The City of Seattle Pushes For Less Accountability
What the actual you-know-what?
As you can imagine, I’m a bit behind on city politics this week, and I’m back to work too, so I am going to have to keep this high level.
But an ugly pattern has emerged at the city and it needs to be seen for what it is.
While conservatives and a couple of moderates campaigned on themes of accountability, it turns out they only mean “for poor people.”
They are reducing enforcement and accountability for themselves and their political allies.
For example, the city has adopted several policies that make it easier to lock people in jail for nonviolent offenses, and are scattering cameras around the cities—policies that have received strenuous criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union. Even the police chief has more or less admitted that these will not remotely accomplish what people like councilmember Bob Kettle claim.
Whether you think this is a good idea or a bad idea is its own discussion, a discussion worth having. But for our purposes in this piece—it’s worth noting the galling hypocrisy associated with it.
Because in the meantime, Bruce Harrell and/or the council have taken serious action to dodge accountability for themselves, for their budget, for police that are hurting citizens, and for corporations that are abusing labor law.
Harrell’s budget proposal cuts money for the office of labor standards. OLS is the cop on the beat when it comes to labor abuse and wage theft by local corporations. These folks know who their real bosses are—big money PAC-lobbyist Tim Ceis made that clear last winter when he told the big spenders who bought the election to demand that the council appoint Tanya Woo.
A few months ago, the council and Harrell gave away their negotiating leverage when they threw tens of millions in raises to the police without adding any accountability to the labor contract, their absolute best and possibly only opportunity to do so. This is a department that is hiring dangerous cops fired for their malpractice elsewhere who are going on to recklessly kill others—and yet Harrell has given away the farm and largely let them off the hook.
Harrell tried to cut significant programming at the Seattle Channel—Seattle’s own C-SPAN. Not only does this reduce public access to information about the city’s political machinations, but it would have cut off a great source for a lot of reporters that use that information for leads for stories. (I’m told that after a large scale public outcry, this has been restored in the latest version of the budget—thank you Dan Strauss! An actual moderate!)
Now, Publicola reports, Seattle’s award-winning budget transparency tool that the city has is gone.
After promising accountability, transparency, audits, and efficiency analysis—they have instead aimed at reducing accountability for elected officials and are making the budget process more opaque.
In other words, they were lying through their teeth.
Enjoy Brett Hamil’s viewpoint:
