Affordability, City Council, housing

“Day Tents” and “Active Rat’s Nests”: Council’s Housing Budget Interrogation Goes Off the Rails

By Erica C. Barnett

For months now, Seattle City Council members have been insinuating that the city’s Office of Housing, along with other departments, has been “sitting on” unused money year after year that could and should be spent on other purposes. Back in July, for instance, Councilmember Maritza Rivera suggested the council should borrow money from the voter-approved housing levy to pay for unrelated city services, given that this money was “not being used” at the moment.

The theory, which is based on a misunderstanding of how funding for housing projects works, is that the city should not be holding on to money it collects for planned housing projects for as long as it does. When it comes to the full budget, the city has an “initial underspend” that includes all the money that hasn’t been spent by the end of the year, currently 9.9 percent; however, that total consists primarily of funds already allocated to specific projects, so the “true” underspend—the amount that goes back into the general budget—is consistently around 2 percent a year.

In addition to that “underspend,” every year, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in housing funds (and funding for other projects that span multiple years) is “carried forward” to the following budget year, because the projects that money will eventually fund have not received the funding from other sources they will need to actually get built. Because the city is typically the first funder for housing projects—other funders, including the county and state, contribute to full funding for projects later—there’s no way to spend this money until the rest of the funding is in.

However, because the funding is all allocated to specific projects, it isn’t available to use for other purposes; dipping into money that’s already dedicated to specific housing projects (or simply using housing levy funds for non-housing levy purposes, as Rivera previously suggested) would be fiscally irresponsible, to say the least.

Nonetheless, the council is still set on the idea that the Office of Housing—along with other city departments—is twiddling its thumbs instead of getting money out the door. On Thursday, Nelson’s governance committee held what amounted to an interrogation of OH and the city’s budget office about why they aren’t spending money faster. The specific purpose of the meeting was to review the two departments’ response to a council directive requiring them to report on why the city underspends its budget every year.

“I’ll just say that this is this is accountability, full stop,” Nelson said to set the tone. “This is all about our role in in making sure that the things that we allocate money to are actually benefiting from those decisions[.]”

In the first half of the meeting, city budget staffers explained why the city doesn’t always spend 100 percent of funds for multi-year or complex projects, such as executed contracts for human services, in exactly 365 days. In addition to projects that carry over from year to year, the city ends each year with an “underspend” of about 2 percent, which goes back into the general budget. “This is a feature, not a bug,” budget director Dan Eder said. “Those are committed dollars that that were always intended to be spent several years later.”

In its memo explaining why the budget works this way, the budget office noted that forcing departments to spend their budgets down to zero every year would lead to wasteful spending, illustrating the concept by linking to an episode of The Office.

Rivera pushed back on Eder, saying she felt “angsty” about her inability to get questions answered to her satisfaction. “Every time we ask a question, it’s really hard to get a response, and that doesn’t inspire confidence in the fiscal responsibility part of the city,” Rivera said. “So I’d love to have some fiscal systems put in place where every time we ask a question, we should be able to readily get to the answer.”

“Councilmember, I just want to assure you that we absolutely do have a system in place, and we can report out chapter and verse on every one of the grants from 2023 if that’s your interest, or 2025 if that’s your more updated focus,” Eder responded. “I’d love to get that,” Rivera said, but what she really wanted to know was “not just about grants,” but “information about vacancies, about just how much [housing] is being created and how vacancies are being filled. I just feel like every time we have this conversation, there isn’t a one stop shop to get all this information.”

That off-topic grievance—the meeting, again, was ostensibly why the city doesn’t spend money for housing and other priorities faster—set the tone for the rest of the discussion, in which the council grilled OH staff about issues that had essentially nothing to do with whether the department was sitting on money the city could be using elsewhere. Bob Kettle started off down this road, musing (as he has many times in the past) that the housing office should create an easily digestible “housing plan” for the whole city, the same way SDOT consolidated all of its modal plans for bikes, pedestrians, freight, and transit into a single, overarching “Seattle Transportation Plan.”

“You know, there’s [the JumpStart tax], there’s [Mandatory Housing Affordability], you mentioned the Housing Levy, but now we have the social housing levy, we have all these different funds,” Kettle said. “So as you know, there’s permanent supportive housing, there’s affordable housing, and it’s different bands and so forth. There’s social housing and the like. We need to have a comprehensive look.”

As Winkler-Chin gently reminded Kettle that social housing is a separate government entity, he cut her off, saying “I recognize that, I recognize that,” but “if they’re not in sync with what we’re doing, or what [the King County Regional Homelessness Authority] is doing on permanent supportive housing, that’s a problem, and the public should know it.” KCRHA does not directly fund the construction of permanent supportive housing; OH does.

Piling on, Nelson said OH should be familiar by now with the “new council’s concern that it appears that we’re stockpiling housing funds during a housing crisis. … Clearly, if we have these questions, and they’re not going away, it is a call for perhaps a database that tracks every single award, what is happening with that award, and when it’s finished, how are we monitoring the performance of that award? What are the vacancy rates? What the impacts to neighborhoods, et cetera?” It’s hard to imagine how such a database would work (the “impact to neighborhoods” of affordable housing is completely subjective, for example, and vacancy rates fluctuate on a daily basis), or what kind of resources it would require.

Switching topics, Nelson mentioned recent media reports that some housing providers are selling off properties; couldn’t the city think about buying some of those? And then there was the recent audit about waste and potential fraud in King County’s Department of Community and Human Services grants; was OH sure there weren’t similar problems happening with the housing providers it funds?

Piling on, Kettle turned to people who hang around at Third and Pike and use drugs; between 15 and 40 percent of them, he said, actually have homes and use “day tents” to do their business before going home. He then complained about an unspecified public housing building “where there’s an active rat’s nest around it. … On the public safety side, if you have a problematic housing situation because there’s a rat’s nest or there’s other maintenance issues, that’s part of the dynamic that we see on the public safety side in terms of what’s happening on our streets.”

Rivera, riffing on Kettle’s comments, said, “And also, just as a city… we should know what other the other organizations, like the [social housing] PDA and the King County Housing Authority, are doing as part of this overall plan. … I understand that OH is focusing on the funding to build the projects, and you don’t necessarily have oversight of the projects, but I do think that we need to create an expectation with the projects… and the not for profits.”

OH policy and planning director Kelli Larsen assured Rivera that the city does monitor its investments after the fact, prompting Rivera to go on a riff about a recent Seattle Times article that found issues at several housing projects. When Larsen noted that the city didn’t fund those projects—King County did—Rivera quickly pivoted, saying, “we shouldn’t just focus on the units that we’re funding and then not look at the big picture, because what we’re doing will have an impact on the big picture, and vice versa. And then when those types of articles come out, and you just said those weren’t our projects, no one knows that, and we didn’t. I didn’t know that.”

Nelson summed up the discussion by expressing skepticism that “things are going pretty well,” criticizing the budget office for the high “initial underspend” number CBO director Eder explained in detail at the beginning of the meeting.”I see that the … net underspend for the general fund, average [s] 2.1 [percent] per year,” she said. “But then lower on the memo, it says actually … [that] the initial underspend, excluding the impact of carryforwards, average 9.9 percent. That gives me personal pause.” In other words: Don’t be surprised if the council raises these exact same questions again, no matter how many times the city’s budget professionals answer them.

After this story posted, Ryan Packer pointed out on Bluesky that Nelson sent out a campaign mailer focused on the meeting, claiming (falsely) that the city’s spending on housing is “routinely delayed for years” (instead of being spent the year it’s allocated) by “bureaucratic delays.” The meeting did not reveal any “bureaucratic delays”; instead, city staff explained repeatedly that housing cycles take more than a year, and that there would be major negative consequences if the city started backing out of its commitments (including contracts and the voter-approved housing levy) in order to use dedicated housing dollars to pay for other general fund priorities like transportation or police.

Note: The original version of this story misstated the percentage of public drug users Bob Kettle estimated have homes and use “day tents” that make them appear to be homeless. 

Affordability, City Council, housing

Debate Over Affordable Housing Tax Break Heats Up
City Councilmember Sara Nelson said expanding eligibility for tax-exempt housing will benefit moderate-income renters.

By Erica C. Barnett

As the Seattle City Council prepares to update a program that gives tax breaks to developers who set aside apartments for low- and moderate-income renters, opponents of the changes called them a giveaway to developers for housing that will still leave its residents burdened by excessive rents. Proponents, including Habitat for Humanity and for-profit developers, said the changes would make it feasible for them to build affordable housing at a time when development of all kinds is slowing across the city.

The 12-year tax exemption program, called the Multifamily Tax Exemption or MFTE, currently has to be renewed every four to five years. The most recent renewal, in 2019, imposed new affordability requirements and restrictions on rent increases—making higher-income renters ineligible to rent MFTE units and imposing a 4.5 percent annual cap on rent increases, among other changes.

The latest iteration, known as “Program 7,” would bump up the cap on annual increases to as much as 10 percent a year and make higher-income renters eligible for some units, a change opponents say will make MFTE apartments unavailable to lower-income tenants.

Earlier this week, two dozen affordable housing providers and advocacy groups sent an open letter to the mayor and council objecting to the proposed changes, arguing that if the council approves them, “the purpose of the MFTE program would no longer be to ‘increase affordable multifamily housing opportunities … for households who cannot afford market-rate housing in Seattle,’ and would instead focus on increasing multifamily development in exchange for a modest share of MFTE units and no guarantee of rents meaningfully lower than market rate.”

At a meeting of the council’s housing committee on Wednesday—where the committee also took up 14 amendments aimed at various aspects of the program—renters’ rights advocates urged the city to reject the proposal and keep the existing program in place another year while the city comes up with a more equitable plan. (The MFTE update has already been delayed twice, and expired yesterday.)

