Tag: Election 2025

Elections, Mayor Harrell

With Half the Ballots Still Uncounted, This Mayoral Election is an Open Contest
Mayor Bruce Harrell’s election night party, just before the first results came in.

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell gained a point on his challenger Katie Wilson yesterday, as King County Elections tallied a batch of about 21,000 ballots that were sent in the mail by Election Day. Those ballots left a gap of just over 11,000 votes between the two candidates, with Harrell leading Wilson 53.8 percent to 45.7 percent.

That’s a big gap, but the math to close it is relatively clear. With total turnout in Seattle around 55 percent, according to data from the Secretary of State’s office, there could be as many as 140,000 votes still uncounted. (This number can still fluctuate, since King County hasn’t finished counting every ballot). That’s about half the votes in Seattle. Based on those numbers, Wilson will need about 54 percent of the outstanding votes to make up her current 11,1134-vote gap. Put another way, she’ll need to gain eight points compared to her election-night showing in order to win.

Is that doable? Seattle’s electoral history suggests it is, although there are other factors at play in this election that I’ll get into in a moment. In 2023, for instance, Seattle City Councilmember Tammy Morales trailed challenger Tanya Woo by 8.9 points on election night and ended up closing that gap to win by 1.6 points. In 2021, mayoral candidate Lorena González came out of election night 29.6 points behind Harrell, narrowing that gap in late-counted votes to 17.4 points—a 12.2-point gain. Harrell obviously won that race, but late voters overwhelmingly favored González, the progressive candidate in that race.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

As I mentioned, there are other factors at play this time. Harrell is the incumbent, and he had millions of dollars behind him, including not just his own campaign (which has raised around $1.2 million) but a real estate and big business-backed PAC that could accept unlimited contributions (and has raised just over $1.8 million). Three million dollars can buy a lot of attack ads, and Harrell hammered away at Wilson, bombarding voters with online and TV ads, mailers, text messages, and social media buys in the final days of the campaign.

The pro-Harrell ads mocked Wilson as inexperienced and privileged, and Wilson (and her own PAC, which raised a comparatively meager $400,000) chose not to respond in kind, hitting Harrell on policy rather than highlighting his own political and personal shortcomings. These attacks may have made a dent in Wilson’s progressive support in the final days of the campaign, by creating the sense that she would be ill-equipped to handle federal attacks and funding cuts in the remaining years of the Trump Administration.

On the other hand, it’s also likely that some voters were turned off by Harrell’s over-the-top attacks and obvious contempt for his 43-year-old opponent, which could have flipped some votes or inspired some on-the-fence voters to fill out their ballots.

Today’s ballot drop, which will happen around 4 pm, should provide some answers to those questions.

Elections, Mayor Harrell

As Mayor, Harrell Paid for Luxury Upgrades on City Trips, Including a $12,000 Flight and $1,000-a-Night Hotels
Screenshot from Mayor Bruce Harrell’s budget speech.

Now he wants voters to believe he represents the working class—and that his opponent, renter Katie Wilson, is an out-of touch-elite.

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell has attacked his opponent Katie Wilson for being insufficiently “working-class,” casting himself as a man of the people running against an out-of-touch elitist who “has never had to struggle because her parents are still paying her bills at age 43,” as a campaign spokesperson put it last month.

Harrell, 67, has been wealthy for decades, and his travel while in office reflects his access to a personal expense account most ordinary travelers would envy. While traveling on city business, the mayor has spent tens of thousands of dollars of his own money to upgrade his accommodations from the economy flights and midrange hotel paid for by the city to purchase first-class flights and luxury accommodations for himself and his wife, Joanne.

Over a two-year period, according to documents obtained through a records request, Harrell spent at least $55,000 on 16 first-class flights to attend conferences, tours, training sessions, and ceremonial events on behalf of the city, among at least 24 out-of-town trips he took during that period.

Hotels for 14 of those trips—the only ones for which the mayor’s office provided hotel expense information—cost at least another $24,000.

Only a small portion of this sum, which represents part of the mayor’s travel between February 2023 and February 2025, was reimbursed by the city; the mayor paid for upgrades, and all of the first lady’s travel, on his own dime.

Generally, the Harrells paid for their travel by credit card (often accumulating Alaska airline points), and received partial reimbursement from the city, reflecting what the same trip would cost for the mayor alone if he was traveling on the city’s middlebrow dime. Harrell was often accompanied by mayoral staff and his security detail on his travels, but the records we received do not include travel costs for the mayor’s retinue.

