Tag: Bob Kettle

City Council

Don’t Open Pike Place to Pedestrians, Council Member Urges

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle City Councilmember Bob Kettle wants to take plans to turn car-choked Pike Place into an “event street” off the table by amending Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed Seattle Transportation Plan. Kettle’s amendment, which the council’s transportation committee discussed on Tuesday, would  express the council’s opposition to using funds from the upcoming Move Seattle Levy to partially pedestrianize the street immediately in front of Pike Place Market.

Advocates have been making the case for years that removing vehicles from Pike Place would improve pedestrian safety and make the market a more welcoming place for shoppers, who are now forced to dart between moving vehicles, taking evasive maneuvers that Maggie Haines, the treasurer for Friends of the Market, described fondly as “a slow dance” in her testimony against pedestrianization.

What the transportation plan proposes is far more modest than true pedestrianization. Under the plan, Pike Place would become an “event street” that could be closed down to vehicular traffic for events, much as Ballard Avenue or South Edmunds Street shut down for weekly farmers’ markets.

“Event streets,” according to the draft plan, are “shared streets” where “events may close movement of all vehicles, except emergency access, on a frequent or intermittent basis.” The goal of the new designation, according to the plan, is to “prioritize people walking and rolling around Pike Place while enabling efficient and reliable delivery of goods and access to Pike Place Market.”

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Vendors and Pike Place Market representatives decried even this modest proposal during the committee’s public comment period, suggesting that allowing even occasional street closures would kill businesses and harm low-income people and seniors.

“Pike Place is not an event street by any stretch of the word—it is the lifeline street in the market historical district,” Friends of the Market president Heather Pihl said.  “Pike Place Market is a working market, and it’s also a community including low income residents, a senior center, a food bank, a child care, and a medical clinic. It’s not a place to hang out.”
Continue reading “Don’t Open Pike Place to Pedestrians, Council Member Urges” →

City Council, homelessness, King County, Morning Fizz

Morning Fizz: COVID at City Hall, Why “Consolidation” Won’t Fix the City Budget, and More on Burien’s Efforts to Kill a Church Encampment

1. Seattle City Councilmember Bob Kettle recently contracted COVID after coming in to his City Hall office while a family member was home sick with the highly infectious disease. During the period when he was not yet testing positive, he and his staff continued to work at City Hall without wearing masks, according to sources on the floor.

Although Kettle told PubliCola that he personally stayed home for a week after his first positive COVID test (including five days after his symptoms receded), his presence on the second floor during the time when his family member was sick unnerved at least one council member, Tammy Morales, who wrote in an email to the city clerk and council HR, “I just learned that a couple folks on the floor are home with Covid. Can I ask you to send around our policies to remind folks WHEN TO STAY HOME.”

According to a staffer for his office, Kettle “took multiple tests and the moment he received a positive result, he immediately began to work from home, and followed the five-day protocol once he received a negative test(s).” The city asks employees to isolate for five days after a positive test and stay home if they still have symptoms; however, even asymptomatic people can be contagious. Kettle and a staffer confirmed that no one else in his office contracted COVID from him.

Council president Sara Nelson and other council members have frequently touted the benefits of in-person work to council members and their staff as well as the recovery of downtown businesses. The council now holds all its meetings in person; previously, some council members attended remotely, including one council member with a young child and one who is immunocompromised.

Saka and Strauss are correct that the city has arborists in multiple departments. It has a total of two: One in the Parks Department, and one in SDOT. It’s unclear how moving both positions into one department or the other would save the city money.

2. Facing the largest budget shortfall in recent history, many city council members have latched on to the idea that city departments are inefficient and full of costly redundancies—a problem council budget committee chair Dan Strauss has recently taken to illustrating with the example of city arborists. “We have multiple different departments that have arborists,” Strauss said at a committee meeting last month, and “I think it makes more sense to have them all in one department.”

Earlier this week, Councilmember Rob Saka took up the mantle, calling the city’s many arborists the “canonical example” of the need for “consolidation” at the city on an episode of the Seattle Channel’s “City Inside/Out,” which features panel discussions with city council members.

