Category: Morning Fizz

Morning Fizz

More Big Changes at City Departments, Jamie Tompkins Has a Podcast, Mike Solan Thinks He’s Cute

1. Mike Solan, a police officer and the outgoing president of the Seattle Police Officers Guild, insulted Community Assisted Response and Engagement Department Chief Amy Barden in an Instagram post on Thursday, calling her “clueless” and her team of first responders a group of “social workers that want to cosplay as first responders. They are not first responders.”

The CARE Team is a group of first responders who can be dispatched to 911 calls that don’t require police, including some mental health crisis calls. The SPOG contract adopted last year expanded the size of the team but placed new restrictions on their ability to respond to people in crisis, requiring them to back off and call police if any sign of drug use is present, if the person is inside a car or building, or if the person is “aggressive” or “confrontational.”

During a recent appearance on the Seattle Nice podcast, which I co-host,  arden expressed frustration at the new restrictions and the fact that police sergeants still serve as gatekeepers deciding whether 911 calls require a police or CARE response. Barden said she was “disappointed that it’s actually gotten worse since the contract,” with sergeants directing even more 911 crisis calls to police unnecessarily, leaving the CARE team unable to their jobs.

Solan, a guy who loves to Photoshop his head onto bulging superhero costumes, grabbed a photo of Barden he probably thinks is unflattering (but is actually cute), and professed outrage at her “attacks on sworn sergeants, SPOG members, and civilian community service officers (CSO),” who, Barden correctly observed, are responding to all kinds of calls for which they don’t have the same specialized training as CARE.

Solan will step down as SPOG president next year. He’s endorsed a mini-Mike.

2. Jamie Tompkins, the former chief of staff to fired former police chief Adrian Diaz, has a new gig: Like the rest of us, she’s now a podcaster! According to an Instagram post, the new show, “Respectfu11y” (or “Respectfu11y”? It’s a really confusing name) will feature the former Q13 anchor telling her own story for the first time. “She’s held the mic. She’s held the space. Now, she’s not holding back,” the promo copy reads. “Real. Raw. Rebellious.”

Tompkins was fired last year after investigators concluded she had lied about an affair with Diaz that violated SPD policies; investigators also concluded she had faked a handwriting sample in an effort to prove she did not write a love note found in Diaz’ car. She filed a tort claim against the city, seeking $3 million in damages for alleged gender discrimination, last year.

Her guests so far include a social media influencer and an actor-turned-“connection expert” who played Frankie Valli’s wife in “Jersey Boys.” They’re probably famous; PubliCola is not the target audience.

3. Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections Director Brooke Belman, resigned on Thursday to return to position as Deputy CEO at Sound Transit, PubliCola has confirmed. Belman, the former deputy CEO and interim CEO of the regional transit agency, was appointed to head the department last September, replacing interim director Kye Lee after longtime department leader Nathan Torgelson left the city in March.

Belman’s apparently sudden departure—we’re told she gave two weeks’ notice—may have come as a surprise to Mayor Katie Wilson, who did not make an official announcement.

The change at the top of the city’s permitting department came on the same day that the city’s other development-related department, the Office of Planning and Community Development, released legislation and zoning maps for “Phase 2” of the One Seattle Comprehensive Plan update (unfortunately, reporters were told yesterday, OPCD can’t remove former mayor Bruce Harrell’s signature branding without legislation changing the name). We’ll have more on the zoning changes in a separate post; for now, you can check out the detailed new zoning maps here.

4. Hamdi Mohamed, who was appointed head of the city’s Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs by former mayor Bruce Harrell in 2022, is out, she announced on Wednesday. Mohamed, who supported Harrell during his unsuccessful reelection campaign, will be replaced on an interim basis by former OIRA director Cuc Vu. OIRA provides support to immigrants in Seattle, including know-your-rights trainings and programs that provide legal assistance to migrants and people targeted by ICE.

Mohamed, who’s currently on leave awaiting the arrival of her second child, told PubliCola “it’s a bittersweet moment” to leave the city, but she’s hoping to “support this work in a new way, especially right now when immigrant communities are under attack.” Mohamed was an active supporter of former mayor Bruce Harrell and is one of many department heads Mayor Katie Wilson has replaced in her first month in office.

