Tag: Rob Saka

City Council, Mayor Harrell, Morning Fizz, Police

Rahr Pledges No Personnel Changes at SPD, Reinstates Assistant Chief Put on Leave By Diaz; Saka Proposes Expanding Transportation Levy
Interim Seattle Police Chief Sue Rahr, speaking at a press conference at City Hall this week

Is it even a Friday without a bunch of late-breaking local news? We think not!

1.  John O’Neil, a Seattle police captain who has been accused of sexual harassment and retaliation by his female subordinates, will continue to direct SPD’s public affairs office, that office confirmed on Friday—contradicting claims from inside the department that O’Neil was seen clearing out his desk on Wednesday, when Mayor Bruce Harrell announced former police chief Adrian Diaz will be reassigned to “special projects.” 

O’Neil, like Diaz, is facing multiple lawsuits and internal complaints from women alleging sexual harassment and retaliation. Three of the women who have filed lawsuits left the public affairs office, including two—Valerie Carson and Judinna Gulpan—who took demotions in order to be reassigned. The decision to retain him in light of allegations similar to the ones against Diaz reads as a vote of confidence in O’Neil and his leadership.

In an internal email on Thursday, Rahr wrote that her number one goal was to “bring stability and continuity” to the department. “I have no plans to make personnel moves, especially at the command level.”

At Wednesday’s press conference, Rahr declined to condemn SPD’s current culture, saying she’s concerned about the culture in all police departments across the country. “I don’t think [SPD is] worse or better than others; I think we have work to do in every department,” Rahr said. “One of the reasons I was very anxious to jump in is, I think the Seattle Police Department is open to doing something meaningful, and implementing systemic change.”

2. Despite her pledge, Rahr did make one top-level personnel decision this week—she reinstated Assistant Chief Tyrone Davis to full duties, just eight days after Diaz put him on administrative leave while the Office of Police Accountability completes an investigation into allegations against him. PubliCola first reported the news on Twitter at 1:30 this afternoon.

Rahr did not say why she decided to restore Davis to his position.

In a brief email to SPD staff, Rahr wrote, “I want to let you know that based on newly available information and a review of the OPA investigation”—which has not been completed—”I have restored A/C Davis to full duty, effective immediately. I am looking forward to having the full team, working together.”

3. Finally—and file this under “more next week”—the city council’s transportation committee chair, Rob Saka, will propose an amended, $1.55 billion Seattle Transportation Levy next week that would increase funding for sidewalks, electric vehicle charging infrastructure, Safe Routes to School projects, transit security officers, and bridges, among other spending areas. The plan would add $100 million to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposal, which Harrell himself boosted by $100 million earlier this month.

Saka’s plan would provide an additional $63 million for new sidewalks; $6 million for transit security, including additional security guards; and $10 million for additional EV charging stations, among other changes.

To make up for some of the new expenditures, Saka’s proposal would cut funding for a new “Neighborhood-Initiated Safety Partnership Program”—a plan to build 16 street-safety projects initiated by neighborhoods based on local conditions and safety concerns—from $41 million to $25.5 million. Harrell’s original plan, released in April, included $48 million for neighborhood-initiated projects.

Saka’s proposal would also set minimum spending requirements for new sidewalk construction, bridge maintenance, arterial street maintenance, and electric vehicle charging facilities, and adds new references to auditing, good governance, and accountability. The council’s special committee on the transportation levy, which Saka chairs, will meet on Tuesday, June 4, at 9:30 am.

Correction: This article originally misstated the details of Saka’s plan, using the numbers from Mayor Harrell’s May proposal instead of those from Saka’s amendment.

City Council, Economy, labor

City Council Bill Cutting “Gig” Delivery Workers’ Pay Moves Forward
Micaela Romero from Washington Community Action Network, joined by her son, testifies against legislation that will reduce delivery driver wages.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council’s governance and economic development committee approved a bill sponsored by Council President Sara Nelson that will lower the minimum wage for so-called “gig” delivery workers on Thursday, with Joy Hollingsworth abstaining because, as she put it, “I still want this bill to be baked more.”

