1. Takayo Ederer, who registered as a candidate for Seattle City Council District 2 in March, reportedly will not file as a candidate for the position next week. Ederer—whose personal wealth, as we reported, eclipses that of the entire current city council—has raised about $27,000, mostly in $650 contributions, the limit for candidates who opt out of the city’s democracy voucher public campaign finance program.
Candidates have to register in order to raise money, but a campaign isn’t official until filing week, when candidates must declare their candidacy. Filing week is next week, and the filing deadline is next Friday, May 9.
2. Earlier this week, we reported that we’d heard 2009 mayoral candidate Joe Mallahan was calling around to local political insiders about challenging Mayor Bruce Harrell. We have an update: Mallahan is definitely calling around, but he seems to be having trouble finding a political consultant who will rep him against the mayor—and that includes the firm that represented him back in 2009 .
Back then, Mallahan was challenging an unpopular two-term mayor, Greg Nickels, who got knocked out in a primary. He lost the general election to Mike McGinn, who became the first in a series of mayors who served one term or less (Ed Murray resigned in his fourth year after five men accused him of sexual assault). If Harrell is reelected, he’ll be the first two-term mayor in 15 years.
3. As the Seattle Times reported yesterday, City Councilmember Cathy Moore is proposing legislation that would remove the requirement that council members = recuse themselves from votes when they have a potential financial conflict of interest. Instead, council members would merely have to disclose their conflict.
The changes, drafted by the Ethics and Elections Commission last year, would remove a standard tool designed to prevent financial conflicts and corruption. Historically, however, it has been vanishingly rare for city council members to actually abstain from votes because of real or perceived conflicts of interest, according to a look at the minutes of every full council meeting over the last five years. (Anecdotally, council members often say they’re abstaining because they need more information, which can be code for not wanting to take an unpopular vote).
Recently, Tanya Woo abstained from voting in committee on a proposal to reduce the minimum wage for delivery workers because she and her husband own a restaurant that uses these services; after widespread opposition, the measure never made it to full council.
Moore will soon introduce legislation rolling back a number of landlord-tenant laws, including a prohibition on adding roommates who are not on a lease, moratoria on winter and school-year evictions, and a law that lowered the minimum fee for late rent to a nominal $10. If the recusal requirement remains in effect, it’s possible that the two council members who each own rental property—Maritza Rivera and Mark Solomon—would face pressure to recuse themselves.
However, history suggests otherwise. Rivera and Solomon each own one small rental apartment, and make less than $30,000 a year from rent (campaign finance disclosures include a range from $0 to $29,999), which makes their potential conflict much smaller than, say, a real estate developer or the owner of multiple apartment buildings.
Smaller, say, than former councilmember Mike O’Brien, who owned three properties that he used as Airbnbs but did not recuse himself from legislation (which he sponsored) limiting the number of Airbnbs a single property owner could operate.
This post has been updated to include more information about SDOT’s pothole budget.
Several recently elected members of the City Council raised a novel objection to pro-housing advocates who argued the city should allow more density and plant more public trees yesterday: Trees in the private yards of single-family houses, they argued, are better for people than those in parks and public rights-of-way.
The arguments against public trees took place during a discussion about the impact proposed changes to the city’s comprehensive plan would have on tree canopy. Two years ago, the city updated its tree code to place new restrictions on some tree removals; since then, groups like Tree Action Seattle have argued that the tree code will lead to the “clearcutting” of Seattle.
Whatever individual tree advocates’ motivations, the impact of forcing Seattle property owners to retain trees in their private lawns is to prevent density in Seattle’s traditional single-family neighborhoods, worsening Seattle’s housing shortage as the population grows. (For people motivated by the desire to keep renters out of “their” neighborhoods, trees have largely replaced the blunter objections of the past, such as complaints that renters ruin people’s property values.) Advocates want to revamp the two-year-old tree code to make it difficult or impossible to remove large private trees for development or any other purpose, and Moore is their main champion on the council.
Addressing several staff for the city departments that deal with planning, land use, and trees, Moore kicked things off by saying that planting trees in street rights-of-way, such as planting strips and medians, is “problematic” and potentially “not sustainable” because sometimes the city ends up removing those trees anyway; for example, Moore said, a SDOT was “wanting to cut down all those trees” on a landscaped median on Beacon Avenue.
