Category: public safety

City Council, Mayor Harrell, public safety, Taxes

Council Takes Up Harrell’s “Inherently Unsustainable” Budget; New Spending Includes $800,000 in Speculative AI Spending
Mayor Bruce Harrell, speaking at AI House in September

1. Your sales taxes are going up next year, thanks to a vote by the City Council Tuesday that approved a 0.1-cent increase that can, in the future, be used for any “public safety” purpose, including programs the city is already funding through its general fund.

The new tax, authorized earlier this year by the state legislature, will add $23.7 million in new funding to the budget to pay for 24 new CARE Team first responders, keep the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program going, and fund treatment, firefighters, and other non-police public safety programs. It also includes $15 million to supplant general fund spending on CARE, giving the city $15 million more to use on any purpose.

But, as a City Council central staff memo on the budget notes, there’s nothing in the state authorizing legislation that requires the city to use the new sales tax on new programs. (The original idea behind the legislation was that cities would use the tax increase to pay for police.)

According to the central staff analysis, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed budget is unsustainable and relies heavily on fiscal sleight-of-hand to come up with a balanced budget in 2026, tumbling precipitously into massive deficits in 2027 and beyond. These tricks include relying on a one-time $141 million fund balance left over from 2025, which won’t be there to balance the budget next year; funding programs that will be necessary long-term, like food assistance for people losing federal benefits, with one-time resources, so that they don’t count toward future deficits; and assuming a $10 million “underspend” every year in the future, allowing the mayor’s budget team to chop $10 million off each year’s expenditures automatically without actually making cuts.

Referring to the fund balance, the memo notes, “The Mayor’s reliance on this $141 million one-time resource to balance his proposed spending for 2026 reflects the inherent unsustainability of the 2026 Proposed Budget, and demonstrates the basic magnitude of the mismatch between the City’s expenditures and its reliable, on-going revenues.

This damning assessment by the council’s own central staff could have implications throughout the budget, which the city council will begin discussing in detail today. What it could mean for the public safety sales tax, specifically is that, if the council passes Harrell’s unsustainable budget mostly as-is, future councils (and a potential future mayor Katie Wilson) could choose to use the money not to fund CARE and LEAD and treatment, but to pay for police, fire, and other basics that would ordinarily be paid for by the general fund.

In other words: Like the JumpStart payroll tax fund, which was supposed to pay for specific program areas (housing, small businesses, Green New Deal, and equitable development), the public safety tax could be used in the future as a slush fund to pay for programs that have historically been funded out of the city’s general budget.

The proposed budget adds about $53 million in new spending compared to the endorsed 2026 budget.

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2. One of the new initiatives Harrell’s proposed 2026 budget would fund is Permitting Accountability and Customer Trust (PACT) program—an $800,000 proposal that will purportedly “streamline the permitting application process and improve customer services using Artificial Intelligence and data integration.”

Callie Craighead, a spokeswoman for the mayor, told PubliCola the city hasn’t picked a vendor for the PACT funding yet. “The integration of AI tools is part of the City’s most concerted effort to date to reduce permitting time, making it faster and easier to build housing across Seattle,” she said.

Harrell is all-in on AI; at an event at the startup incubator AI House last month, he told the crowd, “If you’re thinking, ‘Maybe there’s an opportunity to monetize these things the city’s working on, that’s fair game, by the way. Faster permits—we know that AI can play an incredible role there. …  Time is money, and to the extent we can reduce permit processing times, this would be an added benefit for everyone involved in that process.”

Craighead said the new “AI tools” will help permit applicants catch errors before they submit applications; help “staff apply City code more consistently and efficiently, [and help] the City find opportunities to simplify and streamline policies.”

There are some companies that claim to reduce permitting times using AI chatbots and near-instant plan reviews, but it’s unclear to what extent these tools can actually supplant the human workers who currently work with developers and homeowners on permits and ensure compliance with the city’s complex codes by, for instance, talking to people and answering questions directly and inspecting conditions on the ground.

Moving away from actual employees to tools created by AI startups—a change the city’s new AI plan refers to delicately as “workforce transition”—will face strong opposition from the city’s unions (the largest of which, PROTEC17, has thrown its weight behind Harrell’s opponent Wilson), and potential opposition from the public as well. Replacing public workers with software could also have implications for the local economy, which is increasingly tilted in favor of wealthy tech-sector workers. And, of course, the current frenzy of AI hype could turn out to be just that—hype.

