Police Deny Request to Produce Records in a Timely Fashion; Burien City Manager Filed Complaint Against Progressive Council Member
Today's Afternoon Fizz.
1. The Seattle Police Department's public disclosure office denied PubliCola's request to consider nine outstanding records requests in four batches, as a settlement agreement between the department and the Seattle Times requires, telling us that they are following a rule put in place under former mayor Ed Murray that allowed SPD to "group" all records requests from a single media outlet or individual into a single mega-request and respond to each request one at a time.
In 2023, the city settled the Seattle Times' lawsuit over this practice, which unreasonably delays access to public information, by agreeing to refrain from grouping requests made more than eight weeks apart. Although the agreement did not entirely stop SPD from grouping (and thereby delaying) records requests, it was supposed to rein in the police department's liberal use of this delaying tactic.
SPD did not say why they suddenly decided to group our requests, most of which SPD has claimed to be working on for months, and in some cases well over a year. SPD had already provided disclosure dates for all but one of our nine requests (and three we closed because we've been waiting so long that they're no longer timely; now, SPD has canceled all of those dates and assigned a "placeholder" disclosure date of December 31, 2025 to all but one of our requests.
SPD's decision to group our requests means that records that we were supposed to receive, under SPD's previous disclosure schedule, in the next couple of months have now been arbitrarily pushed out to a date more than a year in the future. Under the old schedule, we were supposed to receive records on three requests this month, one request in January, four in February, one in March, one in April, and two in May. Now, under a best-case scenario, we'll get the first installment on a single request we made last April at the end of February, with all the others pushed out indefinitely.
This delay in providing access to public records directly contradicts the terms of the city's settlement, and creates an obstruction to public access to public information. We filed a records request today to find out how many other media outlets and members of the public have been affected by this policy over the past year. Since our latest request has to get in line behind all the others, dating back to early 2023, it will likely be a long, long time before we have our answer.
2. Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon filed a human-resources complaint against Burien City Councilmember Hugo Garcia earlier this year over a series of tweets Garcia wrote expressing concern about the number of high-level employees who had left the city.
Garcia's initial tweet quoted a story in the B-Town Blog about then-Burien police chief Ted Boe's testimony in a lawsuit challenging the city's near-total ban on unsheltered homelessness, or "camping." In his testimony, Boe said Bailon had demanded a new police chief after Boe refused to direct King County sheriff's deputies, who provide Burien's police service, to enforce the ban.
"🚩I’m concerned with continual departure of long time city employees since the arrival of our city manager and the interactions detailed in this article on how personnel [are] treated is a RED FLAG," Garcia began, then listed four high-level employees who had left over the past 12 months.
"High turnover in staff is bad for businesses & worse for small cities who are already in a budget deficit crisis," Garcia wrote. "There is a good chance that our Chief of Police may too decide to leave sooner than later now too. … Lawsuits, staff turnover, and deteriorating relationships [with] regional partners is bad."
In an email forwarding his complaint to Garcia, Bailon wrote, "This new complaint against you is due to actions that you have performed in your capacity as member of the Burien City Council that are baseless and slanderous in nature. ... As a reminder: you have been advised of your actions on multiple occasions. Any future attempts to slander and or defame a city employee with baseless and or false allegations may expose you to personal liability."
Garcia said Bailon claimed he was unaware of any concerns about high turnover at the city or the likely departure of then-chief Ted Boe. "He was like, 'This is news to me. I’ve not heard that there's an issue.'" Less than a month later, Bailon formally asked for Boe's removal; Boe resigned to become the police chief of Des Moines in June.
Garcia said he doesn't know what, if anything, ever came of Bailon's complaint against him. (The city of Burien has not responded to questions, but we'll update if they do.) But he said he's tired of being just one of two progressive council members, and the only one who is routinely shut out of internal meetings on city policy (sound familiar?)
Garcia said Bailon began excluding him from meetings after Garcia commented that it "reeks of white supremacy" to locate a temporary homeless shelter in a low-income Latino neighborhood in order to keep it out of downtown Burien.
"I have no support from the rest of the council or the mayor to get [Bailon] to act right," Garcia said. "They've basically all shut me out." He said he's waiting until after the February election, when voters will decide whether to raise Burien's minimum wage to about $20 an hour, before deciding whether to run again. But he said he's come to believe he may be able to "do more good outside of the council, like I’ve been doing organizing and [working to pass] the minimum wage ordinance," than on it.
The council has significant work ahead of it, including a planned levy to help address a growing budget gap and an ongoing debate over whether to slash the city's human services budget in order to refill the city manager's discretionary reserve fund.