Category: Mayor Wilson

Mayor Wilson, Media, Police

News Vouchers Delayed Until 2027, Stranger’s Editor Out, Ex-Cop Fired for Punching Handcuffed Woman Involved in Fracas at Pride

1. Mayor Katie Wilson, who had been planning to release her “News Notes” proposal to help fund independent media on or around Independence Day, has pushed the potential ballot measure back a year, according to her office. We’ve followed up with more questions about the reason for the delay and will update this post if we hear back.

News vouchers would work much like democracy vouchers, Seattle’s public campaign finance program. If approved, the program would use a small property tax to provide funding to local news outlets that meet certain criteria, such as providing core content for free, adhering to basic standards such as factual accuracy, and having independent ownership. (Many of the details are TBD).

As they already do with democracy vouchers, Seattle residents could spend news vouchers on the outlets they want to support—providing a boost to the local news ecosystem and allowing more established independent outlets to expand their coverage.

Wilson’s team had reportedly been vetting the outlines of her plan with editorial board members at the Seattle Times, which had already started ramping up its opposition campaign—in the form of opinion pieces by their “save print newspapers” columnist Brier Dudley—as far back as 2023. The pro-news voucher camp was reportedly working to convince the Times editorial board to stay neutral on the measure, rather than opposing it.

2. The Stranger’s editor-in-chief, Hannah Murphy Winter, is out. Stranger publisher Tracey Cataldo told PubliCola Murphy Winter will “stay on to help see the team through the transition” but would not provide further details, such as whether the Stranger has hired a replacement. Murphy Winter took over the paper after it was bought by Noisy Creek, a media company founded by former state legislator and Grist CEO Brady Walkinshaw.

Stranger staff found out about the firing this morning. Internally, there appears to have been some shock at the timing, just before a print endorsement issue that will reportedly include at least one controversial pick. The optics of firing the paper’s top editor right as endorsements hit are also less than ideal.

Murphy Winter, previously the chief research editor at Rolling Stone, did not respond to text messages seeking comment. Walkingshaw also did not respond to messages. (Editor’s note: This post originally said Walkinshaw lives out of state; he contacted us to let us know that he lives in Seattle and owns a house in LA. We regret the error.)

3. A video from last weekend’s Pride events, taken by Turning Point USA activist Jonathan Choe., appears to show former Seattle police officer Adley Shepherd immobilizing a person’s wheelchair by standing on it as they yell “get off my chair!” Shepherd, ID’d in the video as a security guard protecting a street preacher who’s heard yelling something about the “kingdom of Satan,” then appears to shove or punch the person in the wheelchair, prompting a brief fracas in which Shepherd appears to trip and fall to the ground, where another person restrains him. When a third person briefly jumps on Shepherd, people in the crowd, including Choe, can be heard yelling “Stop!”

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If Shepherd’s name isn’t immediately familiar, here’s a refresher: He’s the former cop who was fired in 2016 for punching a woman who was handcuffed in the back of his police car after she kicked him. The woman, who suffered a fractured eye socket, had not committed any obvious crime before Shepherd handcuffed her and shoved her into his car. An arbitrator overturned the firing in a case that led a federal judge to rule SPD out of compliance with a longstanding consent decree, but the firing was upheld after a protracted court battle.

Shepherd was in the news again in 2020 after he attended the January 6 rally alongside with several SPD officers.

Choe and TPUSA, unsurprisingly, have characterized the incident as a vicious attack by activists on a Christian minister and his security guard, but even his own heavily edited video does not show anything of the sort.

Shepherd now runs a security firm, Edrei Solutions. When we called him, Shepherd said PubliCola had treated him unfairly in the past and hung up on us.

Drugs, homelessness, Mayor Wilson, neighborhoods, public safety

KCRHA Spins the News that Homelessness Is Growing
Nearly half of all homeless families are unsheltered, according to the latest count.

We discuss the latest estimate of the region’s homeless population and the latest “new approach” to drug use and crime in Little Saigon on this week’s Seattle Nice.

By Erica C. Barnett

After releasing a high-level summary of the latest “point in time count” report on King County’s homeless population last week, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority tried to put a positive spin on the results at a meeting of the agency’s governing board last week. The new numbers showed a 9 percent increase in overall homelessness—from an estimated 16,868 to 18,365—between 2024 and 2026.

On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we dug into all these numbers—and the KCRHA’s take on what they mean.

At a presentation to the governing board on Friday, the KCRHA’s associate director for strategy, William Towey, said “one of the key takeaways from the Point In Time count is that the system is doing amazing work. It’s moving a lot of people through, we’re housing a lot of people, a lot of people are coming in and successfully exiting, but the inflow just continues to grow.”

Every year, according to KCRHA, about 17,000 people stop using homeless services (a widely used proxy for no longer being homeless), while about 18,000 enter or re-enter the system. As long as the rate of people entering the system exceeds the number of people exiting, overall homelessness will continue to grow.

The KCRHA has focused heavily on the fact that although both sheltered and unsheltered homelessness continue to increase, the rate of increase in overall homelessness has declined—from 21 percent between 2022 and 2024 to 9 percent over the last two years. At the governing board meeting, Towey argued that the “declination in the rate of increase” represented a specific number of people who would be homeless but are not. “That translates to over 2,500 individuals or households who aren’t homeless because of that decrease in the rate of increase,” Towey said.

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson pointed to a troubling aspect of the numbers Towey didn’t mention, but which we highlighted in our coverage of the count last week—unsheltered homelessness, which is both more visible and more dangerous for people living outdoors than living in shelter, has spiked by 21 percent even as sheltered homelessness has grown more slowly. That’s more than 2,000 additional people living unsheltered compared to the count released in 2024.

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“I’m very, very concerned by the really significant increase in the rate of unsheltered homelessness,” Wilson said. “We were already a national outlier in having over 50 percent of our homeless population unsheltered, and now when it’s up to over two thirds, that’s pretty shocking.”

Towey attributed the increase to the closure of 689 shelter beds, including an unspecified number of family shelter beds, which Towey called the “primary driver” of the shelter losses. Family homelessness, according to the report, has declined slightly over the past two years, but the percentage of  families who are unsheltered increased almost 40 percent, to nearly half of all households with minor children. In the 2024 count, about 35 percent of people living in family households were unsheltered.

Also on this week’s show, we discussed the latest  “new approach” to address the crowded drug and stolen goods market around 12th and Jackson in Little Saigon, which consists of expanding the hours service providers are on site, directing existing LEAD diversion services to the area, and, as ever, flooding the zone with cops, who are supposed to send some people to LEAD instead of arresting them.

Personally, I’m tired of hearing elected officials (and certain podcast cohosts) argue that hot spot policing, plus a nominal new investment in services, will improve conditions this time despite the many previous times the same basic approach has failed. Sandeep thinks there’s something truly new this time. I’m far less optimistic.

City Council, homelessness, King County, Mayor Wilson, Police

This Week on PubliCola: June 27, 2026

Discouraging homelessness numbers, SPD hiring debate, King County budget shenanigans, and much more.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, June 22

Allegation: Civil Rights Office Director, Staff Went to Strip Club During City-Sponsored Civil Rights Trip

A recently concluded investigation into Seattle Office for Civil Rights director Derrick Wheeler-Smith, which found Wheeler-Smith subjected a subordinate to “unwelcome conduct of a sexually explicit nature,” details allegations that Wheeler-Smith and several other men went to a strip club in Alabama during an official City of Seattle-sponsored trip to civil rights history sites in the South, PubliCola exclusively reported.

Tuesday, June 23

Report: Homelessness in King County Continues to Grow, with 21 Percent Increase in Unsheltered Homelessness Since 2024

The latest biennial count of the region’s homeless population, which has been based since 2022 on interviews and statistical sampling rather than a physical count, found that homelessness overall increased 9 percent—a data point the King County Regional Homelessness Authority characterized as good news because it represents a slowed pace of increase—but that unsheltered homelessness increased 21 percent, largely because of the closure of some family shelters.

Wednesday, June 24

County’s Midyear Budget Sparks Controversy Over Harm Reduction, Human Service Contracts, and Lobbyists

Three King County budget-related items in this Morning Fizz:

• First, County Councilmember Rod Dembowski’s proposal to defund a successful harm reduction program that connects drug users to services by offering safer smoking supplies will not move forward. After PubliCola broke the story last week, Dembowski replaced the proposal with a request for information on the program.

• Second, Dembowski’s proposal to add more process to every grant or contract issued through the county’s Best Starts for Kids program—subject of a recent high-profile audit—got scaled back to a level the county’s Department of Community and Human Services said it can live with. New grants and contracts will still require a letter to the county council making a number of financial and other guarantees about each program.

• Finally, a majority of the county council voted to retain the county’s longtime federal lobbyist for another year after County Executive Girmay Zahilay put out a request for proposals and hired a new lobbyist. Councilmembers accused Zahilay of taking unilateral action, which his office says isn’t true; in fact, they say, a council representative has been present at every step of the hiring process. The council decision to hire two separate lobbyists will cost the county about $200,000 a year.

Thursday, June 25

Mayor Hires Temporary New Comms Team; Councilmembers Tell SPD: Keep Hiring, We’ll Pay for It!

Thursday’s Fizz featured an exclusive about Mayor Katie Wilson’s decision to hire political consultant, podcaster, and KVRU Radio co-owner Crystal Nicole Fincher as well as longtime SDOT spokesperson Dawn Schellenberg to help craft a new communications strategy and fill in while the mayor finds a permanent new communications director, respectively.

And several members of the city council, including Rob Saka and Bob Kettle, rejected the idea of slowing down Seattle Police Department hiring, as suggested by SPD budget staff, in order to above going above budget this year and in next year’s budget. Saka suggested that slowing the pace of hiring would be tantamount to defunding the police.

Friday, June 26 How Do We Get Transit Champions on Transit Boards?

In a fascinating guest editorial, nondriver movement leader Anna Zivarts explores what it would take to get actual transit riders on the Sound Transit board, looking at how other cities have tackled the problem of transit agencies whose decision makers don’t represent or understand the challenges faced by people who rely on transit every day.

Also this week: Check out the latest episode of Seattle Nice, where we discussed the dramatic increase in unsheltered homelessness and the latest plan to address drug use and criminal activity around 12th and Jackson.

 

City Council, Mayor Wilson, Police

Mayor Hires Temporary New Comms Team; Councilmembers Tell SPD: Keep Hiring, We’ll Pay for It!

1. Mayor Katie Wilson is hiring two new temporary communications staffers: Crystal Nicole Fincher—the political consultant, podcast host, and co-owner of KVRU community radio—will be Wilson’s strategic communications consultant, and Dawn Schellenberg, a longtime spokesperson for the Seattle Department of Transportation, will temporarily take over the communications director position. As we were first to report, Wilson’s original comms director, Seferiana Day, was asked to step down shortly after returning from months of medical leave earlier this month.

Schellenberg started on Wednesday and Fincher will start next month, according to an internal announcement from Wilson’s chief of staff Esther Handy. Fincher will step away from her other duties while working for the mayor, and both she and Schellenberg will be in their new roles through September, Handy wrote.

Fincher will reportedly be in charge of coming up with a new communications strategy for the mayor, who has garnered a fair amount of negative press over her surveillance camera policy, failure to stand up 500 shelter beds by the World Cup as hoped, and other decisions that many have perceived as strategic blunders or policy moves that don’t align with Wilson’s campaign promises.

Wilson is preparing to hire a permanent communications director. (A member of her communications staff reached out after this article was published to clarify that they are not interviewing yet, but seeking candidates). According to internal and external sources, Deputy Mayor Brian Surratt has communicated that the mayor’s office is looking for a Black man, specifically, to fill the position.

After this piece was published, the mayor’s office reached out to say that they are looking for a diverse candidate pool. In an all-staff email, chief of staff Esther Handy wrote that Wilson’s office “values having a diverse pool of candidates to draw from for our hiring processes,” that the office hopes “to attract candidates from a diverse range of backgrounds and perspectives, including leaders of color within the relevant industry, and that “we hope to draw from a diverse and inclusive applicant pool.”

It seems likely that more changes in the communications office are coming. As we reported, there’s tension between the mayor’s communications and policy shops, with each blaming the other for negative press around recent Wilson decisions, like her announcement that she’d be turning surveillance cameras at the stadiums in time for the World Cup.

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2. Several members of the city council say they’re putting their foots down: No matter how much more money the Seattle Police Department needs to hire the flood of new applicants that have poured in since the passage of a new police contractlast year, they aren’t going to support any hiring slowdown. “Now is not the time to withdraw our sustained investments to boost our officer staffing levels and boost our response times,” Councilmember Rob Saka said at a meeting of the council’s public safety committee on Tuesday, adding that the police budget is “sacrosanct.”

“It’s time to lean in, not tap out,” Saka said.

Given that the city will have to close a nearly $200 million budget shortfall, that could be a problem. Earlier this month, we reported that unless SPD slows down its hiring pace this year, it will go $1.7 million over its 2026 budget, with additional overruns next year if hiring continues at its current pace.

Council central staffer Greg Doss noted that SPD’s ballooning costs are “strictly related” to the salary increases the Seattle Police Officers Guild secured last year from former mayor Bruce Harrell and the city council, which guarantees fully trained new officers a salary of $126,000 a year. And Dan Eder, the former Harrell budget office director who was recently appointed budget director at SPD, said a hiring slowdown is, in fact, “on the table” if SPD can’t find other places in its budget to pay for all the new officers the department is hiring.

“We haven’t yet exhausted all possibilities” for funding the new officers, Eder said. “We’re looking at contacts and non-sworn expenditures. It is possible that if that is not enough savings, that we will not shrink the police force, but we will slow the growth of the police force  for the rest of the year. That’s just a recognition of the dire strait that the city budget finds itself in this year and for the next biennium of the budget. We just don’t feel that there is extra money.”

Saka, along with committee chair Bob Kettle, said slowing down police hiring would be tantamount to defunding the police.

Kettle said he had “indicated to SPD to continue the hiring, to maintain the momentum,” while Saka said the city “repealed the defund movement” via resolution last year. That resolution, which acknowledged people’s general “right” to “feel safe,” arguably had less substance than most nonbinding council resolutions. Among other things, it “formally reversed” the completely nonexistent “prior commitments” by the previous city council to defund and abolish the police.

Civil Rights, discrimination, Mayor Wilson

Allegation: Civil Rights Office Director, Staff Went to Strip Club During City-Sponsored Civil Rights Trip

By Erica C. Barnett

A recently concluded investigation into Seattle Office for Civil Rights director that Derrick Wheeler-Smith details allegations that Wheeler-Smith went to a strip club in Alabama during an official City of Seattle-sponsored trip to civil rights history sites in the South, along with other men who were on the trip, according to sources familiar with the incident.

A report on the investigation concluded that Wheeler-Smith subjected “a subordinate employee to unwelcome conduct of a sexually explicit nature during a work-related trip” but did not specify that the conduct that made the employee uncomfortable involved going to the strip club with his boss.

The report, for which PubliCola has filed a records request, also found it more likely than not that Wheeler-Smith made “repeated comments of a sexual nature” to employees.

Mayor Katie Wilson’s office has not responded to multiple requests for comment about the future of the office. Wheeler-Smith, along with his deputy, Fahima Mohamed, has been on administrative leave since March.

The January 2023 trip, organized by a group called the Empower Initiative, included visits to important sites related to the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, including the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, and the Alabama State Capitol. Staff from then-mayor Bruce Harrell’s office, SOCR, the city’s Office of Arts and Culture, and the diversion group Community Passageways, a city contractor, also reportedly went on the trip.

The Empower Initiative, run by consultant Ben McBride, offers these trips, or “learning labs,” as a “team building experience [that] translates the concept of belonging from inspiring theory to real-life practice,” according to the organization’s website.

On the final night of the trip, several of the men, including Wheeler-Smith, left their hotel in Birmingham and went to a  strip club to celebrate a staffer’s birthday, according to accounts of the incident.

Others who participated in the civil rights tour included city staffers who did not accompany the men to the strip club. It’s unclear how many of these staffers were aware of their colleagues’ nighttime jaunt.

Not only was the secretive all-male side quest arguably inappropriate for a city-sponsored trip, the Office for Civil Rights’ mission includes promoting gender equality and empowerment, a commitment staffers would later accuse Wheeler-Smith of flouting on numerous occasions.

As we reported earlier this year, employees accused Wheeler-Smith of making inappropriate sexual comments, belittling Black women, and dismissing staff concerns about the civil rights of LGBTQ+ people, Asian Americans, and Latinos targeted by ICE, among other marginalized groups.

A spokesperson for SOCR responded to PubliCola’s questions about the investigation and alleged strip club visit by saying, “I don’t have that information, and the Department is otherwise not allowed to comment on an open HR investigation.”

The head of the Empower Initiative, Ben McBride, recently wrote a Subatackpraising Wheeler-Smith; the post, titled “A Leadership Journey of Becoming” called the SOCR director “one of those rare leaders who understands that structural work and inner work belong together.”

The Empower Initiative was one of the partners for SOCR’s planned “Bridges of Belonging Community Storytelling Showcase,” along with We Deliver Care, Community Passageways, and Beautifulle LLC. Wheeler-Smith’s half-brother Davis founded Community Passageways and another diversion group that contracts with the city, Choose 180. He is also aco-founder of We Deliver Care, which is run by Wheeler-Smith’s wife Stephanie. Beautifulle was founded by Wheeler-Smith’s former boss at the religious nonprofit World Vision, Leonetta Elaiho. The Bridges of Belonging event was postponed indefinitely in March.

Editor’s note: This story originally mis-identified Davis’ current role with the three group he co-founded. We apologize for the error.

 

homelessness, King County, Mayor Wilson

Regional Homelessness Agency Says King County and Seattle Owe It $8 Million
KCRHA associate director William Towey at last week’s King County Council briefing

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle and King County owe the King County Regional Homelessness Authority around $8 million, KCRHA associate director William Towey told the County Council’s committee of the whole last week, referring to the $8 million in spending that, according to a forensic audit, “could not be reconciled” by auditors and “may have to be written off.” The $8 million made up the bulk of more $13 million the homelessness agency had either overspent or could not account for when Clark Nuber released its forensic audit in April.

“Basically, these are the funds that we should have billed to King County in the city of Seattle, and that we didn’t, and we are in the process, in phase one, of completing a cash accounting, which will help us identify what the amounts of those funds are and who they accrue to,” Towey said. A KCRHA spokesperson confirmed that the agency doesn’t know the exact amount they failed to bill for and how much they believe they are owed by the city and county, respectively.

Towey attended the council meeting without KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison, who was on a family vacation.

Committee vice-chair Claudia Balducci expressed incredulity that King County may be expected to pay KCRHA additional money, on top of its regular funding and whatever it will cost to untangle the agency’s finances and fix the most critical issues outlined in the audit.

Even if the city and county decide to take over control of the region’s homelessness contracts and shut down the agency, they could end up spending millions winding it down; already, the city and county have committed to funding a team of outside accountants, and KCRHA’s finance committee has recommended hiring seven new staff despite a hiring freeze.

“Did I hear you correctly to say that KCRHA believes that King County and Seattle owe the agency money, and if so, how much?” Balducci asked.

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“Yeah, you heard me correctly,” Towey responded. At some point between 2021 and mid-2025, the years the audit covered, “a situation occurred where we expended funds to providers and failed to bill either the city of Seattle or King County for those expenses,” Towey said.

It’s “not great,” Balducci responded, “that there was an $8 million that was unaccounted for, that now will have to come out of the backs of our taxpayers.”

A spokesperson for King County Executive Girmay Zahilay told PubliCola KCRHA has not provided a bill breaking down what the county “owes” the homelessness agency, but is supposed to complete an initial calculation of its outstanding accounts receivable by June 22.

“Failing to properly bill the city and county does not result in the city and county owing KCRHA $8M,” the spokesperson said. “Because the receivables have not yet been validated or tied to specific costs, it is too early to determine whether there is an existing County funding source or account available to pay any portion of the amount.”

Towey suggested that the $8 million that remains accounted for is as much the county and city’s responsibility as the KCRHA’s, because the two governments should have noticed that KCRHA wasn’t billing them and taken action to make them do so.

“Again, I tend toward being generous, but if I have a great relationship with a vendor, and I want them to come work on my business regularly, and they bill me every month, and I notice that they fail to bill me for some funding, I would probably try and correct that myself,” Towey said.  “Now, that is in no way meant to say that this is not our fault,” he added.

As he and Kinnison have done previously, Towey downplayed the audit findings, saying that since Kinnison was hired, the agency has addressed or is in the process of addressing most of the major issues Clark Nuber identified, such as poor financial management and potential misuse of “cash-equivalent” funds,  as credit cards and gift cards. “In the grand scheme of what this is about, these are relatively small dollar amounts,” he said. (Clark Nuber has strongly disputed the KCRHA’s positive spin on its findings, and urged the city, county, and KCRHA governing board to closely verify every claim from the agency, given its history of failing to follow through on commitments.)

Towey also suggested that the vast majority of the problems the auditors identified were long in the past, resulting largely from inept past leaders, early mistakes, and efforts to respond to homelessness quickly during the COVID pandemic. In “hindsight,” he said, people will look back and say, ‘”Gosh, that could have been done a bit more efficiently, but again the expenses are clearly to the right people for the right things.”

Balducci was taken aback by at the blithe tone of Towey’s presentation, which she called “completely at odds with where my constituents are,” Balducci said. “My constituents think that we are done with this organization. … As policymakers, we all own part of how we got here today. We made some decisions that in retrospect we probably should have done differently. But here we are, and I’m just afraid that this is a sinking ship, and regardless of all the work that’s going in, it feels like fiddling on the Titanic.”

Balducci was “shocked,” she added, that Kinnison didn’t make time to attend the meeting of “one of the organizations that’s going to decide the future” of the agency she leads. “That’s not a good look.”

Committee member Rod Dembowski, who was among the first councilmembers to call for dismantling the KCRHA, seemed more impressed by Towey’s presentation, noting that he had worked with Towey when he was head of Lake City Partners, a North Seattle homelessness agency.

“And so I would just say, William, I’m glad you’re over there at KCRHA, and I hope that your time there is short, and that we can get you over here at the county when that’s done,” Dembowski said.

In response to PubliCola’s questions about whether and how the city will pay the money KCRHA says it owes, a spokesperon responded, “The City, County and KCRHA are in conversation about how to resolve this and other on-going financial management issues at the agency, starting with embedding a financial firm this summer.”