City Council

Renters Commission Appointments Thwarted by Saka and Nelson’s Last-Minute Absence from Their Own Committee

By Erica C. Barnett

For 18 months, under former city councilmember Cathy Moore’s leadership, nominees to the Seattle Renters Commission did not receive a single hearing. Moore, whose job as housing and human services committee chair included confirming appointments and reappointments to volunteer city commissions under the committee’s purview, refused to seat the Renters Commission even as she worked on legislation to dramatically reduce eviction protections, an issue the commission would have worked on if it was ever allowed to exist.

After Moore resigned, the vice-chair of the committee, Mark Solomon, approached the renters’ commission members and unconfirmed nominees and told them that before Moore’s replacement—likely former councilmember Debora Juarez—takes over next month, he would finally appoint as many renters’ commission nominees as possible, said Kate Rubin, whose membership on the renters’ commission expired in February.

Thrilled, commission appointees showed up at City Hall Wednesday morning—only to learn that their appointments would continue to be delayed: About three minutes before the committee was scheduled to start, Councilmember Rob Saka sent a message down from his City Hall office that he would not be attending.

Before Solomon adjourned the meeting (and re-convened the same gathering as an informal “community discussion” to avoid breaking council rules), Rinck went to Saka’s second-floor office to see if he was there. Saka’s staffer disappeared behind his closed inner-office door, emerged a few minutes later, and told Rinck that Saka wasn’t available because he was meeting with his chief of staff, Elaine Ko.

In a statement Wednesday, Saka told PubliCola, “This morning I was unable to attend the Housing & Human Services committee meeting due to unexpected personal conflicts. I understand this may have caused undue frustration and inconvenience for attendees and I will work with my colleagues to discuss next steps to carry out necessary committee business.”

The previous day, Council President Sara Nelson, who reportedly got an email from Moore asking her not to allow the appointments to move forward earlier in the week, had reportedly asked Solomon to remove the appointments from the committee agenda. That same day, Nelson reportedly told Solomon she would not attend the meeting, leaving the committee with less than the three-member quorum required to meet.

On Tuesday, at 2:30 in the morning, Moore sent an email to Solomon, cc’ing Saka and Nelson, expressing apparent surprise that there was “a slew of appointments to the Renters’ Commission scheduled for a vote on Wednesday.”

Before she resigned, Moore had suggested replacing the Renters Commission with a joint landlord-tenant commission with seven landlords and eight tenants.

“When we spoke several weeks ago, you mentioned you were interested in my proposal to revamp the commission into a rental housing commission composed of renters and housing providers,” Moore told Solomon.

The renters’ commission is the only city body that works and advocates on behalf of tenants. Rubin said that if Moore’s legislation moves forward, it will inevitably be dominated by landlords. “Having worked in those spaces, I can tell you that the renters would have been shut out,” Rubin said.

 

 

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Nelson confirmed that she told Solomon Tuesday afternoon that “I wasn’t going to be here, so they already knew.” She declined to comment further about why she wasn’t present.

Solomon told PubliCola he was “disappointed” in the lack of quorum, adding, “I believe it’s common-sense good governance to promptly seat all vacancies on City commissions. It’s what constituents should expect from our work. These commission volunteers took time out of their day to show up both in person and online, to talk about their qualifications and lived-experiences as renters in Seattle, and to share their vision for their work on the Seattle Renters Commission. I am grateful to everyone who showed up and enjoyed learning more about these qualified nominees.”

During the meeting, commission nominees expressed frustration at what many of them described as Saka and Nelson’s callous disregard for people who showed up to accept appointments to a volunteer commission.

Commission member Julissa Sánchez, the advocacy director at Choose 180 and a former advocate at the Tenants Union, said she was”very disappointed that we did not meet quorum, because we have been waiting for two years to expand the Seattle Renters Commission.”
Sanchéz, whose term expired in February, said, “I’m here to be reinstated into the Seattle Renters Commission, because … renters [for whom] English is not their first language, or who may not speak English at all, are often left off the table or out of access to different resources.”

