Category: podcasts

City Council, Mayor Wilson, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Mayor-Council Conflict and a Data Center Moratorium

By Erica C. Barnett

This week on Seattle Nice, we discussed tensions between Mayor Katie Wilson’s office and members of the City Council, whose frustration with a lack of collaboration between the second and seventh floors of city hall erupted last week when a Wilson staffer asked the council to hold off on passing a bill to implement the final part of Wilson’s shelter surge plan.

As I reported, Wilson was apparently unhappy with some of the amendments councilmembers proposed and wanted the council to change them.  The council—already irritated that Wilson sent them the shelter bills without first securing a council sponsor and trying to elicit support—was not pleased that the mayor seemed to be ordering them around, and after a reportedly heated meeting between countil members and three Wilson staffers, the council passed the legislation, which Wilson had asked to be expedited as an “emergency” bill, with the (relatively minor) amendments intact.

The tension, Sandeep pointed out, has been brewing since well before the latest conflict; when Wilson fired former City Light director Dawn Lindell, some councilmembers were sensitive to union complaints and excoriated the mayor for what they called a rash decision. Just yesterday, Councilmember Bob Kettle took up that torch again during a discussion about a proposed one-year moratorium on data centers, saying, “We had top notch leadership with Seattle City Light, and this is a failure of our city right now.”

And speaking of data centers, our second segment is all about whether saying no to companies that want to build massive data centers to power AI is a good idea.

Sandeep argued that if Seattle doesn’t embrace the AI future, we may fall behind economically and turn into a hollowed-out shell of a city, like Rust Belt cities did in the 1980s. David some economists claim AI could help solve the affordable housing crisis and doesn’t want to dismiss possibilities like that out of hand. And I, as the resident Luddite, argued that we shouldn’t hitch our entire economy (and the future of our climate) to technology most people don’t like or want.

FYI: Seattle Nice Patreon donors got an early preview of our show this week. Supporting Seattle Nice gets you access to some of our episodes a day before they go out on the regular feed, along with occasional Patreon-only exclusives and the knowledge that your contributions go directly toward making Seattle Nice for you every week, including paying our editor, Quinn Waller.

Mayor Wilson, Media, podcasts

No Wonder the Pundit Class Can’t Stand Her: We Discuss the Mayor’s “Gaffes,” Shelter Buffer Zones, and the KCRHA’s Financial Plight
Mayor Wilson is excited about fixing transit! Or IS she??

By Erica C. Barnett

Is Mayor Katie Wilson proving herself to be a “gaffe”-prone executive, stumbling and bumbling her way into damaging missteps, as Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat argued recently? Or is she exactly who she appeared to be on the campaign trail—an authentic lifelong activist with socialist leanings who refuses to play the game pundits like Westneat want her to play? That’s our first topic on the Seattle Nice podcast this week.

Here’s my take: Westneat’s column was a confusing, first-pass confabulation of unrelated incidents, including a Starbucks rally before Wilson took office, an out-of-context remark about millionaires fleeing the state in response to taxes, and a comment Wilson made at an event in February about social housing.

In addition to these “gaffes,” Westneat was incensed that Wilson allowed a city staffer to steer her briefly away from KOMO’s Chris Daniels, who was interviewing the mayor in a one-on-one after a press conference where she took questions from all members of the media.

(Westneat, like most pundits and the Seattle Times editorial board, failed to summon similar outrage when Wilson’s centrist predecessor, Bruce Harrell, routinely deployed the phrase “how dare anyone question” him when deflecting questions he didn’t want to answer, ended press conferences abruptly, and was rude to unfavored reporters, including on Election Night 2021 when he literally pretended I was invisible. Wonder why.)

Although Daniels, Westneat and seemingly everyone who’s still on X treated this brief faux pas as an assault on journalism itself, Wilson actually did answer the question—which was about whether a recent shooting made her want to add more surveillance cameras faster. (No.)

Sandeep and David think there’s something deeper here—Sandeep in particular argued that it’s important to play nice with the business community—but I think what’s really going on is that people who didn’t want Wilson to win in the first place are now angry that she isn’t playing the usual political games by slapping backs and spooning up sound-bite pablum on command. Despite their outrage about this supposed assault on the free press, it’s clear that Westneat and the rest of the pundit class are perfectly happy when politicians give meaningless comments like “that’s a great question, Chris, and it’s a matter of great concern to me,” as long as the politicians treat them like they’re important.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

Case in point: Westneat praised Wilson’s counterpart at King County, County Executive Girmay Zahilay, for giving “a classic ‘I feel your pain’ answer” to the question Wilson was answering—at much greater length than the out-of-context clip—about millionaires leaving Seattle because of the new state tax. “He said he supports progressive revenue, but that every policy has trade-offs that ought to be acknowledged,” Westneat wrote. Then Wilson “did the very thing Zahilay had just suggested was bad to do.” She was honest. No wonder the pundit class hates her guts!

Later in the podcast, we talked about a couple of stories I covered last week: A proposal to create 750-foot “buffer zones” around schools, child care centers, and parks where new tiny house village shelters would be prohibited, and the ongoing fallout from a damning forensic evaluation of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s finances, which has left many of the people with the power to shut down the agency convinced it’s time to do so.

homelessness, podcasts

Alarming Audit, Missing Millions: Is the End Nigh for KCRHA?

By Erica C. Barnett

On this week’s 🚨emergency episode🚨 of Seattle Nice, we discussed a damning new forensic report into the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s finances, which revealed that the agency could not account for millions of dollars in public funds.

As I reported earlier today, the audit revealed that the KCRHA couldn’t account for $8 million; it also revealed an “administrative overspend” of more than $4 million, on top of a previously reported programmatic overspend of more than $6 million. Beyond the missing money, the repord raises serious concerns about the KCRHA’s accounting practices and use of restricted funds, some of which may have been used for unauthorized purposes.

We discussed what Sandeep described as the “overlapping failures” early in the agency’s history, when the founding CEO, Marc Dones, established a culture in which lived experience of homelessness took primacy over traditional government qualifications, a practice that pushed many of the people who had been managing homelessness contracts at the city of Seattle out and set the agency on a path of lackadaisical record-keeping, few formal financial controls, and accounting practices that included reconciling funds over chat, email, and constant revisions to Excel spreadsheets, rather than traditional government accounting practices.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

 

A number of elected officials at the city and county have already called for the dissolution of the KCRHA, expressing outrage at the audit findings. That process, if it happens, will be long and arduous, and could spell the end of the much-touted “regional approach to homelessness,” which was the ostensible reason the KCRHA was created in the first place.

But as we also discussed, the city and county—the KCRHA’s two primary funders—also bear some responsibility for letting the agency’s finances and accounting get so out of hand and allowing their bank accounts to fall so far into the red. The KCRHA has long served as a bit of a punching bag for its primary funders, but it was it set up to struggle from the very start, when the city and county signed an agreement creating the agency that did not give KCRHA its own funding source, making it basically a pass-through agency that was occasionally allowed to do side missions—like the ill-fated “Partnership for Zero,” which was supposedly going to end unsheltered homelessness downtown.

The KCRHA’s board will meet at 3:00 on Friday, when it will hear from both agency CEO Kelly Kinnison and Clark Nuber, the agency hired by the city and county to do the forensic report. The public can tune in to the meeting on Zoom.

Affordability, Density, podcasts

Will Dialing Back Fees on Housing Fix Seattle’s Construction Crash?

 

Photo by Joshua T. Garcia, via Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 license.

By Erica C. Barnett

On Seattle Nice this week, Sandeep and I brought on two special guests to explain why developers want a holiday from Mandatory Housing Affordability fees, which are added on to of the cost of every new multifamily residential building in Seattle. The fees pay for affordable housing (or a developer can skip them by building affordable units on sight), but they’re bringing in less money than ever as housing development slows.

Since MHA passed, in 2019, Seattle has undergone a political evolution on housing. Density, which neighborhood activists and most political leaders once saw as having an entirely negative impact on neighborhoods, is increasingly seen as a necessity as Seattle’s renter majority grows. Many people no longer agree that the city should segregate renters from property owners by restricting them to dirty, polluted arterials far from parks, libraries, and tree-lined streets. There’s a growing consensus that to reduce the cost of housing, you have to build more of it.

Our guests this week, land use and housing consultant Natalie Quick and former Seattle Chief Operating Officer Marco Lowe, don’t go so far as to call for a total repeal of MHA, but they do make a strong case for its eventual replacement with an incentive-based approach called funded inclusionary zoning. FIZ, which we’ve covered at PubliCola before provides tax breaks, similar to Seattle’s existing Multifamily Tax Exemption program, in exchange for a requirement that developers build affordable units on site. Instead of charging a fee for housing, which drives up rents, FIZ makes it possible for affordable and market-rate housing to coexist.

As Marco points out, housing slowdowns don’t just lead to a shortage of housing, driving up rents. They also deplete city resources, because when developers decide it’s too expensive to build, the city loses out on all other kinds of non-MHA revenues, from sales taxes on materials to taxes on real estate transactions to property taxes on the housing itself.

This one’s a wonky episode, but one well worth listening to if you want to understand why so little new housing—particularly larger units—is getting built right in Seattle right now and what the city could do to reverse the trend.

Editor’s note: This story originally identified Marco Lowe as the former Office of Economic Development director. This error has been corrected.

homelessness, Mayor Wilson, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Mayor Wilson’s Shelter Plan, King County Assessor’s Stalking Charges, an Ambitious Library Levy, and More

By Erica C. Barnett

If you aren’t listening to Seattle Nice, the weekly podcast I co-host along with political consultant (and my former Stranger colleague) Sandeep Kaushik and longtime reporter and producer David Hyde, now’s a great time to tune in—in the last couple months, we’ve talked to City Councilmember Eddie Lin about plans to increase density across the city, debated Mayor Katie Wilson’s apparent plan to move forward with the police surveillance cameras she once opposed, and talked to Downtown Seattle Association director Jon Scholes about the DSA’s unusually sunny forecast for the future of downtown.

This week, we talked about the mayor’s plan to build 500 new tiny house village-style shelter units by this summer, stalking charges against the King County Assessor (who has refused to step down despite a unanimous King County Council vote demanding his resignation), and the latest library levy, which Sandeep said was just another example of Seattle’s willingness to pay any amount of taxes for any purpose.

Sandeep said he was impressed by the mayor’s announcement last week that the city will open 75 new shelter beds in Interbay and expand tiny house villages in two other locations. The biggest unheralded news, he thought, was the announcement that T-Mobile, Starbucks, and Microsoft are all helping to fund the mayor’s initial shelter push, kicking in around $3 million so far.

As someone who’s genuinely excited by Wilson’s ambitious agenda but skeptical about her ability to upend the Seattle Process, I argued it’s too early to declare victory—noting, for instance, that the last time the city participated in a privately backed venture to address homelessness, the “Partnership for Zero” effort to eliminate visible homelessness downtown, they got burned—that initiative, spearheaded by the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, fell apart when it proved harder to house people directly from the street than the homelessness agency anticipated, and funders pulled out, forcing the partnership to shut down in 2023.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

People who’ve been around Seattle’s homelessness system for a while say they’re hopeful about the mayor’s plan, but I’ve also heard concerns that it’s too focused on a single shelter type—tiny house villages—and too optimistic about the timeline for siting nearly 1,000 more tiny house units around the city in the next nine months. Another concern is cost—Wilson’s team has said the average tiny house unit will cost $28,000, all in, but that estimate seems low, given the higher cost of existing villages with the kind of wraparound services and 24/7 security Wilson has suggested will be available at each site.

All that said, you know who didn’t really even bother trying to add shelter in Seattle? Wilson’s predecessor Bruce Harrell, who promised to add 2,000 “shelter or housing” units by the end of his term but ended up using dubious math (taking credit for shelters that were underway by the time he took office, for instance) to claim he had actually added 3,000. (In reality, by the end of Harrell’s term, there were around the same number of shelter beds in Seattle as when he took office). In other words, even if Wilson gets no further than the initial 100 or so additional tiny houses she announced last week, she’ll have increased shelter more than Harrell did in his entire four years in office.

City Council, housing, Mayor Wilson, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Mayor Wilson Wants to Expand Housing Faster; Councilmember Rivera Wants to Audit Human Services

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson is a renter on Capitol Hill, giving her a unique perspective that differentiates her from any previous mayor, and she plans to keep renting through her term. On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we discussed how Wilson’s personal experience renting in Seattle (and struggling to afford escalating rent) may have impacted her decision to go “bigger, taller, and faster” on what’s left of the city’s comprehensive plan update.

In Wilson’s tree-lined neighborhood, single-family houses and apartment buildings mingle effortlessly with newer townhouses and condos, all within a short walk of multiple bus routes and a light rail station. In other words, this mayor has actually experienced the benefits of renting in a neighborhood with lots of trees, walkable amenities, and frequent transit, making her less susceptible to NIMBY arguments that apartments destroy neighborhood “character” or make neighborhoods unlivable.

As Sandeep pointed out, public opinion in Seattle has moved consistently in a YIMBY (yes in my backyard) direction for at least the past decade. That’s good news for Seattle’s renter majority—brand-new housing, though not affordable in itself, takes pressure off Seattle’s acute housing shortage—and bad news for NIMBYs who want Seattle to stay the same as it was when they bought their houses for $23,000 in the ’70s.

We also discussed Councilmember Maritza Rivera’s still-vague proposal to “audit Human Services Department contracts.” Sandeep and David think it seems like a pretty good idea in light of an audit at the county’s equivalent department that found widespread problems among “high-risk” contracts—why not “look under the rock” and see what’s there? “From my side, we’d want to make that a campaign issue,” Sandeep said—perhaps previewing what Rivera’s reelection campaign will look like?

 

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

I countered that as with the Equitable Development initiative, Rivera seems to be fixating on contracts in one specific area (the DCHS contracts were largely first-time contracts with small Black- and brown-led nonprofits) rather than considering which type of contracts across all city departments are worth scrutinizing for waste, fraud, and abuse. (I also noted that the smaller contractors targeted in the DCHS audit do not generally contract with the city.) Sandeep said these kinds of contracts came out of the “peak woke period” after COVID and so should be subject to greater scrutiny.

As I reported, auditing $300 million in human services contracts is far more complex than the kinds of audits Seattle’s auditor typically does, and would tie up resources for years at a small office with just five audit staff. Just as a factual matter, I’ll stand by what I said on the podcast: No matter how much we agree that it would be great for all public contracts to face close scrutiny (no one supports waste, abuse, or fraud), given that the city will never have the resources to audit every contract, the city has to make choices. If that choice is always to audit human services providers and never audit police spending, for instance, that’s an expression of priorities, not an objective assessment of what kind of city spending merits extra scrutiny.