Tag: graffiti

Elections, Mayor Harrell

Post Office Delays Could Result in Uncounted Ballots; Harrell’s Budget Increases Graffiti Spending 36 Percent
Image via Kingcounty.gov

1. Mail processing delays could result in more invalidated mail-in ballots this year, and elections officials are advising voters to vote as early as possible or drop off their ballots at a ballot box in order to have their ballots counted.

“Given some of the operational and logistical priorities that have ben set by the postal service, we really can’t guarantee that ballots sent by mail” on or immediately before election day “will be postmarked by that November 4 timeline, due to how they are processing their mail,” SOS spokesman Charlie Boisner said. Among other issues, the post office has been relying more heavily on regional processing center, rather than processing mail locally, Boisner said.

Earlier this year, USPS announced a policy update stating that it does not guarantee that mail will be postmarked on the day it’s received, potentially invalidating ballots that are mailed on election day, November 4, but postmarked later.

The (Spokane) Spokesman-Review first reported on the potential impacts to Washington’s vote-by-mail system last week.

A spokeswoman for King County Elections, Halei Watkins, said the elections office has always encouraged people to vote by the Friday before election day, and is “not necessarily planning to do a big push” for the November election “since our long-term messaging should continue to serve our voters well.”

“Many counties have relied on a message of ‘check for the last pickup time on the mailbox if you’re mailing on Election Day’ but we’ve heard from too many voters over the years that mailed on Election Day or even the day before only to get a too-late postmark,” Watkins said.

According to Boisner, only about 33 percent of Washington state voters mail in their ballots; the rest use ballot drop boxes.

“We’re really fortunate in this state, where we get to experience an 18-day voting period and have developed the infrastructure over decades to have several convenient and easy ballot return options for voters to use,” Boisner said. “So while we still are confident in the services that the Post Office provides … we recommend taking full advantage of that full 18-day voting period and voting early

King County has  85 drop boxes around the county, including 30 in Seattle. Another option, Watkins said, is to “physically walk the ballot into the post office and ask for a postmark – don’t just drop it, but talk to someone at the counter and ask them to stamp it.”

2. Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed 2026 budget uses a lot of one-time funding, mostly from a business and occupation tax increase that still has  to be approved by voters, to pay for needs that will probably be ongoing, like legal aid for immigrants and food assistance for low-income people who stand to lose federal benefits. According to a Harrell spokesperson, the budget keeps this spending one-time in order “to allow the city to determine where the greatest impacts have been and where other funders may fill gaps in the federal funding” in the future.

Harrell may not be sure whether immigrants will need legal aid (which gets $300,000 in his budget proposal) in the future. But he is certain that the city needs to keep pouring more money into the war on graffiti, which his budget describes as “a priority of the One Seattle initiative” and “a key factor in improving Seattle livability.”

Harrell’s budget increases funding for his “One Seattle Graffiti” plan by $1.6 million this year, for a total of $6.1 million—a 36 percent increase from 2025. Most of that money will be spent hiring six new permanent staffers to address graffiti, including a graffiti prevention specialist in the arts department who works to ” lead and enhance the beautification efforts of graffiti art, connect with the graffiti society, and educate, mentor and guide youth to use their time and energy in constructive ways.”

Harrell’s official accounting of the graffiti budget doesn’t include the “in-house” cost of diverting lawyers in the Law Department from working on other types of misdemeanor cases to focus on pursuing taggers. The budget also propses adding $4.1 million to expand the Downtown Activation Team, whose duties include graffiti abatement, and extending one-time funds for cleanup, including graffiti removal, in the Chinatown-International District.

 

 

City Council, Crime

Council Passes New Laws Against Graffiti, Expanding Police Power to Shut Down Businesses for Off-Premises Violations
“Blight”

By Erica C. Barnett

On predictable 7-1 votes (with progressive Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck dissenting), the council passed two pieces of legislation yesterday that PubliCola—and our podcast, Seattle Nice—have covered extensively: A bill empowering the City Attorney’s Office to pursue civil actions for graffiti and fine individuals $1,500 per tag, and a bill expanding the city’s nuisance property law to allow police to penalize property owners and shut down businesses for off-premises activities, such as drug use or liquor law violations in the vicinity of a nightlife venue.

If police document three violations of the new law in 60 days, or seven in a year, they can begin abatement proceedings against a property owner, which can mean anything from corrective action to shutting down a business for repeated violations.

As we reported last week, Councilmember Rob Saka added a number of amendments in committee that dramatically expanded police power to take action against private property owners for violations of both city and county laws.

Although the ostensible purpose of the legislation was to reduce gun violence and dangerous criminal activity outside bars and clubs, a Saka amendment expanded the list of items that could qualify a property as a “nuisance” to include local laws against animal cruelty and garbage dumping as well as violations of the King County health code, including laws on rodent control, on-site sewage, chemical contamination, and more. (Saka also amended the bill to increase fines for violations by 50 percent, in line with his amendment boosting the fine for graffiti from $1,000 to $1,500 per tag.)

Because the nuisance ordinance allows police to go after property owners who rack up three or more violations, the law, with Saka’s amendment, would have allowed the city to fine or potentially shut down a business for non-criminal health code violations that fall entirely under the county’s purview, and which Seattle police are not trained or authorized to enforce.

On Tuesday, the council passed another amendment to correct Saka’s overreach, removing all of the language he added (and that the public safety committee approved) that would have made the presence of rats near a property the legal equivalent of shooting someone on a nearby sidewalk.

As District 2 Councilmember Mark Solomon put it, people in his district may complain about neighbors with “a junky yard,” but it isn’t appropriate to get police involved in a dispute that can already be resolved through the city’s inspections department or King County Public Health. “My concern is that adding the chief of police into the mix on what is actually a public health issue is not necessary,” Solomon said.

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As amended, the law still allows a court to order property owners to take care of public health nuisances, but it doesn’t count those hazards as “nuisance activities” that police can use to shut down a property.

The council also passed an amendment exempting nonprofits from potential police abatement because of activity that happens around their properties. Dan Strauss, the amendment sponsor, said the change would ensure that police couldn’t shut down food banks or other social service providers based on things like drug use or other criminal activity committed by clients of those providers. “There are other ways for the city to address the issues that don’t result in a loss of social services,” Strauss said.

Council President Sara Nelson and Councilmember Maritza Rivera opposed this exemption, arguing that the police should have the authority to target what Rivera called “bad actor” nonprofits, beyond simply arresting people for doing things that are already illegal, like selling stolen property or using drugs in public.

Nelson, citing an unnamed “small business owner” who complained about “spillover” from a nearby nonprofit, said allowing police to target nonprofits would create “an opportunity to really bring not just the nonprofit but the small business together to really think about what could be some solutions.”

Rivera, who cited an unnamed nonprofit in her district that “has refused to meet with me to discuss any way that they can be better neighbors in the community,” said the city has few tools to stop nonprofit organizations from allowing illegal activity outside their properties. “it’s not my intent to ever use it against” food banks or housing providers, Rivera said, b”ut other providers, that are not ones that we fund, where we don’t really have much of a mechanism for compelling them to behave better in community.”

Councilmember Rinck noted that the intent of a particular elected official in 2025 is less relevant than what the law actually says. “This bill gives not just this mayor, but any future mayor, broad power,” Rinck said. “We may trust this mayor, we may trust this city attorney, but I’m thinking about … the potential for this to be misused in the future.”

The council also passed the new anti-graffiti law, which proponents have argued will “deter” graffiti by imposing fines that could easily add up to tens of thousands of dollars. The ordinance now includes a last-minute walk-on amendment by Kettle that makes the law—which City Attorney Ann Davison has said she plans to enforce using social media posts—retroactive for the past three years, meaning that people could be fined for graffiti that no longer exists. Rinck and Strauss were the only votes against that amendment, which Kettle—inaccurately—called “technical.”

“This is not about murals,” Kettle said. “The murals are essentially commissioned art and beautiful … [going] back to Renaissance Italy. … This is about taggers who damage public and private property. This is about the taggers who bring blight to our community, to our neighborhoods, and then create the challenges that result from that.”

Kettle—always on brand—took the opportunity to say that the two bills were part of his six-pillar “public safety framework,” rather than one-off proposals based on the individual priorities of the mayor and city attorney, who advanced the bills to the council.

“This is not a standalone bill,” Kettle said. “It’s part of a broader strategy and a plan that we have here on council, particularly to the Public Safety Committee, to address the the public safety challenges that we have.” Kettle cited “20 public safety bills” the council has passed since 2024.

This number includes hiring bonuses for new police officers, a bill making it easier for police to shut down after-hours hookah lounges, two bills authorizing closed-circuit police surveillance cameras around the city and funding the expansion of the city’s Real Time Crime Center to monitor them, and bills that created new tools to crack down on sex work and drug use and to banish people from large swaths of downtown and north Seattle if they violate the new sex work and drug laws.

City Council, Elections, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Seattle Solved All the Crime, So We’re Talking About Graffiti

By Erica C. Barnett

Because there are no other public-safety issues in the city of Seattle, our main topic on Seattle Nice this week is one of the mayor and council’s top current priorities: Cracking down on graffiti— already a crime!—with a new law imposing a per-tag fine that’s higher than the ones for animal cruelty or (and I know people really feel strongly about this one) cutting down trees.

Proponents on the council, echoing Republican City Attorney Ann Davison, argue that statistical data shows that the most prolific graffiti artists and taggers are white, middle-class men with plenty of money to pay for attorneys or fines—yet for whom, they also claim, the new fines will be an effective deterrent.

I pointed out that their “data” is based on a statistically insignificant sample, ranging from several dozen people (for the city’s race and gender breakdown) to a majority 17 individuals (for the purported income data.) David argued that these statistics are still valid, and that I believe we should “only use demographic data when it’s politically convenient.” And Sandeep agreed with me that we shouldn’t use fake stats to justify new crackdowns, but for a different reason—he said  talking about the racial demographics of taggers at all is a kind of “identitarian” (i.e. woke) policy that the city should stay away from in general.

For the record, I do think it’s ridiculous that the city is trying so hard to prove that Seattle’s graffiti artists and taggers don’t slot easily into stereotypes, but I also think we shouldn’t be spending so many resources ensuring Seattle’s walls remain bare and gray. I actually think both my co-hosts agree with me about this. As much as Sandeep likes to cite statistics from unknown stories that, according to him, prove that the broadly discredited “broken windows” theory works to deter crime, he had to admit that he doesn’t really consider graffiti a top public-safety priority.

We also talked about a new pro-Bruce Harrell message testing poll that attempts to sell the idea that mayoral candidate Katie Wilson is the second coming of Kshama Sawant. Even Sandeep—who usually leaps at a chance to tie progressive candidates to the former city council member, who left the council more than a year and a half ago—agreed that it’s ridiculous to paint the thoughtful, wonkish Wilson as abrasive, politically conniving, and “loud,” but don’t be surprised if you receive a mailer this fall showing Wilson and Sawant Photoshopped together like they’re running on the same ticket.

City Council, Mayor Harrell, Police

Council Advances Bills Expanding Power to Prosecute and Fine Graffiti Taggers, “Nuisance” Properties

A Rob Saka amendment expands the violations for which police can crack down on property owners, to include violations of a King County law regulating septic tanks and county animal control rules.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council’s public safety committee, headed up by Bob Kettle, advanced two bills their advocates argued are critical to public safety in Seattle on Tuesday.

The first would further criminalize graffiti, which is already illegal and subject to significant fines, by giving the city attorney (currently Republican Ann Davison) the power to bring a civil action against graffiti taggers and fine them up to $1,500 per violation, meaning that a prolific tagger could owe tens of thousands of dollars to the city.

The second will make it easier for the city to bring abatement actions against property owners, up to and including shutting down a business or tearing down a residential property, by expanding the list of offenses that count toward a “chronic nuisance property” determination and making property owners legally liable for things that happen outside their property, such as drug use, prostitution, or—under new amendments added in committee—littering, violating county health regulations, or noise violations.

The council has been discussing how to deal with graffiti, which they argue elected officials are more than capable of distinguishing from “art,” for years. It’s an obsession shared by Mayor Bruce Harrell and Davison, whose presentation on the proposal last month focused on the fact that graffiti artists show off their work on social media (see screenshot above).

Graffiti, Nelson said Tuesday, is “probably the single most common complaint I get from my constituents as a citywide council member, and so I am in strong support of any legislation that will make it easier to make people accountable for their actions.”

Kettle and committee vice-chair Rob Saka both supported raising the fine per tag from $1,000, the amount Davison originally proposed, to $1,500, on the grounds that—as Saka put it—most prolific taggers are “well-heeled.” Kettle piled on, adding that the people who throw up graffiti “used to be the younger white males, teenagers, 20s, but they’ve grown up to be 20, 30, sometimes even 40, and, as noted, with careers of their own.”

It’s unclear where Kettle and Saka got the idea that taggers are mostly older adult men with well-paying jobs. During her presentation last month, Davison presented some data about graffiti referrals to the City Attorney’s office showing that over the last five years, 85 percent of the 200-plus people referred to her office for graffiti violations were male, and 79 percent were white.

The evidence that these men are well-to-do appears to have come from the fact that a majority of the 17 people prosecuted in county court for graffiti last year hired their own attorneys (as opposed to using a public defender because they were indigent) and paid any court-ordered fines.

As a point of comparison, the fine for animal cruelty in Seattle is $500.

