"Pragmatic" in political conversation no longer has its dictionary meaning but is rather just marketing speak for centrist ideology.

@1 centrist by definition represents the middle ground where you can best represent all constituents. Why is that a bad thing? Hannah continually decries the councils efforts to unwind some of the "first in nation" legislation passed by the previous council yet there is no evidence any of these policies have done anything to help solve our issues. There is plenty of evidence they have limited the city's ability to make progress however. I have no doubt a progressive will take on Nelson (my money is on Ron Davis) but as Hannah herself noted Rinck's win was more about the overall satisfaction with the city and not an embrace of the progressive ideals espoused by The Stranger.

Perhaps, but two things can be true at once. Replace the words "Sara Nelson" with "The Stranger" in the title and it still makes sense.

I first met Sara Nelson in 2018 at Fremont Brewing when she hosted conservative Christian James Maiocco in a victory party for overturning the Head Tax. The media was invited to watch Maiocco's Republican group celebrate their anti-democratic movement. It was indeed highly performative political theater. She's terrible.

@2 that's how centrists like to think of themselves but in practice they most often take others' ideas and water down or convolute them until they're minimally effective at best.

@5 you do realize that is called compromising and its how our government was set up to function?

@4: Yet you took part in the event and was able to meet and enjoy a beer with her.

I can't stand Nelson either, but this is a pretty silly article. All politics contain performative elements - performance is part of the job. As another comment here points out, The Stranger is no stranger to performative politics. Instead of actually reporting news stories.

Maybe she is in the wrong theater, she would be a dead ringer for granny in a Beverly Hillbillies revival

So, it’s hard to keep reading when Hannah gets #1 all wrong. That first vote was performance for the police guild to indicate to them that salary changes were coming so that they wouldn’t keep quitting and leaving the city undefended. That vote was followed by a successfully renegotiated contract with the police guild by this city council. Apparently such a performative vote was needed because some people, like the moron Stranger writers, keep arguing, even in this article, that higher pay won’t recruit more people of better quality. It’s like they’ve never chosen between jobs before. But the reality is they just don’t like the police and don’t want to fund them, so anything that indicates more pay for police must be aggressively questioned and derided.

Let’s see if I can get through the rest of this article…

Alright, I’m done. Let’s rework this list of 10 into a shorter list:

Nelson voted with the majority to say they’d be raising police salaries and giving bonuses to keep police from quitting in the interim.
Sara Nelson claimed fellow council members used a rushed opaque process to write the RCV bill in her comments supporting her own bill. Maybe it was, so Stranger goes with but-Nelson-does-that-too attack.
The director of an African American history museum claims Nelson misrepresented a phone conversation with her, without evidence, about something that made her look bad to her stakeholders. Just as likely the museum director is lying. Also, when was the last time city council funded explicitly white museums? Wish we were moving towards integration instead of falling back into tribalism.
She voted against the 2023 budget because she broadly opposed it.
She, entirely within her purview, fired someone and hired someone else more closely aligned to her ideology.
She appointed Tanya Woo.
She shut down StopTheSweeps’ attempt to Jan 6 the council, by limiting the flood of uninformed rabble using mob tactics to intimidate representatives, and has the police arrest people engaging in crimes.
She talked about fixing the gig worker minimum wage laws, but hasn’t yet, and is still researching it. Plus she may not have the votes on that one.
Morales falsely accuses Nelson of being a bully, but really Morales’s just didn’t like being outvoted 8-1 over and over again and needed cover to abandon her constituents. Morales quit rather than face accountability for her failed policies and being in the minority that voters put her in for enacting this policies.
Stranger writers can’t count to ten. There are only nine bold headlines. Do better.

I really don't know anything about Sara Nelson, but I've been around the block long enough to know that any study the city commissions or performs is designed to show the results that the city wants. In the case of the signing bonuses for the cops, if they didn't get more applicants from it, they didn't spend the money, so I don't see what the big deal is on that.

Sara Nelson has improved public safety and downtown is looking better. Long way to go, but she's good.

@7 I most certainly did not take part. I live nearby and just happened to be there. And Sara Nelson was a condescending asshole when I asked her why should would host such an event.