The records reveal the extent to which Harrell has been out of town while on the job—at least 11 weeks in 2023, seven in 2024, and four weeks in the first six months of 2025. This almost certainly underrepresents the mayor’s travel, since it does not include vacation and may not include every city-sponsored trip; for instance, the documents show almost no travel between August and December 2024, indicating either that the mayor did not leave town for five straight months or that the mayor’s office did not provide complete records for that year.

We chose to look at February 2023 through February 2025 because that was the longest period for which the mayor’s office provided a relatively complete set of records.

The pricey flights and luxe hotels reflect the dramatic wealth gap between of Seattle’s 57th mayor, who reported his family’s net worth at around $15 million in 2021, and most of his constituents, to whom lie-flat airplane beds and $1,000-a-night hotels are far out of reach.

The records, which consist mostly of emails between mayoral staff and Joanne Harrell about travel details and reimbursements, don’t include all hotel and flight expenses. For example, they exclude the cost of hotels and flights for at least seven trips, making a total tally of expenses impossible.

Still, the expense records we did receive show that the Harrells travel in style. Here are a few examples of the expenses the Harrells incurred while traveling on the city’s behalf. In most cases, the city paid only for the estimated cost of an economy class flight and the price for a mid-range hotel, typically between $250 and $300 a night, with the Harrells paying the difference. In some cases, such as the Bloomberg trip, conference organizers were the ones paying the cost of economy fares.

• $2,600 for one first-class ticket for Harrell to attend the Bloomberg City Data Alliance in Baltimore in May 2023;

• $7,800 for two first-class tickets for the Harrells to attend the Seattle Chamber’s annual International Leadership Mission in Bergen, Norway, where—according to the program—attendees discussed “Regional Promotion on the Global Stage Through Tourism,” learned about advancements maritime and airline industry sustainability, and participated in “Sister City Engagements” in Bergen and Reykjavik, Iceland.

• $13,000 for two first-class tickets to Tokyo and Seoul, South Korea in June 2023, for a nine-day trip billed as “G7 trip” in emails between Harrell’s staff and Joanne Harrell. Incomplete travel records for this trip suggest the Harrells’ hotels cost $1,000 for one night in Tokyo and $2,200 for three nights in Seoul.

• $5,500 for two first-class flights and $2,600 for three nights in a hotel in Washington, D.C. in 2024 for a trip that included a state dinner at the White House.

• $3,500 for two first-class tickets to Columbus, Ohio for a two-night trip to attend the US Conference of Mayors’ annual event. According to the mayoral staffer who calculated the city’s reimbursement, an economy-class ticket for the same trip was about $550.

The mayor is obviously free to spend his wealth however he chooses. But Harrell has repeatedly claimed the “working class” mantle in order attack his opponent, who shares a one-bedroom apartment with her husband and young child, as comparatively privileged and out of touch. It’s unclear whether voters who struggle to pay their own bills will buy into Harrell’s claim that he’s just like them.

Elections, Mayor Harrell

With Their Jobs on the Line, Half the City’s Department Heads Gave to Harrell’s Campaign

By Erica C. Barnett

The directors of 20 Seattle departments have donated money to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s campaign effort—about half the city’s department directors, almost all of whom were appointed by Harrell. Most have given between $500 and $650, which is the maximum amount the campaign can accept under city campaign finance law. Deputy directors, mayoral staff, and the directors of various ad hoc initiatives, including Harrell’s One Seattle Graffiti Plan and FIFA World Cup planning, have also pitched in to help their boss’ election chances.

It’s likely that not all the contributions represent a spontaneous outpouring of support for the incumbent. According to multiple City Hall sources with direct knowledge of the situation, Harrell has not-no-subtly encouraged his appointees to back his campaign, leaving some with the impression they’ll have more job security in a second Harrell term if they help him defeat his challenger, Katie Wilson. As head of the city’s executive branch, the mayor has the authority to hire and fire department heads at will. He also negotiates pay and working conditions with the unions that represent city employees.

Because Harrell is the first mayor to both run for reelection and make it out of the primary since Greg Nickels, there is no precisely comparable data showing campaign contributions from city department heads for a mayor seeking reelection. The closest recent comparison is former mayor Jenny Durkan, the establishment choice against lefty activist Cary Moon in 2017. Durkan received a single contribution from one city department director,  and pulled in $8,750 from all city employees.

