Week in Review: April 4, 2025 - with Erica Barnett

“Democrats weigh options as Gov. Ferguson rejects WA wealth tax” by Shauna Sowersby and Jim Brunner from The Seattle Times

“Tax the rich? UW economist calls WA a ‘tax haven like the Cayman Islands’” by Danny Westneat from The Seattle Times

“Washington joins multi-state lawsuit against Trump administration for cutting billions in public health funding” by Scott Greenstone from KUOW

“Vaccine clinics canceled, health jobs cut as feds rescind grants to Washington state” by Scott Greenstone from KUOW

“Federal mental health cuts will affect several King County programs” by Taylor Blatchford from The Seattle Times

“WA Head Start staff locked out and let go due to Trump cuts” by Claire Withycombe from The Seattle Times

“Shannon Braddock Appointed Acting County Executive; Saka Says He Opposed Traffic Diverters In His Neighborhood Because of Equity Concerns” from PubliCola

“Cathy Moore Directs $1 Million for Survivor Services to The More We Love, Bypassing Competitive Bidding Process” by Erica C. Barnett from PubliCola

“Council Declares "Defund Is Dead," But Can They Give Up Their Favorite Talking Point?” by Erica C. Barnett from PubliCola

Four Recommendations to Better Understand and Address Current Gun Violence Patterns In Seattle | Seattle Office of City Auditor

“Seattle is weary of gun violence. City auditor’s report is a lifeline” by The Seattle Times Editorial Board

Find stories that Crystal is reading here

Listen on your favorite podcast app to all our episodes here

[00:00:00] Crystal Fincher: Welcome to Hacks & Wonks. I'm your host, Crystal Fincher. On this show, we talk with policy wonks and political hacks to gather insight into local politics and policy in Washington state through the lens of those doing the work with behind-the-scenes perspectives on what's happening, why it's happening, and what you can do about it.

Today, we're continuing our Friday week-in-review shows, where we review the news of the week with a co-host. Welcome back to the program, friend of the show and today's co-host: Seattle political reporter, editor of PubliCola, and co-host of the Seattle Nice podcast, Erica Barnett.

[00:00:45] Erica Barnett: Hey, Crystal.

[00:00:46] Crystal Fincher: Hey, glad to have you back. Well, we have a number of things to cover this week, starting with our governor, Bob Ferguson, calling a press conference to announce that he does not intend to sign a budget that includes wealth taxes that have been proposed by the Legislature. What happened here? What did he say was his justification for this? And what was the legislative reaction?

[00:01:13] Erica Barnett: Well, Ferguson basically said that he believes that a wealth tax is risky, that it's going to be subject to lawsuits and won't be able to close the budget gap for the state within the timeframe that it needs to be closed - that's his rhetoric, anyway. I think that the Legislature is really in a bind now because both the House and the Senate had been relying on the idea of a wealth tax, or some form of tax on wealthy people - whether it's a payroll tax like JumpStart or this wealth tax. And now they're kind of having to go back to the drawing board while meanwhile, Ferguson has said he is committed to spending $100 million on new funding for police officers across the state. So they have until April 27th to figure this out, and they're in a pretty big bind right now.

[00:02:01] Crystal Fincher: So what are legislative leaders saying in response to this?

[00:02:06] Erica Barnett: So I think legislators are expressing frustration about this decision. But also now turning to other possible taxes - like a business tax, which would be similar to Seattle's JumpStart Tax, which would be essentially a payroll tax on large companies with highly compensated employees. That's one possibility. There are different proposals to adjust the cap on property taxes. Right now, property taxes locally can't go up more than 1% a year, which creates obvious problems when inflation is above 1%. So there's proposals to look at that and ease that cap up a little bit. But there are going to have to be significant cuts if Ferguson's proposal to completely eliminate the wealth tax possibility goes forward. And I also don't know what would happen in the case where - and this is pretty unlikely - but in the case where they said, Okay, and passed a budget, Ferguson vetoed it, and then they'd have to go back to the drawing board. I don't actually know how that scenario would play out, but it is a different scenario than we had with Jay Inslee, who was open to these kinds of taxes. And Ferguson is just much more fiscally conservative than Inslee was.

