The directors of 20 Seattle departments have donated money to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s campaign effort—about half the city’s department directors, almost all of whom were appointed by Harrell. Most have given between $500 and $650, which is the maximum amount the campaign can accept under city campaign finance law. Deputy directors, mayoral staff, and the directors of various ad hoc initiatives, including Harrell’s One Seattle Graffiti Plan and FIFA World Cup planning, have also pitched in to help their boss’ election chances.
It’s likely that not all the contributions represent a spontaneous outpouring of support for the incumbent. According to multiple City Hall sources with direct knowledge of the situation, Harrell has not-no-subtly encouraged his appointees to back his campaign, leaving some with the impression they’ll have more job security in a second Harrell term if they help him defeat his challenger, Katie Wilson. As head of the city’s executive branch, the mayor has the authority to hire and fire department heads at will. He also negotiates pay and working conditions with the unions that represent city employees.
Because Harrell is the first mayor to both run for reelection and make it out of the primary since Greg Nickels, there is no precisely comparable data showing campaign contributions from city department heads for a mayor seeking reelection. The closest recent comparison is former mayor Jenny Durkan, the establishment choice against lefty activist Cary Moon in 2017. Durkan received a single contribution from one city department director, and pulled in $8,750 from all city employees.
The city of Seattle department heads who have given at least $500 to Harrell include: City Budget Office director Dan Eder; Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs Director Hamdi Mohamed; Human Services Department Director Tanya Kim; Seattle Parks Director A.P. Diaz; Office of Police Accountability Director Bonnie Glenn; Office for Civil Rights Director Derrick Wheeler-Smith; Seattle Department of Transportation Director Adiam Emery; Seattle Office of Planning and Development Director Rico Quirindongo; and Information Technology Director Rob Lloyd.
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Staffers for the mayor himself—including communications director Jamie Housen, chief of staff Andrew Myerberg, deputy chief of staff Dan Nolte, and deputy mayors Greg Wong and Tim Burgess (who also contributed $2,500 to the Bruce Harrell for Seattle’s Future PAC and is one of its leaders)— have also contributed thousands of dollars, collectively, to their boss’ campaign. Paul Jackson, Harrell’s Graffiti Policy and Initiatives director, has also maxed out to Harrell.
As we reported Monday, Seattle Office of Economic Development director Markham McIntyre—one of the directors who maxed out to Harrell—used the city’s official Teams platform to ask department directors for their contact information on behalf of the Harrell campaign, whose campaign manager a solicitation to help Harrell get reelected to every department director on the list. This week, the city council will discuss OED’s 2026 budget, which Harrell proposed increasing next year by a startling 30 percent—a larger increase, on a percentage basis, than any other department.
City council staff highlighted this discrepancy in a budget memo, noting that almost all of the new business programs Harrell is proposing are billed as “one-time additions,” despite being the kinds of programs that are likely to “create expectations in community for ongoing support beyond 2026.” Like many other “one-time” adds in Harrell’s budget, this new spending provides a burst of funding for key constituencies (small businesses, retail stores, and business groups in specific neighborhoods, like Lake City and Little Saigon) while creating a fiscal cliff that the next mayor and city council will have to address next year.
Wilson, who was endorsed by a union that represents thousands of city workers, PROTEC17, has received a little over $5,000 in contributions from city employees—about a quarter of the $20,000 city employees have given to their current boss.
Mayor Bruce Harrell’s campaign finance filings for October include an unusual series of five $5,000 payments, each one representing one week of work, to a Tukwila-based company called FF and J Consulting. According to Harrell’s public campaign records, the $25,000 was for “Management and consulting services: Community Engagement Consulting.”
For comparison, Harrell’s chief political consultant, Christian Sinderman of NWP Consulting, receives $5,000 for his services every month.
According to state incorporation records, FF and J is a one-person firm run by Abdisalam (Abdul) Yusuf, a prominent member of the Seattle-area Somali community who has frequently advocated on behalf of rideshare drivers as the founder of the company Eastside for Hire. Neither FF and J, , nor Yusuf as an individual, has ever done any paid work for any campaign in the state prior to this year. Yusuf is also the vice president of Drive Forward, the Uber-funded lobbying group that advocated for Seattle legislation that would have reduced the minimum wage for delivery drivers.
It’s unclear what kind of outreach Harrell is paying Yusuf $5,000 a week to do on his behalf. Harrell’s campaign did not respond to detailed questions on Wednesday, and Yusuf did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.
Yusuf was also involved in a previous Harrell campaign controversy. In 2015, when then-city councilmember Harrell was being challenged by Tammy Morales, Harrell was accused of paying for 15 of Yusuf’s Eastside for Hire employees to join the 37th District Democrats in order to sway their endorsement in favor of Pam Banks, then running against Kshama Sawant, and Harrell.
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According to reporting in the South Seattle Emerald, the memberships were paid for in one batch using sequential money orders from the same store. After some of the new members were disqualified because they didn’t live in the district, about 10 showed up to the endorsement meeting wearing Harrell t-shirts and helped both him and Banks win endorsement by one-vote margins. In response to the controversy, NWP Consulting sent out an “open letter” accusing members of the 37th District Democrats who raised concerns of attempting to “silence” “our East African members.”
Several people active in East African communities in Seattle told PubliCola they’ve observed Yusuf (along with Harrell’s director of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs, Hamdi Mohamed) working to drum up support in their communities, hosting meetings with Harrell and extending assurances about what Harrell will do for their communities in a second term.
The $25,000 Harrell has paid Yusuf’s firm so far this year is ten times the $2,500 he paid a different community leader, Somali Independent Business Alliance president Nafiso Samatar, for community engagement and outreach when he first ran in 2021.
Harrell’s campaign has raised just over a million dollars so far; among individual contributors the top three employers are “not employed,” the city of Seattle, and Amazon. A PAC supporting his campaign has raised $1.75 million so far, most of it from real-estate developers and building managers.
New police contract boosts rookie salaries to almost $120,000, Harrell blasts Katie Wilson’s housing plan, controversial cop still in charge at East Precinct, and much more.
First up in Monday’s Morning Fizz: Former Seattle police chief Adrian Diaz got another superior court judge tossed off his lawsuit against the city this week (that’s an update since we posted), arguing that Judge Nelson Lee is biased because he admitted reading news reports about Diaz.
King County Council candidate Peter Kwon told the King County Republican Party he thinks trans girls should have to play on boys’ teams and use boys’ locker rooms in schools. Then, when Planned Parenthood pulled their endorsement over Kwon’s anti-trans views, he claimed it on his campaign mail anyway.
PubliCola got an early look at the city’s new contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild. The new deal gives cops another hefty raise, which, combined with last year’s big salary increase, will raise officer salaries to $126,000 after an initial training period. That’s not counting the bonuses new officers get when they sign on—$7,500 for new officers, $50,000 for those who are already trained.
Mayor Bruce Harrell and Police Chief Shon Barnes publicly announced the new contract on Wednesday, including details about the minimal new accountability provisions it contains. The contract sends questions about arbitration—a process where officers appeal disciplinary decisions to an outside lawyer—to interest arbitration, which could result in even more pay for officers. It also straitjackets the CARE Team of unarmed first responders, limiting the circumstances in which they can respond to 911 calls to an almost comically narrow range—basically, if someone is outdoors, not using drugs, not having a crisis that bystanders consider confrontational, and not committing any crime, CARE can help. Otherwise, the call goes to cops.
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Two weeks ago, Police Chief Barnes said he was removing controversial Captain Mike Tietjen, who was disciplined for several serious violations during the 2020 protests against police brutality, from his new role as commander of Capitol Hill’s East Precinct. But Tietjen’s still there, and SPD said they had no timeline for showing him the door.
Mayor Bruce Harrell’s staff said he will not consider any exemptions to Seattle’s minimum wage, such as a return of the so-called tip credit, if he’s reelected. But a bystander to a meeting he held with restaurant owners caught him promising to “re-discuss” the tip credit, which allows businesses to pay workers sub-minimum wages as long as customer tips raise their pay to minimum wage.
Harrell’s proposed 2026 budget adds tens of millions in new spending on the police department, expands the encampment removal team, and adds funding for his ever-growing graffiti removal team. Meanwhile, services for tenants, including
Affordable housing providers joined Mayor Harrell to decry his opponent Katie Wilson’s proposal to move homeless people from shelters to vacant apartments in affordable housing. Wilson said they’re mischaracterizing her plan.
In a candidate forum this week, City Councilmember Sara Nelson remarked that she and her appointed colleague Debora Juarez had “chuckled” at public commenters opposed to police surveillance cameras.
Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon filed a complaint—quickly dismissed by the Public Disclosure Commission—about a campaign mailer opposing 33rd District Legislative candidate (and Burien Mayor) Kevin Schilling, claiming it was libelous to quote a letter signed by the Burien Police Department expressing a lack of confidence in both Schilling and Bailon.
On Friday, several private and nonprofit affordable housing developers joined Mayor Bruce Harrell to criticize his challenger Katie Wilson’s proposal to move unsheltered people into vacant units in “workforce” housing developments, saying it would be a “disaster” to try to mix chronically homeless people in with the general population in these buildings.
“Our experiences and independent data have shown that people struggling on the street with behavioral health challenges cannot just be placed in an apartment and succeed,” Harrell said.
“According to the 2024 Point in Time Count, most people living unsheltered in King County have a physical, cognitive or general disability, a third of those surveyed said they live with severe mental illness, and nearly half said they struggle with substance abuse. … Scattering people in buildings across the city where the services to address addiction and mental health health issues do not exist, will be a disaster.”
Currently, thousands of units funded with city dollars, many of them small studios with rents comparable to what’s available in the private market, are sitting vacant. Some developers have argued that these will fill up as construction slows and rents for market-rate studio apartments increase.
Karen Lee, the CEO of Plymouth Housing, described the intensive services provided in Plymouth’s buildings, which are designed to serve chronically homeless people who, by definition, have disabling mental or physical conditions. “For them to rejoin society, it takes care, it takes compassion, it takes knowledge, and it is doable. But [living] in an apartment building for working-class folks that is staffed with a building manager and some cleanliness staff—that is not the environment” for success, Lee said.
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Wilson, contacted this afternoon, said she never proposed putting people who need permanent supportive housing in empty apartments at buildings that lack supportive services—an approach that helped doom the “Partnership for Zero” program to swiftly end visible homelessness downtown, which Harrell supported, last year.
Instead, Wilson said, she wants to create subsidies for “low-acuity” people who don’t require intense, round-the-clock care, freeing up shelter beds by helping people who’ve been stuck in shelter for long periods move on to housing. “Obviously, we need to pay close attention to who we’re placing where, and we don’t want to replicate the kind of problems that have ben happening recently with putting high-acuity homeless folks in buildings that aren’t equipped to handle them and without the supportive services that they need on site,” Wilson said.
“If you look across our shelter system, there are a lot of low-acuity homeless folks who are kind of stuck in the system because we don’t have throughput to affordable units for them. … The success of this plan is going to rely on appropriately placing people” in housing that fits their needs, Wilson continued.
Harrell has repeatedly said that recently homeless people do not belong in the same living environment as the “teachers and baristas” for whom workforce housing is designed. Wilson’s strategy, he said, “will actually create more vacancies as these buildings experience the well-known issues” seen in permanent supportive housing, such as fights, overdoses, and frequent 911 calls. “[It] will be a disaster.”
Wilson disagreed that formerly homeless people can’t thrive in regular affordable housing. “If you have someone who is coming out of homelessness, who doesn’t have serious behavioral health problems, who maybe has a disability, they’ll be a fine neighbor,” Wilson said. “Obviously we need to assess people, but the idea that, categorically, these are different kinds of people [is wrong]. There are teachers and barista who are homeless.”
1. Two weeks ago after PubliCola reported that Police Chief Shon Barnes had picked controversial police captain Mike Tietjen to head up Capitol Hill’s East Precinct, Barnes announced internally that he was removing Tietjen, blaming our “recent article that has raised unease within the East Precinct, leading to a crisis of confidence among our LGBTQIA+ community members.”