“I am so furious,” Rubin told PubliCola on Wednesday. As the only paid staffer for the renters’ advocacy group Be: Seattle, Rubin said advocating for the renters’ commission “is pulling me away from my actual job, seemingly for no reason,” given that the council appears to have no interest in seating the commission.

“It’s so disrespectful to waste our time in this way we’re not being paid to do this work and there’s no real voice for renters at city hall other than Councilmember Rinck. … It’s hard for renters to show up to testify. It’s been just awful.”

Rinck, who became visibly emotional while expressing her frustration Nelson and Saka from the dais, echoed Rubin’s sentiment about disrespect when we spoke a few hours after the meeting ended.

“It’s my job to sit in this seat. I had the time on my calendar dedicated to be there. It’s my job to be there. Everyone else in the room was there on a volunteer basis,” Rinck said. “We want people to be engaged in our local government and have trust and have a collaborative relationship with our commissions, so what I’m struggling with is the disrespect to those folks that [Saka and Nelson] displayed by just not even showing up to committee.”

Many of the renters’ commission appointments were from Mayor Bruce Harrell; a spokesperson for the mayor told PubliCola his office was “disappointed that the Council’s Housing and Human Services committee was unable to reach quorum today, given we had commission nominees who we had asked to attend, and the agenda contained important legislative matters, including our proposal to protect constituents from predatory homebuying practices.”

In addition to the renters’ commission appointments, the committee was supposed to approve appointments to the Disability Commission, the Seattle Housing Authority Board, and the Seattle Social Housing Public Development Authority Governing Council.

And it was supposed to adopt an annual action plan for $16 million in federal Housing and Urban Development funding that has not been canceled by the Trump Administration. Delaying that action plan won’t put the funding at risk in itself, but Rinck said it speaks to the absent committee members’ priorities that they allowed such an important vote to slip.

Members of the renters’ commission planned to attend a meeting tonight of an ad hoc group called the Safe and Stable Housing Working Group to discuss potential reforms to Moore’s draft legislation, which would have ended the winter and school-year eviction moratoriums, eliminated limits on fees for late payment, and overturned a law allowing tenants to add new roommates without prior approval, among other changes.

“Councilmember Solomon said his intention was to ensure that nobody was forced out of their housing and to make the nonprofit landlords whole,” Rubin said.

Now, the meeting may end up focusing on the council’s refusal to seat the renters’ commission.

In an email to committee members on Wednesday, Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness director Alison Eisinger said the council’s refusal to seat the renters’ commission in the last scheduled housing committee meeting before the council goes on its August recess “undermine[s] not only that group’s ability to convene and meaningfully carry out its role” but contributes “to the sense that ‘government’  has no interest in solving problems of the people, by the people, and for the people. There is work to be done in this city regarding housing and human services, and it’s reasonable to expect that City Council Committee meetings are one of the places where it gets done.”

Saka’s office sent an automated response to Eisinger and others who contacted his office about his absence, which included a link to “Eviction Assistance.” That link leads to a 404 Error page.

Courts

Municipal Court Judge Shadid Blasts City Attorney for Refusing to Send Cases to Judge Vaddadi

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Municipal Court Judge Damon Shadid excoriated the criminal division chief for City Attorney Ann Davison’s office, Fred Wist, in open court two weeks ago (recording below)for the city attorney’s ongoing refusal to allow Judge Pooja Vaddadi to hear DUI and domestic violence cases. If the city attorney’s office continued to deny Vaddadi’s right to hear such cases, Shadid said, they could be in violation of ethical standards, even if they have the legal right to do so.

In 2024, Davison filed a “blanket affidavit of prejudice” against Vaddadi,  disqualifying her from hearing criminal cases brought by the city attorney’s office. This reduced Vaddadi, who had just been elected, to reviewing traffic tickets—effectively overturning the 2023 election, when voters selected Vaddadi as one of seven municipal court judges. Since then, and despite a Davison has continued to refuse to do so, Shadid said, prompting his unusual statement.

