On Tuesday, right before a court hearing in the lawsuit filed by Washington State and the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development announced that it’s pulling the Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for homeless investments—the subject of the lawsuit.
HUD filed a “notice of withdrawal” in the Rhode Island federal district court where the case is being heard, and claimed in their filing that the issues the state and NAEH raise in the lawsuit are now “moot.” The judge in the case, District Judge Mary McElroy, said the federal government’s last-minute withdrawal “feels like intentional chaos” during a hearing on Monday.
Local agency and elected leaders and a spokesperson for the King County Regional Homelessness Authority told PubliCola they’re still trying to figure out what the decision means for local agencies that rely on federal funds. HUD’s one-paragraph announcement shed little light on the timeline or potential changes, saying only that “the withdrawal will allow the Department to make appropriate revisions to the NOFO, and the Department intends to do so.”
The NOFO—there’s simply no way of getting around the acronym— is an annual funding process for homelessness programs, administered in the Seattle region by the KCRHA, acting as the region’s Continuum of Care. A mandatory committee, the Continuum of Care Board, considers a consolidated regional application for funds each year and approves it for transmission to HUD.
As we reported last month, HUD’s latest NOFO includes many provisions that could exclude KCRHA and other CoCs in blue states and cities from receiving funds, including provisions that prohibit funding for programs that acknowledge and accommodate trans and nonbinary people, those that help specific racial minorities, and those that allow—or have ever allowed—drug use on site.
Beyond those restrictions, the new NOFO also strictly limits funding for permanent housing of all types, from rapid rehousing vouchers to service-rich permanent supportive housing, to 30 percent of total NOFO funding. In Seattle, where more than 90 percent of HUD funding pays for permanent housing, this new restriction alone could put thousands of housed people back onto streets or into the overtaxed shelter system.
KCRHA spokeswoman Lisa Edge said the agency has been planning since last month for the impacts of the delayed NOFO, which was supposed to come out last summer. The November announcement left housing and service providers with just two months to submit new applications under completely different rules by January, with decisions from HUD coming down in May; now, it’s unclear when HUD will release a new version of the NOFO and what kind of restrictions on funding it will include.
According to Edge, some current homeless service contracts were scheduled for renewal in February, March, and April; if the NOFO gets delayed further, pushing back the January deadline for applications, even more contracts may expire without new funding, depriving these housing programs of federal funds.
Slide from KCRHA Continuum of Care board presentation illustrating the “hungry hungry hippo” nature of the competition for federal funding
One step KCRHA is taking to improve its competitiveness for federal funding is a new recruitment push that’s partly aimed at getting elected officials and at least one representative from law enforcement to join its Continuum of Care board. NOFO applications are judged on points; under the NOFO that HUD just pulled, the federal agency planned to allocate extra points for CoCs that have at least three elected officials, and at least one law enforcement official, on the board.
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Under its original 2020 charter, the CoC board was composed largely of members of the Lived Experience Coalition, an advocacy group, and is still made up largely of people with direct, sometimes current, experience with homelessness. The board has had its share of controversy over the years, including a meeting that devolved into a shouting match over the nomination of a man who’d been convicted of multiple sexual offenses involving minors as young as 13.
Since that controversy, the agency has tried to add more homeless service providers to the board and bring more conventional professionalism to its work. CoC meetings are generally less structured than typical government meetings, and often spin out into conversations about topics that are tangential to the official agenda; last week, for instance, a CoC meeting about the new NOFO included a digressive debate about whether a “dog catcher,” which is not an elected position, would have particular insights about homelessness that would make them a valuable elected addition to the board.
Later in that meeting, multiple board members appeared to be learning about the changes to federal funding requirements for the first time, asking a staffer questions about how the overall NOFO process works and what the potential impact of the changes will be.
Channeling the original Wilsonian 14 Points, we offer 14 policy suggestions for incoming mayor Wilson.
