Tag: Katie Wilson

Mayor Wilson

Mayor-Elect Wilson Appoints Deputy Mayor Brian Surratt, Other Top Staff

 

Brian Surratt
Incoming Seattle Deputy Mayor Brian Surratt

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson planned to announce several top hires this afternoon, ending speculation about who will fill some of the top spots on her newly reorganized org chart. The top hires are a diverse mix of city of Seattle veterans, advocates and organizers for lefty causes, and people with experience in areas where Wilson is seen as having less experience, such as corporate partnerships and economic development.

Brian Surratt, the head of the city’s Office of Economic Development from 2015 to 2017 and one of the co-chairs of Wilson’s transition team, will be Wilson’s deputy mayor, returning to the city after years promoting economic development and global trade for the Puget Sound region as the founder and head of Greater Seattle Partners. As we reported last week, Wilson decided to have just one deputy mayor rather than the several that have become common (Harrell had four) in an effort to eliminate the internal power struggles and backstabbing that were common under the previous mayor.

Surratt brings both corporate cred (the Puget Sound Business Journal recently named him a “40 Under 40 Hall of Famer” this year, 10 years after giving him that honor) and city experience to his new position; at OED, he negotiated the redevelopment deal for the arena now known as Climate Pledge and was the city’s policy lead on raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour; he also worked on anti-gentrification efforts in the Central District.

Aly Pennucci, a longtime Seattle City Council central staffer who fled the city (our words, not hers) six months after Sara Nelson became council president, will be head of the City Budget Office, replacing Harrell appointee (and former central staffer) Dan Eder. Pennucci was one of the council’s longest-serving budget experts and her departure was seen as a major loss of institutional knowledge, as well as a rebuke to Nelson’s leadership.

(Side note/rabbit hole: In taking the budget director job, Pennucci’s following in the footsteps of her former central staff colleague Ben Noble, who left central staff to become budget director under Jenny Durkan, then left that position when Harrell became mayor, ultimately returning to the council, where he’s now head of central staff.)

Kate Brunette Kreuzer, the longtime head of external affairs at the powerhouse climate and housing advocacy group Futurewise, will be Wilson’s chief of staff.

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

Support PubliCola

Jen Chan, currently deputy director at the Seattle Housing Authority, will be interim Director of Departments, a new position that will serve as the supervisor for all city department heads. According to a memo laying out all the new roles, the goal of having one person who is not the mayor overseeing departments is to empower department heads to make decisions and give them a single point of contact at the mayor’s office.

Alex Gallo-Brown, Wilson’s campaign manager and a longtime union organizer with UFCW3000, the grocery workers’ union, will be head of Wilson’s Community Relations team, an expanded version of the external relations division that will function as the organizing arm of the mayor’s office.

Nicole Vallestero Soper, a policy analyst and the former executive director of Puget Sound Sage, will be Director of Policy Innovation, a role the transition team memo describes as someone who will “drive forward [Wilson’s] major policy priorities” and manage a team of senior policy advisors.

Seferiana Day, currently the spokesperson for the city’s Office of Planning and Community Development (and a development and housing wonk in her own right), will be Wilson’s communications director, while Sage Wilson, currently at Civic Ventures (the lefty policy shop founded by activist billionaire Nick Hanauer), will be interim deputy communications director.

Others who are rumored to be on Wilson’s  team, but whose roles (if any) the transition team hasn’t confirmed, are former Transportation Choices Coalition director Alex Hudson and former deputy mayor (and Office of Sustainability and the Environment director) Jessyn Farrell. Farrell, a former state representative who received our endorsement for mayor in 2017, was the only one of his four deputy mayors Harrell failed to thank in his concession speech earlier this year.

 

 

City Council, homelessness

Homeless Authority Praises Religious Program, Katie Wilson Plans to Jerk-Proof the Mayor’s Office, and Who Will Be the City Council’s Next President?

1. The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has signed a contract with Barb Oliver, the head of tiny house builder Sound Foundations, to serve as a chief policy advisor to agency CEO Kelly Kinnison. Oliver is a longtime advocate for sheltering people in tiny houses—if you’ve ever read a Danny Westneat column about how there are tons of little freestanding shelters “just sitting around in a warehouse,” waiting to shelter people, you’ve read quotes from her. (The underlying problem isn’t really that there aren’t enough structures for people to live in, but that it’s often incredibly hard to site tiny house villages because of NIMBY objections).

According to Oliver, her title will be Senior Advisor for Special Projects. PubliCola has requested additional information about the contract, including the dollar amount, from KCRHA. Late last month, the agency eliminated 28 positions, including high-level roles like finance director and general counsel, to save money; shortly afterward, Kinnison hired five new people, including one man whose proposed hiring earlier this year led to several internal complaints by people who all ended up losing their jobs in the layoffs.

2. Earlier this month, Kinnison took a trip to Baltimore, MD with The More We Love director Kristine Moreland and Compass Housing Alliance preseident Christopher Ross to learn about a Christian recovery program operated by the Helping Up Mission in that city.

Helping Up, like Union Gospel Mission and other religious missions across the country, is an explicitly Christian organizations that requires recovery program participants to participate in religious services, a controversial practice even among some faith-based homeless service providers. Helping Up’s Spiritual Recovery Program teaches participants “Spiritual 101 through Bible studies, chapel, and discipleship,” according to the mission’s website.

The program also includes mandatory “work therapy.” According to a profile in Baltimore magazine, program participants do 80 percent of the work of running the program.

KCRHA spokeswoman Lisa Edge described Kinnison’s trip to Baltimore as “an opportunity to learn from [Helping Up Mission’s] successes,” and said the group “partners with Johns Hopkins University, are well respected at the federal level, and provide critical resources to people experiencing homelessness.”

Asked if KCRHA hopes to invest local funding in similar groups, Edge said KCRHA already contracts with many faith-based groups, like  Catholic Community Services, The Salvation Army, and Muslim Housing Services. KCRHA’s budget indicates that funding for these groups is generally limited to shelter, not religious programs like Helping Up’s addiction program.

Edge did not respond to questions about whether KCRHA plans to contract with The More We Love. The group, which Moreland started as a for-profit company selling private encampment “sweeps” to landowners, has received contracts for encampment outreach in Burien and for its “high-accountability” shelter program in Renton, which provides temporary lodging to women seeking to leave the sex trade on Aurora Ave. N.

3. Although both Dan Strauss and Bob Kettle have been rumored to be the top contenders to replace outgoing City Councilmember Sara Nelson as council president, the consensus choice appears to be a different person entirely: District 3 Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth.

4. I was on the City Cast Seattle podcast this week, talking about the local impact of federal cuts to funding for permanent housing, the changes coming to city and county government as a new mayor and King County executive take over, and what “Seattle Nice” means to me, as one-third of the Seattle Nice podcast. What does it say about me that when they asked me what I’d do with an extra $51, my brain immediately went to complaining about Seattle’s overpriced, mostly mediocre food?

5. Mayor-elect Katie Wilson is planning to reorg the mayor’s office significantly from the way it’s been run under her last several. predecessors. The biggest change, according to an internal document provided by the transition team, is that Wilson will have just one deputy mayor (and two other direct reports, a chief of staff and a director of departments), as opposed to four deputy mayors under Harrell, a setup that has led to internal power struggles and factionalism in the mayor’s office.

Having a smaller, more “clearly-delieated” team of top staff will mean everyone has a clear role, and putting one person over all the executive departments will help Wilson’s administration empower department directors (another goal outlined in the internal memo), who have often had to accept top-down direction from the Harrell administration instead of collaborating on decisions as policy experts.

My favorite suggestion in the memo, though, is “No drama”—a constant feature of Harrell’s administration. There’s a whole section about how to achieve this, but the bottom line is this: “We don’t think you should hire jerks.” What a novelty!

 

Elections, podcasts

Seattle Nice Interviews Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson!

By Erica C. Barnett

We had Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson on Seattle Nice this week for a wide-ranging interview about her priorities as mayor—as well as how she plans to deal with the massive budget deficits set up by Mayor Bruce Harrell and the city council and the constraints the council has placed on her administration.

As PubliCola has reported, Harrell’s budget—which the council will pass in final form tomorrow—plunges the city into nine-figure deficits starting in 2027, which will force Wilson to act quickly to address budget shortfalls her predecessor failed to address. The budget also seeks to force Wilson to preserve some of her predecessor’s pet projects, including the encampment-sweeping Unified Care Team and a squad of graffiti removal staff, through restrictions that prohibit her from spending city funds on anything other than sweeps and anti-graffiti efforts.

We discussed those issues and much more, including many questions submitted by readers, in a wide-ranging 45-minute discussion with the mayor-elect.

A few highlights:

On whether she plans to replace Harrell’s police chief, Shon Barnes:

I’m going to respectfully decline that question at the moment. It’s a very sensitive question, and I am looking forward to meeting with Shon Barnes in the near future and having conversations with a lot of people about how things are going at the police department. And this is not just about the police chief, but this is about department leadership across the city, because there’s the question, when a new mayor comes into office, of potentially appointing new department heads.

For me, this is really not a political question. I don’t care what department head supported Harrell or campaigned actively for him. For me, this is really about getting the best people in place to lead those departments, and obviously there needs to be a certain amount of kind of vision alignment for someone to want to work with me. But beyond that, the thing that I really care about is that they’re a good leader that their, you know, employees respect them and can work for them. … So I’m hoping to retain in department leadership folks who are dedicated public servants doing a great job, and then yes, I’m sure there will be some, some turnover. So that applies across the board, including our police department.

On whether she’ll be Seattle’s “urbanist mayor”

Seattle’s a big city, and I love living in a big city, and I want Seattle to become a bigger and better city, where it’s possible, for example, for someone to live like I do right now, which is raising a child in in an apartment. And that means that the city kind of becomes your your backyard or your living room. And I think that urban lifestyle is something that we need to promote, and we need to make it possible for more and more people to live in this city without owning a car. And that’s not just for the sake of the people who don’t own cars. I mean, as more people continue to move to Seattle in our region, we just have limited space, and it’s just not possible to keep adding cars to the road. …

We deserve a world-class mass transit system. I think that’s just a very, very important thing to be working towards for all kinds of reasons. And we need great public space. We need more car -free public space. We need great parks, great playgrounds, all of those urban amenities. And so I am going to be very focused on making sure that Seattle is Seattle is a great, big city that can continue to grow in that direction.

On breaking Seattle’s 16-year streak of one-term mayors:

Despite the fact that I challenged an incumbent, I think it’s not great to just have one-term mayor after one-term mayor. So I do hope to govern in a way that leads to me being able to serve another term.

One of the things that I understand about Mayor Harrell is that I do believe that he stepped into office wanting very much to be a two-term mayor. And I think that his approach, and his consultants’ approach to governing over the last four years, has been to really focus on building that coalition of interests that could get him reelected for a second term. … It’s a kind of a transactional style of politics where he was trying to kind of gather together those interests that could get him reelected. I don’t think that’s a good way to govern. Because you’re doing favors for people, you’re building those relationships, but that’s not a vision for the city, you know? That’s not a vision of delivering for the people of Seattle. And so for me, I do want a second term, but I do not want to govern to win a second term.I want to govern to do the right thing, and if I’m lucky, that means that I will get a second term.

On restoring the longstanding nude beach at Denny Blaine Park, which Harrell repeatedly tried to shut down:

Yes, I do want to do this, and I want to work closely with Friends of Denny Blaine and others. I mean, there are some legitimate issues that need to be solved to make sure that the park is good for all the folks using it. But yeah, I would like to restore the park to its historic use as a queer nude beach.

Elections

Seattle Nice: Did Katie Wilson Win or Did Bruce Harrell Lose?

By Erica C. Barnett

Our latest podcast episode (subscribe and get a new one every week!) focuses on the mayor’s race—how Katie Wilson won it, why she won it, and how incumbent mayor Bruce Harrell tried very hard to keep her from winning it.

I kicked things off by talking about Harrell’s not-so-gracious concession speech and Q&A with reporters, in which he suggested baselessly that there were “anomalies” in King County Elections’ vote count and grumped at a reporter who asked, reasonably enough, if he understood what it was it was like to struggle with affordability in Seattle in 2025.

Harrell, who worked as a corporate attorney before being elected to the city council in 2007, told a reporter it was “offensive” to even ask that question, given that he spent his whole life suffering from “scars” such as having to share one bathroom in the Central District house his parents owned. (The fact that Harrell frequently brought up this fairly common annoyance with living in an older house as proof he relates to the present-day challenges of working people in Seattle says a lot about why he lost).

History probably won’t care about the fact that Harrell and his allies used tired misogynistic tropes to attack Wilson, painting her as a privileged, Oxford-educated princess who never worked a day in her life, but I do—especially since Harrell’s gendered attacks created the playbook for national right-wing media like Fox and the New York Post, which will probably never tire of calling her a hypocritical socialist who “lives off her parents’ money.” (If you’re not familiar with this trumped-up issue, Wilson’s parents helped her pay for day care temporarily so she could campaign).

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

Support PubliCola

Sandeep suggested it’s a bit hypocritical for left-leaning white people who “got on the identity train” a few years ago to “throw over the Black, Asian mayor” in favor of a white woman now; Harrell banged this drum at length during his campaign, suggesting that “Seattle’s Black community” monolithically supported him and his policies. And David asked whether I’m not a bit hypocritical for

defending Wilson, who has never worked in government, after criticizing the new city council voters elected in 2023, most of whom had little or no government experience. (This one didn’t feel correct to me—in general, council members don’t have much or any government experience—so I looked it up. Turns out: Nope! I criticized the incoming council cohort for their policy positions and the things they said about how local government works, which were often simplistic.)

Also, for some goddamn reason, we’re still debating whether Wilson promised to lower the price of pizza (she didn’t!)

Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in later this week for a special bonus episode.

Elections

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

By Erica C. Barnett

The voters have spoken: Katie Wilson will be the next Mayor of Seattle.

On Wednesday, incumbent mayor Bruce Harrell announced that he will deliver remarks to “the people of Seattle,” presumably a concession speech, tomorrow.

“We are tremendously grateful for everyone who has supported and guided our vision for the city of Seattle,” the Wilson campaign said in a statement. “This campaign was driven by a deep belief that we need to expand the table to include everyone in the decisions that impact their lives. That is what we will be working to do every day as we set up this new administration.”

I’m out of town, having assumed (ridiculously, it turns out) that the election would be over by now when I made my travel plans earlier this year. So you won’t be getting any live updates from Harrell’s speech. What I can say, assuming Harrell is conceding to Wilson, is that this race shouldn’t have been this close, given Wilson’s incredibly strong showing in the August primary (50.75 percent to Harrell’s 41.2 percent, with six other candidates on the ballot).

Unlike other progressive candidates on the Seattle ballot, Wilson actually lost ballot share, ending Wednesday’s count with just 50.19 percent of the vote to Harrell’s 49.48 percent—enough to win, but barely. Wilson’s fellow progressives Dionne Foster (incoming Position 9 city councilmember), Alexis Mercedes Rinck (the incumbent Position 8 councilmember) and Erika Evans (the incoming city attorney), in comparison, took a greater share of votes in the general election than the primary, demonstrating that the extraordinarily close mayoral election was due to factors specific to that election.

The primary factor that helped the unpopular mayor surge, in my view, was an effective negative campaign claiming that Wilson was too inexperienced to be mayor, a charge that for some reason didn’t stick to former mayors Charley Royer or Mike McGinn, neither of whom had previously held elective office. (McGinn, like Wilson, worked for a lefty nonprofit before becoming mayor; Royer was a TV journalist. While Royer served three terms, McGinn served just one and began Seattle’s long, since-unbroken string of one-term mayors.).

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

Support PubliCola

 

Misleading ads and mail suggested Wilson had never had a real job and was basically a privileged princess, a pretty openly misogynistic tactic Harrell compounded on the campaign trail, when he refused to address Wilson by her name, referring to his opponent instead as “she” and “her.” A KUOW story highlighting the fact that Wilson has received help from her parents paying for child care (which the story initially implied, incorrectly, was something they’d been doing for years), led to exaggerated and false claims that she was “living off her parents’ money.”

None of the stories about Wilson accepting help from her child’s grandparents noted that Harrell, 67, is worth at least $15 million and has been a very wealthy attorney for many decades. Then again, neither did Wilson—a pointed decision that helped Harrell march all over her and almost certainly reclaim some on-the-fence voters who picked Wilson or another progressive in the primary. Instead of hitting back at Harrell’s misstatements and hypocrisy, Wilson ran a generally positive campaign, focusing on her plans for the city instead of responding to her opponent’s attacks.

Unanswered attacks have a way of becoming de facto truth, and Wilson would probably have won on election night if she had reacted in kind. After all, Harrell’s own history includes many potential opportunities to go negative—or, as consultants say, to “contrast” their records.

But no matter—Wilson is ahead, as of this story, by 1,976 votes and by a 0.71-point margin, which is enough—and in the long run, people don’t tend to remember whether mayors have “mandates,” just which candidate won. “Mayor-elect Wilson” sounds pretty good to us.

Elections, Mayor Harrell

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

By Erica C. Barnett

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

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

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

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

Support PubliCola

 

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

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