Tag: Bailey Stober

Democratic Party, homelessness, human services, Mayor Durkan, Morning Fizz, Parks, Police

Another Sweep in Ballard, JustCARE Disputes Mayor’s Cost Claims, and Former County Dems Leader Resigns

1. On Friday, the city will remove any tents that remain at Gilman Playfield in Ballard, part of a wider strategy of removing encampments that are near schools, playgrounds and sports fields. The Gilman sweep comes after similar encampment removals at Rainier Playfield and Miller Park on Capitol Hill, which the mayor’s office said were necessary to make the parks “safe and accessible” to students and children playing sports.

Mayoral spokeswoman Rachel Schulkin said the Seattle Police Department responded 61 times in the past six months to “calls including disturbances, domestic violence, and other suspicious or potentially dangerous activity at the playground,” and that the fire department had responded to another 11 calls. Additionally, “Youth sports team coaches, parents, and neighbors have been reaching out to the City over the past few months with various safety concerns and to express their frustrations over not being able to use the field for youth sports,” Schulkin said.

On the day a jury found Derek Chauvin guilty of murdering George Floyd, the account retweeted a post from the Kent Police Department that read, “If you’re celebrating 420 today, DON’T DRIVE. Pop a squat on your 70s basement couch, play some Boston in the background, binge watch Fast Times and eat Doritos.” When a reader called the tweet “tone deaf,” the Kent account responded, “Just want to encourage people to be safe if they’re celebrating today 😊.”

The encampment was quiet on Wednesday morning, as outreach workers went from tent to tent to discuss options with the people living in the park. None of the tents were on the playground or the nearby playfield; the biggest concentration was in a shaded area near the restrooms and on the sidewalk outside the playfield fence.

According to an outreach worker on site, most of the residents would be offered rooms at the Executive Pacific Hotel downtown; if the majority of the dozens of people living in the park accept placements, the hotel would be essentially full, although some people who moved into the hotel have reportedly left without receiving permanent housing placements.

Encampment removals slowed down dramatically during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic but have been ramping back up this spring, including the removal of tents and encampment residents from University Playfield near I-5 last weekend.

Also Wednesday, the JustCARE program moved a number of people living in Pioneer Square near the historic First Avenue pergola to its own hotel-based shelters, the Navigation Center, and the Executive Pacific Hotel, most likely making a planned sweep of that encampment unnecessary; the city is reportedly planning additional encampment removals in Pioneer Square and the International District in the coming weeks.

2. Mayor Jenny Durkan has repeatedly claimed that JustCARE costs more than $100,000 a person, a claim that has so frustrated the organizations supporting the program that they produced a flyer outlining what they say the program costs “at scale”: Just under $50,000 a client, half of which is the cost of hotel rooms themselves.

Durkan’s office has shown little interest in expanding JustCARE, which is a joint project of the Public Defender Association, Asian Counseling and Referral Service, REACH, and other groups, arguing that there are cheaper options that do the same thing.

A spokeswoman for the mayor’s office provided a chart outlining the budget for King County’s extension of JustCARE, which comes in at an average of $104,000 a month per room. The mayor’s office says that they have always calculated and compared costs on a “per room” basis than a “per person” basis, a claim the PDA disputes. The PDA says that its cost estimate of around $49,000 per client is based on a longer-term model that would bring the program to “scale,” renting “more than twice as many rooms in the same hotels, and [serving] more than twice as many participants,” according to PDA director Lisa Daugaard.

In February, the city rejected a proposal that would have effectively expanded JustCARE by moving clients into the Executive Pacific Hotel downtown, insisting that they could not spend a penny more than $17,000 per client plus the cost of the rooms themselves.

Ultimately, the city signed two contracts for hotel-based shelters, with the Low-Income Housing Institute and Chief Seattle Club, that came in significantly above the $17,000 cap.

Mayoral spokeswoman Kamaria Hightower told PubliCola, “We absolutely agree that a provider contract should be a longer-term commitment both for clients and efficiency and understand the county is seeking that approach. That’s why we created our hotel programs that are a year long and include rapid rehousing resources (and some [permanent supportive housing] resources).

3. Bailey Stober, the former director of the King County Democrats who lost his job after an investigation found him guilty of sexual harassment and workplace misconduct, is leaving his latest job as communications manager for Kent Mayor Dana Ralph under circumstances that remain unclear. Ralph would not provide details about why Stober is leaving, but confirmed that he has “resigned his position effective June 1.”

Contacted by email, Stober said, “When I took the job, I came to Kent from Texas and told the Mayor I would give her 18 months to two years and then my plan was to return to Texas. I took a great job offer in Texas and as I enter my 18/19th month with the city I’ve finished the projects I wanted to finish and am happily going back to Texas.”

Stober is the anonymous voice behind the city of Kent’s Twitter account, which gained thousands of followers for its puerile tweets mocking other cities and making jokes about “nuggs.” (Here are some lyrics the account  posted at 9:00 on a Friday night.)

On the day a jury found Derek Chauvin guilty of murdering George Floyd, the city of Kent account retweeted a post from the Kent Police Department that read, “If you’re celebrating 420 today, DON’T DRIVE. Pop a squat on your 70s basement couch, play some Boston in the background, binge watch Fast Times and eat Doritos. Be chill and stay off the roads.” When a reader called the tweet “tone deaf,” the Kent account responded, “Just want to encourage people to be safe if they’re celebrating today 😊.” Unlike many other local jurisdictions, the city did not acknowledge the Chauvin verdict on its Twitter account.

Earlier this year, Ralph stood by Stober when he got kicked out of a local bar after allegedly inciting a massive brawl and calling both Ralph and the chief of police and threatening to have the bar’s liquor license revoked.

Cops, Democratic Party, Featured, Media, Morning Fizz

Morning Fizz: Stranger Editor Nixed, Former County Dems Director 86’d

By Erica C. Barnett

Doing a retro Morning Fizz this morning to round up a few items I haven’t been able to get to.

1. Bailey Stober, the former head of the King County Democrats who lost his position in 2018 due to allegations of sexual harassment, bullying, and financial mismanagement, called police late one Friday night in July to report what he described as a 10-person bar brawl at the Cloud 9 tavern in Kent. According to reports from witnesses, the fight started when security asked Stober to take his feet off a bar stool and he refused. I documented Stober’s downfall as head of the county Democrats—a saga that included misogynistic text messages, thousands of dollars spent on office rent, booze, and boys’ club getaways, and accusations that one of his accusers was an unreliable drug addict—on the Crank.

Stober resigned from his $90,000-a-year job as communications director for the King County assessor in 2018, amid an investigation into whether his behavior as head of the Democrats disqualified him from the position. But he quickly landed on his feet, taking consulting jobs for local campaigns before getting a full-time position as communications director for Kent Mayor Dana Ralph.

Witnesses interviewed by police who arrived at the Cloud 9 around 2 in the morning on July 11 said that after refusing to take his feet off the bar stool or leave the bar when asked to do so, Stober “began yelling that he works for the City of Kent and that he works for Kent PD.” According to the police report, “As [Stober] was proclaiming his employment, he began waving around his City of Kent ID card.”

Stober later told an officer that he had only claimed to work for the mayor, not the police.

At that point, several witnesses told police, someone punched someone else in the face, and a confusing fight between security guards and several patrons who were with Stober ensued.

Stober, according to all accounts, left the bar and went outside to call 911 without getting mixed up in the fight himself. When officers arrived, he told one that “he believed he may have instigated a bar fight without intending to,” according to one officer’s account.

Another officer reported that “[b]efore I could ask any further questions, he stated ‘I already called the Mayor and the Chief.'” Later, the same officer reported, “Bailey was advised he was trespassed from Cloud Nine for life. Bailey said he understood and would not be coming back.

“Bailey appeared to be very intoxicated during this investigation,” the officer’s account continues. “Bailey mentioned he worked for the Mayor’s Office and made comments to myself and other officers’ that Cloud Nine’s liquor license would not be renewed.”

The Kent City Attorney declined to file charges against Stober and the case was closed in early August.

Contacted by email, Kent Mayor Dana Ralph said her office “has reviewed Mr. Stober’s conduct from a personnel standpoint, taken proper disciplinary action, and documented it in his personnel file. We consider the matter resolved.” Ralph did not specify what disciplinary action she took against Stober, and Stober himself did not respond to an email seeking comment.

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2. A Seattle resident has filled a complaint with the city’s Office of Police Accountability against police chief Carmen Best for “using her official position to promote her private affairs.” The complaint centers on Best’s use of the police department’s website to complain about demonstrators who attempted to show up at her house in Snohomish, a small town about 30 miles north of Seattle.

“[T]he time she, and other employees spend on posting the article on the blog, is not a matter for the City of Seattle, and as a resident of Seattle, my tax dollars should not go to waste on this issue outside of the city,” the complaint says. “This is a serious matter, and a full investigation of what resources Carmen is directing to support her private residence needs to come to public attention.”

The complaint bounced around a bit, going to the city auditor’s office and the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission before landing on OPA director Andrew Myerberg’s desk. Myerberg says OPA is doing intake on the complaint (along with thousands of others stemming from ongoing protests against police violence) now, a process that takes up to 30 days. Once that’s done, the office will determine whether Best violated any city policy and, “even if we close it as a contact log”—a designation that means OPA found no misconduct—”we’ll send some kind of explanation.”

3. Longtime Stranger editor Christopher Frizzelle is no longer employed by the publication. Last week, a majority of the Stranger’s editorial staffers reportedly told upper management it was him—or them. The decision didn’t come out of the blue; according to sources, editorial staffers have been dissatisfied with much of the online content, including daily video messages from people in the Seattle arts scene, and had issues with Frizzelle’s management style.

The paper has not published a print edition since early March, and has downsized dramatically since the onset of the pandemic, laying off all of its print production staff and many editorial staffers. 

Affordability, campaign finance, City Council, Democratic Party, Development, Elections, homelessness, housing, land use, Morning Crank, Taxes

Morning Crank: Public Land for the Public Good

1. City Council member Teresa Mosqueda will introduce affordable-housing legislation that could have major implications for one of the largest land holders in the city, Seattle City Light. Mosqueda’s bill would allow City Light to sell its surplus land to affordable-housing developers for less than market value—all the way down to the amount the city originally paid for the land—and would require City Light to do so if the agency committed to build housing making 60 percent or less of the Seattle median income. (That latter part may be up for negotiation.) For example, if City Light bought a piece of property in South Lake Union 60 years ago for a few thousand dollars, and the land is now worth millions, a nonprofit that agreed to build deeply affordable housing could buy it for the original, decades-old price.

The proposal, if it passes, will mark a significant change in the city’s policy for disposing of excess City Light land, and could invite a court challenge. Currently, the city requires property owned by its electric utility to be sold at fair-market value, thanks to a 2003 ruling striking down a fee City Light imposed to install and maintain streetlights. That ruling found that City Light could not charge ratepayers for any purpose other than providing utilities, and forced the agency to return $24 million to Seattle residents. Mosqueda’s legislation would change this disposition policy. However, Mosqueda’s office maintains that a separate ruling in 2013, in which the state supreme court disagreed with Bellevue developer Kemper Freeman’s claim that it was illegal to build light rail over I-90 because the bridge was built with gas taxes, which are supposed to be spent only on road purposes, establishes a precedent for City Light to sell its property at below-market value once that property is paid off and declared surplus to the city’s purposes.

Separately, Mosqueda’s office says she will introduce legislation that would encourage all city agencies that own surplus land to  give away or sell this excess property for below-market values to public agencies or nonprofit housing providers that agree to use the land to build affordable housing. The legislation comes in response to a new state law, House Bill 2382, passed by the state legislature last year allowing state and local agencies to transfer land to affordable housing developers at little or no cost.  Mosqueda’s proposal would also allow agencies, including nonprofits to exercise this right even if they don’t have all the money in hand or haven’t secured a development partner.

“Through smart management of public land, and using surplus and underutilized public land for the best public good, we can reduce the cost of building the affordable housing our communities need,” Mosqueda says. “This will also help us realize more community-led affordable housing and small-business development” by giving housing providers more time to pull together funding and development plans for properties that become available.

According to the latest city land inventory, there are about 35 pieces of city-owned land larger than 15,000 square feet that are surplus, “excess,” or underutilized, although some are outside Seattle and not all are suitable for housing development.

2. As I noted on Twitter last week, the anti-head tax campaign formed on May 18 and achieved its goal of repealing the tax on June 12. In the course of their brief effort, they spent nearly half a million dollars, according to their latest filing at the city’s Ethics and Elections Commission—more than most of last year’s city council candidates spent in a year-long campaign.

A large amount of that money went to  out-of-town consulting firms, including Scottsdale, Arizona-based firm Morning In America, which was paid $350,000 to gather signatures for the effort to repeal the head tax. Signature gatherers were reportedly paid as much as $6 a signature, belying any notion that the movement to quash a tax that would have impacted nearly 500 high-grossing businesses was primarily a “grassroots” effort. Morning In America, as its name indicates, is a firm closely linked to Republicans; in 2016, the Trump campaign paid Morning In America $256,000 for “ballot access consulting.”
The campaign also paid Swarthmore, PA-based Awareness Analytics Partners $10,000 to target Seattleites with anti-head tax ads on Facebook and Twitter. The firm is also linked to Republicans and right-wing political activism, through its work for individual candidates and national conservative groups such as the D.C.-based Right Way Super PAC. One of the group’s partners, Matthew Elliott, was the head of Vote Leave, the pro-Brexit campaign in England. The campaign was also generous to local burger scion Saul Spady, a political consultant and grandson of Dick Spady, who started Dick’s Burgers. Spady’s consulting firm, Cre8tive Empowerment, received $31,000 for its work on the monthlong campaign to kill the head tax.
3. The state has issued a $24,055 judgment against the King County Democrats for failing to disclose tens of thousands of campaign expenditures and contributions in a timely fashion in 2016, with half of the total suspended if the group doesn’t commit any more violations for the next four years. The judgment, which also includes $12,742 in costs and attorney’s fees, resulted from a series of complaints filed by conservative activist Glen Morgan, who files complaints against Democratic candidates and organizations for violating campaign-disclosure rules—some minor, others significant—in the hope that they will result in significant fines.
As I reported earlier this year, the King County Democrats knew the judgment was coming, but did not know specifically how much they would owe the state. The group was thrown into turmoil earlier this year when its chairman, Bailey Stober, refused to step down after multiple investigations found that he had committed workplace and financial misconduct, including profligate spending on rent, office equipment, and cable service as well as entertainment and travel for himself and his friends. When Stober finally stepped down, after a 13-hour trial in which Stober’s allies turned tables on the woman who accused him of sexual harassment and abusive behavior, insinuating that she was a drug addict who was making up stories to get back at her former boss for firing her, the group had just $3,200 in the bank, with thousands of dollars in outstanding debts.
The group hasn’t filed its latest expenditure reports, so it’s hard to know precisely how much cash they have on hand; at the end of May, they reported raising $3,703 and spending $6,265,  a balance of $13,560, with $3,703 in contributions for the month. Between June 4 and July 6, the group has filed contribution reports totaling just over $1,450. They reportedly plan to pay the judgment in installments.
Affordability, Democratic Party, education, Elections, homelessness, Morning Crank, Transportation

Morning Crank: The Ne Plus Ultra of GOP Supervillains

1. Bailey Stober may have been deposed as head of the King County Democrats, but his legacy of profligate spending lives on, in the form of an $1,800-a-month lease (twice what he was reportedly authorized to spend) for an office space in Auburn that has been sitting vacant for several months. This week, the group’s new chairwoman, Natalie Reber, sent out an announcement: The leasing agent for the space had found a tenant.

The bad news? According to Reber’s email to membership:

The leasing agent at the Auburn office has made a deal with the [Dino] Rossi campaign and it sounds like they will be taking over the lease.  While this is not ideal, I think it is reasonable and as far as any talking points, we just simply say, it was a business decision made by the leasing agent.  

Rossi, a current state senator and two-time gubernatorial candidate who is running for the 8th Congressional District seat being vacated next year by retiring Republican Rep. Dave Reichert, is not just any Republican—among Washington State Democrats, he’s the ne plus ultra of GOP supervillains. And, starting next month, he’ll be helping  them pay their rent.

Reber, who is out of town, declined to provide any details about the new arrangement, saying only that the group has “let the leasing agent know that we would like out of the lease and left it to them to find tenants. While that’s being sorted out, I don’t have a comment.”

Natalia Koss Vallejo, the former executive director of the King County Democrats (Stober fired her shortly after another woman filed a workplace misconduct complaint against him on her behalf), says the group considered subleasing some of its unused space to a Democratic candidate while she was still director, but rejected multiple potential tenants because the group had not formally endorsed anyone in their races yet. (The endorsement process is still ongoing.) With Rossi renting part of the space, she says, it seems unlikely that a Democrat will rent out the rest of the office in the future: “The walls in those units are super thin. If I was a Democratic candidate, I would not want to be sharing that space with a Republican.”

According to the state Public Disclosure Commission, the King County Democrats continued to pay rent on the space through at least April, but appear to have negotiated a better deal on their Internet service, which was costing the group more than $450 a month. (According the group’s treasurer, Stober signed the group up for the most expensive Internet service package Comcast offers, one better suited to a midsize e-commerce firm than a political organization which had, at its peak, one employee.) Donations that were withheld while the Democrats debated what to do with Stober, including $5,000 from King County Executive Dow Constantine and a couple thousand dollars from various district Democratic groups that refused to pay their dues as long as Stober remained in his position.

2. The Families and Education Levy, which funds programs to help kids from birth through 12th grade, and the Seattle preschool levy, which subsidizes preschool, will be on the ballot as a single, combined Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise (FEPP) levy in November. (The levy seems likely to share the ballot with what amounts to an anti-levy: A referendum to repeal the $275-per-employee head  tax, whose proceeds are earmarked for programs to address homelessness.) Among other changes, Mayor Jenny Durkan’s levy renewal plan proposes eliminating for a two-year home visitation literacy program for two- and three-year-olds called the Parent-Child Home Program (the plan assumes that future funding for the program will come from the city’s sweetened beverage tax); dramatically reducing funding for programs in elementary schools; and expanding or increasing subsidies for preschool and college to include the very highest-income families.

At a time when the income and wealth gap between Seattle’s wealthiest and poorest residents is increasing and parents who might be eligible for subsidized preschool are being forced to move outside city limits, it’s unclear why Durkan has proposed increasing tax subsidies for wealthy families to send their kids to preschool and college. Currently, the subsidy for preschool tuition declines with income on a sliding scale, from a total subsidy for people making up to 300 percent of the poverty level to a maximum of $535 a year for the highest-income families. Durkan’s proposal would set a minimum subsidy of $1,000 per student specifically for high-income families, for a total subsidy to wealthy families over the life of the program of about $3.6 million.

Meanwhile, the Seattle Promise program, which currently offers a year of free community college tuition to kids at three South Seattle high schools, would expand tuition subsidies to all public high-school graduates, regardless of their family income. Because higher-income students generally qualify for fewer tuition subsidy programs overall, the city would spend more subsidizing their tuition, on average—about $3,000 a student, or half again as much as the $2,000 the city spends on a typical Seattle Promise subsidy today.

On Wednesday, council members expressed concern at the idea of government subsidies for rich families to send their kids to preschool and college. Council member Rob Johnson, who noted that he recently paid preschool tuition for his daughters, said, “I think there is a value for us to provide opportunities for kids at all income levels to participate in the Seattle Preschool Program, but I’m not sure we should be subsidizing ev family that walks in the door.” Similarly, Johnson said he worried that if eligibility the Seattle Promise program is opened up to all students, “kids in my neck of the woods, in Roosevelt, whose parents are really on them to get on it and get their applications in on  time may take up those slots,” while kids with higher needs “who may benefit more form the Promise program may be shut out of it because all those Roosevelt kids got in first.”

Council president Bruce Harrell, who represents Southeast Seattle’s District 2 (where two of the three current Seattle Promise high schools are located) said he understood the argument for socially engineering preschools so they included kids from all over the income spectrum, but drew the line at expanding scholarship subsidies to wealthy families. “I have very little interest [in] subsidies for higher-income families. In fact, I would be opposed to that,” he said.

The committee will take up the levy proposal again at 11:00 on June 6 in council chambers.

3. A few hours after the levy discussion, council members had only positive things to say about an arguably similar proposal to subsidize transit passes for all Seattle public school students students, not just those who are low-income, at an additional cost of about $3 million a year. (The proposal is one of several changes to a sales tax and vehicle license fee measure voters approved in 2014, which was originally earmarked to expand Metro bus service. Because of driver and bus shortages, Metro has been unable to expand service as much as originally planned.) Currently, the city spends about $1 million a year on the youth ORCA program, which pays for free bus passes for low-income students; the change would add $3 million to the youth program and expand it to fund passes for all high school students, and some middle-school students, regardless of income.

Johnson, who originally proposed expanding the youth ORCA program, said yesterday that he would “like us to discuss more options than what the mayor has put on the table, because there might be things like reduced fare for all kids—as opposed to what we have right now, which is a proposal that would give free ORCA cards to all high school kids, some middle school kids, and no elementary school kids.” Discussing the options with staff after yesterday’s hearing, Johnson pointed out that elementary school kids who rely on the bus are most likely to be accompanied by parents (usually moms, often low-income) who rely on the bus to run errands and get their kids to school.

4. The Downtown Seattle Association is hosting a swank-sounding members-only event next week to solicit donations and hand out signature sheets for the effort to repeal the $275 employee hours tax, which is earmarked for housing and homeless services. The location: The Palace Ballroom in Belltown, owned by noted $15 minimum-wage Chicken Little and head-tax opponent Tom Douglas. Appetizers and drinks will be served.

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site or making a one-time contribution! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as reporting-related and office expenses. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

Democratic Party, Elections, homelessness, housing, King County, Morning Crank, Poverty, Taxes

Afternoon Crank: Competing for a Limited Number of Units

1. While the city of Seattle was debating over the merits of the head tax last week, the King County Auditor’s Office quietly released a report on the region’s response to homelessness that concluded, among other things, that “rapid rehousing”—which provides short-term rent vouchers to low-income households to find housing in the private market—isn’t working in King County. The city of Seattle’s adopted Pathways Home approach to homelessness suggests investing heavily in rapid rehousing, which assumes that formerly homeless people will be able to pay full market rent on a private apartment within just a few months of receiving their vouchers.

For this system to work, either: a) formerly homeless people must get jobs that pay enough to afford full market rent in Seattle, currently over* $1,600 for a one-bedroom apartment, before their three-to-12-month vouchers run out, or b) formerly homeless people must find housing that will still be affordable after they no longer have the subsidy. The problem, the King County report found, is that there are only about 470 private units available throughout the entire county, on average, that are affordable to people making just 30 percent of the area median income—and the competition for those units includes not just the hundreds of rapid rehousing clients who are currently looking for housing at any given time, but all the other low-income people seeking affordable housing in King County. Seattle’s Pathways Home plan would dramatically increase the number of rapid rehousing clients competing for those same several hundred units.

“Given market constraints, difficulties facilitating housing move-ins could limit rapid rehousing success,” the auditor’s report says. “As local funders increase their funding for RRH, it is possible that move-in rates will go down as more households compete for a limited number of units. Given the importance of client move-ins to later success, if this occurs additional funding spent on RRH may have diminishing benefits relative to its costs.” Additionally, the report notes that a proposed “housing resource center” to link landlords and low-income clients seeking housing with vouchers has not materialized since a consultant to the city of Seattle, Focus Strategies, recommended establishing such a center in 2016. In a tight housing market, with rents perpetually on the increase, landlords have little incentive to go out of their way to seek out low-income voucher recipients as potential renters.

2. Learn to trust the Crank: As I predicted when he initially announced his candidacy at the end of April, former King County Democrats chair Bailey Stober, who was ousted as both chair of the King County Democrats and spokesman for King County Assessor John Wilson after separate investigations concluded that he had engaged in unprofessional conduct as head of the Democrats by, among other things, bullying an employee, pressuring her to drink excessively, and calling her demeaning and sexist names, will not run for state legislature in the 47th District.

Fresh off his ouster from his $98,000-a-year job at King County, and with a $37,700 county payoff in hand, Stober told the Seattle Times‘ Jim Brunner that he planned to run for the state house seat currently held by Republican Mark Hargrove. Stober’s splashy “surprise” announcement (his word) came just days before a candidate with broad Democratic support, Debra Entenman, was planning to announce, a fact that was widely known in local Democratic Party circles. In a self-congratulatory Facebook announcement/press release, Stober said that he decided not to run after “conversations with friends, family, and supporters,” as well as “informal internal polling.” Stober went on to say that his “many supporters” had “weathered nasty phone calls and texts; awful online comments; and rude emails from those who opposed my candidacy. We chose not to respond in kind. They went low and my supporters went high.” In addition to routinely calling his employee a “bitch” “both verbally and in writing,” the official King County report found that Stober “made inappropriate and offensive statements about women,” “did state that Republicans could ‘suck his cock,'” and “more likely than not” referred to state Democratic Party chair Tina Podlodowski as “bitch, cunt, and ‘Waddles.'”

3. On Monday morning, Gov. Jay Inslee and Secretary of State Kim Wyman announced $1.2 million in funding for prepaid-postage ballots for the 2018 election. The only county that won’t receive state funding? King County, which funded postage-paid ballots for the 2018 elections, at a cost of $600,000, over Wyman’s objections last week. 

County council chairman Joe McDermott, a Democrat (the council is officially nonpartisan but includes de facto Democratic and Republican caucuses), says he was “really disappointed” that Inslee and Wyman decided to keep King County on the hook for paying for its own prepaid ballots, particularly given Wyman’s objection that the decision should be left up to the state legislature.

“She was against it before she was for it,” McDermott told me yesterday. Wyman’s office, McDermott says, “wasn’t working on the issue last year in the legislature, and yet all of a sudden she can find emergency money and appeal to the governor when King County takes the lead.”

In their announcement yesterday, Wyman and Inslee said they will “ask” the legislature to reimburse King County for the $600,000 it will spend on postage-paid ballots this year, but that funding is far from guaranteed. Still, McDermott says their decision to backfill funding for postage-paid ballots for Washington’s remaining 38 counties could set a precedent that will create pressure on legislators to take action next year. If the state believes it’s important to make it easier for people to vote in 2018, he says, “why would they argue that they’re not going to do it in the future? If it’s valuable this year, it should be valuable going forward.”

4. Dozens of waterfront condo owners spoke this afternoon against a proposed Local Improvement District, which has been in the works since the Greg Nickels administration, which many called an illegal tax on homeowners for the benefit of corporate landowners on the downtown waterfront. The one-time assessment, which homeowners could choose to pay over 20 years, is based on the increase in waterfront property values that the city anticipates will result from park and street improvements that the LID will pay for. Several homeowners who spoke this afternoon said they rarely or never visit the downtown waterfront despite living inside the LID assessment district, either because they live too far away (one condo owner said he lived on Fifth Avenue, and considered the hill leading down to the waterfront “too steep” to traverse) or because the waterfront is always clogged with tourists. Another, homeowner Jonathan Mark, said the city was failing to account for the decrease in property values that could result from “turning Alaskan Way into a freight highway.”

The median assessment on residential property owners, who own about 13 percent of the property that would be subject to the assessment, would be $2,379, according to the city’s Office of the Waterfront.

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site or making a one-time contribution! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as reporting-related and office expenses. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

Democratic Party, Elections, homelessness, human services, King County, Morning Crank

Morning Crank: Bags and Bags of Shredded Ballots
DSC00114
The new version looks just like a mailbox.

1. The King County council voted 7-2—with one Republican, Pete Von Reichbauer, joining the council’s six Democrats—to spend up to $381,000 next year on postage-paid ballots for this year’s midterm and general elections. King County voters have voted exclusively by mail, or by dropping their ballots at designated drop boxes, since 2009, but it has been voters’ responsibility to buy stamps for their ballots. Voting rights advocates have argued that the postage requirement is burdensome for younger voters (who are less likely to have stamps) and very low-income voters (for whom a 49-cent stamp represents a real impediment to voting); those who oppose providing postage say that it’s voters’ responsibility to make the minimal effort required to buy a stamp, and that those who feel they can’t afford it can just trek to their nearest ballot box.

Before the measure passed, County Council members Kathy Lambert and Reagan Dunn offered several amendments that would have watered down or placed conditions on the legislation, including a proposal by Lambert to clarify that the county measure did not set any “precedent” for the rest of the state. Lambert argued that if voters in King County were able to vote more easily than voters in the rest of the state, it would put other counties, particularly more rural counties with fewer resources that are “hanging on by their fingernails,” at a disadvantage—essentially the same argument offered by Republican Secretary of State Kim Wyman when she urged the council to reject the measure one week ago. That amendment failed, as did another Lambert proposal that would have required the county elections office to turn around a complicated report about turnout and ballot box usage three days after the November election was certified. Another, from Republican Reagan Dunn, would put language on the outside of every prepaid ballot encouraging people to put stamps on their ballot anyway, ostensibly in an effort to save King County money. Although King County Elections director Julie Wise made it clear that Dunn’s amendment would almost certainly cost the county far more than it saves (election workers would have to pore over hundreds of thousands of ballots by hand, photocopy them, and mail them to the post office for a refund), the amendment actually passed, after Dunn said the language in his amendment left some wiggle room for the county to reject the idea if it cost too much.

“I like the voters’ drop boxes [because] it’s not shredded, I know it’s in, it’s going to get counted, and I know that there are very few people that are going to handle it.”—King County Council member Kathy Lambert  

Before the final vote, Lambert  offered a strange, last-ditch anecdote to explain why she opposed voting by mail. “I pay my property taxes in person,” Lambert began, because one year when she sent them by mail—she knows it was her anniversary, she said, because she was about to go to Hawaii—and they never made it to the tax assessor’s office. When she went to the post office to find out what had happened, she said, “they brought me out two huge bags of mail that had been shredded, and they said, ‘If you find your check in here, you can take it out and prove that you have found it.’ I hope that we won’t find out later on that there are bags and bags of shredded ballots that have gotten caught in the machinery,” Lambert continued. “I like the voters’ drop boxes [because] it’s not shredded, I know it’s in, it’s going to get counted, and I know that there are very few people that are going to handle it.”

Lambert did not note that voters can track their ballots, and find out whether theirs was counted or “shredded,” at the King County Elections website.

2. A rumor was circulating yesterday that ousted King County Democrats chair (AKA ousted King County Assessor’s office spokesman) Bailey Stober will announce today (or this week) that he is not running for 47th District state representative, despite announcing that he plans to do so in an interview with the Seattle Times. As I reported last week, Stober’s announcement came just two days before Debra Entenman, a deputy field director for Congressman Adam Smith, was planning to formally announce that she would seek the same position with the full support of the House Democratic Campaign Committee. The announcement gave Stober some positive press shortly after he was forced out of two positions of power when four separate investigations concluded he had engaged in sexual harassment, bullying, and multiple acts of workplace and financial misconduct. (Each of the investigations upheld a different combination of allegations).

Stober received a $37,700 settlement from King County in exchange for resigning from his $98,000-a-year position, from which he had been on fully paid leave for most of 2018. On Friday, he posted a photo on Facebook of what he said was his brand-new jeep. “New life new car 💁🏽‍♂️😏 #adulting,” the caption read.

3. Three low-barrier shelters run by the Downtown Emergency Service Center, which were all scheduled to shut down this month, will stay open for the rest of the year, though their fate after that remains uncertain. The shelters—an overnight men’s shelter on Lower Queen Anne, the Kerner-Scott House for mentally ill women in South Lake Union, and DESC’s auxiliary shelter at the Morrison Hotel downtown—lost funding under the new “Pathways Home” approach to funding homeless services, which prioritizes 24/7 “enhanced” shelters over traditional overnight shelters and withholds funding (see page 7) from agencies that fail to move at least 40 percent of their clients from emergency shelter into permanent housing. When the city issued grants under the new criteria, it increased DESC’s overall funding but eliminated funding for the three overnight shelters. All told, about 163 shelter beds were scheduled to disappear in May unless DESC could come up with the money to keep them open or another operator stepped forward.

Oddly, the decision to close at least one of the shelters does not appear to have been strictly about money, but about DESC itself. According to a letter HSD sent to concerned community members in mid-April, the city had “HSD reached out to Salvation Army to discuss the possibility of taking over operations of the Roy Street Queen Anne shelter in June when the DESC contract ends. Salvation Army has agreed and is going to have a May-Dec contract so there is some overlap time during the transition.  Shifting operations to the Salvation Army would have required a special budget allocation from the City Council to keep the shelter running under new management for the rest of the year.

DESC’s overall budget request included significant pay increases for all of the agency’s staff, who are unionized but remain notoriously underpaid, even by human service provider standards. DESC’s $8.6 million budget request for its enhanced shelter program included more than $6 million for salaries and benefits—enough to raise an entry-level counselor’s wages from $15.45 an hour to $19.53 and to boost case managers’ salaries from a high of about $38,000 to $44,550 a year. Even those higher salaries remain paltry by private-market standards, but by proposing to implement the raises all at once, DESC inflated its budget request dramatically at precisely the time when the city was looking to cut “fat” from the system and reward programs that promised fast results and cost savings for the city.

The good news for DESC (and the men and women) who use its overnight shelters) is that funding for the shelters appears to be secure for at least the rest of 2018. The bad news is that the reprieve is temporary, and major issues, including low salaries for shelter workers, remain unresolved.

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site or making a one-time contribution! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as reporting-related and office expenses. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

Bikes, Business, City Council, City Hall, Democratic Party, gentrification, homelessness, Morning Crank, Taxes

Afternoon Crank: I Don’t Understand the Evidentiary Value

 

Image result for cascade bicycle club

1. For the past week, local right-wing talk show host Dori Monson has been on a jag about Cascade Bicycle Club, accusing the bicycling advocacy group of engaging in “gangland” tactics in their years-long effort to complete the “missing link” of the Burke-Gilman multi-use trail in Ballard. Monson’s evidence for this “gangster” activity? A single email from 2014, sent by Cascade policy director Brock Howell to former executive director Elizabeth Kiker, which reads, in full:

  Tue, 28 Oct 2014 16:23:00 -0700

Re: Josh Brower’s jacket Brock Howell <brock.howell@cascadebicycleclub.org> Elizabeth Kiker <elizabeth.kiker@cascadebicycleclub.org>

I would love to go around the litigation. Our best bet is to get this C.D. Stimson development project funded & built. Once it’s built, the operations of Salmon Bay Sand & Gravel and other light industry will likely have to be limited during evening hours due to noise issues —- especially if the development is a hotel, apartment or condo. Once their operations are impacted, it’s only a matter of time before they sell out and give up the litigation. Also, Brower’s “Plan B” will likely be completed in 2016 during a major maintenance project to Leary Way/Ave. Or, rather, we’ll at least get a road diet with bike lanes on Leary. So, in terms of meeting the needs of bicyclists in Ballard, some of the pressure should be lifted from us, and we can push for a true completion of the Burke-Gilman Trail no matter how long it takes.   In the interim, I’m looking forward to shoulder improvements to Shilshole Ave, which is supposed to go to bid this November (basically 1.5 years late) with construction soon there after.   The Connect Ballard team is working on an end-run-around the anti-business framing by building a business coalition in support of fixing the Missing Link. And Mary & I have talked about using Ballard as an ideal pilot neighborhood for creating Seattle’s first Bike-Friendly Business District.   So lots of good things potentially happening. With 240 Connect Ballard team members, hopefully we can make some things happen quickly.   -Brock

No context is provided for the email, and I was unable to obtain the rest of the email chain. However, here is some context that might help explain why a nearly four-year-old conversation between two people who have long since left Cascade might be surfacing now: After waging battle against the Missing Link for years, a group of business owners, including Salmon Bay Sand and Gravel, are trying to convince the new mayor, Jenny Durkan, to kill the project. The email, which the coalition attached to a letter rejecting a proposed settlement in their ongoing lawsuit against the city. bolsters their argument that bike activists really just want to destroy local businesses.

Absurd as that idea might sound, it’s basically the story the anti-Missing Link coalition’s attorney, Josh Brower, has been peddling for years. In fact, Brower tried to introduce the exact same email as evidence of an anti-business plot last year in a hearing before the city hearing examiner, who rejected the email as irrelevant. Here’s an excerpt from the transcript of that hearing, which begins with city hearing examiner Ryan Vancil expressing skepticism about Brower’s claim that it proves Cascade’s plan is to gentrify Ballard so that industrial businesses won’t be around to complain anymore.

EXAMINER VANCIL: [T]he concept you’re getting at is this land use pressure. We had an expert witness addressing those land use pressures, the tensions between the different land uses that are coming. I’m — I’m not sure how we’re getting at that through this. And we had this discussion when we didn’t admit this — this email. Even if this is an accurate — you know, if I sort of apply, sort of, a summary judgment standard, if — if this is exactly how Cascade feels about this and they would love to see every business gone in Ballard, I don’t see how that’s a land use pressure. It’s the opinion of a — of a nonprofit organization. It — it’s  not a … zoning or land use code pressure that’s coming from a use. And this is a hearing inherently analyzing — we are looking at the  analysis of different land uses and whether it’s adequate or not. So I’m just not — I mean, I get it that this is a good stick in the eye to Cascade but I don’t understand the evidentiary value of it.

MR. BROWER: Sure. And it’s not meant to be a stick in the eye, Mr. Examiner.

EXAMINER VANCIL: It comes across that way  very strongly.

MR. BROWER: Okay.

EXAMINER VANCIL: And, so I’m having a hard time understanding why —

MR. BROWER: Certainly.

EXAMINER VANCIL: — particularly with the limited time we have, how this is something we really want to be spending our time on.   

Brower says he did not provide the email, which was one of “hundreds or thousands” his team obtained through the discovery process, to Monson, his fellow talk-show host Todd Herman (who called Howell to confirm the email), or Safe Seattle, which posted the email in mid-April. Brower says he does not agree with Monson’s characterization of Howell and Cascade as “gangsters,” but adds, “I do believe CBC, Brock and other CBC staff have a very heavy handed and personal-attack approach to their advocacy. When CBC does not get what it wants it resorts to personal attacks, which I think is inappropriate in civil discourse.” Brower went on Monson’s show on Tuesday, where he posited that Cascade is “truly trying to put those [Ballard industrial] businesses out of business.” Although Brower stayed on message and avoided personal attacks, he did not object when Monson accused Cascade of engaging in “gangster stuff,” “raw corruption,” and “collud[ing] with developers to put condos on the waterfront where maritime businesses used to be.”

2. Learn to trust the Crank: At last night’s meeting of the 47th District Democrats, Debra Entenman, a field representative for Congressman Adam Smith, announced that she will be challenging state 47th District Rep. Mark Hargrove, a Republican, this year. Entenman has the support of the House Democratic Campaign Committee, which funds and campaigns for Democratic candidates.

Earlier this week, ousted King County Democrats chair Bailey Stober told the Seattle Times that he was running for the position as an “independent Democrat.” The surprise announcement came just two days before Entenman was expected to announce she was running, and just one week after Stober was forced to resign from his $98,000-a-year job at King County over allegations of sexual harassment and workplace misconduct. (Three separate investigations and a 14-hour “trial” by the King County Democrats’ executive board concluded that Stober was guilty of the vast majority of the charges against him, which also included allegations of financial misconduct.)

The 47th District won’t have its formal endorsement process until later this year, but the district’s chairman, Aaron Schuler, announced that he was removing Stober from his position as sergeant-at-arms for the district, citing the fact that Stober had threatened one of the group’s members via text message and is running for office without the support of his party. (I have seen the text message and can confirm that Stober threatened the recipient if she spoke against him politically.) During the same meeting, another member said she felt threatened by Stober’s supporters during the process that resulted in his resignation. “I felt that I was a potential target,” she said. During a panel discussion later in the meeting, Washington State Democratic Party Chair Tina Podlodowski said she hoped that what happened in the King County party would be “a cautionary tale around the state. … I’ve gotta say, as Democrats, one of our tenets is that we believe women,” Podlodowski continued. “I think we could have done a lot of things better.”

3. The One Table task force, which was charged with coming up with regional solutions for the root causes of homelessness and came back with a plan that included just 5,000 units of housing over the next three years across the entire King County region, was supposed to hold its final meeting today in Auburn. But the long-scheduled meeting was canceled quietly and abruptly earlier this week, and removed from the One Table website with no public notice.  One possible reason for the cancellation: An upcoming vote on the city’s proposed employee hours tax, the outcome of which could dramatically alter the task force’s final recommendations. Yesterday, after Amazon effectively threatened to pick up its toys and leave if Seattle passes the tax, the City Council’s finance committee decided to postpone additional discussion on the proposal, prompting speculation that the council will not hit its own self-imposed mid-May deadline for voting on the tax. The tax is expected to bring in $75 million a year.

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site or making a one-time contribution! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as reporting-related and office expenses. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

Democratic Party, gender, King County, South Seattle Emerald, Women

Crisis of Confidence at the King County Democrats

Update: As Jim Brunner at the Seattle Times reported this evening, Bailey Stober  now says he is running for the 47th District state house seat currently held by Republican Mark Hargrove. The announcement came just days after Stober lost his job at King County (receiving a $37,700 payout in exchange for an agreement not to sue) after an investigation concluded he had harassed and behaved inappropriately toward a female employee in his separate position as chair of the King County Democrats, a position from which he was also forced to resign. Stober told Brunner he will run as an “independent Democrat” and has the backing of two local officials, Kent Mayor Dana Ralph and Auburn Mayor Nancy Backus.

Over the past two days, I contacted more than a dozen local officials and Party activists, including Stober, about the rumor that he was running; unsurprisingly, Stober did not respond to my request for comment. Many people in Stober’s circle have advised him against running for office and suggested that he spend at least a few months out of the spotlight before attempting a comeback, given the gravity of the charges that forced him to resign from both positions. His announcement to the Times came just two days before a woman of color was expected to announce her candidacy for the same position.

This story originally ran in the South Seattle Emerald.

Earlier this month—after multiple investigations, a vote of no confidence, and a lengthy internal trial that found him guilty on five counts of workplace misconduct, financial malfeasance, and “conduct unbecoming an officer,” King County Democratic Party chairman Bailey Stober resigned from both his position as chair of the county party and his $98,000-a-year job as communications director for King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson. The announcements capped a months-long process that turned into a referendum on not just Stober but the culture and future of the local Democratic Party.

Even after losing his position at the party and his paying job at the county, Stober remained defiant and mostly unapologetic. In a letter to Party members announcing his resignation, Stober took credit for numerous successes, including a fundraising campaign that began before his tenure. Then, he offered a vague apology, “to those I have let down and disappointed.” He did not mention the sexual harassment and financial misconduct charges that led to his ouster or the fact that after one year under his leadership, the county party had almost no money in the bank.

His resignation letter to Wilson went even further. After taking credit for a long list of successes at the assessor’s office, Stober suggested he was the real reason “longshot” Wilson managed to win his election in 2015 when Stober was 23. Furthermore, he claimed people were telling him Wilson “didn’t stand a chance to succeed.” Stober did not apologize for, or even mention, the investigation, which concluded that Stober had behaved inappropriately toward his employee, Natalia Koss Vallejo by, among other things, calling her a “cunt” and a “bitch.”

In exchange for agreeing not to sue or seek employment at the county in the future, Stober received a $37,700 payout from the jurisdiction, on top of unemployment benefits that could, over six months, total nearly $20,000. Combined with the full pay Stober received during the one month in 2018 when he was on the job at the assessor’s office and the nearly three months when he was on fully paid leave, Stober could make more than $87,000 in 2018 even if he does not work another day. The investigation itself cost taxpayers another $25,360.

To the end, Stober’s supporters have insisted that the investigation into his behavior was a witchhunt by a group of politically motivated fabulists who resented his success. Several allies even resigned their positions at the King County Democrats after the trial, saying that they no longer felt “safe” in the organization. Even after three separate investigations concluded he had committed many of the actionsof which he was accused, Stober professed his innocence and insisted that his accusers had “made up [or] exaggerated” most of their claims.

“If I have to be the first one to go through this process to open our eyes to the flaws that we have … so be it,” Stober said after the trial, noting how hard it had been for him personally to sit in the room throughout the proceedings and listen to people “debate whether or not I’m a horrible person.”

Stober’s opponents, including Koss Vallejo, said their goal was to hold Stober accountable for his actions and ensure future leaders accused of misconduct will not be able to manipulate party rules to hold on to power to the bitter end.

Who won? Strictly speaking, of course, the group of Democrats who accused Stober of misconduct prevailed. The former Chairman is no longer in power, and his ambition to become state Democratic Party Chair has been dashed for now. In a larger sense, though, the jury is still out on that question. The bruising debate over Stober’s guilt or innocence has split the local Democratic Party into factions, and the King County Democrats have been left with no permanent leader, no money in the bank, and no consensus on whether justice was served.

To understand the implications of Stober’s resignation, and the arguments that were made by his supporters and detractors, it is important to know a little about the charges brought against him. They included:

  • Spending thousands of dollars in Party funds without the approval of the group’s treasurer, Nancy Podscwhit, or its governing board.

The expenditures in question included a $1,826 stay at a house on Vashon Island for Stober and a few Party officials; an office in Auburn that cost more than twice the amount Stober was authorized to spend; a $500-a-month Internet package with enough bandwidth to power a mid-size e-commerce firm; and thousands of dollars in brand-new office equipment for Stober and Koss Vallejo. By the end of Stober’s term, according to treasurer Nancy Podschwit, the group was “broke.” (Stober defended his financial decisions in a lengthy open letter).

  • Firing his lone employee, Natalia Koss Vallejo, on shaky grounds and without board approval.

Stober said he dismissed Koss Vallejo after she “vandalized” a car in a parking lot because it had a hat with the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement logo displayed in the back window. A security-camera video of the incident, obtained by Stober and posted anonymously to Youtube by a new account called “DemsAre BadPeople,” shows Vallejo tossing the contents of a cup on the hood of the car. (Koss Vallejo said the cup contained the dregs of an iced coffee.)

  • “Conduct unbecoming an officer,” including frequent “excessive public intoxication,” sexual harassment, incidents of pushing drinks on party volunteers and subordinates, and bullying Koss Vallejo and other Party members.

Among other accusations, Stober allegedly grabbed Koss Vallejo’s phone and posted “I shit my pants” on her Facebook wall, mocked her appearance in front of other people, called her a “bitch” and a “lying sack of shit,” and made sexist jokes, including one about a party member who was accused of raping an underage volunteer at a state Party event in Walla Walla last year.

Stober spent nearly two months pleading his own case—on Facebook, his personal blog, at party meetings, and in emails to party members—but the trial was Koss Vallejo’s first formal opportunity to speak on her own behalf. During and after Koss Vallejo’s testimony, Stober’s supporters aggressively questioned her credibility and even accused her of having a drug problem, witnesses recounted—a claim for which they reportedly provided no evidence, which Koss Vallejo denies, and which is irrelevant to the question of whether Stober was guilty of misconduct.

“It was absolutely humiliating and degrading,” Koss Vallejo said afterward. “I wasn’t the person on trial. He was on trial for misconduct, and he was able to waste several hours focusing on my character and maligning me.”

After the trial ended, Koss Vallejo said, she didn’t feel like she had “won.” “It was never my goal to get Bailey Stober to resign; it gives me no pleasure,” she said. “No one should have to spend this much time on an internal process to remove someone who is guilty of malfeasance. All of those volunteer hours should have gone toward knocking on doors and strategizing about the real work that we’re supposed to be doing”—promoting and electing Democratic Party candidates, Koss Vallejo said.

In King County, electing Democrats might seem like an easy lift. Last year, as Stober himself noted in his farewell message to members, Democrats prevailed in three out of four partisan elections in King County. Currently, they also hold the governor’s office and both houses of the legislature. However, the way King County Democrats have handled allegations of workplace and financial misconduct could have ripple effects across the state.

Will donors, including elected officials, put their funds and efforts into building a party that seems to care more about protecting its own than building power? Will young women considering careers in politics think twice before joining a party that has a reputation of disbelieving women? Will people who do not fit in with the prevailing “party culture”—a culture that, according to many party members, has long revolved around drinking—feel unwelcome?

Stober, who blamed some of his behavior on a “combination of volunteering 30 to 40 hours a week, working a full-time job … stress, alcohol, and immaturity,” was an enthusiastic participant in, and proponent of, the kind of party culture that state Party chairwoman Tina Podlodowski has been trying to root out. Indeed, several witnesses have described him and another Party member mocking Podlodowski for banning alcohol at Party functions and trying to tamp down the drinking culture in the organization. Such effort that was thrown into high relief when an underage Party member said she was sexually assaulted after a state Party event in Walla Walla, where she says she was given alcohol by, among others, Bailey Stober.

More recently, Jin-Ah Kim, a recovering addict who is active in the 32nd District Democrats, said Stober repeatedly pressured her to drink with him, despite knowing she is in recovery. While drinking alcohol neither causes nor excuses misconduct, it undoubtedly contributes to bad decision making and excludes people who, for whatever reason, prefer not to do business at bars or after hours.

Many of the women who supported Koss Vallejo have said they are enthusiastic to get back to the work of promoting Democratic candidates for the 2018 elections and rebuilding the party. This task will require not just changes to the group’s code of conduct and its process for removing officers but a period of reconciliation between party members on both sides of the Stober divide.

Two weeks after the trial, Stober’s most stalwart allies were still lashing out at Koss Vallejo’s supporters online, accusing them of misrepresenting her experience as a part of the MeToo movement and chastising them for deciding Stober was guilty before the 14-hour trial had concluded. With Stober himself out of the picture, though, many on both sides of the debate over his behavior hope the group can start to heal itself and rebuild—starting with the adoption of an HR and a revised code of conduct that gives victims who are not part of the formal party structure an opportunity to speak on their own behalf.

One person who will not be involved in that rebuilding process is Koss Vallejo. “I still care deeply about the Party,” Vallejo says. “I’m deeply invested in helping Democrats win and helping women win. But it’s not my place to fix these problems. I’m hoping that the people who are still involved, and the new people who have come into the party through this process, will be able to correct the problems that have taken place over the course of this investigation,” so that the next person who believes she has been harassed, bullied, or mistreated by someone in the Party will feel safe coming forward.

Addiction, Democratic Party, Development, homelessness, housing, land use, Morning Crank, public safety, zoning

Morning Crank: Needles are a Longstanding Problem
Needles in libraries, a shift in the city’s protectionist industrial-land policies?, and more in today’s Morning Crank.

1. In my piece last month about a library employee who was stuck by a needle while changing the trash in the women’s restroom of the Ballard branch library, Seattle Public Library spokeswoman Andra Addison said that she was unaware of any other instance in which a library staffer had been stuck by a needle and said that the library’s administrative services division had determined that the system “just really [doesn’t] have the need” for sharps containers.

Since then, the library has changed course, and is installing sharps containers at three branches—Capitol Hill, Ballard, and the University District. A review of the “shift logs” (daily logs of notable incidents and interactions with patrons) at the Ballard branch indicates that far from being an anomaly, needle sightings are a regular, even banal, occurrence. Over the course of just six weeks, spanning from late December 2017 to mid-March of this year, Ballard library staff recorded a dozen needle-related incidents, including a man slumped over after shooting up at the library, a needle left unattended in a Pop-Tart box in the lobby, needles found floating in toilets on two different occasions, and an oversized CD case stuffed with needles and empty baggies that had been tossed in the book drop. In one case, an uncapped needle was found lying on the floor in the teen area of the library; in another, a library staffer discovered two needles in the restroom while cleaning up piles of trash and clothes that a patron had left behind.

“We could see the man slumped over and the needle was lying in front of him,” one log report says. “I called 9-11 to report a man shooting up in front of the library. I also called security. I then went back out to check on the man. At this time he was holding the needle in his hand. I told the man that I was excluding him from SPL for 2 weeks. He became very upset and said that he had found the needle on the ground and that the library was putting him at risk. He then came into the library and threw the needle in the garbage in the lobby.”

The logs, which detail many other security incidents as well as a case of mistaken identity (a giant stuffed panda that appeared to be a sleeping patron), make a couple of things clear: First, that improperly discarded syringes, far from being an unusual or notable occurrence, were a well-documented issue at the Ballard library long before the custodian was stuck with a needle and rushed to the hospital. And second, library workers are doing double duty as security guards and hazardous-waste cleanup crew, a situation that has complex causes but that can’t be addressed by merely telling workers to use heavier rubber gloves, or even by installing sharps containers in a couple of branches. As long as the city fails to adequately fund housing and treatment, and delays building safe consumption spaces for people living with active addiction, as a county task force unanimously recommended a year and a half ago, our libraries are going to continue to be de facto safe consumption spaces, crisis clinics, and emergency waiting rooms.

2. Seattle may be known for its rigid rules protecting single-family neighborhoods from incursions by off-brand housing like duplexes, townhomes, and apartments, but when it comes to protected land-use classes, nothing compares to the city’s industrial districts. Since the 1990s, it has been official city policy to wall off industrial areas from other uses by restricting or prohibiting uses (like offices and housing) “that may negatively affect the availability, character, or function of industrial areas.”

That quote is from a presentation Seattle Office of Planning and Community development senior planner Tom Hauger delivered to the Seattle Planning Commission yesterday, and it was meant to show the way the city has viewed industrial lands historically—not necessarily the way they will be viewed in the future. In fact, Hauger said, an industrial lands advisory panel that has been meeting since 2016 to come up with proposed changes to the city’s industrial lands policy is about to release a somewhat radical-by-city-standards) “draft concept” (don’t call it a proposal) that could open much of the industrial land in the SoDo district, around the stadiums and within walking distance of the two south-of-downtown light rail stations, to office uses. This could help reduce the traffic impact of the nearly two million new workers that are expected to move to the region by 2050, and it could provide a bridge to the kind of hybrid office/industrial spaces that are already taking root in other cities as the definition of “industrial” itself evolves.

Under rules adopted in 2007 (and reviled by developers ever since), office buildings in industrial areas are restricted to 10,000 square feet (retail is restricted to 25,000), meaning that in practical terms, there is virtually no office space in the city’s two industrial areas, the Duwamish Manufacturing Industrial Center (which includes SoDo) and theBallard Interbay Northend Manufacturing Industrial Center. The change that’s being contemplated, known as the “SoDo concept,” would allow developers to build office space in the  district if they provide space for industrial businesses on the lower levels, up to a floor-area ratio (FAR) of 1.0, which can be visualized (roughly) as a single story stretching across 100 percent of a lot, two stories that cover half the lot, and so on. In exchange, developers could build up to five times as many stories of  office space, up to the height limit, although Hauger said the task force would probably end up settling on two to four additional office stories (again, roughly) for each full story of industrial space.

This sounds like minor stuff, but in the context of the industrial lands debate in Seattle, it’s a shot across the bow. More radical proposals, such as allowing housing near existing and future light rail stations in SoDo and Interbay, are, for the moment, off the table. “The advisory panel has talked about housing, but it’s been a minority view, and the majority has decided that, especially in the Duwamish area, that housing near the light rail stations is off the table,” Hauger said.

3. King County Democrats chair Bailey Stober gave himself a full week to wrap up his affairs before formally stepping down after his executive board found him guilty on all five charges against him, which included allegations of financial misconduct, conduct unbecoming an officer, and creating a hostile work environment last Sunday. The nearly 14-hour trial ended Stober’s nine-week-long effort to keep his position after an initial investigation concluded that he should step down.

Although it’s unclear why Stober announced his resignation a week in advance instead of stepping down immediately, he did knock out one task right away: Sending an email out to all the precinct committee officers in the county—the same group that would have voted this coming Sunday, April 15, on whether to remove Stober if he had not resigned—thanking them “for the honor and the privilege.” Stober frames the decision to step down as his own voluntary choice—”I have decided to resign,” he writes—and enumerates the Party’s achievements under his leadership before concluding, “Most importantly, we had fun doing all of it. I am so proud of the things we did together – thinking about it brings a smile to my face.” The only hint of an apology to the woman he fired after another woman in the Party who had witnessed his behavior filed a complaint on her behalf? A vague “to those I have let down and disappointed – I am truly sorry,” followed by four sentences of thanks to the people who “have stood by my side.”

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campaign finance, Democratic Party, Politics, Women

King County Democrats Chair Bailey Stober Resigns After 13-Hour Trial Finds Him Guilty of Workplace Misconduct

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, including and especially extended coverage of ongoing stories like this one that get short shrift in the mainstream press, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site or making a one-time contribution! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers like you. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

Bailey Stober, the chairman of the King County Democrats, resigned last night after a 13-hour internal trial that ultimately found him guilty on five counts relating to workplace misconduct and sexual harassment of a former employee, Natalia Koss Vallejo, whom he fired shortly after a third party filed a complaint against him on Koss Vallejo’s behalf (and, she says, without her knowledge). Stober’s resignation, which will take effect next Saturday, comes after more than two months of internal and external debate about his actions as party chair, including three separate internal investigations into both the workplace misconduct allegations and charges of financial misconduct.

Koss Vallejo, who has been barred from speaking on her own behalf because the entire process, including the trial, has been held under Robert’s Rules of Order, which only gives “voice” to voting members of the group, says she’s relieved by the outcome but does not feel victorious. “This does not feel like a win to me. I am grateful that he did finally step down, because, as everyone knows, his grandstanding and drawing this process out was only hurting Democrats,” she says. “However the fact that I and many other nameless people who were involved had to give their time and their emotional and mental energy to this process for over nine weeks means that the process is still flawed, and we have a lot of work to do to correct this so that this never happens again.” Specifically, Koss Vallejo points to the fact that the King County Democrats do not have a formal HR policy or any policy for dealing with allegations against a Party member by someone who is not within the formal party structure, such as an employee.

Stober has said he fired Koss Vallejo after she “vandalized” a car in a parking lot because it had a hat with the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement logo displayed in the back window; a video of the incident, obtained by Stober and posted to Youtube by an anonymous account called “DemsAre BadPeople,” shows her tossing the contents of a cup on the hood of the car, which she says were the dregs of an iced coffee. The firing Stober has also claimed that he had consent from his then-vice chairwoman, Cat Williams, and his treasurer, Nancy Podschwit, to fire Koss Vallejo, which both Williams and Podschwit have denied.

Yesterday’s trial addressed only the workplace misconduct allegations (I’ve covered the financial charges before, including here and here), which included the following claims:

– That Stober repeatedly pressured Koss Vallejo to drink to excess;

–  That Koss Vallejo had told numerous people that she was afraid Stober would retaliate against her if she brought up her concerns;

– That Stober fired Koss Vallejo without consulting with the board’s vice chairwoman or the treasurer of the group;

– That Stober called her a “bitch” and a “cunt” while they were out drinking;

– That Stober sprayed Koss Vallejo with Silly String while she was driving; and

– That Stober had grabbed Koss Vallejo’s phone while she was in the restroom and posted “I shit my pants” on her Facebook timeline without her knowledge.

Last night, Stober was apologetic but defiant when he emerged from the closed-door trial shortly after 11pm to announce his resignation “after 11 years of Party leadership.” (Stober is 26 and has been chair of the group for a little over one year). “If I have to be the first one to go through this process to open our eyes to the flaws that we have … so be it,” Stober said, adding that it was especially difficult for him to sit through his own trial for 13 hours and listen to people “debate whether or not I’m a horrible person.” Some of Stober’s supporters have insinuated that his opponents are engaging in a racially biased witch hunt against him, even though several of Koss Vallejo’s most vocal supporters, and Koss Vallejo herself, are women of color.

Stober sat in the room throughout the trial as witnesses, including his alleged victim and her supporters, gave testimony and were cross-examined by representatives from both the “prosecution” and the “defense,” much as they would in a legal trial. Yesterday, witnesses described the process as intimidating and re-traumatizing, and said at times it seemed as though Koss Vallejo and other people who agreed to testify on her behalf were the ones on trial. At one point, an executive board member reportedly asked a witness at length about whether Koss Vallejo used illegal substances. Witnesses said the line of questioning seemed intended to imply she had a drug problem and was therefore an unreliable witness—the kind of off-point question that is often used in legal trials to discredit victims and refocus attention away from the person accused of misconduct or worse.

Oddly, given how many statements Stober has made on his own behalf on his own website, on Facebook, in meetings, and in emails to the Party members who would have been voting on his fate next weekend if he had not stepped down last night, yesterday’s trial was Koss Vallejo’s first official opportunity to speak on her own behalf. After the meeting, Koss Vallejo said that the process that led up to the trial has treated her as if “I didn’t exist”; for example, while Stober was given a chance to review all the evidence against him nearly a week in advance of the trial, Koss Vallejo says she still has not seen any of the evidence, and only found out when and where the trial would be held through word of mouth from friends, since she is not on any official Party email list. “The whole process treated me like I literally wasn’t a person, and that was one of the most frustrating things about it,” she says.

Prior to Stober’s resignation, two-thirds of his executive board signed a petition calling for his resignation, which triggered the scheduling of a vote by all the precinct committee officers (low-ranking party officials) in the county; if two-thirds of the PCOs at that meeting had voted to remove him, Stober would have lost his position involuntarily. (Prior to that, district Democratic groups across King County passed resolutions calling for his resignation, and several voted to withhold funds from the organization until Stober stepped down. More than 200 Democratic Party members, including several elected officials, also signed a letter calling for his resignation.) At the moment, the organization is basically insolvent; as of late last month, according to recent a financial report from King County Democrats chair Nancy Podschwit, the group had just $3,200 in the bank, with thousands of dollars of outstanding obligations and a potential fine from the state over campaign finance violations from 2016, before Stober was chair, that could total tens of thousands of dollars.

Separately, a court just ordered Stober to pay more than $5,000 in attorney’s fees in an investigation by the state Attorney General’s Office into campaign finance violations Stober allegedly committed in his capacity as both a candidate for Kent City Council and as King County Democrats chair—a case that has not been resolved, in part, because Stober has refused to turn over documents to the state—and several other campaign finance allegations against him remain pending. And his employer, the King County Assessor’s Office, is spending up to $10,000 on a separate investigation to determine whether his workplace behavior as the Democrats’ chair has any bearing on his ability to perform his job as communications director for the office. He is currently on paid leave from that position, which pays more than $90,000.