By Erica C. Barnett and Josh Feit
Seattle Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson doesn’t fit the old-school Seattle leftist stereotype personified by avenger socialists and NIMBYs who have historically aligned in a reactionary nativist coalition to oppose new housing. Wilson is too 21st century for such hokey self-righteousness. She’s more AOC than Bernie Bro—a nerd who examines the numbers, facts, and human consequences of city policies. We are confident her measured MO will guide her inspirational affordability agenda.
Channeling the original version of Wilsonianism, we hope the mayor-elect will consider the aspirational PubliCola agenda we’re laying out below with our 14-Point manifesto.
1. Reopen the Comprehensive Plan
The city’s comprehensive plan—the document that governs future growth in Seattle—was supposed to be finished in 2024, but got delayedagain and again by the torpid Harrell administration, which revised the plan repeatedly to lower (then slightly increase from that nadir) density limits. The city council still hasn’t passed the entire plan, pushing the zoning details off until 2026, along with the fate of urbanist amendments that died this year,.
A “docketing resolution” for next year will take up proposals to restore nine neighborhood centers—central nodes in neighborhoods where apartments will be allowed. (Harrell had city planners remove these higher-density areas from his proposal, so the city never fully studied them). Other proposals the council punted this year include the elimination of minimum parking requirements and a proposal to allow apartment buildings taller than six stories in neighborhood centers near frequent transit stops.
We think these changes are necessary and that the council should pass them as soon as possible next year. But since the comp plan is already delayed, why not take some more time with it and get the right plan for this urbanist moment?
Our modest—if aspirational—proposal: Wilson should send down legislation to allow allow six-story apartment buildings everywhere—and use her organizing chops to drum up support for the idea among renters, who’ve been the loudest voices opposing Harrell’s plan to preserve Seattle’s exclusionary status quo.
Maritza Rivera is going to fume that there hasn’t been enough “outreach and engagement” to single-family homeowners no matter what you do, so you might as well go big.
Oh, and while you’re at it? Allow bars and restaurants, not just small convenience and grocery stores, in every neighborhood—and let them stay open past 10pm!!—ECB
2. Funded Inclusionary Zoning (FIZ)
The problem with the noble policy of forcing developers to include affordable housing in any new multifamily development is that the projects often don’t pencil out. In turn, nothing gets built at all. Seattle’s mandatory housing affordability program (MHA), an inclusionary zoning mandate that requires developers to either include affordable units in new buildings or pay into a fund to support affordable housing construction, has actually contributed to a drop-off in new housing development.
Taking a cue from Portland, where a successful inclusionary zoning program recently saw projects worth hundreds of new units opt in during its first six months, Wilson should do the unthinkable: Give developers a property tax break to make the mandate pencil out. In other words, we shouldn’t tax things we want (affordable housing) by raising the cost of building it. We should encourage it by making affordable housing profitable to build.
Before you gasp at the idea of giving developers a tax break for building affordable housing, consider: We have a longstanding program, the state’s multifamily tax exemption (MFTE) program, that does just that. The problem is: That program isn’t a mandate. Developers don’t have to build affordable housing if they don’t want to.
FIZ, Funded Inclusionary Zoning, would combine the two affordable housing housing programs the city already relies on, MHA and MFTE—coupling the mandate to include affordable housing and the tax break to build it. —JF
3. The Night Mayor
The City’s Office of Economic Development has a Nightlife Business Services Advocate. Their job is to help after-dark venues like nightclubs and bars navigate licensing and compliance. Under Mayor Wilson, the role should be expanded beyond entertainment to support a full-blown evening ecosystem. Let’s have a well-staffed Office of the Night Mayor to promote, coordinate, and support a city that not only has vibrant nighttime businesses (tax breaks to help daytime businesses stay open later, please), but also weaves social services, night owl buses and shuttles, and vital commerce like drugstores into a thrumming evening environment that serves and supports everyone from night shift workers to 9-to-5ers who need to get shit done in the evening.
First initiative the Office of the Night Mayor: Identify murky streets and make them safer and more navigable with new lighting. Light it up, Mayor Wilson. —JF
4. Let CARE do their jobs
The city council is preparing to rubber-stamp the latest contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild, which has already been effectively approved by the five-member council majority who sit on the city’s contract negotiating team. We’d be happy—and impressed—to see the council reject and reopen the contract to add some real accountability measures in exchange for paying new officers $126,000 a year, but we’re not holding our breath.