@10 "That first vote was performance for the police guild to indicate to them that salary changes were coming so that they wouldn’t keep quitting and leaving the city undefended."

The article itself outlines not only how this was not effective, but also that Nelson and the Council had the information at the time to know it would be ineffective. You call the writer a moron for thinking the bonuses wouldn't work but the fact is they DIDN'T work.

"That vote was followed by a successfully renegotiated contract with the police guild by this city council."

That contract was only "successfully renegotiated" for SPOG. The City threw money at them and got no new accountability measures in return. The Council's incompetent negotiation also likely set back efforts to end the consent decree. You say the people you disagree with "just don't like the police" but it seems much more like you just really love the police (or are one) and want them to get whatever they want regardless of actual impact on public safety or the functioning of the City. That or you're such a simp for Nelson you can't help but desperately try to defend her every move.

@15, No, the article outlines that the author and others hold opinions that increased funding wasn’t effective. Those are the kinds of “progressive” opinions that conservatives point to with rightful derision. You don’t need a study to know that you get better applicants if you offer more money. If your study shows something different, you probably did the study wrong. Do you not believe in the whole notion of a labor market? Because this is kinda the crux of it.
Don’t know why you’d suggest I’m police, other than speculative ad hominem attacks being your norm. Sad. I’m a tech professional, like a big chunk of the city.
I do like the police. Or rather I take the policing evil over the evil of lawless anarchy, and people repeatedly prying the front doors to my high rise condo open and robbing us. Crime is real and criminals deserve punishment in ways they haven’t been getting in Seattle.

@15, @16: And the "information" the Stranger won't ever stop flogging was a two-page memo, an opinion survey of City Department heads -- not including the SPD. It's the only "evidence" the Stranger and the anti-bonus crowd ever had, so they keep pretending it's definitive. And, as Mrs. Vel-DuRay reminds us, if the bonuses indeed did not work, then the city lost no money. The vitriol directed at the bonus policy suggests the critics of it were not motivated by wanting a policy which worked, but rather in simply not wanting to hire more cops.

@4: The EHT repeal came after tens of thousands of citizens signed a petition to put it to a referendum. The Council had ignored citizen input on the EHT, and passed it anyway. Your characterization of the referendum effort as "anti-democratic" completely inverts what actually happened. (And the party at the brewpub wasn't "highly performative political theater," it was a victory celebration of highly effective politics.)

@14: You must be a lot of fun at parties.

Performative... now do Sawant: The Socialist Queen of Performative and Grandstanding Action

It's always entertaining to watch The Stranger pretend to care about studies vs vibes when it turns out that one of their hobbyhorses is a giant scam:

www.kuow.org/stories/secret-payments-damning-audit-king-county-s-youth-violence-prevention-effort-mired-in-scandal

Does The Stranger let any of its readers know that this happened? Of course not. The narrative is far more important than the facts.

Instead, we have articles like this one where the authors are loudly claiming that it's bad to try to incentivize people to take jobs by paying them competitive wages in a market economy. And when the pay doesn't attract enough people, The Stranger's answer is to instead pay government employees less, which will result in you attracting better people.

It's the same anti-government right wing bullshit spewed by Tim Eyman or Newt Gingrich or Elon Musk or any number of other right wing idiots. It's yet another example of The Stranger believing Fox News is a model to emulate rather than ignore.

@16 from the article:

"In particular, SPD did not see an increase in applicants even with the City dangling thousands in front of them at the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022."

"According to KOMO, despite the hiring bonuses, SPD lost 40 officers and gained only 15 in the first six months of 2024."

These are not opinions or a study these are empirical facts. Hiring bonuses did not result in increased applications or a net staffing gain. We can talk about why, or what else may need to be done, but the FACT is the bonuses were not effective.

@17 Yeah, at $20 per signature it was the best democracy Amazon and Starbucks could buy. That said, the seven council members (including our current mayor) who then voted to repeal it were fucking pussies.

@20 Number of applicants =/= applicant quality.
That some officers left is not evidence that your new attrition policies aren’t working. You need comparison to a base line for that to be an effective argument. Did attrition improve in subsequent years? Yes? Then maybe accept that you were wrong.
That these narratives are the things you call facts is disappointing.

