New Mayor Katie Wilson is filling out her org chart with some high-profile names, starting with two longtime advocates for civil rights and criminal justice policy reform, according to multiple sources familiar with the new additions.
Alison Holcomb, a longtime ACLU-WA policy director who’s currently deputy general counsel to King County Executive Girmay Zahilay, will be in charge of public safety initiatives—a marked change from ex-mayor Bruce Harrell’s public safety director, Natalie Walton-Anderson, who came straight from city attorney Ann Davison’s office and echoed ex-deputy mayor Tim Burgess’ support for more punitive approaches to crimes related to drug use and poverty.
The second advocate is Lisa Daugaard, the co-executive director of Purpose Dignity Action and the MacArthur Award-winning founder of the LEAD diversion program. Daugaard, who has been advising Wilson as a member of her transition team, will step in on an interim basis to advise Wilson on public safety and homelessness. Jon Grant, the longtime chief strategy officer at the Low-Income Housing Institute and a two-time Seattle City Council candidate, will be Wilson’s senior policy advisor on homelessness.
Holcomb will be working under Mark Ellerbrook, a longtime manager and division director at King County’s housing and community development division who is currently King County Metro’s capital division; Ellerbrook, in turn, will report to the mayor’s new Director of Departments, Jen Chan.
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Other new hires include Esther Handy, the former City Council central staff director, who will serve as a policy advisor, and Alex Hudson, the current director of Commute Seattle and former director of the Transportation Choices Coalition who ran for City Council in 2023, losing the District 3 race to Joy Hollingsworth. Sejal Parikh, a longtime labor leader who previously worked at the city chief of staff for former City Couniclmember Teresa Mosqueda, will be Wilson’s deputy policy director.
Wilson has announced she is keeping a number of department heads, including Human Services Department director Tanya Kim and Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes, while jettisoning others, such as Seattle Department of Transportation Director Adiam Emery. One department director whose job remains up in the air is Office of Housing Director Maiko Winkler-Chin, whose supporters reportedly sent a flurry of emails to Wilson’s team over the past few days asking the new mayor to retain her.
A representative from Wilson’s office confirmed the names of the new hires. This is a developing story and will be updated when we have more information about individual positions.
Mayor Katie Wilson has frequently been compared to fellow Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, the new mayor of New York City. But as one supporter observed at City Hall on Friday, her inauguration ceremony was almost intimate in comparison to Mamdani’s star-studded event. Surrounded by supporters in yellow Transit Riders Union shirts, Wilson sat, beaming, while listening to speakers who included an organizer for the Nickelsville homeless encampment and a Somali American health services researcher who helped organize for free youth transit passes as a student attending Rainier Beach High School.
The Nickelsville organizer, Jarvis Capucion, noted that he hadn’t been inside the mayor’s office since 2015, when then-mayor Ed Murray declared a state of emergency on homelessness.
The audience was packed with people who aren’t regular fixtures at city hall (yet!); I’ve never seen so many young people in the building for anything other than a protest or public comment opposing some conservative action or budget cut proposed by the City Council. A number of city department heads and their deputies sat, mostly stone-faced, on the indoor steps leading up to council chambers, but the audience on the lobby floor consisted largely of young Wilson supporters, longtime activists, and Black and brown Seattle leaders who stuck their necks out to support Wilson even when ex-mayor Bruce Harrell laid on intense pressure to back him or else.
When Cynthia Green, an 80-year Seattle resident who spoke shortly before Wilson took the stage, said “Seattle can hope again,” it wasn’t just about the fact that Seattle voters elected Wilson, a grassroots organizer accustomed to being underestimated, as mayor of Seattle. Green’s speech was also about what Seattle voters rejected—a mayor who closed out a debate in October by telling the people of Seattle, “This is not the time for hope. Passion and great ideas and inexperience is just not going to get us there.”
Harrell’s message was that voters should accept what they already had—a middling mayor who failed to deliver on his promises while insisting that critics and the press had no right to “question the compassion of this administration”—instead of hoping for equitable prosperity and lasting solutions to challenges like homelessness, addiction, and the rising cost of housing.
