Tag: Katie Wilson

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.

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.

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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!