One thing that can be reopened without a huge political lift, however, is the memorandum of understanding SPD signed with CARE—the Community Assisted Response and Engagement Team. While Harrell touted the fact that the new agreement will allow CARE to respond to low-risk 911 calls without a police escort, the MOU imposes new rules on the team that will make it hard to respond to most crisis calls.
Under the new rules, CARE responders can only respond to people who are physically outdoors, not inside a vehicle or any indoor space, and must abort the response effort if they see any indication a person has been using drugs or has committed any type of crime. They’re also banned from responding to encampments or if a person appears to be having a serious mental health crisis, among many other new restrictions.
These rules, which prohibit CARE from responding in most of the situations where they would be most useful, are untenable and will harm CARE’s ability to provide an alternative to sending armed officers to deal with people in crisis.
Given that the city just added $7 million to the budget to expand the CARE Team to 48 responders, it’s critical that the city allows them to do their jobs, even if the police union opposes it. —ECB
5. The Urban Pass
Inspired by NYC’s successful congestion pricing program (which has dramatically reduced car traffic, increased travel speeds, decreased greenhouse gas emissions, and is on track to raise $500 million its first year), Wilson should institute an Urban Pass for Seattle.
The Urban Pass would riff on the basic congestion pricing concept: Drivers could buy the pass for a monthly fee, which would give them discounted parking in the city’s 32 paid parking zones—districts that correspond to the highest-demand destinations in the city, such as Capitol Hill, Ballard, and South Lake Union.
Unlike NYC’s congestion pricing revenue, however, the money wouldn’t go to the transportation budget. Instead, it would fund multi-family housing in the low-density neighborhoods where many of the visitors to these high-demand areas live—including outside the city of Seattle. Clearly, the people who drive in to visit popular neighborhoods are fond of density too. So let’s give them some.
Adding more housing in low-density neighborhoods would also make frequent transit more sustainable in these parts of our city and the region. (As for the loss to the city on parking fees, SDOT should raise those base prices in concert with the Urban Pass discounts.) During her campaign, Wilson praised NYC’s congestion pricing model. Now that she’s in office, we hope she was in earnest. —JF
6. Make City Government Transparent Again
In recent years, we’ve seen the city moving to limit access to public information on every front, a trend that only accelerated during and after the pandemic. While the mayor can’t take direct action against individual public information officers who use their city positions to dissemble and mislead, she can set a tone of transparency with a few simple, immediate actions.
Start with the department that has the greatest aversion to transparency, SPD, by revising the 2017 city rule that the police department has been using to justify sitting on public disclosure requests for years. Under this rule, public disclosure officers are allowed to “group” multiple requests into a single request and to consider records requests from the same person or outlet consecutively rather than simultaneously. SPD has interpreted this rule to mean they are allowed to add any new requests from the same person into one giant mega-request, considering one sub-request at a time and putting any new requests at the back of the line. Instead of waiting for the Seattle Times to prevail in litigation (the Times is suing SPD over its anti-disclosure practices), just get rid of grouping altogether and make SPD’s public disclosure unit live up to its name.
Second: Hold open press briefings. Mike McGinn had his issues (and we reported on them), but one of his best moves was to periodically hold open meetings for the press with nothing specific on the agenda. Sitting at the table, rather than standing behind a rostrum, McGinn would take questions on just about any topic—a practice that not only made it possible for non-mainstream outlets to talk to the mayor directly on a regular basis, but that gave McGinn credibility as a mayor who valued transparency and was capable of answering detailed policy questions without a press staffer hovering nervously nearby to redirect and cut off questions. (The visually boring format also cut down on TV reporters with gotcha questions). The non-mainstream press will love you for having real conversations with us after four years of scripted responses, and the public will appreciate your commitment to open and transparent dialogue.
