Category: LGBTQ+

City Council, Elections, King County, LGBTQ+, Women

This Week On PubliCola: May 31, 2025

Officials call on county assessor to resign amid stalking allegations, far-right activists hold revival at City Hall, Moore withdraws bill to roll back ethics standards, and more.

Monday, May 26

Affordable Housing Providers are Losing Money and Selling Their Buildings. But is Eliminating Eviction Protections the Answer?

As the city council prepares to consider legislation repealing some anti-eviction laws, affordable housing providers offer mixed opinions on whether making it easier to kick out tenants who aren’t paying rent will solve their larger problems, which include not just nonpayment but rising operations costs, empty units, and the need to keep building in order to make their budgets pencil out.

Judge Upholds Burien’s Total Ban on “Camping,” With Appeal Likely

A King County Superior Court judge upheld a Burien law that makes it illegal to fall asleep outdoors, concluding that because it applies to everyone, not just homeless people, it only criminalizes behavior, not the status of being homeless. The plaintiffs, who include three people who were unsheltered in Burien, are likely to appeal.

Seattle Nice: Council Rolls Back Ethics Rules, Tent City’s Temporary Reprieve, and the Debate Over Mandatory Earplug Sales

On this week’s episode of Saettle Nice, we discussed the council’s plans to lower ethical standards for themselves, the city’s decision to allow a long-planned relocation of Tent City to move forward on a temporary basis after Cathy Moore raised objections to the plan, and Dan Strauss’ proposal to require “loud music venues” to sell earplugs, legislation PubliCola covered back in March.

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Wednesday, May 28

Pro-LGBTQ Protesters Stuck Outside Barricades As Far-Right “Rattle In Seattle” Took Over City Hall

Far-right Christian activists held a noisy, amplified rock concert/rally at City Hall on Tuesday, antagonizing trans protesters and their allies across a protective barricade maintained by police armed with pepper spray and batons. Although the organizers lacked a permit for their equipment, which included massive speaker stacks and a diesel generator, the city allowed the show to continue long past its supposed end time and provided protection for the anti-trans group and shut down downtown streets for more than seven hours.

Thursday, May 29

New Stalking Allegations Against King County Assessor, County Executive Candidate Wilson

PubliCola exclusively reported that King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson’s former partner obtained a second restraining order against him for stalking and harassment earlier this month, just as Wilson was officially filing to run for King County executive. Contacted by PubliCola, Wilson said there was no restraining order and that he and the woman were still in a relationship, which she said was untrue; the restraining order includes disturbing text exchanges including one in which Wilson told the woman he would “never” leave her alone.

Friday, May 30

Amid Waning Council Support, Cathy Moore Withdraws Bill to Lower Ethics Standards

After weeks of overwhelming public opposition to her proposal to change the city’s ethics code so that council members could vote on legislation even when they have a direct financial conflict of interest, Councilmember Cathy Moore withdrew her bill. PubliCola spoke to councilmembers who expressed serious concerns about the legislation and our reporting indicated that Moore did not have more than 5-4 support for the proposal, at best—not enough to overturn a veto from Mayor Bruce Harrell, who said he opposed the legislation.

Growing Chorus Calls for County Assessor Wilson to Resign After New Stalking, Harassment Allegations

In response to PubliCola’s story about Wilson, local leaders called on the county assessor to resign his position and drop out of the race for county executive. The growing list includes Harrell, four King County Councilmembers (including Wilson’s two electoral opponents), King County Executive Shannon Braddock, and the King County Democrats.

LGBTQ+, Mayor Harrell, Police

Pro-LGBTQ Protesters Stuck Outside Barricades As Far-Right “Rattle In Seattle” Took Over City Hall

By Erica C. Barnett

You might think that after granting a permit for a day-long anti-LGBTQ rally in a park named after the first gay state representative in the city’s most LGBTQ+-friendly neighborhood, the city might have put some guardrails around a second rally by the same group at City Hall, dubbed the “Rattle In Seattle.” A less intimidating police presence, perhaps? Denying the group a permit to have amplified sound (or, you know, pulling the plug on their speaker stacks)? Asking them nicely to leave once they’d overstayed their official end time by more than an hour?

Nah—I mean, have you MET Seattle city government?

