Podcast appearances and mentions of rich smith

Former Mayor and Democratic candidate in the upcoming Mayoral race, Rich Smith, stopped by the WICC Brown Roofing Melissa in the Morning Diner Tour to talk about Milford and things he'd like to change.  Image Credit: Logo by Meghan Boyd, Edit by Eric Urbanowicz 

We met Rich Smith, the Democratic candidate running for Mayor in Milford. Smith served seven months as mayor for the city, completing former Mayor Ben Blake's term in 2023. Find out why Smith now wants to run for office and his concerns with the current administration. IMAGE CREDIT: Eric Urbanowicz

Brain Drain Episode 50 with Toby Batchelor & Forde Brookfield

We are back behind the scenes of the Grand Reopening of the Raleigh Glenwood store! In the 3rd and final episode of this series, host Charlie Malouf speaks with Rich Smith, the General Manager of the Raleigh Glenwood store, following the grand reopening ceremony and ribbon cutting of their remodeled 7.0 Ashley Store on Glenwood Avenue. Rich, who began working with Broad River Retail in July 2022, shares his journey from joining as an Associate General Manager in Cary to being promoted as the General Manager of various locations, including leading the nearby Raleigh Outlet (a/k/a the Glenwood Gladiators) and the Cary Crushers to great success as GM of those two stores.  The focus of the conversation is on the challenges and triumphs of guiding a team through a store remodel, emphasizing the importance of maintaining energy and motivation among the Memory Makers throughout the process. Rich highlights the transformed showroom's clean and organized appeal, aligning with current market trends and elevating the shopping experience. The episode also delves into the importance of relationship building with guests, as Rich recounts a touching story of helping a guest unexpectedly furnish her home within her financial means. He stresses that providing an exceptional retail experience revolves around understanding and connecting with guests from diverse backgrounds. The conversation is peppered with a discussion on future goals, including achieving titanium status and the potential rebranding of the Raleigh Reign as the Rainmakers. Throughout the episode, Rich embodies enthusiasm and optimism, driven by a belief in his team's capacity to elevate the shopping experience and achieve new heights in sales and customer satisfaction in the competitive retail furniture landscape. This episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/e2ZyTLXWv1Y  Visit https://www.storiesfromtheriver.com for more episodes. Broad River Retail brought this show to you. Visit https://BroadRiverRetail.com                             Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/broad-river-retail 

We are back behind the scenes of the Grand Reopening of the Raleigh Glenwood store! In the 3rd and final episode of this series, host Charlie Malouf speaks with Rich Smith, the General Manager of the Raleigh Glenwood store, following the grand reopening ceremony and ribbon cutting of their remodeled 7.0 Ashley Store on Glenwood Avenue. Rich, who began working with Broad River Retail in July 2022, shares his journey from joining as an Associate General Manager in Cary to being promoted as the General Manager of various locations, including leading the nearby Raleigh Outlet (a/k/a the Glenwood Gladiators) and the Cary Crushers to great success as GM of those two stores.  The focus of the conversation is on the challenges and triumphs of guiding a team through a store remodel, emphasizing the importance of maintaining energy and motivation among the Memory Makers throughout the process. Rich highlights the transformed showroom's clean and organized appeal, aligning with current market trends and elevating the shopping experience. The episode also delves into the importance of relationship building with guests, as Rich recounts a touching story of helping a guest unexpectedly furnish her home within her financial means. He stresses that providing an exceptional retail experience revolves around understanding and connecting with guests from diverse backgrounds. The conversation is peppered with a discussion on future goals, including achieving titanium status and the potential rebranding of the Raleigh Reign as the Rainmakers. Throughout the episode, Rich embodies enthusiasm and optimism, driven by a belief in his team's capacity to elevate the shopping experience and achieve new heights in sales and customer satisfaction in the competitive retail furniture landscape. This episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/e2ZyTLXWv1Y  Visit https://www.storiesfromtheriver.com for more episodes. Broad River Retail brought this show to you. Visit https://BroadRiverRetail.com                             Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/broad-river-retail 

A march and rally in Madison protests the Trump and Musk takeover of the government, Trump goes after the National Labor Relations Board, federal workers discuss the fear and uncertainty as Trump and Musk swing their axes, the National Association of Letter Carriers has voted against its tentative agreement with the US Postal Service, as their strike approaches one month 5000 nurses of the Oregon Nurses Association at Providence Health facilities across Oregon vote on a tentative agreement, the Teamsters and Costco reach a deal, Labor Radio profiles Amazon warehouse worker and union organizer Chris Smalls, Rich Smith looks at a 1913 massacre in West Virginia, and early voting opens for a February 18 election in Wisconsin.

Bill Radke reflects on the year's news and events with longtime journalist Rich Smith, political consultant Sandeep Kaushik, and KUOW's Libby Denkmann. He is joined by special guests Governor Jay Inslee, Kerry Bergere, Auna Tietz, Annie Bilotta, and Tisch Schmidt-Williams. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week… The Seattle City Council tossed around its own baby capital gains tax, similar to the one at the state level. And we're coming up on a big anniversary for an important Seattle landmark - the big hole across the street from City Hall. Local journalist and author Rich Smith and KUOW Director of Community Engagement Zaki Hamid are here to break down the week. We can only make Seattle Now because listeners support us. Tap here to make a gift and keep Seattle Now in your feed. Got questions about local news or story ideas to share? We want to hear from you! Email us at seattlenow@kuow.org, leave us a voicemail at (206) 616-6746 or leave us feedback online.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week…  An old frenemy of Seattle politics popped up on the national scene… Hello, Kshama Sawant. It's endorsement season, and we have two experts from both sides of the process to talk about it. And if you thought YOU were seeing a lot of political ads, try asking your dog what they've seen lately. Stranger News Editor Rich Smith and political strategist Sandeep Kaushik are here to break down the week. We can only make Seattle Now because listeners support us. You have the power! Make the show happen by making a gift to KUOW: https://www.kuow.org/donate/seattlenow And we want to hear from you! Follow us on Instagram at SeattleNowPod, or leave us feedback online: https://www.kuow.org/feedback See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bill Radke discusses the week's news with freelance journalist Nathalie Graham, The Stranger editor Rich Smith, and Washington Policy Center Senior Researcher Paul Guppy. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week… Washington made its mark on the Democratic National Convention in more ways than one. The statewide primary for Public Lands Commissioner is coming down to a thousandth of a percentage point. And eat at your own risk… Local health officials dished about the food they avoid ordering at restaurants. Stranger Editor Rich Smith and South Seattle Emerald Founder Marcus Harrison Green are here to break down the week. We can only make Seattle Now because listeners support us. You have the power! Make the show happen by making a gift to KUOW: https://www.kuow.org/donate/seattlenow And we want to hear from you! Follow us on Instagram at SeattleNowPod, or leave us feedback online: https://www.kuow.org/feedback See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bill Radke discusses the week's news with Geek Wire's Mike Lewis. The Strangers' Rich Smith, and Seattle Nice podcast cohost Sandeep Kaushik. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Join Steve Curtin, CEO of TravCon, as he interviews Rich Smith, the Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Atlas MedStaff. In this insightful conversation, Rich shares the journey of building Atlas MedStaff, the challenges and triumphs of the healthcare staffing industry, and his vision for the future. Don't miss this engaging episode filled with valuable insights for healthcare professionals and industry enthusiasts alike.

Join me for this best-of edition of the show! I talk with Steve Eimers "The Guardrail Guy" about how guardrails are a hidden danger. I also have Custer County Sheriff Rich Smith on the show to talk about why Colorado is the number one state in the nation for auto theft.https://www.youtube.com/@TheGuardrailGuyListen on the Radio in Colorado!AM1460 & FM 101.1 The Answer - Saturdays at 9am, Sundays at 6pm100.7 The Word - Saturdays at 7pmAM 1400 KRLN - Saturdays at 9am91.7 KLZR - Saturdays at 10:30amNow On Video!Rumble.com/automotiveadhdhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUkSzh2ny2Idb4S3lC0qeYAhttps://www.tiktok.com/@automotiveadhdpodcastSupport the Show!thespeedcouncil.orgSend in Your Car Sounds!facebook.com/automotiveadhd --#steveeimers #guardrail #news #custercounty #lawenforcement #police #tesla #evs #electricvehicles #rivian #cybertruck #technology #trucks #trucknation #offroad #speedcamera #politics #v8 #listenable #podcast #radioshow #carenthusiast #carslover #turbo #supercharger #racing #drifting #boostedcars #cars #carswithoutlimits #automotive #racing #automotiveadhd #motorsports #jdm #americancars #musclecar #hotrod #radio #radioshow #podcasts #carculture #car

Renewable Energy Stock Picks podcast includes some great renewable energy stock analyses from Zacks, The Motley Fool, InvestorPlace, and others.   By Ron Robins, MBA Transcript & Links, Episode 130, May 17, 2024 Hello, Ron Robins here. So, welcome to this podcast episode 130 titled “Renewable Energy Stock Picks.” It's presented by Investing for the Soul. Investingforthesoul.com is your site for vital global ethical and sustainable investing mentoring, news, commentary, information, and resources. Now, remember that you can find a full transcript, and links to content – including stock symbols and bonus material – on this episode's podcast page located at investingforthesoul.com/podcasts. Also, a reminder. I do not evaluate any of the stocks or funds mentioned in these podcasts, nor do I receive any compensation from anyone covered in these podcasts. Furthermore, I will reveal to you any personal investments I have in the investments mentioned herein. Additionally, quotes about individual companies are brief. Please go to this podcast's webpage for links to the actual articles for more company and stock information. Also, some companies might be covered more than once and there are also 2 article links below that time didn't allow me to review them here. ------------------------------------------------------------- 1) Renewable Energy Stock Picks I'm beginning with this article which is from the famous Zacks research team. It's titled 4 Stocks to Watch in the Path to Decarbonize the Future and is by Rimmi Singhi and found at sg.news.yahoo.com. Here are brief quotes by the author on each stock. “1. Clearway (CWEN) along with its subsidiaries owns and operates a diverse portfolio of contracted renewable and conventional generation, along with thermal infrastructure assets in the United States. Furthermore, Clearway's asset portfolio includes more than 9,000 megawatts (MW) of wind, solar, thermal, and natural-gas-fired power generation facilities as well as distract energy systems… The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Clearway's 2023 sales and earnings implies year-over-year growth of 15% and 149%, respectively… It boasts a long-term earnings growth rate of 10%. Clearway currently sports a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). 2. NextEra (NEE) is a leading provider of wind and solar energy in the United States. The company also operates in Canada and has a growing presence in Latin America. NextEra has many renewable projects in its backlog and their completion will ensure reduced emissions. The company expects to be able to add 33-42 gigawatts (GW) of new renewables in the 2023-2026 time frame to the generation portfolio via clean energy investments… The Zacks Consensus Estimate for NextEra's 2023 and 2024 earnings implies year-over-year growth of 8% and 8.2%, respectively. The same for 2023 and 2024 revenues indicates a year-over-year uptick of 27% and 9%, respectively. The company surpassed earnings estimates in the last four quarters, the average surprise being 6.2%. It boasts a long-term earnings growth rate of 9%. NextEra currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). 3. Brookfield (BEP) is a renewable energy firm that operates hydro, wind, solar, and storage assets in North America, South America, Europe and Asia. Hydroelectric power comprised 50% of its portfolio in 2022. The firm remains focused on the expansion of its expertise in wind, solar, and energy storage capabilities through acquisitions and development projects. Over the past decade, Brookfield's earnings have witnessed a CAGR of around 10%. Brookfield is committed to maintaining a strong balance sheet to support further expansion. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Brookfield's 2023 and 2024 earnings implies year-over-year growth of 120% and 275%, respectively… The firm boasts a dividend yield of more than 4% and has increased its payout five times in the last five years. Brookfield currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). 4. Vestas (VWS.CO) is a global leader in the wind energy sector. It has a wide range of expertise, including the design, manufacture, installation, development, and servicing of wind energy and hybrid projects worldwide. With over 157 GW of wind turbines installed in 88 countries, Vestas is a major player in the industry… The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Vestas' 2023 and 2024 earnings implies year-over-year growth of 126% and 189%, respectively. The same for 2023 and 2024 revenues indicates a year-over-year uptick of 7% and 25%, respectively. Vestas currently carries a Zacks Rank #3.” End quotes. ------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Renewable Energy Stock Picks This second article is again by the prodigious research output group, InvestorPlace. It's titled 3 Renewable Energy Stocks to Capitalize on the Sustainability Surge. It's by Rick Orford and found on investorplace.com. Now some of what Mr. Orford says about his stock picks. “1. First Solar (NASDAQ:FSLR) The continued growth in solar power as an alternative energy source has made companies like First Solar an important part of the government's plan to transition to a green economy.  The company is one of the top producers of photovoltaic cells (PV) used in building CdTe solar modules that transform sunlight into electricity, making it an invaluable component of the solar power production chain. The growing demand for solar energy has led to First Solar's acquisition of an Ohio facility that serves as its distribution center, enabling it to scale manufacturing… Looking forward, First Solar expects net income per diluted share to end between $13.00 and $14.00 — almost doubling 2023 results — and net sales to be around $4.4 billion and $4.6 billion for 2024. With the government's strong push to go green, First Solar has tremendous potential, making it one of the best choices for renewable energy stocks to buy. 2. Broadwind (NASDAQ:BWEN) specializes in wind energy equipment, clean energy structures and clean technology used by different sectors. The company agreed with MarketAxess Holdings (NASDAQ:MKTX) to ‘sell earned Advanced Manufacturing Production Credits' which will help significantly improve its liquidity profile. Broadwind's latest results showcased impressive growth in FY'23. Revenue reached $203.5 million, 15% higher than the previous year's reported revenue of $176.7 million… Despite a slight decrease in orders and backlog from last year, Broadwind is still optimistic about future prospects, especially with expectations of accelerating wind development in the latter half of 2024.  3. Beam Global (NASDAQ:BEEM) is a clean technology innovator that designs advanced solutions for energy storage, electric vehicle (EV) charging and energy infrastructures.  Its patented infrastructure product EV ARC (Electric Vehicle Autonomous Renewable Charger) uses integrated battery storage and solar power that provides a power source for electric vehicle charging stations. The company also offers street furniture and street lighting products globally… The company finished FY'23 with a record revenue of $67.4 million, a 206% growth compared to last year's $23 million. Earnings for the year improved to a net loss of $1.30, an increase of 34.6% compared to the previous year's loss of $1.99. In addition, the company reported positive full-year gross profit and remained debt-free with an unused $100 million line of credit. Its significant backlog and contracts mean the company should have ample cash flow to fund its future operations.” End quotes. ------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Renewable Energy Stock Picks This third article is titled SunPower Stock Has 87% Upside, According to 1 Wall Street Analyst. It's by Rich Smith and found on fool.com. Here are some of his comments. “Is SunPower (SPWR) stock a buy in 2024? Quoted on The Fly Monday, Richardson explained he cut SunPower's price target because green energy stocks have been underperforming this year and inventories are still bloated. But the analyst remains optimistic that ‘inventory channel clearings are nearly complete' and so the bottom is not far off. Combined with rising electricity rates, that's going to create more demand for cheap solar power, and create the potential for SunPower's sales to turn around. Is he right? As the saying goes, it's hard to make predictions -- especially about the future. Still, if the ‘bottom' has truly already arrived for solar power stocks, then it's arrived remarkably quickly. In related cyclical industries such as semiconductors for example, oversupply cycles ordinarily take six to 18 months to reverse. But SunPower's sales have only been falling for a couple of quarters. According to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence, sales were still on an upswing as recently as the second quarter of 2023! While it's possible SunPower's going to get away with just a six-month downturn, therefore, I wouldn't bet on it. And I wouldn't bet on a company valued at $380 million, and burning more than half that amount ($201 million) in cash every year, doubling over the next 12 months either. More than likely, SunPower stock still has at least a few more rough quarters ahead of it.” End quotes. ------------------------------------------------------------- 4) Renewable Energy Stock Picks The last article is titled 3 Renewable Energy Stocks That Will Make Other Investors Green With Envy. It's by Rick Orford, and found on investorplace.com. Here are some comments by Mr. Orford. “For this analysis, I've started with a screen of the top 30 Renewable Energy Companies based on the Market Cap. Then, I filtered the list for the following criteria: Year-on-year quarterly net income growth of over 30%, Analyst rating of 4 and above (moderate to strong buy) and An upside potential of over 50% based on high target prices. This list of renewable energy stocks to buy is sorted in descending order based on upside potential. 1. First Solar (NASDAQ:FSLR) drives the global transition to renewable energy by harnessing the sun's power. The company manufactures thin-film PV solar modules, which offer a lower-carbon alternative to conventional crystalline silicon PV modules.  First Solar's business operations include manufacturing cadmium telluride solar modules, project development activities, operations and maintenance services. The company has a presence in France, Japan, Chile and, of course, the United States…  First Solar's Q4FY'23 financial report is a relief for many investors. Its revenue Increased to $1.16 billion from $1 billion YOY. EPS also recovered considerably from a 7-cent loss to a $3.27 profit per share.  Its metrics, including its YOY net income growth of 84.65%, make it easy to understand why analysts rate the stock a strong buy, with a high target of $269 — over 52.6% upside potential from its current levels.  2. Fluence Energy (NASDAQ:FLNC) is a driving force in integrating renewable energy into power grids. It delivers highly modernized energy storage solutions worldwide. The company offers various energy storage products like Gridstack Pro, Gridstack, Sunstack, Edgestack and Ultrastack. It caters to applications such as large-scale front-of-the-meter, DC-coupled solar + storage, commercial and industrial use cases, and more… Fluence Energy's Q1'24 financials are pretty decent despite minor setbacks in metrics. Its revenues increased from $363.95 million to $310.46 million YOY. Its gross profit increased from $12 million to $36.39 million. However, Fluence Energy's net quarterly income loss was $25.55 million, an improvement from $37.19 million last year.  Analysts rate FLNC stock a strong buy, targeting a high price of $37, which translates to 107% upside potential from its current levels.  3. Brookfield Renewable Partners (NYSE:BEP) is a prominent player in the renewable energy sector and owns various assets worldwide. The company's portfolio includes hydroelectric, wind, solar and energy storage facilities, with an operating capacity of approximately 33,000 megawatts.  Moreover, Brookfield Renewable Partners has a significant development pipeline and invests in sustainable solutions such as renewable natural gas, carbon capture and storage, recycling and nuclear services… Brookfield Renewable Partners reported pretty decent Q4'23 financial results with its all-positive YOY performance. Its revenue slightly increased to $1.32 billion from $1.20 billion. On top of that, the company's net income significantly increased to $264 million from $60 million, placing its EPS in a recovering trajectory of $0.01 from the -$0.16 loss reported in FY'22. Analysts rate Brookfield Renewable Partners stock a strong buy with a high target of $52, reflecting over 152% upside potential.” End quotes. ------------------------------------------------------------- One Honorable Mention Title: 3 Renewable Energy Stocks to Sell in May Before They Crash & Burn on investorplace.com. By Achintya Pasricha. One article from Australia Title: Does Australian Ethical Investment (ASX:AEF) Deserve A Spot On Your Watchlist? On yahoo.com. By Simply Wall St. ------------------------------------------------------------- Ending Comment Well, these are my top news stories with their stock and fund tips -- for this podcast titled: “Renewable Energy Stock Picks.” Now, please be sure to click the like and subscribe buttons on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever you download or listen to this podcast. That helps bring these podcasts to others like you. And please click the share buttons to share this podcast with your friends and family. Let's promote ethical and sustainable investing as a force for hope and prosperity in these deeply troubled times! Contact me if you have any questions. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next on May 31st. Bye for now.   © 2024 Ron Robins, Investing for the Soul

Bill Radke discusses the week's news with former state Representative and Senator Bill Finkbeiner, Seattle Channel host and producer Brian Callanan, and The Stranger editor Rich Smith.

On this week-in-review, Crystal is joined by staff writer at The Stranger covering policing, incarceration and courts, Ashley Nerbovig! They discuss: GOP Candidate Dave Reichert's Anti-LGBTQ Views Boeing Faces Scrutiny Over Safety Issues and Alleged Cover-Up Tacoma to Implement ShotSpotter Despite Concerns Local Guaranteed Basic Income Pilots Show Promising Results Seattle Police Officer's Troubling Past Revealed As always, a full text transcript of the show is available at officialhacksandwonks.com. Follow us on Twitter at @HacksWonks. Find the host, Crystal Fincher, on Twitter at @finchfrii and find today's co-host, Ashley Nerbovig, at @AshleyNerbovig.   Resources Denver's STAR Program Offers Promising Alternative Response to Mental Health and Substance Use Crises from Hacks & Wonks   “Dave Reichert to Pierce County Republicans: "Marriage Is Between a Man and a Woman"” by Rich Smith from The Stranger   “Boeing whistleblowers describe ‘criminal cover-up,' safety risks to Senate” by Dominic Gates from The Seattle Times   “Tacoma police to test gunshot-detection system. Shotspotter has faced criticism elsewhere” by Puneet Bsanti from The News Tribune   “ShotSpotter is a Failure. What's Next?” by Hannah Cheves of the MacArthur Justice Center   “IMPD will not go ahead with gunshot detection system” by Sarah Nelson from The Indianapolis Star   Seattle Considers Controversial Surveillance Technologies with Flawed Approval Process from Hacks & Wonks   “ShotSpotter: Why waste money we don't have on technology that doesn't work?” by Marcus Harrison Green from The Seattle Times   “How King County's $500-a-month guaranteed income program fared” by Alexandra Yoon-Hendricks from The Seattle Times   Guaranteed Basic Income Final Evaluation | Workforce Development Council of Seattle-King County   “Guaranteed income returned to Pierce County this week. Why free money deserves a shot” by The News Tribune Editorial Board   “Seattle Police Knew Officer Who Struck and Killed Pedestrian Had “Checkered History,” But Hired Him Anyway” by Andrew Engelson from PubliCola   Find stories that Crystal is reading here   Listen on your favorite podcast app to all our episodes here

Bill Radke discusses the week's news with The Stranger's Rich Smith, Seattle Channel's Brian Callanan, and political analyst and contributing columnist Joni Balter