[00:03:17] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, it's really interesting - just as someone observing this whole process - that this is happening at a time where there is more public support for taxing the rich than there has been in recent memory. Where there seems to be growing, I guess, acceptance that the extremely wealthy are not paying their fair share. And looking at that, it's interesting to see Bob Ferguson talk about this in terms of - spending is the problem, spending has gotten out of control, and that's what we need to get back under control. Interestingly, in The Seattle Times, which is not known as a super progressive outlet. And Danny Westneat, who is not known as a super progressive columnist. And a UW Economics professor, who had previously been maligned for moonlighting with right-wing groups, actually raised an alarm that Danny Westneat wrote about in a column this week, saying - Wait a minute, Washington state, at this point in time, is operating like "a tax haven like the Cayman Islands" for the uber wealthy. The lack of an income tax, the lack of certain progressive taxes are really creating an upside down tax system. So this seems to be a problem of funding and revenue more than it is a problem of spending. Bob Ferguson clearly disagrees with that, but it'll be interesting to see what the Legislature comes back with and how the public responds, especially as we're seeing so many cuts from federal sources - and that being such a wild and unstable and unpredictable thing to look forward to on the horizon. It'll be interesting to see how this all lands.

[00:05:06] Erica Barnett: Well, and I will say, it's absolutely true that as a state, we could be a model for the nation. And say - Look, we're going to respond to these coming cuts and the cuts that have already come to the state from the federal government. And we're going to take care of people, and we're going to pass a tax on the wealthy in order to supplement some of the services that we are going to be losing. And that is not what Ferguson is doing. And interestingly, to point out one proposed cut that he has proposed making - the Attorney General's office, which Bob Ferguson used to head, he was AG before becoming governor - he's proposed cutting their staff and their essentially ability to litigate these Trump cases. And so I don't know what goes on in Bob Ferguson's mind - I'm not a state reporter, I don't have access to the governor - but some of these decisions are rather baffling in the national context. When in the first Trump administration, we really were a leader in the country in fighting some of the Trump policies. And now I think we could be a leader fighting the Trump cuts.

[00:06:05] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, and it almost feels like the conversation Bob Ferguson is having is from like, 20 years ago. It sounds so much like what we were heading into with the '08 recession, where we did respond with austerity. And I think a lot of people have concluded we paid for that a long time and decided to move away from that tactic because it really didn't appear to work for our state. This economist, Harvard PhD, used to rail against high taxes in Washington, but now he's saying we used to get called the Soviet of Washington. Now we're a place to offshore money. And so, he says, "in the strange landscape of Washington state" now, he looked at the payroll tax and concluded it's a reasonable way to raise needed revenue now for public services. And saying that because we don't rely on things like an income tax or more progressive taxation, where most of the burden is placed on those at the lower end of the economic ladder and those at the very high end are kind of skating scot-free, that we're relying on population booms, we're relying a lot on construction and consumer purchasing. And we're recording this on Thursday morning as our stock market is taking a dive in response to tariffs and what that might mean in the long term. And those don't seem like very reliable forms of revenue. So is this a continuing problem that we're walking into, that we're just not solving? Because we refuse to look at revenue and we're trying to rely on cuts when spending does not appear to be the main problem? So we'll continue to follow this - we will see where that lands. They have until April 27th to negotiate this, to end this current legislative session on time. Hopefully, they are able to accomplish that.

I also want to talk about Washington state joining a multi-state lawsuit against the Trump administration for cutting billions in public health funding that we're already feeling here in Washington state. What is this lawsuit seeking to do?

[00:08:20] Erica Barnett: Essentially, this lawsuit, which is Washington state along with 24 other states, is trying to block the federal government's termination of $11 billion in grant funding that goes to public health agencies across the country. And, according to KUOW's reporting, if the Trump administration is successful in doing this, Washington state stands to lose around $159 million, which is significant - it gets to what we were talking about earlier - when these massive cuts are coming to Washington state, it's going to have an impact, particularly if the budget ends up also being an all-cuts budget.

[00:08:57] Crystal Fincher: It definitely will. And this KUOW article also gave some examples. Like mobile health clinics - those ones that travel to different neighborhoods, because it is not the simplest and easiest thing to travel increasingly long distances, as a lot of local health providers have shuttered and consolidated to receive care. Vaccination events that our communities rely on to remain healthy, especially as we're seeing things like measles and the third announced case in King County come - one of the most contagious pathogens that we face here - just keeping us safe through that. Behavioral health providers - things like substance abuse treatment, behavioral health treatment are so critical. And, as we have recognized, especially recently in this region, critical to just our entire public safety and public health landscape. And we have worked so hard to stand up some new programs, new capacity - and that is now also being jeopardized and undercut by these cuts. We're just facing a lot here that is on the table for cuts that we don't really have any identified way to replace at this point in time. So this lawsuit is, as you said, seeking to prevent that.

[00:10:20] Erica Barnett: One of the other things that's getting cut - both King County and the City of Seattle, and probably other cities as well, I'm most aware of the city of Seattle, there's just a lot of cuts that are going to have an immediate impact. As part of this MAHA - Make America Healthy Again - so-called plan, RFK Jr. announced that the U.S. Government is eliminating SAMHSA, which is the addiction treatment and behavioral health arm of the government, which is going to have massive implications to mental health treatment, to behavioral treatment, and to addiction treatment across the country. And I think that locally, you know, just the other day, I was hearing the City Council in Seattle talking about how they're going to rely on this federal agency that no longer effectively exists to help with substance use treatment and provide technical assistance. And I'm sorry, it's gone. So I think the local impacts of this are going to be absolutely massive. And we're bracing for it, but I think we're really not prepared.

[00:11:19] Crystal Fincher: Yeah. Valley Medical Center, a hospital and medical center in Renton, has already announced over 100 staff cuts as a result of these funding cuts, which is just massive to the entire South End - so many people rely on Valley Medical Center. Talking about Care-A-Van events on Facebook. UW has talked about funding cut for contagious disease notification - work that started with the WA Notify, WA Verify apps, but was expanded to measles, tuberculosis, foodborne illness outbreaks, food recall information. We've seen more than our share of those here. All of that information - getting known, understood, and disseminated to the public - is frequently reliant on these federal funds, and they have just disappeared. So it's really challenging. I am glad to see that Washington is joining this lawsuit, but I think just the magnitude of states involved in this really underscores how impactful this is - whether it's a red state, blue state, everything in between - these are going to hurt people on the ground pretty severely.

Also, another local impact that we're seeing from federal actions is that Washington Head Start staff were locked out and fired due to Trump cuts. What happened here?

[00:12:49] Erica Barnett: Yeah, the Seattle office of Head Start was just shut down abruptly. And all the staff there - and I think it's a small number of staff, but they do tremendous amount of work overseeing Head Start across the region - they were just told that they're fired. And it's part of this massive wave of layoffs. But it means essentially that this office that served Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, Washington is simply closing down. And I'll point out the HUD office, too. There's just all of these regional offices - a lot of them are located in Seattle - that administer all kinds of services, including Head Start, but also assistance to housing agencies just across the board are just being shut and supposedly consolidated into this new Make America Healthy agency. But it's going to mean massive impacts on this federally funded, very successful preschool program that has been around for decades.

[00:13:44] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. More than 15,000 Washington children are enrolled in Head Start programs. This office oversaw programs in Washington, Alaska, Idaho, and Oregon. I do think it's notable - you kind of said, it's a very small number of people, but they do a whole bunch of stuff. And that's the story for a lot of these cuts that we're seeing. I've heard justifications for this as - Oh, it's inefficient. Oh, it's just a waste of money. But we actually haven't seen that substantiated at all. In fact, what we've seen are these small groups of people, these regional offices being responsible for coordinating and managing so much throughout an entire region. And these closures - they talk about consolidating into other areas - I think it is important to note that this doesn't appear to have been planned. There doesn't appear to have been any notice provided. These people left work one day like they were coming back in the morning, and in the morning they found themselves locked out. They weren't even able to get back into the offices to get their stuff, according to the association's executive director. They were just locked out. So any kind of planning to transition this work, to quantify what they're doing, and to offload that to someone who may be remaining with the agency - the kind of planning that responsible organizations do when there is downsizing, or when there is restructuring - that has not happened. That is not happening. This is just abruptly terminating. And they do manage so much around the state. In fact, a number of the organizations that receive funding that they do manage are due for renewals as of July 1st - more than 70 grant recipients or providers are facing a July 1st grant renewal deadline. If they aren't renewed, programs will shut down. So it's just really a challenging situation. Obviously, there are a number of people lobbying to save Head Start, which is such a benefit to our community. The amount of money invested in early learning pays back multiple times over in the benefits to the community - we all benefit from this happening. And it's just really challenging to see this happening without there being much of a plan or way to mitigate the negative impacts resulting.

Also want to talk about Shannon Braddock being appointed interim King County executive. Who is Shannon Braddock and how did she land here?

[00:16:24] Erica Barnett: Shannon Braddock was the deputy county executive, but she has been around in the county for a really long time. She started out as an aide to Councilmember Joe McDermott. And has just been really crucial to both the County Council, where she worked for a long time. And then Dow Constantine, she started working for in 2017. And she's run for office a couple times and lost, but she is sort of regarded as the person who will be - I think somebody said a steady hand at the tiller - and she's going to be in this position. Well, actually, we don't know how long right now because she is - just a slight clarification - she's acting-

[00:17:05] Crystal Fincher: Thank you.

[00:17:06] Erica Barnett: -King County Executive, which is just this weird distinction. Acting and interim sound like they're the same thing. But if she does not get appointed as interim - so there's a second step that would have to happen, or that has to happen for her to be essentially the county executive - and that has not happened yet. And I think there's some debate internally on the County Council about who should fill that role and whether it should be Shannon Braddock. I think it probably will end up being Shannon Braddock. But it's a little up in the air - and there was kind of a weird executive session that they went into when they voted on Shannon Braddock - and so there's a little bit of up-in-the-air quality to her permanent appointment through November.

[00:17:46] Crystal Fincher: Very interesting. Certainly for people who have worked closely with King County Government and its many initiatives, Shannon Braddock has been intimately involved in many of them and has been a steady hand in guiding the county for several years. So I don't think many people are surprised at all by this selection - it seems like it makes sense to the overwhelming amount of people. Dow Constantine has just been hired by Sound Transit to be their new CEO - that's what opened up this slot. And whoever is ultimately the interim county executive - presumably Shannon Braddock, we'll assume for now - will hold this until the new executive takes office. Shannon Braddock is not currently running for this position. Running for the position are King County Councilmembers Claudia Balducci and Girmay Zahilay, as well as King County Assessor John Wilson. And so we will have a new county executive, but until then, the county still needs to operate, especially as we deal with not just the everyday business of the county, which is enough in and of itself, but a lot of the unexpected happenings, like we just talked about from the federal government. So we will continue to follow that.

Now what I do want to talk about is a story you wrote about Seattle City Councilmember Cathy Moore awarding $1 million to The More We Love, a service organization, without a competitive bidding process. So can you just tell us what happened here and what this process was?

[00:19:32] Erica Barnett: Yeah, so I'll start by just kind of explaining what The More We Love is. It's an organization that came on my radar because I was covering homelessness in Burien, which has passed a total ban on sleeping outdoors. And this group, The More We Love, started coming up. It was started by a Kirkland - I believe, former real estate broker named Kristine Moreland, hence The More We Love. And she basically came in and said she could do a better job than all the other existing homelessness groups in getting people into shelter and housing. And so the City of Burien ended up ending a contract with REACH, which is a longstanding homelessness organization, and giving it to her group. Now, by all accounts, her group fills a niche in Burien and does get people into detox and shows up and takes people to shelter, things like that.