Miram Roskin, the former deputy director of the city’s Office of Housing, said the program removes about $20 million in “invisible” dollars from the city’s budget every year in the form of foregone property taxes, in exchange for very limited benefits for lower-income renters.

“At the margin, there are certainly financially feasible, on the bubble projects that benefit and come to fruition thanks to the tax exemption. However, this is speculative. It is unquantified, it’s anecdotal. This is why the affordability component of the program matters so much,” Roskin said. “In many cases, rents would be indistinguishable from the market. And in fact, in some cases, the affordable rent would even be higher than the market [rent].”

For example, under the new proposal, renters making up to 50 percent of Seattle’s median income would be eligible to rent small studios (less than 320 square feet); the proposal bumps up the maximum rent for these units to $1,375 a month, just $91 less than the median similar apartments rent for on the private market. The maximum rent for a standard one-bedroom would increase to $2,209, or about $395 less than market rent.

Median incomes, and—indirectly—maximum rents are set by a federal formula that includes both homeowners and renters. The Seattle Renters Commission called out this issue in its own letter opposing the new program, noting that the median Seattle renter makes around $79,000, compared to about $181,000 for homeowner households.

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Developers, in contrast, said they the current standards have made them opt out of the tax exemption program, and argued that the changes would spur them to build more affordable apartments at a time when building permits have slowed down dramatically, a trend that will likely make Seattle’s housing crunch significantly worse over the next several years.

“We are evidence that the program currently is not working,” Kamiak Real Estate founder Scott Lien told the committee. “We rescinded our MFTE applications on four of our last five projects prior to occupancy, and now we have six buildings with 1,100 units in our pipeline, and have no plans to participate in MFTE for most of those” under the current program.

Developers also argued that the MFTE program was never designed to provide housing to low-income residents, but is supposed to create “workforce” housing for moderate-income renters.

A 2024 University of Washington study found that the MFTE program does cost the city money every year, but noted that developers won’t use the program if they can’t make a profit. The study also found that the city has historically seen a benefit of about 50 cents on the dollar, in the form of lower rents, over the life of the program, except under the most recent iteration, where rents decreased and the benefit to the city increased more dramatically.

Over the life of the program, which began in 1998, developers have built more than 7,000 affordable housing units, mostly studios and one-bedrooms, but those lower rents “may only represent a modest discount” compared to the rest of the market, the UW study found. Apartments in areas where rents are already higher, like South Lake Union, are more affordable relative to other available units than they are in areas where rents are lower, like South Park or Rainier Beach, where “there may be negligible differences between the rents of restricted and unrestricted units.”

“Some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city,” the study notes, have been categorically exempt from MFTE because they’re zoned for single-family houses. Given that most MFTE units are in three-to-five-story apartment buildings, this isn’t likely to change much, even with zoning changes that allow between four and six units per lot in these areas.

Several of the 14 amendments councilmembers introduced Wednesday would lower the income eligibility thresholds for various types and sizes of apartments, prompting Council President Sara Nelson to object that new affordability restrictions could force renters out of their homes. “We don’t want to be displacing people,” Nelson said. Making people who make more money eligible for MFTE units, she added, “means more access, not higher prices.”

Although a central staffer assured Nelson that the program has a “grace” component that lets existing tenants stay in their homes as their income rises (under the program, existing renters retain their rent discounts until their income rises to 150 percent of the eligibility level, and pay market rent after that), Nelson raised the exact same objection a moment later.

“There are people already living in these units, so what’s going to happen to them if you lower the income per unit? Then the person’s going to have to move out. … I feel like this is going to displace people and in fact that’s what happened to my friend.”

Councilmembers also proposed amendments to allow developers with projects already in the pipeline to opt in to the new, more developer-friendly program, a change the housing advocacy groups called “a bad deal for Seattle” in their open letter. Other amendments would require regular reporting on which developers are participating in the program and what kind of housing they’re building, and reinstate a sunset clause that would require the city to update the program again in 2029, which the original legislation eliminated. Rob Saka, the cosponsor of the sunset amendment along with Alexis Mercedes Rinck, said revisiting the program regularly was a matter of good governance.

“Deleting a sunset date whatsoever, in perpetuity, for something of this significance, and greater scale, and subject to fluctuating market conditions—I don’t know if it’s the best, most appropriate, prudent course of action,” Saka said.

Another amendment sought by developers, from Mark Solomon, would eliminate the requirement that developers who are replacing older, “naturally affordable” housing with (typically denser) new MFTE units add one new unit that’s permanently affordable to renters making 50 percent of median income to their new buildings for every tenant in the demolished building who qualifies for relocation assistance under the city’s Tenant Relocation Assistance Ordinance. Developers argue that this permanent affordability requirement has stopped the development of dense new housing under the MFTE program.

Councilmember Debora Juarez complained that the 14 amendments (including one that was so new it didn’t show up on the council’s online agenda) had been “dropped on us” at the last minute, with little time to analyze or understand them. The committee didn’t vote on the proposed changes; they’ll do that on September 22, with a full council vote likely on September 30.

