New Seattle councilmembers want to weaken their ethics code as the US is sliding into authoritarianism
Seattle News:
Well, Seattle has been buzzing with news these last two weeks! Let’s dive right in.
On April 28, SPD and the Mayor’s Office held a press conference to tout how many officers SPD has hired so far this year. The Mayor’s Office claims the number is 60, with another 160 they say are going through background checks.
At the press conference, which featured a few rows of the new recruits, there appeared to be one woman recruit present, while all the others were men. As PubliCola reported, 5 of the 60 new hires in 2025 are women, while last year SPD hired 12 women. PubliCola also reported that of the 24 officers who have left so far in 2025, five of those were women, meaning a net gain of zero women officers since the beginning of the year.
SPD still doesn’t appear to be a good place to work if you’re a woman, an issue I cover in my story about former SPD Chief of Staff Jamie Tompkins, who alleges SPD was a sexually hostile work environment.
President of the police union SPOG, Mike Solan, isn’t happy either, saying the higher SPD hiring numbers represent a “lessening of standards.” About SPD, Jason Rantz wrote, “nearly 30% of the department is over 50 years old. Nearly 26% are 51 years old or older. At 53, depending on the length of service, officers are eligible for retirement.”
Meanwhile, two more Black SPD officers are suing the department for racial discrimination. And attorney James Bible told the Seattle Times that “there are more cases coming.”
PubliCola has been doing a huge amount of helpful reporting in the public safety space recently, including covering Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison’s new “drug prosecution alternative,” which appears to be a less good version of the community court she shut down a couple years ago; SPOG suing SPD over SPD’s inability to fulfill public records requests; and Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi filing a formal complaint with the Washington State Bar Association against Davison and former criminal division chief (and now the Mayor’s Chief Public Safety Officer) Natalie Walton-Anderson for deciding to use a procedural loophole to disqualify Vaddadi from hearing criminal cases in her courtroom.
Meanwhile, Councilmember Cathy Moore has introduced an ethics bill that would weaken the ethics rules for city councilmembers. If passed, councilmembers would no longer be required to recuse themselves if they have a possible financial conflict of interest. Instead they would be required to simply disclose the possible conflict.
The City’s head of ethics, Wayne Barnett, supports the change. Interestingly, rumor has it that this ethics change is a precursor to Moore introducing new legislation that would gut renters rights protections that are currently in place in the city. Both Councilmember Martiza Rivera and Councilmember Mark Solomon are currently landlords who would have to recuse themselves from a vote on that legislation should the ethics rules not be changed. It is possible Moore would still have the votes to strip renters of protections just as the Trump administration is making cuts that are likely to increase the rate of homelessness in Seattle, even with the two recusals, but it would make for a tighter vote.
Why a sitting councilmember would want to join Trump in worsening the city’s homelessness crisis in the first place is an interesting question. Why she would choose to weaken the longstanding ethics rules governing city council (in place since 1980) right when many political scientists believe the United States is moving into some form of authoritarianism is another good question.
Mayoral candidate Katie Wilson wrote an op-ed about what a bad idea weakening the ethics rules is, and it sounds like most, if not all, current D2 city council candidates oppose the bill as well. Solomon was appointed to his position representing D2 until an election can be held this November.
Council President Sara Nelson’s Governance, Accountability, and Economic Development Committee first took up this ethics bill on Thursday afternoon, although no vote was taken at that time.
Finally, to end on some promising news, the Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC) has been trying a new, less painful method of administering buprenorphine to help people addicted to fentanyl. Early results show that more than 70% of people trying this new course of treatment are making it to their second month of treatment, which is more than triple DESC’s previous numbers. More studies are needed, and cost could be a limiting factor, but this could mark a really helpful breakthrough in treating fentanyl addiction.
King County News:
Shannon Braddock is now officially the King County Executive until the elections in November, and she has rolled out a “200 Day Plan.” Top of the list is enacting the 0.1% “public safety” sales tax just approved by the state legislature and establishing an emergency reserves fund to help the county deal with continued federal shenanigans.
At a Health, Housing, and Human Services committee meeting on Tuesday, county budget director Dwight Dively gave another of his updates on said federal shenanigans. He said one of the things we’re seeing now is an inability to move projects forward because the federal government employees and/or infrastructure no longer exist to do so. The county is also losing federal workers at various of its agencies.
King County filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for adding “unlawful” conditions to previously approved federal grants, which has generally meant insisting the grantee follow every single one of Trump’s executive orders, many of which are probably illegal. A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order against the Trump administration in the case on Wednesday.
Also at the committee meeting was a presentation on an old 2022 report on wage theft that somehow never received a committee presentation until now, as well as an analysis of impediments to fair housing choice.
At the Law and Justice committee meeting on Wednesday, the committee received presentations on an audit of asset forfeitures by the King County Sheriff’s Office (summary: the the records of said asset forfeitures are a mess, the electronic system is incomplete and so the office is basically relying on paper records, and the seizure notices are both hard to understand and only offered in English.) You can read the entire report here.
Also presented at the meeting were the Department of Public Defense’s annual report for 2024 and a briefing about the inquest program.
WA State News:
I wrote a wrap-up piece about the Washington state legislative session in which I primarily focused on the state’s 2025-2027 operating budget, including which new taxes and which new cuts were included. Governor Bob Ferguson has until May 17 to sign or veto the budget.
Meanwhile, Ferguson is being pressured to veto an estimated $1.86 billion of new tax revenue passed in the Democrat’s package.
The Washington state Supreme Court upheld the legislature’s ban on high capacity magazines this week.
We also got a piece from the Washington State Standard about why police accountability didn’t have a good year in the state legislature, which basically boils down to this: because it didn’t suit the people in power to move anything.
In the article, we receive this confusing gem: “Meanwhile, fears of rising crime have emboldened opposition to policies believed to hinder officers trying to do their jobs. In 2023, the last year with available statewide data, the state saw a significant decrease in year-over-year violent crimes after years of increases, according to the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs.”
So fears of rising crime, which the data shows is not happening, is what is keeping the legislature from wanting to pass police accountability legislation. Gotcha.
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