Tag: Seattle Nice

podcasts

Seattle Nice: Our Hopes and Predictions for Seattle In 2026

 

By Erica C. Barnett

For the final Seattle Nice show of 2025, we brought in our returning special guest, PubliCola cofounder Josh Feit, to talk about what we’re hoping (or expecting) will happen in Seattle in 2026.

Josh and my New Year’s wishes included a lot of the items we included in our 14-Point Plan for incoming Mayor Katie Wilson, including Josh’s proposal for Funded Inclusionary Zoning—an idea for boosting housing development that involves giving developers a break on their taxes if they build affordable housing on-site at their new buildings. And to encourage more density in areas that have suburban-style housing—including Seattle’s actual suburbs—Josh wants to see Wilson pass a sprawl tax on people who park in Seattle’s densest neighborhoods.

In tandem with those ideas, I talked up my hope that Wilson and the City Council will get ambitious about the city’s comprehensive plan, which was supposed to be done in 2024 but still isn’t finished, grabbing at the opportunity to upzone more of Seattle, allowing renters to live anywhere in the city, not just on polluted arterial roads.

David predicts that the price of pizza won’t go down, referring to the (at this point, old) viral video in which Wilson explained what the lack of affordable housing in Seattle has to do with the cost of food in Seattle. (Notably, she did not say she would lower the cost of pizza.) And he says he expects Wilson will be far more pragmatic than her biggest detractors have predicted—noting that, despite opponents’ (including, at times, Sandeep) attempts to paint her as a radical leftist, the mayor-elect is surrounding herself with subject-matter experts and people with deep experience at City Hall.

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We also discussed the future of two teams with the word “Care” in them—the 116-person Unified Care Team, which removes homeless encampments and tells their displaced residents about available shelter beds—and the Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) Team, a team of social workers that responds to some 911 calls instead of police.

The latest police contract, which raises police recruits’ salaries to $118,000 ($126,000 after six months), allows CARE responders to go to some calls without a police escort, but also dramatically restricts what kind of calls they can respond to—requiring a police response if drug paraphernalia or a weapon is visible, if there is evidence someone violated a law, if a person in crisis is inside a building or car, or if a person in crisis is exhibiting “extreme” behavior, such as nudity.

The two dads on the show, Sandeep and David, bemoaned the current state of Seattle Public Schools. David said maybe it’s finally time for the city to take over the public school system, and Sandeep said Washington should be embarrassed by the fact that Mississippi showed so much improvement on school test scores over the past few years while our state fell behind.

I hadn’t heard of this dramatic turnaround when we recorded (again, not a parent!), so I looked it up. Turns out it’s either mostly or at partly a fiction—while requiring low-performing students to repeat the third grade may (or may not!) have improved their fourth-grade test scores, the performance boost disappears in later years, returning Mississippi to its regular position near the bottom of the barrel.

 

Mayor Wilson, podcasts, Police

Seattle Nice: New Police Contract, Wilson Keeps Police Chief, and We Celebrate our Four-Year Anniversary!

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Nice celebrated our fourth anniversary this week, and to celebrate, we’re… bringing you the same spicy, insightful content we’ve been putting out week after week since 2021! (And encouraging you to donate to our Patreon, which pays for editing, hosting, and other expenses.)

This week’s topics: Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson’s decision to retain Police Chief Shon Barnes, the generous new police contract that had police guild president Mike Solan gloating that the “socialists” had lost (Mike, are the socialists in the room with you right now?)   and the Trump Administration’s latest erratic moves on homelessness funding.

The Barnes news was pretty big. Mayor Bruce Harrell announced Barnes was his pick for chief year ago, foregoing the usual public process for selecting such a high-profile (and high-paying) position. In the past year, Barnes has stacked his office with people with no experience at SPD (including people who worked for Barnes in previous positions in North Carolina and Madison, Wisconsin), pushing out longtime civilian insiders and listening primarily to his inner circle. Fresh insights from elsewhere can be a breath of fresh air, but the lack of people with knowledge of how SPD functions and what Seattle residents expect from police reportedly contributed to some of Barnes’ high-profile early missteps.

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None of your podcast cohosts— that’s me, Sandeep Kaushik, and David Hyde, if you’re not a regular listener—could really speculate on what Wilson will do if Barnes fails to “make SPD a place where professionalism, integrity, compassion, and community partnership are at the center of every action,” as she put it in a statement announcing she would retain Barnes along with CARE Department Chief Amy Barden, Fire Chief Harold Scoggins, and Office of Emergency Management director Curry Mayer.

However, we did agree that Wilson’s decision made sense–given that the alternative would have been firing Barnes, appointing an interim, and going through a search process that could be internally disruptive and externally divisive. If Barnes’ leadership style and commitment to creating an inclusive (and, specifically, woman- and LGBTQ-friendly) department don’t live up to Wilson’s standards, it’s likely she’ll launch a search (PubliCola has heard the name of a woman who may have the inside track), but with more direct knowledge of what’s working and what isn’t at SPD.

 

King County, Mayor Wilson, Police

Seattle Nice: Shakeups at the County and City as Zahilay and Wilson Take Over

By Erica C. Barnett

This week on the Seattle Nice podcast, we discussed the changes that are taking shape at King County and the city of Seattle, as County Executive Girmay Zahilay and Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson start filling out their staff.

As I reported earlier this week, Zahilay put more than 100 executive branch staffers on notice on a Friday that unless they heard from HR by the end of the day the following Mondday, they should not expect to have jobs after the end of the year.

Employees I spoke to said they expected the executive’s staff, which includes dozen of political appointees, to turn over. But they were dismayed to learn that many other staffers doing technical or bureaucratic work, including land use planners and data analysts, will also lose their jobs in this “restructuring” process. They also said Zahilay’s team handled the delivery of this bad news poorly, damaging morale on teams that worked on reducing the county’s climate impact, promoting racial equity, developing the comprehensive plan, and working to improve the quality of government services.

While I argued (based on what I heard from a half-dozen staffers impacted by the changes) that Team Zahilay could have taken more time and care when deciding the fate of apolitical staff, Sandeep said county employees without civil service protections shouldn’t expect to keep their jobs when a new executive comes in.

We also discussed how the mayor-elect is building her own executive team and speculated about which city department heads she plans to replace or retain. As I reported, Wilson is reportedly still on the fence about Police Chief Shon Barnes, who has fans and detractors inside and outside the city. During his brief time as chief, Barnes has come under scrutiny for the department’s crackdown on nudity at Seattle’s historic LGBTQ nude beach, Denny Blaine, for firing SPD’s top two civilian staffers, and for appointing as East Precinct commander a captain infamous for driving his SUV onto a sidewalk filled with protesters in 2020.

To reiterate something I said on the show (and caught a lot of flak from my co-hosts for saying): Barnes, who has talked openly about how God sent him to Seattle (and, before that, Madison), is a weird cultural fit for a deeply irreligious city with a large LGBTQ+ population and a history of anti-police protests. (And, though I didn’t mention it, an appropriately adversarial press.) Having grown up in the Southern Baptist church myself, I personally have zero patience for the mingling of religion and government, and I’m always surprised when otherwise lowercase-l liberal people argue that it’s intolerant to expect government officials to keep their faith separate from their jobs.

Elections, podcasts

Seattle Nice Interviews Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson!

By Erica C. Barnett

We had Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson on Seattle Nice this week for a wide-ranging interview about her priorities as mayor—as well as how she plans to deal with the massive budget deficits set up by Mayor Bruce Harrell and the city council and the constraints the council has placed on her administration.

As PubliCola has reported, Harrell’s budget—which the council will pass in final form tomorrow—plunges the city into nine-figure deficits starting in 2027, which will force Wilson to act quickly to address budget shortfalls her predecessor failed to address. The budget also seeks to force Wilson to preserve some of her predecessor’s pet projects, including the encampment-sweeping Unified Care Team and a squad of graffiti removal staff, through restrictions that prohibit her from spending city funds on anything other than sweeps and anti-graffiti efforts.

We discussed those issues and much more, including many questions submitted by readers, in a wide-ranging 45-minute discussion with the mayor-elect.

A few highlights:

On whether she plans to replace Harrell’s police chief, Shon Barnes:

I’m going to respectfully decline that question at the moment. It’s a very sensitive question, and I am looking forward to meeting with Shon Barnes in the near future and having conversations with a lot of people about how things are going at the police department. And this is not just about the police chief, but this is about department leadership across the city, because there’s the question, when a new mayor comes into office, of potentially appointing new department heads.

For me, this is really not a political question. I don’t care what department head supported Harrell or campaigned actively for him. For me, this is really about getting the best people in place to lead those departments, and obviously there needs to be a certain amount of kind of vision alignment for someone to want to work with me. But beyond that, the thing that I really care about is that they’re a good leader that their, you know, employees respect them and can work for them. … So I’m hoping to retain in department leadership folks who are dedicated public servants doing a great job, and then yes, I’m sure there will be some, some turnover. So that applies across the board, including our police department.

On whether she’ll be Seattle’s “urbanist mayor”

Seattle’s a big city, and I love living in a big city, and I want Seattle to become a bigger and better city, where it’s possible, for example, for someone to live like I do right now, which is raising a child in in an apartment. And that means that the city kind of becomes your your backyard or your living room. And I think that urban lifestyle is something that we need to promote, and we need to make it possible for more and more people to live in this city without owning a car. And that’s not just for the sake of the people who don’t own cars. I mean, as more people continue to move to Seattle in our region, we just have limited space, and it’s just not possible to keep adding cars to the road. …

We deserve a world-class mass transit system. I think that’s just a very, very important thing to be working towards for all kinds of reasons. And we need great public space. We need more car -free public space. We need great parks, great playgrounds, all of those urban amenities. And so I am going to be very focused on making sure that Seattle is Seattle is a great, big city that can continue to grow in that direction.

On breaking Seattle’s 16-year streak of one-term mayors:

Despite the fact that I challenged an incumbent, I think it’s not great to just have one-term mayor after one-term mayor. So I do hope to govern in a way that leads to me being able to serve another term.

One of the things that I understand about Mayor Harrell is that I do believe that he stepped into office wanting very much to be a two-term mayor. And I think that his approach, and his consultants’ approach to governing over the last four years, has been to really focus on building that coalition of interests that could get him reelected for a second term. … It’s a kind of a transactional style of politics where he was trying to kind of gather together those interests that could get him reelected. I don’t think that’s a good way to govern. Because you’re doing favors for people, you’re building those relationships, but that’s not a vision for the city, you know? That’s not a vision of delivering for the people of Seattle. And so for me, I do want a second term, but I do not want to govern to win a second term.I want to govern to do the right thing, and if I’m lucky, that means that I will get a second term.

On restoring the longstanding nude beach at Denny Blaine Park, which Harrell repeatedly tried to shut down:

Yes, I do want to do this, and I want to work closely with Friends of Denny Blaine and others. I mean, there are some legitimate issues that need to be solved to make sure that the park is good for all the folks using it. But yeah, I would like to restore the park to its historic use as a queer nude beach.

Elections

Seattle Nice: Did Katie Wilson Win or Did Bruce Harrell Lose?

By Erica C. Barnett

Our latest podcast episode (subscribe and get a new one every week!) focuses on the mayor’s race—how Katie Wilson won it, why she won it, and how incumbent mayor Bruce Harrell tried very hard to keep her from winning it.

I kicked things off by talking about Harrell’s not-so-gracious concession speech and Q&A with reporters, in which he suggested baselessly that there were “anomalies” in King County Elections’ vote count and grumped at a reporter who asked, reasonably enough, if he understood what it was it was like to struggle with affordability in Seattle in 2025.

Harrell, who worked as a corporate attorney before being elected to the city council in 2007, told a reporter it was “offensive” to even ask that question, given that he spent his whole life suffering from “scars” such as having to share one bathroom in the Central District house his parents owned. (The fact that Harrell frequently brought up this fairly common annoyance with living in an older house as proof he relates to the present-day challenges of working people in Seattle says a lot about why he lost).

History probably won’t care about the fact that Harrell and his allies used tired misogynistic tropes to attack Wilson, painting her as a privileged, Oxford-educated princess who never worked a day in her life, but I do—especially since Harrell’s gendered attacks created the playbook for national right-wing media like Fox and the New York Post, which will probably never tire of calling her a hypocritical socialist who “lives off her parents’ money.” (If you’re not familiar with this trumped-up issue, Wilson’s parents helped her pay for day care temporarily so she could campaign).

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Sandeep suggested it’s a bit hypocritical for left-leaning white people who “got on the identity train” a few years ago to “throw over the Black, Asian mayor” in favor of a white woman now; Harrell banged this drum at length during his campaign, suggesting that “Seattle’s Black community” monolithically supported him and his policies. And David asked whether I’m not a bit hypocritical for

defending Wilson, who has never worked in government, after criticizing the new city council voters elected in 2023, most of whom had little or no government experience. (This one didn’t feel correct to me—in general, council members don’t have much or any government experience—so I looked it up. Turns out: Nope! I criticized the incoming council cohort for their policy positions and the things they said about how local government works, which were often simplistic.)

Also, for some goddamn reason, we’re still debating whether Wilson promised to lower the price of pizza (she didn’t!)

Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in later this week for a special bonus episode.

Elections, Mayor Harrell, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Closing Arguments in the Mayoral Election, and a $5,000-a-Week “Outreach” Consultant

By Erica C. Barnett

On the final Seattle Nice episode before Tuesday’s election (look for our post-election show in your feed later this week!), the guys and I debated the two mayoral candidates’ closing arguments. Bruce Harrell, the incumbent, has argued that his opponent Katie Wilson lacks his experience in government and is a privileged brat because she dropped out of college and her parents have helped her pay for child care as she campaigns. Katie Wilson has argued that Harrell’s policies cater to his corporate backers and leave working and poor people behind; also, “he’s bad at the budget.”

David said no one he knows is enthusiastic about either Wilson or Harrell; I said he probably isn’t talking to younger people, or not-so-younger renters, who can’t afford Seattle’s ever-rising rent. Sandeep said Wilson’s supporters are part of the “movement Left.” That’s not how I’d describe Wilson’s base, which seems motivated by a candidate whose chief focus has been making Seattle more affordable, rather than maintaining the status quo.

We also discussed a story I wrote last week about Abdul Yusuf, the Eastside for Hire owner who’s getting $5,000 a week from the Harrell campaign for unspecified “outreach” in the Somali community. David and Sandeep both said it didn’t seem that unusual to them (Sandeep compared it to “walking-around money” distributed before elections in the 20th century South; David wanted to know how a campaign giving an individual $25,000 for “outreach” is any different than the way labor unions and business PACs spend money supporting candidates.

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As the author of the story, I argued that the two things have little in common. Unlike PACs, which put out campaign materials like ads and mailers, the nature of Yusuf’s work is unclear (although rumors abound). According to the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, he isn’t registered to collect democracy vouchers (worth up to $100 per voter) on behalf of any campaign, which anyone gathering vouchers is required to do. Nor has he ever done any consulting work for any campaign in the state prior to Harrell’s; his main lobbying work has been on behalf of rideshare drivers as the vice president of Drive Forward, the Uber-backed group that recently advocated against higher minimum wages for delivery drivers.

As I noted in my story, Yusuf’s weekly pay is the same amount his campaign consultant, Christian Sinderman, makes in a month. It’s also more than any full-time Harrell campaign staffer earns in a month, according to campaign finance reports.