City Council, immigration, Mayor Harrell, Police, Privacy

City Expands Police Surveillance Despite Overwhelming Opposition, Concerns About Civil Liberties

By Erica C. Barnett

After dozens of Seattle residents testified in opposition to legislation authorizing the expansion of 24/7 police camera surveillance on Tuesday—the bill, which PubliCola has covered extensively, passed the full council on a contentious 7-2 vote—several councilmembers used most of their speaking time to chastise and criticize their constituents for speaking out against the bill—apparently more offended by overwhelming public opposition than by the likelihood that federal law enforcement officials will use the camera footage to crack down on vulnerable Seattle residents.

The city just created the surveillance “pilot” last year, but is already expanding it before the city can collect any data about its effectiveness.

The new law, introduced just weeks after the city rolled out live camera surveillance in the Chinatown/International District, downtown, and along Aurora Ave. N, expands the pilot to include a swath of the Central District centered on Garfield High School, the area south of downtown around the stadiums, and a section of Capitol Hill that includes the Pike-Pine corridor and Cal Anderson Park. It also incorporates hundreds of cameras maintained by the Seattle Department of Transportation into the Real Time Crime Center, a facility at SPD headquarters where police monitor the cameras in real time.

Opposition to the new surveillance program is widespread. Candidates who came out ahead in this year’s primary elections, including mayoral frontrunner Katie Wilson and City Council Position 9 frontrunner Dionne Foster, have opposed expanding the pilot program as have the ACLU of Washington, Northwest  Immigrant Rights Project, Asian Counseling and Referral Services, and the city’s own Community Police Commission and Office for Civil Rights.

They argue, with substantial evidence, that CCTV cameras don’t help prevent or address violent crime, that they violate people’s civil rights and foster an environment of fear, and that provide new opportunities for the Trump Administration to subpoena or otherwise obtain camera footage to target immigrants and people seeking abortions or gender-affirming care.

This week, 17 members of the state legislature wrote to the council opposing the expansion of police surveillance at a time when the Trump Administration is targeting blue cities, including nominal “sanctuary” cities like Oakland, with subpoenas for surveillance footage and other data that cities have no authority to deny the federal government.

Seattle, similarly, will have to comply with any federal subpoenas for surveillance footage. The fact that local laws prohibit police from volunteering this information does not make the federal government subordinate to Seattle’s local regulations, any more than it has in other blue cities that have policies prohibiting police from voluntary cooperation with ICE and other federal agencies.

Meilani Mandery, a resident of the Chinatown/International District, said that since the council approved 20 cameras on nearly every intersection in the area, “people can’t enter or leave the neighborhood without being surveilled. You did this to a poor immigrant community that remembers the racist surveillance of the 20th century, when the government surveilled Japanese Americans before sending them to concentration camps, and the cops had books of Chinese mug shots to profile and justify police violence.”

Expanding police surveillance, Mandery continued, “rolls out the red carpet for ICE to kidnap our families, friends and neighbors. Do we not deserve safety?”

Only a few people have spoken out, over numerous public meetings, in favor of the cameras and the expansion of the Real Time Crime Center, and emails to the council have been overwhelmingly opposed to the program. Nonetheless, several council members claimed that they have heard directly from constituents who haven’t provided public comment that they support the cameras, particularly constituents of color who believe surveillance will make their neighborhoods safer.

Debora Juarez, an appointed council member who represents North Seattle, dismissed opponents of the legislation as people “with a lot of god damn privilege.”

“You can go on and on about the Trump regime. We all watch the news. We get it. We know. I’m not going to go with fear. I’m going to go with facts. I’m going to go with subject matter expertise.”

In fact, the city’s own Surveillance Working Group recommended strongly against the cameras and Real-Time Crime Center before Trump was elected to a second term, noting that they had the potential to violate people’s Constitutional rights against unreasonable search and seizure as well as the First Amendment, which protects the right to protest and assemble in public. Public comments, the group noted in its report opposing the original program pilot, “were overwhelmingly negative and voiced a serious concern and lack of trust within the community as a whole of the Seattle Police Department’s plan to expand the use of surveillance technology.”

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Although the police department has said repeatedly that the cameras are effective tools for preventing crime and solving crimes after the fact—and the legislation itself says the primary purpose of surveilling Seattle neighborhoods “is to prevent crime [and] collect evidence related to serious and/or violent criminal activity”—some council members suggested the idea that the cameras would prevent crime was a red herring invented by opponents of surveillance.

Calling himself  “one of the few people on this dais who understands the technology,” appointed Councilmember (and former SPD crime prevention coordinator) Mark Solomon said, “Cameras are not a crime prevention tool. They’re an investigative tool.”

“I hear folks say this isn’t going to do anything—well, tell that to family whose house has gotten broken into, because while the stats say that things are getting better, stats don’t mean nothing when it’s your house has gotten broken into, or when it’s your neighborhood that’s been shot at,” Solomon continued. “And I hear that from the people in my neighborhood. I hear that from my community, who are the ones who are saying, yeah, if we had cameras that could help.”

