Tag: Sara Nelson

City Council, Elections, Mayor Wilson

Council Passes Watered-Down Consultant Ethics Bill, Wilson Appoints SDOT Director Who Headed Waterfront, Mercer Projects

1. In one of her final acts as council president, Councilmember Sara Nelson passed a watered-down version of a plan she introduced earlier this year, which in its original form would have prohibited political consultants from working for the city while also working on campaigns.

The legislation targeted consultants like Christian Sinderman, who—under an unusual arrangement—worked as a kind of de facto city staffer for Mayor Bruce Harrell, complete with his own office at City Hall, while also working as a campaign consultant to both Harrell and Foster, who defeated Nelson roundly in November.

The bill would originally have also required political consultants who contract with the city to wait one year before working on political campaigns.

In its final form, the bill only requires political consultants to register with the city, similar to existing requirements for lobbyists. Council members raised concerns about whether the bill—proposed in November—was rushed, with Maritza Rivera saying all the late amendments were so “confusing” that she would just “vote no all the way across the board.”

Even though her colleagues effectively neutered her bill, Nelson said it was a step in the right direction. “Will this fix all forms of undue influence on policy at City Hall? No, but it is a meaningful start,” she said. “It shed lights on an area where the lines between politics and policy are blurred in ways that erode public trust.”

2. In the first major shakeup of her transition period, Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson announced on Wednesday that she’s picked Angela Brady, the current head of the city’s Office of the Waterfront, Civic Projects, and Sound Transit as interim Seattle Department of Transportation director. She’ll replace Adiam Emery, a former deputy mayor for Mayor Bruce Harrell whom he appointed as interim SDOT director earlier this year.

The decision to replace Emery was widely expected: New Seattle mayors almost always pick their own transportation directors to reflect their own priorities, and this may be even more true than usual for Wilson, the longtime director of the Transit Riders Union. We’ve asked Wilson’s team whether she plans to do a national search for an SDOT director.

For those with long memories, Brady is a somewhat surprising pick. Although the pedestrian-friendly section of the waterfront development near Pike Place Marker has been widely lauded, the rest of the downtown waterfront is dominated by a wide surface highway that’s up to nine lanes wide (in Pioneer Square, the city’s most historic neighborhood). The decision to build a surface highway and waterfront tunnel was made before Brady was at the office of the waterfront, but her 12-year tenure does put her on the hook for choices the city made after transportation planners decided to design waterfront road for cars instead of people.

Brady was in charge when the city decided to massively expand Mercer Street, another wide expanse of asphalt that got several lanes wider in each direction during her time as SDOT’s Mercer Corridor Program manager. Expanding the roadway didn’t fix traffic, as boosters promised, but it did make the corridor more dangerous for bikes and more frustrating for everyone who uses it—a reflection of the mid-2000s logic (incorrect, as we knew even then) that widening roads makes traffic go faster.

City Council

Council Finally Seats Renters Commission, New Council Rules Allow Longer Public Comments

1. After an overload of drama last week, the Seattle City Council quietly approved all 14 nominees to the Seattle Renter’s Commission—an advisory body that has had just five members (all of whose terms are now expired) for the past 18 months. The appointments were part of the council’s consent agenda, and all seven council members who were present (Maritza Rivera was excused) voted to approve them, along with several other nominees to unrelated commissions.

As we reported last Wednesday, Councilmembers Sara Nelson and Rob Saka skipped out on the housing and human services committee meeting at the last minute, depriving the committee of a quorum and wasting the time of the nominees who showed up in person and online expecting to finally receive their long-delayed confirmations. Solomon and Alexis Mercedes Rinck held a “community discussion” of the appointments and other business on the committee agenda in lieu of the scheduled committee meeting.

Nelson told Solomon she wouldn’t attend the meeting on Tuesday, after receiving an email from former councilmember Moore urging her to not let the appointments move forward.

