Tag: Maritza Rivera

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.

City Council, Taxes

Business Tax Will Be on November Ballot, Despite Council Objections Over Spending “Buckets”

By Erica C. Barnett

Over objections from some council members that the proposal was “rushed” or that it funds the wrong things, the Seattle City Council voted to place a tax increase for the city’s highest-grossing businesses on the November ballot. If it passes, the “Seattle Shield” proposal would direct new revenues toward housing, homelessness, food security, and other spending areas that are typically vulnerable during budget deficits and at risk of losing federal funding under the Trump Administration.

The proposal, which Counclmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Mayor Bruce Harrell rolled out in June, would raise the business and occupation tax exemption from $100,000 to $2 million in gross revenues, exempting most Seattle businesses from the tax, while increasing the tax rate for revenues above $2 million, netting about $90 million a year.

Amendments passed last week, including two from Councilmember Maritza Rivera exempting Children’s Hospital and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center from the tax, reduced that total to about $81 million a year. Other amendments expanded the potential uses of the new tax to include substance use treatment, business workforce development and storefront repair, and—the broadest spending category—”transportation.”

An amendment from Bob Kettle would make the tax exemption up to $2 million a year permanent (otherwise, the exemption would revert back to $100,000) and reduce the higher tax on large businesses to make it revenue neutral, meaning it would only pay for the tax break for smaller businesses. The city estimates that in 2026, the tax breaks will cost around $61 million.

Councilmember Bob Kettle, who ultimately joined the unanimous vote to move the proposal to the November ballot, said he would much prefer that the council not stipulate how the increased tax revenues would be spent, instead sending a ballot measure to voters that asked them to approve an all-purpose tax that could be used for any need the mayor or council identifies in the future.

Comparing the ballot measure to the council-approved JumpStart payroll tax, which was originally earmarked for housing, Green New Deal priorities, and small business assistance, Kettle said the council only fixed that “problem” last year, when it formally eliminated all spending restrictions on the tax.

“I’m generally opposed to the use of categories or buckets, as some may say. I believe they were a mistake in the payroll expense tax, since over the years, conditions change, but the legislation remains the same,” Kettle said. “I also believe that categories, or buckets, in this B&O legislation was a mistake, in the sense that buckets begets buckets”—a reference to the expansion of the spending categories. “You know, our focus should be on the deficit. … And I think our focus should be for a clean bill to ensure that we are fiscally responsible, that meets the needs of our city.”

It is, of course, unknown whether voters would support a so-called “clean bill” that did not specify any purpose for a tax increase they were being asked to approve. But in general, every local ballot measure calling for a tax increase has had some purpose, whether it’s the transportation levy, the housing levy, the preschool and Seattle Promise levy, the tax we pay to fund emergency medical services, or any other voter-approved tax increase in local taxes.

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A levy “to fix the general fund deficit” would not only be a hard sell to many voters (who wouldn’t know whether new taxes would fund police hiring bonuses or food banks), it would incorporate the assumption that the city will continue going into each budget year with a deficit for the duration of the levy—not exactly “fiscally responsible” financial planning.

Rivera, too, appeared generally dissatisfied with the proposal, saying the six-week process to approve it was “rushed” and that she would also have preferred to send it to voters as a general tax increase to address the current deficit.

“Rather than single out items, this money should have just gone to the general fund and then when the mayor was putting together the budget that he sends us, he could have then considered this funding along with all the other funding,” Rivera said. “That would have been the good governance way to do this. But that is not how this moved forward.”

As I reported last month, Rivera was the first council member to publicly propose asking voters to approve a tax increase for undefined “general fund” purposes, arguing that the city can’t predict what needs will emerge in the future. Rivera has also suggested the city could take dedicated funds from the city’s housing levy and using them to backfill the general fund in the short term, paying back the loaned dollars later and foregoing some potential housing. Editor’s note: This story originally said Bob Kettle backed Rivera’s idea of using housing levy dollars to backfill the general fund; his office said this isn’t the case, so we’ve corrected the story to reflect that.

City Council, Development, Equity, housing

Maritza Rivera Said She Never Intended to Gut the Equitable Development Initiative. Records Tell a Different Story.

 

Records also show that Rivera, who blamed the city’s planning director for delaying a meeting “for months,” was chiefly responsible for the delays.

By Erica C. Barnett

In late May, City Councilmember Maritza Rivera proposed freezing 2024 funds intended for the Office of Planning and Community Development’s Equitable Development Initiative, the city’s largest anti-displacement program, prompting outrage from community-based organizations and residents across the city.

She backed down after thousands of people flooded council members’ inboxes with objections to her proposal, which would have frozen about $24 million in 2024 funding for EDI projects unless OPCD spent all the funds that were currently available for the program, around $53.5 million, by September. Because it can take many years to spend capital funds, the measure would have effectively halted all projects planned for 2024 as well as future projects, putting a halt to the program.

EDI provides partial funding, such as startup capital costs, to community groups and nonprofits doing projects that benefit low-income people and communities of color, largely in Southeast Seattle. Freezing the 2024 funds would have opened up a path for the council to spend these targeted dollars closing the general-fund budget, at the expense of dozens of projects lined up to get EDI funds this year.

Rivera insisted at the time that she wasn’t trying to kill the initiative, and said she never intended to vote against the budget “carryforward” ordinance that would have preserved funding for projects that are already under contract.

But documents obtained through a records request show that Rivera was scoffing at EDI well before she began raising questions publicly, and that as late as May 15, she was suggesting that she might vote to kill the $53.5 million in projects as well, telling OPCD director Rico Quirindongo in an email, “At $50.5 million dollars and given the $250 million budget deficit, I need to have information that will give me confidence in voting for the proposed carryforward and in general, by which to show my constituents the accountability we are giving to OPCD’s programs.”

Even earlier, in March—shortly after OPCD did a lengthy presentation on EDI— Rivera texted Councilmember Cathy Moore, saying, “I could not disagree more that EDI has addressed housing displacement across the city and for low income families.”

In May, Rivera defended her proposal after three hours of public comment against it, accusing her colleague Tammy Morales of spreading “disinformation” and confusing people into believing that her bill would cut funding for projects that were already funded.

A review of thousands of emails that poured in opposing Rivera’s proposal, however, suggests the opposite—community groups, including many that have received EDI funds, understood exactly what her bill would do.

For instance, Wa Na Wari, the Black arts and culture organization, noted in their email that their plans to purchase a permanent home include future EDI funding that would be at risk under Rivera’s proposal. The director of the Church Council of Greater Seattle wrote, “It is imperative to the flourishing of our city that you do not pass any amendment which would freeze funding for the Equitable Development Initiative.” And even a mass email, which referred to the more than 50 organizations whose EDI funding was secured prior to 2024, noted that the proposal would harm ongoing and upcoming projects by halting the program.

Rivera also mischaracterized her attempts to get information from OPCD about the program. During a May council meeting,  for example, Rivera complained that she had repeatedly sought meetings with OPCD, but the department had “consistently rescheduled and delayed.”

But emails and scheduling records only show one instance in which OPCD rescheduled a meeting, moving a one-hour sit-down with Rivera from Friday, May 17 to Monday, May 20 so that Mayor Bruce Harrell’s chief operating officer, Marco Lowe, could be there. (OPCD met with Rivera a second time later that week.) “As a consequence” of this schedule change, Rivera told a council central staffer on May 15, she was pulling EDI program out of “carryforward” legislation for a separate vote, setting up her proposal to freeze funding for the program.

Ironically, the May meeting would have happened a month earlier if Rivera herself had not rescheduled it, after Quirindongo said he had COVID and would need to meet virtually instead of at Rivera’s office.  “I think we should reschedule and give you time to recover,” Rivera wrote. “Feel better soon.”

Quirindongo did meet briefly with Rivera on May 8, but only after Rivera moved the meeting at least twice, according to scheduling records, prompting his assistant to ask Rivera’s legislative aide, “Are you able to clarify about the delay in this meeting getting scheduled? You had said she would be available today, then Monday morning, but now not until midday Wednesday, and I’d like to better understand if there are special steps we need to take in the future to get on her calendar if we have time-sensitive requests.”

Despite being chiefly responsible for putting off the meeting with OPCD, Rivera sent multiple emails to Quirindongo excoriating him for delaying their meeting “for over two months.” Quirindongo responded that, in the case of the May meeting that OPCD bumped from Friday to the following Monday, Lowe was invited to help answer some of Rivera’s questions—including a list she sent Thursday night, just hours before the meeting was scheduled.

Rivera responded, “I have always been clear on the request. Not sure where the disconnect is on OPCD’s end. Looking forward to the set of briefings occurring before next Tuesday,” which was the deadline for council members to amend the budget legislation. Rivera didn’t introduce her amendment to freeze EDI funding until three days after the deadline, filing it late in the afternoon on May 24, the Friday before the long Memorial Day weekend.

City Council, education, Equity, Transportation

Spending Money Earmarked for Student Mental Health Will Require Action from Skeptical Council; Saka Abruptly Cuts Off Presentation on Transportation Equity

1. Seattle City Councilmembers, many of them still focused on undoing the legacy of the previous, more progressive council, turned their attention this week to an increase in the JumpStart payroll tax passed in the final days of budget deliberations last year.

The 0.1 percent increase, sponsored by former councilmember Kshama Sawant (with current council members Sara Nelson and Dan Strauss voting “no”), is supposed to flow into the city’s Department of Education and Early Learning to “expand educational supports at Seattle Public Schools, prioritizing mental health services including, but not limited to, school-based mental health counselors and culturally specific and responsive programming from community-based organizations.”

That won’t happen, however, without followup legislation expanding the possible uses of the JumpStart tax to include mental health supports for students—and until then, money will keep accruing, unspent.

The council and Mayor Bruce Harrell have already signaled that they plan to amend JumpStart, which is supposed to pay for affordable housing, Equitable Development Initiative projects, and Green New Deal investments, to free up money to solve a general-fund deficit of around $260 million. (The deficit has grown, among other reasons, because of a recently adopted contract with the city’s police guild giving officers retroactive raises of 24 percent).

During a budget committee meeting this week, Strauss said the council did no outreach to the school district before passing the increase for mental health programming, and new Councilmember Maritza Rivera expressed skepticism about the city taking on “a newer line of business” that they had no expertise in. The council previously added $4 million, over two years, for mental health services in schools, with $250,000 of that earmarked for Ingraham High School, the site of a 2022 shooting.

Rivera, whose kids go to Ingraham, said she had “no idea how the money was implemented, how well it’s working. It’s a new line of business, [and] there are no mental health experts at the department or at the city. There’s [Seattle-King County] Public Health, but I’m not sure how plugged-in Public Health was to that [decision], so definitely a lot of questions here.”

Yesterday’s shooting at Garfield High School will make it harder, politically, for council members obsessed with undoing Sawant’s legacy to allow the school mental-health funding (which was prompted by the Ingraham shootingl) to lapse, but anything’s possible; if the city doesn’t allocate the money this year, via the regular midyear budget process, it would go back into the JumpStart fund and be allocated among the current spending categories.

Employers have been paying the increased tax—which is based on the pay of the highest-paid employees at the city’s largest companies—since the beginning of the year.

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2. During a meeting of the council’s special transportation levy committee this week, committee chair Rob Saka abruptly cut off a presentation from the Seattle Department of Transportation about a proposed task force that will, if the levy passes in November, be charged with creating policies to guide levy spending on sidewalks, bridges, and street paving, with a focus on equity and financial sustainability.

SDOT director Greg Spotts had just given a brief overview of the levy and was handing the mic off to SDOT’s transportation equity program manager, Annya Pintak, to talk about efforts to integrate the city’s race and social justice goals into the levy.

That’s when Saka jumped in, telling Spotts, “I’m gonna cut you off here for just a moment. I feel like we have a good baseline on that. And so, you know, you were invited here today with the specific purpose and intent [of] talking about the task force. So I encourage you to direct your comments and narrow them to the task force, and I believe slide 14 is… where that starts.”

A third presenter, levy program manager Megan Shepherd, jumped past Pintak’s presentation to her own slides, leaving Pintak—the only person of color at the presenters’ table—sitting silently (and awkwardly) at the table for the rest of the presentation.

Whatever Saka’s reason for rushing SDOT along, nixing the equity section of the department’s presentation didn’t save much time; the whole agenda item took up roughly 15 minutes of an almost two-and-a-half-hour meeting that began and ended with lengthy remarks by Saka.