Updated and Improved: The City of Seattle's Employee Directory, Only On PubliCola

The city's public directory vanished in 2021 and has not been replaced, making Seattle an outlier when it comes to transparency in Washington state.

By Erica C. Barnett

Since 2021, when then-mayor Jenny Durkan disappeared the city's online employee directory (and promised, falsely, to repeat it), PubliCola has been filing records requests, consolidating, editing, and converting multiple spreadsheets in various formats into a single database that anyone can search to find contact information for virtually anyone in the city. (So DON'T COMPLAIN TO ME IF YOU CAN'T USE IT. Just kidding. I love your feedback!)

The reason I publish this database, a process that routinely includes pulling my own hair out, is because this information is public, and it should be publicly available. It is standard practice for other governments, including cities like Bellevue, counties like King and Pierce, and the entire Washington State government, to make their employees' contact information publicly available; Seattle became an outlier, under Durkan, in 2019, and has continued to withhold this information from the public under current Mayor Bruce Harrell.

City officials often talk about "access," "transparency," and "publicly facing databases," suggesting they value keeping themselves accountable to their constituents. But when Seattle (or any city) replaces a standard directory of public employees and their contact information with a short list of gatekeepers and links to generic internal websites, that's a blow against transparency. And while it's easy to throw up our hands and say that this kind of slow erosion of accessible information is inevitable, it's important to remember that it hasn't always been this way.

So, as we have in the past, we're publishing a searchable database—also available as a Google spreadsheet—of all publicly available contact information for city employees. This version, unlike one we published earlier this year, includes each listed employee's name, contact information (email and/or phone), department, and title.

A few notes on the data: Each employee is listed in Lastname,Firstname format in a single cell, so my name would be listed as Barnett,Erica (but searching in the "Name" column for "contains" "Erica" would pull me (and any other Ericas, Americas, etc.) up. Or, if you want to find everyone who works in a department, searching by the department's acronym—say, SDOT, for the Seattle Department of Transportation—will pull up everyone in that department. Alternately, you can just go into the Google spreadsheet and search or sort by whatever you're looking for.

Employees who asked the city to remove them from publicly available contact lists, such as some victims of domestic violence, have been removed from this database. 

As we've said every time we've published this information since 2021: Although this database duplicates much of what was in the official city directory, representing an accurate contact list for city employees as of this summer, it does not provide a substitute for transparency from the city itself, which is ultimately responsible for providing this kind of basic information to its residents.