On Sept. 16, Bruce Harrell was scheduled to attend a fundraising event for Bruce Harrell for Seattle’s Future, the political action committee supporting his reelection campaign. According to an email invitation obtained by The Stranger, the event started at 5 p.m. at a downtown office building. There were refreshments. At 5:15 p.m., Harrell was scheduled to address the group “regarding accomplishments, progress made, needs, policy priorities, and the campaign.” At 6 p.m., “PAC leader” Tim Burgess, who works under Harrell as deputy mayor, addressed “the current imperatives, leads discussion” and then did a Q&A with the attendees.

According to Kim Bradshaw, deputy director at the Public Disclosure Commission, Harrell speaking at a fundraising event for his PAC is “unusual.”

“[It] does invite questions regarding whether the event was an in-kind contribution to the candidate and/or the PAC,” Bradshaw wrote in an email.

The PAC, which has raised $1.5 million to support Harrell’s campaign, is allowed to fundraise far beyond what Harrell’s campaign can. A PAC can accept a donation of any size, while Harrell, who is participating in the democracy voucher program, can only accept $650 per donor.

According to Washington State Law, they absolutely cannot coordinate. The Washington Administrative Code states that any money spent in "cooperation, consultation, concern, or collaboration with, or at the request or suggestion of a candidate” should be considered a contribution to that candidate. Any expenditure made with “fundraising-assistance” from someone from the campaign—like, perhaps, speaking at the fundraising event—should be considered an expenditure for the campaign.

The Stranger shared the event invitation details with election experts and political consultants familiar with Washington’s election law. The law is complicated and nuanced, they all said, but this event creates the appearance of coordination between the campaign and the PAC. If they did coordinate, the PAC’s big-dollar spending on attack ads this month could be a violation of campaign finance law, or more specifically, the Washington Administrative Code. 

When reached for comment, Harrell’s campaign did not answer detailed questions regarding this event and the efforts the campaign might have made to avoid coordinating with the PAC. “Neither Mayor Harrell nor our campaign coordinates with IE groups, and we ensure that we are in compliance with all PDC rules,” was the only response. 

Neither the PAC nor Deputy Mayor Burgess responded to The Stranger’s requests for comment.

The event’s invitation came from organizers of the People for Seattle PAC, which backed Chamber of Commerce candidates and papered mailboxes with negative ads about the progressive city council in 2019. Burgess, Harrell’s deputy mayor, co-founded PFS. In the Bruce Harrell for Seattle’s Future event email, the organizers wrote that PFS  “contributed significantly to voters eventually changing the make-up of the City Council and to electing Mayor Bruce Harrell.” All of PFS’ 2019 candidates, save for Alex Pedersen, lost their races. However, the more conservative slate of candidates began winning elections in 2021 and 2023.

In order to keep power in Seattle, “we again need to come together and support balanced, moderate City government candidates,” the email read. Harrell and other moderate candidates like Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson, the email cited, experienced bad primary showing “in large part due to the stresses our voters are feeling that have been put on ‘Blue States’ by the current federal administration…non-centrist, unprepared, and inexperienced voices grew support for candidates… that do not align with the moderate and bi-partisan vision we all had.” 

The invite urged people to donate to the PAC.

“Your contribution to Bruce Harrell for Seattle’s Future will help us show voters what has happened and outline our future with Bruce as Mayor,” the event email reads. “Our targeted voter outreach will include TV and Internet ads, direct mail, and social media efforts.”

“You can give whatever you feel will help,” the email reads. “There are no limits on contributions to the PAC, which is separate and independent from Bruce’s personal campaign.”

The key issue here is the independence of this “independent” expenditure. Candidates are subject to campaign finance laws that limit the total amount of money they can raise, and how much they can accept from individual donors. Political Action Committees (PACs) are not, and they’re allowed to make “independent expenditures” in favor of, or against, a candidate.

Those expenditures might look like the $103,750 spent on mailers in favor of Bruce Harrell, financing the $34,000 attack ad against Katie Wilson’s record that aired during Monday’s post-season Mariners game, or the $84,130 they spent on ads that will air from this week until the day before the election. To keep their “independent” status, though, these PACs can’t coordinate with the candidates’ campaigns. The campaign can’t tell them what to do, or vice versa. Otherwise, a PAC simply becomes a slush fund that allows candidates to work around campaign finance laws.

Political consultant Crystal Fincher tells The Stranger that an event like the one Harrell spoke at blurs the lines between contributions to him as a candidate and to his PAC. “If you're coordinating directly with the campaign that is essentially exceeding the donation limits there,” Fincher says.

And the event was invite-only. That makes it a private thing, Fincher explains, which is more eyebrow raising.

“They are getting information from and about the campaign that is not available to the general public—that's inside information that they're then using to electioneer on Bruce’s behalf,” Fincher says. “[The PAC] is then just an extension of the campaign. It just flies in the face of our entire campaign finance system.”

And, as we know from the helpful agenda in the email, Harrell was literally scheduled to discuss the campaign with his PAC in the room.

As of October 15, the PAC supporting Harrell has a warchest of more than $1.5 million. Of that, $822,400 came in after this event where Bruce Harrell spoke last month, and 99 percent of those donations were above the limit that would be allowed to give to a candidate.

The PAC is putting that $1.5 million to use—and according to Fincher, that kind of money would make the risk of a campaign finance complaint worthwhile for most candidates. “When you're raising a million dollars on the hard side and the soft side,” Fincher says, referring to candidate funds and PAC funds, “it doesn't seem like much of a penalty.”

Marcus Harrison Green contributed reporting to this story.