Third: Bring back the city directory! Former mayor Jenny Durkan removed the directory of city employees’ phone numbers and email addresses from the city’s website in July 2021, saying the underlying database was out of date. A promised “replacement solution” for this resource, which was the only place the public could access contact information for most people who work at the city, never materialized, and PubliCola has been periodically updating our own public database of city employees ever since. (It’s currently out of date because the city has been dragging its feet on my latest records request for the information, which I filed in June.). Restoring the directory—and bringing Seattle in line with state agencies and King County, whose employee directories are public—would signal transparency and bring back a resource many Seattle residents seeking to reach the right person at the city directly once found indispensable. —ECB
7. You’ve Heard of Transit Oriented Development (TOD). It’s Time for Parks and Schools Oriented Development—POD and SOD.
Since Erica is calling on Wilson to re-open the Comprehensive Plan (and rightfully so, given Mayor Harrell’s years of disinterest at best and outright sabotage at worst), let me propose two comp plan amendments: Upzones around parks and upzones around schools. The city’s highest-performing schools and most salubrious parks seem to serve more affluent and lower-density neighborhoods, meaning a privileged economic class has better access to them. Let’s make it so more people, including renters, can live near parks and schools by building more apartments nearby. —JF
8. Shady Zones
NIMBYs have successfully weaponized tree canopy as a tool for stopping new development.
For the record: Urbanists are pro-tree canopy. Instead of building single homes on single lots (which required sprawl and deforestation in the first place) urbanists are for building more densely, which by definition houses more people—leaving more room for greenery.
But as the Anthropocene accelerates into potential catastrophe, cities will need more sources of shade than tree canopy alone. YIMBYs should flip the script and weaponize development as shorthand for shade. To counter the shadows-are-bad mantra that has dominated building permit debates for decades, pro-development voices need to point out that the built environment can be a source of protection and cooling.
Ever find yourself choosing the shady side of the street on downtown sidewalks, seeking refuge in the cover of buildings? To fashion a truly resilient city, we need to start thinking in terms of awnings, walls, gazebos, park shelters, and yes, buildings themselves as vital cover from the extreme impacts of climate change.
We’re looking to Mayor Shady Wilson to add cooling infrastructure to the city’s resiliency agenda. —JF
9. Close the Sweeps Loophole
Another rule that’s ripe for revisiting is a city policy that has empowered Harrell’s Unified Care Team, a 116-member group of city employees that removes encampments, to sweep people and tents from public spaces with little or no notice and no referrals to shelter or other services.
The rule was designed to guarantee 72 hours’ notice and a referral to shelter before the city sweeps an encampment. But it contains a loophole previous mayors have exploited to sweep people from place to place for years. The rule allows sweeps with no notice or offer of shelter or services if an encampment constitutes a hazard or “obstruction”—a term Durkan and Harrell both interpreted broadly to include anyone located on public property. Editing this legislation to define “hazards” and “obstructions” narrowly will reduce the number of pointless sweeps, like the ones that have been going on for months Ballard, and make it less common for encampment residents to lose everything, including contact with their case managers, when they have to move. Pitching a tent in the middle of a heavily used playfield is an obvious obstruction, while sleeping in a secluded area of a public park obstructs nothing.
Homelessness will be a defining issue of Wilson’s tenure, so this is just one of many necessary steps. We think it’s a prerequisite for ending the kind of indiscriminate sweeps Wilson campaigned against.—ECB
10. Transit Validation
Just as big employers subsidize ORCA cards, so should big destinations: Lumen Field. T-Mobile Park. Climate Pledge Arena. Benaroya Hall. McCaw Hall. All these spots—particularly Benaroya, which is literally a stop on the Link light rail line—should zap a discount back into your ORCA card when they scan your ticket. (Three cheers to Pacific Science Center, one institution that already does a version of this. And I know Climate Pledge has its own Kraken app that includes free transit, but it’s the opposite of user-friendly and should just be rolled in with the ORCA pass).
