Cathy Moore earmarks $1 million to The More We Love, Sara Nelson talks housing in the stadium district, SCORE’s director defends the troubled jail, and more.
After PubliCola reported on substandard conditions at SCORE, a regional jail in South King County where at least 11 people have died over the last two years, jail director Devin Schrum defended her record to a sympathetic Renton City Council committee, calling the jail “human -centered” and safe.
Providers who assist victims of sex trafficking and other types of commercial sexual exploitation have spent months preparing collaboratively for a competitive bidding process for more than $1 million in new funding for a “receiving center” for survivors. Last week, they learned that Councilmember Cathy Moore had chosen to circumvent this process, awarding funds directly to The More We Love, a group that also holds the city of Burien’s homeless encampment response contracts.
Last year’s JumpStart payroll tax revenues came in $47 million shy of forecasts—a potentially significant problem if the trend keeps up, since the city chose last year to use the tax, which was supposed to be dedicated mostly to one-off capital projects, to fill a $250 million-plus general budget gap. And Councilmember Dan Strauss’ proposal to require “loud music venues” to sell earplugs to patrons ran into some skepticism from his colleagues.
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Council President Sara Nelson was our special guest on this week’s podcast, where we talked at length about her successful proposal to allow new apartments in the city’s stadium district (and I asked her if this housing, located in a busy commercial area, was just a distraction from the real need for new apartments in every neighborhood.
The city of Burien, which completely banned sleeping outdoors last year, spent more than $200,000 in 2024 fighting a lawsuit by the Seattle King County Coalition on homelessness and several unsheltered Burien residents. And the city’s glitchy new payroll system, Workday, gave some city workers unauthorized vacation days and failed to pay others for premium pay they were supposed to receive in lieu of benefits.
SEIU 925, the union the represents nearly 400 public defense attorneys and other staffers, raised questions about interim director Matt Sanders’ ability to lead the department amid low morale and concerns about caseload standards, and endorsed another candidate over their current boss. King County Executive Dow Constantine announced he picked Sanders for the job shortly before Sound Transit announced Constantine will be the transit agency’s new CEO.
Earlier this month, as one of his final acts as King County Executive, Dow Constantine nominated Matt Sanders, the interim director of King County’s Department of Public Defense, as director of the agency, which has been without a permanent leaders since Anita Khandelwal resigned last September. In his announcement, Constantine called Sanders ” the ideal candidate to lead the Department of Public Defense in its important work” and praised his “leadership, advocacy, and unwavering commitment to both DPD employees and the people we serve.”
(The Sound Transit board voted to hire Constantine as Sound Transit CEO, at a starting salary of $450,000, on Thursday. The job comes with a monetary benefits package worth an additional $90,000 and will pay out one year’s salary when he leaves.)
Sanders was chosen over two other candidates, Snohomish County public defense department director Jason Schwartz and Morris Anyah, an administrative law judge at the Illinois Department of Employment Security.
A 12-person panel that interviewed the three applicants was made up mostly of management representatives, including several people who received promotions from Sanders and could lose their positions if the King County Council doesn’t choose him to lead the department. SEIU 925, the union that represents 371 DPD employees, including line attorneys and other staff, was allowed to have one attorney and one paralegal in the room.
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Rank and file union members have expressed concerns about Sanders, saying his management style has contributed to low morale and high turnover at the agency. DPD staff have struggled with high caseloads that, according to the union, still have not been resolved more than a year after the Washington State Bar Association adopted new caseload standards that would reduce the number of cases public defense attorneys have to but would also require departments to hire more staff. (Per a union communique in January: “Our Bargaining Team is juuuust about at its patience limit with this ‘collaborative process.’”)
On March 19, the union endorsed Schwartz over interim director Sanders, noting that as chair of the WSBA’s Council on Public Defense, he “was instrumental in drafting the new caseload standards” for public defense attorneys. “We are confident Jason would be an excellent leader during this time of transition,” the union wrote.
Two days later, Constantine announced he was appointing Sanders. The King County Council still has to approve the appointment, which will last one year; at that point, the next King County Executive will decide whether to reappoint Sanders to a full four-year term.
Attorneys who work in the King County court system say turnover at DPD is extraordinarily high, leading to a public defense department with fewer experienced attorneys. On the felony side, attorneys who are qualified to defend the most serious (Class A) felonies end up taking on cases from other attorneys when they leave, contributing to overwork and a lack of consistent representation for people who face the harshest penalties if convicted.
Two days after Constantine announced he was picking Sanders, SEIU delivered a petition demanding that he commit to “fully and faithfully implementing the caseload standards approved by the Washington State Bar Association within three years of July 1st, 2025” and that he reverse new caseload standards the department implemented last year, which, according to the union, are arbitrary and fail to limit caseloads to manageable levels..
“We, the employees of the Department of Public Defense, are feeling frustrated with your leadership,” the union wrote. “You have imposed policies that directly impact our working conditions without informing or consulting our union. We are not here to argue the details of specific policies. We have taken time away from our work—away from the clients that depend on us—to request that you display true leadership.”
In his response on March 27, Sanders wrote that DPD management “remains committed to ongoing improvements” in caseloads, but “will maintain the current status quo” until the union and management have finished bargaining over the new policy.
“[N]ot only am I committed to the implementation of the WSBA standards, but also I am embracing DPD’s place at the national forefront of implementation of these groundbreaking standards.”
The King County Council could approve Sanders’ appointment as early as next month.
1. The city of Burien spent more than $200,000 last year paying a Seattle law firm, Keller Rohrbach, to fight a lawsuit filed by a group of unsheltred people who challenged the city’s ban on sleeping outdoors last year. Keller Rohrbach’s billing statements, obtained through a records request, span 11 months of 2024; they do not include any invoices from this year, which would include preparation for an appearance in King County Superior Court Judge Michael Ryan’s courtroom last month.
The plaintiffs, who were forced to leave an encampment on Ambaum Blvd. in Burien in December 2023, sued to stop an earlier version of Burien’s much-amended ban on sleeping outdoors in the city. The older version of the law made it illegal to “exercise nontransitory exclusive control over any portion of nonresidential public property” but allowed an exemption if no shelter was available in nearby cities, including Seattle. (Burien does not have a year-round emergency shelter).
In January, the city completely banned sleeping or “residing” in the city without shelter at any time of the day or night, regardless of whether shelter is actually available.
Keller Rohrbach billed Burien between $325 and hour and $385 an hour for its attorneys, and $185 an hour for paralegal services. Last year, Burien budgeted $150,000 for outside legal services, a number that increased to $200,000 in the 2025 budget.
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2. Workday, the glitchy HR system the city of Seattle put in place to handle payroll for its 14,000 employees last year, recently began offering vacation time to employees, including interns, who are not eligible for vacation, PubliCola has learned. The time started showing up on the employees’ pay slips, and at least six people used the new option to take time off, the city’s Department of Human Resources confirmed.
The vacation time snafu is reminiscent of another Workday glitch last year, when the system began showing people that they had weeks of available military leave, even though they weren’t in the military.
More serious problems with the new system, which is being maintained by pricey consultants from Deloitte, have included inaccurate paychecks, missing paychecks, vanishing deferred compensation deposits, and inaccurate job classifications for people in temporary positions or working out of class in jobs where they were being paid more than in their regular assignments.
In addition to the vacation issues, Workday recently failed to pay about 300 temporary employees who are ineligible for city benefits and receive premium pay in lieu of those benefits.
A spokesman for the city’s human resources department, Antorris Williams, said the vacation issue resulted from a “Workday configuration” and was fixed on March 13. “A calculation issue in Workday’s setup caused” the premium pay issue for temporary employees, Williams said, and a city team is working to make sure those employees receive pay they’re owed.
The city “continues to address key issues related to Workday implementation to ensure accurate payroll processing,” Williams said. “Paying employees on time and accurately remains a top priority to the City. This large-scale transition has been very challenging, and we know these issues have a real impact on people.”
Council President Sara Nelson was our guest on this week’s Seattle Nice podcast, where we talked at length about the council’s recent 6-3 vote to allow up to 990 apartments, half of them affordable to moderate-income renters, in a small, industrially zoned area just south of the city’s two stadiums.
Affordable housing groups, nearby neighborhoods, and the Building Trades Union supported the proposal to allow housing as part of a planned “makers’ district” where artists, food producers, and small manufacturers will have access to more affordable work and retail space than they would in other parts of the city. The longshoremen’s union, the Port, and some urbanists opposed the plan: Maritime groups claimed the housing would destroy Seattle’s industrial base in SoDo by clogging the area with too many cars, and some advocates for citywide density said it was just another example of the city putting housing along dirty, traffic-clogged arterials instead of single-family areas.
Nelson said she doesn’t understand why “the urbanists” opposed the housing proposal, and said her goal was to create affordable housing while improving public safety in the area, by adding more eyes on the street in a part of the city that has few permanent residents. Hotels are allowed in the area already, but there’s a big difference between people living in a neighborhood and people just passing through.
Opponents may not find Nelson’s arguments convincing, but as I said when she challenged me on this, I’ve never argued that she’s a straightforward NIMBY, despite disagreeing with most of her positions on public safety, workers’ rights, and renter-vs.-landlord issues.
Nelson has taken many centrist or conservative positions during her three-plus years on the council—pushing to eliminate the minimum wage for gig workers, lower testing standards for new police hires, protect landlords who don’t want to reveal how much they charge in rent, and crack down on people who use drugs in public (not to mention those who protest council actions in public meetings).
But beyond “protecting mom and pop landlords” by preserving old apartment buildings (ahem—”naturally occurring affordable housing”), Nelson has not been among the council’s many vocal advocates against housing in neighborhoods, and has voted against proposals that would restrict housing, like former council member Alex Pedersen’s proposed tree removal restrictions that would have made it difficult or impossible to build middle housing in historically single-family areas.
While I have argued vociferously against laws restricting housing to busy arterials (I think we should allow apartments everywhere), I don’t think a policy unfairly restricting housing to certain areas is a reason to ban housing in the stadium district—an area that’s right next to Pioneer Square, another car-choked neighborhood directly adjacent to industrial uses (and a vast new waterfront highway whose opening city officials have celebrated).
Listen to Seattle Nice—where we also discussed the city’s comprehensive plan, the funding Nelson secured in the budget for addiction treatment at Lakeside-Milam, and the council’s upcoming budget challenges.
1. As we reported on Bluesky Tuesday afternoon, the city of Seattle’s revenue update for the last quarter of 2024 shows that the JumpStart payroll tax fell about $47 million short of expectations last year, raising questions about the wisdom of discarding the original spending plan for the tax and using it to pay for basic city services.
Instead of bringing in $406 million last year, as the city’s budget forecast predicted, the payroll expense tax yielded $360 million—more than the $315 million the tax brought in for 2023, but more than 11 percent shy of what city budget planners expected. If this trend continues, it could be a major problem; last year, the mayor and city council added tens of millions of dollars in new spending, much of it ongoing, to the city’s budget, using $287 million in “extra” JumpStart revenues over two years to pay for the new spending and close a massive budget deficit.
Revenues from JumpStart are potentially quite volatile, because the entire tax base consists of fewer than 500 companies, with about 10 companies contributing around 70 percent of JumpStart revenues (and about 90 percent of the tax coming from just 100 companies). Changes at any of those companies, such as layoffs or relocations, can lead to dramatic shifts in the amount of revenue the tax produces.
Despite knowing this, the city has increasingly used these revenues to pay for basic, ongoing city services. Last year, the council gutted the original spending plan for JumpStart, making the original spending categories (housing construction and acquisition, economic revitalization, equitable development, and the Green New Deal) optional instead of mandatory. As we’ve reported, even with ever-increasing JumpStart transfers, Harrell’s 2025 budget already projected another deficit starting in 2027.
The city’s Office of Economic and Revenue Forecasts will release its new budget projections in two weeks, on April 10. That forecast should provide a better sense of how much trouble the city is in financially, and whether the council will need to make budget cuts this year to keep the budget balanced. The budget the city adopted last year assumes that JumpStart revenues will grow continually every year, bringing in $430 million this year, $452 million next year, and $469 million in 2027.
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2. Council member Dan Strauss’ colleagues expressed skepticism last week about his proposal to require all venues that host live music to provide earplugs to patrons for less than $1, with fines of up to $50 a week for those that fail to comply.
The proposal, which Strauss called “simply a good little bill,” would create a new business category called “loud music venues,” which would include all existing music venues as well as some other businesses that allow dancing, sell alcohol, or host live music.
Strauss introduced the legislation in his finance committee the morning after a marathon meeting on housing in the city’s stadium district at which Strauss accused his colleagues of voting to destroy Seattle’s maritime industries by allowing 990 apartments around First Ave. South. The plan passed 6-3 with Strauss, Bob Kettle, and Alexis Mercedes Rinck voting no.
Strauss said he decided to introduce the bill after talking to a “concerned audiologist” who spoke to Strauss about hearing loss during his office hours in Ballard. “This bill is about making sure that people have the opportunity to both enjoy Seattle’s vibrant music scene and protect their hearing health, no matter where they go,” he said.
But Kettle, along with Rob Saka, Sara Nelson, and Maritza Rivera, all questioned the wisdom and timeliness of Strauss’ “good little bill.”
Kettle noted that there are many other situations, such as street racing, where people may be exposed to loud noises involuntarily, as opposed to live music shows, where people know what to expect.
Rivera wondered why only two cities in the US—Minneapolis and San Francisco—have adopted similar laws, and “they did it 10 years ago. No one else has done it again.”
Saka—who reminisced about “screaming like a teenage girl” at a Justin Timberlake concert last year—suggested that instead of requiring venues to offer earplugs, the city could require signs notifying patrons about the risks caused by listening to loud music without hearing protection.
And Nelson said she was concerned about the impact the new regulations might have on venues that are still struggling. “What I hear from music venues is that they just got through pandemic, and they’re really focused on rebuilding their businesses.”
Strauss said he plans to formally introduce the legislation on April 16, and hopes to pass the proposal by the end of next month.
The city’s schedule for the competitive bidding process for $2 million that got underway last year.
By Erica C. Barnett
Last week, Seattle City Councilmember Cathy Moore directed the city’s Human Services Department to award $1 million in funding for survivors of commercial sexual exploitation (CSE) through a direct contract with The More We Love, a group that began as a company offering private encampment sweeps and now holds most of the city of Burien’s homelessness contracts.
Moore’s move, which the city’s Human Services Department immediately agreed to implement, effectively ended a competitive bidding process that had been underway since last year, when providers who work with sexually exploited adults and minors in Seattle began meeting to discuss what a fair and equitable competitive distribution of new local funding could look like. The groups first met with Moore’s office last September, and came away believing that the funds would be distributed to various groups through a fair, competitive bidding process, according to several people involved in those discussions. HSD later created a timeline for this process and distributed it to the potential bidders.
City staff reiterated their commitment to a fair, open process in meetings that included organizations that work with survivors as well as law enforcement, Harborview, and other “system partners” that could potentially refer people to the new services the $2 million was going to fund.
“From the very beginning, when we heard there might be an opportunity for additional funding and resources to support the community of survivors that work against trafficking, we were thrilled—and the next thing out of our mouth was, ‘Providers deserve an open and fair process,'” said Amaranthia Torres, co-executive director for the Coalition Ending Gender Based Violence.
Unless Moore rescinds her directive—or HSD decides not to fulfill her request—the funding decision will be final. The mayor’s office, which oversees HSD and was included in email conversations about Moore’s directive to forego the usual bidding process, directed all of our questions to HSD. After this story posted, HSD responded to PubliCola’s questions with the following statement: “No contract or award has yet been processed for [Moore’s budget action[. HSD is continuing conversations around next steps for implementing these investments.”
“It was shocking that all of the work to engage with the community this whole time is being thwarted,” Torres said. “It seemed obvious to me that the way city funds get allocated shouldn’t feel like its rigged. Everyone should have a fair shake.”
The $1 million, which is supposed to add 10 beds to The More We Love’s shelter for sexually exploited women in Renton, was part of $2 million Moore set aside to help survivors of commercial sexual exploitation in the city budget last year to help providers respond to a new law reinstating Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP) zones. Currently, the only overnight space specifically for people escaping the sex trade in Seattle is a six-bed temporary housing facility run by Real Escape from the Sex Trade (REST).
Representatives from existing Black-led groups that work with survivors said that by giving $1 million to a white-led group that has not previously held a contract to work with CSE survivors, the city is ignoring and undermining the expertise of organizations that focus on Black and brown survivors, who make up a disproportionate number of people in the commercial sex trade. In recent years, organizations that help survivors have made concerted efforts to end what several described as a “white savior” mentality, in which white leaders (often women) believe they know what’s best for Black and brown survivors.
The news was “a slap in the face,” a leader from one Seattle organization, who requested anonymity because her group works with the city, said. “It’s more than a funding issue—it’s about power and whose voices get amplified.”
Another longtime organizational leader said she was disappointed, but not surprised, that Moore was directing the funds to The More We Love. “It’s not to say their organization couldn’t have been funded, but you should not be giving this organization all the funding,” she said. “You’re saying, ‘We’re going to fund this white-led group and let them run this pilot without any of you,’ but they need all of our support.”
It’s highly unusual for an individual council member to ask an executive department to spend a large amount of money on a single organization through a direct contract without holding a vote to release the funds. It’s perhaps even more unusual for an executive department to take this kind of direction from a legislator.
And there’s another odd wrinkle in this case: Moore apparently asked HSD to give $500,000 of the $2 million to REST to expand its own receiving center in February, but rescinded that offer after HSD had already informed REST that they were getting the money, according to emails and sources familiar with the offer. REST participated in all the conversations leading up to the planned RFP and supported the process; the organization’s leaders were reportedly surprised to learn that the city had decided to bypass the RFP and award some of the money to them directly.
Earlier this year, the Mayor’s Office on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault (MODVSA), which is part of HSD, launched a series of meetings to discuss the upcoming request for proposals (RFP) for the funds, which was supposed to come out in May. Under an expedited schedule, the city was set to release the funds to the winning bidders in September.
“We’re going to focus on how to get that $2 million and get all of this work organized and coordinated in a very timely fashion,” HSD Director Tanya Kim told Moore’s housing and human services committee during a public meeting in January. “That $2 million requires us to expedite an RFP to get those services online as soon as possible.”
Elizabeth Dahl, executive director of Aurora Commons, said a competitive RFP “is the only way to ensure a fair and equitable process, with appropriate oversight, to ensure the funds allocated to respond to the SOAP legislation are used effectively. Organizations and leaders in the [gender-based violence] field, including ours, were leaned on for their expertise throughout the SOAP legislation process, and we were ensured there would be a fair process for distributing the funds awarded through an RFP. That is not what is happening.”
“Bypassing the RFP process is a blatant dismissal of the work we did and the expertise of those of us who have been doing this work for years,” the first CSE organization leader who requested anonymity said.
Neither Moore’s office nor HSD responded to questions by press time, but we’ll update this story if we hear back.
Emails between Moore and her staff and Kim, Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington, and other city officials show that Moore directed HSD to give the funds to The More We Love about a week after visiting their shelter in Renton, where she spoke to women living there and found their stories “compelling.”
“Given the urgency of the need for additional receiving beds in a safe location … and The More We Love’s ability to immediately add an additional 10 beds with wrap-around support and 24/7 access, I am requesting $1 million of the $2 million [allocation] be awarded to The More We Love for the provision of 10 emergency receiving center beds at their facility as soon as a contract can be finalized,” Moore told Kim in a March 12 email.
“HSD will move forward with the below, piloting The More We Love’s emergency receiving center—ensuring there’s a clear nexus to Seattle given the location [in Renton]—at $1 million, and implementing the remaining as proposed by HSD,” Kim responded. Renton is about 20 miles away from Aurora Ave. North, where Seattle’s street sex trade is concentrated.
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In a subsequent email directing HSD staff to “move forward with implementation,” Kim said it was unclear how much will be left over from the original $2 million, which also has to pay for a new city staffer, consultants, and any costs associated with the work the city has already done on the planned competitive bidding process.
The More We Love recently opened a small shelter at a house in Renton, but otherwise does not have any track record working with CSE survivors; the group’s leader, Kristine Moreland, worked at REST for a couple of years but was never a direct service provider, according to several people familiar with her role there.
Moreland did not respond to a request for an interview.
In an email inviting Moore to visit The More We Love’s Renton shelter, Moreland said a staffer for the group had recently sat down with the group of women and learned about gaps in service they faced, finding the revelations “both eye-opening and heartbreaking because many of the challenges they described seem like they should be simple to fix, yet they persist.”
The language is similar to the pitch Moreland made to city officials in Burien, where she claimed that she, unlike existing groups with more experience working with chronically homeless people, could easily get people into housing and treatment; subsequently, the Burien council ended the city’s contract with the longstanding outreach group REACH and handed that money to The More We Love.
It’s unclear what services The More We Love provides at its Renton facility. According to Moore’s email to HSD Director Kim, Moreland told the city her organization offers “substance use treatment, counseling, job training, advocacy in the criminal legal system as victims as well as defendants, and assistance accessing housing.”
But people that have been working in the field for years or decades are skeptical. Because the groups that assist CSE survivors have varying levels of funding and offer different services, they typically work together to provide wraparound support rather than trying to do everything themselves, several representatives from these organizations said. Moreland’s group has never been part of those conversations.
A slide from The More We Love’s five-page “year end report” for 2024
Moreland’s claims about The More We Love’s results have been hard to verify.
Earlier this year, Moreland presented The More We Love’s “year end report” to the Burien City Council. The five-page document says The More We Love “assisted” 303 people, including “25 survivors helped,” between August and December 2024, with a numberless pie chart providing a very high-level breakdown of the services the group claims to have provided. The More We Love provided the same five-page report to Seattle leaders, including Moore, as part of their pitch for funding.
The group has not published a more detailed breakdown of its services or data showing more detailed measures of effectiveness, such as how many people obtain and remain in permanent housing, how many people are able to stay sober or in recovery after treatment or detox, and how many people return to the sex trade after going through their program.
The More We Love has been criticized in the past for distributing private health information about their clients to police, elected officials and at least one private business owner in Burien, and one provider we spoke to expressed concern about the fact that the organization publishes the photos of sexual exploitation survivors on its Facebook page, potentially revealing information about their location and lives to their former traffickers.
Despite holding a major homelessness contract with Burien and securing a million-dollar promise from Seattle, The More We Love just organized as a nonprofit in mid-2023, and did not have enough revenue to file a full 990 tax form with the IRS that year. “They haven’t been on the scene long enough to have results,” the longtime provider said.
Many of the organizational leaders who spoke to PubliCola said they felt the city had not only wasted their time but violated their trust.
The longtime CSE leader called the outcome “really sad, because at the end of the day, the city is breaking the trust of the community. … The city talked about providing a forum to share critical information about investments, and now they’re going behind our backs.”
“We already know that white people are in power and that Black and brown people have to fight ten times as hard to get the same respect,” the other CSE organization leader who requested anonymity said. “It reinforces a harmful pattern where white-led groups secure resources and Black-led groups that have the solutions to these critical issues are sidelined.”
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1. The city of Burien spent more than $200,000 last year paying a Seattle law firm, Keller Rohrbach, to fight a lawsuit filed by a group of unsheltred people who challenged the city’s ban on sleeping outdoors last year. Keller Rohrbach’s billing statements, obtained through a records request, span 11 months of 2024; they do not include any invoices from this year, which would include preparation for an appearance in King County Superior Court Judge Michael Ryan’s courtroom last month.
The plaintiffs, who were forced to leave an encampment on Ambaum Blvd. in Burien in December 2023, sued to stop an earlier version of Burien’s 
Instead of bringing in $406 million last year, as the city’s budget forecast predicted, the payroll expense tax yielded $360 million—more than the $315 million the tax brought in for 2023, but more than 11 percent shy of what city budget planners expected. If this trend continues, it could be a major problem; last year, the mayor and city council added tens of millions of dollars in new spending, much of it ongoing, to the city’s budget, using $287 million in “extra” JumpStart revenues over two years to pay for the new spending and close a massive budget deficit.