The city of Seattle department heads who have given at least $500 to Harrell include: City Budget Office director Dan Eder; Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs Director Hamdi Mohamed; Human Services Department Director Tanya Kim; Seattle Parks Director A.P. Diaz; Office of Police Accountability Director Bonnie Glenn; Office for Civil Rights Director Derrick Wheeler-Smith; Seattle Department of Transportation Director Adiam Emery; Seattle Office of Planning and Development Director Rico Quirindongo; and Information Technology Director Rob Lloyd.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

Staffers for the mayor himself—including communications director Jamie Housen, chief of staff Andrew Myerberg, deputy chief of staff Dan Nolte, and deputy mayors Greg Wong and Tim Burgess (who also contributed $2,500 to the Bruce Harrell for Seattle’s Future PAC and is one of its leaders)— have also contributed thousands of dollars, collectively, to their boss’ campaign. Paul Jackson, Harrell’s Graffiti Policy and Initiatives director, has also maxed out to Harrell.

As we reported Monday, Seattle Office of Economic Development director Markham McIntyre—one of the directors who maxed out to Harrell—used the city’s official Teams platform to ask department directors for their contact information on behalf of the Harrell campaign, whose campaign manager a solicitation to help Harrell get reelected to every department director on the list. This week, the city council will discuss OED’s 2026 budget, which Harrell proposed increasing next year by a startling 30 percent—a larger increase, on a percentage basis, than any other department.

City council staff highlighted this discrepancy in a budget memo, noting that almost all of the new business programs Harrell is proposing are billed as “one-time additions,” despite being the kinds of programs that are likely to “create expectations in community for ongoing support beyond 2026.” Like many other “one-time” adds in Harrell’s budget, this new spending provides a burst of funding for key constituencies (small businesses, retail stores, and business groups in specific neighborhoods, like Lake City and Little Saigon) while creating a fiscal cliff that the next mayor and city council will have to address next year.

Wilson, who was endorsed by a union that represents thousands of city workers, PROTEC17, has received a little over $5,000 in contributions from city employees—about a quarter of the $20,000 city employees have given to their current boss.

erica@publicola.com

Elections, homelessness, housing, Mayor Harrell

Harrell, Wilson Disagree Over Whether Formerly Homeless People Can Thrive In “Workforce” Housing

By Erica C. Barnett

On Friday, several private and nonprofit affordable housing developers joined Mayor Bruce Harrell to criticize his challenger Katie Wilson’s proposal to move unsheltered people into vacant units in “workforce” housing developments, saying it would be a “disaster” to try to mix chronically homeless people in with the general population in these buildings.

“Our experiences and independent data have shown that people struggling on the street with behavioral health challenges cannot just be placed in an apartment and succeed,” Harrell said.

“According to the 2024 Point in Time Count, most people living unsheltered in King County have a physical, cognitive or general disability, a third of those surveyed said they live with severe mental illness, and nearly half said they struggle with substance abuse. … Scattering people in buildings across the city where the services to address addiction and mental health health issues do not exist, will be a disaster.”

Currently, thousands of units funded with city dollars, many of them small studios with rents comparable to what’s available in the private market, are sitting vacant. Some developers have argued that these will fill up as construction slows and rents for market-rate studio apartments increase.

Karen Lee, the CEO of Plymouth Housing, described the intensive services provided in Plymouth’s buildings, which are designed to serve chronically homeless people who, by definition, have disabling mental or physical conditions. “For them to rejoin society, it takes care, it takes compassion, it takes knowledge, and it is doable. But [living] in an apartment building for working-class folks that is staffed with a building manager and some cleanliness staff—that is not the environment” for success, Lee said.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

 

Wilson, contacted this afternoon, said she never proposed putting people who need permanent supportive housing in empty apartments at buildings that lack supportive services—an approach that helped doom the “Partnership for Zero” program to swiftly end visible homelessness downtown, which Harrell supported, last year.

Instead, Wilson said, she wants to create subsidies for “low-acuity” people who don’t require intense, round-the-clock care, freeing up shelter beds by helping people who’ve been stuck in shelter for long periods move on to housing. “Obviously, we need to pay close attention to who we’re placing where, and we don’t want to replicate the kind of problems that have ben happening recently with putting high-acuity homeless folks in buildings that aren’t equipped to handle them and without the supportive services that they need on site,” Wilson said.

