In a “corrective action plan” ordered by Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson and King County Executive Girmay Zahilay earlier this month, the region’s homelessness authority laid out a plan to address the findings of a damning forensic audit into the agency’s finances. But the KCRHA cast some of the blame on its funders and warned about the risks of winding down the agency, a path local leaders are seriously considering.
The pressure is building on Mayor Wilson to activate the police surveillance cameras that she already approved installing in the stadium district, with two councilmembers claiming this week that the cameras could save lives in a major attack or other incident during next month’sWorld Cup games. Seattle’s transportation department already has cameras in the area.
PubliCola broke the news that Wilson’s chief homelessness policy advisor, Jon Grant, resigned after being asked to step down, effective this coming Monday. Grant is one of two Wilson staffers who have clashed with city council members and staff and reportedly contributed to frayed relations between the two branches of government; the other, Kate Kreuzer, was removed as chief of staff earlier this month but remains on Wilson’s City Hall team.
In a guest op/ed the day before Sound Transit voted to effectively kill a voter-approved light rail line to Ballard by deferring it indefinitely, Seattle Councilmember Dan Strauss made the case for his alternative proposal—a “starter” light rail line from Westlake Station to Ballard that would defer the second downtown rail tunnel.
As anticipated, the Sound Transit board decided to scrap the voter-approved plan to build light rail to Ballard in order to complete the lower-ridership “spine” between Everett and Tacoma, fulfilling a longstanding commitment to give Pierce and Snohomish County some rail for their tax dollars and building a second tunnel through downtown Seattle. A surface-level station at Graham Street in the Rainier Valley that has been deferred for decades was moved into the “funded” column, making it much more likely that it will finally be built.
Editor’s note: This post has been updated with comments from Mayor Katie Wilson’s office.
On Tuesday, Seattle City Councilmembers Rob Saka and Bob Kettle trashed Mayor Katie Wilson’s decision, announced in March, to leave newly installed police cameras turned off in the absence of a “credible threat” to public safety during the upcoming World Cup games, suggesting that the mayor is “afraid, apparently, to use technology from the World War II era” (Saka) and deriding the “credible threat” standard as “not a professional standard” (Kettle).
“Ask the mayor of Atlanta during the ’96 Olympics, was there a credible threat notification on that bombing? There wasn’t,” Kettle said. The Atalanta Olympics bombing, infamously, was falsely blamed on an innocent security guard, Richard Jewell; the real bomber wasn’t caught until 2003, after setting off several more bombs in Georgia and Alabama.
“Reacting after the fact is not going to get us there, and so, as someone who’s worked in this field, I do have to say, I do not understand the [mayor’s] position related to credible threat,” Kettle said.
In a statement Wednesday morning, a spokesman for the mayor’s office said, “Identifying a credible threat involves multiple experts from federal, state, and local agencies monitoring and assessing various streams of information. In collaboration with one another, they weigh incoming intelligence and jointly recommend whether to elevate security operations. Mayor Wilson’s decision whether to activate the Stadium District cameras will be informed by this group’s recommendation.”
Saka, who showed up to this morning’s public safety committee meeting decked out in 2013 Boston Marathon gear (he held up his finisher’s medal, seen above, through much of his 12-minute speech), said he “didn’t know how to protect my wife” when the bombs went off that year, shortly after the two had finished the race. “I was there. … I know what chaos feels like.”
“I don’t think that our city is is as ready as it could be to host the world for such a global event of this scale,” Saka continued. “The good news is that the solution is simple. There’s a quick fix available. This council has previously authorized and funded the expansion of critical security cameras in key areas throughout the city.”
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Saka accused Wilson of wishful thinking. Waiting for a credible threat, he said, “falsely assumes and incorrectly assumes that the purported threat will always pop up on a radar every single time with no fail rate whatsoever. As someone who’s a former intelligence officer who did this work, I wish that were true. It’s just not.”
As Office of Emergency Management Director Curry Mayer reminded councilmembers this morning, the Seattle Department of Transportation already provide live camera surveillance feeds to the city’s Emergency Operations Center from hundreds of locations around the city, including more than a dozen traffic cameras around the stadiums and several around Seattle Center. The EOC, which will be heavily staffed during the World Cup, is activated during all major events in Seattle and will serve as the central hub for live monitoring and emergency response during the World Cup games.
“The cameras that we rely on in the EOC are the cameras that SDOT uses all throughout the city,” Mayer said, and are “very helpful for any kind of event.”
The EOC, notably, does not have any ability to access any of the surveillance cameras operated by SPD, which feed into a separate Real Time Crime Center at SPD headquarters.
