1. Mayor Wilson’s communications office, which has seen a number of shakeups recently (including the recent firing of digital communications manager Amy Piñon and a series of temporary press secretaries), now has a permanent communications director for the first time since Wilson fired her original communications director, Seferiana Day, in June.
PubliCola first reported the new hires on Bluesky yesterday.
Wilson has also hired a new public safety advisor, South Seattle Emerald founder Marcus Harrison Green; Green will report to public safety director Alison Holcomb. (Green says he’s leaving journalism behind to take the gig.) And she has a new city council liaison, Amanda Pleasant-Brown, who was most recently the government relations supervisor for King County Metro.
The council relations position could be more crucial than the mundane title suggests. Wilson has struggled to build relationships with the legislative branch after a rocky start; as we’ve reported, the council felt sidelined and insulted when Wilson’s team failed to consult them on crucial shelter legislation and then tried to order them to pull the bills when they weren’t exactly what the mayor’s office wanted. The previous council liaison has been on extended medical leave since June.
Tara Lee, Wilson’s new communications director, most recently worked for Washington’s health insurance exchange and was previously the comms director for former Gov. Jay Inslee. Prior to that, she was the director of communications and outreach for the Washington Budget and Policy Center, the influential lefty economic think tank.
Wilson is also expected to announce a new press secretary soon. That person hasn’t signed a contract yet, so we’re not including their name here. We are nice, okay?
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2. Crystal Nicole Fincher, whose $58,000 strategic communications contract with the Wilson Administration wraps up this month, isn’t the only outside consultant Wilson has hired in recent months. And while the contracts themselves are all relatively small (especially compared to, say, the six-figure contract former mayor Harrell handed Tim Ceis to lobby Sound Transit before a crucial vote), their details reveal where the mayor and her team perceive gaps that her (until recently, fairly itinerant) staff can’t fill.
Robert Cruickshank, the Mariners-capped Instagram commentator and former Mike McGinn communications staffer, will receive $10,000 to write the mayor’s upcoming budget speech. along with “significant policy speeches on priority topics as assigned by the Communications Director,” according to his contract.
Another former mayoral staffer (for Greg Nickels), Marianne Bichsel, has a one-month contract “to provide strategic communications advice to City leadership and staff on emerging and sensitive issues.” The contract, for an initial $15,000 with a possible extension for $5,000 more, was signed on August 19 and was reportedly for crisis communications related to the fallout after the Bite of Seattle shooting. We’ve reached out to Bichsel and will update this post if we get any additional information.
As we’ve reported, local media and centrist political leaders have hammered at Wilson over her response to the shooting and decision to fire former police chief Shon Barnes, blaming her for decisions SPD made to withhold information from the public for hours after the shooting was over.
Oliver Miska, a political consultant and former campaign manager for 37th District state House candidate Jaelynn Scott, has reportedly also been hired to do social media work for the mayor’s office, although his firm does not appear to have an official contract yet.
The Management Action Center, a lefty leadership coaching firm based in Washington, D.C., has a $7,000 contract to “support a member(s) of the Mayor’s Office team in navigating leadership challenges, strengthening management skills, and developing practical strategies for real-time workplace situations” through biweekly coaching sessions.
The mayor’s office did not respond to our questions about her consultant roster or whether the mayor herself (or another staffer in her office) has been getting management lessons. We’ll update this post if we hear back.
1. King County is using what it calls an “innovative tool” to train 4,000 executive branch employees on how to prevent waste, fraud, and misuse of public dollars: A series of short videos in which an uncanny AI avatar, wearing a tech CEO-style quarter-zip fleece, recites scripts about various training topics in front of shelves filled with leather-bound books.
According to a King County spokesperson, the videos are part of a new training protocol the county instituted “as part of Executive Girmay Zahilay’s Better Government actions,” after an audit found potential fraud, waste, and abuse of funds in youth contracts overseen by the Department of Community and Human Services.
Usually, the AI speaks with a plummy British accent, but occasionally it speaks in other languages, like German, or in the American accent King County’s IT department chose for the training videos.
The King County spokesperson said the AI videos are based on an anti-fraud training DCHS launched in April, and said the content was generated by humans at DCHS, “in consultation with King County’s Finance and Business Operations Division.”
King County IT put together the videos using a company called Synthesia, which costs the county about $900 a year. According to the spokesperson, the IT department approved the use of the company under the county’s AI policy.
“King County embraces the use of innovative tools, including AI,” the spokesperson said. “The training went through multiple reviews internally to ensure accuracy, the AI-generated presenter has been disclosed to staff, and no prohibited County data was provided to the AI service.”