On this week-in-review, Crystal is joined by Editor of The Stranger and noted poet, Rich Smith! Crystal and Rich discuss the significance of the Stranger endorsing “Uncommitted Delegates” in the March 12th Presidential Primary. They then celebrate the legislature's passage of the Strippers' Bill of Rights and mourn the deaths of rent stabilization and even-year elections at the hands of the Senate Ways & Means Committee. Finally, they cover Seattle City Council's inexcusable silencing of protesters with arrest. As always, a full text transcript of the show is available below and at officialhacksandwonks.com. Find the host, Crystal Fincher, on Twitter at @finchfrii and find today's co-host, Rich Smith at @richsssmith.   Resources Check out our audiograms about proposed Seattle surveillance technologies and get your public comments in by the NEW deadline, March 22nd!   Vote Uncommitted WA   “The Stranger Endorses Uncommitted Delegates for the March 12, 2024 Presidential Primary Election” from The Stranger Election Control Board   “Donald Trump has a massive lead over Nikki Haley in Washington's 2024 Republican presidential primary, NPI poll finds” by Andrew Villeneuve from The Cascadia Advocate   “Washington Passes Strippers' Bill of Rights” by Rich Smith from The Stranger   “Senate Democrats Stiff Renters for the Third or Fourth Time, It's Honestly Difficult to Keep Track” by Rich Smith from The Stranger   “Conservative Senate Democrats Stiff Renters Yet Again” by Rich Smith from The Stranger   “Ways & Means declines to take up NPI's even year elections bill, ending its 2024 run” by Andrew Villeneuve from The Cascadia Advocate   “Police Arrest Six of Sara Nelson's Political Enemies After She Refuses to Hear Concerns of Asylum-Seekers” by Hannah Krieg from The Stranger   “6 protesters arrested during council meeting at Seattle City Hall” by David Kroman from The Seattle Times   “King County, Tukwila announce new investments to help asylum-seekers” by Anna Patrick from The Seattle Times   Find stories that Crystal is reading here   Listen on your favorite podcast app to all our episodes here   Transcript [00:00:00] Crystal Fincher: Welcome to Hacks & Wonks. I'm Crystal Fincher, and I'm a political consultant and your host. On this show, we talk with policy wonks and political hacks to gather insight into local politics and policy in Washington state through the lens of those doing the work with behind-the-scenes perspectives on what's happening, why it's happening, and what you can do about it. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get the full versions of our Tuesday topical show and Friday week-in-review delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, the most helpful thing you can do is leave a review wherever you listen to Hacks & Wonks. Full transcripts and resources referenced in the show are always available at officialhacksandwonks.com and in our episode notes. An update from last week's Tuesday topical show - public comment on bringing three surveillance technologies to Seattle has been extended from the original February 29th deadline to March 22nd. Check out our audiograms from this week and get your comment in now. Today we are continuing our Friday week-in-review shows, where we review the news of the week with a co-host. Welcome back to the program, friend of the show and today's co-host: Editor of The Stranger and noted poet, Rich Smith. [00:01:20] Rich Smith: Hey, Crystal - how you doing? [00:01:22] Crystal Fincher: Doing? I mean - I'm doing. All things considered, I'm all right. All things considered is doing heavy lifting in that statement, but here we are. But hey, we have a presidential primary going on. We have ballots now, and there is a movement that The Stranger has endorsed for Uncommitted Delegates - for those who identify as Democrats - in the March 12th presidential primary. What is that? And why has The Stranger decided to endorse that? [00:01:55] Rich Smith: Great questions. Yeah - well, you've got your primary ballot. You've got some options there. They include Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., Dean Phillips, Marianne Williamson - who dropped out, and Uncommitted Delegates. Uncommitted Delegates is just a delegate that will, if that bubble gets more than 15% of the vote share after the primary, go to the national convention - which is scheduled for August of this year in Chicago. And in the first round of balloting, when voting on the nominee, they just aren't pledged to vote for any particular candidate unlike the pledge delegates, which Joe Biden will almost certainly win the vast majority of at the conclusion of the primary. So functionally, that's what it means - uncommitted delegate is someone who can decide who they want to vote for at the convention rather than just doing it ahead of time. And The Stranger endorsed it for a number of reasons. Chiefly, we do not like Joe Biden's response to the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. We do not like his hard right turn to the right. We do not like a number of other things that he did or did not do during the course of his four years in office. And this is the only time - the Democratic primary - where we get to raise an objection, make our voices heard in a language that he can hear, which is the language of delegates at the convention. The thinking is - if we send some uncommitted delegates, if the movement gets big enough, then during that first round of voting, the delegates can make a little noise if the war crimes are still going on. [00:03:39] Crystal Fincher: Now, one important note in this effort, because a lot of people were saying - We're going to write-in "Ceasefire," we're going to write-in a different candidate. That is, in Washington state - because of state law - a suboptimal option because officials only tally write-in votes from candidates who file "timely declarations" of a write-in candidacy and who also exceed the number of votes earned by the second place candidate. So that "Ceasefire" vote, that write-in is not going to be tallied or reported. It'll get lumped in with people who write-in some random name of a friend or someone who they wish would be president there. So the actual most organized and impactful way to register that vote is Uncommitted Delegates. There also have - heard some people who typically vote for Democrats say - Well, I want to cross over and vote for Nikki Haley instead of Donald Trump because I find Donald Trump offensive and don't want that. I don't know how much of an impact that is going to have here in Washington state. One, ultimately, most of the votes will wind up going to a Democrat - we're a blue state, that's not controversial. But two, even on the Republican side, NPI just came out with a poll this week showing Donald Trump holds a commanding lead in the Republican primary among Republicans - about 75% of Republicans saying that they planned to vote for Donald Trump in that poll. So what's the hope - to get Nikki Haley from 20% to 25%, 25% to 30%? I don't know how much of an impact that is. Obviously, people are free to choose however they do want to vote, but very important that you do make your voice heard, that you are aware of what the options are, what the ballot looks like. And again, for the Uncommitted Delegates option, that's actually a bubble that you can fill in - you don't have to write-in anything, and that's how that would be registered. Also, a reminder that the presidential election ballots are due by March 12th, 2024. Don't forget to sign the outside of your ballot. In presidential primaries, we have to declare the party on the outside of the ballot - without those things happening, your ballot can't be counted. So make sure that you - one, participate and vote your conscience. There is a very effective way to do that right now. [00:06:10] Rich Smith: Yeah, we need as many people to do it as possible so we can send as many delegates as possible and show Biden that his behavior on foreign policy matters and on immigration - two domains over which the executive branch has almost exclusive control. I know that Congress has the purse or whatever, but as we've seen with the sending of weapons to Israel in December - Joe Biden, if there is an emergency, the executive branch can skirt Congress and send the money anyway. And the way that the national security apparatus is set up, especially with the continued authorization of use of military force, Biden can bomb the Houthis without talking to Congress much. He's got a lot of power and it's just so rare to get the opportunity to speak directly to a president about foreign policy. We don't have a draft, people aren't really talking about foreign policy when they vote - foreign policy isn't at the top of their list of things that they vote on. And so, presidents don't feel like they have to respond to Democratic pressure because there's not a lot of Democratic pulleys that give us power over him, basically, on those policies - on immigration and on foreign policy. So we rarely, rarely get this opportunity - it's certainly worth doing for that reason. [00:07:28] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, absolutely. And I've talked about this a lot of times before, but primaries are your opportunity to truly vote your conscience. There's a lot of pressure in a lot of different directions in general elections. And it's not just a referendum on one person - sometimes we are in the position of picking the lesser of the two evils. But when that is ultimately the choice, it is on us to do all we can - in the meantime and around that - to lessen the evil overall. And so it is the time to be able to vote your conscience. There are lots of people who are having lots of discussions about voting in November, about Biden versus Trump. But this isn't that time. This is a Democratic primary where you can vote your conscience and you can send a message in a way that is stronger than just about anything we can do, especially as Washington state residents. So I certainly will be taking advantage of this option and want to make sure that lots of other people know that this is an option for them too. [00:08:35] Rich Smith: Hear, hear. [00:08:37] Crystal Fincher: Also want to talk about the legislature this week. There was a positive thing - a positive, I mean, maybe there are more positive things - but there was a positive thing that happened that's worth talking about. A Strippers' Bill of Rights passed. What did this bill do and why is it important? [00:08:55] Rich Smith: The bill did a lot. The bill established and added a bunch of labor protections for strippers in Washington state who have been needing them for far too long. It repealed the lewd conduct codes - the WAC, as they call them, Washington Administrative Codes - which were used and cited to raid gay bars in Seattle in January. And in doing so, it creates a pathway for strip clubs to apply for liquor licenses, so they can help offset the cost of some of the labor protections the state will now force them to implement - having panic buttons in certain areas, more safety training, lowering the house fees or the rental fees that strippers have to pay to clubs before they go on stage for the night so that they start the night indebted. And if the fees are too high - sometimes they're as high as $150, $200 a night - they will work a whole shift and just give all that money to the club owner and go home empty-handed. So this bill capped those fees to help strippers make money and express themselves sexually without the burdensome fees. What does it do? It frees the nipple and the jockstrap in queer bars so that the police don't have a reason to barge in as they did in January with their flashlights and their photographs - taking pictures of people in jockstrap in the clubs. It will more or less revolutionize the strip club industry in Seattle and give the workers the protections that they've long needed. I don't know if you've been to a strip club recently in Seattle, but it's kind of sad in there. It's not really a social atmosphere. People are there to sort of drink Dr. Pepper, and watch people dance, and then go get loaded in the parking lot, and then come back in. And that creates a kind of menacing atmosphere. And so the hope is - and that's supported by a state report released in 2020 - that having a more social atmosphere, having stuff to do there that's not just watch dancers and mull a lap dance will create a safer and funner environment for everybody and liberate sexual expression. But before this, with the lewd conduct laws - everything that a stripper did on stage was criminalized. They technically couldn't walk off stage with too sheer a bra or they would be having a threat of arrest. They couldn't take tips while they were dancing on stage without actual threat of arrest. There was a bunch of proximity rules in the codes that would have made lap dances illegal, basically. And so it decriminalizes stripping, essentially, in Washington and makes us the last state in the union to allow alcohol sales - in a kind of roundabout way. Basically, the repeal of the code means there's no enforcement of alcohol sales in clubs and it allows them to apply for the state's other liquor licenses - so that's the kind of roundabout way they're doing it. But it's incredible. It takes the boot of the state off the neck of marginalized communities and is a real win. [00:11:58] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, this is a marginalized community of workers. Workers that have been denied rights, been at risk of criminalization and penalties and everything that comes with that. Workers deserve protection - starts just as fundamentally and as simply as that. And every employer owes safety and fair compensation to their employees or to contractors working on their behalf. And so, this certainly brings us in-line with the modern world in many ways. And so just pleased to see that the legislature took action to protect workers in this way. Now, the legislature failed to take action, unfortunately, in some other very key areas - in areas that Democrats, certainly the House of Representatives, defined as priorities, defined as very important. Starting with the failure to pass rent stabilization, which would have, among other things, capped rent increases at 7% annually - which is still a healthy increase. But right now there is still continuing virtually unlimited rent increases across the state. I have talked about before - my neighbors received a 45% rent increase annually - in one year - from previous year. And this is contributing to housing insecurity. This is contributing to our homelessness problem. This is contributing to income inequality. And it's contributing to rising house prices across the state overall. This, in particular, really does fail to help our problem of displacement here in our communities - was just so disappointed to see this. Why did this happen? [00:13:48] Rich Smith: Yeah, it was a little bit - the short answer is that two men with somewhat adorable electoral ambition decided to quietly strangle the bill in the Senate's Ways and Means Committee, after a State senator representing Southwest Washington - Annette Cleveland - strangled the bill in a kind of clumsy and public way in the Senate's Housing Committee. And they don't offer many reasons for doing so, and the reasons they do offer are not good and unsupported by evidence. So in the Ways and Means Committee, you could only lose two Democratic votes, basically, to get anything through. The Ways and Means Committee is stacked with conservative Democrats, certainly fiscally conservative Democrats. And so Mark Mullet is on the Ways and Means Committee - he represents Issaquah, and he's just a true believer. He thinks that a rent stabilization package at 7% will decrease construction of new housing in the medium to long-term. And so it is not worth protecting the 40% of households in Washington who rent now from astronomically high rent increases that push them out of their communities - that's too great a risk - a potential medium to long-term decrease of indeterminate size in the number of housing units constructed in Washington. This is the kind of information that they're providing. Van De Wege did not give a reason. Rep Strom Petersen, who had talked to Van De Wege, asked him if he needed any amendments on the bill - they were willing to negotiate cap size, they were willing to negotiate all manner of exceptions. And Van De Wege shrugged and said, No. So not even giving a full-throated principled reason for quietly doing this to millions of Washington renters. And Annette Cleveland beforehand strangled the bill in her committee, saying that - it was spreading, basically, misinformation as far as I'm concerned. She said that the rent cap of 15%, which was the one that she was considering at the time - extremely high, almost comically high rent cap - would only catch the most egregious abusers because landlords would, as a matter of course, raise rates 15% every year. Because if they can't raise it however much they want, then they'll raise it to the cap every single time. This is silly. Everyone will tell you, even the f**ing landlords will tell you that a 3% to 5% rent increase on an annual basis is the kind of norm. That's what the developers and lenders are both agreeing on when they sign their contracts. That's the stuff that they're counting on when they're figuring out their returns on investment. So a 7% rent cap is more than genuous, especially with the exceptions in the bill. In any event, aside from that, she also cited a bunch of old papers talking about first-generation rent control, which is much more strict than the rent stabilization measures that the legislature was discussing. Those arguments are also - in recent review from academics - a little bit suspect, a little bit rosier, actually, for rent stabilization, and we could have a whole show on that. But anyway, she cited those disingenuous anti-rent control arguments to justify her support of killing rent stabilization measure, which is a completely different policy. And she insulted her colleagues while she was at it by citing the Urban Institute report that was actually less critical of rent stabilization than she made it out to be. But showing that she was concerned with the bill's impact on Black and brown people - doesn't want to raise the rents on those communities - and so decided to kill a bill that would make sure that they wouldn't face high rent gouging prices that have been pushing them out of their communities for the last two decades. I know I'm ranting here, but I can't underline this enough. This bill is too late, but must pass. We really could have used rent stabilization at the beginning of 2010 when rents started shooting up, and would shoot up over 92% over that decade. Rents have been sort of flat in aggregate for the last couple of years, but that doesn't mean, as you say, that landlords aren't jacking up rents on people to economically evict them because they can. That sort of stuff needs to stop - that bill would have prevented it - the Senate Democrats didn't let it happen this year. [00:18:08] Crystal Fincher: Didn't let it happen. And it should be noted that two people who were critical to killing this bill - Mark Mullet and Senator Van De Wege - are also running for statewide office. Mark Mullet is running for governor as a Democrat. Kevin Van De Wege is running for lands commissioner. Really interesting choices to refuse to help 40% of the state's population. [00:18:35] Rich Smith: Just a number of coalition partners - the Members of Color Caucus in both chambers prioritized this bill. The LGBT community came out, especially in Seattle, to do a big rally in support of this bill. Hundreds of people descended on the Capitol steps in Olympia during this session to support a bill from every part of the state - east, west, north, south. Every renter has been feeling this pressure, and the state legislature on some bulls**t about potential long-term costs to the housing supply - which they cannot quantify or have not quantified, I haven't seen the number. If so, please send it over to me - I can't wait to have that discussion. And the only salvo that they're giving us - and I'll stop talking after this - is, Well, next year, Mullet won't be there because he's giving up his seat to run for governor. Van De Wege won't be there because he's giving up his seat to run for land commissioner. A couple of other senators are going to announce their retirement - Sam Hunt has announced his retirement, we've got maybe a couple more. So those places on Ways and Means will be replaced by politicians who don't have the same politics as these conservatives. So next year, it'll be a whole new legislature. The complexion will change and yada, yada, yada. And in the meantime, renters are going to face massive rent increases. So that's the consolation. [00:19:58] Crystal Fincher: Yeah. And we really don't know if the next legislature - if the Senate is going to be constructed differently. We don't know who's going to be elected to those open seats. And so what I will say is moving forward this year, it's important to get people who are running on the record, to talk about how important this is. As local party organizations are going through their endorsement processes, this be a question that's going to impact whether you decide to endorse or not. Those are the types of decisions that should be being talked about now and decided now, so as we move forward we have a better idea of who stands where and what we can expect from this legislature. The last thing I would say is - as people are running, it's so clear how much more power chairs of committees and leadership have. So it's great to be elected as a senator, as a representative. But as we've seen, chairs of committees can just flat out refuse to hear a bill that has wide popular support, that would pass on the floor if it got there. They can prevent it from getting to the floor. So who do these senators expect to support, or will they rule out supporting people for chair and leadership positions? This matters and this is very impactful for the type of policy that we're able to pass here in Washington state. Those are very important things that usually get less attention that need to be getting a whole lot more. [00:21:32] Rich Smith: That's right. [00:21:32] Crystal Fincher: I also want to talk about another bill that died. Even-year elections, which we have talked about, certainly in our conversation with Andrew Villeneuve from the Northwest Progressive Institute. They were instrumental in helping to write and shape that. Representative Mia Gregerson from the 33rd LD sponsored that in the House. It passed the House, got to the Senate. And what unfortunately happens to so many bills in the Senate, it died. What happened here? [00:22:03] Rich Smith: Well, based on the reporting from NPI, the bill was sent not to the Senate Governance Committee, but to the Ways and Means Committee where it quietly died. So another way that a bill can quietly die - because people can take executive action on it and vote on it, and it can die that way, certainly. But they can also just decide not to take it up in the committee and then die that way - then no one has to go on the record with who doesn't want more democracy, who doesn't want to give cities the opportunity to have more democratic elections in Washington. So yeah, that's my understanding - the Ways and Means Committee strikes again. They killed the bill by not taking it up in time. And now cities don't have the option to move their local elections to even years, which studies show and King County proves increases turnout. It's a loss for democracy. It's inexcusable. And Secretary of State Steve Hobbs and a number of power players came out against it - saying that it was going to be costly and there's other complications that election officials were going to encounter. But the state's Office of Financial Management - when sending it to the Ways and Means Committee - said that the bill had an indeterminate fiscal impact. In short, the state doesn't know what the fiscal impact would be. And I struggle to understand how holding fewer elections costs more money than holding an election every year does. But maybe initially with changing stuff around, maybe you have to buy more software or whatever. But yeah, I don't understand that math - haven't seen that math. But that was the political dynamic that killed the bill. [00:23:39] Crystal Fincher: An opportunity to improve our small-D democracy. Has failed to take advantage of the opportunity and basically assurance - we see what even-year elections versus odd-year election turnout is. Even-year elections routinely have turnout 20-plus percentage points higher than odd-year elections. It's always better to have more people weighing in on who represents them and how their community should be shaped. So again, disappointed to see this. And hopefully we can take this time, as we have elections throughout the state at the legislative level, that we press candidates on this, and see where they stand, and try and set this up for success next session. [00:24:26] Rich Smith: Yeah, it was interesting that they decided to send it to the Ways and Means Committee. So Jamie Pedersen - Seattle senator - is the Floor Leader. He decides which committees bills go to. So one question would be - why didn't this bill go to the Governance Committee, which is chaired by Sam Hunt, who's retiring this year? And then another question would be - what was the conversation in Ways about why they wouldn't pass the bill? And those would be two people to ask, in case you're interested in contacting your representative about why the bill died or you want to add your support. [00:24:55] Crystal Fincher: Yep, absolutely. Now we will turn to local politics and policy in the City of Seattle. This week, we saw a different approach from the Seattle City Council in dealing with protests. And coverage, even in The Seattle Times, noted that protest has been a normal, consistent part of public meetings in Seattle for most of the last decade, for decades before that, and beyond. Seattle, as a city, has such a long and storied history of protests in favor of change - and successfully creating change also, by the way. And this is happening while other councils across the state, from Spokane to Tacoma, are dealing with largely the same things - have managed to de-escalate these situations, have managed to listen to people in their community who are passionately advocating for issues - many of which are crisis levels within communities. But in the city of Seattle, we saw insults from the Council perspective and calls for arrest, which did result in several people getting arrested for protesting. What happened? [00:26:18] Rich Smith: Yeah, so the council met to pass a resolution to rename a street after George Fleming, who was a Black state senator. Sidebar, nerd thing - not a big deal, but worth noting. The resolution called George Fleming the first Black person elected to the State Senate, but he was actually the second or third, kind of depending on how you want to slice it. The first Black person was bi-racial - William Owen Bush was elected to the House of Representatives in 1889. He wasn't a senator - okay, fine. But the first Black senator was elected in 1921 - that's John H. Ryan, out of Tacoma. And so George Fleming would be the second Black senator. Minor note. But they basically framed the protesters as interrupting this resolution that was supposed to honor a Black pioneer in Washington politics, but not getting his achievement correct is not particularly honoring him either. So I see it as a little bit disingenuous. But in terms of the facts of what happened, they were going to do this resolution. 20 people showed up during public comment to advocate for the refugees who are in crisis now in Tukwila - in a church parking lot, basically - they don't have anywhere to sleep. The shelter is unstable. And they wanted to say that maybe spending a little bit less money on police would give us more money to help these disadvantaged communities. That was the people's agenda that day, even if it was slightly different than the City Council's agenda. So knowing that, Sara Nelson, Council President, decided to comment by 20 minutes rather than giving them an hour to say their piece. And the people continued to want to talk after 20 minutes and so decided that they were going to stay right there and protest until she made public comment longer. She did not. They called for security. They told people to leave. Some people left. Six people did not leave. The six people who stayed were arrested for trespass and sent to jail. And the people who left were banging on the window outside of the chambers and chanting - Shame, shame, shame. At which point, Seattle City Councilmember Cathy Moore, who's a former judge, said that she felt as if her life was threatened and demanded the police to arrest those people outside of the chamber who were banging on windows. Everybody made a big stink. And I think another councilmember - I can't remember which one - also said that she felt threatened by the mob out there who was interrupting this moment of democracy. As you said, protests in City Hall - that's the job. We tried to tell people that this slate of City councilmembers did not know what they were talking about, had very little understanding of the normal workings of City politics, and of the City in general. And this is just another way to show that they didn't read the job description. You gotta listen to the people when they talk. First of all, because they will stop talking and chanting when they feel like they've said their piece. And so it's just better for democracy to hear their voice. You all ran on listening to community. And one of your first major operations as a council is to sic the police on the community who is voicing their dissent in Council chambers where we have voiced our dissent forever? That's not listening to community. That's saying you listen to some community and you'll use state violence to shut down other members of the community. So that's what happened. And it was inexcusable and dumb - at the same time. [00:30:05] Crystal Fincher: Strategically, it does not seem like that was a wise decision. This isn't even a progressive versus conservative issue on why this was just really poor decision making. That's why you see councils across the state - and country, really, but certainly across the state - not resorting to arresting people for protesting. All that does is escalate issues and create more passion around issues that is going to manifest itself during your meetings. I will say a lot of councils have been struggling with how to better deal with and manage dissent. The reason why I am more familiar with what councils are doing across the state is because of that reason - it's something that a number of people are looking to figure out and respond to, particularly because there have been actual threats of violence - actual threats made during meetings, people carrying guns into meetings - that is happening as well as not even commenting on stuff. Insults, threats coming to people in meetings. Racist, sexist attacks we've seen across the state. So there have been efforts from a variety of councils to implement rules to be able to get through their agendas while enabling people to express their First Amendment rights and make their voices heard to their public representatives. That has not included calling for arrest. That has not included saying that people chanting - maybe in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable or that you disagree with - is threatening to your safety. And that particular thing sounds real familiar to a lot of people in my position and a lot of different positions - and if you know, you know - that conflation of, I am uncomfortable, I don't agree with this, to - I am being physically threatened, my safety is in danger. Those are two very different things, and the conflation of them is something that is a very cynical and harmful thing to resort to that I hope we don't see much more of. I hope they take this opportunity to really explore what it does mean to hear from people who do and don't disagree with you. And I hope they do that quickly because they are going to put the City in a position where they're going to face legal scrutiny, where there are going to be lawsuits that are going to cost the City a lot of money if they continue down this path. So we'll see how this materializes, but certainly this is not the best start to this council that they could have. [00:32:43] Rich Smith: Hear, Hear. There was a moment when Abolish ICE protests were particularly salient and the Council was having a meeting. Abolish ICE protests came in - disrupted the meeting. Immediately, Kshama Sawant stands up with her fist in the air. Teresa Mosqueda starts clapping from her seat. Other progressive members of the council are nodding and listening. Bruce Harrell was the Council President at that time - immediately calls for security to get people out of there. And eventually - they chanted, they stayed a little bit, and eventually they left, and the meeting got brought to order. This is a normal course of events in City Council chambers. And them making a big stink of this is them being politically opportunistic - trying to gain civility politics points with their base. And as you said, it may open them up to liability and it's just unwise. And I agree - I hope they take this opportunity to do a little research on the positions that they have, and on the history of those positions, and how to de-escalate and manage dissent. [00:33:51] Crystal Fincher: Just a side note on that - those protesters were protesting in support of asylum seekers who are trying to secure a place to healthily stay. The county is taking action - it was announced this morning that the county actually authorized grants to organizations that will be assisting the asylum seekers, as well as funding that should secure a stay through June with an enhanced heated tent - better amenities, I guess, than they have now, or just better basic shelter than they have now. It certainly is a conundrum. That is a short-term solution, there needs to be a medium and long-term solution put together. It does look like the governor and the legislature have included allocations to help both migrants and asylum seekers overall, and specifically those in Tukwila - with it looks like $5 million to $8 million allocations is what is proposed. We will see what that turns out to be by the end of session next week. But it's a challenge. Interesting to see the differences in how the different jurisdictions have handled it. People do ask - Well, why would Seattle even be taking that up anyway? Because this is a regional problem and that's why they involved themselves in it before. So these were people returning to the body that had itself involved themselves in it - I think it was a month ago that they decided to take action to help extend stays in some hotels throughout cities in the county. [00:35:23] Rich Smith: By the way, it's the right thing to do. We should be bending over backwards to help these people seeking asylum in our sanctuary city. They want to work. They want to be members of society. And we should be doing everything we can to help ease that transition and help them. It's going to pay off in the long run, and it's morally indefensible not to help them in the short term. I don't know why they're throwing up their hands and saying - Oh gosh, go talk to the county, go talk to the state. We can't really do anything here. That's not particularly welcome in this Portal to the Pacific. And it speaks volumes about how they feel about immigrants, how they feel about people coming into the city, and who they think they're serving. [00:36:03] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, and this feeds into the larger problem that we're having with not having enough housing or shelter for people overall. These are people who don't have it and what we have to contend with - people are like, Well, these are migrants. Other people just want to be homeless. They had the opportunity to get off the street. They could take advantage of shelter if they wanted to. The fact is, there are thousands fewer shelter and housing spaces available than there are people out on the street. We cannot offer housing or shelter to people currently on the street. There is nowhere near enough. Even if we offer shelter to three people, there are eight more standing next to them where it's just not possible. Until we build more, we're going to have this problem. It's going to get worse. It is on us as a society to fix that problem, so that we can move people off of the streets. It's not acceptable to anyone to have people languishing outside - it's unsafe, it's undesirable. These conversations about offers to do stuff are really irrelevant until there is enough space for everyone. Then you can talk about - Well, they decided not to. And then a conversation about penalties could potentially be appropriate then. But before that - how is it valid to talk about criminalization of being outside if there aren't enough spaces to bring people inside? This is what has always perplexed me. [00:37:36] Rich Smith: Yeah, the only way you can believe that is if you believe two things. One, every homeless person is a drug addict and a criminal on purpose because they like it. Two, we have enough space in the jails for all of these drug-addled criminals who just want to steal TVs all day. Neither thing is true. Most people on the street develop drug addictions as a way to cope with being on the street. It is not drug addictions that send them there to the first place, at least not the majority. And the jail - we do not have big jails. And when they go in there, we don't have enough staffing for the jails. And people think that people get treatment in the jails - they do not get adequate treatment in the jails. Staffing issues prevent them from getting the treatment they need. The treatment they need does not meet their needs because they get buprenorphine in lower doses - if you're on fentanyl, bup is not going to be enough to help you or to treat you in jail. And when you get out, you're going to have a higher risk of overdosing and dying. So people's misunderstanding of the criminal justice system leads them to believe these silly things. And I really wish they would read three articles before talking. [00:38:46] Crystal Fincher: And with that, we thank you for listening to Hacks & Wonks on this Friday, March 1st, 2024. The producer of Hacks & Wonks is Shannon Cheng. Our insightful co-host today is editor of The Stranger and noted poet, Rich Smith. You can find Rich on Twitter, @richsssmith, with three S's in the middle. You can follow Hacks & Wonks on Twitter at @HacksWonks. You can find me on all platforms - and soon, Hacks & Wonks on all platforms and a few new things going on - at officialhacksandwonks.com. If you like us, please leave a review - that is a very helpful thing. And be sure to subscribe for the full versions of our Friday week-in-review and the Tuesday topical show. You can always get a full transcript of this episode and links to the resources referenced in the show at officialhacksandwonks.com and in the podcast episode notes. Thanks for tuning in - talk to you next time.

On this week-in-review, Crystal is joined by metro news columnist and opinion editor for The News Tribune in Tacoma, Matt Driscoll! With two weeks left in the State legislative session, Crystal and Matt dig into several bills with potential for huge impact and needing public support to get across the finish line - HB 2114 (rent stabilization), HB 1932 (even-year elections), and SB 6105 (Stripper Bill of Rights). See the resources section for links to contact your legislators about each of these bills! Next, they discuss the promise of the City of Tacoma's detailed Anti-Displacement strategy, Mayor Bruce Harrell pledging no new taxes at his annual State of the City address, and no charges against the SPD officer who killed Jaahnavi Kandula. As always, a full text transcript of the show is available below and at officialhacksandwonks.com. Find the host, Crystal Fincher, on Twitter at @finchfrii and find today's co-host, Matt Driscoll, at @mattsdriscoll.   Resources Why Seattle's Proposed Surveillance Mash-Up is a Lose-Lose with Amy Sundberg and BJ Last of Solidarity Budget from Hacks & Wonks   “Pass bill limiting rent hikes to help stabilize households” by The Seattle Times Editorial Board   “Seattle's LGBTQ Communities Demand Rent Stabilization” by Rich Smith from The Stranger   HB 2114 - Improving housing stability for tenants subject to the residential landlord-tenant act and the manufactured/mobile home landlord-tenant act by limiting rent and fee increases, requiring notice of rent and fee increases, limiting fees and deposits, establishing a landlord resource center and associated services, authorizing tenant lease termination, creating parity between lease types, and providing for attorney general enforcement.   HB 2114 - Send a comment to your legislators   “NPI's even year elections bill advances out of Senate State Government Committee” by Andrew Villeneuve from The Cascadia Advocate   HB 1932 - Shifting general elections for local governments to even-numbered years to increase voter participation.   HB 1932 - Send a comment to your legislators   “Why a dancer with Tacoma ties is fighting for WA's 'Stripper Bill of Rights'” by Matt Driscoll from The News Tribune   Strippers Are Workers Campaign   SB 6105 - Creating safer working conditions in adult entertainment establishments.   SB 6105 - Send a comment to your legislators   “Some Tacomans are being pushed out of their neighborhoods. The city wants to intervene” by Shea Johnson from The News Tribune   Anti-Displacement Strategy | City of Tacoma   “Mayor Bruce Harrell Promises to Deliver Bare Minimum at 2024 State of City Address” by Hannah Krieg from The Stranger   “$230 Million Deficit Hangs Over Annual Harrell Speech” by Doug Trumm from The Urbanist   “King County Prosecutors Decline to Charge SPD Officer for Killing Pedestrian” by Ashley Nerbovig from The Stranger   Find stories that Crystal is reading here   Listen on your favorite podcast app to all our episodes here   Transcript [00:00:00] Crystal Fincher: Welcome to Hacks & Wonks. I'm Crystal Fincher, and I'm a political consultant and your host. On this show, we talk with policy wonks and political hacks to gather insight into local politics and policy in Washington state through the lens of those doing the work with behind-the-scenes perspectives on what's happening, why it's happening, and what you can do about it. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get the full versions of our Tuesday topical show and our Friday week-in-review shows delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, the most helpful thing you can do is leave a review wherever you listen to Hacks & Wonks. Full transcripts and resources referenced in the show are always available at officialhacksandwonks.com and in our episode notes. If you missed our Tuesday topical show, our producer Shannon Cheng was guest host and welcomed back Amy Sundberg and BJ Last from Solidarity Budget to discuss how the City of Seattle is rushing to bring three surveillance technologies to the streets of Seattle with minimal public input. Make your voice heard at the final public meeting next week on Tuesday, February 27th at 6 p.m. Today, we're continuing our Friday week-in-review shows where we review the news of the week with a co-host. Welcome back to the program, friend of the show and today's co-host: Metro News columnist and opinion editor for The News Tribune in Tacoma, Matt Driscoll. [00:01:31] Matt Driscoll: Thank you for having me - it's always wonderful to be here. And of course, as luck would have it, hammering started in the background. Hopefully that's not too annoying, but yeah - it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. [00:01:42] Crystal Fincher: Excellent - love having you back. Well, we have a couple weeks left in this legislative session, which is scheduled to end on March 7th. Houses have already gotten done passing legislation that originated in their chambers, now the other chambers are taking up things. And there's a few bills that I wanted to talk about that are trying to make it through, that a lot of organizations have as policies, and that would be really impactful to residents throughout the state. The first one is one talking about rent stabilization - different than rent control - rent stabilization basically limits rent and fee increases during the year. So this is something that a lot of renters have been talking about. We've certainly covered the housing affordability crisis at length on this program, but it really is a challenge for renters facing seemingly endless rent hikes. And those rent hikes currently don't have any caps. We've seen instances of rent literally doubling in some places, but fees 20-30% increases annually, which is way beyond the cost of inflation, generally, and really challenging for people to be able to afford. This has been cited as contributing to income inequality, to our homelessness crisis, and to just regular affordability, to displacement. Really challenging, so one thing that has been in the works for over a year has been the effort to try and limit rent increases. This bill would limit rent increases to 7% during any 12-month period, which is still a pretty substantial increase for most people - but within the realm of reality and affordability and achievability for a lot of people. How do you see this bill? [00:03:38] Matt Driscoll: Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting and it is very similar to a citizens' ballot initiative that we covered here in Tacoma last election cycle, which did place some rent increase limits on local landlords and some caps on local fees. To me, it's kind of the other side of the coin - although this coin is probably not a coin, it has a bunch of sides. But we talk a lot about just the affordable housing crisis and the need to build more housing of all kinds, particularly affordable housing - being able to meet all sorts of different economic demographics with that. And this is another side of that, which is people faced with the crisis of housing, calling on lawmakers and policymakers to enact some protections and some regulations to keep them from just getting gouged and forced out financially. And particularly in this bill and in the initiative that ended up passing just barely in Tacoma, I mean, the rent increases and the fees that they still allow are not insignificant. And the fact that we see the pushback to it that we do, particularly from landlords' associations, and conservative lawmakers, really speaks to how out of whack the market is. If you can't get by by raising rent 7% annually, I think it raises questions. Now, there are, I think, some legitimate concerns about how far to crank that lever, because I personally believe at some point, if you do crank it too far, you are going to impact the "mom and pop" landlords who do exist, who are real providers of legitimate affordable housing to people and housing to people that they might not be able to get otherwise. So I do think you have to walk that balance. Certainly to me, this bill seems reasonable, but I'm sure for a lot of lawmakers, it comes down to that question of how much reach do you want the government to have in dictating what are supposed to be those free markets we love so much in this country. But really, this conversation is indicative to the crisis that's happening in cities across Washington and across certainly the West Coast, where the cost of housing is just greatly outpacing any income growth or job growth that we might have. People are freaked out, and rightly so. You talk about all the necessities, whether it's food or - there are safety nets for that. But I think the housing one is one that feels really close because there aren't safety nets. If you lose housing, you lose housing. If you need to go to a food bank, you can go to a food bank, but there's not a house bank. And so it'll be interesting to see what happens and then see where the momentum goes on this. [00:06:02] Crystal Fincher: It will be interesting to see where the momentum goes. And you raised a good point in talking about the Tacoma Renter Protection Initiative, which is similar to other renter protection initiatives and legislation we've seen in various cities throughout the state - whether it's Spokane, Bellingham, Tacoma, Federal Way, we've seen local communities across the state take action on this because this is plaguing communities. That housing expense is almost everyone's biggest expense and so if that is skyrocketing, that's taking families' available discretionary income, that's impacting the local economy, and obviously causing a lot of housing insecurity that is really putting a lot of people in tough positions, and communities in tough positions, and governments and how to deal with that. And it's so much more expensive to deal with once it gets to the crisis level - once someone is displaced or can't afford housing, loses their apartment. All of those are really, really expensive to deal with from a city and county perspective. So I am hopeful that this legislation passes. It's currently in the Senate and it faces an uncertain future, so this is going to be one where community feedback to all of your legislators is really going to make a difference on this - particularly your senators, because they're going to determine the fate of this. There are a number of people on the fence - some moderate to conservative Democrats who have voiced some concerns. Jamie Pedersen is working on this in the Senate - has expressed some reservations, but has certainly heard a lot of feedback from his constituents who overwhelmingly are renters in his district. We'll see how this turns out, but this is one where - for folks listening - if this is something that's a priority to you, reach out to your senators. Fortunately, we make it really simple in Washington to be able to send communications about legislation. We'll also put links in the show notes to make that easy. But they're going to need to hear from you on this - certainly would be a big step forward for the state in terms of renter protections here. Also want to talk about another bill, which we've certainly talked about before and recently in our conversation with Andrew Villeneuve in one of our Tuesday topical shows, that the Northwest Progressive Institute has been very active with. The even-year elections bill, which has advanced out of the House and then advanced out of the Senate State Government Committee. So it's looking fairly positive, but still has to go through some more hurdles. This would enable cities and towns to choose to hold their elections in even-numbered years instead of odd-numbered years. This is a big deal because turnout is much higher in even-numbered years. And as we've seen in the state of California, when we do put those other races - municipal races, local races - on the ballot with those national races, people still vote, still great turnout, even better turnout than they would see in those odd-year elections. We just got done with an election in November that had the lowest turnout since we've been keeping records here in Washington. It is a problem. We're deciding elections with sometimes close to only 20% of the residents participating in the election - that's not representative. I don't think that's doing anyone any favors. The more people who can participate, the better. I also sometimes hear - This is all a progressive conspiracy to turn things out because we see so many elections that trend progressive in the end. And one thing that I would remind people is Seattle is a very visible place. Seattle has more progressive voters than conservative ones, so certainly elections in Seattle and therefore King County do trend as ballots are counted in the final days - those late ballots certainly do trend in a progressive direction. That's not the case statewide. It really just depends on what the local population is. If we're looking at southwest Washington, for example, those often trend red in a lot of those swing districts there. It just really depends on what there is on the ground. And even in those situations, I still think it's better for more people to participate in elections, and voting, and deciding what their communities are going to look like. What do you think about this bill? [00:10:23] Matt Driscoll: First and foremost, Crystal, it's awfully generous of you to acknowledge that even where there are more conservative voters, it's better for more people to vote - that's very bipartisan of you, I appreciate that. This is one of those ones that makes me question myself - am I a super liberal hack? Because there really doesn't seem to be a good reason not to do this, in my mind. At the end of the day - participation in democracy, in our elections - the more people, the more registered voters we can get involved, the better. That's what we should all want. None of us should be afraid that our arguments should stand up and they don't - if they're in the minority, they're in the minority - that's the way it's supposed to work. I will say that there's also part of this that frustrates me because we do look at those even-year versus odd-year elections, and one of the reasons that this gets cast as perhaps a progressive-motivated thing or a progressive scheme is because in those odd-year elections, the voting demographic does skew older, whiter, landowner, property owner - that's real - and i guess the frustrating part about it is just progressives could vote. I just went through that election last November and it was brutal to go through the endorsements. I do think election burnout is real. It does feel like there's always an election. I think we got to be generous to the general public and realize that most people are just trying to get through their lives, and put food on the table, and get their kids to school, and all that. And I think we're asking a lot of them to constantly be kind of in election mode, which is certainly how it feels. But at the end of the day, if progressives are concerned about the disparity, they could just vote in odd-year elections and they just don't - historically - we talk about it every time until we're blue in the face, and then they don't. But full circle - this is about participation. Whether we like the reality or not, the reality is people don't vote in off-year elections nearly as much as they do in the even year. We have historical data backing this up. And I also think it's important to note that all this bill will do is give places the ability to do it. It doesn't dictate it. It's local control of it. If you want to make that change, you can. So to me, again, I don't see an argument against this. It seems like a no-brainer, but so little is a no-brainer when it comes to Olympia. [00:12:34] Crystal Fincher: I completely agree with what you're saying. And as this makes it through and follows the path that a lot of bills do, one of the things that happens is amendments are offered and sometimes accepted. So this passed the House. Once it did arrive in the Senate, it received some amendments that passed out of committee. I'm not in love with these amendments. One of them not only requires the city to basically opt-in legislatively and pass an ordinance to say we're going to do this, but now it requires a popular vote from the people. So the city has to both adopt an ordinance or policy by its legislative body- [00:13:10] Matt Driscoll: An odd year? Do they have to vote in an odd year? Is that part of the stipulation? [00:13:15] Crystal Fincher: You know, it probably is. And yeah, it would have to receive approval from its voters. Now, this is something where the voters vote for their city council or their town council - whatever their government legislative body is, usually a city council - who make decisions like this all the time. Putting this out to a public vote is a costly endeavor. Elections aren't free. You have to pay to administer them, it's costly, it's time-consuming. And as you say, this is probably going to be on another odd-year election ballot. This is pretty simple. I wish we would let people and the electeds that they selected make these decisions. I would love to see that amendment taken out before it does get to a final vote, but we'll see how it goes. It would be progress either way. Definitely better than nothing, but would love to see as much good as possible and not add another hurdle to this that is seemingly unnecessary and also costly at a time when a lot of cities and counties are dealing with budget deficits and are really trying to trim costs instead of add them. Another bill that you covered this week is about a proposed Strippers' Bill of Rights that's currently in Olympia. What is happening with this and what would it do? [00:14:29] Matt Driscoll: Yeah, I mean, I kind of became mildly fascinated with this over the last week because it was pretty new territory for me, to be honest with you. So basically, the background on it is adult dancers, strippers in Washington essentially lack a whole lot of protections that I was, for one, shocked to hear didn't exist - like requirements of clubs to have security. In recent years, there have been some slight upgrades, installations of panic buttons and stuff, but really it's kind of a Wild West out there in terms of staffing, and training requirements, and de-escalation requirements. And basically, whether you frequent strip clubs or not, just picture a strip club and think of all the things that you would assume would be in place to protect people and employees and the reality is that many of them don't exist currently. And so this bill would do a lot of that around training, de-escalation, that sort of thing - which all, to me, feel like no-brainers. And I think in the legislature's view - from the testimony that I've heard, at least in the House - it seems to be a shared sentiment. Where it gets tricky is this bill also opens the door for the legal sale of alcohol in strip clubs. And at least initially going into it, for me, it's a juxtaposition until you get into it. Because on one hand, you're talking about safety and regulations. And then - oh, yeah, we're going to add alcohol - and you're like, what the? that doesn't necessarily seem like that's about safety. But at the end of the day, as I learned and wrote about - and others have written about it plenty this session - essentially the deal for strippers is they pay a nightly rate, if you will, to work, to perform. They're independent contractors. They're not employees of the strip club. So you will end up owing $100, $200 just to start your shift. And then the money that you make in the process of your job, after you pay that back, that's what you make. One, that's clearly exploitative. It sets up bad situations, as you can imagine. But the reality of it is because there's no legal alcohol sales in Washington strip clubs, that's really the only financial model that exists for club owners. And so it puts pressure on them to exploit the dancers. And then that puts pressure on the dancers to maybe ignore warning signs about things that make them uncomfortable because they're all of a sudden in financial distress trying to pay what they owe just to work. So it just creates this whole set of tensions that I think - really a lot of the supporters of this bill would argue - really decrease the safety in these clubs. So this bill would do all of that - it made its way through the Senate, it's now over to the House, it's out of committee as of earlier this week. But the hang up is going to be around that alcohol point. I think most lawmakers seem to agree with the safety measures, but there's hang up around the alcohol and how that works. We could go into the weeds - some legislators think that the Liquor Cannabis Board already has the ability, they could just make a rule. Liquor Cannabis Board says - No, we need you to grant us the licensing authority, yada, yada, yada. It's all very complicated, but it's going to come down to the booze. [00:17:22] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, and this is really interesting - I personally am absolutely in support of this. Strippers are workers. They deserve protections that any worker deserves. Employers have an obligation to protect their employees, or in the case of independent contractors to protect the people who they are making money from when they work in their establishment. As you said, this does require adult entertainment establishments to provide dedicated security personnel during operating hours. It does establish restrictions on the leasing fees charged to not exceed what a dancer can make so they don't go into debt while they're dancing - that serves no one. It also requires adult entertainment establishments to provide mandatory training to their employees on first aid, conflict de-escalation, and identifying and preventing human trafficking, sexual harassment, discrimination, and assault. Expands certain safety requirements, including key padlocks for locker rooms, cleaning supplies, and certain safety signage. And then, as you said, it prohibits the Liquor and Cannabis Board from adopting or enforcing a rule that restricts the exposure of certain body parts or that restricts sexually-oriented conduct. That particular element, I believe, came out of the targeted enforcement of gay establishments in the City of Seattle - seemingly with these lewd laws - saying that those can't be in the proximity of alcohol, which just seemed really out of touch, antiquated, potentially a way to harass the LGBTQ+ community, and just not something that is consistent with the values - certainly that we hold in Seattle, but in Washington state, as we've shown. So I do hope this gets through. The alcohol issue - for me, I trust the strippers working in the establishment to know what's safe for them and if they're advocating for this and saying this is part of what we need to have a safe and sustainable environment, I trust them with that. There are plenty of situations where we allow alcohol where, if you take away the purity-attached issues to it, that seem to me to be dicey in a lot of situations. I'm also someone who it's just like - Wow, we have parking lots at bars. Doesn't that seem like it's setting up a very problematic thing? So that's a much broader conversation there. But if the strippers don't have a problem with it, I don't have a problem with it, really. They know the business and their environment much better than I do, certainly. [00:19:48] Matt Driscoll: Yeah, I just think the whole thing's fascinating because I was talking to Laurie Jinkins about this last week when I was reporting on it - and she comes from a public health background. And her basic reaction to it is the expansion of alcohol is not good - she points to health data. I think you can certainly make that argument, but it's very interesting what you hear from folks working in the industry, and they a lot of times will compare it to Oregon. And admittedly, I'm going to lose any Pierce County street cred here, but it's been a long time since I've been inside a strip club - but I've never been in one in Oregon. What they say is - Look, in Oregon, whether you agree with strip clubs or not, they're actually a place that legitimate people might want to hang out because you can get a drink and maybe you can get some food, and if that's what you're into - entertainment - it works for you. And guess what you have in Washington? Strip club, honestly, is almost the last place you would want to hang out unless you were really driven to go to a strip club. Door charges are insane, you're buying $15 Cokes, there's nothing to drink, there's nothing to eat, it's empty and kind of sad. And lo and behold, what do you get? You get the folks who are choosing to go to those establishments - and I'm trying not to paint with a broad brush here, but I think we can all imagine the scene that this creates. And then when you really talk about the fact that you've essentially created an economic model where the clubs in Washington rely on taking income straight from the dancers as opposed to everywhere else, where they make their income off the booze and the food - like every other sort of nightlife establishment. You can see how that would even out the relationship or the power dynamic between the dancer and the club, where here the club has all the incentive to suck as much as possible out of the dancer, and the dancers are in tough positions where they're trying to make it work. So I think it's fascinating. And again, this is not very satisfying, but it'll be very interesting to see where this goes in the coming days. [00:21:41] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely will be. And I agree, it will be very interesting to see where it goes. Moving on from legislation and where things stand there, there was something that I wanted to talk about that I found really interesting and perhaps a model that other cities may be able to look at, depending on how this turns out. And that is a plan from the City of Tacoma to prevent displacement in the city. And this is in addition to a housing affordability action plan that was adopted by the City that they seem to have been making positive progress on. But a specific anti-displacement strategy that consisted of 21 actions, including buying property to build affordable units in areas that have a high risk of displacement, requiring owners of subsidized properties to issue notices if they intend to sell, or opt-out, or refinance. But really saying it's as much of a problem that people are being economically displaced, forced out of neighborhoods - we're losing the culture and character of our neighborhoods, we're losing cohesive communities that are being displaced - and the fallout from that is undesirable. So often we hear in other conversations about zoning - maintaining the character of the neighborhood - well, the people are essential to the character of the neighborhood. And when the people are being lost, that's a problem that the City of Tacoma has recognized and is taking action on, which I think is very commendable. What do you see in this anti-displacement strategy? [00:23:12] Matt Driscoll: Yeah, I think it goes back to that multi-sided, not-a-coin thing I was talking about earlier. Well, we've got the need for housing and you've got policy pushing to place some regulations and protections for tenants. This is another part of that where cities, certainly in Tacoma, are recognizing that the economic realities and the housing realities in the city are, in fact, displacing untold number of people. We've been seeing it here for a long time. Hilltop is often painted, at least regionally, as the epicenter of it, where we've had Link Light Rail expansion and we've seen the housing going in, and if you see a lot of families that have been here for a long time getting pushed out. This is an acknowledgement of that from City leaders, and so I think it's commendable, they get credit. Of course, the cynic can me points out that cities, including Tacoma, are great at coming up with plans - we already had an affordable housing action strategy, and now we've got our anti-displacement strategy, and we passed our anti-racism legislation with 21 bullet points of what we commit to do. And at the end of the day, the proof's in the pudding and people are still getting pushed out. And so the hard part is the work of - is the city actually going to acquire land and do the sorts of things that it lays out as its vision? I've been here long enough to have seen lots of visions - very few of them have come to full fruition - it's usually you get pieces and then a crisis pops up or some other thing happens. And so we'll see what happens at the end of the day, but certainly if nothing less, it's an acknowledgement of those very same forces we started talking out with at the beginning of this show of just the crazy increases of the cost of living, particularly of the housing. I hear from Chamber of Commerce types sometimes who point out - You keep saying rents are skyrocketing and really it's raising similarly to everything else. Yes, everything's getting more expensive. And yes, in theory, there have been some income gains - although I think it's totally fair and accurate to say they have not kept pace with the cost of living. But I just think housing is that one that people feel just so closely and it feels so razor thin and desperate that lawmakers, city council - here in Tacoma - are hearing it loud and clear from their constituents who are actively being pushed out or just looking around and realizing that one wrong move and they would no longer be able to afford to live here. I don't take any shame in admitting that's certainly my family's situation - if we had not purchased our house when we purchased our house, we could absolutely not live where we live today. We would be in Parkland, somewhere other than that - and that's just the reality. And so again, we'll see what comes long-term, but it's an acknowledgement and it's an important one, and I think it's right. [00:25:40] Crystal Fincher: I also think it's right. This affects everybody. A lot of times I hear a lot of people say the same thing you did - Well, thank goodness we were able to buy our house at the time that we did because we certainly couldn't afford it now. This is an issue that is really affecting seniors in the community and whether they can age in place - whether they can remain in the communities that they have built their lives in, that they have relationships in, that is so important to maintaining their own safety net as perhaps their abilities evolve and change as they age. Lots of people need to downsize houses, need to have more accessible homes. And right now in many communities - certainly in Seattle and Tacoma, but also many of the suburbs - it is not possible to buy in the same area and get something similar that you would there. They're looking at a much different quality of life if they were to do that, or they need to move far away, basically, from perhaps family, support systems, the doctors that they've seen forever, the people who've been helping them in their lives for so long, and really lose touch with those things that keep them healthy and supported. And often their family too - and their families aren't able to afford to move in and live in the same area - it's really a problem that a lot of families are facing in this multi-generational way that is really, really troubling. And I'm glad this is being addressed. [00:27:05] Matt Driscoll: Yeah, it's just a subset of the folks being affected by this - you probably know the data better than I do - but if you want to be terrified at some point, look at the data about the number of people moving into retirement age and that age bracket in the next decade or more. It's a significant amount of people. And if we don't come to terms with the fact that our economy as it currently stands, particularly in relation to housing, is just cruel and out of whack right now - there are going to be countless people really with no flexibility, nowhere to move, creating those situations that you just described where you get stuck. You have a house you probably can't look after anymore. You can't afford to move anywhere else. You don't have whatever it would take to get into senior - I mean, it's terrifying. And so one small part of a bigger pie of the economic cruelty that we have, but it's a big one. And so I'm hopeful, but again, cities are great at the plans and the bullet points and the statements of great aspiration. The proof is in how it pans out. And so I think it's important for people to keep an eye on it and keep folks accountable, so it's more than just talk. [00:28:11] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely agree with that. Getting more into the details of this, there were a number of actions - I was happy to see that this was a pretty comprehensive report - there are metrics to track over the time. As plans from cities go, especially ones that we're seeing these days in major cities, it at least had a lot of detail - that they'll either follow or they won't - but certainly a lot less vague than some of the plans that we see elsewhere. Some of the other things included were expanding one-time cash assistance to keeping families housed, offering incentives for developers to build affordable housing in at-risk areas, prioritizing new units to be rented or sold to at-risk or displaced residents, focusing down payment homebuyer assistance in high-risk neighborhoods, or reducing the cost to build accessory dwelling units. In addition to proactive rental inspection programs or community land trust with the intention of preserving affordable housing, increasing funds to the City's tenant protection program and housing assistance contracts, or creating a property tax relief program. The strategy also called for the City to consider establishing a reparations committee that would research the possibility of reparations for historical racist policies, particularly because BIPOC communities have been disproportionately displaced. Those communities have been decimated - they're far less than half of what they initially were, and that percentage is still declining there. It is a challenge - they're being disproportionately displaced, and certainly reparations are being looked at in a variety of areas and is justified. We'll see how this does play out, but I'm excited. The plan excites me because it was quite detailed. We'll also link that in the show notes for people to read themselves and see the data behind the policies, the justifications behind them, the metrics that they'll continue to be tracking, and what their metrics for progress are. It'll be interesting to see, but we talk about affordability under a whole umbrella of a homelessness crisis, the housing crisis - but it is going to take addressing these discrete elements, each one by themselves, and a plan to address all of them. And I think Tacoma is certainly showing leadership so far in that area. Also want to talk this week about Mayor Bruce Harrell delivering his 2024 State of the City address. This is his third State of the City address since he has been elected, these addresses are annual. He touted some reductions in crime, which I'm sure everyone is happy to see. He talked about the CARE Department that they established, which has started with a small trial of a co-responder model during limited hours during the day. Hopefully we will see that expanded - certainly, to at least cover 24 hours throughout the day, and more than a handful of responders there - that would certainly be welcome. And I think polling continually shows that residents want to see this expanded and available at all times and in all areas. He also made news with basically a no new taxes pledge, which is very different than what he said before. He said that he'd be looking to implement progressive revenue. He convened a task force to look at different progressive revenue options because there's a $250 [million] budget shortfall that the City is going to have to deal with this year. And he basically said - Hey, we're not going to raise taxes. I'm not going to support any raising of taxes. Our challenges are much more fundamental to that. We need to basically look at every inch of the budget and re-examine what we're doing. This seems aligned with Council President Sara Nelson's pledge and op-ed where she said not only was she looking to not implement new taxes, but also cut taxes for business. This is also at a time when they're saying they're going to increase funding for public safety. So this seemingly indicates, particularly if they're looking at cutting taxes - but really either way, whether they do or don't cut any taxes - some pretty significant cuts for services and programs throughout the city that don't have to do with public safety. And this has a lot of people alarmed. How did you see the State of the City address? [00:32:31] Matt Driscoll: What I always enjoy about our conversations is I view all this stuff from afar, from Tacoma. I know what Tacoma and Pierce County budgets look like, and I know what Seattle and King County budgets look like -and there's part of me that looks at that, and if you guys can't figure it out with the resources you have already? But I also acknowledge that the challenges in a place like King County and Seattle are not insurmountable, but are sizable. And when you look at budgets and you look at the need for these services and potential of cuts, it's very real and it could be not good for a lot of people. From a broader perspective, I do think the dynamic and the shift that we've seen in Seattle is interesting - particularly as it relates to homeless response as an example of that, because there was a development where some funding appears like it's going to get taken back from the King County Regional Housing Authority. And I do think from the broad constituency that is now reflected in certainly the city council - and you could argue in Mayor Harrell's election as well - there's a dissatisfaction with the amount of money that we are spending towards trying to address some of these problems and the actual outcomes that we are seeing. And I think a lot of that is very natural because the positive outcomes of homeless response are difficult to track. People always want to break it down - we spent this much and we housed this many people. The reality is it's just not that simple. There's more human nature involved in that. But at the same time, I do believe - and I think Seattle in some ways can be the poster city for this - is it's understandable when people look at the more progressive side of homeless response and say - You're basically advocating that we can't sweep encampments, what we see around us is okay. But I think for most people, when they look around and the problems that they see and the suffering they see, it feels not okay. A lot of times, from one side of it, the solutions you get are really long-term. And because of the way these debates stick us into stupid corners, it starts sounding like you've got one side advocating for - Shut up about the encampment in front of your business, just deal with it. And I think that, at some extent, bleeds into the electorate where they start having pushback to that. And I feel like that's the tension point where Seattle's at - yes, it's a progressive city. Yes, people genuinely want humane responses to the homelessness crisis. They're not looking to criminalize people. They're not looking to make matters worse. They want to address the underlying root causes and the lack of housing and the lack of everything that we need. But at the same time, the status quo is unsustainable. I think you see that in some of this talk of re-evaluation of what we're doing, is it working? And those can be tricky evaluations because like I said, they're not always straightforward. And I think there's a lot of good work being done. And I think attempts to purely quantify it in hard data can be suspect. But at the same time, I don't think it's entirely wrong when people say we're spending a lot of money, we've been talking about this a lot, and all I see is it getting worse. And so that's a very rambly way of - my view on Seattle politics from 33 miles away. [00:35:33] Crystal Fincher: Well, there's a lot there to talk about. I absolutely agree that people see the problem getting worse and are frustrated by that. And hear the amounts of money that are being spent and are wondering if that's effective or not - because the amounts do sound big. With the budget in Seattle - Seattle is unique in the state, in the types of industry that it has and the types of companies that it has. And Seattle certainly gets a lot from those companies. But I also feel we absolutely need to talk about and acknowledge that those companies get a lot from Seattle. As of a few years ago, Amazon had more office space in the city of Seattle than any corporation in any other city in the country. So great - Amazon is hiring. But Amazon is also taxing our infrastructure. They're causing a lot of stress on the roads - people talk about potholes and trucks - and well, Amazon is impacting a lot of that. Amazon is a lot of the impacts on our transit network. Amazon is impacting just the use of our resources, right? And Amazon is benefiting from the great resources that the city of Seattle does provide. And again, this goes both ways. Certainly people benefit from being employed, but we can't say - And that's it, that's the end of the story. There's also the desire to have those corporations, some of the richest ones in the world in Seattle, pay their fair share. In our state - as we've talked about, our regressive state tax code without an income tax - I do think there's a very valid conversation, especially in a city that has as many high-earners and as many mega-corporations as the city of Seattle does, whether people are paying their fair share. And when you look at how residents in the city of Seattle vote, that answer continues to be - No, we don't feel like everyone's paying their fair share yet, and we need to move further in that direction. City government currently, both the council and the mayor, seems to feel differently. So that will be a continuing tension that carries on. We'll see what happens, but certainly looks to be a bumpy ride coming up. The last thing I wanted to talk about this week was the announcement that there are going to be no charges for the officer who killed a student, Jaahnavi Kandula, as he was driving 74 miles per hour down a city street - the speed limit is 25 miles per hour - responding to a call. This is the incident that a lot of people probably became familiar with because they heard another officer, who is also the vice-president of the Seattle Police Officers Guild, mock her death - saying that her life didn't have value, basically laughing about it in just a really sick and sadistic way. No charges will be faced by that officer either. For the officer who was mocking, the rationale that the county prosecutor gave was that it's up to the Office of Police Accountability in Seattle to determine what, if any, discipline should be faced by that officer. And then for the officer who actually ran over this young woman, just saying there was not enough evidence to show that basically he was acting recklessly. And a lot of people's response to this has been if driving 74 miles per hour with no indication that it is in a different category of emergency, certainly - and really responding to a call that police are not needed at and that other cities don't have police responding to those calls, but that's a side issue - but hey, if that's not reckless, then what is? And so we're again in a situation where the law feels woefully inadequate. And we have the county prosecutor saying - Okay, but according to the law, this would be tough, if not impossible, to prosecute and get a guilty verdict. And people looking at the common sense of it and saying - But that just doesn't make sense. Can we drive 74 miles per hour on a city road and have no consequences for any actions, any harm that results from that? And so we're once again in a situation where our laws seemingly have endless loopholes or exceptions for people who work in public safety that don't seem to apply to the rest of us. How did you see this? [00:39:53] Matt Driscoll: Yeah, we're certainly tackling the big ones on today's show, aren't we? I mean, to me, and I realize that this is a difficult view to articulate fairly, and I'm going to try my best because people feel very passionate about it for a lot of reasons. But I think two things are true. One, creating the type of police force that we need does demand accountability. There has to be accountability. And I think right now, a lot of folks genuinely feel like there is no accountability. Attempts are made to hold police accountable for what many feel are reckless, or dangerous, or whatever behavior. The result we get is - well, it wasn't illegal, it was fine. And so accountability has to be part of that, but I don't think you can change police culture through accountability. I feel like what this situation represents is more the reflection of a police culture, particularly in the mocking comments. I don't know enough about the intricacies of this case to re-litigate it. I've read the same things you read - I know the speed, the lack of lights, I also know the prosecutor came back - the interviews with other people, that they heard it, that the student seemed distracted. I don't feel prepared to re-litigate that exact string of events. What I will say is when you're in an emergency or your family members in an emergency, you'd probably want the first responders driving 75 miles an hour - maybe not 75, but you get my point. I do think there has to be leeway in the law that gives first responders and cops the ability to do things that otherwise would be considered reckless. I think that needs to happen, but I think the problem we run into is that responsibility that we've given to a police force - the police force, their culture, doesn't reflect those values that are behind that. In a perfect world, if we had the police force we had, they would use these powers responsibly. But a lot of times what we see - and again, particularly in the commentary, that's what feels inhumane. The cop who was involved in the accident, it sounds like they were distraught at the scene - I don't know what's going on with them. But I know when people hear cops talking about this person's life in a way that assigns it no value, it feels like a reflection of police culture that feels above the law, and feels drunk on power, and feels reckless. So if this cop had been charged with this, I don't know what it would have changed. I do think accountability is necessary, but I think the bigger problem is the police culture we have. And maybe, best case scenario, we're in the process of slowly transforming our police forces to - hiring the type of people and weeding out the bad - I don't know if I have a lot of faith in that. But it's not going to happen overnight. My overarching point is - yes, you need accountability, but I don't think accountability can be your vehicle towards the change that we need, if that makes sense. [00:42:49] Crystal Fincher: It makes perfect sense. I completely agree with that. It's just a really, truly unfortunate situation. And this young woman deserved better - from everybody, at all points in time from this. And I hope we take this seriously as a community, both locally and statewide, and really do look at issues with culture and start to get to the root of that problem. And with that, I thank you for listening to Hacks & Wonks on this Friday, February 23rd, 2024. The producer of Hacks & Wonks is Shannon Cheng. Our insightful co-host today was Metro News columnist and opinion editor for The News Tribune in Tacoma, Matt Driscoll. You can find Matt on Twitter or X at @mattsdriscoll, with two L's at the end. You can follow Hacks & Wonks on Twitter at @HacksWonks. You can find me at @finchfrii, with two I's at the end, on all platforms. You can catch Hacks & Wonks on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts - just type "Hacks and Wonks" into the search bar. Be sure to subscribe to get the full versions of our Friday week-in-review shows and our Tuesday topical show delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, leave a review wherever you listen. You can also get a full transcript of this episode and links to the resources referenced in the show at officialhacksandwonks.com and in the podcast episode notes. Thanks for tuning in - talk to you next time.