The 4-1 vote came after hours of testimony from delivery drivers who were overwhelmingly opposed to the legislation and have shown up at public comment periods for weeks on end to ask the council not to cut their wages. After last year’s city council, including Nelson, voted for the “PayUp” bill that required gig companies to cover more of workers’ costs, wages went up to an average of around $26 an hour. In response, the gig companies—Uber, Doordash, Instacart, and others— imposed a flat $5 fee on every order, causing demand for delivery service to plummet.

A handful of drivers, mostly representing the Uber-funded lobbying group Drive Forward, said the changes would enable the companies to drop the fees.

Several council members patted themselves on the back for listening to “all sides” of the issue before voting to approve a bill that satisfied almost all of the delivery companies’ demands.

Nelson, for example, spent several minutes reading the February testimony of bike delivery worker Heather Nielson, who said the fees had caused customers to “boycott the apps” and stop providing tips, into the record. Nielson, later featured on the conservative website The Center Square, said tips make up 90 percent or more of drivers’ wages—a claim that many other drivers contradicted in their testimony.

Nelson seemed eager to ignore those workers’ comments, referring to them dismissively as “all this noise we’ve been hearing.”

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Her legislation, she said, “is an effort to reverse the bad outcomes caused by a flawed law” that resulted in a “drastic reduction in worker wages and lost revenues for restaurants and other retail establishments. That’s what happened. That was the chain of events. And all of this was anticipated but the last council did it anyway. And now we’re faced with the fallout.”

Councilmember Maritza Rivera recalled a time when, “as a young woman, I worked as a server in a fast food restaurant where I made the legal minimum wage and relied on tips to pay rent, utilities and groceries.” In most states, restaurants can pay sub-minimum wages for tipped workers on the justification that workers make plenty of money from customers’ tips, and companies like Doordash and Instacart adopted the practice in states where it’s still legal until a series of lawsuits forced them to alter their policies. Washington state does not allow a “tip credit.”

The legislation notably, does not require companies to stop paying the $5 fee; nor does it impose any new restrictions on the companies’ power over their workers, such as their ability to “deactivate” (fire) workers for any reason, including wanting to set their own work hours.

Instead, the bill reduces workers’ pay and takes away some of the rights they currently have. First, the bill lowers the amount companies must pay their drivers for expenses, such as self-employment (employer) taxes and workers’ compensation, that the drivers wouldn’t have to pay if they were classified as employees. Continue reading “City Council Bill Cutting “Gig” Delivery Workers’ Pay Moves Forward” →

City Council, homelessness, King County, Morning Fizz

Morning Fizz: COVID at City Hall, Why “Consolidation” Won’t Fix the City Budget, and More on Burien’s Efforts to Kill a Church Encampment

1. Seattle City Councilmember Bob Kettle recently contracted COVID after coming in to his City Hall office while a family member was home sick with the highly infectious disease. During the period when he was not yet testing positive, he and his staff continued to work at City Hall without wearing masks, according to sources on the floor.

Although Kettle told PubliCola that he personally stayed home for a week after his first positive COVID test (including five days after his symptoms receded), his presence on the second floor during the time when his family member was sick unnerved at least one council member, Tammy Morales, who wrote in an email to the city clerk and council HR, “I just learned that a couple folks on the floor are home with Covid. Can I ask you to send around our policies to remind folks WHEN TO STAY HOME.”

According to a staffer for his office, Kettle “took multiple tests and the moment he received a positive result, he immediately began to work from home, and followed the five-day protocol once he received a negative test(s).” The city asks employees to isolate for five days after a positive test and stay home if they still have symptoms; however, even asymptomatic people can be contagious. Kettle and a staffer confirmed that no one else in his office contracted COVID from him.

Council president Sara Nelson and other council members have frequently touted the benefits of in-person work to council members and their staff as well as the recovery of downtown businesses. The council now holds all its meetings in person; previously, some council members attended remotely, including one council member with a young child and one who is immunocompromised.

Saka and Strauss are correct that the city has arborists in multiple departments. It has a total of two: One in the Parks Department, and one in SDOT. It’s unclear how moving both positions into one department or the other would save the city money.