@21: The referendum needed fewer than 20,000 signatures to reach the ballot. No Tax on Jobs, the organizers of the referendum effort, stopped collecting signatures before the deadline, having obtained more than 47,000. (Mrs. Vel-DuRay claimed persons in her neighborhood were lining up to sign.) I challenge you to find any successful signature-gathering effort, anywhere, ever, which voluntarily stopped collecting signatures before the deadline.

So, presented with clear evidence their policy was incredibly unpopular with actual voters, to the point their policy was going before those same voters for possible rejection, you believe the Council's proper response should have been what, exactly? Tell us voters to fuck off, shut up, and watch in silent acquiescence as our jobs got taxed? (Do bear in mind the Council hadn't even bothered to write a spending plan for the funds the EHT would have obtained.) Was that supposed to encourage voter approval of the referendum?

Finally, name-calling elected officials who dare to consider the views of actual voters shows a really unhealthy contempt for our democracy and civil discourse.

@22 "Did attrition improve in subsequent years?"

I don't know, did it? I showed my work can you do the same? I'd love to hear how you propose to measure "applicant quality" too.

@24: Look, I get that "post hoc, ergo propter hoc," describes the highest form of valid logical reasoning you're ever likely to deploy, but as @22 tried to educate you, you haven't actually done all of the work. You need to compare results from the hiring-bonus policy to the results from some previous, non-hiring-bonus policy.

Unfortunately for what you're trying to accomplish, the previous policy was the progressive Council spewing 'defund' rhetoric, and driving SPD's first female BIPOC Chief out of her job. Immediately thereafter, SPD officers started leaving in droves (pure coincidence, that!), which makes the hiring-bonus policy results look pretty damned good by comparison.

@2 "centrist by definition represents the middle ground where you can best represent all constituents."

Nowadays most "centrists" are economic conservatives who don't stand a chance of being elected as Republicans. For example, many neoliberals are labeled centrists, which reveals the extent of the snow job when one realizes that neoliberalism is the ideology that returned us to oligarchy.

@25 I present data, they present speculation, and you think the burden is on me to provide more data to rebut their speculation? That's not how this works. If you all want to argue the bonuses DID work feel free to provide evidence to support your claim at any time. As it stands the only evidence presented is that they did not.

@26 I see. Centrists are really conservatives in disguise so anything right of a Marxist like Shaun Scott is really a conservative. Do you actually read the inane stuff you post?

@27 as has been noted several times. The bonus are not paid unless someone is hired so trying the programs costs little to nothing if its not effective. What the program did tell us is that the culture in this city created by activists and the council is so toxic it will take more than money to fix. I do like your new angle though about cutting non effective programs. Next up all the “service providers” getting paid while things continue to get worse.

@28 "as has been noted several times. The bonus are not paid unless someone is hired so trying the programs costs little to nothing if its not effective"

The people who keep "noting" that don't understand how budgets work. Money reserved for the bonuses is not able to be allocated to other areas of need.

"The annual estimated cost for the hiring incentive award program is $1.5 million and is included in the Mayor’s 2025-2026 Proposed Budget."

https://seattle.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&ID=13290537&GUID=C0A3D93E-6983-4BBE-BE7D-2B7B81DD6BCE

@28 "Centrists are really conservatives in disguise" has no logical link to "so anything right of a Marxist like Shaun Scott is really a conservative"

Do you actually believe there is not tons of political space between Nelson and Marxists?

I also said 'most centrists' since I do believe there are actual centrists out there (by definition, corporatists do not qualify)

@29 "The people who keep "noting" that don't understand how budgets work. Money reserved for the bonuses is not able to be allocated to other areas of need."

Indeed, in particular that money could have been allocated to hire professionals who are actually trained for much of what police does and is not trained for like dealing with people with a mental health crisis.

@27: No, you are the one presenting speculation, because as has now been explained to you multiple times by multiple commenters, you haven’t compared the hiring-bonus numbers to the pre-hiring bonus numbers. If the hiring-bonus numbers show more hires than the pre-hiring bonus numbers, then your claim the program isn’t working lacks support. If you say the program isn’t working, then you have to provide both sets of numbers. None of the rest of us need to do anything.

(Of course, we all know what really happened here was you started with the conclusion you wanted to reach, found what you wrongly believed to be evidence in support, and then told the rest of us to disprove you. That’s not how it works.)

Finally, you’re complaining about $1.5M reserved for this program. Over the past decade, Seattle has spent close to a billion dollars on homelessness response. How’s that going? Was that money well spent? Do you believe another $1.5M will finally get everyone housed?

@29 yes and if the money is not spent than it can be reallocated the following budget cycle. You are so wrapped up around $1.5M which is less than one percent of the city's general fund. I don't recall you having any issues when the city tried out the Black Brilliance Project and pissed away $3M. As you avatar clearly indicates I have serious doubts you would support any program that attempts to grow the SPD regardless of its effectiveness.

@13 because Bob labeling anyone in Seattle a centrist (in the context of the rest of the country) is almost a joke in itself. Seattle is very far left of center compared to most of the country and anyone currently on the council would be a far left liberal in any red state. The fact you think they are centrist or even conservative really demonstrates how Seattle "lefties" like yourself are so far out of touch. You think people like Sawant and Scott represent reasonable progressive policy positions when in fact they are radical ideologues.

@31 and we have done that. It's called the CARE team. The last budget increased their funding by $3.5M. Should I start bitching about them though because obviously it hasn't done much for the city as noted by the current conditions at 12th and Jackson.

@33 "in the context of the rest of the country"

This is classic invalid reasoning. Political positioning entirely results from one's position on political issues, and it's not relative to how many people feel or vote one way or another. If almost everyone voted for Trump, it wouldn't make Harris a progressive firebrand, for example. Left wing politicians advocate for policies that favor labor and the oppressed. Conservatives advocate for policies that favor capital and business. This holds true everywhere because it is defined by the history of political movements worldwide, not by present conjuncture.

Also many US cities have progressive councilors, and Seattle currently has very few. Seattle had a mostly progressive council for a while but it is over, and progressives clearly didn't control the mayor's office at the time. The right wing myth that Seattle is perpetually progressive in fact reflects how much conservatives are out of touch with actual policy. Finally, there are radical ideologues in all parts of the political spectrum; Marxists don't hold that privilege.

If anything the situation at 12th and Jackson strongly argues for spending more money on mental health rather than bonuses for cops.

“. Left wing politicians advocate for policies that favor labor and the oppressed.”

No they don’t. They advocate for policies that increase the size of governmet, their own power base and allow them to control even more of our lives. They are primarily grifters who use social issues to divide people and line their own pockets.

“If anything the situation at 12th and Jackson strongly argues for spending more money on mental health rather than bonuses for cops.”

There is no point in doing that unless you have a way to compel people to accept services. We have services today but very few actually accept and follow through on treatment.

@34: "If almost everyone voted for Trump, it wouldn't make Harris a progressive firebrand, for example."

There are plenty of small places where Trump got almost all of the votes. Voters in such places consider Harris to be a dangerous, far-left-wing, extremist looney. Your assertion that context provides no meaning is just bizarre, but it just shows how far your beliefs have separated from reality.

@32 "you haven’t compared the hiring-bonus numbers to the pre-hiring bonus numbers"

Allow me to quote myself at 20, where I quoted the article:

""In particular, SPD did not see an increase in applicants even with the City dangling thousands in front of them at the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022.""

I mean this in the kindest possible way: can you read?

@35 "They advocate for policies that ... allow them to control even more of our lives. They are primarily grifters who use social issues to divide people and line their own pockets."

This is a legitimately hilarious critique coming from a conservative.

@36 Even for you this is an especially dumb comment. It tells us almost nothing about Harris that in some places she is thought to be far left, but it does tell us a lot about the regressive environment and the ignorance to be found there. So she is thought to be far left by many in some bible thumping hell hole and she is thought to be some kind of centrist in Washington's 43rd. Which is it then? The only way one can decide is by looking at how she positions herself relative to issues

@35 these are gratuitous and farcical accusations that very few would take seriously. I mean how could anyone pretend there is no division involved in having just a very few own trillions and half the population own essentially nothing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States#/media/File:1962-Netpersonal_wealth_-averagein_percentile_ranges_-linearscale_-_US.svg

Trying to compel people who, often with good reasons, lack trust in institutions is not a good premise for success. Creating stable environments, which includes getting people off the street, is likely key in having folks accept services. In any case, taking care of people BEFORE they become homeless and lose everything will remain much preferable because of much higher reinsertion success rates, more humane and ultimately way cheaper.