“The blanket affidavit policy of the city attorney’s office in this case completely blows out of the water any other blanket affidavit policy of any other attorney in the history of the state of Washington,” Shadid said, addressing now-criminal chief Fred Wist in open court on July 9. “Thousands of complaints have been filed in this case.”

In a memo explaining that extraordinary decision, then-criminal chief Natalie Walton-Anderson, who is now Mayor Bruce Harrell’s chief public safety advisor, claimed Vaddadi often reversed other judges’ findings of probable cause or failed to find probable cause “in situations where, clearly, probable cause exists” and released people accused of DUI and domestic violence without considering their criminal history or the severity of the offense.

For months, Davison’s office refused to identify the cases she relied on to deny Vaddadi’s right to hear criminal cases. Earlier this year, after getting the actual case numbers and reviewing each example Walton-Anderson and Davison used to justify barring her from hearing misdemeanor cases, Vaddadi filed a formal bar complaint, accusing them of basing their decision on “egregious fabrication[s]” about the cases.

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“Despite this showing,” Shadid said, “the Seattle City Attorney has continued its policy of filing [affidavits of prejudice, which have to be filed individually] against judge Vaddadi on all DUI and DV cases.

“The city or any party does not need to provide any reason whatsoever for the filing of an affidavit and to presume, as it seems, that we are making decisions based on a prior memo seems… presumptuous,” Wist said.

Shadid responded that the city attorney’s office has given them no other reason for preemptively disqualifying Vaddadi from all DUI and DV cases, and said that if attorneys working for Davison continue to file affidavits of prejudice based on Walton-Anderson’s memo and claims about Vaddadi’s bias and incompetence, “I absolutely believe that opens up a city attorney to the same bar complaint that has been filed against Natalie Walton Anderson and Ann Davison,” Shadid said.

During a lengthy back and forth, Wist said he had every right to withhold information about which cases Davison used to justify disqualifying Vaddadi from both the court and the public. “I would not go that far,” Shadid responded.

“If you knew that the facts behind that memo were false, and if you then refuse to give to the public after multiple multiple public disclosure requests, if you knew that and continue the policy, it is not your right to continue a policy of misinformation about a judge without backing it up while continuing that policy,” he continued. “That is not your right. You want to appeal that, go right ahead. But that is not your right.”

Davison—a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for city council and Lieutenant Governor, a partisan position, before winning the city attorney’s race in the backlash election of 2021—is running for reelection this year, with three challengers running to her left. After a very slow fundraising start, she reported $146,250 in new contributions on July 11, bringing her campaign’s total to $225,000 just before the primary.

The other candidates are Rory O’Sullivan (who’s raised $202,000), Erika Evans ($217,000), and Nathan Rouse ($165,000). It’s conceivable that two of the three Democrats running against Davison could oust her in the primary; Evans has the most endorsements, and is almost certain to make it through, while anti-Trump sentiment could push one of the other two past Davison based on her conservative record and allegiance to the party of MAGA.

City Council, Elections, Taxes

Council Broaches Using Housing Levy, Proposed “Seattle Shield” Tax Funds to Backfill General Fund Shortfall

 

By Erica C. Barnett

During a recent discussion of a potential ballot measure that would increase the business and occupation tax for larger businesses and exempt gross revenues up to $2 million a year, Councilmember Maritza Rivera suggested that the city should not dedicate the new tax, if it passes, to housing and human services, but put the money in the general fund instead, where it could pay for anything from police to road repairs to prosecution.

The council sponsor of the proposal, Alexis Mercedes Rinck, has dubbed it the “Seattle Shield” proposal because, she says, it will help shield the city from some of the more devastating cuts from the Trump administration, by contributing about $90 million a year to critical safety-net services. Voters will “choose whether we protect each other or abandon each other,” Rinck said when announcing the plan.