2. Facing the largest budget shortfall in recent history, many city council members have latched on to the idea that city departments are inefficient and full of costly redundancies—a problem council budget committee chair Dan Strauss has recently taken to illustrating with the example of city arborists. “We have multiple different departments that have arborists,” Strauss said at a committee meeting last month, and “I think it makes more sense to have them all in one department.”

Earlier this week, Councilmember Rob Saka took up the mantle, calling the city’s many arborists the “canonical example” of the need for “consolidation” at the city on an episode of the Seattle Channel’s “City Inside/Out,” which features panel discussions with city council members.

“Do we need 17 different departments with arborists, or can they sit under one [department]—parks, for example, or whatever it is. But we need to better consolidate our functions, services, our lines of business, avoid duplication of efforts, [and] I think we’ll achieve some some great savings through that,” Saka said.

Curious, we looked to see how many arborists the city has and in how many different departments. As it turns out, Saka and Strauss are correct that the city has arborists in multiple departments. It has a total of two: One in the Parks Department, and one in SDOT. It’s unclear how moving both positions into one department or the other would save the city money.

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3. As PubliCola reported late last year, Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon failed to inform the city council about a letter from Deputy King County Executive Shannon Braddock telling him the city needed to come up with a plan to spend $1 million the county was offering to build a shelter or lose the money.

Bailon sat on the letter for a week before telling the full council about it, claiming he was too busy responding to to emails opposing a temporary encampment at a local church that was run by a nonprofit started by then-council member Cydney Moore.

Although Bailon later changed his story, documents obtained through a records request show that he did spend a great deal of time responding to opponents of the encampment and raising questions about its legality. Those emails included:

• A note to the Burien fire chief asking him if the city could ensure that all the tents at the encampment would be “flame retardant”;

• An email to Burien Police Chief Ted Boe asking him to send an officer to a meeting to refute “potentially false claims” by the encampment’s sponsor that sex offenders would be barred from the encampment (which they were);

• An email warning the superintendent of the Highline Public School District about the church encampment’s “proximity to Highline High School” and claiming that the encampment violated city law;

• At least seven emails to people who wrote him to oppose the encampment, saying he was “very sorry to hear” about the problems the encampment would cause them and encouraging them to attend an upcoming meeting where they could express their opposition.

The encampment closed in February.

 

 

City Council, homelessness, Mayor Harrell

Harrell Considered Hiring Ceis to Embed in Homelessness Authority, Council Starts Government 101 Briefings

Editor’s note: Due to a glitch, this article went out to newsletter subscribers earlier today but was not published on the site. We apologize for any confusion.

Mayor Bruce Harrell reportedly planned to hire controversial consultant Tim Ceis to serve as a city representative inside the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, where Ceis would work to reorganize and “fix” the organization, according to several sources. The plan to embed Ceis inside KCRHA hasn’t happened—PubliCola hears the mayor’s office decided it would be “too controversial”—but Harrell did manage to more or less singlehandedly appoint his longtime ally (and Garfield football teammate) L. Darrell Powell as the agency’s latest interim director.

It’s unclear whether the mayor plans to send someone other than Ceis over to the homelessness authority, which he recently criticized (along with Seattle-King County Public Health) to the Seattle Times, characterizing both the KCRHA and Public Health – Seattle & King County as “county” functions that should be doing a better job addressing homelessness and fentanyl, respectively, than they are. The city is actually a joint partner in both efforts, and provides a majority of KCRHA’s funding.

Ceis, a former deputy mayor whom Harrell hired to advocate for changes to Sound Transit’s station locations last year (Ceis received $310,000 to push for a plan that will eliminate stations near First Hill and in the Chinatown/International District), was recently criticized for his efforts to elevate business-backed candidate Tanya Woo, the business-backed candidate who lost last November to District 2 council incumbent Tammy Morales, to the city council. The eight elected councilmembers appointed Woo to replace former citywide councilmember Teresa Mosqueda late last month.

Neither Ceis nor Mayor Harrell’s office responded to requests for comment.

Now that Woo’s appointment is complete, the council has said it plans to get to work implementing the policy changes they promised during their campaigns, like hiring more police officers, getting “back to basics” like reducing visible drug use and filling potholes, and finding waste and inefficiencies in every city department.

