Tag: King County Council

homelessness, King County

County Council Launches Action to Address Homelessness Authority’s Financial Issues

By Erica C. Barnett

The King County will take up legislation from Councilmember Jorge Barón this afternoon that directs the King County Executive’s office to take two concrete steps toward addressing the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s financial issues, which have led local elected officials to start discussing a plan for “winding down” the agency. Shutting the KCRHA down would require either the Seattle City Council or the King County Council to adopt a motion to terminate an interlocal agreement between the city and county, triggering a dissolution process that must last at least one year.

Barón’s motion, co-sponsored by Rod Dembowski and Steffanie Fain, asks King County Executive Girmay Zahilay to conduct an assessment of the KCRHA’s forthcoming “corrective action” plan responding the issues identified in a recent forensic audit, and produce a report on “whether the county should continue, amend, or terminate its participation” in the interlocal agreement that created KCRHA.

The legislation sets a June 15 deadline for the briefing, which will cover the corrective plan (due May 23) and options for covering the KCRHA’s shortfall. The longer report, which the legislation says should include an outline for how to “transition contracts and activities currently managed or carried out by the authority,” is due August 1, a few weeks before the council is set to take up a separate proposal, sponsored by Dembowski and Reagan Dunn, to start the process of dissolving the homelessness agency.

“We need to be very thoughtful about this,” Barón said. “We don’t want to make the situation worse by trying to do something quickly and without a lot of thought for the people on the street and those who are getting services right now.”

Talking to PubliCola last week, Dembowski said he considers the KCRHA “a failed agency, by design and also in its implementation. … I don’t see the necessity or value of having the KCRHA continue.” But, Dembowski added, he wants to dismantle the agency “in an orderly way.”

Barón’s proposal comes in response to a forensic financial review that found the KCRHA had a growing negative balance, could not account for at least $8 million of its budget, and has few internal controls over its own budget and finances. A little over a week ago, the KCRHA’s governing board (on which Barón sits) learned from the auditors that just getting KCRHA’s finances to a baseline standard could cost millions of dollars and take years.

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There appears to be little enthusiasm for that option. While Dembowski (along with Seattle City Councilmember Maritza Rivera) has been the most vocal proponent for shutting down KCRHA as quickly as possible, his isn’t the only voice of resignation. County Councilmember Claudia Balducci, a former member of the KCRHA’s governing board, told PubliCola last week, “I think it’s really time to figure out a different path forward. It’s time to admit this isn’t working.”

But Barón told PubliCola the process can’t move forward until after the county know exactly what’s involved in fixing the agency’s financial issues, determine how much it will cost the city and county to pay down the agency’s overspending and debt, and he figure out how to handle the $200 million or so in homeless service contracts the KCRHA administers, most of them funded by the city and county.

If the KCRHA loses its authority to administer contracts, some have suggested that it could serve as a regional body that brings Seattle, King County, and suburban cities together to coordinate regional homelessness policy, while Seattle and King County resume control of homelessness contracts (something Seattle has already started doing with Mayor Katie Wilson’s shelter push).

Barón was cautious when asked what the future of the KCRHA might look like. I don’t want to say this is the end or that it definitely is headed in that direction, because KCRHA hasn’t had a chance to respond to the evaluation yet” or present its corective action plan, Barón said. “For me, the question is, is that where we want to spend resources, or do we want to put those resources in a transition? I am not prepared to make that decision now.”

Whatever the county and city decide about the future of the regional homelessness agency, Barón said they’re going to have to figure out how to pay for any funds the KCRHA can’t account for, including overspending and the interest on loans it took out with the county. “Both of us were funders and I think there should be equitable and fair distribution of responsibility for those issues,” Barón said.

 

City Council, immigration, Jails, King County

As City and County Consider Banning New ICE Facilities, Local Jails Are Exempted from Seattle’s Ban
Alexis Mercedes Rinck (l) and Teresa Mosqueda (r)

By Erica C. Barnett

City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck’s proposed legislation to bar new detention centers in Seattle, originally introduced in February, has been delayed and amended to accommodate other council members’ concerns about prohibiting new local jails even temporarily, as the original legislation would have done. The new version of the bill, which would explicitly exempt jails from the moratorium, went up online yesterday.

A brief recap: On February 13, Rinck announced legislation that would ban new detention centers, as well as jails, in the city of Seattle for one year. The bill, announced in tandem with King County Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda’s similar legislation prohibiting detention centers in unincorporated King County for a year. Both proposals contains an emergency clause to illustrate the urgency of passing the ban; in December, ICE quietly posted a solicitation for contractors to build a new 1,635-bed detention facility in the Seattle area.

Legally, because of the Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution, federal law trumps state law—meaning that ICE, putatively operating in compliance with federal law, can violate any or all of the local and state laws blue cities and states put in their way. But laws like regional bans on detention facilities—and other anti-ICE legislation, including an executive order from Mayor Katie Wilson barring ICE from using city property  and a proposal from Mosqueda that will have the same effect for county land—can create friction, Rinck said.

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“We still will have a law on the books, and if they try to challenge our decision, we will see them in court over this,” Rinck said. “It does force a conversation.”

Both bills are based on local land use regulations. They argue that any new detention center could have major impacts on “water, sewage and wastewater, transportation and parking, public safety, and public health” and that a moratorium would provide time to create permanent legislation on detention centers.

“Here at the county, we have explicit authority in our statute to ensure that land is being used in the public’s interest,” Mosqueda said. “Any detention center in King County is going to not only disrupt the local community, but it goes counter to King County’s interests in making sure that we’re promoting safety and well-being.”

Both bills are classified as “emergency” legislation, allowing them to move forward without the usual committee process. On both councils, emergency legislation requires seven of nine votes to pass—which gets us back to why Rinck’s proposal exempts jails from the one-year moratorium while Mosqueda’s does not.

According to multiple city council sources, at least two council members indicated that they would vote against Rinck’s proposal if jails were included in the ban, even though King County has no current plans to build a new jail in Seattle, or anywhere, in the near future. Banning new jails for a year could create an impression that centrist council members who will be up for election next year, including Maritza Rivera and Bob Kettle, are soft on crime.

Rinck can afford to lose two votes, but not three, and several other council members’ votes can be unpredictable when it comes to legislation perceived as “progressive,” as any legislation proposed by Rinck, one of the council’s most progressive members, inevitably is.

Kettle, the chair of the council’s public safety committee, did not respond to questions PubliCola sent on Monday.

Mosqueda said on Tuesday morning that no one on the council had raised an issue about the inclusion of new jails in the ban, noting that her legislation does explicitly allow renovations at Echo Glen, a youth detention center in unincorporated eastern King County.

Rinck’s legislation will be up for a full council vote on March 10. She said the bill will “buy some time” for the city if ICE does propose building a detention facility here. “I think this is worth fighting over,” she said.

erica@publicola.com

Courts, Elections, LGBTQ+, Mayor Harrell

Ex-Police Chief Diaz Seeks to Toss a Third Judge from His Case, County Council Candidate Claims Planned Parenthood Endorsement After Losing it Over Anti-Trans Views

1. Former Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz is trying to get a third King County Superior Court judge tossed from his lawsuit against the city, claiming that the judge, Nelson Lee, is biased against him. Previously, Diaz petitioned successfully to have Judge Suzanne Parisien removed; a second judge, Cindi Port, later recused herself, sending Diaz’ case to Lee’s courtroom.

Mayor Bruce Harrell removed Diaz from his role as chief last May, after several women accused Diaz of sexual harassment and of fostering a hostile workplace environment for women at SPD. Diaz remained on full pay at the city until seven months later, when Harrell finally fired him after a lengthy investigation. That investigation concluded that Diaz and his chief of staff, Jamie Tompkins, had lied about having an inappropriate workplace relationship and coordinated to cover their tracks.

Diaz’ lawsuit claims Harrell’s true reason for firing him was because he wouldn’t assent to the mayor’s preferred discipline for Daniel Auderer, the officer who was caught on tape laughing and joking about the death of Jaahnavi Kandula, a 23-year-old student, shortly after SPD officer Kevin Dave stuck and killed her in 2023. Interim police chief Sue Rahr fired Auderer in January.

