Category: Mayor Harrell

City Council, Elections, homelessness, Mayor Harrell

This Week on PubliCola: October 4, 2025
The mayoral candidates participated in a televised debate on Friday night; I covered it live on Bluesky..

A shadow councilmember, more turmoil at the homelessness authority, and so, so much election news

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, September 29

Black-Led Group Responds to Mayor’s Claim They “Darkened” His Skin; Real Estate-Backed Harrell PAC Tops $1 Million; Police Chief Disparages PubliCola

Packed Morning Fizz to start the week: Common Power, the Black-led group Mayor Bruce Harrell accused of “darkening” his skin in an email invite to a pro-Katie Wilson debate watch party, responded to the incendiary allegation. A pro-Harrell PAC has raised more than $1 million, mostly from tech and real-estate interests. And Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes took some time during a city council meeting to let everyone know he doesn’t read PubliCola and won’t answer councilmembers’ questions if they’re phrased in a way that mentions us.

Tuesday, September 30

Former Councilmember Moore Edited Legislation, Wrote Interview Questions for Her Potential Successors, After Leaving

Former city councilmember Cathy Moore quit the council after just 18 months, but she continued to work as a shadow council member, editing legislation and ghostwriting questions for current council member Maritza Rivera, after her departure in July.

Seattle Nice: Harrell’s Election-Year Budget, King County’s RealPage Ban, and Mayor Pete’s Endorsement

On this week’s podcast, we talked about Mayor Bruce Harrell’s short-term election-year budget, which piles on tens of millions of dollars in new spending for his priorities while funding many important (and politically popular) programs with one-time funding, plunging the budget into deficits just in time for the next mayor to take office. Also, King County bans rent-fixing software and Pete Buttigieg says vote for Harrell.

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Wednesday, October 1

Homelessness Agency Director Gets Sternly Worded Letter and “Executive Coach” After Investigation Into Racial Bias Complaints

After an investigation into several complaints alleging that King County Regional Homelessness Authority CEO Kelly Kinnison fostered a toxic work environment and favored white job applicants, the agency’s board, made up of elected officials from around the region, gave Kinnison a slap on the wrist, with just one board member arguing for a more serious response.

Thursday, October 2

Harrell’s “Emergency” Legislation on Covenants that Limit Grocery Store Sizes Won’t Address Seattle’s Food Deserts

Harrell proposed a new law that would ban grocery stores that are closing down from restricting the size of future grocery stores when they sell their land, saying the proposal would help address “food deserts.” The city offered two examples where this has happened; both are currently grocery stores, and neither is in a food desert.

Friday, October 3

Post Office Delays Could Result in Uncounted Ballots; Harrell’s Budget Increases Graffiti Spending 36 Percent

A new US Post Office policy could delay postmarking on mailed-in ballots, invalidating votes cast just before, or on, election day; although most Washington residents drop their ballots off at ballot boxes, elections officials are advising mail voters to send their ballots well before November 4. Also, the mayor’s proposed budget expands the War on Graffiti.

Elections, Mayor Harrell

Post Office Delays Could Result in Uncounted Ballots; Harrell’s Budget Increases Graffiti Spending 36 Percent
Image via Kingcounty.gov

1. Mail processing delays could result in more invalidated mail-in ballots this year, and elections officials are advising voters to vote as early as possible or drop off their ballots at a ballot box in order to have their ballots counted.

“Given some of the operational and logistical priorities that have ben set by the postal service, we really can’t guarantee that ballots sent by mail” on or immediately before election day “will be postmarked by that November 4 timeline, due to how they are processing their mail,” SOS spokesman Charlie Boisner said. Among other issues, the post office has been relying more heavily on regional processing center, rather than processing mail locally, Boisner said.

Earlier this year, USPS announced a policy update stating that it does not guarantee that mail will be postmarked on the day it’s received, potentially invalidating ballots that are mailed on election day, November 4, but postmarked later.

The (Spokane) Spokesman-Review first reported on the potential impacts to Washington’s vote-by-mail system last week.

A spokeswoman for King County Elections, Halei Watkins, said the elections office has always encouraged people to vote by the Friday before election day, and is “not necessarily planning to do a big push” for the November election “since our long-term messaging should continue to serve our voters well.”

“Many counties have relied on a message of ‘check for the last pickup time on the mailbox if you’re mailing on Election Day’ but we’ve heard from too many voters over the years that mailed on Election Day or even the day before only to get a too-late postmark,” Watkins said.