As of Thursday, though, Tietjen was still in charge of the precinct, with no clear timeline for replacing him. An SPD spokesperson responded to a list of questions from PubliCola by saying, that “no movement has been made of yet. I do not have a timeline for completion at this time.”
Tietjen has been a high-profile, controversial figure at SPD since at least 2007, when he and his bike patrol partner were accused of planting drugs on a man and arresting him. City investigators later concluded that Tietjen and his partner lied about the arrest (and likely pocketed weed belonging to the suspect). The allegations raised questions about the two men’s credibility in 17 other drug and firearms cases.
More recently, Tietjen became notorious for his actions during the 2020 protests against police brutality after driving onto a sidewalk toward a group of protesters, calling them “cockroaches” when they fled the path of his unmarked SUV. (Tietjen was suspended for that incident and another in which he shoved a protester into a bus stop, slamming their head). During the same period, Tietjen failed to report an incident in which a group of officers, including one who was his direct report, allegedly harassed a trans woman in Capitol Hill, asking her if she “had a dick under” her skirt.
SPD did not respond to PubliCola’s questions about why Tietjen is still at the East Precinct and the process for replacing him.
2. During a recent meeting with restaurant owners at a West Seattle cafe, Mayor Bruce Harrell appeared to commit to considering the reinstatement of the “tip credit” for restaurants or other “exemptions” that could make it less expensive to run their businesses.
Seattle’s minimum wage law, passed in 2015, included a “tip credit” that allowed employers to pay sub-minimum wages as long as their workers made enough in tips to bring their overall “minimum compensation” to the city minimum.
The conversation was overheard by a bystander who provided a brief recording of the conversation to PubliCola. In the recording, Harrell can be heard saying that if reelected, “I fully commit, in January, to convene just restaurants” to discuss “what the city can do, from a policy perspective,” to help them deal with Seattle’s high minimum wage—”whether it’s exemptions, or re-discussion of the tip credit, I’ll have that discussion.”
Contacted by PubliCola, a spokesman for the mayor said, “Rolling back the minimum wage and reinstating the tip credit is not a policy we’re considering now or in the future. The mayor will always meet with small businesses to hear their ideas[.]”
The 2015 minimum wage law, passed unanimously by a city council that included Harrell, gave restaurants and other businesses that rely on customers to pay their workers’ wages through tips 10 years to adjust to the fact that they would have to pay the full minimum wage in 2025. Last year, Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth tried unsuccessfully to preserve the tip credit indefinitely.
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3. Harrell’s proposed budget preserves cuts made last year to the Department of Construction and Inspections’ tenant assistance program, which the city reduced from about $2.4 million to $1.6 million between 2024 and 2025. The tenant services program pays for counseling, legal aid, education, and other assistance to tenants facing eviction or navigating landlord-tenant conflicts. Some of organizations whose city funding was cut or remained flat this year include the Tenants Union, United Indians of All Tribes Foundation, Solid Ground, and the Housing Justice Project, along with half a dozen others.
Harrell’s 2026 budget proposal includes no inflation adjustments, meaning that in real terms, nonprofits whose funding stayed flat will continue to experience reductions in their ability to pay staff salaries and other costs that are funded through SDCI.
In a letter to the city council earlier this month, seven groups that depend on city funding to operate their programs asked the council to reverse the cuts made last year and add more funding to address inflation and augment programs at a time when evictions and homelessness are approaching record highs. The most cost-effective way to address homelessness is prevention, by helping people stay housed,” the organizations wrote. “When rental assistance is paired with tenant services it becomes far more effective, ensuring resources are used efficiently to keep people stably housed.”
Progressive Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck reportedly plans to introduce a budget amendment that would add $1 million to the budget for tenant services, restoring last year’s cut and addressing some of the inflationary cost increases over the past two years.
Last year, then-councilmember Tammy Morales did manage to get $355,000 in the budget to reduce the mayor’s proposed cuts to tenant services, but failed to get support for restoring another $456,000 in cuts. The council is similarly constituted this year, with Rinck, rather than Morales, as the lone consistent progressive on a centrist council focused on boosting the police budget, not helping tenants access legal aid.