As her first agenda item as a Sound Transit board member, Mayor Wilson, the former Transit Riders Union leader, should champion a program to subsidize rides to our city’s cultural destinations. —JF
11. Free the street vendors!
The city and county have made a very big deal recently about their efforts to crack down on street food vendors who lack the proper permits, but haven’t exactly made our city a hospitable place for licensed food vendors to operate legally in the first place. The city currently requires food trucks and street vendors to navigate a byzantine maze of rules and restrictions. For example, if you want to sell food near a residential area or public park, that requires a whole secondary approval process. This approach treats vendors like industrial polluters that should be kept away from people and each other rather than amenities that improve neighborhoods and commercial districts.
Launch a full assessment of the city’s street vending rules and get rid of unnecessary red tape that keeps people in most parts of Seattle from enjoying tacos, soft serve, kebabs, and all other kinds of portable food. The people want to eat! —ECB
12. The Bench Agenda
You know how the former Bloomberg administration in NYC is famous for building more than 300 miles of bike lanes? The Wilson administration should seek a similar legacy by flooding Seattle with benches. Start with a bench at every bus stop, complete with shelter to dovetail with the shade zones. But we also need benches dotting parks, in commercial hubs, in residential areas. And no—correlation fallacy!—benches don’t increase the homeless population. Homelessness already exists. Benches can simply make it more visible. Giving homeless people a place to rest isn’t such a bad thing. —JF
13. Defund (parts of) the Police
Wilson’s detractors, including the $1.8 million pro-Harrell PAC, tried to claim she plans to defund the police (and is responsible for the entire police defunding movement), an absurd but inflammatory claim that probably alarmed some people into supporting the incumbent. In a recent interview with Seattle Nice, Wilson reiterated that she supports hiring more officers and has no interest in defunding the police themselves, but is open to looking closely at spending on nonessential functions.
Our proposal, to paraphrase centrist city council members elected in 2023: Audit the fucking police budget (that is, examine discretionary spending and recent adds), and pare back spending on stuff we don’t need and that is actively harming communities.
One easy target: SPD’s Real Time Crime Center and surveillance cameras, which, under Harrell, have begun to proliferate in neighborhoods across the city. Harrell and SPD tried to ease civil liberties concerns by claiming it’s essentially impossible for the federal government to get hold of footage from the 24/7 cameras. But all the Trump Administration really needs is a subpoena—or a cop with access to the footage and an axe to grind against immigrants or people seeking abortions or gender-affirming care.
Police surveillance cameras have been around for decades, and there’s little evidence that they make a meaningful impact on crime. The cops dispute this, as do Harrell and other pro-surveillance officials around the country. But even if the cameras do occasionally provide evidence that SPD couldn’t get another way (such as the vast network of private cameras they’ve always used in investigations), that isn’t a worthwhile tradeoff for expanding surveillance in the age of Trump. We don’t have to build the panopticon! —ECB
14. Hang Out with State Sen. Jessica Bateman
Mayor Wilson: As you fill up your calendar with important get-to-know-you meetings, please set aside some time to meet with Olympia’s pro-housing, pro-density, pro-city rock star state Sen. Jessica Bateman (D-22). Bateman, of course, is the mastermind behind HB 1110, which forced foot-dragging cities like Seattle to allow four-unit multi-family housing (up to six-units if two of the units are affordable) anywhere single-family housing is allowed.
Mayor Harrell spent his time in quibblingobstructionismwith 1110. Our suggestion to make Bateman your besty is our way of telling you to support rather than subvert the state’s progressive housing agenda, which has lapped Seattle’s progress toward density over the last decade.
Word is the upcoming session will come with pro-housing ideas like a land value tax, which would target low and underused properties like parking lots, prompting land owners to do more useful things like build housing. Seattle should be at the forefront supporting these efforts. —JF
That’s it for our Wilsonian 14 Points. Now, here are some low-hanging quick hits:
Tax new pickleball facilities to expand public access to youth sports.
Instead of pouring millions into “graffiti rangers” and other nonsense, create a fund that provides small grants to business owners for removing graffiti on their property.
Figure out this scooter and e-bike stuff—you can start by banning Class 2 e-bikes with throttles, which are just small electric motorcycles, from shared trails used by cyclists and pedestrians. (Washington Bikes is working at the state level to regulate higher-powered “e-motos,” which can go faster than the speediest e-bikes.)
