Case for Firing SPD Chief Shon Barnes > The Case for Keeping Shon Barnes

The case for firing police chief Shon Barnes, a holdover from the Harrell administration, might seem disproportionate to the happenstance of being out of town during a shooting (and subsequently fucking up media briefings on the shooting because of your absence).

But if you’re a regular PubliCola reader, you know there are plenty of reasons beyond Barnes’ alarming  OOO MO that made him an odd fit with Wilson’s progressive administration. Among them: His aversion to the CARE Team; SPD’s violent treatment of  counter-protesters at an anti-trans rally in Cal Anderson Park; lawsuits accusing him and his team of discriminating against women and LBGTQ staffers; the department’s ongoing failure to recruit more women, and his questionable hiring and promotion decisions.

Wilson can get pretty anxious about diverging from Seattle’s older Black community, which I think partially explains why she recently disappointed her activist base on surveillance cameras. But Wilson is also known for listening to the facts, assessing the situation, and acting accordingly. Thankfully, in weighing Barnes’ rocky tenure against the vague call for stability, she made the right call last week.

And by the way: Barnes’ recent chest-forward display of toxic machismo (after a South Seattle Emerald reporter dared to ask him about Erica’s reporting on those frequent absences) was red card material. If not a fireable offense in its own right, Barnes’ playground behavior surely gave Wilson an unnerving reminder of why he wasn’t a fit.

2) Seattle City Council Members Eddie Lin, Dionne Foster, Alexis Mercedes Rinck, Bob Kettle, and Dan Strauss > Seattle City Council Members Joy Hollingsworth, Debora Juarez, Maritza Rivera, and Rob Saka

A million years ago, I used to write a column on Seattle City Hall called Five to Four. So pardon me for being extra excited about a narrow city council vote last week that distinguished the pro-housing council members from the anti-housing council members.

Erica has the rundown on the 5-4 win for Southeast Seattle Councilmember Lin’s pro-density legislation that will stop homeowners from turning the Seattle Hearing Examiner into a weapon against renters and new housing, something NIMBYs have been doing for the 20-plus years I’ve been reporting on this issue. I just want to add: WTF Joy Hollingsworth? You represent one of the most progressive, densest, renter-centric districts in the city. What’s the gatekeeping about?

3) Ron Davis (and even Will Dreher) > State Rep. Gerry Pollet

In this year’s North Seattle election battle between mansplainers, longtime North Seattle rep  Gerry Pollet (D-46, N. Seattle) versus know-it-all housing pundit Ron Davis, at least Davis is the YIMBY in the race. Pollet is a NIMBY who spent the bulk of his tenure as housing committee chair stalling legislation that would have created more housing in his district. The pro-housing, urbanist wing of the Democratic Party eventually got fed up with Pollet and removed him as chair of the housing committee.

In contrast, Davis is gung-ho on urbanist housing policies such as funded inclusionary zoning (FIZ) (a PubliCola favorite). He also advocates for increasing density around schools and parks.

In addition to supporting upzones  as a way to increase density, Davis also supports hacks to the building code that will allow more density without changing overall zoning, such as Sightline initiatives like parking, stairway, and elevator reform; Davis has been a regular contributor to Sightline, the state’s leading pro-housing, urbansit think tank, and is endorsed by Mayor Katie Wilson and The Urbanist.

But Davis isn’t solely a free-market, density guy. He sees a role for good governance to support affordable housing through progressive taxes, rental assistance, social housing, and universal childcare.

Private attorney and first-time candidate Will Dreher is a former clerk for liberal SCOTUS Justice Elena Kagan and a DOJ prosector who went after J6 rioters. He’s also, yikes, a former clerk for pre-SCOTUS Brett Kavanaugh who signed a letter supporting Kavanaugh’s nomination in June 2018. However, three months later Dreher and two other clerks withdrew their support, calling on the FBI to reopen its background investigation into Kavanaugh over Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her.

Dreher’s focus is on corporate accountability, particularly when it comes to the environment and regulating A.I. He’s been endorsed by A-student progressive Seattle City Council member Dionne Foster and progressive City Attorney Erika Evans.

Slow growther Pollet has been endorsed by the Seattle Times of course.

