Tag: Jenny Durkan

King County, Police, public disclosure

No Charges Against Durkan and Best for Deleted Texts; Investigation Reveals Holes in City Records Retention Policies
Dan Clark, Mainstream Criminal Division Chief, King County Prosecutor’s Office

By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Prosecutor’s Office announced yesterday that they will not pursue criminal charges against former mayor Jenny Durkan, former police chief Carmen Best, and other city officials who deleted thousands text messages during the 2020 protests against police violence. Officials from the prosecutor’s office said yesterday that they were unable to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the officials intentionally deleted the messages with the intent of destroying public information.

“There’s no evidence that the involved individuals intended to permanently delete anything,” mainstream criminal division chief Dan Clark said. “And for most of the individuals, they were actually trying to recover access to their phones, when the deletions occurred.”

Six of the 27 records requests that involved texts that were deleted from the phones of Durkan, Best, and other city officials were filed by PubliCola—the most from any individual news organization. In these requests, we asked for communications about the use of encrypted messaging systems, demonstrations by Black Lives Matter activists, the decision to use tear gas, flash grenades, and other weapons during the 2020 protests, and meetings between Durkan and community groups, among other issues we were covering at the time. PubliCola frequently relies on records requests for internal information from city officials, so the destruction of these messages harmed our ability to provide newsworthy information to the public.

In a civil case against the city filed by businesses in the vicinity of the 2020 protests, US District Judge Thomas Zilly said Durkan’s “various reasons for deleting her text messages strain credibility.” The city settled that case in February. Clark noted that the burden of proof for a criminal case is higher than the standard for that civil case, which requires only a “preponderance of the evidence” deo show that officials intentionally deleted text messages with the intent of destroying public information.

The investigation, conducted by King County Sheriff’s Office detective Joseph Gagliardi, included a review of thousands of pages of depositions with Durkan, Best, Fire Chief Harold Scoggins, and other city officials, all taken during previous lawsuits against the city. The investigators did not interview any of the individuals who destroyed city records during this investigation, relying on existing documents, including forensic analysis of city-issued phones.

In former police chief Carmen Best’s case, the investigation found that she, as well as other city employees, had a “reasonable belief” that her text messages were being backed up somewhere, based on the fact that city emails go to a central server even if people delete them on their city devices.

In his investigation, Gagliardi described two types of situations in which text messages were destroyed. The first, more common, type involved officials getting locked out of their phones, either temporarily or permanently, because they forgot their passwords or through other mishaps. In these cases, according to Gagliardi, the officials lost their messages either after doing a “hard reset” that deleted all their information, or because they, or some other unidentified person, changed the settings on their phone in a way that led to mass deletions.

The investigation concluded that Chief Scoggins, SPD Captain Eric Greening, SPD Chief Strategy Officer Chris Fisher, Seattle Emergency Operations Center coordinator Ken Neafcy, and Seattle Public Utilities manager Idris Beauregard all got locked out of their phones because of errors related to their passwords, usually because they made too many password attempts and their phones automatically reverted to factory settings. Fisher, for example, “stated that he’s had to reset his work phone multiple times, because the passcodes have to be changed frequently and he’s very bad at remembering them.”

Scoggins testified that he took his phone to the Apple Store after city IT employees couldn’t get it to work again, and store employees performed a hard reset, deleting all his data.

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The investigation notes that city phones require employees to reset their passwords every 90 days, which Gagliardi said contributed to officials’ tendency to forget their passwords. In response to a question from PubliCola about text retention, Gagliardi quipped, “I would also argue with the expectation that these people know how phones work.”

Durkan said in earlier depositions that she dropped her phone in a puddle on the beach, dried it out in a bag of rice, and then restored all her messages from an iCloud account. City officials, in general, are not supposed to save things to cloud servers because of security concerns, so this was actually a violation of a separate city records policy.

Later, someone changed her settings from “keep messages: Forever” to “keep messages: 30 days,” which was “the single factor that caused the destruction of all of Mayor DURKAN’s text messages sent or received between 10/30/2019 and 6/24/2020,” according to the investigation. Durkan denied changing this setting, as did her longtime friend and assistant, Colleen O’Reilly Bernier.

However, the investigation noted that Bernier made a number of “demonstrably false” statements during her deposition—falsely claiming, for example, that she didn’t handle Durkan’s phone after it was damaged on the beach, when she actually made changes to the phone’s settings with the help of a city IT employee. This suggests, according to the investigation that Bernier may have changed the setting, resulting in the destruction of thousands of messages; however, Gagliardi wrote in his investigation notes that there was no way to prove this beyond a reasonable doubt.

“They’ve basically encouraged the deletion of transitory messages almost immediately. They said there’s no reason to keep those messages at all. They have left the termination of whether or not a message is transitory up to their employee.”—Chief investigator Detective Gagliardi, King County Sheriff’s Office

In Best’s case, the investigation found that she, as well as other city employees, had a “reasonable belief” that her text messages were being backed up somewhere, based on the fact that city emails go to a central server even if people delete them on their city devices.

“We don’t have any evidence to suggest that to the contrary, that she believed anything else,” Clark, from the prosecutor’s office, said. “There’s no smoking gun, if you will—there’s no admission by her of, you know, ‘Hey, everybody, let’s get together and delete all of our text messages’ or anything of that nature to call into question her reasonable but mistaken belief.'”

Even if Best hadn’t believed the city was backing up her text messages on a server somewhere, the investigation found, the overwhelming majority of her messages were “transitory” in nature, meaning they didn’t deal with substantive policy decisions and were of “short-term, temporary informational use.”

“They’ve basically encouraged the deletion of transitory messages almost immediately,” Gagliardi said yesterday. “They said there’s no reason to keep those messages at all. They have left the termination of whether or not a message is transitory up to their employee.”

Jennifer Winkler, the city’s longtime records manager, told investigators that employees could theoretically ask to have their messages saved on a secure server. However, “they have not identified such a secure server to save those text messages. Essentially, the city of Seattle established the policy and not the practice,” Gagliardi said. This means that unless the city changes its policy, it will continue to be up to individual employees, all the way up to the mayor of Seattle, to decide whether their messages or worth saving or to delete them permanently.

Example messages from the investigation, however, included a number of texts that are similar to texts reporters receive routinely in response to city of Seattle records requests, suggesting that this “transitory” standard is applied inconsistently. Additionally, the texts included information that could be of interest to the general public, including messages sent during the protests about immediate strategies and tactics, such as movement of police from one place to another. According to the investigation, these messages were exempt from rules against deletion because the information in these texts “was subsequently documented in official Seattle Police incident reports and after-action reviews.”

Ultimately, Best deleted almost every text in her phone manually, later justifying the deletions by saying all the messages were “transitory.” Similarly, Durkan “stated that she avoided using text messaging for policy decisions, stating that due to the pandemic and then the protests, she was having cabinet meetings almost every day and that most of her communications were in person. She specifically stated that “the practice would be to not communicate things of substance by text.”

As for the “reasonable belief” that all text messages are stored in a server somewhere, Gagliardi noted that most of the officials named in the investigation were not particularly tech-savvy and wouldn’t realize, for example, that text messages in general don’t automatically go to a separate server once they’re deleted. When you delete messages from your personal phone, your cell-phone provider does not pay for a server to save them for you; unless you save them to a separate server or cloud service, they’re just gone.

When PubliCola asked Gagliardi if it was possible for any city official to save their text messages after deleting them, he laughed and responded, “Yes and no.” Jennifer Winkler, the city’s longtime records manager, told investigators that employees could theoretically ask to have their messages saved on a secure server. However, “they have not identified such a secure server to save those text messages. Essentially, the city of Seattle established the policy and not the practice.” This means that unless the city changes its policy, it will continue to be up to individual employees, all the way up to the mayor of Seattle, to decide whether their messages or worth saving or to delete them permanently.

City Hall, Election 2017, Morning Fizz

Harrell Announces 129-Member Transition Team after Most Expensive Mayoral Race in History; Davison to Take Over Depopulated City Attorney’s Office

1. Mayor-elect Bruce Harrell announced a 129-member transition team yesterday that includes Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan, current city council member Teresa Mosqueda, former mayoral candidate Jessyn Farrell, a long list of former Greg Nickels, Ed Murray, and Jenny Durkan staffers, and an entire committee overseeing “sports and mentorship” programs, headed by regional NAACP president Gerald Hankerson. Also on the team: Two of the leading opponents of a bike lane in Lake City that Mayor Jenny Durkan ultimately killed.

The team seems likely to grow; late on Tuesday, city council member Andrew Lewis confirmed that he will serve on the team’s public safety committee, one of 12 subject-area committees that make up the advisory group.

Harrell’s transition team also includes a “philanthropy” committee that includes representatives from the Ballmer Group, Amazon, Tableau, and a number of local foundations—echoing Harrell’s campaign promise to fund some city needs, such as programs to address homelessness, using voluntary donations from individuals and corporations.

The new administration’s transition team, for those keeping score (sports metaphor?), is more than twice the size of the transition team outgoing mayor Jenny Durkan announced when she was elected in 2017, and almost three times larger than the team ex-mayor Ed Murray set up in 2013.

Transition teams typically help mayors staff up and set priorities, but their primary role in recent years has been to demonstrate broad political support after a bruising election campaign, which this very (very) large and diverse group certainly does.

Harrell’s niece and campaign manager Monisha Harrell told the Seattle Times that Harrell would comb the transition team for potential members of the administration.

Since the August primary election, when voters kicked three-term incumbent Pete Holmes off the ballot, the city attorney’s criminal division has lost eight prosecutors, or nearly a quarter of its entire prosecution team.

As a point of recent historical reference, just two members of Durkan’s transition team joined the administration: former Transportation Choices Coalition director Shefali Ranganathan, who was one of Durkan’s deputy mayors, and former Building Changes director Helen Howell, who served briefly as interim director of the Human Services Department before joining the King County Regional Homelessness Authority as deputy CEO in July.

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2. Harrell’s campaign also set a record this year—it was the most expensive mayoral campaign in Seattle’s history by a long shot (sports metaphor?). According to campaign records, the official Harrell campaign raised just over $1.4 million in direct contributions, including $19,250 from Harrell himself.  By the same point in her campaign, Durkan had raised just over $970,000.

That’s a significant increase—Harrell has raised half again as much as Durkan had by the same point in November 2017—but it’s dwarfed by the total amount of money poured into the campaign by independent spending, primarily a real estate-backed IE called Bruce Harrell for Seattle’s Future. That campaign has raised $1.4 million, almost entirely from commercial real-estate developers and property managers; combined with independent spending from the National Association of REALTORS and the Seattle Firefighters PAC, independent groups spent almost $1.6 million getting Harrell elected, a sum that dwarfs the $835,000 an Amazon-backed group called People for Jenny Durkan spent on Durkan’s behalf.

At the time, editorial and news writers found it at least noteworthy that at a time when publicly financed “democracy vouchers” were supposed to get big money out of campaigns, the mayoral election went to the candidate who had hundreds of thousands of dollars in corporate money propping her up. This year’s election, in which the winning campaign cost $3 million, or almost $20 per vote, makes 2017’s shocking outlays look almost quaint.

3. Ann Davison, the city attorney-elect, had a simple campaign platform: Unlike my opponent, I will prosecute crime. (Davison’s opponent, public defender Nicole Thomas-Kennedy, pledged to phase out most misdemeanor prosecutions.) She’ll enter office with her work cut out for her: Since the August primary election, when voters kicked three-term incumbent Pete Holmes off the ballot, the city attorney’s criminal division has lost eight prosecutors, or nearly a quarter of its entire prosecution team. The chief of the criminal division, Kelly Harris, left the division for a private-sector job last month.

Continue reading “Harrell Announces 129-Member Transition Team after Most Expensive Mayoral Race in History; Davison to Take Over Depopulated City Attorney’s Office” →

Elections, The C Is for Crank

“In This House,” Seattle Votes for the Status Quo

Bruce Harrell campaign sign with extra sign reading "MODERATE."

By Erica C. Barnett

On Tuesday, less than 18 months after nationwide protests against police violence prompted Seattle leaders to consider new approaches to public safety, Seattle voters endorsed a return to the pre-pandemic status quo, electing a slate of candidates who promised to hire more cops, crack down on crimes associated with poverty and addiction, and remove more unsheltered people from public spaces, with “consequences” for those who refuse to go.

Longtime former city council member Bruce Harrell will be mayor;  longtime city council aide-turned-“take back Seattle” brewery owner Sara Nelson will replace Lorena González on the city council, and Republican (and three-time candidate) Ann Davison will be city attorney.

The new regime is a significant win for the business and political leaders who have been shouting for the past year and a half that Seattle Is Dying because the city’s mushy progressivism has gone too far. What’s ironic about that view is that “the left”—that is, people on Twitter who have the unique ability to send mainstream pundits into fits of derangement—has essentially no power in Seattle city government.

Yes, there are a few more progressive faces on the council than there were a dozen years ago. But that doesn’t mean they’ve had much luck changing city policy (and on many issues, the council is still sharply divided). Under Seattle’s form of government, the mayor controls almost every city department and has the authority to ignore or reverse the council’s policy and spending directives, meaning that even if the council were to tell the mayor to, say, cut the police department by 50 percent, the mayor could and probably would just ignore them—as Seattle’s current moderate mayor, Jenny Durkan, has done with policy after policy. If the council’s progressive bloc could spend money or establish policy by fiat, you would see a whole lot more hotel-based shelters, public restrooms, and handwashing sinks around the city.

Of course, if your entire understanding of how politics currently operate in Seattle is based on Twitter, you might believe that the “Nikkita Oliver left” is actually in charge of things. It’s an analysis that feels right—if you choose to ignore the list of people who are actually running the city and the policies they have created.

