Category: Mayor Wilson

Elections, homelessness, Mayor Wilson

Greater Seattle: Wilson’s Sweeps and Nelson’s Disappearing $30,000

By Josh Feit

108 < 112 < 151

In her press conference last Wednesday, Mayor Wilson debuted a new homelessness approach that focuses on identifying homeless people by name and then prioritizes getting them into shelter and formulating individualized plans. Prompted by successful examples, like a joint Downtown Seattle Association/Purpose Dignity Action encampment resolution in Pioneer Square during the World Cup this summer, social service workers will hit the streets neighborhood by neighborhood and connect people to services and shelter that work for them. Erica has a full report.

In addition to this empathetic effort, Wilson also went on record at a press briefing last week to say the city has not—counter to Councilmember Dan Strauss’ claims—backed off on sweeps, telling two different reporters that she has no plans to change the city’s encampment removal policy. “Our Unified Care Tam has continued doing encampment removals at basically the same rate that they were doing removals before I entered office,” Wilson said. 

Wilson’s buy-in on sweeps was not news to us!

The subject of sweeps and how they beget more sweeps was actually the very first item in last Monday’s installment of this column, which also noted that lefty mayor Wilson had done more sweeps in her first year so far than her predecessor, Mayor Harrell had done by the same point in his first year.  Wilson’s 151 > Harrell’s 112. This, despite Harrell’s tough-love, football-coach reputation that endeared him to the pro-sweeps establishment.

It turns out Wilson’s 151 sweeps tally so far also bests Harrell’s tally for the same period (January through September) throughout his entire term, including in 2025, when the number of sweeps under Harrell was 108. In 2024, there were 112 sweeps under Harrell during the same period. In 2023, there were 95. And as I noted, during his first year in 2022, there were 112 sweeps.

These persistent numbers reiterate the main point I was making all along: Sweeps obviously aren’t a solution to homelessness.

Good on Mayor Wilson for at least adding a proven, humanist policy to the otherwise vicious circular logic of sweeps.

$30,000 > $15,000

We could soon find out who contributed to SeaFor, the shadowy entity former Seattle city council president Sara Nelson set up to raise money for local candidates while concealing donor’s names in order to “protect the privacy of businesses and individuals” (as its own website boasted.) That’s the possible silver lining, anyway, after the lefty Progressive People Power PAC  filed two complaints about a $30,000 donation Nelson’s fund made to a local PAC, North Seattle Neighbors. NSN is supporting the establishment-backed choice in this fall’s council race, Julie Kang, against progressive favorite Nilu Jenks.  The complaints convinced NSN to return the mystery money, which accounted for about two-thirds of the money NSN had raised to date.

How would returning the check reveal whose money SeaFor collected and passed through to NSN? Well, NSN effectively already spent the $30,000 by sending out an initial round of anti-Jenks mailers. As a result, in order to pay off the debt they incurred on those mailers, which they originally planned to cover in part with Seafor’s check, they’ll now have to go out and raise more money themselves. And it’s likely NSN will simply turn to the same conservative donor base that Nelson did. The public should keep an eye on NSN’s upcoming disclosure reports to see who their donors are in the next few weeks. NSN has until election day to cover the mailers; they’ve only reported $15,000 raised to date beyond the elusive $30,000.

I say “silver lining,” because on balance, this is an ethically-challenged turn of events for Seattle. Nelson got exactly what she wanted without having to spend any of her PAC’s money. Sure, NSN was going to buy the mailers before they had the money in hand, as political campaigns often do, operating on the assumption that they’d be able to raise the money in time to pay the eventual bill. But the bad actor in all of this, Nelson, hasn’t faced any consequences for her cynical chicanery. Her group’s ephemeral check, which as of last week accounted for two-thirds of NSN’s money “raised” to date, was on NSN’s books—and now it’s not.

By Monday, NSN had reported raising another $15,000 or so from individual donors, including former deputy mayor Tim Burgess, Vulcan chief real estate officer Ada Healey, Fremont industrial landowner Suzie Burke, and real estate investor Judith Runstad. By that time, though, NSN had already sent out another mailer accusing Jenks of being “clueless” on crime.