But, Rivera noted, the city is also facing a budget deficit of $250 million or more (the next revenue forecast will come in August.) “At the end of the day, you know, it begs the question: Why not just put all of this in the general fund?” Rivera said. “And as you’re doing the budget process, then you’re delineating where it goes, because we keep doing these funding sources, and then we are narrowing what we can use to spend with it.”

The JumpStart payroll tax, for example, was originally passed to pay for services targeted toward people most impacted by the high cost of living for which big companies like Amazon are partly responsible; since its passage, however, the council has turned it into an all-purpose slush fund.

Rinck noted that the Trump cuts will likely include emergency housing vouchers, homelessness funding through the federal Continuum of Care, and funding for basic needs like food assistance. “The outlined areas in this legislation are intended to speak to where we are anticipating the cuts will be the deepest,” Rinck said. Additionally, she said, “I think we need to be clear with voters about what we intend to use these funds for.”

It’s hard to say whether voters would find the idea of a tax that can be used for any purpose the council chooses appealing, but Seattle’s other voter-approved levies and taxes are all for specific spending areas, so a business tax for the general fund would be a major departure from precedent.

Rivera also brought up another idea that has come up frequently in recent months, including on the 2025 campaign trail: Given that the Office of Housing is “sitting on” hundreds of millions of dollars it isn’t currently spending, why can’t the city just borrow some of “that housing levy money we’re starting to collect now”?

Doing so would require the city to forego some future housing, Rivera acknowledged—the city can’t encumber tax dollars from the housing levy to build housing in the future if that money has already been used to address the budget deficit the city is facing today—but that seemed to her like a sensible tradeoff.

“Nothing is getting built,” Rivera said, “and this money is going to continue to come in. So if it’s not being used today, we know money is continuing to come in, we can make good down the line, on the award or, you know, the investment. But we have needs today, and we have money sitting somewhere today—I’m not an accountant, but it seems to me that we should be able to” use that money now, she said.

Deputy Mayor Greg Wong noted that the housing levy funds, is “not a pot of money the executive has one to touch, because we want to maintain our promises and investments in affordable housing.” By spending revenues from the housing revenue on general-fund purposes, the city would be breaking an implicit promise to voters when they agreed to tax themselves for housing.

And city budget director Dan Eder noted that it isn’t true that affordable housing isn’t getting built; last year, 1,300 new units of affordable housing were partly funded by housing levy dollars.

On its face, it seems somewhat absurd to think of the city asking voters for a new tax to backfill its budget deficit (a deficit exacerbated, last year, by $100 million in new spending the mayor and council hung on the budget like it was a Christmas tree), or for the city to use the housing levy, a voter-approved property tax for housing, to backfill the general fund.

But the city is entering unprecedented times, with federal funding cuts on the way that will force the mayor and council to decide between massive cuts to basic services (except police and prosecution, of course) and reneging on promises to voters about how the taxes they approved will be spent. It’s always an easier decision for elected officials to cut long-term spending that won’t pay off until years in the future than to make tough choices in the present. Just look at what happened to JumpStart.

Elections, Mayor Harrell

PubliCola Questions: Mayoral Candidate Joe Mallahan

By Erica C. Barnett

Joe Mallahan, a longtime T-Mobile executive and entrepreneur who narrowly lost the 2009 mayor’s race to Mike McGinn after the two men beat out then-mayor Greg Nickels in the primary, has reemerged after 15 years outside the political limelight and is running again for mayor.

Mallahan’s views on local politics don’t fit neatly inside any particular political lane—he blasts incumbent Bruce Harrell for sweeping homeless encampments and failing to build shelter while saying people with addiction should be subjected to government-endorsed “interventions”—but his pitch against Harrell is pretty simple: Harrell, Mallahan says, has run the mayor’s office as a sexist boys’ club and has failed to make any noticeable progress on any number of issues, from police hiring to homelessness to housing affordability.

