Tag: Sara Nelson

Elections, public disclosure

Complaints Filed Against Pass-Through Campaign Funding Group Created by Former Councilmember Sara Nelson

 

From Seafor’s website.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Progressive People Power (P3) PAC, a group that supports lefty candidates and causes, has filed dual complaints with the state Public Disclosure Commission and the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission against Seafor, a new organization set up by former city councilmember Sara Nelson to support centrist candidates.

The crux of both complaints is an allegation that Seafor is illegally funding election campaigns without revealing its donors, which is illegal under state law.

Specifically, the complaints charge that Seafor is a political action committee disguised as a C(4) (yes, pronounced “Seafor”) nonprofit advocacy group, and that the purpose of the organization is to serve as a pass-through for anonymous political donations to campaigns. This would be illegal, because state law requires PACs—unlike nonprofit political groups—to disclose their donors, so that the public can see which people and organizations are bankrolling outside campaigns for candidates.

“If you are an organization in Washington state raising money for politics and then spending money on politics, then you are a political committee. You have to report where your money came from,” Dmitri Iglitzin, the attorney who filed both complaints on behalf of P3, said Wednesday. “The source of political expenditures can’t be cloaked through an intermediary entity.”

Iglitzin filed the complaints before Seafor funded a last-minute $30,000 independent expenditure, by a new group calling itself North Seattle Neighbors, on behalf of District 5 City Council candidate Julie Kang, who came in second in the August primary, trailing frontrunner Nilu Jenks, a progressive, by 21 points. North Seattle Neighbors registered as a PAC just days before a state deadline for independent expenditure campaigns to file, meaning that it’s no longer possible for anyone to register a similar campaign on Jenks’ behalf. It has since reported one additional $5,000 donation, from the founder of a private equity firm.

The complaint notes that Seafor’s website explicitly says one purpose of the group is to elect a “pragmatic majority” of “moderate candidates” to the city council, starting with the District 5 race. The site describes Seafor as a “permanent civic organization” that “recruits candidates, funds their campaigns, defends them between elections, and stays in the field after November.”

What’s more, Seafor’s site touts the fact that “Donor identities are not publicly disclosed,” allowing people who spend on local campaigns to keep their donations “private.”

From Seafor’s website.

“Washington’s 501(c)(4) structure protects the privacy of businesses and individuals historically punished for backing fiscally responsible causes,” the website guarantees. “Many of our supporters operate businesses, sit on boards, or hold positions where political activity isn’t tenable.”

Nelson, the founder of Seafor, initially responded to a phone call but did not respond to followups. The other governors of the group are former councilmember Tanya Woo, lobbyist Dan McGrady, and former Nelson policy director Erik Nielsen. Jordan Royer, the VP of external affairs for the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association (and a longtime background player in conservative Seattle politics), registered the North Seattle Neighbors PAC.

“Seafor just donated $30,000 to a political campaign. So where did that $30,000 come from? We have no idea,” Iglitzin said. “But we know from Seafor’s website that they’re raising money to make political expenditures in the fifth [council] district, which makes Seafor a political committee. The fact that Seafor then goes and says, by the way, give your money to us and no one will know that you gave it to us, just shows that they know exactly what they’re doing.”

The city’s rules for registering as a political committee go further than the state’s; Seattle requires any PAC that raises or spends more than $5,000 to register as a PAC and disclose its donors. Seafor has spent $30,000 so far—five times the legal limit—and, according to reporting in Geekwire, had a budget of $163,000 through September.

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Both complaints also allege that Seafor’s affiliated website advertising “news about city hall,” CivicTide, is also subject to city and state public disclosure rules, because it’s part of the larger Seafor political action group. Unlike actual journalism and commentary, the complaint says, CivicTide’s opinion pieces and AI-powered meeting summaries are part of a political campaign to support candidates, so their funding, too, is subject to public disclosure.

The SEEC complaint also alleges that Seafor is operating illegally as an unregistered grassroots lobbying group. Under the city’s grassroots lobbying rules, groups that raise and spend money to lobby the city on issues, including advocacy for legislation, have to register as lobbyists, which Seafor hasn’t done.

The Ethics and Elections Commission seems most likely to take up the complaint, since it deals with a local campaign; also, the PDC is facing a significant complaint backlog due to hundreds of complaints filed by a single person. On Thursday, SEEC director Wayne Barnett would only confirm that he had received the complaint.

The strongest case that Seafor violated election laws is almost certainly the fact that it advertises itself as a “private” way to fund “serious candidate support” without disclosing who is behind that funding. It’s “really blatant,” Iglitzin said.

The most recent comparable case he could think of, he told me, was a case involving the Grocery Manufacturers Association, a group of corporations including PepsiCo and Kellogg’s that poured millions into a 2013 campaign against a genetically manufactured organism (GMO) labeling initiative without disclosing the source of the money. A protracted lawsuit eventually resulted in the group (now known as the Consumer Brands Association, paying a $9 million fine, including a $3 million donation to food-security nonprofits, in 2022.

Seafor’s $30,000 spend on Kang’s behalf doesn’t compare to the food brands’ massive donation to the anti-GMO campaign. But it is, as Seafor points out repeatedly on its website, merely a “test run” for the “2027 progressive majority play,” when seven city council seats will on the ballot.

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.