Only losers think this view is cool, apparently. Lully, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Erica C. Barnett
Unlike the Seattle City Council, we sped through several local topics on Seattle Nice this week, discussing the Seattle Transit Measure that passed a key council committee yesterday, along with a proposal that would upend Mayor Katie Wilson’s plan to start funding universal school lunches next year using a local levy that pays for education.
During our discussion of the transit tax, Sandeep argued that there needs to be a point when Seattle stops routinely raising taxes, particularly regressive sales taxes (the transit measure renewal would impose a 0.3 percent sales tax, up from the current 0.15 percent). I agree, especially about sales taxes—if it’s gonna get challenged anyway, the legislature should just pass a true progressive income tax—but I also buy the argument that affordable, accessible transit saves low-income riders more money than the tax will cost.
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Worth noting: The incremental sales tax increase will cost the median Seattle household, with an income of $124,000 a year, an additional $29 a year. Although Bob Kettle and Maritza Rivera expressed concern for, as Rivera put it, “our low-income folks,” low-income Seattle residents will pay significantly less than that median burden—more like an extra buck a month. That isn’t to say the sales tax isn’t regressive (meaning it falls disproportionately on poor people, who spend more of their income on purchases), but it’s important to put the actual cost in perspective. If people are able to take fewer trips in their cars, or get rid of their cars entirely, thanks to better transit service, that dollar a month is well worth it.
We also talked about a local judge’s ruling that will allow people who visit the beach at Denny-Blaine Park, a historic LGBTQ-friendly nude beach, to taking their clothes off. The city still has to take unspecified actions to abate the “public nuisance” of “lewd” behavior, a term King County Superior Court Judge Samuel Chung used 35 times in his 14-page ruling.
1. My headline did not mean Wilson LITERALLY PURCHASES SEAT 23F every time she travels. I thought this was super obvious, but some people did not and they have very strong feelings about it.
2. Window seats are great, it is normal to want to look out, and a ton of y’all have very weird (passionate!) feelings about the type of people who do or do not prefer window seats and those who do or do not pull the shade down, blocking off the view. (Apparently people who like to look at clouds are babies.)
3. Presumably anyone who reads PubliCola already knows this, but to those admonishing me WHY ARE YOU COVERING THIS INSTEAD OF NEWS, I post news stories that are not about the mayor’s flying habits all week, every week, right here on this very wonky, very in-depth local news site (which you can support right here!)
Rob Saka holds up a button commemorating Shawn Yim, a Metro bus driver killed by a passenger in 2024.
By Erica C. Barnett
It took three hours and 37 minutes—45 minutes longer than the new film The Odyssey—but a city council committee finally approved Mayor Katie Wilson’s updated Seattle Transit Measure sales tax proposal mostly intact; the 0.3-percent sales tax measure is now headed to the full council and ultimately the November ballot. Approval, with a potential new amendment or two, is a foregone conclusion: The committee that approved the proposal includes all nine city council members.
The transit measure, formally known as the Seattle Transportation Benefit District, first passed in 2014; its purpose is to provide additional King County Metro service hours in Seattle, although it has since been amended to include additional spending priorities.
So why such a lengthy meeting? Mostly because council members proposed 30 amendments—23 more than the the last time the measure was in front of the city council, in 2020. Some of these amendments, which I covered in detail two weeks ago, were substantive. Bob Kettle’s proposal to cut the tax to 0.2 percent, later amended to 0.225, would have placed a measure before voters that kept transit service stable rather than expanding it, for instance.
Others were non-substantive directives to the city’s transportation department (SDOT) and King County Metro to study various concepts and performance measures, like the idea of replacing full-size buses with van-like shuttles on low-ridership routes.
The other reason the meeting was so long is that council members—particularly Rob Saka, the long-winded committee chair—insisted on making lengthy speeches before, during, and after almost every amendment, including many where the vote (pro or con) was a foregone conclusion.
I posted live updates throughout the meeting on Bluesky, where you’ll sense my growing frustration with the council’s windbaggy posturing. The rhetoric reached an apex during a discussion about Saka’s amendment to use funding from the transit tax to pay for additional security officers and transit cops.
Supporters, including Saka and Bob Kettle, suggested additional officers might have somehow saved the life of Shawn Yim, the Metro driver who was killed in December 2025 after leaving his bus to pursue a man who had attacked him with pepper spray.
