King County

Meeting to Consider County Executive Appointment Canceled, Leaving Shannon Braddock In Limbo at Least Two More Weeks
Acting King County Executive Shannon Braddock

By Erica C. Barnett

Shannon Braddock, the acting King County Executive, will have to wait at least another two weeks to find out if the County Council plans to appoint her to the position through November, after Council Chair Girmay Zahilay canceled the council’s scheduled Tuesday meeting. The council appointed Braddock acting executive on April 1.

Zahilay said he made the decision out of respect for Councilmember Sarah Perry, whose husband, state Sen. Bill Ramos, died suddenly during a trail run on Saturday.

“Lots of our colleagues reached out saying they thought it would better for us to not meet on Tuesday, given that our colleague on the council has experienced such a sudden and tragic loss,” Zahilay told PubliCola. Zahilay said council staff told him there was no “time-sensitive legislative action” on the agenda.

In addition to legislation appointing Braddock (and a competing proposal from Reagan Dunn to initiate a process that could potentially end up appointing someone else), the agenda included an item appointing Braddock to the Sound Transit board, which is currently considering the future of light rail extensions to Ballard and West Seattle. The agenda also included a proclamation declaring April Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and the introduction of this year’s Medic One Levy proposal.

“I think this is one of those situations where our desire to address the human side of this job come into play,” he said. Rod Dembowski, the head of the council’s budget committee, also canceled a meeting on Tuesday.

Zahilay is one of two county council members who’s running for County Executive.

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The other is Claudia Balducci, who—after consulting with Perry’s office—decided not to cancel tomorrow’s meeting of the council’s Committee of the Whole. The agenda for that meeting includes several briefings about the local impact of federal funding cuts and a letter, sponsored by Balducci, supporting a state proposal to raise the cap on property tax increases—currently set at a sub-inflationary 1 percent—to 3 percent, which would allow local governments to raise more funds.

Balducci called the federal funding cuts a “rapidly developing risk to county government and services. We meet regularly once a month and by next month, the info we are being briefed on may have changed dramatically,” she said, so “it seemed important to me to proceed.”

“There are no scheduled major votes, so Sarah won’t miss an opportunity to vote,” Balducci added.

The council will take up Braddock’s appointment again on May 6, along with a counterproposal from Councilmember Reagan Dunn that would set up a “blue ribbon selection committee” to choose a finalist and an alternate for the position from a list of five people Constantine previously designated as potential successors.

The proposal is a long shot—Zahilay said he thinks Braddock has the votes—but it’s an example of the obstacles facing Braddock, who’s the first woman to ever serve as King County Executive.

“I absolutely understand and support” the decision to delay the meeting out of respect for Perry and her family, Braddock told PubliCola. “I’m eager to serve on the Sound Transit Board and I’m closely tracking the upcoming actions and will be prepared once the appointment occurs.”

City Council, Elections

PubliCola Questions: Seattle City Council District 2 Candidate Adonis Ducksworth

By Erica C. Barnett

This November, voters in District 2 will choose a replacement for Tammy Morales, the progressive councilmember who resigned in January and was replaced, on a short-term basis, by SPD crime prevention coordinator Mark Solomon, who has said he will not run for the position.

The election will mark the end of an unusually tumultuous time for the council, which consists overwhelmingly of first-time members, most of them elected in 2023. With first-term council president Sara Nelson on the ballot as well, it’s conceivable that by this time next year, the council will have only one member, Dan Strauss, serving a second term—an unprecedented situation, according to Seattle Municipal Archive records.

District 2’s new council member will have their work cut out for them. Many citywide problems, including displacement, a lack of affordable housing, gun violence, traffic deaths, disinvestment in social services, and inequitable access to amenities like grocery stores and parks, are magnified in Southeast Seattle. Rainier Avenue South, for example, has consistently been one of the two deadliest roads in the city for many years, yet efforts to slow traffic and decrease collisions on the busy arterial have been limited to gentrified neighborhoods, like Columbia City, or ineffective at reducing deaths and injuries.

Beyond these district-specific concerns, the new councilmember will have to address a looming budget crisis, vote on a new police contract that can and should fix accountability issues that the most recent contract ignored, and come up with solutions to the citywide housing shortage—all at a time when cuts to federal funding threaten to make every problem facing the city exponentially worse.

So far, four candidates have filed to run for Council District 2; more could join the race before the May 9 filing deadline.

Adonis Ducksworth, a longtime Seattle Department of Transportation staffer who recently returned to SDOT after a stint as Mayor Bruce Harrell’s transportation advisor, grew up on Beacon Hill and now lives in Rainier Beach. As a longtime skateboarder who credits skating (and golf) for keeping him out of trouble in his teens, Ducksworth is a passionate advocate for the Rainier Beach Skate Park, a project that has been delayed repeatedly and is currently scheduled to open later this year. Ducksworth wants to enclose the park so that skaters in South Seattle can have a place to skate in the winter, just like those in North Seattle.

We spoke with Ducksworth last week; this interview has been edited for length and clarity.

PubliCola (ECB): You sought this seat earlier this year, when Tammy Morales stepped down. What made you decide to run for election after the council chose Mark Solomon?

Adonis Ducksworth (AD): I grew up on Beacon Hill, and I live in Rainier Beach with my wife and two daughters. I have a 10-year-old and a 15-year-old. I want them and their friends to be safe when they cross the street, ride the bus, go to the community center or go to school, and whether people have lived here in the South End their whole lives, or are new to the area, or thinking about making South Seattle home, people want a district they can be proud of. That’s why I believe we need to change the narrative about South Seattle. We need to change the narrative that we have the most dangerous roads and the most dangerous neighborhoods.

I believe we need leaders that are from the district and understand the district. We need leaders who know how to bring people together. I’m the only candidate that I know of with the track record of bringing diverse groups of people and ideas together to get some of the city’s most complex projects done and policy adopted, whether it was both phases of 23rd, the West Seattle bridge closure, the Madison [bus rapid transit] project, the Seattle Transportation Plan, or the 2024 Transportation Levy. I know what it takes to get these things done.

ECB: The city may be facing major budget cuts, due to a revenue forecast that shows ongoing shortfalls in 2025 and 2026, plus an already forecasted deficit in 2027 and beyond. That’s before the city even starts trying to address federal cuts at the local level. How would you propose addressing these shortfalls?

AD: All options are on the table, including new progressive revenue, as well as expanding existing progressive revenue and looking at other sources of revenue. If spending cuts are on the table, I would fight to protect our city workers—those are the folks that keep our streets functioning, keep our potholes filled, do garbage collection, and keep our lights on, plus our planners and engineers. And I believe a lesson learned from COVID, especially as times get hard, is that we need to keep departments like Human Services whole, because more than ever, people will need to be connected with resources and solutions during times of need.

ECB: Are there areas that are going to be off limits to cuts, like the police department and the CARE Team?

AD: I think the expansion of the CARE Team has been great, and I think we should definitely continue that. The CARE Team that I would definitely would like to protect if cuts are on the table.

ECB: And just to press again on SPD: The police have a number of positions that are funded but not filled, which comes up as an issue every year. Would you consider cutting SPD?

AD: Like I said, I think all options are on the table. If it makes sense to make cuts to certain departments, I’m definitely willing to explore those.

ECB: Federal funding cuts are coming for local housing and homelessness programs. Would you prioritize housing, which takes years to come online, or immediate responses to the coming funding crisis, like shelter and treatment?

AD: I mean, we definitely need shelters to get people off the street and give them that opportunity to rest and potentially make a better choice. If they’re addicted to drugs or if they need help, they need shelter. Obviously, we are in a housing crisis, so building more housing, providing funding for housing— those are both things that I would say are also off the table in terms of cuts. If we are really going into a recession, those are things that we need more than ever.

ECB: I believe you declined, earlier this year, to say whether you voted for or against Proposition 1A, the measure to fund social housing. Now that the funding measure has passed, what policies would you support as a council member to help the social housing developer succeed? 

AD: I’m extremely happy that it did pass. We got the result that we wanted. As a council person going into 2026, I will do everything I can to support the implementation of Prop. 1A and social housing. And so that would mean directing funds to the social housing developer to make sure that they can get started as soon as they can on building social housing.

I’ve got my eye on seeing how the council implements HB 1110 to make room for more housing throughout the residential zones. Because social housing could, in my mind, fit into that. You could have a fourplex or a triplex, where you’ve got market rate [housing], you’ve got [housing for people making] 60 percent [of median income], and potentially transitional housing. Continue reading “PubliCola Questions: Seattle City Council District 2 Candidate Adonis Ducksworth” →

City Council, Elections, homelessness, Police, Trump

This Week on PubliCola: April 19, 2025
No, we didn’t remove any numbers from this graph—there aren’t any! (And, yes, it only goes through last October for some reason).

The City Council grapples with bleak budget news, PubliCola interviews candidates for City Council District 2, and much more.

Monday, April 14

New Council Committee Shines a Light on Bleak Impacts of Trump Funding Cuts

The city council isn’t merely facing a major revenue shortfall—it also has to decide how to respond to major federal cuts to programs that help give Seattle its progressive, welcoming reputation. We spoke to the chair of a new committee dedicated to responding to these issues (which, we’d argue, every council committee should also be focusing on) about how the federal changes are already impacting Seattle.

Seattle Nice: Is the City Ready for Trump 2.0? (Spoiler: Nope!)

On this week’s podcast, we discussed the upcoming city budget, which is the main venue for elected officials, including the council, to prioritize and support programs and services that benefit Seattle residents. So far, though, there’s little indication that the council is treating the one-two punch of local shortfalls and federal cuts as the emergency it is.

Tuesday, April 15

PubliCola Questions: District 2 City Council Candidate Jamie Fackler

Jamie Fackler, a building inspector for the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections and steward with one of the biggest unions representing city employees, is running for the Seattle City Council seat currently held by Mark Solomon, who replaced Tammy Morales after she stepped down earlier this year. Fackler says he’d work to improve public safety by investing in the social safety net.

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Wednesday, April 16

PubliCola Questions: Seattle City Council District 2 Candidate Eddie Lin

Second in our series of interviews with District 2 council candidates is assistant city attorney Eddie Lin. Lin, who represents the Office of Housing, told us he wants to see deep investments in youth gun violence prevention.

Thursday, April 17

Councilmember Saka Looks for the Bright Side in Grim Local Revenue Forecast

During a grim presentation on the city’s latest revenue forecast, City Councilmember Rob Saka pressed city budget staffers for good news—in the form of unanticipated revenues from the Club World Cup, tourism, and cruise ship traffic—but found little.

KCRHA Holds Closed Session on “Federal Funding Impacts,” Approves Loan to Address Deficit Spending

The regional homelessness authority’s governing board, currently made up entirely of elected politicians, went into executive session to talk about unspecified “federal funding issues” with the agency, but did not fill the public in on what those issues are. At the same meeting, the board approved a cash transfer from King County—a separate government that provides some of the agency’s funding—to improve the KCRHA’s persistent operational deficit.

Former Police Chief Inadvertently IDs New Top SPD Hire

Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes plans to hire his longtime associate Alex Ricketts as his chief of staff. Former police chief Carmen Best inadvertently spilled the news on Facebook last week in a post that included a photo of Ricketts and a caption referring to welcoming Barnes’ chief of staff. SPD’s last chief of staff, Jamie Tompkins, resigned last year after an investigation concluded she lied about her alleged affair with former SPD chief Adrian Diaz.

Police

Former Police Chief Inadvertently IDs New Top SPD Hire

By Erica C. Barnett

In a Facebook post yesterday, former Seattle police chief Carmen Best inadvertently revealed that new SPD Chief Shon Barnes has hired retired police lieutenant Alex Ricketts to serve as his right-hand man in Seattle. Ricketts was most recently a community relations specialist for Barnes in Madison, WI, where Barnes was police chief before coming to Seattle; he previously worked with Barnes in Greensboro, SC, where Barnes was a captain.