“Today we swear in a mayor who did not come from the loudest rooms or the richest donors, but from the long work of organizing, listening and standing with people who are usually told to wait their turn,” Green said. When her family decided to endorse Wilson over Harrell, “We were cautioned to be sensible, urged to temper our hopes and accept what was deemed realistic. But history has taught us this: Realism, accepting a situation as it is—this is often the language of those who have grown comfortable living with inequity and who would prefer others to do the same.
Wilson, Green continued, has “assembled a team that reflects the true Seattle—multiracial, multi-generational, rooted in community, rich in lived wisdom. People who understand that loudness is not clarity, that ego is not leadership, that passion is not weakness.” When she said “ego is not leadership,” Green had to pause for applause.
Wilson’s own speech, which she described as “my last unvetted speech” before she takes office in earnest, focused on a goal I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a Seattle mayor articulate—the role of government in making it possible for people to live full lives, not just solve “the math problem of how a household can make its revenue exceed its expenses.” (Talk about hope!)
“I want to live in a city that honors the things you do when you’re not making money… the time that you spend with your kid at the playground, caring for a sick friend or an elderly relative,” Wilson said. “A city that values the pursuits that create beauty and community, whether or not they ever turn into careers. A city that thinks you should have time to read a book and lay on the grass staring up at the clouds.”
“Because we need bread, but we need roses too. We deserve roses.”
A number of people I spoke to afterward admitted getting misty at this line, and I did too. (What a change from Mayor Football References with his sports name-dropping!) I’m not being excessively idealistic here. Being mayor is (or should be) hard, grinding work, and success requires keeping a daily focus on long-term policy goals amid economic and political pressure. Every mayor has failures and the job requires compromises that inevitably disappoint the most dedicated supporters, particularly if your supporters are progressive and your compromises are with the centrist majority that has always called the shots in Seattle. And every mayor deserves, and should expect, media scrutiny, including (perhaps especially) from those of us who share their aspirations for the city. (Please keep ignoring the dipshits, though!)
But one thing our last two mayors lost sight of, if they ever considered it, is that real success requires a commitment to core principles. Progress doesn’t happen by papering over problems and fudging statistics to paint a picture of success. (Ed Murray’s name is often invoked because of the city’s failure to treat homelessness as a true emergency, but it was his two successors, Durkan and Harrell, who spent their terms twisting the numbers to claim constant progress on homelessness, even amid an obviously growing crisis.) Wilson’s loftiest goal may be turning Seattle into a place where ordinary people can survive on one job and thrive by reading books in the park or writing poetry just because they want to. That’s a refreshingly hopeful aspiration, one Wilson should keep front of mind as she navigates the challenges of being Seattle’s 58th mayor.
Brian Maxey and Rebecca Boatright, two long-serving civilian employees fired by Police Chief Shon Barnes last month
Fired SPD employees allege retaliation by police chief, Harrell pre-election request sent Seattle Channel staffers scrambling, and more news to close out 2025.
Police Chief Shon Barnes took a nearly two-week vacation over the holidays, leaving various deputies in charge while he was off duty. Barnes, whose family lives in Chicago, has previously come under scrutiny for spending many of his weekends out of town.
The Seattle Police Department claims two recent operations targeting a strip club and men who pay for sex successfully targeted human trafficking and sexual exploitation. But they wouldn’t answer questions seeking more detailed information about the two announcements, such as whether the strip club sting led to any actual charges and a request for police reports.
Former Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office said his 2025 budget video was nothing unusual and didn’t cost the city any extra money. But records reveal that the multi-location video was a last-minute request that required Seattle Channel staffers to drop what they were doing and work overtime on a weekend to film and produce a 15-minute film with virtually no notice, just a few weeks before ballots dropped for the 2025 mayoral election.
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In recent years, the police department’s policy toward public disclosure requests has ossified into a kind of tacit refusal via delay. “Grouping,” SPD’s practice of refusing to respond to more than one request from the same person or outlet at a time, is the subject of at least one lawsuit, but SPD also now forces the media and public to file records requests for information that used to be easy to obtain, exacerbating the problem. Mayor Wilson should seek an audit to get to the bottom of SPD’s intrasigence, and make them follow the public records act in practice, not just in theory.
Two top civilian SPD employees who were fired by Police Chief Shon Barnes, Rebecca Boatright and Brian Maxey, have filed tort claims seeking $11 million for what they describe as retaliation. The tort says they advised Barnes against decisions that were widely perceived as anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ, and Boatright also says she was discriminated against because of her gender.
Barnes’ chief of staff reportedly responded to concerns about a crackdown on the longtime nude beach at Denny Blaine Park by saying, “We’re not here for the gays.”
By Erica C. Barnett
Two former civilian Seattle Police Department employees, former general counsel Rebecca Boatright and former chief operating officer Brian Maxey, have filed tort claims against the city, alleging they were “subjected to a widespread course of retaliation and wrongfully terminated” because they opposed decisions made by Barnes and his predecessor, Sue Rahr.
Boatright is also claiming gender discrimination. Maxey is seeking $4.5 million, while Boatright is seeking $6.5 million.
Barnes abruptly fired Boatright and Maxey early in the morning on November 5, less than 12 hours after the first ballots dropped in the mayoral election.
The two were among the longest-serving civilian members of the department, and “the only City employees to navigate the Consent Decree between the United States and the City from start to finish,” according to their claim.
The tort claim, which will lead to a lawsuit if the city declines to settle within 60 days, claims that the department retaliated against Maxey and Boatright for objecting to a number of decisions, including “personnel moves (promotions, demotions, and assignments) that reasonably appeared to be rooted in retaliation or discrimination based upon sexual orientation or gender.”
This is an apparent reference to two hiring decisions. First, Barnes chose to promote Mike Tietjen, a lieutenant who became infamous for his over-the-top misconduct during the 2020 protests on Capitol Hill, to captain of the East Precinct, passing over a gay lieutenant who had been serving as acting captain and was well-liked within the surrounding Capitol Hill community. (Barnes later rescinded his decision and put a different captain in charge at the East Precinct).
In an email to command staff earlier this year, Barnes blamed PubliCola’s reporting for community backlash against his decision to promote Tietjen, as well “a lack of comprehensive input from those involved in employee assignments and internal leaks within our department.”
Barnes had previously come under fire for overseeing a dramatic crackdown on the historic LGBTQ+ nude beach at Denny Blaine Park, in which officers showed up prepared to arrest or trespass anyone who wasn’t wearing clothes. According to people familiar with the conversation, Barnes’ chief of staff, Alex Ricketts, brushed Boatright off when she told Ricketts he and Barnes needed to take the LGBTQ+ community’s concerns seriously, telling her, “We’re not here for the gays.”
Second, Barnes’ Deputy Chief Yvonne Underwood allegedly decided not to promote a gay detective who was serving as acting sergeant over SPD’s policy division, passing her over for the permanent position despite the fact that, like the acting East Precinct Commander who got pushed aside in favor of Tietjen, she was already doing the job. Instead, the woman, a single mom, was assigned to an overnight patrol position, which conflicted with her duties as a parent—a common issue faced by female cops, and one SPD has claimed it wants to solve as part of the “30 by 30” effort to have a recruit class that’s 30 percent women by 2030.
Boatright, Maxey, and executive staff in Harrell’s office also questioned Barnes’ decision to award $50,000 hiring bonuses, created explicitly to recruit trained rank and file officers, to two of his new command staff, and to accept the same bonus himself. Barnes and Deputy chief Yvonne Underwood also took $2,000 recruitment bonuses for hiring the same two executives. PubliCola reported exclusively on the bonuses in a series of stories earlier this year, which led to another search for “leaks” in the department, according to multiple internal sources.
During a conversation about the bonuses that took place in his office, Ricketts reportedly dismissed Boatright’s legal concerns, saying she didn’t know what she was talking about, according to people familiar with the conversation. When Underwood arrived at the office, Ricketts reportedly told the deputy chief, “This girl’s talking foolishness.”
The claim also alleges that in order to justify the highest possible pay classification, Executive 4, for a new position he created for his longtime colleague Lee Hunt, Barnes handed a significant amount of Boatright’s work, along with employees she supervised, to Hunt. “The Chief of Police told Ms. Boatright that the effective demotion was necessary to ‘justify [Hunt’s] Exec 4 classification,'” according to the claim. Boatright had a lower job classification—Executive 3—that tops out in the high $200,000s. Hunt’s salary is $302,000 a year, more than the mayor and most city department heads.
Another issue Boatright and Maxey raise is Barnes’ response to their concerns about an anti-prostitutions initiative in which undercover officers photograph men they believe are paying sex workers on Aurora Ave. N and send the photographs, along with a sternly worded “john letter,” to their homes, with the goal of shaming the men out of paying for sex in the future. (Seattle has had similar programs in the past but found them ineffective). The two expressed concern that the letters could violate people’s state constitutional right to privacy in their own homes and family affairs and lead to potentially violent confrontations with partners.
In the same email that blamed “leaks” and media coverage for the LGBTQ+ backlash against Tietjen’s appointment, Barnes noted “internal resistance” to the new “initiative to combat human trafficking along the Aurora Street [sic] corridor.”
“I want to reiterate that both I and the mayor’s office fully support this program,” Barnes wrote. “Leadership sometimes involves taking risks, and I firmly believe that proactive measures are necessary, even in the face of opposition Those who are not aligned with this mission are encouraged to have an open conversation with me or consider their place within our department.” This email, which quickly circulated outside its intended audience, was widely viewed as a threat: If you disagree with the chief, keep it to yourself or GTFO.
Mayor-elect Katie Wilson, who will take office on Friday, announced earlier this month that she will keep Barnes as police chief.
Maxey and Boatright declined to comment. SPD’s communications office respond to questions by saying, “The department respects the legal process and cannot comment on ongoing legal matters.”
A few of PubliCola’s records requests that have been “grouped” by the Seattle Police Department. SPD’s public disclosure unit will not begin (or resume) responding to any of these requests until they’ve completed the one they’re currently working on. We filed that one, for information about SPD’s use of generative AI, in September; so far, we’ve only gotten only a delay notice in response.
SPD has shown they won’t comply with the state Public Records Act on their own. So make them.
Erica C. Barnett
It’s time for the city to audit the Seattle Police Department’s public disclosure office—and, if they ignore the auditor’s recommendations, for incoming Mayor Katie Wilson to force SPD to follow the law.
The state Public Records Act makes it clear that the government’s obligation to disclose information is no trivial responsibility. “The people of this state do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies that serve them,” the PRA says. “The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. The people insist on remaining informed so that they may maintain control over the instruments that they have created.”
For years, SPD has failed to comply with this bedrock premise. Instead, they’ve evaded disclosure by delaying responses until the records they’ve held back are no longer timely, refusing to work on more than one request at a time, and using the public disclosure process to conceal information that used to be public as a matter of course, including police reports and responses to basic factual questions.
Public disclosure of public information is in everyone’s interest, but for PubliCola and other media outlets, the availability of public records also affects our ability to keep our readers informed. Currently, PubliCola has 10 open records requests with SPD, with the oldest dating back to mid-2023. (We had older unfulfilled requests, but closed them in an effort to triage requests that were still relatively timely).
In all of 2025, SPD provided a single document in response to one of our public disclosure requests—a one-page Excel spreadsheet showing the total compensation for police officers in 2024.
Not only did SPD fail to meaningfully respond to our outstanding requests, they will no longer respond to more than one request at a time from individuals or entities with multiple requests. This practice, known as “grouping,” violates a 2023 agreement between the city and the Seattle Times, which is currently fighting SPD in court to eliminate grouping entirely. It also appears to violate the Public Records Act, which requires agencies to respond to individual requests “promptly,” with specific estimates for the time it will take to respond to each request.
As the Times’ recent motion for summary judgment puts it, “The Grouping Policy denies prompt responses to those disfavored requesters who cannot wait for an old request to slowly emerge from SPD’s backlog before making a new request. … Nothing in the PRA authorizes an agency to choose which requests to process and which ones to leave on a dusty shelf.”
I’ve filed a declaration in support of the Times’ latest lawsuit, describing the ways in which SPD has thwarted PubliCola’s requests for public records and how these actions have affected my ability to keep the public informed about what SPD is up to—from former chief Diaz’ alleged coverup of an unethical affair with a staffer he hired into a specially created position, to the investigation into a police union official who whooped it up over the killing of a pedestrian by a speeding cop. Times reporter Mike Carter’s own declaration shows a similar pattern of selective inaction by SPD—including one request for which he waited 19 months, only to receive the documents unexpectedly because SPD fast-tracked a similar request from a KOMO reporter.
If the Times prevails over SPD, it will directly benefit those in the public and independent press who can’t afford to fight years-long legal battles against the deep-pocketed police department. Meanwhile, though, SPD is still claiming the right to effectively deny records requests by putting them off for years. Earlier this month, the department moved its generic “placeholder date” for PubliCola’s nine inactive “grouped” requests from December 31, 2025 to December 31, 2026. Unless something changes, the remaining unfilled requests will get pushed forward to 2027 at the end of next year.
The single PubliCola records request SPD says it is working on—for information about SPD’s use of generative AI—has already been delayed by three months, until January, and could move again. Until SPD has finished responding to this one request, they will do no work at all on our other nine requests.
Because SPD refuses to process more than one request at a time, I have stopped filing records requests with them. It’s pointless. In effect, their obstructive decisions have succeeded—whether I go through the motions of filing a request or not, SPD will never respond “promptly,” as required by the PRA, or provide the “fullest assistance” the law requires.
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So, in addition to conducting a formal audit, Mayor-elect Wilson should send down legislation to eliminate “grouping,” which has not accomplished its purported goal of weeding out bot requests and those that are excessively burdensome or “extraordinarily broad.” If bots are a problem, separate legislation can address that issue; if a huge number of people are filing harassing or unreasonable requests, the burden should be on SPD to prove this is happening, and to work with the mayor and city council on legislation to address that narrow problem. SPD is currently using city dollars in a legal battle to use “grouping” to conceal public records. It’s long past time (and should not require a lengthy legal battle) to take this tool away from them.
SPD’s lack of compliance with basic public disclosure standards has gotten worse in recent years. But it isn’t new. In 2015, the City Auditor’s Office audited SPD’s public disclosure unit and found serious problems with how the office handles public disclosure requests.
That audit recommended that SPD hire more public disclosure officers, implement a centralized system for managing records requests, and streamline the response process by handling simple requests before more complex ones and prioritizing timely responses. It also recommended some basic best practices—like asking requesters for clarification when necessary and “proactively communicat[ing]” with people who ask for records—something that currently does not happen consistently, if at all.
SPD did not concur with most of the 13 recommendations in the 2015 audit, agreeing explicitly with just two—the recommendation to hire more public disclosure staff, and the one suggesting they set up a new records management system. Over the past 10 years, SPD has added nine new positions to the public disclosure unit to keep up with the increasing pace of requests, up from just five in 2014. That’s a positive step on paper, but it doesn’t actually help if public disclosure officers are steeped in SPD’s current culture of concealment.
Another practice SPD uses to evade public disclosure is expanding the type of records the department refuses to hand over without a public disclosure request.
In the recent past, for instance, SPD put ordinary police reports online as a matter of course—an extension of the department’s earlier practice of printing out copies of police reports and making them available at police precincts. (Yes, you could just walk in to any precinct and grab the day’s police reports!)
Today, police reports are no longer available to the general public through SPD’s website and the reports SPD provides to media (when they choose to do so) consist of heavily redacted and edited “narratives” that omit important information that the public generally has the right to know, such as the names of the officers who respond to calls and write the reports.
Additionally, SPD sometimes refuses to provide police reports, including those cleaned-up narratives, without explanation. Although SPD’s policy manual says explicitly that “Media Representatives May Obtain Copies of Police Reports Through the Public Affairs Unit,” that unit frequently directs PubliCola to file a records request for police reports.
This “file a records request” brushoff applies not just to written reports but to questions of all kinds. If SPD’s communications office—headed, under Police Chief Shon Barnes, by a former corporate PR representative with no prior experience in government—doesn’t want to answer a question, “file a records request” is a polite synonym for “fuck off.” Too far? Not when you consider that even the simplest records requests often take years—if I want to know about a crime that took place downtown last night, the Wilson administration could be halfway over before I find out.