I spoke with Mallahan late last week. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

PubliCola (ECB): When you ran against Nickels 15 years ago, your pitch was basically that he had failed to manage the city well during eight years in office. What’s your pitch against Harrell?

Joe Mallahan (JM): I don’t think Bruce Harrell has any vision for solving homelessness. I think his motivations are how to please developers. He talks about housing constantly. Every time I’m debating him on this, I talk about the need to deploy thousands more tiny house villages and more congregate emergency bed capacity. We’ve lost about 1,500 to 2,000 emergency beds compared to 10 years ago, because with COVID congregate [shelter] didn’t work. Bruce is all about building, building, building, but there’s still 5,000 people living on the streets, and he’s sweeping them around like they’re pieces of dust.

Sweeps are traumatic. They lose their documents, they lose the relationships they might have developed with a social worker. Capitol Hill, the Chinatown International District, Ballard, and other neighborhoods have massive increases in homelessness because you’re sweeping them from downtown.

ECB: One of the lessons of COVID was that we shouldn’t go back to the old noncongregate shelter model—people don’t like sleeping in dorms and they don’t tend to stay long enough to engage in services.

JM: If a shelter is a bunch of beds on a gymnasium floor, I can understand. It doesn’t provide personal security. We need to build shelter in a way that provides an adequate level of personal security. Tiny houses are the most ideal. You get one home for one or two people. Families have their own system. This is individuals living on the streets—almost all of them with mental illness or addiction.

ECB: In a recent forum, your fellow mayoral candidate Joe Molloy strongly took issue with your claim that most homeless people have mental illness or addiction, and I do too. It’s a common belief that isn’t backed up by research or surveys with actual homeless people.

JM: Joe’s perspective comes from living in a sanctioned tent encampment, most of which have rules, and my experience comes from traveling the streets in Rainier Beach and Ballard Avenue and literally sitting on the curb talking to people who are homeless—saying, ‘Tell me your story. Are you using? Do you consider yourself addicted?’ And every person I talk to on the street tells me that story. And talking to service providers like Immanuel Services in South Lake Union, We Heart Seattle, a couple of other service providers. So I’m pretty connected to the homelessness situation. You could say Joe’s more connected, but Joe only talks about Tent City 3.

ECB: You told me recently that you support “pressing” people into treatment. What does that mean to you?

JM: We have this attitude that you can’t get someone to be successful in treatment if you force them to go. I understand that point, but if you take a person with addiction and you put them into an apartment with no community—people like you and me, we have people to press us to deal with our shit. These folks on the street have got nobody to press them, and the idea that at some point they’re going to be ready to accept treatment—we’ve to to create with these individuals an intervention-ish culture.

If I give someone a tiny house, and they’re using and they’re impacting that community, and I say, ‘You’re impacting the community. You can’t be here anymore,’ then they’re using in public. And then I’m arresting you, and now we’re going to take you to drug court and you’re going to have one more opportunity to go into treatment, and [if you don’t], you’re going to be in jail for a little while. To me, that is more loving and respectful of the person suffering from addiction than just letting them continue to kill themselves.

ECB: You’ve criticized Harrell’s leadership of SPD. Do you think the city is on the way to turning the police department around, and how specifically do you think the mayor has failed to lead SPD?

JM: First off, I think it’s great that we’re adding a ton of new police, but we’re doing it by paying $50,000 signing bonuses—so, congratulations, you offer a $50,000 signing bonus to a brand-new young cadet—you’ll increase your ranks. (Editor’s note: SPD’s $50,000 signing bonuses are only available to people moving from other police departments; new recruits receive a bonus of $7,500). Fine, that’s a win, but we still have massive attrition. In the time we hired 60, we lost 20.

I think the reason we continue to lose officers is a lot of these folks are miserable. Maybe sometimes it’s because they have on victim glasses, or maybe there’s so much sexual harassment in the police department.

