1. Former city councilmember Sara Nelson’s effort to repeal a law that increased the way “gig” workers’ salaries are calculated, which would have reduced their pay substantially and increased profits for companies like Uber and Doordash, died that September after six months of heated debate. (The proposal would have effectively overturned the PayUp law, just adopted the previous year, whicih required companies to pay some of the expenses drivers previously had to absorb—expenses that pushed drivers’ pre-tip pay below the legal minimum wage). Although four council members voted for the bill in committee, it died quietly in late 2024.
A recent study by the city’s Office of Labor Standards now confirms what many drivers themselves said when testifying against the Nelson bill: Between January 2024 and July 2025, the average pay for drivers working for the five largest delivery companies average pay increased despite a reduction in tips, indicating that the legislation raising worker pay succeeded at its goal. The study looked at the approximately 92,000 workers who drive for companies like Doordash, most of whom work part-time and use multiple apps.
What’s more, predictions that drivers would get fewer orders did not come true—instead, the number of orders grew by 3.2 percent. The number of drivers increased by a similar amount in the same period—2.8 percent.
Pre-tip pay for “engaged time”—time spent actively completing orders—rose to an average of $30.12 during the study period, after subtracting mileage expenses (the report does not include an average prior to 2024). Pay for “online time,” which includes time drivers spent waiting for orders to come in, rose to an average of $15.98 an hour. This was despite an increase in fees by delivery companies, which add to the cost of orders.
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The PayUp law required delivery companies to report detailed information about drivers and their earnings, which is how OLS had access to such an expansive dataset.
The report did confirm that tips declined a bit (by an average of $2.37 a week) after worker wages went up, increasing the cost of deliveries, but noted that the percentage of workers’ income made up by tips was much lower, since drivers’ new base pay is now more consistent and predictable. Most drivers work part-time, with average weekly wages rising from $314.40 to $341.62, including tips.
2. Three city councilmembers—Council President Joy Hollingsworth, Debora Juarez, and Eddie Lin—will propose legislation next week that would ban large new data centers inside city limits, they announced yesterday. The legislation comes in response to reports that unnamed companies were planning five data centers; according to the Seattle Times, which reported the initial news, two of the companies withdrew their proposals this week.
Editor’s note: This item initially said that the data centers were proposed on City Light-owned property. City Light told PubliCola that none of the centers were planned for City Light property. We regret the error.
A recent complaint alleging that the Seattle Police Department used generative AI without attribution, in violation of the city’s AI policy, has been referred by the Office of Police Accountability as a supervisor action—“a minor policy violation or performance issue that is best addressed through training, communication, or coaching by the employee’s supervisor.”
The complaint, which is anonymous, alleged that a number of public statements from SPD—including an August blog post about recent shootings, an April statement from SPD Chief Shon Barnes about a new “Immediate Violent Crime Prevention & Enforcement Plan,” and a blog post about Barnes’ confirmation in July—were created with a generative AI tool such as ChatGPT.
According the widely used GPTZero AI detector, the August blog post is likely “100 percent AI”-generated, as is the April statement from Barnes; the July blog post appeared to be a mix of AI and human inputs, according to GPTZero, with 29 of its 42 sentences “likely AI generated.” ZeroGPT, another AI detector, found similar results, except that it was more confident that most of the July post was AI-generated.
As a baseline, I checked PubliCola’s last several posts using both AI detectors; both found them to be 100 percent human-generated.
Since 2023, the city has had a policy on generative AI that requires city departments to label AI-generated text.”If text generated by an AI system is used substantively in a final product, attribution to the relevant AI system is required,” the policy said. According to IT Department spokeswoman Megan Erb, city departments are supposed to “determine their standard for substantive use in line with the AI policy principles and relevant intellectual property laws.”
None of SPD’s communications have been labeled to indicate they were produced with AI.
In April, DivestSPD and other outlets reported that OPA recommended SPD come up with its own AI policy after discovering that a sergeant was using ChatGPT to generate reports. OPA said it could not comment on the complaint alleging AI use by the communications team, and SPD did not respond to questions about that recommendation. Currently, SPD does not have its own AI policy.
Last week, Mayor Bruce Harrell and the city’s IT Department director Rob Lloyd announced a new citywide AI policy aimed chiefly at allowing AI pilots to help automate city functions like permitting (a prospect that raises unrelated, but serious, questions about the human labor force doing many jobs that the city may eventually replace with AI.) When it comes specifically to using generative AI to produce text-based documents, however, the new policy is identical to the old one.
Lloyd said there “aren’t any penalties, per se,” for departments that misuse AI tools, “but you do have to go through a rigorous process.”
City departments are required to get permission to use AI systems, including free software such as ChatGPT that poses potential privacy risks. Erb told PubliCola that “SPD was authorized to use specific generative AI applications under City policy following a standard security and privacy review.” (We’ve followed up for more details on which applications SPD is authorized to use).
The city’s generative AI policy does not set specific thresholds for what constitutes “substantive” use of AI-generated text, leaving the term open to interpretation. According to a spokesperson for SPD, the department “has not used generative AI in any substantive way as part of its communications.”
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However, the spokesperson continued, “We are testing use cases, always with a human in the loop. To the limited extent it has been tried, we have explored using it to improve the clarity of existing writing for the public, find ways to get closer to presenting information in plain language, and brainstorm ideas. It is not used as a primary author of content.”
SPD’s legal counsel, Becca Boatright, said that “tools that use AI for grammar, suggested wording changes, suggested brevity/clarity, etc. are not considered ‘generative’ AI for purposes of this policy.”
“Technology is always evolving, and like laptops, social media, and spellchecking tools, AI is another tool in our toolbox to evolve communications, especially given staffing levels and our commitment to share information that educates residents,” the SPD spokesperson said. “It can help do tasks for experienced individuals, allowing them to dedicate more of their time to other responsibilities that align with SPD’s mission and values.”
Because the OPA complaint has been referred as a “supervisor action,” it’s likely that SPD’s Chief Communications Officer Barbara DeLollis, will decide whether and how to respond to the issues it raises about the use of AI by her own office. SPD did not respond to PubliCola’s question about whether the department will take any action to address the issues raised in the recent OPA complaint.
AI detectors like GPTZero are not infallible. They use large datasets, including both AI- and human-generated text, to analyze patterns that indicate the likelihood that a text was AI-generated. Signs that a document was generated by, or with the help of, AI, include buzzwords or repetitive phrases, uniform sentence structure and length, predictable formatting (such as bullet-pointed lists and frequent use of em-dashes), frequent use of passive voice, and an excessively formal or robotic tone.
Here, for example, is the conclusion of the statement from Barnes the AI detector determined was 100 percent AI-generated, which featured a bullet-pointed list: “Public safety is not just about enforcement—it’s about collaboration. The support of our city officials, and our community is vital in ensuring we create long-term, sustainable solutions. I appreciate our ongoing partnerships and look forward to working together to build a safer Seattle.”
And here are the first two paragraphs of the August post about gun violence, which the two AI detectors also suggested was completely AI-generated:
Over the past four days, the Seattle community tragically experienced three separate incidents of gun violence, resulting in the loss of lives. On Thursday, we were confronted with a targeted homicide occurring in front of a place of worship. While the motive for this premeditated act is still under investigation, we recognize the profound impact it has had on those who witnessed this traumatic event, as well as the broader community.
In the early morning hours of Sunday, two additional homicides occurred. The first stemmed from an unauthorized and unregulated gathering, which culminated in the loss of another community member. Shortly thereafter, a third homicide was reported, involving an individual discovered deceased in a parking lot, potentially linked to a vehicle collision or altercation.”
Of course, humans can also write robotically or use AI-style formatting.
To find out more about SPD’s use of AI, PubliCola has filed a records request seeking all AI inputs and outputs, among other information, produced by department communications staff.
As a state program to improve digital equity shuts down, the group that distributes state funds to dozens of small nonprofits and the State Department of Commerce are at an impasse, with millions of dollars in the balance.
By Erica C. Barnett
Terrence Morgan, the CEO of Fresh Start Professional Services, was excited to receive grant funding in 2023 through a state initiative called the Digital Navigator Program. For the first time, Fresh Start would be able to rent an office to hold digital literacy classes and provide a modest monthly subsidy for program participants—people from marginalized communities, including survivors of domestic violence and people coming out of prison or treatment, for whom computer training classes could provide a pathway to higher educat,ion or better-paying jobs.
For more than a year, the state money that paid for the program showed every month, as expected. But then, this past January, the funding stopped.
Fresh Start was able to keep its classes going for a while by spending down its reserves and canceling the stipends that made it feasible for many of its clients to participate in the program, Morgan said. By April, though, “we started really feeling the brunt of it, because our funds were depleted. Our funds are totally completely depleted now.” After six months without any reimbursement for its work, Fresh Start has taken out a line of credit and laid off staff. Morgan and two other top staffers stopped taking pay three months ago.
“We’re doing the bare minimum we can do” until the program ends this month, he said. At this point, he isn’t convinced the state Commerce Department, which funds the Digital Navigator Program, has any intention of paying the dozens of groups that signed contracts for the funding in 2023. “”My guess is—and I’ve been saying this for the last four months—we ain’t never getting paid.”
•••
To understand why Fresh Start and the other organizations have gone unpaid for months requires some background on how the state’s Digital Navigator Program works. In 2021, at the height of the pandemic, the Commerce Department began giving out grants to local organizations to distribute laptops, set up internet connections, and provide digital literacy training to people in underserved communities.
Since then, the Digital Navigator Program has expanded and evolved, granting tens of millions of dollars to dozens of organizations to pay for digital literacy classes, laptops, help lines, and internet service across the state. A dashboard on the EEC’s website documents nearly 230,000 “interactions” made possible by the Digital Navigator Program, which include classes, home visits, calls to technical support lines, and other one-on-one encounters with people who participated in the program.
In 2023, the Commerce Department selected one of those grant recipients, the Seattle-based Equity in Education Center, to distribute more than $20 million in digital equity grants to 39 smaller nonprofits run by and for people of color in marginalized communities—a departure from the department’s previous practice of distributing dozens of grants directly. The EEC headed up the largest of three such “consortiums”; the other two were run by the Community Health Network of Washington and the Nisqually Indian Tribe.
For the first year or so, EEC director Sharonne Navas said, the payments from the Commerce Department came regularly. “We’d submit [invoices] for January, get paid in February, and reimburse our subcontractors by the first week of March,” she said. Last year, the state started asking for additional proof of how the organizations were spending their money, like payroll reports, bank statements, and copies of paper receipts. Navas said the EEC provided all the requested documentation, despite chafing at what they saw as shifting, sometimes arbitrary requirements.
Then, in November, a state audit found issues with 12 of the 62 digital navigator contracts with the organizations heading up the three consortiums. The Commerce Department, according to the audit, had failed to ensure that some forms had signatures, hadn’t verified certain contract requirements, and had paid out a total of $1,510 for “food/snacks that were not approved,” including energy drinks.
Shortly after the audit came out, then-Governor Elect Bob Ferguson appointed a new Commerce Director, former state senator Joe Nguyen, who started in January. That same month, the department stopped paying the EEC, telling the group in April that it was going back over every invoice they had submitted between August and December of 2024, and would start paying them again once they were satisfied that everything was in order.
After the checks stopped coming, Navas said, she was forced to first run through the EEC’s reserves to pay her own staff and the subcontractors, and then to take out a line of credit, using her own house as collateral.
“We’ve floated nine payrolls. We’ve used up all our savings,” Navas said in early June. “I had to furlough 11 staff, and then we had to let nine of them go this week, because we just don’t have the cash anymore.” According to Navas, the state now owes the EEC more than $3 million, with no guarantee that the organization and its subcontractors will ever get paid.
The Commerce Department doesn’t dispute that they haven’t paid the EEC and its sub-grantees since January, but they say it’s the EEC’s fault—not theirs. According to Commerce Director Joe Nguyen, appointed by Governor Bob Ferguson in the EEC was always supposed to pay groups like Fresh Start out of its own funds, in advance, and then submit receipts and other documentation to the state to get reimbursement for the money, which amounts to about $1 million a month. To get paid, Nguyen said, all the EEC needs to do is show that it has paid each of the 39 organizations that are part of its consortium, then show the state exactly how each group spent the money.
In April, Nguyen told Navas in an email that “there is no freeze on the funds” and that “the delays and issues with reimbursement are not due to Commerce’s actions. We have expedited payment as soon as the proper documentation are submitted.”
“I don’t understand why they can’t produce some of these basic receipts,” Nguyen told PubliCola. “It’s all on a reimbursement basis—you submit the receipts, we pay you back.”
In a recent “listening session” with the organizations that contract with the EEC, Nguyen told the groups it was the EEC’s fault, not the state’s, that they haven’t gotten paid this year. (PubliCola received a recording of the meeting, which was not public.) The old leadership at Commerce, Nguyen said, had been paying the EEC without proper documentation, which was out of line with state policy and law. All he was asking for, Nguyen said, was receipts and invoices—and for the EEC to pay everyone in advance, which he said they should have been doing all along.
Navas said there are two flaws in the state’s position. The first, she said, is the Commerce Department keeps changing its requirements. When the program was set up under the agency’s previous director, Mike Fong, subcontractors were only required to submit invoices showing how they spent their grant funding. When Nguyen took over, the requests grew more and more specific, and rejections more common. “We’ve shown proof of payment throughout this whole entire thing,” Navas said. (PubliCola reviewed many of the documents the EEC submitted to Commerce and confirmed that they included receipts, payroll reports, and other detailed documentation.)
“The goalposts have moved so much that I don’t think they want to pay us,” Navas said. “Personally, I think that they want to show that we’re incompetent and then show that the new leadership at Commerce has saved the state $6 million.”
The second issue, Navas said, is that the EEC can’t pay people out of money it doesn’t have. “This grant was created during COVID, when nobody had any money,” she said. “The reimbursement process that we were under was, okay, let’s just be a little bit more flexible with this grant, because we have promised to give out 10,000 laptops and pay 200 digital navigators, and there is no organization that can do that and upfront all the money.”
What Commerce is asking now, Navas said, “is that I pay people before they pay us, and I can’t because I have used all my money to keep the organization open. … It is genuinely impossible” to pay out $1 million a month without having the money in hand, she said.
Nguyen said his only goal is to get the Digital Navigator Program in compliance with state standards that apply to all other contracts. “We have an obligation at the state to adhere to the State Administrative and Accounting Manual,” he said. “We want to make sure that any time people work with Commerce, we are being as supportive as possible, but we literally have [laws] and rules we have to follow.”
During the listening session, which did not include EEC representatives, Nguyen said he was trying to find a way to pay each of the 39 contractors individually, rather than through their contracts with EEC—a deal that would require each contractor to independently cut ties with the Equity In Education Center in the hope that they’d stand a better shot of getting paid by working with Commerce directly. So far, none of the groups have taken him up on his offer.
***
Emails between Commerce and the EEC throughout 2025 show that the relationship between the two is strained, if not broken. The two sides seem unlikely to resolve their impasse by the time the Digital Navigator program ends on June 30. Meanwhile, the nonprofits that received funding through the program are scrambling to figure out how to make up their losses.
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Mission Africa, a Federal Way-based organization that provides case management, mentorship, job training, and other services to immigrant and refugee women and youth, used its Digital Navigator grant to provide broadband access and digital literacy skills to a wide range of participants, from kids in high school to recent immigrants who didn’t need to have computer skills in their home countries.
Since 2022, when Mission Africa first applied for a Digital Navigator grant under an earlier iteration of the program, digital navigation has grown to be the group’s biggest program, according to its CEO, Ndudi Chuku.
“You have people who are medical doctors who come here and they’re not computer literate, maybe they have a serious language barrier. These are the people who are coming her, and we say, ‘This is a mouse. This is a desktop,'” Chuku, who is from Nigeria, said. “And these people end up getting good jobs, and they get a living wage to take care of their families.” In addition to basic digital literacy, Mission Africa teaches classes to train young people in coding, SQL, robotics, and cloud computing—skills that help them access better-paying jobs in the tech sector.
Chuku never stopped paying her staff, she said—”I couldn’t tell them, ‘We can’t pay you because we haven’t been paid,’ because that’s not my agreement with them”—but the loss of regular funding from the state has been “very, very impactful.”
Mission Africa, she said, has given the state no reason to believe they’ve been dishonest about how they’ve spent the money, and they’ve submitted meticulous invoices, including bank and payroll statements that include costs that have nothing to do with the Digital Navigator Program, which Chuku considers “an invasion of our privacy.”
“We did good work, we did it well, with integrity and honesty. We did not cut corners in any way and we did not make up numbers,” Chuku said. “For the past 18 months, Commerce has paid EEC for them to pay us. It has never been the other way around. I don’t know why they won’t pay us now.”
Ana Perera, the CEO of Adonai Counseling and Employment Services, said the Digital Navigator Program has funded four staffers, including one who works one-on-one with migrant workers and other Spanish speakers in Eastern Washington. The group has also provided broadband service to people who are “getting out of prison and going out to places like Omak or Clallam Bay,” Perera said, teaching them how to access their medical records, look for job or entrepreneurship opportunities, and access digital services.
“The heart of our agency is reentry,” Perera said, with a focus on employment, training, and behavioral health. The digital navigator funding has allowed Adonai to expand their work into 31 of the state’s 39 counties, “with a huge focus on rural areas” where broadband access is sparse and where participants lack access to digital literacy and training programs.
Perera, who had to start paying staff out of her own salary, said she thinks Nguyen is trying to drive a wedge between the small community organizations like hers and the EEC, which was previously just one of many organizations receiving direct grants from the state.
“I felt like the listening session was there to make sure to create division among our group so it would break down—’This is all EEC’s fault, they haven’t done thism they haven’t done that,'” Perera said.
Morgan, from Fresh Start, offered a similar assessment. “All they’re doing is stall tactics to get to the end of the grant and say, ‘You didn’t comply, you lost funding.’ At the listening session, they said, ‘We can’t pay you because Sharonne was supposed to pay you all up front.’ But she was paying us up front until you stopped paying her.”
Navas said her organization “absolutely made mistakes,” especially in the early days, when the EEC was a $300,000 organization that rapidly expanded to a budget of $13 million. But none of those errors, she said, justifies cutting off funding to so many small community organizations, including some whose staff have had to go on food assistance, couch surf, or take out personal loans in the months they haven’t been paid.
“When it’s a good day, [I think] it might just be new leadership, under a new governor, trying to come in and trying to enforce internal ways of doing things that should have always been in place,” she said. “On a bad day, it’s hard to give people grace who have so much power, and flippantly say that they’re not going to move any faster.”
The state and the EEC have until July 7 to resolve their impasse. Although the state legislature included an extension of the Digital Navigator Program in its 2025-2027 budget, the governor eliminated the program through a line-item veto, citing “the state’s significant fiscal challenges and funding cuts from the federal government.”
IKE kiosk in Berkeley, one of more than 20 cities that have signed partnerships with the company.
By Erica C. Barnett
The Downtown Seattle Association, an umbrella group for downtown businesses, is asking the city to approve a 30-year permit that would allow a Columbus, Ohio-based advertising company called Orange Barrel Media (through its affiliate, IKE Smart City) to install up to 30 eight-and-a-half-foot-tall digital advertising “kiosks” on sidewalks downtown.
The slides, according to an IKE representative, would “include a mixture of video and static images.”
It’s the second time the city has taken a run at adding kiosks to the downtown landscape. The first proposal, by a Google-affiliated company called Intersection, fizzled in 2018.
The type of permit IKE and the DSA are seeking, known as a term permit, is usually reserved for “significant structures,” like skybridges and tunnels, that need access to city right-of-way on a long-term basis; it’s unusual, if not unprecedented, for the city to grant a long-term permit to dozens of small structures in unspecified locations.
As proposed, the permit would include an option to add another 50 kiosks in the future, including 30 in other neighborhoods, including Ballard.
“We’d like a lot more [kiosks], but we’re comfortable starting with with 30,” DSA CEO Jon Scholes told PubliCola earlier this year.
The kiosks, which will operate 24 hours a day, will scroll through eight ad slots every ten seconds; at least one of the slides will be “proactively curated by the city, organizations like ours, and the community to help people understand what’s happening and what’s available” in the area, Scholes said.
That local programming could include images of Seattle artists’ work, tourist maps, emergency updates, and guides to downtown events. Scholes said people might see an ad for a concert on a kiosk, for example, and say, “‘I’m going to come out for that concert that I didn’t know about’—generating more pedestrian traffic and traffic for events and parks.”
“This level of custom curation provides the City and local stakeholders the ability to curate the content that pedestrians encounter, driving discovery of local and businesses and events, encouraging public transit use, and delivering a platform for non-profits, artists and local businesses who otherwise would never have such an opportunity,” an IKE spokesperson told PubliCola.
According to IKE, cities typically get more like 20 percent of the slides because not all the ad space sells. IKE says its business model is based entirely on ad sales, and that, unlike Intersection and other kiosk companies, it does not sell user data. [Editor’s note: Due to a typo, this story initially said that IKE “does sell user data.”]
A portion of the income from the digital ads—an estimated $1.1 million a year—would go to the DSA to beef up its public programs and events and to fund the business group’s Downtown Ambassador program, Scholes said. Additional revenues could go to the city, a spokesman for Mayor Bruce Harrell, Jamie Housen, said.
“We believe the kiosks would have many public benefits that would complement the goals of Mayor Harrell’s Downtown Activation Plan, including promotion of local businesses and events, WiFi access, wayfinding and mobility tools for visitors, and accessible information on resources like food and shelter for people in need,” Housen said.
“From the city’s interest and our interest, this is a heck of a deal,” Scholes told the city’s Design Commission earlier this week, when it held the second of three meetings to discuss the proposal.
At that meeting, a representative from OBM, Jessica Burton, told commissioners that unlike kiosks operated by other companies, the IKE kiosks won’t include charging stations or built-in tablets—a key distinction from kiosks in other cities, like New York and London, where unhoused people often use the kiosks to charge their devices or get online. Omitting these amenities, Burton, will help “eliminat[e] loitering” and “any type of unnecessary congregating” around the signs, Burton said.
During the commission meeting, officials representing the city’s public safety departments touted the kiosks’ ability to display emergency updates, call 911, and provide real-time public safety information with a single touch. “Let’s be smart, let’s be innovative, let’s be practical, and let’s have the humility to recognize that there are a lot of things working really well in a lot of cities, and the intelligence to look at our own local scoreboard,” CARE (911) Department Chief Amy Smith said. “I’m very excited about these kiosks.”
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But commissioners questioned the value (and equity) of having an emergency alert system that only serves a few blocks of downtown Seattle, and wondered about the usefulness of some of the kiosks’ other features, such QR codes people could use to find local events on their smartphone, or a “Photo Booth” app that allows people to snap a selfie.
Commissioners pressed representatives from OBM and the DSA to explain what public need the vertical billboards would fulfill, and how downtown would be improved by their presence.
“If I try to put this in the context of a magical world in which the city of Seattle has the money to install these themselves, with no advertisement whatsoever, to just provide the public benefits that have been displayed here today, is that desirable?” commissioner Jay Backman said.
A former vice chair of the design commission, Ellen Sollod, said she didn’t think the purported benefits were worth the downsides—”not just the visual clutter of the objects in the landscape, but the visual clutter of the messaging” from illuminated ads all over downtown Seattle.
“I’m very concerned about the continuing homogenization of Seattle, and when I look and I see that this is a program that [has] been used in many cities all over the country, I have to say, maybe the information is specific to Seattle, but it’s a further homogenization of our landscape,” Sollod said.
“If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
The city’s sign code prohibits most illuminated and video signs, although there have been many exceptions, including the large flashing sign at Climate Pledge Arena. The reasons for this, historically, have had to do with both driver distraction and Seattle’s general distaste for ads in public spaces—something Paula Rees, a Seattle planner and designer who’s been fighting against all kinds of billboards downtown for years, says the kiosks epitomize.
“I don’t know about you, but when I get on my phone, and I’m scrolling, and it’s throwing ads at me I can’t stand it. It drives me nuts to go outside and have that same thing on a public street,” Rees said. “I just think it’s not appropriate in the public realm. I don’t get up every morning and say, ‘I want to see another Verizon ad.'”
As for driver distraction, a consultant hired to study the kiosks’ impact said she didn’t believe the kiosks will be a problem, since they’ll be located in areas where speed limits were limited, in 2020, to 25 miles an hour. Deaths from auto collisions have steadily increased since 2013, and spiked after the new speed limits went into effect, suggesting that lower speed limits aren’t doing much to inhibit dangerous driver behavior.
Privacy advocates have also raised concerns about the kiosks. Although the signs won’t include security cameras—an optional feature that other cities have chosen to deploy—Tee Sannon, technology policy program director for the ACLU of Washington, said, “my concern is that this is a slippery slope—once the kiosks are out there, you can retrofit them” to include cameras, she said. “At least we have the surveillance ordinance,” Shannon added—a law that requires a formal review of all new surveillance technologies.
The IKE spokesperson confirmed that in cities that have the cameras, “IKE has provided local authorities with necessary video recordings to assist in criminal investigations, but only in select instances and always in accordance with local law.”
Sannon also said it’s unclear exactly what kind of user data IKE collects and retains. According to IKE, the company “does not collect or sell personally identifiable information or any other data of any kind.” However, IKE’s privacy policy says the company does collect “personal information” such as IP addresses, individual device identifiers, geolocation data, and information collected when people voluntarily interact with the kiosk, such as looking up a location on a map.
“Their privacy policy seems to be riddled with a number of contradictions,” Sannon said. “It says they don’t collect personally identifiable information, but it also says the WiFi does collect MAC addresses, which are unique identifiers [for devices], based on the rationale that it’s to offer WiFi functionality.”
Scholes, from the DSA, said he is sympathetic to privacy concerns, but noted that many technologies people already use involve sharing personally identifiable information with companies. If companies that operate in public spaces couldn’t collect personal data of any kind, he said, “We wouldn’t have bike share, we wouldn’t have scooter share, and we won’t have EV charging provided by private companies. We wouldn’t have public Wi Fi in airports. I think these are legitimate concerns. But we’ve made public policy decisions to balance the public benefits provided by private entities at no cost to the taxpayer [against] a bunch of different interests.”
The Design Commission will hold one more meeting to discuss the DSA and IKE’s proposal before making a recommendation to the city council later this summer. The mayor’s office reportedly wants to have the kiosks up and running before the FIFA World Cup in 2026, which is expected to bring a flood of tourists to downtown Seattle.
After the disastrous launch of a new website that crashed due to traffic from people seeking election results last November, the King County Council passed a budget proviso, or restriction, late last year—holding back $200,000 from the project until the county’s IT department produced a status update “addressing concerns about the King County website upgrade.”
That upgrade, which started in 2017, has cost King County taxpayers $15 million so far (not counting the salaries of county employees), and will be out of date as soon as 2027, when Sitecore—the county’s content management system—changes its technology for web platforms and will no longer support King County’s website. When that happens, the county will have to find a new content management system. (A content management system, or CMS, is the “back end” of a website; PubliCola, a much simpler site than the county’s, uses WordPress).
As we reported last year, the new website design is bare-bones—more than one county employee told us they thought it was an “interim” or “intermediate” step before the “real” website launched—and confusing to navigate.
Many basic government services are hidden somewhere in an alphabetical site index that’s often redundant or counterintuitive—the county assessor’s heavily used property mapping services is buried under the label “GIS services,” in addition to its official name, “Parcel Viewer,” for instance—and the main site features a list of seemingly random county services arranged in no discernible order.
Currently, for example, visitors to kingcounty.gov are greeted with a full screen about dog adoptions, followed by a banner about the March Presidential primary election, followed by highlighted links to King County Metro, rural traffic camera feeds, the pet adoption page (again), and the county’s “careers” site (which requires additional clicks to get to a list of jobs).
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“It’s not an improvement from what we had before,” County Councilmember Claudia Balducci, who represents Bellevue, told PubliCola. “There have been improvements since [the new site] first went up—we’ve put in some requests for changes—but they’re modest. It’s things like borders and white space, and can we have pictures of the council members on their council member pages.” (Originally, the site included text-only links to text-only councilmember pages.)
Beyond those “aesthetic issues,” Balducci continued, “the biggest problem is that people need to be able to find what they need, and it’s just not easy. I stopped using the website to search for things that I wanted to find. I would just use Google, because that was far more reliable.”
A spokesperson for King County said the new website templates “were designed to be user-friendly based on modern best practices. The goal was to simplify content for improved navigation, ADA access, and translations.” The county uses Google Translate for all languages other than English.
At Tuesday’s meeting, county Chief Information Officer Megan Clarke, who became head of the IT department in November 2022, said the issues with the website stem partly from a lack of communication between the IT staffers who were creating the new website and the people who would ultimately have to use it. One example of this was when the IT division determined that 90 percent of web traffic went through 10 percent of the pages on the site, and assumed it would be fine to “eliminate 90 percent of the pages and keep the 10 [percent] that were meaningful. … Unfortunately, those assumptions weren’t vetted.”
Balducci, who noted during the meeting that many of the problems predated Clarke’s appointment, expressed a type of frustration that’s probably familiar to anyone who’s hired a technical expert to build their website: “You know how to build a website. But we know what we do, and you don’t know what we do,” she said. “The only way this stuff works is if this is a partnership.”
In King County IT’s official, written response to the proviso, the department emphasized how many times it met with people from county departments to discuss the website and noting that some departments haven’t reorganized their site content yet in the latest version of the content management system—suggesting, in effect, that the reason “some users experience challenges with finding what they are looking for on Kingcounty.gov” is because county departments aren’t doing their part or signed off on things and later changed their minds.
Balducci, who noted during the meeting that many of the problems predated Clarke’s appointment, expressed a type of frustration that’s probably familiar to anyone who’s hired a technical expert to build their website: “You know how to build a website. But we know what we do, and you don’t know what we do,” she said. “The only way this stuff works… is if this is a partnership.”
Clarke—taking a more conciliatory tone than the department’s official report—told the council that many of the county staffers who worked on the website didn’t have experience working with the platform they were using and didn’t get the training they needed. “There was not someone in charge who had done this before,” Clarke said. “KCIT was trying to manage something that really required a lot of depth and breadth of voices involved, and that just did not happen. We treated the website as a project rather than a product.”