Seize the opportunity (instead of “grabbing the ball”): Don’t speak in sports metaphors.
The Seattle Police Department’s use of overtime has continued to increase year after year, rising to around 500,000 hours last year. Despite multiple midyear budget increases, SPD has run out of overtime funding, and will deprioritize property crimes and other types of investigations in an effort to get a handle on its budget for 2025.
King County Executive Girmay Zahilay has portrayed his decision to lay off the majority of people who fall under his direct purview as a standard part of any transition process. But many employees who will lose their jobs in January told us their positions aren’t political; they’re bureaucrats who the county running, like regional planners, contract managers, and economists.
Regional economic growth leader and city of Seattle veteran Brian Surratt will be Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson’s sole deputy mayor, a pick that seems likely to assuage at least some concerns from business leaders who worried Wilson’s team would consist of socialist radicals. Former council central staffer Aly Pennucci, former Puget Sound Sage director Nicole Soper, and ex-Futurewise policy director Kate Kreuzer are also at the top of Wilson’s org chart.
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Sources confirmed this week that incoming Mayor Katie Wilson is still waffling over whether to keep Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes, a Bruce Harrell appointee who has come under scrutiny for some of his external and internal decisions.
At Barnes’ direction, the department will pay a consultant from North Carolina to do a media training for SPD command staff and executive-level employees. Although command staff and executives just got media training from a different consultant last year, an SPD spokesperson said the new training is needed to make these officials more comfortable talking to the press.
The department will also pay another consultant, this one from California, to do an assessment of how the police chief’s office is organized. Barnes just hired several new high-level staffers and reorganized the office this year. The consultant is the same one who did two previous national searches that resulted in the selection of internal candidates for top roles at SPD, including former police chief Adrian Diaz.
Three weeks before leaving office, Mayor Harrell announced the latest round of Equitable Development initiative grants. For the second time in his administration, the Royal Esquire Club, a private Black men’s club to which Harrell has longstanding ties, will receive money to pay for a renovation. Although Harrell’s office says the EDI committee funded the club based purely on its value as a cultural institution, the mayor’s work on behalf of the group—including alleged attempts to quash a wage-theft investigation and the use of city staff time to do administrative tasks for the club—calls that claim into question.
Newly filed election finance reports for November show that the Harrell campaign paid Eastside for Hire taxi company founder Abdisalam (Abdul) Yusuf more than $46,000, the equivalent of $5,000 a week (based on reports that connect payments to specific weeks of work) to do unspecified “outreach” in the final days of the campaign. Yusuf’s consulting firm has never reported any previous paid work on any campaign.
This week on the Seattle Nice podcast, we discussed the changes that are taking shape at King County and the city of Seattle, as County Executive Girmay Zahilay and Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson start filling out their staff, including Zahilay’s layoffs and internal discussions on Team Wilson about whether to retain SPD Chief Barnes.
This week on the Seattle Nice podcast, we discussed the changes that are taking shape at King County and the city of Seattle, as County Executive Girmay Zahilay and Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson start filling out their staff.
As I reported earlier this week, Zahilay put more than 100 executive branch staffers on notice on a Friday that unless they heard from HR by the end of the day the following Mondday, they should not expect to have jobs after the end of the year.
Employees I spoke to said they expected the executive’s staff, which includes dozen of political appointees, to turn over. But they were dismayed to learn that many other staffers doing technical or bureaucratic work, including land use planners and data analysts, will also lose their jobs in this “restructuring” process. They also said Zahilay’s team handled the delivery of this bad news poorly, damaging morale on teams that worked on reducing the county’s climate impact, promoting racial equity, developing the comprehensive plan, and working to improve the quality of government services.
While I argued (based on what I heard from a half-dozen staffers impacted by the changes) that Team Zahilay could have taken more time and care when deciding the fate of apolitical staff, Sandeep said county employees without civil service protections shouldn’t expect to keep their jobs when a new executive comes in.
