Tag: Katie Wilson

Mayor Harrell, Mayor Wilson

As Mayor, Katie Wilson Doesn’t Travel Much. When She Does, You’ll Find Her in 23F.
Noah Wulf, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Erica C. Barnett

For more than a year, records have been trickling into my inbox documenting the astronomical amounts former mayor Bruce Harrell spent to travel in luxury (along with his wife Joanne) while representing the city around the world. One example that I haven’t previously reported: The Harrells bought two business class tickets to Tokyo, at a cost of $10,000 each, for a sister-city meeting in Kobe, Japan in 2023, bringing a large entourage of city staffers with them. (The staffers sat in coach).

The Harrells took another trip to Japan the following year, spending a comparably thrifty $13,000, as I reported late last year. The Harrells even flew in style for short domestic hops—on the high end, they spent $3,500 for two first-class seats to attend two-day event in Columbus, Ohio, while tickets to Washington, D.C. for a three-day event were more than $5,200.

The Harrells paid for the difference between economy and luxury travel, which also included five-star hotels, out of their own deep pockets. Reading over the their travel records in another batch of documents that arrived earlier this year made me wonder: Does Harrell’s successor, Katie Wilson, also travel first-class?

I requested Wilson’s travel records in April, which, her staff confirmed this week, represent all the trips she’s taken so far this year. The records show two trips—a four-day trip to Washington, D.C. for the US Conference of Mayors in January ($600 for one round-trip coach seat on Alaska, plus $332 a night for a standard room at the Marriott), and a three-day trip to Stanford in April ($463 for a round-trip ticket on Alaska, which Wilson’s staff said was reimbursed by the university.)

PubliCola doesn’t have travel records for Harrell’s first year, but during a comparable period—January to mid-July—in 2023, Harrell took at least 10 trips, including international trips to Japan and Norway, totaling at least 51 days out of Seattle over a period of 28 weeks.

When I asked Wilson why she hasn’t taken advantage of her status as mayor to travel in first class, or even comfort economy (Wilson’s seats were all well behind the exit rows economy), she paused, looked at me like I was nuts, and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever flown first class in my life.” I prodded, asking her if she had a miles program or anything. “Honestly, a lot of the time I’ve lived in Seattle—like, we’d go back and visit my parents or something, but we didn’t do a lot of traveling because we didn’t have money.”

So, would the longtime labor organizer just feel weird traveling in first class, as previous mayors have done? Wilson paused again. “I mean…. Why? I don’t—like, why?.” After I awkwardly tried to change the subject, Wilson interjected, “It’s not something I’ve ever considered.”

Wilson does enjoy a window seat and, like me, doesn’t understand why people put the shade down. “I mean—you’re 40,000 feet in the air. Look around!”

Affordability, City Council, housing, Mayor Wilson, Police, Taxes

Mayor Katie Wilson Says She’s “Doing a Reset” on Housing Agenda, “Very Hopeful” About Police Chief

In Part 2 of our interview, the mayor talks about the police chief and potential cuts to SPD’s budget, the future of the city’s CARE alternative first responder team, and what’s happening with her affordability agenda.

By Erica C. Barnett

PubliCola sat down this week with Mayor Katie Wilson to talk about how her agenda is going at six months in. This is Part 2 of our interview, which took place at City Hall on Tuesday morning. Read Part 1 here.

PubliCola (ECB):  Let’s shift gears to SPD. You decided to keep Police Chief Shon Barnes when you came in. You said you’re going to evaluate his performance and decide how to proceed. Have you made any progress on that evaluation?

Mayor Katie Wilson (KW): I am very hopeful about the relationship that Chief Barnes and I are building, and the work that we’re doing with Chief Barnes and SPD, especially around neighborhood of policing models.

ECB: So are you planning to keep him on as chief?

KW: I’m not making an announcement right now. [Pauses]. Yes, I’m retaining Chief Barnes, and we’re working on a number of things.

ECB: Are you concerned by any of the stuff that has come out on PubliCola and elsewhere about anti-LGBTQ statements and actions by Barnes, his deputies, and SPD officers, and the culture of SPD in general?

KW: Absolutely. And that’s one of the things that we’re working on. I think obviously SPD is a complicated department with a complicated history, and I also don’t think that leadership change changes that. So there’s really deep work that needs to happen within the department, and I’m confident that through a partnership with Chief Barnes, we can make some progress.

ECB: Barnes has said a few times now that he plans to keep hiring at the same pace even though the department’s own budget director said SPD will have to slow down hiring to stay within the budget. Councilmember Bob Kettle has said the same thing. At the same time, I’ve heard that you asked SPD to come up with $20 million in cuts. What would that level of cut look like, and what will you do if the police chief disagrees and keeps hiring?

KW: I’m the mayor. This is ultimately direction that’s coming from my office. We have not directed SPD to slow hiring at this point, and we are working with them very closely with the aim of making sure that they remain within their budget for this year,

ECB: And will there be budget cuts to SPD next year?

KW: We have asked all departments, including SPD, to model cuts, and we’re in that deliberative budget process. There are many things, many variables, but we have asked all departments to model cuts, anticipating that all departments will need to take some kind of cut.

ECB: If you propose an actual cut, conservative media like KOMO are going to scream that you’re defunding the police. How likely is it that we’ll actually see cuts to the police budget?

KW: That’s not just up to me, that’s also up to the council. Big picture, we’re in a very challenging budget situation, where we’re facing a shortfall of $175 million. Plus, JumpStart [tax] revenues are certainly not increasing significantly. And so we’ll have to make some hard decisions across the board.

“It is an option to dig deeper into JumpStart, which means basically cuts to affordable housing. Capital gains tax is an option, but it’s not something where we would see revenue in the short term.  Obviously, raising JumpStart is also an option. We’re still working on other progressive revenue ideas, but we don’t have a silver bullet.”

ECB: Your fire district proposal would have really helped with the budget. Obviously, it’s not happening. So, what else is left? Raiding JumpStart even more?

KW: I mean, yes, it is an option to dig deeper into JumpStart, which means basically cuts to affordable housing. Capital gains tax is an option, but it’s not something where we would see revenue in the short term. It might take a couple years to get that up and running, so that doesn’t [help with] next year’s budget. Obviously, raising JumpStart is also an option. We’re still working on other progressive revenue ideas, but we don’t have a silver bullet.

For me, the bottom line is, we are going to be trying to preserve programs and services that directly serve Seattle residents, that contribute to a city that’s affordable and livable, and support our most vulnerable communities. So there’s definitely values guiding where we might choose to cut. And we’re also in the process now of talking with each council member to understand what their priorities are, the things that they would absolutely want to be preserved, so that we can try to transmit a budget where they see their priorities represented.

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ECB: What’s going to happen to the CARE Team [whose authority was sharply curtailed in the last police contract]? Do you see a way forward for them?

KW: Obviously there are constraints in the police contract, but we’ve been working with the CARE Team and with SPD, and there’s plenty of work out there. There’s plenty of people in crisis, so it’s really a matter of how do we get the CARE team to a place where they’re serving people in crisis. And I think there’s a lot of opportunities to do that, that may be in some cases outside of the 911 dispatch system. So we’re working on making sure that we’re fully utilizing that team.

ECB: CARE is integrated into the 911 dispatch system [911 is known as the CARE Department]—what would it mean to take them out of that system?

KW: I haven’t heard like the latest on what that looks like, but I know that we’ve been working with them and SPD, to try to make sure that they’re not sitting idle.

ECB: If you talk to [CARE Department Chief] Amy Barden, she would say, ‘We’re supposed to be a co-equal department with the fire and police departments, and we can’t go into parking lots‘ [because of the contract].

KW: Yeah, I’m, very, very aware.

ECB: You’ve announced legislation that would ban rental junk fees, and you decided not to move forward with proposals to change the three-day notice requirement for evictions and overturn the roommate law. You’ve also delayed changes to the Mandatory Housing Affordability program that developers say they need to move housing projects forward. The comprehensive plan update is delayed by a lawsuit, which is outside your control. Is there anything else moving forward on affordability this year?

KW: There’s so many pieces to housing. I ran on affordable and abundant housing, and the things that you need to do to advance it are legion. I think what I realized is that for a lot of constituencies on the outside, they want to see more of a vision on housing, and when we’re moving forward with just one piece, then people look at that and they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s your vision on housing, but what about this, what about this, what about this?’ And it kind of accentuates that feeling of, ‘Why weren’t we brought in?’

“In this very difficult budget process, I think the fight is going to be over how to retain funding for existing food security programs at the city. There was a lot that was added in the last budget cycle as one-time, like the expansion of Fresh Bucks, so we are going to have to figure out in this budget how to maintain those.”

So I think what we’re trying to do here is a little bit of a reset, where we can set a table, bring people in, and look at what is it going to take to accelerate housing, from the private market all the way to affordable housing and permanent support housing. Including people’s concerns about displacement, which are totally valid. We’re going to keep it a tight process, but what I’m hoping will come out of that is a little bit more of, ‘Here’s our work plan on housing for the next four years.’ And so that is a process that we’re about to embark on that I think will give us a more coherent vision for housing affordability.

When I think about affordability, housing is core, obviously, but food is a big part of this. Free preschool lunches—I think that’s a really impactful investment that we’re making. Honestly, in this very difficult budget process, I think the fight is going to be over how to retain funding for existing food security programs at the city. There was a lot that was added in the last budget cycle as one-time, like the expansion of Fresh Bucks, so we are going to have to figure out in this budget how to maintain those.

Obviously, the FEPP levy implementation included significant expansions of subsidized child care and preschool program that are certainly affordability investments. I think there’s a larger conversation around child care, which is also not just about subsidy, but also about the supply side, and what it takes to open and operate childcare. We’re working with the business community on what they’re doing to facilitate childcare. That’s a conversation that I think we’re going to be teeing up before the end of the year, but it’s not going to result in policy before the end of the year.

ECB The best thing about the World Cup for me, and I think for a lot of people, has been being able to just walk around in Pioneer Square without cars, and there’s food trucks and there’s excitement and there’s people, and it’s just a vibe. So have you given any thought to taking some of the lessons from that experience, like pedestrianizing the streets, or allowing food trucks, or any of the other things that have made downtown an exciting place to be over these past few weeks?

KW: I think that the last few weeks in Seattle have been amazing, and people are discovering their city anew, and we’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how do we keep that momentum going, how do we do more of this? Obviously, I’m a big fan of pedestrianizing spaces, and I think that the vitality of our city depends on having of people-centered spaces where people can go and hang out and go to restaurants and all that. So yeah, we’re thinking about how we can carry that forward, and I don’t have any specific plans to announce right now, but we’re working on that.

City Council, homelessness, Mayor Wilson, Media

Mayor Katie Wilson at Six Months In: “Incredibly Proud of What We’re Accomplishing”

The mayor talks about her shelter plan, encampment sweeps, why news vouchers aren’t happening this year, and more.

By Erica C. Barnett

PubliCola sat down this week with Mayor Katie Wilson to talk about how her agenda is going at six months in, what she’s learned from the setbacks and conflicts she’s encountered (like early, still-reverberating missteps with the city council), and how she plans to deal with this year’s $175 million budget deficit. Will the city’s shelter expansion continue? Will Wilson propose cutting the police budget? Can the schism between the mayor and the city council be repaired? We discussed all of that and much more on Tuesday morning in Wilson’s office at City Hall.

This is Part 1 of our interview; look for Part 2 later today.

PubliCola (ECB): I want to start with a big-picture question: You’re a little over six months in. What’s the most surprising challenge that you’ve encountered so far?

Mayor Katie Wilson (KW): I hate questions like this!

ECB: I’m not giving you a ‘Rate yourself from A to F’ question! It’s your first time in elected office—I just want to know what has surprised you so far.

KW: I’m not sure how surprising this is, but one thing that I’ve been reflecting on is just the tension—and I think that this is a tension which is maybe unique to people coming in with an ambitious progressive left agenda— the tension between wanting to get things done fast, wanting to get results, wanting to cut through the Seattle process, and people and organizations and communities that are like, ‘wait, wait, ask me.’ It’s not surprising in retrospect, but I just didn’t have a lot of time to think about it coming in. It was more like, ‘Okay, we’re here, what can we do?’

ECB: There was some tension with the city council, obviously, early on, like after things kind of hit a wall on your shelter legislation. Have you recalibrated at all?

KW: Well, I wouldn’t say we hit a wall on the shelter stuff at all.

ECB: I’m talking specifically about the conflict with the council—

KW: I mean, we’ve moved on since then, and we got our three pieces of legislation through, right?

ECB: I’m curious if there’s anything that you learned from that experience.

KW: Well, I certainly think that coming in, setting up a new mayoral administration, you’re bringing in 40-some people, assembling a new office, figuring out how to organize yourselves, and so we definitely were slow to staff and figure out our council relations. And so that that was a learning process. We definitely made some missteps, and in retrospect, should have put a lot more focus on that at the outset—[figuring out] what we needed to do in order to build a really good relationship with each council office.

Some of the shelter thing, I think, was that tension between ‘we need this stuff to happen, so let’s just send it down,’ the urgency of trying to start standing up shelter, and not having an entirely thorough understanding—or more, just not having had time to establish our council relations strategy in a really good way. So I think, in retrospect, we did that poorly, and certainly we’re learning from that and trying to try and do better.

“It’s a tension within myself, as someone who’s coming in from an organizing background, wanting to shake things up and get things done. But also, in order to do that in a way that works and that’s sustainable, you actually need to know how the city works. You need to not burn things down in a bad way.”

ECB: Without getting too philosophical, do you think that some of the growing pains—I can feel you getting ready to disagree with the term ‘growing pains,’ but I think there have been growing pains—

KW: I’m not gonna argue that term. I mean, look, I’ve never been the mayor before, and I think anyone coming into this job, even having been an elected official, even having had previous experience as the executive director of an organization, there’s gonna be a steep learning curve. There’s nothing like being the mayor of a major city—just the pace and the number of things coming at you.

ECB: There seems to be a tension between people in your administration who are government veterans, who are like, ‘This is how the process works, and this is what you do, and this is how you compromise in advance so you can get things through’—and then people who worked on your campaign, who are saying ‘We were elected to do these things, we need to do them fast. How is that tension playing out, and is it causing problems?

KW: There is a tension, and I think it’s a productive tension and an inevitable tension. And it’s a tension within myself, as someone who’s coming in from an organizing background, wanting to shake things up and get things done. But also, in order to do that in a way that works and that’s sustainable, you actually need to know how the city works. You need to not burn things down in a bad way. And so, yeah, that tension exists within my office, and I think that’s healthy, and that’s I think why ultimately we’re going to be successful.

And I’m really proud of the things that we’ve accomplished in these first six months. We’ve had a lot of headwinds. We came in with ICE scares, and we had to stand up our federal response work really fast. We moved $4 million out to the community. We had to immediately figure out the library levy and transmit that to council. Our [Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise levy] implementation got free school meals, which was not easy. (After our interview on Tuesday, City Council President Joy Hollingsworth introduced an amendment to the that would delay universal free meals and use the funding instead on vouchers for kids from low-income families to get meals on weekends and holidays during the school year).

We got the Graham Street Station to affordability on Sound Transit. We’ve transmitted a Seattle Transit Measure package that will expand transit at a time when many jurisdictions in the country are pulling back on public transit, when gas is many dollars a gallon. We’re painting bus lanes on Denny. We got our rapid shelter expansion work off the ground. We’ve opened with one big new shelter, which has been key to the success of the Pioneer Square efforts that [Purpose Dignity Action] and others have led [during the World Cup]. And we have a number of additional shelters that are going to be opening up in over the course of the rest of this year.  Obviously, we’ve had to deal with the KCRHA and everything going on there. We launched Taller, Denser, Faster. We transmitted [rental] junk fee legislation, and you know what, we’re the most successful World Cup host city in America.

We are learning a lot, and obviously, there are things that, in hindsight, we could have done better, and are going to do better moving forward, but I’m incredibly proud of what we’re accomplishing.

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ECB: News vouchers [a funding mechanism for local news] are being pushed to next year. Can you tell me why?

KW: I am very, very excited to advance these vouchers, or News Notes. [But] we are looking ahead to a very challenging budget cycle. And we needed more time and attention to work on the policy than we thought we were going to be able to carve out in the next few months, because a lot of energy right now is going into figuring out the budget.

We need to figure out how to fund it, and there’s obviously a few different ways we can do that. We could send a small levy to the ballot, or we could try to find funding within the existing city budget. We couldn’t have gotten the policy ready in time to put a measure on the ballot this November, even if we wanted to, and it also seems like a hard narrative when you’re in the middle of cutting lots of things. So we’ll get there, but it just wasn’t in the cards [this year].

“Politically, to be like ‘We are stopping all sweeps until we have the shelter—the backlash that that would cause both among constituents and among most of my council colleagues would be such that I think we would lose the ability to actually do our shelter work.”

 ECB: You’ve taken some heat in the press for not hitting your goal of 500 new shelter beds by the World Cup. What have some of the unanticipated roadblocks been? I know that you said that goal is aspirational, but we’re at 165 or so in July.

KW: I don’t want to project exactly where we’re going to be by the end of this year, but we’re chugging away. I think there’s a question of, does it make sense to have a big number goal that then you don’t meet, and then people are like, ‘Oh, you failed.’ But we’ve already opened many times the net shelter that the last administration opened in four years.

Putting that goal out there did really give us something to focus toward, and I can see the immense amount of work that has gone on with our interdepartmental team, and all the city departments—they got together and they just hashed it out, like, ‘how do we make this happen faster, how do we make this happen more efficiently?’ And then we were able to rally not just our service provider partners, but philanthropic contributions, and so that part of it has been such a success.

We know what works. People who are really hard to serve, we can get them inside with support, and that new shelter that we opened was instrumental to the success of [the PDA’s Pioneer Square] project, and so now we’re thinking about, how do we replicate this.

ECB: The Unified Care Team, by all accounts, is doing at least as many encampment sweeps with no notice as they ever have—maybe more. I don’t think you came in wanting to be the sweeps mayor, but in some ways you are. What would you say to supporters who are disappointed that you’re still sweeping people without offering shelter and services?

KW:  I think we’re trying to strike a balance here, where the situation you’re trying to get to is one where we have shelter, we have housing, where we’re able to resolve encampments by getting people into that shelter and housing, and that is what opening up these new shelters is going to allow us to do at a much larger scale. And it is important—and I said this during the campaign—that we are maintaining high-priority public spaces for their intended uses, whether that’s a park or a sidewalk.

So there’s that answer, and then there’s also a political answer of doing this in a way that builds political will to do more. Leaving aside the question of the impacts of an encampment removal or sweep versus leaving an encampment there, leaving aside the question of how that affects people’s lives—politically, to be like ‘We are stopping all sweeps until we have the shelter, the backlash that that would cause both among constituents and among most of my council colleagues would be such that I think we would lose the ability to actually do our shelter work.

We are actively working on improving the operations of the UCT in order to get better outcomes for people living in encampments. Months ago, I asked the UCT to come up with recommendations from their experience of how they could operate differently to get better outcomes, and we’re working through those recommendations now. So we are planning to make some changes to how the UCT operates, especially as we start opening up new shelter, to try to shift that model.

ECB: I know a lot of decisions about KCRHA are in the future, so here’s a short term question about something you do have control over over. Should Kelly Kennison continue to be the leader of KCRHA??

KW: I think stability is really important. We’ve taken the steps outlined in the press conference to embed outside financial consultants, and we’re really looking at what do we need to do to make the strongest possible application for [federal Continuum of Care funds, and I think continuity of leadership is really important.

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.”

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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.

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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.