A geographic breakdown of primary election results shows that Mayor Bruce Harrell lost badly in the primary on his own home turf—Southeast Seattle’s 37th District, where he won just 36 percent of the vote to challenger Katie Wilson’s 56 percent. Harrell also failed to win a majority in any Seattle district.
The city is getting ready to overhaul a program that provides tax breaks to developers who agree to keep 25 percent of their apartments affordable for 12 years, known as the Multifamily Tax Exemption program (MFTE). It’s the city’s main program for providing housing affordable to moderate-income people, but in recent years, developers have become less likely to participate in the voluntary program.
Two of the top-level staff hired by new Police Chief Shon Barnes, Deputy Chief Andre Sayles and Assistant Chief Nicole Powell, received lateral hiring bonuses that were created to hire more trained police officers, not as incentives for command staff. SPD told us the two top executives were “eligible” for the bonuses.
The anti-LGBTQ organizers of the August 30 “Revive in ’25” event planned for Cal Anderson Park, in the heart of Seattle’s historic LGBTQ neighborhood, agreed to move the event to Gas Works Park after negotiations with city officials, including the mayor and City Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth. The voluntary relocation came after the city determined that they didn’t have legal authority to deny the permit or force the group to move.
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After reporting on the hiring bonuses SPD provided to a new deputy chief and assistant chief, PubliCola confirmed that Police Chief Shon Barnes also received the $50,000 bonus created to increase the number of deployable police officers. SPD said Barnes’ bonus was allowed under the legislation that created and the bonus.
Claudia Balducci, a King County Council member who’s running for county executive, announced plans to introduce a measure that would dedicate a portion of a recently approved countywide 0.1-cent sales tax increase to create a permanent retail crimes task force. Balducci, who came in second in the primary behind her council colleague Girmay Zahilay, said prosecuting retail theft would help prevent store closures like that of a Fred Meyer in Kent.
Friday’s Afternoon Fizz included stories about the departure of Seattle Chamber of Commerce CEO Rachel Smith; conflicting explanations for Chief Barnes’ $50,000 bonus; progressive victories in Burien, a city that recently passed a complete ban on sleeping in public aimed at barring homeless people from the city; and details from the permit for the relocated “Revive in ‘25” event at Gas Works Park.
1. Rachel Smith, the longtime CEO of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, is moving on to become director of the Washington Roundtable, a statewide group that represents large employers.
According to a press release, Smith will leave the Chamber as of October 1; Gabriella Buono, the Chamber’s Chief Impact Officer, will be interim president and CEO until the Chamber’s board picks a permanent replacement.
Smith became head of the Chamber in January 2020, just as the group was reeling from a 2019 election in which the Chamber’s political action committee, Civic Alliance for a Sound Economy, spent unprecedented millions to defeat City Council incumbents. That flood of money appeared to spark a backlash against big-business spending, and the Chamber’s candidates mostly flopped. In 2021, the Chamber decided not to endorse any candidates—and, in that election, the more conservative candidates prevailed.
Under Smith’s nearly five years as its leader, the Chamber has thrown its weight behind internal and public-facing campaigns to defeat social housing (the Chamber urged the council to delay the election and backed a ballot alternative that would have directed the city to spend existing funds on traditional affordable housing), as well as a number of efforts to squelch progressive tax proposals.
They’ve opposed the business and occupation tax reform proposal, which—if voters approve it—will pay for critical programs at risk for budget cuts; supported Mayor Bruce Harrell’s efforts to sweep homeless encampments, particularly downtown; and backed a proposed city charter amendment, “Compassion Seattle,” that would have required the city to keep all public spaces clear of encampments while imposing an unfunded mandate for homeless services on the city.
Under Smith, the Chamber also backed the Seattle Transportation Levy and connected the dots between the housing crisis and Seattle’s need to upzone, supporting efforts to build “middle housing” across the city.
2. As we reported earlier this week, Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes received a $50,000 hiring bonus when he was hired, as did a new deputy chief and assistant chief he hired from Beloit, Wisconsin, and New Orleans, respectively. According to SPD, all three chiefs were eligible for the bonuses under legislation, passed in 2022 and amended two years later, that authorized $50,000 “lateral” hiring bonuses for police officers with existing job experience.
