Category: Opinion

Mayor Wilson, Media, Opinion, Police, public disclosure

Mayor Wilson: Audit SPD’s Public Disclosure Office!
A few of PubliCola’s records requests that have been “grouped” by the Seattle Police Department. SPD’s public disclosure unit will not begin (or resume) responding to any of these requests until they’ve completed the one they’re currently working on. We filed that one, for information about SPD’s use of generative AI, in September; so far, we’ve only gotten only a delay notice in response.

SPD has shown they won’t comply with the state Public Records Act on their own. So make them.

Erica C. Barnett

It’s time for the city to audit the Seattle Police Department’s public disclosure office—and, if they ignore the auditor’s recommendations, for incoming Mayor Katie Wilson to force SPD to follow the law.

The state Public Records Act makes it clear that the government’s obligation to disclose information is no trivial responsibility. “The people of this state do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies that serve them,” the PRA says. “The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. The people insist on remaining informed so that they may maintain control over the instruments that they have created.”

For years, SPD has failed to comply with this bedrock premise.  Instead, they’ve evaded disclosure by delaying responses until the records they’ve held back are no longer timely, refusing to work on more than one request at a time, and using the public disclosure process to conceal information that used to be public as a matter of course, including police reports and responses to basic factual questions.

Public disclosure of public information is in everyone’s interest, but for PubliCola and other media outlets, the availability of public records also affects our ability to keep our readers informed. Currently, PubliCola has 10 open records requests with SPD, with the oldest dating back to mid-2023. (We had older unfulfilled requests, but closed them in an effort to triage requests that were still relatively timely).

In all of 2025, SPD provided a single document in response to one of our public disclosure requests—a one-page Excel spreadsheet showing the total compensation for police officers in 2024.

Not only did SPD fail to meaningfully respond to our outstanding requests, they will no longer respond to more than one request at a time from individuals or entities with multiple requests. This practice, known as “grouping,” violates a 2023 agreement between the city and the Seattle Times, which is currently fighting SPD in court to eliminate grouping entirely. It also appears to violate the Public Records Act, which requires agencies to respond to individual requests “promptly,” with specific estimates for the time it will take to respond to each request.

As the Times’ recent motion for summary judgment puts it, “The Grouping Policy denies prompt responses to those disfavored requesters who cannot wait for an old request to slowly emerge from SPD’s backlog before making a new request. …  Nothing in the PRA authorizes an agency to choose which requests to process and which ones to leave on a dusty shelf.”

I’ve filed a declaration in support of the Times’ latest lawsuit, describing the ways in which SPD has thwarted PubliCola’s requests for public records and how these actions have affected my ability to keep the public informed about what SPD is up to—from former chief Diaz’ alleged coverup of an unethical affair with a staffer he hired into a specially created position, to the investigation into a police union official who whooped it up over the killing of a pedestrian by a speeding cop. Times reporter Mike Carter’s own declaration shows a similar pattern of selective inaction by SPD—including one request for which he waited 19 months, only to receive the documents unexpectedly because SPD fast-tracked a similar request from a KOMO reporter.

If the Times prevails over SPD, it will directly benefit those in the public and independent press who can’t afford to fight years-long legal battles against the deep-pocketed police department. Meanwhile, though, SPD is still claiming the right to effectively deny records requests by putting them off for years. Earlier this month, the department moved its generic “placeholder date” for PubliCola’s nine inactive “grouped” requests from December 31, 2025 to December 31, 2026. Unless something changes, the remaining unfilled requests will get pushed forward to 2027 at the end of next year.

The single PubliCola records request SPD says it is working on—for information about SPD’s use of generative AI—has already been delayed by three months, until January, and could move again. Until SPD has finished responding to this one request, they will do no work at all on our other nine requests.

Because SPD refuses to process more than one request at a time, I have stopped filing records requests with them. It’s pointless. In effect, their obstructive decisions have succeeded—whether I go through the motions of filing a request or not, SPD will never respond “promptly,” as required by the PRA, or provide the “fullest assistance” the law requires.

 

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So, in addition to conducting a formal audit, Mayor-elect Wilson should send down legislation to eliminate “grouping,” which has not accomplished its purported goal of weeding out bot requests and those that are excessively burdensome or “extraordinarily broad.” If bots are a problem, separate legislation can address that issue; if a huge number of people are filing harassing or unreasonable requests, the burden should be on SPD to prove this is happening, and to work with the mayor and city council on legislation to address that narrow problem. SPD is currently using city dollars in a legal battle to use “grouping” to conceal public records. It’s long past time (and should not require a lengthy legal battle) to take this tool away from them.

