Tag: minimum wage

labor, Mayor Harrell, Police, Renters

Tietjen Still at East Precinct, Harrell Overheard Discussing Tip Credit Rollback, Mayor’s Budget Preserves Cut to Tenant Services

1. Two weeks ago after PubliCola reported that Police Chief Shon Barnes had picked controversial police captain Mike Tietjen to head up Capitol Hill’s East Precinct, Barnes announced internally that he was removing Tietjen, blaming our “recent article that has raised unease within the East Precinct, leading to a crisis of confidence among our LGBTQIA+ community members.”

As of Thursday, though, Tietjen was still in charge of the precinct, with no clear timeline for replacing him. An SPD spokesperson responded to a list of questions from PubliCola by saying, that “no movement has been made of yet. I do not have a timeline for completion at this time.”

Tietjen has been a high-profile, controversial figure at SPD since at least 2007, when he and his bike patrol partner were accused of planting drugs on a man and arresting him. City investigators later concluded that Tietjen and his partner lied about the arrest (and likely pocketed weed belonging to the suspect). The allegations raised questions about the two men’s credibility in 17 other drug and firearms cases.

More recently, Tietjen became notorious for his actions during the 2020 protests against police brutality after driving onto a sidewalk toward a group of protesters, calling them “cockroaches” when they fled the path of his unmarked SUV. (Tietjen was suspended for that incident and another in which he shoved a protester into a bus stop, slamming their head). During the same period, Tietjen failed to report an incident in which a group of officers, including one who was his direct report, allegedly harassed a trans woman in Capitol Hill, asking her if she “had a dick under” her skirt.

SPD did not respond to PubliCola’s questions about why Tietjen is still at the East Precinct and the process for replacing him.

2. During a recent meeting with restaurant owners at a West Seattle cafe, Mayor Bruce Harrell appeared to commit to considering the reinstatement of the “tip credit” for restaurants or other “exemptions” that could make it less expensive to run their businesses.

Seattle’s minimum wage law, passed in 2015, included a “tip credit” that allowed employers to pay sub-minimum wages as long as their workers made enough in tips to bring their overall “minimum compensation” to the city minimum.

The conversation was overheard by a bystander who provided a brief recording of the conversation to PubliCola. In the recording, Harrell can be heard saying that if reelected, “I fully commit, in January, to convene just restaurants” to discuss “what the city can do, from a policy perspective,” to help them deal with Seattle’s high minimum wage—”whether it’s exemptions, or re-discussion of the tip credit, I’ll have that discussion.”

Contacted by PubliCola, a spokesman for the mayor said, “Rolling back the minimum wage and reinstating the tip credit is not a policy we’re considering now or in the future. The mayor will always meet with small businesses to hear their ideas[.]”

The 2015 minimum wage law, passed unanimously by a city council that included Harrell, gave restaurants and other businesses that rely on customers to pay their workers’ wages through tips 10 years to adjust to the fact that they would have to pay the full minimum wage in 2025. Last year, Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth tried unsuccessfully to preserve the tip credit indefinitely.

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3. Harrell’s proposed budget preserves cuts made last year to the Department of Construction and Inspections’ tenant assistance program, which the city reduced from about $2.4 million to $1.6 million between 2024 and 2025. The tenant services program pays for counseling, legal aid,  education, and other assistance to tenants facing eviction or navigating landlord-tenant conflicts. Some of organizations whose city funding was cut or remained flat this year include the Tenants Union, United Indians of All Tribes Foundation, Solid Ground, and the Housing Justice Project, along with half a dozen others.

Harrell’s 2026 budget proposal includes no inflation adjustments, meaning that in real terms, nonprofits whose funding stayed flat will continue to experience reductions in their ability to pay staff salaries and other costs that are funded through SDCI.

In a letter to the city council earlier this month, seven groups that depend on city funding to operate their programs asked the council to reverse the cuts made last year and add more funding to address inflation and augment programs at a time when evictions and homelessness are approaching record highs.  The most cost-effective way to address homelessness is prevention, by helping people stay housed,” the organizations wrote. “When rental assistance is paired with tenant services it becomes far more effective, ensuring resources are used efficiently to keep people stably housed.”

Progressive Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck reportedly plans to introduce a budget amendment that would add $1 million to the budget for tenant services, restoring last year’s cut and addressing some of the inflationary cost increases over the past two years.

Last year, then-councilmember Tammy Morales did manage to get $355,000 in the budget to reduce the mayor’s proposed cuts to tenant services, but failed to get support for restoring another $456,000 in cuts. The council is similarly constituted this year, with Rinck, rather than Morales, as the lone consistent progressive on a centrist council focused on boosting the police budget, not helping tenants access legal aid.

We’ve reached out to Rinck about her amendment and will update this post if we hear back.

 

Business, labor

David Meinert Joins Burien’s Lawsuit to Kill Voter-Approved Minimum Wage
Steven Pavlov, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Erica C. Barnett

UPDATE: This post has been updated with comments from Meinert.

David Meinert, the onetime Seattle nightlife impresario who sold most of his businesses after KUOW reported that nearly a dozen women had accused him of sexual assault, has mostly retreated from local politics in Seattle. But he’s still active in Burien, where he just joined the city’s lawsuit seeking to strike down a new minimum wage passed by voters in February. The voter-approved minimum, which is pegged to the voter-approved minimum wage and Tukwila, is currently $21.10 an hour.

The city of Burien filed the lawsuit against the minimum wage initiative’s sponsor, the Transit Riders Union, and its general secretary, Katie Wilson. The suit claims that businesses have no way of knowing what Burien’s true minimum wage is, given the existence of a competing minimum wage passed by the Burien City Council last October, while the initiative campaign was going on. The lawsuit also claims that the council’s version pays workers more money anyway.

It doesn’t. In fact, the convoluted law exempts most local businesses (those with 20 or fewer employees) completely, and establishes a “total compensation” of $21.16 an hour, rather than an actual minimum wage—effectively imposing a penalty on employees who receive tips or any kind of benefits. If an employer provides any benefits or if a worker receives tips, those count toward their total hourly “wages,” allowing employers to actually pay much less. With so many carveouts and exemptions, the Burien council’s minimum wage allows most employers to pay the state minimum, currently $16.66 an hour.

Meinert said he joined the lawsuit because he wants clarity on how much he should pay his workers; currently, he said, he’s paying $19.10 an hour, the amount required for medium-sized employers under the initiative.

“It’s a really poorly written initiative, and the biggest problem is that it doesn’t actually set a minimum wage,” Meinert said. As we’ve reported, the Burien initiative sets a minimum wage that’s the same as Tukwila’s, and phases it in over time for smaller employers. Tukwila’s minimum wage, in turn, is set at the same level as the “living wage” established for hospitality and transportation workers in SeaTac, and that number is currently $21.10 an hour with no tip credit or other penalty.

“I literally don’t know which one to follow,” Meinert said. “We just want clarity.”

In his declaration supporting the lawsuit, Meinert wrote that the restaurant’s margins are somewhere between 6 and 10 percent. Last year, Meinert settled a class-action wage theft lawsuit. If the voter-approved minimum ends up prevailing in court, Meinert said he’d have to raise prices to make up the difference, which he said would lead to fewer customers and ultimately layoffs.

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“Because of this legal confusion, I cannot plan our payroll with any confidence. I don’t know whether we’ll be in compliance under one law while violating another,” Meinert wrote in his declaration supporting the lawsuit. “We are trying to act in good faith, but the lack of clarity puts us at risk of enforcement or legal liability no matter what we do.”

Meinert isn’t the only Burien business owner complaining about the “confusion.”  Others who’ve filed declarations supporting the city of Burien in its lawsuit against the voter-approved minimum wage increase include the owners of a McDonald’s franchise, Skinperfect Aesthetics, Andy’s Handy Mart, and Vince’s Italian.

Transit Riders Union and Wilson countersued the city of Burien earlier this month.

In a new response to Burien’s lawsuit, TRU accuses the city of violating the law by obstructing and refusing to implement the initiative, and failing to pay the new minimum to its own workers; currently, the city is advertising several jobs that pay just above the state minimum.

TRU’s counterclaim describes the actions Burien took before the February 2025 election to undermine the minimum wage initiative, including by passing a weaker minimum wage ordinance “to compete with the Initiative,” creating a ballot title and explanatory statement designed to create “an unfavorable comparison to defeat the Initiative, and sending mailers to voters “that tout the competing ordinance, which were intended to garner opposition to the Initiative.”

City Council, labor

Minimum Wage Advocates Countersue Burien; Council Bill Says Conflict of Interest Recusals Are Bad for Democracy

1. Legislation from City Councilmember Cathy Moore that would loosen the city’s ethics code to allow council members to vote on issues where they have a financial conflict of interest, as long as they disclose the conflict, is now available on the city’s website, along with a staff report outlining the (thin) justification for the proposal.

“This legislation would ensure fuller representation by providing additional opportunity for Councilmembers to participate in legislative matters in which they have a financial interest or other conflict of interest,” the memo says.

Currently, council members are supposed to abstain from votes if they have a financial conflict—for example, if they stand to make or lose money if a piece of legislation passes. The most recent example of this was when Tanya Woo recused herself from a committee vote on a proposal to lower the minimum wage for delivery workers; she and her husband own a restaurant.

Historically, it has been vanishingly rare for council members to actually recuse themselves from votes, including when legislation will clearly impact them directly; Airbnb impresario Mike O’Brien, a progressive past council member who owned and rented out several houses, proposed and voted on legislation imposing new regulations on Airbnb owners, for example.

Weakening the ethics rules further would just ensure that recusal is completely off the table, even in the case of egregious conflicts of interest—like a council member approving legislation that would increase the value of their own property, or create a job for a family member.

According to the memo, “This legislation would ensure fuller representation by providing additional opportunity for Councilmembers to participate in legislative matters in which they have a financial interest or other conflict of interest.”

By exempting the council from recusal requirements, the staff memo notes, Moore’s legislation would create a double standard for financial conflicts: Other elected officials and city employees would still be required to recuse themselves from making decisions when they have a financial interest in the outcome.

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2. Quick update on the city of Burien’s lawsuit seeking to overturn a new, voter-approved minimum wage: In April, the Transit Riders Union and Katie Wilson (who’s now running for Seattle mayor) countersued the city, saying that Burien illegally rejected the minimum wage initiative and attempted to interfere with the campaign for a higher minimum wage by passing a lower minimum wage after the measure qualified for the ballot.

The lawsuit accuses Burien of violating the 1st and 14th Amendment by depriving people of the substantive right to vote and of violating the state constitution, which designates the right to petition the government through initiative as a fundamental right under the US Constitution.

As we’ve reported, the minimum wage initiative raised Burien’s minimum wage to the same minimum wage as Tukwila’s, currently $21.10 an hour. The minimum wage passed by the Burien City Council would require employers to provide “total compensation,” including tips, health care, and other benefits, of $19.66 an hour; tipped employees and anyone who receives benefits worth more than $3 an hour would receive the state minimum wage of $16.66 an hour.

“In addition” the countersuit says, “Burien has failed to pay the legal minimum wage required by the Initiative and is currently advertising positions for less than the minimum wage adopted by the Initiative.”

As of today, three of the five jobs the city of Burien is advertising pay less than the voter-approved minimum wage, including two that pay just $17.81 an hour.

 

homelessness, labor, Uncategorized

Shelter Referrals Are (Still) a Poor Metric for Progress on Homelessness; Burien Sues Minimum Wage Campaign
Mayor Bruce Harrell delivers his 2025 State of the City speech.

1. During his State of the City speech earlier this month (titled “Seattle On the Rise”), Mayor Bruce Harrell touted the fact that, “paired with” a dramatic reduction in visible encampments, the city’s encampment removal team made more than 1,800 “referrals to shelter” in 2024. Some people, Harrell conceded, may initially refuse the Unified Care Team’s offers, but “we will always ask and create spaces for people to recover.”

For years, the city has used shelter “referrals” as a metric for success. But, as PubliCola has documented year after year after year after year after year, only a fraction of the people the city “refers” to shelter during or before encampment sweeps actually end up showing up at shelter and staying there for even a single night.

Numbers provided by the mayor’s office confirm that this continued to be the case in 2024, when only 48 percent of 1,884 “referrals” actually resulted in someone staying in a shelter.  That’s 903 instances in which a person slept in a shelter as the result of a Unified Care Team referral last year—down from 970 in 2023. This “enrollments” number fluctuates from season to season and year to year; people tend to be more willing to spend a night or two in a shelter bed when it’s cold out, for example.

A spokesperson for the mayor’s office noted that the enrollment numbers are likely an undercount, since some people don’t confirm their identities when they enroll in shelter; others, the spokesperson noted, may end up going to a different shelter or take more than 48 hours to enroll.

Alison Eisinger, director of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, said the “referrals to shelter” metric is about as meaningful as telling someone about a lunch place that has a good tofu banh mi and counting that as business for the restaurant. “No contracted outreach provider reports [referrals] because it is such a lousy indicator of the work,” she said.

Instead of focusing on “crappy data,” Eisinger said, she’d like to see the city working with the state to address the looming $250 million shortfall in revenue from the document recording fees that fund homeless services, or preparing for the likelihood that the Trump Administration will soon decimate the Department of Housing and Urban Development by slashing its workforce and cutting federal grants for housing.

None of the recent numbers Harrell touted in his speech are available on the city’s “One Seattle Homelessness Action Plan” dashboard, which does not appear to have been updated since last June. The mayor’s spokesperson called this an “oversight” and said the site would be updated with December figures later this week.

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2. The city of Burien is suing to roll back a voter-approved measure that increased Burien’s minimum wage to the same minimum as Tukwila—currently $21.10 an hour. The lawsuit, first reported by the B-Town Blog, targets the Transit Riders Union, which ran last year’s initiative campaign, and its general secretary (and sometime PubliCola contributor) Katie Wilson.

In its lawsuit, Burien claims that the initiative is too vague and “confusing” for voters to understand; additionally, the city argues that the initiative didn’t explicitly overturn the old minimum wage, leaving two “competing” minimum wages in place. The lawsuit also claims the campaign “went to exceptional lengths to suggest and imply that Burien had no minimum wage at all.”

The city is using the same Seattle law firm to sue Wilson and TRU that it’s using to defend against three homeless people seeking to overturn the city’s ban on sleeping outdoors, Keller Rohrback.

It’s hard to square Burien’s outrage with the details of the law its city council passed last year, which includes so many exemptions and carveouts that it could exempt many or most employers from paying more than the state minimum, currently $16.66 an hour.

The biggest carveout is that the law doesn’t set a minimum wage, but a minimum “total compensation” that varies by employer size. Total compensation, according to the law, includes not just wages but tips and medical benefits like health insurance. Other cities with minimum wage laws, such as Seattle, phased in their minimum wages over time, allowing smaller employers to count medical benefits and tips toward the minimum, but that initial grace period ended this year. Burien’s law permanently exempts any employer that provides benefits, or whose employees rely on customer tips, from paying more than the state minimum.

There are additional exemptions, too. Companies with fewer than 20 employees (which the law itself estimates at about 26 percent of Burien’s businesses) are completely exempt from the law. In addition, the highest possible wage—set at $4.50 an hour above whatever the state minimum happens to be—only applies to employers with more than 500 employees in King County. According to 2022 Census data, there are 269 businesses who meet that standard in all of King County, most of them outside Burien.

In the lawsuit, the city of Burien argues that by pegging the Burien minimum wage to Tukwila’s (which, in turn, is indexed on the city of SeaTac’s), the initiative is “uniquely problematic.” Voters in Renton passed a similar law last year, also pinned to Tukwila’s minimum; so far, it has not been challenged.