Wilson is clearly feeling the pressure to turn the cameras on, whether or not they will actually add significant coverage to the existing web of surveillance surrounding the stadium district. Her spokesperson said the mayor “continues to consult public safety officials regarding circumstances that might warrant use of the expanded set of cameras during the FIFA World Cup. We appreciate councilmembers’ perspectives, and those will be part of ongoing discussions.”
As PubliCola reported last week, SPD Assistant Chief Todd Kibbee is on extended leave before his expected retirement, leaving taxpayers on the hook for his position as well as that of his replacement, Acting Assistant Chief Rob Brown. Like many SPD veterans before him, Kibbee appears to be “burning” his sick time prior to retiring, a common practice at SPD despite city policy that requires employees to provide verification that they have a valid reason for taking sick leave.
The practice allows retiring officers to earn full pay for every day of sick leave they’ve accumulated, even when they aren’t actually sick.
Earlier this year, the city’s Office of Inspector General released an audit into this practice, finding that the city spends about $3 million a year in so-called sick leave “for officers who are functionally retired,” plus another $900,000 a year for benefits such as retirement contributions that continue to accrue while these “functionally retired” officers are on leave.
According to the audit, nearly two-thirds of the SPD officers who retired between January 2018 and May 2024 did so after going on leave for more than two weeks, a status that puts them on a list of employees that are “unavailable” for assignments. “Among this group, the median employee was assigned to the ‘unavailable’ unit for 226 days,” according to the audit. After 2020, the percentage of retiring officers who took extended sick leave before separating from the department increased to 72 percent.
“Of the 276 sworn employees retiring from extended leave status, 219 (79%) used every full day of sick leave they had accrued,” the audit found.
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Notably, retiring SPD officers generally hang on to large amounts of vacation time, which “cashes out” at 100 percent—meaning that officers receive full pay for accrued vacation time they don’t use. In contrast, sick time only cashes out at 25 percent, so it’s more lucrative for officers to use up all their sick time and cash out their vacation time before retiring.
Not surprisingly, SPD officers generally hoarded their remaining vacation time and cashed it out after burning up their sick leave. By the time they retired, the median SPD retiree cashed out 251 hours of vacation time—nearly two months’ worth—and less than four hours of sick time.
Because retirement and other benefits keep accruing while employees are on sick leave, simply “paying sworn employees 100% of their sick leave to retire instead of going on extended leave, the City would have saved an average of at least $1.7 million per year,” the OIG found.
In theory, officers are supposed to provide a doctor’s note justifying their sick time when they return to duty, but since retiring officers never come back, they never have to show they were actually sick.
As part of the latest police contract, the Seattle Police Officers Guild agreed to come up with a policy that will require officers to provide verification from a health care provider that they have a legitimate reason to take extended sick leave. According to the department’s response to the audit, this policy will be implemented this year.
Asked about the timeline for implementing this new policy, SPD Chief Operating Officer Sarah Smith said “SPD is still in discussions with our labor partners regarding this matter. Once a final policy is finalized, we will provide more details.”
After a presentation on a devastating forensic audit that found widespread financial problems and a lack of internal financial controls at the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, a consensus is growing among regional decision-makers that it’s time to start “winding down” the agency. The KCRHA itself would go on to release an FAQ later in the week that took little responsibility for the ongoing issues and suggested fixing them would be a relatively straightforward matter.
Although official SPD policy calls for diversion, rather than arrest and jail, when officers encounter someone violating the city’s laws against using drugs in public and simple drug possession, Police Chief Shon Barnes appeared to criticize the city’s main diversion program, LEAD, at a recent council meeting. Afterward, Councilmember Maritza Rivera suggested the program already has plenty of money.
City Councilmembers Maritza Rivera and Joy Hollingsworth proposed amendments to Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to allow larger tiny house village-style shelters around Seattle. Their walk-on amendments would mandate 24-hour security and buffer zones around parks, schools, and child care centers for new micromodular shelters with more than 100 residents.
After an audit revealed potential fraud and waste at King County’s Department of Community and Human Services, County Councilmembers are proposing an office of inspector general to provide a new layer of oversight to receive tips and conduct investigations into claims about contractor misuse of county funds.
More than a dozen King County employees showed up to a King County Council meeting this week to testify against King County Executive Girmay Zahilay’s “return to office” mandate. One person who wasn’t there to hear their testimony in person: The council’s biggest RTO booster, Councilmember Reagan Dunn, who attended the meeting—as he often does—remotely.