According to Boisner, only about 33 percent of Washington state voters mail in their ballots; the rest use ballot drop boxes.

“We’re really fortunate in this state, where we get to experience an 18-day voting period and have developed the infrastructure over decades to have several convenient and easy ballot return options for voters to use,” Boisner said. “So while we still are confident in the services that the Post Office provides … we recommend taking full advantage of that full 18-day voting period and voting early

King County has  85 drop boxes around the county, including 30 in Seattle. Another option, Watkins said, is to “physically walk the ballot into the post office and ask for a postmark – don’t just drop it, but talk to someone at the counter and ask them to stamp it.”

2. Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed 2026 budget uses a lot of one-time funding, mostly from a business and occupation tax increase that still has  to be approved by voters, to pay for needs that will probably be ongoing, like legal aid for immigrants and food assistance for low-income people who stand to lose federal benefits. According to a Harrell spokesperson, the budget keeps this spending one-time in order “to allow the city to determine where the greatest impacts have been and where other funders may fill gaps in the federal funding” in the future.

Harrell may not be sure whether immigrants will need legal aid (which gets $300,000 in his budget proposal) in the future. But he is certain that the city needs to keep pouring more money into the war on graffiti, which his budget describes as “a priority of the One Seattle initiative” and “a key factor in improving Seattle livability.”

Harrell’s budget increases funding for his “One Seattle Graffiti” plan by $1.6 million this year, for a total of $6.1 million—a 36 percent increase from 2025. Most of that money will be spent hiring six new permanent staffers to address graffiti, including a graffiti prevention specialist in the arts department who works to ” lead and enhance the beautification efforts of graffiti art, connect with the graffiti society, and educate, mentor and guide youth to use their time and energy in constructive ways.”

Harrell’s official accounting of the graffiti budget doesn’t include the “in-house” cost of diverting lawyers in the Law Department from working on other types of misdemeanor cases to focus on pursuing taggers. The budget also propses adding $4.1 million to expand the Downtown Activation Team, whose duties include graffiti abatement, and extending one-time funds for cleanup, including graffiti removal, in the Chinatown-International District.

 

 

Mayor Harrell

Harrell’s “Emergency” Legislation on Covenants that Limit Grocery Store Sizes Won’t Address Seattle’s Food Deserts
This new apartment building in Greenwood, anchored by a Trader Joe’s, is one of two sites the mayor used as a example of restrictive covenants that may contribute to food deserts. The other example, an abandoned Albertson’s in Haller Lake, is now a Sprouts.

By Erica C. Barnett

Yesterday—fresh off a campaign debate at which he asserted that “Trump will walk all over” his opponent, Katie Wilson—Mayor Bruce Harrell announced legislation to ban restrictive, anti-competitive covenants that, he said, are contributing to the lack of pharmacies and grocery stores in certain parts of the city.

“When a company closes a grocery store or pharmacy, they can add a restrictive covenant into a property’s deed or lease that blocks a new grocery or pharmacy from locating at the same place,” Harrell said in a statement announcing the new legislation. “They do this to block competitors, and these actions harm neighborhoods and contribute to grocery and pharmacy deserts.”

Seattle, like other cities, has a growing number of food and pharmacy “deserts” due to a series of consolidations and closures by grocery and pharmacy chains. Rite Aid, which bought Bartell Drugs, has closed at least 40 stores in Washington over the past few months, including every Bartell store. Kroger, which owns Fred Meyer, recently announced plans to close dozens of stores across the country, including several in the Seattle area.

In his announcement, Harrell noted the existence of “at least two covenants restricting … the square footage of any future grocery store at that location for as long as 50 years.”

Curious, we asked for these two examples. Both are currently North Seattle grocery stores.

The first, a Sprouts store that opened in 2020 in North Seattle’s Haller Lake neighborhood, filled a space that had been vacant since the Albertson’s supermarket that had been there closed in 2018. While the covenant on the property, located at N 130th St. and Aurora Ave N, does restrict any grocery to less than 28,000 square feet for 20 years, the rest of the once-vacant space has now been filled by a HomeGoods store—not my personal idea of a highest and best use, but in keeping with the strip-mall built environment of this area just south of Shoreline.

Grocery stores in the immediate vicinity of the Sprouts include an Amazon Fresh, an Asian Family Market, a US ChefStore retail-wholesaler, and several smaller grocers specializing in Ethiopian, Latin American, and Eastern European foods. There’s also a Safeway and a Town and Country Market a couple miles north in Shoreline, a straight shot up Aurora Ave. N. That’s still too far to qualify as convenient, but the area now has one more grocery option than it did a couple years ago, when the old Albertson’s was just a vacant building.

The second covenant Harrell cited in his announcement is also now a grocery store—Trader Joe’s, at the corner of N 87th St. and Greenwood Ave. N, in the heart of the Greenwood neighborhood. The TJ’s, which replaced a single-story, car-oriented Safeway, anchors a new mixed-use development with nearly 300 new apartments. The company did have to comply with a covenant restricting its size to 20,000 square feet, but that’s actually is on the generous side for Trader Joe’s. And fortunately for those who want a big-supermarket experience, there’s a large Fred Meyer store just four blocks away.

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A spokesman for HSD told PubliCola that Trader Joe’s and Sprouts don’t accept benefits under WIC (the Women, Infants, and Children Nutrition Program), which helps pregnant people and new parents buy healthy foods, because they don’t meet WIC’s minimum stocking requirements. That’s a real issue, but it’s related to company policy, not store size. Many large supermarkets in Seattle don’t accept WIC benefits, and some very small convenience stores do; changing WIC policies (for instance, by requiring participation or making it easier for stores to qualify and stay in compliance) is a federal issue, not the purview of the city.

Harrell’s proposal, which Council President Sara Nelson has said she’ll sponsor, won’t hurt anything—and maybe, at some future date, it will even stop a grocery store that’s closing from adding a restrictive covenant in a neighborhood where groceries are actually in short supply. But the legislation, and the flurry of stories that accompanied it, does create the illusory apperaance that the city is taking meaningful action on food deserts, which are primarily in southeast and southwest Seattle, not north of the Ship Canal.

The problem in these areas isn’t that smaller grocery stores are replacing big ones, but that there aren’t enough places to get groceries or fill prescriptions, period. (On Rainier Ave. S. alone, two Rite Aids and a Bartell have closed in recent years and have not been replaced.) Bringing grocery stores and pharmacies back to the parts of town profit-seeking corporations have abandoned won’t be as simple as telling them they can’t restrict the size of future stores when they close.

As a side note, an actual proposed new grocery store in Wedgwood has been mired in the city’s design review process for months. The local design review board finally allowed the project to go forward, subject to future conditions, this week, but not before hours of discussion over whether to make the developer move a proposed child care center, whether to require an on-site restaurant to be open specific hours, and whether to allow “pictures of produce” in store windows —along with, as always, debates over aesthetic details like what type brick the developer can use. Which just goes to show: Even when a company wants to open a grocery store in Seattle, the Seattle Process is often stacked against it.

 

Elections, housing, King County, Mayor Harrell, podcasts, Police

Seattle Nice: Harrell’s Election-Year Budget, King County’s RealPage Ban, and Mayor Pete’s Endorsement

 

By Erica C. Barnett

On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we discussed Mayor Bruce Harrell’s election-year budget proposal, a one-year plan for 2026 that increases spending by more than $50 million, including “one-time” programs that will almost certainly require ongoing funds. Harrell’s budget also adds $26 million to hire new police officers, on top of the Seattle Police Department’s existing budget; public safety, including police and fire, now makes up more than half the city’s discretionary budget.

The one-time spending in Harrell’s budget includes temporary funding for programs that are likely to lose federal funding under the Trump Administration, as well as assistance for immigrants being targeted by the federal government. These needs are likely to accelerate, rather than diminish, over the next several years.

Sandeep and I actually agreed that the city should be doing more to address future budget deficits (Harrell’s budget, not counting the one-time funds, assumes a deficit that will grow from $140 million in 2027 to $374 million in 2029). Where we departed ways was on the question of whether the city should be “”goring some oxes” in the budget by telling some human services organizations they’re “not going to get money because we’re not seeing results. … I think there would be a human cry coming from the progressive side saying, this is austerity budget[ing]. ”

While it’s definitely true that slashing the city’s budget for human services would anger progressives, I argued that the call for cuts seems to always focus on programs designed to help people directly with needs like food, housing, and other basic needs, rather than departments like SPD, whose funding only goes up every year. (Police are always a sacred cow, never a gored ox). This year, public safety departments will consume more than half the city’s discretionary budget, with SPD accounting for half that amount, at $486 million.

Perhaps the city could reduce some of this year’s expansion plans for SPD, I suggested, by taking a peek into the extremely opaque police budget and finding some money there; personally, I’d stop the CCTV surveillance program, which Harrell added to the budget as a new ongoing obligation last year, and look for other places where money is sitting unused or being spent ineffectively.

We also talked about the King County Council’s recent vote to ban the use of rent-pricing software like RealPage. David noted that bans on rent-fixing software are similar to “trust-busting,” in which the federal government cracked down on mergers, price-fixing, and other anti-competitive practices. Landlords use algorithmic pricing tools to charge the highest rent possible, a rate that can vary day by day—much like Ticketmaster, Expedia, and Uber use “dynamic” pricing to determine the price of tickets, flights, hotels, and rides.

Finally, we all issued our verdict on former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg’s endorsement of Harrell. Our assessment: A big “whatever.”

City Council, Elections, Mayor Harrell, Police, Uncategorized

Black-Led Group Responds to Mayor’s Claim They “Darkened” His Skin; Real Estate-Backed Harrell PAC Tops $1 Million; Police Chief Disparages PubliCola

1. On Friday, Mayor Bruce Harrell accused his opponent, Katie Wilson, of “darkening” his photo in a social media post, blaming her for “another chapter in the troubling history of manipulating skin color to dehumanize candidates of color” like himself. The image Harrell circulated, an Instagram post by the Black-led progressive nonprofit Common Power, made his skin looked unnaturally orange.

In a statement, Harrell campaign manager Marta Johnson said, “We are asking the Wilson Campaign and Common Power to immediately retract the manipulated image and apologize for the clear intent to darken Bruce’s skin tone. There is no excuse to alter the tone of a candidate’s skin, especially given the troubling history of racist intent behind these types of manipulations.”

Harrell made the accusation again during a debate on Saturday at the Royal Room in Southeast Seattle, saying she had used the “common tactic—to darken my image in a regular picture, to make me look ominous, okay?”

The practice of darkening Black and brown people’s skin tone in photographs has a long and ignominious history based in colorism and the racist idea that darker-skinned people are more threatening than those with lighter skin. The most famous example comes from Time magazine, which dramatically darkened OJ Simpson’s skin color on its cover in 1994.

Beyond the screen shot, Harrell presented no evidence for his claims.

On Sunday, Common Power director Charles Douglas responded to Harrell’s accusation that his group had darkened Harrell’s skin to make him look “ominous”: “The claim that we ‘darkened’ Mayor Harrell’s photo is both offensive and untrue. As a Black man leading an organization primarily run by people of color, I know firsthand the harm caused when racial tropes are weaponized in politics.”

“To suggest that Common Power engaged in such tactics is a sensationalist smear that reeks of desperation from a mayor who has repeatedly contributed to inequality and hurt the very communities he now claims to represent.” On Sunday, Common Power and the 36th District Democrats swapped out the photo of Halloween Harrell for a less orange version.

The source for the image appears to have been a story by the (UK) Independent about the 2021 mayor’s race. The photo appears to have been taken in low light at this debate, creating the unnaturally orange cast.

Smartphone photos taken by several different people in similar conditions at Saturday’s low-light debate at the Royal Room made both Harrell and Wilson look orange, with Harrell’s black hair coming through as grayish in the photos. For example, a reader contributed this photo of Harrell checking in on the Huskies game during the debate; my own, unedited iPhone photos, taken from the front row, turned Harrell an even more extreme orange color and tinted Wilson orange as well.

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2. As I reported on Bluesky last week (seriously, follow me there for the latest breaking news, short news items, and live coverage of everything from mayoral debates to the council’s budget deliberations), the  business-backed political action committee supporting Mayor Bruce Harrell, Bruce Harrell for Seattle’s Future, has raised more than a million to defeat Harrell’s challenger, Katie Wilson. Most of that money, $554,000, has come in since the beginning of September—revealing a rush to fill the pro-Harrell campaign’s coffers after the mayor’s dispiriting 41 percent showing in the August primary.

The biggest donations to the PAC, which is separate from Harrell’s official campaign, come from real estate advocacy groups, development and property management companies and their current or retired CEOs, and land-use attorneys who work for real-estate interests. Overall, real-estate interests contributed at least $592,000 of the $1,080,500 the PAC has collected so far. Tech companies and their leaders, including retired tech company founders as well as current executives like Microsoft CEO Brad Smith, gave another $257,000, at a minimum.

A majority of the 218 contributors to the pro-Harrell PAC listed their occupations as “retired” (59 total) or did not list their occupations (56 total), so the true percentage of both real estate interests and tech company executives is almost certainly higher than the ones I was able to confirm.

A pro-Wilson PAC, Katie Wilson for an Affordable Seattle, has raised about $85,000.

3. During a meeting about the city’s police department budget on Monday, Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes responded to a question from Council President Sara Nelson by saying he couldn’t answer it because Nelson cited PubliCola as her source.

“I came across an article in PubliCola … that mentioned [the city’s proposed contract with the south King County jail] SCORE, and I wanted some information on this,” Nelson said. “I think that it mentioned that we are no longer depending on that contract. Is that the case?” 

In response, Barnes told Nelson he would not answer her question, forcing her to reframe her factual question about SCORE. “I’ll be clear. I do not read PubliCola, so I won’t respond to that,” Barnes said. After Barnes answered the rest of Nelson’s questions, but not the one about SCORE,  budget director Dan Eder had to jump in and answer in the affirmative. 

Barnes’ dismissive comment about PubliCola was the first time I can recall, in this publication’s 16-year history, that a department director has used a public meeting to disparage us directly. SPD’s communications department has reportedly stopped including stories from PubliCola in the department’s daily news clippings email, and in a recent social media post, Barnes said he wouldn’t be “swayed by opinions, criticism, lies, or the stories that others may fabricate.” He added, cryptically, “This is my leadership journey and you won’t make me quit! The battle is not mine.. It’s the Lords!”

PubliCola will, of course, continue to apply a critical lens to SPD and other city departments in our coverage, as we have since 2009.

 

Elections, homelessness, Mayor Harrell

Digging into Harrell’s Campaign “They Aren’t From Here” Homelessness Talking Point

By Erica C. Barnett

On the campaign trail and in his slickly produced Seattle Channel budget video, Mayor Bruce Harrell has been touting a new statistic: “Most of the most of the people that are homeless in Seattle did not become unhoused in Seattle,” he said at a recent debate. He’s made a similar claim at other campaign forums and events.

“About 70% of people experiencing homelessness on Seattle streets became homeless outside of our city, and even with Seattle providing over six providing over 60% of the region’s shelter beds and 85% of the region’s tiny homes, we cannot do this alone,” Harrell claimed in his budget video, adding that it’s time for the rest of the region to step up and take care of their homeless residents. He also called on the King County Regional Homelessness Authority to identify land in areas with “fewer land constraints than we have here” where new shelters could open away from the city.

Leaving aside the fact that unhoused people congregate in cities, rather than far-flung suburbs, for obvious reasons—not only are there services here, there’s also community, opportunity, and access to transit—Harrell’s “they’re not from here” stat is extremely misleading, because it’s based entirely on responses to about 240 surveys with people who showed up at KCRHA’s survey tents over several days in January and February 2024.

A bit of background: Since 2022, the KCRHA has based its Point In Time Count of the region’s homeless population not on a physical count (which generally results in undercounting) but surveys with people who travel to fixed sites to provide demographic data and answer questions. This technique, known as respondent-driven sampling, was used to extrapolate some of the data in the full 2024 report, including an estimate (16,868) of the total number of sheltered and unsheltered homeless people across the county.

However, Harrell’s “about 70 percent” number (actually 69 percent) isn’t based on that sampling method; it’s based on raw data that represents less than a third of about 800 surveys across all parts of King County. In Seattle, the KCRHA interviewed around 240 people.

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This is important, because statistics based on small, self-selected samples of people aren’t generally considered reliable guides to demographic and population-level trends; that’s why KCRHA used statistical sampling for all its top-level data, rather than just extrapolating directly from a few hundred surveys.

It’s also to important to know that Harrell’s new talking point completely ignores the 43 percent of people who said they were last stably housed outside King County, which is one reason the “last housed in Seattle” and “last housed in King County” sample sizes are so small. If the city and county based their “fair share” of homelessness spending on where people were housed most recently, it would make sense for both Seattle and King County to refuse to fund services for nearly half their homeless residents, a heartless policy neither would be likely to adopt.

During a “deep dive” on the PIT numbers on Friday, KCRHA data staffers confirmed that researchers intended for the raw survey information to be taken “at face value,” not used to “make any further inferences” about the homeless population as a whole. The staffers also noted that KCRHA didn’t ask how long it had been since people had stable housing; given that the number of chronically homeless people increased in the 2024 count, people could have been talking about housing they had years in the past, which makes the question of which city or region they “belong” to murkier.

Like previous point-in-time surveys, the 2024 PIT count suggests not just that people are mobile—relocating around the region for various reasons, including local laws designed to keep them moving—but that “last stably housed” statistics aren’t a a good way of deciding whether people are worth spending local dollars on—even ignoring the obvious anti-humanitarian implications of making policy this way.