Tag: Election 2023

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.”

City Council, Elections

PubliCola Questions: City Council Member Tammy Morales, District 2

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. Ballots go out on October 18.

Today’s interview is with District 2 Councilmember Tammy Morales, who represents Southeast Seattle and is running for reelection in District 2.

PubliCola [ECB]: Some of your colleagues have disavowed their support for reducing the police budget by 50 percent. Do you still think the council did the right thing in drawing this line in the sand in 2020, and what does the backlash say about where we are as a city?

Tammy Morales [TM]: I think the thing [to know] about all of that is that nobody [on the council] is talking about that anymore. The important thing for us to do now is to talk about accountability. Because when officers demonstrate contempt for the public, when they’re harassing neighbors, when they’re laughing at the death of a young woman, a death that was caused by one of their own, that’s public safety, too. That’s a safety issue for all of us. And I think we need to really start to have a conversation about this department that takes 47 percent of our general fud—what is the return on investment for us?

My hope is that we can have those conversations about the culture of the department, which is clearly very toxic, as demonstrated by the fact that the majority of members elected two very toxic leaders of their union. And we need to figure this out, because people are frustrated and angry, and rightfully so.

“Pushing a narrative of fear, and [portraying the city as] a dystopian situation is not helpful. And I don’t think just listing off all the challenges that the city has, as so many candidates are doing right now, is helpful either. We need serious solutions, we need to be able to pay for them, and we need to be able to provide our neighbors with the things that they need in order to thrive.”

ECB: You seem pretty pessimistic. Do you think that SPD can be reformed?

TM: Here’s the challenge that we face as a city: We have boxed ourselves into a corner. We allowed the guild to bargain, and to assume that they can continue to bargain, around accountability. I think we are going to have to have a conversation in the legislature about this as we’re trying to move the dial there. But as we’re moving toward the next contract, questions about arbitration, questions about allowing disciplinary decisions to be overturned—these are things that really need to be front and center, and we really need to get back to the accountability measures that we had in the 2017 accountability legislation.

I’m not part of those conversations anymore. I’m not on the [Labor Relations Policy Committee]. Even if it was, I couldn’t talk about it. But I will say that I don’t know how we change the culture. That has to come from the top. That has to come from expectations from the mayor, expectations from the chief. Loudly and clearly calling out when shit happens instead of excuses. I don’t see that happening right now. And so what we are left with as a council is the contract negotiation, and how and whether we support whatever that looks like.

ECB: The new council is going to consist largely or mostly of new members, and if you’re reelected, you’ll be a veteran by virtue of being in your second term. Are you worried that having so many newcomers getting up to speed at once will diminish the council’s ability to serve as a check on the mayor, especially when there are disagreements?

TM: I am actually not worried about that. Well, I guess it depends on the outcome. I do think that there are candidates who are coming in with some pretty clear visions for what they want to see in terms of how the city grows and changes, how we make sure that our communities are vibrant, strong, and healthy, and what that means for the way we hold ourselves accountable as a city and fund the things that need to happen in the city. So, again depending on the outcome, we could be moving in a really positive direction. I do think it is important to pay attention to the tone that’s being set.

ECB: Can you talk a little more about what you mean by tone?

TM: We’re a growing city, and we did not keep pace with the infrastructure or the services that we need to deal with the structural problems that we have. And then on top of that, we have a social service crisis brought on in part by the pandemic. So there’s absolutely a lot of work to do. But pushing a narrative of fear, and [portraying the city as] a dystopian situation is not helpful. And I don’t think just listing off all the challenges that the city has, as so many candidates are doing right now, is helpful either. We need serious solutions, we need to be able to pay for them, and we need to be able to provide our neighbors with the things that they need in order to thrive.

ECB: The council is in the middle of its annual budget process. What are your priorities for new investments, and how are you going to pay for them beyond this year, given that the city faces a looming budget deficit of $250 million a year starting in 2024?

TM: It’s going to be hard. There’s no doubt about that. We’re a growing city with growing needs. We were able to fund a lot of those needs with one-time federal money that we got during COVID. But that money is gone, and the needs still exist, and they are growing. So we’re going to have to talk about raising more revenue. I was one of three council members in last year’s budget who voted to increase the progressive payroll expense tax. And I think that needs to be on the table. I think the capital gains tax needs to be on the table. I don’t quite know how the executive pay disparity tax would work. But that I know, that was also a recommendation, and I think it’s something worth investigating more.