Saka, who was cc’d on a late-night email from Moore touting her proposed alternative to the renters’ commission, which would have added seven landlords to the mix, told Solomon he wouldn’t be attending the meeting just minutes before it started, citing unspecified personal matters for his unexcused absence.

During a council briefing meeting on Monday, Saka told his colleagues that “right before that meeting, on the bus to City Hall, I got some uncomfortable calls and and that really impacted my ability to to show up in a public meeting … and so in any event, I make no apologies for the decision.” Saka dismissed suggestions that he sat out the vote in order to deprive the committee of a quorum as a “grand conspiracy” with no factual basis.

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2. Also Tuesday, the council passed a new rule that will effectively prevent the council president and committee chairs from cutting public comment short just because they feel like it.

Currently, the person who’s chairing a meeting can decide, based entirely on their own feelings in the moment, to restrict comments to one minute instead of the standard two and to limit the amount of time allowed for public comments, depriving people of the opportunity to speak to their representatives.

This broad discretionary power has caused major problems in the recent past, as Council President Nelson has repeatedly shut down public comment and closed down the council chambers after would-be commenters have loudly protested being cut off. (Moore, who often took umbrage at critical public comments, once suggested that a group of people who had been locked out of council chambers planned to rush the dais and assault the council because they were pounding on the walls.)

The new public comment rule, proposed by frequent Nelson antagonist Dan Strauss (who will, if Nelson isn’t reelected this year, be the council’s most senior member and a contender for council president), increases the minimum time allotted for public comment from 20 minutes to an hour and stipulates that if there are fewer than 30 commenters, they will each get two minutes to speak. If the number of commenters is between 30 and 60, they’ll get a minute, and if there are more than 60, they’ll still get a minute unless the council president or committee chair sets a lower time.

City Council

Renters Commission Appointments Thwarted by Saka and Nelson’s Last-Minute Absence from Their Own Committee

By Erica C. Barnett

For 18 months, under former city councilmember Cathy Moore’s leadership, nominees to the Seattle Renters Commission did not receive a single hearing. Moore, whose job as housing and human services committee chair included confirming appointments and reappointments to volunteer city commissions under the committee’s purview, refused to seat the Renters Commission even as she worked on legislation to dramatically reduce eviction protections, an issue the commission would have worked on if it was ever allowed to exist.

After Moore resigned, the vice-chair of the committee, Mark Solomon, approached the renters’ commission members and unconfirmed nominees and told them that before Moore’s replacement—likely former councilmember Debora Juarez—takes over next month, he would finally appoint as many renters’ commission nominees as possible, said Kate Rubin, whose membership on the renters’ commission expired in February.

Thrilled, commission appointees showed up at City Hall Wednesday morning—only to learn that their appointments would continue to be delayed: About three minutes before the committee was scheduled to start, Councilmember Rob Saka sent a message down from his City Hall office that he would not be attending.

Before Solomon adjourned the meeting (and re-convened the same gathering as an informal “community discussion” to avoid breaking council rules), Rinck went to Saka’s second-floor office to see if he was there. Saka’s staffer disappeared behind his closed inner-office door, emerged a few minutes later, and told Rinck that Saka wasn’t available because he was meeting with his chief of staff, Elaine Ko.

In a statement Wednesday, Saka told PubliCola, “This morning I was unable to attend the Housing & Human Services committee meeting due to unexpected personal conflicts. I understand this may have caused undue frustration and inconvenience for attendees and I will work with my colleagues to discuss next steps to carry out necessary committee business.”

The previous day, Council President Sara Nelson, who reportedly got an email from Moore asking her not to allow the appointments to move forward earlier in the week, had reportedly asked Solomon to remove the appointments from the committee agenda. That same day, Nelson reportedly told Solomon she would not attend the meeting, leaving the committee with less than the three-member quorum required to meet.

On Tuesday, at 2:30 in the morning, Moore sent an email to Solomon, cc’ing Saka and Nelson, expressing apparent surprise that there was “a slew of appointments to the Renters’ Commission scheduled for a vote on Wednesday.”

Before she resigned, Moore had suggested replacing the Renters Commission with a joint landlord-tenant commission with seven landlords and eight tenants.

“When we spoke several weeks ago, you mentioned you were interested in my proposal to revamp the commission into a rental housing commission composed of renters and housing providers,” Moore told Solomon.

The renters’ commission is the only city body that works and advocates on behalf of tenants. Rubin said that if Moore’s legislation moves forward, it will inevitably be dominated by landlords. “Having worked in those spaces, I can tell you that the renters would have been shut out,” Rubin said.

 

 

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Nelson confirmed that she told Solomon Tuesday afternoon that “I wasn’t going to be here, so they already knew.” She declined to comment further about why she wasn’t present.

Solomon told PubliCola he was “disappointed” in the lack of quorum, adding, “I believe it’s common-sense good governance to promptly seat all vacancies on City commissions. It’s what constituents should expect from our work. These commission volunteers took time out of their day to show up both in person and online, to talk about their qualifications and lived-experiences as renters in Seattle, and to share their vision for their work on the Seattle Renters Commission. I am grateful to everyone who showed up and enjoyed learning more about these qualified nominees.”

During the meeting, commission nominees expressed frustration at what many of them described as Saka and Nelson’s callous disregard for people who showed up to accept appointments to a volunteer commission.

Commission member Julissa Sánchez, the advocacy director at Choose 180 and a former advocate at the Tenants Union, said she was”very disappointed that we did not meet quorum, because we have been waiting for two years to expand the Seattle Renters Commission.”
Sanchéz, whose term expired in February, said, “I’m here to be reinstated into the Seattle Renters Commission, because … renters [for whom] English is not their first language, or who may not speak English at all, are often left off the table or out of access to different resources.”

“I am so furious,” Rubin told PubliCola on Wednesday. As the only paid staffer for the renters’ advocacy group Be: Seattle, Rubin said advocating for the renters’ commission “is pulling me away from my actual job, seemingly for no reason,” given that the council appears to have no interest in seating the commission.

“It’s so disrespectful to waste our time in this way we’re not being paid to do this work and there’s no real voice for renters at city hall other than Councilmember Rinck. … It’s hard for renters to show up to testify. It’s been just awful.”

Rinck, who became visibly emotional while expressing her frustration Nelson and Saka from the dais, echoed Rubin’s sentiment about disrespect when we spoke a few hours after the meeting ended.

“It’s my job to sit in this seat. I had the time on my calendar dedicated to be there. It’s my job to be there. Everyone else in the room was there on a volunteer basis,” Rinck said. “We want people to be engaged in our local government and have trust and have a collaborative relationship with our commissions, so what I’m struggling with is the disrespect to those folks that [Saka and Nelson] displayed by just not even showing up to committee.”

Many of the renters’ commission appointments were from Mayor Bruce Harrell; a spokesperson for the mayor told PubliCola his office was “disappointed that the Council’s Housing and Human Services committee was unable to reach quorum today, given we had commission nominees who we had asked to attend, and the agenda contained important legislative matters, including our proposal to protect constituents from predatory homebuying practices.”

In addition to the renters’ commission appointments, the committee was supposed to approve appointments to the Disability Commission, the Seattle Housing Authority Board, and the Seattle Social Housing Public Development Authority Governing Council.

And it was supposed to adopt an annual action plan for $16 million in federal Housing and Urban Development funding that has not been canceled by the Trump Administration. Delaying that action plan won’t put the funding at risk in itself, but Rinck said it speaks to the absent committee members’ priorities that they allowed such an important vote to slip.