After staffers responded that most of those trees were actually going to stay in place—the city puts signs on trees to indicate that they could be removed, not that they will—Moore made her case that trees in people’s private yards are actually better than trees in parks and other public spaces.
“While you say everybody is 10 minutes’ walking distance from a park, not everybody is mobile,” Moore said, addressing city staffers who had been describing the city’s tree planting and maintenance program. “And also, I don’t think that you can necessarily get the benefit of a tree by it being in a park. I mean, sometimes the benefit of the tree is that you’re standing outside your apartment building or your house when it’s 90 degrees and you’re getting some relief from the heat. You have the benefit of looking out a window and seeing a tree that you might not see in a park.”
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Moving beyond parks, Moore said that planting trees in public rights-of-way could also be “problematic,” because the city might have to remove the trees later for unanticipated reasons. For example, she’s “received a lot of emails about Beacon Avenue,” where the city has to repair sidewalks damaged by the roots of large street trees, “[and] SDOT wanting to cut down all those trees,” Moore said. “I appreciate the idea of wanting to put trees in the right-of-way, but that, too, comes with with issues.”
The trees Moore was referring to were marked with evaluation notices earlier this year; as a staffer noted in response to Moore, most will be retained thanks to sidewalk redesigns that allow the trees to keep growing while keeping the sidewalk accessible to people with disabilities.
Moore also brought up her favorite straw-man argument, one I’ve never heard anyone actually make: People who want to allow private property owners to remove trees, she said, inaccurately believe that any new housing that gets built in its place has to be affordable. (In other words, she’s saying that you probably believe any townhouse that goes up in your neighborhood is reserved for a low-income person).
“So this narrative that [if we remove trees for development], suddenly we’re going to have affordable housing, is incorrect,” Moore said. “I challenge the department, [the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections], to show me how many of these permits were for affordable housing, I submit to you that none of them were affordable housing.” This is the point when I started yelling “Literally no one has ever said that!” at my laptop screen.
Moore wasn’t the only council member to come up with reasons that forcing property owners to keep trees in their private yards was superior to planting and maintaining public trees.
Rob Saka, who set aside $2 million in last year’s budget to remove a traffic barrier that prevented illegal left turns into his children’s preschool, pointed out that if trees are allowed to grow tall in city rights-of-way, it makes it harder to remove them later for other “transportation purposes.”
“I definitely recognize that the right of way is it is an appropriate place to to plant trees and build our tree canopy,” Saka said, but “there are associated costs, nontrivial costs, associated with maintaining these tree canopies in our public right of ways.” Every year, SDOT’s budget for trees seems to “grow and grow. … I love arborists out there [but we’re] getting to a point, getting to a state where our ongoing annual maintenance costs for maintaining tree canopy alone, in shrubbery alone, eclipses our ability what we spend to repair basic potholes.”
“Planting trees is expensive,” Moore chimed in later, adding that the city should create a new fund to move existing trees, like a sequoia whose owner has become the target of protests, to other locations because the trees the city is planting now aren’t comparable to the ones in people’s existing yards. (City staff who compared new tree plantings to evergreens planted when Seattle was being developed were also being “disingenuous,” Moore said, because the new trees won’t live as long.)
SDOT’s general-fund budget for tree planting and maintenance is $11 million this year, up from $6.9 million in 2024 and $7.5 million in 2021. The general fund budget also includes $19 million for pavement maintenance and repair, which includes potholes—roughly the same amount as last year, and up from $15 million in 2023. Of that total, according to SDOT, about $4.2 million pays for pothole repair. Repairing each pothole costs a few hundred dollars.
The voter-approved 2024 transportation levy has an additional $29 million for urban forestry and citywide tree planting, and $67 million for pavement spot improvements, including potholes.
Planting “trees in a specific location,” Saka continued, has other inherent problems: “It limits our freedom to operate, and removes any flexibility, sense of flexibility or agility, that we need as a city. … So when you plant a lot of trees in rights-of-way and fully leverage that space, again, it limits our flexibility to accommodate new travel, new modes of travel, new traffic patterns, and make the most beneficial use of our roads that works for all.”
I have to admit, “street trees are a problem because you can’t move them” was a new one for me. So it was almost comforting to hear Moore return to a very, very old argument against adding density in single-family areas.
Contrary to what urbanists claim, Moore said, “it is disingenuous, I think, to talk about, you know, ‘if we don’t build density, then we’re going to sprawl.’ We are constrained by the Growth Management Act. If we don’t have density in Seattle, we’re not going to sprawl out, because we’re constrained by state law. So that’s a red herring, frankly. … People recognize when they’ve been sold a bill of goods.”
In reality, the red herring here is that the Growth Management Act prevents sprawl. King County’s growth management boundary—where, according to Moore, sprawl is prohibited— includes every sprawling bedroom community in the region, from Black Diamond and Maple Valley to North Bend and the Issaquah Highlands. (That sprawl exists, by the way, because developers cut down actual forests, as opposed to the “forest” of individual trees in people’s private yards that’s the subject of so much handwringing in Seattle.)
Moore’s wrong about the reason it’s happening, too. Seattle has created a housing shortage by adopting policies that prevent housing. That increases housing prices in Seattle and forces middle- and working-class people to move out into the sprawl that surrounds the city. The “bill of goods” is that Seattle’s anti-housing policies—and, yes, proposals to prevent development by forcing property owners to retain trees are anti-housing—don’t have consequences for the entire region.
City Attorney Ann Davison, who unilaterally ended the city’s therapeutic community court two years ago, announced yesterday that she’s rolling out a new option for people accused of drug misdemeanors, such as the recently adopted laws against using or possessing drugs in public spaces. The office announced the new “drug prosecution alternative” in a press release after the Seattle Times posted a story about it yesterday morning.
According to the announcement, “The Drug Prosecution Alternative will provide an incentive for defendants arrested for drug use and possession to connect with services and commit no new law violations to have their drug cases dismissed.”
The new alternative will include a “warm hand-off” from the court to the city’s Community Resource Center, where they will be able to access resources directly. After that, if they don’t violate the law for 60 days, their charges will be dismissed. This process will, in theory, free up the city attorney’s office to focus on other cases instead of going through a discovery process for every drug case they pursue.
If most of that sounds awfully familiar, it should. The structure of the new “drug prosecution alternative” is identical to the community court Davison shut down two years ago as the fentanyl epidemic raged. Put another way, what Davison is proposing is effectively a restoration of the old community court.
When Davison’s office announced it was ending community court two years ago, they derided the court as as ineffective and soft, in part, because defendants retained their right to trial and were not required to do community services as a condition for receiving services.
At the time, the office called this work requirement a non-negotiable “central component” of community court. “Community service was an essential and fundamental component of the original conception of Community Court, then-criminal division chief Natalie Walton-Anderson (who is now Mayor Bruce Harrell’s public safety director) wrote.
The new drug prosecution alternative has no community service requirements. Nor does it require defendants to give up their right to trial.
Municipal Court Judge Damon Shadid, who ran the old community court, wrote a proposal for a revamped version of community court back in 2023 in response to Davison’s concerns. Among other concessions to Davison, Shadid proposed eliminating a “level 1” track that allowed people to attend a life-skills class and get their charges dismissed and starting defendants at Level 2—going to an appointment at the service center.
Davison’s new proposal is substantively identical to what Shadid recommended in 2023.
Shadid said he was glad that Davison had come around on community court, retaining the elements he said were essential to its success when he tried to save a version of the court two years ago.
“I am pleased that the city attorney has adopted the Seattle Municipal Court Community Court structure for Drug Diversion Court,” Shadid said. “Ensuring defendants don’t have to give up rights to receive services allows us to start connecting defendants to services on their first court appearance.”
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Advocates generally agree that existing services are inadequate, particularly for unhoused people with severe substance use disorders.
Although the new adjudication process will be almost identical to the old community court, some of the details are new. The court will require participants to go through an initial urinalysis and a substance use disorder assessment, which will likely require the city to pay for a new staffer to do this arguably unnecessary task. (Assessments determine the severity of a person’s substance use disorder; someone arrested for using fentanyl on a sidewalk probably doesn’t need a test to know that he’s using drugs problematically.)