Courts, legislature

Most Men Prosecuted for Sex Buying Don’t Reoffend, Report Suggests
The county prosecutor says locking up men who attempt to pay for sex would reduce demand, but the defense department says the evidence suggests otherwise.

By Erica C. Barnett

A new report from the King County Department of Public Defense about misdemeanor arrests for “commercial sexual exploitation,” or paying for sex, found that virtually none of the men prosecuted between 2022 and 2025 (typically in SPD stings) has been prosecuted again. DPD has argued that this lack of recidivism proves there’s no need to make the offense a felony. Last year, the King County Prosecutor’s Office pushed for state legislation that would do just that, using lurid stories about sex traffickers, accompanied by unredacted images of beaten women, to argue that sex buyers are complicit in abuse.

Most of the 81 cases DPD reviewed resulted in what’s called a dispositional continuance, in which a person agrees to diversion—typically, a class on the consequences of buying sex (“john school”) and community service. None of those men were caught reoffending, suggesting that misdemeanor prosecution—and perhaps the embarrassment and shame of being caught—was enough to convince them not to reoffend.

“These findings clearly suggest that a misdemeanor offense is sufficient to deter people from engaging in this behavior, even one that uses a diversionary response” like sex buyers’ classes, DPD special counsel for criminal policy and practice Katie Hurley said. “And so, there’s no showing that a higher level, a more serious level offense is needed, and the misdemeanor response appears more than sufficient to deter repeat offending.”

The prosecutor’s office disagrees with this assessment, arguing that sex buying should come with harsher penalties, including jail time, in order to end the demand for sex work. In a recent statement, prosecutor Leesa Manion said prosecuting traffickers and pimps alone “won’t fix this problem” of sex trafficking. “Children, women and others from vulnerable communities continue to be exploited because they are in high demand by buyers. We’re fighting for state legislation to protect and increase resources for trafficking survivors by holding sex buyers accountable for using their money to buy sexual access to vulnerable people.

“Until that changes, we will continue to see the wild west of human trafficking, violence, and misery taking place along Aurora,” Manion said.

There are other possible explanations for the apparent lack of recidivism by men who buy sex, including the possibility that they do offend again but haven’t been caught.

Hurley said that if harsher consequences were necessary, more misdemeanor cases would lead to jail time, rather than dismissal. “You’d expect that people would only talk about needing a higher-level response if they were really maximizing the response available within the misdemeanor system, but in fact we see the opposite,” Hurley said .”We see the vast, vast majority of these cases being dismissed with dispositional continuances or for other reasons, and we see the recidivism rate being exceedingly low, and we’re seeing no real jail time imposed for these offenses.”

Although the prosecutor’s office often argues that wealthier white men are most likely to pay for sex in general, most of the men who actually get prosecuted for the offense are men of color, and a hugely disproportionate percentage are Latino, as PubliCola has previously reported. In the cases DPD covered in its report, 44 percent of the men prosecuted for sex buying were Latino (compared to 8 percent of the King County population), and 53 percent required an interpreter because they didn’t speak English.

One possible reason for the racial imbalance is that most of the prosecutions appear to have originated with SPD stings in the Lowe’s parking lot at 125th and Aurora, a place where Latino day laborers congregate. The police department trains female officers to pose as sex workers, then swoops in, using multiple teams of officers to grab and arrest one man at a time.

PubliCola reviewed about 35 of the cases in DPD’s report, and all but one originated in stings at 125th and Aurora. This area is about 20 blocks north of the area where neighborhood residents and business owners have sought help from the city to address gun violence related to sex trafficking.

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“Increasing the penalties and collateral consequences (such as adverse effects on housing, employment, and immigration) for people prosecuted in these cases would only further entrench existing racial and ethnic disparities in Washington’s criminal legal system,” DPD’s report concludes.

“To the extent that the claim that the majority of people who buy sex are wealthy white men, the ‘tool; of prosecuting people through sting operations by SPD on Aurora Avenue North will not reach the supposed majority of potential buyers – further undermining the claim that classifying this behavior as a felony will be an effective deterrent for that population.”

