Cascade PBS News - Washington state & Seattle News

Mayor Bruce Harrell talks SCOTUS homelessness case and SPD culture

Paris Jackson — Wed, 08 May 2024 05:00:00 PDT

Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell likes to look at every challenge from a variety of directions, including the perspective he gained growing up in Seattle in a multi-racial working-class family.

Everything from his childhood and his education to his other life and work experiences have informed how he approaches the job and tackles Seattle’s biggest challenges – from public safety to public trust.

Cascade PBS sat down with Harrell recently for a wide-ranging interview and learned a lot about the mayor’s thinking – as a Seattleite, as the son of Black and Japanese parents, as a sports fan and outdoors enthusiast and as the leader of this city.

If you prefer, you can also listen to this conversation as a podcast on Northwest Reports or watch it on camera in two parts on The Newsfeed.

This interview has been edited for both length and clarity.

Cascade PBS: Of all the issues you are working on, do you think the Downtown revitalization plan has been one of your biggest accomplishments so far?

Mayor Harrell: I don’t try to measure or size up different things that we do. One is not more important than the other because depending on who’s experiencing what we’re trying to do, it may be more important to them. So Downtown, for example, is critical to our success, but not so much more than someone living in a neighborhood that may not even come Downtown.

Across our country, many downtowns have suffered. E-commerce has changed the way people live, shop, work. COVID has affected the way people live, work, shop. And so now, instead of just trying to go back to the good old days, we have to ask ourselves, what do we build? What are people’s behavior and how do we use that to make a great, vibrant city?

We have over 100,000 people living Downtown. It is a great place to live. We want it to be active. We know that day care is an issue. We know that dog parks are in need. We know that we want to increase density in certain areas. And so we look at our building code to think about how do we activate it, number one. Number two is we know that from a public safety standpoint, that illumination is critical. Activities, the arts, the theater. song and dance, if you will, are critical toward vibrancy.

How do we increase foot traffic? How do we get people wanting to go Downtown? How do we want more people to live Downtown? I’ve talked to almost every mayor of every major city to understand what they’re doing as well.

So we think we’ve given a good blueprint on what Seattle should be in our Downtown area for the next several years, and a lot of it is working. And I’ll give you one good example. If you look at City Hall Park next to the courthouse … that place was an eyesore. There was litter everywhere. People were sitting around and making it unwelcoming for others. We’ve cleaned up the area and invested in lighting to make it welcoming. So I would say it’s a great accomplishment, but all part of trying to get our city back to where we need it to be.

Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell sat down for an interview with Cascade PBS at City Hall, May 2, 2024. (Genna Martin/Cascade PBS)

Most mayors and city councils don’t always have the best relationship. But the current Council shares some philosophical values with you, and many on this Council are people who you have endorsed. Do you think this will play an integral role in accomplishing your priorities?

Absolutely. I think, you know, I served on the Council for 12 years. And I can say as a Council member, I could literally count on one hand the number of times I saw the mayor on that floor. And I know as a Council member I could count on maybe two hands the number of times I met with certain mayors. Some mayors I never met with. And what I’ve tried to do, even with last year’s Council, is I’ll go to the second floor. I’ll understand their agenda. They ran for office. I don’t want to say to be a superstar, but they have their own agenda and what they want to do for the communities and for their district, or even for the city at large. So what I try to do is help them. And I’m sure we are aligned on most things. We may disagree, but for me, and it’s served me well as a person in the city, every organization I’ve been around, I’ve never said, hey, I need you to make me look good. I never lead that way.

And people that have been around me since I’ve been in grade school have known that when I’m around teams, that’s what I fight for. It’s just to make sure that the team works together.

This new Council, again, they have their own agenda: around public safety, housing, income inequality, race and social justice. They are very aligned with what the city wants, and that’s most important. You run for Council to be part of a team. You’re not running to be a superstar. You’re like a baseball team or football team or a soccer team, or, dare I say, an NBA basketball team. You’re running to win collectively.

Quite candidly, if you look at our history, many Council members really missed the mark. They really missed the mark because it was all about their personal engine and they were misaligned. So this Council, I’m very confident that we’ll work together. We will have some disagreements, but we won’t be disagreeable. I’m excited for this city to see what we’re going to do together.

I was watching the press conference that took place a couple of days ago, and a lot of questions came up about public safety. SPD is facing lawsuits from within, from longtime women employees and cops over sexual harassment, racism and gender bias. And this week, you stood before that on that podium, and you said that you were going to hire an outside investigator to investigate these claims. Do we have a culture problem in SPD?

You asked a question: Do we have a culture problem in SPD? Which then means a thousand-plus folks and saying, Hey, you over there, you have a culture problem. I’m part of their culture. I’m the chief executive officer of the city. I recognize that cultures always have to be changed for the good. And how do you change a culture? Well, first of all, you become that culture that you tolerate. So if I allow everyone to come to meetings repeatedly late, or if I allow race and gender discrimination to be implicit or explicit in behaviors, then that becomes the culture. So one of my life’s missions has always been to try to change cultures for the good.

At SPD, yes, it’s been a male-dominated culture, to some extent militaristic in their approach. This is the history of policing in this country. And while I never subscribed to a quote-unquote defund movement, the idea behind the defund movement was, How do we take out the militaristic culture in a department and re-energize that department to realize they are to protect and serve and that no one should die over a routine traffic ticket?

And that you don’t ignore race. You realize there could be cultural or racial biases in everything that you do.

I was hit with a question and that is how many complaints does it take before you re-evaluate the chief? That’s a fair question. Only one. It’s not the number of complaints. It’s whether the chief can do his or her job.

I expect each department here to understand the vulnerabilities in their culture and to take action. So the question for this chief is, given the history of cultural or gender bias – I should say in gender bias in police departments generally – what are you doing effectively to mitigate that, to build the culture that we need? What could happen with this kind of commitment toward parity and equity and kindness? And he’s being evaluated in that sense right now. And so it’s a work in progress.

Now, I picked him out of a national search. I believed in his ability. He has a history with the department and he’s done some magnificent work. But for me, I have a certain standard of excellence that I’m held to, that I hold myself to every single day. In my lifetime, I’ve tried to push myself to the limits of excellence in everything that I do. So the question for me is, is he meeting that mark? And that is a process I’m going through right now.

What do you think the next police union contract should include when we talk about police accountability? And will it be enough to end the federal consent decree?

So, the first thing is I’m confident it will be enough to end the consent decree. Now, I just have to put a little skin in the game. I don’t know this for a fact, so let me give a disclaimer, but I think I’m the only mayor in recent history, at least maybe in our entire history, that’s actually cross-examined police officers on the stand. I was a fairly accomplished attorney. I take accountability very seriously. And I think everyone in the community knows that, that that’s been my walk for as long as I’ve been in this city.

Regarding police accountability, we have accomplished a lot. I wanted the ability to bring in civilians for some of the work. I wanted the flexibility to bring in park rangers for some of the traditional gun-and-badge work. We were able to look at the 100-day requirement by which we have to investigate potential criminal misconduct. So from an accountability standpoint, we accomplished a heck of a lot. And we’ll continue to do so.

You look at our use of force, which is less than 1%. We are modeling what reasonable force should look like. So we’re doing some real good police work out there. Given the limitations of our resources and our personnel power out there, our numbers are still below where we want to be, from a staffing standpoint, but we are doing some really, really good work.

So when I tell the accountability people that want more, I say specifically, what do you want? Because we have the Office of Public Accountability, the officer Inspector General, the Community Police Commission, we have a robust accountability system. So rather than people saying nebulous claims that we want more accountability, tell me specifically.

I know there are two areas that I’d still like to achieve. Oh, you’re going to tell me.

Mayor Harrell with Councilmembers-elect Bob Kettle, Joy Hollingsworth, Maritza Rivera, Rob Saka, and Cathy Moore at City Hall on Dec. 15, 2023. (Josh Cohen/Cascade PBS)

Well, I’m thinking one in particular is disciplining officers. I think that’s one that people are saying, when is that going to reach a level where the discipline, they have more flexibility in the statute to make sure that happens? If an officer steps out of line while out there on the street?

I think that our current Chief, Diaz, has shown remarkable leadership in how he has disciplined officers. In fact, in the older system, it was our inability to discipline officers. So I’m not seeing case after case where the discipline of an officer for misconduct was weakened or nonexistent.

In fairness to the officers, I believe in due process. I believe that, if a person says something offensive but they said it either intentionally or unintentionally, can I train that person up? Can I coach that person up? I make mistakes every single week. I was going to say every single day, but I’ve had a good day today, so I haven’t made any.

So there’s an element of being too punitive, recognizing that there’s human contact. These are human beings. They’re not robots. On the other hand, when you look at the use of force, use of a gun, you look at strong holding or violence committed by officers. That’s the stuff that under my administration, we have zero tolerance for. So again, on a case-by-case basis, I will look at every officer and what he or she does and how they are disciplined. And if we have to revamp it, we’ll revamp it. But you look at activities that took place, you know, five, 10, 15 years ago. We’re pretty tight right now in terms of what we tolerate and what we don’t.

The court was incredibly concerned about how we dealt with crowds and protests.

From 2020, yes.

And so, again, I think we made some remarkable progress there. Are we perfect? Of course not. But again, with respect to how we discipline, I will always have a chief that understands that we do have to discipline appropriately. And, you know, justice is an interesting concept. It’s easy to define. I’ll define justice as to treat equals equally and unequal as unequally in proportion to their inequality.

Last year, we ended the year with a 7% dip in violent crime and then a 17% decline in property crime. But still, many residents are concerned about public safety. That seems to be what you continuously see or read. What do you plan to do to continue addressing that issue?

I’ll put it in two buckets: a police response and a non-police response. Then investments in infrastructure. So on the police response, we are recruiting more officers right now. We’re getting 250 to 300 applications a month. We are now living in a country, Paris, where it’s just not as cool anymore to be a police officer. That is just a reality. I asked officers who become officers, what inspired you. Because I want to tap into that. So we’re getting our recruiting numbers up. We’re changing processes that have been in place for decades. Literally, the testing procedures, the physical testing and agility exercise.

Number two, we’ve created the care department, a civilian assistant response and engagement and non-police response, because we did realize we were sending officers with a badge to situations where they needed another skill set. It’s a third department – police, fire and CARE.

A lot of people are when you think of safety, also think about pedestrian safety, cyclist safety and transportation safety. As an example, we eliminated right turns at dozens and dozens of high-collision intersections. Then you also look at crime prevention through environmental design. So in our comprehensive plan and our housing strategies and our transportation levy, we’re also looking physically even in our building codes, how do we illuminate areas to create more safety?

So our approach is holistic, including community-based solutions, realizing that some people come from trauma. Perhaps they didn’t have some of the cultural safeguards in place to prevent them from committing acts of violence. How do we go upstream? You look at our pre-K investments. I was part of the Council at the start of this movement. So we’re trying to go as far upstream as possible, realizing that even prenatal care with our nursing program is critical toward brain development from ages 0 to 4. So, again, my approach to public safety is not just more cops. I think about every human being reaching their potential.

By ordinary statistics, I shouldn’t even be mayor. Well, my mother was interned as Japanese were, interned when she was just a young girl. She wasn’t fortunate to go to college. And my father came from the Jim Crow South as a Black man here in the ’50s. And he wasn’t college-educated. And that’s not quite the setup for a son to be the mayor of this great city of Seattle. But I was given other privileges that a lot of people didn’t have. They loved each other hard, and they created something in me to self-optimize. Now what is that something? And how can I duplicate that? I get energized about it because when I roll out our plans and our investment strategy, I asked my senior team, how are we investing in people such that they self-optimize? Because the problems you see out there, people huddled around tinfoil, something broke down in their life and a police officer can’t fix that.

CARE team community crisis responders Abdillahi Mohamed and Chris Inaba (in blue) take over for two SPD patrol officers as they attempt to help a woman who had just been evicted from her apartment and was in a state of crisis. The CARE team spent several hours with the woman working to calm her and find her emergency housing for the night. (Genna Martin/Cascade PBS)

How would you rate the CARE department at this point?

I think they’re awesome. And I think Chief Amy Smith is doing a magnificent job of both recruiting the right people and the employees there are. I think they understand the significant role they play. They’ve eliminated a need for the police to go out often. They’ve de-escalated so many situations. Now there’s other safety type of people around that we’ve started under my administration. We’re taking the park rangers out, for example. I think I want to say up to, like, 26 or 28 park rangers from two, I believe, and my numbers might be a little off.

In park situations, which should be open and accessible to all, I don’t need police going out there and just apprehending people when perhaps they are doing some stuff they shouldn’t be doing. We will call the police if we have to, but that’s not a desired approach.

We have community service officers, many are hired from the communities that they serve, and they can be a liaison between the Police Department and the city of Seattle. So again, we’ve increased the CSOs in our approach. And so when I say we’re looking for a holistic approach, I have new types of employees out there doing new kinds of things to take some of the pressure off of our police officers.

You mentioned the numbers are down with officers and recruitment, and I want to dig into that. It’s been a slow progress, but there have been bonuses and incentives to entice those potential officers. So that said, do you think these higher wages will secure more people who want to become a Seattle Police officer?

I think compensation is always an interesting question, as to the role compensation alone plays into someone’s career choice. Certainly in retention, we know that plays a significant role. So we put forth a very attractive package for officers to be compensated. And I think they should be. We’re the largest city in the state and it’s a very demanding job with the challenges, and I think they should be compensated to the highest. And I’m willing to put that in front of the City Council as I have. But there’s so many other intangibles.

And so we met with private employers that are recruiting, you know, in the high-tech industry or in the educational industry, in the social media industry. How do you entice your employees? Is it compensation alone? And so we’ve come up with some new ideas. One example would be if someone’s coming from another city. Perhaps they have a spouse or partner that’s interested. How do we make it very easy for that person to have at least a pathway to employment as they relocate?

I’m an outdoors person. So if I weren’t working every single day, I’d either hike or fish or swim. So I sell Seattle. I say in 45 minutes you could snow-ski or scuba-dive, or you could hike or camp, or go to a river and do some steelhead fishing. You have all this beautiful outdoors here, and we are a multifaceted economy. We are part maritime industry, high tech, biotech and a great university system. So Seattle has a lot to offer. And I do a lot of that. I’ll actually do that tomorrow morning to a group of folks who may consider moving here. And I’m not selling snake oil.

I’m selling the fact that we are one of the most rapidly growing cities in the country; that is just a fact. And people are coming here. So it’s not just compensation. Yes, that’s a component of it, but it’s also what this area has to offer. I’ve been to other cities. I’ve been to every major city … I wouldn’t put Seattle below any of those cities. It’s an awesome city.

Certain communities that have experienced trauma, especially BIPOC communities, have in some instances had negative relationships with law enforcement. What do you say to people who have experienced mistrust of officers at points in their lives? And what are you doing in terms of, or what could you say in terms of, reassuring them about the police who patrol our streets?

Well, the first thing I would say is I don’t have to go far to talk to that community. I just have to go to a mirror. I grew up in these streets, grew up in this. I’m half Black and half Japanese. I grew up around the Black folk of the Central District. But it wasn’t just Black folk. There were Filipinos and Native Americans and white folk. But it’s primarily people of color because that’s where we lived in the Central District back in the 1960s. And if you look at my background again, I was president of a Black fraternity, and I was vice president of the Black Bar Association. And I’ve been involved in Asian and other BIPOC organizations throughout my life.

I understand mistrust; as I said earlier, I’ve cross-examined police officers. Police officers are human beings. We all have biases. I didn’t change when I became mayor. I’ve successfully won four elections in the city. What I say to communities that mistrust the police, all I can say is, I get it, man. I don’t trust government and I’m the mayor of a city.

I’ll tell you a funny story. When I was on the City Council, there was a camera that was positioned right outside my office, and it zoomed in on my office. And I said, “Hey, who’s on the other end of that camera?” They said, “Don’t worry, it’s blacked out. Your office is blacked out.” And I said, “Well, how do I know that?” I mean, I’ve never been to the police. It was a Police Department camera, and it was, I think it was, like, 180 or 360 [degrees]. And I said, “Man, I don’t trust that stuff in my office.”

So I get the mistrust. And so now it’s incumbent upon me as an executive. I was the author of the privacy surveillance statute, like how we use technology, to make sure that at least you have people in positions of power and influence to build community trust.

Give us a try. Trust is not something you should give freely. As I’ve told my three kids, trust has to be earned. We have to earn it as members of government in everything that we do. We’re human. So this is ongoing work.

We’re going to put a button in that and get to another pressing topic facing the city: homelessness. And currently the U.S. Supreme Court is weighing a class-action lawsuit about whether to criminalize the unhoused for sleeping in public. What are your thoughts on what that could mean for the city?

From my standpoint, it’s not going to have a significant effect. The reason I say that is we will always lead toward offering shelter first. And I believe that the issue of housing and sheltering so many is solvable, and that we go about it in a very compassionate approach. I don’t want anyone sleeping in a tent and dying in the extreme heat or the extreme cold.

It’s as simple as that. I want to give people permanent, supportive housing, but in the meantime, I may have to put someone in a temporary kind of shelter, whether it’s a tiny home or some kind of congregate shelter, with other types of supportive services. I don’t want someone having to live in those conditions, and I won’t criminalize poverty.

The legal flexibility or restrictions are not going to alter our approach, because I believe in a humane approach. Now, I don’t believe someone has a fundamental right to live right where you’re blocking a person’s wheelchair. Accessibility. As an example. I made that point when first taking office, in looking at the route to the courthouse. All of the sidewalks were cluttered with tents, and someone in a wheelchair literally could not use the sidewalk and was going to be forced to go on the street. To me, that’s a safety issue. But in terms of sheltering people, we will always lead with compassion and with the need to shelter them. That is our Housing First policy that I was a supporter of when I was on the City Council.

Next year, the city will face a nearly $250 million budget deficit. What measures are you considering to close those shortfalls?