“If you look across our shelter system, there are a lot of low-acuity homeless folks who are kind of stuck in the system because we don’t have throughput to affordable units for them. … The success of this plan is going to rely on appropriately placing people” in housing that fits their needs, Wilson continued.

Harrell has repeatedly said that recently homeless people do not belong in the same living environment as the “teachers and baristas” for whom workforce housing is designed. Wilson’s strategy, he said, “will actually create more vacancies as these buildings experience the well-known issues” seen in permanent supportive housing, such as fights, overdoses, and frequent 911 calls. “[It] will be a disaster.”

Wilson disagreed that formerly homeless people can’t thrive in regular affordable housing.  “If you have someone who is coming out of homelessness, who doesn’t have serious behavioral health problems, who maybe has a disability, they’ll be a fine neighbor,” Wilson said. “Obviously we need to assess people, but the idea that, categorically, these are different kinds of people [is wrong]. There are teachers and barista who are homeless.”

 

Courts, Elections, LGBTQ+, Mayor Harrell

Ex-Police Chief Diaz Seeks to Toss a Third Judge from His Case, County Council Candidate Claims Planned Parenthood Endorsement After Losing it Over Anti-Trans Views

1. Former Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz is trying to get a third King County Superior Court judge tossed from his lawsuit against the city, claiming that the judge, Nelson Lee, is biased against him. Previously, Diaz petitioned successfully to have Judge Suzanne Parisien removed; a second judge, Cindi Port, later recused herself, sending Diaz’ case to Lee’s courtroom.

Mayor Bruce Harrell removed Diaz from his role as chief last May, after several women accused Diaz of sexual harassment and of fostering a hostile workplace environment for women at SPD. Diaz remained on full pay at the city until seven months later, when Harrell finally fired him after a lengthy investigation. That investigation concluded that Diaz and his chief of staff, Jamie Tompkins, had lied about having an inappropriate workplace relationship and coordinated to cover their tracks.

Diaz’ lawsuit claims Harrell’s true reason for firing him was because he wouldn’t assent to the mayor’s preferred discipline for Daniel Auderer, the officer who was caught on tape laughing and joking about the death of Jaahnavi Kandula, a 23-year-old student, shortly after SPD officer Kevin Dave stuck and killed her in 2023. Interim police chief Sue Rahr fired Auderer in January.

Diaz’ motion to have Lee removed from his case claims Lee is biased against him based on the fact that he is overseeing a case filed against the city (though not against Diaz himself) by SPD officer Lauren Truscott, one of several women who have sued over alleged gender discrimination, sexual and racial harassment, and retaliation at SPD. “Although Chief Diaz is not a named defendant or party in that matter, as this Court is aware, the allegations against him in Truscott are both false and highly prejudicial,” Diaz’ petition says.

In addition, Diaz claims that because Lee “expressly admitted to following media coverage about Chief Diaz,” he is admitting bias, since the coverage of Diaz has been “overwhelmingly negative,” “salacious,” and “false.”

As one of several examples, Diaz pointed to PubliCola’s report on his firing, using an inaccurate version of a headline that appeared on the article only briefly, “Mayor Harrell Fired Diaz over ‘False’ Statements Denying ‘Intimate Relationship’ With Top Staffer.” (I shortened the headline in the interest of brevity, but the newsletter version of the post is subheaded, “Harrell said Diaz repeatedly made ‘false statements’ about an ‘intimate relationship’ with a top staffer to members of the media, to SPD’s command staff, and to Harrell himself.”

Diaz’ attorney altered our headline to remove the quotation marks, making it appear as if we were asserting his statements were false, rather than  Harrell.

“Setting aside for a moment the false nature of these reports, the mere fact that Judge Lee has followed and commented on such coverage gives rise to a well-founded appearance of bias,” the motion claims.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

 

2. Planned Parenthood Votes Northwest (PPVNW) filed a complaint against King County Council candidate Peter Kwon, saying he falsely claimed to have their endorsement on a campaign mailing earlier this month.

Kwon, a SeaTac City Councilmember, is running against attorney Steffanie Fain for the South King County seat. The reproductive rights group rescinded their endorsement of Kwon on September 18 after learning he told the King County Republican Party that he supports banning trans girls from girls’ school sports and locker rooms.

This position was inconsistent with what Kwon told PPVNW in a written statement, according to the complaint.