Casey McNerthney, a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, said the discussion over how harshly to penalize sex buyers often ignores the perspectives of sex trafficking survivors, ” who we can say without speculation are disproportionately from marginalized communities, including people of color, kids from the foster care system, and people from the LGBTQIA+ community. The KCPAO’s support in the last session was rooted in what we have learned from extensive conversations with sex trafficking survivors and the lasting trauma that they endure.”

SPD stings, however, don’t involve actual sex workers—and do nothing to help victims of sex trafficking, for whom the city and county provide very few direct resources compared to their huge investments in policing and prosecutions.

We discussed the debate over sex work prosecutions, along with my recent reporting on another staff departure from Mayor Katie Wilson’s office, on the Seattle Nice podcast this week.

education, Guest Contributor, legislature

Here’s What Being a “Child Care Candidate” Actually Means
Photo by BBC Creative on Unsplash

By Erin Haick

Everyone loves child care, especially in an election year.  Candidates for the Legislature, City Council, and County Council are promising universal child care, because it’s a real problem that child care is so expensive for parents while providers make poverty wages. Child care is easy to love, but policy and funding fixes are much harder.

So the first question: Why is it so expensive? First, child care isn’t babysitting. High-quality early learning means credentialed educators, and enough of them to give a toddler a lot of one-on-one attention. It means warm, safe, nurturing environments filled with bright colors and toys. Early learning professionals take continuing education classes just like other educators, and use a quality curriculum that teaches infants, toddlers, and pre-k at each age, from numbers and letters to how to play well with others.  

And unlike public schools, child care businesses pay for labor, rent, supplies, insurance, and more from the individual tuitions of individual families. The math just isn’t mathing anymore.  

In 2021, the Legislature passed SB 5237, the Fair Start for Kids Act—a road map for making child care more affordable for parents and more sustainable for providers. Gone was the cap of 33,000 households (in a state of 3.5 million) who could get help paying for care, imposed a decade prior during the Great Recession. Under Fair Start, a family of three earning an extravagant $4,317 a month (about $52,000 a year) was newly able to access assistance. Subsidy rates increased for providers, helping to stabilize these small, typically women- and immigrant-owned businesses. And family income eligibility was scheduled to go up 10 percent in 2025 and again in 2027.  

If the Legislature had kept the promise of Fair Start for Kids, a family of three in 2025 making (again, an extravagant) $83,000 a year would have qualified for state help, and their child care costs could have dropped from $2,000 or more a month to $215. When affordability is the issue of the day, this is functionally a serious pay raise. Fair Start laid out a road map to helping not both low-income and middle-income families, and thousands of working families were signing up for this program that helped their kids get a Fair Start while they went to work.

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Today, those promises are gone, eliminated by multiple years of state budget shortfalls and child care, which lacks the constitutional protections of public education, being treated as discretionary spending.  

The first test for leaders who want universal child care is simple: Will they say no to further cuts?  Will they protect provider sustainability and family access, in a world where more than a billion dollars was already cut out of early learning in 2025?

So first, stop the bleeding. Next, remember that help paying for child care is only valuable if the care exists to be paid for. In 2025, New Mexico got headlines for being the first state to offer no-cost child care to all families, but they forgot about the workforce. The state’s own estimates identified a shortfall of nearly 16,000 physical slots and at least 5,000 new professionals needed to staff them. Today, many families have access to a subsidy they cannot use because the care provider is not there.

The warning for Washington: Expanded eligibility will fall short if the state continues to cut or lets the workforce shrink. Families need open doors, staffed classrooms, and providers who can afford to stay.

So what should elected officials do?

  1. Commit to no more cuts to child care.  Governor Ferguson’s most recent budget proposed that child care account for 40 percent of budget cuts. This month, he told agencies like the Department of Children, Youth, and Families to prepare for “significant cuts” this winter. Washington should not balance the budget by making child care more expensive for families or harder for providers to deliver.
  2. Treat child care workers like the professionals they are with wages, benefits, real career pathways, and retirement security. Today, unionized child care providers —the largely Black, brown, and immigrant women who uphold our economy—are prohibited by law from bargaining over retirement. Washington cannot keep asking workers to carry the system while denying them the tools to stay in the field.
  3. Pay for the actual cost of care. Washington requires high quality care from providers, but the subsidy rates don’t cover those same costs. A bill to reform how these rates are set has languished for two sessions. When rates are uncompetitive, providers make rational economic choices, like reducing their enrollment of low income families or raising rates on middle income families to make up the difference.  