We’ve reached out to Rinck about her amendment and will update this post if we hear back.
Police Chief Shon Barnes, flanked by Council President Sara Nelson and Mayor Bruce Harrell
In theory, the new contract allows the CARE Team to respond to more call types. In practice, it says they can’t go to homeless encampments, residences, businesses, or calls where a person is using drugs or being “confrontational.”
By Erica C. Barnett
This morning, Mayor Bruce Harrell and Police Chief Shon Barnes announced the new police contract we reported on yesterday, including starting salaries of $118,000 for new recruits, rising to $126,000 in six months.
Sergeants’ pay will increase from a base wage of $140,000 ($146,000 after six months) to $159,000 ($167,000 after six months). After 18 months on the job, new cops and sergeants will make $132,000 and $177,000, respectively.
In 2021, the starting pay for a brand-new police officer was $83,000 a year. Last year, Harrell signed a three-year retroactive contract that raised Seattle police salaries to the highest in Washington state. Once the new round of raises go into effect, that number will have gone up by $35,000—a remarkable 42 percent pay increase in just five years. New officers also receive bonuses ranging from $7,500 for new recruits to $50,000 for officers transferring from other departments.
“This contract ensures Seattle will remain competitive with other major city police departments and adds incentives for the skills that modern policing requires,” including a 1.5 percent or 4 percent salary boost for officers with two- or four-year criminal-justice degrees, Harrell said Wednesday.
“These recruitment improvements will allow us to build a police force that reflects our community’s diversity and meets the demands of 21st century public safety with respect to accountability. This contract delivers significant account accountability reforms that address concerns raised by the accountability entities and the community, and builds on the successful resolution of the federal consent period earlier this year. ”
In fact, the contract includes just two changes related to accountability. First, it simplifies a 180-day “clock” for disciplinary decisions, removing some carveouts that have contributed to very long delays between the time when someone files a misconduct complaint and when it gets resolved.
Second, it allows sergeants, rather than the Office of Police Accountability, to determine discipline for misconduct that doesn’t rise to the level of a fireable offense. Whether this is an improvement to accountability, as opposed to a simplification of OPA’s workload, remains to be seen; the federal consent decree SPD was under until earlier this year called precinct-level discipline “admittedly ‘appalling,’ quoting an OPA supervisor), so bringing this kind of discipline back inside SPD will have good or bad consequences depending on how sergeants use this new authority.
Bob Kettle, head of the city council’s public safety committee, said bringing discipline back in-house would produce better sergeants, which would lead to “better lieutenants, captains, assistant chiefs, deputy chiefs, and maybe chiefs of the future. We have to invest in our leaders early to get the return later.”
One accountability issue the contract does not address is arbitration—an outside process police officers can use to get disciplinary decisions overturned Harrell’s chief of staff Andrew Myerberg said the two sides remain at an impasse on arbitration because the Seattle Police Officers Guild does not want to make concessions on four separate issues related to discipline.
Under the current arbitration rules, officers can bring in new evidence and witnesses that the city hasn’t seen, and the arbitrator can use any standard of proof they want to decide whether a cop is guilty of misconduct. For example, arbitrators can require the city to present “clear and convincing” evidence that an person is guilty of misconduct that justifies the punishment they received. Arbitrators can also completely relitigate an officer’s case after the fact (known as de novo review).
Myerberg said the city couldn’t get SPOG to bend on changes to these requirements, as well as a request for a new standard saying that an arbitrator can’t overturn a disciplinary decision (such as firing) by the police chief unless the chief’s decision was “arbitrary and capricious.”
All those issues are now heading to interest arbitration between the city and SPOG, a secondary bargaining process overseen by the state Public Employee Relations Commission. If the city succeeds in placing more guardrails on arbitration, it will come at a cost—likely additional salary increases for officers in exchange for agreeing to restrictions on arbitration.
“The city had an opportunity to finally deliver on the promise of the 2017 accountability ordinance, to build a system where misconduct is investigated swiftly and discipline can stick. Unfortunately, this contract largely maintains the status quo,” Jazmyn Clark, smart justice policy program director for the ACLU-WA, said. “While some procedural clarifications are welcome, meaningful accountability reforms, especially around arbitration and disciplinary appeals, remain unresolved. Public confidence in the police cannot grow if the mechanisms for accountability are still subject to closed-door processes.”