Diaz’ motion to have Lee removed from his case claims Lee is biased against him based on the fact that he is overseeing a case filed against the city (though not against Diaz himself) by SPD officer Lauren Truscott, one of several women who have sued over alleged gender discrimination, sexual and racial harassment, and retaliation at SPD. “Although Chief Diaz is not a named defendant or party in that matter, as this Court is aware, the allegations against him in Truscott are both false and highly prejudicial,” Diaz’ petition says.

In addition, Diaz claims that because Lee “expressly admitted to following media coverage about Chief Diaz,” he is admitting bias, since the coverage of Diaz has been “overwhelmingly negative,” “salacious,” and “false.”

As one of several examples, Diaz pointed to PubliCola’s report on his firing, using an inaccurate version of a headline that appeared on the article only briefly, “Mayor Harrell Fired Diaz over ‘False’ Statements Denying ‘Intimate Relationship’ With Top Staffer.” (I shortened the headline in the interest of brevity, but the newsletter version of the post is subheaded, “Harrell said Diaz repeatedly made ‘false statements’ about an ‘intimate relationship’ with a top staffer to members of the media, to SPD’s command staff, and to Harrell himself.”

Diaz’ attorney altered our headline to remove the quotation marks, making it appear as if we were asserting his statements were false, rather than  Harrell.

“Setting aside for a moment the false nature of these reports, the mere fact that Judge Lee has followed and commented on such coverage gives rise to a well-founded appearance of bias,” the motion claims.

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2. Planned Parenthood Votes Northwest (PPVNW) filed a complaint against King County Council candidate Peter Kwon, saying he falsely claimed to have their endorsement on a campaign mailing earlier this month.

Kwon, a SeaTac City Councilmember, is running against attorney Steffanie Fain for the South King County seat. The reproductive rights group rescinded their endorsement of Kwon on September 18 after learning he told the King County Republican Party that he supports banning trans girls from girls’ school sports and locker rooms.

This position was inconsistent with what Kwon told PPVNW in a written statement, according to the complaint.

The Republican questionnaire included the question, “What are your thoughts on allowing trans students assigned male at birth to play in girls’ school sports and use girls’ restrooms and locker rooms?” Kwon responded: “I believe students should compete in their respective biological category to preserve fairness and protect opportunities—especially for girls and young women. Competitive sports are often divided by sex for a reason: to ensure a level playing field and prevent physical advantages from undermining fair competition.”

In an email to Kwon rescinding the endorsement on September 18, PPVNW Washington State Director Courtney Normand wrote, “As we discussed on the phone last week and via email, there are inconsistencies between written statements you made to Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates and to other groups regarding your position on trans youth and their right to full inclusion and participation in all parts of school and community life.” 

“We hold our endorsed candidates to the highest standards of integrity and any decision to rescind an endorsement is made with careful deliberation and due diligence,” Normand said in a written statement. “We have zero tolerance for the misleading or unauthorized use of our trusted name and respected brand.”

Kwon did not respond to a request for an interview.

King County, Women

In Unanimous Vote, King County Council Calls for Assessor John Arthur Wilson, Accused of Stalking, to Step Down


By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Council voted late Tuesday afternoon to approve a motion stating they have “no confidence” in King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson and calling on him to resign. As PubliCola reported exclusively last month, Wilson’s ex-partner Lee Keller has accused him of stalking and harassing her and obtained a restraining order against him for the second time this year.

Councilmember Claudia Balducci, who sponsored the motion, said Wilson’s behavior since the new accusations came to light was classic DARVO, a term used to describe the way many men accused of mistreating women during MeToo behaved. DARVO stands for “deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender,” and Balducci said Wilson has done everything but deny the allegations against him: He’s denied he did anything wrong, attacked people who have criticized him and demanded he resign, and pretend that he himself is the victim.

“The only way to remove an elected official from office is through a recall election, which is not in our power to initiate or to do,” Balducci said. “But I believe we should make very, very clear that we have a line, and this behavior is beyond that line.”

Balducci was one of the only elected officials to call out Wilson publicly the first time he was accused of harassing Keller, in January, when the Seattle Times reported that Wilson had found Keller when she was hiding from him, refused to leave or stop texting and calling her, and even tried to get someone she dated briefly fired by calling his boss and falsely accusing him of sexually assaulting Keller. She didn’t call for his resignation at the time, she told PubliCola, because ““I was concerned at the time that the focus should be on survivors and supporting survivors.”

Councilmember Jorge Barón said he had supported the council’s decision to give Wilson a week to respond to the call for him to step down, but said he did not agree with Wilson’s defenders who have said the council should let the allegations work themselves through the court system before passing judgment.

“I think it’s important to note that this isn’t a judicial proceeding,” Barón said. “This is about our assessment, about whether this elected official has sound judgment … and the confidence of this body, as representatives of the residents of King County, to continue to carry out [his duties]. And I believe that the answer to the questions is clearly, no, we don’t have that confidence because of the way that Mr. Wilson has acted.”

The vote came after the council withdrew to a conference room for a nearly 40-minute executive session.

Since we first reported on the allegations against him, Wilson has been defiant, telling other reporters he has no plan to step down and putting up self-pitying posts on Facebook. In one, he posted a photo of a church in Seattle and said going to church “gives me a chance to ask God for forgiveness for those who I might have hurt and to forgive those who are bearing false witness against me. May that person find peace,” he concluded—an apparent reference to Keller.

In another, he wrote that it was “[g]reat to have friends that stick by you and don’t simply parrot what’s being said by the chattering class. #Onward!!!!”

In a third, he posted a photo of a plaque displayed at former state House Speaker Frank Chopp’s memorial, of a famous quote from a Theodore Roosevelt speech now known as “The Man In the Arena.”* The excerpt, which is frequently quoted by politicians frustrated with their critics, is about how critics, “those cold and timid souls,” stay on the sidelines and point fingers while the man of action strides forward to victory or valiant defeat. “This quote from Teddy Roosevelt seems particularly timely for me,” Wilson wrote on June 1.

“After seeing a glimpse of what accountability for unacceptable behavior looks like during the MeToo movement, I refuse to have to continue to operate in a society that just expects women to deal with stalking, harassment, assault,” Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda said. “I refuse to tell my daughter that she will have to continue to grow up in a society that just expects that of women. … So I hope that this act today will be one more effort to ask him to step down and to see that he has lost the trust of this body.”

The motion passed unanimously, with only Reagan Dunn—a Republican council member who was present via Zoom earlier in the meeting—absent.

* Politicians love to quote this one partial (partial!) paragraph from this one fucking speech, which is in reality almost 9,000 words long and probably took at least an hour to read out loud. The speech, “Citizenship In A Republic,” is a lengthy jeremiad against extremism in political and personal affairs, with a populist tilt favoring men who do “the rough work of a workaday world.” Unsurprisingly for such a long speech, it’s a bit all over the map—there are references to pioneers conquering an “Indian-haunted land” and Gamaliel the Old (had to look that one up), and at one point TR encourages his audience to “perpetuate the race” by having as many children as possible. What the speech does not encourage is grandiosity or self-pity, which is usually the context in which it is quoted.

King County, legislature, Taxes

Could a Sales Tax Hike for Criminal Justice Programs Save the County’s Budget?
King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay speaks at a recent press conference on state funding cuts.

By Erica C. Barnett

Late last week, King County Council chair Girmay Zahilay and budget chair Rod Dembowski sent a letter urging acting King County Executive Shannon Braddock to send down legislation imposing a new sales tax of 0.1 percent to boost funding for the county’s criminal legal system, including sheriff’s deputies, prosecutors, public defenders, and diversion programs.

State legislators approved a bill giving local jurisdictions the new taxing authority last week; Governor Bob Ferguson hasn’t sign the bill yet, but he expressed support for the proposal earlier in the session, which ended on Sunday.

With the county facing an estimated $160 million shortfall in its general-fund budget over the next two years, Zahilay said the new revenue would be a game-changer. “If we don’t find a solution, we will see deep and painful cuts to services that the community relies on,” like police, prosecutors, and public health clinics, Zahilay said. “It would mean hundreds and hundreds of positions cut out of King County government.”

The new tax could be used on a variety of programs that fall broadly in the “criminal justice” category, explicitly including reentry programs, public defenders, diversion programs, and “Local government programs that have a reasonable relationship to reducing the numbers of people interacting with the criminal justice system including, but not limited to, reducing homelessness or improving behavioral health.”

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Last week, county budget director Dwight Dively told the council that the areas most at risk for cuts (some of them due to potential state budget cuts that did not materialize) are public health and the Department of Community and Human Services, which funds services for homeless King County residents.

Because DCHS is funded largely by the state’s document recording fee on real-estate transactions, its funding has declined dramatically as the housing market has slowed. When that happens, Dively said, “either we have to immediately cut funding for homelessness services, and we all understand the consequences of that, or we have to find another revenue source to at least temporarily backfill that, and that’s the general fund.

So what does that have to do with a criminal-justice sales tax? According to Zahilay, because the legislation did not include language banning “supplantation”—which would have barred the county from using the tax to free up general-fund dollars for unrelated purposes—the tax could help address that looming $160 million deficit. (The county’s deficit is smaller than the city’s, in part, because more county services are funded with dedicated funding sources, like levies.)

That “means that we could absolutely use these funds to fund our criminal justice efforts and redirect funds that would otherwise go toward those initiatives … to fund other things,” Zahilay said. “Based on the estimates that I’ve seen, this new tax would be enough to fund our entire general fund shortfall.”

The sales tax remains the primary tool local governments have for raising funds without passing a property tax levy; it’s a regressive tax because people with lower incomes pay a larger percentage of their income on sales taxes than people who make more. “I was hoping we’d have more options [from the legislature], beacuse out of all the types of taxes, I believe the sales tax is the most regressive one of all,” Zahilay said. “But I’m definitely grateful that we have an option to save our general fund and critical services.”

King County

Meeting to Consider County Executive Appointment Canceled, Leaving Shannon Braddock In Limbo at Least Two More Weeks
Acting King County Executive Shannon Braddock

By Erica C. Barnett

Shannon Braddock, the acting King County Executive, will have to wait at least another two weeks to find out if the County Council plans to appoint her to the position through November, after Council Chair Girmay Zahilay canceled the council’s scheduled Tuesday meeting. The council appointed Braddock acting executive on April 1.

Zahilay said he made the decision out of respect for Councilmember Sarah Perry, whose husband, state Sen. Bill Ramos, died suddenly during a trail run on Saturday.

“Lots of our colleagues reached out saying they thought it would better for us to not meet on Tuesday, given that our colleague on the council has experienced such a sudden and tragic loss,” Zahilay told PubliCola. Zahilay said council staff told him there was no “time-sensitive legislative action” on the agenda.

In addition to legislation appointing Braddock (and a competing proposal from Reagan Dunn to initiate a process that could potentially end up appointing someone else), the agenda included an item appointing Braddock to the Sound Transit board, which is currently considering the future of light rail extensions to Ballard and West Seattle. The agenda also included a proclamation declaring April Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and the introduction of this year’s Medic One Levy proposal.

“I think this is one of those situations where our desire to address the human side of this job come into play,” he said. Rod Dembowski, the head of the council’s budget committee, also canceled a meeting on Tuesday.

Zahilay is one of two county council members who’s running for County Executive.

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The other is Claudia Balducci, who—after consulting with Perry’s office—decided not to cancel tomorrow’s meeting of the council’s Committee of the Whole. The agenda for that meeting includes several briefings about the local impact of federal funding cuts and a letter, sponsored by Balducci, supporting a state proposal to raise the cap on property tax increases—currently set at a sub-inflationary 1 percent—to 3 percent, which would allow local governments to raise more funds.

Balducci called the federal funding cuts a “rapidly developing risk to county government and services. We meet regularly once a month and by next month, the info we are being briefed on may have changed dramatically,” she said, so “it seemed important to me to proceed.”

“There are no scheduled major votes, so Sarah won’t miss an opportunity to vote,” Balducci added.

The council will take up Braddock’s appointment again on May 6, along with a counterproposal from Councilmember Reagan Dunn that would set up a “blue ribbon selection committee” to choose a finalist and an alternate for the position from a list of five people Constantine previously designated as potential successors.

The proposal is a long shot—Zahilay said he thinks Braddock has the votes—but it’s an example of the obstacles facing Braddock, who’s the first woman to ever serve as King County Executive.

“I absolutely understand and support” the decision to delay the meeting out of respect for Perry and her family, Braddock told PubliCola. “I’m eager to serve on the Sound Transit Board and I’m closely tracking the upcoming actions and will be prepared once the appointment occurs.”