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(Why they couldn’t start holding committees during the first month of their terms is unclear. The new council decided not to hold a single committee meeting until filling the vacant position. In contrast, the council filled the most recent several vacancies while holding committees and conducting a typical full roster of council business.)

But first, the new council members’ committee agendas consist of a series of Government 101-style briefings from city departments and council staff about what the departments do, how the division of powers works when it comes to the budget and executive departments, and how the city functions as a whole. On Monday, council central staff director Ben Noble held a briefing to explain how the city budget works. Throughout, new councilmembers offered suggestions about how the budget could change this year—including adopting a whole “new model” for budgeting, “benchmarking” Seattle’s spending on certain areas (say: homelessness or transportation) in comparison to what other cities, such as Houston, do; and “driving efficiencies” by “consolidating functions” that are being done by multiple departments.

“Taxpayers need to see some good return on investments, and members of the public, they’re just not seeing that today. And I think the number one area where the members of the public are seeing lack of ROI is in our homelessness spending.”—Councilmember Rob Saka

Councilmember Rob Saka, in particular, said he would like to see the overall city budget (written by the mayor’s budget office, but amended and approved by the council), change to reflect the values of the “two-thirds net new council,” which is politically to the right of the previous council. “We need to align our budget priorities with the priorities of everyone here that sits at the dais,” Saka said, “not that of previous councils.” Specifically, he added, the city’s “taxpayers… need to see some good return on investments, and members of the public, they’re just not seeing that today. And … I think the number one area where the members of the public are seeing lack of ROI is in our homelessness spending.”

Saka, along with new councilmember Maritza Rivera, promised to “audit the budget” during his campaign. On Monday, both said that they do not think a full “budget audit” is affordable or feasible. (The exact definition of a “full budget audit” has always been vague, and the city already conducts routine audits of its departments).

“It would be great to audit the full budget, but that’s not practical,” Rivera said. This is something their opponents noted repeatedly on the campaign trail, but both stuck with their “audit the budget” promise until the end of the campaign, abandoning it only once they were securely on the council.

City Council, Elections

And Then There Were Eight: Council Narrows Down Nominees for Open Seat
Overhead of shot of Seattle City Council sitting at the dais
Seattle Channel screenshot.

By Erica C. Barnett

Each of the eight current Seattle City Councilmembers nominated one person each to serve as the replacement for former councilmember Teresa Mosqueda on Friday, narrowing down the list of 72 candidates whose applications just became public yesterday to eight.

Most of them will be familiar names to anyone who has been reading this site. Council members went one by one starting with Bob Kettle (who ousted Andrew Lewis last year), so the nominations don’t necessarily reflect which candidate was each council member’s first pick. They are:

Tanya Woo, the Chinatown-International District activist who fought against the expansion of a homeless shelter in SoDo and narrowly lost her race against District 2 incumbent Tammy Morales in November. (Bob Kettle)

Linh Thai, a former staffer for Congressman Adam Smith who was most recently the head of a veterans’ service organization. (Joy Hollingsworth).

Mark Solomon, a crime prevention coordinator with the Seattle Police Department who ran against Morales in 2019, when she was first elected to the council. (Rob Saka)

Juan Cotto, a a neighborhood activist from South Seattle who works as government affairs director for Bloodworks Northwest. (Maritza Rivera)

Mari Sugiyama, a Human Services Department manager who got a recent boost from a letter signed by 300 supporters, which I wrote about yesterday. (Tammy Morales).

Neha Nariya, the owner of the Civic Hotel in Queen Anne, which has served as emergency shelter (during the early days of the pandemic) and, more recently, as the site of harm reduction-based lodging through Purpose Dignity Action’s CoLEAD program. (Cathy Moore)

Steve Strand, the captain of SPD’s West Precinct. (Sara Nelson).

Vivian Song, a member of the Seattle School Board. (Dan Strauss).

If PubliCola was taking bets, the odds are on Woo, who several council members said would have been their first pick if they’d been at the front of the nominating line (Moore and Rivera, plus Saka, who mentioned her and a couple of people who didn’t make the cut). By installing Woo immediately after she lost an election, the council wouldn’t just be overturning the will of the voters, but requiring Morales to serve alongside the person she defeated—not a great look for a council that can’t stop talking about the new era of good feelings their election will usher in at city hall.