Members of the renters’ commission planned to attend a meeting tonight of an ad hoc group called the Safe and Stable Housing Working Group to discuss potential reforms to Moore’s draft legislation, which would have ended the winter and school-year eviction moratoriums, eliminated limits on fees for late payment, and overturned a law allowing tenants to add new roommates without prior approval, among other changes.

“Councilmember Solomon said his intention was to ensure that nobody was forced out of their housing and to make the nonprofit landlords whole,” Rubin said.

Now, the meeting may end up focusing on the council’s refusal to seat the renters’ commission.

In an email to committee members on Wednesday, Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness director Alison Eisinger said the council’s refusal to seat the renters’ commission in the last scheduled housing committee meeting before the council goes on its August recess “undermine[s] not only that group’s ability to convene and meaningfully carry out its role” but contributes “to the sense that ‘government’  has no interest in solving problems of the people, by the people, and for the people. There is work to be done in this city regarding housing and human services, and it’s reasonable to expect that City Council Committee meetings are one of the places where it gets done.”

Saka’s office sent an automated response to Eisinger and others who contacted his office about his absence, which included a link to “Eviction Assistance.” That link leads to a 404 Error page.

Addiction, podcasts, Police

Seattle Nice: Sara Nelson Proposes Funding Treatment With New Public Safety Sales Tax

By Erica C. Barnett

On this week’s podcast, Sandeep and I discussed Council President Sara Nelson’s “Pathways to Recovery” resolution, which—if passed—will commit up to 25 percent of a planned local sales tax increase to addiction treatment services.

Flanked by treatment providers and business representatives, along with more politically outré groups like The More We Love and We Heart Seattle, Nelson announced the proposal last week. At a press conference in Pioneer Square, the council president—who’s up for reelection this year—said she was committed to funding treatment of all kinds with the 0.1 percent tax increase, which is expected to raise more than $35 million a year.

The state legislature gave cities and counties the authority to pass the sales tax for public safety earlier this year.

We took a close look at what the council president is proposing to fund and the backroom politics swirling around the proposal (including Mayor Bruce Harrell’s tepid response). And we discussed at how this proposed new public spending fits into the city’s overall budget picture and priorities.

The public safety funding doesn’t have to go to police, and it does not include any rules against “supplantation,” meaning that the city could use it to fund existing public safety programs and free up that money for other services. King County is considering its own 0.1-cent sales tax increase that could theoretically free up county funding for human-services programs most at risk from local funding shortfalls and federal funding cuts.

Sandeep and I agreed that if the city is going to increase the sales tax—a regressive tax that falls hardest on the poorest Seattle residents—it should all go to expanding treatment options, not more funding for cops.

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However, given city officials’ current fervor for hiring more police, it seems likely that any plan Harrell proposes for the tax will include new funding for SPD, even if Harrell agrees to some amount of treatment funding. There’s also the question of what kind of treatment will get funded with the potential windfall. The presence of many evidence-based treatment providers and referral agencies—including Evergreen Treatment Services, the Downtown Emergency Service Center, and Purpose, Dignity, Action—offered some reassurance that Nelson’s plan will help people with addiction, rather than funneling more city dollars to high-barrier programs.

We also debated whether the city’s projected $250 million revenue shortfall really represents a budget shortfall of that size. Sandeep argued that the city has tons of money left over at the end of every year, while I cautioned that declining revenues (from sources like the JumpStart payroll tax and taxes on real-estate sales) represent a real problem regardless of whether city departments could, and should, spend their budgets more effectively.

The mayor and city council will likely take up the sales tax proposal as part of their budget discussions this coming fall.

City Council, housing, land use, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Council President Sara Nelson Talks About Housing in the Stadium District, Addiction Treatment, and More

By Erica C. Barnett

Council President Sara Nelson was our guest on this week’s Seattle Nice podcast, where we talked at length about the council’s recent 6-3 vote to allow up to 990 apartments, half of them affordable to moderate-income renters, in a small, industrially zoned area just south of the city’s two stadiums.

Affordable housing groups, nearby neighborhoods, and the Building Trades Union supported the proposal to allow housing as part of a planned “makers’ district” where artists, food producers, and small manufacturers will have access to more affordable work and retail space than they would in other parts of the city. The longshoremen’s union, the Port, and some urbanists opposed the plan: Maritime groups claimed the housing would destroy Seattle’s industrial base in SoDo by clogging the area with too many cars, and some advocates for citywide density said it was just another example of the city putting housing along dirty, traffic-clogged arterials instead of single-family areas.

Nelson said she doesn’t understand why “the urbanists” opposed the housing proposal, and said her goal was to create affordable housing while improving public safety in the area, by adding more eyes on the street in a part of the city that has few permanent residents. Hotels are allowed in the area already, but there’s a big difference between people living in a neighborhood and people just passing through.

Opponents may not find Nelson’s arguments convincing, but as I said when she challenged me on this, I’ve never argued that she’s a straightforward NIMBY, despite disagreeing with most of her positions on public safety, workers’ rights, and renter-vs.-landlord issues.

Nelson has taken many centrist or conservative positions during her three-plus years on the council—pushing to eliminate the minimum wage for gig workers, lower testing standards for new police hires, protect landlords who don’t want to reveal how much they charge in rent, and crack down on people who use drugs in public (not to mention those who protest council actions in public meetings).

But beyond “protecting mom and pop landlords” by preserving old apartment buildings (ahem—”naturally occurring affordable housing”), Nelson has not been among the council’s many vocal advocates against housing in neighborhoods, and has voted against proposals that would restrict housing, like former council member Alex Pedersen’s proposed tree removal restrictions that would have made it difficult or impossible to build middle housing in historically single-family areas.

While I have argued vociferously against laws restricting housing to busy arterials (I think we should allow apartments everywhere), I don’t think a policy unfairly restricting housing to certain areas is a reason to ban housing in the stadium district—an area that’s right next to Pioneer Square, another car-choked neighborhood directly adjacent to industrial uses (and a vast new waterfront highway whose opening city officials have celebrated).

Listen to Seattle Nice—where we also discussed the city’s comprehensive plan, the funding Nelson secured in the budget for addiction treatment at Lakeside-Milam, and the council’s upcoming budget challenges.

 

City Council, homelessness, housing, State of Washington

Head of Anti-Eviction Group Leaves for Job at Homelessness Authority, Ferguson Appointment Could Shake Up Legislature
Photo by Allan Vega on Unsplash

And City Council president Sara Nelson suggests departing Councilmember Tammy Morales was lying about her own experiences. “This is a positive work environment,” she told KUOW.

1. Edmund Witter, the longtime director of the Housing Justice Project, is leaving HJP to become the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s general counsel—part of a shakeup at the KCRHA under CEO Kelly Kinnison, who became the homelessness agency’s second permanent CEO in June.

In addition to Witter, Kinnison is bringing on Simon Foster as deputy director and Xochitl Maykovich as his associate deputy overseeing strategy. Foster directs the homelessness, housing, and community development division of King County’s Departmhent of Community and Human Services; Maykovich is his chief strategy and operations officer and served as interim deputy director for much of the past year. The new hires appear to be part of a larger reorganization at the agency.

KCRHA did not respond to a request for an interview with Kinnison.

The Housing Justice Project, a project of the King County Bar Association, provides free legal counsel to tenants facing eviction, who have had the right to an attorney in Seattle since 2021.

Instead of fighting evictions in the courts, Witter said, he’ll be “working on the other side of the equation to help make sure those programs [for people experiencing homelessness] work.”

In the past few months, as evictions have risen and the number of people seeking attorneys has exploded, HJP has been overwhelmed, Witter said. “The court is hearing about 800 cases a month, and we’re [only] contracted to do about 200 cases a month,” Witter said. “In October, we had 608 households who applied for our services and qualified for an attorney, and we were only about to carry about 160 of those” cases.