As Harrell telegraphed earlier this year, the CARE Team, a group of social workers that currently responds alongside SPD to certain 911 calls, will be allowed to expand without restriction in the future and can respond to more types of calls, including behavioral-health calls from the public and requests for shelter and transportation from people on the streets.
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During Wednesday’s announcement—and before she had actually seen the new contract—CARE Department Chief Amy Barden said the changes would allow the CARE Team to respond to up to 47,000 calls a year.
However, the contract language actually places so many restrictions on what types of calls CARE can respond to that the true number of eligible calls is likely much lower. What’s more, the contract actually prohibits CARE from responding to exactly the kind of calls Barden has repeatedly said are more appropriate for social workers than armed police.
Under the new agreement (which CARE played no direct role in negotiating), SPD won’t allow CARE to respond to 911 calls on their own, and will instead send armed police officers, in the following circumstances:
If a person is anywhere besides a public space, such as a car, business, or residence;
If a person is in a homeless encampment, defined as four or more tents;
If there has been any report of “aggressive or threatening behavior towards others, destructive or confrontational behavior, or behavior posing a danger to others”;
If “drug paraphernalia” is present, indicating drug use;
If a minor is present;
If there is an “indication” that the person has committed any crime;
If the person is exhibiting “extreme behavior that might warrant investigation for a potential involuntary commitment (e.g., public nakedness accompanied by crisis.”
This list arguably covers most circumstances in which CARE might be called to respond to a person in crisis. Under these criteria, CARE can’t respond to a call about someone living in permanent supportive housing or staying in a shelter, or someone whose behavior stems from public drug use. They can’t respond to a person in their car or who has wandered into a business, or someone who lives in a tent that’s near other tents. Barden
Many of the terms in the list are subjective, leaving it up to officers to decide whether a person is being “confrontational” or if their behavior is “extreme.” (The example given in the contract, of someone who takes their clothes off while “in crisis,” is a good reason not to let SPD decide which calls require police—people who remove their clothes in public are often using drugs that make them hot, which doesn’t on its own mean someone needs to be involuntarily committed).
The contract still has to be lawyered and approved by the city council before it can go into effect. Historically, dissent on police contracts is rare, since rejecting a contract would force the city back into negotiations—a process that, with the exception of this year’s speedy approval, typically takes years.
Those new salary figures don’t include overtime, paid at time and a half, which accounted for about 500,000 police hours in 2025. In a budget paper, the city council’s central staff noted that SPD is proposing to include less than 500,000 hours in the budget for the second year in a row; last year’s initial budget funded 489,000 hours, but the council had to amend that during the year to add 11,000 hours at a cost of $1.2 million.
The salaries also don’t include recruiting bonuses that range from $7,500 for new recruits to $50,000 for fully trained officers transferring from other departments (including Police Chief Shon Barnes, who accepted this “lateral” bonus on top of his $360,000 salary earlier this year.)
The retroactive contract the city approved last year did not include any meaningful new accountability measures, such as progress toward implementing a 2017 accountability ordinance that called for major changes in the way officers are investigated and disciplined for misconduct. At the time, supporters of the retroactive contract generally agreed that it was important to make sure officers got paid as soon as possible for the years they worked under an expired contract, and that significant new accountability measures would be part of the 2024-2027 agreement.
Because the new spending on officer salaries is retroactive to 2024, meaning that police officers will get back pay for 2024 and 2025 to bring their pay for those years up to the amounts in the new contract. Although the city sets aside reserves to pay for negotiated increases to officer pay, these increased costs become an ongoing part of the city’s budget, adding to projected deficits in the hundreds of millions of dollars starting in 2027.
As of Thursday, though, Tietjen was still in charge of the precinct, with no clear timeline for replacing him. An SPD spokesperson responded to a list of questions from PubliCola by saying, that “no movement has been made of yet. I do not have a timeline for completion at this time.”