The mayor talks about her shelter plan, encampment sweeps, why news vouchers aren’t happening this year, and more.
By Erica C. Barnett
PubliCola sat down this week with Mayor Katie Wilson to talk about how her agenda is going at six months in, what she’s learned from the setbacks and conflicts she’s encountered (like early, still-reverberating missteps with the city council), and how she plans to deal with this year’s $175 million budget deficit. Will the city’s shelter expansion continue? Will Wilson propose cutting the police budget? Can the schism between the mayor and the city council be repaired? We discussed all of that and much more on Tuesday morning in Wilson’s office at City Hall.
This is Part 1 of our interview; look for Part 2 later today.
PubliCola (ECB): I want to start with a big-picture question: You’re a little over six months in. What’s the most surprising challenge that you’ve encountered so far?
Mayor Katie Wilson (KW): I hate questions like this!
ECB: I’m not giving you a ‘Rate yourself from A to F’ question! It’s your first time in elected office—I just want to know what has surprised you so far.
KW: I’m not sure how surprising this is, but one thing that I’ve been reflecting on is just the tension—and I think that this is a tension which is maybe unique to people coming in with an ambitious progressive left agenda— the tension between wanting to get things done fast, wanting to get results, wanting to cut through the Seattle process, and people and organizations and communities that are like, ‘wait, wait, ask me.’ It’s not surprising in retrospect, but I just didn’t have a lot of time to think about it coming in. It was more like, ‘Okay, we’re here, what can we do?’
ECB: There was some tension with the city council, obviously, early on, like after things kind of hit a wall on your shelter legislation. Have you recalibrated at all?
KW: Well, I wouldn’t say we hit a wall on the shelter stuff at all.
ECB: I’m talking specifically about the conflict with the council—
KW: I mean, we’ve moved on since then, and we got our three pieces of legislation through, right?
ECB: I’m curious if there’s anything that you learned from that experience.
KW: Well, I certainly think that coming in, setting up a new mayoral administration, you’re bringing in 40-some people, assembling a new office, figuring out how to organize yourselves, and so we definitely were slow to staff and figure out our council relations. And so that that was a learning process. We definitely made some missteps, and in retrospect, should have put a lot more focus on that at the outset—[figuring out] what we needed to do in order to build a really good relationship with each council office.
Some of the shelter thing, I think, was that tension between ‘we need this stuff to happen, so let’s just send it down,’ the urgency of trying to start standing up shelter, and not having an entirely thorough understanding—or more, just not having had time to establish our council relations strategy in a really good way. So I think, in retrospect, we did that poorly, and certainly we’re learning from that and trying to try and do better.
“It’s a tension within myself, as someone who’s coming in from an organizing background, wanting to shake things up and get things done. But also, in order to do that in a way that works and that’s sustainable, you actually need to know how the city works. You need to not burn things down in a bad way.”
ECB: Without getting too philosophical, do you think that some of the growing pains—I can feel you getting ready to disagree with the term ‘growing pains,’ but I think there have been growing pains—
KW: I’m not gonna argue that term. I mean, look, I’ve never been the mayor before, and I think anyone coming into this job, even having been an elected official, even having had previous experience as the executive director of an organization, there’s gonna be a steep learning curve. There’s nothing like being the mayor of a major city—just the pace and the number of things coming at you.
ECB: There seems to be a tension between people in your administration who are government veterans, who are like, ‘This is how the process works, and this is what you do, and this is how you compromise in advance so you can get things through’—and then people who worked on your campaign, who are saying ‘We were elected to do these things, we need to do them fast. How is that tension playing out, and is it causing problems?
KW: There is a tension, and I think it’s a productive tension and an inevitable tension. And it’s a tension within myself, as someone who’s coming in from an organizing background, wanting to shake things up and get things done. But also, in order to do that in a way that works and that’s sustainable, you actually need to know how the city works. You need to not burn things down in a bad way. And so, yeah, that tension exists within my office, and I think that’s healthy, and that’s I think why ultimately we’re going to be successful.
And I’m really proud of the things that we’ve accomplished in these first six months. We’ve had a lot of headwinds. We came in with ICE scares, and we had to stand up our federal response work really fast. We moved $4 million out to the community. We had to immediately figure out the library levy and transmit that to council. Our [Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise levy] implementation got free school meals, which was not easy. (After our interview on Tuesday, City Council President Joy Hollingsworth introduced an amendment to the that would delay universal free meals and use the funding instead on vouchers for kids from low-income families to get meals on weekends and holidays during the school year).
We got the Graham Street Station to affordability on Sound Transit. We’ve transmitted a Seattle Transit Measure package that will expand transit at a time when many jurisdictions in the country are pulling back on public transit, when gas is many dollars a gallon. We’re painting bus lanes on Denny. We got our rapid shelter expansion work off the ground. We’ve opened with one big new shelter, which has been key to the success of the Pioneer Square efforts that [Purpose Dignity Action] and others have led [during the World Cup]. And we have a number of additional shelters that are going to be opening up in over the course of the rest of this year. Obviously, we’ve had to deal with the KCRHA and everything going on there. We launched Taller, Denser, Faster. We transmitted [rental] junk fee legislation, and you know what, we’re the most successful World Cup host city in America.
We are learning a lot, and obviously, there are things that, in hindsight, we could have done better, and are going to do better moving forward, but I’m incredibly proud of what we’re accomplishing.
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ECB: News vouchers [a funding mechanism for local news] are being pushed to next year. Can you tell me why?
KW: I am very, very excited to advance these vouchers, or News Notes. [But] we are looking ahead to a very challenging budget cycle. And we needed more time and attention to work on the policy than we thought we were going to be able to carve out in the next few months, because a lot of energy right now is going into figuring out the budget.
We need to figure out how to fund it, and there’s obviously a few different ways we can do that. We could send a small levy to the ballot, or we could try to find funding within the existing city budget. We couldn’t have gotten the policy ready in time to put a measure on the ballot this November, even if we wanted to, and it also seems like a hard narrative when you’re in the middle of cutting lots of things. So we’ll get there, but it just wasn’t in the cards [this year].
“Politically, to be like ‘We are stopping all sweeps until we have the shelter—the backlash that that would cause both among constituents and among most of my council colleagues would be such that I think we would lose the ability to actually do our shelter work.”
ECB: You’ve taken some heat in the press for not hitting your goal of 500 new shelter beds by the World Cup. What have some of the unanticipated roadblocks been? I know that you said that goal is aspirational, but we’re at 165 or so in July.
KW: I don’t want to project exactly where we’re going to be by the end of this year, but we’re chugging away. I think there’s a question of, does it make sense to have a big number goal that then you don’t meet, and then people are like, ‘Oh, you failed.’ But we’ve already opened many times the net shelter that the last administration opened in four years.
Putting that goal out there did really give us something to focus toward, and I can see the immense amount of work that has gone on with our interdepartmental team, and all the city departments—they got together and they just hashed it out, like, ‘how do we make this happen faster, how do we make this happen more efficiently?’ And then we were able to rally not just our service provider partners, but philanthropic contributions, and so that part of it has been such a success.
We know what works. People who are really hard to serve, we can get them inside with support, and that new shelter that we opened was instrumental to the success of [the PDA’s Pioneer Square] project, and so now we’re thinking about, how do we replicate this.
ECB: The Unified Care Team, by all accounts, is doing at least as many encampment sweeps with no notice as they ever have—maybe more. I don’t think you came in wanting to be the sweeps mayor, but in some ways you are. What would you say to supporters who are disappointed that you’re still sweeping people without offering shelter and services?
KW: I think we’re trying to strike a balance here, where the situation you’re trying to get to is one where we have shelter, we have housing, where we’re able to resolve encampments by getting people into that shelter and housing, and that is what opening up these new shelters is going to allow us to do at a much larger scale. And it is important—and I said this during the campaign—that we are maintaining high-priority public spaces for their intended uses, whether that’s a park or a sidewalk.
So there’s that answer, and then there’s also a political answer of doing this in a way that builds political will to do more. Leaving aside the question of the impacts of an encampment removal or sweep versus leaving an encampment there, leaving aside the question of how that affects people’s lives—politically, to be like ‘We are stopping all sweeps until we have the shelter, the backlash that that would cause both among constituents and among most of my council colleagues would be such that I think we would lose the ability to actually do our shelter work.
We are actively working on improving the operations of the UCT in order to get better outcomes for people living in encampments. Months ago, I asked the UCT to come up with recommendations from their experience of how they could operate differently to get better outcomes, and we’re working through those recommendations now. So we are planning to make some changes to how the UCT operates, especially as we start opening up new shelter, to try to shift that model.
ECB: I know a lot of decisions about KCRHA are in the future, so here’s a short term question about something you do have control over over. Should Kelly Kennison continue to be the leader of KCRHA??
KW: I think stability is really important. We’ve taken the steps outlined in the press conference to embed outside financial consultants, and we’re really looking at what do we need to do to make the strongest possible application for [federal Continuum of Care funds, and I think continuity of leadership is really important.
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