July 2025

Seattle Mayor’s Race Remains a Dead Heat in Polling

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Seattle and King County News:

First off, I took a closer look at the upcoming Seattle City Attorney election, with a particular focus on incumbent Ann Davison’s signature policies, for Bolts Magazine.

For The Urbanist, I wrote about the nuisance property and graffiti legislation recently passed by the Seattle City Council, as well as Council President Sara Nelson’s proposal to allocate some of a not-yet-proposed sales tax bump to pay for addiction treatment. I also gave an update on how Donald Trump’s recently passed budget reconciliation package, which includes large cuts to Medicaid (Apple Care) and SNAP, will impact Washingtonians, and how Seattle and King County are responding to the current national funding and policy threats.

We have a primary election coming up next Tuesday, August 5, which means it’s time for some new polls. The two frontrunners for Seattle Mayor, Bruce Harrell and Katie Wilson, are still statistically tied. In the Seattle City Attorney’s race, incumbent Davison is ahead, closely followed by Erika Evans. 

And a recent poll on Washington Governor Bob Ferguson’s job performance found that only 32% of voters think he’s been doing an “excellent” or “good” job during his first six months. 

We also have a new Seattle councilmember, the returning Debora Juarez, who has been appointed to fill Cathy Moore’s empty D5 seat. That seat will not be up for election until November of 2026. 

Coming up this week, we have a select budget committee meeting tomorrow morning with a possible vote on the Seattle Shield Initiative, which has picked up a whopping 17 proposed amendments. Then on Thursday morning, there will be a special public safety committee meeting to discuss the proposed expansion of CCTV cameras to three new locations, which will cost over $1 million. The updates would also allow SPD to view and record footage from SDOT traffic management cameras.

Guy Oron recently published a great piece about the ballooning settlements the City of Seattle has had to pay related to SPD actions. He includes some illustrative graphs as well, and I recommend taking a look. Overall, the City spent nearly twice the amount it had budgeted over the last ten years (2014-2024) on SPD settlements etc. The most recent figure: in 2024 the City spent $15.1 million on police litigation. 

The Urbanist has a piece from Carolyn Bick documenting the poor public record practices of the Office of the Inspector General (OIG). 

The Seattle City Attorney’s Office is still refusing to allow Seattle Municipal Court (SMC) Judge Pooja Vaddadi to hear domestic violence and DUI cases. SMC Judge Damon Shadid vigorously criticized this decision in open court earlier this month.

The King County Prosecutor’s Office has paused youth felony diversion due to a limited analysis that showed a recidivism rate of 53% for youth being referred to Restorative Community Pathways for felonies. Some of these cases will instead be referred to court-supervised diversion programs, but these programs are currently lacking in capacity and also lack other benefits provided by community-based programs. An audit of Restorative Community Pathways is due later this summer. 

Last week, a meeting of Seattle’s housing and human services committee was unable to convene due to a lack of quorum after both Nelson and Councilmember Rob Saka didn’t show up. Nelson apparently gave a day’s notice about her absence, and Saka was reportedly in his office at City Hall at the time of the meeting. 

As a result, the committee was unable to vote on many appointments that would finally fill the City’s renters commission, which former committee chair Cathy Moore appears to have deliberately let languish as she pursued the idea of including landlords in a body meant to advocate for renter rights. The committee was also supposed to report on accepting $16 million in federal HUD grants. 

Neither Nelson or Saka has given much explanation for what happened. If they deliberately skipped the meeting in order to thwart the renters commission appointments, doing so would be an undemocratic act, the seriousness of which is only magnified by the active erosion of democracy right now at the federal level.

The committee’s business is now supposed to be heard at the full City Council meeting later today, when the renters commission vacancies will hopefully finally be filled. 

Recent Headlines:

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Local surveillance is ramping up in tandem with federal surveillance

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Seattle News:

First up, I wrote about the new proposed crisis care center site in Capitol Hill. 

One detail I hadn’t remembered is that the King County crisis care levy doesn’t provide any funding for involuntary treatment. Now, there is an important distinction here, because the first crisis care center, Kirkland Connections, does have involuntary beds, and when I interviewed them earlier this year, that involuntary capacity was mostly full. So it’s not impossible for crisis care centers to have involuntary treatment space, but none of that is funded by the crisis care levy dollars. 

New SPD Chief Shon Barnes was sworn in last week. PubliCola reported that Barnes was out of town most weekends during his first four months as SPD Chief. A side note from that reporting is that Barnes met with Sound Thinking Technologies on March 17, when he’d been chief for less than two months. Sound Thinking is known for their Shotspotter gun shot detection technology that Harrell has proposed a couple of times, only to have community reject it. 

Mayor Bruce Harrell and Chief Barnes are celebrating SPD’s real time crime center (RTCC) so I finally got to enter the room where it happens. It did not, in fact, feel like I’d entered the control center of a science fiction movie. The RTCC is staffed by two analysts 19 hours a day, seven days a week. 

The cameras SPD are installing include five cameras in each deployment: a 360 camera with a pan tilt zoom camera mounted below. So each camera actually gives out five feeds, four of which are static and facing all four directions, the last of which is a pan tilt zoom that can move and focus. The cameras record for five days at a time. They don’t use facial recognition or gait analysis, but they do have an AI overlay within the camera systems that allows the police to look for things such as “blue shirts, black pants,” to use SPD Captain James Britt’s example. 

57 cameras have been installed so far in the three zones: Aurora North, the downtown core, and the CID. 

Britt said, “​​We’re looking to add a couple of new locations in coming legislation, which will include the Capitol Hill nightlife area, the area around the stadiums, and the area around Garfield High School. We’re working with council right now to work on that legislation. The ability for the real time crime center has also to pull in private video from businesses and other places that are willing to give their video. We’re working on getting that rolled out, but we’re not quite ready to go there just yet. We’re also working, as part of the legislation, to be able to pull in other government-owned cameras, which would include DOT cameras and cameras from other city facilities around the area.”

By DOT cameras, Britt is referring to traffic cameras operated by SDOT. 

Britt assured me that the RTCC doesn’t connect with any federal agencies with its data or equipment. SPD is also planning to have random audits of their analysts to make sure they’re following policy. Britt said it would be illegal to use RTCC data to assist ICE. However, in recent months we have been seeing many of these protective laws being bent or broken across the country, including close to home in Pierce County.

You can read articles about the RTCC center from The Seattle Times and PubliCola. The Times article in particular does a good job covering some of the civil rights concerns related to the use of these cameras and the RTCC.

At the same press conference, Harrell announced that SPD has hired almost 100 new officers as of July 1. 

Seattle is also asking to leave its federal consent decree after more than 13 years. My guess is that Judge James Robart will schedule a hearing in the fall, possibly in September.

This week the city council passed new graffiti and nuisance property legislation, which I will be writing more about in the near future. 

The applicants for Cathy Moore’s council seat have been made public, and rumor has it that former Councilmember Debra Juarez might be a shoo-in for the position. The final vote on the councilmember appointment will be on July 28. 

Surveillance news

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking and reading about surveillance since President Donald Trump signed his big budget bill on July 4. The bill gives ICE a whole lot of money, and as a result, we can expect to see large investments in building out surveillance systems. These will be nominally for the purpose of helping to deport illegal immigrants, but there is always the potential for an existing surveillance system to be used for other purposes. 

Right now, here’s some of the data we know is being shared with ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP):

I’d recommend caution when thinking about laws such as Washington’s Shield Law that are designed to protect immigrants or California’s law regulating the sharing of ALPR data. While it is good to have these legal protections, we are currently seeing the limit of these laws in action, including in California, Illinois, and here in Washington. Assurances that a surveillance behavior and/or data sharing would be illegal are not sufficient to ensure safety at this time. 

Recent Headlines:

 

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We’re thinking about the Seattle budget early this year

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Seattle News:

First off, we have some new revenue possibilities on the table for Seattle, one of which is progressive and one of which is decidedly not. 

Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck introduced a B&O tax proposal that would bring in an additional $90 million of revenue every year. Should the city council pass the proposal, it will be brought before voters to decide this November. 

There have been some changes to the legislation since my reporting above. Most importantly, there will no longer be a specific spending plan that will be hammered out at the beginning of next year. Instead, the legislation outlines specific investment areas that are allowable uses for the new revenue being generated by the B&O tax restructure. Up to $30 million of the proceeds will be available to use to address potential federal funding reductions within specific categories, while the rest will be used to backfill certain investment areas within the general fund. 

You can take a look at the following presentations for more information:

One big thing to note from the first presentation: Last year, we forecast a 2027 budget deficit of $89 million. However, that number has gotten markedly worse and now stands at $233 million. That is for just 2027’s budget. Depending on how economic conditions develop, that number could continue to go up.

2025’s original deficit, dealt with during budget season last fall, stood around $250 million or so. Harrell chose to address it by reallocating JumpStart payroll tax proceeds away from its spending plan buckets to instead backfill the general fund. It is not clear whether that fix will work a second time to balance 2027’s budget, especially without largely eroding the intended JumpStart investments. 

Following the above presentations, Councilmember Bob Kettle stated he didn’t like how new revenue being passed is given buckets of investment areas for which it can be used. On Bluesky, I explained that often new revenue streams are dedicated to specific investment areas in order to avoid all new funding being used for purposes such as the police department, homeless sweeps, and pet projects of current electeds. Providing funding buckets focuses investment on urgent needs and/or long-term needs (such as affordable housing), meaning those investments don’t have to compete with other funding priorities. Especially with a voter-approved initiative, it’s important to give voters a clear idea of what investments they’re voting to support. 

Council President Sara Nelson also announced this week that should the council implement the state-allowed 0.1% “public safety” sales tax, up to 25% of the collected funds may be spent on “evidence-based treatment” for addiction. Don’t get too excited, though. Up to 25% is less than $9 million, and Nelson provides a long list of initiatives that she says the $9 million would support: a much longer list than $9 million could be realistically expected to pay for. 

PubliCola also expressed skepticism of the announcement, given that at the related press conference, Nelson was “flanked by a much larger contingent of allies from “treatment first” groups.”

Finally, a sales tax is a very regressive tax. We can already expect to see a sales tax increase of 0.2% in King County next year, and this would increase that to 0.3% within Seattle.

The Seattle Public Schools (SPS) school board met this week, but they decided not to take up their moratorium on police officers in Seattle public schools until later this summer. In the meantime, The Urbanist published an op-ed written by SPS students expressing the desire to keep police out of schools. 

The public safety committee heard again from SPD Chief Shon Barnes last week, followed by a full council vote on his confirmation as chief on Tuesday. 

The public safety committee also heard about new legislation that would fine graffiti taggers $1000 per piece of graffiti (Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison’s latest foray into policy making) and an amendment related legislation on chronic nuisance properties that would expand the CIty’s power to hold businesses responsible for illegal activities that don’t take place on their premises. You can read more about both of these pieces of legislation over at PubliCola.

The Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise (FEPP) levy will be on the ballot this November. In addition to the levy providing new investments in student mental health and school safety, which could include money going to SPD, PubliCola reported that the levy will shift funding for 30 programs that are currently supported by the general fund, the JumpStart payroll tax, and the sweetened beverage tax. This adds up to almost $50 million per year. Yikes! 

In the last edition, I reported about an AI pilot being tested by the City Budget Office and Central Staff. Last week we also heard about an AI pilot that began this spring to improve the City’s permitting process.

Lastly, ‘tis the season for endorsements, and The Stranger just came out with their Seattle mayoral endorsement for Katie Wilson. 

Upcoming local events:

There are several upcoming events in Seattle I’d like to call to your attention.

First, on Monday, July 7 at 7pm, there will be a crisis care center townhall at Vermillion to discuss the new proposed site of a crisis care center in Capitol Hill. 

Second, The Burner will be holding a candidate forum on Thursday, July 10 at 6:30pm at the First Baptist Church in Capitol Hill. Present will be three candidates for Seattle City Attorney, three of the four candidates for the City Council D2 seat, and three of the mayoral candidates, including the aforementioned Katie Wilson. 

The Stranger will be hosting their usual candidate forum on Thursday, July 24 at 7:30pm at Neumos. 

Finally, the Mayor’s Office will be hosting “Safer Seattle Community Forums” this summer in each council district, for which you need to RSVP to save a spot. District 2’s forum will be on Thursday, July 10, at Rainier Community Center from 6-7:30 PM. District 4’s forum will be at the Magnuson Community Center on July 15 from 6-7:30 PM. None of the other dates have been announced. 

WA State News:

The Washington State Economic and Revenue Forecast Council released a new forecast, which estimates that WA State will have a $720 million budget deficit over the next four years. Governor Bob Ferguson said he doesn’t anticipate having to call a special legislative session in response to this news. 

“As we begin preparing to draft my first budget, OFM has already communicated to agencies that they need to look for additional savings,” Ferguson said. 

In other words, look for Ferguson to be pushing more austerity in the coming months. 

Recent Headlines:

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