Tag: Seattle Fire Department

Mayor Wilson, Privacy, public safety, Taxes

Wilson Backs Down on Tenant Protection Rollbacks, Fire Department Funding Plan Fizzles, Privacy Advocates Push Back on Surveillance During World Cup

1. Mayor Katie Wilson’s office confirmed that Wilson will not be proposing changes to the city’s just cause eviction ordinance that housing developers, including the Housing Development Consortium, had been pushing for months. Tenant advocacy groups opposed the potential changes and met with Wilson the week before last to urge her not to move forward with the changes.

Some affordable housing developers have argued for years that the city’s landlord-tenant protections, which are stronger than the state’s,  have made it impossible for them to evict tenants who don’t pay rent or break the law. Specifically, they wanted Wilson to roll back the city’s roommate law, which allows renters to add roommates without asking their landlords’ permission, and and align the requirements to evict a tenant with three days’ notice with the more landlord-friendly state law.

“The Mayor is not proposing changes to the roommate law or the three‑day notice,” a Wilson spokesperson said. “Her office has received proposals and perspectives on a wide range of economic, health, safety, and operational issues.”

Former City Councilmember Cathy Moore said she would introduce legislation that would have rolled back the roommate and three-day notice provisions but resigned before she actually introduced it.

Had Wilson introduced the rollbacks, tenant advocates argued, it would have given centrist councilmembers the opportunity to reopen the entire just cause eviction law, which includes many other provisions landlords oppose. The optics of Wilson—a tenants’ rights activist before becoming mayor—proposing landlord-friendly legislation that even her predecessor, Bruce Harrell, didn’t support would also be terrible, for obvious reasons.

Wilson does plan to propose legislation, in collaboration with Councilmember Dionne Foster, to curb rental “junk fees” in July, her spokesperson said. Wilson wrote about these fees, which include “notice fees,” fees for going month-to-month, and monthly “billing fees,” in 2023.

2. A proposal to create a special taxing district to pay for the Seattle Fire Department is dead, at least for this year, PubliCola has confirmed.

Creating a fire district would have allowed the city to fund much of SFD’s budget through a new property tax, moving that money out of the city’s general fund and helping to close a budget deficit Wilson recently said would be close to $175 million. The district, authorized by a new state law this year, would have had the ability to levy taxes outside the existing property tax cap of $3.60 per $1,000 of assessed property value, making it an appealing way to offload a big chunk of city spending.

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The firefighters’ union, however, did not get on board, effectively killing the proposal. The plan would have made much of the fire department’s funding subject to regular voter approval; it would have also moved SFD under the direct control of the city council, acting as the fire district’s board; the union reportedly wanted SFD to have direct participation on the board, at a minimum.

PubliCola exclusively reported on the potential fire district proposal last month. At a City Club event last week, Wilson said the city is facing a budget deficit of “about $175 million next year.” Without the fire district serving as a relief valve, Wilson will likely introduce additional taxes this year, including a local capital gain tax opposed by business groups like the Seattle Metro Chamber and Downtown Seattle Association.

3. In response to Wilson’s announcement last week that she will turn on police surveillance cameras in the stadium district for the upcoming World Cup games, the anti-surveillance advocates at Community Not Cameras questioned the mayor’s claim that police and the FBI had presented evidence of a “credible threat” to public safety. Wilson previously said she would not turn the cameras on without evidence of a credible threat, but did not clearly define what she meant by that term; last week, she cited “general but credible” threats to justify activating the cameras.

“By activating an Axon-backed surveillance grid in Seattle, the City is risking this data being handed over to a weaponized federal intelligence apparatus,” the coalition said in a statement.

“[R]egardless of whatever bureaucratic policy or verbal assurances the Mayor hides behind, the City of Seattle does not have the power to stop the federal government from obtaining this data once it exists. Any local safeguards or policy limitations the City claims SPD follows are completely meaningless against the collection capabilities and legal mechanisms available to the federal government.  If you build it, and if you turn it on, they can take it.”

Our Seattle, a group of Wilson supporters who organized to hold the mayor accountable to her campaign promises, requested footage from one of the surveillance cameras, which SPD has maintained is deleted after five days and only accessible to a handful of people. They received and posted the footage on Instagram on May 28.

 

 

public safety, Taxes

Seattle Considers Using Special Fire District Tax to Close Budget Deficit
Photo by Joe Mabel, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson and the City Council are discussing whether to close a nearly $150 million budget shortfall by moving much of the Seattle Fire Department’s budget out of the city’s general fund by creating a special fire district, which—if approved by voters—could levy additional property taxes, freeing up hundreds of millions of general budget dollars for other purposes.

Wilson’s office confirmed that they are working with the fire department on a potential fire district, saying the city can no longer rely on the usual budget tricks or cuts alone to address a $175 million deficit  next year, which amounts to about 10 percent of the city’s general fund. “The gap is far too large to address with the kinds of temporary fixes that have been used in the past, and closing this deficit with cuts alone would require reductions in critical services and substantial layoffs across departments,” a spokesperson for Wilson’s office said. “Half of the general fund goes to public safety and human services, so there are no easy solutions here.”

A fire district would also be a way to raise revenues while steering clear of a state-imposed cap on local property tax levies that limits local levies to $3.60 per $1,000 of assessed value. The city is quickly running up against that limit.

In a press release Wednesday night, the Seattle Firefighters Union said the union “is currently evaluating the mayor’s plan.” Union president Kenny Stuart did not return a call seeking comment.

The spokesperson called a fire district one “potential path forward to stabilize SFD resources while also protecting other public services. … We have been working closely with SFD Chief Scoggins as well as the leadership of Local 27 to see if we can find a path forward that balances varying needs around revenue, public safety, and good governance.”

Prior to this year, Seattle had the authority to set up its own fire district, but there was no benefit to doing so: Any taxes the district levied would have to be offset by a reduction in other property taxes. The state legislature changed the law governing fire districts this year to give Seattle the authority to levy taxes (or a fee called a “benefit charge”) outside the existing property tax cap—meaning that the city could increase taxes without bumping up against the $3.60 limit.

“It’s just additional revenue flexibility and authority,” said Candice Bock, government relations director for the Association of Washington Cities, which supported the legislation. “Cities have to fund everything within their existing property tax levy authority, and this … creates more capacity.”

Wilson has asked all city departments, including the Seattle Police Department, to come up with potential cuts ranging from 3 to 5 percent of their budgets to close a deficit created in part by “structural issues”—costs, including labor, are growing faster than city revenues—and in part by her predecessor Bruce Harrell’s decision (supported by the city council) to pile on tens of millions in new spending every year, including a $100 million spree in the 2025 budget.

The fire department’s budget is around $350 million. Moving even half that amount into a new fire district would close next year’s budget deficit. However, that would also mean that funding for some of the city’s most basic public safety services—protecting residents from fires and responding to emergency calls—would be put to a periodic public vote. Seattle already uses local levies to fund its libraries, parks, and transportation system, but putting fire services up to a public vote would put the city on a potentially risky limb.

“Cities will have to continue to figure out a way to fund it if voters don’t like this option,” Bock said.

If the city puts the fire district plan on the ballot this year and it passes, the district will be a separate government entity under the direct control of the city council, which would act as its board of directors—similar to the way the council serves as the governing board for the city’s Park District, which oversees parks levy spending.

Health, public safety

Investigation Suggests Seattle Firefighters Forged Vaccine Cards to Get Out of Citywide Vaccine Mandate
Image by Steve Morgan via Wikimedia Commons

By Erica C. Barnett

An independent investigation found it probable that Seattle Fire Department officials obtained blank vaccine cards and used them to falsely claim they were compliant with the city’s COVID vaccine requirement, PubliCola has learned.

The city launched the investigation after a fire lieutenant, Lance Fisher, told Seattle Fire Chief Harold Scoggins that people in the department were buying and selling fake vaccine cards. Fisher relayed this information during his own disciplinary hearing; he was one of many SFD employees who refused to get vaccinated during the pandemic.

According to the investigation—provided by Rose Terse, who frequently posts documents obtained through records requests on Muckrock—”a now former (retired) SFD employee contacted Lieutenant Fisher and offered him a CDC-issued COVID-19 vaccination record card that Lieutenant Fisher ‘could fill out’ and submit to the City as fraudulent proof that he had complied with the vaccination mandate.” Fisher told investigators the cards came from a former COVID vaccination site that SFD shut down without safeguarding the blank vaccine cards, allowing a firefighter to grab the blank cards and sell them.

Later, Fisher said, he learned that there were blank vaccination cards at many fire stations, and “people could just take them.”

Fisher told investigators he “declined that offer” to get a fake vaccine card and told Scoggins, “It’s known that people are submitting fake vax cards. What are you doing to verify the authenticity?”

“According to Lieutenant Fisher, Chief Scoggins’ response was that ‘it wasn’t his problem,'” the investigator concluded.

Much of the investigator’s evidence consisted of Signal messages sent to and from Deputy Chief Tom Walsh on his city-issued phone, “suggest[ing] that a system and/or network existed through which SFD employees obtained COVID-19 vaccination cards, which they submitted to the City.”

“Facts found throughout the course of my investigation suggest that one or more SFD employees may have obtained CDC-issued COVID-19 vaccination record cards; filled the cards out with false information to reflect that they had been vaccinated for COVID-19; submitted the cards to the City as proof of their compliance with the COVID-19 vaccination mandate; and were deemed to have satisfied the City’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate based on their submission of the CDC-issued COVID-19 vaccination record cards containing falsified information,” the independent investigator, Jennifer Parda-Aldrich, wrote.

“My investigation, however, did not reveal sufficient evidence from which I was able to make any conclusive findings, based on preponderance of the evidence, of the existence of any such practice or of the identity of any SFD employee(s) who submitted a COVID- 19 vaccination record card containing false information to reflect that they had been vaccinated for COVID-19 in satisfaction of the City’s vaccination mandate.”

PubliCola readers may recognize Walsh’s name. He was the deputy fire chief who, along with longtime firefighter Paul Patterson, sent emails to Scoggins in which he pretended to be a “proud Latino” South Park resident who was deeply offended by the term “brownout.”  The goal of the prank emails was to get the fire department to stop using the term to describe power outages in order to prove that the department was excessively “woke.”

Walsh and Patterson worked closely with right-wing talk show host Jason Rantz, who wrote about the hoax repeatedly and seemed to find it hilarious; they later collaborated with local right-wing activist Ari Hoffman to accuse Scoggins of breaking the law when he loaned stretchers to volunteer medics trying to get injured people out of the so-called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in 2020.

Although the Seattle Police Department got the lion’s share of attention, positive and negative, for fighting against the city’s vaccine requirements, the Seattle Fire Department was also a hotbed of anti-vax sentiment.

Messages between Walsh and other fire department employees, including Patterson, along with a city IT staffer named Dan Whipple, include multiple references to people buying “art,” using Patterson as the go-between, for themselves and other fire department officials, including Walsh’s son, firefighter Devon Walsh.

For example, in this Signal exchange from December 2021, Patterson and Walsh discussed whether it would be better for Walsh and his son to wait a few days after his daughters and wife got their “art” so it won’t look “ridiculous”:

Patterson: No reason to think you guys wouldn’t shop together 🤔

I will see what the artist thinks

Just cause you get the piece sooner then later doesn’t mean you have to put it on display until you are ready

Walsh: Fair point. If I did return to the art show circuit, it would save me some sick time as well.

Paul Patterson. The Harriet Tubman of the SFD.

* * *

Walsh: Did a guy from 2’s named Seto or Setu or something like that get a piece of art from you?

Patterson: One thing about my art dealings is that it is totally Anonymous

Walsh: Well I am asking out of curiosity. What you should wonder is why I’m asking. I couldn’t pick this guy out of the police lineup, but I know that somebody’s done some artwork for him. If it’s you, you should tell him to keep his fucking mouth shut.

If you weren’t the artiest, just let me know that and I’ll tell him to keep his mouth shut. All we need is an audit.

Patterson: Wasn’t me, and I appreciate you looking out Yes I would have a sit down with him. It’s important for people to know it can be down but in a very discreet way.

Walsh:  My 20-year-old daughter came in the house and told me he had some art done. Now, the exact mechanism by which she found out is unimportant—He just needs to know that what happens in a fight club stays and fight club.

Had it been Hasting’s daughter, this is a different story.

Walsh referred to himself as Harriett Tubman in a Signal exchange with Whipple that same month, saying he had found “a path to get that one piece of paper that I need” in order to fulfill “my missing requirements to work at SFD.”

“If you had a friend who is counterfeiting $20 bills, that would be good,” Walsh wrote. “But if it was actually counterfeiting them at the US mint,…Well that would just be money at that point. Those bills would have real life serial numbers, and probably be appropriately placed in whatever database they put $20 bills in.”

Whipple later told investigators he thought he and Walsh were talking about a “joke” that “we were going to have to pay people to get us out of the state or country” because of the vaccine mandate. “I didn’t understand him to be referring to fake vax cards.”

Parda-Aldrich also looked into the possibility that Walsh and Deputy Chief Chris Lombard, who was then heading up the Community Safety and Communications Center had conspired with Walsh to produce evidence that the city was refusing to grant religious exemptions to the vaccine mandate, which could help bolster the claims of a group of former firefighters who sued the department over the requirement. The CSCC was the predecessor to today’s CARE Department, a civilian department that dispatches 911 calls.

In October 2021, after a meeting in which he told then-mayor Jenny Durkan’s policy advisor, Adrienne Thompson, that the CSCC was going to lose 10 percent of its staff if they had to comply with the vaccine mandate, Lombard wrote an email to himself and his own human-resources manager to establish for the record that the mayor’s office refused to provide accommodations for CSCC staff who refused to get the vaccine on religious grounds.

Signal messages between Walsh and Patterson, along with Signal messages between Walsh and fire lieutenant Chris Carter, show that the men believed Lombard was getting the mayor’s position in writing to help the plaintiffs in two lawsuits filed by firefighters who were fired for refusing to comply with the vaccine mandate. (In one exchange, Walsh referred to Lombard as “the kind of person who hides Jews under [the] floorboard.”)

Parda-Aldrich wrote that she was unable to substantiate the claim that Lombard wrote the email with the intent of establishing a written record that would help the suing firefighters. However, she did conclude he had improperly disclosed confidential personnel information—the identities of firefighters who asked for exemptions from the vaccination requirement—to Walsh.

Neither Walsh nor Patterson responded to requests for an interview; both have retired from the department. Lombard did not respond to a request for an interview.

A spokesperson for the fire department, Kim Schmanke, said no one at SFD has faced disciplinary action for falsifying vaccine cards, and said she does not know how firefighters might have gotten the cards, if they did so.

“SFD has no conclusive facts showing that employees falsified their vaccine cards and cannot take personnel actions without factual findings,” Schmanke said. “Although the April 2025 investigative report facts that ‘suggest’ SFD employees submitted authentic COVID-19 vaccination cards with falsified information to comply with the City’s vaccine mandate, the investigation was ‘unable to make any conclusive findings, based on a preponderance of the evidence, as to the existence of any such practice or the specific identity of any employee(s) who submitted a COVID-19 vaccination record card with falsified information.'”

Devon Walsh, Dan Whipple, Chris Lombard, and Lance Fisher all remain employed at the city.

The fire department considers the matter closed, Schmanke said. “However, if any new information comes to light, the department will take appropriate follow-up action.”

public safety, Uncategorized

Nearly 200 Firefighters Made More than $200,000 Last Year, Amassing Thousands of Hours of Overtime
Seattle Fire Station Tim, by Joe Mabel, via Wikimedia Commons

By Erica C. Barnett

Last year, 180 Seattle Fire Department employees—almost one in five—made more than $200,000, doubling or tripling their salaries by working large, and sometimes mind-boggling, amounts of overtime. Of those, 19 (20 if you count Fire Chief Harold Scoggins) made more than $300,000, with several reporting salaries close to $400,000—a level that puts them in the ranks of Seattle Police Department officers like Ron Willis, who was recently suspended for working excess overtime after making almost $400,000 last year.

PubliCola obtained Fire employees’ pay information, including a breakdown that accounts for vacation, leave, overtime, and other pay codes, through a records request.

Most of the SFD employees who made over $300,000 reported working thousands of hours of overtime, on top of the 90.46 hours they get paid for every two weeks.

The highest-paid SFD employee was Captain James Hilliard, a 32-year veteran who added $180,000 to his $120,000 salary by working 2,335 hours of overtime, reporting more than 200 hours of overtime in each of five different months in 2024. Another captain, Michael Frediani, more than tripled his $105,000 salary—to $384,000—by clocking in for 1,726 hours of overtime, including 252 in December alone.

But it wasn’t just higher-ranking firefighters who cleared the $300,000 bar.

Under their union contract, Seattle firefighters automatically get paid for about 2,350 hours in a year, including vacation, sick time, merit pay, holidays, and other time off. Many Seattle firefighters in the top income bracket were paid for 4,000, 5,000, or even 6,000 hours, most of that in overtime.

Firefighter Daniel Kieta, whose base salary in 2024 was $95,000, more than tripled his pay to $315,000, receiving pay for 6,000 hours on the clock last year, including almost 2,400 hours of overtime. That works out, on average, to 45 hours of overtime for each 45-hour week. But it wasn’t distributed evenly. Last June, for example, Kieta reported working 267 hours at regular pay and 283 hours of overtime, for an average of 128 hours a week, more than 65 hours a week of that in overtime.

Darren Schulberg, a firefighter since 1991, reported working 5,730 hours in 2024, including 2,405 hours of overtime; those hours helped boost his annual pay from $86,635 to $322,775. In June, Schulberg added 259 hours of overtime to 254 hours at regular pay, for a an average of 120 hours a week.

And Jason Lynch, a firefighter with a base salary of $97,000, made an additional $238,000 in overtime, including 441 overtime hours in December. All told, Lynch reported working 688 hours in December, for a average of 155 hours a week that month. (There are 168 hours in a week).

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Firefighters can take rest breaks during long shifts, so these extraordinary hours include some down time for sleep. PubliCola has asked SFD if there are any other factors that would account for firefighters working 120-, 130, or 150-hour weeks.

These are far from the only Seattle firefighters who reported working more than 5,000 hours last year; in the $200,000 to $300,000 range, at least 30 firefighters said they worked between 4,002 and 5,278 hours.

SFD did not respond to a request to make firefighters at the top end of the overtime range available to talk about what their shifts are like.

In 2022, the Seattle Times ran a piece about firefighters working record overtime hours the previous year—claiming that firefighters like Kieta were “forced” to work thousands of extra hours because “unprecedented staffing shortages.” At the time, the department had 1,026 firefighters, about 50 fewer than it does today. Fire department spokesperson Kristin Hanson said the department is still facing a shortage, as more officers retire and recruitment lags. Currently, she said, 130 firefighter positions are vacant, after 232 retirements between 2020 and 2024.

But that doesn’t entirely account for employees like Kieta, who the Seattle Times highlighted as the top member of what the paper called the “4,000-hour club”—firefighters who were paid for working more than 4,000 hours in a year.

While staffing shortages explain the need for overtime, they don’t explain why it’s distributed so unevenly. Nor is it clear how supervisors, or firefighters themselves, determine when excessive work hours start to affect a firefighter’s ability to do their job, including responding to emergencies.

Unlike many other city employees, firefighters can volunteer for virtually unlimited overtime. Their union contract allows them to work 60 hours in a row, take 12 hours off, and then do it again. Working that schedule, a firefighter could amass 144 hours in a week. On top of that, Hanson said, a firefighter could amass more hours, up to 168, if they worked overtime at special events or were deployed to a large emergency event, like a wildfire or natural disaster.

According to Hanson, “Overtime hiring within the Seattle Fire Department is a fair and procedural-based process” based on the firefighters’ union contract. When firefighters sign up for overtime shifts, the person with the lowest number of overtime hours gets first crack at available overtime, for instance.

“As members approach higher amounts of overtime, additional hiring rules come into play all with the focus of a fair and equitable hiring process,” Hanson said.

Beyond rules designed to give everyone at the fire department a chance at overtime, the only real limit on a firefighter’s ability to work nonstop is their own level of fatigue: Emergency responders need to be alert, and a tired firefighter, like a tired cop, could be prone to making critical (and potentially fatal) mistakes.

But the only person who determines whether a firefighter is too fatigued to work is the firefighter himself. According to the firefighters’ contract, “Members are responsible for monitoring their state of readiness. When a member’s scheduled shift falls on the second consecutive shift and the member is not adequately rested to perform their duties, the member will inform his or her supervisor and request time off using sick leave, merits or other personal compensatory time.”

If a firefighter decides they can work 144 hours in a week,  in other words, that’s up to them. And hiring more firefighters, which SFD has been doing, clearly isn’t going to stop people from trying to amass as much overtime as possible.

There’s another potential motivation, beyond earning more money in any given year, for firefighters to try to boost their pay. The size of a firefighter’s pensions most of which are managed and funded through a state system called LEOFF, is determined by their five top-paying years—a powerful incentive to boost their “high five” numbers, especially they approach the end of their careers.

The city’s spending on the fire department has increased in recent years, although Hanson says the extra overtime is balanced out by the money the department saves by not being fully staffed.