Tag: Maritza Rivera

Crime, Police

SPD Dedicates Three Officers to Magnuson Park, Citing Success with “Disorder” and Property Crimes During Pilot
City Councilmember Maritza Rivera and Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes

By Erica C. Barnett

Citing a “double-digit” reduction in crime since the launch of a pilot that added police patrols in and around Northeast Seattle’s Magnuson Park last summer, Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes announced that SPD will assign three full-time officers to the park. The officers will report to the North Precinct, and will essentially be on call there if needed, but otherwise, their jobs will involve patrolling the park and doing what Barnes calls “neighborhood-oriented policing.”

PubliCola first reported on the pilot expansion in January.

Barnes said SPD chose Magnuson Park, which is surrounded by some of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, “because it’s the second largest park in our city [and] we have housing on the property”—hundreds of low-income and affordable units run by Mercy Housing and Solid Ground.

“We also chose this location because I heard from the community about … the rise in disorder crimes” such as noisy parties and street racing, Barnes said.

In the expanded program, SPD will assign three full-time officers, working in pairs to do bike and foot patrols in and around the park, getting to know people who live in the area and “fulfilling our obligation of problem oriented policing and community policing, which is the hallmark of my leadership philosophy,” Barnes said. The officers will be assigned to the North Precinct and will still be expected to respond to calls from other areas if necessary.

Asked why the city didn’t expand the Magnuson pilot into neighborhoods that have experienced more crime, like Rainier Beach or Little Saigon, Barnes said, “It’s not always about [putting resources in] the highest-crime area. One of the reasons we chose this particular location [is that] it’s our second biggest park. It has homes here as well. We’re hearing from the community. It just seemed like a good place to start and kind of work through some of those bugs.”

SPD has assigned new police academy graduates “who are not quite ready for patrol” to the area around 12th and Jackson, Barnes added. Additionally, “We’re looking at a space now, I believe at Third and Pine, that could be available for us” in the future. An SPD spokeswoman declined to provide additional details about the space Barnes mentioned.

City Councilmember Maritza Rivera, who represents Northeast Seattle, said there are “people living in the park that I very much care about, and I want to make sure that our families and the kids that are living here at Mercy Housing and Solid Ground are living in a safe environment, as well as the surrounding neighbors and all the people that come to visit the park.”

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The “double-digit” crime reduction Barnes mentioned appears to refer to a drop in reported crimes during the 90-day pilot period compared to the same period in 2024.

SPD’s public crime database shows that the number of reported crimes in the Sand Point neighborhood, which includes Magnuson Park, shows that there were 113 fewer reported crimes during the pilot period than the same period in 2024. However, a broader look at crime trends in the area and in Seattle as a whole shows that crime was lower across the city last year, and continues to trend lower in 2026 than in 2025, indicating a more general reduction in crime than the success of a specific pilot in one area.

One of the most infamous incidents of police violence in Seattle happened in Magnuson Park several years ago, before former mayor Bruce Harrell hired Barnes away from his previous position in Madison, Wisconsin. In 2017, officers shot and killed Charleena Lyles, a Black mother of four who called 911 during a mental health crisis, in her apartment. Lyles’ killing was one of the incidents that spurred calls for unarmed first responders with social work backgrounds to assist people in crisis. Although the city never admitted liability, Seattle paid $3.5 million in 2021 to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit by Lyles’ family.

SPD’s press event took place about 700 feet from where Lyles was killed.

When a TV reporter asked about past “officer-involved shootings” (shootings by police) in the park, Barnes appeared confused. “Officer-involved shootings?” he said.

After the reporter, who did not mention Lyles by name, attempted to elaborate— “there have been some tense events that have happened in the past”— Barnes responded: “I think no matter if it’s Magnuson Park or any other area in the city, we want to make sure that we’re policing in a way that’s procedurally just and that’s according to the expectations of our community. … That’s what policing is to me—knowing the people who may be dealing with issues, the people who may be dealing with mental health crisis, because when you know them and you can communicate with them, you have better outcomes.”

City Council, housing, Mayor Wilson, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Mayor Wilson Wants to Expand Housing Faster; Councilmember Rivera Wants to Audit Human Services

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson is a renter on Capitol Hill, giving her a unique perspective that differentiates her from any previous mayor, and she plans to keep renting through her term. On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we discussed how Wilson’s personal experience renting in Seattle (and struggling to afford escalating rent) may have impacted her decision to go “bigger, taller, and faster” on what’s left of the city’s comprehensive plan update.

In Wilson’s tree-lined neighborhood, single-family houses and apartment buildings mingle effortlessly with newer townhouses and condos, all within a short walk of multiple bus routes and a light rail station. In other words, this mayor has actually experienced the benefits of renting in a neighborhood with lots of trees, walkable amenities, and frequent transit, making her less susceptible to NIMBY arguments that apartments destroy neighborhood “character” or make neighborhoods unlivable.

As Sandeep pointed out, public opinion in Seattle has moved consistently in a YIMBY (yes in my backyard) direction for at least the past decade. That’s good news for Seattle’s renter majority—brand-new housing, though not affordable in itself, takes pressure off Seattle’s acute housing shortage—and bad news for NIMBYs who want Seattle to stay the same as it was when they bought their houses for $23,000 in the ’70s.

We also discussed Councilmember Maritza Rivera’s still-vague proposal to “audit Human Services Department contracts.” Sandeep and David think it seems like a pretty good idea in light of an audit at the county’s equivalent department that found widespread problems among “high-risk” contracts—why not “look under the rock” and see what’s there? “From my side, we’d want to make that a campaign issue,” Sandeep said—perhaps previewing what Rivera’s reelection campaign will look like?

 

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I countered that as with the Equitable Development initiative, Rivera seems to be fixating on contracts in one specific area (the DCHS contracts were largely first-time contracts with small Black- and brown-led nonprofits) rather than considering which type of contracts across all city departments are worth scrutinizing for waste, fraud, and abuse. (I also noted that the smaller contractors targeted in the DCHS audit do not generally contract with the city.) Sandeep said these kinds of contracts came out of the “peak woke period” after COVID and so should be subject to greater scrutiny.

As I reported, auditing $300 million in human services contracts is far more complex than the kinds of audits Seattle’s auditor typically does, and would tie up resources for years at a small office with just five audit staff. Just as a factual matter, I’ll stand by what I said on the podcast: No matter how much we agree that it would be great for all public contracts to face close scrutiny (no one supports waste, abuse, or fraud), given that the city will never have the resources to audit every contract, the city has to make choices. If that choice is always to audit human services providers and never audit police spending, for instance, that’s an expression of priorities, not an objective assessment of what kind of city spending merits extra scrutiny.

City Council, human services

Councilmember Wants “Audit of Human Services Contracts.” That’s a Big Ask.

By Erica C. Barnett

City Councilmember Maritza Rivera wants the City Auditor to do an audit of all Human Services Department contracts, she announced this week, in light of a damning King County audit that found evidence of waste, misuse of funds, and potential fraud in a 36-contract sample of King County Department of Community and Human Services contracts for youth services.

Rivera, one of several councilmembers whose 2023 campaigns included a generalized demand for the city to “audit the budget” (an overbroad campaign demand that, of course, never happened) said in a press release that “in light of the issues at the County, we would be remiss if we did not conduct our own due diligence.”

Many of the contracts the county’s auditor reviewed were with new organizations with little or no prior government contracting experience, landing them in the “high risk” group that made up about half the contracts DCHS signed with providers between 2019 and 2024. The audit found that DCHS “had not prioritized resources for financial stewardship” of these contracts and failed to catch instances of noncompliance, waste, and fraud.

Rivera’s office did not respond to detailed questions sent Thursday morning, including why she believes HSD contracts are more likely to be problematic than other city contracts (such as those at the Department of Transportation or SPD) and whether she planned to limit the scope of any future audit to city contracts with specific groups identified in the county’s audit. HSD has more than $300 million in contracts; the bulk of that is funding for the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, which has its own separate contracting process.

Typically, the city auditor’s office, which currently has five audit staff, does limited audits of programs and initiatives, not far-reaching audits of entire city departments. Recent audits have looked at the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections’ final building inspection process, Comcast’s compliance with the city’s Cable Customer Bill of Rights, and the city’s approach to maintaining and cleaning restrooms in parks.

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The city’s acting auditor, Arushi Thakorlal, said her office is currently “at capacity” through the fall, but said they’ll work with Rivera to figure out the scope of a general HSD contract audit if it moves forward. (The auditor is appointed by the council but functions independently).

The previous auditor, David Jones, established a method for prioritizing audits that Thakorlal said she’s continuing to follow: First, any audits that are required by law, such as annual reviews of non-police surveillance technology, have to be performed no matter what. Then, the office prioritizes audit requests from the council president and the head of the committee overseeing the subject of the proposed audit, in that order. Rivera is neither the council president nor the head of the council’s human services committee.

“If multiple council members support something, it moves toward the top of the list,” Thakorlal said. “Right now, I haven’t heard from other council members about this.” Thakorlal said she encouraged Rivera to work Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who heads the human services committee. Rinck told PubliCola she asked Rivera “for clarification on her request for an audit and shared what I understood about current contracting and auditing processes.”

Most of HSD’s contracts are reimbursable fee-for-service contracts: Contractors get paid after they spend money and submit invoices to the city. Most of the DCHS contractors in the King County audit, in contrast, received fixed monthly payments from the county and were supposed to reconcile what they spent the county by submitting detailed expense reports after the fact.

A spokeswoman for HSD, Caitlin Moran, said the department’s standard contract monitoring provides “improved levels of accountability and oversight” and said the department “routinely undergoes external audits by our federal and state funders as part of their standard fiscal oversight”; in 2025, a state audit requested by former city councilmember Sara Nelson looked at two years of contracts in HSD’s Community Safety division and did not identify any concerns, Moran said.

HSD’s internal controls, “as well as ongoing staff training and continuous improvement efforts to both our procurement and contracting processes, enable HSD to responsibly contract with community organizations who are critical partners in helping the City of Seattle build a strong social safety net that connects our most vulnerable residents to resources and services during times of need,” Moran said.

 

City Council

Former Councilmember Moore Edited Legislation, Wrote Interview Questions for Her Potential Successors, After Leaving
Former Councilmember Cathy Moore

By Erica C. Barnett

Former City Councilmember Cathy Moore, who quit the council, effective July 7, after serving just a year and a half of her four-year term, continued to lobby her former colleagues, and even work on legislation, after she stepped down, emails PubliCola obtained through a records request reveal.

PubliCola and other outlets have reported on the infamous email Moore sent to Councilmember Mark Solomon, who took over Moore’s leadership of the council’s housing and human services committee after she left, pressuring him not to seat members of the city’s Renters Commission whose appointments Moore had refused to consider during her time as head of the committee.

In that email, she told Solomon that she thought he was on board with her plan to dismantle the renters’ commission and replace it with one dominated by landlords, blaming “[t]he current disastrous situation so many non-profit and small for-profit housing providers find themselves in” on “the advocacy of the commission for rental laws uninformed by the knowledge and experience of the housing providers implementing those laws.”

The additional, newly obtained records reveal that Moore continued to exert her influence with other council members, particularly Northeast Seattle rep Maritza Rivera, and weigh in on legislation after she left office. The documents show that Moore edited two controversial Rivera amendments to the comprehensive plan designed to place more restrictions on developers’ ability to remove trees. Moore also wrote =the questions Rivera asked candidates during the selection process for Moore’s replacement on the council.

The city’s post-employment rules prohibit former city employees from participating in matters they worked on as part of their prior employment for two years after leaving the city. Examples of prohibited behavior include advising or working on legislation.

However, Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission Director Wayne Barnett said he doesn’t think those prohibitions would apply in Moore’s situation “because she is assisting the City, not anyone else, such as a private company or lobbying firm.

“Former employees are routinely tapped for their expertise after they retire,” Barnett continued. “If we were to decide that this back and forth between CM Rivera and former CM Moore was a violation of the Ethics Code, or that former CM Moore cannot write her former colleagues about the fate of the renter’s commission, it would have dramatic repercussions for every former City employee, the latter especially. I would need to train that communicating with the City on issues where you have expertise after you leave is illegal.”

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Moore’s attempts to influence the council immediately after quitting the council are unusual, and fly in the face of her frequent statements that as the elected representative for District 5, she served as her constituents’ voice on the council. Debora Juarez now occupies Moore’s former seat, and generally voted in favor of amendments to the city’s comprehensive plan that supported more density, the opposite of how Moore generally voted. She also voted against one of the amendments by Maritza Rivera that Moore worked on after she left, amendment 93. Which raises the question: By working at cross purposes to her successor, is Moore undercutting her former constituents’ new voice on the council?

When she was still on the council, Moore was a vocal advocate against aspects of the comprehensive plan that would allow more density in residential neighborhoods, arguing that allowing small apartment buildings in Maple Leaf, for example, was tantamount to “sacrificing” the North Seattle neighborhood. She also sided with Rivera on tree protections, fighting for restrictions on tree removal that would result directly in less housing in Seattle’s traditional single-family neighborhoods.

Moore’s work on comp plan amendments affecting density and trees began shortly after she left office in July.

For example, on August 1, 2025, Rivera’s chief of staff Wendy Sykes sent Moore a copy of a tree-related amendment Rivera planned to introduce as part of legislation to implement the city’s comprehensive plan. Moore sent the amendment on to Sandy Shettler, an activist who has lobbied the council for protecting trees, typically at the expense of housing. That proposed change eventually surfaced as Amendment 93, one of two controversial Rivera amendments to limit the amount of housing that can be built when a tree is present on a lot.

Moore sent herself a copy of another set of tree-related amendments at 4:30 in the afternoon of her final day in office, forwarding two amendments proposed by arborist and tree activist Andrea Starbird to her personal address. Moore forwarded the amendments to Rivera on July 21, writing:

Hi Maritza,

Attached is the tree amendment proposal I was working from when I left. I spoke with [central staffer Ketil Freeman] and HB about potentially drafting three separate amendments from this proposal. This is in addition to a mandatory “treed area” for preservation/planting with flexible setbacks and height or [floor-area ration] incentives. I’m still looking for anything in writing regarding those ideas, but we did have a good conversation about those ideas and I think they were comfortable proceeding with drafting some language.

Best

Cathy

On August 1, Moore sent an email to Rivera’s private email address with the subject line “Proposed tree ordinance amendments,” along with this note:

Dear Maritza,

As a former colleague who was deeply engaged in the work of improving the tree ordinance, thank you for extending me the professional courtesy of an opportunity to provide my feedback on your draft proposal. After conferring with subject matter experts and others concerned about tree canopy, I have attached my suggested edits to the proposal. Please let me know if you have any questions about the suggestions or if I can be of any assistance. Thank you!

Best,

Cathy

The records provided by the city’s legislative department didn’t include the amendment itself (we’ve requested it), but the email alone makes clear that Moore was directly editing city legislation after she left office. Moore also sent her proposed changes, titled “Amendment 4 – Tree Protections CMMR 7-31 edits.docx,” to Shettler.

Another document, a draft of a Rivera amendment, 102, that would have given the director of the city’s Department of Construction and Inspections (SDCI) the ability to force developers to come up with “alternate site plans” that preserve trees at any point in the development process, includes two comments and apparent amendments by Moore, identified as “CM” in the margins.

One, allowing the SDCI director to require a secondary tree protection review by an arborist before a development can move forward, made it into the final version of the comp plan legislation.

Neither Moore nor Rivera responded to PubliCola’s emailed questions.

Moore didn’t just continue weighing in on and editing legislation after she resigned from the council. She also sent six questions for Rivera to ask the applicants for appointment to her council seat, focusing on trees, sex workers on Aurora, neighborhood centers in the comprehensive plan, and crime. During a council question-and-answer session with the candidates on July 22, which started shortly after Moore sent her questions to Rivera, Rivera read five of Moore’s questions virtually verbatim, giving the departed council member a voice at the table when the council was choosing her successor.

Moore also emailed Mayor Bruce Harrell, police chief Shon Barnes, several council members, and other city officials shortly before midnight on the night after her final day in office, urging him to take a series of actions on the Aurora corridor.

“Dear Bruce,” the email begins. “Please immediately close the streets from 95th through 107th. Please immediately implement the SDOT reader board messages notifying drivers/buyers that they are in a SOAP area. Please implement the Prostitution Prevention and Awareness campaign designed by VICE, [the city attorney’s office], and [public safety] Director [Natalie] Walton-Anderson. Please add loitering for the purposes of prostitution to the nuisance ordinance.”

Had Moore chosen to stay in office, she could have worked on all those things through the legislative process rather than lobbying the mayor after she left.

City Council, Equity

Councilmember Rivera Questions 2026 Funding for CARE Team, LEAD Diversion, and Equitable Development Initiative

 

By Erica C. Barnett

At the city council’s first meetings on Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed budget this week, Councilmember Maritza Rivera repeatedly suggested that she has not gotten sufficient information, since joining the council last year, about several programs the city funds that are designed to help people living unsheltered or in crisis. Rivera has opposed some of the

On Thursday morning, Rivera suggested it might be premature to expand the city’s CARE Department, which responds to 911 calls, and the related CARE Team, which responds to a limited subset of emergency calls alongside police and can take over those calls once police sign off. As we’ve reported, the CARE Team is set to sign a new agreement with SPD that will allow it to respond to calls without police in tow, and expand the types of calls team members, who are social workers, are allowed to respond to.

The city expanded CARE to 24 people last year, the maximum allowed under the agreement with SPD that expires at the end of this year. A proposed 0.1 cent sales tax would increase that number to 48, on the assumption that the new agreement will allow the expansion.

“I don’t know how well that expansion is going,” Rivera said. “I know there are issues underlying all of that. Nevertheless, we are not done with this full year and  the proposal in this budget is to go from 24 to 48… and I have not seen any information about the work that CARE is doing that warrants the expansion,” given that the 2025 budget year isn’t over yet.

Largely in response to council questions, CARE launched a detailed data dashboard, currently accessible only the city’s internal network (to which Rivera has access) earlier this year. CARE has also repeatedly presented data and results to the council and publicly answered their questions.

Rivera did not raise similar concerns about a lack of data when the council approved an expansion of live police cameras into several new neighborhoods earlier this month. The council started discussing that expansion in late July, just weeks after SPD turned on new surveillance cameras in three initial “pilot” neighborhoods. The pilot program added almost $6 million to the 2025-2026 budget along with 21 new positions at SPD; the new budget anticipates SPD will need to hire another nine people to staff the surveillance center, and cost around $500,000 on cameras alone. A majority of the council, including Rivera, green-lit the surveillance expansion without any data showing that the cameras helped SPD solve or stop crimes that would have gone unaddressed without the cameras.

Later in the day, Rivera said she also didn’t have enough information to know whether LEAD and CoLEAD, two programs run by the nonprofit Purpose Dignity Action, were worth the funding provided in the mayor’s budget, which includes about $15 million for LEAD pre-booking diversion and $5 million for the CoLEAD encampment resolution program. That money, Rivera observed, is enough to “fund an actual department,” like the Office of Arts and Culture.

“I just want to make sure I understand how well we’re doing with diversion services,” Rivera said. “I just don’t feel, since I got here last year, that I have that information that I can really speak to. How really are we helping people? I understand there’s a lot more people in the system. Ideally we’d be people should be going into recovery, and then we’re taking up new people. I don’t necessarily think that’s happening, but I don’t want to be unfair, so I just need more information.”

Andrew Myerberg, Harrell’s chief of staff, said the people LEAD and CoLEAD work with, who are often homeless and involved in the criminal legal system, don’t just “go into recovery” and cycle out; their complex needs can take years to address, and relapse is common. LEAD, founded in 2021, is an internationally renowned diversion model that has been implemented around the world, while CoLEAD has been widely praised as the most successful approach to addressing unsanctioned encampments by permanently housing people living in state-owned rights-of way.

Speaking more broadly, Rivera said she was not “supportive of Housing First”—programs based on the premise that housing is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for long-term stability, health, and recovery—because “I don’t think it’s fair. … They’re not going to be able to stay housed if they don’t have the treatment services.” This reflects a misunderstanding that has become a talking point among the right across the country—that “housing first” means “housing only,” and that programs like LEAD simply dump people in empty houses and leave them there to rot.

On Friday, Rivera appeared eager to reignite her efforts last year to gut the city’s Equitable Development initiative, which helps fund community-based efforts by small, often first-time, developers to help their projects get off the ground. Last year, Rivera proposed legislation that would have frozen all new funding for the program and required the community groups it funded to spend down every penny they received from EDI by the end of the year or lose all their funding—a virtual impossibility for long-term capital projects that typically take five to seven years to complete.

Rivera’s proposal resulted in an outcry from communities that were slated to benefit from EDI projects (which are concentrated in Southeast Seattle) as well as panicked EDI recipients, who begged the council not to withdraw city funding for their projects. (Eventually, Rivera withdrew her amendment and replaced it with new reporting requirements for EDI projects.) Rivera suggested Friday that she still thinks EDI is completing projects too slowly, noting that 20 of 75 EDI projects that have received funding at some point in the last 10 years, through 2025, are finished.

“You know, ideology is great, but what is really great is when we [take] action and these projects actually open to help community,” Rivera said. “Just talking about it, that’s great, but we have to do it. And so this was my concern, as you know last year, is a lot of these projects are not not moving along fast enough where they’re actually going to benefit community, and that’s a concern.”

Rob Saka backed Rivera up, saying that while he didn’t “remember all the ins and outs and twists and turns of that… [I] remember there being a fair amount of confusion around the original purpose and goals of that underlying effort. And I also remember my colleague being unfairly attacked, in some cases based off of race, which, you know, check your privilege! White saviorism in the city of Seattle is particularly real.”

Saka did not give any examples of anyone making a racist argument against Rivera’s proposal to gut the Equitable Development Initiative, which is explicitly designed to benefit underserved communities of color. The original EDI initiative was sponsored by former councilmember Tammy Morales, who, like Rivera, is Latina.

PubliCola’s own coverage at the time showed that the overwhelming majority of those who asked the council to allow EDI projects to keep moving forward were people of color who worked on or whose communities directly benefited from these grassroots community projects.

City Council, Elections, housing, podcasts

Another Tree Petition, Another Council Staff Departure, and Another Round of Election Results
Google image of the site before demolition; the “million dollar house” is the white house in foreground, with the closest tree to the property visible on the right.

1. More than 400 people have signed a Change.org petition imploring the city to “Save Three Sisters Park in Ballard,” which the petition page describes as “a trio of trees that must be over 100 years old” that, the petition claims, are now threatened by development.

“What was once a quiet refuge could soon be overshadowed by development. Someone’s living room window will be mere feet away from what was once a community space. All for what? So that some corporate entity can replace the existing million dollar home with SEVEN million dollar homes. Lining the pockets of capitalism.”

Just a few problems with that description. First, there’s no park called “Three Sisters Park”—as with other campaigns to whip up opposition to new housing, the petitioners have anthropomorphized the trees. (See also: “Luma,” “Kaia,” “Astra,” and of course, “Grandma’s Cedar.” Second, the “park” isn’t even a park—it’s a stand of three Western Red Cedars on what’s known as an “unopened street end,” like a planting strip that functions as a barrier to traffic, owned by the Seattle Department of Transportation. (The trees’ age is unknown).