And I think we’re going to have to partner with the county, with the state, with the feds, to try to fill some of these other holes that we have, if we’re really going to get serious about meeting the needs of the folks who are most vulnerable in our community. And, you know, I can certainly think of one place that we could trim a little bit, but that conversation is fraught, and I don’t know that it would be terribly productive.

ECB: You don’t think that talking about cutting the police budget at this point is going to be productive?

TM: What I will say is that I certainly don’t think we should be adding funding there. And I know there is more money added to the department [in Harrell’s proposed 2024 budget] from salary savings, from some other places, for some additional one-time funding [for things like Shotspotter and surveillance cameras]. I don’t think we need to be adding anything new that isn’t going to be sustainably funded.

“As a city, we have a responsibility to protect the safety of our community members, and that includes [drug users’] health and safety. That includes people who are experiencing homelessness and substance use disorder. So in my mind, this bill does not protect them. It doesn’t provide treatment, it doesn’t provide services, and in fact, basically defines the threat of harm as public drug use.”

ECB: What about Jumpstart? Every year, Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda is a fierce advocate for preserving the Jumpstart spending plan instead of raiding that funding source for other purposes. If she’s elected to the county council, which seems likely, are you concerned about preserving that stable source of funding for housing and equitable developmemt?

TM: I want to have that conversation in the context of whether or not we will be able to increase [the Jumpstart payroll tax]. And I don’t know yet. There are some really important programs that Jumpstart is funding—some really important goals that we have for the city around affordability and housing. And it was really important to me to get the Equitable Development Initiative included in that package. And I fought to make sure that we had at least that 9 percent setaside because EDI needs a permanent funding source. And so the way that was set up was really, in my mind, a value statement—wanting to dedicate resources to the things that we say are important, and not letting it get sort of swept up in the general fund.

That said, you know, it has been an important way to fill some of the [budget] hole, and now that that hole is bigger. I don’t want all of the payroll expense tax to go into that gap. But we may need to at least extend the percentage that has been going [to the general fund]. And if we’re able to increase the tax, then that is another way to try to fill some of that hole.

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ECB: What are some of your priorities for reducing gun violence in southeast Seattle, and why do you think the rate of gun violence has continued to rise, both in your district and throughout Seattle?

TM: What I have what I have said my entire term, and even before my term, is that what we really need to be doing is investing in neighborhoods that are underresourced, and investing in things that can change the community conditions that lead to violence in the first place. And part of the problem is we just don’t have a social safety net in this country. So we need to invest in our neighborhoods so that people have housing they can afford, and food security, and access to medical care, and high quality education and job opportunities, and after school programs, and mentoring, and all of those things. We need all of that.

And in addition to that very upstream answer, we need to be scaling up the kinds of programs that provide street activation and diversion programs and violence interruption programs—all of those things that can help activate the streets, that can identify the people who are involved in some of this activity, and either divert them after arrest or try to engage them before they’re arrested so that they get onto a different path. I think identifying the people who are at risk is important, and there are a lot of programs that do that kind of work.

And then trying to mitigate that risk, and making sure that we are providing groups like, you know, Southeast Safety Net and Choose 180—those groups that work on a pathway out of violence are also important. And then I think there is a role for the police to play after the fact in some of this— responding to violent calls, investigating incidents of drug trafficking, or sex trafficking, or any of the other things that that are really harming people.

ECB: You voted against the new drug criminalization bill, which put you in the minority on the council, and I wanted to just give you a brief opportunity to explain why and what you would like to see happen now.

TM:  For me, the issue remains that this bill was really about giving the city attorney the ability to prosecute [drug users], more than more than anything else. And I still believe that if our goal is to help people who are suffering from addiction, then we need to be taking a public health approach to solving that problem. And what public health professionals are saying is that we need to expand treatment options. We need to expand harm reduction options. We need to make sure folks can access the medications that they need that could help them with withdrawing from these drugs that they’re on.

I think something like 1,000 opioid-related deaths have happened in the last year. As a city, we have a responsibility to protect the safety of our community members, and that includes [drug users’] health and safety. That includes people who are experiencing homelessness and substance use disorder. So in my mind, this bill does not protect them. It doesn’t provide treatment, it doesn’t provide services, and in fact, basically defines the threat of harm as public drug use.

“The folks in the south end don’t consider [Link light rail] done yet, and won’t consider it done until you make the safety investments that you should have made in the first place. Because it’s great that you’ve learned all kinds of lessons, and you’re doing things differently, or plan to do things differently, up in Ballard or wherever else you’re going. But you learned those lessons at the expense of the folks in the Rainier Valley.”

ECB: You came out in favor of the new “North and South of Chinatown/International District” light rail option, which would eliminate stations in Midtown and the heart of the CID. There are a lot of people in the district who have advocated for a Fourth Avenue option that would provide the CID with a connection to the rest of the system, including the airport, in the future. Can you explain why you decided to support these new locations?

TM: There’s a real fear that if we move with the Fourth Avenue option, local businesses will be disrupted, local businesses will lose customers, and they will shut down. I think there’s something like 20 businesses around there. And the CID is changing rapidly already. There’s a lot of national chains coming in that I think are really changing the character of the neighborhood. And so the initial conversations were really like, how do we make sure that we’re preserving these businesses? And so the conversation started about the other two locations that [some neighborhood] advocates were proposing. This is a community, as we’ve all heard over and over again, that has regularly borne the brunt of these transit projects with very little engagement or seeming understanding from the agencies themselves about the impact they’re having. And they’re fed up, understandably.

So that’s where the conversation started. I will say that I realize the plans weren’t fully developed as we were having those conversations. And now that Sound Transit has identified that as the preferred alternative, and is beginning the process of diving deeper into what these are, I do want to see what it’s going to look like. And I think that regardless of what ends up happening, Sound Transit really needs to step up their community engagement there, and they need to be very clear about what mitigation measures and what community benefits they will commit to.

ECB: In Southeast Seattle, Sound Transit’s at-grade light rail trains continue to collide with vehicles along MLK Way SE on a routine basis, and a number of pedestrians have been struck and killed by trains. How are you working with Sound Transit to make the light rail crossings in Southeast Seattle safer for residents of those neighborhoods?

TM: I have quarterly meetings with Sound Transit about MLK, in particular. And there’s been some movement on [the Seattle Department of Transportation’s] side to add leading pedestrian intervals, different kinds of signal timing, and more lighting around the stations themselves. On Sound Transit’s side, there is beginning to be a conversation about what it would take to add [railroad] arms to the pedestrian pathway so that they can’t cross into the track. There’s all kinds of design and engineering reasons why they say that is problematic. But I think there’s finally a willingness to really have that conversation.

And as I say every time we talk, the folks in the south end don’t consider this project done yet, and won’t consider it done until you make the safety investments that you should have made in the first place. Because it’s great that you’ve learned all kinds of lessons, and you’re doing things differently, or plan to do things differently, up in Ballard or wherever else you’re going. But you learned those lessons at the expense of the folks in the Rainier Valley. And that needs to be addressed.

 

City Council, Elections

PubliCola Questions: City Council Candidate Maren Costa, District 1

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. Ballots go out on October 18.

First up: Maren Costa, a former Amazon employee who founded Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, where her organizing helped lead to Amazon’s “climate pledge” to reduce the company’s net emissions to zero by 2040. In 2020, she was fired after circulating a petition on behalf of warehouse workers organizing for better workplace conditions. Her opponent, Rob Saka, is supported by Mayor Bruce Harrell.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

PubliCola [ECB]: Seattle Police Department officers have repeatedly been caught mocking or belittling the deaths of people killed by police—most recently SPOG vice president Daniel Auderer, who was caught on tape joking with SPOG president Mike Solan about the killing of Jaahnavi Kandula by a third officer. These are police leaders, and they shape the culture at the department. Do you think SPD can be reformed, and if so, how?

Maren Costa [MC]: Reform is really hard. A lot of the things that happen in a fight or flight decision—which is where we see, oftentimes, the worst examples of police brutality and overpolicing—those come from the brain stem. In big tech, we deal with implicit bias all the time. We know that there’s implicit bias—it’s just everywhere, and it hard to train out of people. So when you’re dealing with somebody who has a gun, and they’re in an adrenaline situation, it’s just going to be hard for people not to resort to that lower brain and not to go to their fear-based reactions.

I am a proponent of minimizing armed response where it’s not needed—so, standing up that third department that we’ve all been waiting for, whether we call it CARE or civilian response or dual dispatch. I think the community will be safer if we don’t send an armed officer when we don’t need an armed officer.

And then we need to hold people accountable when we see that kind of behavior. Culture comes from the top.

“I do think that treatment for some people might need to be mandatory— enough to give someone a chance to be off drugs, to help them get onto methadone, or whatever will help ease them back to a non-drug[-using] stage.”

ECB: You told me before the primary that you opposed local legislation giving the city attorney the ability to prosecute people for using drugs in public or for simple possession. Now that the law has passed, what policies will you advocate to promote diversion and minimize harm?

MC: I think the evidence shows that treatment works better than incarceration for substance use disorder. So but we need to fund that. But this bill that passed, unfortunately, seemed performative. If you’re someone who wants to incarcerate someone for substance use disorder, I’m sorry, that won’t happen. Because we don’t have time, courts are backed up, the jails are full. If you’re someone that wants to treat substance use disorder, sorry, that won’t happen [either]. Because we don’t have the beds, we don’t have the programs, we don’t have the resources and the diversion set up to deal with it.

ECB: What do you think effective treatment looks like?

MC: Fentanyl is such a beast. And, you know, somebody said, ‘There’s no such thing as a long-term fentanyl user,’ which is so tragic. We know that getting out of addiction can often take multiple tries. And sometimes you just don’t get those chances with fentanyl. So I think it’s just going to be different for every person. You know, ‘is this your eighth time in [treatment]? Have we seen you before? What are you struggling with?’

I think when people talk about, ‘incarceration works,’ they’ll have these anecdotal stories of somebody saying, ‘I sobered up in jail and it saved my life.’ And you can have the same anecdotal stories of people saying ‘I sobered up in the hospital’ because they had some kind of an injury that put them in the hospital where they couldn’t leave [and had to stop using drugs]. So I don’t think it has to be jail. But I do think that treatment for some people might need to be mandatory— enough to give someone a chance to be off drugs, to help them get onto methadone, or whatever will help ease them back to a non-drug[-using] stage.

ECB: How do you feel about your ability to work with City Attorney Ann Davison’s office on less punitive alternatives to prosecution for drug users arrested under the new law?

MC: Oh, great. We agree on the outcomes. We want people to not hurt other people and not hurt themselves. [We want them to] not be doing drugs on openly on the streets. We want to house people. Most of us still want to be compassionate. But we also don’t want to accept harmful behavior. And the devil then is in the details. How do we do all of those things? And then also, how do we pay for them?

ECB: How do we pay for them? Inpatient treatment can be very expensive, to name one example.

MC: We  obviously want to make sure we’re spending every dollar that we have as best as we can. At Amazon, there was a leadership principle called frugality: Every dollar not spent on the customer is a dollar wasted. That was drilled into us. So we should make sure we’re spending the money we have as efficiently as we can. This might have to come from the mayor, but I would love to say to all the departments, ‘Filter up 10 ways that your department can save money.’

And it can be anonymous, because there might be people in a department who are like, ‘We have this meeting every week where there’s 10 people sitting around making $300 an hour and nothing comes out of that meeting.’ Or, ‘we’re paying this one nonprofit to do this work, and they have never produced results.’ Or whatever it is—you know, bubble it up. And let’s go after those things and try to save as much money as we can and do that quickly, because we’re going to need to do everything we can.

And then we need to raise progressive revenue, because we have an upside-down tax code where the poorest among us pay the highest percentage of their wages. We have a ton of money in the city. And we have a hard time getting the people who have that money to pay their fair share. So we have to make sure that we’re getting everybody to pay their fair share, and then we’ll have more money to solve our big problems. And that’s where I can’t get my opponent to commit, because the Trump donors that are funding his [independent expenditure] campaign don’t want to hear him say he’s going to raise taxes on big business.

Enjoying this article? PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. Help keep PubliCola sustainable by CLICKING HERE to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

ECB: The King County Regional Homelessness Authority, which is mostly funded by the city, has struggled to find its footing in its first two years and has suffered a number of high-profile setbacks, including the termination of its program to end homelessness downtown and the departure of its founding CEO. Do you think homelessness requires a regional approach, and if so, what can be done to turn the KCRHA around?

MC: I’m not ready to abandon it. But we have to make sure that we’re monitoring it and auditing it to make sure it’s meeting the goals, and if it’s not meeting the goals, fix it or kill it. And I think we’re at the fixing stage. I have hopes for it. I think the regional intent is good. When it comes to [deciding], where are we going to put all the tiny home villages or safe [parking] lots that we want to build, everyone in the region has to pony up. You know, ‘Give me three places where you will be willing to put [shelter] in your neighborhood’ and share the load appropriately. I think it’ll make us more efficient and more able to actually meet the needs of our own homeless population, which is growing every day.

I met with [a policy staffer for KCRHA] recently, and he gave me a lot of hope for the organization. He said that when they are actually going into encampments armed with what they need to solve the problem, they’re having a 90% success rate of bringing people inside. And that’s what I love to hear. Because that’s what we need to do. And you need to tailor that offer. Before, we were offering congregate shelters and nobody wants to go. When we can go in and really help people get situated into something that works for them, we’re getting 90%.

ECB: It sounds like he was talking about CoLEAD, which does encampment work in state-owned rights-of-way in collaboration with the KCRHA. That’s an intensive, expensive model that is unlike how the city itself responds to most encampments, which is to give 72 hours’ notice and offer people whatever shelter is available. And that’s in a best-case scenario where the city doesn’t just call an encampment an obstruction and remove it without notice or a shelter offer.

MC: LEAD works. It’s also very expensive. So if there’s a way to do it cheaper, great. And we can look at that, too. But I mean, these things are just going to cost money. I think we’re all really tired of not solving the problem.

“These decisions we’re making right now are going to impact our city for hundreds of years. And so it’s very short-sighted to worry about years of [light rail] construction. The most important thing we can do is build something that people actually want to use and that meets their needs, because we need to get people out of their cars, and in order to do that, we have to make it more convenient.”

ECB: Sound Transit has recently proposed moving around several stations in downtown Seattle to reduce the impact of construction on businesses and residents. What are some of the tradeoffs you see coming down the road in West Seattle, and can you talk about how you see light rail transforming District 1, for good or bad?

MC: Well, there’s going to be disruptions. Somebody’s going to lose their house, somebody’s going to lose their business. I guess I would want to make sure that we’re fairly compensating businesses and renters and homeowners. My sister’s business was actually under eminent domain for a while. I met with the owner of a daycare center who will probably get displaced for the Delridge station,, and the amount of money that they’re being offered to compensate them is not anywhere near the amount of money they’re actually going to need to reestablish their business somewhere else.

These decisions we’re making right now are going to impact our city for hundreds of years. And so it’s very short-sighted to worry about years of construction. The most important thing we can do is build something that people actually want to use and that meets their needs, because we need to get people out of their cars, and in order to do that, we have to make it more convenient. It’s a long wait. Ten years from now. Where are self-driving vehicles going to be at [by then]?

ECB: Do you support putting self-driving vehicles on our streets?

MC: Yeah. Probably not yet, but like 10 years from now? Sure. Let [other cities] be the guinea pigs for a year or two. We tend to want to rush everything—like rushing AI. And we don’t really just slow down and take a minute to see how well it’s working. So I’m not opposed to it, when it’s safe.

ECB: What are some of your ideas to decarbonize the city, other than electric vehicles and maybe, eventually, self-driving cabs?

MC: Everything we do to bring cars off the road is great, and we can’t just electrify them all because it is still an inefficient way to move people around. Sometimes when I’m sitting on I-5, I like to think about if you could snap your fingers and have the cars go away, the way that like Cinderella’s carriage went away, and then you just had the number of people that were there. It would be empty. It would just be like, ‘Oh my God, we have this massive thing running through our city and it’s only moving this this many people. It’s so frustrating. So we need to get cars off the road.

We have building emissions performance standards coming up—that needs to have teeth and it needs to happen. I would love to find a way to tax carbon so that we’re making the right thing to do the actual cheaper thing to do

We’re currently not on track to meet our climate goals. As a city, as a state, as a nation, as a planet, nobody is on track to meet our climate goals. We are all just numbingly accepting this as business as usual. We can’t refreeze the ice caps, we can’t de-acidify the oceans, we can’t reverse the biodiversity loss. And I don’t believe in blaming the individual at all, because that’s not where we need to change. But we need to have people understanding what the tradeoffs are—we’re currently trading our convenience today for a livable future. We need to help people understand that and then demand better from our government.

City Council, Elections, homelessness

Another Heated Debate Over Role of Lived Experience Coalition, Business-Backed Campaigns Form for Council Elections

1. A Wednesday meeting of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s implementation board erupted into a dispute over the role of the Lived Experience Coalition within the agency’s ombuds office, after implementation board members Ben Maritz, an affordable housing developer, and Sara Rankin, the LEC’s designated board representative, questioned the agency’s decision to end an agreement in which the LEC itself helped run the oversight office.

PubliCola reported on the KCRHA’s decision to terminate an agreement that gave the LEC—a group of homeless and formerly homeless advocates who also ran a hotel-based shelter program that ran out of money earlier this year—unusual power over the ombuds office, which is part of the KCRHA. The ombuds office, whose responsibilities were described in the original interlocal agreement that set up the KCRHA in 2019, responds to and investigates questions and complaints from service providers, clients, and KCRHA employees.

Maritz asked chief ombudsperson Katara Jordan why the KCRHA was icing out the LEC, given the importance of including the perspectives of people with lived experience in the ombuds office. “Setting aside the personalities in the organizations, do we not want people with lived experience to have some direct oversight in this organization, specifically on individual cases, which our organization could easily misinterpret or get things wrong on?” Maritz asked.

“Now, do you honestly believe that a joint office with the LEC, an organization that has no oversight and has caused irreparable harm to people with lived experience in this community, would actually provide independence, accountability, or neutrality, for the ombuds office? I just feel like every time I come before this board, we have to litigate this issue.”—KCRHA chief ombudsperson Katara Jordan

Jordan—who already responded to the same questions back in June—said it was “offensive” to suggest that the office didn’t care about people with lived experience, and called the ongoing focus on including the LEC in agency operations, as opposed to people with lived experience more broadly, a kind of insidious “tokenization.” Rankin made her question or comment thriough an internal messaging system that was not visible on the video or Webex livestream.

“Now, do you honestly believe that a joint office with the LEC, an organization that has no oversight and has caused irreparable harm to people with lived experience in this community, would actually provide independence, accountability, or neutrality, for the ombuds office?” Jordan asked. “I just feel like every time I come before this board, we have to litigate this issue.”

“My team has thought really hard about how we’re going to continue to engage people with lived experience,” Jordan continued. “So please, whether it’s you, Sara Rankin, or you, Benjamin, please do not in any way, shape, or form imply that we don’t care about people with lived experience.”

After board members Juanita Spotted Elk and John Chelminiak tried to lower the tension in the virtual room—” it’s just time to put this discussion aside and continue with the operation of an excellent ombuds office,” Chelminiak said—Rankin, who is white, chided Jordan, who is Black, for turning the conversation into a “volatile” one.

“If we can’t have discussions about independence and accountability on the implementation board about the KCHRA and the different parts of the KCHRA, without it exploding into into ad hominem attacks, I think it’s problematic,” Rankin said. “I think the tenor of this conversation became very unfortunate. … I also don’t think it’s appropriate for any of us to resort to personal attacks, or emotional attacks, on any group or individual or to question the intentions or the commitment of anyone.”

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2. After helping to push council candidates Rob Saka (District 1, West Seattle) and Maritza Rivera (District 4, northeast Seattle) through the primary, business and real estate interests appear to be readying similar campaigns in every other council district. Since the primary, when “Elliott Bay Neighbors” and “University Neighbors” spent a combined $130,000 on efforts that included nearly identical mailers broadly assailing the City Council, four more similarly named groups with the same mailing address and treasurer have popped up in other districts, including Greenwood (District 5), Ballard (District 6), and downtown (District 7).

So far, only the Downtown Neighbors committee has explicitly identified the candidate it’s supporting: Bob Kettle, running against incumbent Andrew Lewis. The business-backed candidates in the other races are Cathy Moore in District 5 (running against Christiana ObeySumner for the open seat) and Pete Hanning in District 6 (challenging incumbent Dan Strauss).

Notably, the only part of the city for which there is no obvious “Neighbors” campaign so far is Southeast Seattle, where Chinatown/International District activist Tanya Woo is challenging incumbent Tammy Morales. There is also a “Seattle Neighbors” committee that does not specify a council district but shares a donor, private equity firm co-founder T.J. McGill, with the original two “Neighbors’ groups.

The top donors to Elliott Bay and Downtown Neighbors include Costco co-founder Jim Sinegal, real estate developer and 2020 Trump supporter George Petrie, Dunn Lumber, and a number of other local real-estate and business interests.

Unlike candidates, independent expenditure campaigns can spend unlimited money to influence the outcome of Seattle’s local elections.

City Council, Elections, homelessness, King County, Mayor Harrell, Transit

Ceis Gets Another $30,000 from City, Poll Tests Anti-Andrew Lewis Messages, Burien Site May be Too Loud for Shelter

1. Tim Ceis, the consultant who received a no-bid, $280,000 city contract to work on issues related to Sound Transit’s Ballard-to-West Seattle light rail alignment earlier this year, received a $30,000 contract extension this month, bringing his total city contract to $310,000.

Ceis’ contract involves meeting with neighborhood advocacy groups and other stakeholders to build “community consensus” around the mayor’s priorities for the light rail extension, strategizing, and advancing Harrell’s views to the Sound Transit board.

PubliCola broke the story about Ceis’ initial contract in March.

At the time, Harrell was pushing a proposal to eliminate a station in the Chinatown International District (CID) neighborhood and replace it with a second Pioneer Square Station across from City Hall, roughly where the King County Administration Building currently stands. King County Executive Dow Constantine has proposed creating a towering new residential neighborhood and new civic center in the area. Sound Transit board adopted this proposal as its preferred alternative in March, but left one potential CID option on the table in response to protests from residents and businesses.

The plan to skip over the CID would add a new light rail station near Lumen Field and an existing Salvation Army shelter, amid a broad swath of land owned by developer Greg Smith. As far back as 2022, Smith’s company Urban Visions had mocked up a proposal to move the planned CID station south into SoDo, suggesting the area could turn into a new destination like Chelsea Market in New York or the food and event center in the revamped Seattle Center Armory.

Documents obtained through records requests show that Ceis, along with the city’s designated liaison to Sound Transit, has met with Smith “to discuss potential partnerships related to the proposed CID south station” on Smith’s property. He has also met with attorney Jack McCullough, who represents the developer that owns the development rights around the proposed second Pioneer Street station.

The newly amended contract says that “due to delayed Sound Transit board action,” Ceis’ work will continue through November. The board spent several weeks this summer debating whether to eliminate a promised station on Denny Way or build it on Westlake as planned; Harrell, who initially seemed to support eliminating the long-planned station on Denny, ultimately got behind a station north of the original proposed site on Westlake that will cause less disruption to Amazon and the South Lake Union developer Vulcan.

Public records show that Ceis communicates regularly with Vulcan, and facilitated a meeting between Harrell and Vulcan VP Ada Healey, who told Ceis that the original plan for a station on Westlake would “put [the city’s] economic engines at risk and “sacrific[e] our downtown neighborhoods.” A spokesman for the mayor’s office said the scope for Ceis’ $250-an-hour contract remains unchanged.

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2. There’s a new poll in the field testing positive and negative messages about District 7 City Councilmember Andrew Lewis, along with positive messages about his opponent Bob Kettle—a former Navy officer who received 31.5 percent of the vote to Lewis’ 43.5 percent.

The poll, which only tests positive messages about Kettle, appears to be from the Kettle campaign. For one thing, it mischaracterizes several of Lewis’ key positions in odd ways—saying, for example, that Lewis is “working…to bring rent control to Seattle” (in fact, he voted against a rent control “trigger” law earlier this month). For another, it describes Lewis’ views in a way that no human working on his campaign would be likely to phrase them—like a question that says Lewis “believes we can make progress… if we center the work and meet the moment with the urgency it requires,” or another that talks about “electrify[ing] houses.”

The real meat of the poll—the messages voters should prepare to hear from Kettle as he runs against Lewis from the right—is more or less what you’d expect from a guy with campaign signs all over the top of Magnolia and Queen Anne: Kettle will represent District 7 neighborhoods outside downtown Seattle, crack down on “open drug use and dealing from Downtown to our neighborhoods,” and “clean up our public spaces” by removing encampments now that “we’ve finally built-up enough shelter space to offer housing to everyone.”

Quick fact check on that last point: There are currently around 6,000 shelter and transitional housing beds in all of King County—a fraction of what’s needed to serve a homeless population that could be as high as 48,000. Even under the most conservative estimates, we have not “built up enough shelter space,” much less housing, “for everyone.”

3. A potential site for a Pallet shelter in Burien could be disqualified because of extreme noise levels from nearby SeaTac Airport. The property—an empty lot next to the Boulevard Park branch of the King County Library—sits inside a “35 decibel reduction zone,” in which all “living and working areas” must be soundproofed to reduce inside noise by 35 decibels.

Pallet shelters, which are thin-walled temporary structures ventilated to the outdoors, can’t be soundproofed—a fact the Port of Seattle brought up in rejecting a proposal from the city to site the shelter inside the Port’s Northeast Redevelopment Area (NERA). In both locations, the average noise level is between 60 and 70 decibels, a level SeaTac Airport’s director of environment and sustainability said was “not conducive to residential purposes, especially when it is highly unlikely that any temporary housing structures (let alone permanent structures) could be modified to attain the City of Burien’s stringent noise mitigation code.”

A spokesperson for the city of Burien did not immediately respond to questions about noise levels at the potential shelter location and how the site, which has been vacant for many years, first came to the attention of the city.

City Council, Elections, The C Is for Crank

Are Incumbent City Councilmembers Doomed? The Seattle Times Sure Hopes So!
The Seattle Times editorial board, citing “election watchers,” argues that Tammy Morales and other incumbent council members are in trouble, but they don’t have the numbers to back it up.

By Erica C. Barnett

In a recent editorial arguing that city council incumbents face uphill battles against their business-backed challengers in November, the Seattle Times confidently asserted that “only one barely broke 50% in counts as of Wednesday suggesting voters are open to making a change.” That sentence, which according to the piece’s byline was not written by AI, is a reference to Dan Strauss, the District 6 incumbent who currently has just under 52 percent—23 points more than his Times-backed challenger, Pete Hanning.

The editorial continues: “Experienced election watchers say any final result under 55% bodes ominously for incumbents. Challengers now must press their case.”

Unsure which “experienced election watchers” the Times is talking to, I decided to look at the numbers myself, going back to 2009 in our quest to find incumbents who came in close to, but failed to top, 55 percent and went on to lose.

Actually, it turned out to a pretty easy task, because there weren’t any examples.

Since the Times set 55 percent rather than 50 percent as their metric, we started by looking only people who got between 50 and 55 percent in the primary and went on to lose in the general—eliminating people like former mayor Greg Nickels, who got knocked out in the 2009 primary with 25 percent; former mayor Mike McGinn, whose 27 percent primary showing in 2013 translated to a four-point loss to Ed Murray; and former council member Jean Godden, who failed to top 20 percent and got bumped in the 2015 primary. That yielded no results—no one, in other words, who started out close to but under 55 percent and didn’t win reelection.

Unsure which “experienced election watchers” the Times is talking to, I decided to look at the numbers myself, going back to 2009 in our quest to find incumbents who came in close to, but failed to top, 55 percent and went on to lose. Actually, it turned out to a pretty easy task, because there weren’t any examples.  

In fact, the only election that came close to meeting the Times’ sweeping claim was former council member Richard Conlin’s reelection bid in 2013, when he went on to lose in a citywide election to challenger Kshama Sawant by a 1.7 percent margin. Since the Times is arguing that the city is clamoring for leaders who will “provide comfort to [Seattle residents” while enforcing basic rules to ensure peace, security and prosperity for everyone,” the election of a firebrand socialist over a traditional Seattle centrist is probably not the example they’re looking for.

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Contrary to the Times’ “experienced election watchers” (many of whom, we suspect, may sit on the Seattle Times editorial board), there are many examples of candidates who won less than 55 percent of the primary-election vote—in some cases, far less than 55 percent—and went on to win the general election by margins of 12 to 22 percent. They include Sawant and Tim Burgess in 2015, as well as Lisa Herbold, Tammy Morales, and Debora Juarez in 2019.

Obviously, this election, like any election, could end up with the ouster of one or more incumbents—Andrew Lewis, in District 7, is currently looking the weakest with around 44 percent, about him around where Burgess and Juarez were before they bounced back to win reelection by large margins. The Times has been doing a victory lap since election night, claiming their endorsements “matter a lot” when it comes to anointing the right-lane candidates in every race. In that context, it’s hard not to read the Times’ unsourced declaration as wishful thinking on behalf of the “outstanding” candidates they endorsed to take down the council incumbents—candidates who currently have between 29 and 43 percent of the vote.