Category: podcasts

Business, City Council, Elections, podcasts

Seattle Nice: City Council Shakeup in Southeast Seattle

And on Are You Mad At Me?: Why You Should Watch Shattered Glass!

By Erica C. Barnett

After last week’s grim assessment of how local leaders are (and mostly aren’t) preparing for the dual impact of city funding shortfalls and federal funding cuts, we turned this week to a more hopeful subject: Who will represent Southeast Seattle’s District 2 on the City Council next year?

Tammy Morales stepped down at the beginning of 2025, saying her colleagues had bullied her and made it impossible to get anything done, and the council appointed Mark Solomon, whom Morales defeated in 2019, to the seat. (Solomon was the second candidate to be vanquished by Morales and subsequently appointed to the council; the first was Tanya Woo, who went on to lose to Alexis Mercedes Rinck.) Four candidates have filed for the position so far: Assistant City Attorney Eddie Lin, SDOT staffer (and, until recently, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s transportation advisor) Adonis Ducksworth; business owner Takayo Ederer; and city building inspector and union leader Jamie Fackler.

I think the candidates for District 2 have more diverse viewpoints than the pigeonholes pundits are slotting them into—the usual “left,” “center-left,” and “moderate” (conservative by Seattle standards) “lanes.”

Lin, for example, floated the idea of a new levy to fund gun violence prevention programs—but also told me he supports beefing up the police department to crack down on “disorder” and “open-air drug markets” while the city figures out a way to address the addiction and poverty that lead to drug sales and petty thefts. Ducksworth, who is strongly associated with Harrell, said that while he may not have supported Proposition 1A, the measure that funded social housing, he’s “extremely happy it did pass” and will do everything in his power to make it a success. (Harrell campaigned against 1A, favoring an alternative that would have raised no new funds and would not have built social housing).

And Fackler, a union shop steward who said he was motivated to run by Prop. 1A’s success, went deep on the need to eliminate the red tape that’s currently hindering development in Seattle, including utility hookup requirements that can quickly make housing projects infeasible.

It’s too soon to say how many more candidates will get into these races before the May 9 filing deadline—there’s often a rush—but we will note that the biggest vote-winner in local election history, Position 8 (citywide) rep Rinck, is not facing any serious opposition so far. The same can’t be said for Position 9 (also citywide) Councilmember Sara Nelson, who faces a formidable challenger in Dionne Foster, the former director of the lefty Washington Progress Alliance, who we interviewed earlier this year.

In addition to the upcoming elections, we discussed the (potential) closure of the Virginia Inn, a Pike Place Market institution that is in an apparently intractable dispute with its landlord, the Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority. Sandeep and I hope they can work it out; David says that as anti-NIMBYs, we’re hypocrites for opposing the closure of a business we happen to like.

Also this week, it’s time for another episode of “Are You Mad At Me?,” our limited-run podcast about the great, underappreciated journalism movie Shattered Glass. The film, released on 2003, is about the downfall of serial fabulist Stephen Glass, a journalist for The New Republic who was caught fabricating stories after reporters for a digital startup started digging into his blockbuster piece about teenage hackers working as security consultants.

This month, Josh and I will tell you why you—yes, YOU—should watch this excellent film, even if you don’t think you care about the subject matter.

To quote the New York Times’ A.O. Scott, who reviewed Shattered Glass when it came out in 2003, it’s “an astute and surprisingly gripping drama not only about the ethics of magazine writing, but also, more generally, about the subtle political and psychological dynamics of modern office culture.”

 

City Council, Mayor Harrell, podcasts, Trump

Seattle Nice: Is the City Ready for Trump 2.0? (Spoiler: Nope!)
Perhaps a little Brutalism will cheer you up? HHS headquarters photo by ajay_suresh on Flickr; Creative Commons 2.0 license

By Erica C. Barnett

As I noted earlier today on Bluesky, it’s past time for Seattle leaders to be running around with their hair on fire. Not only are federal policies contributing to a shortfall in local revenues, direct cuts are just starting to hit programs that serve people across the county—from nonprofits that provide shelter, housing, and health care to people experiencing or at risk of homelessness to groups that provide legal and other critical services to immigrants and refugees.

Less than three months in, the second Trump Administration has already decimated the Departments of Health and Human Services and HUD, cuts that directly reduce funding for local service providers, and has just begun the process of denying federal funds to so-called “sanctuary” jurisdictions like Seattle and the state of Washington, to which FEMA just denied funding to pay or the damage done during last year’s “bomb cyclone” weather emergency.

FEMA also just eliminated a disaster preparedness program, started during the first Trump Administration, that funds emergency preparedness programs such as HVAC upgrades for libraries to serve as emergency shelters during dangerous heat and wildfire events; flood prevention; earthquake mitigation for unreinforced masonry buildings, and “resilience hubs” designed to support residents during and after a disaster.

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More cuts are coming, and the city shows few signs of preparation. Instead of talking about cuts to the city’s biggest budget items, local taxes to help prevent thousands more people from becoming homeless, or other radical budget options (like a local New Deal), the city seems like it’s preparing to meet this moment by doing what it always does in challenging budget years—ask departments to come up with potential cuts, then find ways to make the cuts as painless as possible while also exempting the police department or increasing its budget.