The city’s new AI plan says the “City’s AI Proof of Value framework ensures pilots are judged on clear objectives, business value, responsible use, and long-term supportability, not hype-fueled adoption we hear from sales staff.” Which seems, I don’t know… a little doth-protest-too much?

City Council, Density, Mayor Harrell, public safety, Taxes

Seattle Nice: CARE Team Expansion and a Missed Opportunity for Neighborhood Businesses

By Erica C. Barnett

Gearing up for Seattle’s 2025 budget season on the latest episode of Seattle Nice, we discussed Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposal to increase the local sales tax rate by 0.1 cent to pay for an expansion of the city’s CARE Team and 911 department, backfill $20 million in spending that currently comes from other sources, and add funding for firefighters, addiction treatment, and the fire department’s Health 99 overdose response team.

Governor Bob Ferguson gave cities and counties the authority to hike sales taxes to pay for public safety programs in his budget last year, effectively punting his promise to spend $100 million on police to local jurisdictions and forcing cities and counties to use a regressive sales tax increase if they wanted more public safety funding. King County already passed its 0.1-cent tax in June; assuming Harrell’s proposal passes, the total sales tax in Seattle will rise to nearly 10.6 percent.

We dug into what the new tax will pay for, as well as why CARE Team expansion is happening now, after a lengthy stalemate between the Seattle Police Officers Guild and CARE over what responsibilities SPD is willing to hand over to unarmed social workers.

Since 2023, a memorandum of understanding between CARE and the police department requires cops to go out with CARE on every call, limits the kind of calls CARE’s first responders are allowed to respond to, and restricts the size of the team to 24 people. That MOU expires at the end of the year.

Although new SPOG contracts typically drag on for years (the most recent contract, covering the years 2021 through 2023, passed in April 2024), that may not be the case this time, as we discussed, thanks to the recent primary election results, which had Katie Wilson leading incumbent Harrell outright.

In short, SPOG appears to be racing (relatively speaking) to wrap up their latest contract this year, betting that Katie Wilson might win the mayor’s race and be less willing than Harrell to provide concessions to the union without corresponding improvements to police accountability.

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This goes far beyond CARE, of course, but the new urgency around the contract seems to have produced a new willingness to give the team some of what it’s been asking for almost since its inception, including expansion from 24 to 48 tea members, the ability to go out on calls without a police escort and to respond to more types of calls where a social worker can do more good than officers with guns.

Harrell’s sales tax proposal, part of the 2025 budget he announced today, includes funding for CARE expansion, which suggests the MOU language may already be settled. As Sandeep put it, “The specter of Katie Wilson has scared SPOG into actually making the deal to allow alternative dispatch.”

Also this week, the guys gave me a lot of time to geek out over the council’s amendments to legislation implementing “phase 1” of the city’s comprehensive plan, which just passed last week.

Did they go into a boredom-induced fugue state? Who knows, but I did get an opportunity to talk about why I’d be thrilled to have bars, restaurants, and late-night corner stores in my own residential neighborhood. Unfortunately, the council foreclosed that possibility when they voted to restrict new businesses in neighborhoods to stores and to make them close no later than 10pm—a missed opportunity to give more people access to the kinds of things that make a city a city.

Health, public safety

Investigation Suggests Seattle Firefighters Forged Vaccine Cards to Get Out of Citywide Vaccine Mandate
Image by Steve Morgan via Wikimedia Commons

By Erica C. Barnett

An independent investigation found it probable that Seattle Fire Department officials obtained blank vaccine cards and used them to falsely claim they were compliant with the city’s COVID vaccine requirement, PubliCola has learned.

The city launched the investigation after a fire lieutenant, Lance Fisher, told Seattle Fire Chief Harold Scoggins that people in the department were buying and selling fake vaccine cards. Fisher relayed this information during his own disciplinary hearing; he was one of many SFD employees who refused to get vaccinated during the pandemic.

According to the investigation—provided by Rose Terse, who frequently posts documents obtained through records requests on Muckrock—”a now former (retired) SFD employee contacted Lieutenant Fisher and offered him a CDC-issued COVID-19 vaccination record card that Lieutenant Fisher ‘could fill out’ and submit to the City as fraudulent proof that he had complied with the vaccination mandate.” Fisher told investigators the cards came from a former COVID vaccination site that SFD shut down without safeguarding the blank vaccine cards, allowing a firefighter to grab the blank cards and sell them.

Later, Fisher said, he learned that there were blank vaccination cards at many fire stations, and “people could just take them.”

Fisher told investigators he “declined that offer” to get a fake vaccine card and told Scoggins, “It’s known that people are submitting fake vax cards. What are you doing to verify the authenticity?”

“According to Lieutenant Fisher, Chief Scoggins’ response was that ‘it wasn’t his problem,'” the investigator concluded.

Much of the investigator’s evidence consisted of Signal messages sent to and from Deputy Chief Tom Walsh on his city-issued phone, “suggest[ing] that a system and/or network existed through which SFD employees obtained COVID-19 vaccination cards, which they submitted to the City.”

“Facts found throughout the course of my investigation suggest that one or more SFD employees may have obtained CDC-issued COVID-19 vaccination record cards; filled the cards out with false information to reflect that they had been vaccinated for COVID-19; submitted the cards to the City as proof of their compliance with the COVID-19 vaccination mandate; and were deemed to have satisfied the City’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate based on their submission of the CDC-issued COVID-19 vaccination record cards containing falsified information,” the independent investigator, Jennifer Parda-Aldrich, wrote.

“My investigation, however, did not reveal sufficient evidence from which I was able to make any conclusive findings, based on preponderance of the evidence, of the existence of any such practice or of the identity of any SFD employee(s) who submitted a COVID- 19 vaccination record card containing false information to reflect that they had been vaccinated for COVID-19 in satisfaction of the City’s vaccination mandate.”

PubliCola readers may recognize Walsh’s name. He was the deputy fire chief who, along with longtime firefighter Paul Patterson, sent emails to Scoggins in which he pretended to be a “proud Latino” South Park resident who was deeply offended by the term “brownout.”  The goal of the prank emails was to get the fire department to stop using the term to describe power outages in order to prove that the department was excessively “woke.”

Walsh and Patterson worked closely with right-wing talk show host Jason Rantz, who wrote about the hoax repeatedly and seemed to find it hilarious; they later collaborated with local right-wing activist Ari Hoffman to accuse Scoggins of breaking the law when he loaned stretchers to volunteer medics trying to get injured people out of the so-called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in 2020.

Although the Seattle Police Department got the lion’s share of attention, positive and negative, for fighting against the city’s vaccine requirements, the Seattle Fire Department was also a hotbed of anti-vax sentiment.

Messages between Walsh and other fire department employees, including Patterson, along with a city IT staffer named Dan Whipple, include multiple references to people buying “art,” using Patterson as the go-between, for themselves and other fire department officials, including Walsh’s son, firefighter Devon Walsh.

For example, in this Signal exchange from December 2021, Patterson and Walsh discussed whether it would be better for Walsh and his son to wait a few days after his daughters and wife got their “art” so it won’t look “ridiculous”:

Patterson: No reason to think you guys wouldn’t shop together 🤔

I will see what the artist thinks

Just cause you get the piece sooner then later doesn’t mean you have to put it on display until you are ready

Walsh: Fair point. If I did return to the art show circuit, it would save me some sick time as well.

Paul Patterson. The Harriet Tubman of the SFD.

* * *

Walsh: Did a guy from 2’s named Seto or Setu or something like that get a piece of art from you?

Patterson: One thing about my art dealings is that it is totally Anonymous

Walsh: Well I am asking out of curiosity. What you should wonder is why I’m asking. I couldn’t pick this guy out of the police lineup, but I know that somebody’s done some artwork for him. If it’s you, you should tell him to keep his fucking mouth shut.

If you weren’t the artiest, just let me know that and I’ll tell him to keep his mouth shut. All we need is an audit.

Patterson: Wasn’t me, and I appreciate you looking out Yes I would have a sit down with him. It’s important for people to know it can be down but in a very discreet way.

Walsh:  My 20-year-old daughter came in the house and told me he had some art done. Now, the exact mechanism by which she found out is unimportant—He just needs to know that what happens in a fight club stays and fight club.

Had it been Hasting’s daughter, this is a different story.

Walsh referred to himself as Harriett Tubman in a Signal exchange with Whipple that same month, saying he had found “a path to get that one piece of paper that I need” in order to fulfill “my missing requirements to work at SFD.”

“If you had a friend who is counterfeiting $20 bills, that would be good,” Walsh wrote. “But if it was actually counterfeiting them at the US mint,…Well that would just be money at that point. Those bills would have real life serial numbers, and probably be appropriately placed in whatever database they put $20 bills in.”

Whipple later told investigators he thought he and Walsh were talking about a “joke” that “we were going to have to pay people to get us out of the state or country” because of the vaccine mandate. “I didn’t understand him to be referring to fake vax cards.”

Parda-Aldrich also looked into the possibility that Walsh and Deputy Chief Chris Lombard, who was then heading up the Community Safety and Communications Center had conspired with Walsh to produce evidence that the city was refusing to grant religious exemptions to the vaccine mandate, which could help bolster the claims of a group of former firefighters who sued the department over the requirement. The CSCC was the predecessor to today’s CARE Department, a civilian department that dispatches 911 calls.

In October 2021, after a meeting in which he told then-mayor Jenny Durkan’s policy advisor, Adrienne Thompson, that the CSCC was going to lose 10 percent of its staff if they had to comply with the vaccine mandate, Lombard wrote an email to himself and his own human-resources manager to establish for the record that the mayor’s office refused to provide accommodations for CSCC staff who refused to get the vaccine on religious grounds.

Signal messages between Walsh and Patterson, along with Signal messages between Walsh and fire lieutenant Chris Carter, show that the men believed Lombard was getting the mayor’s position in writing to help the plaintiffs in two lawsuits filed by firefighters who were fired for refusing to comply with the vaccine mandate. (In one exchange, Walsh referred to Lombard as “the kind of person who hides Jews under [the] floorboard.”)

Parda-Aldrich wrote that she was unable to substantiate the claim that Lombard wrote the email with the intent of establishing a written record that would help the suing firefighters. However, she did conclude he had improperly disclosed confidential personnel information—the identities of firefighters who asked for exemptions from the vaccination requirement—to Walsh.

Neither Walsh nor Patterson responded to requests for an interview; both have retired from the department. Lombard did not respond to a request for an interview.

A spokesperson for the fire department, Kim Schmanke, said no one at SFD has faced disciplinary action for falsifying vaccine cards, and said she does not know how firefighters might have gotten the cards, if they did so.

“SFD has no conclusive facts showing that employees falsified their vaccine cards and cannot take personnel actions without factual findings,” Schmanke said. “Although the April 2025 investigative report facts that ‘suggest’ SFD employees submitted authentic COVID-19 vaccination cards with falsified information to comply with the City’s vaccine mandate, the investigation was ‘unable to make any conclusive findings, based on a preponderance of the evidence, as to the existence of any such practice or the specific identity of any employee(s) who submitted a COVID-19 vaccination record card with falsified information.'”

Devon Walsh, Dan Whipple, Chris Lombard, and Lance Fisher all remain employed at the city.

The fire department considers the matter closed, Schmanke said. “However, if any new information comes to light, the department will take appropriate follow-up action.”

City Council, Crime, Mayor Harrell, public safety

Auditor’s Gun Violence Recommendations Prompt Defensive Response from Mayor’s Office

By Erica C. Barnett

Late last month, the City Auditor’s Office released a report on Seattle’s response to gun violence that concluded the city has failed to create the kind of systematic, transparent, multi-departmental approach that has been adopted successfully in other cities like Baltimore and Milwaukee, which have dramatically reduced their rates of gun violence even as Seattle’s has increased. Between 2020 and 2024, the number of (reported) shots fired in Seattle increased 71 percent, non-fatal shootings increased 58 percent, and fatal shootings increased 23 percent.

The auditor’s office, which presented their findings to Council President Sara Nelson’s governance committee last week, made four broad recommendations.

First, they said, the city should develop systemic, transparent reporting on patterns in gun violence and make that information available to the public. Second, the mayor’s office should provide an update on its work to integrate all the city’s violence prevention programs under the CARE (Community Assisted Response and Engagement) Department, which “has not yet begun,” according to the audit, despite being a key element of the department’s mission since it was established in 2023.

Third, the city should implement evidence-based approaches to gun violence, such as problem-oriented policing (a proactive strategy that addresses underlying factors that contribute to crime), homicide review panels, and training requirements for organizations that get city funds for violence prevention to ensure they’re using evidence-based problem-solving methods; a previous audit found that many city-funded programs judged their own success against measures like how many people enrolled in a program, rather than whether the program reduced gun violence.

And fourth, the city should use multi-departmental, place-based methods to prevent and respond to gun violence, rather than just being reactive.

The audit—originally requested by Mayor Bruce Harrell and Council President Nelson as an update on a 2012 report on the city’s crime prevention strategies—noted that the city never implemented many of auditor’s previous recommendations on crime and public safety, including several on street outreach programs that the office “stopped tracking” last year because “we had no evidence that they would ever be implemented.”

The report noted that the city doesn’t need to invent its own strategy out of whole cloth: Other cities have already created frameworks that Seattle could adopt, including public-facing dashboards that provide access to a broad range of data about gun violence, post-homicide review panels, and investment in community-based programs that have been shown to reduce gun violence, rather than those that don’t produce results.

Milwaukee, for example, has a Homicide Review Commission that includes case management and services for victims’ families, along with an ongoing, detailed review of every homicide in the city that includes an analysis of “community-level contributing factors and … community interventions that may be appropriate.”

Baltimore’s comprehensive crime prevention strategy established a new Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE) that is based on four “pillars”: A public health approach to violence; youth justice and violence reduction; community engagement and interagency collaboration; and evaluation and accountability.” Since the two cities implemented these new approaches, homicides in Milwaukee have dropped 52 percent over eight years; in Baltimore, fatal shootings declined 23 percent between 2023 and 2024.

“We tried to lift up the examples that we found from other jurisdictions where there’s just more visibility and more of a comprehensive view of gun violence,” Claudia Gross Shader, the audit’s lead author, told PubliCola. “There’s not an action plan for gun violence in Seattle that we can look at like like Baltimore has developed.”

For example, Gross Shader said, Baltimore has a public safety accountability dashboard that’s maintained by MONSE, not the police department, and includes information from police, prosecutors, and community-based providers. “That level of visibility into what the city’s doing and how things are changing over time does not exist in Seattle,” Gross Shader said.

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Councilmember Maritza Rivera, who said during last week’s meeting that she felt “validated” by the fact that the audit identified Magnuson Park as number four on a list of city parks with the highest incidences of gun violence, said she spent last summer asking police, the Parks Department, and the mayor’s office to do something about a spate of shootings and other criminal activity in and around Magnuson Park.

“I was asking them what their plan was  for addressing this, and I definitely got responses form SPD and from Parks, in terms of action items, but I felt that the things I was bringing to the mayor’s office were getting diminished or dismissed,” Rivera told PubliCola. “I didn’t feel like there was that recognition that things were happening and we have a plan for addressing it. I didn’t get the sense of urgency.”

Shortly after the meeting, the mayor’s office reached out to Rivera and they had “a great conversation” about what the city can do in the short term to address issues in her Northeast Seattle district, Rivera said.

But, she added, “we should be taking a centralized approach” to gun violence, the way Milwaukee and Baltimore have done. In those cities, “it seems like it’s all-hands-on-deck to address gun violence in general, and the audit showed that the centralization wasn’t there like it should be.”

Tensions flared during last week’s meeting about how much the city is actually doing to address gun violence holistically and whether the audit was even necessary.

After Harrell’s office initiated the audit last January, Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess told the city auditor to stop working on it in April, “because [the Human Services Department] is preparing to issue a new round of [requests for proposals] that will result in new funding opportunities” for community safety organizations. HSD subsequently postponed the community safety RFP until later this year, and in October, Nelson directed the auditor’s office to move forward with its work.

Harrell formally “concurred” with all the audit’s recommendations, but it became clear during the committee meeting that the mayor’s office considered the audit unnecessarym even insulting. “The mayor’s office agrees with the audit findings, but we were already doing the things that were in the audit findings,” Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington told the committee.

When PubliCola asked if the mayor’s office or SPD plans to implement any new strategies in response to the audit, as opposed to policies that are already underway,, Harrell spokeswoman Callie Craighead said, “Our office plans to incorporate the findings of the Auditor’s report into existing strategies and initiatives. The report validated the approach of our One Seattle Restoration Framework, which states that improving public safety within our city involves collaboration across multiple City departments and programs and taking a place-based approach to our needs, as seen with the launch of our Downtown Activation Team.”

Speaking more bluntly at last week’s meeting, Washington told Nelson, “When you were getting ready to launch this, my argument to you [was], we are working on this, and we didn’t get that same respect. … It would have been nice to know that you guys heard us when we were telling you that we were already working on it.”

“I have a master’s degree in human services,” Washington added, along with a “personal degree” as someone directly impacted by gun violence. “I don’t need an audit to tell me the things that I can see on the streets and tell me the things that I hear from constituents.”

As examples of things the city is already doing, Washington pointed to the establishment of the CARE dual-dispatch pilot; the Unified Care Team, which removes encampments; Harrell’s “One Seattle Restoration Framework,” which includes a section on gun violence; the establishment of a real-time crime center that will be connected to new CCTV cameras around the city; the enrollment of the city’s gun violence liaison in a national workshop on violence interruption; and new Police Chief Shon Barnes’ plan to implement “stratified policing.”

According to Craighead, stratified policing “focuses on identifying and tackling crime and disorder issues by analyzing immediate, short-term, and long-term patterns, ensuring they are addressed swiftly and effectively through a collaborative approach that emphasizes community partnerships.”

Although the audit found that “the city has not systematically implemented” problem-oriented policing (identifying it as one reason the city hasn’t successfully reduced crime and overdoses at two well-known hot spots), SPD general counsel Rebecca Boatright told the council that “SPD routinely does a fair amount of work with problem- oriented policing and place-based policing” and would continue to do so.

As for the recommendation that the city create a systemic public safety dashboard like Baltimore’s, Boatright said the department is working to put more information online, but that providing too much specific information could harm ongoing investigations.

Gross Shader said she hopes the city will respond to the audit in more detail in the future to explain how some of the city’s existing approaches are working to reduce gun violence and how Harrell’s One Seattle Restoration plan compares to the holistic approach like the ones Baltimore and Milwaukee have.

She also noted that the city already has at least one home-grown example of a systematic public safety plan—the Phố Đẹp (Beautiful Neighborhood) Little Saigon Safety Plan that Friends of Little Sài Gòn released last month, which identifies a list of eight public-safety problems in the neighborhood, interventions to address those problems, and the outcomes that will result when each problem has been addressed. That framework focuses almost entirely on strategies that don’t involve police, such as the creation of a business coalition to combat EBT (food stamp) fraud, increased funding for affordable housing in lieu of policies that “criminalize poverty,” including sweeps, and funding for dedicated outreach workers in the Chinatown-International District.

City Council, King County, public safety, Transportation

Shannon Braddock Appointed Acting County Executive; Saka Says He Opposed Traffic Diverters In His Neighborhood Because of Equity Concerns

1. On Tuesday, the King County Council unanimously appointed Shannon Braddock as acting King County Executive; previously, Braddock was deputy county executive to Dow Constantine, who took a new job this month as CEO of Sound Transit. Braddock previously worked at the county for 15 years, starting as chief of staff to former councilmember Joe McDermott; she also ran unsuccessfully for Seattle City Council in 2015 and for state senate in 2018.

Braddock will be the first female county executive in King County history. At yesterday’s meeting, several male council members praised Braddock without mentioning this historic fact—including two who did mention Braddock’s father, former state legislator Dennis Braddock, saying he should be proud. It fell to Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda to note that Braddock’s appointment marked “a big moment for our county.”

Councilmember Claudia Balducci called Braddock’s appointment “a milestone that should be and will be celebrated,” and asked the council to move quickly to appoint Braddock not just acting but full county executive through November, when a new county executive will take office, “so that we get the stability and the value of the complete and total confidence that we have in Shannon through November.” (As acting executive, Braddock can be removed and replaced at any time.)

When Balducci asked what the process would be to vote on Braddock’s appointment through November, council chair Girmay Zahilay abruptly called the council into a closed-door executive session, and the meeting ended without a clear answer on whether the council will appoint Braddock permanently or go through a second, separate process, potentially considering other candidates. Balducci said she plans to introduce legislation to appoint Braddock as full county executive at the council’s next meeting on April 15.

Balducci and Zahilay are running against each other for county executive; a third candidate, county assessor John Arthur Wilson, is also running.

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2. When he isn’t denouncing the words of people who left the council years ago, Rob Saka is head of the Seattle City Council’s transportation committee, which got a briefing from the Seattle Department of Transportation Tuesday about the city’s efforts to deploy new automated traffic enforcement cameras in school zones and to site five new full-time automated speed enforcement cameras.