Instead, the city shut down Fourth Avenue and other streets around City Hall starting at around 1:30 pm, setting up barricades to keep counterprotesters out on the street. (To get past police and enter the plaza, people simply had to say they were affiliated with the Christian rally.) Phalanxes of bike officers assembled at the entry points to the event, occasionally leaping on their bikes and mobilizing when it seemed like there might be a conflict—typically a verbal altercation between one or two people on each side—and retreating to their posts when the yelling was over.

Overall, SPD officers arrested eight people, one at a time, over the course of about seven hours. I saw four of the arrests as they were happening or immediately after, and I didn’t witness anything that looked like a serious assault. Jonathan Choe, the far-right broadcaster (“I’m going live for Newsmax and I have to deal with this shit too?” I heard him complain), posted a video of himself clubbing a protester who touched him. The protester was arrested; Choe was not.

The purported purpose of the “Rattle In Seattle” event was to demand Mayor Bruce Harrell’s resignation for “silencing” and “intimidating” them (he issued an anodyne statement saying the city supports LGBTQ rights and, for good measure, accusing “anarchists” of “infiltrating” the counterprotest and causing chaos). It was essentially a replay of last Saturday’s event in Cal Anderson Park: Anti-LGBTQ sermons railing against, as one speaker put it, people who engage in “perverse sexual acts,” interspersed with endless praise songs sung off-key and off-beat. Brandi Kruse, another right-wing broadcaster who, like Choe, used to work for a conventional TV station, addressed the crowd, praising their bravery and thanking police officers for doing such a good job protecting them.

Rallies outside City Hall do not require permits, but amplification—like the massive speaker system the rally group brought in, along with a giant diesel generator, to project their sermons and songs so loudly they could be heard blocks away—does. Several internal sources said the group did not ask for or receive a permit for their speaker system; they simply set it up, and the city let them, providing police protection as they loaded in and out.

Asked directly whether the group had permit for all their equipment and their speaker system, a spokesperson for the city’s department of Finance and Administrative services said only that the city sent the group a copy of the city’s rules, which state that any amplification or use of equipment requires a special permit from the city.

Police were generally more restrained during Tuesday’s rally than during Saturday’s event on Capitol Hill Although some officers were wielding pepper spray (and many carried the long wooden batons that are used for holding police lines and pushing crowds), they didn’t deploy chemical weapons, likely because of the widespread backlash to their violent actions last weekend. They did use their bikes to shove crowds backward down the street, but quickly pulled back to a barricaded area overlooking the rally.

The question of what to do when far-right groups come to Seattle seeking (and getting) negative attention from the people who live here is not going away: A different far-right group has reportedly received another permit at Cal Anderson Park for a “Revive in 25” event on August 30, and the likely result if it goes forward is another high-profile standoff between out-of-town activists and members and allies of the LGBTQ community in Seattle.

Although all kinds of speech are protected under the First Amendment, the city is not required to issue a permit for the location of an organization’s choice. (As a counterfactual, consider if the city would grant an anti-Asian hate group a permit for a rally at Hing Hay Park in the Chinatown-International District).

In fact, an ordinance passed in 2001 establishes that while “the City has no interest in basing special event permitting decisions, including decisions regarding reasonable permit conditions, on the viewpoint or message of the proposed event, [it] does have the responsibility to develop reasonable and effective permit conditions” based on parameters that include “the history of problems associated with the event or similar events and the event’s or event organizer’s compliance with previous permit conditions designed to deal with those issues and problems.”

A spokesperson for the mayor’s office said that prior to Saturday’s event, the Mayday group sought a permit for “a street location between 1st and 2nd Avenue on Pike Street, which was not a fit given size and logistical needs. To be clear: the group did not apply for a permit at Victor Steinbrueck Park,” as some outlets have reported. The group then asked for a permit at Cal Anderson, and the Parks Department granted it “as the park was available and met the size and logistical needs for the event requested.”

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That same ordinance says that the city’s Special Events Committee—a group that includes the mayor, police chief, and the directors of several other departments—can set time, place, and manner conditions on events, such as where the event takes place, based on the “size, scope, complexity, and history of the event, as long as the restrictions are content-neutral.

The Parks Department did not respond to multiple inquiries about why it granted the permit. The special events committee is generally involved in permitting all major public events, including those in city parks.