I experienced a cultural training at T-Mobile that really changed my perspective, and one of the key tenets was ‘shadow of a leader’—how you behave as a leader creates a shadow of how your direct reports behave. The sexual harassment in the police department—I’m not saying it started with Bruce Harrell but it ain’t going to get fixed with Bruce Harrell.

ECB: Why should voters believe it will get fixed under you?

JM: I committed to 50 hours of ridealongs in my first year. I’m on the campaign trail constantly talking about the mayor’s misogyny and the need to have respect for women, and I think it makes a huge difference to have an executive of a city promoting that.

ECB: One thing that has changed since 2009 is that more than half the city’s population are renters. At a recent candidate forum, you agreed with the statement that the city should change its tenant protection laws laws in response to landlord concerns. Can you elaborate on that?

JM: If I’m a landlord and I’m charging $1,000 for rent and I’ve got $900 of expenses, I’m expecting to make $100 of profit. If I’ve got 10% bad debt because 10 percent of folks aren’t paying me, I’m now breaking even or losing money.

My best friend Tommy’s a lefty liberal. He says, ‘If you evict someone, you’ve created another homeless person.’ Yeah, but if this landlord, oftentimes a not-for-profit, has to shut down their operations, then you’ve created a bunch more homeless people. I get the motivation for renter protections, but if there’s too many of them and they’re not rational, bad debt becomes a really big problem.

Maybe the solution is to subsidize people who have really bad debt, but foisting all that onto landlords is just going to get people to stop building rental units.

ECB: You’ve talked about building in the immediate vicinity of light rail stations. But urbanists would argue that people who rent apartments should also have access to Seattle’s historically single-family neighborhoods, and that the comprehensive plan should go further to accomplish that. How much more housing do you think is appropriate in the city’s historically single-family neighborhoods?

JM:We spent billions of dollars building these beautiful light rail stations and the neighborhoods around the stations have all known that density would be allowed there, and their land value has grown dramatically. I don’t think it matters to them whether it’s a 2-or 30-story building. I think we should think about going higher around transit stations. And the impact on trees there is small because it would be a very, very dense environment.

When we passed the new tree ordinance, there’s something called an Urban Forestry Commission, and they completely opposed the new tree ordinance. And the Urban Forestry Commission only had three meetings over six months with the council and the mayor when they were talking about this in 2023, and the Master Builders [Association] had 37 meetings.

I had a fundraiser up on Queen Anne, and there was this wealthy individual saying, ‘Hey, Joe, this plan doesn’t create affordable housing. It just creates opportunities for developers to take a residential lot and turn it into four or five tombstone, $1.3 million housing units and that doesn’t accomplish anything.’ And I thought, you’re a wealthy guy, you live in a beautiful neighborhood, you just don’t want this development. And then I heard the exact same thing in the Central District. A developer has carte blanche to clearcut a residential lot.

The city says it has 28 percent canopy, but it’s 8-foot-high trees. It could be a shrub; it could be a rhododendron. This new plan is going to deforest places like the Rainier Valley and the Central District, and I think we should be thoughtful about that.

I also think we need to talk about an anti-displacement policy. I talked to three different African-American women who live in the homes of their parents. They’re professionals and they can’t afford to stay in their homes because taxes are so high. If, on their block, someone builds four $1 million units, the land value gets reassessed and their taxes increase significantly.

ECB: Seattle has effectively abandoned Vision Zero, the effort to reduce road deaths and serious fatalities to zero. What would you do to make Seattle streets less dangerous for people who aren’t in cars?

JM: I think we should automate traffic control. That technology could be deployed to say, ‘You’re going too fast, and here’s a ticket.’ I’ve been going to every light rail station in the city in the mornings, handing out literature, and at Othello station, I handed out literature for about 10 minutes before I said, ‘I can’t do this is.’ It’s so freaking dangerous—the cars going by on MLK doing 40 mph in a 25—and I realized if I distracted a person for half a second, that could be unsafe.