According to Tim Robinson, a spokesman for the City Attorney’s Office, “Substance abuse assessment assists in determining the level of care necessary.” As for the new drug test requirement, Robinson said, “a clean UA can lead to an expedited successful completion in the program. A dirty UA would not provide that same expedited pathway, but the individual could end up successfully completing the program and having their charges dropped.”
The new version of community court also gives the city attorney, not the court, sole authority to determine who is and isn’t eligible—another concession Shadid included in his2023 proposal. Davison’s office said they didn’t plan to apply any specific criteria to cases, but would instead decide on a “case by case” basis. “It is a complex endeavor,” Robinson said.
Previously, Davison excluded everyone on her list of frequent misdemeanor offenders (so-called “high utilizers”) from community court. This was problematic, even arbitrary, at the time; it may be even more so now that drug use is itself a misdemeanor, because the rule would explicitly exclude frequent drug offenders from services designed to help them out of addiction.
Mayor Bruce Harrell turns to address a group of new SPD recruits at a hiring announcement Monday.
1. Earlier this week, we reported that the Seattle Police Department has only managed to hire five women, out of 60 new recruits, so far this year—a result that falls far short of the city’s “30 by 30” goal of having a 30-percent female recruit class by 2030. (To meet that goal, SPD would have had to hire 25 women so far; the five women represent 8 percent of the new recruits.
But the story is actually worse than that, because women are actually leaving the department at a much faster rate than SPD is recruiting new women to replace them.
In 2025 so far, according to the mayor’s office, 24 people have left SPD. Five of those were women. So not only does the net increase in female officers this year stand at zero, more than 20 percent of the people who have left the department are women. Put another way: SPD is losing women far faster than it is replacing them.
New police chief Shon Barnes said this week that the department was looking at why some women don’t pass recruiting requirements and may “give them another look,” adding that lots of departments have trouble hiring women.
He didn’t address ways the department could make women more likely to apply for jobs in the first place, since the real issue isn’t so much that women are applying and failing but that women don’t see SPD as a good place to work and advance their careers—understandably so.
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2. The final state budget adopted by the legislature last week failed to restore funding for a critical program that has successfully moved hundreds of unsheltered people indoors.
The program, a collaboration that includes Purpose Dignity Action, REACH, and the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, resolves encampments in state rights-of-way by providing sustained outreach, intensive case management, and hotel-based shelter to former encampment residents. Unlike Seattle’s policy of aggressive sweeps, the program sticks with people and gets them indoors long-term; since 2022, more than two-thirds of the people in the program remain housed.
The budget the state legislature passed reduced funding for the program from $75 million to $45 million, which is just enough to continue services for people already enrolled in the program, but not enough to keep the “front door” open by resolving new encampments in the future.
Carolanne Sanders Lundgren, PDA’s chief campaigns officer, said that while nearly everyone, including people living in encampments, “agree that no one should be living in those conditions,” the systems that are in place to deal with encampments “do not do a good enough job of connecting people to real help that makes sense for their lives and circumstances.”
By slashing funds to the program, Sanders Lundgren said, the budget “halts all progress. The bigger picture is that as social and economic instability continue to grow, the need for resources like [right-of-way] outreach and temporary lodging–which provide immediate relief and a bridge to long-term stability–will only increase.”
A story posted earlier today in the Burner—an online publication started by former Stranger writer Hannah Krieg—claimed that the Seattle Public Library was “capitulating to fascism,” as Krieg put it on X, by forbidding frontline workers from recording ICE raids in library buildings on their phones and telling them that ICE does not need warrants to barge in and make arrests.
Citing a memo titled “Protocols for Immigration Enforcement: Compliance and Readiness at The Seattle Public Library” as well as an all-staff email from library director Tom Fay, the post also claimed that library staffers can’t ask ICE for a warrant to make arrests, and that SPL will not protect any employee who’s arrested for allegedly interfering in an ICE arrest.
What’s more, according to the article (written by a guest writer but posted by Krieg) the memo itself was apparently written by someone every progressive hates—Republican City Attorney Ann Davison.
Banning staffers from asking ICE agents for warrants? Prohibiting people from recording arrests on their phones? It all sounds quite alarming—and it would be, if any of it was true.