We discussed all of that and more (including a false alarm about ICE vehicles that turned out to be regular Seattle police) on this week’s episode. It’s a bleak one, but at least we all agreed on the diagnosis, if not the cure.

City Council, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Fees for Housing, a Lightweight Condemnation of “Defund,” and a Critique of Seattle’s Response to Shootings

By Erica C. Barnett

On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we blast through a range of local topics—from the city council’s nonbinding resolution denouncing “defund” (Rob Saka called it a “truth and reconciliation” process), to Councilmember Cathy Moore’s efforts to impose Mandatory Housing Affordability fees on small infill “middle housing” in former single-family neighborhoods, where state legislators recently forced cities to allow townhouses, fourplexes, and other kinds of very low-density development. Developers say that MHA fees would make small projects infeasible by adding potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in pre-development costs; Moore said they should just accept lower returns.

In addition to going in deep on MHA (and appropriately shallow on Saka’s lightweight resolution), we talked about a recent city audit that explored some of the reasons gun violence has been declining in cities like Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Las Vegas, even as shootings continue to rise in Seattle. The City Auditor’s Office recommended more transparent, better-integrated information about patterns in gun violence, and said the city should collaborate more effectively with regional governments and community groups to understand the root causes of shootings in specific communities, rather than responding reactively and operating in siloes.

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At a recent council committee meeting, Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington said she felt a lack of “respect” from the council, which moved forward with the audit even after the mayor’s office directed the auditor’s office to stop working on it, telling Councilmember Maritza Rivera and Council President Sara Nelson that the mayor’s office and police department are already implementing all the recommendations in the audit, rendering the audit unnecessary and even insulting.

Last week, Rivera said the mayor’s office contacted her right after the meeting to discuss the concerns she raised about shootings in and around Magnuson Park, and she felt at least somewhat reassured that they heard her and were taking action. But, she added, the city still needs to centralize its response to gun violence in response to the audit—taking the kind of “all-hands-on-deck” approach of other cities that have actually seen gun violence go down.

Listen to Seattle Nice below or wherever you get your podcasts.

City Council, podcasts, Police

On Hacks and Wonks, We Discussed Ferguson’s Tax Aversion, Seattle’s Performative Anti-“Defund” Pledge, and Cathy Moore’s Funding Directive

By Erica C. Barnett

I went on Crystal Nicole Fincher’s Hacks and Wonks podcast this week to discuss recent state and local news, including Governor Bob Ferguson’s steadfast refusal to consider wealth taxes on the very richest Washingtonians to help close a $1 billion budget hole; the Seattle City Council’s recent performative vote denouncing the very existence of  never-realized proposals, in 2020, to fund alternatives to police; and Councilmember Cathy Moore’s recent decision to halt a competitive bidding process and direct the city to give $1 million to a group called The More We Love to expand its Renton “receiving center” for women escaping the sex trade.

I don’t mean to be alarmist or overstate the impact of Moore’s move, which I covered at length late last month. The result of Moore’s directive (which the mayor’s office agreed to; the Human Services Department is an executive department and it wouldn’t have happened if they didn’t), in the most literal sense, is that a group of Seattle-based organizations that work with commercially exploited sex workers on Aurora Ave. N. will not be able to move forward with the plans they were making to use the money most effectively, and it will go to an untested nonprofit best known for wresting a homeless outreach contract from REACH in Burien instead.

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But there’s something undemocratic about a single official, elected by an 8,600-vote margin in 2023 to represent one of seven City Council districts, deciding that work the city had been directing to help underfunded Seattle nonprofits apply for city funds was no longer necessary, because—according to Moore’s emails to HSD officials—she visited The More We Love’s Renton shelter and found it impressive. There’s also something unseemly about the executive branch agreeing, with few or no questions asked, to halt a competitive bidding process—for funds designed to help some of the most vulnerable people in the city—just because a legislator said so.

All this stuff is technically legal. But at a time when the separation of powers is a joke at the federal level, it’s disturbing to see a legislator discarding the work of organizations that had been going through a competitive that they believed could lead to an expansion of their work, just because she decided she liked one specific group best. These are our tax dollars, and while $1 million isn’t much in the scheme of the city’s budget (especially compared to, say, the half-a-billion dollars we spend on the never-defunded police department), we should have some confidence that they aren’t being spent on a whim.

City Council, housing, land use, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Council President Sara Nelson Talks About Housing in the Stadium District, Addiction Treatment, and More

By Erica C. Barnett

Council President Sara Nelson was our guest on this week’s Seattle Nice podcast, where we talked at length about the council’s recent 6-3 vote to allow up to 990 apartments, half of them affordable to moderate-income renters, in a small, industrially zoned area just south of the city’s two stadiums.

Affordable housing groups, nearby neighborhoods, and the Building Trades Union supported the proposal to allow housing as part of a planned “makers’ district” where artists, food producers, and small manufacturers will have access to more affordable work and retail space than they would in other parts of the city. The longshoremen’s union, the Port, and some urbanists opposed the plan: Maritime groups claimed the housing would destroy Seattle’s industrial base in SoDo by clogging the area with too many cars, and some advocates for citywide density said it was just another example of the city putting housing along dirty, traffic-clogged arterials instead of single-family areas.

Nelson said she doesn’t understand why “the urbanists” opposed the housing proposal, and said her goal was to create affordable housing while improving public safety in the area, by adding more eyes on the street in a part of the city that has few permanent residents. Hotels are allowed in the area already, but there’s a big difference between people living in a neighborhood and people just passing through.

Opponents may not find Nelson’s arguments convincing, but as I said when she challenged me on this, I’ve never argued that she’s a straightforward NIMBY, despite disagreeing with most of her positions on public safety, workers’ rights, and renter-vs.-landlord issues.

Nelson has taken many centrist or conservative positions during her three-plus years on the council—pushing to eliminate the minimum wage for gig workers, lower testing standards for new police hires, protect landlords who don’t want to reveal how much they charge in rent, and crack down on people who use drugs in public (not to mention those who protest council actions in public meetings).

But beyond “protecting mom and pop landlords” by preserving old apartment buildings (ahem—”naturally occurring affordable housing”), Nelson has not been among the council’s many vocal advocates against housing in neighborhoods, and has voted against proposals that would restrict housing, like former council member Alex Pedersen’s proposed tree removal restrictions that would have made it difficult or impossible to build middle housing in historically single-family areas.

While I have argued vociferously against laws restricting housing to busy arterials (I think we should allow apartments everywhere), I don’t think a policy unfairly restricting housing to certain areas is a reason to ban housing in the stadium district—an area that’s right next to Pioneer Square, another car-choked neighborhood directly adjacent to industrial uses (and a vast new waterfront highway whose opening city officials have celebrated).

Listen to Seattle Nice—where we also discussed the city’s comprehensive plan, the funding Nelson secured in the budget for addiction treatment at Lakeside-Milam, and the council’s upcoming budget challenges.

 

Elections, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Sound Transit’s New Leader, Katie Wilson’s Run for Mayor, and Ann Davison’s Challengers

By Erica C. Barnett

On our latest episode of Seattle Nice, we discuss King County Executive Dow Constantine’s likely appointment to a $675,000-a-year job as head of Sound Transit; mayor Bruce Harrell’s first potentially viable challenger, Katie Wilson; and a new candidate, Erika Evans, who’s joining the race against Republican City Attorney Ann Davison. We also poured one out for the short-lived candidacy of Tanya Woo, who briefly filed to run for City Council District 2 (the seat she lost to Tammy Morales before getting appointed to the council and losing to Alexis Mercedes Rinck last year).

It’s somewhat unusual for an incumbent city attorney to have so many challengers this early in the race (in addition to Evans, Rory O’Sullivan and Nathan Rouse are running). But in the case of Davison, it’s hardly surprising.

In her first unsuccessful campaign, in 2019, Davison ran against Debora Juarez from the right. As part of her appeal to voters, Davison proposed warehousing unsheltered people in former big-box stores, called climate change a pointless “luxury” issue compared to removing encampments and making Seattle “clean”; and claimed the city’s streets were covered in human feces.

In her second campaign, for lieutenant governor in 2020, Davison ran as a Republican, announcing that she had left the Democratic Party as part of the Walk Away movement headed up by (later-convicted) January 6 rioter Bradon Straka. (State elections are partisan, but Washington state does not require voters to register as a party member, so there’s no way to confirm Davison’s previous Democratic affiliation).

After losing that race in the primary, Davison defeated police abolitionist Nicole Thomas Kennedy in 2021, running on a law and order platform. She has spent her term advocating for the right to prosecute people who use drugs in public, crack down on sex workers, and banish people who commit drug and sex work misdemeanors from parts of the city.

Under Davison, the city shut down community court, which provided an alternative to jail for people accused of certain misdemeanors; created a new “high utilizers” program in which people arrested over and over are subject to a higher level of punishment; and began pursuing charges aggressively under a new drug law that makes simple drug possession or using drugs in public a misdemeanor. She also supports limiting the number of times people are allowed to overdose before they’re thrown in jail.

We debated whether Davison is really a Republican (she is, ) or if she’s maybe some kind of moderate Democrat (as Sandeep seems to believe).

Last month, Davison belatedly joined a lawsuit filed by other cities against a Trump executive order threatening to withhold federal funds from cities that won’t help the federal government conduct immigration raids—a Seattle policy for many years. Unlike other city attorneys, however, Davison’s justification for joining was that the order violates “local control,” a tepid reason at best.

Notably, Davison has declined to denounce Trump generally or say whether she voted for Trump or Harris in the last election (we asked), and the policies she supports are, very generously, on the far right end of Seattle’s political spectrum. (Although, again, she denounced the Democrats and joined a national Republican movement in 2020, as Trump was running for reelection, and ran on a Republican ticket that was headed by a far-right MAGA extremist who went on to deny the election results.)

Check out our discussion on this week’s episode: