Tag: Katie Wilson

homelessness, Mayor Wilson, Transportation

Wilson Issues Orders to Speed Up Transit and Shelter, Will Replace More Harrell Appointees

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson issued two executive order on Thursday. The first is aimed at speeding up the production of shelter in the run-up to this year’s World Cup games and beyond. The second will help speed up the city’s slowest bus, the 8, by finally painting a long-planned bus lane on Denny Way.

Wilson announced the orders at a meeting of her transition team at El Centro de la Raza on Beacon Hill.

More news is expected out of Wilson’s team in the next week, including the dismissals of several high-profile department heads appointed by her predecessor, Bruce Harrell.

City Light CEO Dawn Lindell, appointed in 2024, is out, internal sources tell PubliCola (no word on her replacement yet). So, we’ve heard, is interim Office of Labor Relations interim director Chase Munroe—a Harrell appointee who worked, on city time, on behalf of the Royal Esquire Club, a private men’s club with longstanding ties to Harrell. Adrienne Thompson, a onetime labor policy advisor to ex-mayor Jenny Durkan who applied for the labor relations in 2022, will reportedly be Munroe’s replacement as interim director.

Other departments that could see changes in the next week include the Office of Housing (currently headed by Maiko Winkler-Chin) and the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs (headed by Hamdi Mohamed, who’s also a Seattle Port Commissioner.)

Wilson’s first executive order, on homelessness, sets a deadline of March for a multi-department work group to “identify all possible financial incentives, permitting changes, and policy changes” that could help the city build new shelters and housing quickly. The group will also “identify City-owned property that could be used temporarily or permanently to support shelter and housing opportunities.”

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

Support PubliCola

The order also directs the city’s Office of Intergovernmental Relations to work with other governments to identify additional public land that could be used for shelter and housing, and directs the Human Services Department to identify existing shelter programs that have room for expansion.

Wilson has pledged to add 4,000 new shelter beds and housing units by the end of her term, with a short-term goal of adding 500 before the World Cup games here in June.

Wilson will have to find funding for the new shelter projects in the existing city budget. Last year, the city council set aside a little over $11 million to help address potential funding cuts from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, which had changed its guidelines for funding housing projects to emphasize short-term housing over the type of permanent housing projects that rely on HUD funding locally.

After a judge ruled that HUD couldn’t change its standards in the middle of a funding cycle, the department allowed the application process to move forward under the old criteria. HUD could still pull the rug out from under providers by refusing to fund projects next year, but if it doesn’t, that $11 million could be used to fund Wilson’s shelter push.

There’s also the 116-member Unified Care Team, which removes encampments and costs the city upward of $30 million a year. Although the council adopted a Rob Saka-sponsored amendment prohibiting Wilson from spending the UCT’s budget on other purposes, some creative reallocation could put the giant team to better use.

Wilson said she’s evaluating how the UCT prioritizes encampments for removal and may change them. As an interim step, Wilson halted a planned removal of an encampment in Ballard after meeting with encampment residents earlier this week; on Thursday, she said she wanted to gain an “understanding, from the perspective of folks who are living outside, what can we do to make the process of an encampment removal more comprehensible and just maximize the the opportunities for people to get into a better situation.”

Wilson’s second executive order directs the Seattle Department of Transportation to immediately paint a long-delayed bus lane on Denny Way, a change that will help the most infamously delayed bus in the city, Metro’s Route 8, be a little less late. Last year, under Harrell, SDOT rejected the bus lane, arguing that giving buses priority would make drivers late. Wilson said the bus lane would run, at a minimum, from Fifth Ave. to Fairview, the most congested section of the route.

“I know the feeling of waiting at the stop for the bus to come and it’s 30 minutes late or 40 minutes late,” Wilson said. “I know the feeling of sitting on the bus knowing that you could be walking up that hill faster than that bus is going.”

Mayor Wilson

Mayor Wilson’s Team Grows With Addition of High-Profile Reformers and Housing Leaders

By Erica C. Barnett

New Mayor Katie Wilson is filling out her org chart with some high-profile names, starting with two longtime advocates for civil rights and criminal justice policy reform, according to multiple sources familiar with the new additions.

Alison Holcomb, a longtime ACLU-WA policy director who’s currently deputy general counsel to King County Executive Girmay Zahilay, will be in charge of public safety initiatives—a marked change from ex-mayor Bruce Harrell’s public safety director, Natalie Walton-Anderson, who came straight from city attorney Ann Davison’s office and echoed ex-deputy mayor Tim Burgess’ support for more punitive approaches to crimes related to drug use and poverty.

The second advocate is Lisa Daugaard, the co-executive director of Purpose Dignity Action and the MacArthur Award-winning founder of the LEAD diversion program. Daugaard, who has been advising Wilson as a member of her transition team, will step in on an interim basis to advise Wilson on public safety and homelessness. Jon Grant, the longtime chief strategy officer at the Low-Income Housing Institute and a two-time Seattle City Council candidate, will be Wilson’s senior policy advisor on homelessness.

Holcomb will be working under Mark Ellerbrook, a longtime manager and division director at King County’s housing and community development division who is currently King County Metro’s capital division; Ellerbrook, in turn, will report to the mayor’s new Director of Departments, Jen Chan.

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

Support PubliCola

 

Other new hires include Esther Handy, the former City Council central staff director, who will serve as a policy advisor, and Alex Hudson, the current director of Commute Seattle and former director of the Transportation Choices Coalition who ran for City Council in 2023, losing the District 3 race to Joy Hollingsworth. Sejal Parikh, a longtime labor leader who previously worked at the city chief of staff for former City Couniclmember Teresa Mosqueda, will be Wilson’s deputy policy director.

Wilson has announced she is keeping a number of department heads, including Human Services Department director Tanya Kim and Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes, while jettisoning others, such as Seattle Department of Transportation Director Adiam Emery. One department director whose job remains up in the air is Office of Housing Director Maiko Winkler-Chin, whose supporters reportedly sent a flurry of emails to Wilson’s team over the past few days asking the new mayor to retain her.

A representative from Wilson’s office confirmed the names of the new hires. This is a developing story and will be updated when we have more information about individual positions.

Elections, Mayor Wilson

Katie Wilson Wants a City Where People Can Do More than Just Survive

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson has frequently been compared to fellow Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, the new mayor of New York City. But as one supporter observed at City Hall on Friday, her inauguration ceremony was almost intimate in comparison to Mamdani’s star-studded event. Surrounded by supporters in yellow Transit Riders Union shirts, Wilson sat, beaming, while listening to speakers who included an organizer for the Nickelsville homeless encampment and a Somali American health services researcher who helped organize for free youth transit passes as a student attending Rainier Beach High School.

The Nickelsville organizer, Jarvis Capucion, noted that he hadn’t been inside the mayor’s office since 2015, when then-mayor Ed Murray declared a state of emergency on homelessness.

The audience was packed with people who aren’t regular fixtures at city hall (yet!); I’ve never seen so many young people in the building for anything other than a protest or public comment opposing some conservative action or budget cut proposed by the City Council. A number of city department heads and their deputies sat, mostly stone-faced, on the indoor steps leading up to council chambers, but the audience on the lobby floor consisted largely of young Wilson supporters, longtime activists, and Black and brown Seattle leaders who stuck their necks out to support Wilson even when ex-mayor Bruce Harrell laid on intense pressure to back him or else.

When Cynthia Green, an 80-year Seattle resident who spoke shortly before Wilson took the stage, said “Seattle can hope again,” it wasn’t just about the fact that Seattle voters elected Wilson, a grassroots organizer accustomed to being underestimated, as mayor of Seattle. Green’s speech was also about what Seattle voters rejected—a mayor who closed out a debate in October by telling the people of Seattle, “This is not the time for hope. Passion and great ideas and inexperience is just not going to get us there.”

Harrell’s message was that voters should accept what they already had—a middling mayor who failed to deliver on his promises while insisting that critics and the press had no right to “question the compassion of this administration”—instead of hoping for equitable prosperity and lasting solutions to challenges like homelessness, addiction, and the rising cost of housing.

“Today we swear in a mayor who did not come from the loudest rooms or the richest donors, but from the long work of organizing, listening and standing with people who are usually told to wait their turn,” Green said. When her family decided to endorse Wilson over Harrell, “We were cautioned to be sensible, urged to temper our hopes and accept what was deemed realistic. But history has taught us this: Realism, accepting a situation as it is—this is often the language of those who have grown comfortable living with inequity and who would prefer others to do the same.

Wilson, Green continued, has “assembled a team that reflects the true Seattle—multiracial, multi-generational, rooted in community, rich in lived wisdom. People who understand that loudness is not clarity, that ego is not leadership, that passion is not weakness.” When she said “ego is not leadership,” Green had to pause for applause.

Wilson’s own speech, which she described as “my last unvetted speech” before she takes office in earnest, focused on a goal I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a Seattle mayor articulate—the role of government in making it possible for people to live full lives, not just solve “the math problem of how a household can make its revenue exceed its expenses.” (Talk about hope!)

“I want to live in a city that honors the things you do when you’re not making money… the time that you spend with your kid at the playground, caring for a sick friend or an elderly relative,” Wilson said. “A city that values the pursuits that create beauty and community, whether or not they ever turn into careers. A city that thinks you should have time to read a book and lay on the grass staring up at the clouds.”

“Because we need bread, but we need roses too. We deserve roses.”

A number of people I spoke to afterward admitted getting misty at this line, and I did too. (What a change from Mayor Football References with his sports name-dropping!) I’m not being excessively idealistic here. Being mayor is (or should be) hard, grinding work, and success requires keeping a daily focus on long-term policy goals amid economic and political pressure. Every mayor has failures and the job requires compromises that inevitably disappoint the most dedicated supporters, particularly if your supporters are progressive and your compromises are with the centrist majority that has always called the shots in Seattle. And every mayor deserves, and should expect, media scrutiny, including (perhaps especially) from those of us who share their aspirations for the city. (Please keep ignoring the dipshits, though!)

But one thing our last two mayors lost sight of, if they ever considered it, is that real success requires a commitment to core principles. Progress doesn’t happen by papering over problems and fudging statistics to paint a picture of success. (Ed Murray’s name is often invoked because of the city’s failure to treat homelessness as a true emergency, but it was his two successors, Durkan and Harrell, who spent their terms twisting the numbers to claim constant progress on homelessness, even amid an obviously growing crisis.) Wilson’s loftiest goal may be turning Seattle into a place where ordinary people can survive on one job and thrive by reading books in the park or writing poetry just because they want to. That’s a refreshingly hopeful aspiration, one Wilson should keep front of mind as she navigates the challenges of being Seattle’s 58th mayor.

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.