PubliCola co-founder Josh Feit has a new column based on a simple premise: X > (is greater than” Y, as in “The Case for Firing SPD Chief Shon Barnes > The Case for Keeping Shon Barnes,” the first of three Greater Than items this week.
A lot has been made (appropriately so) of former police chief Shon Barnes’ outsize response when reporter Connor Nash asked him about my reporting on his frequent absences from Seattle. But Barnes’ tenure in Seattle was already tenuous, thanks to a litany of other issues ranging from SPD’s treatment of the LGBTQ+ community under his leadership to his seeming lack of interest in partnering with the city’s team of trained mental health first responder.
When City Council President Joy Hollingsworth introduced a proposal to spend $250,000 in funding for surveillance cameras that can’t be used this year to hire violence interruptors from We Deliver Care, Councilmember Bob Kettle had a bit of a meltdown, saying he would vote against the entire midyear budget if they didn’t set the money aside for cameras (which the budget director had just explained could not be spent on cameras this year).
We would finally get a (mostly) complete copy of former chief Barnes’ camera later in the week, but as of Wednesday, SPD told us to file a records request and wait. Last week, they said they’d be able to provide Barnes’ schedule no problem, but after he left, they said it was “locked down” in some way and no longer accessible. 🤔
PubliCola reported exclusively that former chief Barnes’ would get an even larger payout than the $700,000 package that was previously known. Read on down the list for more details on the extra bonus he received when he signed a no-sue agreement.
The city and county announced this week that they’ll be hiring 23 and 11 new staffers, respectively, to manage the transition of homeless service contracts as the King County Regional Homelessness Authority shrinks down to just a few “core” functions. Although the “rightsizing” was announced more than a month ago, the KCRHA has not made any layoffs, and still has 73 employees.
Remember how a bunch of local commentators went on KIRO, KUOW, and other local shows to call my reporting dishonest, unfair, and false last week (and how one of them said I should be “ashamed”?) Hopefully they saw this post, which confirms that Barnes was, or planned to be out of town or otherwise off duty, including at his family home in Chicago, at least 12 weeks this year—including three weeks from late July to mid-August.
On Friday, PubliCola exclusively obtained the details about Barnes’ vacation payout: Despite being out of town 40 percent of the time, he still somehow had 29 days’ paid time off accrued, according to the city. The additional money—a little less than a minimum wage worker makes in Seattle, btw—brings Barnes’ total payout to more than $741,000.
Reporters and anchors at KOMO filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to end their representation by SAG-AFTRA; the vote’s next week. One likely factor behind the push is that the staffers all negotiate their own contracts individually, and SAG-AFTRA’s guarantee is reportedly far below what any of the on-air talent makes.
Also this week: I made the rounds of local podcasts, talking about Barnes’ resignation, Tuesday’s election results, and other news from this week with City Cast Seattle, KUOW’s Seattle Now, and as always, our weekly podcast, Seattle Nice.
1. On August 12, the reporters, anchors, and other on-air staff at KOMO TV, a station owned by the conservative media company Sinclair, are scheduled vote on a proposal to leave their union, the Screenwriters Guild/ American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA). The action, known as a decertification petition, was filed with the National Labor Relations Board last month, with reporter Jeremy Harris submitting the paperwork.
The group of KOMO staffers who want to leave the union is represented by the National Right to Work Foundation, a national anti-union organization.
It would be easy enough to characterize Sinclair staffers as anti-union activists politically aligned with their bosses and a controversial national anti-labor group. KOMO’s anchors and high-profile “talent,” including vocal Katie Wilson critic Chris Daniels and “Seattle Is Dying” creator Eric Johnson, who’s now retired, skew conservative.
But the issues at play in KOMO’s union debate seem a bit more complicated. On-air reporters and editors typically negotiate their own individual contracts with management, rather than working through the union, and the minimum union guarantee for reporters is reportedly in the mid-five figures—far below what most on-air reporters and anchors actually make. The group already gets its health care through Sinclair, rather than the union. Union dues cost money. All of that has prompted a robust internal debate at KOMO about whether union representation is worth it.
Holding a decertification vote requires a petition signed by at least 30 percent of represented staff; the KOMO petition reportedly received more than 60 percent support.
Patrick Semmens, a spokesman for the NRWF, said the KOMO staffers reached out to the group for legal representation. Semmens didn’t offer specific details about why KOMO’s reporters and anchors wanted to de-unionize, but said typical reasons include the union’s responsiveness—”sometimes they aren’t around except when it comes time to pay dues”—the cost of dues, and political objections to unionization.
No one from the anchors’ and reporters’ group was authorized to speak with PubliCola on the record. SAG-AFTRA’s local representative did not respond to a call and email Thursday.
2. Former police chief Shon Barnes will receive 29 days of additional full pay, on top of his previously reported $700,000 payout, PubliCola has learned—a total additional payout of $41,653. Mayor Katie Wilson’s office confirmed this additional payout on Friday.
The total Barnes will receive in exchange for signing a settlement, which includes a stipulation that he won’t sue the city, now tops twice his annual salary. Barnes was police chief for just over 17 months.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
It’s unclear how much official time Barnes took off during 2026; we’ve asked SPD and the mayor’s office how much paid time Barnes got off each year and whether it rolled over from year to year. As we’ve reported, Barnes had planned to be out of town for 12 weeks through August 10 of this year; that includes time spent at his family home in Chicago as well as vacation time and conferences.
3. I talked about Mayor Katie Wilson’s decision to part ways with former police chief Shon Barnes, Tuesday’s election in legislative and local races, and more news from this week on three different shows this week, two of them with my Seattle Nice co-host Sandeep Kaushik. In roughly descending order of spiciness, they are:
Seattle Nice (in which Sandeep, David, and I debate how Wilson handled the Barnes decision and whether anyone pays attention to which legislative candidates the mayor endorses—also embedded below);
KUOW’s Seattle Now (Sandeep and me again, talking with Patricia Murphy about the same topics, with a dash of public radio politesse and zero cusses!
City Cast Seattle (with host Jane Hu and the Seattle Times’ tech reporter Alex Halverson, also about elections and the police chief, plus what’s really going on with the big local companies’ AI spending).
Barnes’ schedule had him out of the office 12 weeks through mid-August, including a three-week stretch between July and mid- August.
By Erica C. Barnett
A mostly complete version of former Seattle police chief Shon Barnes’ schedule for 2026, which SPD previously claimed had been “locked down” when he resigned, shows that Barnes was, or planned to be, out of the office nearly 40 percent of the time through mid-August.
PubliCola obtained Barnes’ schedule through a records request.
Barnes was out of town or otherwise off duty at least 75 days between January and the end of July, and had planned to be off the first 10 days of August, for a total of at least 12 planned weeks out of the office in the seven and a half months leading up to August 10, 2026, the last day for which SPD provided a full or partial schedule.
Barnes’ calendar contradicts Barnes’ claim that PubliCola’s reporting on his absences from Seattle was inaccurate; we reported that he had “planned to be out of town until mid-August, taking several weeks away from Seattle during the period when shootings and other violent incidents are most likely to occur.”
The schedule SPD provided still does not reflect Barnes’ original calendar for the week of July 26. Instead, it has edited to replace Barnes’ original schedule with events related to the shooting.
However, a spokesperson for SPD confirmed that Barnes planned to be out of town that entire week, with another member of his command staff serving as active chief during his absence.
This newly available timeline contradicts SPD’s (and Barnes’) previous claim that he had planned to be back in town on August 3.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
When South Seattle Emerald reporter Connor Nash asked Barnes about my reporting on his schedule, he lost his temper and claimed my reporting was inaccurate, resulting in a video that went viral and contributed to Wilson’s decision to ask for his resignation.
The calendar SPD originally provided to PubliCola was not taken directly from Barnes’ schedule. Instead, it was altered by someone at SPD in ways that make it appear Barnes was in town more often than he was.
Public agencies are supposed to provide existing documents, like Outlook calendars, in their original format; they aren’t allowed to alter public records except when information is exempt from public disclosure under the Public Records Act. If an agency is going to redact or alter documents, they have to identify what specific exemption applies for each redaction in an exemption log. SPD did not do any of those things.
The version SPD originally provided appears to have been altered in two respects, in addition to the changes SPD staff made after the shooting. First, it has been color-coded in a different way than the original. Second, large blocks of purple, an Outlook feature that indicates the times when Barnes was out of the office and unavailable, have been removed.
The visual difference between the two versions of the calendar is fairly stark:
The 85 days that Barnes’ calendar show him out of the office are a minimum. As with his 2025 calendar, most of Barnes’ weekends are empty, and many are preceded by Friday afternoons that are blocked off, with nothing on the calendar, starting as early as 1pm, which could indicate time off or out of town.
Of the 75 days Barnes was out of the office between January and July, he spent about 27 attending five conferences across the country—in Detroit, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Las Vegas, and Dallas, respectively. The conferences all took place between April and July, so Barnes was at a conference, on average, about a week each month during that period.
Much of Barnes’ remaining time out of Seattle consisted of trips home to Chicago, which accounted for a minimum 20 days of the 75; other days off were marked “private appointment” “vacation” “focus time” or “out of office” blocks with no additional information, so it’s impossible to say with certainty where he was. Barnes’ frequent travel meant that there were large, nearly continuous chunks of time when he was nowhere near Seattle. Between May and July, Barnes’ calendar shows just three weeks—the weeks of May 11, June 7, and June 21—when he was on duty and available all five weekdays.
1. A council committee meeting about midyear changes to the city budget went briefly off the rails on Tuesday, after Joy Hollingsworth proposed using $250,000 in unused funding for police surveillance cameras to pay for community violence interruptors from the group We D eliver Care for the rest of the year. The money is a one-time expenditure; starting next year, the city expects King County to pick up the tab as part of its”mitigation” for a mental health crisis center the county is opening in Hollingsworth’s district.
Nine surveillance-related SPD positions are sitting vacant while the NYU Policing Project completes a privacy and security audit of the cameras. City budget director Aly Pennuci said any money from the unfilled positions may be needed to fund a “significant request” for more spending on SPD, which appears to have once again overspent its budget this year.
Council budget hawk Maritza Rivera, who had already questioned some of the other midyear adds, seemed satisfied with that explanation. But public safety chair (and camera fanatic) Bob Kettle was not, taking the mic to bellow that he found it “unconscionable” that Wilson would not simply expand the camera system without finishing the study.
“I am confident how the NYU report is going to come out, and then the mayor should push forward on the CCTV cameras, and SPD can obligate those funds here in this calendar year,” Kettle said. “And I would note that is unconscionable in terms of what the mayor has been doing with this program, because we vetted this program, we built in so many protections in this program, we built in so many safeguards, protocols from top to bottom. So the fact that she hasn’t done anything on those nine positions is unconscionable.”
In fact, the city council rushed a second round of cameras through last year before any study could be done, asserting at the time that there was no way they could be used to violate people’s privacy. The Policing Project is doing the review the council declined to do in its haste to get cameras up before Bruce Harrell left office.
After he finished criticizing Wilson for doing basic due diligence before unleashing police surveillance citywide, Kettle said that even though he supported violence interruption programs “110 percent,” he would vote against funding this violence prevention program—and oppose the whole supplemental budget—if it used a penny of 2026 camera funding for anything other than cameras.
The midyear budget also includes funding to pay for universal school lunches during the upcoming school year, announced last week in a joint statement by Mayor Katie Wilson and city councilmembers. The money will come from $5 million the city no longer plans to spend on Northgate Commons, a mixed-use Seattle Housing Authority project near the Northgate light rail station (the city’s contribution will go from $20 million to $15 million).
2. Last Monday, several days before Mayor Katie Wilson asked then-police chief Shon Barnes to resign, I (and other reporters) requested Barnes’ calendar. The version I received begins abruptly on March 29, and has been color-coded and altered to remove Barnes’ original plans for the last week of July and first week of August, when he returned to Seattle from planned time off to respond to a shooting at Seattle Center.
Each time I followed up to request Barnes’ full calendar last week, SPD assured me they were “working on it” and would have the missing months’ schedule to me shortly.
But this Monday, a week after I originally requested Barnes’ calendar, an SPD spokesman told me that because Barnes resigned, his schedule is now “locked down” and can only be accessed through a public disclosure request. As I’ve reported, getting records out of SPD often takes months or years, meaning that a document SPD could have simply handed over last week won’t be public until their public disclosure office gets around to providing it.
Despite this newly imposed delay, we do know a little about Barnes’ calendar for the first few months of the year. Between information SPD provided reporters last week, PubliCola’s previous reporting, and Barnes’ social media, it’s clear that between late last December and the end of March, Barnes took a 15-day vacation, was in Chicago with his family for at least nine additional days, and spent five days doing recruitment at a basketball tournament held by a conference of small HBCUs that includes Barnes’ 2,300-student alma mater.
As with his calendar we reviewed in 2025, Barnes’ weekends were mostly empty, with several Fridays preceding unscheduled weekends marked as “unavailable,” “out of office,” or “focus time,” with nothing specific on the calendar.
Mainstream media outlets and many Seattle City Councilmembers have expressed outrage over Mayor Katie Wilson’s decision to remove Shon Barnes as police chief after he confronted a reporter who asked him about my stories on Barnes’ frequent absences from Seattle. (Barnes, as I reported in 2025, rented an apartment here and regularly visited his family home in Chicago; he also attended frequent conferences, like the one he was attending when shooting broke out at Seattle Center on Sunday, July 26).
Critics have overwhelmingly suggested that Wilson made the decision to remove Barnes rashly, with no real justification other than his outsize reaction to the South Connor Nash’s question and the fact that he spends time out of town. A typical complaint came from the editorial board of the Seattle Times, which insinuated that Wilson fired the chief to create a “distraction” to hide her own incompetence, and not for any actual reason.
Wilson, as I pointed out on Seattle Nice last week, signed a binding settlement with Barnes (he got a total of $700,000) that almost certainly includes a mutual nondisparagement clause that prevents her from saying exactly why she asked him to resign. But Barnes was only police chief for 19 months, so the current collective shortsightedness about the controversies that arose during his tenure feels almost deliberate.
When Wilson came into office, Barnes’ future at SPD was very much in doubt, and questions about his performance as chief had not receded in the seven months since Wilson took office. But for those with short memories, here are just a few of the issues that had been swirling around Barnes prior to last week’s events.
No girls allowed: Although Barnes’ supporters touted the high percentage of female oficers at the department where he was previously chief, in Madison, WI, skeptics noted that the progress happened mostly before he took over. Under Barnes, SPD’s progress toward the “30 by 30” goal of having a 30 percent female recruit class by 2030 has stalled and even reversed.
In April 2025, for example, SPD had only managed to hire five women, compared to a total of 12 women in 2024. By the end of the year, the department had added just 12 more women to that total. Women accounted for just 10 percent of new police hires in 2026, a year when SPD spent millions of dollars on a macho ad campaign featuring burly, tattooed men fighting in a ring, male cops racing around on motorcycles and boats, and men busting down doors, SCUBA diving, and defusing bombs. The toxic culture at SPD preceded Barnes, but it persisted, and may have gotten worse, during his brief time in Seattle.
Anti-LGBTQ accusations: Not long after taking over the department, Barnes oversaw a dramatic crackdown on nude sunbathers at Denny-Blaine Park, a historic LGBTQ+friendly nude beach that former mayor Harrell previously tried to shut down by siting a playground there. (The planned children’s play area would have been funded by a wealthy neighbor and Harrell donor who has continued to campaign relentlessly against the people who use the beach.)
In a later tort claim, it would come out that Barnes’ chief of staff Alex Ricketts allegedly responded “we’re not here for the gays” when a top staffer raised concerns about the chief’s apparent indifference to Seattle’s LGBTQ+ residents.
Barnes also passed over a gay lieutenant who was a fixture in the Capitol Hill community and had been serving as acting captain of the East Precinct, Doug Raguso, in favor of an infamous officer named Mike Tietjen.
Tietjen’s name was synonymous with his misconduct during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the neighborhood, when he drove his SUV onto a sidewalk full of protesters, likening them to “cockroaches” as they ran out of his path. Tietjen was also disciplined for an incident that same year, in which he was among a group of officers who harassed a trans woman, asking if she “had a dick under” her skirt.
When PubliCola broke the news about Tietjen’s promotion and Raguso’s reassignment, Barnes launched an internal search to find out who had “leaked” the information, which was posted on SPD’s own social media. Barnes eventually replaced Tietjen—not with Raguso, but with Jim Britt, another straight white man. Raguso was reassigned to the department’s Real-Time Crime Center.
Under Barnes, SPD also badly blundered its response to a pro-LGBTQ counter-protest at an anti-trans event by a religious-right group at Cal Anderson Park on Capitol Hill. Instead of maintaining a distance (as they did at the much larger No Kings protests), police pepper-sprayed, tackled, and arrested counter-protesters, behaving—as a subsequent review by the city’s Office of Inspector General concluded—like security for the religious group, even referring to counter-protesters as “transtifa.”
SPD officers repeated the performance during a second event by the same group at City Hall, blocking off access to the public plaza to everyone except the anti-trans activist group and escorting the activists from place to place. At the same time, police on bikes mobilized repeatedly against a small group of counterprotesters, using their bikes as weapons and shields.
Discrimination lawsuits: Raguso, the former East Precinct acting captain, and detective Anna Fishel filed discrimination claims against SPD earlier this year, alleging the department denied them promotions because of their sexual orientations and, in Fishel’s case, her gender. Fishel, who had a young child, was the only woman up for promotion to sergeant; in her claim, she said Barnes refused to promote her in place and instead offered her an overnight shift she couldn’t take because she needed to be home with her daughter. The position went to a straight man.
An earlier tort claim, from two department veterans Barnes fired in 2025, also accused Barnes of retaliation and discrimination. Barnes fired Brian Maxey, the department’s chief operating officer, and Rebecca Boatright, SPD’s general counsel, after the two disagreed with some of his decisions, including an initiative to send embarrassing letters to men the department suspected of paying women for sex on Aurora. Barnes replaced Maxey with Sarah Smith, a staffer with a slim resume who had risen through the ranks at Harrell’s office.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
Alternative response stymied: Before Barnes came on board, the Seattle Police Officers Guild negotiated a generous contract with Harrell and the City Council that—in addition to giving officers huge raises—put limits on the ability of the CARE Team, a group of social workers that is supposed to respond to crisis calls that don’t require an armed response, to do its job. The restrictions prevent CARE from responding at homeless encampments, residences, businesses, or to calls where a person is using drugs or being “confrontational.”
The CARE Team has been expanded repeatedly, but can’t be dispatched even in situations where the contract’s restraints don’t apply unless a police sergeant agrees to let them go to a call.
Despite these restrictions, CARE Department Chief Amy Barden hoped to negotiate some wiggle room with Barnes that would allow her team to respond to 911 calls involving people in crisis. Instead, she said earlier this year, the constraints actually tightened under Barnes, to the point where CARE was told it couldn’t respond to someone having a mental health crisis in a QFC parking lot, because the person was technically on private property. The team has also been prohibited from responding to calls where a child is present, which Barnes said has resulted in a gender disparity in the team’s responses, since women are more likely to be accompanied by their kids.
Barnes appeared at times to reject the entire concept of allowing social workers to respond to mental health crisis calls, suggesting that every type of 911 call can easily escalate into violence. This contradicts national research showing that most 911 calls do not involve any crime and could be handled by someone other than a police officer. It’s also contrary to the city’s own policies on unarmed first response.
“I’ve been to calls before where it was ‘dementia,’ but when I got there, there was a gun stuck in my stomach,” Barnes said. “So it is unpredictable. … Just because we have a badge and a gun doesn’t mean that we should be relegated to certain types of calls.”
Bloated staff, big bonuses: As I reported exclusively last year, Barnes and two of his new chiefs, deputy chief (and now interim police chief) Andre Sayles and assistant chief Nicole Powell, took $50,000 bonuses that were created explicitly to recruit more trained rank-and-file police officers during a staffing shortage.
This $150,000 payout was on top of the $3,000 Barnes and his other deputy chief, Yvonne Underwood, took after Barnes hired new executive staff. Barnes got two $1,000 payouts for hiring Powell and Sayles, while Underwood got $1,000 for Sayles. These bonuses, like the $50,000 “lateral” hiring incentives, were explicitly created for SPD employees to recruit new rank-and-file police officers.
Sayles and Powell were just two of several new executive hires Barnes made when he started, expanding SPD’s command staff substantially at an additional ongoing cost of more than $1,000,000 a year. Those new positions included a second deputy chief (Sayles), a new executive director of crime and community harm reduction (Lee Hunt), a chief communications officer (Barbara DeLollis, and a chief of staff (Alex Ricketts). Ricketts, Hunt, and Sayles had worked with Barnes previously.
Ricketts was the only one of Barnes’ new executive hires that technically counted as a replacement; previous chief Adrian Diaz, who was appointed and fired by Harrell, appointed Jamie Tompkins to a job with the same title, but she was the first SPD chief of staff since 2001.
Barnes’ top staff got top perks to go with their top salaries, which in most cases topped $300,000. Hunt, for instance, got at least one month’s free stay at the four-star Arctic Club Hotel in downtown Seattle, at a cost of more than $6,000, while he looked for a place to live. And Barnes himself got a $60,000 relocation bonus to move to Seattle. As we’ve reported, Barnes kept an apartment here while he traveled back and forth to his permanent home in Chicago; under his settlement, he gets to keep that money.
Barnes presented this graph at community events, minus the Madison, WI branding.
Policy by buzzword: Barnes frequently touted two ideas he claimed were innovations, and featured them in his PowerPoint presentations to community meetings that were mostly attended by SPD and city staff. Both ideas faced criticism inside and outside the department as not particularly innovative or unique. “Stratfied policing” consisted of focusing on crime “hot spots” and focusing higher-ranked officers on more serious crimes, and “Seattle-centric policing” seemed to involve working with communities to come up with solutions to crime.
Although Barnes’ defenders have given him credit for reducing crime and recruiting more police to the city, both those trends are explained by other factors. Crime of all kinds is down in cities nationwide compared to the relative highs of the pandemic, so it’s unsurprising that Seattle’s crime rate has followed the national trend. And hiring spiked as soon as the police guild signed a new contract that guarantees brand-new officers a minimum salary of $126,000 after a six-month training period.
And, OK, all that travel: Not only did Barnes’ defenders treat Wilson’s decision as an out-of-nowhere shock, they also made light of his travel, even misrepresenting his time out of town as no different than that of previous police chiefs. On KUOW’s “Week In Review” last Friday, KIRO’s Angela Poe Russell and KUOW editor/reporter Catherine Smith ripped my coverage, calling me an “influencer” who “hung out a shingle” and called myself a “news person” (Poe) and asserting, “”It’s not quite fair to criticize him for that when other chiefs travel like that.” (Smith).
Smith’s co-bylined story said that according to an SPD spokesman, “Barnes’ level of travel is consistent with past chiefs of police.” Since that contradicted all of my own current and past reporting on the subject, I contacted the same spokesman. He told me he told KUOW that all police chiefs go to conferences held by groups like the International Association of Chiefs of Police, but that he never said Barnes’ overall travel, including his trips home to Chicago, was typical. That’s because it isn’t: While other police chiefs went to conferences, too, Barnes traveled more. For example, Barnes was out of town nearly 40 percent of the time during the 17 weeks for which SPD provided his schedule.
Mayor Katie Wilson, with new interim chief Andre Sayles at far left
By Josh Feit
PubliCola isn’t making endorsements this year, but election season (see item 3 below) gives me the perfect opportunity to debut this new opinion column with its simple premise: X > (is greater than) Y.
1) The Case for Firing SPD Chief Shon Barnes > The Case for Keeping Shon Barnes
The case for firing police chief Shon Barnes, a holdover from the Harrell administration, might seem disproportionate to the happenstance of being out of town during a shooting (and subsequently fucking up media briefings on the shooting because of your absence).
But if you’re a regular PubliCola reader, you know there are plenty of reasons beyond Barnes’ alarming OOO MO that made him an odd fit with Wilson’s progressive administration. Among them: His aversion to the CARE Team; SPD’s violent treatment of counter-protesters at an anti-trans rally in Cal Anderson Park; lawsuits accusing him and his team of discriminating against women and LBGTQ staffers; the department’s ongoing failure to recruit more women, and his questionable hiring and promotiondecisions.
Wilson can get pretty anxious about diverging from Seattle’s older Black community, which I think partially explains why she recently disappointed her activist base on surveillance cameras. But Wilson is also known for listening to the facts, assessing the situation, and acting accordingly. Thankfully, in weighing Barnes’ rocky tenure against the vague call for stability, she made the right call last week.
And by the way: Barnes’ recent chest-forward display of toxic machismo (after a South Seattle Emerald reporter dared to ask him about Erica’s reporting on those frequent absences) was red card material. If not a fireable offense in its own right, Barnes’ playground behavior surely gave Wilson an unnerving reminder of why he wasn’t a fit.
2) Seattle City Council Members Eddie Lin, Dionne Foster, Alexis Mercedes Rinck, Bob Kettle, and Dan Strauss > Seattle City Council Members Joy Hollingsworth, Debora Juarez, Maritza Rivera, and Rob Saka
A million years ago, I used to write a column on Seattle City Hall called Five to Four. So pardon me for being extra excited about a narrow city council vote last week that distinguished the pro-housing council members from the anti-housing council members.
Erica has the rundown on the 5-4 win for Southeast Seattle Councilmember Lin’s pro-density legislation that will stop homeowners from turning the Seattle Hearing Examiner into a weapon against renters and new housing, something NIMBYs have been doing for the 20-plus years I’ve been reporting on this issue. I just want to add: WTF Joy Hollingsworth? You represent one of the most progressive, densest, renter-centric districts in the city. What’s the gatekeeping about?
3) Ron Davis (and even Will Dreher) > State Rep. Gerry Pollet
In this year’s North Seattle election battle between mansplainers, longtime North Seattle rep Gerry Pollet (D-46, N. Seattle) versus know-it-all housing pundit Ron Davis, at least Davis is the YIMBY in the race. Pollet is a NIMBY who spent the bulk of his tenure as housing committee chair stalling legislation that would have created more housing in his district. The pro-housing, urbanist wing of the Democratic Party eventually got fed up with Pollet and removed him as chair of the housing committee.
In addition to supporting upzones as a way to increase density, Davis also supports hacks to the building code that will allow more density without changing overall zoning, such as Sightline initiatives like parking, stairway, and elevator reform; Davis has been a regular contributor to Sightline, the state’s leading pro-housing, urbansit think tank, and is endorsed by Mayor Katie Wilson and The Urbanist.
Private attorney and first-time candidate Will Dreher is a former clerk for liberal SCOTUS Justice Elena Kagan and a DOJ prosector who went after J6 rioters. He’s also, yikes, a former clerk for pre-SCOTUS Brett Kavanaugh who signed a letter supporting Kavanaugh’s nomination in June 2018. However, three months later Dreher and two other clerks withdrew their support, calling on the FBI to reopen its background investigation into Kavanaugh over Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her.
Dreher’s focus is on corporate accountability, particularly when it comes to the environment and regulating A.I. He’s been endorsed by A-student progressive Seattle City Council member Dionne Foster and progressive City Attorney Erika Evans.
Slow growther Pollet has been endorsed by the Seattle Times of course.