On this week-in-review, Crystal is joined by Chair of Sierra Club Seattle, long time communications and political strategist, Robert Cruickshank! Crystal and Robert chat about Raise the Wage Renton's special election win, how a rent stabilization bill passed out of the State House but faces an uphill battle in the State Senate, and the authorization of a strike by Alaska Airlines flight attendants. They then shift to how gender discrimination problems in the Seattle Police Department create a toxic work culture that impedes recruitment, the inexplicable pressing forward by Seattle on ShotSpotter while other cities reject it, and the failure of a philanthropic effort by business titans to solve the regional homelessness crisis. As always, a full text transcript of the show is available below and at officialhacksandwonks.com. Find the host, Crystal Fincher, on Twitter at @finchfrii and find today's co-host, Robert Cruickshank, at @cruickshank.   Resources “Renton $19 minimum wage hike ballot measure leading in early results” by Alexandra Yoon-Hendricks from The Seattle Times   “Washington State House Passes Rent Stabilization Bill” by Rich Smith from The Stranger   “Rent Stabilization Backers Aim to Beat Deadline to Keep Bill Alive” by Doug Trumm from The Urbanist   2024 Town Halls | Washington State House Democrats   “Alaska Airlines flight attendants authorize strike for first time in 3 decades” by Alex DeMarban from Anchorage Daily News   “The Seattle Police Department Has a Gender Discrimination Problem” by Andrew Engelson from PubliCola   “Harrell Plans Hasty Rollout of Massive Surveillance Expansion” by Amy Sundberg from The Urbanist   “Chicago will not renew controversial ShotSpotter contract, drawing support, criticism from aldermen” by Craig Wall and Eric Horng from ABC7 Chicago   “Despite Public Opinion, Seattle Cops and Prosecutors Still Prioritize Cracking Down on Sex Work” by Erica C. Barnett from PubliCola   “Council's Public Safety Focus Will Be “Permissive Environment” Toward Crime” by Erica C. Barnett from PubliCola   “The private sector's biggest bet in homelessness fell apart. What now?” by Greg Kim from The Seattle Times   “Amazon donation is ‘another step' after homelessness group's collapse” by Greg Kim from The Seattle Times   Find stories that Crystal is reading here   Listen on your favorite podcast app to all our episodes here   Transcript [00:00:00] Crystal Fincher: Welcome to Hacks & Wonks. I'm Crystal Fincher, and I'm a political consultant and your host. On this show, we talk with policy wonks and political hacks to gather insight into local politics and policy in Washington state through the lens of those doing the work with behind-the-scenes perspectives on what's happening, why it's happening, and what you can do about it. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get the full versions of our Tuesday topical shows and our Friday week-in-review shows delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, the most helpful thing you can do is leave a review. Full transcripts and resources referenced in the show are always available at officialhacksandwonks.com and in our episode notes. Today, we're continuing our Friday week-in-review shows where we review the news of the week with a co-host. Welcome back to the program, friend of the show and today's co-host: Chair of Sierra Club Seattle, longtime communications and political strategist, Robert Cruickshank. [00:01:08] Robert Cruickshank: Thank you for having me back here again, Crystal. [00:01:11] Crystal Fincher: Thank you so much. Well, we've got a number of items to cover this week, starting with news that I'm certainly excited about - I think you are, too - that this week, in our February special election, Renton had a ballot measure to increase the minimum wage which passed. What are your takeaways from this? [00:01:31] Robert Cruickshank: It's a huge win, both in terms of the margin of victory so far - nearly 60% of Renton voters saying Yes to this in a February election with low turnout. It will raise the wage to around $20 an hour in Renton. And I think it's a clear sign that just as we saw voters in Tukwila last year, and just as in fact voters in SeaTac 11 years ago - kicking all this off - moving to $15 an hour with a city ballot initiative that year, voters in King County, Western Washington want higher minimum wages. And I don't even think we need to qualify it by saying King County in Western Washington. You can look around the country and see - in states like Arkansas, when people put initiatives on the ballot to raise the wage, they pass. So I think there's, yet again, widespread support for this. And I think it also shows that the politicians in Renton - there were several city councilmembers like Carmen Rivera who supported this. There are others, though - the majority of the Renton City Council didn't. They spouted a lot of the usual right-wing Chamber of Commerce arguments against raising the minimum wage, saying it would hurt small businesses and make it hard for workers - none of which actually happens in practice. And voters get that. Voters very clearly understand that you need to pay workers more - they deserve more, especially in a time of inflation. This has been understood for well over 10 years now - that the minimum wage wasn't rising quickly enough and it needs to keep going up. So I think it's a huge wake-up call to elected officials - not just in local city councils, but at the state legislature - they've got to keep doing work to make sure that workers are getting paid well and that the minimum wage keeps rising. [00:03:04] Crystal Fincher: I completely agree. I also think, just for the campaign's purposes, this was really exciting to see. Again, not coming from some of the traditional places where we see ballot measures, campaigns being funded - great that they're funding progressive campaigns in other areas, but that these efforts are largely community-led, community-driven. The Raise the Wage Renton campaign, the Seattle DSA - the Democratic Socialists of America, Seattle chapter - were very involved, did a lot of the heavy lifting here. So really kudos to that entire effort - really important - and really showing that when people get together within communities to respond to problems that they're seeing and challenges that they face, they can create change. It doesn't take that many people acting together and in unison, speaking to their neighbors, to have this happen in city after city. And like you said, it started in SeaTac, and we see how far it's carried. I also think, as you alluded to, this puts other councils on notice. I know the City of Burien is talking about this right now, other cities are looking at this locally. And we have been hearing similar things from Burien city councilmembers that we heard from some of those Renton city councilmembers who declined to pass this on their own. They were parroting Chamber of Commerce talking points. They were parroting some old, disproven data. People recognize and so much data has shown that when you empower people, when you pay people, that is what fuels and builds economy. The economy is the people. So if the people aren't in good shape, the economy is not going to be in good shape. People recognize that. And we really do have to ask and reflect on - I think these elected officials need to reflect on - who are they serving? And where are they getting their information from? Because in city after city, we see overwhelmingly residents respond and say - This is absolutely something we want and we need. And there's this disconnect between them and their elected officials who are parroting these talking points - Well, we're worried about business. Well, we're worried about these. And I think they need to really pause and reflect and say - Okay, who are we really representing here? Where are we getting our information from and why are we seeing time after time that these talking points that have been used for decades, from the same old people and the same old sources, are completely falling flat with the public? I think they should be concerned about their own rhetoric falling flat with the public. They're certainly considering where these elected officials are as their reelections come due, as they're evaluating the job that they're doing. So I think they really need to think hard, evaluate where they are, and get aligned with the people who need the most help, who are trying to build lives in their communities. And stop making this go to the ballot. Stop making the people work harder for what they need - just pass this in your cities and make it so. [00:06:17] Robert Cruickshank: Absolutely. It would be certainly better for working people - for the elected officials to do this themselves. I am noticing a growing trend, though, of progressive and left-wing activists - socialists in this case, DSA - going directly to the ballot when needed. We saw it in Tacoma with the renters' rights legislation last year. We've seen it last year with social housing. And now again this week, House Our Neighbors came out with the initiative to fund social housing, which they had to split in two - due to legal reasons, you had to create the developer first, and then now you have to fund it. And again, the city council had an opportunity to do both here in Seattle. They had the opportunity to create the authority. They passed on that. Then they had the opportunity to fund it. They passed on that. And I am bullish on House Our Neighbors' chances to get their funding initiative, which would be through a payroll tax on large employers, passed by voters this fall. Because again, social housing was super popular at the ballot last year in a February election. Now they're going to go for November 2024 election when there's going to be massive turnout. It's unfortunate that people are having to put a lot of time, money, effort into mounting independent efforts to get things on the ballot - that's hard. It takes a ton of work, not just the gathering signatures and raising money, but just keeping a coalition going and all the meetings and stuff. But hats off to the people who are able to do that. It's not a sustainable way to get progressive policy done, but in a moment where there are more members of city councils who are aligned with the big corporations and wealthy donors, it's what you're going to have to do and it's building power. Ultimately - hopefully - it starts leading into successful victories in city council elections around the region, just as it's led to successes at the ballot box for initiatives. [00:07:59] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. We saw in this effort, as we've seen in others, significant opposition from some elements in the business community. There were some businesses, especially small businesses, who were supportive of this, who were either already paying their employees higher wages because that's how you attract people in business - is not doing the absolute bare minimum. But we saw significant resources spent. This campaign was outspent. And still, the people made it clear what they wanted with another really, really impressive and strong margin. So we'll continue to follow where that goes. We will certainly continue to follow other ballot measures on the ballot as they develop this year, especially with House Our Neighbors and the Social Housing Initiative in Seattle - just going to be really interesting to see. Moving to the legislature, significant news this week that rent stabilization has passed the State House and now it moves on to the Senate. What will rent stabilization accomplish? [00:09:03] Robert Cruickshank: So the bill, HB 2114, which passed out of the State House - it was the last bill they took up before the deadline to pass bills out of their original house - limits the amount of increase in rent each year to 7%. So a landlord can only raise your rent 7% a year. This is modeled on similar legislation that was adopted in Oregon and California right before the pandemic - in Oregon and California, it's a 5% annual increase. This being Washington state, we can't do things exactly the way that are done elsewhere - we've got to water it down a little bit, so it's 7%. But it's not rent control in which a property or a apartment is permanently capped at a certain level, no matter who's renting it. Like the Oregon and California laws, this one in Washington would exempt new construction. And the reason you want to exempt new construction is to encourage people to keep building housing. And there's plenty of research that shows now that one of the most effective ways to bring rent down, not just cap its growth, is to build more housing. So building more housing and then capping the annual rent increase on housing that's been around for a while generally works. And you're seeing this in California and in Oregon - especially in cities that have been building more housing, rents have come down while those living in older apartments, older homes, are seeing their rents capped, so they're having an easier time affording rent. This is all good, and it made it out of the State House on mostly a party line vote - Democrats almost all in favor with a few exceptions, Republicans almost all against. Now it goes to the State Senate where there's a number of conservative Democrats, like Annette Cleveland from Vancouver who blocked the Senate's version of the bill, who's against it. Surely Mark Mullet, a conservative Democrat from Issaquah running for governor - surely against it. And Rich Smith in The Stranger had a piece yesterday in which he related his conversation with Jamie Pedersen from Capitol Hill, one of the most rent-burdened districts in the city, one of the districts in the state of Washington - legislative districts - with the most renters in it. And Pedersen was hemming and hawing on it. And so it's clear that for this bill to pass - it surely is popular with the public. Democrats, you would think, would want to do the right thing on housing costs going into an election. But it's gonna take some pressure on Democrats in the State Senate to pass the bill, especially without watering it down further. The bill that Annette Cleveland, the senator from Vancouver, had blocked in the Senate would cap rent increases at 15% a year. It's like. - Why would you even bother passing a bill at that point? 7% is itself, like I said, watering down what California and Oregon have done, but 7% is still a pretty valuable cap. Hopefully the Senate passes it as is. Hopefully the State Senate doesn't demand even more watering down. There's no need for that. Just pass the bill. Protect people who are renting. [00:11:44] Crystal Fincher: Agree. We absolutely need to pass the bill. I do appreciate the House making this such a priority - building on the work that they did to enable the building of more housing, which is absolutely necessary, last session. And this session moving forward with protecting people in their homes - trying to prevent our homelessness crisis from getting even worse with people being unable to afford rent, being displaced, being unable to stay where they're living, to maintain their current job. So that's really important. But it does face an uncertain future in the Senate. I do appreciate the reporting that Rich Smith did. He also covered some other State senators on the fence, including Jesse Salomon from Shoreline, John Lovick from Mill Creek, Marko Liias from Everett, Steve Conway from Tacoma, Drew Hansen from Bainbridge Island, Sam Hunt from Olympia, Lisa Wellman from Mercer Island, and Majority Leader Andy Billig being on the fence. And so it's going to be really important for people who do care about this to let their opinions be known to these senators. This is really going to be another example of where - they've obviously had concerns for a while, they're hearing talking points that we're used to hearing - that we know have been refuted, that maybe that information hasn't gotten to them yet. And maybe they don't realize how much of a concern this is for residents. They may be - they're in Olympia a lot of time, they're hearing from a lot of lobbyists - and they aren't as close sometimes to the opinions of the people in their districts. But one thing that many people need to understand is that many of these districts are having legislative town halls coming up as soon as this weekend, but certainly in short order. We'll put a link to where you can find that information in the show notes. Make it a point to attend one of those. If you can't, call, email, make your voice heard - it's really going to take you letting them know that this is a priority for you in order for this to happen. It's possible. So we really need to do all we can to ensure that they know how we feel. [00:13:58] Robert Cruickshank: Exactly. And those State senators you named, they are all from safe blue seats. Not a single one of them, except for maybe John Lovick in Mill Creek, is from a purplish district where they have to worry about any electoral impact. Although, to be honest, this stuff is popular. There are plenty of renters in purple districts who are rent-burdened and who would love to see the Democratic majority in Olympia help them out, help keep their rent more affordable. So it's a huge political win for them. Some of this may be ideological opposition. Some of them may be getting a lot of money from apartment owners and landlords. Who knows? You got to look at the case by case. But gosh, you would hope that the State Senate has political sense - understands that this is not only the right thing to do, but a winner with the electorate, and passes the bill. But it is Olympia. And unfortunately, the State Senate in particular is often where good ideas go to die in Olympia. So we'll see what happens. [00:14:48] Crystal Fincher: We will see. We'll continue to follow that. Also want to talk about Alaska Airlines flight attendants this week authorizing a strike. Why did they authorize this, and what does this mean? [00:15:01] Robert Cruickshank: Well, I think it goes back to what we were talking about with workers in Renton. Flight attendants work long hours - they're not always paid for it. They're often only paid for when the flight is in the air. And their costs are going up, too. The expense of working in this country continues to rise and flight attendants continue to need to get paid well for that. Flight attendants' union is very well organized. There's the good Sara Nelson - Sara Nelson, head of the flight attendants' union, not Sara Nelson, head of Seattle City Council - is an amazing labor leader and has done a really good job advocating for the flight attendants across the industry. And you see that in the strike authorization vote - it was almost unanimous with almost complete 100% turnout from members of the Alaska Flight Attendants Union. Alaska Airlines has been facing its own issues lately, especially with some of their Boeing jets having problems. They've also, for the last 20 years, at least tried to cut costs everywhere they could. They outsourced what used to be unionized baggage handlers at SeaTac many years ago - that caused a big uproar. It was, in fact, concerns about Alaska Airlines and how they're paying ground crews that was a major factor in driving the SeaTac minimum wage ballot initiative way back in 2013. So here we are now - the Alaska Airlines flight attendants looking to get better treatment, better wages and working conditions. And huge support from the union. And as we've seen in this decade in particular, huge support from the public. And I think it's really worth noting - you and I can both remember the 90s, 2000s, when workers went out on strike weren't always getting widespread public support. And corporations had an ability to work the media to try to turn public against striking workers - now, teachers always had public support, firefighters had public support, but other workers didn't always. But that's really shifted. Here, there's a widespread public agreement that workers need to be treated well and paid well. You see that in Raise the Wage Renton succeeding. You see that in the huge public support for Starbucks workers out on strike who want a union contract. And if Alaska Airlines forces its flight attendants out on strike, you will see widespread public support for them as well, especially here in western Washington, where Alaska maintains a strong customer base. People in the Seattle area are loyal to Alaska, and they're going to support Alaska's flight attendants if they have to go out on strike. [00:17:20] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, and there's still a number of steps that would need to happen in order for it to lead to an actual strike. The flight attendants' union and Alaska Airlines are currently in negotiations, which according to an Alaska statement, is still ongoing. They signal positivity there. Hopefully that is the case and that continues. But first-year flight attendants right now are averaging less than $24,000 in salary annually. And especially here, but basically anywhere, that's not a wage you can live on. Those are literally poverty wages. And this is happening while Alaska Airlines has touted significant profits, very high profits. They're in the process of attempting to acquire another airline for $1.9 billion right now. And so part of this, which is the first strike authorization in 30 years for this union - it's not like this happens all the time. This is really long-standing grievances and really long dealing with these poverty wages - and they just can't anymore. This is unsustainable. And so hopefully they are earnestly making a go at a real fair wage. And I do think they have the public support. It is something that we've recognized across the country, unionization efforts in many different sectors for many different people. This week, we even saw - The Stranger writers announced that they're seeking a union, and wish them best of luck with that. But looking at this being necessary across the board - and even in tech sectors, which before felt immune to unionization pushes and they used to tout all of their benefits and how they received everything they could ever want - we've seen how quickly that tide can change. We've seen how quickly mass layoffs can take over an industry, even while companies are reporting record profits. And so this is really just another link in this chain here, saying - You know what, you're going to have to give a fair deal. It's not only about shareholders. It's about the people actually working, actually delivering the products and services that these companies are known for. The folks doing the work deserve a share of those profits, certainly more than they're getting right now. [00:19:44] Robert Cruickshank: I think that's right. And again, the public sees that and they know that being a flight attendant isn't easy work. But whoever it is, whatever sector they're in, whatever work they're doing, the public has really shifted and is in a really good place. They recognize that corporations and governments need to do right by workers and pay them well. Hopefully the flight attendants can settle this without a strike. And hopefully Alaska Airlines understands that the last thing they need right now is a strike. They've had enough problems already. So hopefully the corporate leadership gets that. [00:20:13] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. I also want to talk about a new study that certainly a lot of people haven't found surprising, especially after two very high-profile gender discrimination lawsuits against SPD. But a study was actually done that included focus groups with Seattle officers, both male and female. And what was uncovered was a pervasive apparent gender discrimination problem within SPD. What was uncovered here? [00:20:45] Robert Cruickshank: All sorts of instances of gender discrimination - from blocked promotions, to negative comments, to inequities and inconsistencies in who gets leave - all sorts of things that made it an extremely hostile work environment for women. And some of the celebrated women of the department - Detective Cookie, who's well known for leading chess clubs in Rainier Beach, sued the department for gender and racial discrimination. And what the study shows that it's pervasive, but the only times it seemed to get any better were when women led the department - Kathleen O'Toole in the mid 2010s and then Carmen Best up until 2020 seemed to have a little bit of positive impact on addressing these problems. But under current leadership and other recent leadership, it's just not a priority. And it speaks, I think, to the real problems - the actual problems - facing police. You hear from people like Sara Nelson and others on the right that the reason it's hard to recruit officers is because - Oh, those mean old progressives tried to "Defund the Police' and they said mean things about the cops. That's not it at all. This report actually shows why there's a recruiting problem for police. Normal people don't want to go work for the police department. They see a department that is racist, sexist - nothing is being done to address it. Who would want to enter that hostile work environment? I remember when Mike McGinn was mayor - we were working for McGinn in the early 2010s - trying to address some of these same problems, trying to help recruit a department that not only reflected Seattle's diversity, but lived in Seattle - was rooted in the community - and how hard that was. And you're seeing why. It's because there's a major cultural problem with police departments all across the country - Seattle's not uniquely bad at being sexist towards women officers, it's a problem everywhere. But it's the city that you would think would try to do something about it. But what we're hearing from the city council right now - and they had their first Public Safety Committee meeting recently of the newly elected council - is the same usual nonsense that just thinks, Oh, if we give them a bunch more money and say nice things about cops and ease up a little bit on, maybe more than a little bit, on reform efforts trying to hold the department accountable - that officers will want to join the ranks. And that's just not going to happen. It is a cultural problem with the department. It is a structural problem. The red flags are everywhere. And it's going to take new leadership at the police department - maybe at City Hall - that takes this seriously, is willing to do the hard work of rooting out these attitudes. And you've got to keep in mind, when you look at this rank-and-file department - they elected Mike Solan to lead their union, SPOG - in January of 2020. Solan was a known Trumper, hard right-wing guy - and this is well before George Floyd protests began. Yet another sign that the problem is the department itself, the officers themselves, who are often engaging in this behavior or refusing to hold each other accountable. Because again, this toxic culture of - Well, we got to protect each other at all costs. - it's going to take major changes, and I don't see this City leadership at City Hall being willing to undertake the work necessary to fix it. [00:23:54] Crystal Fincher: I think you've hit the nail on the head there. And just demonstrating that once again, we get a clear illustration of why SPD has a problem recruiting. It is absolutely a cultural issue. It is what they have been getting away with despite dissatisfaction from women. And women in the department saying either we're targeted or discriminated against, but a lot of us - even though we're experiencing it - just try and keep our heads down and stay silent. And a lot of those people end up moving out eventually because who wants to work in an environment like this? We recognize this in every other industry. There's a reason why organizations and corporations tout their corporate culture, tout their benefits for women, their respect for women, their inclusion of women in leadership and executive-level positions. And we don't see that here. So if the leadership in charge of this - from Bruce Harrell, who is the ultimate head of the department, the buck stops with him to the police chief to the City Council - if they're actually serious about addressing this and not just using this as a campaign wedge issue with the rhetoric, they will have to address the culture of this department. Now, the Chair of the Seattle City Council's Public Safety Committee, Bob Kettle, who was recently elected in November, said that the hiring numbers were disappointed. He said - "The number of women that were hired in 2023 was not acceptable. We need to have a representative force where women are well represented. We need to be creating that culture and an environment of inclusion. And also the idea that you can advance, you can be promoted, you can move forward in the organization." So if he is serious about that, he has to address the culture - and that's going to involve addressing a number of things. That's going to involve, perhaps, addressing a number of the people currently in leadership who have created and who continue this culture and who are going to have to be dealt with if this is going to change. But this isn't something that's just going to change because there're new people elected in office. This isn't something that's just going to change because they're getting compliments more as a department and more funding has been thrown at them. This is going to take active engagement and a difference in leadership, a difference in training, a completely different approach. So we'll follow this. Mayor Bruce Harrell also said that he is planning to meet with women throughout the department to hear directly from them and listen to their concerns - we will see what results from those conversations and what happens. But now there is a lot of touted alignment between the mayor and city council here, so there really should be no roadblocks to them really addressing this substantively - if they're serious about addressing this. [00:26:58] Robert Cruickshank: I agree. And one of the ways you'll see whether they're serious or not is how they handle the SPOG contract. And one of the things that helps change a department's culture, where this sort of behavior is clearly known to not be tolerated, is for there to be real consequences. How are officers disciplined? How are officers fired? How are they held accountable? Right now, it's very difficult to remove an officer - the current contract rules make it very easy for an officer to contest a firing or disciplinary action and be reinstated or have the disciplinary action overturned. You're not going to eradicate a culture of racism and sexism without changing that as well. And that is at the core of the fight over the SPOG contract, and we will see whether the mayor and the city council are serious about cultural changes at SPD. And you'll see it in how they handle the SPOG contract - hopefully they'll put a strong one out and hold their ground when SPOG pushes back. But that's not going to happen, honestly, without the public really pushing City Hall hard. Because I think you see - from both the mayor and the city council - a desire to cut deals with SPOG, a desire to not go too hard at them. And I don't see - absent public mobilization - a strong SPOG contract coming. [00:28:07] Crystal Fincher: I think you're right about that. In other SPD public safety news, Seattle is planning a significant rollout of the ShotSpotter system. We've talked about that before here on the show - it's basically a surveillance system that's supposed to hear, to be able to determine gunshots from noises, to try and pinpoint where it came from. Unfortunately, it has been an absolute failure in several other cities - we've had lots of information and data about this. And this week, we received news that the City of Chicago is actually canceling their contract after this failed in their city. And so once again, people are asking the question - Why, with such a horrible track record, are we spending so much money and getting ready to roll this failed technology out in Seattle? Why is this happening? [00:29:04] Robert Cruickshank: Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I see people on social media speculating it's because of campaign donations and things like that. I'm not sure that's it. I honestly think this goes back to something Ron Davis said in the campaign when he was running for city council, criticizing his opponent, Maritza Rivera, who ultimately won, and other candidates in-line with Sara Nelson for wanting to, in his words, "spread magic fairy dust" around public safety issues and assume that would work. And that really, I think, is what ShotSpotter is. It's magic fairy dust. This idea that there's some magical technological tool that can quickly identify where a gunshot is happening and deploy the officers there immediately. It sounds cool when you first hear about it like that, but as you pointed out and as Amy Sundberg has written about extensively, it doesn't work - just literally doesn't work. The number of false positives are so high that officers are essentially sent on wild goose chases - you can't trust it, it's not worth the money. And Chicago, which is a city with a very serious gun violence problem, explored this. And for them to reject it means it clearly does not work, and Chicago needs solutions that work. I think honestly, the reason why the city is adopting is they want to do something that looks like they're acting, that looks like they're taking it seriously, even though this isn't going to actually succeed. It is very much that magic fairy dust of trying to appear serious about gun violence, without really tackling the core issues that are happening here, without tackling the problems with policing, without tackling the underlying problems in communities and neighborhoods that can cause gun violence. There is a growing issue at schools in Seattle with gun violence. And students have been trying to raise this issue for a while, ever since a shooting at Ingraham High School in late 2022, another shooting that led to another student's death in near Chief Sealth High School in West Seattle recently, to a group of students robbing another student at Ingraham High School at gunpoint in recent weeks. There's a serious problem. And what you're not seeing is the City or the school district, to be honest, taking that very seriously or really responding in the ways that the students are demanding responses. And I think the really sad story with something like ShotSpotter is all this money and effort is being spent on a clearly failed piece of technology when other answers that students and community members are crying out for aren't being delivered. That's a real problem. [00:31:21] Crystal Fincher: It is absolutely a real problem. And I think there's near unanimous concern and desire for there to be real earnest effort to fix this. We know things that help reduce gun violence - there's lots of data out about that. The city and county have done some of them. They've implemented some of them on very limited basis. But it is challenging to see so much money diverted elsewhere to failed technologies and solutions like this, while actual evidence-based solutions are starved, defunded, and are not getting the kind of support they deserve - and that the residents of the city, that the students in our schools deserve. This is a major problem that we have to deal with seriously. And this just isn't serious at all. I feel like - it was the early 2010s - this technology came out and it was in that era of "the tech will save us" - everyone was disrupting in one way or another. There were lots of promises being made about new technology. And unfortunately, we saw with a lot of it in a lot of different areas that it just didn't deliver on the promises. So I don't fault people for initially saying - Hey, this may be another tool in the toolkit that we can use. But over the past 10 years, through several implementations in Atlanta, Pasadena, San Antonio, Dayton, Ohio, Chicago - it has failed to deliver anything close to what has happened. In fact, it's been harmful in many areas. And so you have people who are interested in solving this problem who are not just saying - Hey, we just need to throw our hands up and do nothing here. We're not trying to minimize the problem. They're in active roles and positions really saying - Hey, this is a priority. And unfortunately, this is not a serious solution to the problem. The Cook County state's attorney's office found that ShotSpotter had a "minimal effect on prosecuting gun violence cases," with their report saying "ShotSpotter is not making a significant impact on shooting incidents," with only 1% of shooting incidents ending in a ShotSpotter arrest. And it estimates the cost per ShotSpotter incident arrestee is over $200,000. That is not a wise use of government expenditures. A large study found that ShotSpotter has no impact - literally no impact - on the number of murder arrests or weapons arrests. And the Chicago's Office of Inspector General concluded that "CPD responses to ShotSpotter alerts rarely produced documented evidence of any gun-related crime, investigatory stop, or recovery of a firearm." Also, one of the big reasons why Seattle is saying they're implementing this is - Well, we're so short-staffed that we really need this technology and it's going to save manpower, it's going to save our officers' time, it's going to really take a lot of the work off their plate. Unfortunately, the exact opposite was shown to happen with ShotSpotter - "ShotSpotter does not make police more efficient or relieve staffing shortages." In fact, they found it's the opposite. ShotSpotter vastly increases the number of police deployments in response to supposed gunfire, but with no corresponding increase in gun violence arrests or other interventions. In fact, ShotSpotter imposes such a massive drain on police resources that it slows down police response to actual 911 emergencies reported by the public. This is a problem. It's not just something that doesn't work. It's actually actively harmful. It makes the problems worse that these elected officials are saying that they're seeking to address. With the challenges that we're experiencing with gun violence, with the absolute need to make our cities safer - to reduce these incidences - we quite literally cannot afford this. And so I hope they take a hard look at this, but it is really defying logic - in the midst of a budget crisis, in the midst of a gun violence crisis - to be embarking on this. I really hope they seriously evaluate what they're doing here. [00:35:54] Robert Cruickshank: I agree. And what you're raising is this question of where should we be putting the resources? And shout out to Erica C. Barnett at PubliCola, who's been writing in the last week or so some really good articles on this very topic - where is SPD putting its resources? A few days ago, she had a very well-reported article at PubliCola about enforcement of prostitution on Aurora Avenue, which is a very controversial thing to be doing for many reasons - is this is actually how you should protect sex workers? But also, is this how we should be prioritizing police resources? Whatever you think of sex work, pro or con, whatever your opinion is - is that where police resources should be going right now when we don't have as many officers as the City would like to have, when there's gun violence, and when there's property crime? And then she also reported recently about, speaking of Bob Kettle, he put out this proposal that he wants to focus on what he calls a "permissive environment towards crime" and closing unsecured vacant buildings, graffiti remediation as priorities. Again, whatever you think about vacant buildings and graffiti - how does that rank on a list of priorities when there are problems with gun violence in the City of Seattle? There are problems with real violent crime in the City of Seattle. And how are police department resources being allocated? I think these are questions that the public needs to be asking pretty tough questions about to City Hall, to Bob Kettle, to Sara Nelson, to Bruce Harrell, and SPD. Because, again, they haven't solved the cultural problem with SPD. They're not going to get many new officers until they do. So how do you use the resources you have right now? And it doesn't look like they're being allocated very effectively, whether it's cracking down, in their terms, on sex work on Aurora or buying things like ShotSpotter. It just seems like they're chasing what they think are easy wins that are not going to do anything to actually address the problem. And we will be here a year or two later still talking about problems with gun violence because City Hall didn't make it a real priority. [00:37:52] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. Also want to talk this week about news that was covered - actually in The Seattle Times and elsewhere - about the private sector kind of corresponding organization to the King County Regional Homeless Authority - We Are In, a philanthropic endeavor from some of the richest residents in the states and corporations in the state - actually folded. It was a failure. What happened? Why did this fall apart? [00:38:24] Robert Cruickshank: A lot of this stems from the debate in 2018 over the Head Tax - taxing Amazon to fund services related to homelessness. Mayor Ed Murray declared way back in, I think 2014, a state of emergency around homelessness. We're 10 years into that and nothing's been done. But what the City was looking to do in 2018 - Mike O'Brien and others were talking about bringing back the Head Tax, taxing the corporations in the city to fund services to address the homelessness issue. And the pushback from Amazon and others was - You don't need to tax us. We'll spend money better than government can and do it ourselves. And so that's what things like We Are In was intended to do. It was really intended to try to forestall new taxes by, in theory, showing that the private sector - through philanthropic efforts - can solve this more effectively. And guess what? They can't. In part because homelessness is a major challenge to solve without government resources, without major changes in how we build housing and how we provide services and where they're provided. And what you're seeing is that a philanthropic effort is not going to solve that. They keep chasing it because I think they have a political imperative to do so. But what happened was that We Are In wasn't producing the result they wanted to, leadership problems. And now Steve Ballmer is talking about - Well, maybe we'll just fund the King County Regional Homelessness Authority directly. It's like - okay, in that case, what's so different between that and taxation? There is a report that consultants came up with - I think got publicized in 2019 or 2020 - that the region would need to spend something like $450 million a year to really solve homelessness. You could easily raise that money through taxes and taxing corporations and wealthy individuals. And they are just so adamantly opposed to doing that. They would rather try to make philanthropic donations here and there, even when it's clearly insufficient to meet the need. It's not well thought out. It's not well programmed and just falls apart quickly. [00:40:27] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. I agree. Over so many years, we've heard so many times - Just run it like a business. We need to run government like a business. And over and over and over again, we see that fail - that doesn't work. When you can't target what you're doing to a certain market, when you're only serving a limited subset - when you have to serve the entire public, when you have to actually invest in people, and this isn't a quick product or service that you can use that automatically fixes a situation, there have to be systemic issues that are addressed. And sometimes there's this attitude that - Oh, it's so simple to fix. If you just put a business person in charge of it, they'll get it done. Look at how they built their company. They can certainly tackle this. And over and over again - this is the latest example - that just simply doesn't work. They aren't the same. They aren't the same set of skills. They operate on different levels. There's different training. Lots of stuff is just absolutely different. And part of me, fundamentally, wishes we would stop denigrating and insulting the people who have been doing this work, who have been really consistently voicing their concerns about what's needed, about what their experience shows solves this problem, about what is actually working. There are things that are working. There are things going right in our region that we seem to not pay attention to or that we seem to, especially from the perspective of a number of these organizations who spend so much money to fight taxes, spend so much money to pick councilmembers, saying - Well, we think we have a better solution here. And so we wasted time trying and failing with this when, again, the answer is systemic. We have to sustainably fund the types of housing and resources that get people housed once more, that prevent people from becoming unhoused, and that make this region affordable for everyone so that one unforeseen expense can't launch someone into homelessness. We have been doing a poor job on all of those accounts as a region for so long that it's going to take significant investment and effort to turn things around. Some of that is happening, and I'm encouraged by some things that we're seeing. But at the same time, we're also hearing, especially in the midst of these budget problems that cities are dealing with, that they're looking at unfunding and rolling back these things. Interesting on the heels of this ShotSpotter conversation, where we're investing money into that - they're talking about de-investing, about defunding homelessness responses, public health responses to these crises. And I think we have just seen that this group involved with this effort just does not understand the problem, had the opportunity to meaningfully participate in a fix, and it just didn't work out. That's great - they're doing a great job running their businesses. They can continue to do that. But it's time to really follow what the evidence says fixes this and not what business titans are wishing would fix it. [00:43:55] Robert Cruickshank: That's exactly right. And yet for the business titans, it's a question of power. They want to be the ones to ultimately decide how their money gets spent, not we the people or our elected representatives. I think of one of the things we started out talking about today is - rent stabilization bill in Olympia. Capping rent increases is a way to reduce homelessness. There are plenty of people who are pushed into homelessness by a rent increase they can't afford. Steve Ballmer calling up those State senators who are going to be tackling this bill saying - Hey, this would really help reduce homelessness if you pass this bill. I'm going to doubt that Steve Ballmer is making those calls. If I'm wrong, I'm happy to be wrong. I don't think I am. For them, they want the power to decide how their money is spent. And even when they spend it poorly, they still want that power. And I think they're willing to hoard that power even at the expense of people who really are in need, who are living without a home, and who need all of our help urgently. [00:44:49] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely agree. The last point I would want to make is that it's not like philanthropic funding is all evil, it's never helpful - it is. But this is about who is leading the solutions here and what we're doing. And I think that there are so many experts - so many people in organizations who are doing this work well - who need that additional funding. Let's put that philanthropic money into systems that are working instead of trying to recreate the wheel once again. So much time and money was lost here that so many people can't afford and that have had really horrible consequences. And I think a number of people who went into this were probably well-intentioned. But it just goes to show once again that - we know what works. And no matter how much we wish that it could be some simple fix over here, that it wouldn't require any public expenditure, it absolutely does. So it'll be interesting to follow and see what happens from there. And with that, I thank you for listening to Hacks & Wonks on this Friday, February 16th, 2024. The producer of Hacks & Wonks is the incredible Shannon Cheng. Our insightful co-host today was Chair of Sierra Club Seattle, longtime communications and political strategist, Robert Cruickshank. You can find Robert on Twitter at @cruickshank. You can find Hacks & Wonks on Twitter at @HacksWonks. You can find me on all platforms at @finchfrii, with two I's at the end. You can catch Hacks & Wonks on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts - just type "Hacks and Wonks" into the search bar. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get the full versions of our Friday week-in-review shows and our Tuesday topical show delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, leave a review wherever you listen. You can also get a full transcript of this episode and links to the resources referenced in the show at officialhacksandwonks.com and in the podcast episode notes. Thanks for tuning in. Talk to you next time.

Rich Smith, managing artistic director of the Over Our Head Players in Racine, talks about the Snowdance 10-Minute Comedy Festival, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. It has been a blockbuster success, with hundreds and hundreds of submissions coming from writers all across the country. (As of this posting, there appear to be a few seats available for some of the March performances.)

Chris Hughes, co-founder of Aquia, joins Chris and Robert on the Application Security Podcast to discuss points from his recent book Software Transparency: Supply Chain Security in an Era of a Software-Driven Society, co-authored with Tony Turner. The conversation touches on the U.S. government in the software supply chain, the definition and benefits of software transparency, the concept of a software bill of materials (SBOM), and the growth of open-source software. The episode also covers crucial topics like compliance versus real security in software startups, the role of SOC 2 in setting security baselines, and the importance of threat modeling in understanding software supply chain risks. They also talk about the imbalance between software suppliers and consumers in terms of information transparency and the burden on developers and engineers to handle vulnerability lists with little context.As an expert in the field, Chris touches on the broader challenges facing the cybersecurity community, including the pitfalls of overemphasizing technology at the expense of building strong relationships and trust. He advocates for a more holistic approach to security, one that prioritizes people over technology.LinksSoftware Transparency: Supply Chain Security in an Era of a Software-Driven Society by Chris Hughes and Tony Turnerhttps://www.wiley.com/en-us/Software+Transparency%3A+Supply+Chain+Security+in+an+Era+of+a+Software+Driven+Society-p-9781394158492Application Security Program Handbook by Derek Fisher https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Application-Security-Program-Handbook/Derek-Fisher/9781633439818Agile Application Security by Laura Bell, Michael Brunton-Spall, Rich Smith, Jim Birdhttps://www.oreilly.com/library/view/agile-application-security/9781491938836/CNCF Catalog of Supply Chain Compromiseshttps://github.com/cncf/tag-security/blob/main/supply-chain-security/compromises/README.mdFOLLOW OUR SOCIAL MEDIA: ➜Twitter: @AppSecPodcast➜LinkedIn: The Application Security Podcast➜YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ApplicationSecurityPodcast Thanks for Listening! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Today, I am blessed to have here with me Richard Smith. Richard began his keto journey for weight loss hoping to cure severe anxiety, depression, chronic fatigue, and daily debilitating migraines. During the year, Richard managed to lose over 100lbs. After reversing his illnesses and transforming his physical and emotional well-being via a ketogenic lifestyle, Richard was dedicated to helping transform the health and lives of others by providing support and supplements. In this episode, Richard discusses his past health problems, including obesity, diabetes, fatigue, depression, and anxiety. He reveals how keto transformed his well-being and life. Then, Richard dives into why cholesterol isn't the enemy and how you can determine if your cholesterol profile is actually damaged or not. Richard digs deep into insulin and leptin and how to optimize these hormones. Tune in as we chat about the problem with insulin resistance and a simple test to tell if you are insulin resistant. Reserve your FREE spot to our upcoming 5 day Keto Kickstart Challenge with Dr Eric Berg, Cynthia Thurlow, Ben Azadi & The Keto Kamp Team: https://www.ketokamp.com/keto-challenge / / E P I S O D E   S P ON S O R S  Wild Pastures: $20 OFF per Box for Life + Free Shipping for Life + $15 OFF your 1st Box! https://wildpastures.com/promos/save-20-for-life-lf?oid=6&affid=132&source_id=podcast&sub1=ad BonCharge: Blue light Blocking Glasses, Red Light Therapy, Sauna Blankets & More. Visit https://boncharge.com/pages/ketokamp and use the coupon code KETOKAMP for 15% off your order.  Text me the words "Podcast" +1 (786) 364-5002 to be added to my contacts list.  [00:40] Richard Speaks About His Health Problems and How Keto Transformed His Life Richard was clinically obese, diabetic, chronically tired, depressed, anxious, and experienced debilitating migraines that would make him blind. The worst part of Richard's health was his anxiety; he wouldn't be able to leave his house, car, or office. Richard never felt good enough to be around other people. Eventually, Richard realized that bread made his belly swell. So, he gave it up. Within 30 days of ditching bread, Richard lost 28 pounds. Starting keto has completely changed Richard's life; luckily, every factor of his life has improved. [26:20] Cholesterol Isn't The Enemy; In Fact, Cholesterol is Essential For Health Cholesterol is essential for life. It's imperative for cell formation, cell communication, nutrient absorption, nutrient transportation, and hormone production. The brain and the myelin sheath are made of cholesterol. Lacking cholesterol would be detrimental to your health. There is a massive miscommunication when it comes to cholesterol. LDL is proactive; it heals the body and repairs it. The two main contributing factors to heart disease are grains and seed oils. Seed oils do not help lower cholesterol. Reducing carbohydrates and seed oils is the best way to have healthy LDL. [35:00] Is Your Cholesterol Profile Damaged? Richard Explains Where Your Markers Should Be There's a simple way to see whether your cholesterol profile is damaged. Triglycerides are one of the most significant factors; aim for less than 0.5%. HDL should be greater than 1.5. The triglyceride to HDL ratio should be below one. You're in good shape if your cholesterol profile is around these markers. Remember, cholesterol is essential for life; every cell in the body is made of cholesterol. [39:45] You Can't Store Fat Without Insulin From Carbohydrates, Sugars, and Seed Oils We can't store fat without insulin. Insulin is secreted by the pancreas when we consume carbohydrates. Many people will eat carbs before going to the gym to have the energy to burn fat. However, when insulin is elevated, it tells the body to store fat. Eating carbs will make it almost impossible for us to burn fat for fuel. Insulin puts a biological lock on our fat stores and prevents them from leaving. Carbohydrates and sugars will increase insulin. Seed oils will also impact insulin; they cause insulin resistance. [42:40] The Foods You Eat Could Be Blocking Your Ability To Feel Full Leptin is a satiety hormone. It tells us that we have eaten and that we are full. Seed oils will block leptin. If you aren't feeling full, you will consume more food. Grains are high in lectins; they cause five times more fat storage than insulin. Lectins in grains will also block leptin. [49:55] Richard Reveals A Simple Test To Tell If You're Insulin Resistant As a world, we are insulin resistant. In fact, 95% of people are insulin resistant. Diabetes will start with food choices that began ten to fifteen years prior. There's a simple way to test if you suffer from insulin resistance. You have insulin resistance if you have an overhang over your pants, belt, or skirt. Restrict carbohydrates, and you will see a reduction in insulin levels. You don't need a myriad of medications to solve insulin resistance. AND MUCH MORE! Resources from this episode: Check out Keto Pro: https://theketopro.com/ Follow Richard Smith LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-smith-b810881b3/ Follow Keto-Pro Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theketoprocom/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/keto_pro/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/pro_keto Join the Keto Kamp Academy: https://ketokampacademy.com/7-day-trial-a Watch Keto Kamp on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUh_MOM621MvpW_HLtfkLyQ Get Keto Flex on Audible for Free (New Customers Only): https://adbl.co/36d6A24 Get Keto Flex on Audible here for current customers: https://adbl.co/3699lBm Reserve your FREE spot to our upcoming 5 day Keto Kickstart Challenge with Dr Eric Berg, Cynthia Thurlow, Ben Azadi & The Keto Kamp Team: https://www.ketokamp.com/keto-challenge / / E P I S O D E   S P ON S O R S  Wild Pastures: $20 OFF per Box for Life + Free Shipping for Life + $15 OFF your 1st Box! https://wildpastures.com/promos/save-20-for-life-lf?oid=6&affid=132&source_id=podcast&sub1=ad BonCharge: Blue light Blocking Glasses, Red Light Therapy, Sauna Blankets & More. Visit https://boncharge.com/pages/ketokamp and use the coupon code KETOKAMP for 15% off your order.  Text me the words "Podcast" +1 (786) 364-5002 to be added to my contacts list.  *Some Links Are Affiliates* // F O L L O W ▸ instagram | @thebenazadi | http://bit.ly/2B1NXKW ▸ facebook | /thebenazadi | http://bit.ly/2BVvvW6 ▸ twitter | @thebenazadi http://bit.ly/2USE0so ▸clubhouse | @thebenazadi Disclaimer: This podcast is for information purposes only. Statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast including Ben Azadi disclaim responsibility from any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not accept responsibility of statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guests qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or non-direct interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician.

Rich Smith steps into the limelight in this episode of 'Behind The Scrubs.' From a journey that starts in politics, passes through family movie theaters, and lands in healthcare staffing - his story is nothing short of incredible. And let's not forget the craft beers and pivotal debates on AI's role in healthcare staffing. Grab your headphones, travel nurses, and let's delve into the real stories behind the scrubs.

I talk about the new Corvette "E-Ray" and why hybrid sports cars are a great idea. I also spend the second half of the show talking to Custer County Sheriff Rich Smith about why Colorado is the #1 state in the nation for auto theft, as well as what we can do about it. That, and YOUR car sounds on this special edition of the show!Now On Video!Rumble.com/automotiveadhdhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUkSzh2ny2Idb4S3lC0qeYAhttps://www.tiktok.com/@automotiveadhdpodcastSupport the Show!thespeedcouncil.orgSend in Your Car Sounds!facebook.com/automotiveadhd

On this week-in-review, Crystal is joined by Seattle political reporter and editor of PubliCola, Erica Barnett! The show starts with the infuriating story of Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) leaders joking about a fellow Seattle Police Department (SPD) officer running over and killing Jaahnavi Kandula - how the shocking comments caught on body cam confirm suspicions of a culture in SPD that disregards life, that the SPOG police union is synonymous with the department, and whether a seemingly absent Mayor Bruce Harrell will do anything about a troubled department under his executive purview. Erica and Crystal then discuss Bob Ferguson officially entering the governor's race with Jay Inslee's endorsement, Rebecca Saldaña jumping into a crowded Public Lands Commissioner race, no charges against Jenny Durkan or Carmen Best for their deleted texts during the 2020 George Floyd protests, the latest on Seattle's drug criminalization bill, and flawed interviews for KCRHA's Five-Year Plan for homelessness. As always, a full text transcript of the show is available below and at officialhacksandwonks.com. Find the host, Crystal Fincher, on Twitter at @finchfrii and find today's co-host, Erica Barnett, at @ericacbarnett.   Resources “Rob Saka, Candidate for Seattle City Council District 1” from Hacks & Wonks   “Maren Costa, Candidate for Seattle City Council District 1” from Hacks & Wonks   “"Write a Check for $11,000. She Was 26, She Had Limited Value." SPD Officer Jokes with Police Union Leader About Killing of Pedestrian by Fellow Cop” by Erica C. Barnett from PubliCola   “‘Feel safer yet?' Seattle police union's contempt keeps showing through” by Danny Westneat from The Seattle Times   “Handling of Jaahnavi Kandula's death brings criticism from Seattle leaders” by Sarah Grace Taylor from The Seattle Times   “Political consultant weighs in on growing Washington governor's race” by Brittany Toolis from KIRO 7 News Seattle   “Jay Inslee endorses Bob Ferguson to succeed him as WA governor” by David Gutman and Lauren Girgis from The Seattle Times   “Rebecca Saldaña Jumps into Weirdly Crowded Race for Lands Commissioner” by Rich Smith from The Stranger   “No Charges Against Durkan and Best for Deleted Texts; Investigation Reveals Holes in City Records Retention Policies” by Erica C. Barnett from PubliCola   “After Watering Down Language About Diversion, Committee Moves Drug Criminalization Bill Forward” by Erica C. Barnett from PubliCola   “Harrell's “$27 Million Drug Diversion and Treatment” Plan Would Allow Prosecutions But Add No New Funding” by Erica C. Barnett from PubliCola   “The Five-Year Plan for Homelessness Was Based Largely on 180 Interviews. Experts Say They Were Deeply Flawed.” by Erica C. Barnett from PubliCola   Find stories that Crystal is reading here   Transcript [00:00:00] Crystal Fincher: Welcome to Hacks & Wonks. I'm Crystal Fincher, and I'm a political consultant and your host. On this show, we talk with policy wonks and political hacks to gather insight into local politics and policy in Washington state through the lens of those doing the work with behind-the-scenes perspectives on what's happening, why it's happening, and what you can do about it. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get the full versions of our Tuesday topical show and our Friday week-in-review delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, the most helpful thing you can do is leave a review wherever you listen to Hacks & Wonks. Full transcripts and resources referenced in the show are always available at officialhacksandwonks.com and in our episode notes. If you missed this week's topical shows, we kicked off our series of Seattle City Council candidate interviews. All 14 candidates for 7 positions were invited. And over the last week, we had in-depth conversations with many of them. This week, we presented District 1 candidates, Rob Saka and Maren Costa. Have a listen to those and stay tuned over the coming weeks - we hope these interviews will help voters better understand who these candidates are and inform their choices for the November 7th general election. Today, we're continuing our Friday week-in-review shows where we review the news of the week with a co-host. Welcome back to the program, friend of the show and today's co-host: Seattle political reporter and editor of PubliCola, Erica Barnett. [00:01:37] Erica Barnett: It's great to be here. [00:01:39] Crystal Fincher: Great to have you back. Well, I wanna start off talking about just an infuriating story this week where Seattle police officers - a union leader - joked about killing of a pedestrian by another Seattle police officer - and just really disgusting. What happened here? [00:01:58] Erica Barnett: The Seattle Police Department and the King County Prosecutor's Office actually released this video from the night that Jaahnavi Kandula was killed by Officer Kevin Dave. It is a short clip that shows one-half of a conversation between Daniel Auderer, who is the Seattle Police Officers Guild vice president, and Mike Solan, the president of the police guild - as you said, joking and laughing about the incident that had just happened. And also minimizing the incident - so from what we can hear of Auderer's part of the conversation, he makes some comments implying that the crash wasn't that bad, that Dave was acting within policy, that he was not speeding too much - all of which was not true. He was going 74 miles an hour. The incident was very gruesome and just a horrible tragedy. Then you can hear him saying in a joking manner, "But she is dead." And then he pauses and he says, "No, it's a regular person." in response to something that Solan has said - and there's been a lot of speculation about what that might be. Then he says, "Yeah, just write a check." - after laughing - "Yeah, $11,000. She was 26 anyway, she had limited value." I'm reading the words verbatim, but I really recommend watching the video, which we posted on PubliCola.com, because you can hear the tone and you can hear the sort of cackling laughter - which I think conveys the intent a lot more clearly than just reading a transcript of it. [00:03:23] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, we will link that PubliCola story with the video in our show notes, but it's just infuriating. And just to recap what happened just in the killing of her initially - that was a tragedy and an infuriating event. An officer was responding to a call that arguably police aren't needed at - in other jurisdictions, they don't seem to be needed on those types of calls - but without lights and sirens blaring, going over 70 mph on just a regular City street. And yeah, that's illegal for regular people for a reason - common sense would dictate that would be against policy - we give them lights and sirens for a reason to alert people that they're coming really fast and to clear the way. And it just seemed like Jaahnavi didn't have a chance here. And then the slow leak of information afterwards - just the event itself seemed to devalue their life and the way it was handled - and then to see this as the reaction. If their job is to keep us safe, they seem gleefully opposed to that. [00:04:28] Erica Barnett: Yeah, I think that in the aftermath of the story going national and international, I think that one of the reactions I've heard is - Well, this is how we've always thought - from people who are skeptical of the police, I should say - this is how we've always assumed they talk, but to actually hear it on tape is shocking. And I think what happened in this video, the reason we have it is because Auderer perhaps forgot his body cam was on. 'Cause after he makes his last comment about $11,000, she had limited value, he turns off the camera and we don't hear any more of that conversation. This is a rare look into one such conversation between officers. And I will say too, that there was a - Jason Rantz, a local radio personality, right-wing commentator, tried to pre-spin this by saying that this was just "gallows humor" between two officers, and this is very common in professions where you see a lot of grisly and terrible stuff. And I will just point out, first of all, gallows humor is like making a joke about, I don't know, like a 9/11 joke, you know, 20 years after the fact. It's not on the night that someone was killed, joking about her being essentially worthless and trying to minimize the incident. That's not gallows humor. That's just the way, apparently, the police union VP and president talk amongst each other. It just shows that the culture of the department - we talk a lot about City Hall, which I cover - they talk a lot about recruiting better officers and getting the right kind of police. But the problem is if the culture itself is rotten, there's no fixing that by just putting 5 new officers, 10 new officers at the bottom of the chain. It comes from the top. And that is then - these two officials are at the top of that chain. [00:06:09] Crystal Fincher: It does come from the top. And this also isn't the only time that it seems they have really distastefully discussed deaths at the hands of their officers or other people's deaths. There was a story that made the news not too long ago about them having a tombstone in one of their precincts for someone who was killed. There have been a couple officers who've had complaints for posting social media posts that seem to make fun of protesters who were run over. We have had a protester run over and killed here in the city. This is something that we've talked about that we - as a community - project that is against our values, but we continue to let this police department just mock people's safety in the city. I mean, you know something wild is happening when even Danny Westneat - who I think most people consider to be an extremely moderate, feels in-line with the Seattle Times editorial board, columnist for The Times - even he thinks SPOG has gone too far, and he's notoriously sympathetic to the police department. [00:07:15] Erica Barnett: Yeah, I think that in that article, he almost got there. The article was basically - we desperately need more police, but this darn police union just keeps messing up and saying these terrible things, so we've got to reform this police union - which I just thought was a bizarre note in an otherwise pretty reasonable article because the police union is the top. It is the people that create the culture for the rest of the department in a lot of ways, perhaps more so than the police chief and the command staff. It's made up of cops. The cops vote in the head of the police union, the vice president - they are the ones that are choosing these folks. So if the police union's culture is broken, I think that means that SPD's culture is broken. [00:07:54] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, unions are the culture. I feel like that's a trickle-down effect of anti-labor forces trying to paint unions as separate entities as workers. They are the workers. They're elected and selected by workers. So if anything, they seem to be the distillation of the culture. And there is a problem - I don't think that's controversial to say, I don't think that's even in dispute anymore - widely across this. And there've been, again, lots of people pointing out these problems for years and years. And it feels like this is where we arrive at if we ignore this for so long. As I talked about in the opening, we just got done with a large round of Seattle City Council candidate interviews. And it was really interesting to hear, particularly from a few of them - there's three that I'm thinking of, that people will eventually hear - but who will talk about the need for more cops, who will talk about how important it is to rebuild trust with the community. But over and over again, it seems like they put it completely on the community to be responsible for coddling, and repairing the relationship, and building trust. And it seems like that needs to start on the other side. This is not even something that in polite society would happen, right? These are disgusting comments and disgusting beliefs, no matter who has them or where they come from. And we basically have sanctioned and hand over the power to violate people's civic rights to a department where this happens. And it's just a real challenge. And we have several councilmembers right now who have talked about needing to bring accountability and reform the police department in campaign materials when they were running. And it just seems like that dropped off the face of the earth. This should be a priority. But more than everything else, I wanna talk about the responsibility that the mayor has here - it's like he disappears in these conversations and we talk about the council and we talk about the police department. Bruce Harrell is their boss. Bruce Harrell is the executive in charge here. Chief Adrian Diaz serves at the pleasure of, is appointed by the mayor. This is the executive's responsibility. The buck literally stops with him on this. And he seems to just be largely absent. I think I saw comments that he may have issued an apology this morning, but - Where is he on talking about the culture? Where is his outrage? Where is he in dealing with this? And this is happening amid a backdrop of a SPOG contract negotiation. How is he going to address the issues here in this contract? Or are we gonna paper over it? There's a lot talked about - one of his chief lieutenants, Tim Burgess, a former police officer, and how sympathetic he's been to police - and is that going to create a situation where this is yet another event that goes unaddressed in policy, and we don't put anything in place to prevent this from happening again? [00:10:45] Erica Barnett: Harrell's statement was very much like a "bad apple" statement without completing the thought, which is that a bad apple ruins the bunch - that we're disheartened by the comments of this one officer. As you said, not addressing the culture, not addressing the fact that he can actually do something about this stuff. He is the person with the power. And as you mentioned, he was basically absent - made a statement in response to some questions, but it was pretty terse, and it didn't get at the larger cultural issues that I think this does reflect. [00:11:14] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. And I know there were comments, I saw comments from a couple of City