As we also reported, the sponsors of the legislation never intended for the bonuses to go to command staff, and the legislation itself says it applies only to police officers in the civil service, not management or executive-level staff.
SPD told us the city “offered as part of [Barnes’] compensation a ‘hiring incentive’ of $50,000 under the City’s 2024 legislation, which is related to the recruitment and retention of police officers at the understaffed Seattle Police Department. Asked about this, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office gave a somewhat contradictory response.
“Chief Barnes is a nationally recognized leader in the field and the inclusion of the $50,000 was negotiated as part of his offer letter,” a spokesperson said, adding that the mayor was “not involved” in the other two $50,000 bonuses. This suggests that Barnes’ bonus was not actually a standard “lateral” incentive—as SPD has said—but was something the mayor’s office offered him on top of his $360,000 salary and other perks. The two contradictory explanations for Barnes’ hiring bonus leave the true origin of this unusual hiring bonus unclear.
Harrell’s office said Barnes’ “negotiated compensation makes his package consistent with the West Coast Seven (Long Beach, Portland, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Diego, San Jose, and Seattle), where in 2023 the median salary for police chiefs was $476,454 and the average salary was $424,712.” the spokesperson said.
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3. The Burien City Council, which in recent years has adopted a series of increasingly onerous laws targeting homeless people, could soon take a more progressive turn. Progressives (including incumbents Sarah Moore and Hugo Garcia, plus Sam Méndez, a progressive running to replace Jimmy Matta, who’s leaving the council) hold commanding leads in all three council races on the August primary ballot.
That bodes poorly for Stephanie Mora, the council’s most conservative member, who’s being challenged by progressive Rocco DeVito; their race wasn’t on the August ballot because they were the only two candidates. Mora, a staunch opponent of allowing homeless shelters or authorized encampments anywhere in Burien, has argued that the government has no role to play in addressing homelessness.
Kevin Schilling, the council member who currently serves as mayor of Burien, isn’t doing so well in his own race to defeat 33rd District state Rep. Edwin Obras, either. With the election certified, Obras has 48.2 percent of the vote to Schilling’s 34.6 percent. Schilling lost by the highest margin in the city where he’s mayor, trailing Obras by 15 points in Burien.
4. PubliCola obtained a copy of the permit for a controversial “Revive in ’25” rally in Gas Works Park. As PubliCola was first to report, the contentious event was relocated from Cal Anderson Park on Capitol Hill after negotiations between its anti-LGBTQ organizers and city officials, including City Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth and Mayor Harrell.
The permit reveals few details about the event, except that the group, led by Christian nationalist minister Sean Feucht, expects 350 people to attend—less than a similar “Mayday USA” rally at Cal Anderson earlier this year.
Although the permit goes from 9 am to 9 pm, the rally and concert is scheduled for 5 pm—leaving organizers plenty of time to hold a planned “Jesus March” in the streets around Cal Anderson before heading over to Fremont for the main event. Organizers have removed references to this march from their Facebook page, but have not publicly said they won’t be marching. According to city officials, Feucht’s group did not apply for a street use or special event permit for a march.
On Tuesday, PubliCola exclusively reported (via Bluesky) that the anti-LGBTQ organizers of the August 30 “Revive in ’25” event planned for Cal Anderson Park, in the heart of Seattle’s historic LGBTQ neighborhood, agreed to move the event to Gas Works Park. The city’s Parks Department issued a permit on Tuesday afternoon that will allow Sean Feucht’s “Let Us Worship” group to use Gas Works from 9 am to 9 pm.
The group’s voluntary relocation to a less provocative (and transit-accessible) location came after the city effectively threw up its hands, determining that Parks did not have the legal authority, under the First Amendment, to deny the permit or move the event to another location that Feucht hadn’t requested.
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The city has denied a permit to a similar group in the past—telling Pursuit NW Pastor Russell Johnson’s Mayday USA group they couldn’t rally at a site near Pike Place Market earlier this year—but the reasons were logistical, not content-based: According to emails discussing the event, the city’s special events office rejected the permit because of overcrowding and complaints about access and notification from residents and businesses.
As we reported last week (original story here), the city, on the advice of City Attorney Ann Davison, decided it couldn’t legally justify denying the permit to Feucht’s group, or did not want to take on the risk of a potentially precedent-setting First Amendment lawsuit.
PubliCola has requested a copy of the permit.
Update: About two hours after PubliCola reported on the new permit, the city announced the relocation of Feucht’s event.
Mayor Bruce Harrell and Joy Hollingsworth, who represents the council district (3) that includes Capitol Hill and negotiated with its organizers to move it away from Cal Anderson, said in a joint statement, “Recognizing that Cal Anderson Park is an important gathering space for our LGBTQ+ residents and receiving their feedback on the event location, we worked with the organizers to suggest alternative park locations. After that conversation, the organizers have agreed to move their event to Gas Works Park. We are grateful that they were receptive to our recommendation.”
Feucht’s group posted on Facebook that they still plan to hold a “Jesus March” on Capitol Hill starting at 3:30 pm before the event officially kicks off at Gas Works at 5pm. It’s unclear whether the group needs, or has sought, a permit to hold its march.
Update August 20: The Seattle Department of Transportation said Feucht’s group had not sought a street use permit from them for the Jesus March, and directed us to the city’s Special Events Office. Asked if the group had applied for a special events permit, the office referred us to the mayor’s office. A spokesperson for the mayor’s office said, “We are not aware of a planned ‘Jesus March,’ and the organizers have not submitted an application to hold a march in or around Cal Anderson Park.”
Editor’s note: In a concession to the many Fremont residents who wrote to complain that Gas Works Park is not in Fremont but in Wallingford, I took “Fremont” out of the headline and story. Although this debate is tangential to the subject at hand, I remember this debate springing up a while back—is it “East Fremont” or “South Wallingford”?—and I don’t consider it settled law. But in the interest of peace, I’ve removed all references to the park’s location.
Reporter Andrew Engelson did a deep dive into the data on embattled City Attorney Ann Davison’s 2021 campaign promises, finding that while Davison did speed up filing on some misdemeanor cases, more cases have ended up dismissed or with no conviction than under her predecessor, and she has filed domestic violence cases much more slowly.
New Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes and Deputy Chief Yvonne Underwood received recruitment bonuses of $1,000 each for bringing on two executive-level staff (the two each got a bonus for recruiting the same new deputy chief and Barnes got a separate bonus for hiring an assistant chief). The bonuses were created with the intent of hiring more officers who can respond to calls, not executive staff.
As of Thursday, the city had exhausted all legal options for preventing an anti-LGBTQ Christian nationalist group from holding a concert and rally in Cal Anderson Park, and queer organizers were planning counter-programming with cooperation from city officials. On Friday, when the permit was to be announced, PubliCola learned that the city was working on a last-minute solution in which the group would voluntarily hold its “Revive in ‘25” event elsewhere.
In Thursday’s Afternoon Fizz, we took a look at historical election numbers to consider the likelihood that Harrell will be able to come back from a 10-point primary election loss to challenger Katie Wilson. And the council moved closer to expanding the city’s brand-new 24/7 police camera surveillance to new neighborhoods, including the Central District, Capitol Hill, and the stadium district.
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Mayor Bruce Harrell’s longtime aide, chief of staff and general counsel Jeremy Racca, is leaving the mayor’s office to move to New York after a month-long leave of absence. Racca is the first high-level staffer to leave Harrell’s office after the election. The departure led to a shuffling of personnel in Harrell’s office, elevating deputy mayor Tiffany Washington, who has played a top role on homelessness policy, to a new position of chief deputy mayor.
Newly release interviews with former police chief Adrian Diaz’ staff include new details about incidents that led the people surrounding Diaz to believe he was covering up an affair with the woman he hired as his chief of staff, including a late-night visit to an abandoned park in North Bend and an alleged directive to use encrypted messaging to communicate as a way of avoiding public disclosure.
A Seattle police officer takes a report from a participant in a May rally at city hall who had been harassing counterprotesters through the barricades set up by police.
By Erica C. Barnett
UPDATE on Friday, August 15: Last-minute discussions could end up moving the event after all; we probably won’t know more until next week, but the planned statements and counter-programming announcements originally planned for Friday have been postponed amid ongoing conversations, PubliCola has learned.
Organizers of a far-right August 30 rally and concert called “Revive In 25” will receive approval this week to hold a rally and concert at Cal Anderson Park on Capitol Hill, PubliCola has learned. The event’s organizer, Christian nationalist celebrity Sean Feucht, has promoted as an explicit provocation to the historically LGBTQ+ neighborhood. Feucht has described homosexuality as demonic, frequently mocks trans people, and has claimed to “deliver” people from being gay.
Multiple sources familiar with the discussions say the city is preparing to issue a permit for the park at the end of this week, ending months of speculation that began in May, when Feucht claimed falsely on X that the city had already granted the permit. “Will @MayorofSeattle revoke it because we are Christians?” he wrote. Nothing’s official until it’s official, of course—the city still has two days before the planned announcement—but PubliCola’s reporting indicates that the decision has essentially been made.
An anti-trans “Mayday Seattle” rally held by a different extremist group earlier this year led to an over-the-top response from police, who deployed pepper spray and other “less lethal” weapons against protesters, arresting 23. Days later, police served as de facto security for the same group when they held a second rally at City Hall, barricading the public plaza outside City Hall, shutting down Fourth Ave., and allowing the group to blast amplified praise music for hours without a permit. Police arrested eight protesters at that event.
Seattle officials who want to prevent a repeat of the Mayday debacle tried to find a way to justify denying the permit without violating the group’s First Amendment rights.
One idea—closing down the park for the day for maintenance or repairs—was reportedly rejected out of hand. So was the idea of getting another group to file for a permit for the park and granting that permit instead of Feucht’s. The city also considered denying the permit on security grounds—police will be stretched thin across multiple big events over the busy Labor Day weekend—but ultimately did not want to risk a First Amendment lawsuit from Feucht’s group.
Several people familiar with the discussions about whether to issue the permit pointed out that events like the planned rally also result in lawsuits, typically from people injured by police. If the concern is strict liability, allowing extremists to hold events in Seattle parks may ultimately cost the city more money than denying a permit and dealing with the legal fallout.
The Lavender Rights Project is reportedly working with other Black queer community organizers to put on counter-programming in the park. The exact details of how this will work remain under wraps until the permit decision becomes official, but Hollingsworth said she’s “hopeful and optimistic that … if people want to peacefully protest, that they can—that people can exercise their First Amendment rights and those [events] can coexist together.”
The rally and concert is part of a tour through what Feucht has called “America’s darkest, most broken cities” that, according to Feucht, have been taken over by “antifa” and are persecuting Christians. Feucht, who did not respond to PubliCola’s request for comment, has described the tour as a “MANDATE from heaven to ‘rebuild places long devastated’.”
The tour is part of Feucht’s ongoing “Let Us Worship” campaign, which began as a protest against public health measures that prevented large groups from gathering indoors in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The city’s ability to deny permits to groups with political opinions it finds noxious or hateful is limited by the First Amendment, which prevents local officials from restricting speech based on a person or organization’s views. Denying a permit on the grounds that Feucht is running a hate group could open the city up to a lawsuit that could be hard to win, given longstanding legal precedent that the First Amendment protects all kinds of expression, including hate speech.
First Amendment rights aren’t limitless, however; cities can impose time, place, and manner restrictions on events—for example, providing a permit for a different, less provocative location than the heart of Seattle’s historical LGBTQ+ neighborhood—if they have a legitimate reason for doing so, such as an incitement to violence or threat of harm to the public.
Historically, the city has been reluctant to impose time, place, and manner restrictions, and generally grants permits to controversial groups that choose high-profile locations for their events in the hope of provoking controversy; the Seattle Public Library, for instance, has repeatedly allowed anti-trans and far-right groups to book its downtown Seattle auditorium rather than renting out alternative, less centrally located library meeting rooms to groups seeking negative attention.
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Advocates say the city could do more than just throw up their hands and issue condemnatory statements after the fact.
Jaelynn Scott, executive director of the Lavender Rights Project, said city officials “need to take a bold stance on trans folks in the face of the rising threat of fascism in our community— to not be over-restrictive in their interpretation of the law and to take a risk.” Standing up to groups like Feucht’s would risk a lawsuit, but facilitating the use of Seattle’s parks by Christian nationalist groups with MAGA ties also sends a message that the city is a willing pawn for far-right extremists.
City Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth, who represents Capitol Hill, said she would prefer that the rally take place somewhere other than Cal Anderson, but “I can’t dictate that.” She said she’s spoken to Police Chief Shon Barnes about the best ways to protect both rally participants and counterprotesters, including physical separation between the two groups.
“It is not my place to say whether the city can or cannot provide a safe environment at Cal Anderson; that is a logistical thing,” Hollingsworth said. “I want to protect First Amendment rights on all fronts.”
It’s unclear how City Attorney Ann Davison advised the city on any of these alternatives; her office declined to respond to questions. Davison’s legal advice carries weight—city officials can ignore it, but risk personal legal liability for doing so.
The mayor’s office also declined to answer PubliCola’s questions. A spokesperson for the mayor’s office said, “Park Use Permits aren’t issued for about two weeks (15 days) prior the event.” In fact, the Parks Department has no such policy, and typically issues permits much faster than in this case. For example, the department issued the permit for the Mayday USA rally on April 8, just eight days after the organizers filed their application and more than six weeks before the rally took place.
Additionally, a document outlining the Parks Department’s permitting process says it typically takes between 15 and 30 days to approve a permit once it’s filed. There is no reference in city code or on the department’s permitting page to a policy of waiting until two weeks before an event to grant a permit.
In response to followup questions, Harrell’s spokesperson said, “No permit has been issued, so at this time, I don’t have anything more to add.”
A petition in Seattle, which mirrors similar petitions in other cities targeted by Feucht’s “Let Us Worship” tour, asks the city to move the event to Magnuson Park instead of Cal Anderson.
Emails obtained through a records request show that city departments did a poor job of communicating with each other about the Mayday rally earliert his year. Three days before the event, a lieutenant in SPD’s operations center asked the Parks Department about moving the event “to lessen the chance of a conflict between the event organizers and counter protesters” after receiving an email from the Mayday group complaining that “pro-trans protesters” might show up without a permit. (People do not need a permit to protest).
Two days after that, and less than 24 hours before the event, an emergency management official overseeing the city’s Park Rangers reached out to the Parks Department to confirm the rally was happening; apparently, no one had bothered to tell him.
We had a great time recording the latest episode of Seattle Nice live at the 43rd District Democrats’ meeting on Tuesday, where we discussed the primary election, offered some unsolicited advice to a local candidate who happened to be in the audience, and said “fuck” a lot (Sandeep) and made ill-considered predictions (me.)
The big question on the table: Will the backlash to Trump’s tax cuts for millionaires and service cuts for the rest of us translate to a local anti-establishment election? In 2021 (when business-oriented, pro-sweeps Mayor Bruce Harrell and Republican City Attorney Ann Davison were elected) and again in 2023, when voters replaced most of the city council with a crop of candidates who promised to “audit the budget” and attributed the decline in police hiring to low morale brought on by pro-“defund” incumbents, Seattle rejected a progressive agenda.
Could this year bring around a course correction? Katie Wilson seems to have Harrell running scared, Davison has several very viable opponents, and progressive Dionne Foster is running a strong, if low-key, campaign against centrist Council President Sara Nelson. Even Joe Mallahan, defeated by Mike McGinn in 2009, is trashing the mayor over his enthusiasm for encampment sweeps, which have indisputably pushed people living unsheltered in downtown Seattle to Belltown, the International District, and other parts of Seattle.
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We also discussed the baffling recent decision about nudity at the longtime nude beach at Denny-Blaine Park: A King County Superior Court judge (Samuel Chung, not up for reelection until 2028) ordered the city to come up with a plan to stop public masturbation and lewd behavior—which a wealthy adjacent property owner insists are rampant—and “nudity as constituted at the park.” I am obviously not a lawyer, but I’m not sure how an injunction that gives police the power to determine whether nudity is “constituted” properly—or if it’s inherently lewd—can withstand legal scrutiny.
Nudity is legal in Seattle. As I noted on the podcast, I was walking on the downtown just last weekend when a bunch of naked people—by appearance, almost all cisgender men—rode their bikes along the new bike path, in full view of God and everybody. There’s a transparent double standard at work here, I argued—while LGBTQ+ sunbathers are presumptively indecent, a parade of naked men on bikes is just another fun part of life in quirky Seattle.
According to a press release, Smith will leave the Chamber as of October 1; Gabriella Buono, the Chamber’s Chief Impact Officer, will be interim president and CEO until the Chamber’s board picks a permanent replacement.