Well, I tell everyone it’s my problem, not yours. And I’m pretty darn good at budgeting, whether it’s zero-based budgeting or target-based budgeting. I don’t want to prematurely talk about what we’re doing to address it, but it will be addressed. I’ve asked each department head – who are quite capable, you know – what a certain percentage looks like, 15% or 8%, etc. I put a hiring freeze on jobs. We’re looking at where there’s duplications in departments. My goal is to not reduce in any way essential services of the city – safety as an example, or housing. And so, we’ll present a balanced budget. We have a plan and will unveil the plan at the appropriate time. What we need to understand is why the budget reached almost $8 billion, right? We’ve grown exponentially in our spending. And I think, quite honestly, we can be more efficient in city government. And that’s what we’re going to do. We will unveil our plans toward the end of this summer.

Mayor, before I let you go, in your state-of-the-city address, you alluded to a major development that could take place here in the city. Is an NBA team on their way to return home?

You know, it’s not a huge secret that both Seattle and Las Vegas are the most attractive markets for an NBA team. And, full disclosure, even as soon as last night I had dinner with two people who have both the means and the resources to put this together. And so, yes, there are discussions underway. Hopefully we’ll have some announcements here in the near future, but I am not going to get in front of my skis. But it looks very, very promising here. Very promising.

Topics: Seattle City Government

UW weighs whether to revoke a notorious child molester’s Ph.D.

Daniel Walters — Wed, 08 May 2024 04:59:00 PDT

In part, it was his position — as a priest and doctoral student — that convinced so many children and parents at Seattle’s St. Paul School and Catholic parish to trust Patrick O’Donnell.

He told them he was working on his graduate research when he recruited 60 seventh- and eighth-graders for a 1978 dissertation experiment “on the subject of trust.” And he told them he was working on “research” when he asked parents and teachers to pull students out of class.

In fact, the reason he was in Seattle in the first place was because the Spokane Diocese had sent him to get treatment for what one priest euphemistically called his "pediatrician complex.”

InvestigateWest (invw.org) is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest.

In the 1970s and early ’80s, as he was moved from parish to parish — in Spokane, Seattle, and the small eastern Washington town of Rosalia — he allegedly molested more than 65 children, court records show. He admitted abusing at least 30. Six victims were from St. Paul.

By 2002, O’Donnell had become known as one of the most infamous predator priests in the region. His actions helped drive the Spokane Diocese into bankruptcy. He was sued — settling for $5 million he didn’t have. He lost his psychology license, his role as a priest and his reputation.

But O’Donnell still has one honor left.

“He can put the letters Ph.D. after his name, and that’s still a problem,” said Pomona College chemistry professor Dan O’Leary. “He’s in my world, higher education. I don’t think he deserves to be in this world.”

Back when O’Leary was an altar boy in Seattle, he had his own run-in with O’Donnell. Since 2018, O’Leary has been doggedly urging the University of Washington to take a radical step: revoking O’Donnell’s 1978 degree entirely.

Emails provided to InvestigateWest show that UW has seriously considered taking that step over the past six years. Numerous administrators, university investigators, the Title IX office and even the state attorney general’s office have weighed in. The university declined to make any staffers available for an interview with InvestigateWest, and InvestigateWest was unable to reach O'Donnell, now 81, for comment.

In a statement, however, the university said that while the actions were "heinous and reprehensible" and the efforts to seek justice "certainly understandable,” they were “unable to obtain evidence that in the course of his graduate work, Mr. O’Donnell met the standard for degree revocation.”

InvestigateWest, however, has uncovered additional evidence tying O’Donnell’s sexual abuse to his graduate work and calling the honesty of the work itself into question.

Degrees have been revoked before, but mostly for issues like plagiarism and data falsification. Revoking a degree for sexual assault would mean diving into a thorny issue that has divided academics for decades: Can you separate the research from the researcher?

Former American Psychiatric Association President Paul Appelbaum, an expert on ethics in medicine and psychiatry, said even the question of whether to use data from the experiments conducted in Nazi death camps doesn’t have a clear consensus among researchers. He’s uneasy about the idea of revoking O’Donnell’s degree, instead of just condemning his actions.

“Going back to erase the record of his Ph.D. seems to raise more problems than it could conceivably address,” Appelbaum said.

Yet Mary Dispenza, part of the Seattle Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said that even decades later, it “matters to a survivor” when an “institution finally stands up to crimes of any nature.”

“If the university has the right to do that, I say do it,” Dispenza said. “If it is a wrong act, you make it right. It doesn’t matter if it’s 50 years later.”

For the sake of science

O’Leary wasn’t one of O’Donnell’s victims. But he thinks he almost was. O’Leary said he remembers lying on his back, in the winter of his eighth-grade year, at a university pool after O’Donnell offered to teach him how to swim. He will never forget the look on O’Donnell’s face as he floated in his arms.

"It was really clear to me that he was fantasizing,” O’Leary said.

The priest wanted to shower afterward, O’Leary recalls, but the altar boy declined to join him. These memories are nearly a half-century old, but he still finds them “chilling to the bone.”

“It’s like being in a car with Ted Bundy,” O’Leary said.

But he also knows that lawsuits are filled with depositions from boys who said they’d experienced far worse. There were boys who knew O’Donnell as a basketball coach, track coach, Boy Scout chaplain or family friend. There were boys he’d strip naked after basketball practice; boys he’d take out on his boat; boys he’d wrestle, grope, tell to keep quiet.

There was the boy O’Donnell would let drive if he’d sit on his lap. The boy who rolled the lowest number in a dice game in O’Donnell’s hot tub and had to run naked to the dock to do push-ups. And the boy who knew something was wrong one night at Spokane’s Bishop White Seminary, who tried to call his mom again and again but kept getting a busy signal until O’Donnell was on top of him, mauling him, kissing him, grinding against him, until the boy pleaded with him enough times to stop.

There were boys who grew up and confronted O’Donnell. In the courtroom. In the press. At the front door of the parish with a Bible in their shaking hands. In a suicide note.

The fact that O’Leary got away unharmed, while so many of O’Donnell’s victims didn’t, has stuck with him.

“I think there’s probably some survivor's guilt,” O’Leary said. “You lived and other people perished.”

It’s part of what’s fueling his tenacity, driving him to keep hammering away on this issue for so many years. Whenever one UW administrator stopped responding to his emails, he’d simply reach out to another.

When he managed to get his hands on O’Donnell’s 1978 doctoral dissertation — sent to him in California by interlibrary loan — the thing that angered him the most was on the very last page: the University of Washington consent form, a permission slip to participate in the experiment that students and parents were asked to sign.

“That told me that O’Donnell understood that researching with human subjects has responsibility,” O’Leary said. “It’s clear that he was well aware there are ethical obligations.”

The May 1978 experiment had focused on studying how trust develops between kids and adults. The recruits were asked about the prisoner’s dilemma, a famous two-person negotiation game: If both players are trustworthy and choose to cooperate, they both benefit — gaining a small amount of money. But if one decides to betray the other, the betrayer gets more money and the victim gets nothing. Attorney Michael Pfau, who represented many of O’Donnell’s victims, said he’s never come across any victims who remember being a part of the experiment. But he cited O’Donnell’s doctoral dissertation, “Evoking Trustworthy Behavior of Children and Adults in a Prisoner’s Dilemma Game,” in multiple lawsuits as an example “of a pedophile using a number of means to gain access to children.”

To O’Leary, the topic was “tragically ironic.” In March 2018, as the #MeToo movement sparked hundreds of whistleblowers across the country to go public with allegations against rapists, O’Leary made his pitch in an email to the UW: If O’Donnell had “engaged in sexually abusive behavior under the pretext of conducting doctoral research,” then surely UW would “disavow itself from that research and question the validity of any degrees given in association” with it.

He knew it was going to be an uphill battle. While plenty of honorary degrees of serial predators such as Bill Cosby have been retracted, pulling a real degree for nonacademic reasons is very rare.

There have been exceptions. In 1999, MIT revoked the diploma of a former fraternity pledge trainer for providing a freshman with the alcohol that killed him. In 2000, a federal court found that University of Virginia did have the right to revoke a graduate’s degree for embezzling funds from a student club, but allowed the student to sue on due-process grounds. And while Columbia University officials revoked the degree of a journalism student accused of sexual assault in 2017, they restored it three years later as part of a lawsuit settlement. But almost all of these cases involved recent graduates.

UW’s Suzzallo Library on June 11, 2019. (Photo by Paul Christian Gordon for Cascade PBS)

But Applebaum, the ethics expert, said he’s uneasy about the notion of stripping away someone’s degree for anything but academic reasons.

“Whenever someone is convicted of a felony, does that mean we go back and take away their graduate degrees or their undergraduate degrees or their high school diplomas?” he asked. “Where does this end?”

But when O’Leary reached out to UW in 2018, they were coming off of multiple years of headlines about a star university researcher accused repeatedly of sexual harassment.

In emails provided to InvestigateWest, university officials initially seemed supportive of revoking O’Donnell’s degree. Martin Howell, assistant dean for academic and student affairs in the College of Education at UW, told O’Leary that the “mission and values” of the university were driving him and other administrators to push O’Leary’s proposal forward.

Since the 1950s, UW faculty have had the power to recommend that the Board of Regents revoke a degree retroactively — if they could prove it was granted based on “fraud and deceit.”

The fundamental question, Howell wrote in a 2019 email, was whether, if the school knew about O’Donnell’s conduct at the time, they would have refused to grant him the doctorate. At first, Howell said, they anticipated being able to rely on “non-academic misconduct that would have violated the UW Student Conduct Code in place at that time.”

But after a conversation with the state attorney general’s office, the university concluded it would be more difficult than they had suspected: To take away his degree they needed proof of fraud and deceit connected to his actual academic work.

The best evidence for that had come from Jim Biteman, one of O’Donnell’s victims at St. Paul. Biteman was never a part of O’Donnell’s 1978 “Prisoner’s Dilemma” experiment. But the year before, he recounted in a deposition, O’Donnell repeatedly pulled him out of class, claiming “he was going to ask me questions regarding research for his university studies.”

The priest would ask the boy to stand in front of the cafeteria window — his back to O’Donnell — and imagine himself naked and describe what he saw. And then O’Donnell would ask Biteman to imagine another boy naked with him, touching him, and ask how the thought made the eighth-grader feel.

“He would always say, ‘Don’t tell anybody about this conversation. This is part of my research. I don’t want you to spoil it, because I have to talk to some other boys,’” Biteman said in the deposition. “I know for a fact that he pulled other boys down there and did the same routine, same questions because I have spoken with others that have gone through it.”

Later, O’Donnell invited Biteman on trips on his boat up at a lake — as he did with so many other kids — and molested him.

While Biteman did not respond to an interview request from InvestigateWest, in a 2019 email he stressed to O’Leary that the evidence clearly showed O’Donnell had used his role as a graduate student to abuse underage boys.

“If the UW chooses to ignore the facts and requires ‘proof’ that directly ties his research to the abuse,” Biteman wrote, “then it appears they are not interested in pursuing what is right and are taking the easy way out.”

He hoped O’Leary could get traction on his efforts to convince UW to revoke O’Donnell’s degree.

“Anything that can be done to discredit this guy, who is currently living out his life … with little if any payment or accountability for his crimes, is welcome,” Biteman wrote.

An academic question

Finally, last June — more than five years after O’Leary first raised the issue with the university — he was told the investigation had come to a halt.

The trouble with Biteman’s account, the university explained in a letter to O’Leary, was that they didn’t have any evidence O’Donnell was actually conducting doctoral research when he was victimizing the eighth-grade boy.

If O’Donnell was lying to Biteman, if his “research” didn’t have anything to do with his studies and he was just molesting them, then his degree was safe.

On its face, that may seem perverse. But Appelbaum, the ethics expert, argues that it makes sense. A university degree shouldn’t be read as a moral badge of character, he said; it’s proof of the completion of academic standards.

“If a man, however evil he was a person and however many people he may have harmed, fulfilled the requirements for a Ph.D., then he’s got a Ph.D.,” Appelbaum said.

In UW’s emails to O’Leary, officials stressed they’d tried to find a clear connection to his dissertation.

While O’Donnell had written that 60 seventh- and eighth-graders had participated in the experiment at St. Paul, there was no record of who they were. The university tried to reach out to Biteman, but never heard back. The university even sent a letter to O’Donnell himself, to his home in Mount Vernon, but, through an attorney, O’Donnell declined to talk.

But UW would not tell InvestigateWest whether they considered another major trove of information: court records.

During a 2004 deposition, O’Donnell testified that he did pull kids like Biteman out of class for purposes tied to UW academics — but didn’t indicate it had anything to do directly with his dissertation. Instead, he said, he was performing a “psychological test” on them.

His academic transcripts, indeed, show he was taking a class called “individual testing,” which focused on intelligence tests for children. But O’Donnell said the tests he was conducting involved a word-association game where the kids would have to react to words like “man,” “masturbation” and “intercourse,” though he claimed he didn’t particularly emphasize the sexually charged words over other words.

O’Leary sees it as evidence of “extensive human subjects violation during the courses” that O’Donnell had taken. Combined with Biteman’s testimony, it suggested that O’Donnell had been using these kinds of games to groom young boys and that this behavior was clearly intertwined with his academic work.

“When someone is a rule-breaker, it’s worth going back and taking a close look at their doctoral research, and see whether there’s any rule-breaking there, too,” Appelbaum said.

Indeed, O’Donnell insisted that the only reason that he had landed on the “prisoner’s dilemma” dissertation topic was because “the ethics committee at the university wouldn’t let me do what I wanted to do” and he’d done similar research for his master’s program at Gonzaga University. InvestigateWest found his published master’s thesis — “Eliciting Trustworthy Behavior in a Prisoner's Dilemma Game” — in the Gonzaga library archives.

Vast sections of O’Donnell’s doctoral dissertation had lifted entire pages from his master’s thesis word for word, right down to using the same lengthy quotes from George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, about how the “difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated.”

Today, the UW warns doctoral students that plagiarism, even using “your own, previously published work” without citing it, could prevent them from getting a degree.

The prohibition against self-plagiarism can be hazy, Appelbaum said, but it becomes a problem “when it crosses the line from merely recapitulating the same idea or using the same phrase to extracting and reusing a larger body of words.”

Self-plagiarism, of course, is almost a comically minor sin compared to those committed against the more than 30 victims O’Donnell has confessed to molesting. But, crucially, it’s an academic one.

The revelation has reinvigorated O’Leary. Earlier this month, he was armed with a highlighter and a green pen, going line by line through a copy of O’Donnell’s dissertation, marking up just how many lines appeared verbatim in each of them. He even identified two small instances of plagiarizing other people’s work — nearly word-for-word quotes that were sourced in the Gonzaga thesis but unsourced in his dissertation.

“I’m confident it would raise eyebrows,” O’Leary said. “Anyone on a dissertation committee, if they knew that was happening, they would consider it fraud or deceit.”

Presented with this evidence by InvestigateWest, the UW said it remains open to new information but was “focused on the concerns regarding abuse of minors within the conduct of his university research, not plagiarism.” It declined to comment further.

But O’Leary sees an opportunity: O’Donnell had used the pretext of UW doctoral research to molest children as a grad student. Now, O’Leary argued, the university could use the shoddiness of his actual research as a pretext for removing the degree of a child molester.

“It does directly meet the usual standard for degree revocation,” O’Leary said. “Maybe the university is actually secretly hoping for a valid reason to do the right thing.”

InvestigateWest (invw.org) is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. A Report for America corps member, Daniel Walters covers democracy and extremism across the region. He can be reached at daniel@invw.org.

Topics: Education

The American economy is booming, if not in most voters’ minds

Brandon Block — Wed, 08 May 2024 04:58:59 PDT

By all the traditional metrics, the American economy is booming. Except for one: public opinion.

Poll after poll finds Americans overwhelmingly pessimistic about the state of the economy and distrustful of the elites in charge of steering it, although many tell pollsters their personal financial situation is OK.

Perhaps the person most affected by the jumbled economic picture is President Biden, whose re-election chances hinge to some degree on his ability to remind voters that jobs are still plentiful and inflation has slowed from its historic peak in 2022. Financial analysts even appear cautiously optimistic that a so-called “soft landing” will continue – but it’s a message many voters appear uninterested in hearing.

“If he pulls [the soft landing] off it is a pretty commendable achievement, but it’s not something voters are in the mood to give him much credit for,” said Molly Ball, senior political correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. Ball spoke to a crowd of hundreds as part of the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival on Saturday, May 4, recording a live episode of the newspaper’s daily podcast The Journal.

Co-hosts Ryan Knutson and Kate Linebaugh asked Ball why Biden has struggled to claim credit for a robust economic recovery – at least on paper – in contrast with Trump’s enduring ability to portray himself as a successful businessman who presided over a pre-COVID economy marked by easy money and high profits, at least for some. Trump has also managed to position himself as a political outsider, reflecting popular frustration and cynicism toward the political establishment.

“Anger has always been a big part of his brand and I think a big part of why he appeals to people who feel bad about stuff,” Ball said. “A lot of candidates go out there and sort of say to the electorate, ‘I see that you are angry and I understand and I sympathize.’ Trump doesn’t do that. He says, ‘I’m angry too.’”

One irony often lost in the partisan scrum, Ball said, is that Trump and Biden made some similar economic choices during their terms. Biden largely continued Trump’s tariffs and has continued to embrace protectionist economic policies in an attempt to bolster American manufacturing of things like microchips and solar panels. The bipartisan turn against free-trade agreements and toward industrial policy in both parties, Ball said, would have been unthinkable just a decade or two ago, when Republicans and Democrats alike both reliably supported things like the North American Free Trade Agreement and China’s admission to the World Trade Organization.

But how much does the economy matter to voters? Ball noted that while perceptions about the economy typically factor in elections, both Trump’s and Biden’s campaigns have drawn voter attention to other issues like immigration and abortion rights. Biden’s campaign has also sought to frame the election as a referendum on democracy, highlighting Trump’s authoritarian aspirations, his attempts to consolidate executive power and overturn the 2020 election.

Ultimately the 2024 election may come down to what version of reality the American public believes – Biden’s optimism about a “resurgent America that’s making steady progress towards a future of shared prosperity” or Trump’s version of a “dystopian backwater on a path to ruin.”

Right now, Ball said, voters are more attuned to see the country with swamp-colored glasses.

“The mood of the electorate seems to be much more dystopian backwater than morning in America,” she said. “I think they’re seeing things broadly the way Trump wants them to.”

Topics: Cascade PBS Ideas Festival

Podcast | Sitting down with Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell

Maleeha Syed — Wed, 08 May 2024 04:57:00 PDT

Topics: Podcast

Confronting political polarization: Student protests to elections

Jadenne Radoc Cabahug — Tue, 07 May 2024 05:00:01 PDT

University student protests against the Israel-Hamas war became the through line of discussion at last weekend’s Cascade PBS Ideas Festival.

The topic filling newscasts and newspapers right now came up during conversations ranging from the 2024 election to racism in America today. And not surprisingly it was a focus of the live recording of the podcast Left, Right & Center, KCRW’s weekly politics show hosted by David Greene.

The show looks to bring together people with different political perspectives to show it is possible to have a productive and peaceful conversation, without changing the topic to what they had for breakfast or what the weather is.

Greene was joined on Saturday by Sarah Isgur, senior editor at The Dispatch and spokesman for the Department of Justice during the Trump administration, and Mo Elleithee, spokesman for the Democratic National Committee during the Obama administration.

The conversation started by addressing the first elephant in the room: the nationwide university student protests calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.

Despite some disagreements regarding their stances on the conflict, Elleithee and Isgur agreed that the conflict in Gaza relates to a larger topic in the U.S. about freedom of speech and hate speech.

They came to the consensus that the campus protests are pushing public sentiment away from the plight of the Palestinian people by dramatic actions like shutting down the Golden Gate Bridge.

“I think we’re in agreement on the fundamental point that this is about much bigger stuff, it is about a culture of mistrust and distrust in our institutions and the political incentive is to fuel that fire,” Elleithee said.

Isgur said students were limiting freedom of speech on campuses, allowing only those to express their freedom of speech if it aligned with their beliefs, and choosing to steer away from speaking to the media.

The conversation shifted to a larger topic on public distrust of media, especially around coverage of the 2024 Presidential election. Isgur said the media wasn’t curious enough to uncover topics surrounding either candidate, and that their conversations within the newsroom were completely different from the content they produced.

She shared an example, after she left her job at the Justice Department, in which a reporter asked for information about an extramarital affair of two department employees.

“The reporter who had the story called me to confirm certain details that I didn’t have,” Isgur said. “He was trying to coax me, he’s like, well if you have anything, it’s really important. This story will help Donald Trump so we need to be careful with it.”

Elleithee said one way to regain public trust is to diversify newsrooms with journalists with different life experiences, including hiring more people of color and those from rural America to “pop the bubble.” He also advised the media to stop blurring the line between analysis and editorial.

“I don’t need you as a reporter to tell me what isn’t a threat to democracy. What I need you to do is tell me what is happening, what they said, what they did and what that would result in, and let me decide,” Elleithee said.

To hear more of the conversation, watch the broadcast on Cascade PBS at 7 p.m. on May 15, or streaming the next day on cascadepbs.org and crosscut.com. Listen to all sessions on the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival podcast.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story included incorrect titles for some of the speakers. This version has been updated with correct titles.

Topics: Cascade PBS Ideas Festival

Podcast | How Buffalo Bill shaped the West – and the Western

Sara Bernard — Tue, 07 May 2024 04:59:00 PDT

Topics:

Black Arts Legacies: Moses Sun in light & shadow

Jas Keimig — Tue, 07 May 2024 04:58:00 PDT

Topics: artist, Arts, black arts legacies, Seattle

From the practical to the policy in the national gun control debate

Donna Gordon Blankinship — Mon, 06 May 2024 05:00:00 PDT

As you might expect, life and death came into the conversation numerous times during a session on gun violence at last weekend’s Cascade PBS Ideas Festival.

From a somewhat gruesome description of Washington, D.C., trauma surgeon Dr. Babak Sarani’s work day, including data on the average holes in gunshot victims’ bodies. To the passionate declaration that ended Malcolm Gladwell’s live interview for the “Revisionist History” podcast.

In response to Gladwell’s question of what gives him hope, activist David Hogg answered without a touch of irony, “Young people have time.”

“No matter what the Supreme Court says, we’re going to outlive them,” said the co-founder of March for Our Lives. He got involved in gun control activism after his Parkland, Florida, high school suffered a mass shooting in 2018. That statement attracted more applause than most speakers at Saturday's event.

Gladwell said he hoped the conversation would bridge what he sees as a disconnect between what is happening on the ground in gun violence and the policy response to that reality.

Dr. Sarani brought the reality check. For instance, before the pandemic, 15% of patients coming into his emergency room at George Washington University Hospital had gunshot wounds. During the pandemic, that number rose to 33%. It has dropped again, to 25%, still above pre-pandemic levels.

The surgeon explained that most of the gunshot victims who make it to the emergency room survive, as medical science has made great strides. The big difference today is that almost everybody is shot more than once because semiautomatic weapons have pushed most other handguns out of the market. The average number of holes in a body these days, in case you’re wondering, is three or four, Sarani said.

He spoke of the need for more research, and shared one of his hardest saves: a school security guard shot multiple times by a man shooting at an elementary school. When Gladwell asked him about his emotional response to his job, Sarani admitted he was doing his best to stay unemotional on stage.

“It goes from elation to the extremes of remorse and sorrow,” the surgeon said, adding that they can, thankfully, save the majority of trauma victims who make it to the hospital. Of course, many gunshot victims do not.

But the easiest way to prevent death from injury is to prevent the injury in the first place, he added, reciting a list of policy developments that have saved lives from seat belts to road design.

“There’s always room to improve,” Sarani said of the work of doctors. “But nothing will ever beat prevention.”

And keeping guns out of the hands of potential shooters and people who are suicidal, both Sarani and Hogg emphasized.

When asked what one policy change he would make to decrease gun violence, Sarani mostly deferred to Hogg, who had a lot of ideas.

No. 1 suggestion on Hogg’s list: Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Hogg and most other gun responsibility activists agree that Massachusetts has some of the strongest gun laws in the country, and among the fewest gun deaths per capita. He said the U.S. should federalize those laws.

You can still get a gun in Massachusetts, but it takes more work to buy guns as well as bullets.

“If you need more than 10 rounds to hit something, you need one of two things: glasses or more range time,” Hogg said.

If you want to watch this whole session, it will air on Cascade PBS on May 17 at 7 p.m. and be streamed from cascadepbs.org and crosscut.com the next day. Listen to all sessions on the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival podcast.

Article continues below Related Stories

Topics: Festivals, gun control, guns, Seattle, Cascade PBS Ideas Festival

Podcast | Listen in on the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival

Paris Jackson — Mon, 06 May 2024 04:59:00 PDT

Topics: Cascade PBS Ideas Festival

UW pro-Gaza encampment expands to over 100, remains peaceful

Scarlet Hansen — Fri, 03 May 2024 11:17:09 PDT

An encampment on the University of Washington campus has grown to more than 100 demonstrators after a second group set up a protest zone in solidarity with Gaza. Both groups are calling on the University to cut ties with Israel and Boeing.

The initial encampment established Monday morning by UW’s Progressive Student Union now sits across the path from the United Front’s “Popular University for Gaza.” United Front members say they wanted to ensure adequate resources and community support to protect the safety of their members before establishing their “liberated zone.”

“We [UF and PSU] are sharing this space, we are fighting for the same cause which is standing in solidarity with Palestinians,” said United Front member and UW student Isaac, who asked that his last name not be used out of concern for privacy and possible retribution. “We are here in the struggle together.”

The two groups’ demands are identical, calling for the University to divest from Israel, cut its ties with Boeing, and end the repression of pro-Palestinian students, staff and faculty. United Front members say they are working to deliver their demands to UW’s Board of Regents in the coming weeks, and plan to remain on the quad until their demands are met.

A handwritten sign in solidarity with Gaza rests against a tent at the UW encampment on Thursday, May 3. (Scarlet Hansen for Cascade PBS)

Since the establishment of Columbia University students’ Gaza solidarity encampment on April 17, students at dozens of universities have echoed their demands for university divestment from Israel. The nationwide student movement has resulted in more than 2,000 arrests and has put university administrations under intense scrutiny.

In recent weeks, The Evergreen State College in Olympia agreed to explore divestment from Israel-linked companies, and Portland State University has paused donations from Boeing following significant student pressure.

“I think it is really powerful to see the amount of power that students hold, especially when they all come together,” said United Front member and UW student Oviya, who asked that their last name not be used out of concern for privacy and possible retribution. “We are hoping that the administration will feel the pressure and address our demands.”

The two encampments have grown steadily over the past few days, with close to 85 tents on the UW quad by Thursday evening, including a medic tent, food tent, library, mutual aid tent, welcome center and a media center. The group has also implemented security and a de-escalation team.

The demonstration has remained peaceful since its establishment.

“It feels like a welcoming, beautiful, uplifting space as a Jewish person,” said UW Jewish Voice for Peace member Joe, who asked that his last name not be used out of concern for privacy. “This movement has brought me closer to my Jewish identity in so many ways.”

The university’s response has remained consistent since Monday, stating they will continue to monitor the situation and respond as appropriate to maintain a safe and secure environment on campus.

CLARIFICATION: This version of the story clarifies the actions of nearby university universities concerning their connections with Israel-linked companies.