Dionne Foster, one of two votes (along with Alexis Mercedes Rinck) against Saka’s proposal, pointed out that about 10 percent of transit measure funding already goes to transit security, and noted that the city’s 2024 Transportation Levy (thanks largely to a similar push from Saka) included about $9 million in transit security funding that the city hasn’t even figured out how to use yet.
Saka said it’s obvious that Metro needs to hire more transit security, citing data that shows more people are reporting incidents on buses. (This could also be because more people are riding buses). In one such incident, a man broke out several bus windows, reportedly with a machete—a wide, thin blade commonly used in Central America. Saka fixated on this apparently exotic weapon, pronouncing the word with an exaggerated foreign accent—”a mah-chet-EEE! A mah-chet-EEE!”—and emphasizing his point by asking, “Is this a banana republic?”
Despite the lengthy, mostly one-sided debate, Saka’s amendment had plenty of support. It identifies transit security officers, behavioral health specialists, and transit cops as one of the uses for the transit funding measure. Twenty-eight minutes into that discussion, Dan Strauss used a parliamentary move to stop Saka mid-sentence, mercifully “calling the question” on the amendment, which passed 7-2. Here’s that moment:
Few of the remaining substantive changes to Wilson’s proposal moved forward.
As mentioned, Kettle’s amendment to reduce the size of the levy failed, with only Maritza Rivera joining Kettle in voting yes. Rivera, who often brings up her working-class origins in the Bronx, said she didn’t want anyone to suggest that she didn’t support transit. “I have so much support for the transit system, to include that for the almost first 30 years of my life, I exclusively used public transit,” Rivera said. Noting that sales taxes have the greatest negative impact on lower-income people, she continued, “We should not be judged by, sometimes, the decisions that we have to grapple with. It’s not just, do you support it or do do you not. It’s, we do, and there are other considerations.”
Another proposal from Saka, which passed as part of a consent package, directs SDOT, “in partnership with” Metro, to produce annual reports on a long list of data, including on-time performance and reliability; fare recovery rates along with a report on how Metro’s fare recovery compares to at least 20 comparable transit systems; fare compliance actions by Metro; and “On-time performance across service hours and routes served,” including year-over-year comparison reports.
As I mentioned at the outset, one reason this council had so many amendments this year is that they seem not to trust Metro to spend Seattle’s money wisely. Ten of the council’s 30 proposed amendments include requests for reports, which require Metro’s “participation.”
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The city can’t actually require Metro to do anything, which is why I described these amendments yesterday as a purely performative form of “accountability.” Metro may choose to dedicate staff time and funding to running down all the numbers and data the Seattle City Council is asking for with all these amendments (on Monday, Rivera said, she plans to introduce an amendment requiring reports on ridership across all routes serving all elementary, middle, and high schools across the city), but they are also free to ignore the council’s requests.
The council also spent considerable time yesterday debating how much of the transit measure should go toward capital projects like sidewalks and curb cuts, rather than transit service hours. A Saka amendment, which passed 5-4, directs SDOT to deliver a report to the council on any transit measure funding that goes unspent each year, and expresses the council’s “intent to reappropriate these funds” for capital projects.
Proponents for more capital spending argued that Metro wasn’t able to use all its funding for transit hours in the most recent levy and ended up using that money on capital projects anyway. Opponents, including Rinck, pointed out that the reason Metro didn’t use as many bus hours during the last levy is that there was a global pandemic that reduced ridership to virtually zero.
The bus system is still recovering from that pandemic, but there’s no particular reason to believe ridership won’t continue to rebound over the life of the next transit measure. A staffer attempted to explain this— “I think it’s always useful to remember that the last measure came right at the start of the COVID pandemic, we found ourselves with additional [transit measure] resources piling up, and so there was a decision made by previous councils and the executive to divert those resources to do more capital projects”—but Rivera cut off his explanation, saying, “Because they’re needed. I mean, that’s what I’m going to take away from that.”
A proposal from Rinck to reduce capital spending from $5 million to $2 million a year, predictably, failed, but a separate amendment from Strauss guarantees that at least 75 percent of the transit measure gets spent on transit service.
Saka’s proposal to reduce the term of the tax measure from 10 years to 7 (increased from Saka’s original 6.75-year proposal) failed 7-2, with only Saka and Rivera voting “yes.”
1. A city council committee voted to move legislation forward on Wednesday that will—if it passes full council next week—shut down one avenue of appeal commonly used to slow down zoning changes that allow more housing in Seattle. The bill, sponsored by land use chair Eddie Lin, would eliminate appeals to the city’s hearing examiner over zoning legislation and changes to the city’s comprehensive plan, which is currently delayed by environmental appeals that began at the hearing examiner’s office.
Hearing-examiner appeals can delay legislation by months or years even if they are unsuccessful, as the vast majority are; the council spends most of the fall focusing on the city budget, so a delay of a few months can mean legislation won’t be heard until the following year.
Lin’s bill wouldn’t eliminate the right to appeal specific projects, and it would still leave two (arguably more relevant) avenues for appeal: Once legislation is finalized and adopted, people can appeal to the state Growth Management Hearings Board or sue in King County Superior Court. Those two avenues don’t stop legislation in its tracks the way “pre-legislative” appeals to the hearing examiner do.
Dan Strauss and Joy Hollingsworth abstained from voting, saying they still had questions about the proposal, leaving Lin, Dionne Foster, and Alexis Mercedes Rinck to vote it through.
Before the vote, opponents raised familiar objections, along with a novel one. The familiar: By eliminating land use appeals to the hearing examiner, the council was “muzzling the voices of the citizens who elected you to serve us” and ignoring the plight of salmon, orcas and birds. The novel: If the council passes the legislation, no one will have the right to appeal the siting of any data center in Seattle in the future.
Councilmember Dionne Foster addressed both objections. “From my perspective, cities are an incredibly important element to how we combat climate change—growing in a way that is responsible, growing in a way where we take into account that so much of our pollution comes from transportation-related emissions,” Foster said. “If we fail to do our job and build substantial and affordable housing… you also have environmental impacts.”
Foster also confirmed with a staffer that because data centers are “projects,” people will still have a right to appeal any data center proposal to the hearing examiner, if and when the council lifts the current moratorium on data centers. “I I think that’s an incredibly important distinction to make,” she said.
2. Foster and Lin are on different sides of another issue—a proposal, co-sponsored by Foster and Council President Joy Hollingsworth, to delay funding for universal school meals from the spending plan for the Families, Education Preschool, and Promise levy and replace it with vouchers for qualifying low-income families to buy food on weekends and holidays during the school year.
Mayor Katie Wilson’s spending proposal would pay for free breakfast and lunch for every Seattle school student for the first two years of the levy, with the assumption that voters will uphold the statewide “millionaires tax” (a proposed tax on annual income above a million dollars) in a referendum challenge this November. If this happens, and there are no additional legal hiccups, the statewide tax would start paying for universal school meals in 2029.
Foster and Hollingsworth’s proposal would address uncertainty around the millionaires tax by taking universal free school meals off the table for the first year of the levy; if the high-earners’ income tax holds, it can pay for universal school lunches starting in 2029, and if it doesn’t, the city won’t be on the hook. Meanwhile, Foster said the alternative plan will provide groceries to low-income kids who need food the most.
“I genuinely think it’s a balanced amendment,” Foster told PubliCola earlier this week, noting that dozens of Seattle schools already have universal free lunches through the state Community Eligibility Provision, because more than 40 percent of their students qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches.
Opponents of the amendment have argued that means-testing programs for basic needs like food stigmatizes lower-income kids and may leave some students hungry, including those whose parents don’t sign up for income-based programs or who struggle to pay for food but aren’t poor enough to qualify.
Foster said she’s aware of those critiques. “The intent is not, ‘Here’s a hoop that we want you to jump through.’ The intent is to get more resources to the kids who are low-income or who have those financial gaps,” she said.
Lin said he doesn’t doubt Foster and Hollingsworth’s commitment to food access, but says he’s leaning strongly toward supporting universal school meals over income-based vouchers. “I know they have very valid concerns, and there’s concerns about what’s going to happen with the millionaires tax, but at this point I have a hard time imagining not supporting” Wilson’s proposal, Lin said. “I think there’s widespread support for universal free lunch, not just here but across the state.”
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!”
On Seattle Nice this week, Sandeep, David, and I discussed the mayor’s track record at six months in, starting with her approach to encampment sweeps, which have continued at a steady clip through the new mayor’s tenure.
Some Wilson never promised to “stop the sweeps”—before she ran for mayor, we had her on the podcast to talk about a piece she wrote for the Stranger titled “Where the Left Went Wrong on Homelessness”—but she did say she would moderate the aggressive sweeps of the Harrell administration. Wilson also set an aspirational goal for new shelters (specifically, tiny house village units): 500 by the World Cup, 1,000 by the end of this year.