So, fast forward to now, there has been a competitive process underway to award some portion of $2 million - I think it's about $1.2 million - that Cathy Moore got in the Seattle budget last year to basically create a "receiving center" for people who are trying to escape the sex trade on Aurora. And so Kristine Moreland and The More We Love once again started popping up - this time in Seattle. They have never been active in this space before. They are not sort of one of the groups that was lining up to compete for this contract. And a competitive bidding process was underway - the various groups have been meeting to sort of talk about which niches each one could best provide in bidding for these contracts. And the RFP, which is a request for proposals, was going to go out in May. And quite a bit of money has been spent on this process, too - just convening these meetings, city staff being dedicated to this work. And Cathy Moore decided that instead of doing this, she was going to direct the City's Human Services Department to award all of the money to Kristine Moreland and The More we Love. And the Human Services Department doesn't actually - it's not under the City Council, but they agreed to do it. And so that's what's happening now. So The More We Love is going to get this contract for - basically, to take women from Aurora down to its existing house that they run now in Renton. So it's just - sorry for the long, long windup, but that's kind of the backstory and the story.

[00:21:58] Crystal Fincher: No, that's a really important windup and really important context. And I actually wanted to get a little bit more context. So part of the issue here is that essentially there was a public bidding process and the outreach and the work that goes into that being teed up. And that was essentially just terminated, or they just bypassed that. Why are public bidding processes important? Why do cities view that as being in the public interest?

[00:22:28] Erica Barnett: Well, there's a lot of reasons. I mean, the public deserves to know where its money is being spent. And the way that this money was allocated last year, Cathy Moore could have written it so that it was essentially directed at The More We Love. City does that all the time, usually for smaller contracts, where they'll say an organization that does this and this and this, and it's obvious which organization it is. She didn't do that. And so that launched this competitive process that was supposed to be somewhat public, and where people could go and they could look at the proposals that everybody made. And the Council itself could have a discussion about which of these proposals made the most sense, how they made sense together. Decisions about major, large amounts of funding - and $2 million is a large amount of funding - are meant to be made both in public and not unilaterally by one person. And so it is a problem.

Another issue is that we tend to, in the city, try to take equity and diversity and inclusion into account. And there's been a longstanding sort of issue in the sexual exploitation survivor space about white-led organizations being put at the head of things and getting all the money. And I think that these organizations are very cognizant of that or trying to address it. And so this is basically a brand new to this space, white-led organization that Cathy Moore, white councilmember, is just unilaterally handing money to, while there's all these Black-led organizations that had hoped to compete for it. And so there's an equity issue as well, I think.

[00:24:03] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. And the public has an interest in knowing it's not getting ripped off. The public has an interest in knowing it's not throwing good money after bad and buying a lemon, essentially. And it seems like bypassing the competitive process doesn't give people much confidence that they're not getting ripped off and that they're not buying a lemon. The More We Love is new to this space, and they don't appear to have any kind of track record here - or certainly not a substantial one. It does not mean that they can't do the job, but it does mean that they should be responsible for demonstrating that they can and how they will do that - which is usually what is involved in a public bidding process. And now we don't know - is what we're paying for their services two, three, four times as high as we would be with another organization? We don't even know the answer to that question. But that's one of the things that a public bidding process seeks to understand and ensure doesn't happen, that - Hey, we are advertising a uniform set of needs being addressed. How can you do that? At what price? And so we don't know if this is the best deal we've ever seen, or the biggest ripoff we've ever seen. And that is a stunning question to be left with for a contract this size, particularly when the city is facing a budget deficit and decreased funding from other sources.

And also, are they able to deliver on these services? What capacity do they have? We don't know that answer. And I think in your previous reporting, you had also covered that - in reviewing work that they had done in other sectors, it was unclear specifically what they had delivered. They sometimes provide generalities, kind of an overview. But specifically, what the money has brought, what the results have been doesn't appear to be clear to anyone at this point in time.

[00:26:06] Erica Barnett: Yeah. As I reported, they provided a year-end report to the City of Burien. And this was not required, so it's not like there were - to be fair, there weren't like specific parameters they were supposed to fulfill in this report. But still, it's a five-page document that says that The More We Love assisted a certain number of people. About 300 - and of those, they said there were 25 survivors helped. And don't know what that means. And the information we have about their services in Renton is pretty sketchy, too. They have a house - as I mentioned, they bought a house down there last year and are putting up some commercially sexually exploited women trying to leave the sex trade. But they're saying that they can massively expand services at that house to accommodate something like 25 women, and I'm not sure how that's going to physically work. But also, I mean, there's a couple problems with that. Ordinarily, there's lots of organizations here in Seattle, and they provide different types of services to these women who are trying to get off the street on Aurora, and no one organization provides all the services. And what Kristine Moreland's group is saying is - We will provide all the services. And hopefully they will work in collaboration with some of these other groups. But I think that it will be challenging because they are in Renton and most of these other groups are located where the services are actually needed, which is on Aurora. So this house is 20 miles away, and I think that that is a significant problem that the Council just didn't get an opportunity to even talk about. Because this money, as I said, has just been directed to them.

[00:27:41] Crystal Fincher: Has Cathy Moore or anyone else on the Council responded to some of the criticism and blowback that they've received as a result of this decision?

[00:27:49] Erica Barnett: Not to me. Cathy Moore did not respond to my request to talk to her. But I think that she has been pretty defensive whenever she's been sort of pushed on anything that she has proposed that has been controversial. On this specific issue, it just hasn't really come up - because it was just a unilateral thing, and she directed HSD to do it. And HSD is an executive department - they don't really have to talk about it. They just can spend money if the mayor's office tells them that they can. And so that's what happened in this case. So a lot of the responsibility - to be fair to Cathy Moore, she made this decision, but the mayor's office did not have to go along with it. And ordinarily, we have separation of powers. And I would expect a mayor's office that was engaged on this issue to ask a few more questions than it seems like they did.

[00:28:37] Crystal Fincher: Interesting. Well, we will continue to follow how that goes. Final thing I want to talk about was Councilmember Rob Saka denouncing the defund movement through a resolution. What did this resolution do, if it did anything, and what did it say?

[00:28:57] Erica Barnett: Well, ironically, this Council got elected saying, among other things, that the last Council was performative and constantly passing meaningless, non-binding resolutions. And yet, Saka introduced and spent quite a bit of time talking about this resolution, which is entirely performative and non-binding. Don't care what the Council says - there was a lot of rhetoric from everybody about how this makes it possible for the consent decree to be lifted, and that this means that more people are going to apply to be police in Seattle, etc. It doesn't. All it does is say that the era of "defund," which never happened - you have to say it every time - we did not defund the police in Seattle. But that era when people on the Council were openly discussing the idea of taking some money from the police department and putting it into community-based public safety organizations - that that is over. Now, it's been over since 2020, but this Council has been, frankly, rather obsessed with the 2020 Council. And continues a year and three months in to blame that Council for all the problems of the city, and this is just another way of doing that.

[00:30:14] Crystal Fincher: Well, and it's so interesting to me because we're a year and three months into the newest members' terms, but Sara Nelson, Mayor Bruce Harrell were elected in 2021.

[00:30:26] Erica Barnett: Yeah.

[00:30:27] Crystal Fincher: And so we have been in this new era for years now. After promises of hiring tons and tons of new cops - that have not quite come to fruition. After tons of promises about improving services, improving police response time and responsiveness, and reducing gun crime and all of these kinds of things. And it's striking to me that we're not talking about what we can do to better address the many things that have been promised and not delivered, and yet just passing a non-binding resolution about things that happened years ago.

[00:31:14] Erica Barnett: Yeah.

[00:31:15] Crystal Fincher: Did they address that at all?

[00:31:17] Erica Barnett: Well, it will shock you to know that they did not. And the one councilmember who might have pushed back, Alexis Mercedes Rinck, was not present - I'm not sure why she was not there. So there were only six councilmembers present - Dan Strauss and Cathy Moore had asked for absences several weeks ago. But yeah, they didn't really get around to that. Saka kind of gave a long, discursive lecture about how the last Council was a bunch of white saviors and that they didn't represent the views of Black and Brown people. And that he's never met another person in his community that - and he didn't say what community he meant by that - but in his community that opposes more funding for police, that doesn't want more police. And I thought that was particularly interesting that he said that the last Council was white saviors, when a majority of that council were women of color. So his speech was pretty - like all Rob Saka speeches, he hit on a lot of points multiple times. But I think that if defund is dead, it's really time for the Council to stop talking about it and start actually taking action and implementing policies that promote public safety. And they point to these 14 public safety bills that they say they've passed. And I would say, of those 14, the substantive ones were the SOAP and SODA laws. And the rest are like signing off on surveillance policies that SPD has, which the last Council did, too - but they don't get credit for those as public safety bills because they're really not.

