Jeremy Racca, a longtime aide to Mayor Bruce Harrell who has served as his chief of staff and general counsel for the past several years, is leaving the mayor’s office, citing health and family concerns. Racca, 40, has had two heart attacks in recent years, and took an unpaid leave of absence last month.
During that absence, Racca took a job at a New York City law firm while still an employee at the city. “I wasn’t willing to quit and lose insurance until I got another job,” he said.
Racca said Harrell, who served three terms on the council before becoming mayor, “has been a big part of my life for 15 years. I believe in him and I believe in the administration. But at this time, I do have to prioritize my health, and having two very significant cardiac events before the age of 40 is a warning sign.”
He said the recent primary election results, which have Harrell trailing challenger Katie Wilson by almost 10 points, weren’t a factor in his decision.
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Racca says he plans to split his time between New York and Louisiana, where his 94-year father lives.
In an internal email to staff, Harrell said he was “proud of Jeremy for making this decision and want to express my eternal gratitude for everything he has done to support our administration.”
Harrell’s Chief Innovation Office Andrew Myerberg, who has been Harrell’s interim chief of staff for the past month, will take over as chief of staff, while Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington, will have a new title, Chief Deputy Mayor. Deputy Mayor Greg Wong will add General Counsel to his title.
While “we’ll also miss [Racca’s] humor, empathy, and friendship,” Harrell wrote, “thanks to the team that we have collectively developed, I am confident we will continue to execute at the same pace and quality that the people of Seattle have grown accustomed to.”
1. Katie Wilson, the labor organizer and transit advocate who’s challenging Mayor Bruce Harrell, is on target to come out of the August primary with around 51 percent of the vote, with Harrell trailing 10 points behind at 41 percent. It’s a huge political victory—passing 50 percent against an incumbent mayor backed by almost $800,000 in pre-primary spending sends a strong message that voters want change—and puts Wilson in an extremely strong position to win in November.
A look at historical vote totals shows why Wilson is on track to win.
To start with, Seattle has not reelected a single incumbent mayor since 2005, when Greg Nickels defeated a nominal challenge from a UW professor named Al Runte, beating him in the primary by a 35-point margin. (Nickels got his comeuppance in the following election, when two challengers, Mike McGinn and Joe Mallahan, nudged him out in the primary).
Additionally, it’s been almost 25 years years since a mayoral candidate has come in second in the primary and won in the general election, which happened most recently in 2001. In that race, the two frontrunners, Mark Sidran and Greg Nickels, were neck and neck, and both advanced to the general after knocking out incumbent Paul Schell. Nickels went on to beat Sidran 50-48.
You have to go back even further, to 1997, to find a comparable gap between the two mayoral frontrunners. In that case, though, the ultimate winner, Paul Schell, won decisively in the primary, beating neighborhood activist Charlie Chong by just under 6 points going into the general. As a weak incumbent, Harrell appears more likely to follow the path of his five most recent predecessors who each failed to win reelection.
2. The city council’s public safety committee unanimously approved bill expanding police camera surveillance into three new neighborhoods on Tuesday, rejecting one accountability-focused amendment from progressive Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck and passing an amendment from Joy Hollingsworth that limits the new CCTV cameras around Garfield High School and Playfield, which is in her council district, to three arterial streets—East Cherry, 23rd Avenue East, and South Jackson St.
Rinck isn’t on the committee, so she couldn’t vote; committee chair Bob Kettle sponsored her amendments as a courtesty.
Another amendment from Rinck, aimed at ensuring that police report back on whether SPD had provided camera footage to any outside entity in response to court orders or subpoenas, passed unanimously.
The expansion of camera surveillance is now on a glide path for approval by the full council.
Once the new cameras are up and recording, Hollingsworth said, “I’m going to continue to be listening to community and trying to address a lot of concerns that they have with the cameras and making sure that we are not violating people’s civil liberties.”
An amendment from Joy Hollingsworth restricted surveillance cameras around Garfield high school to the arterials marked by the blue lines on this map.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Council President Sara Nelson asked a staffer if the cameras would ever be trained on “residential streets.” In reality, they already are—because of Seattle’s zoning laws, apartments are heavily concentrated on arterial roads, and streets where Seattle is currently placing most of its new surveillance cameras are no exception. Although SPD has said it will blur out images of residential buildings, renters coming to and from their homes will frequently be caught on SPD’s surveillance cameras, along with anyone who patronizes businesses, goes to (or has kids in) school, spends time in parks, or visits a public library branch in the areas under SPD surveillance.
The committee also rejected two amendments by progressive Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck. The first would have required any future evaluation of the cameras to include a controlled assessment to determine whether the cameras were meeting the city’s stated goals for deploying them—deterring violent crime, human trafficking, or persistent felony crime.
If the assessment found that the cameras were failing to meet those goals, the mayor would “consider” discontinuing them. “We, as an elected body, should be instilling trust in our community and not pushing for expansions of programs before getting data and information about their effectiveness,” Rinck said.
Committee chair Bob Kettle said it was likely the cameras would accomplish lots of other important goals, beyond the ones supporters have used to justify their expansion, such as aiding in prosecutions, reducing response times, and improving the relationship between SPD and the public, much as Saka said body-worn police cameras have. Juarez added that the city “would have a hard time measuring and enforcing whether or not the cameras are actually deterring violent crime, because if we could do that, we would have done that.”
Nelson then piled on the anti-data train, saying that “it’s very difficult to draw causal conclusions based on an evaluation because many things could be impacting the trends that we have seen.”
Nelson, Kettle, and other council members have consistently blamed the previous city council for causing police to leave the city for by demoralizing them with talk of reducing SPD’s budget in 2020, despite the lack of data to support this claim.
A Seattle police officer takes a report from a participant in a May rally at city hall who had been harassing counterprotesters through the barricades set up by police.
By Erica C. Barnett
UPDATE on Friday, August 15: Last-minute discussions could end up moving the event after all; we probably won’t know more until next week, but the planned statements and counter-programming announcements originally planned for Friday have been postponed amid ongoing conversations, PubliCola has learned.
Organizers of a far-right August 30 rally and concert called “Revive In 25” will receive approval this week to hold a rally and concert at Cal Anderson Park on Capitol Hill, PubliCola has learned. The event’s organizer, Christian nationalist celebrity Sean Feucht, has promoted as an explicit provocation to the historically LGBTQ+ neighborhood. Feucht has described homosexuality as demonic, frequently mocks trans people, and has claimed to “deliver” people from being gay.
Multiple sources familiar with the discussions say the city is preparing to issue a permit for the park at the end of this week, ending months of speculation that began in May, when Feucht claimed falsely on X that the city had already granted the permit. “Will @MayorofSeattle revoke it because we are Christians?” he wrote. Nothing’s official until it’s official, of course—the city still has two days before the planned announcement—but PubliCola’s reporting indicates that the decision has essentially been made.
An anti-trans “Mayday Seattle” rally held by a different extremist group earlier this year led to an over-the-top response from police, who deployed pepper spray and other “less lethal” weapons against protesters, arresting 23. Days later, police served as de facto security for the same group when they held a second rally at City Hall, barricading the public plaza outside City Hall, shutting down Fourth Ave., and allowing the group to blast amplified praise music for hours without a permit. Police arrested eight protesters at that event.
Seattle officials who want to prevent a repeat of the Mayday debacle tried to find a way to justify denying the permit without violating the group’s First Amendment rights.
One idea—closing down the park for the day for maintenance or repairs—was reportedly rejected out of hand. So was the idea of getting another group to file for a permit for the park and granting that permit instead of Feucht’s. The city also considered denying the permit on security grounds—police will be stretched thin across multiple big events over the busy Labor Day weekend—but ultimately did not want to risk a First Amendment lawsuit from Feucht’s group.