Harrell has not explicitly said that granting a permit to an anti-LGBTQ group in the heart of Capitol Hill was a mistake; instead, he has issued several statements condemning the group’s beliefs. “Mayor Harrell will continue to lead our city’s fight against bigotry and unfairness and stand for Seattle’s values of inclusion, welcoming, and justice,” the most recent such statement says. “We will not be intimidated by the kind of fear mongering or divisiveness inspired by the rally and extreme rhetoric endorsed by Matt Shea”—the former Washington state representative who was accused of domestic terrorism for his extremist activities—”and others that takes aim at our residents and at Seattle’s second Black and first biracial mayor.”

Harrell also released statements from several local Christian and Jewish leaders condemning the event.

SPD says it will do an “after-action” report on the events on Saturday, when police pepper-sprayed counterprotesters and arrested 23 people. Most of the arrests involved “obstructing a public officer,” although in several cases police accused people of “pushing” them, spitting, or hitting or punching them. In one case, the police said a counterprotester hit another person with a baton, smashed their phone, then “threw a rock with an explosive” at a cop, an allegation that brings to mind the “incendiary device” police accused a protester of throwing at them in 2020, which turned out to be a candle.

Police Chief Shon Barnes, whom Harrell recently praised for a “record-breaking” first 100 days, was out of town during the weekend’s events, according to city sources. Through an SPD spokesperson, Barnes told PubliCola it’s “unrealistic to expect that any individual in the police department can be available around the clock for unexpected emergencies.”

Being the Chief of Police in a bustling city like Seattle is truly a 24/7 responsibility. This role necessitates a team-oriented approach, and we are fully committed to that mission. It’s unrealistic to expect that any individual in the police department can be available around the clock for unexpected emergencies. That’s why I’ve focused on building a leadership team grounded in constant communication during crises, which was clearly demonstrated this past weekend. My strategy ensures that I am actively involved in all emergencies, regardless of whether I am in Seattle or on personal leave.

Neither the King County Prosecutor’s Office or the City Attorney’s Office has announced any charges yet. The City Attorney deals with misdemeanors and the county prosecutor deals with felonies.

LGBTQ+, Uncategorized

Burien City Manager Filed Complaint Against Public Commenter; Seattle Library Hosts Another Anti-Trans Event

1. The Seattle Public Library is, once again, renting out public space to an organization dedicated to eliminating the rights of trans people—this time, a trans eliminationist group called Women’s Declaration USA, which will hold a panel discussion in the large auditorium of the Central Library downtown at 7 pm on Sunday, November 17.

Like other anti-trans groups, the WDI argues that being trans is an “ideology,” and that their goal is to stop people from believing they are trans, not to eliminate specific trans people. However, their policy prescriptions are dangerous for trans women, in particular, making them potential targets for anti-trans violence and subjecting them to legal discrimination. For example, the group supports banning trans women from using all women-only spaces as well as girl’s and women’s sports; one of the speakers at next week’s event, April Morrow, recently wrote that allowing trans women to be jailed with other women will subject cis women to attacks by “serial killers, pedos, and rapists.”

According to the invitation, WDI’s event will include discussions about “the atrocity of pediatric sex change”; a rehash of the Olympus Spa case, in which a trans woman sued a Tacoma women’s spa for kicking her out; “K-12 indoctrination”; “how women’s prisons in Washington state are no longer safe for women due to the inclusion of men,” and other inflammatory topics. (In fact, trans women in men’s prisons are at high risk for sexual assault, forced prostitution, and other dangers. According to The Marshall Project, just 10 of the approximately 1,000 trans women in federal prison are incarcerated in women’s prisons.)

The panel will include six different anti-trans activists, including Morrow; Amy Sousa, who argues that “the cult of trans ideology is one of body dissociation and external validation seeking”; detrans activist Elle Palmer; and Carol Dansereau, an activist who argues that parents should avoid “affirming” their gender-nonconforming kids’ gender identities and raise them as the sex they were assigned at birth.

Echoing a blog post the library posted last month, library spokeswoman Laura Gentry said, “Unless speech expressed by a group booking a Library meeting room directly incites imminent criminal activity or comprises specific threats of violence, it is protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

“The Seattle Public Library works hard every day to support and amplify the voices of vulnerable or historically excluded groups, including trans and queer communities,” Gentry added.

The directors of Capitol Hill Pride and Lynnwood Pride, Charlotte LeFevre and Philip Lipson, asked the library to cancel the event, arguing that members of WDI are associated with far-right militia groups. In response, library director Tom Fay said the library couldn’t cancel the event, but doesn’t endorse the views of WDI or any other group; he also noted that WDI agreed to hold their event after hours “to mitigate potential disruption and address concerns from staff,” and that the library will have additional security, including Seattle Police Department officers, on hand.

The library hasn’t figured out how much it will cost to have extra security, including police, on hand for the event, but Gentry said the funding for security comes from SPD’s budget, not the library’s. WDI paid $1,150 to rent the auditorium, including a $250 security fee.

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2. The state Public Disclosure Commission has dismissed a complaint against a Burien resident by Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon, who accused Rashell Lisowski of violating state law during a Burien City Council public comment in October, when she urged the council to pass legislation raising the city’s minimum wage to $20 an hour instead of sending the proposal to voters.

During the meeting, Burien City Attorney Garmon Newsom II told Lisowski to stop “campaigning for an initiative.” She did not urge a yes vote on the measure, but did say Burien residents supported a higher minimum wage.

In addition to asking the council to pass the higher minimum wage, Lisowski—who owns a small business in Burien and works for Washington Community Action Network—used her two minutes to talk about her personal experience working for low wages in the service industry.

Lisowski said it was her first time speaking at a city council meeting, and she found the way the city attorney and city manager “zoomed in on me” shocking. “I didn’t know why they were treating me like that,” she said. “If I wasn’t someone that had been in public speaking situations or had experience dealing with people treating me like that, I would have felt very intimidated and silenced. …  I’m a constituent, and they treated me like I had no stake at all in the community.”

The state’s Open Public Meetings A/ct prohibits elected officials and public employees from using public facilities, or allowing them to be used to promote political campaigns. The PDC dismissed the complaint because Lisowski is not a public official, and noted in their dismissal—issued just one week after Bailon filed his complaint—that it’s up to the presiding officer of the city council to stop people from electioneering, meaning that Burien Mayor Kevin Schilling, rather than any member of the public, could be liable if he let people use public comment to campaign.

In his complaint, Bailon described Lisowski as “the perpetrator” and provided “screenshots of the Washington Community Action Network website that promotes Ms. Lisowski as an organization employee [and] a website screenshot hosted by the Transit Riders Union, sponsor of Initiative Measure 24.001, that promotes involvement from Ms. Lisowski in their campaign effort.” According to Burien budget documents, Bailon made $225,000 as city manager this year.

 

 

LGBTQ+, Police

Diaz Comes Out as Gay to Right-Wing Radio Host, Who Says this Proves His “Innocence”

Also, the head of SPD’s communications office will be stepping down—but not just yet.

1. Former police chief Adrian Diaz told conservative talk-radio host Jason Rantz that he is a “gay Latino man,” and suggested that his being gay undermines the claims of the women who have accused him of with sexual harassment, discrimination, and creating a hostile work environment toward women as well as Black officers.

Previously, Diaz suggested he understood the devastating consequences of gender-based discrimination because of his race. “As a Hispanic American with decades of experience in law enforcement, Chief Diaz has faced significant discrimination throughout his career,” Diaz’ Seattle attorney, Ted Buck, told KUOW. Then Buck called the women “disgruntled, dissatisfied” liars.

In his post about Diaz’ new revelation, Rantz said that as a gay man, Diaz obviously could not have done any of the things he’s accused of doing.

“His innocence, overshadowed by these damning allegations of predatory behavior, remained hidden behind a secret he wasn’t ready to share,” Rantz wrote.

Diaz, 46, has a wife and three kids; in the interview, he said he and his wife have been sleeping in separate parts of the house for a long time.

In the interview, Rantz asked Diaz, “in retrospect, had you come out earlier, would that have saved your job?” Diaz responded, “You know, it’s a good question. I think it addresses a lot of the concerns of what people had. I mean, it doesn’t—you know, just because you’re a gay man doesn’t mean that you can’t be a misogynist…”

Through his attorneys, Mark Thomson and Andy Phillips of the Washington, D.C.-based firm Meier Watkins Phillips Pusch LLP, Diaz said that his comment about misogyny expressed “the opposite” of the view that gay men don’t sexually harass women. Diaz argued that PubliCola gave short shrift to this comment in an effort to suggest he was saying that being gay inoculated him against the legal claims against him.

Over and over, Diaz and Rantz implied that gay men are unlikely to sexually harass or assault women. “He had a clear defense against claims he wanted to sleep with a female officer, but the question was when he would go public,” Rantz wrote.

Incredible that this needs to be said, but being gay (or Latino, for that matter) does not exonerate anyone from allegations of sexual assault, sexual harassment, gender-based discrimination , creating a hostile work environment, or anything else Diaz and the department he led have been accused of doing.

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It’s beyond unfortunate that, in 2024, so many people (including cis gay men like Rantz) use “impossible—he’s gay!” as an all-purpose excuse for men accused of mistreating women, as if gender-based discrimination and harassment were about men’s uncontrollable sex drive rather than the assertion of power.

People who experience one form of discrimination can discriminate against other people. Someone who has experienced one kind of discrimination does not automatically understand what it’s like to experience a completely different kind of discrimination. Gay men are perfectly capable of sexually harassing, assaulting, discriminating against, and otherwise mistreating women. Full stop.

(Hard to remember now, but there was a time when it was briefly fashionable to “believe women,” or at least not dismiss them as conspiring liars, especially when multiple women came forward with separate allegations.)

Diaz told Rantz that Mayor Bruce Harrell knows all allegations against him are false, but, as Rantz summarized, Harrell was “hesitant to offer a full-throated public defense of his chief, even though he must have doubted the allegations.”

On Monday night, a spokesman for Harrell responded to PubliCola’s questions with the following statement:

“Former Chief Diaz informed Mayor Harrell and staff of his administration several months ago about his sexual orientation. Mayor Harrell supports him now, as he did then, for sharing this about himself and being an authentic leader. How former Chief Diaz’s sexual orientation will be treated during the litigation process will be left to the courts and we will not comment on pending litigation.”

2. The Seattle Police Department confirmed that Lt. John O’Neil is on his way out at SPD’s public relations office, which he has headed up since August 2022. Several women who worked for or with O’Neil have filed complaints against him alleging discrimination, retaliation, and sexual harassment, and at least three officers on his staff (two of the women who said he mistreated them and one man) have left their positions for patrol jobs in recent months.

A spokesperson for SPD said O’Neil is still in charge of the communications office, but added, “It has always been the plan, since the beginning of this year, for Lt. O’Neil to further his career by moving into another assignment. (Labor rules require us to do this.)” The spokesperson said it’s “very common for Lieutenants to want to move for more experience.” O’Neil’s position was posted on an internal job board last week.

The job is ordinarily held by a sergeant, not a lieutenant, and O’Neil’s lengthy assignment reportedly raised hackles at the Seattle Police Officers Guild. (Officers with the rank of lieutenant or higher are represented by a separate management union). SPOG president Mike Solan did not return PubliCola’s call for comment, and SPD did not respond to followup questions, including a request for more information about which “labor rules” require O’Neil to move on.

homelessness, human services, LGBTQ+, Mayor Harrell

KCRHA Updates: Chief Financial Officer Fired, Board Approves Budget that Will Shut Down Shelters, CEO Comments on “The LGBTQ Stuff,” and—Believe it or Not—More
KCRHA headquarters in Pioneer Square, Seattle

By Erica C. Barnett

Darrell Powell, the interim director of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, abruptly fired the KCRHA’s interim Chief Financial Officer James Rouse last week, according to sources familiar with the decision. Rouse had the job for just six months; he replaced another interim CFO, Bill Reichert, who was also at the agency for less than six months. KCRHA confirmed that Rouse is no longer working for the agency but would not provide additional details, and PubliCola was unable to reach Rouse on Friday.

Sources familiar with the situation said Rouse and Powell had recently clashed over whether to pay the Low-Income Housing Institute $1 million from the tiny house village provider’s 2023 contract.

The money was still unpaid at the beginning of 2024 because of a contract stipulation that prevents KCRHA contractors from moving more than 10 percent of their budget for any project from one expense type to another—for example, from staff salaries to utilities. Because the details of large contracts tend to change over the course of a year (a site gets more expensive, or monthly utility costs go up), providers may end up paying for unanticipated expenses out of pocket and seeking reimbursement at the end of the year through an annual reconciliation process.

Because the KCRHA moved to a new system for filing reconciliation forms last year, LIHI asked KCRHA staff for assistance starting late last year, but reportedly never heard back; by the time LIHI asked the city of Seattle to intervene, the KCRHA had already sent the money back to the city, which provided the funding in the first place. Eventually, a high-level city staffer intervened and LIHI got paid in late April. It’s unclear whether Powell or Rouse decided not to just reimburse LIHI the $1 million in the first place, but Rouse was the one who paid for the decision.

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The city of Seattle has made no secret about its lack of confidence in the KCRHA, and often treats the homelessness authority as department of the city. In February, the city took back responsibility for homelessness outreach and prevention, which had been the KCRHA’s purview, saying the agency “did not have capacity to fulfill the outreach, coordination, and referral roles” that it took on in 2021.

The city also ordered the KCRHA to cut its budget for next year, and—unlike in the past—the agency quickly fell into line. In an April memo, the city “instructed” the agency to reduce its budget to reflect a 1 percent cut in city funding, and to “not propose any other funding increase unless it is offset by reductions or is revenue-backed.”

The resulting 2025 homelessness budget will cut as many as 300 shelter beds and eliminate rapid rehousing funds that are currently keeping 265 families from becoming homeless. The budget will likely require the closure of Benu Community Home, a low-barrier shelter serving Black men in the Central District that has been funded with federal COVID emergency dollars, as well as cuts to tiny house villages.

The new budget, at $230 million, is $39 million lighter than the “stabilization plan” KCRHA staff proposed in March, which would have preserved existing services and provided an across-the-board inflationary wage adjustment for homeless service providers.

In a letter to the implementation board, the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness urged the board to, at a minimum, adopt the March version of the budget. “The KCRHA, as the organization charged with leading a regional homelessness response, should not simply maintain an insufficient system during an emergency,” the letter, which was also signed by representatives from the King County Alliance for Human Services and the Seattle Human Services Coalition, said.

Advocacy groups were conspicuously absent from the KCRHA implementation board meeting last week, where the board adopted a resolution endorsing the shelter-slashing budget, because the authority moved the meeting back one hour without sending out a public notice. Advocates expressed dismay at missing their last chance to comment before the board approved a resolution supporting the budget, which includes language asking the KCRHA’s funders (primarily the city and county) to “explore all potential scenarios to reconsider” the cuts.

The KCRHA does not send out email notices to let the public know when meetings are happening or when they’re rescheduled, which means that even people who attend the agency’s regularly scheduled meetings have no way of knowing about changes unless they check in regularly on the meeting agenda on the KCRHA’s website, which is buried in a fifth-level sub-page with no information on any previous page to indicate whether anything has changed.

PubliCola put the meeting on our calendar for the regular time of 2pm. By the time we logged on, the board had gone into executive session to interview candidates for the job of permanent KCRHA CEO, which has been filled by interim directors since the last permanent CEO, Marc Dones, left almost exactly one year ago.

One of those candidates, interim director Powell, reportedly made off-color comments about the LGBTQ+ community during a recent job interview for the permanent position.

Powell, a longtime friend of Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell and the mayor’s pick for the interim role, was responding to a question about equity when he reportedly volunteered that he didn’t like the KCRHA’s gender-neutral restrooms and, in general, didn’t get the “LGBTQ stuff.” Former director Dones, who is nonbinary, emphasized gender inclusiveness at the authority, directing staff to introduce themselves with their pronouns and implementing the switch to gender-neutral restrooms.

KCRHA would not confirm Powell’s comments. When PubliCola approached Powell directly at an event on Monday, he declined to speak with us.

 

Elections, LGBTQ+

Candidate Says Bagel Giveaway Is Strictly Business; Big Business PACs Back Harrell-Allied Candidates; “Books Unbanned” Still Open to Minors In Library Book Ban States

1. Stephen Brown, the president of Eltana Bagels and a candidate for City Council in District 1 (West Seattle), said a mailer emblazoned “Seattle Deserves Better… – Stephen Brown” that included an offer for free bagels was just a routine promotional pitch for his local wood-fired bagel chain, not a campaign expenditure.