This election season, it’s easy to say you want universal child care.  The real test is how leaders support the workforce that make access to care for families possible in the first place.  

Erin Haick is the Political & Legislative Director at SEIU 925, which represents more than 19,000 workers in early learning, K-12, higher education, and public service across Washington State.

City Council, Density, homelessness, King County, legislature

This Week on PubliCola: April 4, 2026

Wilson and Zahilay Push Forward on Housing Rivera Wants to Audit HSD, and More.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, March 30

Ron Davis, Running for the State House on an Urbanist Platform, Says North Seattle Is Ready for a Change

Ron 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.

Tuesday, March 31

Hannah Sabio-Howell Says It’s Time to Replace Longtime Legislator Jamie Pedersen

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.

Wednesday, April 1

County Executive Floats Countywide Housing Levy, 500 New Housing Units or Shelter Beds by Mid-2027

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.

Thursday, April 2

Mayor Wilson Says She’ll Accelerate Comprehensive Plan and “Go Bigger” on Density

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.

Friday, April 3

Councilmember Wants “Audit of Human Services Contracts.” That’s a Big Ask.

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.

Afternoon Fizz:

Rivera Plays Grinch to Library Supporters, Saka Holds Committee Hostage for Extended NBA Rally

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.

 

Elections, legislature

Hannah Sabio-Howell Says It’s Time to Replace Longtime Legislator Jamie Pedersen

By Erica C. Barnett

Yesterday, we told you about onetime Seattle City Council candidate Ron Davis’ campaign to defeat longtime incumbent state Rep. Gerry Pollet, who’s represented North Seattle’s 46th District since 2011. Davis is hoping voters will reject Pollet, who’s run virtually unopposed for years, in favor of his go-fast urbanist vision.

Today, we’re focusing on a candidate who’s running against an even more entrenched, powerful incumbent: 29-year-old Hannah Sabio-Howell, a first-time candidate who’s running for state senate against 43rd District State Sen. Jamie Pedersen, who was first elected to the state house in 2006 and has run basically unopposed ever since.

Pedersen, who lives on Capitol Hill with his husband and four sons, was Lambda Legal’s lead counsel during the fight over marriage equality in the early 2000s and sponsored the state’s marriage equality bill in 2012. Around the same time, he helped organize and served as a plaintiff in a landmark lawsuit that overturned a Tim Eyman initiative requiring a legislative supermajority for tax increases.

Since those victories more than a decade ago, Pedersen has become known as an effective, moderate Democrat who represents an area whose politics and priorities have shifted leftward. This year, Pedersen shepherded the “millionaire’s tax” through the legislature—a 9.9. percent income tax on earnings above $1 million year. Many progressives were disappointed by the bill, which failed to meaningfully reduce sales taxes that are among the highest in the country.

Sabio-Howell, a First Hill renter and recent communications director for the statewide pro-labor group Working Washington, believes Pedersen’s concessions on the income tax show how he is out of touch with his own constituents. She also accuses Pedersen of capitulating on last year’s rent stabilization law, which capped annual rent increases at an 10 percent—”an amount we know is totally impossible for most people to absorb.”

“After two decades, those of us who live here in this district are looking around like, ‘I still barely can afford my one-bedroom apartment,’ or ‘I would like to have a kid, but that is completely foreclosed to me because I can’t afford $5,000 a month for child care,” Sabio-Howell said. “I think we are pretty tired of being told, ‘I’ve delivered for you,’ and then looking around and saying, ‘Where is it? What has been delivered when I can’t build the life I want to build here?'”

Sabio-Howell said Democratic lawmakers like Pedersen talk frequently about cutting deals and compromising to get things done, “but I think that cutting deals has been at the expense of what we could have won if we started first with our with with what our community has demanded and reaffirmed that we want”—things like funding for public defenders, affordable child care, adequately funded schools, and accessible higher education that won’t leave young people in debt for decades.

As an example, Sabio-Howell pointed to this year’s “Well Washington Fund” proposal from state Rep. Shaun Scott (D-43), which would have imposed a 5 percent payroll tax on large companies that pay workers more than $125,000 a year, similar to Seattle’s JumpStart tax. Although Scott’s bill went nowhere, Sabio-Howell said the proposal helped push moderate legislators like Pedersen out of their comfort zone. Scott was also one of 13 Democrats who pushed back against a proposed $550 million corporate tax break that was ultimately excised from the income tax proposal.

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“There is so much wealth among the ultra wealthy in our state, and I really think that for a state as progressive and pioneering and wealthy as ours, we have an opportunity to really build something that we could be proud of,” she said.

Sabio-Howell also pointed to the $100 million Gov. Bob Ferguson set aside to help cities hire more police as a potential source of funds for progressive priorities, such as fully funding public defense. “That [money] is not being used,” Sabio-Howell said. “It’s inaccessible. The people on the ground who would be in a position to use that money have literally said so. And that’s $100 million a year that we could be funneling into the upstream problems of people not having stable homes and warm, safe places to be.”

First-time candidates often enter campaigns with big ideas but few concrete plans for implementing them, and Sabio-Howell didn’t provide a roadmap to achieving her lofty goals. Universal child care, a top priority for Davis as well, would be costly, complex, and probably infeasible, especially since the majority Democrats have lately been cutting, not funding, child care and education programs. A statewide social housing plan “would be a very pioneering thing that I have not really seen” in other states, Sabio-Howell acknowledged.  And voters may be reluctant to throw out an incumbent who has risen through the ranks and now holds the highest position in the state’s upper chamber.

But Sabio-Howell thinks voters in the 43rd, which includes Capitol Hill, First Hill, and the University District along with parts of downtown, Lower Queen Anne, and Fremont, are ready for a change.

“For a risk-averse voter. I understand. I get it,” Sabio-Howell said. “Our current structure rewards seniority, but we know for sure that visionary policies are possible, when we elect fighters to get in there and go to the mat for them. And that’s what a newer generations of leaders will do.”

 

 

legislature, Urbanism

Ron Davis, Running for the State House on an Urbanist Platform, Says North Seattle Is Ready for a Change

By Erica C. Barnett

At least two Seattle candidates are betting that this is the year voters will decide to replace longstanding Democratic state legislators with progressive newcomers who want to move forward quickly with pro-housing, pro-worker agendas. If either succeeds, it will be a repudiation of the received wisdom that entrenched incumbents have an unshakeable advantage.

The first candidate, Ron Davis, will be familiar to PubliCola readers—he ran for City Council in northeast Seattle’s District 4 in the 2023 election, losing narrowly to Maritza Rivera in a year when moderates swept the council elections. Davis is running against 46th District Rep. Gerry Pollet. Pollet, appointed in 2011, leads an environmental group that advocates for cleaning up the Hanford nuclear site; as a legislator, he has worked to defeat or water down bills that would allow more housing in single-family neighborhoods.

In 2022, the state House Democratic Caucus voted to remove housing issues from Pollet’s committee—a decision that was quickly followed by several years of pro-housing legislation that forced cities dominated by suburban-style housing to allow apartments in neighborhoods, not just on busy streets.

Davis is hoping his North Seattle neighbors will get behind his explicitly urbanist agenda—and reject what he calls Pollet’s anti-growth approach.

“He’s been sort of the chief NIMBY in the Democratic caucus,” Davis said. “He does not want anything that involves changing the landscape in any way.” For instance, Davis points out Pollet’s opposite to accessory dwelling units, his support for adding additional environmental review to the long-delayed completion of the Burke-Gilman Trail through Ballard, and opposition to the low-density multifamily buildings known as “missing middle” housing.

“I think there is a set of people whose idea of being an environmentalist, like his, remains sort of stuck in the 1970s Malthusian, Thanos kind of worldview—like, ‘There should be less people in the world,'” Davis said. “I really don’t think that’s going to be most voters.'”

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(After we published this story, Pollet’s team contacted us to say that Pollet co-sponsored HB 1110, which required cities to allow up to six apartments per lot; that he co-sponsored a transit-oriented development bill we covered last year; and that he voted for a middle-housing bill, HB 1782, that included a huge number of loopholes and exemptions.