“Do we need 17 different departments with arborists, or can they sit under one [department]—parks, for example, or whatever it is. But we need to better consolidate our functions, services, our lines of business, avoid duplication of efforts, [and] I think we’ll achieve some some great savings through that,” Saka said.

Curious, we looked to see how many arborists the city has and in how many different departments. As it turns out, Saka and Strauss are correct that the city has arborists in multiple departments. It has a total of two: One in the Parks Department, and one in SDOT. It’s unclear how moving both positions into one department or the other would save the city money.

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3. As PubliCola reported late last year, Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon failed to inform the city council about a letter from Deputy King County Executive Shannon Braddock telling him the city needed to come up with a plan to spend $1 million the county was offering to build a shelter or lose the money.

Bailon sat on the letter for a week before telling the full council about it, claiming he was too busy responding to to emails opposing a temporary encampment at a local church that was run by a nonprofit started by then-council member Cydney Moore.

Although Bailon later changed his story, documents obtained through a records request show that he did spend a great deal of time responding to opponents of the encampment and raising questions about its legality. Those emails included:

• A note to the Burien fire chief asking him if the city could ensure that all the tents at the encampment would be “flame retardant”;

• An email to Burien Police Chief Ted Boe asking him to send an officer to a meeting to refute “potentially false claims” by the encampment’s sponsor that sex offenders would be barred from the encampment (which they were);

• An email warning the superintendent of the Highline Public School District about the church encampment’s “proximity to Highline High School” and claiming that the encampment violated city law;

• At least seven emails to people who wrote him to oppose the encampment, saying he was “very sorry to hear” about the problems the encampment would cause them and encouraging them to attend an upcoming meeting where they could express their opposition.

The encampment closed in February.

 

 

City Council, Opinion, Police

Council’s Public Safety Focus Will Be “Permissive Environment” Toward Crime

By Erica C. Barnett

The new attitude of the city council’s public safety committee, headed by former Queen Anne Community council public safety chair Bob Kettle, was evident from the first slide of Councilmember Kettle’s presentation on the scope of the committee, titled “Public Safety Vision.” It read: “We envision a future where families feel safe sending their children on the bus to school, businesses can operate without paying for private security, and the city can respond in a timely and appropriate manner to people experiencing acute crises.”

The implication—that Seattle is so dangerous that businesses need security to operate, buses are so unsafe that kids can’t take them to school, and police are so understaffed they can no longer respond swiftly to crises—went unquestioned throughout the two-and-a-half hour meeting. Instead, council members lavished praise on the police department, asked what they could do personally to “improve officer morale,” and assured Police Chief Adrian Diaz, who talked at length about the “trauma” police have experienced “after George Floyd,” that they would—as Councilmember Cathy Moore put it—”allow police to police.”

“Doesn’t this feel different?” Council President Sara Nelson asked Diaz, smiling broadly, before diving into questions about how the council could support the police department.

“I think we’ve had a lot of micromanaging in the prior councils,” Moore said. “I think there was a sense among rank and file that we are constantly micromanaging and that we’ve taken their power away to police.” Additionally, Moore said, she wanted to “have [a] hard conversation about the jail space” that the city is paying for, but not using, “because we do need to be able to send a message that people are going to be held accountable. That doesn’t mean that we’re going to run them through the system and create long records for them, but you need a place to go police need to feel like the work that they’re doing matters.”

Other council members emphasized how much friendlier the committee would be toward police. “Doesn’t this feel different?” Council President Sara Nelson asked Diaz, smiling broadly, before diving into questions about how the council could support the police department.

During her two years on the council, Nelson has advocated to keep vacant police positions open and funded, and to provide bonuses of up to $25,000 for new police hires. The previous chair of the public safety committee, 27-year City Hall veteran Lisa Herbold, also supported police hiring, but she also focused on accountability, frequently requiring the police department to report back to her committee on the results of initiatives the council agreed to fund.

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Without regular reports on things like SPD’s use of overtime, the efficacy of the overdose response program Health 99, and the cost to staff up the new CARE Department to take over some police calls (to name just three reports that will be required this year thanks to Herbold’s budget “meddling”), the council would have significantly less information to help it judge the job police are doing. Which, perhaps, is precisely the point.

As public safety chair, Kettle has transferred his key campaign message—that Seattle has a “culture of permissiveness” that has allowed crime to flourish—directly into the mission of his committee, whose official mission statement previously highlighted police accountability, alternatives to arrest and jail, and “programs to reduce the public’s involvement with law enforcement and decrease involvement with the Criminal Legal System.” Now, the mission can be summarized in a single slide, which defines a “permissive environment” as “the underlying factors behind crime tied to the lack of deterring structures that allow people to endanger themselves and our city.

The slide includes six “pillars of public safety.” “Public health” appears fifth, after “graffiti remediation.” Police reform, alternatives to arrest and prosecution, and human services appear nowhere on the list.

City Council, Elections

PubliCola Questions: City Council Candidate Bob Kettle, District 7

By Erica C. Barnett

The 2023 election will dramatically reshape the Seattle City Council. Four council members are not seeking reelection, while a fifth, Teresa Mosqueda, is running for King County Council and will be replaced by an appointee if she wins. Even if all three of the incumbents who are running win reelection, the council will probably have at least five new members next year—a new majority of freshmen on a council whose most experienced members will, at most, be entering their second terms. If all eight seats turn over, it would make Sara Nelson, an at-large council member who started her first term last year, the most senior member of the council.

Debates over issues and ideology are understandably front and center in campaigns. But with eight of nine council seats up for grabs, I want to focus for a moment on an often overlooked question that impacts how the city council makes decisions and functions on a daily basis:  Can these people work together? Among the current council, the answer is frequently no. At best, there’s a sense that council members aren’t talking to each other outside public meetings, which are still largely virtual. At worst, the hostility bursts out into the open—as it has during this election, when one council member, Sara Nelson, is actively campaigning against three of her incumbent colleagues.

In this setting, five—and up to eight—new council members could provide a needed reset and eliminate some of the bad blood that has built up over the past several years.

Less optimistically, an inexperienced council could leave Mayor Bruce Harrell’s exercise of executive power unchecked, allowing the mayor to push through any number of priorities that the current council has shot down—like raiding the JumpStart payroll tax, which is supposed to be spend on housing and equitable development, to pay for general city obligations.

The next council will have to get up to speed fast, because they’ll soon face challenges that are only growing in scope—from homelessness, gun violence, and addiction to a looming $250 million budget deficit that will require tough decisions and could mean significant service cuts.

To get a better sense of how council incumbents, challengers, and first-time candidates would tackle these challenges, PubliCola spoke with 10 of the 14 council candidates, representing every council district.

Two candidates—Rob Saka in District 1 and Tanya Woo in District 2—ignored our emailed requests to sit down for an interview and did not follow up after I asked again in person. One candidate, District 3’s Joy Hollingsworth, set up an interview but then canceled, and did not respond to my request to reschedule. Maritza Rivera, running in District 4, would not sit down for an interview but did provide emailed responses to written questions. And Cathy Moore, in District 5, declined my request in an email.

The number of candidates who declined, canceled, or ignored our requests for an interview is unusual. While PubliCola isn’t shy about expressing our views on issues, that has rarely been an impediment to dialogue in the past. These candidates’ refusal to sit down for an in-depth conversation about the issues they will have to address if elected could bode poorly for transparency on the new council; in our experience, candidates who refuse to talk to members of the press they perceive as critical rarely become more tolerant of tough questions under the pressure of public office.

I’ll be rolling out interviews with the council candidates in every race over the next two weeks. I hope readers will learn more about the candidates from these in-depth conversations and use them to inform your vote.

Our final interview is with Bob Kettle, a Navy veteran and longtime Queen Anne Community Council leader who has positioned himself as a moderate alternative to incumbent Andrew Lewis. Kettle has focused on Lewis’ support for reducing the police department in 2020 and what he sees as a culture of “permissiveness” that allows people to break laws with impunity.

PubliCola [ECB]: You’ve talked a lot about there being a “permissive environment” in Seattle. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that? Who do you believe is permitting people to live unsheltered and who is permitting people to use drugs on the streets—and what do you propose as solutions?

Bob Kettle [BK]: In March of this year, [Lewis] said that he was shocked that drug dealers can operate with impunity on Third Avenue. And I was like, what? They’re able to do that because of the permissive environment, and the permissive environment comes from the fact that we’ve lost, for example, so many police officers—and that comes back to the council’s work on Defund the Police. There’s no police presence to go after that drug dealer on Third Avenue. And that permissive environment also kind of creates this idea that anything can happen. So that kind of promotes these random acts of violence, this lawlessness piece that that plays out in different ways.

And it’s furthered when the city council says no, we’re not going to line up the municipal code with state law on public drug use and possession. The drug dealers, they feel a bit more comfortable, because they know that there’s going to be restrictions and the city government is going to be on its heels in terms of dealing with them. And that wrecks havoc on so many lives.

So that is the permissive environment that I’m talking about. And I think that we can arrest it—pardon the pun—hold it, stop it, and have it go on retreat, so that we can create a safer environment for not just my daughter at school, or the people who are small business owners and employees, but also those people that are in these encampments. Because ultimately, they’re inhumane.

ECB: It seems to me, having lived here for a long time, that the situation on Third Avenue kind of ebbs and flows, and that the number of people dealing and using drugs does not correlate directly with the number of police who are out there. And the jail is full, so booking people post-arrest is rarely an option.

BK: That’s why I say that we can’t succeed in public safety if we don’t also succeed in public health, and that primarily means behavioral health and addiction issues. And I know that homelessness has many root causes. It could be domestic violence, it could be medical emergencies, there could be dislocation. Helping out with behavioral health and addiction has been harder because we don’t have that capacity. You know, we’ve been talking about having alternative responses for years here. Mental health is a state function, and then public health service is a county function. So where are we at with capacity on that? And we need the city government’s engagement, because the last thing we need is we pass this [crisis] care levy that says we’re going to get five care centers, and then in the county says, ‘No, we’re only getting three.’ That’s gonna be horrendous, because it’s so important to have that capacity on the public health side. Because if we don’t, we can’t succeed.

“We do need to have the [appropriate] number of officers based on city of our size. So I support the mayor’s goal [of 1,400 officers], in terms of the  number. And we need a conducive, constructive relationship with SPD. Right now, we’re not there.”

ECB: I want to press some more, though, on the question of police presence in places like Third Avenue. What is the impact of that, if the goal is not to arrest or jail people? Is it just a matter of having a presence there so that people don’t feel comfortable dealing drugs there?

BK: Yes, that’s part of it. And there’s a little bit of a challenge in terms of playing whack-a-mole. To your earlier point, I would say, yes, there’s certain parts of the city where this has been an ongoing issue. But now we’re seeing it in other parts of the city that you didn’t see it before—Ballard, Queen Anne, Nickerson, or parts of 15th or Elliott Avenue, the U District—I mean, all across the city. Whereas before, we had a couple places downtown, a few places, that had the ebb and flow like you’re talking about.

Again, I do believe that we need to build up the public health side of things. It’s public health as much as public safety. But we do need to have the [appropriate] number of officers based on city of our size. So I support the mayor’s goal [of 1,400 officers], in terms of the  number. And we need a conducive, constructive relationship with SPD. Right now, we’re not there.

ECB: What about the need to ensure accountability for some of the abhorrent behavior some police officers have been caught engaging in recently, like the phone call between Officer Auderer and Mike Solan, the head of the police union? Do you see a need to address the overall culture of SPD, as opposed to cracking down on individual officers for their actions?

BK: I think we’re moving in a positive direction with the consent decree reforms and Chief [Adrian] Diaz’ leadership. If you spend time, like I have, with the Before the Badge team, with these young recruits, I think it’s fantastic in terms of their desire for public service. They’re going around and they’re learning [things] like, in this neighborhood, there’s a lot of [people who speak] English as a second language and they may not respond to you the same way that you might expect if you’re looking at somebody who looks like me. And there’s different reasons for that, based on past practices and what’s happened to those communities over the years, over the decades. And so they’re learning about this to help change the culture. And the challenge is that it’s kind of like turning an aircraft carrier—you can’t do that on a dime. It takes time and effort. And so I think we’re definitely moving in that positive direction.

ECB: In the case of Officer Auderer, do you think Diaz should fire him or take some other kind of disciplinary action?

BK: Yes, Diaz can take action. I’m not sure about firing, but definitely take action. And by the way, then it’s on his record. And I think then [other officers] can see the repercussions and see that they need to do better in terms of conduct.

ECB: Officer Auderer has a long record of complaints about professionalism, though, so I don’t know that having another one on his record will change his behavior.

BK: It might be a consideration for Chief Diaz to take that stronger step, maybe to to fire him or to really change his career, where he’s not going have any public-facing role anymore. I mean, he’s not going to be able to go as an expert witness before any jury. So his ability to be an officer is now hindered, particularly given his role and his expertise [in determining if someone is driving under the influence].

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ECB: Do you think the city needs to remove accountability measures from future contracts with the police guild?

BK: Yes, I believe accountability should be separate. Disciplinary measures, maybe— like, you can receive this punishment for this or that. But accountability cannot be bargained. Accountability is accountability. And so I don’t think it should be part of the contract in that sense.

ECB: When I was talking to Andrew Lewis, he had a good soundbite: ‘The tax for single-family zoning is chronic homelessness.’ His point was basically that if we’re not going to allow more housing deeper into the neighborhoods, it’s going to be really hard to address homelessness. How do you, as a Queen Anne Community Council guy, respond to that?

BK: The Queen Anne Community Council and the Queen Anne community, we’ve always been for densification. So I kind of push back on that premise. Because look at the densification that’s been happening already—for example, in the Queen Anne urban village, like what’s happening right now with 21 Boston [Safeway] project. That’s a perfect example, by the way, of the community and developer working together, except where there was an appeal. In the community sense, that’s just an appeal. On the other side, that’s basically a lawsuit, and it goes over poorly. It’s thought of as a loss. Which is unfortunate, because in that effort, we got densification—we got 59 townhomes. Plus if you go down there, there’s a cedar on 10th, there’s elms on 9th, there’s different fir trees that have been saved. It’s like a win-win.

But the problem was we didn’t get the affordable housing. Because all those townhomes are a million dollars. So we’ve been doing the densification piece, but we shifted the affordability aspect of that densification to other parts of the city.

“We used to have a district council system. That system had major issues, but Mayor Murray just got rid of it. That was a mistake.”

I remember being on the Queen Anne Community Council when Mayor Murray’s team came to us and briefed us on the homelessness crisis and said, here’s the plan. I was like, sitting there going, Oh, my God, this is not going to work. We had no span of control, it was all over the place. It’s the same kind of reasons, I think, the KCRHA had such a false start. We need to have that organization, that structure, that management piece, to partner with the outreach. We need MSWs, but we also need MBAs. We need to have oversight to make sure that these programs are accomplishing goals. And we need accountability and transparency.

Yes, we are creating affordable homes. But we’re not really seeing them in Queen Anne, unless they’re part of the Seattle Housing Authority or Plymouth Housing. You’re not seeing in the more general sense, because those are always going to the south end.

ECB: Mayor Harrell has focused really heavily on bringing people back to the office. What do you think of those efforts? Is urging people to return to their downtown offices, in itself, going to revitalize downtown?

BK: I support the mayor’s efforts to activate downtown, and a key component is bringing people [back] there and to build up on commercial side—the small businesses or medium size businesses. We don’t want that Target [at Second and Union] to close down, for example. I will work downtown, as will my staff. If we can activate downtown, that will help alleviate some of the challenges that downtown has. But every business has its own policies. If there’s a company that wants to go two days a week, one day a week, whatever, fine. But ultimately we should know that we need people downtown. And this goes, by the way back to the idea of permissive environment. Creating a permissive environment is saying yeah, we don’t mind if we have secondhand fentanyl smoke on the buses.

ECB:  Every study has shown that secondhand fentanyl smoke can’t make another person high or sick. I’m not saying it’s acceptable. I don’t think it’s acceptable. But at the same time, I also think that we need to be realistic and not alarmist about the science.

BK: Well, I definitely believe in science. But I also believe that we have to be consistent—we don’t allow cigarette smoke pipe smoke and the rest of it, but somehow fentanyl smoke is okay? I don’t understand that. The other thing is, I know what [research] you’re referring to, but at the same time, and I’ve talked to people who were on the bus [next to someone smoking fentanyl] and suddenly he’s got a massive headache. That is testimony.

ECB: What other priorities do you have for the district that you don’t generally get asked about?

BK: We used to have a district council system. That system had major issues, but Mayor Murray just got rid of it. That was a mistake. So what I want to do is create a District Seven Neighborhood Council, where I bring in Magnolia Community Council, the Queen Anne Community Council, the Uptown Alliance, the East[lake], South [Lake Union], Westlake, and Belltown Community Councils. And I think we really need to have a Downtown Community Council. If we meet at least quarterly, and we learn the issues that each are dealing with, that makes me a better councilmember. But very importantly, they learn from each other. So, Magnolia can learn from Belltown, Uptown can learn from downtown. And that builds community. And I think that building community in all those different forms is something that we need to foster, and we shouldn’t be afraid of it. And it goes to the good governance piece, that we need to have positive, engaged leadership. This is why I like the mayor’s One Seattle [slogan]—it’s positive, it’s engaged, it’s simple, it’s clear.

ECB: If elected, you’ll be on a council with a majority of newcomers. Do you have a mentor, or someone you hope will be a mentor, on the council?

BK: I really respect Alex [Pedersen] and his departure is a loss for the council. Sara [Nelson] will be there, obviously, and I believe in what she’s been doing on so many fronts, and obviously she’s been supportive of my campaign. And we will have the central staff, which is [made up of] smart people. But then we can also bring in people on our personal staffs that have that expertise in terms of the workings of city government. And as you mentioned, we may be able to vote for an eighth. And so that would be an opportunity to bring another incredible, different perspective.

campaign finance, City Council, Density, Development, Elections, housing

Candidate Ron Davis Signs Anti-Upzoning Pledge, Democrats Blast Bob Kettle’s Misleading Ad; Prosecutors Seek Second Opinion in Police Crash Case

1. City Council candidate Ron Davis, who frequently touts his urbanist cred (The Urbanist called him an “urbanist supervolunteer“) signed a pledge written by the U District Community Council attesting that he will never vote to upzone University Way NE, AKA The Ave, during his council tenure. Davis is running to represent District 4, which includes the University District, against Maritza Rivera, who declined to sign the pledge.

The pledge, which takes the form of a letter to Mayor Bruce Harrell and the city council, says in part:

Preserving the unique quality that small independent businesses bring to the city and maintaining a pedestrian- friendly experience on this narrow street are critical to the sustainable development of this urban center.

You will recall that both candidates for our position on the council in the previous election cycle endorsed a similar letter in support. We will follow their lead and agree to not upzone The Ave during our tenure on the council.

The Ave is a special and historic place. Preserving it provides a serious public good, directly experienced by hundreds of thousands of people every year.

Former District 4 city councilmember Rob Johnson agreed to a plan to remove the Ave from a 2017 upzone that was part of the city’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda, or HALA; the upzones increased the amount of density allowed along arterial streets, where apartments were already legal, and modestly increased housing capacity in some former single-family-only areas. Neighborhood activists and small businesses rallied against upzoning the Ave, arguing that taller buildings (and more housing) in the U District’s commercial core would destroy the neighborhood’s character.

“As you know, I’m not a fan of using historic preservation style actions to create private benefits,” Davis told PubliCola. “But I’ve always thought that where preservation creates significant public benefit (in this case, preserving one of our few human scale, walkable, downtown style gathering places in Seattle) and it is open to the public, it makes sense to consider preservation if the benefits outweigh the costs.” Davis added that the rest of the city needs to be upzoned, not just commercial areas, and said downtown Ballard and Pike Place Market were similar areas that “don’t need high rises.”

Earlier this week, Davis sent out a fundraising email lambasting “the giant corporate developers (Master Builders Association) that have done so much to make Seattle expensive” for “dumping upwards of $100K on behalf of Rivera.” The Master Builders, Davis’ email continued, were the same “people who rewrote our tree legislation so it would be easier to cut down trees like Luma the Cedar in Wedgwood.”

Asked why she didn’t sign, Rivera told PubliCola, “I’m not comfortable signing a blanket pledge about this—or any other—complicated policy issue where the policy proposal’s details are unknown. As I told the UDCC, if I’m elected in November, I am committed to bringing a thoughtful approach to reviewing any proposal that is put before me.”

Earlier this week, Davis sent out a fundraising email lambasting “the giant corporate developers (Master Builders Association) that have done so much to make Seattle expensive” for “dumping upwards of $100K on behalf of Rivera.” The Master Builders, Davis’ email continued, were the same “people who rewrote our tree legislation so it would be easier to cut down trees like Luma the Cedar in Wedgwood.”

The claim puts Davis’ position squarely in line with Alex Pedersen, the District 4 incumbent who has been the most vocal opponent of new housing on the council. Pedersen was out on the fringes of the council on this issue; Davis’ mailer echoes the misleading claims Pedersen made back in May when trying to scuttle a tree protection proposal that a supermajority of the council supported.

“Luma,” the name advocates gave to a large cedar tree that a developer planned to (legally) remove to build townhouses, became a rallying point for neighborhood activists who have long opposed new housing in historically single-family areas like Wedgwood—which, as Josh pointed out last month, was originally a dense forest that was razed by white colonizers who wanted to build a new whites-only neighborhood in the area. Pedersen’s attempt to derail the long-negotiated legislation failed 6-1.

The Democrats called Councilmember Sara Nelson’s claim about people dying because Lewis did not initially vote for the bill “unintentionally misleading at best, deliberately lying at worst.”

2. The King County Democrats issued a statement on Thursday condemning District 7 council candidate Bob Kettle for an ad (which PubliCola covered last week) that includes images of encampments and features Position 8 City Councilmember Sara Nelson, who blames District 7 incumbent Andrew Lewis for causing deaths due to drug overdoses by failing to pass her original version of a bill empowering the city attorney to prosecute people for having or using drugs in public.

In the video, Nelson says, “Andrew Lewis’ decision to block my drug bill cost the lives of too many people from fentanyl overdose. I trust Bob Kettle to do the right thing.”

The Democrats compared the ads to similar “Republican scare tactics” used by Sen. Patty Murray’s unsuccessful challenger Tiffany Smiley last year; Smiley’s ads included images of encampments and a boarded-up Starbucks on Capitol Hill.

“Most distressing of all is the use of individuals experiencing homelessness in Bob Kettle’s ad, likely without their consent. It is imperative that we treat all individuals with dignity, especially those experiencing homelessness who already face immense challenges. Using their struggles for political gain is not only ethically wrong but also demonstrates a shocking lack of empathy and understanding,” the Democrats said in their statement. 

The Democrats called Nelson’s claim about people dying because Lewis did not initially vote for the bill “unintentionally misleading at best, deliberately lying at worst.”

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3.  The King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office announced Thursday that it has hired an outside collision reconstruction firm, ACES, Inc., to analyze in-car and body-worn video and other materials submitted by the Seattle Police Department for the prosecutor’s felony traffic investigation into Kevin Dave, the SPD officer who struck and killed 23-year-old student Jaahnavi Kandula as he was speeding to respond to a call nearby.

According to KCPAO spokesman Casey McNerthney, the prosecutor’s office will decide whether to file charges against Dave at some point after they review the video—and, potentially, reconstruct the collision scene itself. McNerthney said the prosecutor’s office will have another update—which could, but won’t necessarily, include a charging decision—in November.

As we’ve reported, the police and fire departments initially claimed Dave was responding “as an EMT” to an overdose nearby when he struck and killed Kandula in a crosswalk, elaborating later that police need to be on scene when the fire department is reviving people who have overdosed because they can be violent. PubliCola’s reporting later revealed that the caller had not overdosed, but was lucid and waiting outside his South Lake Union apartment building when he made the 911 call. As PubliCola reported, Dave was driving 74 miles an hour and did not have his siren on when he struck Kandula on Dexter Ave., which has a 25 mph speed limit.

City Council, Drugs, Elections, homelessness

Burien Mayor Sees No Issue With Distribution of Homeless People’s Private Info, Council Member Blames Her Colleague for Fentanyl Deaths

1. During a debate focusing on homelessness sponsored Wednesday night, Burien Mayor Sofia Aragon, who is running for King County Council District 8, responded to PubliCola’s report that the director of a group called The More We Love that offers private encampment sweeps had shared personal and medical information about vulnerable homeless residents of the city with police, city officials, and a private business owner.

The real issue, Aragon said, was that someone in the city had “leaked” the information to me, not that the person who shared the information, The More We Love director Kristine Moreland, had done so without apparent concern for the privacy of the more than 80 people included in the detailed spreadsheet she created.

“I know that there was some information shared, and I don’t know how that got to the reporter, but I know that you know, things that we share within the city will often leak out,” Aragon said. “I don’t know how that occurred, we definitely would be we would be serious about the protection of health information because in [the nonprofit] industry, that is certainly something important.”

Aragon said it was understandable that Moreland sent her spreadsheet of personal information to the private business owner, Jeff Rakow of Snowball Investment, because he contracted with Moreland’s group to remove an encampment outside a Grocery Outlet property that he owns.

As I reported, I received the information through a routine public disclosure request; Moreland attached the spreadsheet to an email she sent to a city council member, two police officials, and a real estate investor who paid Moreland’s group to remove an encampment on his property. It’s unknown whether, or how widely, Moreland distributed her spreadsheet outside the city of Burien, since only public officials are subject to public disclosure requests.

When debate moderator Scott Greenstone from KNKX noted that I got the information through a records request, Aragon breezed past the clarification, saying it was understandable that Moreland sent her spreadsheet of personal information to the private business owner, Jeff Rakow of Snowball Investment, because he contracted with Moreland’s group to remove an encampment outside a Grocery Outlet property that he owns.

“And what he did, because he did see some success, is he shared that with the city, but that doesn’t excuse leaking out of private information from those who are homeless, and that’s something that needs to be addressed,” Aragon said.

As a side note: Unlike Moreland, I did not publish or distribute any of the private information contained in Moreland’s spreadsheet, because that would be an additional violation of the privacy of the people whose information she distributed.

For context, credible nonprofit homeless service providers do not, as a rule, share their clients’ private information outside their organizations without explicit informed consent, because to do so would violate people’s privacy, damage trust, and potentially break federal laws protecting people’s medical information.

2.In a TV ad for District 7 city council candidate Bob Kettle, Seattle City Council member Sara Nelson accused her colleague, District 7 incumbent Councilmember Andrew Lewis, of being responsible for the deaths of countless people from drug overdoses during the two and a half months when the city did not have a law empowering the city attorney to prosecute people who use drugs in public. Lewis cast the deciding vote against the bill in June, then voted with the majority of the council in favor ot a substantively similar bill in September.

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“Andrew Lewis’ decision to block my drug bill cost the lives of too many people from fentanyl overdose. I trust Bob Kettle to do the right thing,” Nelson said in the ad.

Nelson sponsored the initial version of the bill, which said nothing about treatment, diversion, or overdose prevention, and opposed many of the new provisions in the updated bill that support diversion and crisis intervention training. Lisa Herbold and Lewis sponsored the version that passed, which included language indicating that police should divert people to treatment or other diversion programs instead of jail. Public drug use and simple possession are already illegal across the state, thanks to a law passed in May that made both a gross misdemeanor.

“When you have nothing substantive to say, I guess the only thing to do is resort to Republican-style attack ads,” Lewis said. “I will continue my campaign of bringing people together to achieve real results for the people of District 7.”