The flyer (which opens to the word “Bagels!”) offers a half-dozen free bagels and a “spread of your choice”—a “more than $25 value!” to anyone who comes in to either of Eltana’s two locations, which are both located outside District 1. In small print below the offer, the mailer says the offer expires at the end of August and has “no cash value.”

Contacted by email, Brown said the flyers were part of Eltana’s routine direct-marketing strategy and went out “to various addresses in the city that are close to retail grocery stores selling Eltana bagels. … As part of its promotions, Eltana regularly gives bagels away in an effort to garner trial and acquire customers.”

“The intention was to use a banal, stereotypical message as a parody—to use humor to sell bagels,” Brown added.

“This effort is not a campaign expense—it is not electoral in nature.” —District 1 city council candidate Stephen Brown

Eltana has also purchased four billboards, including at least one in West Seattle, prominently featuring Brown’s name.

“Eltana has never bought billboards in the past but the incredibly low price for billboards this summer ($1000 a month) made this promotional offer too attractive for Eltana to pass up,” Brown said. “We have used me, as the founder, in the past to promote Eltana[.] …. This effort is not a campaign expense—it is not electoral in nature.”

If the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission determines that the mailers, giveaway, or billboards do promote Brown’s candidacy, the campaign would be in violation of Seattle election law, which bars candidates who participate in the democracy voucher program (as Brown is) from accepting more than $300 in cash or in-kind contributions from any campaign donor. The commission declined to comment.

Brown said “the campaign will not be reporting on the performance of the Eltana trial promotion,” as “the offer is made and distributed by Eltana, is city wide, and doesn’t promote any candidate for public office nor does it mention any elections or geography.”

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2. A developer-funded independent expenditure campaign poured more than $27,000 into the effort to elect Maritza Rivera—whose campaign focuses on hiring more police—to City Council District 4, where urbanist Ron Davis is the other top contender.

“University Neighbors Committee” received its largest donations from developers John Goodman and George Petrie—two frequent Republican donors who bankrolled the failed Compassion Seattle campaign and poured $150,000 into the political committee that helped elect Bruce Harrell in 2021. The other donors backing the pro-Rivera PAC include developer Jordan Selig, developer Martin Smith, developer Matt Griffin, and Amazon bigwig David Zapolsky.

The PAC’s first pro-Rivera mailer says that as a parent of a child at Ingraham High School, where a 17-year-old was shot last year, she “decided to run for city council because our current council isn’t doing enough to keep us safe. “If voters elect Rivera, the mailer promises, they’ll get “More cops. Better training. Faster response times”—Rivera has said wants to reduce Priority 1 911 response times to five minutes, which would require hiring hundreds more officers—a goal SPD has acknowledged isn’t realistic—and making Seattle the exception to a nationwide trend.

The exact same group of donors has contributed more than $32,000 to the “Elliott Bay Neighbors” PAC supporting Rob Saka—another Harrell-allied candidate—in District 1 (West Seattle).

If you’ve seen any mailers and want to send them our way, email erica@publicola.com. 

3. Earlier this month, the state of Mississippi effectively banned people under 18 from accessing e-books or audiobooks through any of its public libraries—part of the growing trend of book bans and other restrictions aimed at preventing young people from accessing information about gender, sexuality, race, and anything else Republican lawmakers consider objectionable.

The law requires vendors of digital materials like Libby and Hoopla to ensure that no minors can access anything the state deems “sexually explicit,” which includes everything from textbooks that include human anatomy sketches to “descriptions [of] homosexuality or lesbianism.”

Seattle Public Library spokeswoman Laura Gentry said the library will continue to offer Seattle library cards to people with Internet access living in Mississippi, whose ban on online materials for minors only extends to public and school libraries in that state, through its Books Unbanned program. Currently, she said, the program has 17 participants from Mississippi, including a 23-year-old teacher who submitted this comment: 

“Living in Mississippi, a lot of books with vital information/stories/perspectives are banned or being banned. Being a Black woman in the city with the highest population of Black people, I know how important it is for us to protect our history. Also, being a teacher, I see how certain books being banned has already affected the younger generation. There is a lot that they don’t know and may never know so it’s extremely helpful to have access to this catalog.”