The King County Council committed yesterday to keeping the Patricia Clark Children and Family Justice Center open, in a symbolic vote that signals a retreat from previous commitments to close down the youth jail.
The resolution, originally proposed by Republican Councilmember Reagan Dunn, says, “It is the intent of the King County Council to maintain operations of the juvenile secure detention facility at the Judge Patricia H. Clark Children and Family Justice Center.”
During the summer of 2020, King County Executive Dow Constantine committed to closing down the youth jail, saying the county would move “public dollars away from systems that are rooted in oppression and into those that maintain public health and safety, and help people on a path to success.” Historically, the county has disproportionately jailed Black youth; in 2021, Constantine said closing the youth jail would affirm
King County’s commitment to becoming an anti-racist, pro-equity government.”
As part of this “Care and Closure” effort, an advisory committee recommended six actions the county could take to facilitate the closure of the youth jail, but not all had unanimous support; for instance, a proposal to create a “receiving and respite” center for young people to go immediately after they’re arrested, as an alternative to jail, proved contentious.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
During yesterday’s meeting, Democratic council members emphasized that they were still committed to creating a better kind of youth detention at some point in the future.
Councilmember Girmay Zahilay called this a “yes, and” approach, through which “we can have a building with a secure perimeter, where the internal infrastructure is far more conducive to rehabilitation, mental health, education, job training and more. … This is what our amendment calls for—a commitment to transformation, while acknowledging the persistent need for a serious building that is far more oriented toward rehabilitation.”
A majority of the people who spoke about the jail supported closing it or replacing it with a less punitive facility. The jail supporters included several speakers who suggested that incarcerating young people was the only way to keep children, elderly people, and other law-abiding people safe.
“Unfortunately some kids need to go on to a juvenile detention center because the other things are not working,” said one Maple Valley resident, who said her daughter was attacked by “minorities” because she is white. “Please, keep the facility open,” she said, claiming this was the only way her family could feel safe from “being jumped” by non-white people in their community.
As of today, there are 59 young people, from 12 to 18 years old, incarcerated at the youth jail, with another 48 on electronic home detention; 61 percent of them are Black.
After the disastrous launch of a new website that crashed due to traffic from people seeking election results last November, the King County Council passed a budget proviso, or restriction, late last year—holding back $200,000 from the project until the county’s IT department produced a status update “addressing concerns about the King County website upgrade.”
That upgrade, which started in 2017, has cost King County taxpayers $15 million so far (not counting the salaries of county employees), and will be out of date as soon as 2027, when Sitecore—the county’s content management system—changes its technology for web platforms and will no longer support King County’s website. When that happens, the county will have to find a new content management system. (A content management system, or CMS, is the “back end” of a website; PubliCola, a much simpler site than the county’s, uses WordPress).
As we reported last year, the new website design is bare-bones—more than one county employee told us they thought it was an “interim” or “intermediate” step before the “real” website launched—and confusing to navigate.
Many basic government services are hidden somewhere in an alphabetical site index that’s often redundant or counterintuitive—the county assessor’s heavily used property mapping services is buried under the label “GIS services,” in addition to its official name, “Parcel Viewer,” for instance—and the main site features a list of seemingly random county services arranged in no discernible order.
Currently, for example, visitors to kingcounty.gov are greeted with a full screen about dog adoptions, followed by a banner about the March Presidential primary election, followed by highlighted links to King County Metro, rural traffic camera feeds, the pet adoption page (again), and the county’s “careers” site (which requires additional clicks to get to a list of jobs).
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
“It’s not an improvement from what we had before,” County Councilmember Claudia Balducci, who represents Bellevue, told PubliCola. “There have been improvements since [the new site] first went up—we’ve put in some requests for changes—but they’re modest. It’s things like borders and white space, and can we have pictures of the council members on their council member pages.” (Originally, the site included text-only links to text-only councilmember pages.)
Beyond those “aesthetic issues,” Balducci continued, “the biggest problem is that people need to be able to find what they need, and it’s just not easy. I stopped using the website to search for things that I wanted to find. I would just use Google, because that was far more reliable.”