So far, the Wilson administration has fallen far short of that goal, and sweeps have continued apace. (Wilson has also embraced Purpose Dignity Action’s approach to encampment resolution, which involves longer-term outreach and shelter or housing options that are actually tailored to people’s needs, but that sort of solution is limited by funding and political will).
In an interview published in twoparts on PubliCola last week, Wilson said it was important to keep “high-priority” areas like parks and sidewalks clear. Discussing her comments on the podcast, I said sounded an awful lot like the way her predecessor Bruce Harrell justified accelerating sweeps, saying it was important to keep parks and sidewalks open for their intended use.
Sandeep argued that Wilson is “charting a new path for the left” by reversing the “stop the sweeps” attitude that led the city to stop removing encampments during the pandemic. As I repeatedly interjected, the business-backed mayor at the time, Jenny Durkan, actually stopped sweeping encampments in response to guidance from the CDC during Trump’s first term, and the sweeps were quickly resumed once the immediate emergency was over. At no time was “the left” in control of the city’s sweeps team during those years.
Wilson has also faced headwinds that Harrell didn’t, including conflicts with the council—some self-inflicted, others a matter of ideological differences.
As we discussed, one of the items Wilson ticked off in her list of achievements—securing funding in the Families, Education, Preschool and Promise (FEPP) levy plan for universal school meals—was undermined the very day of our interview, when Council President Joy Hollingsworth and Councilmember proposed using the school-meal money to pay for vouchers for weekend and holiday lunches for low-income kids. The debate over whether children’s access to food at school should be means-tested or universal is still ongoing.
The upcoming budget will also be a test of both mayor-council relations and Wilson’s ability to get her priorities through the legislative process. We discussed the challenges the mayor will face while navigating likely spending cuts (Harrell, who was running for reelection when he drafted his final head-in-the-sand budget, knowingly left Wilson with a starting deficit of $140 million, which has risen to around $175 million), including council members who oppose any slowdown in SPD hiring.
During our interview, Wilson said she’s retaining Police Chief Shon Barnes. But I heard an unspoken “for now.” Sandeep, citing unnamed sources “in her orbit,” says I’m wrong. Who’s right? I’m sure we’ll talk about that more on a future episode!
A wide-ranging interview with the mayor, a proposal to replace universal free meals at school with means-tested vouchers, serious questions about public disclosure at the homelessness author, and more.
The regional light-rail agency has made significant changes to its wayfinding signage over the past few years, in what the agency calls an effort to make the signs easier to understand. But many of the new features, such as the removal of location information from station exits, are more confusing than clarifying.
Mayor Katie Wilson kept her word on surveillance cameras in the stadium district, cutting power to the cameras immediately after the World Cup games ended. But the future of police camera surveillance in Seattle still hangs in the balance as the city waits for a security audit by the NYU Policing Project to wrap up later this year.
After the city and county announced they were taking control of the region’s homeless service contracts, a process that will lead to layoffs at the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, KCRHA’s director Kelly Kinnison sent an all-staff email telling her employees not to believe what they read in the media, “especially outlets with low journalistic standards with a history of one-sided, agenda-driven, or incorrect reporting.”
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In part one of my interview with Mayor Wilson, she discussed the accomplishments she’s proudest of in her first six months; why the city is still sweeping encampments without providing shelter or services; the prognosis for her plan to add 1,000 new shelter beds in her first year, and much more.
A proposal from City Council President Joy Hollingsworth would undo one of the items Wilson ticked off on her list of signature achievements, by replacing a plan to use the city’s families and education levy to fund universal school meals with one that would provide vouchers for meals on weekends and holidays to low-income kids. Hollingsworth said her proposal was more fair because it would largely benefit low-income Black kids in places with more food insecurity, as opposed to helping all kids, including some whose parents could afford to pay for school lunches.
In part 2 of our interview, Mayor Wilson talked about some of the pushback she’s gotten on her affordability agenda. We also discussed the $175 million budget deficit the city is facing next year, and whether the police department will face cuts or if other city departments, as usual, will have to take bigger cuts to keep SPD’s budget growing.
Emails between KCRHA CEO Kinnison and agency staff suggest that Kinnison sought to exempt many of her emails from public disclosure through a number of methods, including “sensitivity labels” designed to ensure some emails wouldn’t show up in records request searches. Kinnison also appears to have put an IT manager, rather than a certified public disclosure officer, in charge of doing initial searches for records. Kinnison’s decisions raise questions about whether the agency has withheld records from disclosure that it is legally required to produce.