Several people familiar with the discussions about whether to issue the permit pointed out that events like the planned rally also result in lawsuits, typically from people injured by police. If the concern is strict liability, allowing extremists to hold events in Seattle parks may ultimately cost the city more money than denying a permit and dealing with the legal fallout.
The Lavender Rights Project is reportedly working with other Black queer community organizers to put on counter-programming in the park. The exact details of how this will work remain under wraps until the permit decision becomes official, but Hollingsworth said she’s “hopeful and optimistic that … if people want to peacefully protest, that they can—that people can exercise their First Amendment rights and those [events] can coexist together.”
The rally and concert is part of a tour through what Feucht has called “America’s darkest, most broken cities” that, according to Feucht, have been taken over by “antifa” and are persecuting Christians. Feucht, who did not respond to PubliCola’s request for comment, has described the tour as a “MANDATE from heaven to ‘rebuild places long devastated’.”
The tour is part of Feucht’s ongoing “Let Us Worship” campaign, which began as a protest against public health measures that prevented large groups from gathering indoors in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The city’s ability to deny permits to groups with political opinions it finds noxious or hateful is limited by the First Amendment, which prevents local officials from restricting speech based on a person or organization’s views. Denying a permit on the grounds that Feucht is running a hate group could open the city up to a lawsuit that could be hard to win, given longstanding legal precedent that the First Amendment protects all kinds of expression, including hate speech.
First Amendment rights aren’t limitless, however; cities can impose time, place, and manner restrictions on events—for example, providing a permit for a different, less provocative location than the heart of Seattle’s historical LGBTQ+ neighborhood—if they have a legitimate reason for doing so, such as an incitement to violence or threat of harm to the public.
Historically, the city has been reluctant to impose time, place, and manner restrictions, and generally grants permits to controversial groups that choose high-profile locations for their events in the hope of provoking controversy; the Seattle Public Library, for instance, has repeatedly allowed anti-trans and far-right groups to book its downtown Seattle auditorium rather than renting out alternative, less centrally located library meeting rooms to groups seeking negative attention.
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Advocates say the city could do more than just throw up their hands and issue condemnatory statements after the fact.
Jaelynn Scott, executive director of the Lavender Rights Project, said city officials “need to take a bold stance on trans folks in the face of the rising threat of fascism in our community— to not be over-restrictive in their interpretation of the law and to take a risk.” Standing up to groups like Feucht’s would risk a lawsuit, but facilitating the use of Seattle’s parks by Christian nationalist groups with MAGA ties also sends a message that the city is a willing pawn for far-right extremists.
City Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth, who represents Capitol Hill, said she would prefer that the rally take place somewhere other than Cal Anderson, but “I can’t dictate that.” She said she’s spoken to Police Chief Shon Barnes about the best ways to protect both rally participants and counterprotesters, including physical separation between the two groups.
“It is not my place to say whether the city can or cannot provide a safe environment at Cal Anderson; that is a logistical thing,” Hollingsworth said. “I want to protect First Amendment rights on all fronts.”
It’s unclear how City Attorney Ann Davison advised the city on any of these alternatives; her office declined to respond to questions. Davison’s legal advice carries weight—city officials can ignore it, but risk personal legal liability for doing so.
The mayor’s office also declined to answer PubliCola’s questions. A spokesperson for the mayor’s office said, “Park Use Permits aren’t issued for about two weeks (15 days) prior the event.” In fact, the Parks Department has no such policy, and typically issues permits much faster than in this case. For example, the department issued the permit for the Mayday USA rally on April 8, just eight days after the organizers filed their application and more than six weeks before the rally took place.
Additionally, a document outlining the Parks Department’s permitting process says it typically takes between 15 and 30 days to approve a permit once it’s filed. There is no reference in city code or on the department’s permitting page to a policy of waiting until two weeks before an event to grant a permit.