A spokesperson for King County said the new website templates “were designed to be user-friendly based on modern best practices. The goal was to simplify content for improved navigation, ADA access, and translations.” The county uses Google Translate for all languages other than English.
At Tuesday’s meeting, county Chief Information Officer Megan Clarke, who became head of the IT department in November 2022, said the issues with the website stem partly from a lack of communication between the IT staffers who were creating the new website and the people who would ultimately have to use it. One example of this was when the IT division determined that 90 percent of web traffic went through 10 percent of the pages on the site, and assumed it would be fine to “eliminate 90 percent of the pages and keep the 10 [percent] that were meaningful. … Unfortunately, those assumptions weren’t vetted.”
Balducci, who noted during the meeting that many of the problems predated Clarke’s appointment, expressed a type of frustration that’s probably familiar to anyone who’s hired a technical expert to build their website: “You know how to build a website. But we know what we do, and you don’t know what we do,” she said. “The only way this stuff works is if this is a partnership.”
In King County IT’s official, written response to the proviso, the department emphasized how many times it met with people from county departments to discuss the website and noting that some departments haven’t reorganized their site content yet in the latest version of the content management system—suggesting, in effect, that the reason “some users experience challenges with finding what they are looking for on Kingcounty.gov” is because county departments aren’t doing their part or signed off on things and later changed their minds.
Balducci, who noted during the meeting that many of the problems predated Clarke’s appointment, expressed a type of frustration that’s probably familiar to anyone who’s hired a technical expert to build their website: “You know how to build a website. But we know what we do, and you don’t know what we do,” she said. “The only way this stuff works… is if this is a partnership.”
Clarke—taking a more conciliatory tone than the department’s official report—told the council that many of the county staffers who worked on the website didn’t have experience working with the platform they were using and didn’t get the training they needed. “There was not someone in charge who had done this before,” Clarke said. “KCIT was trying to manage something that really required a lot of depth and breadth of voices involved, and that just did not happen. We treated the website as a project rather than a product.”
Clarke told the council she’s hiring an outside consultant to try to identifying some of the underlying issues with the site, including why it couldn’t handle traffic on a low-turnout odd-year election night, in order to fix some of the most glaring problems. (The King County spokesperson told PubliCola that the IT department did anticipate the spike in traffic on election night, and that “although [the site] initially failed to function properly, KCIT was able to resolve the issue on Election Night”—albeit long after everyone had turned to KING 5’s website, which had the results on time.)
was designed to handle traffic, and only failed when people were seeking results at 8:00, when they’re ordinarily available.
However, she noted, the county is facing a budget deficit; even if Sitecore can support the website for a couple of years after 2027, it doesn’t make much sense to sink more money into the current site.
“I look at it as, how much more do we want to sink in this area [if] we are going to move to something else?” Clarke said. “I’ve seen website projects with twice the number of pages finish on time and on budget. I absolutely know it’s possible.”
PubliCola has reached out to the King County Executive’s Office and the IT department and will update this post when we hear back.
A King County Council committee rejected a last-minute proposal by King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski to cut $6 million from a five-year plan to improve human service workers’ wages on Wednesday, voting to reject an amendment passed by the countywide Regional Policy Committee (RPC) this past Monday.
Dembowski’s amendment, which went out to RPC members the Friday after Thanksgiving, would amend the spending plan for the voter-approved Veterans, Seniors, and Human Services Levy to reduce funding for human service worker raises by $1 million a year, or between 9 and 12 percent every year the levy is in effect, with the money going to unspecified future capital grants to improve food access
The RPC, which is in charge of approving the levy spending plan before it goes on to the county council, passed Dembowski’s proposal with minimal discussion on Monday. (The amendments didn’t go out to RPC members until the day after Thanksgiving, and the discussion lasted less than five minutes). “We’ve really got a rising need in this county for folks who are hungry,” Dembowski said Monday. While he would have preferred to pass a more generous levy in the first place, Dembowski added, $6 million “didn’t seem to me to have a tremendously adverse impact in the scale of things.”
King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci, one of two county council representatives on the RPC, disagreed, telling PubliCola that Dembowski’s amendment “fundamentally changed the proposal by taking 10 percent out of a program that was fundamental to the levy.” Dembowski, she added, “didn’t do any outreach to me” before putting his amendment forward.
“I am sympathetic to Councilmember Dembowski’s desire to add more funds to the food strategy. We know that food banks everywhere are seeing huge increases in clients. … I’m sympathetic to the intent, but not to the impact.”—Seattle City Councilmember Lisa Herbold
Dembowski did not return a call or text messages seeking comment.
Human services providers seemed blindsided by the amendment, which only Seattle City Councilmember Lisa Herbold and King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci opposed at Monday’s meeting. “It was extremely disappointing to see this unfold in a process with effectively no notice, engagement, or opportunity to comment before the Regional Policy Committee took action during a special meeting,” Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness director Alison Eisinger said.
But by Wednesday, when a county council committee took up Dembowski’s amendment, providers had mobilized, urging the council not to pit food security against human service providers’ wages. Councilmember Girmay Zahilay said that in the last two days, he had “heard from so many organizations that I work with regularly that they didn’t have an opportunity to make their voice heard on on those changes…. [and] are terrified that depriving them of the needed resources at this time would really jam up their services.”
“I am sympathetic to Councilmember Dembowski’s desire to add more funds to the food strategy,” Herbold told PubliCola after the vote on Wednesday. “We know that food banks everywhere are seeing huge increases in clients. … I’m sympathetic to the intent, but not to the impact.”
The levy funding, on its own, isn’t enough to give human service workers a living wags—a fact Dembowski used to argue for repurposing the funds, noting that by his math, $1 million a year across 10,000 human service workers works out to only “about two bucks a week.” But the money, combined with similar increases adopted as part of the city of Seattle’s 2024 budget and in the county’s Crisis Centers Levy, would help keep these workers from falling further behind.
For years, nonprofits in King County have struggled to recruit and retain workers because they can’t afford to pay them living wages, much less competitive salaries. A study conducted by University of Washington researchers in 2022 and released earlier this year found that people who left jobs in human services for jobs in other fields saw their wages increase 7 percent relative to what they would have received if they had stayed in their human services jobs. The 7 percent figure accounts for factors like workers moving into higher job classifications and working more hours, according to the researchers.
Eisinger, from the Coalition on Homelessness, said she was “grateful” to the county council for restoring the funding for human service worker wages. “I hope every elected official in King County understands that achieving our shared goals for the Levy requires a strong human services workforce,” she said.
On Wednesday, Dembowski urged his county council colleagues to support his proposal, arguing that it was too late in the process to start second-guessing amendments now. “It would sadden me if we were to zero this out,” Dembowski said, “and I’m very worried about a whole back and forth at the year-end.” This argument might hold more water if Dembowski himself hadn’t initiated the back and forth with his last-minute amendment moving funds from provider pay into a vaguely defined capital fund, which the council will now have to “zero out” to return things to the way they were.
Had Dembowski made a proposal much earlier in the spending plan discussions about “specific needs at specific food banks, that could have been compelling, but it was at the last minute and the end of the process,” Balducci noted. The RPC will now have to hold a special meeting to reconsider the plan, as amended, and the county council will have to approve it before December 14, when the council starts its winter recess.
1. During a debate focusing on homelessness sponsored Wednesday night, Burien Mayor Sofia Aragon, who is running for King County Council District 8, responded to PubliCola’s report that the director of a group called The More We Love that offers private encampment sweeps had shared personal and medical information about vulnerable homeless residents of the city with police, city officials, and a private business owner.
The real issue, Aragon said, was that someone in the city had “leaked” the information to me, not that the person who shared the information, The More We Love director Kristine Moreland, had done so without apparent concern for the privacy of the more than 80 people included in the detailed spreadsheet she created.
“I know that there was some information shared, and I don’t know how that got to the reporter, but I know that you know, things that we share within the city will often leak out,” Aragon said. “I don’t know how that occurred, we definitely would be we would be serious about the protection of health information because in [the nonprofit] industry, that is certainly something important.”
Aragon said it was understandable that Moreland sent her spreadsheet of personal information to the private business owner, Jeff Rakow of Snowball Investment, because he contracted with Moreland’s group to remove an encampment outside a Grocery Outlet property that he owns.
As I reported, I received the information through a routine public disclosure request; Moreland attached the spreadsheet to an email she sent to a city council member, two police officials, and a real estate investor who paid Moreland’s group to remove an encampment on his property. It’s unknown whether, or how widely, Moreland distributed her spreadsheet outside the city of Burien, since only public officials are subject to public disclosure requests.
When debate moderator Scott Greenstone from KNKX noted that I got the information through a records request, Aragon breezed past the clarification, saying it was understandable that Moreland sent her spreadsheet of personal information to the private business owner, Jeff Rakow of Snowball Investment, because he contracted with Moreland’s group to remove an encampment outside a Grocery Outlet property that he owns.
“And what he did, because he did see some success, is he shared that with the city, but that doesn’t excuse leaking out of private information from those who are homeless, and that’s something that needs to be addressed,” Aragon said.
As a side note: Unlike Moreland, I did not publish or distribute any of the private information contained in Moreland’s spreadsheet, because that would be an additional violation of the privacy of the people whose information she distributed.
For context, credible nonprofit homeless service providers do not, as a rule, share their clients’ private information outside their organizations without explicit informed consent, because to do so would violate people’s privacy, damage trust, and potentially break federal laws protecting people’s medical information.
2.In a TV ad for District 7 city council candidate Bob Kettle, Seattle City Council member Sara Nelson accused her colleague, District 7 incumbent Councilmember Andrew Lewis, of being responsible for the deaths of countless people from drug overdoses during the two and a half months when the city did not have a law empowering the city attorney to prosecute people who use drugs in public. Lewis cast the deciding vote against the bill in June, then voted with the majority of the council in favor ot a substantively similar bill in September.
“Andrew Lewis’ decisiontoblockmydrugbillcost the lives oftoomanypeoplefromfentanyloverdose.Itrust Bob Kettletodotherightthing,” Nelson said in the ad.
Nelson sponsored the initial version of the bill, which said nothing about treatment, diversion, or overdose prevention, and opposed many of the new provisions in the updated bill that support diversion and crisis intervention training. Lisa Herbold and Lewis sponsored the version that passed, which included language indicating that police should divert people to treatment or other diversion programs instead of jail. Public drug use and simple possession are already illegal across the state, thanks to a law passed in May that made both a gross misdemeanor.
“When you have nothing substantive to say, I guess the only thing to do is resort to Republican-style attack ads,” Lewis said. “I will continue my campaign of bringing people together to achieve real results for the people of District 7.”
1. Seattle police captain Keith Swank, a 33-year department veteran who is currently out on long-term paid leave, has posted dozens of tweets that appear to violate SPD’s social media policy, which says SPD employees “shall not post speech that negatively impacts the department’s ability to serve the public,” including any post that “ridicules, maligns, disparages, expresses bias, or disrespect toward any race, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, or any other protected class of individuals.”
In the past several months, for example, Swank has posted tweets that are that are transphobic (March 24: “Transwomen are men. #KeepTheRepublicSafe”), racist (March 24: “Democrats let violent animals like this [Black attacker] back out on the streets to kill Americans”) and conspiratorial (March 21: “It’s time for Republican prosecutors across the country to start investigating Pelosi, Schumer, Swalwell, etc. I’m giving you the names, now find the crimes.”)
In addition to denigrating trans women and promoting conspiracy theories about—among other things—election fraud and Paul Pelosi, Swank has repeatedly expressed his support for the rioters who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, calling the killing of Ashli Babbitt—a woman who was shot while breaking into the US Capitol—”state-sanctioned murder.”
“Pelosi coordinated the deadly attack, and Ashli Babbitt was murdered,” Swank wrote in March. “Would be great to see this criminal face accountability for her crime.”
At least six SPD officers went to the pro-Trump rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol, and two who trespassed on Capitol grounds were fired in 2021 after an Office of Police Accountability investigation in 2021. Shortly after the attacks, Seattle Police Officers Guild director Mike Solan faced calls for his resignation after blaming Black Lives Matter for the attacks, which were coordinated and carried out by Trump supporters.
Men and women who pretend to be the other sex are appropriating gender.#KeeptheRepublicSafe
When PubliCola inquired about Swank’s tweets attacking marginalized people and defending the January 6 rioters, a spokesman for the police department, Sgt. John O’Neil, said the “department will evaluate any policy violating statements that we become aware of and refer them to OPA as appropriate.” Asked if SPD does believe Swank’s tweets violate SPD’s social media policy, O’Neil responded, “It’s the view of the Seattle Police that any employee that violates social media policy will be referred to OPA. There is a process. We have no further comment on this.”
UPDATE May 4: The Office of Police Accountability confirmed that SPD did not file a complaint about Swank’s posts, indicating that SPD does not believe his comments violated its social media policy. OPA disagrees; after PubliCola contacted the office, the OPA opened a complaint into Swank’s social media behavior.
2. The King County Council rejected a measure that would have asked voters to increase the size of the Veterans, Seniors, and Human Services Levy by 2 cents per $1,000 of property value, or about $17 a year, opting instead for a flat renewal at an initial 10 cents per $1,000 that will result in cuts to services and build only half as many housing units as the most recent levy renewal.
“Going to the ballot with a property tax increase opposed by the suburban cities puts at risk the funding for the underlying levy, and I’m not willing to do that.” —King County Council Chair Dave Upthegrove
The seven-year VSHSL levy pays for housing, domestic violence prevention, senior centers, and supportive services for low-income and homeless veterans, seniors, and other King County residents. Over the last six years, it has raised around $350 million. Because property values have increased dramatically, the next seven-year levy will raise an estimated $565 million and cost the owner of a median (in 2024 dollars) $838,000 home around $100 a year.
Council members who supported the higher levy, including North King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski, noted that a flat 10-cent renewal will severely constrain the uses of the levy for the next seven years. “Ten cents is a cut,” Dembowski said. “It’s a cut because of inflation, [and] because of increased demand for the services that exist and for things we might want to do.”
Suburban council members said they feared a higher levy would lose outside Seattle, potentially dooming it. Eastside Councilmember Claudia Balducci, voted for the 12-cent rate, noted that the levy to build mental health crisis centers, which passed countywide in April, fared poorly in suburban districts, including hers.
Council chair Dave Upthegrove, said he had “no political problem” with the higher, 12-cent rate, but added, “I do worry about passage. … Going to the ballot with a property tax increase opposed by the suburban cities puts at risk the funding for the underlying levy, and I’m not willing to do that.”
After rejecting the larger levy proposal on a 5-4 vote, the council unanimously voted to put the 1o-cent levy on the ballot in August.
The nine-member King County Council is expected to vote this afternoon to place the Veterans, Seniors, and Human Services Levy renewal on the August ballot, although the size of the levy was still up for debate going into Tuesday’s meeting.
The two options on the table are a flat renewal at 10 cents per $1,000 of property value—the plan King County Executive Dow Constantine sent the council for approval back in February. A levy renewal at that level would raise about $565 million over six years, but—due to inflation and increased construction costs—would produce only about half as much housing as the expiring levy and require 45 percent cut to housing-related services. The other option on the table is to increase the levy to 12 cents per $1,000, which would raise about $678 million over the same period. The higher levy would cost the owner of a median ($838,000) home about $17 more per year.
The levy pays for housing, domestic violence prevention, senior centers, and supportive services for low-income and homeless veterans, seniors, and other King County residents. Over the last six years, it has raised around $350 million. Placing a levy on the ballot requires a six-vote supermajority, which means that in order to pass a higher, 12-cent tax, at least six of the county council’s seven Democrats will need to be on board.
In a special meeting last Friday, the county’s 12-member Regional Policy Committee, which makes recommendations to the county council, failed to reach agreement on the appropriate size for the levy, with five members voting for the lower rate and four holding out for the 12-cent option. (Because county council members on the RPC get two votes each, a 5-4 vote in favor of the smaller levy option resulted in a 6-6 vote).
Originally, the RPC was supposed to make a recommendation at its regularly scheduled meeting last Monday. Instead of voting then, the RPC decided to hold off on a recommendation until after Tuesday’s election on another countywide property tax levy—the King County Crisis Centers Levy, which will build five mental health crisis centers across the county, restore some residential mental health care beds, and increase behavioral health workers’ pay.
“Sadly, there is a bond measure for the Kent School District that failed by almost the same percentage, if not more, than [the crisis centers levy passed by] I think that is a pretty good indicator that there are individuals in our communities that have tax fatigue and are not looking for adding any new taxes.”—Auburn Mayor Nancy Backus
That levy is currently passing with nearly 57 percent of the vote. However, both County Councilmember Claudia Balducci, who represents Bellevue, and Auburn Mayor Nancy Backus noted last week that the levy was failing in parts of rural and suburban King County—suggesting a lack of appetite for higher property taxes outside Seattle.
“Sadly, there is a bond measure for the Kent School District that failed by almost the same percentage, if not more, than [the crisis centers levy passed by],” Backus said. “I think that is a pretty good indicator that there are individuals in our communities that have tax fatigue and are not looking for adding any new taxes.”
“I have to say that I hear very clearly the message that Mayor Backus is sending,” Balducci said. “We need to look at what our voters are telling us.”
Last week, around the same time that the RPC was meeting, King County Executive Dow Constantine posted a “community survey” asking voters to pick which services to cut in light of a $100 million projected 2025-2026 shortfall Constantine said was “due to the state’s arbitrary one percent limit on property tax collection.” Constantine’s announcement noted pointedly that services for domestic violence and sexual assault survivors, gun violence prevention, programs for BIPOC youth, and public health clinics were all among the options on the chopping block.
In the legislative session that just concluded, lawmakers proposed, but did not pass, a bill that would have raised the cap to 3 percent. The bill never got a hearing. A fiscal analysis by legislative staff found that it would increase local tax revenues statewide by about $480 million during the 2025-2026 biennium. According to an analysis of the legislation by Constantine’s staff, however, a 3 percent cap would have increased property taxes for the median King County homeowner by $7.96 a year, an amount that would not make up for the $100 million biennial shortfall Constantine blamed on the legislature.
Alison Eisinger, the executive director of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, said it was absurd for Constantine to blame the legislature for the county’s budget shortfall, especially when he chose to leave money on the table by proposing a flat renewal of the levy.
“Are people supposed to think that government can actually be part of the solution if, on the one hand, government is saying we have a $100 million shortfall and we’re going to have to cut critical services, and on the other hand, they’re debating something that would cost the average homeowner pennies?” Eisinger said. “This is about elected officials not having the courage of their convictions and taking the necessary votes to let the public decide whether or not we are going to house veterans and seniors and support our communities.”
The services identified in the county’s survey are funded with the general fund, not the veterans’ levy, and the county can’t legally use levy dollars to supplant items that would ordinarily be paid for by the general fund; Eisinger’s comments were about the contrast between Constantine’s complaint about the county’s taxing authority and his support for the smallest version of the levy under consideration.
The last time the veterans, seniors, and human services levy was on the ballot, in November 2017, it passed with 69 percent of the vote.
The real issue, Aragon said, was that someone in the city had “leaked” the information to me, not that the person who shared the information, The More We Love director Kristine Moreland, had done so without apparent concern for the privacy of the more than 80 people included in the detailed spreadsheet she created.
that appear to violate SPD’s 