Beyond that, it’s unclear whether Woo—who received fewer than 13,000 votes in all, and whose support is strongly rooted in the CID—can win citywide, particularly in a Presidential election year when general electorate in Seattle will be younger and more progressive than in the low-turnout, non-mayoral odd-year election in which Woo narrowly lost. But apparently some on the council think she can; council president Sara Nelson, for example, said her “first criterion” for choosing a new colleague was that they must be “somebody who was going to run for office this year” and win.

After describing West Precinct Captain Steve Strand’s attributes, Nelson changed her mind, interrupting her own comments to say “You know what? I’ve convinced myself,” and nominate him after all.

“I would like the person that is in this seat to be the person who is going to have to live with those decisions that they make over the next nine months,” Nelson said. “The tendency to promise more than we can deliver long term is what I believe has gotten us into this position, and so I am very much looking for somebody who’s going to be willing to be accountable for the decisions that they make when they’re at this dais.” It’s not clear which council members she was referring to with that comment—of her colleagues that didn’t seek reelection last year, only one, Alex Pedersen, had served just one term before bowing out; the rest were veterans (Herbold, Juarez, Sawant) or ran and lost (Lewis).

Besides Nelson, most council members said the characteristics they were looking for in a new colleague were things like commitment to the city, community support, and expertise in at least one issue area—standard stuff. The only exception: Rob Saka, who said that after “collaboration,” his primary requirement is that they must be “someone who doesn’t view me as the enemy. Someone who doesn’t view any of my colleagues as the enemy either.”

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“It’s unfortunate that that is something that have to have to say as something we should specifically avoid in this day and age,” Saka continued. “But that’s where we are. That’s a point where … we need to move move beyond that. So, let us move beyond the divisive, toxic, inappropriate rhetoric of ‘enemy.'” Noting that he is an Air Force veteran, Saka said he had spent time on combat missions “fighting against enemies. And what we’re doing [on the council] does not create or engender an enemy mindset or mentality.”

Saka did not specify who was trying to create an “enemy” mentality on the past or current council, or whether any of the 72 applicants had prompted this concern.

There was one more odd moment near the end of the meeting. It came during Nelson’s comments, which were initially about how she didn’t plan to nominate Strand, given that there were so many good candidates already. But, after describing Strand’s attributes—he has “partnered with multiple city departments, human service providers, businesses, and community based organizations to address homelessness, drug addiction, organized retail theft, [and] coordinated operations to target predatory drug dealers that fueled the fentanyl crisis”—she changed her mind, interrupting her own comments to say “You know what? I’ve convinced myself,” and nominate Strand after all.

 

Yesterday, Strand sent an email to all West Precinct staff that made it sound like he’d be going away for a while.

“I will leave my door open and light on for the next week and a half so you can come up and take a look” inside the office, the email—which, he insisted, was “not a going away speech”—said. “Outside the door you’ll see my Officer of the Year plaque from 1999. The handcuffs are Zsolt’s and were placed on all 326 arrestees we made that year.” Zsolt is Zsolt Dornay, a notorious officer who shot an unarmed DUI attorney in a brawl on Post Alley that may have started when he drove his motorcycle through a crowd, was suspended in 1995 for a violent road-rage incident, was suspended again for drunk driving in 2010, and was sued (and suspended) for allegedly assaulting a handcuffed man.

The email also encourages officers and staff to check out his military awards and gear, along with various other memorabilia, but warns “Don’t drink the snake wine, not sure what would happen.”

City Council, Transportation

Councilmember-Elect Saka Compared 8-Inch Road Divider to Trump’s Border Wall
Partial map of the RapidRide road safety improvement project on Delridge; the arrow points to the daycare Saka says the city is discriminating against.

By Erica C. Barnett

City Councilmember-elect Rob Saka, a former Meta attorney who will represent West Seattle’s District 1 starting next year, sent a series of increasingly heated emails to Seattle Department of Transportation employees during 2021 and 2022 seeking the removal of a road divider that SDOT installed in front of his kids’ preschool. The divider was part of the RapidRide H project connecting Burien, White Center, and West Seattle to downtown.

The curb-like divider is a variation on a common traffic calming device known as a hardened centerline. The curb, which replaced a double yellow line, physically prevents northbound drivers from making an illegal left turn to access homes and businesses on the west side of the street, including a bilingual preschool called the Refugee and Immigrant Family Center. According to an April 2022 South Seattle Emerald story about the dispute, Saka’s two children attended the preschool as of last year.

In the email thread (reproduced in part here), which PubliCola obtained through a records request, Saka compared the mid-block traffic barrier to Trump’s border wall and said it was “triggering” and “severely traumatizing” to immigrants who “have faced significant trauma during their perilous journeys, including by navigating divisive structures and barriers designed to exclude lives in the US.”

“First, it might be helpful to reset on physical barriers as a social construct and how SDOT’s dangerous barrier here has severely traumatized and upset our community at the Refugee & Immigrant Family Center (RIFC),” Saka wrote. “Historically, barriers have been used to exclude, isolate, divide, discriminate against, project power over, subjugate, render less than status to, punish, segregate, humiliate/embarrass, harass, degrade, and so much more.”

“Historically, barriers have been used to exclude, isolate, divide, discriminate against, project power over, subjugate, render less than status to, punish, segregate, humiliate/embarrass, harass, degrade, and so much more,” Saka told project staff last March. “More recently, the Trump administration sought to build an enormous wall on the southern border with Mexico – presumably, to exclude certain individuals deemed ‘undesirable’ in the name of national security.”

The border wall is a 30-foot-high barrier, spanning hundreds of miles, that has contributed to the deaths of countless migrants, including a growing number of deaths and injuries due to falls. The Delridge barrier is an 8-inch-high road divider that runs for about 100 feet. Although Saka described the divider as “highly unique and bizarre,” SDOT has installed similar road treatments across the city, including along 15th Ave. NW in Ballard and Rainier Ave. South between I-90 and the Rainier Valley.

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Even before SDOT installed the divider, left turns were illegal along the length of the RapidRide project, which also includes new bike lanes on both sides of the street. The divider is one of many new road treatments designed to keep people from attempting to pass stopped buses and prevent collisions with pedestrians and cyclists.

Many of the new safety measures along Delridge are much larger and more permanent than the raised centerline outside the RIFC. Just to the north of the preschool, for example, a new RapidRide bus stop in front of Louisa Boren K-8 school features a raised concrete island in the middle of Delridge, along with wide markings between the lanes to indicate that drivers should not turn left or pass buses at the RapidRide stop. Immediately to the north, a broad, landscaped median protects patrons at the Delridge library from cars turning illegally into the bike lanes and parking lot.

Nationwide, about a quarter of all car crashes involving pedestrians are caused by a driver turning left and hitting someone in their path.

The South Seattle Emerald’s story about the preschool’s concerns also notes that the new bike lane took out several parking spaces parents had used to drop off and pick up their kids.

POV: Driving north on Delridge Way SW, the new barrier blocks drivers from turning into a new bike lane and the sidewalk used by transit riders. It also prevents illegal left turns into a preschool parking lot.

In his emails, Saka suggested that community members, not roadway designers at SDOT, were in the best position to know what keeps their roadways safe.

“For clarity, we don’t need a secretive ‘design team’ to impose their errant decisions on us in the name of ‘public safety’. Nor do we need a benevolent king to do the same,” Saka wrote. (Emphasis in original.) “SDOT must immediately remove the most egregious feature – a concrete barrier that directly targets our RIFC community and was erected without our prior consultation, input, or knowledge.”

In April 2022, an SDOT public engagement manager offered to set up a meeting with Saka to discuss the project. Saka responded that he would only meet the SDOT team if the agency guaranteed in advance that they would remove the barrier. “Like I mentioned earlier, we need this pretty simple confirmation from SDOT in order to ensure any meeting would be an effective and efficient use of time,” Saka wrote. “I strongly urge you to NOT overthink your response.”

SDOT has not yet responded to PubliCola’s inquiries about the project, and Saka did not respond to detailed questions sent on Tuesday. The operator of the RIFC also did not immediately respond to questions sent Thursday. A search of court records did not show any legal action by Saka, either on his own or on behalf of the preschool, and the road divider remains in place.