councilmembers as of last night - calls to hear from more on their opinion on this issue. I have not seen more - we'll see if those trickle in over the coming day or two. But Bruce Harrell has the responsibility and the power to do something about this. Is he going to use it? - that's the question people should be asking, even more than what Chief Adrian Diaz is gonna do. This is unacceptable behavior. This absolutely speaks to the culture, and it's time we have someone who takes that seriously as an executive. Now, I also wanna talk about news that came out this week - that wasn't necessarily surprising, but certainly a benchmark and a milestone in a campaign - and that is current Attorney General Bob Ferguson officially announced his candidacy for governor and came with the endorsement of Jay Inslee. How do you see him as a candidate and his position in this field so far? [00:12:17] Erica Barnett: It's a big deal. I think Ferguson has been waiting patiently - or not - to run for governor for a while. He's had this trajectory - waited for Inslee when he decided to run again last time - this is the reward. I think it puts him very much in the front of the field as Inslee's successor. Obviously we'll see, but I think Inslee is a fairly popular governor. You see this in a lot of races, where you have an anointed person - the King County Council, Teresa Mosqueda is kind of similar - comes in with all the endorsements and I think is well-placed to win. So yeah, I think this puts Ferguson in a really strong position. [00:12:52] Crystal Fincher: He is in a really strong position. As we know - I wish it wasn't the case, but unfortunately it is reality - that money matters a lot in politics right now. It's the only reliable way to communicate with voters en masse. There's earned media, but there's less reporters around the state than there used to be. So paying to put communications in front of voters is something that needs to be done. Paying a staff that can manage a campaign of that scale is something that needs to be done. And Bob Ferguson is head and shoulders above everyone else - he has more than double what all of the other candidates have combined in terms of finances, so that puts him in a great position. Obviously having the endorsement of the most visible Democrat in the state right now is something that every candidate would accept - I'm sure almost every candidate on the Democratic side would accept right now. It's gonna be interesting. But I do think we still have a lot of time left, there's still a lot of conversation left. It is an interesting field from Hilary Franz to Mark Mullet, a moderate or conservative Democrat. And then on the Republican side, Dave Reichert and Semi Bird - one who I think is trading in on his reputation, at least in a lot of media stories as a moderate, but from being pro-life, anti-choice, to a number of other viewpoints - I don't know that realistically he's a moderate, just kind of a standard Republican. And then Semi Bird, who's endorsed by people like Joe Kent and others, who are definitely on the far right-wing side. So this is gonna be an interesting race. There's a lot of time left. And I still think even though Bob Ferguson - I think it's uncontroversial to say he's the front runner - still important to really examine what they believe, to talk to the voters around the state. And it seems like he's taking that seriously and vigorously campaigning. So we'll continue to follow what this race is, but it is going to be an interesting one. [00:14:54] Erica Barnett: I will say really quickly too, that Reichert does not seem to be running a particularly active campaign. He's not, from what I hear, out there doing a lot of on-the-ground campaigning the way that Ferguson has. So while I think you're gonna hear a lot about him on TV news and more right-leaning publications, I think that we're talking about the Democratic side of the field because it's very unlikely that we'll have a Republican governor - even one who has a lot of name recognition like Reichert. [00:15:20] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, absolutely. So we'll continue to follow that. And just as an aside, I thought I would mention that in the race, another statewide race, for Public Lands Commissioner, State Senator Rebecca Saldaña jumped into the race - joining State Senator Mona Das, Makah Tribal member Patrick Finedays DePoe, King County Councilmember Dave Upthegrove, and current State Senator Kevin Van De Wege. As well as on the Republican side - I'm not sure how to pronounce her name - but Sue Kuehl Pederson. It's a crowded race that's going to be an interesting one. And I'm really curious to continue to see what Senator Rebecca Saldaña has to say, as well as the other ones. But that's a crowded race, and that one could be very interesting. [00:16:03] Erica Barnett: Absolutely. Weirdly crowded race. [00:16:05] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, very interesting. [00:16:06] Erica Barnett: Or surprisingly - I don't know about weirdly - but surprisingly crowded. [00:16:09] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, surprisingly. Rich Smith of The Stranger did an article about that this week, which we will link in the show notes. Now, I also want to talk about news we received this week about another long-standing issue tied to both public safety and a former mayor. And that's news that we received that former Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan and former Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best will not be facing charges for deleting texts. What was the finding here and what does this mean? [00:16:39] Erica Barnett: Yeah, as we all know, they deleted tens of thousands of texts, many of them during the crucial period when 2020 protests were going on, when they were amassing troops - so to speak - and reacting with force to people protesting police violence after George Floyd was killed. And the finding essentially was that the King County Prosecutor's Office could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that these deletions had been intentional and that they were trying to effectively conceal public records. It's a pretty high standard of proof that they have to meet at the prosecutor's office. I read the entire report from the investigator - what was released to reporters earlier this week - I have to say they put a lot of faith, I think, in or at least trust in public officials' statements that they sort of didn't know anything about the City's retention policy for cell phones, for text messages. The excuse was often - Well, I thought they were being preserved in a server somewhere, so it was fine to delete them. And I asked - because I think we all know when we delete our text messages, they're gone. You can't just get them back. AT&T doesn't have a server for us somewhere where we can get our text messages. So I said - Do they not understand how cell phones work? Was there any training on this? - and the response was - Well, I would dispute that they understand how cell phones work and there was training, but it was mostly about email. There's some stuff in here that kind of strains credulity a little bit, but again, it's a high standard of proof they had to meet, so that was their argument. There's a civil case where a federal judge said that it was unlikely that they didn't know what they were doing, but he had a lower standard of proof. So that's why it's a slightly different conclusion from basically the same facts. [00:18:17] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, I think these are always interesting situation - when it comes to an actual charging decision and what's needed there. I'm sure they're considering - unfortunately in our society today, they can afford significant defenses that are not available to a lot of people - that may have factored into their decision. But overall, it just once again seems like there is a different standard for people with power than those without power. And we're having conversations about people dealing with addiction, about people shoplifting for financial reasons - and even not for financial reasons - people being assaulted and in some instances killed for petty theft, or eviction, or different things. And it seems like we have no problem cracking down and expecting perfect compliance from people without power. But those that do just don't seem to be held to the same standard of accountability. And I think that's damaging and troubling. And I think we need to explore that and make sure we do hold people accountable. And it also just doesn't, once again, escape my notice that these aren't the first controversies that either one of them dealt with that did not have the kind of accountability attached to them. And so yes, it's a slippery slope. And if you keep sliding, you're gonna wind up in a low, dirty place. And once again, this is part of what undermines people's trust in power, and in institutions, and in democracy. And we need to be doing all we can to move in the opposite direction right now - to build trust and to conduct actions with integrity. And it just doesn't seem like that is a priority everywhere - they know they can get away with it - and it's really frustrating and disheartening, and we just need to do better overall. [00:20:05] Erica Barnett: To put a fine point on one of the things that the investigation revealed to me that I was not aware of actually about public disclosure - which is that text messages, according to the City, can be deleted if they are "transitory" in nature. And "transitory" is defined as not relating to policy decisions or things of substance like that, which means that according to Durkan and Best, it was fine to delete anything that was not like - We are going to adopt this policy or propose this policy, or our policy is to tear gas all protesters or something like that. So if it's tactical in the moment, that was not preserved. But I do records requests - I get text messages from officials - and a lot of times they include stuff that Durkan and Best are defining as transitory, like text message - I mean, I'm just making this up - but an official saying this other official is a jerk or somebody. There's all kinds of sort of process related text messages and texts that give some insight to decision-making that would be considered transitory. It is entirely possible that Durkan and Best are deleting all of those kinds of messages, which is not something I think should be deleted, and that I think is in the public interest to know about if people are requesting it. So I found that very disturbing - this notion that you can just destroy records if they aren't related to policy. I think in practice, most officials know better than that - and that's just based on records requests I've done - but apparently that's a big loophole that I think should be closed in the policies at the City, if at all possible. [00:21:33] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. Now I wanna talk about the return of the drug criminalization bill in the City of Seattle. What's happening with this? [00:21:43] Erica Barnett: The City Council's Public Safety Committee voted this week to basically move it forward to the full council. There's a new version that has a lot of nice language - in the sort of non-binding whereas clauses - about we don't wanna start another drug war and we definitely, for sure for real, prefer diversion. But essentially the impact of the bill is the same as it has always been, which is to empower the city attorney to prosecute and empower police to arrest for people using drugs in public and for simple possession of drugs other than cannabis. There's some language in the bill - and including in the text of the bill itself - that says there will be a policy in the future that says that police should try to put people into diversion programs first. And there's a couple kinds of diversion programs that we fund - inadequately currently - to actually divert the number of people that would be eligible now. So the impact of this bill is, I think, going to actually be pretty limited because - unless the mayor proposes massive investments in diversion programs like LEAD, potentially like some of these pretrial diversion programs that City Attorney's Office wants to fund. But we're facing a huge budget deficit in 2025 and years out, so it feels like a lot of kind of smoke-and-mirrors talk. We really love diversion, but we're not gonna fund it. And maybe I'll be proven wrong in two weeks when the mayor releases his budget, but my bet is that there's not gonna be massive new funding for these programs and that this is gonna end up being mostly talk. [00:23:19] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, mostly talk. And just on that specifically - that the mayor did announce $27 million to help support this effort. Is that $27 million - is it what it sounds like? [00:23:33] Erica Barnett: Yeah, this is like one of the things that I feel like I've been shouting from the rooftops, and all the other local press - I don't know why - keep reporting it as if it is a $27 million check of new money, but it's actually $7 million that's left over in federal CDBG [Community Development Block Grant] grant funding that has to be spent, but the City has failed to spend it so far. So that's a lump sum - some of that's gonna go to an opiate recovery site run by DESC that I wrote about at PubliCola a couple of weeks ago. And then the rest is a slow trickle, over 18 years, of funding from a previously announced opiate settlement. And so that's gonna be on average about $1 million a year. As City Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda was pointing out earlier this week, a lot of that - 20% of that goes to administrative overhead. So you're really looking at more $700,000-$800,000 a year, and it diminishes in out years - that is what they call budget dust - it is not enough to pay for virtually anything. I don't know what they're going to ultimately spend that trickle of funding on, but it's definitely not $27 million. That's what I mean by smoke and mirrors - that's a good example. It looks like a fairly big number, but then you realize it's stretched out into the 2030s and it's not nearly as big looking - actually, sorry, the 2040s, I believe, if I'm doing my math right - it doesn't look nearly as big when you actually look at what it is. So I encourage people to do that, and I've written more about this at PubliCola too. [00:24:58] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, absolutely. We can also link that article. The most frustrating thing to me about Seattle politics, I think - in addition to just the endless process and reconsideration of things instead of making a decision and doing it - is this thing right here where there is a problem and people seem to actually, in public, rhetorically agree with the problem. Arresting people just for drug offenses does not solve that problem - it destabilizes people more, jail is not an effective place for drug treatment. Does that mean no one in the history of ever has ever become clean in jail? - there have been people, but they're few and far between. And experience and research and common sense, when you look at what actually happens there, really shows that is more of a destabilizing experience, that people who are in addiction need treatment, effective treatment, for that addiction and substance use disorder. And for people who may be recreationally using, sending them to jail doesn't help them when it comes to - and in fact, it's very hurtful - when it comes to finding a job, to securing housing, a variety of things. And that often has a more negative effect when it comes to forcing people into needing assistance, into needing help or completely falling through the cracks and becoming homeless - and dealing with the challenges there that we all pay for as a society. And so here we are again, where we actually did not solve the problem that everyone is articulating - and it seems like we just punted on that. But we're funding the thing that we say is not going to solve the problem, that we're confident is not going to solve the problem - and wrapping words around everything else, but that action isn't there. And I think what's frustrating to a lot of people, including me, it's sometimes - people on the left or Democrats are in this larger public safety conversation get painted as not wanting to do anything. And that's just so far from the truth. This is a problem, we need to address it. I just want to do something that has a chance of helping. And it seems like we're throwing good money after bad here and investing in something that we know is not going to be very helpful, meanwhile not funding the things that will be. And so we're going to be a year or two down the line and we'll see what the conversation we continue to have then is, but wondering at which point we stop doing the same thing that keeps getting us these suboptimal results. [00:27:20] Erica Barnett: And this is one place that you can blame the city council. I know the city council gets blamed for everything, but they are out there saying that this is a massively changed bill and it's changed in meaningful ways - in my opinion, it really hasn't been. [00:27:32] Crystal Fincher: I agree with that. I want to conclude by talking about a story that you wrote at PubliCola this week, talking about challenges with the way interviews for the Regional Homeless Authority's Five-Year Plan. What happened here and what were the problems? [00:27:49] Erica Barnett: Yeah, the new Five-Year Plan for homelessness, which was pretty controversial when it first came out because it had a $12 billion price tag, was based largely on 180 interviews that the homelessness authority did with people who are unsheltered in places around the county. And the interviews were basically 31 questions that they were supposed to vaguely stick to, but some that they really needed to get the answers to - for demographic reasons - and didn't always. The interviews were conducted primarily by members of the Lived Experience Coalition with some KCRHA staff doing them too. I've read about 90 of the 180, so about half of the 180 so far - and I would describe them as primarily being very discursive, very non-scientific. And it's not just that they are qualitative interviews 'cause it's fine for a qualitative interview to ramble - I talked to a couple of experts about how this kind of research usually works - and the idea is to make it more like a conversation, and that was the goal here. But in a lot of cases, the interviewers were doing things like suggesting answers, like interrupting, like talking at great length about themselves and their own experience, making suggestions, making assurances or promises that they could help them with services. There are just all kinds of things going on in these interviews that are not best practices for this type of interview. And then the interviews, which generally, people didn't tend to answer the question - there was a question about what has been helpful or harmful to you - and the goal there was to get people to say things that would suggest a shelter type, for example. They almost never said a specific shelter type except for a tiny house village, but the interviews were then coded by researchers to sort of lead to a specific set of shelter types. And without getting into too much technical detail, the idea was if somebody said they wanted X type of service or they had Y type of problem, that would suggest they needed Z type of service. So you're living in your car, you probably need a place to park your car safely. You're living in an RV, you need an RV safe lot. And the problem is, first of all, you're extrapolating from 180 interviews. And second, some of these solutions are pretty determinative. If you live in an RV, do you wanna live in an RV forever? Maybe not. Anyway, it just, it was not a great process to come up with this plan that ultimately is a plan to spend billions of dollars, even if it doesn't have that price tag, on a specific breakdown of types of service. And so I think they're not gonna do it again this way next year, but I think it did really inform this plan in a way that was not always super helpful. [00:30:23] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, and I do know a little something about qualitative and quantitative research. As you said, doing qualitative interviews - in a narrative format, having a conversation - is not in itself a bad thing, but you can't interject your experience. You can't help inform the answers of the people you're talking to and that seemed to happen. And it really did seem like it was - they had an ambitious plan, maybe the training for how to do this was not as comprehensive as it needed to be - that certainly appears to be the case. Initially, they actually did hundreds, multiple hundreds of interviews for this, but a lot of them had to just be discarded - they were so outside of the bounds of what was supposed to happen, they were not able to be included in what they considered their final data set. And that's really unfortunate. It's a lot of time, it's a lot of effort - especially with populations that are harder to consistently contact and follow up with, any chance you have to connect with them is really meaningful. And so if you don't utilize that time correctly, or if you can't do anything with that, that just seems like an extra painful loss. I understand the ambition to get this done, but the execution really suffered. And I hope that there are lessons learned from this. Even in the ones that were done wrong - I say it seems like an issue of training and overambition, 'cause usually there is a lot of training that goes into how to do this. Usually these are people's professions that actually do this. It's not - Oh, hey, today we're gonna do some qualitative interviews and just walk up and have a conversation and check some things off the list. - it doesn't work that way. So that was unfortunate to hear. And the recommendations from this - I don't know if they change or not after review of this whole situation - but certainly when you know that eyes are going to be getting wide looking at the price tag of this, you really do have to make sure that you're executing and implementing well and that was a challenge here. So how do they move on from this? Was it at all addressed? Are they gonna do this again? What's going to happen? [00:32:25] Erica Barnett: I don't think they're gonna do the qualitative interviews, at least in this way again. I think this was something that Marc Dones really emphasized - the former head of the KCRHA - really wanted to do. And it got rolled into also doing the Point-In-Time count based on extrapolations from this group of folks they interviewed. They call these oral histories and really emphasized the need to get this data. I don't think it's gonna happen again based on what KCRHA officials told me, but qualitative data - I mean, I should say, is not as you mentioned a bad thing - it can be very useful. But the training that they received was a one-time training, or perhaps in two parts, by Marc Dones - I don't think they have anybody on staff right now that is trained in the kind of stuff that Dones was training them on. So I think this is probably one of many things that we'll see that happened under - in the first two years of the agency - that's gonna go by the wayside in the future. So doubt we'll see this again. [00:33:22] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, I hope - there usually is really useful information and insight that comes from doing qualitative research. I don't think that we should necessarily throw the baby out with the bathwater here overall, but certainly this was a big challenge. And I hope that informs how they choose to move forward in the future. But with that, we thank you for listening to Hacks & Wonks on this Friday, September 15th, 2023. The producer of Hacks & Wonks is the wonderful Dr. Shannon Cheng. Our insightful co-host today is Seattle political reporter and editor of PubliCola, Erica Barnett. You can find Erica on Twitter @ericacbarnett, or X formerly known as Twitter, as @ericacbarnett and on PubliCola.com. You can follow Hacks & Wonks on Twitter @HacksWonks. You can find me on multiple platforms as @finchfrii, that's F-I-N-C-H-F-R-I-I. You can catch Hacks & Wonks wherever you get your podcasts - just type "Hacks and Wonks" into the search bar. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get the full versions of our Friday week-in-review shows and our Tuesday topical show delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, leave a review wherever you listen. You can also get the full transcript of this episode and links to the resources referenced in the show at officialhacksandwonks.com and in the podcast episode notes. Thanks for tuning in - talk to you next time.