We also discussed how the mayor-elect is building her own executive team and speculated about which city department heads she plans to replace or retain. As I reported, Wilson is reportedly still on the fence about Police Chief Shon Barnes, who has fans and detractors inside and outside the city. During his brief time as chief, Barnes has come under scrutiny for the department’s crackdown on nudity at Seattle’s historic LGBTQ nude beach, Denny Blaine, for firing SPD’s top two civilian staffers, and for appointing as East Precinct commander a captain infamous for driving his SUV onto a sidewalk filled with protesters in 2020.
To reiterate something I said on the show (and caught a lot of flak from my co-hosts for saying): Barnes, who has talked openly about how God sent him to Seattle (and, before that, Madison), is a weird cultural fit for a deeply irreligious city with a large LGBTQ+ population and a history of anti-police protests. (And, though I didn’t mention it, an appropriately adversarial press.) Having grown up in the Southern Baptist church myself, I personally have zero patience for the mingling of religion and government, and I’m always surprised when otherwise lowercase-l liberal people argue that it’s intolerant to expect government officials to keep their faith separate from their jobs.
Mayor Bruce Harrell on election night at the Royal Esquire Club
1. On Thursday, Mayor Bruce Harrell announced $27.8 million in new grants through the city’s Equitable Development Initiative—the city’s largest anti-displacement program. On the list, for the second time in Harrell’s term: The Royal Esquire Club, a 78-year-old private social club on Rainier Avenue South where Harrell served as board president (and where he held his election-night party this year).
This year’s $184,000 grant serves as a kind of bookend to the Harrell Administration. In 2022, shortly after Harrell became mayor, the city granted the club $800,000 for renovations to its building—one of the largest grants that year. This year’s grant will also go toward that renovation.
Back in 2022, Harrell’s office said the EDI program chose all grants based on objective, merit- and equity-based criteria and that the mayor had no influence over the process. When we asked about this year’s award, Harrell’s office referred us to the same statement they sent three years ago when the club got its first EDI grant: “Decisions on which organizations received funding were determined by the EDI Advisory Board and community panel through a competitive community-based process. The mayor had no role in deciding which organizations would receive the awards and did not receive or score the applications.”
Harrell’s longstanding connection to the Royal Esquire Club has been the source of controversy, and the subject of a formal ethics complaint, in the past. In 2018, when he was city council president, Harrell intervened in an investigation into wage theft allegations by five women who worked as servers at the club.
When the city’s Office of Labor Standards began looking into the allegations, Harrell contacted the city employee who was investigating the case to remind him that the council and mayor had the power to cut OLS’ budget. At various council meetings, Harrell called OLS’ investigators “extremely unprofessional” and their treatment of the Royal Esquire Club “horrible.” (The women eventually reached a financial settlement).
This year, KUOW reported that Harrell had directed his city council staff to do administrative work for the Royal Esquire Club, which lacked secretarial support at the time, including tasks like filling out insurance paperwork, collecting membership dues, and sending out invitations to fundraising events. (Harrell characterized this work as “constituent services.”)
The EDI program funds organizations “working on anti-displacement efforts in high displacement risk neighborhoods.” According to a spokeswoman for Harrell, the club “is a historically significant gathering space for Seattle’s Black community, which has experienced well-reported displacement from the city and the loss of culturally significant spaces.”
2. On Sunday, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s reelection campaign filed its campaign finance reports for the week leading up to the November 4 election. The reports show that Harrell reported paid the one-person consulting firm owned by Eastside for Hire founder Abdisalam (Abdul) Yusuf more than $21,000 on election day.
Combined with the payments PubliCola reported last month, the Harrell campaign has paid Yusuf more than $46,000 for unspecified outreach work. Yusuf’s firm, FF and J Consulting, has never reported any previous paid work on any campaign.
Yusuf is a prominent member of the Seattle-area Somali community who has frequently advocated on behalf of rideshare drivers. During the final weeks of the campaign, Harrell was reportedly eager to drum up votes from Seattle’s tight-knit East African communities. The nature of Yusuf’s outreach and engagement is unclear—neither he nor the Harrell campaign responded to our questions just before the election‚‚but whatever it was, Harrell considered it extremely high-value. His consultant, Christian Sinderman, received the same amount in a month that Yusuf got from the campaign every week, and his campaign manager made around $1,200 a week, according to campaign finance reports.