The original bill would have allowed the city to go after people who “encouraged” taggers by, for example, praising their posts on social media. During a presentation to the committee last month, Davison repeatedly denounced people who “promote themselves on social media,” showing slides with Instagram posts to demonstrate that, “sadly they have people that are encouraging them.”

An amendment from Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth stripped out the language about “encouraging” graffiti, which Hollingsworth pointed out could raise First Amendment concerns. Hollingsworth did vote for the underlying bill, however, agreeing with the rest of the committee that the threat of large fines could serve as a deterrent to prevent people from tagging small businesses and churches.

Hollingsworth agreed with comments from Nelson, Saka, and Kettle about the supposedly clear differences between “art” and graffiti (Kettle noted that he likes the sanctioned “Henry” cartoon murals all over town), saying, “I am a big fan of art and the and graffiti in places that it’s supposed to be at, where it’s invited” by property owners.

After moving the anti-graffiti bill forward, the committee turned to legislation to dramatically expand the list of offenses that will allow police and prosecutors to declare a business or residence a “chronic nuisance,” a designation that allows the city to take action against a property owner such as shutting a business down.

The legislation, proposed by Mayor Harrell, already proposed making property owners liable for violations that happen “in proximity to” a business or residence, if police can establish a “nexus” between whoever commits the violation and the property, such as a patron who leaves a club and uses drugs outside. If a property has three or more nuisancely  violations within 60 days, or seven within a year, police can take action against the property owner, including by revoking their business license.

Saka proposed two amendments to expand the penalties and scope of the already-expanded nuisance law. The first, much like his amendment increasing the fine for graffiti, boosts fines for nuisance violations by 50 percent, so that violators can be fined $750 per day (up from $500) and up to $37,500 for failing to cooperate with police attempts to abate the nuisance (up from $25,000). These 50 percent increases, Saka said, were necessary to keep up with “inflation” since the original nuisance bill was adopted in 2009.

An second Saka amendment added several items to the list of serious offenses that could give police an opening to shut down a business or fine a residential building owner for activities on or near their property. The new reasons for abatement include selling, buying, or possessing stolen property; illegal dumping; noise violations; and a number of King County Health Code violations that the Seattle police are not in charge of enforcing.

These King County laws including provisions on illegal dumping,  rodent control, sewage, and hazardous waste contamination. (Note: This sentence originally referred to the wrong section of the King County Code, linking a section on animal control instead of the section of the health code pertaining to hazardous waste. PubliCola regrets the error.)

The section of Saka’s amendment about sewage violations is even more confusing (so much so that Nelson told Saka she didn’t know what that part of his amendment was even about); the section of code it refers to, “On-Site Sewage,” is almost exclusively about on-site sewage systems, also known as septic tanks, which don’t generally exist in Seattle

 

City Council, Mayor Harrell

Council Can’t Wait to Vote “Hell Yes” on Bills Cracking Down on Graffiti and “Nuisance” Bars and Clubs
Graffiti in Belltown

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council discussed two new laws this week that will, if passed, give the city new powers to crack down on nightclubs and graffiti—although the impact of the latter is very much in question, given that the police department currently refers only a few dozen cases to the City Attorney’s Office for prosecution every year.

The graffiti proposal, which PubliCola reported on when it was introduced, would fine taggers $1,000 per “graffiti violation,” defined in the proposal as “a single piece of graffiti, including but not limited to a graffiti tagger name or design, in a single location.”

Under state law, graffiti is already a gross misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 and up to a year in jail, or (if the graffiti causes more than $750 in damage) a felony, so the new local law would add an additional penalty. The new fines would be cumulative, so the cost to prolific taggers could add up quickly.

The city already spends several million dollars a year on graffiti abatement. The money, part of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s “One Seattle Graffiti Plan,” pays for 11 full-time city staffers (including two new positions added last year), including seven “Graffiti Rangers,” and a contract with Uplift Northwest to remove graffiti.

Previewing the legislation at a meeting of the council’s public safety committee this week, City Attorney Ann Davison said fining prolific taggers would serve as a deterrent and help ensure “that our city is known as a place of order,” particularly in preparation for next year’s FIFA World Cup games, when people driving through Seattle might be endangered by graffiti along I-5, “where you maybe can’t read the exits that you’re trying to safely take.”

The taggers whose cases SPD has referred to her office, Davison continued, aren’t “lost young people” but “fully functioning, employed adults, oftentimes,” most of them white men. “Oftentimes, these are people that have strategically engaged in this activity for a long time, and again, looking to increase their social reputation and notoriety by damaging our property and costing us millions of dollars,” Davison said.

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Davison declined to say how much, if anything, the city expects to take in from fining taggers $1,000 per tag. (The legislation would also allow people to do graffiti abatement work for the city in lieu of fines). But her deputy, Scott Lindsay, said the city attorney’s office has already identified 20 or so people it plans to pursue based on their social media posts, and believes they’ll have more success imposing fines because civil cases have a lower standard of proof than criminal cases.

“The initial goal really is focused on those top 20 or so graffiti taggers … most of whom have already been identified” and bringing cases against them, Lindsay said, in order to “create the deterrence effect at the top and let that filter down.”

The proposed legislation would also allow the city attorney’s office to bring civil cases, and impose fines, on anyone who “assists or encourages” another person who violates graffiti laws. According to council staff analysis, the point of this provision is to empower Davison’s office to ”seek restitution and penalties from on-line graffiti promoters, who incentivize tagging and publish graffiti on Instagram.”

Council President Sara Nelson, who said she’s eager to vote “hell yes” on the legislation, said she expected the potential for fines to deter taggers from doing so in the future. After all, she said, “how many of us don’t speed because of the ticket we might get?”

Nelson was also enthusiastic about another bill the public safety committee discussed this week—an amendment to the city’s existing “chronic nuisance property” ordinance that would dramatically expand the city’s power to fine or shut down businesses by holding them responsible for activity that takes place “in proximity” to the business (a term that is undefined), and adding alcohol violations in or around a business to the list of activities that could enable the city to shut a business down.

Could the legislation be used, Nelson asked Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess, to target businesses like the McDonald’s at Third and Pine, where people have historically congregated to buy and sell drugs?

Yes, Burgess responded, the new law would allow police to target people using or buying drugs near any property, as long as the Seattle Police Department could demonstrate that the people were “associated with” the property (a term that the bill analysis interprets to mean customers or patrons) and that there was some “nexus” between the property and the drug activity (a term that is not defined).

Burgess—who as a city councilmember, fought fiercely for a bill that would have criminalized “aggressive panhandling” by people he characterized as “street thugs“—assured the council that the city would use their new powers judiciously. “We answered [stakeholders’] concerns about enforcement by pointing to the history of the [nuisance] ordinance being used only 17 times in 16 years,” Burgess said.

But by expanding the ordinance to hold businesses liable for what happens on other people’s properties, or on nearbt streets and sidewalks, the ordinance is explicitly designed to increase that number.

The expansion to offsite does represent a significant expansion of the city’s authority,” the council’s central staff director, Ben Noble, told the committee. “I think there’s there’s no question about that, and there really is a question of whether the due process measures that are in place are sufficient to balance the interest of the property owners and the interest of the public.”

Committee chair Bob Kettle said the ordinance is necessary to reduce gun violence outside nightclubs. Committee vice chairman Rob Saka said he had been working on similar legislation on his own but Mayor Bruce Harrell beat him to it, and asked to be added as a cosponsor until Kettle reminded him that he was already cosponsoring the bill.

City Council

New Anti-Graffiti Bill Would Fine Violators $1,000 Per Tag

By Erica C. Barnett

City Councilmember Bob Kettle, who chairs the council’s public safety committee, is sponsoring a new anti-graffiti bill that would establish a civil penalty of $1,000 for every “graffiti violation,” defined in the proposal as “a single piece of graffiti, including but not limited to a graffiti tagger name or design, in a single location.” The new penalty would apply not just to taggers but to anyone “who assists or encourages another person or entity” to draw, write, or paint on public or private property; the city attorney would have three years to pursue penalties against anyone accused of violating the ordinance.

Graffiti is already a gross misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 and up to a year in jail, so Kettle’s proposal represents an expansion of the city’s authority to crack down on something that is already criminalized. The strategy is similar to the local drug criminalization law the council passed at the behest of City Attorney Ann Davison in 2023, which doubled down on existing state law by empowering Davison’s office to prosecute people for simple possession and outdoor drug use.

We reached out to Kettle to find out why he’s sponsoring the bill, but did not hear back.

To state the obvious, it’s unlikely that most taggers—who aren’t generally pulling six-figure salaries—will be able to pay thousands of dollars in fines. (While state law caps the potential fine for graffiti at $5,000, the potential fines under Kettle’s legislation are unlimited.) The legislation includes an option for people to work off their fines by doing graffiti abatement for the city, but also notes that any unpaid fines or restitution will go to a collection agency, meaning that people fined for graffiti in Seattle could end up in a crushing cycle of debt.

According to a staff memo on Kettle’s bill, the city attorney’s office believes it can fold graffiti enforcement into its existing work without adding more attorneys.