Garmon Newsom II, until recently the Burien City Attorney, is running for an open Seattle Municipal Court seat; he defended many of the city’s anti-homeless policies, including a ban on sleeping in public and an attempt to shut down a private encampment at a church. And Mike Solan, the bombastic former Seattle Police Officers Guild president, just bought a house in Gig Harbor and plans to run for Pierce County Council as a Republican.
Why does SPD have an acting assistant chief, rather than a permanent one? As it turns out, they have both. Todd Kibbee, the permanent acting chief, is burning his leave, with full pay, before he retires while Brown does his job.
A recent analysis by the city’s Office of Labor Standards found that despite dire warnings from council members who wanted to overturn the law, a 2023 law guaranteeing higher hourly pay for delivery drivers resulted in higher pay overall, along with less reliance on tips.
Three city councilmembers—Council President Joy Hollingsworth, Debora Juarez, and Eddie Lin—will propose legislation next week that would ban data centers inside city limits. The proposal comes in response to reports that companies were planning five data centers on land owned by Seattle City Light.
1. Former Burien city attorney Garmon Newsom II has filed to run for the Seattle Municipal Court seat currently held by Judge Willie Gregory, who’s retiring. As PubliCola reported, Newsom was put on leave last year and returned only to be summarily fired by controversial city manager Adolfo Bailon earlier this month. The Burien City Council recently put Bailon on administrative leave.
As Burien city attorney, Newsom defended a city law that makes it illegal to sleep in public in the city, arguing that the ban created an “incentive” for people to go to shelter. (Burien does not have any year-round shelter for single adults).
He also argued for using city permitting rules to prohibit a church from hosting an encampment, and criticized the church for denying access to right-wing commentator Jonathan Choe, who was working for the Discovery Institute but whom Newsom described as a “member of the press.” During the debate over proposed shelter bans in Burien, we reported on a couple of instances in which he described existing or proposed laws inaccurately.
Newsom is represented by Northwest Passage, the Seattle consulting firm founded by Christian Sinderman. Last year, Northwest Passage was the consultant for then-mayor Bruce Harrell (who lost) as well as successful candidates Erika Evans (now Seattle City Attorney), Dionne Foster (now a Seattle councilmember) and Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck (who was reelected).
The other candidates in the race, so far, are Seattle attorney Lindsay Calkins and Snohomish County public defender Gabriel Rothstein.
2. Former Seattle Police Officers Guild director Mike Solan is running as a Republican for the Pierce County Council seat that’s currently held by Democrat Robyn Denson, who isn’t seeking reelection.
Solan has long lived in West Seattle, but Pierce County tax records indicate he bought a house in Gig Harbor last month. Solan is a controversial figure; in addition to (infamously) blaming the January 6, 2020, insurrection on Black Lives Matter protesters, Solan recently mocked the head of the city’s CARE Department and appeared to joke with then-SPOG vice president Daniel Auderer about the death of a young student killed in a crosswalk by a speeding cop.
Solan didn’t immediately respond to a text message asking about about his candidacy this morning.
Brenda Lykins, a former Gig Harbor City Council member, is running for the seat as a Democrat. So far, Solan has not reported any contributions.
3. During a presentation on the Law Enforcement Diversion program earlier this week, the Seattle Police Department was represented by Chief Shon Barnes as well as Acting Assistant Chief Rob Brown, a longtime captain and former South Precinct commander who now oversees operations.
Why does SPD have an acting assistant chief, rather than a permanent one? As it turns out, they have both. Todd Kibbee, the permanent acting chief, is out on paid leave while Brown does his job.
SPD Chief Operating Officer Sarah Smith would not confirm that Kibbee, who has been at SPD for 33 years, was burning his leave before retiring, a common practice that allows officers to continue receiving full pay and benefits while they use up their accrued sick and vacation time at the end of their careers. Smith said only that Kibbee was on “approved leave.”
Smith did not respond to questions about how long Kibbee would be on paid leave and whether Barnes plans to appoint Brown permanent assistant chief.
Kibbee makes around $313,000 a year, while Brown makes around $266,000, according to city salary data.
“Mark43 Recorded Diversion” refers to all completed referrals police made through arrests; LEAD also gets some referrals that don’t come from SPD.
Barnes allowed that LEAD was better than “no diversion at all,” while Councilmember Rivera said the city has already “thrown a lot” of money at the program.