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On this Hacks & Wonks week-in-review, political consultant and host Crystal Fincher is joined by Seattle Axios reporter, Melissa Santos! Now that the Washington state legislature has passed a major bill cutoff deadline, Crystal and Melissa discuss a long list of bills that died and those still fighting to survive - including landmark gun safety and housing bills. They also discuss Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell's still-unfulfilled promise to advance alternate 911 response programs that can make our streets safer and help mitigate the SPD staffing crisis that the mayor says we have. They also discuss Mayor Harrell's decision to postpone the removal of cherry trees at Pike Place Market after community pushback. As always, a full text transcript of the show is available below and at officialhacksandwonks.com. Find the host, Crystal Fincher, on Twitter at @finchfrii and find today's co-host, Melissa Santos at @MelissaSantos1.   Melissa Santos Melissa Santos is one of two Seattle-based reporters for Axios. She has spent the past decade covering Washington politics and the Legislature, including five years covering the state Capitol for The News Tribune in Tacoma and three years for Crosscut, a nonprofit news website. She was a member of The Seattle Times editorial board from 2017 to 2019, where she wrote columns and opinion pieces focused on state government.     Resources Shasti Conrad, Newly-elected Chair of the Washington State Democratic Party from Hacks & Wonks    “Rifle ban, housing bills and more advance in the WA Legislature” by Joseph O'Sullivan & Donna Gordon Blankinship from Crosscut   “WA House votes to ban assault weapons” by Jim Brunner and Claire Withycombe from The Seattle Times   “Ban on selling assault weapons clears state House” by Melissa Santos from Axios   “The Olympia Waltz Continues for Middle Housing and Other Vital Legislation” by Ray Dubicki from The Urbanist   “WA's Missing Middle Legislation Threatened by Grab Bag of Municipal Excuses” by Ryan Packer from The Urbanist   “State Democrats Stiff Renters Again” by Rich Smith from The Stranger   “Legislative Cutoff Fizz: Police Pursuit Bill Moves Forward While Tenant Protections Die” by Andrew Engelson and Ryan Packer from PubliCola   “High-Speed Police Chase Bill Still Unpopular Among State House Democrats” by Ashley Nerbovig from The Stranger   “WA police a step closer to resuming pursuits under bill passed Wednesday by Senate” by Shauna Sowersby from The Olympian    “Innocent Bystanders are the Losers in this Week's WA Senate Shenanigans” by Amy Sundberg from Notes from the Emerald City   “Bills aim to protect abortion patients who travel to Washington” by Melissa Santos from Axios   “Seattle's alternative 911 response program falls behind schedule” by Melissa Santos from Axios “Removal of Seattle cherry trees near Pike Place Market paused” by KING 5 News     Transcript [00:00:00] Crystal Fincher: Welcome to Hacks & Wonks. I'm Crystal Fincher, and I'm a political consultant and your host. On this show, we talk with policy wonks and political hacks to gather insight into local politics and policy in Washington state through the lens of those doing the work with behind-the-scenes perspectives on what's happening, why it's happening, and what you can do about it. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get the full versions of our Friday almost-live shows and our midweek show delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, the most helpful thing you can do is leave a review wherever you listen to Hacks & Wonks. Full transcripts and resources referenced in the show are always available at officialhacksandwonks.com and in our episode notes. If you missed our Tuesday midweek show, I spoke with new Chair of the Washington State Democratic Party, Shasti Conrad, about what the role of chair entails, lessons learned from the previous Chair, Tina Podlodowski, and her plans for continuing forward as a strong and effective political party in Washington state. Today, we're continuing our Friday almost-live shows where we review the news of the week with a cohost. Welcome back to the program, friend of the show, today's cohost: Seattle Axios reporter, Melissa Santos. Hey. [00:01:23] Melissa Santos: Hi, Crystal. [00:01:23] Crystal Fincher: Welcome back. Glad to have you and always enjoy the Axios newsletter in my inbox every morning. [00:01:30] Melissa Santos: I'm so glad - good, good. [00:01:32] Crystal Fincher: It's good stuff - good updates and easily digestible, which is good. Today we have just passed a significant deadline in our legislative session. We're just about halfway done. And with that comes the deadline to pass bills out of their house of origin. They need to pass a floor vote, and get to the other chamber in order to survive. So now we have a list of bills that have died, as well as those that go on to be heard in the other chamber. So I guess starting a roundup of what is living and what is dead, what is going on still in our legislature? [00:02:14] Melissa Santos: Oh, you're asking me - there are so many things that actually lived this year - I'm actually kind of surprised. For instance, a ban on selling assault weapons did pass the State House, and this has never happened before in our state. The governor and the attorney general and a lot of Democratic lawmakers have been trying to pass a ban on assault weapons - different versions of it - for, I don't know, six, seven years now, maybe since 2015. I don't know how many years that is 'cause time is like a vortex, but a lot of years - and this time is the first time it's passed a chamber. So that's actually fairly significant. [00:02:44] Crystal Fincher: Very significant and nationally significant. And was an issue that a lot of Democrats ran on in this past election - promising to take action, saying thoughts and prayers are no longer enough, we have seen enough of this. But this is a pretty substantial, major piece of legislation that we can expect to see also wind up in the courts. [00:03:05] Melissa Santos: Yeah, there definitely will be challenges. I think there are challenges happening in Illinois over there's - they've already been promised if they're not already in progress. And Illinois was the most recent state, I think, to enact one. We would be the 10th if we do so, unless someone somehow gets to it first - a couple of months before our legislative session ends. But there's still a big road. It has to pass the Senate. And you know - that we've had some shifts in the Senate, though. I think that legislators did take a message from last year's election results in which Democrats gained seats - didn't lose ground - after passing high-capacity magazine bans. There's no backlash, even in what was supposed to be a big Republican year. There's a lot of factors that go into that, but they're like this is not something that is hurting us at the ballot box at all. And in fact, Washington voters - I think you and I have talked about this before - they have been voting for stricter gun control measures for several years now. It's not an issue that loses in Washington state, or even the polls don't really show nationally. I think there's a big shift to - this is not 1994 when it comes to these gun laws. It's just not, and it's not the political football it was. [00:04:06] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, absolutely. And especially given the amount of mass shootings that we've seen, of just gun violence overall, of people dying by suicide using guns - it is just a lot. And we've had just about everyone say that we need to do something, and expecting our elected officials to do something. And we did see them take action - pretty significant action - in responding to the calls of parents, of students. We even saw students from Seattle's Ingraham High School, which experienced a school shooting, advocating for some of these gun bills, saying that they needed it to be safer in their schools. So this is something that Democrats promised - they took action on. This is something where they heard, and they've delivered - and we'll see how this legislation withstands court challenges - but certainly a big step here in our Legislature. Another big bill that was talked about - has been talked about really since last session - big time is the state's hallmark missing middle bill, HB 1110, which passed out of the House. [00:05:13] Melissa Santos: It did. And one thing I think that is one reason maybe why - I think there has been some conflict, not just the cities not wanting regulation - that was an argument that worked last year, cities saying - Hey, we don't want the state telling us what to do, essentially. We need local control over these things. Maybe it was an argument that worked last year, but I think the housing crisis is so deep that I think that that wasn't necessarily gonna work forever. But what I think was a genuine concern is whether allowing four to six units per lot, in basically all residential lots in some of these cities, might contribute to displacement. I think that's a concern for some people, and whether - there's a lot of stuff that goes into that. But what they did do was essentially make it so if you have neighborhoods where this upzoning would contribute to displacement - I'm not describing the bill very well, I'm jumping right in - but they basically said you can zone only 75% of your residential area to have these upzones and requiring four units or six units per lot. So that's a change that I think was made to try and assuage those who are worried about displacement. And it's possible the displacement argument is a front for other concerns - and that's just a - but that was a change they made this year that makes it a little more flexible. There's an alternate way to comply other than just saying - Hey, it's a strict four units per lot. You have to build a duplex on every lot - I should back up - zone for a duplex. God, you know what, Crystal? I really got ahead of myself. But my point is, changing zoning doesn't necessarily mean that there's a duplex going everywhere. It just means that the next time someone wants to do something, maybe they can do this thing. So yeah, there was never gonna be just suddenly everything's apartments. That never was gonna happen with any of these versions of this bill, but - [00:06:52] Crystal Fincher: Right - and we saw some hyperbolic headlines over the past week saying the Legislature's banned single-family zoning - which you can still build single-family - it just prohibits the exclusion of other types of housing. And the reason why this is so important and necessary - and there was such a broad coalition of business, labor, environmental groups, others saying - Hey, we absolutely need more housing - is because study after study has shown that we are behind on building the amount of housing necessary to house people who currently live in this state, even before we get to others who are moving to the state. And it's because so many areas have been prohibited from building anything but single-family homes - and the areas where you can build a duplex, a triplex, a sixplex, or a larger building are so small in comparison to all of the other areas. There just isn't the ability to build the appropriate and necessary density without a change in this zoning. And the way this manifests is - we have seen these rent hikes, these price hikes - when you have constrained supply and you have people moving here, that in and of itself has contributed to a lot of displacement and affordability crisis. And most people now recognize that we do have a housing affordability crisis. And so this is what has been proposed as a remedy - giving homeowners more control and property owners more control over what they can do with their lots and how they can build, and making sure that cities can absorb the amount of density that is there without the escalating costs that are driving so many people out of cities, out of housing, preventing seniors from being able to age in place, and their families from being able to live near them. And we've seen a shift in public opinion in support for this, where before it was something where it's like - Ah, it's dicey, a lot of people don't - but we've seen poll after poll showing northwards of 60% of residents across the state believe in this. And we've seen cities like Spokane and cities in Pierce County and Clark County take action on this already. This is actually an area where Seattle is behind the bend of several other cities. So interesting to see this going. Certainly there are a lot of cities who - judging by just some city and municipal meetings over the past week - who were hoping and thinking this would probably not get out of the House, but now it has made it to the Senate and they seem like they plan on stepping up their opposition to this bill. So people who are trying to get this passed also need to step up their advocacy of the bill and make sure that their elected officials know that they support this - even if they're homeowners, even if they're in higher income brackets, even if they're seniors - that this is something that they want in their communities if they want this to succeed, 'cause there certainly is a continuing battle ahead. Absolutely - and so other things that have survived, or are talking about housing and talking about the issues of displacement - for those really concerned about the issue of displacement - a couple of bills that didn't make it out, would have been nice and helpful for that. And those included some renter protections. One bill would have capped rent increases at 7% a year. Another would have required six months notice of rent hikes for more than 5%. Some cities also currently have some of those provisions, but certainly the majority of cities in the state do not. That would have certainly helped people. Rent increases are having a devastating toll on our communities and on homelessness, frankly. And those would have been really good to see pass the House - would have directly addressed issues leading to displacement and homelessness - and I'm disappointed that they didn't make it through. Other bills that didn't make it include a bill raising the age of juvenile sentencing from 8 years to 13 - that didn't make it through. A bill that would have ended design review statewide for residential developments didn't make it out of the House, nor did a WRAP Act bill that attempted to improve the state's solid waste system through bottle deposit and packaging reform. As well as a really common sense bill to ban jaywalking laws which are disproportionately enforced against BIPOC and low income people without an impact on public safety, it looks like, and so that didn't survive. One thing that looked like it was on its deathbed, but that was snatched out was a police pursuits bill. What happened with this? [00:11:36] Melissa Santos: Essentially, interestingly, the Senate had looked like it was not gonna advance this bill at all. This is a measure that kind of - it would roll back some of the stricter standards for police car chases that were passed a couple of years ago in 2021. It would say - We're not gonna be as strict in restricting when police can chase people in vehicles. Now, the Senate wasn't looking like it would advance it at all, but it was pulled from the floor and kind of skipped the whole committee process, basically - on Tuesday or so, I think - and it passed the Senate. And interestingly, what bill that looked like it had been moving on this issue in the House did not actually pass out of the House. So now we have a little situation where we don't really know what's gonna happen with it going forward. But, it essentially is just saying the Legislature, following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and the protests against police brutality that we saw - one of the things they did in the Legislature was say - Hey, you can't just chase people over stolen car or whatever and go on a high-speed chase that could be deadly for people. And it applied to more things too. It basically said that you have to have probable cause to chase people in some of these scenarios. You can't chase people for low-level crimes. Police have just been saying that they can't really do their jobs - that's been pushed back on quite a bit. But, there's been a lot of pressure for the Legislature to change this law and make it easier for police to engage in these pursuits again, especially when it comes to certain crimes that are violent. They still can chase them under the current law, but it would make it easier to with a lower-level evidentiary standard that that's the right person in the car - basically is what these bills would do. So we'll see what happens there. It is a weird bipartisan interest in this bill, I would say - the sponsor of the bill in the House is a Democratic lawmaker from a swing district. And I've got to look at the vote count again, but there are some Democratic votes for this. It's not like one party against another. So that makes it hard to figure out how it'll play out. But the House wouldn't take it up, so I'm not sure they'll take it up now - what's coming from the Senate - on the actual floor. [00:13:31] Crystal Fincher: We will see what happens with this. I think the House probably will end up taking it up, but maybe they won't, but - I hope they don't - because this is a bill that frankly, in my view, lacks the data behind it to justify what its proponents are saying. To your point, a lot of police have said - Ah, we just can't pursue anymore - and have been in community meetings where police officers and departments have suggested that their hands are tied, that they can't pursue anyone. It's never been the case that they straight up could not pursue anyone or that pursuits were outlawed. It really is a question between, as you said, two evidentiary standards - that of probable cause or reasonable suspicion. Probable cause having a much higher - or not a much higher, but a significant - a threshold that is significant, that is also higher in terms of what they can do and when they are authorized to chase. And so when it came to serious things, if they had proof of something - they can and have been pursuing vehicles, including continuing to pursue in ways that have endangered the public and have injured the public, even in recent weeks and months. And so really a challenge here is addressing the potential harm and expected harm to the community as a result of these chases that in many jurisdictions already - certainly across the country - they have limited when this can happen because of the collateral damage that occurs, especially when oftentimes they're able to identify who is in the car, apprehend them after the fact, or apprehend them in a way that doesn't endanger the public through a chase. And they've also, I think, tried to say - Well, we've seen some increases in certain types of crime and it's because these criminals know that we can't chase them. And so they're just doing stuff and chasing, running away from us and laughing at us. And it doesn't really look like there's much evidence to back that up. In fact, they've talked about auto thefts and tried to suggest that auto thefts were increasing because they were limited in pursuing somehow, when it actually looks correlated to the price of used cars and that being much more correlated there. So it seems like it would make sense to pass legislation that would deal directly with the challenges that are having instead of some of fighting to re-enact and re-allow practices that have just frankly been harmful to innocent people in the public. [00:16:03] Melissa Santos: I think the data is a little lacking. There was this weird data war going on on both sides with this bill at one point. And it was kind of like, but it is a little - some of the data that's being used to say - Look, look, look, this is all is a huge problem. It's incomplete. It is incomplete. Like for instance, there's a lot of been, did a lot of citing of the State Patrol saying - We've had more people fleeing stops - basically, and that sort of thing. But then they don't - there's not any sort of follow-up about - were they caught from another means, some other - like later, which you can do through investigation or if further down the road, if they're doing something, maybe you would find them and be able to pull them over for something. There's not complete data there. They weren't tracking the stat exactly before. So there's not a good way to compare. It's just really hard. So I think that that's one reason why the Senate committee chair and the Democratic side on this has really been saying - Can we, do get some more data on this before we change the law? And the Republicans have been like - We should have gotten the data in the first place before we changed the law in the first place. But it is true that people die. Vehicle chases are dangerous. There are people who die. And it looks like we've seen fewer deaths - but the number from police pursuits since the law passed, but the numbers are so small, that the percentages can fluctuate wildly. I think there's an argument to be made to get a little bit more information for sure on this. And there has been crime increases in a lot of places, so it's just - there's a pandemic, there's been a lot of stuff happening. Sometimes when people are attributing the rise in crime to certain things, there's just - there's been a lot going on in the last few years and there's been a lot of contributions to crime rising, and there's been a lot of economic problems and that corresponds, and other places have seen crime rise. So it's just really hard to pinpoint it on this law. It's really difficult to do that as much as people want to. And honestly, some of the stories actually - when I followed up on them - haven't quite been accurate about how these things have played out. So it's just really messy to untangle. [00:17:47] Crystal Fincher: It is. And it seems like even when things are messy and in need of being untangled, we find ways to expand and support increased policing, especially of Black and Brown bodies. Also, things that passed this legislative session - passed their house of origin - made it out of their house of origin into the other chamber to be discussed to see if it will be passed, include a new drug possession bill that increases penalties for drugs such as fentanyl, meth, cocaine - and pushes those convicted into treatment, mandated treatment - a lot of people consider that coercive treatment. And really addressing laws in the wake of the Blake decision and the subsequent legislation, which had a sunset provision, meaning that they need to take action again now. Anything notable you saw with this bill in the process? [00:18:41] Melissa Santos: Honestly, I think this bill is gonna be totally different potentially by the time the session ends. It's one of those - it passed out of a chamber and they're being viewed as like a vehicle. You know what I mean? They can, it maybe will look very different by the end. But I think it's - the problem here a little bit is you want people to basically make drug possession a felony again, especially on the Republican side. Some people want that and then other people want the state to have it be totally decriminalized. And people are trying to, I think, thread the needle on it and there's not really a lot of - those sides don't really agree. You're not gonna find a compromise on - between make it a felony and decriminalize drug possession - that makes any of those folks feel like it's a good policy. So I think it's gonna be a really tricky one for that reason. I think this compromise of being like - Let's make it a gross misdemeanor, it won't be a misdemeanor anymore, but it'll be, it won't be a felony. I don't think that's gonna make people who think that the War on Drugs has been damaging to communities of color and everyone happy that it's still criminalized. And then I don't think that Republicans think that's strong enough. And so that's another one where it's - I think you're gonna see some weird vote counts. You're gonna see some weird coalitions build and it could be very different by the end. [00:19:49] Crystal Fincher: This definitely could change by the end. I think one thing that is useful to just recall is that - in this reality that we're in, we have been enacting and tinkering with criminalization for drugs for basically my entire life. I went to DARE assemblies when I was in elementary school. [00:20:13] Melissa Santos: Does that mean we're old if we went to those? I just wanted to check. [00:20:15] Crystal Fincher: I am definitely old. [00:20:16] Melissa Santos: Oh, okay - I went to those too. [00:20:16] Crystal Fincher: I won't lump you in with me, but I'm old. [00:20:18] Melissa Santos: No, I went to those too, so I guess - I don't know, all right - [00:20:21] Crystal Fincher: But I'm okay with being old. [00:20:22] Melissa Santos: It's fine. We all accept it, but I just wanted to check if that's what that means. I don't know - [00:20:26] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, yeah, it does, it does. [00:20:27] Melissa Santos: Okay, all right. [00:20:29] Crystal Fincher: But we have seen this big War on Drugs - billions upon billions spent - for what? To be in arguably a worse position than we've been in - to have this entire criminalized approach that has supported mass incarceration, that hasn't reduced recidivism, that hasn't reduced addiction, that has allowed it to proliferate really. And what we really need is a public health approach, and we've seen a public health approach to substance use disorder be much more effective than that. But that's not what a number of people have grown up watching on TV, have grown up being told from the DARE assemblies - anything about drugs is just bad and illegal and immoral. And if you touch those things - especially if you're poor or Brown, really, or in a low wage job - you're bad and horrible and immoral. Even though, my goodness, drug use is rampant among high income and high powered people. It doesn't seem to carry the same social stigma with them that it does for people who don't have the benefit of a home to do their drugs in, or can't do it as privately as others are able to do it. But man, this thing has failed, and it just feels like we're doubling down on a failed policy here because of fear - some of the same fear that went into the vehicle pursuit bill conversation - of not looking sufficiently tough on crime, of not doing that. Even though the public really is in a better place than most of our elected leaders are here - on not looking at this as such a binary and understanding that public safety includes a lot more than policing, a lot more than punitive punishment penalties. And if we focus on people being well, and if we focus on building a healthy community, and focus on stopping the harmful behavior, addressing root causes - that we prevent a lot of the problem and do a lot better in fixing the existing problems that we have. But that seems like a conversation that many people are not entertaining about this right now, but I certainly wish they would and hope that legislation improves. Also a bill survived that would reform the state's criminal sentencing system so that the juvenile convictions no longer lead to longer sentences for crimes that people commit as adults. Also Growth Management Act climate change provisions. This was also discussed last year - forcing and mandating that counties, cities, as they go through their Growth Management Act planning, which is mandated by the state, consider climate change impacts throughout that and build that into this process. Certainly helpful. Another bill promoting transit-oriented development - that's assigned to the Housing Committee - a lot splitting bill, easing barriers for ADUs or accessory dwelling units. A bill which was - I think we talked about it last week - near and dear to my heart, especially this session, for free school meals was watered down significantly to now - what passed is if a school has 30% or more of their students eligible for free and reduced lunch, then any student at that school can request a free meal - which is better than nothing certainly, but would love to see that expanded to be universal for everyone. As well as a bill that creates a task force for promoting research into psilocybin and developing a pathway for legal access to that psychedelic substance. So a lot of things are still alive. A lot of good stuff is still alive. A lot of good stuff still looks like it's moving forward. Other stuff - there are some abortion bills that are still alive this session. What will they do? [00:24:22] Melissa Santos: There's been ones trying to protect people from other states with restrictive abortion laws who might come here for an abortion. So we have some bills that basically create a shield law so that - trying to say - doctors here really can't be, putting them out the reach of those abortion laws if they perform abortions on someone. So they would basically - one of those bills that did pass the House - would make it so courts here can't participate in subpoenas from other states that are trying to get information about abortions that maybe happen here, if someone from their state travels to our state. And so that's designed to protect the doctors as well as the patients who come here. And that's something that Democrats have been going for. Similar bill dealing with data and health data on apps, because we have federal protections for health data under this law called HIPAA, but that doesn't apply to everything. It doesn't apply to period tracking apps. And there's also apps that track if you're trying to get pregnant and then maybe have a miscarriage - that there's data in there that maybe could be used, is the fear, from some states trying to prosecute abortions if they've criminalized it or have created civil lawsuit potential. Getting that data could show you had a miscarriage, you terminated pregnancy, this shows that. So they're trying to say - You can't get that, basically. So those are some of the things that are still alive. [00:25:33] Crystal Fincher: We will continue to follow this legislation as they make their way through the House and Senate. Also, they will - the Legislature will be taking up Governor Inslee's proposed budget, $70 billion biennial budget, before adjourning on April 23rd. So a lot to be done - still special education and other educational funding is wrapped up also with the budget - so many things are, so we will follow along. Also wanna talk about some Seattle news that you covered this week about Seattle's alternative response - another leg in the public safety stool - running behind schedule, at least Bruce Harrell running behind schedule on the promise and commitment that he made for this. What is happening? [00:26:23] Melissa Santos: It's actually interesting to me to see the mayor's office have actually laid out a commitment, a bunch of commitments, in writing like this. 'Cause sometimes at this mayor's office, it's not really - I'm not really clear on what's happening with them. That's the case sometimes with a lot of administrations, I suppose. But in this case, there was a document that the mayor's office agreed to in September - I think under pressure from the council, basically, to be honest, from watching that meeting - just saying we need some deliverables. We have this program we've been talking about since, again, the Black Lives Matter protests. It's now 20 - as of last year, it was 2022 - we still don't have this pilot program that we said to the community - Okay, we're going to reimagine public safety. This is going to be part of it. We're going to try and not send police officers to some calls where maybe it's not warranted and it can escalate into police killing someone or injuring someone, or just even an arrest that's traumatizing, potentially. So they're trying to say - We want to have a way of sending mental health responders and others to some of these calls. But there was supposed to be a pilot program that was supposed to have a plan from the mayor's office in December that was actually delivered and it hasn't been delivered. So the mayor's office is driving this - it looks like that's part of the agreement - waiting on the mayor to develop sort of some policies, proposals for the permanent program, as well as this pilot. And they have not come forth. There's also some intermediate steps that I didn't get into in my story, but that were missed. The mayor was supposed to narrow down what calls would this would actually apply to, what calls would some mental health responder go to? Is it officer down calls? Is it welfare check calls? And that really hasn't been narrowed down, which means there's not really - when someone asks me, for instance, how does this interact with our new 988 system? You can't really, we don't know because we don't know what calls they're going to be directing this to. But the idea is at least the 911 center would be able to dispatch something other than a cop - even though it's called a dual dispatch for some reason, which I found very confusing - the cop wouldn't necessarily have to be on site for these responses. And it's just - if this was a response to this - I have a policy document that says the social outcry for justice for policing, this is a City document - and it's been now three years and we don't have a pilot in range of being started. I think there's a lot of frustration on the city council saying - What the heck? And they expressed that at a meeting last week in the Public Safety Committee. I think Andrew Lewis, one of the city council members said - It seems like the mayor's office is behind on every deliverable that was asked for. The city council staff was - demurred on that, was like - I don't know if I would say that, but they have working relationships to maintain. As much in Seattle speak, it could be - as much as a WTF could be said in Seattle municipal speak - that's what happened last week, I think, on this, honestly. And yeah, it's just, I don't know where, how things - things don't seem very far along, is what it seems fair to say. [00:29:08] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, and it's challenging for me - looking at this administration and how confidently they talked about their ability to handle public safety in the City, particularly during the election and the commitments that were made. Bruce Harrell having sat on the city council and had been a former mayor of Seattle - very familiar with the workings of the City, the size of the bureaucracy, and the scope of what needs to be done. He has seen that from every angle for over a decade. And the response when you asked that office - Hey, why is this behind schedule? - was like, Okay, but it's really hard, is what the response boiled down to. And it's yeah, no kidding. That's what you signed up for when you say you wanna be mayor and can handle that job - and not only can handle it, but can handle it better than everyone else in the field. We want to see what's gonna happen. And this isn't just for good feelings and responding to a community call, even though listening to the community is absolutely important. This is also about public safety. This is about reducing the amount of people who are victimized. It's about keeping the entire community safe and making it safer. This is about a more effective response that keeps people safer. And that can eliminate the frustration that a lot of people have with seeing a revolving door issue where they're being arrested for a problem - that isn't primarily a desire to commit whatever crime or to be loitering in whatever area - that are exacerbated by a variety of different things, where if we actually addressed those things, we can also eliminate any criminal or harmful activity and more effectively deal with an issue of someone who is creating a disturbance or causing discomfort or whatever that is. This is good for the City. This helps keep everyone safer. And it seems like there is no bigger priority than getting this spun up. [00:31:13] Melissa Santos: If there's a concern - the mayor's office and the police department are concerned they don't have enough officers to send to important calls - if that's a concern, the people who are concerned about that, right? This theoretically could make it so officers aren't responding to stuff they maybe shouldn't even be responding to, or aren't the best equipped at responding to. Theoretically, freeing up officers to respond to stuff for which an officer is really needed. It seems like both people who want to have a less aggressive police response, and then also people who want to have more police response in a way - both kind of are coming together to say - This would be good for us. The business people want it - for again, more cops to respond to crime crimes would be - they want. And then people who want to not have traumatic police encounters want it too, which - theoretically, everyone wants to not have those, I would assume. But, people who, that's their focus, also think this is good. It's okay, so what - and I don't even think it's gotten to, to be honest, I don't know if it's had the chance to get to the part that's actually really complex. 'Cause I think the mayor's office and a lot - honestly, city council and everyone - it's easy to say the police union won't let us do this, or something. I don't even think they've gotten to the point where they're even talking about that, really, with labor yet. It's okay, so if that's always the hurdle in doing police reform and you're not even really - you haven't really decided what you want to do. It's like the Legislature passed a bill to create an independent office for police investigations that theoretically should have been ready to have takeover jurisdiction of police killings last summer. And I haven't checked on it for a couple months, I'm gonna say, but it still was not up and running six months after that. And there's still a lot of hiring to do and a lot of policymaking to do. And you could argue - Okay, maybe that was too fast. Maybe a year - okay, so some people would say maybe a year plus was 18 months or so. You can't really set up a whole agency in that time. I'm like - Well... eh, like, how long? I don't know, I don't know. This just seems like - there's a lot of stuff that ends up taking a long time and then other cities do have some of these programs in place already, so it seems like there should be some models. And I don't have great answers about - could you, Denver does this thing - did you ask them? What's going on? It's hard to get a sense of what conversations are happening within the administration about this stuff. [00:33:24] Crystal Fincher: It is. We know they've had tons of conversations about graffiti and there's definitely an action plan and things happening for that, so priorities - seems to come down to priorities. I hope this becomes a higher priority in this administration for sure. Also this week, we have seen trees at Pike Place Market make a lot of news. How come? [00:33:49] Melissa Santos: Seattle people love cherry trees. Everyone loves cherry trees. Does anyone dislike cherry trees? So there are cherry trees, one of - yeah, there's cherry trees by the entrance of Pike Place Market that kind of frame one of our city's biggest landmarks, biggest tourist attractions. And they were set to be removed on Tuesday, maybe Monday and Tuesday possibly, and there was a group that's called, I think, Save Our Market Entrance, something along those lines, that put out some press releases on Sunday and also went and demonstrated and were like - Why are we tearing these down? There's some - it's been raised that there's some significance potentially in the Seattle's Japanese and Japanese-American community of having these cherry trees. The origin is being traced to maybe there was a significant gift to these potentially, but even if there's not - it's just, there's some people asking - Why do we need to replace these trees? They're part of the sort of fabric of our city and what we love about our city. I think the mayor did, someone in the mayor's administration did press pause on the removal of the trees this week, so that was a pretty successful effort by people who wanted to see those trees stay. And their future isn't really certain right now because there's gonna be some probably very Seattle-esque discussions about the trees. And there's some disagreement about whether the trees are healthy and will be healthy for the next 50 years or not. And so that's just all kind of being worked out. But I think people in Seattle like their cherry trees and also there might be some cultural significance here to pay attention to, so that's - at least for now - saved the trees for time being. Yeah, definitely. And this is also happening amidst discussions of Seattle's waning tree canopy and a need to increase the amount of trees - mature and other trees - and certainly not lose trees in the process. And I know some people are concerned about that as we go through this whole thing. But with that, we will wrap it up for today, Friday, March 10th, 2023. Hacks & Wonks is produced by Shannon Cheng. Our insightful co-host today is Seattle Axios reporter, Melissa Santos. You can find Melissa on Twitter @MelissaSantos1. You can follow Hacks & Wonks on Twitter @HacksWonks. And you can find me on Twitter @FrenchFries - it's two I's at the end - @finchfrii, I don't even, whatever. You can catch Hacks & Wonks wherever you get your podcasts - just type "Hacks and Wonks" into the search bar. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get the full versions of our Friday almost-live shows and our midweek show delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, leave a review wherever you listen. You can also get a transcript of this episode and links to the resources referenced in the show at officialhacksandwonks.com and in the podcast episode notes. Thanks for tuning in - talk to you next time.

Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant is going national.The Council's most senior member and only socialist says she will launch a national movement to support workers instead of running for re-election.The Stranger's Rich Smith will break down the councilwoman's legacy and what it might mean for the city when she's gone.We can only make Seattle Now because listeners support us. Make the show happen by making a gift to KUOW: https://www.kuow.org/donate/seattlenowAnd we want to hear from you! Follow us on Instagram @SeattleNowPod, or leave us feedback online: https://www.kuow.org/feedback

This week we learned Seattle lags way behind other cities when it comes to workers returning to the office. We're also getting rid of our state of emergency, and losing the masks. But hey! At least we all get to put our shoes on our heads this Saturday in hopes of bringing the Mariners some sorely-needed luck in their playoff contention. We can only make Seattle Now because listeners support us. Make the show happen by making a gift to KUOW: https://www.kuow.org/donate/Fall22SeattleNow And we want to hear from you! Follow us on Instagram at SeattleNowPod, or leave us feedback online: https://www.kuow.org/feedback

This week about 24% of eligible voters cast ballots in the primary, Monkeypox was declared a national health emergency, and millennials are staying close to home, but some of them are moving here. The Strangers Rich Smith and author Ruchika Tulshyan are here to break down the weekAnd, we want to hear from you! Follow us on Instagram SeattleNowPod, or leave us feedback online: https://www.kuow.org/feedback

Today, I am blessed to have here with me Richard Smith. Richard began his keto journey for weight loss hoping to cure severe anxiety, depression, chronic fatigue, and daily debilitating migraines. During the year, Richard managed to lose over 100lbs. After reversing his illnesses and transforming his physical and emotional well-being via a ketogenic lifestyle, Richard was dedicated to helping transform the health and lives of others by providing support and supplements. In this episode, Richard discusses his past health problems, including obesity, diabetes, fatigue, depression, and anxiety. He reveals how keto transformed his well-being and life. Then, Richard dives into why cholesterol isn't the enemy and how you can determine if your cholesterol profile is actually damaged or not. Richard digs deep into insulin and leptin and how to optimize these hormones. Tune in as we chat about the problem with insulin resistance and a simple test to tell if you are insulin resistant. Download my free keto grocery shopping list: http://www.ketokampblueprint.com Get Keto Flex on Audible for Free (New Customers Only): https://adbl.co/36d6A24 Get Keto Flex on Audible here for current customers: https://adbl.co/3699lBm / / E P I S O D E   S P ON S O R S  Paleo Valley beef sticks, apple cider vinegar complex, organ meat complex & more. Use the coupon code KETOKAMP15 over at https://paleovalley.com/ to receive 15% off your entire order. Upgraded Formulas Hair Mineral Deficiency Analysis & Supplements: http://www.upgradedformulas.com Use KETOKAMP15 at checkout for 15% off your order.  Text me the words "Podcast" +1 (786) 364-5002 to be added to my contacts list.  [00:40] Richard Speaks About His Health Problems and How Keto Transformed His Life Richard was clinically obese, diabetic, chronically tired, depressed, anxious, and experienced debilitating migraines that would make him blind. The worst part of Richard's health was his anxiety; he wouldn't be able to leave his house, car, or office. Richard never felt good enough to be around other people. Eventually, Richard realized that bread made his belly swell. So, he gave it up. Within 30 days of ditching bread, Richard lost 28 pounds. Starting keto has completely changed Richard's life; luckily, every factor of his life has improved. [26:20] Cholesterol Isn't The Enemy; In Fact, Cholesterol is Essential For Health Cholesterol is essential for life. It's imperative for cell formation, cell communication, nutrient absorption, nutrient transportation, and hormone production. The brain and the myelin sheath are made of cholesterol. Lacking cholesterol would be detrimental to your health. There is a massive miscommunication when it comes to cholesterol. LDL is proactive; it heals the body and repairs it. The two main contributing factors to heart disease are grains and seed oils. Seed oils do not help lower cholesterol. Reducing carbohydrates and seed oils is the best way to have healthy LDL. [35:00] Is Your Cholesterol Profile Damaged? Richard Explains Where Your Markers Should Be There's a simple way to see whether your cholesterol profile is damaged. Triglycerides are one of the most significant factors; aim for less than 0.5%. HDL should be greater than 1.5. The triglyceride to HDL ratio should be below one. You're in good shape if your cholesterol profile is around these markers. Remember, cholesterol is essential for life; every cell in the body is made of cholesterol. [39:45] You Can't Store Fat Without Insulin From Carbohydrates, Sugars, and Seed Oils We can't store fat without insulin. Insulin is secreted by the pancreas when we consume carbohydrates. Many people will eat carbs before going to the gym to have the energy to burn fat. However, when insulin is elevated, it tells the body to store fat. Eating carbs will make it almost impossible for us to burn fat for fuel. Insulin puts a biological lock on our fat stores and prevents them from leaving. Carbohydrates and sugars will increase insulin. Seed oils will also impact insulin; they cause insulin resistance. [42:40] The Foods You Eat Could Be Blocking Your Ability To Feel Full Leptin is a satiety hormone. It tells us that we have eaten and that we are full. Seed oils will block leptin. If you aren't feeling full, you will consume more food. Grains are high in lectins; they cause five times more fat storage than insulin. Lectins in grains will also block leptin. [49:55] Richard Reveals A Simple Test To Tell If You're Insulin Resistant As a world, we are insulin resistant. In fact, 95% of people are insulin resistant. Diabetes will start with food choices that began ten to fifteen years prior. There's a simple way to test if you suffer from insulin resistance. You have insulin resistance if you have an overhang over your pants, belt, or skirt. Restrict carbohydrates, and you will see a reduction in insulin levels. You don't need a myriad of medications to solve insulin resistance. AND MUCH MORE! Resources from this episode: Check out Keto Pro: https://theketopro.com/ Follow Richard Smith LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-smith-b810881b3/ Follow Keto-Pro Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theketoprocom/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/keto_pro/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/pro_keto Join the Keto Kamp Academy: https://ketokampacademy.com/7-day-trial-a Watch Keto Kamp on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUh_MOM621MvpW_HLtfkLyQ Get Keto Flex on Audible for Free (New Customers Only): https://adbl.co/36d6A24 Get Keto Flex on Audible here for current customers: https://adbl.co/3699lBm / / E P I S O D E   S P ON S O R S  Paleo Valley beef sticks, apple cider vinegar complex, organ meat complex & more. Use the coupon code KETOKAMP15 over at https://paleovalley.com/ to receive 15% off your entire order. Upgraded Formulas Hair Mineral Deficiency Analysis & Supplements: http://www.upgradedformulas.com Use KETOKAMP15 at checkout for 15% off your order.  Text me the words "Podcast" +1 (786) 364-5002 to be added to my contacts list.  *Some Links Are Affiliates* // F O L L O W ▸ instagram | @thebenazadi | http://bit.ly/2B1NXKW ▸ facebook | /thebenazadi | http://bit.ly/2BVvvW6 ▸ twitter | @thebenazadi http://bit.ly/2USE0so ▸clubhouse | @thebenazadi Disclaimer: This podcast is for information purposes only. Statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast including Ben Azadi disclaim responsibility from any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not accept responsibility of statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guests qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or non-direct interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician.