Tag: Election 2025

Elections, Mayor Harrell

Harrell’s “Last-Minute Request” for Pre-Election Budget Video Sent Seattle Channel Scrambling
Mayor Bruce Harrell stands in front of an affordable-housing building in his 2025 budget video

By Erica C. Barnett

Back in September, outgoing Mayor Bruce Harrell announced his annual budget not with an in-person speech, in keeping with longstanding custom, but in a slickly produced video, filmed at multiple locations around Seattle. The timing, as well as the content—an upbeat preview that emphasized new spending while failing to mention the looming budget cliff—looked more like a campaign video  than an informational announcement. It has been viewed on YouTube around 1,400 times.

Asked about the timing and expense of the video earlier this year, a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Information Technology said, “The Seattle Channel supports the Mayor’s office for various requests, including producing the recent budget video,” the spokesperson said, adding, “This work was completed in-house using staff time.”

While this was technically true, records PubliCola obtained through a public disclosure request show that Seattle Channel staff had to work overtime to comply with Harrell’s last-minute pre-election request, postponing work on regular Seattle Channel shows and working over the weekend to complete the project.

According to an email, 11 staffers were involved in producing Harrell’s budget video.

A review of the emails that flew back and forth before and during production of Harrell’s video suggest a frantic rush to fulfill a last-minute demand from Harrell, who had just lost the primary election to Katie Wilson.

On Monday, September 15, Seattle Channel production manager Ed Escalona sent out an email to staff letting them know about a “last-minute request” from Harrell’s office for a budget video, with multiple takes at three to five locations, filmed “on the mayor’s schedule” and due in a week. “The details are sketchy,” the email noted; another exchange said the mayor planned to “ad lib” without a teleprompter.

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The timeline sent producers scrambling to reschedule other projects and find people who could take on extra work on very short notice. But Harrell’s office took their time coming up with a plan. That Thursday, a staffer described the lack of information from the mayor’s office as “inefficient and not best practices,” and the filming didn’t happen until Friday, with producers still asking Harrell’s office for a script at 2:00 that afternoon.

Work on other Seattle Channel shows appears to have been upended by the last-minute production, and staffers worked through the weekend to finish filming and editing—a situation that prompted grousing from some staff. “Looks great… all except for the part of having to work the whole weekend!” one staffer wrote.

Emails show that Seattle Channel staff tried to limit the number of shooting locations, but Harrell’s team insisted on four—the Green Lake Community Center, a low-income housing complex in the Central District, and the downtown waterfront, plus City Hall.

Harrell’s office also requested a long list of B-roll, including new drone shots, to serve as segues between locations. On the day before the video was due, a Sunday, Seattle Channel general manager Shannon Gee described the work in an email as “very rough going. I don’t know if I’ve been of any help at all trying to hunt down footage that doesn’t exist. … There are sections where there is no way to illustrate what is being said and there are still a lot of edits that need to be covered.”

As we noted at the time, it’s unusual for a Seattle mayor to introduce the annual budget with a video rather than a live speech; the only mayor who has done so in recent memory was Jenny Durkan, who was halfway out the door when she announced her final budget with a perfunctory six-minute video taped at a North Seattle College classroom in 2021.

Elections

Wilson Wins In a Squeaker (That Should Not Have Been This Close)

By Erica C. Barnett

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.

Elections, homelessness, Mayor Harrell

Homelessness Authority Makes Potentially Controversial Hire, Harrell’s $5,000-a-Week Consultant Speaks Out

1. After laying off 13 people and holding 15 vacant positions open as part of a cost-cutting effort last month, King County Regional Homelessness Authority director Kelly Kinnison added five new positions, including three new executives— erasing some of the savings the KCRHA achieved by axing its deputy director, chief financial officer, associate strategy director, general counsel, and research and data director, among others.

As PubliCola reported last month, the layoffs included every person who filed complaints against Kinnison earlier this year, claiming she displayed racial bias after she attempted to create new positions for two white men, allegedly passing over potential Black internal candidates for those roles. At the time, Kinnison backed off on the hires while the authority conducted an investigation. The investigation ended when the KCRHA board voted to place “a letter reminding [Kinnison] of the organization’s policy on retaliation” in her file and hire an executive coach, who ended up advising Kinnison on which jobs to cut.

This week, Kinnison hired one of the men whose proposed employment by KCRHA led to the investigation in the first place. William Towey, the director of Lake City Partners, will start next week as associate director of strategy—the same title Xochitl Maykovich, one of the staffers who complained about Kinnison, held before she quit in August. Lake City Partners provides shelter and services in North Seattle.

We’ve reached out to KCRHA about Towey’s new role at the agency, as well as whether Kinnison plans to hire the other man she considered earlier this year, who currently runs a nonprofit focused on youth and young adult homelessness.

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2. Abdul Yusuf, the founder of the Eastside for Hire taxi company and an ardent supporter of Mayor Bruce Harrell, didn’t respond when we reached out to ask him what kind of “outreach and engagement” he did for the campaign, which paid him $5,000 a week for undefined services (for comparison, that’s what Harrell’s chief consultant, Christian Sinderman, made from the campaign every month).

Yusuf has been downright voluble on Facebook, however, posting after the election that he, along with Seattle Office of Refugee Affairs director Hamdi Mohamed and Breakfast Group founder Nate Miles, had been able “to organize nearly 500 volunteers in support of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s campaign,” including “over 280 taxi drivers, more than 100 African daycare owners, 28 gas station owners, and many other small-business and community leaders.”

Seattle’s East African community, like most, was divided over the mayor’s race and some who supported Wilson over Harrell reported feeling pressure to support Harrell or refrain from supporting Wilson publicly. In his post, Yusuf accuses “some ome within our broader community” of trying “to play both sides — showing public support while quietly working for the opposition. That kind of double-dealing hurts more than open disagreement, but it also teaches us that true partnership is proven by consistency, not convenience.

In addition to her job at the city, Mohamed is a Seattle Port Commissioner. Miles’ organization, the Breakfast Group, is a mentorship program for young Black men; he jumped up during the We Heart Seattle/Discovery Institute-sponsored “Great Debate” earlier this year to deliver an impromptu pro-Harrell speech while Harrell answered friendly questions from the moderator, who was also a supporter.

Elections, Mayor Harrell

Mayor Katie Wilson? It’s Sure Looking That Way!

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayoral candidate Katie Wilson edged above 50 percent of the vote on Tuesday, in the final sizeable batch of ballots King County Elections expects to count. The 6,200 new ballots represent almost all of the 6,400 ballots that were still outstanding as of Monday, and Wilson received just over 60 percent of that batch, boosting her lead over Harrell to 1,346 votes, or 0.49 percent.

Those numbers are still within the margins that trigger an automatic machine recount, which is required when two candidates are less than 2,000 votes and less than half a percentage point apart.

This mayor’s race is the closest in modern history; you’d have to go back to 1906, when William Hickman Moore defeated Jonathan Riplinger by 15 votes, to find a closer race. That election isn’t really comparable, though; among other differences, women couldn’t vote, and the total number of votes was less than 17,000.

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“We want to wait until every vote has been counted, but we believe that we’ve won this race,” campaign manager Alex Gallo-Brown said. “We’re just inside the mandatory recount threshold, but as we continue to cure ballots with our huge turnout of volunteers, we’re hopeful that we can put the campaign behind us soon and focus on governing the city.” Campaigns “cure” ballots by reaching out to voters whose ballots have been challenged and making sure their signatures count.

“While not the direction we were hoping for, this remains a very close race, and we want to ensure every vote is counted,” a spokesperson for the Harrell campaign said. “We are grateful to our volunteers, who continue to reach out to voters, and will see how the final ballots are tallied.”
(Footnote: Today’s count showed fewer write-in ballots than yesterday’s. A spokesperson for King County Elections said this was because some people wrote one of the two candidates in instead of filling in the circle. “Our team actually reviews every write-in vote and if an actual candidate is written-in (on the line), that counts for the candidate’s total,” the spokesperson said. “A lot of that work happened today as part of regular quality control so that’s why you saw the write-ins go down and the candidate totals go up.”

 

Elections, Mayor Harrell

Katie Wilson Leads Incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell by 91 Votes

 

I mean…

 

By Erica C. Barnett

In the latest batch of ballots counted by King County’s elections office, labor organizer Katie Wilson pulled ahead of incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell by 91 votes—a little over 55.6 percent of the 38,000 votes counted on Monday, with about 6,400 ballots outstanding.

While supporters cheered Wilson on social media as the latest results trended in her favor, she hasn’t won the election yet. If the margin between two candidates is less than one half of one percent, and less than 2,000 votes (which it currently is), that triggers a hand recount of all the ballots. If it’s outside either of those margins, the ballots still have to go through a machine recount, a process that can take days.

Recounts don’t generally change the outcome of elections, but it isn’t impossible: In 2004, Democrat Christine Gregoire became governor after a hand recount added about 400 votes to her total, bringing her 129 votes ahead of Republican Dino Rossi. That margin represented a much smaller percentage of the 2.9 million votes cast statewide than Wilson’s current 91-vote margin over Harrell, out of about 280,000 votes cast in Seattle.

Closer to home, in 2015, the City Council District 1 results were so close they triggered a recount, but the recount didn’t end up changing a single vote in the race between Shannon Braddock and Lisa Herbold, who won.

Both campaigns are currently working to “cure” the ballots of supporters whose ballots have been challenged, which often happens when someone’s signature doesn’t match the one King County has on file or they forget to sign their ballot. Currently, there are about 1,700 ballots that have been challenged, according to King County Elections, which leaves a lot of potential votes on the table.

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Although the late ballots have come in about 55 percent in Wilson’s favor, the last few batches of ballots to be counted can be hard to predict. (A spokesperson for King County Elections said they’re definitely from ballot boxes on Election Night, but there’s no way to know where in the city they were from.) In addition, King County generally holds some ballots they weren’t able to tabulate during the regular machine count and adds them to the tally at the end; these ballots don’t mirror late ballots, which generally trend toward progressive candidates, because they’re from the entire voting period, which starts weeks before the election.

Still, Wilson supporters have cause to be optimistic; to paraphrases Bruce Harrell on election night, they’d rather be where they are than where he is. “We’re elated to see the results of the recent drop!” Wilson’s campaign manager said after the results came out. “Our volunteers will be working to make sure that every single ballot is counted over the next few days. We believe that those cured ballots will be critical.”

“We are grateful to our volunteers who are working to ensure that every vote is counted,” the Harrell campaign said in a statement. “This is important work, and essential in a close race.

Voters whose ballots are being challenged (check here if you don’t know) have until November 24 to fix any issues and have their vote counted. According to the King County Elections spokesperson, “the bulk of [the ballots] left should be in tomorrow,” so we’ll know more by around 4:00 tomorrow. Tuesday afternoon around 4pm.

Elections, Mayor Harrell, Police

Friday Fizz: Latest Ballots Trend Toward Wilson, Barnes Moves Controversial Cop Out of East Precinct, Harrell Says Shaming Sex Buyers Works

1. Some quick math on the latest ballot drop from King County Elections, which included another 56,118 votes in the Seattle mayor’s race:

Katie Wilson narrowed the gap with Mayor Bruce Harrell, who’s now leading 50.74 to 48.86 percent, to 4,300 votes, compared to around 10,000 in the previous (Thursday) count.

In this batch, Wilson increased her showing from 51 percent to almost 55 percent of the vote—exactly the percentage she needed of all outstanding ballots as of Thursday. That means that if she can maintain or gain on that percentage in the final rounds of ballot counting, she can win.

Historically, late ballots tend to be very progressive. (They also tend to be in by now, but the count has been delayed slightly this year because two-thirds of King County voters used ballot drop boxes rather than the mail, heeding warnings that the US Postal Service would not guarantee that ballots received on Election Day would be postmarked on time for them to count.)

At the same time, there are a still a few reasons for caution. First, Harrell and the business-backed PAC working on his behalf hit Wilson hard on experience in the final days of the campaign, which appears to have dampened some of Wilson’s support. (She ended the primary above 50 percent with several more people in the race).

Second, late ballots can be somewhat unpredictable. If the ballot boxes that remain uncounted are from more conservative areas, like Magnolia, they’ll move the final tally in Harrell’s direction regardless of the truism that late voters pick progressive candidates.

Bottom line: It’s still anybody’s guess, so try not to think about it until Monday, when the county will announce the next big batch of results.

2. Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes announced yesterday that he’s reassigning Michael Tietjen, the recently promoted captain who became commander of Capitol Hill’s East Precinct in September, and appointing Captain Jim Britt as head of that precinct.

Barnes, previously the police chief in Madison, Wisconsin, reportedly reprimanded SPD staff for not letting him know promoting Tietjen and putting him in the heart of Capitol Hill might cause a backlash. (PubliCola broke the news about Tietjen’s appointment last month). Tietjen has been at the center of several high-profile controversies, going back to 2007, when he and a partner were accused of planting drugs on a man in a wheelchair.

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In 2020, Tietjen was suspended after driving his SUV onto a sidewalk filled with people and mocking them as “cockroaches,” as well as a separate incident in which he threw a protester against a bus stop, injuring them. He also failed to report officers’ alleged harassment of a trans woman during the same period, according to an Office of Police Accountability investigation.

SPD did not respond to detailed questions about Tietjen’s reassignment PubliCola asked on Tuesday. Instead, they announced Britt’s assignment on SPD’s website on Thursday, describing Tietjen’s “recent assignment” in passive voice and saying Barnes took action as soon as he learned about Tietjen’s history. In reality, Barnes announced plans to reassign Tietjen in an internal announcement, also reported exclusively by PubliCola, that blamed our story and “internal leaks” for creating “a crisis of confidence among our LGBTQIA+ community members.” Then he left Tietjen in charge for a month.

Tietjen is reportedly moving to the department’s Internet Crimes Against Children/High-Risk Victims unit.

If the new commander of the East Precinct’s name  name sounds familiar, that’s because Captain Britt has been

of the city’s Real Time Crime Center, a facility at SPD headquarters where police monitor the new CCTV cameras the city is installing in neighborhoods across Seattle. Britt has been the face of the RTCC, so his reassignment after just a few months leaves a void.

Barnes also announced that East Precinct patrol officer Haden Barton will be SPD’s new LGBTQ+ liaison, a position that has gone unfilled for months after the reassignment of the previous liaison, Doran Koreio.

3. If Tietjen is now in charge of the high-risk victims unit, he’ll be overseeing a program SPD announced last week in which detectives stake out and photograph the cars of men paying for sex on Aurora Ave. N, trace their license plates, and send “Dear John” letters to their homes. The idea is that shaming men and provoking fights with their partners will reduce demand for sex work.

Despite the centuries-long history of shaming as a demand reduction strategy, there’s little to no evidence that it works as a deterrent or decreases the demand for sex work (though there is evidence that it pushes some street-based sex workers to move online). Advocates who work against sex trafficking have argued that “john shaming” harms sex workers and destabilizes the families of the men who end up on “john lists” or receive letters from police at home, with little to no impact on sex trafficking, usually the ostensible purpose of such campaigns.

Deputy city attorney Scott Lindsay, a former public safety advisor to ex-mayor Ed Murray, has been trying to get SPD to adopt the “Dear John” program for years, but was rebuffed by previous police chiefs. (Lindsay’s boss, Republican city attorney Ann Davison, just lost her bid for reeelection).

Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office told PubliCola he supports the program. “’John Letter’” programs have been adopted in roughly 100 cities across the United States, including San Francisco last year, and are endorsed by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation as a best practice in addressing commercial sexual exploitation,” a spokesperson for the mayor said. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation, a national Christian fundamentalist group previously known as Morality in Media, campaigns against pornography, sex work, comprehensive sex education, sex shops, same-sex marriage, among other right-wing crusades.