By Erica C. Barnett
Police Chief Shon Barnes questioned the value of LEAD, the city’s main criminal justice diversion program, at a city council committee on Monday—saying the program could not, on its own, “deliver the level of order, safety and visible presence that residents, businesses and visitors believe should be indicative of a major US city.” For 15 years, LEAD has provided services as an alternative to arrest and incarceration; the model, which includes long-term case management, harm reduction, and connections to housing and treatment, has been replicated around the country and is considered a best practice for minimizing people’s involvement in the criminal legal system.
Since 2023, police have had the power to arrest and charge people with a gross misdemeanor for possessing or drugs or using them in public. That year, a new state law made drug use or possession a gross misdemeanor, rather than a felony, in response to a 2021 state supreme court decision called State v. Blake that overturned existing laws that classified possession and public use as felony crimes.
Between 2024 and 2025, according to a staff presentation during the council’s public safety committee on Tuesday, LEAD diversions for people arrested for possession or public use declined almost 37 percent—from 173 to 109—while charges filed by police officers more than doubled and attempted jail bookings increased by 191 percent. (This number includes both jail bookings and people the jail declined to book because of medical and other issues). Misdemeanor drug use and possession cases made up just under half of all drug arrests.
This is not the outcome local leaders said they hoped for when they adopted the law in 2023. In an executive order that accompanied the new law, then-mayor Bruce Harrell directed SPD to adopt a policy that directed officers to divert drug users into LEAD or other programs whenever possible, rather than arresting them. That policy says, “When an arrest is warranted, sworn employees should prioritize diversion in lieu of booking.”
In general, the numbers show, police have continued to routinely arrest and book people using drugs in public rather than sending them to LEAD.
Both the new law and the executive order gave individual police officers the ultimate authority to decide whether to arrest someone or refer them to LEAD, based partly on whether they decide a person is posing a “threat of harm” to anyone in the public. (LEAD can also take referrals after an arrest).
The way SPD’s policy defines a threat of harm gives police a lot of discretion to decide whether they think someone is causing harm. But it specifies that any time a person is using drugs near a bus or rail stop, school, or park, a threat of “harm will be presumed.”
Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes said the list was almost too expansive. “A very important policy decision will have to be made whether or not officers can [arrest] people using drugs” when they witness it, “and whether or not we can make that arrest without having to go through the checklist,” Barnes said.
Barnes and acting Assistant Chief Rob Brown told the committee that they respected LEAD and planned to continue diverting people to the program. In “many cases,” Barnes said, LEAD “is better than having what we’ve always done, which is no intervention at all. But it’s also important to be clear-eyed about what the program can and cannot accomplish and whether it’s meeting the expectations of the people who live, work and visit the city.”
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LEAD was started in Belltown in 2011 and has expanded in size and scope many times since, so it’s inaccurate to say that the city has “always” done “no intervention at all.” Barnes, previously police chief in Madison, Wisconsin, was appointed chief by Harrell last year.
Brown, who was previously the commander of SPD’s South Precinct, said he was particularly interested in holding people accountable who engage in what he called “defiant” drug use—that is, drug use in highly visible places that make residents and customers “very uncomfortable.” These “defiant” users, Brown said, “feel like they’re entitled to consume. … I understand that [for] somebody who is an addict, that jail alone, by itself, is not necessarily going to help them get to moving beyond their addiction. But what I do want to see is behavior change for this type of defiant, open consumption.”
In a separate presentation, Purpose Dignity Action’s Lisa Daugaard, who launched LEAD in Belltown 15 years ago, said funding for the PDA-run program hit “a high-water mark” in 2022 and has been declining ever since, reducing LEAD’s capacity to take on new clients.
After a LEAD staffer described an analysis that showed people do better the longer people they stick with LEAD, Councilmember Maritza Rivera said she wasn’t convinced the program was doing enough to impact visible drug use and disorder. “I appreciate that it can take up to two years to get someone to accept services and get toward a path of recovery,” Rivera said, but businesses can’t wait that long to see improvements. “It taking two years to help someone get off of 12th and Jackson is not helping that small business be able to stay in business and stay open,” she said.
“I don’t mean any disrespect by this,” Rivera continued, “but everyone comes here and says, if we had more money, it would be different. … “You know, we have thrown a lot [of money at LEAD]—I mean, PDA gets $20 million from the city.”
“We’re in a budget deficit. So are there other things that we can do to address the problem? … Because I don’t know that we have more money that we can put into it.”
Last year, Rivera voted along with the rest of the council to increase the police department’s budget by $35 million, including millions for to expand SPD’s camera surveillance program into additional neighborhoods. That amount will grow this year even in he absence of new programs, as officers that received raises of 42 percent over the past five years get raises on top of their new higher salaries.
