Wilson Issues Orders to Speed Up Transit and Shelter, Will Replace More Harrell Appointees

The mayor wants to build shelter and move buses faster.

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson issued two executive order on Thursday. The first is aimed at speeding up the production of shelter in the run-up to this year’s World Cup games and beyond. The second will help speed up the city’s slowest bus, the 8, by finally painting a long-planned bus lane on Denny Way.

Wilson announced the orders at a meeting of her transition team at El Centro de la Raza on Beacon Hill.

More news is expected out of Wilson’s team in the next week, including the dismissals of several high-profile department heads appointed by her predecessor, Bruce Harrell.

City Light CEO Dawn Lindell, appointed in 2024, is out, internal sources tell PubliCola (no word on her replacement yet). So, we’ve heard, is interim Office of Labor Relations interim director Chase Munroe—a Harrell appointee who worked, on city time, on behalf of the Royal Esquire Club, a private men’s club with longstanding ties to Harrell. Adrienne Thompson, a onetime labor policy advisor to ex-mayor Jenny Durkan who applied for the labor relations in 2022, will reportedly be Munroe’s replacement as interim director.

Other departments that could see changes in the next week include the Office of Housing (currently headed by Maiko Winkler-Chin) and the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs (headed by Hamdi Mohamed, who’s also a Seattle Port Commissioner.)

Wilson’s first executive order, on homelessness, sets a deadline of March for a multi-department work group to “identify all possible financial incentives, permitting changes, and policy changes” that could help the city build new shelters and housing quickly. The group will also “identify City-owned property that could be used temporarily or permanently to support shelter and housing opportunities.”

The order also directs the city’s Office of Intergovernmental Relations to work with other governments to identify additional public land that could be used for shelter and housing, and directs the Human Services Department to identify existing shelter programs that have room for expansion.

Wilson has pledged to add 4,000 new shelter beds and housing units by the end of her term, with a short-term goal of adding 500 before the World Cup games here in June.

Wilson will have to find funding for the new shelter projects in the existing city budget. Last year, the city council set aside a little over $11 million to help address potential funding cuts from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, which had changed its guidelines for funding housing projects to emphasize short-term housing over the type of permanent housing projects that rely on HUD funding locally.

After a judge ruled that HUD couldn’t change its standards in the middle of a funding cycle, the department allowed the application process to move forward under the old criteria. HUD could still pull the rug out from under providers by refusing to fund projects next year, but if it doesn’t, that $11 million could be used to fund Wilson’s shelter push.

There’s also the 116-member Unified Care Team, which removes encampments and costs the city upward of $30 million a year. Although the council adopted a Rob Saka-sponsored amendment prohibiting Wilson from spending the UCT’s budget on other purposes, some creative reallocation could put the giant team to better use.

Wilson said she’s evaluating how the UCT prioritizes encampments for removal and may change them. As an interim step, Wilson halted a planned removal of an encampment in Ballard after meeting with encampment residents earlier this week; on Thursday, she said she wanted to gain an “understanding, from the perspective of folks who are living outside, what can we do to make the process of an encampment removal more comprehensible and just maximize the the opportunities for people to get into a better situation.”

Wilson’s second executive order directs the Seattle Department of Transportation to immediately paint a long-delayed bus lane on Denny Way, a change that will help the most infamously delayed bus in the city, Metro’s Route 8, be a little less late. Last year, under Harrell, SDOT rejected the bus lane, arguing that giving buses priority would make drivers late. Wilson said the bus lane would run, at a minimum, from Fifth Ave. to Fairview, the most congested section of the route.

“I know the feeling of waiting at the stop for the bus to come and it’s 30 minutes late or 40 minutes late,” Wilson said. “I know the feeling of sitting on the bus knowing that you could be walking up that hill faster than that bus is going.”