Mayor Harrell, Police, Taxes

SPD Celebrates Its Hiring Spree. The Only Thing That’s Missing: Women

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell and acting Police Chief Shon Barnes touted SPD’s latest hiring numbers on Monday. Standing in a gym at SPD’s training facility in Georgetown, the two men stood in front of by 15 members of the Seattle Police Department recruit class of 2025—a group of people Harrell said “truly represent our community.”

One thing was notably absent in the backdrop of new recruits: Women. SPD, which is facing multiple lawsuits from women alleging gender discrimination and harassment, has frequently said that recruiting more women is a top priority, but the department has not announced any specific efforts to improve the department’s well-documented culture of misogyny.

In 2021, SPD signed the “30 by 30” pledge, committing to have a 30 percent female recruit class by 2030.

To say they’ve failed to make progress is an understatement. Last year, SPD only managed to hire 12 women—just 14 percent of its 84 new hires. This year, that figure has dropped to just eight percent—an abysmal five women out of 60 officers hired so far this year.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that a city so hyperfocused on increasing the number of bodies in police uniforms has failed to register alarm that almost all those new bodies are male. If your whole pitch for SPD is that you can make six figures and get a hiring bonus, you probably aren’t going to reach people who aren’t considering a job in law enforcement in the first place, particularly those who have heard about SPD’s reputation as a place where women get harassed and overlooked.

Still, it was a bit of a visual jump-scare to walk into SPD’s training facility and see that the city had chosen a phalanx of preternaturally buff young men to serve as the visual backdrop for their big hiring announcement. (One young woman became visible in the back of the group partway through the press conference.)

I asked Barnes—who received wide praise in Seattle for maintaining a better gender breakdown  at the Madison, WI police, where he was chief before coming to Seattle—what the department was doing to address its male-dominated culture and proactively recruit more women. (Barnes had just finished telling three brief anecdotes in which various men expressed an interest in becoming a Seattle police officer to him personally).

“I looked at those numbers, and those numbers are not exceeding my expectations,” Barnes said. “Last year we hired 10 females,” he continued, misspeaking slightly. “This year we have five. So we still have some work to do on that.”

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“Maureen McGaugh”—the founder of 30 By 30— “is a close personal friend of mine,” Barnes continued. “And so I had a conversation this morning with staff about making sure that we give a second look to any female applicant before we give them a rejection letter—like, what’s going on there?”

“But you know, a lot of police departments struggle with” hiring women, Barnes said. “I think for me, it’s making sure that any applicant, no matter your demographics, you know that Seattle Police Department has a place for you.”

Overall, the 60 new hires represent a net increase of 36 officers, after factoring in 24 departures so far this year.

The police department remains by far the biggest portion of the city’s general fund budget. On Monday, Harrell said he would consider the new option of a 0.1 percent sales tax for public safety that the state legislature approved last week, using public safety as the “lens by which we will make decisions” on the upcoming budget. “That doesn’t mean that housing and child care and education and other climate change, the other strong components of our ecosystem, are not important,” Harrell said. But, he added, “we have to center public safety to make sure that our kids are safe.”

The local-option tax has to be spent on criminal justice, but the legislation adopts an expansive definition of that term that includes diversion, public defense, and prevention programs, which King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay said he would want to fund, in addition to more prosecutors and cops, if the county passes their own version of the tax.

The city is facing a projected budget shortfall of $241 million over the next two years, on top of previous budget forecasts that showed growing deficits starting in 2026. Thanks to the council’s actions last year, the JumpStart tax, originally dedicated to four specific spending categories, is now an all-purpose bucket of money the city can slosh into the general fund at will, but the council may soon have to reckon with the volatility of a tax that depends overwhelmingly on fewer than a dozen companies.

King County, legislature, Taxes

Could a Sales Tax Hike for Criminal Justice Programs Save the County’s Budget?
King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay speaks at a recent press conference on state funding cuts.

By Erica C. Barnett

Late last week, King County Council chair Girmay Zahilay and budget chair Rod Dembowski sent a letter urging acting King County Executive Shannon Braddock to send down legislation imposing a new sales tax of 0.1 percent to boost funding for the county’s criminal legal system, including sheriff’s deputies, prosecutors, public defenders, and diversion programs.

State legislators approved a bill giving local jurisdictions the new taxing authority last week; Governor Bob Ferguson hasn’t sign the bill yet, but he expressed support for the proposal earlier in the session, which ended on Sunday.

With the county facing an estimated $160 million shortfall in its general-fund budget over the next two years, Zahilay said the new revenue would be a game-changer. “If we don’t find a solution, we will see deep and painful cuts to services that the community relies on,” like police, prosecutors, and public health clinics, Zahilay said. “It would mean hundreds and hundreds of positions cut out of King County government.”

The new tax could be used on a variety of programs that fall broadly in the “criminal justice” category, explicitly including reentry programs, public defenders, diversion programs, and “Local government programs that have a reasonable relationship to reducing the numbers of people interacting with the criminal justice system including, but not limited to, reducing homelessness or improving behavioral health.”

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Last week, county budget director Dwight Dively told the council that the areas most at risk for cuts (some of them due to potential state budget cuts that did not materialize) are public health and the Department of Community and Human Services, which funds services for homeless King County residents.

Because DCHS is funded largely by the state’s document recording fee on real-estate transactions, its funding has declined dramatically as the housing market has slowed. When that happens, Dively said, “either we have to immediately cut funding for homelessness services, and we all understand the consequences of that, or we have to find another revenue source to at least temporarily backfill that, and that’s the general fund.

So what does that have to do with a criminal-justice sales tax? According to Zahilay, because the legislation did not include language banning “supplantation”—which would have barred the county from using the tax to free up general-fund dollars for unrelated purposes—the tax could help address that looming $160 million deficit. (The county’s deficit is smaller than the city’s, in part, because more county services are funded with dedicated funding sources, like levies.)

That “means that we could absolutely use these funds to fund our criminal justice efforts and redirect funds that would otherwise go toward those initiatives … to fund other things,” Zahilay said. “Based on the estimates that I’ve seen, this new tax would be enough to fund our entire general fund shortfall.”

The sales tax remains the primary tool local governments have for raising funds without passing a property tax levy; it’s a regressive tax because people with lower incomes pay a larger percentage of their income on sales taxes than people who make more. “I was hoping we’d have more options [from the legislature], beacuse out of all the types of taxes, I believe the sales tax is the most regressive one of all,” Zahilay said. “But I’m definitely grateful that we have an option to save our general fund and critical services.”

Arts

Three Fun Things: Pizza and Protests

1. Homemade Pizza! Specifically, this method.

I used to be intimidated by baking anything that involved risen dough, put off by a few unsuccessful experiments with yeast that had probably gone off from spending too much time in the heat. Like a lot of home cooks, I got bolder with my baking experiments during the pandemic—taking the time to craft homemade Pop Tarts, pecan rolls, and marzipan-filled challah that I documented on Instagram using my new Fuji XT20 camera, another pandemic purchase.

But I never really made baking with yeast a part of my regular routine until very recently, when I stumbled upon a pizza dough recipe that is dead-simple and works every time, as long as you have the patience to follow the steps. Like bagels, this dough from Serious Eats proofs a long time in the fridge—you mix it, dump in a Ziploc, and let it hang out at least a day, although even longer is better—and requires a secondary step (a couple of hours on the counter) to reach a perfect proof. After that, it’s a matter of assembly. Because I always have a lot of random bits of things hanging out in the fridge, I cobbled together a misshapen pizza with what was lying around: A half-cup of simple tomato sauce (use a small food processor to pulverize one 14-ounce can of tomatoes, a pinch of sugar, a drop of vinegar, and salt and pepper), plus sliced halloumi (my preferred local source is Goodie’s in Lake City), shredded parmesan, and some leftover schmaltz-based green garlic pesto, daubed on top.

Cooking has always been one of my primary outlets when I want to turn off the wall of sound in my brain, and it’s also a way I’ve saved money when times have been lean. (I don’t miss much about not having money, but there was some satisfaction in making the most of a food bank haul.) It’s hardly revelatory to point out that the ingredients for two pizzas cost less than a small salad at Pagliacci and that the homemade version took very little time and was an order of magnitude better than a congealing delivery pie. At a time of extreme economic uncertainty, though, it’s kind of magical to have a few culinary tricks up your sleeve for times when you want a treat but don’t want to, or can’t afford, to spend $50 or more on a basic meal.

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2. Windy City Pie

Thinking about pizza did remind me that I’ve been meaning to mention my go-to pizza place: Windy City Pie, just across the street from a former Three Fun Things subject, the nonalcoholic bottle shop Cheeky and Dry. It’s a tough choice between the traditional Chicago-style deep dish pizza (which achieves a perfect balance of crackly crust and filling and is never soupy) and the cracker-thin tavern-style pizza, a more recent addition to the menu—both are great, but the deep dish is slightly more likely to send you to bed at 9. As a bonus, they have RC Cola on tap.

3. #TeslaTakedown

As a local news reporter, I don’t cover national protests very often, but I’m extremely happy every time I get a press release in my inbox telling me the protests against Tesla—maker of the Iron Crossover, the Incel Camino, the Model SS, the Deplorean, the Klaborghini—are going strong.

Besides all the political reasons you should not buy a Tesla and should sell yours immediately if you own one (for everyone slapping a “bought it before we knew he was crazy” sticker on the car you bought two years ago, here’s a damning list from 2022!), Teslas haven’t been state of the art for years and are losing value faster than a basement unit in a flood. (Tesla owners: You can probably still sell your Swasticar and still afford a used Ioniq 6, a superior sedan that looks much cooler, if you act fast).

If you’d like to participate in a protest at the Tesla dealership nearest you, the Tesla Takedown website is a user-friendly resource. Oh, look! There’s one coming up in South Lake Union this Tuesday.

City Council, Elections, homelessness, housing, legislature

This Week On PubliCola: April 26, 2025

Homelessness programs threatened, sex work crackdown fizzles, and Metro considers converting parking lots into housing.

Monday, April 21

PubliCola Questions: Seattle City Council District 2 Candidate Adonis Ducksworth

We sat down with Adonis Ducksworth—a longtime skateboarder and Seattle Department of Transportation staffer who’s running to represent Southeast Seattle—to talk about density, social housing, and how to address and prevent gun violence in the district.

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

Acting county executive Shannon Braddock, appointed on a temporary basis several weeks ago, remains essentially an at-will employee until (and unless) the county council appoints her as interim executive through November. They were supposed to make a decision this week (after declining to appoint her at an earlier meeting) but now won’t do so until at least early May.

Tuesday, April 22

Seattle Nice: City Council Shakeup in Southeast Seattle

On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we discussed the District 2 city council election, hacked crossing signals in Amazon’s neighborhood, and the potential closure of the Virginia Inn, an institution in Pike Place Market. Also, on this week’s episode of Are You Mad At Me?, the podcast Josh and I are doing about the movie Shattered Glass, we explain why everyone should watch this excellent movie.

Seattle Leaders Said “Stay Out” Orders Would Reduce Gun Violence and Sex Trafficking. So Far, They’ve Issued Five.

When City Attorney Ann Davison and City Councilmember Cathy Moore pushed to urgently pass a new law allowing judges to ban sex buyers from Aurora Ave. N, they claimed the orders would help end gun violence and trafficking in the area. In the seven months since, there have only been five such orders, all issued after costly stings involving police pretending to be sex workers.

Wednesday, April 23

As Cuts to Critical Programs Loom, Latest Count Shows Sharp Increase in Homelessness

The homelessness authority released some new details about its latest statistical estimate of the number of people experiencing homelessness in King County. Unsurprisingly, homelessness has gotten worse, just as the state and federal governments prepare to make cuts to programs that bring people indoors.

State Budget Cuts Could Halt Successful Encampment Resolution Program

One of the programs on the state’s chopping block is an encampment resolution program begun during the pandemic. Unlike the city of Seattle’s policy, which mostly consists of designating people as obstructions and sweeping them from place to place, the state program involves weeks of outreach and provides both case management and temporary lodging as part of a path to housing. The state budget would eliminate funding to address encampments in the future.

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Thursday, April 24

New Federal Homelessness Contracts Appear Designed to Exclude Undocumented Immigrants

New contracts from HUD’s Continuum of Care program, which provides about 11 percent of the region’s homelessness budget through grants to nonprofit providers, would require providers to check the immigration status of people seeking shelter and other services, and deny service to anyone who can’t prove they’re in the country legally. The regional homelessness authority hasn’t decided yet how to respond to the contracts, which also include anti-”gender ideology” language.

Friday, April 25

Turning Park-and-Rides Into Housing

In his “Maybe Metropolis” column, Josh Feit touts legislation that would allow King County Metro to redevelop up to three underutilized park-and-ride lots as affordable housing—the ultimate transit-oriented development.

 

housing, land use, legislature, Maybe Metropolis, Urbanism

Turning Park-and-Rides Into Housing
Aerial view of Shoreline Park-and-Ride via Google Maps.

By Josh Feit

We (Ed: Actually, Erica) gladly paid $7 an hour on a recent Friday afternoon for a  street parking spot behind Capitol Hill’s Stoup Brewing. The reasonable fee is part of SDOT’s data-driven demand management program, which puts an appropriate price on parking, recognizing—sort of like NYC’s congestion pricing program—that popular destinations should be subsidized by the car-centric culture their urban density offsets. After all, density makes Capitol Hill’s go-to clubs, bars, restaurants, and shops possible in the first place.

Applauding the high cost of parking was on point because the event we were attending was a happy hour thrown by Sightline Institute, where more than 50 people crowded in to celebrate, I kid you not, a parking reform bill.  Sightline, which has become an incubator of green metropolis legislation in Olympia, helped draft the bill, which had just passed the state legislature the day before.

Demand management is well and good. But the Sightline bill takes the next step: It prevents cities from requiring too much parking in the first place. The bill, which was sponsored by urbanist rock star Sen. Jessica Bateman (D-22, Olympia), caps parking mandates statewide. For example, the bill says cities can’t require more than one parking space for every two units in new multifamily housing. Developers could still build more parking, but they’ll no longer have to.

There were free stickers on the tables proclaiming, in the style of parking signs: “End Parking Mandates.” And when Sightline’s parking reform guru Catie Gould jumped up on a table with a handful of drink tickets to thank everyone for coming—identifying herself as “the one who wrote” SB 5184—the crowd feted her like she was Bernie or AOC behind the mic on the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour.

Certainly, three cheers for the parking caps; I grabbed one of the free stickers. But it’s another bill that sets my war-on-cars heart aflutter. Where the Bateman/Sightline bill limits new parking, the one I’m giddy about actually nukes existing parking infrastructure—parking infrastructure that (unsurprisingly to those who have been predicting a transit future for years) is sitting largely empty.

According to King County Metro spokesman Jeff Switzer, only about 30 percent of the parking spaces in park-and-rides across the system are full on a typical day—and the most heavily used lots, at Northgate and on the Eastside, are only 60 to 70 percent full.

King County lobbied for a change in state law to allow for a different use at these properties: Affordable housing. Appropriately enough, the reform—which authorizes  Metro to overhaul three pilot sites for now—came as an amendment to state Sen. Julia Reed’s (D-36, Seattle) transit-oriented development bill, broader legislation that’s about incentivizing affordable housing near transit hubs. (I wrote about Reed’s bill and its innovative funded inclusionary zoning progam earlier this session.)

 

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The un-pave paradise amendment, a friendly add from state Sen. Yasmin Trudeau (D-27, Tacoma), says WSDOT can select up to three park-and-ride facilities in King County so Metro can conduct a pilot affordable housing program that “releases [Metro from] any covenant imposed for highway purposes and replace it with a covenant requiring affordable housing.” “Gaining this flexibility,” Metro spokesman Switzer said, “would be really important to help both the state and King County Metro achieve their shared goals around transit oriented development and building housing conveniently near frequent and reliable transit service.”

You don’t have to convince me, Jeff. Turning parking into housing is an urbanist’s version of turning swords into ploughshares.

Switzer declined to specify which park-and-rides are being liberated, but the legislation specifies three large surface parking lots—each with between 300 and 1,000 parking spaces—in Kirkland, Shoreline, and South King County.

Go figure. Parking lots with 300 to 1,000 stalls are going underutilized. Props to King County Metro for turning those empty stalls into an opportunity for fulfilling the potential of transit infrastructure as a prompt to build affordable housing. Transit policy is land use policy. And King County needs more land use policy like this that authorizes affordable housing.

Josh@PubliCola.com

homelessness, immigration, Trump

New Federal Homelessness Contracts Appear Designed to Exclude Undocumented Immigrants

By Erica C. Barnett

New federal contracts for homeless services include a requirement that providers deny benefits to undocumented immigrants, King County Regional Homelessness Authority deputy CEO Simon Foster told the King County Council this week. Foster warned that the new restrictions, which have not appeared in previous federal contracts, could result in people losing services they already access and avoiding homeless providers for fear of deportation.

“We know that citizenship verification requirements have a chilling effect that extends throughout the community, and even documented individuals are less likely to seek help if they are afraid of the repercussions to themselves, their friends and their family,” Foster said.

The new language showed up in the KCRHA’s first 2025 grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Continuum of Care program, which provides about 11 percent of KCRHA’s funding. In keeping with new, Trump-era boilerplate for other federal grants, the new language also says agencies must certify that they won’t use the funding in ways that “promote ‘gender ideology'” or violate several new executive orders, including one denying federal funds to “sanctuary cities.” A judge temporarily blocked the sanctuary city order on Thursday.

Under the terms of the contract, KCRHA would be required to “administer its grant in accordance with all applicable immigration restrictions and requirements, including the eligibility and verification requirements” from the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, better known as welfare reform. That law prohibits undocumented immigrants from receiving federally funded services, with some exceptions whose interpretation is entirely up to the “unreviewable” discretion of the attorney general, according to the law.

In 2016, then-attorney general Loretta Lynch issued guidance affirming that homeless service providers could spend federal funding on programs that provide shelter, transitional housing, rapid rehousing, and outreach to undocumented immigrants. Under Trump, that guidance has been removed from HUD’s website.

The new rules also say that KCRHA, or the nonprofit agencies that provide services and housing (the language is ambiguous), has to check the immigration status of every person seeking housing, shelter, or services in a massive federal database called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, or SAVE. According to the contract language, KCRHA “must use SAVE, or an equivalent verification system approved by the Federal government, to prevent any Federal public benefit from being provided to an ineligible alien who entered the United States illegally or is otherwise unlawfully present in the United States.”

KCRHA is currently considering its legal options, which could include suing the federal government. Earlier this month, the agency’s governing board held a lengthy, unscheduled executive session to discuss “federal funding impacts,” going into closed session under an exemption to the open meetings act that allows private conversations about litigation or potential litigation.

The agency, unlike the city or county governments, has a legal department of one—general counsel Edmund Witter. Although suing (or joining a larger lawsuit) creates legal risks, so would signing the grant agreement. If the KCRHA agreed to exclude undocumented immigrants from services and avoid funding “gender ideology,” it could open the agency up to legal liability from activist lawsuits. It’s easy to see, for instance, how providing shelter where queer and trans people feel safe would count as “gender ideology” under the new Trump administration’s rule.

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Alison Eisinger, director of the Seattle-King County Coalition on Homelessness, said SKCCH fully expects “to see attempts to insert irrelevant and odious requirements and restrictions on federal funds that keep people housed in our community” coming from the federal government.

“We have to make sure we can keep people safe, housed, sheltered, and helped regardless of where they were born, who is in their household, and how they pay their rent,” Eisinger said. “Local government and any philanthropic partners who concern themselves with housing and homelessness should be creating robust reserves to ensure that we are not at the mercy of the billionaire sociopaths.”

It’s unclear how any of this would work, in a purely practical sense. Searching SAVE to see if someone is in the country legally is expensive (the government charges for each search), and neither KCRHA nor nonprofit service providers currently have access to the database. Most service providers won’t want to be in charge of asking for people’s virtual papers as a condition of providing services, and the possibility of mixups—between people with the same name, for instance—raises major due process issues, according to a person familiar with the legal issues.

Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, a former director of subregional planning and equitable engagement at KCRHA, said immigrants, particularly new arrivals, were already apprehensive about accessing the homelessness system before Trump’s election, because of the fear of deportation and the stigma of being homeless.

“It’s a much more invisibilized homelessness experience,” Rinck said. “People naturally feel anxious about accessing any type of government services already,” she said, without having to prove their eligibility for a place to sleep at night. “I think the broad idea is that they’re just going to use any measure to prevent immigrants from tapping into any program or services.”

PubliCola has reached out to HUD’s regional office, as well as several organizations that could be impacted if the new restrictions go into effect, and will post an update if we hear back.