For the past several years—the period when centrist pundits claim that Seattle was controlled by a far-left progressive bloc—the city has stayed the course on any number of policies that previously failed to address the city’s problems—pouring money into downtown Seattle at the expense of other neighborhoods, offering huge hiring bonuses to new police officers, and ramping up encampment sweeps to pre-pandemic levels. (Prior to the current administration, encampment residents generally got 72 hours’ notice before a sweep.)  Progress on Vision Zero, a plan to eliminate traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2030, has not only stalled but reversed, with more people killed by traffic violence last year than in any year since 2006. Exclusionary zoning laws continue to prohibit new housing except in tiny strips of land along major arterial roads. And overdose deaths have increased dramatically, an outcome that could have been mitigated by opening the supervised consumption site King County recommended in 2016, and which Durkan has consistently (and successfully) opposed.

The claim that Bruce Harrell, Sara Nelson, and Ann Davison represent a set of “fresh new faces” with “new ideas” may be the most confusing piece of conventional wisdom being pushed by Seattle’s pundit class. Harrell served on the council for 12 years before stepping down at the end of 2019. His homelessness policy, a copy-and-paste of the failed Compassion Seattle charter amendment, was drafted by 12-year council veteran Tim Burgess. And Nelson’s old boss, Richard Conlin, was a 16-year incumbent.

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We know there are a lot of publications competing for your dollars and attention, but PubliCola truly is different: We’re funded entirely by reader contributions—no ads, no paywalls, ever.

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As mayor, Harrell’s campaign promises sound pretty much the same as Durkan’s when she came into office: More, better, reformed police, lots of new shelter beds, and a “pragmatic” approach to the city’s basic issues, like transportation. (Cycling advocates have considered Durkan particularly hostile to their requests for safer infrastructure; at a recent campaign forum, Harrell made a point of mocking bikes as a viable transportation option.) Durkan never did build all 1,000 tiny houses she promised to complete by the end of her first year, and the police department is so far from “reform” that it remains under a federal consent decree, after Durkan and outgoing city attorney Pete Holmes prematurely tried to terminate the agreement in 2020. At the beginning of her term, Durkan vowed to apply a compassionate but tough approach to the city’s most pressing issues. Now that her four years are up, Harrell is proposing more of the same.

Seattle has always been a wealthy, mostly white, fundamentally centrist city that wears its thin veneer of progressive politics like a “Black Lives Matter” sign slapped in the window of a single-family house in a segregated neighborhood.

Of course, if your entire understanding of how politics currently operate in Seattle is based on Twitter, you might believe that the “Nikkita Oliver left” is actually in charge of things. It’s an analysis that feels right—if you choose to ignore the list of people who are actually running the city and the policies they have created. For people who are well represented by the current status quo, it can feel like oppression to listen to how people talk about you and your political allies in an online space that you chose to enter. But look around: Seattle has always been a wealthy, mostly white, fundamentally centrist city that wears its thin veneer of progressive politics like a “Black Lives Matter” sign slapped in the window of a single-family house in a segregated neighborhood.

Davison, admittedly, is a special case—one Seattle’s center left may soon regret supporting as gleefully as they backed moderates Nelson and Harrell. On election night, several Davison supporters at Harrell’s party referred to her, somewhat apologetically, as “Republican-Lite,” but there’s little question about the views she has expressed in public. When Davison ran against city council incumbent Debora Juarez (one of those moderate council members the pundits who scream about the “far-left council” never mention) in 2019, she proposed fixing homelessness by rounding up unsheltered people and busing them to warehouses on the outskirts of the city, where they would somehow be kept alive for less than $1,500 a year. A year later, she declared herself a proud Republican and ran for lieutenant governor on the Donald Trump/Loren Culp ticket. Her plans for that office were even easier to fit on an index card: If elected, she said, she would abolish the office.

Seattle spent much of 2020 in righteous convulsions over Trump’s revanchist, neo-1968 law-and-order rhetoric. But when it comes to quieter dog whistles—protecting single-family zoning, “reclaiming our parks,” and “reforming” the police department—Seattle always responds on cue.

And there is considerable overlap between Harrell’s supporters and Davison’s (they even share some of the same consultants). On election night, after Harrell made his celebratory speech, a number of people from Harrell’s party piled into their cars and headed over to Davison’s celebration party. One was former Ed Murray public safety advisor (and Davison endorser, Chris Gregoire’s son-in-law) Scott Lindsay, who could hold a high-ranking position in the Davison city attorney’s office. Although most of the work of the office is in the civil division, Davison has said her top priority would be prosecuting misdemeanors—a radical reversal of the policies Holmes has put in place over the past 12 years, and a retreat into the zero-tolerance, broken-windows approach Lindsay has advocated.

Seattle spent much of 2020 in righteous convulsions over Trump’s revanchist, neo-1968 law-and-order rhetoric. But when it comes to quieter dog whistles—protecting single-family zoning, “reclaiming our parks,” and “reforming” the police department—Seattle always responds on cue. “In this house,” Seattle votes for the status quo.

Democratic Party, Elections, labor, Transit, Transportation

Sound Transit CEO Rogoff Out Next Year, Labor Council Wades Into Sawant Fray, 43rd Democrats Divided on Dow

1. Learn to trust the Fizz: Sound Transit CEO Peter Rogoff will leave the agency next spring. On Thursday, Sound Transit board members voted to approve the terms of Rogoff’s departure and queuing up a national search for his replacement.

The announcement came two weeks after the board removed what had seemed to be a standard one-year renewal of Rogoff’s contract from their regular agenda, after a nearly two-hour executive session in which board members discussed his performance as director of the agency. Board members also retreated to a lengthy executive session during Thursday’s meeting before emerging with the news that Rogoff “did not foresee continuing in his role,” in the words of board chair Kent Keel.

As PubliCola reported in early September, board members have spent the last month discussing whether to renew Rogoff’s contract, raising questions about Rogoff’s leadership style as well as large cost increases—largely for property acquisition—that forced the board to adopt a “realignment” plan for the voter-approved Sound Transit 3 package earlier this year. Mayor Jenny Durkan King County Council member Claudia Balducci, and King County Executive Dow Constantine are among the board members who brought up concerns publicly and internally.

According to a report by an independent consultant, Triunity, the cost increases were worsened by the fact that various divisions of the agency didn’t communicate with each other, thanks to a “siloed” organizational structure and a culture of keeping bad news under wraps. Another issue: Sound Transit, under Rogoff’s leadership, has been slow to make decisions that could reduce costs, such as choosing a single preferred alignment for light rail expansion instead of continuing to study many different options.

Durkan, one of two board members to vote against retaining Rogoff after allegations that he acted inappropriately around female staff, did not join in the round of praise for Rogoff that followed the board vote Thursday. After a round of effusive praise for Rogoff (Auburn Mayor Nancy Backus: “We should be very grateful as a board and a region for his expertise and skills”), Balducci’s comments focused mostly on Rogoff’s early years at the agency, calling him a steady hand when the agency was struggling to get its bearings

“We were trying… to build this incredibly ambitious and future-looking transit plan, to finally meet the promise of what we have needed and wanted in this region for over 50 years,” Balducci said. “Peter stepped in in the middle of that and quickly got his bearings and helped to bring us home.”

Rogoff will receive severance worth one year’s salary, plus unused vacation time and other benefits outlined in his contract. Speaking after the vote, Rogoff said he has found the job “simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting,” sometimes leaning more toward the latter. “I will continue to be the loudest cheerleader for Sound Transit’s staff and all of their accomplishments even after I step to the sidelines next year,” he said.

2. The King County Labor Council, which represents around 150 unions in King County, tweeted on Thursday urging Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant to stop “meddling” and “interfering” in the internal business of the Pacific Northwest Carpenters Union, which is currently on strike over a contract that a majority of members rejected over issues including pay, contract length, and parking reimbursements. “Ask how you can support instead of being a nuisance,” the Labor Council said.

Sawant began inserting herself into the debate earlier this month, when she issued statements and held a rally urging union members to vote “no” on the contract. Union leaders, including the head of the anti-Sawant Building Trades Union as well as the Carpenters’ Union itself, have repeatedly asked Sawant to stay out of their negotiations. “[N]o politician should be meddling in a private sector union contract negotiation,” Washington State Building Trades vice president Chris McClaine said. “It only helps those who want to destroy worker unions and take money out of workers’ paychecks.”

This week, Sawant issued a flurry of statements supporting the strike, touting her own promise to contribute $10,000 (up from an initial pledge of $2,000) to the carpenters’ strike fund, and showcasing a letter of support from several dozen carpenters’ union members for “stepp[ing] forward in solidarity” with the strike. The $10,000 pledge will come from the Sawant Solidarity Fund, which supports various political efforts and campaigns.

Sawant also said this week that she will introduce legislation to “require construction contractors to fully pay for workers’ parking costs, strengthen enforcement and penalties for wage theft, and restore [the] right to strike” at sites with a project labor agreement (PLA)—a bargained agreement between the union and contractors that prohibits workers from walking off the job. PLA sites in Seattle include the NHL hockey arena, the downtown convention center, and Sound Transit’s ongoing light rail construction.

It’s unclear when Sawant plans to introduce the legislation or what mechanism it would contain for requiring specific parking reimbursements, which are currently included in union contracts, not dictated by legislation.

3. The 43rd Legislative District Democrats failed to reach an endorsement for King County Executive at their endorsement meeting Tuesday night, a victory of sorts for incumbent Dow Constantine after a series of landslide votes for lefty candidates in other races. Constantine received a little over 43 percent of the vote to his challenger, state Sen. Joe Nguyen’s, 54 percent.

That may not seem like a blowout, but compared to the district’s sweeping support for other progressive candidates—city attorney candidate Nicole Thomas Kennedy, City Council candidate Nikkita Oliver, and mayoral candidate Lorena González all received first-round votes of at least 75 percent—Nguyen’s 54 percent showing looked limp.

“We cannot wait for the status quo to solve the problems that have been impacting us for decades and they especially won’t be solved by those who helped create them,” Nguyen said before the vote. Constantine responded to this by highlighting the county’s work responding to the COVID pandemic, including the imposition of a countywide vaccine mandate for indoor and large outdoor events. “This is the kind of difficult work that real leaders do. I’ve never been much for bluster,” Constantine said.

City Hall, Elections, Mayor Durkan

Durkan Won’t Seek Reelection

This post originally appeared at the South Seattle Emerald.

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Jenny Durkan announced Monday that she will not run for reelection, making her Seattle’s third one-term mayor in a row, after Ed Murray and Mike McGinn. 

In an 265-word announcement, Durkan said she couldn’t have done her job well and run for reelection at the same time, so she decided not to run. “I could spend the next year campaigning to keep this job or focus all my energy on doing the job,” she said. “I have decided not to run for reelection because Seattle, we still have some tough months ahead.”

Durkan’s announcement opens up the 2021 mayoral race. Potential candidates include the two at-large City Council members, Teresa Mosqueda and Lorena González, both up for reelection next year. Neither Mosqueda nor González immediately responded to messages seeking comment about the mayor’s decision or how it impacts their election plans. Last week, PubliCola reported on some of the fundraising issues that might be raised if either or both council members decide to run for mayor.

Speculation about whether the mayor would run again has been rampant in recent months—and the mayor’s consulting team has done little to tamp it down. The COVID pandemic transformed the economy overnight, a pivot that required Durkan to adapt quickly to being a recession-era mayor. The position often seemed like an uncomfortable one for Durkan, whose impulse was always to put a positive spin on every announcement, even if the news was bad. 

Thanks in part to circumstances no elected leader could have anticipated, Durkan’s term was largely reactive. In addition to the pandemic, Durkan had to respond to the emergency closure of the West Seattle Bridge, protests against police brutality, a homeless crisis that became increasingly visible as the city halted its policy (established under Durkan) of aggressively removing encampments, and the abrupt resignation of police chief Carmen Best.

The need to respond to so many crises at once often challenged Durkan’s ability to put a positive spin on the news, especially when the news was unequivocally bad. Faced with unprecedented challenges, she often lashed out, accusing the council of irresponsible budgeting and issuing multiple budget-related vetoes that she almost certainly knew would be overturned. When police turned on mostly peaceful protesters with tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets, Durkan defended their actions, standing by Best day after day as she claimed, without presenting evidence, that people “bent on destruction and chaos” with “nothing but ill intent” in their hearts had taken over whole swaths of the city.

As the city council responded to protesters’ demands by reducing the size of the Seattle Police Department, Durkan resisted, initially insisting that the council’s proposals would force the city to “abolish the police department.” Later, Durkan responded to calls to defund the police by promising Black communities a big round number—$100 million­, to be spent on unspecified programs that would be determined in the future. Then, when it became clear her plan relied on funding that was already allocated to marginalized communities, said that the 2021 budget the council adopted—which reduced her $100 million proposal by $70 million and funded a participatory budgeting process led by King County Equity Now—fulfilled her promise “through slightly different community-led processes.”

Durkan telegraphed her disinterest in keeping the job in other, more subtle ways. For the first time in recent memory, the budget adopted for 2021 was a one-year budget, which Durkan said was necessary because it is impossible to predict the two-year impact of the COVID recession. During the last recession, then-mayor McGinn produced grim all-cuts budgets that helped seal his status as a one-term mayor. Durkan has also raised almost no money this election cycle, an early indicator that she was, at best, on the fence about seeking to keep her position. And she has appointed an unusually high number of interim and acting department directors, including two more just last week. Finding permanent directors for these positions, including the head of the Human Services Department (already led by an interim director since 2018) will likely be the next mayor’s problem.

Since before the 2020 presidential election, there has been speculation locally that Durkan might seek appointment in the incoming Biden Administration. Prior to her election in 2017, Durkan was the US Attorney for Western Washington under President Obama between 2009 and 2014. Asked whether there would be an announcement soon about a federal appointment, Durkan campaign spokeswoman Stephanie Formas responded: “Nope!”

Mayor Durkan, Police, Privacy, public safety, Tech

ACLU Calls on Durkan to Ban Facial Recognition Software After Possible SPD Violation
Clearview AI Software Logo (Source: Creative Commons)

By Paul Kiefer

In early November, a blogger’s public records request turned up evidence that a Seattle Police Officer has used a widely-criticized facial recognition software called Clearview AI for over a year, possibly violating Seattle Police Department policy and raising questions from privacy advocates about the use of prohibited surveillance technology within SPD.

On Wednesday, the ACLU of Washington responded to the revelation by calling for Mayor Jenny Durkan to issue a specific ban on the use of facial recognition software by city agencies, as well as for a city council hearing to question SPD representatives about their use of surveillance tools.

As PubliCola first reported in November, the ACLU first sounded the alarm after the department released roughly 200 emails containing references to Clearview AI, a search engine for faces that enables law enforcement agencies to identify unknown people—protest participants, for example—by matching their photos to online images, allowing police to arrest or interrogate them.

Clearview AI has been the subject of harsh condemnation from privacy and police accountability advocates since it first drew national attention last year. The company’s business model relies on scraping billions of images from across the internet without permission; as a result, Clearview AI’s database of faces includes untold numbers of people with no criminal background whatsoever.

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Most of the emails SPD released were promotional offers sent from Clearview AI to SPD officers of all ranks, including former Police Chief Carmen Best. But one officer—Detective Nicholas Kartes of the South Precinct’s burglary unit—accepted the company’s offer, opening an account with his work email in September 2019. In the past year, Kartes corresponded with a Clearview AI representative about his experiences “experimenting” with the application, and login alerts sent to Kartes’ work email indicated that the account was used on at least two desktop computers. Both computers’ IP addresses place them in Seattle city government buildings, and one IP address belongs to a secure city network.

The revelation was alarming enough to prompt Office of Police Accountability Director Andrew Myerberg to launch an investigation into Kartes’ use of Clearview AI. However, Myerberg told PubliCola in November that merely opening an account with Clearview AI might not constitute a policy violation, though using the account for law enforcement purposes would be a clear violation of department policy. He added that there is no precedent for that kind of misconduct.

But the city council’s 2018 surveillance ordinance that restricts SPD’s use of surveillance technologies might not cover Kartes’ use of an unapproved software. Mary Dory, a public safety auditor working with the Office of the Inspector General on the case, told PubliCola in November that the ordinance was designed to address the use of surveillance technologies by SPD itself, not the behavior of an individual officer using surveillance software without the department’s knowledge.

That dilemma is now at the center of the ACLU’s disagreement with Interim Police Chief Adrian Diaz. Jennifer Lee, the manager of the ACLU of Washington’s Technology and Liberty Project, told PubliCola that her organization sees Kartes’ use of Clearview AI as a violation of the surveillance ordinance, and believes that SPD is liable for Kartes’ infractions. She cited Kartes’ use of his work email—and, possibly, his work computer—as evidence that the detective opened a Clearview AI account for law enforcement purposes.

Lee says that the ACLU of Washington is calling for Durkan to issue a targeted ban on facial recognition technology. “We have a surveillance ordinance which is supposed to prevent exactly what happened: SPD secretly using a surveillance technology,” she told PubliCola. “But it’s clear that without an explicit prohibition on facial recognition use, there are risks that remain.”

A press release from the ACLU sent out on Wednesday morning also called for council members Lisa Herbold and Alex Pedersen, the chairs of the council’s public safety and transportation and public utilities committees, respectively, to hold a public hearing to “get answers from SPD about its use of Clearview AI and other surveillance tools.”

In a response sent to the ACLU of Washington on Wednesday afternoon, Diaz categorically denied that SPD has sanctioned the use of Clearview AI by its officers. “We have no intention or interest in pursuing a partnership with Clearview AI or acquiring the use of any facial recognition technology,” he wrote. He also challenged the ACLU’s assertion—included in their press release—that multiple SPD detectives have used Clearview AI since September, pointing out that the emails only clearly point to Kartes’ use of the technology. (In November, Lee told PubliCola that the login alerts from multiple desktop computers point to the possibility of multiple detectives using Kartes’ account).

Diaz also made a passing reference connecting the Clearview AI promotional emails to a possible phishing attempt involving city of Seattle email addresses; PubliCola has reached out for clarification.

Because Diaz’s response dismisses the ACLU’s assertion that the department is liable for Kartes’ conduct, the ACLU’s call for Durkan to issue a specific ban on facial recognition software is effectively dead in the water.

Cops, Featured, Mayor Durkan, Opinion, Police

Durkan Praises Police As Tear Gas Engulfs City

The lens of crisis shifts so quickly now that it can be hard to keep everything in our heads at once. Last week, the city held a five-and-a-half-hour hearing on the injustice of our city’s policy toward its homeless residents, which includes pushing them from place to place if they do not “accept” a specific shelter bed on a specific day—a one-size-fits-all policy that is especially inept at responding to the conditions of vulnerable people in the middle of a nationwide public health crisis.

Over the weekend and today, and almost certainly tomorrow and the rest of the week as well, the city and nation have focused our attention on another crisis that, like the criminalization of homelessness, has racism and dehumanization at its core: Police violence against black and brown Americans.

The cameras don’t look away, even when political leaders do.

The protests against the murder of George Floyd are multifaceted and raise real questions about whether cities have the right to dictate the “proper” way to protest, as well as legitimate concerns that a movement for justice (“peaceful,” as that term is defined by law enforcement, or not) has been hijacked by outside forces on the right or left. But they also may be an inflection point (it seems far too optimistic to talk of turning points) in the debate over the role of police in Seattle and other cities, and to what extent cities should allow police to act with impunity, and unquestioned, for behavior that any rational person would consider unreasonable: Putting a knee on a young man’s neck, or spraying mace indiscriminately into a mostly peaceful crowd, or covering up badge numbers with rubber tape on the grounds that it is an inviolable “tradition.”

This weekend, the city described young white men showing up in Seattle from elsewhere bent on sowing “chaos” and destruction, using projectiles, Molotov cocktails, and “frozen water bottles” to attack police. By today, those young men had morphed into “thousands of people out there with nothing but ill intent,” as Best put it, and their weapons had evolved into huge backpacks full of the aforementioned projectiles along with rocks, “urine, and feces.”

This afternoon, Mayor Jenny Durkan and her police chief, Carmen Best (and fire chief Harold Scoggins, who always looks and sounds like he knows he isn’t going to be quoted at these things) stood up and intoned the same lines they have been reciting all weekend, repeated with a bit more fervor and flourish. A protest by “peaceful people” of color and allies got hijacked by outside forces, “young white men,” probably right-wing or perhaps left-wing, “bent on destruction and chaos,” with “nothing but ill intent” in their hearts. (The phrase “ill intent” was repeated so often that it started to sound more like a mantra than a talking point.) The nightly curfews, initially imposed with less than 15 minutes’ notice, are meant to “take the lawful people off the street” and are necessary, night after night, to “protect public health and safety.” Looting, rioting, fighting back when police throw tear gas canisters and flash bangs indiscriminately into crowds: “This is not what people trying to express their opinions do,” Best said. “This is what criminals do. So we have to differentiate between the two.”

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As the protests have stretched into their second week, the rhetoric from the mayor’s office and the police department has grown more pitched and baroque. This weekend, the city described young white men showing up in Seattle from elsewhere bent on sowing “chaos” and destruction, using projectiles, Molotov cocktails, and “frozen water bottles” to attack police. By today, those young men had morphed into “thousands of people out there with nothing but ill intent,” as Best put it, and their weapons had evolved into huge backpacks full of the aforementioned projectiles along with rocks, “urine, and feces.”

Mourning bands, black bands that many officers placed over their badge numbers, making them harder to identify, had evolved from something people might not be aware of (“Google it,” Durkan said this weekend, helpfully spelling it out: “M-O-U-R-N-I-N-G bands”) to a tradition so hallowed and ingrained that it was actually offensive for the public to suggest that concealing badge numbers during a protest about police accountability might send the wrong message. Durkan, exasperated, insisted, “There was no attempt by anyone to cover badge numbers” and called the very existence of badge numbers on officers’ badges “a fallback and in some ways an unnecessary redundancy” to the first-initial, last name identification on officers’ name tags.

Herbold, who heads up the council’s public safety committee, was hardly the only council member who raised concerns about the behavior of police this week, or who will be demanding answers from the mayor and police chief about why police acted with such apparent indiscretion during protests against police violence. (One reasonable answer might be that they felt empowered to do so.)

Durkan even expressed surprise when a reporter asked about reports (described, videotaped and posted on social media by hundreds of witnesses for anyone to see) that officers had fired tear gas, flash grenades, and pepper spray indiscriminately into crowds that were mostly peaceful, saying that she would follow up with city council member Lisa Herbold, who had spoken earlier in the day about witnessing many such instances herself over the weekend. “I don’t know the facts of the case that she’s indicating… but we’ll reach out to the council member to find out what she’s concerned about,” Durkan said. Continue reading “Durkan Praises Police As Tear Gas Engulfs City” →

Affordability, campaign finance, City Council, Election 2017, homelessness, Mayor Durkan, Morning Crank, Transit, Transportation

Morning Crank: The “Unique Problem” That Separates Us from Salt Lake City and Houston

1. A line of people and pets snaked along the eastern perimeter of CenturyLink Field yesterday morning as the United Way’s annual Community Resource Exchange, an annual event where volunteers and service providers offer resources, food, dental care, and other services to people experiencing homelessness. Upstairs, in the stadium’s event center, a decidedly more well-heeled crowd gathered for an event called the Changemakers Rally—a series of short speeches, actually, followed by a panel discussion with leaders from Amazon, Starbucks, and Zillow, along with All Home, the Chief Seattle Club, and United Way. The highlight of the odd event wasn’t the anodyne address by Mayor Jenny Durkan, who skirted substance in her speech and during the brief Q&A with remarks like, “We need to commit over time to make this change in people’s lives for every day of their lives” and “We know what works, we just need to do it and have the collective will to do it.” Nor was it an awkward onstage back-and-forth between United Way board chair Kathy Surace-Smith and Justin Butler, a formerly homeless Metropolitan Improvement District Ambassador who moved here from Phoenix and couldn’t be prodded to say much more about the Community Resource Exchange beyond, “Well, it got me a job.”

No, the highlight was when Starbucks VP John Kelly took the mic and used his time to blast the Seattle City Council for considering an employee hours tax to fund investments in homelessness at a cost of up to $75 million a year, a proposal he called an example of the way “our government keeps on targeting [businesses] as a  source of funds rather than innovators and problem solvers.” Starbucks has focused its homelessness spending on family homelessness, as has Ohio homelessness consultant Barb Poppe, whose famous/infamous “Poppe Report” is the blueprint for Seattle’s Pathways Home initiative. Kelly highlighted that report, which calls on the city to move funding away from service-rich transitional housing toward “rapid rehousing” with short-term vouchers to help people rent apartments on the private market. “We know the decisions, we’ve got the Poppe Report with all the solutions, the blueprint is there—we just need to act on reform,” Kelly said. “Barbara Poppe has worked with Salt Lake City and Houston and seen demonstrable progress.”

The “unique problem” that differentiates  Seattle from those two cities, Kelly continued, is that only Seattle has a large number of families living on the streets and in cars. The other difference, of course, is that Seattle apartments cost about twice as much as apartments in either of those cities, thanks in no small part to a housing shortage that is also unlike anything Houston or Salt Lake City is experiencing.

2. A curious addendum to the saga of former mayor Ed Murray, who resigned last year amid accusations that he had sexually abused several minors in the past: Last April, as the scandal was breaking, Murray filed a financial disclosure report showing that he owned just one property—his Seattle house on Capitol Hill, valued at $876,000. (I came across Murray’s financial documents while I was looking into an item related to current Mayor Jenny Durkan’s own investments). That was odd, because a previous financial disclosure report, from 2016, showed that he owned another house—a three-bedroom, two-bath vacation home in the coastal community of Seabrook, which Murray and his husband Michael Shiosaki bought in November 2015 for $470,000.

Murray amended the report to include his second home six weeks after filing the initial report without it. However, those six weeks—from April 14, when he filed the initial report, to May 31, when he corrected it—were critical ones. During April and May, while the press was all over the story, Murray repeatedly pleaded poverty—claiming, for example, that he needed a special dispensation from the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission allowing him to raise money from supporters for his own legal defense because as “a lifelong public servant, [he] does not have the personal resources needed to fund his own legal defense.” Murray also told Q13 Fox that he had “no assets.” Referring to his house in Seattle, he said,  “Michael owns the house.” In fact, both Shiosaki and Murray, who are married, are listed as the owners of both houses.

The mis-filed report could have been a simple oversight, and the addition of the house didn’t change Murray’s total assets, which he listed in 2017 as $1.8 million. Murray and Shiosaki still own the Seabrook house, which can be rented for between $148 and $335, depending on the season. One other bit of historical trivia: In 2013, when he was still a state senator, Murray earmarked $437,000 in the state budget for a new bike and pedestrian connection between Pacific Beach and Seabrook—at the time a brand-new planned community—at the request of a longtime friend who owned a house there. Not long afterward, the friend maxed out to Murray’s first campaign. And about two years after that, Murray himself bought a vacation house in the town.

3. After the Seattle Times reported last week that, according to King County Metro, the downtown Seattle streetcar will cost 50 percent more to operate than the Seattle Department of Transportation previously claimed, Mayor Durkan requested an independent review of the $177 million megaproject, which is already under construction. On Tuesday, city budget director Ben Noble told the council’s transportation committee that the mayor’s office is concerned about “whether we have accurate information about the operating costs and… potentially the capital costs as well.” That prompted council member Lisa Herbold, a longtime opponent of the streetcar, to suggest “pressing pause” on the project until the city could get a handle on how much it will cost to operate and build (and how the city will pay for any overruns). Goran Sparrman, SDOT’s interim director, suggested that putting the project on ice, even temporarily, could put federal funds at risk and lead to higher costs in the future, since the cost of labor and materials tends to escalate while projects are idle.

Fans of the downtown streetcar, which will link the South Lake Union and First Hill streetcars, will conclude from today’s discussion that it makes sense to keep plowing ahead with the project; even if the thing is over budget, the costs will only get worse if we wait. Detractors, meanwhile, will see that argument as an example of the sunk-cost fallacy—the idea that because the city has already invested so much in the project, the only option is to keep building, when in fact, there’s something to be said for quitting while you’re ahead.

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Affordability, Health, homelessness, housing, human services, King County, Mayor Durkan, Poverty

Morning Crank: I Don’t Want That Rumor to Be Perpetuated

1. Sitting at the year’s first meeting of the Progressive Revenue task force Thursday morning, it was hard not to flash back to a press conference the previous day, when Mayor Jenny Durkan announced that the city would spend some of the $11 million it expects to receive from the sale of a city-owned property in South Lake Union (a different property than the “teardrop” site council members discussed as part of their budget deliberations last year). At that briefing, held in front of two “tiny houses” under construction at the Seattle Vocational Institute, Durkan said it would take time to build all the housing that will ultimately be funded by the $290 million 2016 housing levy, and that in the meantime, a $5.5 million investment in “bridge housing”—or, in the clunky title Durkan chose for the initiative, “building a bridge to housing for all”—would give people living on the street slightly better options. “In an ideal world, we would not need to be building tiny houses,” Durkan said. Then she acknowledged that state and federal support for affordable housing is about to fall off a cliff.

The rest of the money would pay for rental assistance for people on SHA’s Section 8 voucher waiting list—”we’re going to focus on the people who need that assistance the most,” Durkan said— design of a new fire station, and city expenses related to the land sale. The developer buying the property would also provide $2 million of a total $7.7 million payment toward affordable housing projects elsewhere, required as part of the city’s Mandatory Housing Affordability program, to build actual affordable housing.

The reason I was thinking about Durkan’s announcement Thursday morning is that it was basically a rounding error—what government staffers sometimes call “budget dust”— in the funding needed to actually address the city’s homelessness problem, which has been growing every year since at least 2013. According to task force co-chair Kirsten Harris-Talley, if every unit of affordable housing requires $160,000 in capital expenditures from the city (more on how advocates for a higher employee hours tax arrived at that number in a minute), and the city will need around 20,000 new units for very low-income people in the next 10 years, that means the city will need to spend around $3.2 billion over that time. As you can probably imagine, the city isn’t spending anywhere close to that right now—according to the presentation, the city spent just under $95 million from all sources on capital housing investments last year. At that rate, it would take more than 33 years to come up with $3.2 billion (and that’s assuming housing costs stayed flat).

Obviously, none of this is an exact science. The $160,000 figure is an estimate provided by council member Kshama Sawant’s office, of what the city would need to contribute if it ramped up its affordable housing production and was unable to find a significant amount of new funding from other sources to help pay for all the new units. (Currently, each new unit costs the city about $93,000 in capital costs, but the programs that pay for the difference between the city’s contribution and the total cost to build a new unit, about $311,000, are only committed to a certain number of units, requiring the city—theoretically—to pay more for each additional unit out of its own pockets.)

If Harris-Talley and Sawant’s figures are correct, that provides a ready-made argument for the employee hours tax (effectively a flat annual tax for each full-time employee on every business over a certain revenue threshold) that they’ve wanted to pass all along. Today, the task force looked at potential revenues from the so-called head tax at different levels and with different sizes of business exempt from the tax, which I’ve copied below. (Last year’s proposed head tax would have exempted businesses with less than $10 million in gross revenues, up from $5 million in the initial proposal; some businesses argued that basing the tax on gross revenues was unfair because it didn’t take into account thin profit margins in certain industries, like restaurants.)

If the city goes through a recession, of course, the amount it can expect to collect will shrink. However, recessions tend to actually lower rents; Downtown Emergency Service Center director and task force member Daniel Malone pointed out that during the last recession, the county’s annual point in time count of people living outdoors tends to stagnate or even decrease, as it did between 2010 and 2011, and between 2011 and 2012. That’s one of the paradoxes of a weakening economy: Although revenues from taxes that are less stable, like direct taxes on businesses, tend to decline, so do rents, making it possible for some people forced onto the street by an impossible housing market to actually find a place to live.

2. In a King County Board of Health discussion about the possibility of a Hepatitis A outbreak in Seattle yesterday (a nationwide outbreak, ongoing now, began in California and was widely blamed on lack of access to handwashing facilities for the state’s homeless population), King County Health Department Director Patty Hayes expressed concern about the city’s decision last year to cut funding for three downtown hygiene centers that provide restrooms, showers, and handwashing and laundry facilities for homeless people living and moving through downtown.

City council and Board of Health member Sally Bagshaw—a vocal proponent for cutting funding to the facilities as part of the city’s new “performance-based” approach to homeless service contracts—objected to Hayes’ characterization of the problem.

“I think that [problem with the closure of the hygiene centers] is more apparent than real,” Bagshaw said. “We’re putting huge investments into new 24/7 shelters …  I’m working with those 24-hours shelters to say, ‘Can you open these up for people who aren’t [staying] here tonight” to take showers, she said. “We opened up community centers [for people to shower]. There are more facilities open now than before. It’s just that the money’s being shifted. I don’t want that rumor to be perpetuated. There were some organizations that didn’t get funded” because the city went to a competitive process, Bagshaw said.

I covered the cuts to funding for hygiene centers, and the reason some advocates believe community centers and shelters are not an adequate substitute for public restrooms and dedicated hygiene facilities, here.

3. The Sightline Institute, a progressive think tank that researches and covers of housing, transportation, and environmental policy from a green, pro-transit, pro-housing perspective, just brought on a new (unpaid) fellow to cover “issues of infrastructure, technology and energy with a view towards sustainability.” His name: Daniel Malarkey.

If that name sounds familiar, it should. (If it doesn’t, you weren’t following Seattle politics in the early 2000s.) He was the finance director for the Seattle Monorail Project, the transportation agency that was going to build a monorail line from Ballard to downtown to West Seattle. That project was doomed to failure after Malarkey’s revenue projections overshot the mark by about 50 percent, and after the agency compounded the problem by trying to paper over the error. (The error Malarkey made was counting revenues from taxes on every single car in Seattle, when in reality, thanks to heavy lobbying from the auto industry, all new cars and cars brought to the city by people moving here from out of state were exempt from the monorail tax. The result was that Malarkey overestimated the monorail’s tax base by a third) When he resigned at the end of 2003, I wrote this. Interestingly, it looks like his three years consulting or working directly for the monorail agency aren’t on his official Sightline bio.

Anyway, it looks like he’ll be writing about autonomous cars.

Full disclosure: I have written several pieces for Sightline and often use their research in my reporting.

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site or making a one-time contribution! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as reporting-related and office expenses. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

Addiction, Drugs, Election 2017, Elections, legislature, Mayor Durkan, Morning Crank

Morning Crank: “Clearly An Undisclosed Pledge”

1. Last week, former mayoral candidate Cary Moon wrote her campaign a check for $207,000, bringing the total she contributed to her own campaign to nearly $400,000—the largest amount spent by any self-financed candidate in Seattle history.

The campaign for now-Mayor Jenny Durkan now argues that the contribution confirms what they predicted in two complaints they filed last year, alleging that Moon was engaging in a campaign-finance “shell game,” accepting a loan-on-paper from her campaign consultant Moxie Media with a promise to pay Moxie back after the campaign was over.

Shortly before the November election, the Durkan campaign filed a complaint with the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission against the Moon campaign, charging that Moon had unlawfully contributed tens of thousands of dollars to her own campaign within 21 days of the election, in violation of a state law prohibiting candidates from giving more than $5,000 to their own campaigns within that period, or had promised to repay a large loan to her campaign during that period, which, they argue, would also violate a city election rule prohibiting vendors from extending credit to campaigns in a way that is outside the “ordinary course of business.” A week later, the campaign filed a separate, similar complaint at the state Public Disclosure Commission, charging that the campaign’s final report before the election “clearly indicates that Moxie Media is relying on Ms. Moon to cover debts that are clearly beyond the pace of their other fundraising efforts. The increase in debt by $77,459.18 [over the last two weeks of October] is clearly an undisclosed pledge from Ms. Moon and is over 15 times the amount that Ms. Moon can pledge during the 21 days before the election.”

According to the SEEC complaint, “A close look at the Moon campaigns [sic] filings indicates that one of two things, both illegal, is going on: either her campaign’s vendors are making tens of thousands of dollars in illegal in-kind donations to her campaign, or Moon is contributing (or promising to contribute) tens of thousands of  dollars to her own campaign in direct contravention of the 21-day self-contribution limit,” the complaint alleges.

The complaints zeroed in on tens of thousands of dollars campaign consultant Moxie Media spent in the final weeks of the campaign on up-front expenses like postage, which can’t be deferred until after the campaign is over. In the last two weeks of October, according to the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, the campaign’s debt increased by more than $85,000, to $186,000 (the election was November 7). This amount of last-minute debt, the Durkan campaign suggests, violates the spirit of the ban on late contributions. “If these actions by the Moon campaign and Moxie Media are acceptable, then there are essentially no limits to the amount that a campaign consultant can spend out of their own funds on media, mail or other paid communication buys on behalf of a wealthy candidate for whom they work, under the assumption that the candidate can reimburse them for all of those up front payments after election day, when campaign contribution limits (like the 21-day restriction on candidate self-contradictions [sic]) no longer apply,” the state complaint says.

Moon’s camp says the loan (or pledge) was completely within the normal course of business, and notes that Durkan’s own debt increased by about $45,000 in the same period, to $98,000. They also point out that the debt was hardly a secret—the campaign reported it on every election filing.

Moxie Media’s Lisa MacLean did not return a call for comment.

Although consultants are allowed to extend credit to candidates for 90 days, the complaint charged that the Moon campaign and its consultant, Moxie Media, were aware that the debt would ultimately be paid by Moon, not other campaign contributors. At the time of the complaint, October 25 of last year, the campaign was reporting more than $125,000 in debt, which was almost as much as Moon had raised from individual donors at that point in the race, raising questions about her ability to generate enough in donations after the election to pay back that debt without using her own money. By the end of November, three weeks after Moon had lost the election, campaign finance reports indicated her campaign was $206,000 in the red.

If the SEEC tosses the complaint, the Durkan campaign says, it will essentially be saying that there is are no limitations on campaign contributions by self-financed candidates, opening the floodgates for candidates to make massive loans to struggling campaigns in the hopes that a big last-minute financial push will make up for a lack of grassroots support. (The PDC will consider the campaign’s complaint, too, but on a much slower timeline because the agency is working its way through a huge backlog caused primarily by a single conservative activist who has filed dozens of complaints against local Democratic Party districts alleging various reporting violations.)

But officials with the SEEC and the state PDC say this is the direction the courts seem to be going already. In addition to Buckley v. Valeo, in which the Supreme Court ruled that limiting a candidate’s spending on her own campaign violated the First Amendment, there’s Family PAC v. McKenna, in which the Ninth Circuit district court ruled that a 21-day limit on large contributions to ballot initiatives (though not individual candidates) was unconstitutional.

The direction the courts are going, in other words, is in favor of unlimited spending and contributions by wealthy candidates to their own campaigns. This may mean more self-financed campaigns in the future, but it may also mean more laws meant to encourage candidates to raise their money from individual donors, like the initiative that provided each voter $100 in “democracy vouchers” to spend on city council campaigns this past election. There’s also the distinct possibility that Moon—a candidate whose consultant, Moxie Media, bragged was “well-resourced” before she had even declared she was running—was simply an outlier in Seattle politics: A progressive candidate with deep pockets who failed to win the imagination of the public (Moon received 1,088 individual contributions to Durkan’s 4,210) yet was able to eke out a second-place primary election finish in a very crowded (21-candidate) field. A big test for the viability of non-wealthy candidates will come in 2021, when democracy vouchers go into effect for mayoral candidates. Although vouchers do not include restrictions on self-financing, they do place other limitations on candidates, such as spending limits, in exchange for public funds.

2. At 10:00 this morning, the state Senate Health and Long-Term Care Committee will hold a public hearing on a bill, SB 6150, that would update the state’s current abstinence-first approach to opiate addiction and require the state Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) to promote the use of medication-assisted treatment and other evidence-based approaches to opiate addiction. Currently, state law says explicitly that there is no fundamental right to medication-assisted treatment for addiction, that total abstinence from all opiates should be the “primary goal” of any opiate addiction treatment, and that if a doctor does prescribe medication, it should only be a stopgap measure on the way to total abstinence.

Overwhelming evidence has concluded that medication-assisted treatment with opiates is effective at saving lives, reducing the harm caused by buying and consuming illegal drugs, and reducing or eliminating the use of harmful opiates. There is still some debate about whether people should continue taking replacement drugs like suboxone for the rest of their lives—they are opiates, and do cause dependency—but there’s no question that punitive, abstinence-only policies result in more deaths and ruined lives than compassionate, evidence-based approaches like medication-assisted treatment, and it’s high time that state law reflected that.

The bill would also declare the opiate epidemic a public health crisis, seek a waiver from federal Medicare and Medicaid rules to allow opiate addiction treatment in prison, and develop a plan for purchasing and distributing naloxone, the overdose-reversal drug, throughout the state.

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