We think they dost protest a bit too much. Our question was, “Does DCHS believe this kind of AI talking head video is an effective training tool, and if so, why?”
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2. The Seattle Metro Chamber of Commerce released another batch of poll results on Thursday. (The first poll, done in collaboration with Challenge Seattle and released earlier this week, purported to show overwhelming support for police camera surveillance in Seattle neighborhoods). One poll question found that Mayor Katie Wilson’s approval rating has slipped 20 percentage points, to 37 percent; the other showed broad public support for a long list of potential public safety strategies and interventions.
Local media outlets interpreted the results as bad news for Wilson, which is certainly the case with her approval rating. But it’s worth noting, as my friend and colleague Marcus Harrison Green did on Bluesky, that approval ratings don’t exist in a vacuum: The same media that’s dutifully reporting on the mayor’s drop in support has also spent the last several weeks falling over themselves to blame Wilson for a delayed press conference after a shooting at the Bite of Seattle last month and suggest that she fired former police chief Shon Barnes on a baseless whim. (Marcus, citing his podcast co-host Nora Kenworthy, also pointed out that the backlash is transparently gendered, and I’ll add that it’s also ageist—no one would say Bruce Harrell had no right to fire his department heads or tell them what to do.)
As we’ve noted, Wilson had many pre-existing reasons for letting the police chief go—beyond his embarrassing explosion at a reporter who asked him a question, arguably a fireable offense in itself. And many in the mainstream press have done a disservice to their profession by failing to ask basic questions Barnes’ role in delaying his own department’s press conference while he waited to be briefed from his hotel room in Dallas. The press, as much as any official action or press release, create public opinion, and they’ve been working overtime to make Wilson look feckless, incompetent, and out of bounds.
The responses to the public safety questions, which the Chamber characterized as a sign of “growing concern among voters about public safety,” are not so much… that, as they are a sign that people continue to support a combination of punishment (arrests and jail) and services (treatment and housing). Although the Seattle Times (which ran the news under the headline “Seattle voters are done waiting on public safety, new poll finds”) was “staggered” by the fact that people like ideas like foot patrols and drug treatment, these concepts generally poll well, as do ideas like banning encampments near schools and in public parks.
None of the coverage I’ve seen added much context to the poll results. Context like: SPD has said it lacks the resources to do regular foot patrols , or the fact that the city already prohibits sleeping in parks. The wording of questions like these is both misleading (suggesting that the mayor could do these things but is refusing) and designed to elicit a positive response. They are, in other words, predictable. But to a mainstream press invested in promoting a narrative of “socialist failure” (Wilson, who’s overseen steady improvement in public safety and increased police hiring, is hardly Leon Trotsky), the results of a business poll are just more evidence the mayor is refusing to give voters what they want.
Mainstream media outlets and many Seattle City Councilmembers have expressed outrage over Mayor Katie Wilson’s decision to remove Shon Barnes as police chief after he confronted a reporter who asked him about my stories on Barnes’ frequent absences from Seattle. (Barnes, as I reported in 2025, rented an apartment here and regularly visited his family home in Chicago; he also attended frequent conferences, like the one he was attending when shooting broke out at Seattle Center on Sunday, July 26).
Critics have overwhelmingly suggested that Wilson made the decision to remove Barnes rashly, with no real justification other than his outsize reaction to the South Connor Nash’s question and the fact that he spends time out of town. A typical complaint came from the editorial board of the Seattle Times, which insinuated that Wilson fired the chief to create a “distraction” to hide her own incompetence, and not for any actual reason.
Wilson, as I pointed out on Seattle Nice last week, signed a binding settlement with Barnes (he got a total of $700,000) that almost certainly includes a mutual nondisparagement clause that prevents her from saying exactly why she asked him to resign. But Barnes was only police chief for 19 months, so the current collective shortsightedness about the controversies that arose during his tenure feels almost deliberate.
When Wilson came into office, Barnes’ future at SPD was very much in doubt, and questions about his performance as chief had not receded in the seven months since Wilson took office. But for those with short memories, here are just a few of the issues that had been swirling around Barnes prior to last week’s events.
No girls allowed: Although Barnes’ supporters touted the high percentage of female oficers at the department where he was previously chief, in Madison, WI, skeptics noted that the progress happened mostly before he took over. Under Barnes, SPD’s progress toward the “30 by 30” goal of having a 30 percent female recruit class by 2030 has stalled and even reversed.
In April 2025, for example, SPD had only managed to hire five women, compared to a total of 12 women in 2024. By the end of the year, the department had added just 12 more women to that total. Women accounted for just 10 percent of new police hires in 2026, a year when SPD spent millions of dollars on a macho ad campaign featuring burly, tattooed men fighting in a ring, male cops racing around on motorcycles and boats, and men busting down doors, SCUBA diving, and defusing bombs. The toxic culture at SPD preceded Barnes, but it persisted, and may have gotten worse, during his brief time in Seattle.
Anti-LGBTQ accusations: Not long after taking over the department, Barnes oversaw a dramatic crackdown on nude sunbathers at Denny-Blaine Park, a historic LGBTQ+friendly nude beach that former mayor Harrell previously tried to shut down by siting a playground there. (The planned children’s play area would have been funded by a wealthy neighbor and Harrell donor who has continued to campaign relentlessly against the people who use the beach.)
In a later tort claim, it would come out that Barnes’ chief of staff Alex Ricketts allegedly responded “we’re not here for the gays” when a top staffer raised concerns about the chief’s apparent indifference to Seattle’s LGBTQ+ residents.
Barnes also passed over a gay lieutenant who was a fixture in the Capitol Hill community and had been serving as acting captain of the East Precinct, Doug Raguso, in favor of an infamous officer named Mike Tietjen.
Tietjen’s name was synonymous with his misconduct during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the neighborhood, when he drove his SUV onto a sidewalk full of protesters, likening them to “cockroaches” as they ran out of his path. Tietjen was also disciplined for an incident that same year, in which he was among a group of officers who harassed a trans woman, asking if she “had a dick under” her skirt.
When PubliCola broke the news about Tietjen’s promotion and Raguso’s reassignment, Barnes launched an internal search to find out who had “leaked” the information, which was posted on SPD’s own social media. Barnes eventually replaced Tietjen—not with Raguso, but with Jim Britt, another straight white man. Raguso was reassigned to the department’s Real-Time Crime Center.
Under Barnes, SPD also badly blundered its response to a pro-LGBTQ counter-protest at an anti-trans event by a religious-right group at Cal Anderson Park on Capitol Hill. Instead of maintaining a distance (as they did at the much larger No Kings protests), police pepper-sprayed, tackled, and arrested counter-protesters, behaving—as a subsequent review by the city’s Office of Inspector General concluded—like security for the religious group, even referring to counter-protesters as “transtifa.”
SPD officers repeated the performance during a second event by the same group at City Hall, blocking off access to the public plaza to everyone except the anti-trans activist group and escorting the activists from place to place. At the same time, police on bikes mobilized repeatedly against a small group of counterprotesters, using their bikes as weapons and shields.
Discrimination lawsuits: Raguso, the former East Precinct acting captain, and detective Anna Fishel filed discrimination claims against SPD earlier this year, alleging the department denied them promotions because of their sexual orientations and, in Fishel’s case, her gender. Fishel, who had a young child, was the only woman up for promotion to sergeant; in her claim, she said Barnes refused to promote her in place and instead offered her an overnight shift she couldn’t take because she needed to be home with her daughter. The position went to a straight man.
An earlier tort claim, from two department veterans Barnes fired in 2025, also accused Barnes of retaliation and discrimination. Barnes fired Brian Maxey, the department’s chief operating officer, and Rebecca Boatright, SPD’s general counsel, after the two disagreed with some of his decisions, including an initiative to send embarrassing letters to men the department suspected of paying women for sex on Aurora. Barnes replaced Maxey with Sarah Smith, a staffer with a slim resume who had risen through the ranks at Harrell’s office.
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Alternative response stymied: Before Barnes came on board, the Seattle Police Officers Guild negotiated a generous contract with Harrell and the City Council that—in addition to giving officers huge raises—put limits on the ability of the CARE Team, a group of social workers that is supposed to respond to crisis calls that don’t require an armed response, to do its job. The restrictions prevent CARE from responding at homeless encampments, residences, businesses, or to calls where a person is using drugs or being “confrontational.”
The CARE Team has been expanded repeatedly, but can’t be dispatched even in situations where the contract’s restraints don’t apply unless a police sergeant agrees to let them go to a call.
Despite these restrictions, CARE Department Chief Amy Barden hoped to negotiate some wiggle room with Barnes that would allow her team to respond to 911 calls involving people in crisis. Instead, she said earlier this year, the constraints actually tightened under Barnes, to the point where CARE was told it couldn’t respond to someone having a mental health crisis in a QFC parking lot, because the person was technically on private property. The team has also been prohibited from responding to calls where a child is present, which Barnes said has resulted in a gender disparity in the team’s responses, since women are more likely to be accompanied by their kids.
Barnes appeared at times to reject the entire concept of allowing social workers to respond to mental health crisis calls, suggesting that every type of 911 call can easily escalate into violence. This contradicts national research showing that most 911 calls do not involve any crime and could be handled by someone other than a police officer. It’s also contrary to the city’s own policies on unarmed first response.
“I’ve been to calls before where it was ‘dementia,’ but when I got there, there was a gun stuck in my stomach,” Barnes said. “So it is unpredictable. … Just because we have a badge and a gun doesn’t mean that we should be relegated to certain types of calls.”
Bloated staff, big bonuses: As I reported exclusively last year, Barnes and two of his new chiefs, deputy chief (and now interim police chief) Andre Sayles and assistant chief Nicole Powell, took $50,000 bonuses that were created explicitly to recruit more trained rank-and-file police officers during a staffing shortage.
This $150,000 payout was on top of the $3,000 Barnes and his other deputy chief, Yvonne Underwood, took after Barnes hired new executive staff. Barnes got two $1,000 payouts for hiring Powell and Sayles, while Underwood got $1,000 for Sayles. These bonuses, like the $50,000 “lateral” hiring incentives, were explicitly created for SPD employees to recruit new rank-and-file police officers.
Sayles and Powell were just two of several new executive hires Barnes made when he started, expanding SPD’s command staff substantially at an additional ongoing cost of more than $1,000,000 a year. Those new positions included a second deputy chief (Sayles), a new executive director of crime and community harm reduction (Lee Hunt), a chief communications officer (Barbara DeLollis, and a chief of staff (Alex Ricketts). Ricketts, Hunt, and Sayles had worked with Barnes previously.
Ricketts was the only one of Barnes’ new executive hires that technically counted as a replacement; previous chief Adrian Diaz, who was appointed and fired by Harrell, appointed Jamie Tompkins to a job with the same title, but she was the first SPD chief of staff since 2001.
Barnes’ top staff got top perks to go with their top salaries, which in most cases topped $300,000. Hunt, for instance, got at least one month’s free stay at the four-star Arctic Club Hotel in downtown Seattle, at a cost of more than $6,000, while he looked for a place to live. And Barnes himself got a $60,000 relocation bonus to move to Seattle. As we’ve reported, Barnes kept an apartment here while he traveled back and forth to his permanent home in Chicago; under his settlement, he gets to keep that money.
Barnes presented this graph at community events, minus the Madison, WI branding.
Policy by buzzword: Barnes frequently touted two ideas he claimed were innovations, and featured them in his PowerPoint presentations to community meetings that were mostly attended by SPD and city staff. Both ideas faced criticism inside and outside the department as not particularly innovative or unique. “Stratfied policing” consisted of focusing on crime “hot spots” and focusing higher-ranked officers on more serious crimes, and “Seattle-centric policing” seemed to involve working with communities to come up with solutions to crime.
Although Barnes’ defenders have given him credit for reducing crime and recruiting more police to the city, both those trends are explained by other factors. Crime of all kinds is down in cities nationwide compared to the relative highs of the pandemic, so it’s unsurprising that Seattle’s crime rate has followed the national trend. And hiring spiked as soon as the police guild signed a new contract that guarantees brand-new officers a minimum salary of $126,000 after a six-month training period.
And, OK, all that travel: Not only did Barnes’ defenders treat Wilson’s decision as an out-of-nowhere shock, they also made light of his travel, even misrepresenting his time out of town as no different than that of previous police chiefs. On KUOW’s “Week In Review” last Friday, KIRO’s Angela Poe Russell and KUOW editor/reporter Catherine Smith ripped my coverage, calling me an “influencer” who “hung out a shingle” and called myself a “news person” (Poe) and asserting, “”It’s not quite fair to criticize him for that when other chiefs travel like that.” (Smith).
Smith’s co-bylined story said that according to an SPD spokesman, “Barnes’ level of travel is consistent with past chiefs of police.” Since that contradicted all of my own current and past reporting on the subject, I contacted the same spokesman. He told me he told KUOW that all police chiefs go to conferences held by groups like the International Association of Chiefs of Police, but that he never said Barnes’ overall travel, including his trips home to Chicago, was typical. That’s because it isn’t: While other police chiefs went to conferences, too, Barnes traveled more. For example, Barnes was out of town nearly 40 percent of the time during the 17 weeks for which SPD provided his schedule.
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!”
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.
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.
PubliCola first reported the new hires on Bluesky yesterday.