SPD’s lack of compliance with basic public disclosure standards has gotten worse in recent years. But it isn’t new. In 2015, the City Auditor’s Office audited SPD’s public disclosure unit and found serious problems with how the office handles public disclosure requests.

That audit recommended that SPD hire more public disclosure officers, implement a centralized system for managing records requests, and streamline the response process by handling simple requests before more complex ones and prioritizing timely responses. It also recommended some basic best practices—like asking requesters for clarification when necessary and “proactively communicat[ing]” with people who ask for records—something that currently does not happen consistently, if at all.

SPD did not concur with most of the 13 recommendations in the 2015 audit, agreeing explicitly with just two—the recommendation to hire more public disclosure staff, and the one suggesting they set up a new records management system. Over the past 10 years, SPD has added nine new positions to the public disclosure unit to keep up with the increasing pace of requests, up from just five in 2014. That’s a positive step on paper, but it doesn’t actually help if public disclosure officers are steeped in SPD’s current culture of concealment.

Another practice SPD uses to evade public disclosure is expanding the type of records the department refuses to hand over without a public disclosure request.

In the recent past, for instance, SPD put ordinary police reports online as a matter of course—an extension of the department’s earlier practice of printing out copies of police reports and making them available at police precincts. (Yes, you could just walk in to any precinct and grab the day’s police reports!)

Today, police reports are no longer available to the general public through SPD’s website and the reports SPD provides to media (when they choose to do so) consist of heavily redacted and edited “narratives” that omit important information that the public generally has the right to know, such as the names of the officers who respond to calls and write the reports.

Additionally, SPD sometimes refuses to provide police reports, including those cleaned-up narratives, without explanation. Although SPD’s policy manual says explicitly that “Media Representatives May Obtain Copies of Police Reports Through the Public Affairs Unit,” that unit frequently directs PubliCola to file a records request for police reports.

This “file a records request” brushoff applies not just to written reports but to questions of all kinds. If SPD’s communications office—headed, under Police Chief Shon Barnes, by a former corporate PR representative with no prior experience in government—doesn’t want to answer a question, “file a records request” is a polite synonym for “fuck off.” Too far? Not when you consider that even the simplest records requests often take years—if I want to know about a crime that took place downtown last night, the Wilson administration could be halfway over before I find out.

The police, in short, are getting away with refusing to follow the letter and spirit of our state’s strongly worded public disclosure law—a law explicitly designed to ensure that the public has access to information that isn’t mediated and managed by government agencies and their press offices.

SPD has made it very clear that they won’t meet their legal obligation to provide public records unless they’re forced to do so—by legislation, a court order, or a directive from the mayor, who has the ability to fire for reprimand the police chief if his department is failing to comply with expectations.

It’s possible, perhaps even likely, that the Seattle Times will prevail in its current attempt to get SPD to stop grouping records requests, taking away one of the department’s current methods for withholding public documents.

But undoing a culture of obfuscation could require forcing, rather than asking, SPD to meet its obligation to provide records that ultimately belong to us, the public.

An audit laser-focused on these tactics will outline the problem and lay out solutions and a timeline for compliance. Mayor Wilson can then show she’s serious about transparency by requiring SPD to show progress on public disclosure, and holding Chief Barnes directly accountable if his department fails to act. SPD has had plenty of chances (and received plenty of public funding) to fix a broken process. It’s time they face consequences for their inaction.

City Council, Density, Opinion, The C Is for Crank

Cathy Moore’s Opinions on Growth and Housing Aren’t New. What’s New is That Most Voters Disagree With Them.

By Erica C. Barnett

On Wednesday, City Councilmember Cathy Moore lashed out at members of the public who she said attacked her personally over her support for legislation (which Ryan Packer covered in detail at the Urbanist) that would have required Sound Transit to create bespoke Community Outreach Plans for every light rail-related project that requires the city to approve a master use permit, about 60 projects in all. The original proposal, sponsored by Maritza Rivera, would have added more process, delay, and cost to the already delayed, over-budget light rail expansion to Ballard and West Seattle.

Moore—whose comments I quoted at length in yesterday’s post about the latest episode of the Seattle Nice podcast, and which you can view above—said people were directing “hate” and “personal attacks” at her over the legislation. She spoke at length about her long record of public service, suggesting that her critics were unfairly maligning someone who has “dedicated 30-plus years to improving the lives of people who don’t have a voice and have chosen to put myself out here,for all this love that I get every day.” Prior to her 2023 election, Moore served in many different judicial roles, including five years as a King County Superior Court judge.

It’s true that Moore didn’t get much love from the public for supporting proposals that would slow down or prevent housing from being built, and that hundreds of people mobilized to write emails to Moore and other councilmembers urging them to vote against the amendment.

Ultimately, the legislation—a bill from the mayor’s office that was actually supposed to speed up permitting for light rail-related projects in the city—moved out of the council’s land use committee without the red-tape amendment—not because the public was mean to council members, but because it didn’t have majority support. Instead, the committee considered and passed an unpublished walk-on amendment from Rivera that requires Sound Transit to produce a report about its public outreach for each project that requires a permit.

One thing that was striking about Moore’s comments yesterday, and comments she’s made about other hot topics like tree preservation requirements and proposals to allow more apartments in her district, is that she isn’t proposing anything new. Rather, she’s calling for a return to policies that the council and mayor generally supported 20 years ago. But those policies are no longer in step with the majority in Seattle, which is why most of them have failed to pass. This is how democracy is supposed to work. The fact that people are calling Moore a NIMBY—for “not in my backyard”—reflects dramatic changes in public opinion about housing in recent decades. NIMBY isn’t a slur—it’s a description.

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Having covered City Hall in the old NIMBY days—back when councilmembers openly used terms like “protecting neighborhood character” and neighborhood activists denigrated renters as “transients” who had no right to comment on land use or housing—I can tell you that pro-housing advocates used to be pariahs at city hall. (Hell, I remember being called a “clueless little twit” by a West Seattle homeowner because I argued that renters deserved a voice at City Hall). The very idea that we should allow duplexes, much less apartments, in single-family areas would get you shouted down by homeowners furious that renters thought they had any right to encroach on the sanctified character of “their” neighborhoods. Think of the shadows those huge new three-story buildings would cast on their tomato plants!

Things have changed; public opinion in Seattle has shifted. The views of people who bought their houses for five-figure sums in the ’60s and ’70s are no longer massively overrepresented on the city council. Even as a body made up overwhelmingly of homeowners (the job pays well enough that renters who join the council can usually buy at least a condo, and do), the council now represents renters’ perspectives better than it ever has in the past, and that trend is unlikely to reverse.

Bottom line: We’re a bigger city now than we were in the old “lesser Seattle” days, and the people who live here—Moore’s constituents—generally want to do away with “not in my backyard” policies, including red tape and design review requirements that slow down and prevent housing and transit. Moore wouldn’t have gotten much pushback for her views if she’d been on the council in 2001, but in 2025, she represents a minority perspective, and she’s facing inevitable criticism for policy proposals that are broadly unpopular.

I empathize with the pain Moore is clearly feeling as the result of public opposition; being attacked and called names is unpleasant and can be very upsetting. But the fact is, calling someone a NIMBY isn’t an expression of “hate.” It’s just a description of a once-dominant perspective that most of the Seattle public no longer holds.

Guest Contributor, Opinion, Transportation

Sound Transit’s CEO Search Should Be About Leadership, Not Political Deals
Image via Soundtransit.org

By Francois Kaeppelin and Trevor Reed

Imagine applying for a high-powered job where you get to pick half of the hiring committee. That’s exactly what’s happening at Sound Transit, where King County Executive Dow Constantine is asking his own appointees to give him the top job.

As King County Executive, Constantine holds a built-in advantage on Sound Transit’s board: He personally nominated half of its 18 members and sits on it himself. With the rest of the board filled by top leaders from Pierce and Snohomish counties, their appointees, and the state Secretary of Transportation, Constantine still wields disproportionate influence over who gets the job. No credible hiring process would ever allow an applicant this level of influence over their own selection.

Think about that for a minute: the person who appointed half of the board members is now asking them for the agency’s top job. While Constantine has stepped aside from voting on his own candidacy, the people he chose are still there, making the decision.

This isn’t just a technical oversight—it’s a blatant conflict of interest. When those in power have a direct hand in choosing their own decision-makers, it becomes nearly impossible to say that the selection process is truly fair.

A second issue with this appointment is that Sound Transit has chosen to keep much of this process behind closed doors. The agency has publicly stated that state law allows them to hold secret hiring meetings. But the law they cite doesn’t require this secrecy—in fact, it explicitly encourages transparency, urging public agencies to seek community input even when not legally required to do so.

While other agencies openly disclose CEO candidates, Sound Transit has chosen, once again, to shield the process from public scrutiny.

The lack of transparency is compounded by hiring criteria that favor insiders over expertise. The job posting includes a requirement for an “understanding of the local cultural and political landscape.” At first glance, this requirement sounds reasonable—but in practice, it creates an artificial barrier to outside talent and reinforces the same system that has failed to deliver on-time and on-budget transit projects. Instead of recruiting the best leader for the job, Sound Transit is making it easier for a political insider to take control.

The new CEO will be responsible for making decisions that impact your daily commute, whether you’re heading to work or getting around the city. If political favors influence the selection process, there’s a real risk that the agency will prioritize insider interests over public benefit. This could lead to delays, rising costs, and a transit system that fails the millions of people who rely on it.

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For Sound Transit to deliver on its promises, the public must have confidence in its leadership selection process. While Dow Constantine brings decades of experience in public service, the next CEO should be chosen based on their qualifications and vision—not because they have been around the longest or have the right political connections. A truly accountable process requires public disclosure of finalists, clear evaluation criteria, and meaningful public input.

Other cities have recognized that effective transit leadership requires fresh perspectives, not just political familiarity. Canada’s VIA Rail, for example, brought in international talent to modernize its intercity network. Seattle needs a CEO who can bring innovative solutions to the agency’s long-standing challenges.

Sound Transit is responsible for billions of taxpayer dollars and the future of mobility in our region. This decision must be made with full public trust. To make this possible, the Board must:

• Fully disclose the criteria they’re using to judge candidates;

• Publicly disclose the list of finalists before making a hiring decision;

• Host a public hearing on the finalists; and

• Establish a structured public feedback process to inform the CEO selection.

If Sound Transit is confident they have the best leader, why keep it a secret? Riders deserve transparency—before it’s too late.

Francois Kaeppelin is a transportation policy researcher focused on transit governance, infrastructure development, and equity. He currently serves as Legislative Advocacy Director for Seattle Subway, working to advance transit governance reform in the Seattle metro area. Previously, he conducted research at the National Center for Sustainable Transportation and the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies, focusing on the impacts of freeway construction on communities of color, barriers to transit-oriented development, and regional transit coordination in California.

Trevor Reed represents the East-King sub area on Sound Transit’s Community Oversight Panel and is founder of Transportation Reform. He completed his Master’s degree at University College London where he worked as a researcher at the Omega Center for Mega Infrastructure and Development focusing on how governance structures impact the efficient delivery of transit projects internationally. His work concerning traffic’s economic impacts has appeared nationally in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and PBS’s Nightly Business Report.

City Council, Development, homelessness, housing, immigration, Mayor Harrell, Opinion

PubliCola’s Seattle Predictions for 2025

By Erica C. Barnett, Josh Feit, and Sandeep Kaushik

The three co-founders of PubliCola—that’s me, PubliCola columnist Josh Feit, and my Seattle Nice sparring partner Sandeep Kaushik—have put together our annual list policy-obsessed, 100-percent accurate Seattle predictions for 2025. Each of us gave the assignment our own spin—I’m going out on a limb by boldly predicting things that will definitely happen in Seattle next year; Josh is predicting things that shouldn’t happen but will; and Sandeep has a list of things that won’t happen, but should. – ECB

Erica’s Predictions: Things that definitely will happen

Predictions are vibes. By that I mean: Even when they don’t come true, a good prediction captures the zeitgeist of the year, whether or not it’s correct in all the details.

One reason I believe this, probably, is because I’m notoriously terrible at making specific, particularly political predictions. This goes way back, to at least 2003, when I referred to a city council candidate as a “formidable” challenger to the incumbent, Peter Steinbrueck—less than three months before he dropped out of the race because he couldn’t raise any money. (Steinbrueck went on to win with nearly 83 percent of the vote.)

But another reason I think this is because it’s basically true. No, my 2024 prediction that the new council would move quickly to reverse renter protections like the winter eviction ban didn’t pan out—but only because the council wasted months getting up to speed on what the city does, and the repeals got pushed to this year, when they’ll likely happen.

And yes, I was technically wrong when I said the council would find it harder than expected to close a $250 million budget deficit—but only because I didn’t anticipate that council members who campaigned on making “hard choices” would practically trample each other to endorse a cynical short-term fix—using revenues from the dedicated JumpStart payroll tax to fill the entire budget gap.

As for my prediction that the then-new drug law wouldn’t have much of an impact? Well, the city failed to invest adequately in new diversion or treatment programs, so the people who are getting arrested for using drugs in public are still largely ending up back where they started—on corners like 3rd and Pine and 12th and Jackson, where police stage occasional raids that only push people to the next neighborhood over.

So with those caveats out of the way, here’s my list of specific, measurable predictions that will definitely come true in 2025. At least in spirit.

Big picture stuff: 

Federal funding cuts will hit Seattle because of our status as a “sanctuary city,” and we won’t be remotely prepared.

Monday, January 6 marked the first time a council member (Cathy Moore) publicly raised serious concerns about the incoming Trump Administration’s promise to cut federal funding to cities that refuse to participate in mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. But the city has done little to plan for what happens when we no longer have access to federal emergency response dollars (pretty critical during COVID), federal housing funds, which come  in the form of tax credits as well as direct subsidies that make our housing levy pencil out, and federal transportation funds, without which we would have no functioning transit system.

If Seattle really is going to do its part to protect immigrants from racist deportations (and people seeking reproductive and gender-affirming care from prosecution and jail), the time to start planning was last November. But the mayor and council have shown little inclination to discuss what losing funds will mean, much less come up with a plan to deal with this near-inevitability.

The city council will amend the tree ordinance to prevent even more new apartments, all in the name of environmental protection. 

The comprehensive plan isn’t the only policy area where council members are likely to weaponize the city’s environmental goals to prevent new housing in the city’s single-family enclaves. Last year, the city council passed a comprehensive tree protection ordinance that requires property owners to navigate a labyrinth of new restrictions (and pay thousands of dollars) if they want to remove a tree larger than 12 inches in diameter. (We called it byzantine and pointed out that most of Seattle’s tree loss occurs in city parks, not on privately owned lawns). But so-called tree advocates, whose transparent (and often explicit) goal is preventing development in the single-family neighborhoods where they own houses, have argued that these new rules don’t go far enough.

During the council’s first two meetings of 2025, on Monday, Councilmember Cathy Moore accused housing advocates of dismissing trees as a “NIMBY issue” (again, I’ll point readers to the piece I wrote about why the focus on trees in people’s private yards won’t actually protect the city’s tree canopy, while tree planting requirements would), and said she plans to do something to stop the “indiscriminate cutting of trees relating to development” that she claimed is allowed under the current tree law.

Expect a tree code update this year that hews closely to the demands of groups like Don’t Clearcut Seattle, which has misrepresented city regulations to argue for expanded tree requirements for multifamily housing along with dramatic increases in tree removal fees. (They also want to create permanent, legally binding tree covenants for private residential properties). These policies are designed to prevent the housing council members claim they want, but they’ll pass as long as the rest of the neighborhood-based council members go along with Moore and Northeast Seattle Councilmember Maritza Rivera, who has also cited trees as a reason not to allow new housing in her low-density district.

Elected officials will take the wrong lessons from the ongoing uptick in police hiring.

As Sandeep notes below, the Seattle Police Department has started to reverse a trend that began during the 2020 pandemic, when police officers began retiring and quitting en masse, in some cases to avoid COVID vaccine requirements. However, the new hires will not come close to meeting Seattle’s (already scaled-back) version of the nationwide 30 by 30 initiative, which calls for three out of ten new police recruits to be women by 2030. Recruiting women to become officers will turn out to be more complicated than just hiring the former chief of a department that hit that goal; it will require deep changes to a culture of misogyny and actions to remedy past and current gender discrimination in the department.

The city council will continue to take its cues—and legislation—from the mayor, further blurring the gap between the legislative and executive branches.

Although the council did exercise initiative this year by reversing many progressive policies—reinstating special “stay out” zones for drug users and sex workers, expanding the city’s use of jail beds for misdemeanor offenders, and bringing back the old prostitution loitering law, to name a few—much of the legislation they passed this year came prewritten from the mayor’s office, from legislation to increase the city’s control over the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, to a proposal to remove restrictions on SPD’s use of “less lethal weapons” for crowd control.

Hell, the entire 2025 budget radically shifted the way the city funds general government services, and no one protested except Tammy Morales, who cited bullying by her colleagues as the reason she resigned last year. Sure, individual council members will occasionally butt heads with specific  departments (for Rob Saka, that’s SDOT; for Moore and Maritza Rivera, the city’s planning and land use departments), but they won’t oppose the mayor who helped most of them get elected.

Even major appointments now play out like faits accomplis: Harrell chose Madison, Wisconsin police chief Shon Barnes as the city’s new police chief without any public process or even a list of finalists. It’s hard to overstate what a break this is from longstanding practice; I went back 25 years, to the appointment of Gil Kerlikowske, and could find no examples in which a mayor appointed a permanent police chief without publicly vetting multiple candidates.

The council would be wise to question Harrell’s judgment when it comes to police chiefs. Just last year, Harrell defended disgraced former police chief Adrian Diaz as a “fine leader” whose “integrity is above reproach.” (Diaz, who was facing allegations that he had sexually harassed and discriminated against his female subordinates, announced he was gay on a right-wing talk show the following day. Seven months later, Harrell fired him for having, and lying about, an inappropriate relationship with a woman he hired.)

But they won’t. The head of the city council’s public safety committee, Bob Kettle, has already offered Barnes a “warm welcome” to his new job in a Harrell press release, and the council will almost certainly follow suit, approving the mayor’s pick after a perfunctory hearing process.

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And some quick hits: 

Despite near-unanimous support from the council she helped get elected, Sara Nelson will face a serious reelection challenger and could lose her seat.

Despite a lackluster first term (see Sandeep’s predictions, below), Mayor Bruce Harrell will not face a serious challenger and will win reelection, after a shakeup that involves the appointment of two, if not three, new deputy mayors.

Despite the city council’s successful push to place the social housing funding measure, I-137, into a low-turnout February election slot (more on that underhanded effort here), the proposal will pass, because the concept is broadly popular.

Despite overwhelming public support for turning Pike Place Market into a pedestrian-only zone, the streets around the Market will still be choked with cars at the end of 2025.

Rob Saka will still have to look at his nemesis—that fucking curb!—every time he drives to or from his downtown office, as SDOT finds reasons not to spend $2 million removing it.

Continue reading “PubliCola’s Seattle Predictions for 2025” →

City Council, Development, housing, Opinion

“I’m Not Prepared to Sacrifice My Neighborhood”: Councilmember Cathy Moore Takes Hard Line Against Apartments
Cathy Moore says she won’t “sacrifice” her neighborhood to three-to-five-story apartments around an intersection in Maple Leaf (the lavender blocks inside the circle above)

By Erica C. Barnett

Councilmember Cathy Moore came out swinging against the extremely modest, geographically limited density increases Mayor Bruce Harrell proposed in his comprehensive plan update on Monday, taking aim at straw “urbanists” who, she claimed, believe the “lie” that brand-new housing is affordable and that new apartments automatically lead to frequent transit.

“Too many of our young people cannot afford to live in this city, and this is what’s driving a lot of this. And yet they are told, ‘Well, if you just let us have a free rein and build, you’ll be able to have the housing.’ It’s not true,” Moore fulminated. “Allowing free-range zoning is not going to get you into the home that you want. It’s not going to create the homeownership opportunity that you need to grow your wealth [and] create a stable society where people are engaged socially and politically.”

Moore’s specific objection to the plan was Harrell’s refusal to eliminate a small node of density in her neighborhood, Maple Leaf, where the current comp plan proposal would allow apartments within one to two blocks of a small commercial center at 90th and Roosevelt. The intersection, she noted, is still “slated for a neighborhood center, despite my two formal requests to the mayor’s office to remove it.”

“I’m not prepared to sacrifice this particular—my particular—neighborhood, and the reason that I live here and support this neighborhood, so that we can just throw a bunch of townhouses up that start at $700,000,” Moore said.

The planned neighborhood center includes eight and a half blocks around an existing commercial district around 90th and Roosevelt, where apartments between three and six stories would be allowed. The location is smack between two light rail stations and on a frequent bus route that arrives every 15 minutes, which Moore referred to as the “one little bus” that serves the neighborhood.

An example (from the proposed comp plan) of a neighborhood center.

Density is code for rental housing, Moore continued, and “rental housing isn’t working. … When I talk to young people, they want a place of their own. They want a little garden. They want the amenities that us current homeowners have, and we’re creating a false promise what we’re putting out here and what the urbanist people are telling us.”

Moreover, Moore said, “people seem to believe that if you build all this multifamily housing, transit will come. Let me tell you, it will not come. That’s not how it works.”

Phew. OK. It’s hard to fully capture to the condescension in Moore’s comments about renters and “young people,” but let’s start here: Sixty percent of the people who live in Seattle—young, old, and in between—rent their homes, and it’s pretty insulting to dismiss all of them as naifs who don’t understand basic realities about the cost of housing in Seattle. Nor, frankly, is it the place of homeowners in their 60s, 70s, and 80s—including those who showed up in the middle of the morning on Monday to argue that apartments don’t belong next to houses—to talk about what working renters need or want.

Maple Leaf’s planned neighborhood center already has a commercial district that includes bars, coffee shops, restaurants, and businesses.

Much like the idea that most current renters will ever be able to afford a house in Seattle, Moore’s straw urbanist is a fiction. Real-world urbanists have never argued that brand-new rental housing is cheap; rather, they point out that in cities with acute housing shortages like Seattle, artificial scarcity—the kind city governments create by imposing sweeping prohibitions on new housing—pushes non-wealthy people out. “Rental housing isn’t working” because too many renters are paying half their income to live far away from their jobs, not because they don’t understand that what they really want is a mortgage. (Note to the “buy a house like I did” crowd: Given that at least half of all renters pay more than they can afford on rent, how exactly are they supposed to save up for the $462,000 downpayment they’ll need to qualify for a home loan in Seattle?)

Second, she’s actually wrong about how transit decisions work—King County Metro makes bus planning decisions precisely based on housing density—the more people live in an area, the more demand there is for bus service, which is why you don’t see frequent transit in places like west Magnolia or Laurelhurst. “If you build it, they will come” is literally how it works.

Moore and Councilmember Maritza Rivera represent some of the wealthiest, lowest-density areas of the city; although Moore’s district includes Northgate, Lake City, and other urban hubs, it also encompasses vast swaths of single-family urban deserts, represented by the beige areas in the northeast corner of the map above. Seattle has always concentrated density and growth along large arterials,

The council is discussing the comprehensive plan over several meetings in January and February. Because Harrell took so long to finalize the plan (amending it repeatedly to decrease, then slightly increase, the amount of housing it would allow), the council has a hard deadline: If a new plan isn’t in place by June, the state’s model code, which would increase density citywide, will go into effect.

City Council, Opinion

The City Council Says Cracking Down on Sex Workers Will Create Services, Stop Sex Trafficking, and End Gun Violence. Don’t Believe Them.

By Erica C. Barnett

A sad spectacle played out at Seattle City Hall today, as council members who support a crackdown on sex workers made a series of baseless promises to people who live and own businesses on and around Aurora Ave. North. Many of these residents expressed understandable concern about a recent surge in gun violence in the area, but blamed it on sex workers and “pimps fighting over turf.”

Others argued that all or most of the women working on Aurora are victims of trafficking who would benefit from the city’s support, in the form of services after arrest, to escape their abusers.

And many simply expressed disgust at the visible presence of sex workers in the area, saying they could no longer walk outdoors because of scantily clad women, condoms, and “human waste,” which is also a common complaint about unsheltered people who lack access to toilets.

Council members did not address the points made by sex workers, advocates, and experts on sex trafficking who spoke against the bill and asked for the council to engage with them before adopting legislation that will impact them directly. They did respond to supporters of the legislation, assuring them repeatedly that the new laws targeting sex workers will reduce gun violence and eliminate sex work along Aurora once and for all, while giving victims of sex trafficking and exploitation abundant “off ramps” to escape the sex trade.

Finally, Moore claimed, police would have “the ability to approach and inquire and talk about, ‘how do we get you into services’?” Finally, Moore told groups that provide services for sex workers, the city would be able to “provide the tools to go after the buyers and the pimps, and to provide services, off-ramps, and the collaboration, the money that you need, to do the work that you are doing on a shoestring right now.” Finally, gun violence will become a thing of the past, as would-be sex workers are “deterred” by the threat of punishment and pimps find themselves out of a job.

None of these claims is based in fact. The legislation would do nothing to address gun violence, which is already a felony for which the police have full authority to make arrests.  It doesn’t address sex trafficking, which is also a felony, beyond asserting, in a lengthy preamble, that the “intent” of the legislation is to stop it from happening. And it creates no “off-ramps,” and provides no money, to anyone working to help sex workers or victims of sex trafficking, saying only that police “should” attempt to divert people to programs when possible, without identifying or funding these unidentified programs.

Substantively, the proposed law would make it easier for police to arrest people they believe are “loitering” in order to engage in sex work. Prostitution is already illegal, as is paying for sex, and the city attorney already has the authority to prosecute people for either crime; felony sex trafficking is handled by the King County Prosecutor. The reinstated loitering law would simply lower the bar for police to search and arrest suspected sex workers—allowing police to target people who engage in behaviors such as waving, asking someone if they’re a cop, or “engag[ing] passersby in conversation,” rather than conducting a lengthy, expensive sting.

The Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP) orders, which are part of the same bill, would also do nothing to help victims or address gun violence. Instead, it would  empower the Seattle Municipal Court to banish people from hundreds of blocks around Aurora as a form of probation or a condition of their release from jail, pushing them into other areas. The bill would establish a new crime, a gross misdemeanor, for anyone who violates a SOAP order, even if they haven’t been convicted of the underlying misdemeanor crime.

Nearly 140 people signed up to speak about the legislation Tuesday morning; Kettle cut off public comment after about an hour and a half, when just over half the people who signed up had a chance to speak. (Not to be thwarted, many of them stuck around until the 2:00 council meeting and expressed their opposition then). Then he handed the floor to Moore, who showed an eight-minute video featuring supporters of her legislation, surveillance video showing unidentified women who Moore said were “commercially sexually exploited,” and video of several gun battles that sent the sound of gunshots ricocheting loudly throughout council chambers. The sudden, ear-splitting gunfire was an unpleasant surprise, as Moore didn’t warn the audience—which included many people who testified they had been traumatized by gunshots—that it was coming.

After this lurid display, Moore introduced a panel to speak in favor of her proposal—a group that included Kirkland real estate broker Kristine Moreland, who runs a controversial group called The More We Love. PubliCola has written extensively about The More We Love and Moreland, who originally performed private encampments sweeps at a rate of $515 for each person removed and now holds the sole contract for all homeless outreach in Burien. Moreland didn’t bring up her work in Burien, instead describing The More We Love as “an anti-sex trafficking organization” and talking about the need for more funding for supportive services for victims of trafficking.

Moore appears to have gone to great lengths to eliminate any suggestion that her legislation could have negative consequences from the official council record. As Ashley Nerbovig reported in the Stranger, she took the highly unusual step of removing references to the potential unintended consequences of her legislation from a council staff analysis, which is supposed to be assiduously neutral.

The language Moore removed included a reference to my reporting on the city’s ongoing use of undercover stings, which primarily target men of color, especially immigrants, who often plead guilty rather than exposing themselves to a risky criminal trial. In an interview, an experienced public defender said she had never had a white, English-speaking client charged with sexual exploitation (the city’s term for patronizing a prostitute).

Moore promised that as part of the fall budget process, she will propose funding for a new “receiving center” for sex workers who need services and help leaving the sex trade.

Reality check: The city is facing a $260 million budget deficit, and so far, the only programs that have received significant new funding are police recruitment initiatives. My prediction is that after the council adopts these new laws criminalizing sex work, they’ll end up giving $85,000 to an existing group such as REST or The More We Love and calling it a “pilot receiving center.”

Ironically, after making outlandish claims about a bill that makes gauzy, unfunded promises about future diversion and prevention programs, a majority of the council later voted against legislation from Tammy Morales that would release the full $20 million collected to pay for youth mental health programs this year—justifying their vote by claiming supporters of the funding failed to understand the perils of voting for legislation that lacks a detailed funding plan.

“It is problematic to be making promises to communities that we very well know we cannot fulfill, because what you saw today is what happens— people leave here and children leave here thinking that we are not supporting them… and that is very upsetting to me,” Councilmember Maritza Rivera said. “We shouldn’t be making promises to community that we know we cannot deliver in an act of symbolism, because community doesn’t understand the difference between a symbolic vote and an actual vote.” She could have been talking about the council.