Council President Sara Nelson and public safety committee chair Bob Kettle were also quick to dismiss overwhelming public opposition to the surveillance expansion. Kettle said he had just talked to 24 people in Interbay, and “every single one of those 24 people, those two dozen people, would have been happy to have a CCTV program. So this idea that [there is] overwhelming opposition is false.”

The bills the city is passing to expand police surveillance, Kettle continued, “are not standard bills. They do not reflect what you see in other jurisdictions across the country and they are definitely not red state, red county American bills. They are Seattle bills.”

The council rejected several amendments that would have limited the expansion of surveillance to fewer areas of the city and created new evaluation requirements that would help the city better understand the impact of the cameras on civil rights and crime. In a mostly symbolic acknowledgement of public concerns, they did pass an amendment authorizing the city to pause the cameras for 60 days if the federal government issues an order to turn over camera footage for immigration purposes.

Only Dan Strauss and Alexis Mercedes Rinck opposed the legislation. In comments prior to the vote, Rinck said it was reckless to expand surveillance of Seattle residents at the precise time when the Trump Administration is targeting progressive cities and without any data showing that the pilot program has accomplished any of its goals.

In San Francisco, she noted, the police department itself shared data from automated license plate readers with police from red states, “in contradiction to all of their local policies and state laws that purport to shield their citizens.” Similar incidents are occurring across the country, including in Denver, Nashville, Washington, D.C., and cities across California, she noted.

“Sure, no city has done it exactly the way that we have. We have different contractor providers and different companies, and we all have different safety protocols,” Rinck said. “But this is happening across the board. Do we know with 100 percent certainty what happened in each of these cases that caused their systems to fail? Why do we think we’re so special, so across all across the US, in other liberal and blue cities where communities live, hoping that their government that their government will serve and protect them?”

“I do not look forward to the day where we have to sit back up here on this dais and deal with the aftermath of our data being handed over to other actors,” Rinck continue. “I do not want to be sitting up here in the future telling people telling people, ‘I’m sorry we put your community in danger,’ when we could have stopped it today. It is a matter of when, not if, our data will be handed over to the federal government and other actors.”

Rinck, currently the council’s only consistent progressive, could soon be joined by Eddie Lin (District 2) and Dionne Foster  (Position 9). Debora Juarez, appointed to replace District 5 short-timer Cathy Moore, will be off the council next year, and the incumbents who won in the backlash election of 2023—Rob Saka, Joy Hollingsworth, Maritza Rivera, and Kettle—will be up for reelection in 2027.

If some of the council’s more conservative members are replaced by progressive challengers that year (and if Wilson defeats incumbent Bruce Harrell, as she seems on track to do), it’s likely that some of some of the heavy-handed police-state legislation passed by this council will be reversed—though not in time to prevent any privacy and civil-rights violations that take place as the result of expanded police surveillance between now and then.

Arts, City Council

An Interview With the Creator of the Seattle City Council Sock Puppets

By Erica C. Barnett

City Hall has been speculating for months about who’s behind a series of short Youtube videos featuring the members of the Seattle City Council as sock puppets—each meticulously designed to highlight or scrutinize some aspect of each council member’s character.

The vertically shot videos are deceptively simple—each Muppet-style puppet speaks in turn, lip-synching to audio of a council meeting—and often include visual jokes that range from subtle (a tiny Maritza Rivera can barely get her eyes above the dais) to blunt, like the most recent video featuring books the council might be reading on their two-week summer vacations. (Former Councilmember Cathy Moore, who frequently became indignant when people opposed her politically, is reading a copy of White Fragility at the golf course. Layers!)

One of my personal favorites came from a meeting when Rob Saka, unprompted, brought up a supposedly untranslatable Finnish concept called sisu, then proceeded to translate it, at great length, while the rest of the council just kind of sat there. In the video, Saka—the son of a Nigerian dad and a Finnish mom—bobs around in a tiny replica of the dashiki he wore during his 2023 campaign as the Finnish flag unfurls behind him and the Finnish national anthem plays in the background.

The identity of the “The Seattle Channel” puppet master has been a topic of fierce speculation at City Hall. As recently as primary election night, an elected official told me they knew for a fact that it was someone who works for city government, and they were so confident, I believed them. But they were wrong.

“The puppets,” as they’re referred to at City Hall, are the product of a group of people, but the project was launched by one person—a longtime visual artist who lives on Capitol Hill and has never worked at City Hall. We asked for an interview earlier this year; this week, the originator of the puppet channel finally said yes, on the condition that we not reveal his identity. The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

I love the puppets. What made you decide to start doing these videos?

My story is that I started really tuning in to local politics, I think like a lot of people, in 2020, with the Black Lives Matter/George Floyd/Breonna Taylor uprising in my neighborhood, on Capitol Hill. Through that experience of those protests and the experience of having police bombing my neighborhood and seeing all of that firsthand, I got involved in some local activist groups [like Solidarity Budget and Stop Surveillance City] that are are particularly focused on the mayor and the city council and local politics—groups that are really focused on trying to push the city toward an idea of public safety that’s much more about solidarity and human services and less on policing and courts.