Clarke told the council she’s hiring an outside consultant to try to identifying some of the underlying issues with the site, including why it couldn’t handle traffic on a low-turnout odd-year election night, in order to fix some of the most glaring problems. (The King County spokesperson told PubliCola that the IT department did anticipate the spike in traffic on election night, and that “although [the site] initially failed to function properly, KCIT was able to resolve the issue on Election Night”—albeit long after everyone had turned to KING 5’s website, which had the results on time.)
was designed to handle traffic, and only failed when people were seeking results at 8:00, when they’re ordinarily available.
However, she noted, the county is facing a budget deficit; even if Sitecore can support the website for a couple of years after 2027, it doesn’t make much sense to sink more money into the current site.
“I look at it as, how much more do we want to sink in this area [if] we are going to move to something else?” Clarke said. “I’ve seen website projects with twice the number of pages finish on time and on budget. I absolutely know it’s possible.”
PubliCola has reached out to the King County Executive’s Office and the IT department and will update this post when we hear back.
On the docket this year: A carbon tax, plus a wealth tax, changes to the estate tax, and a sweetened beverage tax.
by Leo Brine
Progressive legislators have been unleashing a slew of tax legislation this session, with bills like the capital gains tax (SB 5096) and the working families tax exemption (HB 1297) grabbing headlines after historic floor votes on both earlier month.
And they have more cued up. Legislators typically pass tax and revenue bills late in the session as a means of funding the budget, but this year Democrats have a much bigger agenda: They want to pass tax legislation that reforms how the budget is actually funded. They plan to create new taxes on carbon-dioxide emissions, extreme wealth, data collection, and more this year.
Ingeniously flipping the script on Republicans who say that sudden rosy revenue forecasts prove our tax system doesn’t need reform, progressives say the latest revenue forecast actually highlights the volatility of Washington’s current tax structure. In June, the state forecast a nearly $9 billion revenue shortfall. However, a sequence of higher forecasts based on an uptick in retail sales tax revenue between September and March nearly re-balanced the budget.
Ingeniously flipping the script on Republicans who say sudden rosy revenue forecasts prove our tax system doesn’t need reform, progressives say the budget turnaround is being funded on the backs of low-income residents who pay a disproportionate amount of their incomes in regressive sales taxes.
Seizing on the volatility argument, and noting that the turnaround is being funded largely on the backs of low-income residents who pay a disproportionate amount of their incomes in regressive sales taxes, Democrats are pushing a sweeping tax reform agenda.
At the March 17 revenue forecast meeting, House Appropriations Committee chair Rep. Timm Ormsby (D-3, Spokane) said the revenue increase was not a reason to change course on new progressive tax legislation. “I think we have to be quite concerned about ongoing stability of our revenue system. I think that today’s forecast and other economic news will affect our discussion, but I don’t see a wholesale change in discussion [around tax legislation] in the legislature,” he said.
Wealth Tax
One of the most daring pieces of progressive legislation is the wealth tax bill (HB 1406). Sponsored by House Finance Committee chair Rep. Noel Frame (D-36, Seattle), the bill proposes a 1 percent tax on worldwide “intangible financial assets of more than $1 billion.” Intangible assets include cash, stocks, bonds, pension funds and ownership in revenue-generating partnerships such as businesses. (In contrast, tangible and intangible personal property includes things like as homes, farm equipment and federal and state bonds.) The bill is currently in the house finance committee, where it is awaiting an executive session.
The Department of Revenue estimates the tax will generate an additional $2.5 billion in annual revenue for the state.
Rep. Frame surmises Bezos is already claiming residency in a different state.
One of the main critiques of the bill, along with other bills aimed at taxing the rich, is that people like Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates could just leave the state and live elsewhere. Rep. Frame said she is not worried about this. Frame told GeekWire in February that based on the DOR revenue predictions, she believes Bezos is already claiming residency in a different state. As for Gates, whose father campaigned for an income tax a decade ago, Frame believes he is too invested in his home state to leave.
Carbon Tax
The legislature is working on several environmental bills this session, including two bills aimed at curbing carbon emissions and greenhouse gases. The Senate Ways and Means committee currently has SB 5126 scheduled for executive committee hearings, while SB 5373 remains in the Environment, Energy & Technology committee waiting for an executive session.
By Erica C. Barnett
PayUp law, just adopted the previous year, whicih required companies to pay some of the expenses drivers previously had to absorb—expenses that pushed drivers’ pre-tip pay below the legal minimum wage). Although four council members voted for the bill in committee, it died quietly in late 2024.
By Erica C. Barnett