The Burner, which represents itself as independent journalism with a lefty twist, seems to have forgotten the journalism part. I got a copy of the memo, which was not linked in the post, and it took about five seconds to realize that at least one of the statements the publication represented, between quotation marks, as quotes from the memo … is not actually a quote from the memo.
These misrepresentations would just be sloppy if the memo actually did tell library staff that ICE never needs a warrant or that people can’t record ICE on their phones, as the story explicitly claims. But the memo (which is 12 pages long) basically says the opposite, so the misquotes are really misinformation.
The false quote from the memo is “Do not record interactions on a phone.” In fact, the memo (and a followup email to staff from Fay) emphasizes that it is legal to record ICE interactions, but that employees should use their personal devices to do so and understand the risk that a cop might get excited (as they do) and decide to arrest them. Describing a shitty fact about police behavior is a far cry from the saying that the “City will not defend, support or represent them in any legal case,” which is how the article describes the policy. The memo does not say any of that.
“This guidance does not intend to to strip library staff of their citizen right to film law enforcement,” Fay wrote, adding a link to guidance on recording police officers from the Freedom Forum, a First Amendment advocacy group.
UPDATE: On Wednesday, in an email to staff that also advised staff about the Burner’s inaccurate reporting, Fay said the library’s guidance not to record on city-owned phones was “the result of a misunderstanding that occurred at a citywide training in February.” That was the only part of the guidance that was specific to SPL’s protocols; now, the rules at the library are identical to those for all other city of Seattle staff.
This change won’t actually impact any frontline library staff, because none of those staffers have city-issued phones. In fact, just 76 of the library’s more than 650 employees have phones, including regional managers, supervisors, gardeners, and maintenance workers.
The story also says the memo directs staff that “warrants [are] not required” for ICE to make arrests. “[A]rrest warrants definitely are required except in limited cases (the memo does not acknowledged this),” the piece claims, contrasting the library’s policy unfavorably with a Seattle Public Schools policy that requires ICE to present a warrant before entering school buildings.
In fact, the memo dedicates several pages to the library’s protocol for barring ICE officers from all non-public spaces unless they can present a judicial warrant; explains the difference from a judicial and administrative warrant and notes that the latter isn’t sufficient; and gives staffers a script to use if an ICE officer tries to get into areas where they aren’t allowed without a warrant.
“Officers need a judicial warrant to enter and search non-public areas,” the memo says. (Emphasis in original.) “DO NOT consent/grant access to non-public areas.Please tell them the following: ‘You may not enter this non-public area, and I am not authorized to let you enter. I will notify Library administration, and someone will be coming to verify.” At that point, staffers are supposed to call their manager and document everything that happens.
Legally, ICE can make arrests in most public places, including libraries; schools were exempt under a federal policy that designated them as “sensitive” areas ICE needs a judicial warrant to enter. Although Trump rescinded that Biden-era policy in January, his executive order—which also covers churches, where the sanctuary movement began—is being challenged in court.
The library’s guidance comes directly from a citywide training on February 27 about how city employees should respond to ICE raids, among other topics related to immigration. The training was created by the city’s Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs, which has a ton of other know-your-rights resources on its website.
More than 1,000 employees across the city took part in the training, which explained existing city policies for dealing with ICE (which have not changed, but have obviously become more urgent) and included resources from Northwest Immigrant Rights Project and the National Immigrant Law Center.
I posted obliquely about this on Bluesky earlier, and I see that since then, the Burner has posted a whole separate post that now includes a completely different two-page memo, and has changed the headline on the original post, which was “Seattle Public Libraries Tells Workers Not To Interfere With ICE Raids.” Once you tell people they should be outraged at the local library for violating the First Amendment and forcing staff to roll over for ICE arrests, and shout on social media that they’re basically fascists, it’s pretty hard to walk that back.
“Library memo describes citywide ICE policy for public buildings, developed by Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs” isn’t much of a headline, though. That’s because it isn’t much of a story.
Update Wednesday: The original story has been removed, replaced by a new piece by Krieg asserting essentially the same facts and with a misleading headline that still suggests the library has ordered staff to stand by passively and not ask for warrants when they are required, which is false. The story was purportedly taken down because it did not include “copies of the memos” laying out the city’s policy, but the new piece still doesn’t include the the 12-page memo laying out the policy, which includes a script for demanding warrants and barring ICE from entering areas of public buildings where they are not allowed to be. The new piece also argues that SPL should order its frontline workers to be confrontational toward armed ICE agents. By doubling down on the false narrative and failing to correct or acknowledge any errors, the new post does not address any of the the issues outlined below.
1.Joe Mallahan, a 2009 mayoral candidate who narrowly beat incumbent Greg Nickels in the primary and went on to lose to Mike McGinn, has been calling around to local political insiders about challenging Mayor Bruce Harrell, PubliCola has heard. Mallahan’s victory in the August 2009 primary was widely seen as more of a defeat for Nickels than a victory for Mallahan’s ill-defined agenda; as Josh noted in his interview of Mallahan for PubliCola that year, Mallahan “seemed to agree with the Nickels on all of Nickels’ signature issues” and didn’t present a strong case against the mayor.
Mallahan, who spent $230,000 of his own money on his 2009 campaign, didn’t respond to a request for comment. In the 15 years since his defeat, Mallahan has voted consistently, and has donated sporadically to local candidates, including current King County Executive candidate Claudia Balducci (2025); Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi (2023); and then-councilmember Tim Burgess (2011.)
For those who weren’t around at the time, this was an actual pro-Mallahan video produced by the Seattle firefighters union on Mallahan’s behalf:
2. Takayo Ederer, a candidate for city council in District 2, is the only candidate to represent Southeast Seattle who did not responded to PubliCola’s request for an interview. Since the only information I have about Ederer’s political views comes from my Seattle Nice podcast co-host Sandeep Kaushik (make of that what you will!), I decided to take a peep at the political contributions she and her husband, real estate investor Daniel Ederer, have made locally over the years.
Here’s a quick, noncomprehensive list that should give you an idea of Ederer’s political leanings, as well as (perhaps) the reason she didn’t bother calling PubliCola back. In 2025, Ederer listed her job status as “unemployed” and her occupation as “homemaker,” although media reports have also described her as a karate teacher and the owner of her family’s karate studio.
• Republican City Attorney Ann Davison (2025);
• Mayor Bruce Harrell;
• Republican gubernatorial candidate Dave Reichert (2024)
• We Heart Seattle activist and 43rd District state House candidate Andrea Suarez (2024)
• Recall Kshama Sawant campaign (2021)
• City Councilmember Sara Nelson (2021 and 2017, when she lost her first council bid)
• Conservative District 2 council candidate-turned-right-wing X provocateur (and plagiarist) Ari Hoffman (2017).
Voting records show that Ederer has skipped a number of local elections in recent years, including both the general and primary elections in 2017 and 2021.
Although Ederer grew up in Columbia City, the Ederers lived in Laurelhurst, then Madison Park, until 2016. The family lives in a rarefied enclave; after selling their Madison Park house for $2 million, they bought a $2.3 million house overlooking the water on a 15,000-square-foot lot in Seward Park; according to public records, they’ve since doubled the size of the house, increasing its value to $3.5 million.
According to campaign finance records, Ederer reported an annual income between $530,000 and $860,000 a year, and owns assets with her husband valued at at least $13 million, not counting their home; Ederer’s true wealth, however, is almost certainly much higher, because nine of her 22 sources of investment income have values at “more than $1,000,000,” the highest number the Public Disclosure Commission requires candidates to report.
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That $13 million figure is lowballed in one other way: It represents the lowest range of every asset that is enumerated in Ederer’s financial disclosure report. Assuming the higher end of the range (and still counting all nine of those “more than $1,000,000” as exactly one million dollars), that’s a net worth of at least $15,000,000.
For comparison, the entire wealth of the current nine-member city council, not counting real estate, is less than $7 million, according to campaign finance records.
If elected, Ederer would be the wealthiest city council member in recent history. Although Mayor (and former councilmember) Bruce Harrell, who also lives in a $3.5 million view house on a huge lot in Seward Park, reported a similar household income, his non-real estate assets “only” add up to a minimum of $1.6 million, with three investment accounts valued at the vague “more than $1 million” level.
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But the story is actually worse than that, because women are actually leaving the department at a much faster rate than SPD is recruiting new women to replace them.