He also sponsored his own middle-housing bill,  HB 1981, which included poison-pill elements such as concurrency requirements—a common preemptive tactic for preventing new housing—and protections for historic buildings, trees, and “access to sunlight” in residential areas, among other provisions that would restrict new housing. Pollet sponsored amendments to water down both 1110 and 1782), for instance, and attempting to make it harder to build in areas at “high risk of displacement” where urbanists would argue more housing is also necessary.

Pollet has championed the inclusion of more affordable housing in new developments, backed rent stabilization bills, and supported adding back neighborhood centers that former mayor Bruce Harrell removed from Seattle’s comprehensive plan. However, he also argued the city should require private developers to ensure that up to 25 percent of all new units near transit are affordable to people making as little as 0 percent of median income (and up to 80 percent), an idea that seems designed to kill rather than encourage housing even without the bill’s language about protecting trees, historic structures, and access to sunlight.)

On the surface, there seem to be plenty of voters in North Seattle who agree, at least nominally, with Pollet’s slow-growth agenda; in 2024, running essentially unopposed (the other candidate was a Republican), Pollet got more than 83 percent of the vote.

But Davis thinks North Seattle voters will support his ambitious vision, which also includes universal child care; removing police accountability from the list of conditions police unions can negotiate as part of their contracts; replacing endless highway megaprojects with state investments in local transit; and using creative tools like revolving loan funds and state-funded Section 8-style vouchers to expand access to affordable housing and backfill federal funding cuts. All of this would probably require more funding than the state will take in from the “millionaire’s” income tax, which still has to withstand a court challenge after passing this year; Davis says that even with that tax in place, Washington’s tax system will still be more regressive than most other states.

Davis also said he wants to see stronger sanctions against ICE than Democrats in the legislature managed to muster so faåår.” I see our Democrats in Olympia saying, ‘Oh my God, there’s a fascist takeover of the federal government. It’s a threat to our basic freedoms,'” Davis said when we spoke late last month. “And then they’re like, ‘We have a mask ban that says maybe you could sue, but only if they violate your constitutional rights.’ I mean, God, are you fucking kidding?”

Davis said he’d support creating a state-funded “civilian response team” to serve as “the vanguard of resistance” if and when ICE descends on Washington state en masse. He’d also support legislation to “punish Vichy collaborators,” like a proposal last session that would have barred law enforcement agencies from hiring people who worked for ICE during the second Trump Administration.

In fact, Davis says he’d support going even further, by keeping them from taking “any state- or locally funded job, or contracting job, ever again.” Asked whether this kind of mass punishment paints every ICE employee with too broad a brush, Davis said, “I’m talking about who’s participating in this process [of targeting and abducting people perceived as immigrants] now. So you time bound it, and give people notice that they have six weeks or two weeks to quit or whatever.”

When Davis ran for council in 2023, he had a hyperlocal pitch: Elect me, and I’ll work to establish 15-minute neighborhoods and build “intermediate” housing solutions for people experiencing homelessness, including tiny house villages. Three years later, it’s clear that most of Seattle’s new urbanist policies were the result of action by the stateles  legislature, including Sens. Jessica Bateman (D-22, Olympia) and Emily Alvarado (D-34, Seattle), which forced cities to allow denser housing near transit stops and in traditional single-family neighborhoods, to widespread NIMBY chagrin.

Davis said his own experience “putting together the coalition that passed the parking reform bill”—a Bateman bill that placed limits on how much parking cities can require in new developments—made him realize “I could get more done in just a few months” in Olympia than the council, with its Seattle Process, often gets done in years. Not only that, he said, the state has the power and funding potential to pull off bigger things—like universal child care, housing, and supplementary funding for local buses.

When I mentioned the conventional wisdom that legislators don’t have much power until they’ve been around a while, Davis pointed to examples like Bateman (elected in 2020) and Alvarado (elected to the House in 2022). “It’s not as if they showed up and the skies parted,” Davis said, “but I do feel like they’ve moved much more quickly, and they haven’t listened the conventional wisdom, which is that you have to put your head down for many, many years” before getting anything done.

Next up: Progressive renter Hannah Sabio-Howell challenges Sen. Jamie Pedersen, a member of the state legislature for 20 years.