Category: Mayor Harrell

City Council, Mayor Harrell, Mayor Wilson, Police

As Council Considers Reinstating Police Hiring Bonuses, an Unreleased Draft Report Finding They Don’t Work Is Timely Again
Seattle interim Police Chief Shon Barnes at a recent City Council committee meeting.

A city report showed one-time bonuses have no effect on police hiring. The Harrell Administration rewrote it to say the opposite.

By Erica C. Barnett

As the city council begins the process of dissecting and amending Mayor Katie Wilson’s budget, council members are already pushing back on the mayor’s police hiring plan, which funds a net increase of 66 new officers through 2028. The budget includes around $56 million in raises for existing SPD officers; it also incorporates SPD’s decision, which went into effect September 1, to eliminate hiring bonuses for new and transferring officers, saving the city a couple million dollars a year.

The bonuses, which officers receive in two payments (one when they’re hired, the second about a year later) range from $7,500 for first-time recruits to $50,000 for officers with prior police training and experience. Between July 2022 and May 2026, they’ve cost the city around $3 million, with another $1.4 million in second payments outstanding, according to SPD’s most recent data.

Council members, including public safety committee chair Bob Kettle, have pushed back on the decision to end hiring bonuses, which was a cost-saving move by SPD. At a budget committee meeting late last month, Kettle called the payments an effective tool for maintaining the hirng “momentum” SPD has achieved since last year.

Addressing interim Police Chief Andre Sayles, Sayles asked: “If we get lateral transfers, isn’t [paying the bonuses] a net positive for us?”

“Yes, I believe looking at a way to provide the incentive for lateral hires, specifically here in the state of Washington, will be ideal,” Sayles agreed. “Removing those incentives, particularly for lateral officers, has the potential to put us behind” neighboring jurisdictions, he added.

Since the city adopted the incentives as a way to boost hiring during a post-pandemic slump (and boosted the lateral bonuses to $50,000 in 2023), the efficacy of offering the one-time payments has gone (mostly) unquestioned,

But an unpublished 2024 analysis by the city’s Office of Performance and Innovation, based on a survey of newly hired officers and click-through rates on ads advertising various benefits of joining SPD, found that hiring bonuses weren’t a significant factor in new officers’ decision to apply for jobs at SPD. Instead, the analysis found that recruits were drawn by SPD’s competitive salary and benefits—which, at the time, were lower than the six-figure starting salaries SPD offers today.

PubliCola obtained several early drafts of the report, including comments and suggested edits, through a records request made last year.

“This evaluation found that incentive pay did not significantly impact police hiring numbers compared to other recruitment factors within the timeframe of the analysis,” one draft read. “The incentive alone is not enough to motivate people to join the Seattle Police Department,” another version concluded.

“The City should not continue the use of the hiring incentive as currently designed as an ongoing recruitment strategy,” one draft recommended..

Former mayor Harrell’s office, including then-deputy mayor Tim Burgess, public safety advisor Sarah Smith, and communications staffers, raised objections about almost every substantive element of report, from its tone, which they found too negative, to its conclusions, which they said the data didn’t support. “I don’t believe the evaluation is persuasive since the key findings are speculative,” Burgess wrote in January 2024. Every version of the report we reviewed was littered with comments from the mayor’s staff, highlighting the Harrell administration’s direct intervention in what was supposed to be an independent analysis by OPI.

By the time the mayor’s office was done with the report, it recommended keeping the hiring bonuses, rather than eliminating them.

Information that was unflattering to the program—like the fact that “100% of the employees who were hired and left since August 2022 were people of color,” as yet another draft put it—as was the fact that officers overwhelmingly mentioned salary as the main reason they applied. (Indirectly verifying this fairly intuitive survey result, SPD hiring spiked immediately after a new contract gave first-time officers a starting salary of $126,000 after a six-month training period.)

The report no longer mentioned that not one officer had mentioned hiring incentives in their self-reported reasons for working at SPD, nor that incentives ranked in the middle (above “in-person recruiting” and “personal referral” but under “salary” and “benefits”) on a five-item list that was included in the survey.

The final, public version of the report, now whittled down to just over four pages plus a chart of local police salaries, concluded, contrary to previous drafts, that it was “impossible to pinpoint the hiring incentive’s specific effect with the available data, It is clear from the survey and A/B testing that the hiring incentive is compelling to some applicants yet does not have as strong an effect as salary and benefits.”

“Given SPD’s staffing challenges, the relatively low cost, and the fact that other competing jurisdictions continue to provide the incentive, we recommend the continued use of hiring incentives,” the report now said (bold in original).

The new report also put a positive spin on the dismal finding that hiring incentives only beat out referrals and in-person recruitment in a multiple-choice question about people’s motivation for applying. “All but two hires selected incentive pay as having some level of importance in their decision to become a police officer,”  the rewritten report concluded. “Of these respondents, 23% ranked incentive pay first or second in importance, 41% ranked it as third, and 36% ranked it as fourth or fifth.”

Speaking to PubliCola last year, staff who were involved in the creation of the report expressed intense frustration at being asked to turn their office into one called a “propaganda arm of the city” by the Harrell Administration. “We tried to soften the language to appease them,” that staffer said, but the report ended up making claims that just weren’t supported by the data. “I’m not going to spend my waking outs doing that,” the staffer said; that staffer, and another staffer who worked on the report, quit their jobs and left the city over what they saw as interference in their work that compromised its integrity.

The report that found hiring incentives have no effect is based on the only available data, which is old. The city council only required a single report on hiring incentives, eliminating the reporting requirement when they increased the lateral bonus to $50,000 in 2024. But given that new recruits now earn six-figure salaries on Day 1, and pay for lateral officers has increased commensurately, it seems likely that salary is more of a motivating factor now, not less. Ending the bonuses now will help show whether Kettle and the police chief are right. If hiring craters, even at the newly inflated salaries, the council could look for money in next year’s  budget to reinstate them. That would be a “data-driven” approach—the kind this council routinely says they support.

 

 

Mayor Harrell, Mayor Wilson

As Mayor, Katie Wilson Doesn’t Travel Much. When She Does, You’ll Find Her in 23F.
Noah Wulf, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Erica C. Barnett

For more than a year, records have been trickling into my inbox documenting the astronomical amounts former mayor Bruce Harrell spent to travel in luxury (along with his wife Joanne) while representing the city around the world. One example that I haven’t previously reported: The Harrells bought two business class tickets to Tokyo, at a cost of $10,000 each, for a sister-city meeting in Kobe, Japan in 2023, bringing a large entourage of city staffers with them. (The staffers sat in coach).

The Harrells took another trip to Japan the following year, spending a comparably thrifty $13,000, as I reported late last year. The Harrells even flew in style for short domestic hops—on the high end, they spent $3,500 for two first-class seats to attend two-day event in Columbus, Ohio, while tickets to Washington, D.C. for a three-day event were more than $5,200.

The Harrells paid for the difference between economy and luxury travel, which also included five-star hotels, out of their own deep pockets. Reading over the their travel records in another batch of documents that arrived earlier this year made me wonder: Does Harrell’s successor, Katie Wilson, also travel first-class?

I requested Wilson’s travel records in April, which, her staff confirmed this week, represent all the trips she’s taken so far this year. The records show two trips—a four-day trip to Washington, D.C. for the US Conference of Mayors in January ($600 for one round-trip coach seat on Alaska, plus $332 a night for a standard room at the Marriott), and a three-day trip to Stanford in April ($463 for a round-trip ticket on Alaska, which Wilson’s staff said was reimbursed by the university.)

PubliCola doesn’t have travel records for Harrell’s first year, but during a comparable period—January to mid-July—in 2023, Harrell took at least 10 trips, including international trips to Japan and Norway, totaling at least 51 days out of Seattle over a period of 28 weeks.

When I asked Wilson why she hasn’t taken advantage of her status as mayor to travel in first class, or even comfort economy (Wilson’s seats were all well behind the exit rows economy), she paused, looked at me like I was nuts, and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever flown first class in my life.” I prodded, asking her if she had a miles program or anything. “Honestly, a lot of the time I’ve lived in Seattle—like, we’d go back and visit my parents or something, but we didn’t do a lot of traveling because we didn’t have money.”

So, would the longtime labor organizer just feel weird traveling in first class, as previous mayors have done? Wilson paused again. “I mean…. Why? I don’t—like, why?.” After I awkwardly tried to change the subject, Wilson interjected, “It’s not something I’ve ever considered.”

Wilson does enjoy a window seat and, like me, doesn’t understand why people put the shade down. “I mean—you’re 40,000 feet in the air. Look around!”

Elections, Mayor Harrell, Mayor Wilson, Police, public disclosure

This Week on PubliCola: January 4, 2026
Brian Maxey and Rebecca Boatright, two long-serving civilian employees fired by Police Chief Shon Barnes last month

Fired SPD employees allege retaliation by police chief, Harrell pre-election request sent Seattle Channel staffers scrambling, and more news to close out 2025.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, December 29

Police Chief Takes the Holidays Off

Police Chief Shon Barnes took a nearly two-week vacation over the holidays, leaving various deputies in charge while he was off duty. Barnes, whose family lives in Chicago, has previously come under scrutiny for spending many of his weekends out of town.

SPD Won’t Answer Questions About Two Anti-Prostitution Stings They Announced

The Seattle Police Department claims two recent operations targeting a strip club and men who pay for sex successfully targeted human trafficking and sexual exploitation. But they wouldn’t answer questions seeking more detailed information about the two announcements, such as whether the strip club sting led to any actual charges and a request for police reports.

Tuesday, December 30

Harrell’s “Last-Minute Request” for Pre-Election Budget Video Sent Seattle Channel Scrambling

Former Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office said his 2025 budget video was nothing unusual and didn’t cost the city any extra money. But records reveal that the multi-location video was a last-minute request that required Seattle Channel staffers to drop what they were doing and work overtime on a weekend to film and produce a 15-minute film with virtually no notice, just a few weeks before ballots dropped for the 2025 mayoral election.

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Wednesday, December 31

Mayor Wilson: Audit SPD’s Public Disclosure Office!

In recent years, the police department’s policy toward public disclosure requests has ossified into a kind of tacit refusal via delay. “Grouping,” SPD’s practice of refusing to respond to more than one request from the same person or outlet at a time, is the subject of at least one lawsuit, but SPD also now forces the media and public to file records requests for information that used to be easy to obtain, exacerbating the problem. Mayor Wilson should seek an audit to get to the bottom of SPD’s intrasigence, and make them follow the public records act in practice, not just in theory.

Tort Claim by Two Fired SPD Employees Alleges Gender, Anti-LGBTQ Discrimination Under Police Chief Shon Barnes

Two top civilian SPD employees who were fired by Police Chief Shon Barnes, Rebecca Boatright and Brian Maxey, have filed tort claims seeking $11 million for what they describe as retaliation. The tort says they advised Barnes against decisions that were widely perceived as anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ, and Boatright also says she was discriminated against because of her gender.

Elections, Mayor Harrell

Harrell’s “Last-Minute Request” for Pre-Election Budget Video Sent Seattle Channel Scrambling
Mayor Bruce Harrell stands in front of an affordable-housing building in his 2025 budget video

By Erica C. Barnett

Back in September, outgoing Mayor Bruce Harrell announced his annual budget not with an in-person speech, in keeping with longstanding custom, but in a slickly produced video, filmed at multiple locations around Seattle. The timing, as well as the content—an upbeat preview that emphasized new spending while failing to mention the looming budget cliff—looked more like a campaign video  than an informational announcement. It has been viewed on YouTube around 1,400 times.

Asked about the timing and expense of the video earlier this year, a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Information Technology said, “The Seattle Channel supports the Mayor’s office for various requests, including producing the recent budget video,” the spokesperson said, adding, “This work was completed in-house using staff time.”

While this was technically true, records PubliCola obtained through a public disclosure request show that Seattle Channel staff had to work overtime to comply with Harrell’s last-minute pre-election request, postponing work on regular Seattle Channel shows and working over the weekend to complete the project.

According to an email, 11 staffers were involved in producing Harrell’s budget video.

A review of the emails that flew back and forth before and during production of Harrell’s video suggest a frantic rush to fulfill a last-minute demand from Harrell, who had just lost the primary election to Katie Wilson.

On Monday, September 15, Seattle Channel production manager Ed Escalona sent out an email to staff letting them know about a “last-minute request” from Harrell’s office for a budget video, with multiple takes at three to five locations, filmed “on the mayor’s schedule” and due in a week. “The details are sketchy,” the email noted; another exchange said the mayor planned to “ad lib” without a teleprompter.

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The timeline sent producers scrambling to reschedule other projects and find people who could take on extra work on very short notice. But Harrell’s office took their time coming up with a plan. That Thursday, a staffer described the lack of information from the mayor’s office as “inefficient and not best practices,” and the filming didn’t happen until Friday, with producers still asking Harrell’s office for a script at 2:00 that afternoon.

Work on other Seattle Channel shows appears to have been upended by the last-minute production, and staffers worked through the weekend to finish filming and editing—a situation that prompted grousing from some staff. “Looks great… all except for the part of having to work the whole weekend!” one staffer wrote.

Emails show that Seattle Channel staff tried to limit the number of shooting locations, but Harrell’s team insisted on four—the Green Lake Community Center, a low-income housing complex in the Central District, and the downtown waterfront, plus City Hall.

Harrell’s office also requested a long list of B-roll, including new drone shots, to serve as segues between locations. On the day before the video was due, a Sunday, Seattle Channel general manager Shannon Gee described the work in an email as “very rough going. I don’t know if I’ve been of any help at all trying to hunt down footage that doesn’t exist. … There are sections where there is no way to illustrate what is being said and there are still a lot of edits that need to be covered.”

As we noted at the time, it’s unusual for a Seattle mayor to introduce the annual budget with a video rather than a live speech; the only mayor who has done so in recent memory was Jenny Durkan, who was halfway out the door when she announced her final budget with a perfunctory six-minute video taped at a North Seattle College classroom in 2021.

labor, Mayor Harrell

Parking Enforcement Officers On Work Slowdown After Contract Negotiations Stall
Image by Kyah117, via Wikimedia Commons. CC-by-4.0 license

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle’s parking enforcement officers have been engaged in a work slowdown since mid-November, after failing to reach an agreement on a contract that would raise their pay and allow them to take paid lunch breaks, among other union demands.

Jake Sisley, the head of the Seattle Parking Enforcement Officers Guild (SPEOG), said that on November 18, the parking enforcement officers started a “realignment of enforcement priorities” that will result in fewer tickets and more warnings for people who violate on-street parking rules.

“The city makes money off PEOs going out and doing their job, and while I maintain that’s not the primary purpose, I think the city sees it as the primary purpose,” Sisley said. “We don’t want to diminish the level of service we provide the public—like, if someone calls and says there’s a car blocking their driveway, we’ll still cite that person and tow them. But for everything else that’s kind of benign, like pay to park or if there’s a no parking zone, maybe that’s not a problem. Maybe you don’t give them a ticket, but just give them a warning.”

SPEOG represents the city’s 85 or so parking enforcement officers, who are part of the Seattle Police Department but operate under a separate contract. (Mayor Bruce Harrell just signed a new police contract giving rookie officers a starting salary of $118,000, rising to $126,000 after six months, plus bonuses for having a two- or four-year degree).

Currently, PEO salaries max out at just over $37 an hour—an amount SPEOG President Jake Sisley says is far too low, especially compared to civilian Community Service Officers and License and Standards Inspectors, who make up to $52 an hour. “Parking enforcement officers do a lot,” Sisley said—from ticketing and towing cars that are blocking driveways and roads to directing traffic at special events to knocking on the doors of RVs where people are living as part of the abandoned vehicles team.

The PEOs have been working without a contract since the end of 2023, the same year that six new people joined the city council, shaking up the Labor Relations Policy Committee, which votes on labor contracts. (A five-member council majority serves on the LRPC.)  SPEOG agreed to put the contract, which would go through the end of this year, off until the fall of 2024, Sisley said, when the union asked for a “robust” 32 percent pay increase that would to put parking enforcement officers’ pay in line with CSOs and licensing inspectors. The city countered with an offer of 2 percent.

“Our response was essentially, ‘Get real,’ because there were so many other things that were on the table,” Sisley said. “The fact that they came back with essentially [just] 2 percent— it was like, you aren’t even trying. You’re trying to delay.”

Since then, Sisley said “they’ve slowly clawed back up to a real proposal”—one that would increase PEO pay by at least 11.5 percent—but a number of issues are still outstanding and the contract is currently in mediation, with no clear path to consensus.

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The PEOs are asking for a half-hour paid lunch, rather than their current unpaid lunch breaks, because they often get calls during lunch and have to leave. Sisley said the city’s labor negotiators said they could just turn their radios and phones off during their breaks, but SPEOG argued that would create a safety issue.

They’re also opposing the city’s effort to make service on specialty teams, like the abandoned vehicles squad, a mandatory part of the routine “bid” for shifts, instead of something people sign up for on a voluntary basis; they argue that if not enough people are signing up to work these shifts, the city should pay a premium to those who volunteer. SPEOG has filed a grievance over this issue, Sisley said.

For years, the parking enforcement division has had high turnover and about 20 vacant positions. Moving the PEOs back to SPD from SDOT, where they were moved in 2021 (the only sense in which SPD was meaningfully “defunded”) was supposed to improve hiring and reduce turnover, but it didn’t, leaving about 18 perennially vacant positions.

This year, Mayor Bruce Harrell tried to defund these positions and move their funding, almost $3 million, to pay for his other priorities. After learning that PEOs actually bring in more money than they cost, in the form of fines, the council rejected that proposal. SPEOG argues the hiring and turnover issues will persist, however, as long as parking enforcement officer wages and working conditions remain worse than similar jobs, like CSOs.

“It’s not so much about the money—it’s about the principles,” Sisley said. “But the money does matter.”

The city’s lead negotiator on the contract and Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office declined to comment for this story, citing the ongoing negotiations.

Elections, King County, Mayor Harrell, Mayor Wilson, Police

This Week on PubliCola: December 6, 2025

Overtime cuts and media training at SPD, layoffs at King County, a big grant to private club closely linked to Harrell, and more.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, December 1

After Overspending, SPD Scrambles to “Drastically Reduce” Overtime

The Seattle Police Department’s use of overtime has continued to increase year after year, rising to around 500,000 hours last year. Despite multiple midyear budget increases, SPD has run out of overtime funding, and will deprioritize property crimes and other types of investigations in an effort to get a handle on its budget for 2025.

Tuesday, December 2

“Bureaucrats” Losing Jobs in King County Shakeup Say They Were Blindsided by Zahilay’s Emailed Layoff Announcement

King County Executive Girmay Zahilay has portrayed his decision to lay off the majority of people who fall under his direct purview as a standard part of any transition process. But many employees who will lose their jobs in January told us their positions aren’t political; they’re bureaucrats who the county running, like regional planners, contract managers, and economists.

Mayor-Elect Wilson Appoints Deputy Mayor Brian Surratt, Other Top Staff

Regional economic growth leader and city of Seattle veteran Brian Surratt will be Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson’s sole deputy mayor, a pick that seems likely to assuage at least some concerns from business leaders who worried Wilson’s team would consist of socialist radicals. Former council central staffer Aly Pennucci, former Puget Sound Sage director Nicole Soper, and ex-Futurewise policy director Kate Kreuzer are also at the top of Wilson’s org chart.

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Thursday, December 4

Incoming Mayor Wilson Mulls Police Chief’s Future

Sources confirmed this week that incoming Mayor Katie Wilson is still waffling over whether to keep Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes, a Bruce Harrell appointee who has come under scrutiny for some of his external and internal decisions.

SPD Pays Consultants for Media Training, Executive Assessment

At Barnes’ direction, the department will pay a consultant from North Carolina to do a media training for SPD command staff and executive-level employees. Although command staff and executives just got media training from a different consultant last year, an SPD spokesperson said the new training is needed to make these officials more comfortable talking to the press.

The department will also pay another consultant, this one from California, to do an assessment of how the police chief’s office is organized. Barnes just hired several new high-level staffers and reorganized the office this year. The consultant is the same one who did two previous national searches that resulted in the selection of internal candidates for top roles at SPD, including former police chief Adrian Diaz.

Private Club With Deep Ties to Harrell Gets $183,000 City Grant

Three weeks before leaving office, Mayor Harrell announced the latest round of Equitable Development initiative grants. For the second time in his administration, the Royal Esquire Club, a private Black men’s club to which Harrell has longstanding ties, will receive money to pay for a renovation. Although Harrell’s office says the EDI committee funded the club based purely on its value as a cultural institution, the mayor’s work on behalf of the group—including alleged attempts to quash a wage-theft investigation and the use of city staff time to do administrative tasks for the club—calls that claim into question.

Harrell Campaign Paid Consultant $46,000 for Last-Minute “Outreach”

Newly filed election finance reports for November show that the Harrell campaign paid Eastside for Hire taxi company founder Abdisalam (Abdul) Yusuf more than $46,000, the equivalent of $5,000 a week (based on reports that connect payments to specific weeks of work) to do unspecified “outreach” in the final days of the campaign. Yusuf’s consulting firm has never reported any previous paid work on any campaign.

Friday, December 5

Seattle Nice: Shakeups at the County and City as Zahilay and Wilson Take Over

This week on the Seattle Nice podcast, we discussed the changes that are taking shape at King County and the city of Seattle, as County Executive Girmay Zahilay and Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson start filling out their staff, including Zahilay’s layoffs and internal discussions on Team Wilson about whether to retain SPD Chief Barnes.