We have these light stations sitting in the middle of a freeway. And the reasons it’s a freeway is because no one is enforcing speed laws. Automation of traffic control is a huge part of getting to zero fatalities, but it’s also a win in terms of the police budget. It’s also a win in terms of reducing the opportunities for police and a resident to enter into a situation that could create escalation.

ECB: The city is facing severe deficits in the coming years, even before you factor in cuts to basic services that are going to come from the Trump Administration. How would you propose fixing this looming budget shortfall, and would your solutions include progressive taxes?

JM: Washington state tax laws and the Washington State Constitution saddle us with an unbelievably regressive tax scheme. If we need to raise revenue, I would look for progressive ways to do it, and I also think wealthy individuals are whom I’d like to pay more if we can figure out a way to do it.

I’m a little concerned that taxing big companies right now is a little bit dangerous. I do have a fear of losing tax revenue from corporations, because of the JumpStart tax, which I’m a huge fan of, and the social housing tax, which I’m a huge fan of. Those things combined make me think we should tax individuals. If we have to raise taxes, the next place to raise them is on wealthy individuals—who, by the way, just got a 2 percent tax break from the federal government.

I think there’s real efficiencies to be driven on city government spending. There’s homeless outreach organizations that have been ginned up out of nowhere that have big city contracts, and the mayor’s office has turned down the council’s request to audit those organizations. Community Passageways—they have an $8 million outreach budget and people have said that outreach is not effective or meaningful, and Sara Nelson requested an audit of that and the mayor said ‘We’re not going to do an audit right now.’ Third Avenue Project is another $8 million spend that I don’t understand what they’re getting from it. There’s no reporting on how that’s going and what we’re paying for, but the money is still going out the door.

I think DOGE is completely bullshit, but at T-Mobile, I ran corporate strategy and analysis and I hired like half a dozen or more operations research PhDs. These are people who are highly educated in systemic thinking and analysis. And we drove billions of dollars out of a $40 billion operation just by smart thinking and analysis.

ECB: Last question: Why did you vote for Nikki Haley in the 2024 primary, given that Trump had locked down the Republican nomination by then?

JO: I was trying to keep Trump from getting Washington state delegates. Everyone I knew was doing that. Biden had the endorsement wrapped it. It was a classic Dem dilemma—I can’t have any impact in Washington state, so I’m voting for Nikki Haley. I think it’s delightful that Bruce Harrell is emailing his that Joe Mallahan is a Republican and the best dirt he can dig up on me is that I voted in the Republican primary once.

One more thing I wanted to bring up. The police stopped investigating sexual assault for six months, because we took detectives and turned them into patrol officers so we’d have more patrol capacity to do sweeps, and you’d have to be someone like Bruce Harrell to allow something like that to happen. At the Seattle Times editorial board meeting, Bruce blurted out, ‘I doubled the sexual assault division from four to eight officers.’ Well, it was originally 12. He’s positioning it as if he solved the problem. He doesn’t care about sexual assault.

 

City Council, Elections, Mayor Harrell, Police, Privacy

This Week on PubliCola: July 19, 2025

Elections, graffiti, police surveillance, and more.

By Erica C. Barnett

Tuesday, July 15

PubliCola Questions: Mayoral Candidate Ry Armstrong

Ry Armstrong, one of seven candidates seeking to unseat incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell, says that if elected, they’d stop sweeps of homeless encampments and pass progressive revenue to pay for shelters around the city. Armstrong also wants to make it easier to build child care centers and help people purchase their first homes.

Seattle Nice: Seattle Solved All the Crime, So We’re Talking About Graffiti

Our main topic on Seattle Nice this week was one of the mayor and council’s top current priorities: Cracking down on graffiti—which is already a crime—with a new fine of up to $1,500 for each individual “tag.” We also discussed a new pro- Harrell message testing poll pushing the idea that mayoral candidate Katie Wilson is the second coming of socialist firebrand Kshama Sawant.