Signs sit outside the encampment's library tent on the UW campus on Thursday, May 3. (Scarlet Hansen for Cascade PBS)

Topics:

The multimillion-dollar fight over WA’s cap-and-invest program

John Stang — Fri, 03 May 2024 05:00:00 PDT

Bolstered by an almost $5 million war chest, supporters of Washington’s cap-and-invest program have begun their efforts to keep the state’s carbon pricing system, which is facing a November recall referendum.

No On 2117 recently announced it expects its campaign dollars to grow eventually to about $11 million. The coalition hoping to repeal the state’s new cap-and-invest program, Let’s Go Washington, has raised just over $8 million so far, but most of that came as $5 million in loans from the instigator of the initiative.

“We’re going to make sure we have the resources needed to defeat 2117,“ said No On 2117 spokesman Mark Prentice. Environmental and left-leaning organizations make up most of the No On 2117 coalition, but the group also includes the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, BP America, and the Certified Electrical Workers of Washington union.

The cap-and-invest program has already brought about $2 billion into the state budget, mostly to support climate change mitigation, health and construction programs. During this year’s legislative session, lawmakers allocated more than $800 million of those dollars to do things like buy electric school and transit buses, install electric vehicle charging stations, support salmon recovery and coastline restoration, buy forest land and restore landscapes destroyed by wildfires.

If the initiative passes, that new source of cash would dry up. Voters will also decide in November whether to kill Washington’s new capital gains tax, which also has plowed new money into the state budget.

Every quarter since the beginning of 2023, the state has been auctioning carbon emission allowances to polluting industries. The program has been blamed for a 21-cent- to 50-cent-per-gallon increase in gasoline prices, but the reasons for gas price fluctuations are actually much more complex.

Since participation in the bidding is kept confidential, no public information is available on which oil companies have bought allowances and how much they have purchased. Therefore, it is impossible to tell if the finances of all oil companies and gasoline providers are affected equally, even though gas prices usually go up and down in unison. Fuel prices increase or decrease due to numerous national, international, political, geographic and economic factors. And, as the governor’s office likes to point out, gas prices have gone both up and down since the program started.

In a July 2023 photo, a motorist fills up at an Englewood, Colo., Shell station. Republican lawmakers say the new cap and trade system is leading to higher gas prices. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

Since February, No On 2117 has collected roughly $4.7 million and spent about $365,000, according to the Washington Public Disclosure Commission. Big donors include Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates ($1 million), software developer Chris Stolte ($1 million), husband-and-wife software developers Craig McKibben and Sarah Merner ($1 million), venture capitalist David Thatcher ($350,000), Seattle Kraken co-owner Samantha Holloway ($250,000), board member of several climate and progressive organizations Jabe Blumenthal ($250,000) and the Washington Federation of State Employees ($100,000). No On 2117 has $76,000 in debt.

In a press release, No On 2117 reported it has received pledges for donations from Amazon, Microsoft and Connie and Steve Ballmer, retired Microsoft CEO.

Meanwhile during the signature gathering phase, Let’s Go Washington raised $7.37 million and spent $7.66 million, according to the PDC. So far in 2024, Let’s Go Washington has raised $765,488 and spent $464,970. It has $256,873 in debt.

Redmond hedge fund manager Brian Heywood provided roughly $5 million of the 2023 donations to get I-2117 on the November ballot. “I’m not putting any more money into it,” Heywood said of the 2024 campaign. That $5 million also included getting two other Let’s Go Washington initiatives on the November ballot — repealing the state’s fledging capital gains tax and revoking a 2023 law that taxes paychecks to provide for long-term health care insurance.

In an April 10 memo, Democratic political consultant Sandeep Kaushik noted that most of Heywood's 2023 donations were loans that might have to be repaid. "How much of the contributions given to [Let's Go Washington] over the next seven months will go to paying back Heywood for his initial investment versus funding actual campaign expenditures? This unanswered question is a huge disincentive for potential donors to Let’s Go Washington," Kaushik wrote.

In an interview, Kaushik said the Heywood contribution listed as loans in PDC documents “implies Heywood wants to pay himself back to some extent.”

A Volvo XC40 electric vehicle is shown following a December 2021 news conference in Olympia, where Gov. Jay Inslee announced several climate-related proposals for the 2022 legislative session, including a plan to offer rebates on the purchase of new and used electric vehicles for qualified buyers. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

Heywood loaned Let’s Go Washington another $157,000 in 2024, according to the PDC. Let’s Go Washington’s top donors in 2024 are Bellevue-based Kemper Holdings, led by prominent businessman Kemper Freeman Jr. ($100,000), Yakima business investor Peter Plath ($50,000), a Yakima-based entity called 1975 CHRD ($12,000) and the Washington Retail Association ($10,000).

Cap-and-invest supporters “are going to have to raise $15 million to convince people of something that is not true. [Cap-and-invest] is not designed to remove climate change. It is designed to be a tax,” Heywood said.

Both sides said they expect lots of small contributors to donate to their campaigns. “Other side is a bunch of big money. … They’re going to make me the villain. … This is the American Revolution army versus the well-financed British army,” Heywood said.

Meanwhile, the Western States Petroleum Association — which represents four of Washington’s oil refineries, plus others along the Pacific Coast — plans to sit out the balloting. “We do not oppose the [Climate Commitment Act] and believe the cap-and-trade program should be fixed rather than repealed. We are not involved in the campaign,” wrote WSPA spokesman Kevin Slagle in an email.

The fifth Washington oil refinery is owned by BP America, which is part of the No On 2117 coalition.

Let’s Go Washington plans to focus its campaign on the increase in Washington’s gas prices.

No On 2117 will stress the fallout on Washingtonians if the cap-and-invest program is revoked. “All these involve cutbacks in public programs that have broad public support. … I don’t think that is a hard message to convey,” Kaushik said.

“I-2117 would deal a catastrophic blow to efforts to reduce carbon and health-harming air pollution and it would have a devastating impact on our state budget,” said David Mendoza, director of public advocacy and engagement for The Nature Conservancy, in a No On 2117 press release. He mentioned the money needed for renewable energy, clean air and water, healthy communities and forests, and for economic support for those most impacted by the climate crisis. “That’s why a broad coalition of organizations and community leaders from across our state has come together to mobilize communities in Washington to defeat I-2117,” he added.

Topics: Election 2024

Mossback’s Northwest: Seattle loved Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show

Knute Berger — Fri, 03 May 2024 04:59:00 PDT

Back before Taylor Swift filled stadiums on multiple nights, another touring show drew huge crowds. It was pure spectacle, part circus, rodeo, melodrama and pageant. It was the Wild West Show. The mold was set by William F. Cody — the frontier Barnum known as Buffalo Bill.

A scout, buffalo hunter and soldier, his resume was more inflated than the belly of Diamond Jim Brady, the notorious Gilded Age gourmand. Bill never rode for the Pony Express nor scouted for Custer as he claimed, but his message and spectacle sold a fantasy of the American West that shaped the world’s sense of American history and spawned dozens of copycats.

And when the buffalo were gone, Buffalo Bill rode on. He toured the country and Europe. As the railroads stretched across the North American continent, he went further west, eventually to Seattle. And in Seattle he had an idea that helped his celebrity live on even further.

Buffalo Bill Cody poses for a portrait while performing in England. (Library of Congress)

You associate the buffalo — the American bison — with the Great Plains, where they lived by the millions. But they also lived and grazed in the Pacific Northwest, proliferating after the glaciers melted and the megafauna vanished. They were in eastern Oregon and Washington, and many tribes here had access to them — for the Yakama, the Nez Perce, the Cayuse, the Spokane and others, they were part of their diet and culture.

Buffalo Bill made his name as a scout for the U.S. Army and as a buffalo hunter — a deadly shot who led wealthy tourists from back East on buffalo hunts at a time when one way of fighting Indigenous people of the plains was to wipe out their source of life support, the buffalo. Interest in life on the plains eventually drew Bill to New York City, where he played himself in stage and in touring dramas.

Bill decided to take his show on the road. He recruited cowboys and sharpshooters like Annie Oakley, native chiefs like Sitting Bull, Sioux dancers and white soldiers to recreate, night after night in city after city, a traveling pageant of the West. His selling point was “authenticity” — a performance that merged real frontier figures and fiction into a narrative of colonial conquest. His show was multicultural: mixed-race scouts, stunt horse men and women and rough riders from all over the world — Mexican vaqueros, Cossacks, gauchos, Arab Bedouins. Native people, often whole families, were hired to show off Indigenous ways. Yet the big white man on his white horse with his white hat presided over the mythmaking.

Buffalo Bill’s show first reached Seattle in 1908. The show set up on grounds at 29th and Jefferson — an open-air arena of tents and grandstands. It promised “a diorama of Indian warfare, a reproduction of Western life … ” There was a great train holdup; riders playing football on horseback; the Battle of Summit Springs was recreated with Bill himself playing himself killing Cheyenne Chief Tall Bull, a disputed claim. The Seattle Star reported “It was all a whirl of galloping horses, shouts in all languages from Piute to Tartar, whips crackling, lariats whirling and a big roar of applause.” It sold out.

From our perspective now, every Western cliché was showcased or invented in Wild West shows like Buffalo Bill’s, and they had a direct impact on the new medium of silent films. A good example is a Wild West show that came to town the following year, setting up on the county fairgrounds at Madison Park, across Union Bay from the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, Seattle's first world’s fair.

A Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show poster. (Library of Congress)

A cowboy from Bill’s show who called himself Cheyenne Bill — his real name was William J. Gabriel — put on a very similar show. It featured a young up-and-coming rodeo rider, Tom Mix, who went on to stardom in the first movie Westerns that would turn the Wild West show into cinematic entertainment.

Some of the realism portrayed in Cheyenne Bill’s show might shock modern sensibilities. The closing act showcased a performer named “Reindeer Ike” who played a cattle rustler. He is lassoed, dragged across the arena behind a horse, and lynched in the grand finale — in two performances a day! “So realistic is his part of the event illustrating quick justice in the old cattle country that many of the spectators refuse to believe the apparently lifeless form hanging from the tree is really that of the man who crept up on the sleeping cowboy and stole his horse.”

Movie star Tom Mix Started as a performer in Cheyenne Bill’s Wild West Show. (Library of Congress)

While most of the Northwest was no longer the frontier, lynchings were not unknown here into the early 20th century. And in 1882, three white men, accused killers, were brutally lynched by a Seattle mob downtown intent on committing its own murders — a mob that got off scot-free.

Cheyenne Bill’s show included fake history too. It showcased a recreation of the infamous Mountain Meadow massacre in which an immigrant train crossing Utah had been slaughtered. In the show, Sioux warriors were responsible. But in reality, the slaughter was committed by a Mormon militia in white-on-white violence. Cheyenne Bill did know something about massacres: He’d been a dispatch rider for Gen. Nelson Miles during the Wounded Knee campaign.

Today, myths of the West persist. So do the buffalo, thanks largely to Indigenous people who sought to save them from extermination. Some tribes are still allowed to hunt wild buffalo by treaty rights. The Yakama nation, for example, is building a large bison herd and have made sanctioned trips to hunt buffalo in Yellowstone to keep their cultural traditions alive and feed their community.

Bill himself last performed in Seattle in 1915, and while staying at a Seattle home, his niece said, he knew the end of his touring was near. The idea of a museum was hatched because Bill wanted his legacy to live on.

For better and worse, it has.

Topics: History, Mossback, Mossback's Northwest, Multimedia, Video

ArtSEA: Seattle International Film Festival turns 50-ish

Brangien Davis — Thu, 02 May 2024 16:37:40 PDT

Suddenly it’s May, which means time for the Seattle International Film Festival (May 9-19). This year, in addition to independent filmmaking, SIFF celebrates its return to an old favorite screening location — the former Cinerama theater, acquired by SIFF last year — as well as the festival’s 50th anniversary. And here I must pause to grab my pocket calculator.

The festival started in 1976, so presumably the 50th would arrive in 2026. But SIFF is accepting as fact that the 13th annual festival was actually the 14th (so deemed for superstitious reasons by organizers in 1988). We must also ignore the lack of a festival in 2020 (skipped for pandemic reasons). If you make both those leaps, you arrive at a facsimile of 50.

This math hurts my fact-checking head but I hope to let it go by the end of this newsletter. After all, a longstanding local event centered on emerging filmmakers and the increasingly rare joy of seeing movies in theaters is absolutely worth celebrating.

ArtSEA: Notes on Northwest Culture is Cascade PBS’s weekly arts & culture newsletter.

My consternation was largely quelled upon seeing clips from the featured Rainier: A Beer Odyssey, an extensive look at the creative genius-goofballs responsible for some of the wackiest beer commercials ever produced.

These locally crafted gems ran on television from 1974-1987 — well before I arrived on these forested shores in 1993. But long(er)time locals remember the Rainier ads fondly for their off-kilter humor and Northwest joie de vivre. There was the classic herd of wild Rainier beers stampeding across an open plain (the bottle-creatures’ human legs enrobed in tights), and the Rainier cans that steadfastly swam upstream like salmon. There were spoofs on Rambo and Jaws and Amadeus (the last of which features a Mozart character wildly pulling on Rainier beer taps). There were, somehow, appearances by Mickey Rooney.

Culled from some 100 hours of advertisements and including interviews with the original creators, the film is a nostalgic tribute to local ingenuity — and to a time when people in our upper left corner were making weird art to entertain their community.

‘Solo Lino’ traces the monumental career of glassblower Lino Tagliapietra. (Seattle International Film Festival)

Rainier beer isn’t the only local subject of interest covered in the slew of films at SIFF.

Among the documentaries with local ties are several that showcase immigrants, including Grandpa Guru, a Croatian film about Srdjan Gino Jevđevic, who fled Sarajevo, landed in Seattle and formed popular punk band Kultur Shock. See also All We Carry, about a young family that escapes Honduras and finds community in a Seattle synagogue.

Ultimate Citizens, by Seattle filmmaker Francine Strickwerda, highlights Jamshid Khajavi, an Iranian American counselor and coach who encourages young immigrant students at Hazel Wolf K-8 school to pursue their dreams — both in life and in ultimate Frisbee. And glass art fans should check out Solo Lino, which traces the long career and local legacy of glassblower Lino Tagliapietra, the person Dale Chihuly calls the greatest glassblower of all time. SIFF also offers a tasty smorgasbord of short film packages, including “Sound Visions,” an array of diverse stories by local filmmakers. Included in this lively mix is I’ll Take Porn for $200, by Seattle filmmaker Mischa Jakupcak, a comedy in which Annette Toutonghi (one of my favorite local actors) stars as a woman with a certain surprise for her husband. Humor meets horror in Carlos A.F. Lopez’s Dream Creep, and Lael Rogers digs into the dark side of social media with The Influencer.

Other short film packages at SIFF’s 50-ish showcase animal tales, horror flicks, animation, Indigenous stories and new takes on old complications of love.

From left: Taj E.M. Burroughs and Reginald André Jackson in ‘Fat Ham’ at Seattle Rep. (Bronwen Houck)

For those who prefer their storytelling live on stage, never fear. Seattle has a bevy of theater offerings on the boards, including a couple Pulitzer and Tony winners.

Tonight is the official opening of The Lehman Trilogy (at ACT Theatre through May 19), helmed by ACT’s revered artistic director John Langs (who recently announced he’s leaving town for a gig in North Carolina — a big loss for Seattle). This epic tale of the rise and fall of an immigrant family won the Tony Award for Best Play in 2022, among countless other accolades. Meanwhile James Ijames’ Fat Ham (at Seattle Rep through May 12) is cracking up audiences with its contemporary spin on Hamlet, wherein the vengeful ghost shows up at a Black family’s BBQ. The comedy earned a Tony nomination for Best Play in 2023, and while it didn’t take home the award, some consolation must have come in winning the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for drama.

If Fat Ham puts you in the mood for more Bard, Seattle Shakespeare stands at the ready with Romeo and Juliet (through May 19), featuring a cast of local standouts including Sarah Harlett and Andrew Lee Creech. And for a more intimate experience, consider Shakespeare Up Close: Ages of Being (through June 22), a one-woman show by Seattle theater legend Mary Ewald (co-founder of New City Theater), who performs snippets and sonnets in the living room of her Capitol Hill home.

Lastly, for another lively classic, there’s The Barber of Seville at Seattle Opera (May 4-19). Meanwhile Black Arts Legacies: Season 3 continues, as we reveal the name of one featured artist each week through June. Earlier this week we spotlighted longtime Seattle actor/director Tee Dennard, whose resume ranges from helping to establish the Black Arts/West theater company in the 1970s to prime roles in An Officer and a Gentleman and recent indie flicks. Sign up for the Black Arts Legacies newsletter to be among the first to discover each new artist in this year’s cohort.

Topics: Arts, ArtSEA, Features, Film, Theater, Things to do

Audit finds inflation, wages drove Seattle’s $1.7B budget increase

Josh Cohen — Thu, 02 May 2024 05:01:35 PDT

Seattle’s city budget grew 29% over the past five years, mostly because of increased labor costs plus high inflation.

About $90 million of the budget increase — from $6.1 billion in 2019 to $7.8 billion in 2024 — came from the creation of new programs such as the Clean City Initiative to pick up trash and the Unified Care Team that does homeless encampment outreach and clearance.

Though $1.7 billion is a far cry from pocket change, it averages out to a 5.8% annual increase over the five-year period, a time when annual inflation was about 5%.

“We’re barely treading water there. [The budget growth] is primarily driven by baseline and technical adjustments, responding to historically high inflation,” said Aly Pennucci, deputy director of the City Council’s central staff at an April 17 Budget Committee meeting.

Those are the topline takeaways from the staff’s new five-year budget analysis. The analysis comes as the city grapples with a projected $241-million-and-counting budget deficit beginning in 2025.

Released April 30, the 224-page analysis digs into every department’s budget from 2019-2024 to understand how and why the city budget has changed — a far deeper dive than the City Council usually performs when tackling annual budget writing.

“What we have before us is something that’s never been done by central staff in the last 25 years,” said Councilmember Dan Strauss at a May 1 Finance, Native Communities & Tribal Governments Committee meeting. “This document is going to inform our work throughout the remainder of the year.”

A chart from the Seattle City Council showing total budget growth.

The projected deficit loomed over last year’s City Council elections, and Councilmembers Joy Hollingsworth, Bob Kettle, Cathy Moore, Maritza Rivera, Rob Saka and Tanya Woo all promised to perform an audit of the city budget before taking any other steps to close the gap.

Seattle is legally required to have a balanced budget, and has relatively few tools available when its revenues don’t match spending. City leaders can cut staff and services, they can raise taxes, loosen restrictions on taxes earmarked for certain programs, and they can nibble around the edges with things like hiring freezes, which Mayor Bruce Harrell implemented in January. The new Council majority has said they’d prefer to find places to cut before considering any new taxes. and the deep analysis is meant, in part, to help them figure out where to do so.

The analysis is organized in an upside-down pyramid, with each layer showing how much the budget has grown over five years. The top layer is total budget growth from 2019-2024. The next layer separates departmental budgets into six policy areas — Administration; Arts, Culture and Recreation; Education and Human Services; Livable and Inclusive Communities; Public Safety; and Utilities, Transportation, and Environment — and groups each city department into one of them. And finally, the document looks at each department’s major program areas to identify where the growth stems from.

The Livable and Inclusive Communities policy area — which includes the Office of Housing, Construction and Inspections, Economic Development, Civil Rights and more — saw the largest five-year growth. Budgets in that grouping grew by $363.8 million or 174% since 2019. Much of that comes from the $270 million growth in the Office of Housing budget as the city has rapidly expanded its investment in subsidized affordable-housing construction.

The Education and Human Services policy area had the next largest five-year growth, up $196 million or 65% since 2019. More than $142 million of that increase comes from the Human Services Department, which contracts with nonprofits to provide social safety-net programs to address homelessness, food insecurity, elder care and more.

The city’s internal operations costs have also risen sharply in the past five years. The Administration policy bucket — which includes IT, human resources, the mayor’s office and the legislative department, among others — grew by $387.2 million, a 33% increase. At the May 1 Finance Committee meeting, Strauss said he was interested in digging much further into that policy bucket to understand the cost increases.

Rounding out the policy areas: Arts, Culture and Recreation grew by $109.7 million or 28%; Utilities, Transportation and Environment grew by $573.6 million or 17%; and Public Safety grew by $115.1 million or 16%.

A chart from the Seattle City Council showing budget growth by policy area.

Tom Mikesell, a central staff policy analyst, explained at the April 17 meeting that about 75% of the five-year budget growth stemmed from budget amendments meant to keep up with inflation — whether from expenses and fees the city pays or from worker wages. Those labor costs include wage increases for city employees as well as for workers the city has contracted with to provide services.

Pennucci pointed out that although labor costs have increased, the city’s workforce has not expanded significantly. Between 2019 and 2024 the city added only 591 full time employees.

The City Council recently voted unanimously to increase wages for about 7,000 unionized city workers along with another 3,000 non-union city workers. The roughly $10 million in additional costs for the city is already reflected in the $241 million projected deficit for next year. That deficit will increase further thanks to significant back pay the Seattle Police Officers Guild just negotiated in its recently approved contract.

Although the central staff analysis is far more in-depth than normal, it does not provide granular details about whether a given program should be deemed successful or might be susceptible to cut. At the May 1 Finance Committee meeting, Strauss and Councilmember Maritza Rivera both encouraged their colleagues to dig even deeper into the departments that fall under their committee assignments.

A chart from the Seattle City Council showing revenue versus inflation over 10 years.

The city’s budget deficit stems from pandemic fall out. After a decade of steady growth and low inflation, tax revenue dropped precipitously in 2020. Tax revenues have recovered some since, but property, retail sales, business and occupation, and public utilities taxes are all still lagging. High inflation is exacerbating the deficit.

Council staff chose the 2019 budget as the baseline for their analysis because that was the last year the city’s revenues matched spending. During the pandemic, Seattle relied heavily on one-time federal grants to close the deficit. The city also took money from the Jumpstart Payroll Tax on large businesses, which has continued to outperform expectations.

Jumpstart revenues are meant to be spent only on affordable housing, economic revitalization for small businesses, the Equitable Development Initiative and Green New Deal climate programs. For the past several budget cycles, however, the Council has voted to allow one-time uses of Jumpstart to close gaps, including shifting the 2024 budget $85.6 million of the roughly $395 million Jumpstart is projected to raise this year. The Council could draw from Jumpstart again to close next year’s deficit, though doing so takes money away from its intended housing, climate and economic development goals.

In addition to taking on the deeper budget analysis, the City Council is diverting from the normal budget process by starting things much earlier. In a typical year, the Mayor’s Office drafts its proposed budget in the spring and summer before passing it off to the City Council for amendments, balancing and final adoption in September. This year, the Council held its first Budget Committee meeting in April.

Topics: Seattle City Budget, Seattle City Government

Your Last Meal | Jesse Tyler Ferguson always craves green chiles

Rachel Belle — Thu, 02 May 2024 05:00:00 PDT

Topics:

The Newsfeed: The ecological power of underground seed banks

Paris Jackson — Thu, 02 May 2024 04:57:00 PDT

Topics: Multimedia, Video

Whatcom County to investigate handling of sexual harassment case

Isaac Stone Simonelli — Wed, 01 May 2024 14:30:18 PDT

The Whatcom County Council unanimously voted on Tuesday to launch a formal investigation into the county’s handling of sexual harassment and retaliation allegations against a former Public Works director and subsequent settlement of $225,000 to a female employee.

“The system needs to be looked at from stem to stern,” Chairman Barry Buchanan said ahead of the vote.

During the special session on Tuesday, April 30, Council members openly struggled with understanding the scope and scale of the problem, as well as what oversight — if any — the Council has on such personnel matters and complaints. Members had told Cascadia Daily News last week they were unaware of all of it.

Tuesday’s meeting was the latest chapter in a 10-day firestorm of statements, rebuttals and, now, official actions as county leaders grapple with calls for change and more transparency in the wake of a Cascade PBS investigation.

“You’ve made all of our jobs harder by not communicating,” Council member Ben Elenbaas told members of the county administration. “The public questions our abilities to do our jobs in the future.”

The Council repeatedly voiced frustration with the county prosecutor’s office and County Executive Satpal Sidhu for keeping them in the dark about the allegations from several women about former Public Works Director Jon Hutchings and the county’s response, as well as the 2023 settlement.

In a letter to Council members last week, Sidhu confirmed that he did not bring the issue before the Council but instead worked alongside the county’s human resources and legal teams to ensure county policies and procedures were followed.

Council members underscored their concerns about not having a clear understanding of oversight or responsibility when complaints deemed significant are made to human resources, or when payouts are made.

Council members and the general public became aware of the county’s handling of Hutchings’ resignation — including a glowing “letter of introduction” to potential employers — in a Cascade PBS investigative story published on April 19.

On Monday, facing continued pressure from the public, Sidhu stated the county’s handling of the allegations points toward “systemic issues in reporting protocols, transparency and action steps.” Sidhu, who had initially defended his actions in the matter, apologized for writing the letter in his statement on Monday, calling it an error of judgment.

However, George Roche, speaking on behalf of the prosecutor’s office on Tuesday, said, “We’ve got good policies and bad humans.”

Roche previously handled the Hutchings incident for the county’s Human Resources Department. He told Council members Tuesday that his dual role did not present a conflict of interest.

Sidhu largely sat quietly through the three-hour meeting, in which Roche took a lead role addressing the Council. Sidhu had agreed to an interview with a CDN reporter following the special meeting, but on Tuesday he changed his mind, said county spokesperson Jed Holmes.

While Roche said the Council had no legal liability in the situation, Council members pointed out that their constituents feel strongly about accountability.

“A lot of the feedback I’ve gotten is: ‘Well, if you don’t know about any of this, what else goes on in county government that you don’t know about and how can we trust you guys are doing your job?’” Elenbaas said.

Council member Todd Donovan attempted to get a solid sense of how pervasive such harassment incidents were within the county government and how often the county was making payouts connected to personnel issues. Ultimately, he said he wanted to know “How is our HR system working or not working that we don’t know about as a Council?”

Roche failed to provide a direct answer to the question, saying “Each one of those cases takes a different course.”

He did say there were a variety of “educational opportunities” the county experienced during the process that couldn’t be discussed in the public forum.

In the Hutchings incident, Roche explained that the settlement was reached within 72 hours of the county receiving a “threatening letter” from the complainant’s lawyer alleging a pattern of harassment and discrimination that the county failed to properly address.

That letter alleges that the county protected Hutchings despite his creation of a hostile work environment, sexually harassing multiple employees and retaliating against the woman who received the settlement for reporting harassment to Human Resources.

Multiple times throughout the meeting, Roche explained to the Council that in order for him to share a more complete picture of the situation, they would need to be in an executive session.

Members voted 5-1 to go into executive session due to “potential legal liabilities.” Council member Donovan was not present for that vote; Jon Scanlon was the only dissenter.

Earlier in the meeting, Scanlon explained that he had spoken with the woman who received the settlement and that she’d expressed her desire — like so many victims have — to simply be believed.

Hutchings signed a letter of resignation in early November 2022 and was hired into a similar role in Lynden in summer 2023.

The Council is expected to present the scope and process for the outside investigation at the next regular meeting on May 7.

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Topics: Labor