1. On Thursday, Mayor Bruce Harrell announced $27.8 million in new grants through the city’s Equitable Development Initiative—the city’s largest anti-displacement program. On the list, for the second time in Harrell’s term: The Royal Esquire Club, a 78-year-old private social club on Rainier Avenue South where Harrell served as board president (and where he held his election-night party this year).
This year’s $184,000 grant serves as a kind of bookend to the Harrell Administration. In 2022, shortly after Harrell became mayor, the city granted the club $800,000 for renovations to its building—one of the largest grants that year. This year’s grant will also go toward that renovation.
Back in 2022, Harrell’s office said the EDI program chose all grants based on objective, merit- and equity-based criteria and that the mayor had no influence over the process. When we asked about this year’s award, Harrell’s office referred us to the same statement they sent three years ago when the club got its first EDI grant: “Decisions on which organizations received funding were determined by the EDI Advisory Board and community panel through a competitive community-based process. The mayor had no role in deciding which organizations would receive the awards and did not receive or score the applications.”
Harrell’s longstanding connection to the Royal Esquire Club has been the source of controversy, and the subject of a formal ethics complaint, in the past. In 2018, when he was city council president, Harrell intervened in an investigation into wage theft allegations by five women who worked as servers at the club.
When the city’s Office of Labor Standards began looking into the allegations, Harrell contacted the city employee who was investigating the case to remind him that the council and mayor had the power to cut OLS’ budget. At various council meetings, Harrell called OLS’ investigators “extremely unprofessional” and their treatment of the Royal Esquire Club “horrible.” (The women eventually reached a financial settlement).
This year, KUOW reported that Harrell had directed his city council staff to do administrative work for the Royal Esquire Club, which lacked secretarial support at the time, including tasks like filling out insurance paperwork, collecting membership dues, and sending out invitations to fundraising events. (Harrell characterized this work as “constituent services.”)
The EDI program funds organizations “working on anti-displacement efforts in high displacement risk neighborhoods.” According to a spokeswoman for Harrell, the club “is a historically significant gathering space for Seattle’s Black community, which has experienced well-reported displacement from the city and the loss of culturally significant spaces.”
Other projects that received EDI funding this year included an immigrant and refugee public market (African Community Housing & Development) the Khmer Community Center (Khmer Community Seattle King County, a birth and parenting center for Indigenous parents (Hummingbird Indigenous Family Services,) and a health care center for seniors on Beacon Hill (International Community Health Services).
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2. On Sunday, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s reelection campaign filed its campaign finance reports for the week leading up to the November 4 election. The reports show that Harrell reported paid the one-person consulting firm owned by Eastside for Hire founder Abdisalam (Abdul) Yusuf more than $21,000 on election day.
Combined with the payments PubliCola reported last month, the Harrell campaign has paid Yusuf more than $46,000 for unspecified outreach work. Yusuf’s firm, FF and J Consulting, has never reported any previous paid work on any campaign.
Yusuf is a prominent member of the Seattle-area Somali community who has frequently advocated on behalf of rideshare drivers. During the final weeks of the campaign, Harrell was reportedly eager to drum up votes from Seattle’s tight-knit East African communities. The nature of Yusuf’s outreach and engagement is unclear—neither he nor the Harrell campaign responded to our questions just before the election‚‚but whatever it was, Harrell considered it extremely high-value. His consultant, Christian Sinderman, received the same amount in a month that Yusuf got from the campaign every week, and his campaign manager made around $1,200 a week, according to campaign finance reports.
Harrell lost the election to Katie Wilson by a margin of 2,011 votes.