1. The Seattle City Council’s library levy committee, which includes all nine councilmembers, approved amendments to this year’s library levy proposal that will add almost $70 million to Mayor Katie Wilson’s initial $410 million proposal. Maritza Rivera, who chairs the committee, voted against every one of her colleagues’ amendments, saying that while “I love libraries,” increasing the levy further was fiscally irresponsible.
“With the proposed package, we would have $310 million left for future levies, including the housing theft and transportation levies. If all the amendments pass today, then we will only have $230 million left. The additions from the amendments today, while worthy, are increasing items that are already in the mayor’s package at a time when we can’t afford more. We know there are other needs that are coming. Let’s face it, we’re only in year two of this madman in the President’s president’s seat. Who knows? Who knows what else we will have to deal with. And of course, everyone keeps talking about affordability in Seattle these days, that seems more real than ever.
The city faces a state-mandated property tax cap of $3.60 per $1,000 in home value; the new levy, which is virtually certain to pass, will leave Seattle with just $310 million in capacity for future levies, such as the housing and transportation levies, Rivera said.
“If I felt that we could add this levy without jeopardizing future levies or adding to our affordability crisis, I too would add more,” Rivera said. “We don’t have a crystal ball to predict what will happen in the future. We’re operating with the knowledge that we have today. There is no judgment here. There is this is not about who loves the libraries more. This is about fiscal responsibility and our ability to pay for all our needs.”
The levy cap is a real, looming issue, and one the council should arguably be taking on more directly—for instance, by advocating for broad changes to property tax law in Olympia. If it isn’t the library levy, it will be the Seattle Transit Measure, or the next transportation levy, or election funding, or Seattle Center—whatever unlucky levy happens to fall in a year that Seattle’s property taxes finally touch the cap.
The amendments the committee passed include funding for repairs and maintenance at the Central Library downtown, seismic upgrades at the Columbia Branch library, multilingual children’s programming, and elevator and escalator maintenance, and air conditioning in libraries that current lack it. In an apparent response to Rivera’s comment, last month, that the city has federal FEMA dollars coming in to pay for cooling systems in five libraries, Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck said, “I would note that trusting our library’s future to Donald Trump’s FEMA is irresponsible.”
Deferring maintenance always leads to higher costs down the line, Rinck added. “Any pennies we pinch now will will cost us dollars seven years from now.”
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2. On Thursday, the city council’s governance committee voted unanimously (with three councilmembers present) to appoint Evan Smith, the founder of a company called Ethosphere, to serve on the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission. Ethosphere sells AI software to retail companies so that they can spy on their sales associates—or, as a boosterish Geekwire profile put it, “help associates improve their performance while giving managers better visibility into what drives sales.”
Retail companies that use Ethosphere’s system—and it’s unclear at this point which, if any, retailers have signed up—will require floor staff to wear microphones that record every conversation they have on their shift; these recordings get transcribed and analyzed by AI large language models “to assess how well employees followed the brand’s selling approach,” according to Geekwire. Sales associates the AI finds out of compliance could be penalized, retrained, or fired.
For anyone who’s worked retail, the dystopian nature of this kind of “productivity” software is obvious; selling khakis for minimum wage could soon mean submitting to intense surveillance by companies that consider workers interchangeable sales pitch dissemination machines.
None of that is directly related to the work of the ethics commission, which decides whether elected officials have violated ethics and elections law, among other responsibilities. But it does indicate on which side of the management-worker divide Smith’s sympathies fall. Smith didn’t show up for his nomination hearing on Thursday; according to Ethics and Elections director Wayne Barnett, he was “in San Francisco.”