Third, and most important: The trees aren’t threatened by the development next door. According to an SDOT spokesperson, “There are no current plans to prune or remove the Western Redcedars.If construction requires pruning in the future, the developer will need to file an amendment to the permit. This would be reviewed by SDOT Urban Forestry to assess the necessity and impact. If approved, the work would need to be completed by a Registered Tree Service Provider (RTSP).”

In addition, the developer, MRN Homes, plans to plant four new trees on a site that currently has nowsignificant trees, just bushes, adding tree canopy in the future. (It’s also ironic that the petition posits proximity to trees as a bad thing for people living in these future townhouses, when their more common tactic is to claim people living in new buildings will lose the benefits of shade if trees are removed).

Finally, it’s pretty disingenuous to claim that a “million-dollar home” is being replaced by “seven million-dollar homes.” MRN, a local Seattle builder, has built some large, almost-million-dollar townhouses in the city. However, their smaller townhouses sell for a more typical-for-Seattle price of around $700,000—not affordable housing, by any stretch, but considerably more in reach than the $2 million to $3 million single-family houses currently for sale in the neighborhood near this development site.

As for the “million-dollar home” that was on the site—an 875-square foot, 2-bedroom house from the 1960s? That “house” was valuable not because of the house itself but because of the land underneath it, which is zoned for multifamily use.

2. City Councilmember Maritza Rivera has lost another legislative assistant—the fourth person to leave the position in the 19 months Rivera has been in office. Unlike most other council members, Rivera has just two legislative assistants, or LAs—longtime aide Wendy Sykes, and another position that has gone under several different titles in Rivera’s brief time on the council, including “policy lead,” “policy director,” and “district director.”

The turnover rate is higher, by far, than in most council offices, which tend to have more staff and retain them longer. (Only Rob Saka has had similarly high staff turnover).

The latest staffer, who we were unable to reach, lasted less than six months. That’s actually a better record than some of Rivera’s previous staffers, who’ve lasted between four and six months. In 2023, according to the Stranger, 26 employees at the city’s Office of Arts and Culture signed off on a letter complaining about a toxic environment at the office, quoting workers who called her a micromanager who treated them with condescension.

3. Friday update: Yup, Thursday’s results were an anomaly. As of the latest vote count, Katie Wilson leads the mayor’s race with more than 50 percent of the vote, to Harrell’s 41.7 percent. That’s a terrible result for an incumbent.

Thursday’s election numbers, which reflected the second set of ballots counted since Tuesday (election night), saw a notable shift away from the progressive trend in Wednesday’s results, moving the needle back slightly toward centrist incumbents. In the latest batch of about 32,000 ballots, challenger Katie Wilson led Mayor Bruce Harrell 47 to 45; challenger Erika Evans led incumbent City Attorney Ann Davison 53.4 to 36.7; and challenger Dionne Foster led incumbent Sara Nelson 54.9 to 39.3.

Overall, Wilson is currently leading Harrell 47.8 to 43.8, Evans is leading Davison 53 to 36, and Foster is leading Nelson 55.4 to 38. Rinck has 76.7 percent of the vote.

It’s unclear why Thursday’s ballots swung slightly back toward centrist candidates. Thursday’s count may have included ballots mailed before election day, while Wednesday’s reflected ballots dropped off at drop boxes on Tuesday; later votes almost invariably trend more progressive.

In the race for City Council in District 2—the seat currently held by appointee Mark Solomon—city land-use attorney Eddie Lin was leading SDOT outreach staffer (and former Harrell transportation advisor) Adonis Ducksworth by 46 percent to 30 percent overall, reflecting a slight gain by Lin (considered the more progressive candidate in this race) in the latest round of ballots, in which Lin got 47.7 percent to Ducksworth’s 30.4.

As of Friday, there are about 15,000 Seattle ballots left uncounted.

4. If you couldn’t get enough of Sandeep and me beefing over the election results, and/or if you’d like to hear what an actual current council member thinks Tuesday’s election means, check out Week in Review on KUOW this week, with host Bill Radke, City Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth, and us two chuckleheads. It’s a fun, lively listen.