1. On Monday, Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes announced permanent replacements for the two civilian command staff members he fired late last year, along with a newly created position of deputy chief of staff. The two fired staffers, ex-general counsel Rebecca Boatright and ex-chief operating officer Brian Maxey, have filed a tort claim against the city alleging Barnes retaliated against them for giving advice he and his inner circle disagreed with, and discriminated against Boatright based on her gender.
Among the advice Boatright and Maxey gave Barnes and his chief of staff ewre a suggestion that they take concerns from the LGBTQ+ community more seriously including pushback over police raids at a longstanding nude beach. To that suggestion, Barnes’ chief of staff Alex Ricketts allegedly responded, “We’re not here for the gays.”
Two of the new staffers will join Barnes’ team directly from former mayor Bruce Harrell’s office.
Maxey will be replaced by Sarah Smith, a public safety advisor to Harrell who previously worked as a policy staffer for Jenny Durkan. In addition to her time at Harrell’s office, Smith’s resumé includes a brief stint at the fire department, where she “ideated, organized, and executed EMS staffing for events,” according to her LinkedIn page. Before that, she worked as a program manager at the YMCA and a manager at Specialty’s, a now-defunct bakery in downtown Seattle.
Another Harrell staffer, Cindy Wong, will become deputy chief of staff under Alex Ricketts, a new position. Prior to former chief Adrian Diaz, SPD had not had a “chief of staff” since 2001, when an assistant police chief held the job as an informal secondary title. Wong is the author of a children’s book with a background in human resources who had worked for Harrell since 2023.
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Boatright will be replaced by her former deputy, Cherie Getchell. “Please join me in welcoming each of these women to their new roles,” Barnes wrote in an email to all SPD staff. “Their extensive experience and deep commitment to public safety in our community will be instrumental in guiding us through SPD’s next chapter.”
Combined with the five new positions Barnes added when he came on as chief last year—Ricketts, new Assistant Chief Nicole Powell, executive director of crime reduction Lee Hunt, new Deputy Chief Andre Sayles, and Chief Communications Officer Barbara DeLollis, all making well over $200,000—Barnes now has the largest executive staff of any police chief in recent memory.
Mayor Katie Wilson’s office had no comment on Barnes’ hiring of the two Harrell staffers.
2. Across the street at City Hall, the new year began with two departures from City Councilmember Rob Saka’s office, where no staffer (other than chief of staff Elaine Ko) has lasted longer than 16 months. On Monday, a new Saka staffer started work—former SPD lieutenant Brendan Kolding, who will be Saka’s policy director.
Kolding’s name may be familiar. In 2019, he ran for City Council against then-incumbent Lisa Herbold and later endorsed Phil Tavel, a conservative two-time candidate for the position, on a platform that included setting up FEMA-style camps and moving unsheltered people into them. (He lost in the primary). Although Kolding told reporters he quit SPD to run for council, the Seattle Times reported that he actually resigned in lieu of termination after an investigation concluded he had harassed a coworker and lied about it to the police chief.
Some of Kolding’s political views appear to be at odds with some of the lofty rhetoric Saka adopted when he voted against the Seattle Police Officers Guild contract last year. His most recent post on X, from 2024, is a reposted SPOG endorsement for then-Republican gubernatorial candidate Dave Reichert. Kolding has also reposted content from SPOG leader Mike Solan, Turning Point USA activist Jonathan Choe, and former city councilmember Sara Nelson.
Kolding was also fond of posting photos of his ballots, including votes for Nelson, former city attorney Ann Davison, and—whoops—Phil Tavel, who ran against Saka in 2023.
The voters have spoken: Katie Wilson will be the next Mayor of Seattle.
On Wednesday, incumbent mayor Bruce Harrell announced that he will deliver remarks to “the people of Seattle,” presumably a concession speech, tomorrow.
“We are tremendously grateful for everyone who has supported and guided our vision for the city of Seattle,” the Wilson campaign said in a statement. “This campaign was driven by a deep belief that we need to expand the table to include everyone in the decisions that impact their lives. That is what we will be working to do every day as we set up this new administration.”
I’m out of town, having assumed (ridiculously, it turns out) that the election would be over by now when I made my travel plans earlier this year. So you won’t be getting any live updates from Harrell’s speech. What I can say, assuming Harrell is conceding to Wilson, is that this race shouldn’t have been this close, given Wilson’s incredibly strong showing in the August primary (50.75 percent to Harrell’s 41.2 percent, with six other candidates on the ballot).
Unlike other progressive candidates on the Seattle ballot, Wilson actually lost ballot share, ending Wednesday’s count with just 50.19 percent of the vote to Harrell’s 49.48 percent—enough to win, but barely. Wilson’s fellow progressives Dionne Foster (incoming Position 9 city councilmember), Alexis Mercedes Rinck (the incumbent Position 8 councilmember) and Erika Evans (the incoming city attorney), in comparison, took a greater share of votes in the general election than the primary, demonstrating that the extraordinarily close mayoral election was due to factors specific to that election.
The primary factor that helped the unpopular mayor surge, in my view, was an effective negative campaign claiming that Wilson was too inexperienced to be mayor, a charge that for some reason didn’t stick to former mayors Charley Royer or Mike McGinn, neither of whom had previously held elective office. (McGinn, like Wilson, worked for a lefty nonprofit before becoming mayor; Royer was a TV journalist. While Royer served three terms, McGinn served just one and began Seattle’s long, since-unbroken string of one-term mayors.).
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Misleading ads and mail suggested Wilson had never had a real job and was basically a privileged princess, a pretty openly misogynistic tactic Harrell compounded on the campaign trail, when he refused to address Wilson by her name, referring to his opponent instead as “she” and “her.” A KUOW story highlighting the fact that Wilson has received help from her parents paying for child care (which the story initially implied, incorrectly, was something they’d been doing for years), led to exaggerated and false claims that she was “living off her parents’ money.”
None of the stories about Wilson accepting help from her child’s grandparents noted that Harrell, 67, is worth at least $15 million and has been a very wealthy attorney for many decades. Then again, neither did Wilson—a pointed decision that helped Harrell march all over her and almost certainly reclaim some on-the-fence voters who picked Wilson or another progressive in the primary. Instead of hitting back at Harrell’s misstatements and hypocrisy, Wilson ran a generally positive campaign, focusing on her plans for the city instead of responding to her opponent’s attacks.
Unanswered attacks have a way of becoming de facto truth, and Wilson would probably have won on election night if she had reacted in kind. After all, Harrell’s own history includes many potential opportunities to go negative—or, as consultants say, to “contrast” their records.
But no matter—Wilson is ahead, as of this story, by 1,976 votes and by a 0.71-point margin, which is enough—and in the long run, people don’t tend to remember whether mayors have “mandates,” just which candidate won. “Mayor-elect Wilson” sounds pretty good to us.
In a short but spirited debate that aired on the Seattle Channel Friday, Mayor Bruce Harrell repeatedly attacked his frontrunning opponent, policy nerd and Transit Riders Union leader Katie Wilson, as a know-nothing policy lightweight with zero leadership experience, while explaining away his own missteps, including the ongoing budget deficits that have resulted, in part, from his own proposals to increase city spending, as the result of circumstances beyond his control.
During the debate, Harrell consistently spoke over Wilson, interrupted her, and repeatedly posed his own questions, then wouldn’t let Wilson answer them.
Repeatedly, Harrell took over the role of moderator (to the consternation, no doubt, of actual moderator Brian Callanan) and needled Wilson with rhetorical questions that seemed designed to suggest his challenger—a longtime labor and transit activist who helped craft the JumpStart payroll tax and led several successful minimum wage campaigns— had no business coming anywhere near the mayor’s office. (At one point, Harrell, an attorney, noted that Wilson “has no experience in constitutional law, in arguing in front of courts to be able to protect the people that matter most,” which is not part of the mayor’s job.)