And as we were going to press, Jenks’ campaign announced they’d filed a complaint with the state Public Disclosure Commission and the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission calling on NSN to halt any more mailings until the names of their donors are released. They note in their complaint that the NSN’s mailers themselves list Nelson’s group as their top donor.

Josh@PubliCola.com

homelessness, Mayor Wilson

Mayor’s Homelessness Proposal Would Bring Hundreds Out of Tents and Into Shelter That Works for Them

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson announced a new approach to unsheltered homelessness this week that builds on previous successful “encampment resolution” efforts that brought hundreds of unsheltered people into shelter that met their needs instead of simply sweeping them from place to place.

The new approach, announced at Community Solutions’ Built for Zero conference on Tuesday (and at a press conference at City Hall the following day) will change how the city does outreach to encampments and connects people to shelter. It depends—as Wilson emphasized several times during a press conference at City Hall on Wednesday—on the council fully funding her two-year, $37 million shelter plan, which would add around 960 new shelter beds, including a new, 90-unit RV “safe lot” where people living in RVs can park as they move into shelter and, eventually, housing.

Instead of brief outreach followed by sweeps, the city’s new approach is supposed to include targeted, neighborhood-based outreach that goes on for weeks, not days, and includes genuine connections to appropriate shelter and services, rather than a “referral” to whatever shelter happens to be available at the time of a sweep. Outreach workers will be assigned to specific neighborhoods (rather than council districts, which is how the current system works) and will work to create a “by-name list” of everyone in an area, getting to know people and their needs individually and working with them during and after they go to shelter and, ideally, from there into housing (more on that in a moment).

The shelter part is critical, proponents say, because outreach without shelter just moves people from place to place, traumatizing them repeatedly and angering housed residents who feel the city isn’t addressing visible homelessness.

“We’ve seen that neighborhood leaders, ambassadors, and outreach teams are great at identifying and case conferencing individuals who had high neighborhood impact, but we rarely, if ever, have access to the kind of shelter and services that we need to resolve their concerns out in the community,” REACH program Chloe Gale said Wednesday. “So we’re pleased that this will change through this plan.”

The city and state have used (or given lip service to using) a similar approach before, both during the pandemic and afterward, but the most successful recent effort came during last summer’s World Cup games, when Purpose Dignity Action, along with the Downtown Seattle Alliance and other groups, spent weeks doing outreach to a group of unsheltered people living in Pioneer Square and moved most of them into a newly opened high-acuity shelter in Interbay run by the nonprofit Everyone Deserves Housing. Of the group, 47 percent had been homeless for more than three years, and 77 percent had addiction or mental illness.

Speaking at the Built for Zero conference on Wednesday, Wilson said, “My predecessor’s administration moved extraordinary numbers of people from place to place, largely without meaningful offers of shelter or services. Those poor outcomes fostered cynicism, and I believe that we had to do better. And that’s why, when I stepped into the mayor’s office, my first priority was to build a lot more shelter fast, and not just any shelter, but shelter that can accommodate people who need intense support to get back from their feet.”

The citywide effort has support from the Downtown Seattle Association—a business group whose leader, Jon Scholes, also praised Wilson’s budget when she announced it in September. Echoing something homeless advocates have been saying in response to conservative complaints about homeless people for many yesrs, Scholes said Wednesday, “This idea that we have a lot of service resistant people in our city, I just think. is a myth, and it’s not a thing,” Scholes said. “ If f we offer the right service, if we understand who’s out there, if we don’t offer a one-size-fits-all, we can bring people inside instead of chasing them around the corner, down the block, or to the next park.” (As I was heading to the elevators, I passed by a bank of TV reporters shouting questions at Scholes, including one who asked whether would like to disavow that statement).

Wilson said she hoped the new approach would reduce the need for encampment sweeps, which she has continued to carry out at a similar or slightly higher rate than her predecessor Bruce Harrell. The vast majority of encampment removals are “obstruction” removals that require no prior notice or offers of shelter; if an encampment qualifies for outreach, the Unified Care Team, which conducts sweeps, will give 72 hours’ notice and offer whatever shelter beds are available to the people they’re displacing. This approach has not been generally successful at connecting people to shelter, services, or housing.

The biggest challenge facing of Wilson’s plan is the fact that permanent supportive housing development has fallen off a cliff and will likely lose federal funding beginning next year. Last month, a federal judge ruled that the US Department of Housing and Urban Development can move forward with a 2026 Notice of Funding Opportunity that prioritizes projects that require residents to get and stay sober, look for work, and move quickly to “self-sufficiency.” Permanent supportive housing is for people who can’t meet those requirements, including chronically homeless people with severe disabilities related to behavioral health conditions—exactly the group Wilson’s new shelter initiative is supposed to help.

Although Wilson said yesterday that the housing part of her plan will rely entirely on using “existing resources” more “efficiently,” the city does not have enough of this expensive, service-rich housing type to serve everyone who needs it. The bottleneck is there; if Wilson’s new plan gets people into shelter, the equally challenging stretch goal will be making sure they don’t just languish there.

City Council, homelessness, human services, Mayor Wilson

Council Budget Fizz: Rinck Wants to Fund Survivor Services, Saka Wants to Defund Restrooms, and Strauss Says the Mayor Is Weak on Homelessness
City Attorney Erika Evans speaks at a press conference about Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck’s budget proposal at City Hall on Wednesday.

1. Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck announced Wednesday that she’ll propose adding $8 million to this year’s city budget to restore services for domestic violence and sex trafficking survivors that the council funded on a one-time basis last year, and expand services and shelter for victims of gender-based violence that are losing federal funds due to the passage of HR1, Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”

The money, Rinck said at a press conference on Wednesday, would help fund legal services, flexible funding for needs like apartment deposits and childcare during court dates, support groups and counseling for survivors and their children, and prevention programs like consent education and bystander intervention.

“Gender-based violence is not inevitable. It is learned, which means it can be unlearned, and it also means it can be stopped before it starts,” Rinck said.

City Attorney Erika Evans said she started her term this year with a backlog of 1,700 domestic violence cases, which has resulted in some victims, like a woman she identified as “Sarah,” waiting years for her case to go to trial. “She said waiting two years made her feel like Seattle didn’t care about what happened to her,” Evans said. Councilmember Dionne Foster said she’ll propose a one-time add to next year’s budget that will help close that backlog; we’ve reached out to her for more details about that separate funding proposal.

HR1 cuts millions of dollars for survivor services and domestic violence prevention programs, impacting groups like the  King County Sexual Assault Resource Center (KCSARC). Meanwhile, changes and cuts to grants made through the US Department of Housing and Urban Development have left local survivor housing programs with less ability to provide shelter and housing to people fleeting abuse.

“The administration has proposed cutting the Office of Violence Against Women by 29 percent. It has moved to terminate millions of dollars in federal grants to hundreds of organizations. It has cut housing assistance,” Rinck said. “Every one of those cuts has an address, and too many of those addresses are right here in Seattle.”

Rinck didn’t offer specific details about her proposal on Wednesday, saying she’ll introduce a detailed budget amendment next week.

2. The city’s Office of Economic and Revenue Forecasts, whose October revenue forecast has recently provided the city council with more (projected) money to play with in its November budget, had sobering news on Friday: The new forecast projects just $7.8 million in additional revenues between 2026 and 2028 compared to previous forecasts. In reality, the true number will be $2.8 million in the negative, city economist Jan Duras told the Economic and Revenue Forecast Council, because the city intends to continue exempting health care providers from the JumpStart payroll tax.

The city also expects revenues to dip below previous forecasts in 2028.

What this means for the council’s budget deliberations is that for all their bluster about funding more police, more surveillance cameras, more Unified Care Team staffers, and more firefighters, they’ll be facing an even tougher budget reality this year. Funding everything council members have said they hope to add to the budget would cost tens of millions of dollars, which would require equivalent cuts to other parts of the budget. So far, no one on the council has said where they plan to cut (or what budget tricks they plan to use on the budget they received from the mayor’s office, which shows a positive balance through 2023) to pay for those additions.

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3. During one of several all-day council budget meetings this week, City Councilmember Rob Saka took several minutes to rail against Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to install 12 new restrooms, including two permanent Portland Loo-style restrooms at parks in Northeast and Southeast Seattle, using both general-fund and King County and Seattle parks levy revenues. Wilson’s proposal would also add 10 new Throne restrooms, like the ones installed in Pioneer Square earlier this year, across the city.