During her four years, Mohamed said, she was able to increase OIRA’s budget by 40 percent. “It really took holding the line for the community advocating for them, and being able to articulate why the funds that flow through our office directly support community organizations on the front lines.”

 

Morning Fizz, Police, public disclosure

Police Chief Takes the Holidays Off, SPD Won’t Answer Questions About Two Anti-Prostitution Stings They Announced
During the holidays, a rotating group of deputies will take over for Police Chief Shon Barnes, who’s out of town.

1. If you’re wondering who’s in charge at the Seattle Police Department during the historically busy holiday season, including New Year’s Eve, it isn’t Police Chief Shon Barnes, who’s been taking a two-week vacation since December 20. Barnes’ family lives in Chicago, and he has not bought a home in Seattle, continuing a practice from his days as police chief in Madison, Wisconsin, when his family remained in Chicago.

During Barnes’ absence, the role of Acting Chief of Police will rotate between Deputy Chief Yvonne Underwood, Assistant Chief Tyrone Davis, and Deputy Chief Andre Sayles. Underwood and Davis were at SPD prior to Barnes’ arrival; Sayles was previously police chief in Beloit, Wisconsin, a small town outside Madison with a population of 36,000.

Police chiefs are generally expected to be on call for incidents that happen outside regular working hours, including on weekends, evenings, and holidays, and typically show up in person at events that involve a major police response, which isn’t possible when the chief is out of town.

SPD’s communications office did not respond to a list of questions about Barnes’ lengthy absence. Earlier this year, when PubliCola asked why Barnes was spending almost every weekend out of town, a spokesperson told us that crime was down and that Barnes was “tirelessly working to protect the Seattle community.”

Historically, Seattle’s police chiefs have lived in or near Seattle full-time, as have other high-ranking SPD officials, making Barnes’ administration an outlier. At least three of Barnes’ top staffers reportedly rent apartments in Seattle while their families live in their permanent homes out of state.

During Barnes’ time out of the office, he will earn just under $12,500.

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2. SPD’s communications office also declined to respond to questions about two recent operations—one involving alleged “human trafficking” at a strip club on Aurora, and one about the “Dear John” letters SPD sends to men whose cars they photograph during sting operations targeting menwho pay for sex. The department announced both anti-prostitution operations with blog posts claiming success at fighting sexual exploitation, the legal term the city uses to describe any exchange of money for sex, but said they could not answer any questions about either announcement because “This [sic] is an open investigation.”

Another spokesperson declined to provide copies of the three police reports related to their strip club sting, telling us to file a records request. (In the past, SPD put police reports online, but they have made these public records increasingly inaccessible). PubliCola does not file records requests with SPD because they do not meaningfully respond to them. In 2025, SPD provided a single one-page document in response to one of our 10 unfulfilled requests, which go back to 2023, giving us a new “placeholder date” of December 31, 2026 for the rest of our requests.

A spokesperson for the King County Prosecutor’s Office said the city has not referred any cases from the strip club sting for charging or a first appearance, despite the seriousness of SPD’s allegations—human trafficking is a Class A felony.

As for the “Dear John” notices, which are designed to embarrass men who pay for sex and potentially sprak explosive conflicts with their partners,, SPD did eventually provide the sample letter we requested. It says the women and girls who work on Aurora are “almost always the victims of criminal trafficking” and that prostitution “is not a victimless crime.”

The letters include photos taken by police conducting the stings and note that any vehicle used when buying sex is subject to impoundment, with fees that “often exceed $2,000” to get a vehicle back.

SPD’s legal counsel reportedly argued against sending the letters on the grounds that people have a right to privacy in their own homes, opening the department up to potential lawsuits.

labor, Morning Fizz, Police

Former Police Chief Diaz Headed for Brady List; City’s New Payroll System Still Leaves Some Unpaid
A billboard for Workday in Atlanta: “Be a rock star of business” with “one epic platform”

1. Former Seattle police chief Adrian Diaz—fired earlier this month after an investigation found he had an affair with a subordinate, Jamie Tompkins, and lied about it—will be put on King County’s Brady list of dishonest cops as soon as next week, the King County Prosecutor’s Office confirmed. The Brady list is a list of law enforcement officers whose testimony in court is suspect because they have a history of dishonesty, calling their future testimony into question.