@39 stop with the wealth inequality nonsense. You and the rest of the progressives routinely confuse wealth with income. Wealth is not real and can go away tomorrow. You can also not legislate wealth equity without completely killing innovation. Our economic system is such that those who create enjoy the benefits of that success. There is absolutely cases where capital has become too concentrated in a particular area (thereby creating some of the wealth you decry) and in those cases you'll find monopolistic behavior. There the government has a role in breaking up the monopoly, increasing competition and allowing capital to flow to other investments (kinda like breaking up a beaver dam). What should never happen is some nameless bureaucrats simply confiscating wealth and redistributing according to their own preferences. That is a recipe for corruption and will stifle innovation.

As for homeless, no one would dispute what you are saying however the homeless that chew up most of the resources, cause most of the disorder on the street and are at the center of this conversation aren't those people. These are people who due to whatever circumstance befell them are incapable of making rational decisions. They have severed any connections they have in society due to their toxic and harmful actions and are generally entitled assholes who don't want to meet their part of the social contract. No amount of services is going to be good enough for them because they don't want to be part of society. That is their choice of course but if they do things that impact innocent people around them they need to be removed from society to prevent them from harming others and themselves.

Don't be disingenuous, thirteen12 dear. Of course, unspent funds can be reallocated during the budget process. It quite frequently happens. Or it can be carried over to the next year with proper approval. It's a two-year budget process.

@37: “…did not see an increase in applicants…”

The “hiring bonuses” program did not aim to increase the number of applicants, it aimed to increase the number of hires. If, in the pre-hiring-bonus days, not every applicant had gotten hired, then it was entirely possible to obtain an increase in the number of hires, without an increase in the number of applicants.

If a hiring increase happened after the program went into effect, then that would support a claim the hiring bonuses were not merely effective, but effective even without an increase in the number of applicants. That, in turn, would support a claim the hiring bonuses program was indeed effective.

@40 "Wealth is not real"

Are YOU for real? Because, going from one unsubstantiated outrageous statement to the next suggest you aren't.

Wealth is the best indicator of income level, financial stability, and influence. For the top income bracket, income is mostly determined by wealth because dividends, gains, profit and other types of incomes result from owning capital and other assets.

@43 none the less wealth doesn’t exist until you liquidate it. If housing crashed tomorrow would the loss of equity make those who don’t own a house any better off? No, and those who do own the house will still have the house. Same goes for stocks. If Amazon crashed tomorrow would those who don’t own Amazon stock be suddenly better off? No. Wealth only exists on paper.

@41 in real life the money they allocate to cops stays with the cops

https://www.thestranger.com/city/2023/11/29/79284148/seattles-antifa-city-council-lets-police-department-keep-its-slush-funds

"The Council briefly toyed with the idea of reducing the ghost cop budget by about a million dollars, but Council Member Alex Pedersen discouraged this idea, saying he wouldn’t want to “micromanage” SPD over a million dollars."

"This year the cops blew past their $31 million overtime budget, spending $9 million more than anticipated. To help fill that gap, SPD said it would use salary savings from unfilled officer positions."

"Public commenters got pissed and staged an impromptu protest since Nelson denied them the official channels through which to levy concerns. The ordeal ended in six arrests and an hour and a half delay, meaning it would have actually saved time and some heat from the press to listen to her constituents rather than silence them."

Saving public comment period from being "open-mic night" (as a commenter at the linked story put it) was an accomplishment of which CM Nelson should be rightfully proud, and I hope she uses it in her re-election campaign. Public comments are for city business the Council currently considers, not for whatever some loudmouthed crowd of self-appointed activists wants to yell at the Council.

Although the Stranger won't admit it, the abuse of public comments for such obviously performative political theatre helped bolster the narrative of an out-of-touch 'progressive' Council listening only to a loud crowd of self-appointed activists, with actual voices of real citizens simply pushed out of the Council room.