[00:32:47] Crystal Fincher: Interesting. Well, it will be interesting to see, especially as we head into campaign season, how they do characterize the records there. And to be fair - it's not fair to say that they haven't been talking about anything else entirely. Curious to see so much time spent on that non-binding resolution. But there was seemingly substantive conversation held by Sara Nelson and the Council this past week about gun violence, reducing gun violence and findings from the City Auditor on that. And I think you have a story coming out about that soon.

[00:33:21] Erica Barnett: Yeah, I do. I'm actually talking to the City Auditor today, Thursday, about this audit that came out. And it has some recommendations for how the city could - I guess, to use the parlance that they love - eliminate silos and reduce gun violence, by doing what a lot of other cities have done, including Baltimore. And having tables where public health authorities and police and community groups sit down and talk about ways to reduce known hot spots for gun violence, to address those, and just a whole host of other things that are in place elsewhere. This conversation at the Council - it got a little heated between the mayor's office and both Sara Nelson and Maritza Rivera on the Council, because the mayor's contention, or Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington's contention, was that this audit was unnecessary because the city is already doing all these things. And the audit says explicitly that the city is not doing these things. So those were very contradictory statements. The auditor was sort of sitting there at the table with the mayor's office folks and with SPD, so it was a little awkward. But Rivera got pretty passionate, saying - Look, gun violence is not getting better in my district. It's getting worse. And she pointed to Magnuson Park, which is one of the hot spots that the audit identified as a place where there have been a number of shootings. And she basically said - Why aren't we doing anything about this? Why are you always back here saying that you can't get anything done or you're trying your best? And the mayor's office essentially said - Well, we've had all these great recommendations since the last audit, which was in 2012, but the Council has stymied us every single time. She didn't provide any specific examples of that. But 2012 was a long time ago. Bruce Harrell wasn't mayor, but he was on the Council.

[00:35:10] Crystal Fincher: He was a councilmember, yes.

[00:35:13] Erica Barnett: And so that was interesting. So, yeah, I think there's quite a bit of tension there that we're going to continue to see play out over whether the city and the mayor's office and SPD are actually addressing gun violence in a meaningful way, or just sort of running around and being reactive. Which is essentially one of the audit's conclusions - that SPD is reacting and the mayor's office is reacting, but people are not talking to each other and they're not talking to King County Public Health in any structured, meaningful, ongoing way.

[00:35:43] Crystal Fincher: Interesting. Yeah. And not only was Bruce Harrell a councilmember, but so was Tim Burgess, who is a deputy mayor with the city, so-

[00:35:52] Erica Barnett: Right.

[00:35:53] Crystal Fincher: -curious to see the past versions of people who are now in the mayor's office blamed for work of those same people now in the mayor's office not getting done. But we will be eagerly awaiting your story and appreciate your informative and enlightening coverage that we always receive about this.

And with that, we thank you for listening to Hacks & Wonks on this Friday, April 4th, 2025. The producer of Hacks & Wonks is the incredible Shannon Cheng. Our insightful co-host today was Seattle political reporter, editor of PubliCola, and co-host of the Seattle Nice podcast, Erica Barnett. You can find Erica on Bluesky at @ericacbarnett and on PubliCola.com. You can follow Hacks & Wonks and me on Bluesky as well. You can catch Hacks & Wonks on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts - just type "Hacks and Wonks" into the search bar. Be sure to subscribe to get the full versions of our Friday week-in-review shows and our Tuesday topical show delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, leave a review wherever you listen. You can also get a full transcript of this episode and links to the resources referenced in the show at officialhacksandwonks.com.

Thanks for tuning in - talk to you next time.