“The Brady list is meant to comply with Constitutional requirements to provide notice to defendants if a witness in their case can be impeached in court,” KCPAO  spokesman Casey McNerthney said.

King County is awaiting confirmation from the city’s Office of Police Accountability that they’ve sustained a finding of dishonesty against Diaz. According to McNerthney, this typically takes “a few days—likely we’ll get it soon after the new year if not sooner.”

McNerthney noted that Diaz “isn’t expected to be a witness in upcoming cases.” But the real impact of being on a Brady list is the stain it puts on a law enforcement officer’s record. Diaz, once considered a top candidate for police chief in Austin, Texas, will now be known as the chief who got demoted amid allegations of sexual harassment and gender discrimination, responded by going on a right-wing radio show to announce he was gay, got caught lying about an affair with a woman he hired and promoted, and finally got fired and put on a special list for dishonest officers.

The final formal penalty Diaz could face—separate from any future court-ordered judgments in ongoing and potential future lawsuits against him—is decertification as a law enforcement officer by the state. His name is not on a list of current decertification investigations; we’ve contacted the state’s Criminal Justice Training Commission, which certifies and decertifies law enforcement officers, to find out if they’re planning to initiate a decertification investigation.

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2. Current and former city of Seattle employees continue to report issues with Workday, the cloud-based HR and finance system whose October debut was plagued by underpayments, overpayments, vanishing sick and vacation days, and other problems.

Among other issues, employees have reported that Workday is failing to accrue and update their vacation, sick leave, and comp time correctly, leading to the denial of time off that they’ve earned and should be allowed to take. Other employees report that their paychecks have started showing that they have several weeks of time off for military leave, even though they’ve never served in the military. And just last week, apparently due to a glitch in how some employees’ hours were imported into Workday from an internal city system, some people reported that they didn’t get a paycheck at all.

Additionally, people in “out of class” positions—temporary assignments that pay more than their current job classification—have not been paid correctly; one person reported being short around $5,000 between two paychecks, while others reported losing out on vacation pay.

Megan Erb, the spokeswoman for the city’s IT department, Erb said some of the issues people are reporting stem from “the challenge of adapting to a new system.” Military leave, for example, is available to all employees who qualify, but it didn’t show up as an option on every city employee’s paycheck until Workday went into effect. “While an employee may see a military leave entitlement balance in their Workday account, it does not mean the employee is eligible for this leave,” Erb said.

The city has generally characterized each problem with Workday as a one-off issue that they were able to correct easily one employees brought it to their attention. For example, Erb said the errors in vacation time resulted from “a data conversion issue that caused Workday to show some incorrect vacation balances. Impacted employees and their supervisors have been notified the balances are now accurate.”

But other agencies and jurisdictions have reported similar issues, including the University of Washington, where problems with Workday delayed hundreds of research grants; Los Angeles, where employees experienced  under- and overpayments for months; and Oregon, which filed multiple lawsuits after problems with their paychecks dragged on for months.

A contract with Deloitte, the high-profile consultant brought on to help with Workday implementation, ballooned between 2022 and 2023 (the last year for which PubliCola has been able to obtain records from the city), growing from $14,754,000 to $17,852,000—an increase of more than 20 percent.

PROTEC17, a union that represents more than 3,000 city employees, has requested a third-party audit of Workday to identify what went wrong with the system and how it can be fixed. They’re also reportedly considering a demand to bargain over the impact the city’s decision to implement Workday has had on union members’ working conditions at the city. We’ve reached out to PROTEC17’s labor negotiator and will update this post if we hear back.

City Council, Morning Fizz, Police

Office of Police Accountability Director Out, Local Capital Gains Tax Loses Momentum, and More

1. Gino Betts, the director of the city’s Office of Police Accountability, will leave his position next month, after two and a half years on the job. According to the official account—released by Mayor Bruce Harrell’s Friday afternoon, shortly after I reported the news on Bluesky—Betts “announced his intention to resign effective December 13” and will be replaced on an interim basis by his deputy, Bonnie Glenn.