Wednesday, July 16

Council Passes New Laws Against Graffiti, Expanding Police Power to Shut Down Businesses for Off-Premises Violations

The City Council passed two bills cracking down on “disorder” this week. The first empowers the City Attorney to pursue civil actions for graffiti and fine individuals $1,500 per tag, and the second expands the city’s nuisance property law to allow police to penalize property owners and shut down businesses for off-premises activities, such as drug use or other illegal activities in the vicinity of a nightlife venue.

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As Police Roll Out Live Cameras in Purported Crime “Hot Spots,” Not Everyone Is Thrilled to Be Under Surveillance

At a press event, police chief Shon Barnes and the mayor touted new cameras that allow police to keep a watchful eye on dozens of locations around the city. Officials have promoted the cameras as a way to prevent and respond to major crimes like human trafficking and gun violence. But not everyone who’s now under 24/7 police surveillance considers the cameras a benign crime-fighting tool.

Thursday, July 17

Election Fizz: City Employees Back Wilson for Mayor, Harrell Slams “Wilson’s Defund Movement,” and More

Professional and Technical Employees Local 17 (PROTEC17), made up of thousands of city workers, endorsed their boss’s opponent Katie Wilson Thursday after years of fighting Harrell for better wages and working conditions. Plus, Harrell’s campaign blamed his opponent “Wilson’s Defund movement” for an “exodus from SPD and a dramatic rise in violent crime,” and more election news from the final weeks before the August 5 deadline for voters to send in their primary ballots.

Friday, July 18

Seattle Nice: Is the Progressive Left Back?

We recorded the latest episode of the Seattle Nice podcast at the 43rd District Democrats’ meeting, where we discussed the primary election, offered some unsolicited advice to a local candidate who happened to be in the audience, and discussed the latest battle over nudity at a longtime LGBTQ+-friendly nude beach.

Elections, LGBTQ+, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Is the Progressive Left Back?

By Erica C. Barnett

We had a great time recording the latest episode of Seattle Nice live at the 43rd District Democrats’ meeting on Tuesday, where we discussed the primary election, offered some unsolicited advice to a local candidate who happened to be in the audience, and said “fuck” a lot (Sandeep) and made ill-considered predictions (me.)

The big question on the table: Will the backlash to Trump’s tax cuts for millionaires and service cuts for the rest of us translate to a local anti-establishment election? In 2021 (when business-oriented, pro-sweeps Mayor Bruce Harrell and Republican City Attorney Ann Davison were elected) and again in 2023, when voters replaced most of the city council with a crop of candidates who promised to “audit the budget” and attributed the decline in police hiring to low morale brought on by pro-“defund” incumbents, Seattle rejected a progressive agenda.

Could this year bring around a course correction? Katie Wilson seems to have Harrell running scared, Davison has several very viable opponents, and progressive Dionne Foster is running a strong, if low-key, campaign against centrist Council President Sara Nelson. Even Joe Mallahan, defeated by Mike McGinn in 2009, is trashing the mayor over his enthusiasm for encampment sweeps, which have indisputably pushed people living unsheltered in downtown Seattle to Belltown, the International District, and other parts of Seattle.

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We also discussed the baffling recent decision about nudity at the longtime nude beach at Denny-Blaine Park: A King County Superior Court judge (Samuel Chung, not up for reelection until 2028) ordered the city to come up with a plan to stop public masturbation and lewd behavior—which a wealthy adjacent property owner insists are rampant—and “nudity as constituted at the park.” I am obviously not a lawyer, but I’m not sure how an injunction that gives police the power to determine whether nudity is “constituted” properly—or if it’s inherently lewd—can withstand legal scrutiny.

Nudity is legal in Seattle. As I noted on the podcast, I was walking on the downtown just last weekend when a bunch of naked people—by appearance, almost all cisgender men—rode their bikes along the new bike path, in full view of God and everybody. There’s a transparent double standard at work here, I argued—while LGBTQ+ sunbathers are presumptively indecent, a parade of naked men on bikes is just another fun part of life in quirky Seattle.