In response to followup questions, Harrell’s spokesperson said, “No permit has been issued, so at this time, I don’t have anything more to add.”
A petition in Seattle, which mirrors similar petitions in other cities targeted by Feucht’s “Let Us Worship” tour, asks the city to move the event to Magnuson Park instead of Cal Anderson.
Emails obtained through a records request show that city departments did a poor job of communicating with each other about the Mayday rally earliert his year. Three days before the event, a lieutenant in SPD’s operations center asked the Parks Department about moving the event “to lessen the chance of a conflict between the event organizers and counter protesters” after receiving an email from the Mayday group complaining that “pro-trans protesters” might show up without a permit. (People do not need a permit to protest).
Two days after that, and less than 24 hours before the event, an emergency management official overseeing the city’s Park Rangers reached out to the Parks Department to confirm the rally was happening; apparently, no one had bothered to tell him.
Editor’s note: This post has been updated to reflect the fact that SPD would not tell us whether two new executive-level SPD officials received $50,000 hiring bonuses and told us to file a records request. The story also reflects that Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office did not respond to our request for this information.
Seattle’s new police chief, Shon Barnes, and Deputy Police Chief Yvonne Underwood each received recruitment bonuses for hiring new high-level staff, including a second deputy police chief, when Barnes became police chief earlier this year. Both Underwood and Chief Barnes make more than $300,000 a year.
Barnes received $2,000 for recruiting a new assistant chief overseeing investigations, Nicole Powell, and a second deputy chief, Andre Sayles. Yvonne Underwood received $1,000 payment for recruiting Sayles. Sayles came to the department from Beloit, Wisconsin, a town about 50 miles south of Madison, where Barnes was previously chief. Powell came to Seattle from New Orleans, where she was the lieutenant in charge of recruitment.
According to a spokesman for SPD, the bonuses—part of legislation passed in August 2022 intended to increase police hiring in Seattle—are available to any city employee, with a few exceptions, and were added to Barnes’ and Underwood’s paychecks once Sayles and Powell joined the department. Barnes makes $360,485 a year; Underwood makes $302,016.
Overall, the spokesman said, the city has made 21 $1,000 payments to city employees who recruit new SPD officers, including the three that went to Barnes and Underwood.
PubliCola also asked SPD if Sayles and Powell (whose salaries are $302,016 and $294,549, respectively) received the city’s standard lateral hiring bonus of $50,000. The department’s communications department refused to respond to our yes/no question, directing us to file a records request for the information.
As we have reported previously, SPD has adopted an official policy called “grouping” for individuals and media outlets that file multiple records request. Under the policy, SPD’s public disclosure division refuses to work on multiple records requests at one time. Instead, they work on one request until it is completely fulfilled—a process that can take years—before moving on to another request and beginning the same process again. The policy is designed to discourage multiple records requests—a standard part of reporting—and has made it essentially pointless to file records requests for information.
Although we have been unable to directly confirm the $50,000 payments, the fact that SPD would not answer this question is suggestive.
Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office also did not respond to a request for an answer to our question.
A 2024 amendment to the 2022 hiring incentive legislation, sponsored by Council President Sara Nelson, raised the size of lateral hiring bonuses, which were previously $30,000.
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Barnes has brought on a number of new staffers since his appointment, including three new executive-level staff—Chief of Staff Alex Ricketts, Executive Director of Crime and Community Harm Reduction Lee Hunt, and Chief Communications Officer Barbara DeLollis. Ricketts previously worked with Barnes in Madison, WI, where Barnes was chief before coming to Seattle, and in Greensboro, NC, where Barnes was a captain. Hunt worked with Barnes in Greensboro.
The new staffers’ salaries collectively cost $1.34 million, and most are new positions that add permanent costs to SPD’s budget at a time when other city departments have been asked to make cuts. The city is currently facing a two-year budget shortfall of around $150 million.
Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison, flanked by council members, Mayor Bruce Harrell, and department directors at City Hall earlier this month.
By Andrew Engelson
A PubliCola analysis of Seattle Municipal Court data reveals that, in the three and half years Ann Davison has served as Seattle City Attorney, her office has failed to live up to promises she made in her campaign in 2021, when she criticized former city attorney Pete Holmes for waiting too long to file cases and failing to prosecute serious misdemeanors aggressively.
Under Davison, a greater percentage of cases have been dismissed or ended in no conviction than when Holmes was city attorney. And while she has sped up the time it takes to file non-traffic misdemeanors, she’s taking more than twice as long as her predecessor, Pete Holmes, to file domestic violence cases.
Davison, a Republican who took office in 2022 after defeating abolitionist public defender Nicole Thomas Kennedy, is currently trailing challenger Erika Evans by a wide margin in her race for reelection. As of Friday, August 8, Davison had 33.8 percent of the vote to Evans’ 55.3 percent.
During her first campaign, Davison promised to more effectively prosecute people for misdemeanor offenses, crack down on repeat offenders, and critically examine community court, a therapeutic court she single-handedly dismantled in 2023. After winning the 2021 primary, Davison told KIRO NewsRadio, “We must address crimes at the misdemeanor level because otherwise it invites an increase in severity and frequency.” The city attorney’s office prosecutes misdemeanors, not felonies, and also serves as the city’s law firm.
“[The city attorney’s office] can talk a big game about wanting to get tough, but they’re not really willing to devote the resources necessary to take a tougher approach, because everybody understands that that would be too expensive and time-consuming to be worth it,” said Austin Field, political action coordinator for the chapter of SEIU 925 that represents King County public defenders.
The COVID pandemic profoundly altered how Seattle’s criminal justice system functioned. The number of cases SPD referred and the number of charges the city attorney’s office filed fell dramatically. In addition, in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the King County Jail stopped booking people on misdemeanor charges.
Both before and during this period, Holmes’ office was widely criticized for slow filing times – the period between when someone is arrested by SPD and when the city attorney decides whether to charge them with a crime. According to Davison’s office, delays under Holmes increased to a median of 162 days in late 2021. Since Davison’s election, the office has dropped the median time to file charges to 19 days.
In 2022, Davison’s office cleared a huge backlog of cases left over from the pandemic era out of the system, declining to file charges in 3,790 old cases. These cases are not included in our analysis of Davison’s record.
Lisa Daugaard, co-director of Purpose Dignity Action and the founder of the LEAD diversion program, said decreasing those delays improves things for people who are arrested. “The time to a decision about whether or not a case is going to be filed is a clear improvement. They said they were going to do that, and they did that,” Daugaard said.
But data from the Seattle Municipal Court also show that Davison is performing far more poorly than her predecessor on many metrics she promised to address.
One of Davison’s biggest supporters, Scott Lindsay—a former city public safety advisor who now serves as Davison’s deputy—wrote two reports in 2019 that heaped criticism on Holmes for filing cases slowly or declining to file charges for serious misdemeanors. In the second of those reports, Lindsay criticized Holmes for declining to file nearly half of all non-traffic misdemeanor cases, claiming that only one in three cases reached what Lindsay called “meaningful resolution.”
“[D]eclining to file almost half of all cases for multiple consecutive years leads to a significant waste of police time and effort and has significant consequences for victims,” Lindsay wrote.
However, data from the Seattle Municipal Court indicates that Davison’s office also declines to file cases about half the time.
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Lindsay also faulted Holmes for failing to reach “meaningful resolution” in 42 percent of non-traffic misdemeanor cases, including cases dismissed for incomplete or missing evidence, cases that were still pending two years or more after an arrest, cases dismissed because the defendant was not mentally competent to stand trial, or a dismissal in the “interest of justice”—usually a judge using discretion to toss a case they believe is without merit.
Since taking office, however, Davison’s record on this measure has been nearly identical to Holmes’, with about 38 percent of non-traffic misdemeanor cases between February 2022 and April 2025 failing to meet Lindsay’s “meaningful resolution” standard— 2,218 of 5,804 cases that were resolved during that period. In April, there were an additional 2,358 cases still pending.
According to Daugaard, the similarity between Davison’s and Holmes’ record shows that Lindsay’s “meaningful resolution” standard is a faulty metric. “A lot of cases have always been dismissed in Seattle Municipal Court, whether under Mark Sidran, Tom Carr, Pete Holmes or Davison,” she said. “That’s just in the nature of the work.”
In his report, Lindsay also claimed that Holmes declined to file charges too often after arrests, letting people who should have been prosecuted off the hook. At the lowest point for filing during Holmes’ tenure, in 2016 and 2017, the city attorney’s office declined to file charges 46 percent of the time.
But data from Davison’s most recent quarterly report indicates that the rate of declines under Davison has been similar, and at times higher, than under Holmes, hovering between 40 and 50 percent. In the first quarter of 2025, Davison’s decline rate was 48 percent—two percent higher than what Lindsay called the “worst” years under Holmes.
In addition, Davison’s office declined to file charges in an increasingly large number of those cases because city attorneys believed they were unable to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. In the past two years, according to the city attorney office’s first quarter 2025 criminal division report, that figure has climbed to 38 percent of all declines. This compares to an average of 27 percent in 2018, when Holmes was city attorney.
Daugaard says a high decline rate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “There is no absolute right percentage or right number of filings,” she said. “Declining a large number of cases may be completely appropriate and the absolute right level of filings to be pursuing.”
Field says that because Davison is declining so many cases due to lack of decisive evidence, many of his public defender colleagues are now more willing to take cases to trial. “[The city attorney’s] goal has really been to try to scoop people up and impose just enough bail so that they get held until they plead,” said Field. “For them it’s really not about taking cases to trial. So the best way to ensure a good outcome for our clients is to try to aggressively litigate.”
In its 2024 annual report, the King County Department of Public Defense (DPD) noted that when the city attorney’s office takes cases to trial, it often fails to get convictions. “The [city attorney’s] own data for 2024 show that they were more likely to have their case dismissed than receive a conviction,” the report said.
Despite improving filing times, Davison’s office is taking much longer than her predecessor to decide whether to file charges in domestic violence cases. According to data provided by the Seattle Municipal Court, the average time to file in DV cases more than doubled during Davison’s term—from 25 days in 2018, under Holmes, to 58 days in 2023.
Kennedy, who ran against Davison on a progressive platform, said that figure is deeply disturbing. “In cases of domestic violence, there are times when someone does need to be incarcerated, or something of that nature, for someone to be safe,” she said. “And if the time to file goes from 25 days to 58 days, that’s not really doing anything for the victim. In fact, it’s potentially putting them in more danger.”
Many of the people Davison is choosing to prosecute are homeless, dealing with substance use disorder, or experiencing mental illness. Last year, Davison’s criminal division prosecuted nearly 5,400 total non-traffic misdemeanor cases—well above the pandemic low of 3,500 set in 2021, but actually down from a high of more than 7,300 set in 2018 under Holmes.
In its 2024 report, DPD criticized Davin’s strategy, saying that her office was “reviving failed policies and a renewed focus on jailing people accused of low-level, non-violent offenses.”
“Our clients experiencing housing instability or a behavioral health disorder routinely see their needs unmet and their challenges exacerbated when they are prosecuted for nonviolent misdemeanor charges,” said Matt Sanders, Director of the King County Department of Public Defense.
“What these clients need, and what would ultimately reduce their likelihood of future involvement in the increasingly costly criminal legal system, is access to supportive housing and effective treatment options.”
A review of cases Davison show that many of the people she charges are accused of minor offenses that often result from poverty, drug use, or mental health issues.
For example, a woman was arrested in May 2023 and later charged by the CAO for shoplifting $30 worth of merchandise—several rolls of paper towels and some wine—from the Walgreens at 23rd and Jackson. Court records show that the woman was likely homeless and had a chronic history of minor shoplifting, including a 2022 conviction for stealing a pack of toilet paper and a bottle of laundry detergent. Another case, also in 2023, involved accusations that she shoplifted frozen shrimp, Lysol cleaner, a bag of frozen lima beans, and several other items from a Safeway.
The woman, who pled guilty to charges of theft and criminal trespass in the 2023 case last year, has not served her 364-day jail sentence after failing to appear at multiple court hearings, most likely because she’s homeless and can’t be located.
Another “high utilizer” of the court system identified by Davison’s office, according to municipal court records, was a woman charged with several counts of theft after a 2023 incident in which she allegedly shoplifted small items, including a pair of earrings and a hoodie, from several Pike Place Market merchants. Later that year, a competency evaluation found that the woman’s mental health prevented her from understanding the court proceedings, and her case was dismissed.
Field says Davison’s performative “tough on crime” approach to incidents like these doesn’t address underlying issues like homelessness and poverty. “Poverty is actually a political choice,” he said. “It’s something we’re imposing on folks, and one of the ways that we are keeping people poor is by prosecuting them for behavior that’s inevitably associated with having been born poor and having grown up poor.”
Before she become city attorney in 2022, Davison ran for and lost a race against Debora Juarez for Seattle city council. Then, in 2020, during the first Trump administration, she ran for lieutenant governor on the Republican Party ticket headed up by Loren Culp, losing in the primary.
Seattle’s latest revenue forecast, which will form the basis of the 2026-2027 biennial budget, reduced the. city’s projected two-year budget shortfall from around $240 million to about $150 million. The city’s revenue forecasters used a more optimistic model than the April forecast.
On the first of two Seattle Nice episodes this week, we discussed the broader implications of a proposed ballot initiative that would make it illegal to fall asleep outdoors in unincorporated King County, a Seattle ballot measure to raise business and occupation taxes to pay for housing stability and human services, and a lawsuit filed by City Attorney Ann Davison, a Republican who’s struggling to retain support, over a seven-month-old Trump executive.
The city council approved the business and occupation tax proposal for the November ballot, overcoming objections from some councilmembers that it shouldn’t be dedicated to any specific purpose, but instead should go toward any current or future general-fund purpose elected officials decide they want to fund. In general, voters approve taxes for specific purposes, and there is no recent precedent for sending a blank-check tax measure to the ballot.
This week’s local elections represented a massive rebuke of the people elected in the wake of COVID and the 2020 protests against police brutality. Across the board in Seattle, progressive candidates were leading big, from Katie Wilson (running against Mayor Bruce Harrell) to Erika Evans (headed for victory against Davison).
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City councilmembers have proposed more than 100 amendments to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s much-delayed Comprehensive Plan update, which only deals with neighborhood residential (former single-family) zoning. Some amendments would further shrink the size of neighborhood centers—small nodes of potential future density—while others would expand them and create new incentives for housing.
On this week’s second edition of the podcast, we debated what’s behind the shift toward progressive candidates this year. I argued that it’s a combination of people’s desire to have people in office who’ll fight Trump policies that impact Seattle and a rejection of politicians who’ve prioritized cracking down on minor crimes over solving the affordability crisis; Sandeep says voters are reflexively “lurching to the left” because of Trump, not any specific local issues.
A petition to “save the trees” is more blatantly misleading than usual, as the trees in question aren’t threatened by the development people are protesting. Maritza Rivera can’t seem to keep staff for more than six months. And the latest election results put Katie Wilson at 50.2 percent to Harrell’s 41.7, while Ann Davison and City Council President Sara Nelson lost ground too: The two incumbents have 33.8 percent and 35.8 percent of the vote, respectively.
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