Harrell, who has claimed (unjustifiably) to have created 3,000 new units of housing for homeless Seattle residents, accused Wilson of having “all the platitudes” but “no plan” to build 4,000 new shelter units, as she has vowed to do. “You see the weakness in her platform—it’s just complaints with no solutions,” he said. In comparison, Harrell claimed, his administration successfully referred thousands of people to shelter. (More on why that’s a poor metric for addressing homelessness here.)
Then Harrell accused Wilson of “taking credit for the minimum wage” in Seattle and said businesses were “hemorrhaging money” because of the JumpStart payroll tax she supported.
“There’s been no evidence at all that we haven’t supported” social housing, “we just wanted it paid for differently,” Harrell continued. In fact, Harrell appeared on campaign materials for a proposal to reject social housing and instead use existing funds to pay for traditional affordable housing, something the city already does.
Wilson did get a moment to explain the difference between the social housing measure (which she has said inspired her to jump into the race) and the alternative Harrell supported, which would have deprived social housing of funding. She also corrected Harrell’s false claim about the minimum wage: “I have never taken credit for Seattle minimum wage. What I have rightly taken credit for is leading and coordinating campaigns in the cities of incorporating King County and Burien to raise the minimum wage to the highest in the country.”
Wilson also pointed out that the Jumpstart payroll tax has provided the money to cover gaps in the city budget year after year, even as the mayor and council have piled on new spending that has contributed to a structural budget deficit that now tops $240 million budget. Harrell characterized deficits during his administration as “a very tough hand” he was “dealt,” and changed the subject to accuse Wilson of wanting to eliminate the entire police department.
Instead of responding directly to that claim (Wilson wrote a piece in 2020 about what defunding the police would realistically look like), Wilson accused Harrell of making repeated bad hires that have harmed morale at SPD. “You hired and stood by Adrian Diaz as police chief, and under his reign, SPD lost many high-integrity career officers. Morale tanked,” Wilson said. “It’s weird to be the one saying this in this race, but the police actually have a really important role to play. That’s not happening right now.”
Addressing Callanan, Harrell responded, “It’s pretty rich of her to say that. …. She’s never led anything. Number one, just look at her background. I mean, she’s run a nonprofit. I think one employee.”
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When Wilson also brought up two other disastrous hires: Pedro Gomez, a key staffer who was accused of sexual assault and harassment by several women who met him through his official role at the city, and Darrell Powell, a longtime Harrell friend who spent a brief and tumultuous time as head of the regional homelessness authority—Harrell said he wasn’t to blame. “If you actually had experience of hiring people, which clearly you do not, you’ll realize that sometimes you get it right and sometimes you can make corrections, and you have to be nimble.” Harrell defended Powell, who was accused of referring to an employee as a “retard” and fostering a hostile work environment for LGBTQ staffers, by citing his MBA and CPA degrees.
“When you run an organization of 14,000 employees, you have to make these tough decisions. That’s why the stakes are so high in this particular election, because you are really, literally hiring a person. If you look at her—but she doesn’t talk much about her personal story, by the way. There’s no ability to lead an organization, no budget. What’s the highest budget you’ve ever managed?”
As Wilson began to respond, Harrell interrupted her. “What I’m trying to impress upon everyone that’s listening is that an executive has to have executive experience. Even before this, I was elected to the City Council, as president twice. [I was] a managing partner at a law firm. I know how to manage people. … These are tough decisions. Katie, and if you’ve never managed any employees, you should at least tell them. Maybe they’d accept that—'[it’s] the city of Seattle, I’m hoping to be the mayor of an $8 billion organization, and I’ve never managed any employees,'” Harrell said.
On the topic of police surveillance, Harrell accused Wilson of claiming to speak “on behalf of minorities” while “ignoring” the opinions of Seattle Councilmembers Joy Hollingsworth and Debora Juarez, two women of color who voted to expand camera surveillance earlier this week. (No mention of another woman of color on the council, Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who opposed the bill.)
“How rich is it for this person to talk about protecting my community?” Harrell said. “We ran into the same same arguments when I proposed body cameras [for police]. Body cameras are put for the protection of communities of color. Now this surveillance will be used smartly and not to the detriment of the very same people that my opponent seems to want to speak on their behalf.”
The law the council passed expanding surveillance, Harrell continued, has plenty of “safeguards” to ensure the footage can’t be used to prosecute immigrants and people seeking abortions or gender-affirming care.
Not even the most ardent surveillance supporters on the city council were so bold as to make this claim when they passed the legislation earlier this week; instead, they added an amendment saying the city can shut down the cameras for 60 days if the feds come after SPD’s footage, as the many civil-rights groups that opposed the legislation believe they will.
Harrell concluded by calling Wilson’s plan for creating new shelter beds “ridiculous,” calling Wilson herself “a person that gives platitudes, that will not answer a question,” and accusing her of being “hypocritical” by “talk[ing] about the need for public safety.”
Seattle’s latest revenue forecast, which will form the basis of the 2026-2027 biennial budget, reduced the. city’s projected two-year budget shortfall from around $240 million to about $150 million. The city’s revenue forecasters used a more optimistic model than the April forecast.
On the first of two Seattle Nice episodes this week, we discussed the broader implications of a proposed ballot initiative that would make it illegal to fall asleep outdoors in unincorporated King County, a Seattle ballot measure to raise business and occupation taxes to pay for housing stability and human services, and a lawsuit filed by City Attorney Ann Davison, a Republican who’s struggling to retain support, over a seven-month-old Trump executive.
The city council approved the business and occupation tax proposal for the November ballot, overcoming objections from some councilmembers that it shouldn’t be dedicated to any specific purpose, but instead should go toward any current or future general-fund purpose elected officials decide they want to fund. In general, voters approve taxes for specific purposes, and there is no recent precedent for sending a blank-check tax measure to the ballot.
This week’s local elections represented a massive rebuke of the people elected in the wake of COVID and the 2020 protests against police brutality. Across the board in Seattle, progressive candidates were leading big, from Katie Wilson (running against Mayor Bruce Harrell) to Erika Evans (headed for victory against Davison).
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City councilmembers have proposed more than 100 amendments to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s much-delayed Comprehensive Plan update, which only deals with neighborhood residential (former single-family) zoning. Some amendments would further shrink the size of neighborhood centers—small nodes of potential future density—while others would expand them and create new incentives for housing.
On this week’s second edition of the podcast, we debated what’s behind the shift toward progressive candidates this year. I argued that it’s a combination of people’s desire to have people in office who’ll fight Trump policies that impact Seattle and a rejection of politicians who’ve prioritized cracking down on minor crimes over solving the affordability crisis; Sandeep says voters are reflexively “lurching to the left” because of Trump, not any specific local issues.
A petition to “save the trees” is more blatantly misleading than usual, as the trees in question aren’t threatened by the development people are protesting. Maritza Rivera can’t seem to keep staff for more than six months. And the latest election results put Katie Wilson at 50.2 percent to Harrell’s 41.7, while Ann Davison and City Council President Sara Nelson lost ground too: The two incumbents have 33.8 percent and 35.8 percent of the vote, respectively.
On our latest episode of Seattle Nice, we discused King County Executive Dow Constantine’s likely appointment as head of Sound Transit; mayor Bruce Harrell’s first potentially viable challenger, Katie Wilson; and a new candidate, Erika Evans, who’s joining the race against Republican City Attorney Ann Davison.
Nathan Rouse, a public defender who’s also challenging Davison, talked with PubliCola about his agenda for the office. If elected, he said, he’ll bring back community court, end Davison’s “high utilizers” initiative that targets repeat offenders for extra punishment, and focus more resources on prosecuting wage theft, protecting tenants, and providing resources to crime victims.
After months of deliberation, the council voted 6-3 to allow a limited amount of housing near the city’s two stadiums south of downtown. Dan Strauss, a vocal adversary of the plan, dominated the five-hour meeting with increasingly dour speeches predicting the downfall of the maritime industry in Seattle, due primarily to traffic caused by people living in apartments in the area.
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The city’s CARE crisis response team—a team of social workers that responds, accompanied by police, to certain 911 calls—announced this week that it’s expanding citywide. Last week, the city council complained that the the team has not produced visible reductions in misery on Seattle’s streets; in response, CARE’s director noted that the team is limited under an agreement with the police union to 24 responders.
Mayor Bruce Harrell’s external affairs director, Pedro Gomez, was accused of raping a woman he met through the mayor’s office last year. After she came forward, several other women spoke to PubliCola about their own experiences with Gomez, including a coworker who said she never reported her own assault. Harrell’s office said there was never any indication that Gomez had any history of inappropriate behavior with women.
A description of evidence submitted as part of Delostrinos’ rape kit—an invasive, lengthy procedure that victims are encouraged to undergo to preserve DNA and other evidence immediately after a sexual assault
By Erica C. Barnett
Late last September, Mayor Bruce Harrell put a high-ranking longtime staffer, external affairs director Pedro Gomez, on paid administrative leave after learning that Gomez was under investigation for alleged sexual assault. His accuser, Cheryl Delostrinos, met Gomez through his work at the mayor’s office, and filed a report with the Seattle Police Department five days after the incident in June. Gomez remained on the city’s payroll until January, when the case advanced to the King County Prosecutor’s office, prompting his resignation.
Delostrinos, who spoke with the Stranger earlier this year, was the first woman to make public allegations against Harrell’s longtime staffer. In recent weeks, however PubliCola has spoken with several other women who said many of the circumstances Delostrinos described in her police report were unnervingly familiar, down to the Capitol Hill restaurant where he bought them drink after drink, bragging that he was a part-owner of the business. That restaurant, Mercado Luna (previously known as Mezcalaria Oaxaca) shut down in September.
Two of the women said Gomez offered to mentor them or collaborate on future business opportunities, then took them out for a night of heavy drinking and surprised them by suddenly kissing them at the end of the night. Those two women ended up in what they described as consensual (and overlapping) relationships with Gomez that they now regret. “I ended up feeling very violated,” one said.
Another, who worked with Gomez at the city, said she had a single, nonconsensual sexual encounter with Gomez after a night that began as a meeting to discuss city business and ended in a blackout. “I’d have weird sight, where I could see him sitting on my couch and I was very confused,” she recalled. “Somehow it progressed to the bedroom—it was like flashes of memory. I was just like, ‘There’s no way I can be this drunk.'”
Before he resigned last September, Gomez had worked for the city for more than a decade, including several years as a staffer for former mayor Ed Murray. During the Jenny Durkan administration, Gomez was the small business development director for the city’s Office of Economic Development. He returned to the mayor’s office in 2021, before Harrell even took office, as part of an initial wave of insider hires.
Delostrinos said she decided to go public with her story because she wants to reduce the stigma and shame associated with sexual assault and to help other survivors see that they have options. “I have nothing to be ashamed of. This is something that happened to me,” she said.
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Years before Delostrinos filed her report alleging Gomez had raped her, another woman—a city employee who worked with Gomez directly—had a similar experience, she told PubliCola. The woman has never spoken publicly about what happened to her, but says she was inspired to come forward after news of the allegations came out and she began comparing notes with one of Gomez’ ex-girlfriends, who posted on social media about Gomez.
The city employee told PubliCola Gomez sexually assaulted her after a night of drinking that began as a meeting to discuss her progress at work. She never called the police or pursued charges, she said, because as a young, single mom, she couldn’t afford to lose her job. Additionally, the woman said, she belongs to an immigrant community with a deep-seated “stay in culture” ethos of resolving issues internally, rather than going to police, and a lot of “cultural shame and stigma” around sexual assault.
Unlike the other women, the city employee felt she couldn’t say no to meeting Gomez for drinks to discuss work matters. She said she tried to keep their frequent meetings, which took place after hours, focused on business, but Gomez would often turn the conversation to more personal matters—like their previous romantic relationships, their common background as immigrants, and their obligation to support each other.
“It felt really fucked up—really cheap, really dirty, really sad,” she said. “Because what he’s saying is the truth—it is hard, especially as a young Black immigrant woman. We share some of the character traits that he used to prey on me—like, ‘We really have to make a lane for ourselves,’ and talking about what a big deal he is in the community.”
One evening around 6:00, the woman recalled, she met Gomez at Mercado Luna (then known as Mezcalaria Oaxaca) for what she assumed was a routine meeting to talk about issues at work. Very quickly, though “the conversation swayed away from work, and the drinks kept flowing. … “I’m talking about rounds and rounds, just continuous.” Gomez kept saying things were “‘on the house, because I take care of my people,'” she said. As Gomez watched her drink, she said, he nursed a glass of mezcal, which she had never heard of, telling her it was meant to be “sipped.” As the night wore on, things got “blurry” and “kind of messy.”
She had never expressed any romantic interest in Gomez, the woman said. “There was never a progression, like, ‘Oh my god, I have feelings for him.’ It was never, ever, ever, ever mutual.”
By the end of the evening, she recalled, she was disoriented, weak, and losing patches of time.”It was almost as if my vision had a stutter —it was like, ‘Okay, my body’s betraying me and I’m not sure what’s going on.'” When Gomez offered to drive her home, she thought, “this is a good guy taking care of a coworker who got messy.”
Back at her house, she thought to herself, “There’s no way I can be this drunk.” Things seemed to be happening in flashes: Gomez was on her couch, then, the next minute, in her bedroom, and suddenly she was in the middle of a sex act to which she says she did not consent. The next thing she remembers, she was waking up the next day.
“I have no idea when I went to bed. I don’t know how long he was there afterward or when he let himself out,” she said. The next day, she found her phone and wallet “neatly put in a place that I would never normally put them in my house.”
“I felt gross. I was filled with so much deep shame,” the woman said.
Apart from a text saying something along the lines of “last night got crazy,” she said Gomez “pretended like it never happened.” At one point, she said, he seemed to be “testing” her to see what she remembered about that night. “He was like, ‘Do you remember what tattoos I have?’ And I said, ‘You have tattoos?”
The woman stayed at her job for another year. She said she never confronted Gomez, but there were many times when she would have “random outburst of anger” and lash out at him over text. She felt furious that he wouldn’t acknowledge he had done anything wrong. “I’m pretending like this shit didn’t happen. I didn’t tell a fucking soul. And I know for a fucking fact that he remembered more than I did.”
Shortly before she left her position, the woman said Gomez drove to her home one night and invited himself in. “Conveniently, he had a bottle of mezcal in his car.” The woman said he tried to convince her to “do what we did last time. He was like, ‘I can really trust you. You’re good people because you don’t gossip. You don’t tell other people your business.” She told him her brothers were coming to drop her kids off, she said, and “he was quick to get out of there.”
Because Gomez was involved in Harrell’s campaign and said he could help her get a better position at the city once Harrell was in office, “I didn’t want to burn a bridge, because he really put a heavy emphasis on how a recommendation from him goes so far,” she said. “He said, ‘Bruce is going to win and I’m going to be working for him. … I’ll be the reference of a lifetime.'”
The woman said Gomez never followed through on his promises to help her get a better job at the city, and after she left, she fell into a deep depression. At one point, she went to a barber in the Central District and asked him to shave off her hair—and suddenly found herself facing a placard from the city touting Gomez’ work relocating the shop as part of an anti-displacement effort. “This guy was raving about how much a savior he was. He had a great rapport with all these small businesses, and you felt it,” she sighed.
Among the advice Boatright and Maxey gave Barnes and his chief of staff ewre a suggestion that they take concerns from the LGBTQ+ community more seriously including pushback over police raids at a longstanding nude beach. To that suggestion, Barnes’ chief of staff Alex Ricketts allegedly responded, “We’re not here for the gays.”