Behind the scenes, though, Betts was under heavy fire. Interim police chief Sue Rahr overturned several of his disciplinary decisions and expressed the view that he took too long to complete major investigations, including into former police chief Adrian Diaz, whom multiple women have accused him of sexual harassment, discrimination, and fostering a hostile work environment.

Diaz, appointed in September 2022, has remained on the city’s payroll since May, when Harrell announced he would be stepping down as chief. The Office of Inspector General (OIG), which is overseeing some of the investigations into the former chief, has reportedly sent one, involving allegations that Diaz used his security detail to run personal errands, to Harrell for review.

Harrell appointed Betts and Diaz in July and September 2022, respectively..

Some OPA staff complained that Betts spent too much time investigating relatively minor offenses while slow-walking major investigations like the ones into Diaz and Kevin Dave, the officer who struck and killed 23-year-old pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula almost two years ago. PubliCola confirmed that the OPA finally wrapped up its investigation into Dave last week, but it will likely be weeks before the office recommends any formal discipline for Dave, who has remained employed by SPD since Kandula’s death in January 2023.

Rahr has expressed frustration about the city’s accountability system—telling the city council in July, for instance, that “because the OPA and some of the other other partners have so many investigations going, there’s a pretty significant time lag between when a complaint is made and when it’s resolved. … We have a lot of minor misconduct investigations that are going to OPA, and I have the perception that it’s clogging up the system to be really good. And I would like to see us figure out a way to better distinguish between those two things.

In July, a group of OPA employees delivered an anonymous complaint to several city council members, along with the OIG and Community Police Commission, saying Betts had “ignored and not investigated” complaints against Diaz, including allegations that he used his security detail for personal errands, retaliated against employees who spoke out against him, and discriminated against female employees. The letter, which PubliCola obtained from a source, also accused Betts of creating a “toxic work environment.”

Betts was the fifth director of OPA, which was previously called the Office of Professional Accountability.

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2. As we reported this week, the City Council voted 6-3 to reject a 2 percent tax on capital gains that mirrors the state capital gains tax, which statewide voters overwhelmingly upheld in the November election. Joy Hollingsworth, who voted for the new tax in the council’s budget committee (which includes all nine council members), switched her vote to “no,” dashing progressive hopes that capital gains would be an easy win just as soon as progressive Alexis Mercedes Rinck joins the council.

As I said on this week’s “Hacks and Wonks” podcast, recorded on Thursday before the vote, Rinck will be an advocate for the tax—in stark contrast to the appointed council member she defeated, Tanya Woo, whose husband is the lead trader at an investment firm. But as I also noted, Hollingsworth’s (and Dan Strauss’s) support for the tax was squishy—it’s much easier to take a controversial position when you know a bill won’t pass then cast the deciding vote in its favor.

However, I said I considered it politically risky to switch a vote on something as consequential as a capital gains tax: Council members have to consider their decision carefully and give a solid reason for doing so. Otherwise, they risk looking flaky—look at former council member Andrew Lewis, who voted against arresting people who use drugs in public before voting for it, and ended up losing to his more conservative challenger Bob Kettle anyway.

Apparently, I was wrong on this point—Hollingsworth didn’t give a substantive reason for her vote, instead offering the explanation that the budget committee (that is, the whole council) ended up with a “do not pass” recommendation, with four of nine council members supporting it. If Hollingsworth remains a no on the tax, it’s unlikely to pass.

3. Prior to Thursday’s vote, Hollingsworth dismissed her legislative director, Logan Bowers. (Unlike previous councils, where each legislative assistant typically staffed a different policy area, most of the current council members have slotted their staffers into a hierarchical structure where a “chief of staff” oversees a couple of “directors.”)

Reportedly, Bowers—an extremely online former software engineer who likes to spar with progressives on social media—had a habit of inserting himself between Hollingsworth and other council members in a way that made it unclear whether he was representing Hollingsworth’s views or his own. It’s unclear what incident, if any, prompted his sudden dismissal on Wednesday. Neither Bowers nor Hollingsworth responded to requests for comment.