Through that work I started tracking city politics and the city council. When they started with the original legislation proposing CCTV, I was really frustrated at how this particular council seems to be extremely uninterested in listening to public feedback and data and taking in information. Especially with the surveillance bill, because there was such a huge amount of skepticism expressed by the public and the official surveillance working group recommended not passing it. There were lots of reasons they should not have passed that bill and they did it anyway

There are so many amazing details in your sock puppets that I feel like it takes a keen observer of the city council to notice—like the fact that Bob Kettle’s eyebrows are the same color as his skin. What’s your process for identifying and including all those details?

At first, I was trying to find socks at a thrift store to try to match the complexion of the council members. I think of Kettle as being a very, very white man, and somehow one of those athletic socks just seemed appropriate. I love making things. I’ve only made some of the puppets. Some of them were made by other people who are also very talented puppet makers. The thing about puppets that’s amazing as an art form is, it takes so little to turn an inanimate object into something animate. You just put some googly eyes on a sock and it suddenly has a personality.

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I’m obsessed with the way you chose to do Sara Nelson’s hair—it’s somehow exactly her hair, even though the yarn is a bunch of tangled-up colors and her actual hair is gray.  

She was the first puppet I made and I think it’s partially just kind of the materials I had on hand. It seemed like it worked.

Tell me more about your goals for this project.

The group that is working on the puppets is a group that has been going since 2020. We make all sorts of media for different kind of activist campaigns. The question is, how do you take complicated issues that the city is facing and distill it down in a way that’s poppy enough that it catches somebody’s attention that may not be following it closely and doesn’t simplify and flatten it. We’ve done a lot of stuff on social media to try to get people to pay attention to what is happening. This puppet project is in that same spirit. Puppets as a metaphor for politicians who seem to be beholden to interests that are not in the public interest.

In terms of process, there are actually several people in the immediate group who make it with me, and a larger group of people who are regular watchers of the council through the official Seattle Channel because of the activist work that we do. So people send me bits and suggestions. Originally they were going to be much shorter and kind of sillier, which is how they started, but increasingly we got this idea of really trying to base it on whatever happened in the council the week before. And then, obviously, we take audio from the Seattle Channel’s recordings of the meetings

Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth has complained that she doesn’t have a puppet. Do you only make puppets for the “bad guys”?

I mean, kind of, yeah. The ones who seem like they’re acting the worst are going to get puppets—the ones that seem most unwilling to think about public opinion and be swayed by what people in Seattle really want.

Have you gotten any feedback from anyone featured in your videos?

No, I haven’t really heard from anyone. The only person who really provided feedback from any government position was [CARE Department Chief] Amy Barden. There was video of a meeting where she presented [and was represented by a Barbie doll], and she posted “career highlight!”  Because it’s all anonymous, the only feedback I get, really, is from my friends.

Everyone at City Hall watches your videos. I mean, everyone.

Oh my god! That’s so funny to hear.

I love that it’s become such a thing in City Hall, and also among the people who follow your reporting closely. I would love to try to reach a broader audience. It’s hard to get people’s attention. There’s so much stuff going on and it’s hard to get people to tune in. We’re all so overwhelmed by things that are happening nationally and internationally, but in terms of ways that we can really survive this upcoming time, where I think things are going to get really bad, I think [we should be] focusing locally on city and state politics, and trying to make sure we have a representative democratic government that is focused on how we keep people safe and housed and fed.

The video I think about the most is the one where Bob Kettle says “happy birthday” to Sara Nelson in a bunch of different languages, and then you see the top of Maritza Rivera’s head pop up above the dais and add “and Feliz Cumpleaños!” 

That’s one of my favorites ever. Their interpersonal dynamics! We were talking the other day—is the genre sort of like The Office? It’s the same cast of characters, they come in every day and have their little spats and it just repeats, just like a workplace comedy.

 

Housekeeping

Summer Recess FAQ

By Erica C. Barnett

PubliCola is going on summer recess for the next two weeks, returning on September 10. Here are the answers to a few commonly asked questions.

Where are you going? 

Follow me on Instagram if you’re really interested, but, roughly, here.

Will you be posting while you’re out of town?

Probably not, unless, you know, something major happens! The last time I was in this part of the world, this happened (I broke the news on Twitter from somewhere in Bulgaria).

What if I want to reach you? 

As always, you can reach out to me on Bluesky (or IG) and by email (erica@publicola.com), just know that it’ll take me a while to get back to you.

Are you timing your vacation with the city council’s summer recess? 

Nope, it’s just a happy accident, and I’ll be back about a week after they are.

By Erica C. Barnett

PubliCola is going on summer recess for the next two weeks, returning on September 10. Here are the answers to a few commonly asked questions.

Where are you going? 

Follow me on Instagram if you’re really interested, but, roughly, here.

Will you be posting while you’re out of town?

Probably not, unless, you know, something major happens! The last time I was in this part of the world, this happened (I broke the news on Twitter from somewhere in Bulgaria).

What if I want to reach you? 

As always, you can reach out to me on Bluesky (or IG) and by email (erica@publicola.com), just know that it’ll take me a while to get back to you.

Are you timing your vacation with the city council’s summer recess? 

Nope, it’s just a happy accident, and I’ll be back about a week after they are.

How dare you.

Yeah, I know.

 

homelessness

Homelessness Authority Director Under Investigation After Complaints Claiming Racial Bias, “Toxic Work Environment”
KCRHA director Kelly Kinnison

By Erica C. Barnett

Kelly Kinnison, the CEO of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, is currently the subject of an internal investigation into several complaints about her management style and hiring decisions, including one by a high-level staffer who quit the agency last week over what she described as a “toxic work environment.”

The KCRHA’s governing board, made up of elected officials from across the county, has held multiple closed-door executive sessions to discuss the ongoing investigation, which could result in discipline.

The investigation is expected to wrap up in the next few weeks, according to sources familiar with the board’s deliberations.

The initial spark for the complaints came earlier this year, when Kinnison, who is white, decided to create two new executive positions—a chief of youth programs overseeing Built for Zero work to end youth homelessness and a chief of systems innovation—and direct-hire two white men to fill them, including one who was reportedly allowed to write his own job description. (PubliCola has chosen not to name either man).

The salary for both positions was set at $200,000 a year. The Raikes Foundation would provide partial funding for the youth homelessness position, but the rest of the funds would have to come out of KCRHA’s budget, which faces potential cuts of more than $2 million next year. Emails obtained through a records request show that Kinnison had been directly talking with both men about potential jobs at the agency since 2024.

The proposed new hires, coming at at time when KCRHA was drafting a budget that would eliminate nearly 60 shelter beds and cut as many as 22 positions, struck many on KCRHA staff as irresponsible. Not only would both the new executive-level positions pay more tha most staff were making, there were, according to at least one of the complainants, multiple Black KCRHA employees qualified to fill the two roles if KCRHA management really believed they were necessary.

In a complaint filed on August 7, the staffer who quit last week, then-interim chief program officer Xochitl Maykovich, wrote, “I do not have faith that the current CEO of KCRHA can effectively manage the organization because she does not prioritize the responsibility the agency has to effectively manage tax payer dollars, she has not addressed concerns raised about racial discrimination, and she is making irresponsible financial decisions.

“Since I’ve been in the Interim Chief Program Officer role, I have raised consistent concerns about the appearance of racial discrimination and fiscal irresponsibility, but each time, rather than trying to find a solution, she has dug in and made me feel like she wants to fire me. I feel at very high risk of retaliation from the CEO for raising these concerns.”

Maykovich told PubliCola that when she heard Kinnison wanted to hire the two men, she was already wondering “why did I even get hired?” given that the agency’s budget, at the time, was several million dollars in the red. “I was so aggressive about it because it felt so wrong—this is so much money, we were having budget issues, and we could be in a position of laying people off,” she said.  “We don’t have the business justification for this, and morale was so low.”

Maykovich said she told Kinnison, “It’s going to create a lot of feelings if you directly hire a white guy at this level and pay him this much money, when we have at least three Black staff with expertise in youth homelessness who you pay a lot less, and you don’t consider them.”

In response, Maykovich said, “She snapped at me and said, ‘I don’t care about their feelings.” Maykovich included this alleged incident in her complaint.

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KCRHA has not hired either of the two men, and it’s unclear whether they plan to in the future. A KCRHA spokesperson declined to respond to questions, citing the ongoing investigation.

As news of the potential new hires leaked out internally, rumors also spread that Kinnison said it would be helpful to have white men representing KCRHA in discussions with elected officials, including specific Seattle City Council members. According to Maykovich’s complaint, she told Kinnison in a meeting of the executive team that “staff would have a lot of feelings about this decision,” to which Kinnison reportedly replied, “I don’t care about their feelings.”

Emails obtained through public disclosure requests show that KCRHA’s deputy chief, Simon Foster, also raised concerns about the optics and cost of the new hires. On April 16, Foster wrote Kinnison raising concerns about the new positions, including “budgetary alignment,” “mission consistency,” and “team cohesion.”

“We are actively asking our teams to absorb significant reductions, delay hiring, and reassess work plans based on limited resources,” Foster, who is Black, wrote. “Bringing on additional high salaried executive roles during this time may compromise our fiscal credibility and sustainability.”

Additionally, Foster wrote, the hires could call into question KCRHA’s “commitment to equity, not just in outcomes, but in process and leadership composition. Relying on a framing that centers White male representation as a political access point risks undermining the values we have stated publicly and internally.”

Kinnison responded by saying she planned to move forward with the two hires that week.

Two days later, in a separate email thread, Kinnison said she was “shocked” to learn that members of the executive leadership team knew about one of the new job descriptions, and said she was looking into “how this information was inappropriately shared so that we can ensure the integrity of our hiring processes and internal communication protocols.”

Kinnison also rejected “the perception that I feel we need white male representation to get political access. … That is not my belief, nor it is reflected in my hiring practices or guidance to hiring managers.”

In response, Foster confirmed that he was the one who shared the job descriptions, saying he did so as “an effort to surface critical feedback early and ensure that if we move forward, we do so with clarity, buy‐in, and organizational alignment.”

“I want to be clear, the discomfort being expressed within the Executive Leadership Team and throughout the organization, is not merely about an individual hire, but about a pattern of decision making, communication, and lack of clarity that is beginning to erode trust,” Foster wrote. “While you and I may have different perspectives on the intent behind these decisions, the perception among senior leaders is very real, and needs to be addressed head‐on, not deflected.”

In a followup email, which Foster shared with KCRHA’s human resources director Irwin Batara, Foster asked Kinnison to participate in a special meeting with the entire leadership team to discuss, among other issues, “unspoken frustrations, questions, and concerns that haven’t been given proper space for direct engagement with you.”

That meeting apparently didn’t happen. But less than two weeks later, at a meeting of top agency leaders that Kinnison did not attend, Maykovich and at least one other staffer complained at length about her plan to hire two new executive staff at a time when many lower-level KCRHA workers stood to lose their jobs. Two days later, the executive team met again, this time with Kinnison in attendance.

According to multiple accounts, Kinnison told everyone on her team to come out with whatever complaints they had, and each did so in turn. Some raised concerns that Kinnison and Foster were being too public about their internal leadership disputes, while others, including Maykovich, said KCRHA had become a hostile work environment, particularly for people of color. (Maykovich is Latina). In response, Kinnison reportedly said that she has the final say over all KCRHA decisions, including who gets hired.

At the end, Maykovich said, Kinnison told the leaders, “‘If you think you’re in a hostile work environment, bring it on.'”

After the meeting, Batara reportedly recorded the comments of each member of the executive staff as a separate complaint against Kinnison—about a half-dozen complaints in all.

About half an hour after the meeting ended, Kinnison wrote an email to Foster and Batara expressing “concerns about Xochitl’s performance”—effectively an HR complaint against Maykovich. The email described several recent meetings at which, according to Kinnison, Maykovich had been unprepared or spoken out of turn (Maykovich disputes this) and concluded by calling her “combative” and suggesting that “we escalate the coaching we are providing.”

Two days later, after meeting with King County Councilmember Jorge Báron, Kinnison wrote another email to Foster telling him to hold off on disciplining Maykovich; she did not cite a reason, and Báron, citing the investigation, declined to comment.

“I want to hold on taking any action on this until things settle, so no rush on bringing back recommended next steps,” she wrote.

The KCRHA’s general counsel, Edmund Witter, was reportedly among the staff who raised concerns about the perception of racial bias in Kinnison’s hiring decisions. Five days after the meeting where the executive leadership team aired their grievances, Kinnison told Witter he would no longer represent the agency on any HR matters, “so that we have his housing and agency expertise available to the many other things on his plate,” according to an April 29 email. (Witter declined to comment).

As the result of that decision, KCRHA has retained an international law firm, Ogletree Deakins, to represent them on employment matters. In addition to the additional cost of hiring an outside firm, the agency plans to hire a consultant, at an estimated cost of more than $60,000, to do an organizational assessment. It’s unclear if this outside assessment is part of an internal agreement to resolve the complaints; this is one of the questions we posed to KCRHA that a spokesperson declined ot answer.

A report on the investigation into Kinnison’s actions as CEO has reportedly been completed, so it probably won’t be long before its conclusions are public.

Meanwhile, the KCRHA still faces many internal and external pressures. As we’ve reported, the Harrell administration directed the authority to go through an “exercise” of cutting its budget by 2 percent earlier this year; in response, the agency came up with a proposal that it said would result in a $4.7 million shortfall in its administrative budget, which already falls far short of what most government agencies set aside for these positions.

The city of Seattle has tremendous sway over KCRHA’s actions because it provides most of the authority’s budget, along with King County; in recent years, the Harrell administration has used that power to claw back control over homelessness prevention and outreach, which the city restructured earlier this year. Harrell has reportedly not wanted to get involved in the dispute over Kinnison’s management of the agency; a spokesperson for the mayor declined to answer questions, citing the investigation.

Kinnison was chosen after Harrell’s pick to head the KCRHA on an interim basis, Darrell Powell, withdrew his name for the permanent position and stepped down after PubliCola reported statements he made about LGBTQ staffers and allegations that he repeatedly used an ableist slur in the presence of staff, among other issues.

KCRHA’s budget is also perennially in the red, ever since—in an effort to do a better job of paying contractors on time—the agency began taking out loans to fund up-front payments to nonprofit homeless service providers, leaving the agency in debt until all its funding comes in at end of the budget year.