Instead of providing attorneys for each person, HJP has been “unbundling” its services to provide at least some help to as many people as possible, but “tenants are appearing pro se”—acting as their own attorneys—”in front of judges now. The numbers are as bad as we’ve seen in 20 years, certainly since 2008,” the first year of the Great Recession.

Even compared to the HJP, the regional homelessness authority is hardly an oasis of calm. The agency’s first several years were a period of frequent upheaval marked by unforced errors, abandoned and unsuccessful initiatives, and financial debacles. In the year after the agency’s first CEO, Marc Dones, left, the KCRHA had three interim directors. Now, Kinnison seems eager to overhaul and reorganize the agency.

Witter says he’s hoping to help the KCRHA streamline and improve its contracts with the nonprofits that do the work of addressing homelessness across King County. Many of these groups have complained in the past about late payments that force them to go into debt, dip into reserves, or scale back programs while they wait for funding.

The KCRHA, Witter noted, has “not had a general counsel, ever” in four years of operations, which is practically unheard-of for such a large government entity. “It’s a $253 million organization with tons of compliance” requirements that will likely become more complicated under Trump, Witter said. “Not to mention all the other government issues they have to deal with, [like] open meetings and public records.”

HJP’s Spokane County managing attorney, Renee Ballou, will take over Witter’s job on an interim basis while the group looks for a permanent replacement, Witter said.

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2. Governor-elect (and state Attorney General) Bob Ferguson is considering State Sen. Joe Nguyen (D-34, West Seattle and Vashon) for director of the state Department of Commerce, whose wide portfolio includes affordable housing, energy and climate investments, broadband, gun violence prevention, and local economic development. Nguyen confirmed that he is “under consideration,” but did not know when Ferguson planned to make his decision or announce his pick.

If it is Nguyen, Ferguson will have to act fast. The next legislative session starts on January 13, and the 34th District Democrats and the King County Council will have to appoint a successor, a process that takes weeks.

Commerce director Mike Fong, appointed by Gov. Jay Inslee in 2023, will become Snohomish County’s director of economic development. The role is similar to the one Fong held before his stint at the Commerce Department, when he was Snohomish County’s chief recovery and resilience officer. Prior to that, Fong was a longtime city staffer who rose to the position of senior deputy mayor under Jenny Durkan.

Ferguson has brought over most of his senior staff from the Attorney General’s Office. His transition office said they had no information to share yet on the appointment.

3. After City Councilmember  Tammy Morales announced she’s stepping down because of what she described as bullying and undermining by her colleagues, KUOW—like many outlets—interviewed Morales about her decision. Then they gave one of the people Morales has accused of fostering a toxic workplace environment, Council President Sara Nelson, almost 15 minutes of air time to say Morales was lying.

“I’m frankly shocked and disappointed with the way she has characterized the dynamic on council and what occurs at the dais,” Nelson told KUOW’s Soundside. Morales, Nelson suggested, was just lashing out because she hasn’t done the work of convincing colleagues to support her proposals. “It’s our responsibility to work with our colleagues on our own time and try to build support for our legislative priorities,” Nelson said.

Nelson, who campaigned for Morales’ 2023 opponent Tanya Woo and oversaw her appointment to a citywide council seat after she lost to Morales, thanked KUOW on X for “the opportunity to set the record straight” about her colleague’s experience of working with Nelson and the rest of the council, who Morales also accused of gaslighting—treating her as if she was imagining her own experience. “This is a positive work environment,” Nelson insisted.

She wasn’t quite done shading Morales. On the city’s website seeking applications to fill Morales’ seat, the link in “Tammy Morales (District 2) resigned her seat” goes not to Morales’ resignation announcement but to Nelson’s own terse statement about Morales’ departure.

(Update: The link to Nelson’s statement has been removed as of late Tuesday morning.)