Bowers, who owns several weed stores with his wife,  tried to challenge Kshama Sawant in District 3, the seat Hollingsworth now holds in 2019. He lost in the primary.

City Council, Elections, Morning Fizz

Lived Experience Coalition Says KCRHA Owes Them $365,000; Tanya Woo Proposes No-Protest Zones Around Politicians’ Houses

1. In a Q&A with a North Seattle neighborhood group, Seattle City Councilmember Tanya Woo said that if she’s elected in November, she’ll propose legislation to create “buffer zones” in the public space around local elected officials’ houses where people will not be allowed to protest.

The legislation Woo contemplates would establish “a set distance or buffer zone to protect personal safety while ensuring protests take place in appropriate public spaces where free speech can be exercised without infringing on the well-being of individuals.” Police would be on hand to make sure protesters stay inside officially sanctioned protest areas—which, practically speaking, would be in front of other people’s homes.

“I fully support the right to protest,” she told Neighborhoods for Smart Streets, which originally formed to oppose bike lanes in Northeast Seattle, but “I also believe there are limits when it comes to personal safety and privacy. Protesting at the homes of elected officials crosses that line.”

Woo is not, strictly speaking, an elected official—the council, which took a more conservative turn in the last election, appointed her to a citywide position after she lost to District 2 incumbent Tammy Morales, who is now the lone left on the council.

Seattle has a long history of protests on the public streets and sidewalks outside elected officials’ homes, and of enforcing existing laws against harassment and violence when people cross legal lines. In 2012, police investigated when protesters through rocks through the window of then-mayor Mike McGinn’s home in Greenwood. In contrast,  no arrests were made when activists with the group SHARE camped in public areas outside council members’ houses, starting with now-Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess, to demand funding for bus tickets.

The most famous “no-protest zone” in Seattle’s history occurred during the WTO protests in 1999, and led to years of lawsuits, costing the city millions of dollars in payouts and legal fees.

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2. Members of the Lived Experience Coalition, an organization that was once closely linked with the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, say the KCRHA owes them more than $365,000.

Coalition members and advocates, including several who sit on the KCRHA’s implementation board, said it was imperative that the KCRHA pay the Lived Experience Coalition what they say they are owed. “I don’t understand how a organization can be stood up to support or center lived experience voices, use lived experience to do work, and then dismiss them and not pay them,” said implementation board and LEC member Zsa Zsa Floyd. “It saddens me that we become so political and so money-hungry that we step on, step over, and dismiss folks … who have done work.”

“It’s not just about the money that’s owed to us, it’s about respect and recognition for the invaluable contributions we make,” LEC member Courtney Love told the board. “When we don’t receive the support we are owed, it undermines not only our efforts, but also the trust we strive to build within our community.

The dispute stems from work the LEC did in 2022 and 2023, for which the KCRHA contends they did not have a formal contract. The work included standing up a Youth Action Board—a requirement for the KCRHA to apply for a new federal youth homelessness pilot program—as well as efforts to get unsheltered people indoors in the winter of 2022-2023 and work to create a new ombuds office for the agency.

During last week’s meeting, KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison said the LEC had no written contract with KCRHA to do the work for which they’re now demanding payment. The LEC disputes this, saying that an email from former KCRHA staffer Meg Barclay, in which Barclay assured the LEC they would commit to paying them for the work they did in 2023, constituted an informal, but official, contract.

KCRHA spokeswoman Lisa Edge said agency officials have repeatedly told the LEC that the group “didn’t have a contract with KCRHA and are not owed for the submitted reimbursements. We’ve meticulously reviewed the documentation and determined they were reimbursed by Building Changes [a separate nonprofit that served as the LEC’s fiscal sponsor] with the exception of a small amount that individuals would need to submit documentation for.”

Building Changes, which is no longer the LEC’s fiscal sponsor, declined to comment on its payments to the LEC.

But a representative for the LEC told PubliCola the LEC never received outside compensation for their work, saying the payment from Building Changes came out of the LEC’s own reserves. The LEC and Building Changes parted ways in 2023 amid a dispute over who was to blame when the LEC ran out of money to run an emergency hotel-based shelter program, which the KCRHA took over in April of that year.

“Building Changes was our fiscal sponsor at the time and utilized LEC’s reserves to pay folks,” the LEC representative said. “It is absolutely an outrageous claim and a deflection that Building Changes utilized their funds to pay LEC. …During the 2022 contract year, before LEC had any reserves, Building Changes halted payments instead of allowing LEC to utilize their reserves. LEC learned from this and ensured that we had funds to cover expenses given KCRHA’s not being timely with contracts.”

The implementation board agreed last week to discuss the payment dispute at its next meeting, on November 13. The board is under a time crunch: Under a new interlocal agreement adopted by Seattle and King County, the board will dissolve at the end of the year and be replaced by the agency’s governing board, which is made up of current elected officials from around the region.

City Council, Courts, Drugs, Mayor Harrell, Morning Fizz

City Attorney Wants to Bring Back Drug Banishment Zones, Harrell’s Chief Labor Negotiator Is Out
Seattle’s SODA areas, circa 2005

1. City Attorney Ann Davison’s office reportedly plans to bring back so-called Stay Out of Drug Area (SODA) orders, a change that may require legislation, PubliCola has learned. SODA orders, which the city stopped issuing under former city attorney Pete Holmes, banish people who have committed drug offenses from engering areas with “continuous drug activity,” as a state law authorizing such exclusions puts it, for any reason; people who violate the law by going into these parts of the city can be prosecuted for a separate crime.

In the past, these orders were commonly used by Seattle police and the City Attorney’s Office to target people who violated the city’s (since overturned) drug loitering law or who were caught using or selling drugs in public, including cannabis. SPD’s policy manual still includes descriptions of 17 SODA areas from which people convicted of drug offenses can be banned.

Studies of SODA areas in Seattle have found that they can exacerbate biased policing when police target people of color, as well as people who appear to be homeless, for exclusions from large swaths of the city, including the areas where most social services are located.

“[C]ompliance with banishment orders is frequently complicated by the fact that the spaces from which people are banned usually offer crucial opportunities for social contact and relationships,” two researchers, Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert, concluded in 2010.  A 2021 community task force report found that SODA areas can also “isolate people from their friends, families, and communities within areas like downtown Seattle, the Central District, and much of Southeast Seattle, which are considered drug areas.”

The most likely initial SODA areas would be in downtown Seattle, where the sidewalk at Third and Pike is often so crowded with drug users and buyers that it’s unnavigable, and at 12th and Jackson, where razor wire and fencing around a single block has simply moved a market for drugs and stolen goods into the immediately surrounding area.

Councilmember Cathy Moore previously said she plans to revive a repealed law banning “prostitution loitering” on Aurora Ave. N; she did not respond to a request for comment on potential SODA legislation. The city has also issued “Stay Out of Prostitution Area” orders to sex workers in the past, and also had a “drug loitering” ordinance that has since been overturned.

The city attorney’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

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2. Mayor Bruce Harrell’s labor relations director, Shaun van Eyk, is out after two and a half years on the job. Van Eyk, who previously spent almost six years as the labor representative for the city’s largest labor union, PROTEC17, announced the news on LinkedIn, saying he had “recently stepped down” from the position.

A spokesperson for Harrell confirmed that van Eyk had “stepped down as Director of Labor Relations,” and said the mayor’s deputy general counsel, Chase Munroe, is the interim director. Munroe was a legislative aide to Harrell for almost six years, until Harrell left the city council in 2019; he got his law degree and founded a sports law agency before rejoining Team Harrell in 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile.

The city’s labor relations director represents the city in negotiations with city unions, like PROTEC17; earlier this year, the city approved a contract providing cost of living increases totaling 9.7 percent—a significant boost from Harrell’s initial offer of 1 percent. As labor relations director, van Eyk was also a party to the city’s contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild, which gave police retroactive pay increases of 24 percent, making SPD the highest-paid department in the region.

Van Eyk did not respond to requests for comment.