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“Season final, Kraken lost after a great effort!” Best wrote. “Awesome to welcome Seattle Police Department new Chief of Staff who was there with our Seattle Police Chief,” Best wrote. The second of four photos included in the post shows Best, Barnes, and others posing in what appears to be a suite at Climate Pledge Arena; in the photo, Ricketts is wearing a sweatshirt for Kappa Alpha Psi, the Black fraternity to which both he and Barnes belong, according to publicly available records.

Shortly after the post went up, Best edited the post to remove the references to Barnes and his chief of staff.

A spokesperson for SPD declined to confirm or deny Ricketts’ appointment.

The most recent SPD chief of staff was Jamie Tompkins, who resigned last year after investigators accused her of lying and faking a handwriting sample during an investigation into an alleged inappropriate relationship with former chief Adrian Diaz.

homelessness, Trump

KCRHA Holds Closed Session on “Federal Funding Impacts,” Approves Loan to Address Deficit Spending

The top graph is from a KCRHA presentation in February, predicting positive cash flow through 2025 with the help of cash advances and loans from King County. The second is from a KCRHA presentation this morning, showing actual cash flow in 2024. Maddeningly, neither graph includes numbers to indicate how much money those gray bars represent.

By Erica C. Barnett

During a Thursday-morning meeting of the King County Regional Council’s governing board, which includes nine elected officials from around the county, the board went into an extended executive session to discuss what the board’s pro tem chair, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell, described as unspecified “federal funding impacts.” The closed session lasted about half an hour.

Before shutting down the meeting, Harrell announced, “We’re going to move into executive session to discuss federal funding impacts pursuant to RCW 42.3 0.110″—the part of the Open Public Meetings Act that includes a list of reasons a government agency can call an executive session. Anyone calling an executive session has to cite a specific exemption from that list, which Harrell did not do.

KCRHA spokeswoman Lisa Edge told PubliCola after the fact that the board had used the “litigation” exemption, which allows closed meetings to discuss current or potential lawsuits.  This exemption is fairly common for elected bodies (the Seattle City Council uses it all the time to talk about lawsuits the city is embroiled in), but it’s generally included in the written agenda and always stated out loud—not vaguely implied by a hand-waving reference to the entire list of possible reasons for closing a meeting to the public.

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It’s unclear whether the KCRHA is involved in any lawsuits related to federal funding. (The executive session was not on the agenda for the meeting). But the agency’s contracts, and KCRHA itself, will definitely be impacted by cuts to the Interagency Council on Homelessness, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Health and Human Services, among other lifeline federal agencies. Except for a brief discussion in February, KCRHA’s governing board has not talked about the impact of these potentially existential cuts during any of its regular public meetings.

By all appearances, KCRHA already operates on a razor’s edge. After the board returned from executive session, the agency’s finance director, James Rouse, explained that because the authority doesn’t receive money from its funders—primarily the city and King County— at the same time that it needs to pay homeless service providers, it operates at a deficit for most of the year, relying on “interfund” loans and cash advances from the city and King County to stay solvent.

“We start off with a zero cash balance,” Rouse said, then “we pay our providers, [and] we end up in a negative cash balance” that grows throughout the year while the KCRHA waits for reimbursement. By the end of the year, Rouse said, the authority receives enough money to bring the agency’s balance back to zero, and the cycle starts again.

That isn’t exactly what happened last year (the authority only had a positive cash balance in August and September, according to a graph presented at today’s meeting), and it isn’t the pattern the agency’s finance staff predicted just two months ago, when they presented a graph showing large deficits in January and February that transformed into positive balances starting in March 2025 and dwindling to zero by the end of this year.

Both graphs are reproduced above; neither includes specific monetary figures, and the legislation authorizing the interfund loan from King County is effectively a blank check. According to Edge, the loan kicks in when the agency’s bank account drops into the negative.

City Council, Economy

Councilmember Saka Looks for the Bright Side in Grim Local Revenue Forecast
The city’s revenue from local sales taxes comes largely from construction and trade, not from people spending money here.

By Erica C. Barnett

On Wednesday, the city council’s budget committee got briefed on the latest bad news for upcoming city budgets: Revenues are expected to come in lower than anticipated over the next two years, forcing the city to consider substantial budget cuts. The shortfall is the result of numerous small and large revenue reductions, but the biggest change is a decline in projected revenues from the JumpStart tax, which is now expected to produce $167 million less over the next two years than previously assumed.

Under the original JumpStart law, these funds would have gone to a specific list of spending priorities that were outside the general fund; last year, the council codified what had become a regular practice and passed a law saying JumpStart can be used for any purpose, so shortfalls can now have a direct impact on basic city services. The new numbers also include shortfalls in sales tax revenues, business and occupation taxes, parking meter revenues, and utility taxes, among lots of other items marked by red ink in the Economic and Revenue Forecast Council’s presentation.

During the largely grim presentation, Councilmember Rob Saka sought reasons for optimism. First, he said that even though revenues from court fines have been declining, his committee just approved new speed cameras in school zones and is planning to add several automated speed cameras in locations outside school zones in the near future, which, he said, should improve the outlook. The 2025-2026 budget the council adopted last year, however, already includes projected revenues from the new school-zone cameras—$4.2 million, against $1.2 million in new spending to get the cameras up and running.

Still looking for the bright side, Saka wanted to know what kind of new revenues the city expects to bring in from the FIFA World Club Cup in 2025 and the FIFA World Cup in 2026. Won’t those big events help line the city’s bank accounts in ways the revenue forecasts don’t account for? Not exactly, council central staff director Ben Noble responded.

The huge economic bump FIFA boosters are projecting—supposedly $500 million or more across the two World Cup years—is a budget trick that includes things like hotel rooms that would already be sold out at the height of summer anyway. “We’re going to see less of a bump than we might then you might otherwise imagine, because we’re plenty busy in the summer all the time,” Noble said. “I see those numbers, and as an economist, they bother me a little bit, because they’re they’re usually quoted out of that important context.”

Also, all the admissions taxes for World Cup events will go to the county, not the city, so the main boost to city revenues will be from sales taxes from visitors, including international visitors, who would not otherwise have come to Seattle in the summer.

Saka tried a final time: What about cruises and other types of tourism? The Port of Seattle, Saka said, “anticipates this to be the busiest crew season ever in Seattle history. … On the tourism sector, with respect to the cruise industry next year, what other kind of signature, marquee events or opportunities could help drive tourism here in Seattle, all the tomfoolery outside of Seattle notwithstanding?”

But Economic Revenue Forecast Council director Jan Duras only offered more bad news: “When it comes to that record-breaking cruise season, that was, again, the prediction that was made more than two weeks ago, before the recent turmoil in the financial markets, before all the potential impacts on cancelation that Canadian citizens might consider. … If people see their savings shrink, if they are worried about the future, they’re probably less likely to book a cruise ship vacation. They are less likely to travel. They might reconsider their plans.”

Saka wasn’t the only one looking for some good news amid the gloom. Dan Strauss also offered, hopefully, that it’s possible the city hasn’t accounted for all the people who will return to the office five days a week and start spending more money during the day. “I was supposed to bring my lunch today, and I forgot, so we’ll have a little bit more sales tax revenue in the buckets for today,” Strauss joked.

Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who reportedly plans to propose a local progressive revenue package before the city starts its annual budget process, countered her colleagues’ attempts at optimism by saying the council is “going to be responsible for crafting a budget in what might be the most worst economic storm in our lifetime, and … we also need to be honest that tightening the belt and coordinating with our regional partners isn’t going to close a gap this big. …  And so looking forward, [we should be] looking at our options for being able to raise progressive revenue to protect our investments in critical city services.”