Overall, Wilson’s budget includes about $6.5 million, roughly half of that from the King County and Seattle parks levies, to pay for the new permanent and prefabricated restrooms, along with maintenance and renovations at existing parks restrooms, including at Judkins and Cal Anderson Parks.

Saka, who has previously complained that restrooms in his West Seattle district are poorly maintained and covered with graffiti, characterized the new toilets as a waste of money given the poor condition of the permanent restrooms in other Seattle parks. (His comments came during a discussion of the city’s parks and recreation budget; the restroom spending is spread across several budget areas).

“We’re a year plus away from an audit, a damning, scathing audit, that revealed can’t get our own house in order—quite literally, bath house in order!” Saka siad. “We can’t even solve the problem of maintaining properly our existing restroom inventory fleet. And how many new bathrooms are proposed for expansion under this? And yes, my council district is the worst off. It’s no secret, in terms of inability to properly maintain because of graffiti and vandalism our existing restroom fleet!. And now we want to expand, create new shiny names, and we can’t take care and look after the things that we have properly today.”

Saka’s opposition to new public restrooms represented a dramatic reversal of his position just one year ago, when he added $1 million in funding to then-mayor Bruce Harrell’s budget for new public restrooms in his district. Citing the exact same “scathing audit,” Saka argued last year that his district should be prioritized for new Portland Loo-style restrooms.

Adding these restrooms, Saka argued, would help “to harden the parks restrooms, to make it more tamper resistant, to make it more vandalism resistant, to make it more graffiti resistant.” Funding restrooms in his district, Saka said, was a way of respecting “the gravity and severity of the underlying problem at issue” in the audit.

Saka’s total reversal on the issue of public restrooms may seem perplexing, but two things have changed. First, this year’s proposed new restrooms are not in his district. And second, the mayor is Katie Wilson, a person many on the council, including Saka, seem determined to oppose even when it means they have to completely reverse positions.

4. For another example, look no further than Dan Strauss’ dark insinuations on Thursday about Wilson’s proposal to move the city’s huge (more than 100-member) encampment sweeps team out of her direct control and into the Human Services Department, which oversees homelessness programs and, until Harrell vastly expanded the city’s encampment removal apparatus, oversaw previous iterations of the team.

Logically, taking the UCT out of Wilson’s office is a way of depoliticizing it, and that’s how a staffer characterized the change. Council central staffer Ann Gorman said, “this was undertaken in order to protect the UCT across mayoral administrations, so that it continues” no matter who is in office. “To someone who is interested in the continuation of the UCT, that’ss good news that would seem to reflect the the achievement of efficiencies.”

Strauss said he took “a little bit of issue” with Gorman’s comments, calling the claim that moving the sweeps team back to HSD would insulate it politically “the largest pile of horse pucky I’ve ever seen occur in my life.” The city needs “executive leadership”—that is, direct control by the elected mayor—for the UCT to be effective, Strauss said.

The real reason Wilson wants to move the team, Strauss continued, is that she doesn’t want to deal with homelessness—quite a thing to claim about a mayor whose budget includes $37 million for new shelter, far more than any of her predecessor’s budgets.

“I believe that that transfer happened because the mayor is likely uncomfortable addressing homelessness, because addressing homelessness requires both a lot of compassion and firm boundaries, and it can be very uncomfortable,” Strauss said. 

Strauss also assailed Wilson for using existing funds—$3.5 million—for an RV safe lot where people living in RVs could access services and shelter and move toward housing. Strauss wants to use that money on his plan to eventually ban RVs from the city, with a transitional period where people currently living in RVs would be required to register with the city and accept services and shelter offers. Strauss said he was “deeply disappointed in the lack of collaboration from the Wilson administration regarding this funding, and my door remains open.” 

 

homelessness, King County, Mayor Wilson

Regional Homelessness Authority’s Overspending Grows to $17 Million, According to New Report
KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison

By Erica C. Barnett

The city of Seattle and King County will be on the hook for at least $16.7 million in previously unreported costs accrued by the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, city and county officials said Thursday afternoon.

The additional shortfall, a combination of excessive administrative spending and growing debt, was revealed in a new report from Turning Point, the consultant hired to reconcile the agency’s finances after a damning forensic audit found widespread, longstanding accounting irregularities earlier this year.

In a joint statement, King County Executive Girmay Zahilay and Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson said, “The $17 million unrecoverable balance is unacceptable, and the County and City are working together to address repayment while protecting critical services for people experiencing homelessness.”

Elected officials who previously called for the KCRHA to shut down immediately, including King County Councilmembers Reagan Dunn and Rod Dembowski and Seattle Councilmember Maritza Rivera, issued statements calling the latest news “shocking” (Rivera) and “outrageous” (Dembowski) and describing the KCRHA as a “failed experiment” in a regional approach to homelessness (Dunn).

Tough talk aside, city and county taxpayers are now on the hook for the KCRHA’s overspending; according to deputy county budget director Aaron Rubardt, paying back the KCRHA’s unpaid debts will likely take several years.

According to Turning Point’s report, as of July 31, the KCRHA had a net negative balance of more than $31 million, which was offset by money it was owed by the city and county, resulting in an overall negative balance of $16.7 million as of that date. Here’s the high-level breakdown:

For context, KCRHA has long blamed its persistent negative balance on its reimbursement-based model, in which the agency pays homeless service providers for their annual contracts and gets reimbursement from its funders, chiefly the city and county, after the fact.

However, if this was the only reason for the negative balance, the homelessness agency’s bank account should end up with a positive or zero balance once all those reimbursements come in; instead, the KCRHA’s negative balance grew larger and larger over time. “This was an argument for needing large cash advances to avoid those negative cash balances,” City Budget Office director Aly Pennucci said on Thursday. “However, even after those cash advances were approved, the cash position remained negative, raising further concerns.”

The overall net deficit of $16.7 million is what will remain after every entity that owes KCRHA money has paid everything they owe.

The bulk of the shortfall resulted from KCRHA overspending the amount of administrative funding they had coming in. That excessive spending included lavish outlays on high-priced temporary staffing firms like Robert Half, which charges hefty recruitment fees to do work that would more typically be done by regular full-time employees. It also includes the salaries of KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison and recently promoted Chief Operating Officer William Towey, who make a combined total above $600,000, according to the union that represents many KCRHA employees.

The largest portion of the KCRHA’s overspending resulted from errors in calculating how much money the agency would receive as the result of grants to homeless service providers.

Every dollar of funding the KCRHA receives and sends to service providers in the form of grants comes with an “administrative allowance”—a percentage of the contract amount that enables the KCRHA to administer the contracts. But that allowance is based on how much of the money actually gets spent—if a provider can’t use all the money it receives in a certain year, the amount the KCRHA receives to administer that money also decreases.

What the KCRHA did, according to the report, was assume that 100 percent of every grant it administered would be spent each year, and spent the administrative allowance that would apply if that was true. This resulted, over time, in an administrative “overspend,” based on contractor underspending of $259 million, of $15.7 million by July 2026. On top of that, the KCRHA overspent what it was bringing in by another $3.3 million on top of the amount that resulted from that miscalculation. And the KCRHA owed an outstanding $4.4 million in interest on its debt to King County, which serves as the KCRHA’s bank.

“The general idea is because they didn’t have the [necessary] financial practices in place, it was difficult for KCRHA to see this happening,” King County’s Rubardt said. “We have asked for a followup on the timing of all the accumulation, but my sense is that’s been occurring over the entire time the KCRHA has been in existence.”

Pennucci said the total amount of outstanding administrative debt will probably “come down” by the end of the year, as grantees spend more money. Interest payments, meanwhile, will keep accruing on the KCRHA’s negative bank balance, resulting in a larger interest balance by the end of the year.

The KCRHA’s governing board, made up of elected officials from across the region, will discuss the findings of the report at its meeting on November 6. When I asked whether anyone will be held accountable for the agency’s expensive errors, Wilson’s director of city governance and human services, Mark Ellerbrook, said it will be up to the governing board “to work on and wrestle with” that question.

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homelessness, Mayor Wilson, Police, Taxes, Transportation

This Week On PubliCola: Police Hiring Bonuses Don’t Work, Scooter Usage is Up, Community Court is Back, and More

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, October 5

Greater Seattle: Bike and Scooter Share Could Soon Lap 2025’s Record-Setting Numbers

Josh is hyped about the latest stats on Lime scooter and electric bike rentals in Seattle, which show more people are using micromobility options than ever before, even when you discount the spike in usage around the World Cup. In less encouraging news, the number of people in downtown Seattle hasn’t bounced back from the pandemic as fast as other cities—something he says alley activations, and loosening the city’s puritanical rules against drinkign al fresco, could help.

Tuesday, October 6

As Council Considers Reinstating Police Hiring Bonuses, an Unreleased Draft Report Finding They Don’t Work Is Timely Again

When a council-mandated report found that hiring bonuses don’t have a meaningful impact on whether people apply for jobs at the Seattle Police Department (and recommended ditching them), then-mayor Bruce Harrell’s team just changed the report, whittling it down to a few bullet points and recommending that the city keep them. The City Council is currently talking about reinstating the bonuses, which SPD ended in September.

Wednesday, October 7

Former SPD Chief Lands on His Feet

Former Seattle police chief Shon Barnes, who received a departure package worth well over $700,000 when he resigned under pressure earlier this year, has landed a new job at a company that sells surveillance and other technology to law enforcement agencies. No word on whether Barnes, who spent much of his time as police chief out of town at networking conferences or at his family home in Chicago, will be working remotely.

Sound Transit Removes Candidate’s Photo from Station

For two days, riders who passed through Sound Transit’s new Pinehurst station in North Seattle saw a giant photo of District 5 City Council candidate Julie Kang and emitcomplained, Sound Transit took the image down—a move Kang calls unfair.

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More Moves at Wilson’s Office

After months without a press secretary,, Mayor Katie Wilson has hired former Stranger writer and longtime progressive comms person Ansel Herz for the role (a fact I teased on Bluesky a couple months ago, before it was official) Alex Gallo-Brown, who’s been Wilson’s director of community engagement, is moving into a senior advisor role where he will no longer be managing a staff, but will be advising on external relations and digital strategy; Wilson fired her digital strategist in August.

Thursday, October 8

Revived Community Court Will be Paired With Punitive New “High-Priority” Track for Repeat Offenders

City Attorney Erika Evans is reviving the old community court her predecessor, Ann Davison, shut down in 2023, but with new “accountability” requirements and stricter eligibility—for instance, anyone who commits additional misdemeanors within 90 days will get bounced back to mainstream court for prosecution. Services will now be mandatory and failing to comply with service commitments will also be disqualifying.

At the same, Evans announced a new “high-priority offenses” program, in which she’ll seek longer jail sentences for people who commit more than a threshold number of misdemeanors over a certain period—three in 90 days, for example, or two if the second offense is stealing from a store that has issued a trespass order. Public defenders called the punitive elements of Evans’ plan counterproductive because, they argue, they’ll exclude people who would most benefit from services like treatment.

Also this week: On Seattle Nice, we spoke with Transportation Choices Coalition Director Kirk Hovenkotter about Proposition 1, which would double a sales tax that pays for extra bus service in Seattle. If you live in Seattle, it’s on your ballot this month.

On the same show, we talked briefly about a column by Danny Westneat in the Seattle Times, in which he complained about the King County Council writing what he called a “blank check” to. pay for vaguely defined youth and family services. I had only read the column that morning, and said it would be better if there was some kind of spending plan attached to the proposal. Silly me, responding to a Westneat column without doing my own reporting! After a morning of phone calls (including with sponsor Jorge Barón, who said I was the only reporter who called him about his proposal) have a very different take, which I’ll share on a future episode. TL;DR, though: Westneat broadly misrepresented both the tax proposal and the audit of the county’s Best Starts for Kids program his criticisms were based on, while unfairly maligning an unrelated county program that has successfully kept people housed as a failure.

I also went on KUOW’s Week in Review this week, where host Bill Radke, commentator Joni Balter, KUOW’s Scott Greenstone and I talked about the shelter sales tax, whether Democrats plan to broaden the “millionaires’ tax” to apply to slightly less-rich people, whether Mayor Wilson is betraying her socialist roots, and much more.

Save the date: Seattle Nice is hosting a live debate for Seattle City Council District 5 between Julie Kang and Nilu Jenks. Join us at the National Nordic Museum on October 21 at 6 p.m. See you there!

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Elections, Mayor Wilson, Police

Former SPD Chief Lands on His Feet, Sound Transit Removes Candidate’s Photo from Station, More Moves at Wilson’s Office

1. As we reported on Bluesky Tuesday afternoon, former police chief Shon Barnes got a soft landing after Mayor Wilson asked him to resign, a belabored process that ended in Barnes getting a going-away gift worth almost $750,000. In his new gig will be heading up “public safety programs and strategy” for Mission Ready Technologies (or Mission RT), a Scottsdale, AZ-based company that appears to sell surveillance technology, computer-aided dispatch systems, AI-based 911 response software, and other tech tools to state and local police agencies.

In a long LinkedIn statement that three different LLM detectors assured me was 100% AI, Barnes said he’ll “focus on helping state and local public-safety agencies connect their operational needs with technology, strategy, and organizational readiness” in his new position. The details of the former chief’s new job—like what he’ll actually be doing on a daily basis—are pretty vague, but it sounds like they could involve a lot of travel to cities whose police departments are implementing new technology. Neither Barnes nor Mission RT’s press release said whether Barnes will be renting in Arizona or working remotely from his home outside Chicago.

2. Julie Kang, a candidate for Seattle City Council Position 5, got prominent placement at the grand opening of Sound Transit’s new Pinehurst station on September 30, courtesy of a large photo featuring Kang, her husband, and their daughter placed prominently at the station, The photo was one of a series featuring community groups that had supported the station just east of I-5 at NE 130th Street, and it identified Kang’s family as representatives of the Haller Lake Community Club. Kang posted it on her Instagram page.

 

Sound Transit did the photo shoot on June 30; Kang entered the race late last year.

According to Sound Transit spokeswoman Rachelle Cunningham, Kang was “nominated, selected and photographed as a representative of the Haller Lake Community Club” and her photo was “randomly selected as one of the photographs to be featured at the station.”

At least one community member had a problem with the transit agency giving a candidate such prominent billing just weeks before the election, and complained to Sound Transit shortly after the station opened. The agency acted fast. By Friday night, two days after it went up, the photo of Kang and her family was gone.

Asked about the swift removal of the image, Cunningham said, “we heard concerns from community members about the photos and the perception of agency funds being used to support a campaign. Sound Transit does not endorse political candidates, and the photos were removed Friday.”

Sound Transit emailed Kang late Friday afternoon to let her know the photo was coming down . In response, Kang wrote, “When our family agreed to participate in the community photo shoot, we did so because representation matters to us. As an Asian American family, we wanted our community to be visible in the public spaces and transportation system that belong to all of us. At the time, I had no expectation that I would someday be a candidate for Seattle City Council.”

“I respect Sound Transit’s responsibility to remain neutral in elections. At the same time, I hope you will reconsider whether removing a longstanding community image simply because one of the people pictured later became a candidate is the appropriate way to maintain that neutrality.”

Kang told PubliCola she was referring to her general support for the light rail station, not the photo shoot in June.

3. Ansel Herz, the former Stranger reporter who’s spent the last decade or so doing comms for progressive candidates and causes, will take over Mayor Katie Wilson’s press office as press secretary and digital strategy director next Wednesday. Wilson has had a string of temporary press secretaries since Sage Wilson left in June, including, most recently, Alex Hudson, the former Transportation Choices Coalition director, who’ll return to her previous role as a transportation policy advisor.

Alex Gallo-Brown, a longtime who was glued to her side on the campaign, will no longer be Wilson’s director of community relations; instead, he’ll step into the newly created position of  “senior advisor on public engagement.” Matt McIntosh, another Wilson campaign staffer who’s currently a community relations manager, will be Wilson’s interim community relations director. The change means that Gallo-Brown will no longer be directly managing staff, but will have more direct control, along with Herz, over Wilson’s online communications.

As we reported, Wilson fired her digital communications manager Amy Piñon earlier this year, hiring a temporary contractor to do social media in her stead.

Wilson’s communications office has had extremely high turnover since she took office, the result of both firings (Wilson axed her original comms director, Seferiana Day, in June) and voluntary departures, like former press secretary Wilson’s. The turmoil reflects, among other issues, an ongoing tension between campaign loyalists who came into office wanting to blow up the old, institutional ways of doing things and government veterans with experience working in those institutions.

Wilson recently hired Tara Lee, a longtime comms professional who’s worked for former Gov. Jay Inslee as well as the Washington Budget and Policy Center, the nerdy left-wing think tank, as communications director.