Harrell lost the election to Katie Wilson by a margin of 2,011 votes.
Police Chief Shon Barnes speaks at a press conference.
1. Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes expanded the police chief’s office and command staff earlier this year, adding a second deputy chief, a chief of staff, an assistant chief, an Executive Director of Crime and Community Harm Reduction, and a Chief Communications Officer, each earning between $222,000 and $302,000 a year.
Given that extensive restructure, PubliCola was surprised to learn about a separate, $100,000 contract SPD signed earlier this year to “conduct a leadership and positional inventory to review the structure, responsibilities, and operational effectiveness of executive roles within the Office of the Chief to enhance accountability, efficiency, and strategic alignment across SPD’s leadership team.”
The contractor, Public Sector Search and Consulting, previously led the national search for a new Seattle police chief in 2022, making $75,000 for a process that led to the appointment of then-SPD lieutenant Adrian Diaz. The following year, Peterson received $150,000 to conduct a second national search for an assistant chief and deputy chief in 2023; that search, too, concluded with the promotion of two internal candidates.
By the end of 2025, Public Sector Search and Consulting is supposed to produce a report on what each person on command staff does and how their work might be streamlined “to enhance efficiency”; a comparison of command-staff responsibilities between Seattle and similar-size cities, and “recommendations for leadership development that includes a succession planning framework to ensure long-term leadership stability and a recommendation to improve leadership training and mentorship programs.”
A spokesperson for SPD responded to PubliCola’s detailed questions with a statement saying the new contract is necessary “to ensure accountability, efficiency, and efficacy, and to allow for continuous improvement. … In keeping with his desire for feedback, Chief Shon Barnes values outside perspectives that are usually unbiased.”
2. Multiple sources have confirmed that incoming Mayor Katie Wilson has not decided yet whether to keep Barnes, who was directly appointed by Bruce Harrell without the usual public process, or find a new police chief. (The city council rubber-stamped Barnes’ appointment in July). In recent weeks, Barnes’ supporters have reportedly been engaged in an all-out lobbying effort, including a letter-writing campaign, aimed at Wilson’s transition team—which includes multiple people who are pushing Wilson to oust Harrell’s pick.
Barnes has come under internal and external scrutiny for some of his high-profile actions, which included firing SPD’s top two civilian staffers, accepting hiring and recruitment bonuses meant to boost the number of deployable rank-and-file officers, and appointing a captain infamous for driving his SUV onto a sidewalk filled with protesters to head up Capitol Hill’s East Precinct. As chief, Barnes has emphasized strategies he deployed in Madison, such as “stratified policing” (focusing on crime “hot spots” and putting more resources into more serious crimes) and “Seattle-centric policing” (like “Madison-centric policing,” but for Seattle).
Before coming to Seattle, he told an interviewer in Madison that God was sending him to be a “blessing to others” outside Wisconsin and “extending” the prayer he had previously granted when Barnes became Madison police chief in 2020.
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3, SPD hired another consultant—North Carolina-based Tufano Media—to do a three-day “command-level media training” for SPD command and executive-level staff in January. According to a memo about the event, the training will focus on “strengthening the department’s communication strategy, improving media engagement, and preparing leadership to effectively communicate, both internally and externally.”
The lessons will cover topics like the “Anatomy of an effective press briefing,” “Advanced presence and tone control,” and “Strategies for managing hostile or misleading questions,” according to the overview.
SPD’s media relations department did not respond to PubliCola’s detailed questions about their media relations training, including how much the training will cost the city, how Tufano’s firm was chosen, or why the department is paying for command and executive staff to attend a media training so soon after a similar series of media trainings for command and executive staff just last year.
Instead, they provided a statement describing the trainings as a move toward transparency: “The Seattle Police Department believes that the public has a right to know what is happening in their city when it comes to public safety. Given leadership changes during 2025, we are preparing our current Command staff to be trained by a national expert. Speaking to the public through Seattle’s media is an important skill and one that doesn’t come easy to everyone, which is why Chief Barnes is providing people with training and practice.”
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