The Republican questionnaire included the question, “What are your thoughts on allowing trans students assigned male at birth to play in girls’ school sports and use girls’ restrooms and locker rooms?” Kwon responded: “I believe students should compete in their respective biological category to preserve fairness and protect opportunities—especially for girls and young women. Competitive sports are often divided by sex for a reason: to ensure a level playing field and prevent physical advantages from undermining fair competition.”

In an email to Kwon rescinding the endorsement on September 18, PPVNW Washington State Director Courtney Normand wrote, “As we discussed on the phone last week and via email, there are inconsistencies between written statements you made to Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates and to other groups regarding your position on trans youth and their right to full inclusion and participation in all parts of school and community life.” 

“We hold our endorsed candidates to the highest standards of integrity and any decision to rescind an endorsement is made with careful deliberation and due diligence,” Normand said in a written statement. “We have zero tolerance for the misleading or unauthorized use of our trusted name and respected brand.”

Kwon did not respond to a request for an interview.

Elections, Mayor Harrell, Police

SPD Can’t Find Funds to Recruit Women While Spending $3 Million on Macho Ads; Affordable Housing Tax Will Pay for Police Surveillance Instead; Pro-Harrell PAC Goes Low

1. Bruce Harrell for Seattle’s Future, the business-backed political action committee headed by Harrell’s deputy mayor Tim Burgess, sent out a condescending and misleading mailer featuring a résumé that his opponent, labor leader Katie Wilson, submitted as part of an application for a city transit board more than a decade ago.

The document, which includes Wilson’s former home address as well as the address and partially visible phone number of a long-ago employer, purports to show that Wilson has no experience. Ten years ago, Wilson included jobs going back to when she was 24 years old, including a stint at Julia’s Bakery in Wallingford.

At the time she submitted the résumé to the city, Wilson had just started her role as general secretary ot the Transit Riders Union, an organization founded in 2011 to fight for better transit. Since then, as the head of TRU, Wilson led three successful campaigns for higher minimum wages, helped craft the JumpStart payroll tax as a leader of the city’s progressive revenue task force, fought for free transit passes for youth, and led campaigns for stronger renter protections in Seattle and several other cities.

You wouldn’t know that from the misleading mailer from the Burgess-led PAC, though, which doubles down on Harrell’s strategy of pretending his opponent is an ineffective know-nothing. If one were eliminate the last 10 years from Harrell’s resume, his own most recent experience would include “two-term city council member (2007-2014)” and “failed candidate for mayor” (2013).

2. The Seattle Police Department’s budget for this year includes funding for a $3.3 million, two-year advertising contract with the firm Epic Productions of Phoenix, LLC aimed at recruiting new officers through online ads through the end of 2026.

This is just the latest of several recruiting contracts the city has funded amid annual deficits in the hundreds of millions of dollars. As of this year, the city is hiring police at an unprecedented rate, according to a city council central staff analysis, a fact that almost certainly has more to do with new six-figure starting salaries than macho Youtube videos about “what gives us a rush.”

Interestingly, SPD’s budget counts those videos as part of its “30 by 30” effort to recruit more women, perhaps because there are women in the videos. The “30 by 30” initiative is a commitment by police departments to boost recruitment classes to 30 percent women by 2030 and to retain women through initiatives focused on improving police culture and meeting women’s specific needs. So far this year, SPD’s recruitment class has been less than 9 percent female.

While SPD was able to find $3 million for the Epic ads, they have not hired anyone for a position created in 2024 to oversee its 30 by 30 efforts, despite the fact that the city assumed funding for this position last year for both 2025 and 2026 would come from “salary savings that would accrue from vacant, funded civilian positions within the department.” According to a central staff memo, SPD chose instead to use this money for “civilian salary savings.”

“In response to the pessimistic revenue forecast in April, as well as threats of federal funding cuts, the Executive took immediate action to proactively prepare for significant negative impacts to the City budget. Additionally, given the unexpected increase in officer hiring, the department has had to take on an increase in expenses and has had to use the remaining civilian salary savings to balance the GF budget.”

SPD will also get nearly a million dollars from the JumpStart payroll tax to pay for live CCTV camera surveillance in the Stadium District, part of a permanent police surveillance program, and for unspecified equipment and security costs for the six FIFA World Cup games happening here next year. JumpStart was passed explicitly to pay for equitable development projects, affordable housing, and other programs to benefit low-income people and underserved communities. Last year, the council voted to remove all restrictions on the fund, allowing the city to use it as an all-purpose slush fund for any budget purpose.