The police, in short, are getting away with refusing to follow the letter and spirit of our state’s strongly worded public disclosure law—a law explicitly designed to ensure that the public has access to information that isn’t mediated and managed by government agencies and their press offices.
SPD has made it very clear that they won’t meet their legal obligation to provide public records unless they’re forced to do so—by legislation, a court order, or a directive from the mayor, who has the ability to fire for reprimand the police chief if his department is failing to comply with expectations.
It’s possible, perhaps even likely, that the Seattle Times will prevail in its current attempt to get SPD to stop grouping records requests, taking away one of the department’s current methods for withholding public documents.
But undoing a culture of obfuscation could require forcing, rather than asking, SPD to meet its obligation to provide records that ultimately belong to us, the public.
An audit laser-focused on these tactics will outline the problem and lay out solutions and a timeline for compliance. Mayor Wilson can then show she’s serious about transparency by requiring SPD to show progress on public disclosure, and holding Chief Barnes directly accountable if his department fails to act. SPD has had plenty of chances (and received plenty of public funding) to fix a broken process. It’s time they face consequences for their inaction.
Mayor Bruce Harrell stands in front of an affordable-housing building in his 2025 budget video
By Erica C. Barnett
Back in September, outgoing Mayor Bruce Harrell announced his annual budget not with an in-person speech, in keeping with longstanding custom, but in a slickly produced video, filmed at multiple locations around Seattle. The timing, as well as the content—an upbeat preview that emphasized new spending while failing to mention the looming budget cliff—looked more like a campaign video than an informational announcement. It has been viewed on YouTube around 1,400 times.
Asked about the timing and expense of the video earlier this year, a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Information Technology said, “The Seattle Channel supports the Mayor’s office for various requests, including producing the recent budgetvideo,” the spokesperson said, adding, “This work was completed in-house using staff time.”
While this was technically true, records PubliCola obtained through a public disclosure request show that Seattle Channel staff had to work overtime to comply with Harrell’s last-minute pre-election request, postponing work on regular Seattle Channel shows and working over the weekend to complete the project.
According to an email, 11 staffers were involved in producing Harrell’s budget video.
A review of the emails that flew back and forth before and during production of Harrell’s video suggest a frantic rush to fulfill a last-minute demand from Harrell, who had just lost the primary election to Katie Wilson.
On Monday, September 15, Seattle Channel production manager Ed Escalona sent out an email to staff letting them know about a “last-minute request” from Harrell’s office for a budget video, with multiple takes at three to five locations, filmed “on the mayor’s schedule” and due in a week. “The details are sketchy,” the email noted; another exchange said the mayor planned to “ad lib” without a teleprompter.
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The timeline sent producers scrambling to reschedule other projects and find people who could take on extra work on very short notice. But Harrell’s office took their time coming up with a plan. That Thursday, a staffer described the lack of information from the mayor’s office as “inefficient and not best practices,” and the filming didn’t happen until Friday, with producers still asking Harrell’s office for a script at 2:00 that afternoon.
Work on other Seattle Channel shows appears to have been upended by the last-minute production, and staffers worked through the weekend to finish filming and editing—a situation that prompted grousing from some staff. “Looks great… all except for the part of having to work the whole weekend!” one staffer wrote.
Emails show that Seattle Channel staff tried to limit the number of shooting locations, but Harrell’s team insisted on four—the Green Lake Community Center, a low-income housing complex in the Central District, and the downtown waterfront, plus City Hall.
Harrell’s office also requested a long list of B-roll, including new drone shots, to serve as segues between locations. On the day before the video was due, a Sunday, Seattle Channel general manager Shannon Gee described the work in an email as “very rough going. I don’t know if I’ve been of any help at all trying to hunt down footage that doesn’t exist. … There are sections where there is no way to illustrate what is being said and there are still a lot of edits that need to be covered.”
As we noted at the time, it’s unusual for a Seattle mayor to introduce the annual budget with a video rather than a live speech; the only mayor who has done so in recent memory was Jenny Durkan, who was halfway out the door when she announced her final budget with a perfunctory six-minute video taped at a North Seattle College classroom in 2021.
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