After SDOT staffers laid out their plans to pick the best locations for the speed cameras by studying safety and equity issues at potential camera sites, Saka raised an objection: The city council, he said, had already decided where the new cameras should go. “So, Alki-Harbor Avenue, Magnuson Park, Golden Gardens, and probably Belltown,” Saka said. “So, boom! There’s four for you… We took care of the siting for ya.” That, an SDOT staffer noted quickly, is not how the process works; the state law authorizing automated traffic cameras requires an equity and safety analysis, and that—not vibes or the volume of neighborhood complaints—becomes the basis for placing the new cameras around the city.

Before the camera discussion began, Saka took a few minutes to respond to a public commenter who called out Saka’s opposition, as a neighborhood resident, to two proposed traffic diverters that would prevent people from cutting across the 26th Avenue SW greenway in the North Delridge neighborhood. The commenter, who identified himself as Max, noted that the diverter was supposed to reduce cut-through car traffic on 26th, the main cycling route in the area after SDOT canceled a planned northbound bike lane on Delridge. The diverter was canceled after residents objected that it would slow down car traffic, among other complaints.

Saka said his opposition to this and other traffic calming measures was a matter of “equity” because North Delridge is a “food desert” and the dividers, at SW Brandon and SW Genesee, would have prevented people from accessing “fresh food” in the neighborhood.

“It makes no sense,” Saka said. “It’s a head scratcher, in my view, to install a traffic diverter and prevent left-hand turns in a food desert, rendering Delridge the only single point of access to any fresh foods [or ] vegetables whatsoever. … It doesn’t make a lot of sense, from my perspective, to install such a drastic, draconian measure that has a a significant impact on neighborhoods and communities.”

This is hardly the first time Saka has raised “equity” objections to projects designed to protect vulnerable road users. In 2023, PubliCola reported on Saka’s fervid opposition to another traffic-safety divider, installed as part of a major transit upgrade on Delridge and also intended to protect cyclists and pedestrians. Saka compared the 8-inch divider, which prevents illegal left turns into the parking lot of the preschool his children attended, to Trump’s border wall, and set aside $2 million in last year’s budget to remove it.

City Council, Elections, housing, land use, Mayor Harrell, public safety

This Week on PubliCola: March 23, 2025
Mayor Bruce Harrell spoke this week at an announcement about the CARE team’s expansion into south Seattle.

Monday, March 17

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

On our latest episode of Seattle Nice, we discused King County Executive Dow Constantine’s likely appointment 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.

Tuesday, March 18

PubliCola Questions: City Attorney Candidate Nathan Rouse

Nathan Rouse, a public defender who’s also challenging Davison, talked with PubliCola about his agenda for the office. If elected, he said, he’ll bring back community court, end Davison’s “high utilizers” initiative that targets repeat offenders for extra punishment, and focus more resources on prosecuting wage theft, protecting tenants, and providing resources to crime victims.

Wednesday, March 19

“We’re Gonna Throw It Away.” Dan Strauss, on Losing End of Stadium Housing Vote, Predicts Disaster for Industrial Seattle

After months of deliberation, the council voted 6-3 to allow a limited amount of housing near the city’s two stadiums south of downtown. Dan Strauss, a vocal adversary of the plan, dominated the five-hour meeting with increasingly dour speeches predicting the downfall of the maritime industry in Seattle, due primarily to traffic caused by people living in apartments in the area.

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Thursday, March 20

CARE Crisis Response Team Moves into South Seattle As Council Complains It’s Ineffective

The city’s CARE crisis response team—a team of social workers that responds, accompanied by police, to certain 911 calls—announced this week that it’s expanding citywide. Last week, the city council complained that the the team has not produced visible reductions in misery on Seattle’s streets; in response, CARE’s director noted that the team is limited under an agreement with the police union to 24 responders.

Friday, March 21

When a Top Mayoral Staffer Was Accused of Sexual Assault, These Women Decided It Was Time to Come Forward

Mayor Bruce Harrell’s external affairs director, Pedro Gomez, was accused of raping a woman he met through the mayor’s office last year. After she came forward, several other women spoke to PubliCola about their own experiences with Gomez, including a coworker who said she never reported her own assault. Harrell’s office said there was never any indication that Gomez had any history of inappropriate behavior with women.